Gansey Nation

Britain has been basking in a heatwave this weekend, which means that in Caithness the temperatures have reached a giddy 20°C and I celebrated by taking my pullover off and—feeling rather rakish—unbuttoned my shirt’s top button. Even the wind was warm, like holding your face up close to a rapidly panting dog (fortunately without the meaty dog food smell).

The lighthouse at Dunnet Head – Orkney is in the background

So we decided to get out of the house and take in some scenery. It’s puffin season, so on Saturday we went up to Dunnet Head, the jutting-out bit that is the northernmost tip of mainland Britain, and watched the puffins nesting in the cliffs, with Orkney almost close enough to touch.

Puffins really are absurd birds, they’re like penguins who ran away to join the circus and got taken on as clowns. Their wings are so small it’s as if they’re propelled by continually expelling trapped gas. And yet in flight they’re as graceful in their own way as swallows, albeit chubby swallows with a weakness for doughnuts. It’s always windy up on Dunnet Head, even when the sea is calm, and it was pretty gusty on Saturday, as though the ghosts of Viking invaders were constantly jostling us, trying to reclaim their lost kingdom. My baseball cap was snatched off my head and sent bowling along the gravel track by the wind—unless it was the Vikings, Yankees fans to a man, harbouring bitter thoughts against the Red Sox.

Camster Cairns – the Long Cairn

Then on Sunday we drove out to the Grey Cairns of Camster, about half an hour away. These are a couple of Neolithic structures dating from c.3,000 BC, presumably burial mounds, whose walls and roofs have been partially reconstructed, but whose inner chambers are still intact. (You can unbolt the grilles that cover the entrance passageways and squeeze inside, if you feel like crawling on hands and knees: a puffin that’s been on a strict diet could probably do it easily, but we decided to pass.)

View into one of the cairns

The cairns are on a lonely hillside, surrounded by forestry plantations and acres of moorland, miles from anywhere. It was hot and still when we were there and utterly silent except for the birds, and a lost sheep which seemed to be facing an existential crisis (its constant bleating far more annoying than a car alarm). It feels like a special place—but is it? Did they build the cairns here for some special property of the landscape, or does the landscape feel special because it is graced by their presence?

The great Philip Larkin, as ever, said it best, in his poem “Church Going”:

“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”

Side view of the Long Cairn

I’ve started working my way down the first sleeve. It’s about 9.5 inches from gusset to shoulder join, and I cast on 168 stitches, decreasing (once I got past the gusset) 2 stitches every 7 rows, to coincide with the cable rows. As you’ll see, I’ve reverted to my usual double-pointed needles after experimenting with 2 circular needles, which felt a bit like trying to knit a pattern by Escher: the problem was mine entirely, though, and I will have another go with the circulars now it’s been explained to me where I was going wrong!

Finally this week, another splendid gansey has fallen off Judit’s needles, a white one this time and based on patterns from Beth Brown Reinsel’s book. You can see it here (note the initials just above the welt): it really shows how effective banded patterns can be – congratulations to her once again.

On Friday It was Midsummer Day, the longest day of the year; and here in Caithness, when we say longest, we really mean it: the sun rises just after 4.00 in the morning and sets just before 10.30 at—if you can call it that—night. The days are so long the birds have to take it in shifts to sing or they get tired out, packing up around dinnertime and going back to bed with sore throats.

It’s been such a rubbish summer we celebrated the solstice by turning on the central heating for an hour, so the towels—and the house—could maybe get dry for a change.

Escargot a go-go

So, it’s back to a diet of hot, nourishing winter soups, and porridge for breakfast. In fact, I’ve been doing some research into porridge. I always thought that there were only two kinds: one which was made with water and seasoned with salt (the Scots or, as my father would say, “correct” way), and the other with milk and sugar (the incorrect way, also known as “spawn o’ the devil”)—and that, no matter which you adopted, you still ended up with something that looked like a pound of snails pureed in a blender.

Turns out I was wrong (though not about the snails). Since time immemorial porridge has been made with oatmeal, i.e., untreated ground oats boiled in liquid for half an hour or so to a consistency of wallpaper paste. But in 1877 the Quaker Oat Co. discovered a method of steaming the oat grains and rolling them flat (to make rolled oats), which means they absorb moisture more rapidly and only take 5 minutes to cook.

And so, alas, even the sludgy world of porridge now has its schisms. The oatmeal purists despise the rolled oats-eaters (did you know that rolled oats are banned from the porridge world championships?), while the rolled oaters shrug their shoulders, happy in the knowledge that they’ve saved themselves 25 minutes’ saucepan-stirring a day. (One of the little-known causes of the First World War was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand just minutes after devouring a bowl of rolled-oat porridge, shot down by an incensed pinhead oatmeal fanatic.)

Sunset, 18 June – 10:48 PM

As for me, I refuse to take sides: either is fine, so long as there’s plenty of sugar and cream at hand—and my father isn’t around to see.

I’ve been making good progress on the gansey, and in a day or so I’ll be dividing for the neck and shoulders of the front. The neck will be indented by 1.5 inches, or half a diamond, so it shouldn’t interfere with the pattern too much. Then it’s onto the collar and picking up stitches around the first sleeve, something which is outlawed in several states as a cruel and unnatural punishment.

Meanwhile, we sit and shiver and regret the rash impulse that made us switch to the summer weight duvet just because the sun was shining. It’s so cold I’m thinking of forming the NHWBA, or National Hot Water Bottle Association. Its motto? “You can take my hot water bottle when you pry it from my cold, frostbitten toes…”

Each night, as I soak my dry eyes in a warm cloth, I listen to 10 minutes of Proust as an audiobook. The books aren’t so much a novel as a fictionalised autobiography, an extraordinarily detailed meditation on time, childhood, and how we behave when we’re in love (so far, at least: I live in hopes that it may contain scenes of wacky nude alien mud-wrestling later on, but I’m only on book 2).

I find it strange how fascinating Proust’s narrator finds his own life, sent spinning back through the years by a piece of madeleine soaked in a teaspoon of tea; for in my own case, I try to avoid thinking about the past as much as possible.

In fact, it wouldn’t be too much to say that I regard my own memories as a sort of asylum for the insane, each recollection firmly locked away—but in the night I can hear them howling and banging on the doors to their cells, demanding to be let out.

You think I’m exaggerating? Suppose we open a door at random, lulled by the silence within, in the hopes of finding a docile patient.

The River at Helmsdale

Here is the café in Birmingham New Street railway station one dreary, wet Saturday afternoon in 1979, and here is our hero, sitting at a table, waiting for his connection home after the ugly termination of some commonplace affair or other. In front of him is a big cup of coca-cola of the kind you find in movie theatres, untouched.

A smart wedding party enters the café, which is crowded, and settle at his table. Just then, our hero hears his train called and gets to his feet—and in doing so, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, knocks over the cup of coke. A tidal wave of black, sticky liquid is launched across the table, directly towards the middle-aged lady opposite: it resembles the blast wave of a nuclear explosion as seen from the air, or one of those animations of the Black Death spreading across Europe in the 1340s.

Gorse in bloom above Helmsdale

Everyone freezes and stares, fascinated, as it pours remorselessly across the surface, reaches the lip, and cascades in a frothing waterfall directly into the lady’s lap… And when the mist clears, our hero realises that his well-intentioned attempts to dab up the stuff with a napkin have left glistening handprints on her dress in places that…

But no. Best we close the door again, and leave this inmate to rave on in dark seclusion. And after all, if I’m going to spend my time reminiscing, I think it’s best if it’s somebody else’s life, such as Proust’s; mine is a bit too, well, personal.

Back in the present, this weekend we went for a jaunt south down the coast to Helmsdale (which always sounds to me like it should’ve been besieged by an army of slavering orcs in The Lord of the Rings); it’s a scenic fishing village just over the border into Sutherland, with a harbour and a museum—which was the reason for our trip.

There’s gold in them thar hills?

The museum has a modern feel, open and airy, well worth a visit if you’re in the area: it’s not bursting with exhibits, but the ones they have are well displayed. (Or at least I presume they are: when we went they were having trouble with the lighting, which kept flicking on and off as if a 10 year-old with ADD was operating the switch; such was the effect on epileptics that the foyer resembled the “Atlanta wounded” sequence from Gone With The Wind.)

I’d been told they didn’t have any ganseys, but we were delighted to find that this wasn’t the case—there was one on display, knit in that lovely old-fashioned silvery-grey yarn you don’t see any more. It had a buttoned collar and the body consisted of an open diamond pattern; the shoulders were patterned with a > > > > .

(By the way, strange but true, did you know there was a short-lived gold rush in the hills behind Helmsdale in 1869? Over 600 prospectors piled in and a shanty town of huts sprang up in the bare uplands. But the gold ran out, winter set in and within a year most had gone back to the herring fishing. You can still buy a licence and go prospecting up in the hills, though whether you’d find even enough gold for a filling these days is an open question.)

Finally, the gansey: I’ve almost finished the back—just 3 more rows and it’s on to the “rig ’n’ fur” shoulder straps. (I’ve also, mirabile dictu, just finished the first cone of Frangipani yarn, something I was beginning to doubt would ever happen: like those magical goblets of wine in Irish legend that replenish themselves when emptied I thought I’d discovered a cone of fairy yarn.) Hopefully by next week I’ll have started the front.

And now it’s time to go soak my eyes, and listen to some more reminiscences. As the great Bob Dylan says in one of his songs, “Maybe someday I’ll remember to forget…”