If there’s anything that proves to me the quantum theory of alternative realities governed by the choices we make, it’s job interviews. Even if you don’t expect to get the job, you still find yourself imagining what it would be like, what you would do, how you would live, as if you’re seeing another you in the future. For a few days you’re living two lives, one for each of the trouser legs of time stretching out in front of you. Then, when you fail to get the job, the waveform collapses, and you’re back in a single reality again.
This happened to me last week. I went all the way down to Oxford (6-7 hours by train) for an unsuccessful interview for a job based in Glasgow (don’t ask). The interview itself went well, even if it was a bit superficial – in fact, truth to tell, I’ve had far more rigorous examinations at the immigrations desk at Boston airport. But I answered all the questions, gave a good presentation, and didn’t trip over the doorway and end up in the interviewer’s lap, like I did so memorably all those years ago at one county record office. So I have no regrets. (No job, either, of course, but you can’t have everything.)
The day was memorable in another way, too. The wind was blowing hard into my face as I walked up to the Bodleian Library for my ordeal, and suddenly something hit my glasses, and my left eye blurred. When I took my glasses off, I found the lens smeared with bits of some green insect – I’d received my first bug splat as a pedestrian!
All this and the unshakeable cold meant that I didn’t get a whole lot of knitting done last week. Still, as you’ll see from the pictures, I’ve finished the other sleeve pattern and started the cuff. Just under six inches to go! I was absurdly pleased to find that I had exactly the same number of stitches at the start of the cuff as the other sleeve (118 decreased down to 108); of course, this is just as it should be, but it’s nice when things work out. And when I divine the tea leaves (tricky with tea bags but not impossible) I see a tall, dark pair of scissors looming in my future.
It’s been something of a week of rejections. I sent off my novel to a handful of agents to test the water a month ago. I’ve now received my first couple of rejection notices, as they slowly work through their “slush pile” (which they charmingly call the hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts awaiting their attention). Both were form letters, but one had a nice handwritten note at the bottom: “I need something a bit more scary, though nicely done”. Which is some consolation at least.
This week’s bread is a variation on Scottish morning rolls, softened with olive oil rather than milk, and with a couple of teaspoons of sugar added to take the edge off. Take them out the freezer first thing, pop them in the oven for 10-15 minutes, then split them steaming hot and slather with anything that comes to hand. Then go back to bed and sleep till noon.
Margaret celebrated her birthday at the weekend. What do you give the woman who has everything? Reader, I gave her my cold.
Well, this week’s blog has a tawdry, hungover, morning-after-the-party, stale-coffee-and-cigarette-coated-tongue feel to it.
Bogart or Doom?
I mean, the last few days have seen a birthday, Easter, a royal wedding-cum-public holiday, the seriously underdressed Beltane festival on Calton Hill and a new series of Doctor Who. After all that, I guess the only thing left is to fold away the bunting and wait patiently for Christmas. (Somehow a referendum on adopting the alternative voting system on Friday doesn’t set the heart a-skipping in the same way – can’t imagine why.)
I’m writing this a day early, on Sunday, May Day, as I have to be away from home for a couple of days (so apologies, I won’t be able to respond to any posts till mid-week at the earliest). Many years ago I used to be a Morris dancer – think bells and cudgels and real ale – so May 1st is always associated in my mind with getting up at 4am and driving off to Brackley market square to dance the sun up, which usually happens around 5.35am. We’d get a surprisingly decent crowd shivering on the cobbles, then it was into the pub for a cooked breakfast (ah, bacon – the curse of vegetarian taste buds) and some music.
Some years we used to “beat the bounds”, an old custom where you process around the old parish boundary, marking key points with dances and beats of the drum. (Because your parish was the most important unit of local government for centuries it was vital to know its limits.) Delightfully, these days the old boundaries are often obscured under housing estates. Few things are more satisfying on a cold morning when you’ve got up at 4am, than to stroll into a housing estate at a quarter to six beating drums and shouting – and when people come out to complain, thrusting a collecting hat under their noses! (Of course, Britain has rigorous gun laws – I don’t suppose it would work so well everywhere.)
Still plagued with this persistent cold – I no longer have to look phlegm up in the dictionary, having a daily yellow rohrschach test in my handkerchief – I have ploughed on with the gansey, and am well advanced down the sleeve. I’ve just reached the tipping point, the moment when feel you’ve decreased enough to really get the effect as you knit, it all starts to speed up like a spider zeroing in on the centre of its web. Also, I’m still on my second 500g cone of Frangipani 5-ply yarn – only just, though. I’ll still have to break into the third cone to finish it.
The bread this week is a toothsome ciabatta, a very soft dough that is ideally mixed by machine. Not being able to afford a machine I relish the challenge of doing it by hand, though a stranger observing me through the window may have wondered why I was making love to an octopus (as in the great Simpsons mafia joke, “No, I didn’t say he was dead, I said he sleeps with the fishes…”).
As I say, hopefully I’ll catch up on Wednesday. Till then, enjoy the Spring and good luck with the Easter chocolate withdrawal symptoms!
Just a short entry this week, as (a) it’s Easter holiday, and (b) I am rotten with cold and seem to have turned into the slime monster from a 1950s B-movie who sounds like the love child of Barry White and Darth Vader. Or maybe I’ve finally reached puberty and my voice has broken? Or else this is just what you get when you meddle in the affairs of Unitarians, like I rashly did last week.
In my drug-raddled, tissue-sodden, mucus-encrusted state I have still found time for a little knitting – so the epic descent down Sleeve 2 continues slowly. (No more cables! Yeay!) If I keep bending my double-pointed needles like this I’ll end up turning them circular, a sort of cross between my method and the circular method recommended by Lynne, Dave and SongBird last week. And I reckon at this rate I’ll finish sometime later next week. Then – out come the scissors!
If you saw the comments to last week’s blog you’ll have seen one from Michael Pearson (peace and blessings be upon him), saying that his book Traditional Knitting is being republished by Dover. Which is really excellent news, and may generate a bit of publicity for ganseys, too. Do you think ganseys are undergoing something of a revival? I’d like to think so – certainly the numbers of people visiting this website are slowly going up, not that that means anything. What we need is a famous TV detective to wear one, like Sarah Lund’s celebrated jumper in the cult Danish cop show The Killing (which for a time sold out at the company who supply them). Maybe someone could suggest that Matt Smith’s Doctor Who could wear one? (But then, since his fashion sense includes bow ties, fezzes and stetsons this may not have the desired effect…)
Had a jolly nice time in the Midlands, thanks – my parents live in a lovely ex-pub on the Grand Union Canal, near the town of Northampton, which is where I grew up. It was a great place to be a kid – I remember freaking my Mum out once by walking across the canal one winter when it froze over. The downstairs still has the original bar where the canal boat crews would drink, with a great inglenook fireplace, oak beams, and bundles of character. It’s a bit much for them to manage now, but my brother was there and we discussed the possibility of converting the place into a sort of residential workshop venue, for classes on crafts such as, as it might be, knitting… (Watch this space.)
It was unseasonably hot down south – a sticky 22 degrees. But coming back, once we crossed the border into Scotland we watched the temperature drop like an altimeter – in the space of about 50 miles it went down 10 degrees to a brisk 12. (Yet another reason why I love living in Scotland!)
Well, as I have a chocolate Easter Bunny fluttering its eyelashes at me across the room with those come-hither eyes I guess I’d better close. By this time next week I’ll be a whole year older, but with a slightly larger CD collection, so it’s swings and roundabouts. There’s also the small matter of a royal wedding, which will, apparently, lift the spirits of a nation just like the last one in 1981 – and that one worked out pretty well, didn’t it? (What? Oh…)
Here’s another “picking up stitches” tutorial, folks, and this time there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is, this time it’s got sound, so you get some commentary. The bad news is, ahem, this time it’s got sound… You see, there’s just one small thing I should warn you about: we don’t have an external microphone, so the words are kind of muffled. But that’s not all bad, when you consider that if you turn the volume up you get my prissy Anglo-New Zealand “anyone-for-tennis have-another-cucumber-sandwich-vicar” accent. (We tried to get Morgan Freeman, honest we did, but he only does Honiton lace voiceovers now.) Anyway, see what you think.
The first sleeve is successfully finished, including all six inches of cuff, and I’ve picked up the stitches round the armhole and embarked on the second sleeve. And as usual, I have no recollection what I did last time, and can’t make sense of my notes, so it’s rather more stressful than necessary!
In other news, I had a ghastly flashback to the disco scene of 1979 yesterday. We’ve been flirting with Unitarianism – the saucy little minx – and have gone along to a couple of services at St Mark’s church in Edinburgh near the Castle. (Margaret is Unitarian by inclination and while I regretfully reject religion I do accept the idea of the life of the spirit, as is apparent from my fiction, and Unitarianism seems as good a place to explore this as any.)
The services have been agreeable enough, so yesterday we thought we’d stay after for the “coffee and conversation”. But oh dear! It was essentially like being at a party when you don’t know anyone – and, like I said, brought back many happy memories of the discos of my student years (encapsulated brilliantly by The Smiths: “So you go on your own/ And you stand on your own/ And you go home and you cry/ And you want to die”). Lesson One: How To Stand and Nurse Your Coffee and Not Look As Though You Mind Being Utterly Ignored By Everyone in the Room.
Still, I’m not a shy 19 year-old any more, so I decided to be proactive and break the ice. Ah, when will I learn? There was only one person in view who didn’t have their back to us, a woman, so I went up and introduced myself. Alas! She turned out to be a former member, now a born-again atheist, who had only come this time to meet someone (who hadn’t showed up). She responded briefly to direct questions (rather like a spinster aunt who’s had the children dumped on her for the afternoon despite protesting vigorously, and it’s raining outside), preferring instead to stare past my right ear in silence. But like two colliding galaxies locked together in a death-grip by gravity, once we’d moved closer it seemed impossible to break free, held together by the recently-discovered force which binds the universe together, and which scientists have identified as Social Death – and so I gulped down my scalding coffee while she counted the cracks in the ceiling and so the long morning wore on, bringing the peace of the grave a crucial few minutes nearer.
Actually that’s not quite the ghastliest social occasion in my portfolio – in fact, there are surprisingly many to choose from. Pride of place goes to the Society of Archivists function when I sat down to dinner next to an intimidating-looking woman. The conversation went as follows:
The Intimidating-Looking Woman: Hello, I’m Clare.
Me (relieved, thinking, maybe this isn’t going to be so bad): Oh, hello, I’m Gordon.
The Intimidating-Looking Woman (crushingly): No, I mean I’m the archivist of Clare College, Cambridge.
By which point she’d obviously written me off as a total loss and didn’t speak to me again throughout the meal. And after a social annihilation on that scale there was nothing for me to do but resign from all my clubs and go and join the Foreign Legion, a crushed and broken man.
Well, this wasn’t as bad as that, but it definitely goes in the memoirs. (I mean to say, I already knew that we live in an indifferent universe, but I hadn’t realised that this was now church policy…)
Never mind! The sun is shining and in a few days it will be Easter. And if I can’t find solace in religion, I can at least turn to the greatest balm and comfort known to man, chocolate Easter eggs. And I think we can all find it in our hearts to say, Amen to that!
A very Happy Easter from Gordon and Margaret to all.
I came across an interesting definition of magic the other day: “effects without causes”. Which has got me thinking. You see, I’ve tentatively started another novel (just 3,000 words so far), and I’ve decided I want it to be a proper fantasy – not set in the real world, but in a wholly fictitious world, as you’d expect from a fantasy novel.
Now, one of the key elements of a fantasy story is magic. This ranges from the tantalisingly low key (Gandalf in Lord of the Rings using his staff like an electric torch or setting pine cones on fire to drop onto prowling wolves) to the rather overdone (Steven Erikson’s mages operating in barrages like heavy artillery in World War 1). In fact, I think one of the most appealing aspects of the Lord of the Rings – and one that few of its imitators have taken on board – is that magic is at its most magical when it is used sparingly.
Interestingly, two of the best children’s authors who write about magicians – JK Rowling and Ursula le Guin – both just use magic as a backdrop, and their stories are character-led – so the magic remains, I suppose, magical. (Hmm. I think there’s an interesting question to be pursued here – all I need is a research grant and some grad students…)
So anyway, my challenge to myself is to come up with a form of “magic” that I can justify in terms of what I know about about the way our universe works (pretty limited, actually, based almost entirely on Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Universe” but with a less bombastic soundtrack). But which is still magical.
Speaking of magic, it’s almost Easter, and that means lots of big pieces of classical music to listen to – Bach’s St John and St Matthew Passions, Wagner’s Parsifal (ah, you ask, but which version?). And that, in turn, means lots of time for knitting. So, as you can see, I’ve almost finished the first sleeve; I did wonder for a while if I’d actually manage to get it done, but then fortunately my sanity cut-off switch intervened! (I’m pleased to note that I’ve got my knitting callus back, just above the first joint on the ring finger of my right hand; all I need to do now is develop a martial art based around knitting in which you can deliver a lethal blow with one flick of your fingers…)
I decreased at a rate of 2 stitches every 6 rows all the way down the sleeve (one stitch either side of the seam), so I was left with 118 stitches immediately before the cuff. I decreased that by 10 stitches (approximately 10% of the total) to 108. The advantage of 108 is that it is divisible by 4, so it gives me exactly 28 ribs in the cuff (each rib consisting of 4 stitches in the usual way, k-k-p-p). As is my custom these days, I shall – eheu – knit a 6-inch cuff, so the wearer can adjust the length to suit (and on cold days can unroll it all the way down to make a sort of fingerless mitten).
This weeks’ bread is Richard Bertinet’s Ale and Yeast bread. Basically, you replace some of the water with ale (or in my case, Mexican beer) and the result is a nice, yeasty, slightly bitter tasting bread which is particularly toothsome dunked in a hearty soup. And you get to drink the rest of the beer after – it’s a win-win!
Going back to magic, I think there’s something interesting too in the thought that we seem to have a particular hunger for marvels – look at the success of Harry Potter, fantasy in general, and even “magic realism” in literary fiction; and yet when you think about it, we actually live in an age of marvels – iPads, iPods, digital cameras, even the fact that you are reading this now – all of which were, I guess, fantasy when I was growing up. So why aren’t we satisfied? What are we missing?
If there’s anything that proves to me the quantum theory of alternative realities governed by the choices we make, it’s job interviews. Even if you don’t expect to get the job, you still find yourself imagining what it would be like, what you would do, how you would live, as if you’re seeing another you in the future. For a few days you’re living two lives, one for each of the trouser legs of time stretching out in front of you. Then, when you fail to get the job, the waveform collapses, and you’re back in a single reality again.
This happened to me last week. I went all the way down to Oxford (6-7 hours by train) for an unsuccessful interview for a job based in Glasgow (don’t ask). The interview itself went well, even if it was a bit superficial – in fact, truth to tell, I’ve had far more rigorous examinations at the immigrations desk at Boston airport. But I answered all the questions, gave a good presentation, and didn’t trip over the doorway and end up in the interviewer’s lap, like I did so memorably all those years ago at one county record office. So I have no regrets. (No job, either, of course, but you can’t have everything.)
All this and the unshakeable cold meant that I didn’t get a whole lot of knitting done last week. Still, as you’ll see from the pictures, I’ve finished the other sleeve pattern and started the cuff. Just under six inches to go! I was absurdly pleased to find that I had exactly the same number of stitches at the start of the cuff as the other sleeve (118 decreased down to 108); of course, this is just as it should be, but it’s nice when things work out. And when I divine the tea leaves (tricky with tea bags but not impossible) I see a tall, dark pair of scissors looming in my future.
This week’s bread is a variation on Scottish morning rolls, softened with olive oil rather than milk, and with a couple of teaspoons of sugar added to take the edge off. Take them out the freezer first thing, pop them in the oven for 10-15 minutes, then split them steaming hot and slather with anything that comes to hand. Then go back to bed and sleep till noon.
