Gansey Nation

First of all, apologies for the absence of the blog the last few days. As you’ll have gathered, we’ve had a major crash on the website—and while Margaret’s heroically managed to recover all but the last month’s blog posts we still don’t have any images for the rest of the site, and a few glitches remain. It’ll be a bit rough ‘n’ ready for the next week, so please bear with us. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Sorry for any inconvenience. Computers are wonderful things—it’s a miracle I’m talking to you now, really, when you think about it—but when they go wrong, boy do they go wrong. (The British comedian Eddie Izzard does a great routine about how you never see the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek having to go Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot their computer just when the Klingons are attacking, which would certainly happen in real life.)

Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes—the blog. Many thanks to everyone who downloaded a copy of my novel An Inquisition of Demons during the free promotion last week—just under 800, which isn’t bad at all—and for the positive reviews (3 on Amazon.co.uk, and Song’s on Amazon.com). I shall now slip back into well-merited obscurity until September, when the next one—the devastatingly brilliant The Bone Fire – comes out.

In late-breaking gansey news, I’ve started the gussets, just over 14 inches up the body. As I said last week, I’m going to let the seam stitch run up the centre of each gusset—always a neat effect. Perhaps the best way to explain this is with a chart, so I’ll post one here shortly. As ever, the first few rows of a gusset look pretty ugly, but it soon settles down. (I hope!) I’m going to keep these gussets small, just over 3 inches.

Not sure if there’ll be a blog next week; partly because the Queen’s Jubilee is coming up, so I have to practice saluting the flags that fly proudly over our home – a Union Flag, and the Reid family crest (a weasel couchant cringing under a double cross); but also because Margaret’s sister Gail, who sometimes posts here, and her husband Bill are over here for a visit.

We advised them to bring lots of warm clothes: as regular readers will know, the climate in Wick sometimes resembles the deck of a merchant vessel in heavy weather, lashed by wind and rain, and the only way to avoid being blown away on the way to the shops is to tie a line round your waist and put your trust in God. Well, wonderful to relate, the wind’s died down, the sun is out, the birds are making a bloody nuisance of themselves and it’s—well, it’s all rather gorgeous.

Without the cloud layer it’s as if the scaffolding’s been taken down and you get to see the finished edifice entire at last, the sky goes all the way up to the Ionosphere, and may not stop even there. You can go for a walk at eleven at night without a torch. All over Caithness people are emerging blinking into the sunlight like earthquake survivors, a little bit stunned, trying to reconnect themselves with their landscape, not quite able to believe they’re alive, inheritors of a suddenly silent, windless world.

It’s a bank holiday, it’s Margaret’s birthday, and outside the sun is shining brightly, lasering in through the windows like some alien death-ray and threatening to incinerate us like ants under a magnifying glass. And yet the last couple of days we’ve woken up to find the cars covered in snow. It’s all very confusing: the weather’s gone bipolar, when we want it to be bi-tropical. (Hey, here’s an idea for new children’s tv series helping to highlight the issues around depression – Brian the Bipolar Bear!)

I’ve been aware for some while now that I’m not seeing as well as I used to. You know the way the old Star Trek television series would go all soft focus whenever a pretty girl was on camera? It’s a bit like that, it’s as if my eyes have been fitted with a soft focus lens. (So that’s why all the local girls suddenly look so much more attractive! Well, that or the whisky.) It makes night driving difficult as oncoming headlights just become a distorted blur, and everything is slightly murky, like looking through cobwebs.

I’ve been expecting this. You see, sometimes after you have cataract surgery, a thin film grows over your new lenses. It’s easily fixed – you just pop down to the hospital and they zap it with a laser, clearing the lens. It’s quick and painless and only takes a few seconds (my Dad had it done). Unfortunately for me, I have to wait a while longer till the film has grown to a point where it’s worth firing up the laser. So it sounds like I have a fun few months in store (the optician said, “I’ll see you again in April”; yes, I thought, but I probably won’t see you…)

Luckily I can still knit. You should be able to date progress on this gansey by counting the steps, like rings in a tree. I’m about a foot up the body now, and will probably start the gussets in a week or so. There’s not much to comment on a pattern like this, except to say that it’s going like a breeze, it’s delightfully tactile, it’s very red and I haven’t made any major mistakes (yet); and the Wendy yarn is definitely knitting up softer and bendier than the tighter Frangipani.

The prolific Judit from Finland has kindly allowed us to add another one of her splendid ganseys to the Gallery, here. As she says the tree of life represents the importance of the forests to the people of Finland, so I suggest you play a piece of music by the great Sibelius while you look at it – possibly the finale of his 5th symphony – to get you in the mood. (At least our snow melts!)

Finally, I’ve had an enquiry from Jeanette Baker looking for a traditional gansey pattern associated with Arbroath, just up the coast from Dundee. I’ve found mention in Gladys Thompson (p.109) to marriage lines from Arbroath, and Rae Compton (p.84) has a diagonal line, or bar. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew of any other references or patterns…?

It’s always interesting to consider what might have happened in history if certain people hadn’t lived: science without Newton or Einstein, music without Beethoven or Bob Dylan – and fantasy without JRR Tolkien.

Of course, there was fantasy literature before Tolkien – Conan the Barbarian in America, Jules Verne in France, Homer in Greece, the whimsical English fairy tradition. But the whole “high medieval” fantasy of kings and queens, dark lords and dragons, armies of darkness and elves of light, all really stems from Tolkien. Like composers after Beethoven, every fantasy writer since Tolkien has had to either imitate or reject; he casts a very long shadow, even today.

My problem with a lot of this kind of fantasy is that I’m a democrat. I hate the idea of “rightful kings”, of an aristocracy; I want my fantasy world to have equality of the sexes, universal education and suffrage, proper dentistry (I can’t imagine Aragorn, even if he had the hands of a healer, popping round to perform a tricky tooth extraction after office hours). I want to see Aragorn and Sauron standing for election, maybe seeing off Saruman and Elrond in the primaries, facing Obama in a live televised debate.

Anyway, replace Aragorn with Prince Charles and you see the problem with hereditary monarchies at a stroke. Preferably of an axe. (What’s that you say? We get an extra day’s holiday for the Queen’s jubilee? Why no, madam, I was only kidding. Vive la Reine!)

Slightly slower gansey progress this week as I spent a couple of days in Edinburgh for work; and as you still can’t take knitting needles as carry-on I had to leave the poor thing behind, like an abandoned puppy, nose pressed against the window watching me leave, howling inconsolably (“Down, Red!”).

This meant flying from Wick airport, possibly the cutest airport in Britain. There’s something very pleasing about watching your bag being hauled out of the cargo hold, put on a truck, driven the ten metres to the terminal, and unloaded through a hatch directly into the waiting lounge for you to pick up, even if some of the mystique of air travel is lost in the process.

Here at last is the pattern chart – though it’s scarcely a surprise at this stage. The only change I made from the original pattern was to widen the step slightly, from 10 stitches to 12, and of course to increase the number of pattern repeats to fit my stitch gauge. I’m cabling every 6 rows which makes for a nice, tight cable. The wearer will be lucky if he can bend over once it’s on. Heaven help him if he sneezes.

The Humber Keel gansey finally made it to Des, the intended victim, in Edinburgh – here’s a picture to prove it. I thought he wouldn’t get a chance to wear it till the cold weather in autumn, but luckily we’re having a traditional Scottish spring.

Finally, another triumph for Lynne; here’s her Cape Cod gansey, based on the pattern from Alice Starmore’s book. Note the patterned gusset, a nice touch. Congratulations again!