Gansey Nation

Back view. For a change.

It’s slowly beginning to dawn on me that if I wanted to work in a glamorous profession, perhaps archives may have been the wrong choice—at least as far as tv and Hollywood are concerned.

When villainous Rutger Hauer shuts down Morgan Freeman’s special research department in Batman Begins, he transfers him to Archives—the implication being, this is a dead end for hope and ambition and rocket-propelled motorcycles.

Now I see in Warehouse 13 that when the special agents are looking for a cover, they tell the secret service they work in … Archives. And the secret service make fun of them for being “filing clerks”, and warn them of the dangers of paper cuts.

You see? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I can’t help feeling there’s a lack of respect here. (And have you ever had a paper cut? I mean, those puppies can sting.) By a spooky coincidence I got a paper cut only last week, and bled over several old electoral rolls without realising it, leaving bloody thumbprints to make it look like citizens of Caithness in the 1950s were tortured for their names and addresses. (In fact, in the archives world, paper cuts are the equivalent of German duelling scars, worn as a badge of pride.)

It’s officially spring so it’s snowing outside, a bitter north wind sweeping the flakes across the fields under heavy grey skies. It’s just a light dusting—think of icing sugar sieved over a chocolate cake—ah, damn, I just did and now my keyboard’s all wet—but it’s persistent. We went down to the harbour yesterday to watch the wind whip the waves in from the sea—not as spectacular as the great storm of a few months ago, but still pretty good, as the waves exploded against the harbour walls in showers of spray. Spring, eh?

I’ve been in a knitting mood this last week, and have made pretty good progress, for me. I finished one cuff, picked up the stitches around the other armhole and am now about 5 inches down the sleeve. This is partly the result of getting my eyes fixed, of course, because I can now see well enough to knit while watching television—for the last six months it’s been one or the other.

The shawl, she is finished. May have to redo the centre. Quickly.

But sometimes I’m just in the zone, and enjoy the knitting as an end in itself. I definitely blow hot and cold over the duration of a gansey, sometimes I can hardly be bothered to lift a needle—other times, like now, it’s fun. You just have to hang in there through the bad times. I suspect Michelangelo felt much the same over the four years he painted the Sistine Chapel; except in his case he had the motivation of a monetary reward for success, or the threat of the Inquisition and excommunication and/or eternal damnation if things didn’t work out—so no pressure, Mike, knock yourself out.

I should finish the sleeve in the next fortnight or so, and then it’s scissor time. I’m still mulling over what patterns to try next, as I do towards the end of a project; whatever I finally decide on, you can bet it’ll be simple, after this one! I keep careful records as I go, so I know that I have exactly the same number of stitches on my needles at this point as for the other sleeve, and am knitting the exact same row of the pattern. You have no idea how reassuring this is!

I won’t get so much done this next week because I’m away in Edinburgh from Sunday to Tuesday, attending my last meeting of the Archives and Records Association Board as Vice Chair before stepping down (so I may not be able to respond to any comments for a few days).

Which makes me wonder—if other people get sent to Archives when they’re demoted, where do archivists get sent…?

And suddenly that’s a whole week gone. I feel like a cut-rate sleeping beauty (albeit rather older and more cynical and with fewer bluebirds to do the washing up), who pricked his finger on a poison 2.25mm needle and fell asleep, forgotten by time, in an enchanted semi-detached castle in Wick.

Reader, I’ve had a chest infection. I felt as though God was squeezing my chest like a tube of toothpaste, and even now my chest froths and wheezes like the last slurp at the bottom of the milkshake and my coughing fits sound like someone unsuccessfully trying to kick-start an old motorbike.

As if that wasn’t enough, on Monday I had my hospital appointment to get my eyes sorted. I should have stayed in bed, but after not being able to see clearly for over nine months I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. So Margaret drove me the hundred miles to Inverness, a crisp, clear day, blue sky, sunlight glittering on the ocean, and the start of spring.

I had posterior capsule opacity, a film that can grow over the artificial lens they give you when you get cataract surgery, and which is easily burned off with a laser. First the doctor gave me eyedrops to dilate my pupils so big I resembled a very startled owl. Then she placed a contact lens in the eye to hold it steady and open, directed a very bright light at me that illuminated my skull like a Halloween lantern and began firing the laser much as Han Solo used to shoot down enemy fighters in Star Wars.

It wasn’t a lot of fun, and I think my eyes have only just about stopped watering now, but it was over in ten minutes—and then I could see again. Quite incredible. (You mean this is how the rest of you see the world? Sharp, clear and—in focus? Do you know how lucky you are?) The only problem was, my eyes remained dilated for several hours afterwards, so the drive home in bright sunshine was painful, to say the least, like a migraine hangover.

Only downside is, I can finally see how uneven my knitting really is. (Perhaps I should hold it further away?) Despite everything I’ve made some progress this week, still plugging away down the sleeve. I’ve completed the herringbone and have started the final pattern section which will carry me down the sleeve towards the cuff. (I won’t run the pattern all the way to the cuff, but will leave a few inches of plain knitting between the two, ending somewhere mid-forearm.)

It’s a bit of a shock being able to see my knitting at all, to be honest. I haven’t been able to identify individual stitches for several months now, but now I can see the single black thread running through the cream yarn I’m using. It’s like I’ve upgraded to a High Definition world. I have an urge to stop strangers in the street and read things out to them. I keep waking up and expecting to find it the way it was, and being pleasantly surprised.

In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and find something to look at right now—just because I can…

First the good news: my cold has gone and I’m off the betablockers my doctor prescribed to stop me getting migraines, so I no longer shuffle through the streets like a survivor of the zombie apocalypse with hay fever. The bad news? Oh yeah, the migraines. (I wish now I’d kept the receipt for this body – then I could take it back and demand a new one, or alternatively a refund.)

Thanks for all the cat stories and comments last week. Now the evenings are slowly getting lighter the little beggars have abandoned their camouflage and no longer shadow me up the path; instead when I get to the door they seem to just materialise out of thin air directly between my ankles, as if the Enterprise’s ship’s cats had learned how to work the transporter—the only warning being what I used to think of as a plaintive meow, but which I now believe to be the sound a cat-sized quantity of air makes when it is displaced.

I have—hurrah—finished the collar of the gansey, which consists of an inch of knit 2/ purl 2 ribbing, cast off in pattern. So that’s the body substantially complete, and just the sleeves to go. As I’ve said before, this for me is when the gansey really starts to come together, and you feel you’re on the downhill straight; like reassembling C3PO in Star Wars, he may not have all his arms and legs yet, but you feel you could attach a head and have a conversation.

The armhole is 9.5 inches high, so with a stitch gauge of 9.25 stitches to the inch that gives me about 88 stitches to pick up per side. The sleeves are going to replicate the body patterns all the way to the cuff, so that it all looks of a piece, which means the section closest to the shoulder will be the same pattern as the yoke (but necessarily shorter, so instead of three trees or anchors in a column there will just be the one).

As I work down the sleeve I’m also decreasing the gusset out of existence; the rate of decrease is the same as the increases, to get that nice parallelogram shape, i.e., decreasing one stitch each side every four rows. (I used the red yarn from the Filey gansey as stitch holders for the gusset; the only downside is, if you’re not careful, stray wisps of the stitch holder yarn get snagged when you transfer the stitches to a needle. But I’m not worried – I mean, pink stripes in the gusset were traditional, right?)

Margaret has now finished her magic shawl, fashioned from angels’ eyelashes and sea foam. When it’s stretched and blocked she’s going down to the river on midsummer eve to catch fairies with it.

Judit continues to come up with fun and novel uses for leftover gansey yarn: this time it’s a delicate little mobile phone bag or case which you can see here, which is the kind of thing I imagine archaeologists would be raving about if they found in the tomb of a bronze age princess, assuming her phone was buried with her (not that you’d get much of a signal in a lead-lined coffin, of course). She’s also helpfully tweaked the photo of Dave’s gansey so you can see the rich complexity of the pattern more clearly, so many thanks to Judit for that.

Finally, this week I came across a splendid entry in a register of applications for poor relief back in the 1870s: a woman who was receiving money for looking after an old lady had asked for an increase, on the grounds that she had “grown increasingly fatuous” – I’ve been wondering how best to keep myself amused in my old age, and I must say this sounds like a plan…