Gansey Nation

I flew down to Edinburgh last Sunday for a day of meetings on the Monday. I met my colleagues at a pizza chain on Sunday night, and at one point the person next to me looked up and said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen snow falling horizontally before. Or fall up, for that matter.’ (‘Welcome to Scotland,’ I said as I nonchalantly speared a leaf of rocket from my plate.)

In truth the weather was pretty wild, strong winds gusting the snow around like we were living inside a snow globe. (Heading south, the tail wind was enough to shave 20 minutes off an hour-long flight.)

It wasn’t a great trip, to be honest. Apart from the horrid weather, the citizens of Edinburgh seemed to be taking turns outside my hotel room through the night to shout explicit anatomical instructions, some of which I discovered to be quite hard to achieve on your own. The room’s double glazing was warped and didn’t quite fasten – handy if you wanted to preserve a side of beef for a few days, say, but not to take a shower in comfort (my progress to and from the bathroom resembled a firewalker who’s just discovered halfway down the ramp that someone put a live mouse in his shirt for a joke).

I didn’t take the knitting with me – apart from the whole vexed issue of taking needles on planes, the gansey now weighs about as much as a recently dipped sheep, and the prospect of lugging it around Edinburgh didn’t appeal. So I haven’t made as much progress as I’d have liked (by this stage I’m usually impatient to see it done), but am still well down the sleeve. I don’t think I’ll get it finished this week – quite – but I should still meet my target of Easter.

Next Saturday I’ll be at the Caithness Science Festival Fun Day (‘a day of fun and discovery’, it says on the poster) where the Archives will have a display on maps and mapping from our collections. (‘Archives’ and ‘fun’ aren’t words you usually see in the same sentence, but we’re holding a competition to win an Easter egg – and as scientists have discovered, nothing is more fun than chocolate.)

Speaking of fun, Nigel has sent some pictures of his gansey sampler taken from patterns in Beth Brown Reinsel’s book, in which you can see Henry the bear posing in his ganseyette. (In fact, I’m hoping Henry will in future emulate the garden gnome from the French film Amelie and appear in a variety of pictures sent back from exotic locations – the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Waverley Steps…)

Meanwhile, we scrape the snow off the daffodils and watch the seagulls being blown backwards by the wind, and patiently wait for summer. Or Christmas. Whichever comes first…

It’s always a good day when a new book on ganseys appears, and that’s what popped through the letter box on Saturday.

The Moray Firth Gansey Project have produced a splendid 60-page colour booklet called “Fishing For Ganseys” to celebrate the project and the ganseys of the area. (You can find details on how to order on their website at http://www.gansey-mf.co.uk/outcomes.html – they suggest a donation of £4 plus postage and packing, which seems like a bargain to me.)

There’s a couple of chapters on the project, another on the fishing industry along the Moray Firth, and there are instructions for knitting their new “Beatrice” gansey design. But the heart of the book is the chapter on “Ganseys, Patterns and Evolution”, which is full of old black and white photos and colour photos of knitted ganseys. Quite a few of these haven’t appeared in print before to my knowledge, so the MFGP has done us all a service by making them available here.

My only disappointment is that they haven’t charted out the patterns. This feels like something of a missed opportunity but, as they say, the point is to encourage you to try charting them out yourself (and, to be fair, some the photos are clear enough that even someone like me could probably manage it).

Anyway, definitely one for the library, and speaking as a Moray Firth resident, it’s good to see the far north of Scotland getting the attention it deserves: order your copy today! (And if you needed a further incentive to buy it, Judit, resident of this parish, gets a mention. (And Liz Lovick reviews it here.))

My own knitting has leaped on apace this week. I’ve found when knitting ganseys that I sort of soldier on for weeks at a time, like a knitting hamster in a wheel, with no real sense of progress—then suddenly I put on a spurt, and when I look up I see I’m near the end. This has been one of those weeks. As I’m still getting over my cold, I took some leave and spent a day with my feet up, knitting and listening to music and just relaxing. (And sneezing, of course, producing an effect not unlike a shell exploding on the Somme in 1916; and coughing, which still sounds like a dalek sanitary engineer unblocking a stubborn drain.)

So here I am, just half an inch or so from starting the cuff. So I’ll probably finish the sleeve this week and make a start on the other one. I’d hoped to finish the gansey around Easter and I won’t be far off, I think, if I knuckle down. I’ve maintained a steady decrease down the sleeve (after the gusset) of 2 stitches every 6 rows; I also use that as the sign to move the stitches round on the needles to stop a line of uneven stitches at the joins developing.

And with the end in sight, as ever I start to think of what the next project will be. At least with Fishing For Ganseys to read, I won’t be short of ideas…

Just a short blog this week, as I’m afraid my cold has returned with a vengeance and I’m a little the worse for wear: my chest is so tight I might as well be wearing a corset (or, er, so I would imagine, *cough*), and I have a tendency to slump in my chair like a Stephen Hawking who’s really let himself go. Several times the neighbours have gone out to help jump-start a car which won’t start, only to find it was me coughing.

It will pass, but once again God has given me a glimpse of what it’s like to be ninety. My only consolation is, it’s not flu – as a doctor said on the radio when someone asked them how you could tell the difference between a bad cold and the flu: if someone leaves a sack containing a million pounds on your front doorstep, and you’re too sick to get out of bed and collect it – that’s flu.

Not that the weather has helped. On Wednesday we had 70-mph gusts and sub-zero temperatures, and I trudged to work through rain, sleet, snow and rain again – all in the space of a ten-minute walk. Seagulls on the harbour wall were being skittled like ninepins by the wind and seemed to be wondering why they’d never thought of migrating south in winter (as, by then, was I). When I got to work, the tracks the sleet made on the windows were horizontal, leaving traces like elementary particles in a particle accelerator. Then the library roof started to leak…

Notwithstanding all this, I’m making steady progress down the sleeve, and have finished the first panel and decreased the gusset out of existence. I’ve just started the herringbone panel, which is something of a relief as I was finding the top pattern a bit challenging in my addled state.

Special thanks to Yasmin at Island at the Edge for sending me a couple of samples of their gansey yarn to try. The more people out there supplying gansey materials the better, I feel, and I’m looking forward to giving this a go, especially the natural yarn.

Also thanks again to Judit for making me a phone case like the one we showed last week. Again, a very innovative use for leftover yarn (this one featuring Caithness flags, a nice touch!). The curly strap reminds me of a chameleon’s tail.

Right. I’m afraid it’s back to bed for me while the blog pixies (aka ‘tech support’) take over from here. I look forward to rejoining the human race in a few days – see you then.