This week we did something we’ve been meaning to do for some time, and paid a visit to the Anstruther Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther. It was a beautiful day (i.e., the one day of the week when it wasn’t raining), perfect for a trip up the Fife coast.
So off we drove. Anstruther is about an hour and a half north of Edinburgh, over the Forth bridge, and it’s a very pleasant drive, meandering up the coast road. (Of course, you have to be strong and not get sidetracked by the advertisements to go see Scotland’s Secret Bunker and the enticingly named Kingdom of Fun along the way, which requires some willpower.)
I’ve had a bit of a thing for east coast fishing towns and villages ever since we lived in Lowestoft, and Anstruther is definitely up there. The seafront has lots of restaurants and fish and chip shops, there are quaint back alleys and wynds, and you can walk out along the harbour to the lighthouse, and get a good view of the sea. Of course, there must be a reason why they need a sea wall over six feet high, but I haven’t been able to work it out yet…
I hate to say it, but we were a little bit disappointed by the museum. Just a bit. Of course, my main interest is ganseys, and I accept that’s not the typical reason for visiting; but despite housing the Moray Ganseys Project temporary exhibition, they didn’t really have much interesting knitwear on display. A couple of the dummies were wearing ganseys, but these were hidden under waistcoats or oilskins; and they had a small glass case dedicated to fishermen’s knitting, but the lights weren’t on in that gallery, and it was impossible to see any detail.
The museum itself is interesting, much larger than it looks from the outside, consisting of several buildings knocked together, and you can tour galleries ranging from the age of sail to the introduction of steam, view a recreated fisherman’s cottage, and walk round the hulk of a real fishing boat, or watch someone working on a sail boat.
So why weren’t we more impressed? I suppose it’s because, although each item was displayed and labelled, it didn’t really add up to a coherent narrative. There wasn’t a “wow” factor, nothing to make you stop and think, no real human interest. (Actually, that’s not fair – they have a very effective room like a chapel, with plaques to fishermen lost at sea on the walls.) But I was hoping for more than a bunch of fishing-related stuff in glass cases and some of the world’s least convincing dummies. Hopefully when I go again it will click.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s well worth a visit, though I’d recommend going in summer since they don’t appear to heat the galleries in winter, or turn on all the lights for the displays. (I still plan to donate a couple of my ganseys to them one day, if they’re interested.) And I can recommend the museum cafeteria unreservedly. Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks might have had reservations about their coffee, but not about the coffee cake.
The trip was by way of a celebration, as I’ve finally finished the gansey. I slogged my way down the cuff with all the enthusiasm of the Allies fighting their way up Italy in World War 2, with similarly happy results, though it felt like it took as long in the end. Speaking of ends, I darned them in last night, so all we have to do now is wash it and block it and then feed it to the moths. So the cycle of life continues.
This week’s bread is a sourdough rye bread. Closer textured than normal bread (rye hasn’t got any gluten, or something), I’m not sure how much of the final density is due to my inexperience or if it’s supposed to be that way. I decided to move it off the counter when it started attracting a garlic press and a couple of spoons into close orbit around it…
Now, I know that not everyone who reads this blog lives in large conurbations, so you may be wondering what it’s like to experience something like fireworks night in a vibrant, exciting, happening city like Edinburgh.
First, lay in a stock of small paper bags, the kind I used to buy a quarter pound of lemon drops in when I was a kid from the sweet shop on the corner (yes, that’s how old I am – supermarkets hadn’t been invented yet). Crisp packets would do at a pinch. Put these on your bedside table and wait until your partner or child is just falling asleep – anywhere between, say, 11.30 and 12.30 at night. Pick up one of the bags and make an O of your thumb and first finger, grasping the back firmly but not too tightly around the neck.
Lean back and watch them thrash around like an electrocuted salmon, while you make “tut-tut” noises and other insincere expressions of sympathy, happy in the knowledge of a job well done.
This week’s bread is another variation on French bread, this time a “spiked” sourdough. (Basically you make some of the bread the day before with your sourdough yeast culture, then make the rest of it the next day using commercial instant yeast. The advantage of this is that you still get the richer flavour of sourdough, but you can make the finished bread in a lot less time on the second day because it ferments in a shorter time. The downside is that sourdough purists look at you reproachfully like a cat who’s had its cream ration replaced by low fat long life milk substitute…)
In the late, great Alan Plater’s 1994 novel Oliver’s Travels, the characters play a game to pass the time on a long car journey. In the game, you have to talk as if you’re a character in a soap opera (“I sometimes think we’re all running away in this God-forsaken world” “And I guess this is where the running has to stop”). And if you can’t think of anything to say, you can use the line, “What’s that supposed to mean?” because it crops up all the time in tv dialogue to get the writers out of a hole.
I finished the first major overhaul of my novel at the weekend, reducing it from 135,000 words to 95,000, mostly by cutting out all unnecessary exposition, descriptions and adverbs. I still have my heart set on getting it under 90,000 words, which I’m confident of achieving by Christmas (it may have no literary merit, but by God, it’s going to be brief!). I wrote the very first draft back in 2003, and reading it again after such a long gap was like reading somebody else’s book. This made it much easier to be ruthless, but there were still times when I felt this other person was a better writer than his current editor!
I’ve been taking it easy on the gansey front this week, partly because I haven’t really been in a knitting mood, partly because I haven’t got a project lined up for when I finish this one, so I’m trying to make it last. Lawrence of Arabia claimed to have left his first (handwritten) draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a railway carriage, and never recovered it, so he had to write the whole thing again from scratch. There are times when I tackle the second sleeve on a gansey that I think I know how he must have felt.
This week’s bread is another ciabatta, using a different (more authentic) recipe. The thing with ciabatta is that the dough is very wet, and you’re advised to use a machine. As I don’t have a machine, I have to do it the hard way and knead it by hand, though knead is really the wrong word – mostly you’re just trying to stop it pouring off the edge of the counter, like someone trying to contain an oil spill. Overall, the experience is not unlike trying to fit diapers on an octopus. (Once the gluten starts to form it becomes very sticky, too, and at times it was hard to know where the dough stopped and I began.) The results are worth it, though – soft crumb inside, a nice crackly crust and lots of holes.
I dare say you already know this, in which case feel free to skip down to a different paragraph (there’s some good stuff about arm seams later on), but did you know where JRR Tolkien got the name of Gandalf the wizard from?
In the middle of the list is the name, “Gandalfr”. This seems to mean “wand” (gand) “elf” (alfr). Professor Shippey speculates that Tolkien must have looked at that name and wondered just what a “wand-elf” was, and what one was doing in the middle of a list of dwarves. A “wand-elf” could be another word for a wizard; and maybe he was with the dwarves because they were on a quest… And so The Hobbit was born.
I find this fascinating, because it reinforces the authenticity that underpins so much of Tolkien’s universe, and which no other fantasy writer can ever hope to emulate, but also because it offers an insight into the creative process. You can easily imagine Tolkien puzzling over what a wizard and a bunch of dwarves might have been up to, and ending up at the Lonely Mountain and the dragon asleep on his hoard. (Beowulf is another influence – a thief steals a cup from the dragon in that, too.)
One thing I forgot to mention last week was the border to the seam stitches. (The seam, as you know, is really just a purl stitch acting as a marker, or row divider, running down the middle of the sleeve.) I’ve been making a conscious effort to knit this gansey “properly” (whatever that means). So I’ve maintained the outer stitches of the gusset intact until the end, and decreased on the stitches immediately inside them to create a nice diamond-shaped border all round the edge. In the same way, I’ve left the stitches either side of the seam stitch intact, and have decreased on the stitches next to them. This also creates a nice border effect next to the seam, running down the arm.
This week I have broken the all-comers gansey sleeve-finishing championships, by completing the first sleeve. That’s a whole sleeve in a fortnight, which is pretty good going for me. But that’s the advantage of plain knitting, you can just go with it.
The cuff itself is 6 inches long, rolled over to 3 inches, give or take – the advantage of this being, of course, that if the wearer has arms like a gibbon he or she can vary the length of the rollover to suit. The cast off row is in the same knit 2/purl 2 ribbing as the rest of the cuff to make for a snug fit round the wrist (even for gibbons, with their unique ball-and-socket wrist joints).
Actually, I’m amazed I’ve even got this far, since the highlight of last week was a 3-day migraine brought on, I suspect, by some Indian spices (turmeric, I’m looking at you – frequently from the inside of a toilet bowl). As is often the case these days, I get the flashing lights in my sleep, so that I wake up with the disturbing after-effects (headache, nausea, desire to watch daytime television), which certainly saves time. I’m trying to work out if I can out-source the entire experience to my dreams so I can lead a normal life, but so far life is fighting back.
I’ve been having fun hacking away at the novel I wrote a few years ago, and have reduced the verbiage from 135,000 to 123,000 words – and I’m only halfway through. It’s obvious I was suffering from Not Very Good Writer syndrome when I wrote it, since the characters are always talking grimly, excitedly, suddenly – when they’re not just shrugging – and on several occasions Basil Exposition drops in and makes sure the audience is keeping up with the plot. (It’s quite addictive, this editing lark. Take any novel off the shelves, open it at random and see how many unnecessary adverbs you can spot on a page – he urged pointedly. Or two characters are in dialogue, but the author keeps telling you their names, Gordon said…) My aim is now to reduce the novel to a 15-syllable haiku; it will be short, but by God it will be focused.
This week’s bread is another sourdough wholemeal loaf, 80% wholemeal to 20% plain flour. The next step is to create an exact scale replica of Stonehenge made out of these loaves, with a sacrificial dormouse tied to the slaughter stone, specially for the winter solstice. (OK, it’s a work in progress, but maybe if I can get an arts grant…)