Gansey Nation

Spring has come at last. I know this because we went to a friend’s house for lunch on Saturday, and – I know this will be hard to believe – they actually made us go for a walk. (Well, I say a walk – given the conditions underfoot it felt more like a recreation of the Battle of the Somme, but I daresay they meant well.) So we got to see where William Wallace fought the battle of Stirling, and where he subsequently sited his oil refinery.

Somehow over dinner, as you do, we got onto the topic of the Trojan War, and the famous horse inside which the Greeks concealed themselves in order to sneak out at night and open the gates of the city. And I found myself speculating about what might have happened if this had taken place in another country – Mexico, for example. And all at once the vision of a giant Trojan pinata came into my mind, only instead of sweets tumbling out when it was split open, fully armed Greek soldiers emerged. (At which point I realised I should probably go easier on the coffee.)

I wonder what the British equivalent would be? (A giant Thorntons chocolate Easter egg? A pie with four and twenty blackbirds baked in it? A large chest filled with darjeeling tea?) Anyway, when I start my stand-up routine at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe, I’m thinking of working this into the set (trust me, it’ll be funnier when you see the mime that goes with it). Unfortunately if you ask most people what they’d call a large thing out of which soldiers jump, they reply “a Black Hawk helicopter”, which kind of spoils the joke.

Ahem. Back in the real world, the back is now finished (except for the shoulders, which I’ll do all of a piece as part of the front, as discussed last week). Time to turn it over and start on the front. I’m secretly rather relieved and – si fas est, as my good friend Catullus used to say – a little bit cocky, that my calculations proved correct and the yoke is more or less the right height – i.e., that I got the maths right! (Regular readers of this blog will appreciate that this is not necessarily a given.) In truth, it’s a quarter inch shorter than planned, but still close enough for jazz.

I’m going to make the front central diamond slightly smaller than the one on the back, by starting it 2 rows further up the panel. If nothing else it will help distinguish the front from the back. But everything else should be the same. I haven’t thought through the neckline yet – how deep to make it, and what effect this will have on the pattern – plenty of time to worry about that later.

Meanwhile I get to enjoy Spring in all its glory – by turning on the television and watching programmes about people hillwalking…

I’ve fallen in love with the Count of Monte Cristo – the novel by Alexandre Dumas, of course, just in case any of you thought I was taking advantage of Margaret’s absence to explore other sides of my personality – which I’d never read before. I’ve been listening to it as an audiobook downloaded from iTunes – 50 hours for £6 is pretty good value. It’s perfect to knit to, since it’s just a well-told story; by which I mean, it’s a ripping yarn and you don’t have to concentrate on the words to get at the meaning as you sometimes have to do with, say, Hardy or Conrad.

It also has the huge advantage that it’s all about a well-planned and executed revenge for a terrible wrong, which I feel has some relevance to my present situation (as I prepare to leave my job in April). All I need is an astonishingly large fortune and I can wreak a dreadful vengeance on those who have wronged me – for, as the Klingons say, “revenge, like strawberry blancmange, is a dish best served cold”.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I’m now two-thirds of the way up the back of the gansey. I must confess, I don’t quite have the hang of the yarnovers yet – the chevrons are fine, but I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the central diamond which I was more or less able to rectify – if you don’t look too closely. (The difficulty is that, with Margaret being away, I’ve been operating without a safety net, and as my usual technique for dealing with problems is to drop and pick up stitches at random in the hopes that sooner or later I’ll get lucky. A high risk strategy, I admit.)

The feeling on discovering a yarnover in the wrong place on the previous row (which is in reverse, of course, like a negative image on a photograph) is not dissimilar to realising that you should have carried the 1 at the start of a lengthy calculation on the existence of dark matter – a sort of hot flush that starts at the shoulders and rises gently till it reaches the eyebrows, while a cold sensation spreads down the spine like a slug which has just escaped from devouring your salad in the fridge.

Still adjusting to life without the cat. One of the after-effects of all my eye problems has been a sort of periodic flash in the corner of my right eye, which looks like movement – imagine a glimpse of a rat scurrying quickly past and gone – and now I keep looking round thinking it’s her. Damn it.

First of all, I apologise for the poor quality of the pictures this week. You see, Margaret’s off on another of her jaunts to the States, leaving me to wipe up the cat vomit for once, and has left me without a camera, save for the one in my iPhone. (Actually, there is a camera, but the truth is I just don’t know how to use it. Apparently you have to press buttons and everything, I mean, come on.)

The cat has developed an annoying bleat over the last year, like a cross between a sheep who’s discovered from that her ram’s been unfaithful with other ewes, and a police siren. She’s taken to roaming the flat making this noise – sometimes it’s quite strident, a ma-waaaah!, like a triumphant seagull who’s just made you drop your ice cream; other times it’s utterly forlorn, and you hear it echoing from distant uninhabited rooms, and you imagine a cat who’s lost all hope, alone in a hostile universe, with nothing to do but cry herself to sleep at the inhumanity of man to cat. (She’s been doing it for seven minutes solid, since I started typing this, and my nerves are like shredded tin. Now she’s decided, oh, what the hell, I suppose I could just eat the damn food he put out for me after all, that’ll show him, the bastard.)

Last week I was woken up by that same cry from a distance of about three inches, as she had climbed up onto my pillow as I slept and leaned over my face like a dragon on a church steeple about to consume a town in flame, and let rip. This was at 5.00am. When I my eyes jerked open I found myself looking right up her nose, which isn’t the ideal way to start the day. Plus she could do with trying a different brand of mouthwash.

Anyway, in spite of the lousy pictures – which for some reason look like I’ve been dyeing the gansey with pastels (probably sunlight, come to think of it – it’s been so long since I’ve seen the sun I didn’t recognise it at first) – this last week’s seen some real progress. So hopefully you can see the shape of the yoke pattern, and last week’s geometry and algebra lesson begins to make a bit more sense. I’ve been immersing myself in The Count of Monte Cristo as an audiobook, all 50 hours of it, which is ideal for knitting to. (Well, that and all the violent dvds Margaret won’t let me watch usually, like Alien and Apocalypse Now, and The Little Mermaid.) The only problem now is I’ve started to talk with a slight French accent…

The cat’s off again – I can hear a despairing wail from the bedroom, as she realises once again that without an opposable thumb it’s a hopeless task to tie the belt on my dressing gown into a noose, plus I’ve taken her shoelaces away. So I’d better go and cheer her up by reading her some Dostoevsky. Or play with a piece of string. Both are good.