A couple of months ago I received a letter from the hospital, saying that they were conducting a clinical trial into hypertension, and would I like to take part, on the grounds that my blood pressure was so high I should avoid cutting my finger in case I burst like a balloon popped with a pin. Well, I thought, at least I’d get a free medical out of it, and anyway my encounters with hospitals usually involve someone saying things like, “I’ve never seen one like this before” or “Are you sure it’s supposed to be that colour?”, so I thought this might be more fun.
Last week I duly toddled along and was met by a very nice nurse, and we got down to it. I signed various consent forms, told them where I’d like my ashes scattered (into the coffees of my late employers when they weren’t looking), stood on various scales, gave various coloured samples (chiefly red and yellow, since you ask), and after 45 minutes was having the home blood pressure testing kit demonstrated on me.
This was where events started to take a left turn. For it turned out that my blood pressure wasn’t high at all – it was bang in the middle of where it ought to be. The nurse decided on a “best out of 3” approach, which finally became a “best out of 9”, standing and sitting, before she finally admitted defeat. My blood pressure was too normal to allow me to take part in the trial. (I don’t know if you’ve ever had your blood pressure taken 9 times in a row on the same spot – it’s rather uncomfortable. Not unlike being gummed to death by an elderly manatee who’s lost his teeth and mistaken you for a clump of unusually tough algae, I should imagine.)
Is there any reason, the nurse asked me, why your blood pressure should have come down in the last couple of months? Well, I said, I’ve lost over half a stone by only eating food I don’t like, and I no longer work in a stressful job for mad people. (Ah, she said in a defeated tone, that would do it.) So there I am: too healthy for the National Health Service. I always suspected giving up work was a good thing, but now it’s medically proven.
Back at the knitting: as you will see, rapid progress down the sleeve this week. Now the gusset’s been decreased into oblivion I’m working down the sleeve at a decrease of 2 stitches every 7 rows. (I’ve adopted this rate because the sleeve was quite narrow anyway, and I don’t want it to be too tight in the forearms. But I won’t really know how well it works till it’s finished.)
The other thing to bear in mind at this stage is constantly to change the join points between the double-pointed needles. If you always have the join points between needles at the same places you end up with 3 columns of uneven stitches (or at least I do, since I tend to knit the join stitches at a slightly different tension to the rest of my stitches, try as I might). But if I do as the books say, and move it along by one stitch per row, I replace the columns with 3 diagonal scars running round the sleeve. So my solution is to knit 3-7 rows with the joins in the same place, then move them on by 5-10 stitches, varying the amounts randomly in an attempt to fool the eye. It’s my knitting equivalent of soldiers breaking step to march over a bridge.
Finally, this weeks’ bread is a sourdough pain de campagne, 80% white flour blended with 10% each of wholemeal and rye. I forgot to put the trays in the oven to heat up first, so instead of rising from the bottom it rose from the top! I’m wondering if I can use this technique to bake edible bowling balls that come with the finger holes baked in…
It’s not often I compare myself to St Paul. But when he says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things,” then I think he’s describing my situation pretty closely. Not in all ways, of course – I mean, I still read Stephen King novels and laugh at the fart jokes in Family Guy – but certainly when it comes to picking up stitches round the neck and armhole, you just have to be grown up about it and get the job done.
The technique is laughably simple, and (for new readers) is described in some detail in the 
The armhole on this gansey is 8.5 inches per side, which at 9 stitches per inch equates to 76 stitches (or 152 stitches in the round). Because the armhole covers approximately 2 pattern bands on the yoke plus the ridge and furrow shoulder strap, I made sure I picked up about 33 stitches for each pattern band, leaving me 10 for the shoulder strap as far as the central cast-off ridge. Then the same again working down the other side. (This sort of spread is important to make sure you get an even distribution of stitches all round.) As usual, I decreased on the first row of the gusset, which coincided with the pick-up row, so that the row count for the gusset and the pattern will be in sync as I progress down the sleeve.
The neckline isn’t shaped, unlike most of the ganseys I knit. Instead, I divided for the neck a few rows earlier on the front than I did on the back, to give a marginally deeper neckline on the front. But the shape of the collar is a straight rectangle in the traditional style, with the traditional crinkly edge “clam” effect. The collar itself is in a conventional knit 2/purl 2 rib to a height of just under 1.5 inches.
Finally, this week’s bread, a basic ciabatta, the Italian slipper bread. The secret of ciabatta is a very moist, runny dough – it should really be kneaded by a machine (which I can’t afford right now), so I use a recipe that’s a little drier. It’s very easy to make, though, and has a crisp, crunchy, crackly crust and a soft, chewy crumb. This week’s tip: be very careful if you eat this bread with runny honey… Unless you plan on changing your shirt soon after.
Being a man of my word, at least when it suits me (or when I can actually deliver on my promises), I am delighted to say that I’ve finished the front and joined the shoulders, as forecast last week. It was touch and go, actually, as I got rather sidetracked, but more on that later.
These days I’ve modified my technique, so that I join each shoulder as soon as each front strap is completed. Let me explain. I divide the front in three as before, and I work back and forth (as before) to complete one shoulder strap; but now I join it to its counterpart on the back straight away, casting off in the usual way. Then I go back and complete the other shoulder strap and join it to the back counterpart and cast off.
Maddeningly, it’s not (quite) good and it’s not (quite) awful. If it was great I could rest easily; if it was dreadful I could just throw it away and we would Never Speak Of It Again, like Aunt Mildred’s elopement with the second under-gardener. So I’ve started going through it, editing it, stripping away the useless verbiage and pruning ruthlessly (as I had to while we were between under-gardeners). The draft stood at 
135,000 words: I’ve resolved to get it down to perhaps 75,000. (They say you have to “kill your darlings”, i.e., get rid of any fancy writing that gets in the way of the plot; if you open your windows and listen carefully, you’ll hear my darlings’ death cries cries fading on the wind…)
And so Edinburgh has hosted a state visit by Pope Benedict XVI, which by all accounts went very well – even if the church and the Government between them had to invent a new festival around which to celebrate his visit (as far as I can tell, this was the first time St Ninian’s Day – 16 September – had been favoured with a parade; or celebrated; or even publicly remembered).
Other memorable events on that day include the declaration of Owain Glyndwr as Prince of Wales in 1400, the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 and the release of “She Loves You” by the Beatles in 1963. But I guess none of them have that much resonance for the Catholic church, unless the young Cardinal Ratzinger was a Beatles fan – which seems unlikely – so I guess St Ninian’s day was the logical choice.
Margaret went down for a look, and was favoured by a glimpse of the Pope skimming past at a surprisingly brisk pace. (As a friend of mine who watched from the windows of the National Archives remarked, “He’s not going to sell many ice creams going at that speed”.) I cheated and ended up watching some of it on tv (I know, I know).
Meanwhile, on to secular matters. Work on the gansey continues apace; as you will see, after finishing the back last week, the front is halfway complete now. My aim to complete it and join the shoulders by next weekend. (We’ll see.) I’ve just finished by 7th ball of yarn, too, so I know I’ve used 700g of gansey wool so far.
So, there’s the back finished, and the accompanying shoulder straps. On the whole, the pattern is coming out more strongly than I’d imagined – especially in strong light – and the pattern bands are deep enough to really allow the eye to catch the diagonal lines. So no need to rip this one up after all!
By the way, the more observant among you will have noticed that this is a half-patterned gansey, i.e., a plain body and a patterned yoke. Traditionally the yoke and the gussets would start together, halfway up the body. Now, I still want to follow this principle, but given that my ganseys tend to be a bit longer than the old ones were, there’s a complication: half of 27 inches is 13.5 inches, and that might result in a deeper armhole than I want.
Since I want this gansey to be as traditional as I can make it, I’ve decided to go ahead and start the gusset and yoke at the halfway point; but in order to ensure that the armhole isn’t too deep, I’m making the gusset longer instead of the armhole (which will be just 8 inches plus the shoulder strap). And in order to ensure that the gusset doesn’t become too wide, I’ve increased once every 5th row (instead of every 4th row, as is my usual practice). The result is a longer, narrower gusset than my ganseys usually show. I just need to remember that the gusset will extend further down the sleeve than normal, too, so I’ll have to be careful about my rate of decrease when I get to that point.
Meanwhile I’ve been continuing my experiments with sourdough bread. I tried a wholemeal loaf that came out well, but was perhaps a little dry; so my next attempt was a granary loaf with extra water. Well, somewhere down the line I miscalculated, because the dough was so wet that it didn’t so much rise as flow stickily, and my attempts to knead it resembled nothing so much as someone scooping up vomit off the counter with their bare hands. From a distance it must have looked as though I was wresting a particularly tenacious jellyfish, and losing. Still, one of the advantages of wet dough is that it can rise nicely in the oven, and result in a ciabatta-like texture, which was the case here, so I’m counting this one as a success. My new invention – pain de dégueulis.
Finally, yesterday, 12 September, was the centenary of the first performance of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, his great explosive celebratory hymn to life and love and the mysteries and splendours of God’s creation. I have no idea whether God really exists or not – even Richard Dawkins admits there is a possibility, however remote – but listening to this great symphony, as so often with Mahler, I’m prepared to give Him (or Her, or It) the benefit of the doubt…