Gansey Nation

Humber 7: 7 – 13 November

I once saw a documentary about X-rays and the way they travel invisibly through our bodies, which really creeped me out at the time – same as those subatomic particles barrelling through the helmets of astronauts and punching microscopic holes as they go. Well, I can now add a new category to all of these – Caithness wind, which I’ve discovered blows straight through my skull without being deterred by any headgear, exiting via the back, and leaving a chilled and shivering mass of shrunken brain behind.

The wind, I find, is the defining characteristic of Caithness, along with the grey skies and dark winter nights. Walking in a strong wind is like crossing a field full of goats who keep wandering over and butting you from random directions, causing you to stagger drunkenly. People’s cheeks ripple and stretch as though they were in one of those g-force centrifuges the air force uses, and their clothes shimmer as though you’re looking at them underwater. Trees lean tiredly.

Our latest battle with the elements came on Saturday – Margaret’s up for the week, and as it was a sunny day we thought we’d revisit the rugged and spectacular north coast. We thought we’d start with John o’ Groats, which was bleak and deserted this time of year. It’s curious, but no one seems to know how John o’ Groats came to be so famous – it’s not even the most northerly part of Scotland – that’s Dunnet Point just up the coast, which sticks up into the sea like the antenna on top of Bender the robot in Futurama. Nor can it be due to the charm of its architecture, consisting as it does of a ferry terminal and a large car park ringed with touristy souvenir shops, sheds with peeling paint, beyond which the land slopes abruptly down to the ocean. But on a clear day – like this – you get a good view of the island of Stroma, across the Pentland Firth. (incidentally, does anyone know the – pretty tenuous, I admit – connection between the Pentland Firth and the Lord of the Rings?)

You also get a lot of wind. We went down to look at the waves bursting like artillery shells on the harbour wall, spray like spouting whales, the ocean heaving menacingly like some great leviathan of the deep. But after watching a seagull effectively flying on the spot into a headwind for a while we decided enough was enough. (My new idea is to have car airbags double up as giant hot water bottles for days such as this, so you can at least get warm quickly.)

All of which reinforces the attraction of a gansey, though you’d also need several more layers and some thermal underwear if you were really venturing out. I’m inching my way nearer the start of the yoke, and the body is getting pretty floppy – I’ve got used to knitting ganseys that are patterned all over, so that the pattern effectively serves as reinforcing struts up the body, like the frame on an airship. Suddenly it feels like I have a drunken toddler on my lap, one with attention deficit disorder, or am trying to play a deflated set of bagpipes.

On Wednesday I gave a talk to the family history society. It seemed to go down well, though as I’m suffering with a nasty cold my voice gave out before the end and I finished up squeaking like Beaker from Sesame Street, and was reduced to getting my points across with hand gestures. As a thank-you they gave me a jar of golden local honey for my throat, which was very nice of them. There’s a possible joke to be made here about how Caithness honey should be cloudy and dark to reflect the weather, but that would be unfair – so long as it doesn’t give you wind…!

Humber 6: 31 October – 6 November

Behold, as Walt Whitman used to say, the sea itself, and on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships. Or in this case – for we are talking about Wick harbour on a crisp, clear, Saturday morning – the ship, singular (a fishing boat, I think, not unlike the one the shark destroyed in Jaws, putting out to sea and bouncing up and down as though the sea was a giant bouncy castle).

It seems hard to imagine now, looking round the peaceful, almost deserted marinas, but at one time Wick was the epicentre of the whirlwind Scottish herring industry. In 1900 some 1,200 boats fished out of Wick, and it’s said that the record catch was some 50 million fish landed over 2 days. (Can this be true? Apparently. Personally I can’t visualise 50 million M&M’s, let alone fish, so it all goes over my head, really. But given that the population of the UK was just 38 million in 1900, that’s really quite impressive.)

I was thinking about this as I picked my way over the slippery stones, seaweed, empty beer cans and plastic bottles along the north shore on Saturday, drawn out of bed by the brilliant sun and the gulls (wearing a gansey, of course, though the old sea dog ensemble was somewhat ruined by the Boston Red Sox baseball cap…), and looking back towards the town. There are old photographs of Wick harbour absolutely crammed with ships – as the old cliché has it, masts thick as a forest – and I was trying to picture what it must have been like, the bustle, the noise, the smell. But it’s too far in the past, in a black and white era, and we live in colour now. Like the First World War, somehow it all happened in monochrome.

Work on Des’s Humber Keel gansey continues apace. The body’s long enough now that it won’t stand upright on its own any more, but collapses gracefully like a punctured soufflé, or an Edwardian lady curtseying, skirts ballooning like a hovercraft coming to rest. It’s a little over 9 inches long now, 3 inches of welt and 6 inches of body. The pattern, as recorded in Michael Pearson’s book, calls for 10 inches of plain knitting in the body before the fun starts, so if things carry on as they are I should reach that point around the start of December.

After all my preparations I didn’t get a single treat-or-treater, or door-kicker-in-er on Halloween. There were stray bangs and pops all through the evening, both then and on Bonfire Night – I assume they were fireworks, unless Wick has a gang problem with drive-by shootings I don’t know about. But other than that, nothing. Removing the shells from my shotgun, I felt curiously let down.

Ah, well. There’s something about the ocean (“the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song”, as Walt Whitman says) that makes you think. Sometimes these thoughts are profound, like Whitman’s thinking “a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future”; other times they merely remind you how much you’d like a Chinese takeaway. Whatever floats, as they say, your boat.
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[All black & white photos are from the Johnston Collection – a wonderful collection of old photos of Wick. – admin.]

Humber 5: 24 – 30 October

So, Halloween. Many people in Britain get annoyed that the American tradition of “trick or treat” has become commonplace over here, displacing native customs like the grey squirrel driving out the red. So I have already started the time-honoured response by boarding over the doors and windows and electrifying the door knocker, while seeding the doormat with landmines (the Tescos superstore really does have everything).

But I was interested to learn that Caithness has its own variant of the festival, called “Kickie Doorie”. This happens on the night before Halloween, and cleverly avoids giving the victim a choice. Instead, gangs of children go round playing harmless pranks, like egging houses and cars, setting fire to bags of poo, and smearing baked beans on cars and windows. (This was told to me with an air of civic pride, which may be the most worrying thing I’ve experienced since I came to Wick.)

The Library Crocodile

… and dressed up for his 100th birthday in 2009

On the gansey front, eagle-eyed readers may notice a tragic falling-off in the quality of the photos this week. This is because Margaret has returned to Edinburgh with her trusty camera, leaving me to fend for myself with an aging smartphone and no talent. But hopefully you can see progress from the chevrons, which are slowly accruing like tree rings. My only problem now is that we re-wound the 500g cone into a ball, and after a trouble-free few weeks I’ve reached the stage where it keeps snarling up into a massive tangle, like someone’s dumped an enormous pan of cold green spaghetti into my lap or I’m being attacked by a carnivorous plant from outer space. Imagine someone laying out a giant jellyfish to dry in their living room and that will give you the general idea of my technique for dealing with it.

Special thanks to Sue for permission to show a gansey she knitted for her brother in our “Reader’s Gallery” – looks pretty splendid, doesn’t it? Congratulations to artist and model!

I’ve been asked if anyone knows an American supplier of guernsey 5-ply yarn. Any suggestions? [a quick Google reveals that Kirtland’s Yarn Barn in VA carries Frangipani, as does Churchmouse Yarns & Teas in WA, and Handknitting.com in WY has Wendy Guernsey 5-ply – admin.]

Snappy & Chompy and friend

Highlight of my first couple of weeks at work so far is the time when the cleaner came in on the day we’re closed to the public and I was on my own, and she decided to set the alarm on her way out – so when I stood up all the alarms went off. And the key to the alarm cupboard was downstairs in the library, which was (inevitably) empty and locked (though it is, bizarrely, guarded by a genuine 100 year-old stuffed crocodile all the way from India). Picture me standing there like Oliver Hardy covered in whitewash, looking into an imaginary camera, with a curious persistent ringing in my ears.

Right, time to get the alligators (Snappy and Chompy) out of their crate and into the moat, and then I think my Halloween preparations are complete. All I have to do is try it out by phoning for a pizza delivery, and then we’re in business…

Humber 4: 17 – 23 October

I think I’ve had occasion to mention before the blessing and curse of the modern world that is autocorrect – whereby your computer assumes it’s smarter than you and corrects what you’ve typed into what it thinks you should have typed.

Long-term readers will recall that this used to happen most spectacularly when I worked in Wales, of course, when my word processor regularly replaced Archyfydd, the Welsh for Archivist, with Archfiend – so that I used to go round describing myself as the County Archfiend, still my favourite job title.

Now, while I’m between two homes, I’m doing most of my computing on my iPad – a fantastic little device that lets you surf the web while supine and/or comatose – but whose virtual keyboard is just a smidgeon smaller than a regular computer keyboard. Throw into the mix my blunt, stubby fingers, and you have an unrivalled opportunity for gobbledygook.

Big Skies of Caithness

Last night I discovered, to my great delight, that through some clumsy typing on my part Darth Vader had morphed into Death Badger. (I defy you to replay Star Wars in your head, replacing the one with the other, and not feel that it makes for a huge improvement.) Anyway, it’s all done so sneakily you don’t always notice – so this partially explains why there are so many typos in comments I’m posting at the moment.

Thanks for all the good wishes on my new job. I won’t pretend it hasn’t been stressful, finding a house to rent, moving up, starting the job, house hunting – and so much of archives work is “stuff you just have to learn” (what collections you hold, what sort of material they contain, the location of every village and hamlet in the county), I’ll be blundering around in a fog for some time to come. But so far so good – in fact, I may even be able to take my analyst off speed dial if things keep improving.

And in case you were wondering . . . Balerno modeled by recipient

It’s almost the end of October, though, so the weather’s unkind. Last week temperatures were only a degree or two above freezing, and the rain fell as hail, then sleet (most of it down the back of my neck). Today it’s warmer, but so windy people are walking around with what I thought were balloons, but it turned out to be small dogs swept up by the wind, tethered by their leashes.

So it looks like I’m going to need a good supply of ganseys. As you’ll see, I’ve slowed down a bit this week – not surprisingly. But you can see the seed stitch/ chevron pattern is starting to emerge clearly now. Now I’m well into it I’m not making any mistakes – one row starts purl-knit-purl, the next knit-knit-purl, and it’s almost impossible to get that wrong, even for the likes of me.

Next week the clocks go back and it’ll be Hallowe’en, so I suppose I’d better gear up to tricked or treated by the local gangs. I may even dress up in my own costume – who knows? I could always appear as Death Badger…

Humber 3: 10 – 16 October

I hadn’t realised how much simple pleasure you can get by writing old songs and substituting one word for another – in this case, “Caithness” for “Christmas”. It works with just about any song or carol, but is perhaps most effective with the soundtrack to the Muppet Christmas Carol. (“A cup of kindness that we share with another/ A sweet reunion with a friend or a brother / In all the places you find love it feels like C-a-i-t-h-h-n-e-s-s.”)

For I am typing this blog in Wick, on Sunday night, having moved up here a few days ago to get settled in before starting work on Monday. I’m renting a nice little house on the outskirts of town for a few months. Quite a change from the centre of Edinburgh – from the bedroom window I get an unrivalled view of Tesco’s (at night it’s lit up like an alien landing strip) and open fields stretching away to the far horizon. People up here talk about the “big skies” of Caithness and I can see what they mean – sort of like the plains of the Midwest USA but with more midges.

Initial forays to the supermarket are encouraging – not only do they have oodles of fruit and veg, they also sell those imitation burgers and sausages that let vegetarians masquerade as normal people at barbecues like alien pod creatures disguised in human shape. The store is so big I suspect they could hold town meetings there and fit most of the population inside, and I have an urge to replicate the scene from the Blues Brothers movie and drive a car up and down the aisles. So we won’t starve anyway.

In between looking at possible houses to buy and trying to figure out the subtleties of a new heating system, I’ve been making the most of my free time to get some knitting done before work swallows my spare time. The pictures are from a camera phone, so apologies for that. (The blog’s going to be held together with chewing gum and sticky tape for a few weeks till we get settled.)

But hopefully you’ll get an idea of the general rate of progress and be able to see some of the detail of the moss stitch and chevron panels running up the sides of the seam stitches. Already it looks distinct from the usual type of yoke-pattern ganseys where the body is entirely plain – so long as you don’t lose concentration and just knit through the patterned panels, as I’ve already done several times! Ah well.

Well, it’s late, so I suppose I’d better go and prepare myself for work tomorrow with a night’s vigil of fasting and meditation, like some medieval knight on the eve of his investiture, but with a sharp pencil instead of a sword. Thanks to all of you who’ve sent me good will messages, it’s much appreciated.

So picture me tomorrow, skipping to work like Pinocchio on his way to school, and singing a merry tune – after all, there’s only one more sleep to C-a-i-t-h-n-e-s-s…

Gansey Nation

Humber 7: 7 – 13 November

Humber 6: 31 October – 6 November

Humber 5: 24 – 30 October

Humber 4: 17 – 23 October

Humber 3: 10 – 16 October

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