Gansey Nation

Week 11: 8-14 February

Ever noticed how good news always seems to come balanced with a healthy dose of just enough bad news to take the edge off it? Like having Barack Obama in the White House at the same time as the deepest economic crisis for 70 years.

Or, in my case, like finally getting rid of my gum infection (touch wood) with an antiseptic mouthwash, but finding it’s coated my tongue a woad-coloured shade of blue which makes everything I eat or drink taste like spearmint-flavoured marmite.

Or discovering I have an improbable job interview in a couple of weeks, but having to do an online psychometric assessment first. Now, the last time I took one of those my confidence was destroyed by the maths paper – I still wake up at night thinking I’m back at my desk, frantically trying to answer questions about the profitability of acreages of woodland (just the sort of thing you need to know when working with libraries, obviously) with a clock in the corner counting down remorselessly. (Come to think of it, perhaps it’s not such a surprise I didn’t get the job!)

Ah, well. To take my mind off all that I’ve spent a week plotting out the yoke pattern for my Hebridean gansey. So no knitting this week, but lots of graph paper.

I can’t find a way to set out the whole pattern for you – it’s 213 cells wide and 130-odd high in spreadsheet terms – but close your eyes and I’ll try to describe it so you can picture it. OK? Ready?

There are 2 seam stitches next to the gusset.
Then a ladder (2 rows purl to 4 rows knit), 13 stitches wide inc. a seam stitch.
Then one of my standard cables (10 stitches, i.e. p2/k6/p2) cable every 6th row.
Then a panel (A) of 31 stitches, with a 3-stitch moss border on each side plus a seam stitch.
Then another cable.
Then an open chevron with yarn-overs, 15 stitches across.
Then another cable.
Then a centre panel (B), also 31 stitches, with borders as in panel A.
Then another cable.
Then another chevron panel with yarn-overs.
Then another cable.
Then another panel (A).
A last cable.
Another ladder.
Finally, another 2 seam stitches.

Each of the 3 panels is divided into 3 vertical sections. The (A) panels will have an X pattern in the top and bottom sections, with an anchor in the middle. The centre (B) panel will have a purl diamond in the top and bottom sections, and an open diamond with yarn-overs in the middle.

All of which adds up to 213 stitches (I know because I’ve just knit the first row today!) Repeat for the other side.

If this sounds a bit over-the-top, trust me, it’s entirely in the spirit of the originals. These ganseys are supposed to look like a baroque wedding cake, or the web of an anally retentive spider suffering from psychological trauma. If the viewer doesn’t reach for their sunglasses you’ve done it wrong. (At least, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!)

I admit there’s a certain irony in me worrying about a maths test after spending a week laying out a pattern this complex, having adapted a combination of sub-patterns to my stitch gauge. But I don’t suppose I can just turn up to the interview with a gansey and expect to get away with it. Or can I…?

Week 10: 1 – 7 February

Many years ago, in the course of a rather undistinguished school career, I developed certain life habits that have stuck with me into adulthood. So, for instance, whenever I am ill, I heat up a tin of Heinz tomato soup for us tea – something I never partake of when I am well – because that’s what my mum used to give me as a lad when I was sick. What else? Well, I developed a healthy aversion to games masters, or indeed anyone large, fat and psychopathic who tried to persuade me to take exercise while they watched on the sidelines with a pistol (“Dance, gringo!” they used to shout, firing bullets between our skipping feet as we fled across the rugby pitch to the sound of their hysterical laughter). That’s stayed with me, unless time has distorted the memory a touch.

Where was I? Oh, yes, childhood. One of the most significant habits I developed as a child was the ability to put something off until it was needed. So on Friday night through Saturday and into Sunday I could forget the weekend’s homework and watch TV, read books, listen to music and go for walks (the child is father to the man) and plant explosive devices under the games master’s car (ditto). But, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, would come the time, late on a Sunday, when I had to dig out the textbooks and start figuring out cosines, or translate the gerund, or write an essay on the economics of the Hapsburg empire. And all light and joy was crushed from the universe, not least because even once the work was done I knew the day of reckoning was just round the corner – because, of course, I knew how far short of the mark I had fallen. Kids always know.

So why, you ask, am I sharing with you this trip down a fairly seedy memory lane? It’s because the gansey has, alas, reached the Sunday-evening-homework stage. Here I’ve been, frolicking my way up the welt and body to the gussets, finishing the central panel, heedlessly unthinking of the day when I’d have to get out the slide rule and protractors and work out what on earth to do with the yoke (I knew all that work on cosines would come in handy one day). It’s a bit like daydreaming on your daily commute, only to realise that jolt you felt just then was you driving smartly into a parked police car.

Now the gansey is laid aside, gathering dust in a corner. Moths eye it across the room with greedy eyes. But in front of me lie sheets of graph paper, a calculator, Michael Pearson’s book of patterns, a pencil and – most importantly of all – an eraser. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle where all you have is the edge pieces – the rest you have to devise, paint, cut and fit yourself. In fact, it’s rather fun, in the way that my homework never was (and how sad is that? So many wasted years). And at least these days I’m unlikely to get detention if I get it wrong.

I plan to swatch (gulp) the patterns before I deploy them, to make sure they work and I’ve got them right. I hope to show these next time.

Meanwhile, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard observed to Dr Who in a recent BBC production of the RSC’s Hamlet. So, not only am I departing my job, but I also have a gum infection (though not, hopefully, an abscess, as initially feared). Cue a trip to the dentist, who asked innocently, as they are probably trained to do, “Does it hurt when I do this?’ as she inserted the pointy end of a nasty looking hooked implement into the swelling, “just to see”. As I started thrashing around like a gaffed salmon it took three strong men to restrain me. “Ah. Thought so,’ she said.

And I thought games masters were bad…

Week 9: 25 – 31 January

Well, there we are. As I mentioned in the comments section last week, I’ve resigned from my job. It would be unprofessional of me to talk about it in a public blog, so I won’t, saving it all for my memoirs (which will cause a few blushes in the world of archives when they’re published, I can tell you). But as a colleague said to me today, “sometimes you just have to walk away with your dignity intact”, and that’s what I’ve done – except for the part about the dignity.

I’ll be here till April as I work out my notice. But everyone knows I’m on borrowed time, and it’s disconcerting to walk the corridors of the National Archives of Scotland and have the cataloguing staff rattling their pencil sharpeners on the bars of their cells shouting, “Dead archivist walking!” all the time. Honestly.

But enough of that – on to more serious matters. Anytime I’m asked about my “guilty pleasures” – those things you secretly like but are ashamed to admit because they’re either totally uncool or you know they’re rubbish but you enjoy them anyway – I usually go for the prog-rock group Genesis in the first category (in their pretentious-ish 1970s incarnations), and the Star Wars Prequels in the second. Genesis I’m not really ashamed of – I’m old enough to remember when they were cool, after all – but I have no excuse when it comes to the Phantom Menace et al.

I know the dialogue is awful, the acting is questionable, the CGI is patchy and the movies are frequently boring – and yet, and yet. (Or, as my American brother in law said once, “Hey, whaddya want? It’s a Star Wars movie!”) But then I came across this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

It’s a 70-minute deconstruction of The Phantom Menace in 7 YouTube segments, and it’s a blast. Not only does it show you all those niggling details about the plot and characters that you knew were wrong, but couldn’t be bothered to work out because it’s only a movie, it’s also got some brilliant diversions of its own. Trust me. Watch the first 2 before you make up your mind – it’s brilliant, if you don’t mind a bit of swearing.

What with dealing with the emotional and other fallout of resigning, and watching all these YouTube videos, the knitting has taken something of a back seat. But as you can see, the trellis pattern is coming along nicely, and the gussets are shaping up.

Thanks to all of you who’ve been in touch, too – it’s much appreciated. The future, as they say, lies ahead of us… Or something.

Week 8: 18 – 24 January

Apologies for the lack of information in the blog this week and last – there’s some bad craziness going on at work, and it makes it hard to concentrate, sometimes. (I can’t talk about it just now, but any ageing hipsters out there who remember the lyrics to Peter Gabriel’s classic 1977 single “Solsbury Hill” and what they meant will have a clue as to what’s going on. I should be able to go public next week, if you’ll bear with me till then.)

Still, I’ve managed to finish the body and have started the trellis pattern that divides the body from the yoke, and which also marks the start of the gussets. So we’re making progress, even if it means that the time is drawing nearer when I’ll have to work out the pattern for the yoke – and how to knit it… Till then, I can relax with a nice bit of trellis and listen to some 1970s pop music.

All together now,

“Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city lights
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night…”