Gansey Nation

Spring is advancing like a suspicious fencing master: a few steps forward, a few steps back, a thrust here and a parry there; daffodils in the hedgerows and buds on the trees coupled with blustery wind and cold rain. It’s all up in the air still; you feel it could go either way. The shops, even in Wick, are optimistically full of summer clothes, t-shirts and sunblock, while people, wrapped in coats and scarves, huddle in the doorways out of the wind.

It’s my birthday this week, so I decided to treat myself to a subscription to Major League Baseball – it’s much cheaper than cricket and you can stream games on your computer, tv or iPad.

Watching my first game last night (Red Sox vs. Kansas City) was a bit of a shock. The last time I saw any baseball the players were all different creeds and colours; now they all look like the members of the rock group ZZ Top. They’re big, too: whereas cricketers have slimmed down and go haring round the field like whippets in flannels, some of these guys look like nightclub bouncers running for the bus.

There are many things that I love about baseball: the incredible skill, the tactics I can’t begin to understand, the family atmosphere – but also the fact that the players don’t habitually bite one another. A footballer, Luis Suarez, made the headlines in the UK this weekend for biting the arm of one the opposition players, and I mention this only because it’s given rise to my new favourite online joke: “the other guy stuck out his arm and Suarez made a meal of it…”

In gansey news the cardigan is in intensive care, surrounded by highly trained medical staff and machines that go “beep”. (I couldn’t bear to watch while Margaret cut the steek, but instead paced back and forth downstairs like an anxious father-to-be in a Victorian novel.) We hope to make next week’s blog a cardigan special but in the meantime here are a couple of “behind the scenes” photos.

Meanwhile the new Filey gansey continues to slowly grow under the needles. It’s about seven inches high now, including the welt, and the pattern is really starting to take shape.

I often find that knitting a gansey is like reading Proust: you start off full of enthusiasm and zonk through the first volume in no time, and find yourself thinking, this isn’t so bad, ha, don’t know what all the fuss is about. Then sometime around the middle of volume 2 it begins to occur to you that there are still another five volumes to go and young blasted Marcel is unbelievably still only a child; despair insinuates itself into your soul like the lingering smell of yesterday’s burnt toast and you find yourself possessed of an urge to re-read Harry Potter books instead. (In fact, now I think of it, I may patent the Gansey Proustometer, a scale to measure knitting progress against based on the great man’s works. On that scale I’m probably a Swann’s Way 7.5 at the moment.)

As I said, it’s my birthday later in the week, and as a special treat I’ll be spending it at the hospital in Inverness getting my eyes examined – which means bright lights, dilated pupils and tears before bedtime: only two of which are in any way unusual for me…

First of all, apologies to those who’ve tuned in to see open-heart surgery on the cardigan (actually I think of it as a sort of sex-change operation, from a gansey to a cardy—each requiring the steady use of a pair of scissors, if the cartoons I watched as a child are to be believed). But owing to one of those random acts of God that come along now and then and cause untold devastation—e.g., a meteorite strike, an earthquake, a Conservative government—I’m afraid we’re a little behind schedule.

Let me explain: we’re back in Wick after our Easter holiday down south—but our car isn’t. Instead, it languishes in a garage 450 miles away, after the steering lock died outside our friends’ house in Southport (in the process lowering the tone of a very decent neighbourhood).

We only found out there was a problem at 8.30am on the day we were set to leave, said automobile having made the journey there with no difficulties whatsoever; but when I inserted the card in the ignition all that resulted was a sort of sad ticking noise, as though the car was clicking its tongue at the futility of our expectations of getting home. Luckily we had roadside assistance cover, but it took 3 RAC patrolmen over 5 hours to decide that we were beyond help. (It was like watching an episode of “House”, but one where by the time the credits rolled he’d given up and gone down the pub instead of solving the mystery at the last minute.)

The stack in Staxigoe

At times the whole experience resembled Baldilocks and the Three Bewildered RAC Patrolmen: the first thought it was the immobiliser; the second thought it was the electrics; and the third thought it was the ignition. (I just thought it was bloody freezing, and I was the only correct one among us.)

At last a trailer came and hauled the carcase away and we were provided with a hire car to get home, a feat we achieved at 12.15am (after a rather scenic twilight drive through the snow-capped Highlands). If the garage can fix it soon, I’ll take another couple of days off work later in the week and we’ll hire another car and repeat the 9-hour drive south to pick it up—and pay the £600+ repair bill.

As Feste the clown sings in Twelfth Night:

“And when I bought myself a car,
With hey ho, the wind and the rain,
It never got me very far,
For the car it breaketh every day…”

Staxigoe harbour

Anyway. Thank you to everyone who downloaded copies of my books when they were on the free promotion over Easter. I’m delighted to report that there were about 2,000 downloads overall, a record for me.

Finally, as the discerning among you will have guessed, I’ve started another gansey. This one is in Frangipani seaspray yarn. My plan is to knit a generic gansey to donate to the crew of the Reaper, the fishing boat the Anstruther Fisheries Museum uses for educational purposes and which came to the Wick Harbour Festival last year (when the captain told me they were always looking for authentic ganseys to wear).

Since I’m fairly generic myself, I’m basing it on my own size: so a 44”-46” chest. I cast on 388 stitches to make a ribbed welt of 97 ribs, and after knitting about 3.5 inches have just increased into the body to bring it to 430 stitches. The pattern will be based on Matt Cammish’s gansey, a Filey pattern recorded in Gladys Thompson’s book (picture on p.21, directions on p.24). I’ve had to change it slightly to fit the number of stitches I have, but it’ll be essentially the same. More on this next week, though.

Meanwhile, spring has come to Wick, in the form of stunning blue skies and crisp sunshine, even if the wind is bitterly cold. In fact it’s so nice we could just jump in the car and go for a dri—

Oh wait.

If you open your windows and listen carefully – assuming there isn’t a howling gale blowing rain and sleet in your direction – unlikely if you live anywhere near Wick, but you never know – you may just hear the faint sound of distant trumpets carried on the breeze.

This will be the fanfare I have arranged to be blown every hour, on the hour, throughout the day, to celebrate the end of the knitting phase of the gansey. The garment has now been handed over to our Cardiganification Department for washing, blocking, scissoring and buttoning, and probably an anti-glare coating and wax for the finish as well.

I didn’t expect to get it done so soon, to be honest. But it always catches me out how quickly you get to the cuff once the end is in sight. And, as ever, I can’t really remember knitting most of it (if it wasn’t for this blog I’d just have assumed the Gansey Fairies visit me in the night every 6 months and leave me ganseys in exchange for my youth and some of my hair, like something from Grimm’s fairy tales).

That’s better – the reknit shawl centre

Looking back on this blog, it occurs to me that I’ve been doing this for rather a long time. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons – in my case it’s ganseys. There’s a classic Welsh novel about a man who comes back to the house he grew up in after his mother’s death to sort out her effects, and every chapter is based around the memories of a different object – the mangle she used when she had to take in washing after her husband died, etc. I feel a bit like that with the pictures in the gallery, except there are still so many patterns yet to try.

Gordon’s in the blue shirt, on the left. Artist Joanne B Kaar displays the “Portable Museum of Curiosity”, inspired by the Robert Dick Herbarium at Caithness Horizons

I had a (predictably) fun day on Saturday at the Caithness Science Fair Family Fun Day. We took a bunch of photographs of old maps from the archives and put them on my iPad so people could look up their neighbourhoods in 1903 (of course several children tried to use it to hack into the internet instead, but I found I could reach their ankles quite easily under the table – a steel toecap is the gift that keeps on giving – so that was all right). But oh, it’s been years since I spent a day on my feet like that. All day Sunday I needed a sort of block and tackle system to get me out of my chair, like Henry VIII in his armour having to be winched onto his horse.

I’m publishing another book on Amazon kindle for Easter, The World’s Midnight, the long-awaited sequel to The Wraiths of Elfael, in which Mair, my heroine, journeys to an alternative version of medieval Wales to recover the stolen spirit of her friend. It’s a fairly dark little tale, I must admit, but I like to think of it as my Empire Strikes Back before the final part of the trilogy ends happily with cuddly child-bears armed only with spears and rocks overthrowing a ruthless totalitarian regime (hey, it could happen).

Speaking of Star Wars, I wonder why no one had invented the laser equivalent of a machine gun by then? Or even carried machine guns and grenades? (Bit tricky for even a Jedi to deflect the splinters from a fragment grenade or even a flamethrower with a light sabre, you’d think!)

Where was I? Oh yes, books. All four of my other books plus the new one will be on a free promotion on Amazon from Friday to Tuesday over Easter, so if you know anyone who might be interested please let them know: you see, the more people read them for free, the more reviews they’re likely to get, and the more reviews they have the higher they go in the rankings. So it’s a win-win for me (so long as the reviews are positive!).

Finally, Judit has sent pictures of another splendid gansey she’s made, which you can see here. This one is based on a Filey pattern in Rae Compton’s book (page 64); note the initials above the welt.

In fact, maybe if I give my trumpeters an extra shilling they’ll play something from Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite as a kind of joint celebration for both our ganseys…?