Gansey Nation

Back at work today after a week’s holiday, so I’m in a fairly sombre mood. The weather’s put on mourning grey in sympathy, summer’s over, now there’s nothing for it but to see the nights grow shorter to Christmas, like a marooned sailor slowly watching the tide come in and submerge his tiny atoll. Did I mention the sombreness? (Or is that sombriety? In Spanish, of course, sombrero.)

We had a good break, though, hosting a visit by our friends Vincent and Derek in a mini-Indian summer. Highlights included a visit to the exposed headland of Dunnet Head in gale-force winds, which was bracing, albeit uncomfortably like standing in a wind tunnel (I learned I am not as aerodynamic as I thought), and a visit to the Castle of Mey.

Off Dunnet Head: last week

This was the late Queen Mother’s private retreat, a charming little castle overlooking the ocean, now run by a trust and open to the public. It’s well worth a visit, even for republicans like me, as you can both admire the architecture and pick up gossip about the royal family at the same time. (Sometimes the devil takes over my mouth, though, as when I suggested, when the assistant pointed out the mysterious red legs of a heraldic creature on a tapestry, that it probably reflected the fact that they’d ‘waded through blood to the throne.’ Ahem.) My favourite story? The guest who thought her bedroom was haunted after seeing strange lights in the night, only to have the lighthouse up the coast pointed out next day.

Off Dunnet Head: a ‘normal’ day

Anyway, I’m slowly working through my pipeline of gansey projects, and here’s the next. It’s going to be a north of Scotland gansey, possibly another Hebridean pattern (I haven’t decided yet), in Frangipani cream. It has to be light – with my eyesight, any dark colour and I might as well knit blindfold. It’s going to be a cardigan, so it has a steek of 20 stitches running up the front centre. And after the repetitive multi-cabled Filey gansey, when I found myself so in the groove I even found myself cabling my spaghetti at dinnertime, this one won’t have any cables until the yoke.

It’s for a 45-inch chest in the round, so I cast on 420 stitches for the gansey, plus the 20 for the steek, a total of 440. Unusually for me, the welt is in garter stitch, alternating knit and purl rows. This isn’t as easy as ribbing, I find (ribbing sits more comfortably on my needles), but it doesn’t draw in so much on the hips for the wearer, and anyway I rather like the look, which reminds me of the curved wall of an Iron age broch. To keep the welt nice and loose it’s the same size as the body, so no increases this time (I usually increase 10% from ribbed welt to body).

The downside to garter stitch, I have discovered – and I share this nugget with you for free – is that it concertinas, like pleats on a skirt. So you think, aha, that’s 24 rows completed, that must equate to a whopping two inches; only to find that when placed next to a ruler it wilts like last week’s lettuce and you barely scrape an inch and a half. How unfair is that? Garter stitch is the Catch-22 or Zeno’s paradox of knitting.

I’ve been trying to think of something cheerful to end on, and the best I can come up with is this: there’s just 106 sleeps till Christmas. Time to start sketching out that list…

It’s the last week of August and outside my window the trees are thrashing furiously in the strong wind, while down in the harbour the waves are crashing against the harbour wall with the blind persistence of rugby prop forwards. The sky is the colour of the kind of porridge you find congealed on sidewalks. Suddenly it feels like autumn.

All the more reason, then, to bring a little colour back into the world with a flaming, bright red gansey. I finally finished it on Saturday. I seem, by the way, to have created my own “Zeno’s paradox” of ganseys: on the second cuff I managed to knit the first half (three inches) easily enough; but by then I’m starting to run out of steam, and the next inch and a half takes just as long; then the next three-quarters of an inch; and so on.

So a job that should just take a few days ends up seeming to last forever. (To make matters worse I had to rip out and re-knit a couple of inches when I realised that I’d made a mess of the join between two balls of wool, so that a stray loop of one of the ends was left peeking coyly out.)

But it’s over now. It’s very red – so bright in fact that I keep thinking I’ve left the light on; and several times I’ve gone out to admire the sunset, only to find it was the glow of the gansey reflected in the window. Once it’s been properly blocked and dried I’ll ship it down to my friend in Edinburgh; I’ve already warned him to be careful, or he’ll look like he’s been caught in an explosion in an Italian restaurant.

Meanwhile it’s time to take a short break, and start planning the next project. It’s going to be another cardigan (c.f., Margaret’s Fife gansey in the gallery), knit in Frangipani cream, and will probably feature some of the intricate and riotous patterns from the far north of Scotland.

It’s a scary thought that it will probably be the New Year before that one is finished, and the bleak (very bleak!) midwinter will hopefully be on the wane. Since moving up here I’ve come up with a new definition of summer: videlicet, any day when I don’t need a hot water bottle. So far this summer has consisted of about 19 days.

By the way, I’ve just discovered I have an allergic reaction to something – but I don’t know what. Speculation is rife: what can it be? It’s not grass or tree pollen, or dust: could it be porridge? Vegetables? Reality TV shows? Proust? Work? So long as it’s not coffee or bread, I can probably cope; but (gulp) – what if it’s wool…?

So here we are: with all the fanfare of a submarine slipping its moorings in the predawn darkness one cold winter’s morning, my second novel was launched on Amazon this weekend. It’s called The Bone Fire and is a contemporary fantasy novel, set partly in Edinburgh, partly in the shaman spirit world, and is probably even stranger than that sounds. And it’s free! (At least till Wednesday, anyway.)

You can read more about it, if you’re interested—and you can always go to Amazon and read the beginning online, or download a sample. As ever, the hard part is getting noticed among the deluge of self-published books; but short of renaming it “A Good Shag” to capitalise on the Fifty Shades of Gray market, there’s not much I can do—and anyway, knowing my luck, it’d just get lost among all the other books on pipe tobacco…

Anyway, as ever, if you feel so inclined, any help you can furnish by letting people know it exists via Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads.com, or blogs would be a huge help; and if you should happen to read it, and enjoy it—stranger things have happened—then an Amazon review would be much appreciated.

Thanks to everyone for your solicitation over my blocked ears last week. I duly had them syringed on Friday. I don’t know if you’ve ever had it done? Basically, the nurse plants one foot on your chest to keep you steady, while filling a syringe that looks like something a market gardener in the 1930s would use to spray greenfly on his roses. She then inserts the nozzle in your ear and squirts.

Teepee? No, it’s the bonfire-in-waiting

Now, if this was a Bugs Bunny cartoon a jet of water would immediately arc out of the other ear. But no. In fact, the effect is rather like having a power shower turned on inside your head, and it’s only a wonder the nurse doesn’t look in the basin afterwards and say, ‘Oops! Is that a piece of brain floating in there?’

Not that I’m complaining. The good news, I can hear again; the bad news, the fairground parked down by the riverside was suddenly far more annoying, like having a Bruce Springsteen fan parked outside your house for several hours a night. (I didn’t go to the fair; I find them a bit tacky, plus those rides that spin you round have an unpleasant effect on my stomach, turning me into a sort of human muck spreader, with unfortunate consequences for anyone happening to look up as I go whirling past…)

The fair was here for Wick Gala, and it all finished off with fireworks over the river—we could see them from our house, thus saving us the inhuman effort of a five minutes’ walk. But the really cool part was the fog: at ground level all was clear; but higher up there was a dense cloud of mist, so when the rockets went off all you could see was a coloured haze in the sky, like Captain Kirk torpedoing Klingons in a nebula.

I’m on the second sleeve of the gansey, and as usual it’s going slower than the first. I’m never sure quite why this should be, but it always happens. I suppose it’s partly the feeling of starting all over again, and partly because the top of the sleeve is wider than the cuff—so each row takes half as long again as you’re used to. Still, I’ve seen off the gusset, and am slowly getting back into the zone.

Now it’s back to Amazon to see how my book is doing. And remember, if you only read one novel this year combining the shaman spirit world, Arthurian knights, and foul-mouthed talking animals, please make sure it’s mine.