Gansey Nation

It’s the end of another Edinburgh Festival, and last night we went down to Princes Street to watch the fireworks – and very spectacular they were too. Apart from the general whizz-bang-kapop-pop-pop experience, they always have some unusual effects, such as the fireworks “waterfall” which cascades in a golden stream down the castle mound; and the fireworks are choreographed to go off in time to a 45-minute concert of popular classical music in the gardens (which was, in the words of some New Englanders standing behind us, “ossum”).

It was a still night, mild with hardly any wind, so when the rockets exploded into clusters of smaller flares, like a sunburst, their smoke trails hung high in the air for several seconds – and just for a moment it was like looking at a negative photograph of a snow-covered bush in midwinter, until they slowly faded, leaving just a drifting haze of smoke. I thought that was pretty ossum too.

The other bonus of the Festival is all the culture that clogs up the city for a month like a overgrown garden. Alas, being unemployed, I’ve had to ration myself to just a couple of concerts this year: the Mahler I mentioned last week, and a rare performance of Richard Strauss’s fairy-tale opera, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, conducted by the Valery Gergiev and performed by the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra. The plot of the opera is, quite frankly, barking, but the music is wonderful and the sets and costumes were stunning, and – for once – the effects were magical. I’m still on something of a high three days later. (See this YouTube clip to get an idea.)

We’re approaching the gansey end-game now, with about a third of the second sleeve completed. I’ve kept careful records of the first sleeve, so I can make sure that everything is exactly the same. (This works fine until, cough, you get your columns mixed up and spend half an hour panicking, counting and re-counting, only to realise that you’re looking in the wrong column… oh well.) It’s always great to reach this point – with only one arm it looks a bit like an amputee – now it starts to look like a gansey.

This week’s bread is a departure for me – Dan Leader’s Green Olive Sticks (or to give them their Italian name, Pane di oliva verde). It’s a standard dough made with a traditional “biga” starter, with 2 cups of chopped, pitted green olives mixed in. You shape them into little mini baguettes (baguettinis?) of about 70g each, so they’re sort of a cross between baguettes and breadsticks. (These were made for Margaret – I can’t bear the taste or smell of olives, and kneading their slimy, oily little husks into the dough was something of a trial – like trying to replace the intestine of a dead goat after it’d been removed by mistake during the autopsy – but even I have to concede they look good.)

Finally, we had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn Logan of the Moray Firth Partnership last week. (By the way, Kathryn mentioned that Frangipani – who are also going to be at the Gansey Project’s “Ganseyfest” in Inverness on 1-2 October – now supply a pretty good range of 2.25mm needles, too, which is always good to know.) She brought down a couple of the Gansey Project’s original ganseys for us to look at, and they simply blew us away – such fine knitting, and so soft – really makes you regret the fact that you just can’t get that wool any more. As for the ganseys themselves, well, what can I say? They were – forgive me – ossum.

Sometimes we all must face up to the realisation, as PG Wodehouse said, that life is stern, and life is earnest. In my case, this usually happens every time I have to pick up stitches around the armhole for a sleeve. But there’s nothing for it but to take a deep breath, play some calm, relaxing music – Bach, perhaps, or The Pixies – and, after entering a zen-like trance, the mind free of illusion and distraction, grasp the needle, and the nettle.

The armhole for this gansey measures 8.5 inches from the gusset to the shoulder join, or 17 inches in the round. At a stitch gauge of around 9 stitches per inch, that gives me 159 stitches. It fought me every step of the way, for some reason – I would normally expect to pick up those stitches in 45 minutes to an hour, this time it took me an hour and a half – but they all came up cleanly and of course once the pick-up row is out of the way you’re off and running.

159 stitches gives me a central chevron panel flanked by two diamonds per side, each of 19 stitches, interspersed with cables. I’ve decreased the gusset at the same rate as it was increased, 2 stitches every fourth row. After that, the decreases happen on the cable, i.e., every 8th row. Now it’s just a question of actually knitting the sleeve and as you can see, I’ve made pretty good progress.

Other than knitting, I’ve been tweaking some writing around. Some years ago, I wrote a Victorian detective story, set during the building of the Elan Valley dams in mid Wales to provide fresh water for Birmingham. It’s a bleak little tale, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it; the story was quite good, but the writing was truly awful – dreadful – as lifeless and bloated as last month’s beached whale. So while I take a break from life in general, I’ve been rewriting this story, and drastically editing it down to just over 75,000 words. The funny thing is, I even tried to give it a happier ending, but it just didn’t work – so finally I admitted defeat and restored the original nihilistic one (Thomas Hardy frequently had the same problem, I understand).

Finally, after much experimentation, I’d like to share my basic bread recipe with you.

1 kg flour, 10g powdered dried yeast, 20g salt, 680ml warm water, 1 tbsp olive oil. Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl, leave for 20 minutes to let the flour absorb the liquid. Tip out on counter and knead for 10 minutes or so. Clean the bowl, oil it and put in the dough. Cover with plastic and leave overnight in the fridge. Next morning, take it out of the fridge, do a stretch and fold and leave for an hour in the bowl to warm up. After that, tip it out and shape the loaves (I usually make 4 8-inch baguettes and 6 rolls), leave to rise for 75 minutes or so, then score the tops if desired and bake in a pre-warmed hot oven for 15-20 minutes.

You can add a splash of sourdough to the basic mix, or leave out the oil, or add a spoon of honey or sugar without making much difference. Angels eat this bread for breakfast, with a sort of ambrosia pate in place of marmalade. Fallen angels are cut off from the divine bakeries, and it’s well known that this is their greatest torment, being forced to eat supermarket sliced bread for all eternity, forever tortured with the memory of a crackling crusty baguette.

In shock news this week I’ve been reminded that I’m still, technically, an archivist (you can take the boy out of archives, but you can’t, etc.). First of all I’ve been approached out of the blue by the professional association of archivists in the UK to be their new Vice Chair.

I did explain to them that I do not, on the whole, seem to see the world in the same way as most archivists, which is one reason I tend to keep a low profile, professionally – the association conference is in Edinburgh this year and I’m still not going (as the great Liverpool football manager said of local rivals Everton, “If Everton were playing at the bottom of the garden, I’d draw the curtains”. Well, it’s not like that with me, but I’ve learned down the years that there’s no point in arguing with people who disagree with you). But like some white-haired Roman senator, sick of the decadence of the imperial court who retired to his country estates to grow grapes and write iambic pentameters, I’ve been called back into service. My first move will be, I think, to propose that we rename the Board “The Parliament of Saints”, and take it from there.

I also found myself having lunch in the unlikely surroundings of an officers’ mess in a regimental HQ last week. (Note to self: next time, wear a tie, put on your jacket without being prompted, and forget about being a vegetarian…). I’d gone to give them some advice on looking after their archives; perhaps the only collection I’ve come across where “pigsticking” is a useful indexing term.

They have a really good little regimental museum, too – and I wore out more shoes than I care to remember traipsing round dispiriting local museums in the South West, so I know whereof I speak. They don’t have much storage space and, of course, there’s no money to build more (everything you need to know about the modern world is contained in the fact that they were recently turned down for a grant to build a store on the grounds that it “wasn’t strategic”). So most of what they have is on display, including some splendid old uniforms.

Incidentally, do you feel the same way I do when you see an historic uniform – it looks so small, you wonder how anyone could fit inside? But then, I once saw an exhibition of costumes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and even Worf’s uniform looked like it was intended for a teenage member of the chess club, so go figure.

Meanwhile, I’ve been recreating the labours of Sisyphus (replacing the enormous boulder he was forced to roll up the hill, only for it to endlessly roll back down again, with a ball of yarn – well, it’s me back, you see) and have – finally! – re-knitted the rows which had to be ripped out last week. So in one sense I’ve only done about 7 rows this week, while in another, more accurate sense, I’ve done about 40. If anyone wants me, I’ll be in my room listening to Pink Floyd with the curtains drawn for a while.

I’ve also finally drawn a line under the “Wars of the Roses with magic” novel, which clocks in at a respectable 71,000 words (something in the region of 270 pages or so if it were a paperback). As usual, I’ve gone from being quietly pleased with it to despairing at its shortcomings in the space of about 3 days. (I wonder if plumbers ever feel this sort of insecurity about a washing machine, waking up days later at 3 in the morning, wondering if the connection is tight enough, if anyone will like the hose? “I tell you Liz, I should have been a novelist, I can’t take the insecurity…”)

Heigh ho, there’s always bread. This week’s bread is one of my most successful sourdoughs to date, light, full of bubbles, soft crumb, crisp, crackling crust, and with that authentic sourdough tang. Maybe I should set up a Bread Museum, like the dwarves in Terry Pratchett? In fact, if I could think of a strategic use for bread, I’d probably get a grant, too…