Gansey Nation

Who’d have thought it? Snow at Christmas, a new Doctor Who and the England cricket team winning in South Africa after beating the Australians last summer. Truly, as the old ballad has it, the world is turned upside down (“the poor old cook, in the larder does look/ Where is no goodness to be found/ Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down”). The story goes that the British soldiers played the tune when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781, so astonishing did that seem, but really I think the cricket is the more remarkable event.

And here we are, Christmas well and truly over, the decorations taken down and put away and the Lord of the Rings dvds back on the shelf to gather dust for another year. The new year always has the feeling of The Morning After the Hogmanay Party The Night Before, a bit tawdry, a bit stale and hung over, wondering quite where that underwear came from (and just who put it there…). Edinburgh’s citizenry seem to be collectively avoiding each other’s gaze right now, just in case they recognise themselves (“It was you!”).

It’s not a pretty sight, believe me, but then neither am I, since I’m still clean shaven. I’ve remembered now why I usually affect a beard – it’s not because I cut myself, which was what I thought, though I do that too – but something much simpler: I just get bored. Plus I have to get out of bed 10 minutes earlier, which seems a bit much on a cold, dark January morning.

Not much to report on the knitting front, just steady progress. It’s slowed down a bit now I’m back at work, of course, and no longer shuffling about the flat in my slippers, but I’m still keeping up with an hour a night or so, which equates to 2 rows, more at weekends. In a couple of weeks it will be time to start the yoke, I expect, which means I’d better think of a pattern soon.

Still, look on the bright side – there’s only 348 sleeps till Christmas!

Aha, the joys of a northern winter! It’s been a cold and snowy christmas in Edinburgh, and a white one to boot, with a few flakes falling on frozen ice and snow, laid down a few days earlier. I’ve been introduced to a new spectator sport – sitting at the window with a cup of tea and watching pedestrians slithering down the frozen pavements. In fact, I’ve found it goes even better if you have a cd of comedy sound effects playing in the background – beeyoingyoingyoing noises, that sort of thing – for when someone falls over.

The arctic conditions have kept us indoors, and as I have zero sense of balance at the best of times I tend to do a nifty impersonation of a new-born foal who isn’t sure what legs are for every time I venture out onto ice. I did make one trip up the hill to Old Town last week, though, to see a hospital consultant about my sinuses.

For new readers, or those who simply can’t keep up with all my various ailments (rather like the young man in Three Men In A Boat I’m working my way through the medical dictionary to see how many problems I can accumulate – the answer is, a surprising amount), I’ve been having trouble breathing, with massive congestion, like someone’s injected lead just below each eye socket. It’s like waking up each morning with a bad cold, or a hangover. Because I have a deviated septum the proposed solution has always been to break my nose and re-set it and see if that helped, a procedure which I viewed with some misgivings. But things had gotten so bad recently, I thought I’d better get it over with.

Anyway, I saw the consultant – harassed and overworked and with two other patients already “warmed up”, as he put it, in waiting rooms – and at first he too was rather keen to go for the nose-breaking option (“though it’s much more complicated than that sounds”). He went on to reassure me that he’d performed the operation on his wife. (“Doesn’t that count as spousal abuse?” I asked, which earned me a snigger from the nurse and a look from the consultant as though breaking my nose would count as both work and pleasure.)

Fife hills from the kitchen window

But after he’d actually inspected me, and shoved one of those cold wire coat-hanger probe-y things so far up my nose I could feel it banging on the top of my skull, he had to concede that perhaps it wouldn’t help me any. In a gesture that gives you faith in modern medicine he sent me away with a promise of drugs if my symptoms got any worse, and an appointment to see him when his diary was a bit clearer, which turned out to be May 2010. And I was turned back out into the snow, relieved and unrelieved all at the same time.

Meanwhile the gansey is shaping up nicely, which is what a week of sitting around listening to cricket, music and audiobooks can do for you. The sun’s shining outside now as I type this, and I should get out and go for a walk, but I think I picked up a cold at the hospital (serves me right for shaving, it’s God’s judgement I tell you) so am forced to wrap up warm, put on the heating and sit down with a cup of tea and some Bach, and… Well. That’s kind of where we came in, isn’t it?

Hope Santa was kind. All the best for a happy New Year!

Here’s a question: which has the better Christmas German market, Edinburgh or Birmingham? Edinburgh’s is better situated on Princes Street Gardens, under the giant Ferris wheel, whereas Birmingham’s is just straddled along New Street near the railway station. On the other hand, Edinburgh’s seems to be mostly trinkets, pretzels and Stollen cakes, while Birmingham’s has the added attraction of doughnuts. On the whole, then, you’d have to say Birmingham just edges it.

I’ve had experience of both recently. At the weekend we strolled down to the Edinburgh German market amid the crowds, and bought some Stollen from the world’s haughtiest market trader. She disdained any banter (which in Northampton used to go, “Carm on darlin’, three f’r a pahnd…”), contenting herself with the contemptuous twitch of an eyebrow and a curl of her lip, as if she’d decided to take her revenge for the Fatherland’s controversial defeat in the 1966 World Cup final by encouraging fatty degeneration of the heart in the people of this island. (A long term strategy, but looking around me, a pretty successful one, I think. Wasted on me, though, as I don’t like marzipan.)

And I was in Birmingham yesterday, back at my old employers’ head office for a meeting. It was just a year ago, of course, that I made the pilgrimage there from the south west in a futile effort to stave off redundancy (by applying for what was in effect my own job, and not being successful). So it’s with mixed feelings that I go back now, cloaked in the diplomatic immunity of another nation. It’s still funny though to meet in the corridors the people who turned me down back then, who can’t quite work out how I seem to have got past security…

All this travelling has cut into my knitting time – I can’t knit on the train as my technique requires my elbows to pump rhythmically in and out like a machine for drawing water out of wells, or someone doing an impression of a constipated chicken trying to lay an egg, and anyone unlucky to sit next to me would find themselves severely bruised about the ribs.

But as you will see from the picture it’s still coming along nicely. Today was my last day at work, as I’ve got some leave saved up, and I don’t go back now until January. So I should make better progress for a time, what with Wagner’s Ring Cycle to listen to, and a talking book of Tad Williams’ fantasy epic “Memory Sorrow and Thorn”, and of course England playing South Africa at cricket. And if I get bored I can go down and taunt the German traders with the traditional courteous English football chant to the tune of Camptown Races, “Two world wars and one world cup, doodah, doodah…”

Shaved my beard off, too. Just in time for winter.