Gansey Nation

After a few weeks of arctic conditions the snow has moved south, thereby becoming newsworthy to the BBC, who only have to look out the window of their offices in London to report it. This would be perfectly fine with me, if only the cold weather would leave Scotland altogether to go infest southern England, like an annoying elderly relative who takes turns to inflict himself on his offspring (King Lear’s daughters had the same problem, I seem to remember).

Alas, dear reader, it hasn’t budged. So it’s still bitterly cold in Edinburgh, below zero, and snowing just enough to freeze and be treacherous. I start the day immersing my fingers in a mixture of boiling water and antifreeze to get them to work (well, it helps with the car…), and sullenly waiting for my Amazon parcels to arrive (latest delivery estimate: 8 December; looks like Tiny Tim isn’t going to get that new crutch for Christmas after all).

So, while I sit at home and work on my Vitamin D deficiency, I can knit, albeit very slowly with frozen fingers. (People think I’m cracking my knuckles when all I’m doing is shattering the ice.) I’ve finished the 3 inches of ribbing at the bottom, and made the increase into the body.

If you recall I cast on 384 stitches for the ribbing (plus 20 stockinette stitches for the steek, making 404 in all). It’s customary to increase by 10%, and 10% of 384 is, of course 38.4. I decided to round this up to 40, on a whim, and to err on the side of caution (too big is better than too small – though I grant you 1.6 stitches isn’t going to make much difference). So I now have 424 stitches to play with (or 212 per side), plus the 20 stitches of the steek.

It’s important to ensure an even distribution of increases round the body so that your pattern will be centred properly. In this case I had 96 ribs round the bottom, and 40 stitches to add. Dividing 96 by 40 gave me one increase every 2.4 ribs, or 2 increases every 5 ribs. (Basically I divided the ribs into quarters and made sure I increased by 10 stitches every quarter. You don’t have to get too anal about it, broad brush is fine.)

We still haven’t given any serious thought to the pattern. I’ve got a couple more days’ grace, as it’s customary to allow an inch of plain knitting above the ribbing before launching into the pattern. Working out the pattern is a bit like doing fractions for homework, or memorizing fourth declension nouns in Latin, and one of the joys of being a grown up is putting things off till the last minute. (Hang on: that was on one of my report cards from school, too. H’m. I seem to detect a trend…)

Good progress on the novel. I’m up to 35,000 words (about half a standard Graham Greene-sized book), though I suspect very few of them will make it through to the final cut.

This week’s bread, a bunch of my patented “baguettinis”, or mini baguettes, and my first attempt at a stollen, the German marzipan-centred dried fruit bread, a recipe that can only be enhanced by soaking the fruit, and the baker, in rum…

Wishing you a very happy Christmas, from Gordon and Margaret. May your dreams be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white, assuming they’ve gritted the roads properly…

I said last week that winter had come early to Edinburgh. Well, evidently it liked what it saw, because it unpacked its valise, put its feet up on the mantelpiece and settled in for a lengthy stay.  Compare the photo at the head of this week’s blog with last week’s – no, it’s not a duplicate, a week on it’s still snowing.

Wednesday was the day I was scheduled to have my septoplasty operation. I got up bright and early, with a song in my heart (unfortunately the song was “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC). It was snowing heavily and cars were sliding all over the road outside. Didn’t look promising. I phoned the hospital at 9.00 to see if the operation was still going ahead and was told, sure, why not?

I had a cunning plan to get to Livingston – I would take the train, and walk the mile and a half from the station to the hospital. I checked the Waverley Station website, yup, all trains were running. So I fed the huskies and strapped them to the sled, and after a last piece of toast and glass of water with a crack of the whip we were off, into the frozen north. At the station I received my first setback. The line to Livingston was closed, heavy snow, had been all morning – they just hadn’t updated the website. There was a line of about 30 people waiting for taxis, steaming damply, so I joined the queue and steamed along with them. It was only 9.20 and I didn’t have to be there till 11.00. I still had plenty of time, I thought, it’s only 18 miles away.

After a quarter of an hour I reached the front of the line and secured a taxi. When I told him where I wanted to go the driver blanched and begged me on the lives of his wife and sixteen children to reconsider, but I was adamant. The NHS has promised me an operation, I told him, giving way to my proud Klingon heritage; it would be dishonourable to back out now. (Not even the price – £42.30 one way – was enough to dissuade me.)

Well, it was a mistake. It took us two goes to get out of the station. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the taxi fish-tailed. The M8 was down to a single lane, the hard shoulder littered with buried vehicles. It was like going for a scenic drive through the Ardennes after the Battle of the Bulge. It was snowing even more heavily in Livingston, where the White Witch had apparently established herself after being ousted from Narnia, the roads flanked by snowdrifts deep as hedgerows.

We reached the hospital at 10.45, an hour and 10 minutes to travel 18 miles. I found the ward and was shown into a day room to wait. Where I waited. At noon the shift changed and a new nurse, understandably curious, looked in to find out what I was doing there. Apparently because of the snow they hadn’t been able to discharge the previous day’s patients, so all the beds were occupied.

Finally at 14.00 they conceded it wasn’t going to happen, not enough staff had made it in to man the theatre. I had to wait till 15.00 for a taxi back, so all in all it wasn’t my most productive day. (They did let me drink a whole glass of water, though, and paid for the return taxi, so I can’t complain.) Best bit was the taxi driver coming back, who’d been a soldier stationed in Germany. He said once when he and his mates had been out on the lash one night a German skinhead tried to pick a fight with him, kept calling him English. As he squared up to take him on, my driver said he told him, “Ey, pal, stoap callin’ me English; Ah’m Sco’ish!” At which the German man’s friends dragged him away with many apologies, calling him a “dumkopf” for picking a fight with a Scotsman… “Ah guess oor reputation gies aheid o’ us, eh?”

But alas the operation is still to come, when I was hoping it would be but a memory by now. And, with rapidly approaching senility, a distant one at that.

In other news, I ordered the wool for the next gansey from Frangipani, in sea spray colour. The snow has disrupted mail deliveries across the country, but there was a partial let-up over the weekend, so we had the novel experience of a mail delivery on a Sunday. Anyway, thanks to the good people at Frangipani for their usual prompt delivery. I ordered 5 x 500g cones, enough for 2 ganseys. (It’s more economical than buying 3 cones and having 250g left over – so long as you find someone who wants another gansey that colour!).

Finally, here’s the final instalment of my novel, in which Scrooge the miser finds out that the spirits have done their work all in one night and it’s still Christmas morning, but Tiny Tim’s been run over by a bus.

You can download it as a PDF by clicking here.

You can download it as an eBook by clicking here.

Spare a thought this week for my Dad. Went into hospital to have a pacemaker fitted, a short operation under a local anaesthetic. It’s your basic in-out op… Except in his case, they went in over the heart, and discovered the veins were in the wrong place. So they had to back out, open a new seam over on the other side of his chest, and pull the pacemaker across and into position by wire – all under local anaesthetic. And bear in mind my Dad is in his eighties.
And then, if that wasn’t bad enough, when we visited last week he insisted on pulling up his shirt and showing me the scars. Just after dinner, too. He looked like a gaffed salmon. (I asked him if it wouldn’t be easier just to get a zip fitted, since he’s already had two bypass operations before this.) He’s already pretty active, so once again I’ve missed my chance to arm-wrestle him for my inheritance.

So here we are at last, the gansey is finished, all the ends have been darned in, and it’s been washed and blocked. (Not that this one took much blocking, since there were no cables to pull it in, or other distorting patterns. Just endless knit 2/purl 2, the knitting equivalent of breaking rocks). And, who knows, with psychiatric help I might even be able to knit purl stitches again one day.

Thoughts are already turning to the next one, not that I have a waiting list exactly. But Margaret has set me the challenge of a gansey cardigan, a terrifying prospect (warning: contents may involve sewing), which sounds like something different to try. But I’ll need something to keep me occupied while listening to the Ashes down under (i.e., test cricket from Australia) over the next few weeks. Mind you, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that “steek” rhymes with “eek!”.

In response to popular demand (I’m generously assuming two people counts as popular demand) I am posting the novel I’ve been revising on the website. It naturally falls into 3 parts, and will continue over the next 3 weeks. Please do not feel any obligation to read it. It’s a fantasy story, set over one Christmas in Wales, which I think can best be summarised as a blend of Twin Peaks, Stephen King, Alan Garner and Ted Hughes, so you have been warned. (A friend of mine who has read it, while searching for something to say, tentatively offered, “It’s not very cheerful, is it?”) Certainly the tone of whimsical persiflage that permeates this website is disappointingly absent, as is any discussion of knitting in general and ganseys in particular.

If it’s any consolation, Part One is about half the length of the total novel, Part Two (in which hardly anybody dies, honestly) is a relatively short pastoral interlude, and then Part Three rounds things off with a custard pie fight followed by a song. (Caution: your experience may differ.). It’s available in two formats:

as a PDF File:  Click here for the PDF file,

but also as an eBook for anyone with an iPad or iPhone and the iBooks application, or equivalent (maybe a Kindle, I don’t know). Click here for the eBook.

[17.11.2014:  The Wraiths of Elfael is now available via Amazon: The Wraiths of Elfael (Elfael Trilogy Book 1), so the above links have been removed.]

If you do read it and want to comment, please feel free to drop me an email or use the comment feature on that page – I think it’s best if this main blog doesn’t get sidetracked too much from knitting…

…and bread, of course. This week’s bread is a sourdough that didn’t quite work, just to prove that I’m not lifting the bread pictures on this blog from books all the time. It didn’t want to rise, even after 3 hours, and when it went in the oven the bottom half stubbornly refused to budge while the top half went up like a bouncy castle. This made for an interesting texture, Terry Pratchett’s dwarf bread on the bottom, cavernous holes in the middle and a sort of roof on top. Very strange.