Gansey Nation

A nose, as Shakespeare almost said, by any other name would smell as sweet.

Nearly three weeks on from my septoplasty operation, and I can finally gauge how it all went. The infection’s gone, the painful swelling has responded to treatment, and my sense of taste and smell is pretty much back. (By the way, have you ever noticed how great stuff tastes? I read of one poor woman who bought a very expensive box of chocolates in advance, to cheer herself up after a septoplasty, then found she couldn’t taste any of them!).

And I am – this is actually quite exciting – able to blow my nose, albeit tentatively, just a gentle snuffle, without worrying about looking down to find most of my nose nestling in the handkerchief.

I’m not out of the woods yet. The inside of my nose is still very tender (hardly a surprise), I’m still very congested (I wake up every morning with a sore throat and a headache), and when I touch the inside of my nose I feel like a blind man running his fingers over a baby dragon. But it’s still very early days – I’m told that it can take up to a year for all the bits to settle down properly.

I’ve written up my diary of the operation and its aftermath, on the off-chance that it will be of use or interest to anyone thinking of having anything similar done – if you’re anything like me, you won’t know the half of it. (But, as ever, now it’s over, it doesn’t seem so bad…) You can read that here, if you wish.

I’m still finding it hard to get back into things – everything I was doing before the operation feels like it was being done by someone else (in some ways I feel like I’m taking over another person’s life, but their interests weren’t necessarily the same as mine).

In the same way that pregnant women are said to crave unusual foods – pilchards and ice cream, that sort of thing – I’ve had an inexplicable craving to listen to the music of Anton Bruckner. Bruckner wrote long, grand, noble symphonies (“cathedrals in sound” someone called them) with slow movements of an achingly profound, transcendent, shattering beauty. (Trust me on this. Fill the bath with scented foam, light some candles, close your eyes and lie back and listen to the adagio of his eighth or ninth symphonies. If you don’t emerge after half an hour determined to sell all your possessions and devote your life to good works I guarantee the shop will give you your money back.)

And while I’ve been listening to dear old Anton, I’ve been rustily getting my fingers back into the knitting habit, a whole two inches this week. The pattern makes better sense than I’d expected, from a knitting point of view, for all the knit-purl-knit-purl taradiddle that it contains. (Essentially, you have an elaborate pattern row followed by a mostly plain row, which makes it easier.) The diamond effect is starting to emerge nicely, too, an interesting reversal of the usual pattern.

At least my doppelganger and I seem to share a fondness for baking bread. For whatever reason – I suspect the warmer weather has a lot to do with it – I’ve had some notable sourdough success lately. Illustrated here is a couple of sourdough “granary” or malted flour loaves, moistened with a glug of olive oil to help it stay soft for longer.

I’ve also included my favourite bread of the moment, Piadini, or Italian flatbread. It’s basically a standard bread dough (the recipe calls for carbonated water, though I don’t know if it really makes a difference). After it’s risen once you divide it into 8 rounds and then cook them in a frying pan without any oil, like English muffins, pricking them all over with a fork to stop them swelling up with air pockets. You can either eat them warm, straight from the pan (my preference), or let them cool and then fold them over and fill them with whatever takes your fancy – tomatoes, cheese, felafel, you name it – like a sock puppet sandwich. And because you don’t have to worry about a second rise and baking time, you can start after breakfast and still have them ready for lunch.

In other words – now I’ve got my sense of taste back I mean to make the most of it…

No noticeable progress this week; your regular blogging service will resume next Monday.

As hoped and expected, Himself had the septoplasty operation last Wednesday and recovery is slow but going to plan – he’s effectively confined to bed with what he describes as a combination of a hangover, jet-lag and a migraine, and is planning a self-help book called “how to lose weight on a diet of blood and mucus” which should be a best-seller. Oh, and if anyone has the secret if time travel, he would like to know so he can go back in time and tell himself not to have the blasted operation in the first place.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your nose rearranged from the inside.  It’s certainly taken the fizz out of the gin, and no mistake.  Apart from short bursts of activity to sit over a steaming bowl to cleanse nasal passages, the rest of the time is spent prone on the bed.  Perhaps waiting for death, I haven’t asked.  There are occasionally brief episodes of lucidity, when the congestion clears.  Then the traffic jams up again, and clarity goes on holiday.  At night, sleep is only possible flat on his back, propped up, sporting a rather fetching white gauze pad – think reverse polar bear, but cuter.

Anaesthetically speaking, the op was a far greater success than the cataract ops – there was no post-op nausea or side-effects.  Aesthetically speaking, you’d never know he’d had an op.  The surgery was all where the likes of you and I can’t see it, in the dark dripping regions of the sinuses.  There’s even a splint up there, to keep everything on the straight and narrow.  That comes out Friday. Apparently the splint can be up to 4 in. long, but it’s a preferable alternative to yards of gauze packing . . . But progress has been steady; each day the breathing is slightly easier, the congestion slightly less, the oozing lighter . . .

So, hopefully, Gordon will be back next week, and thanks for all your get well wishes.

Margaret

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…