I’m in mourning this week. Not, let me hasten to add, for anything serious: but I just discovered that Groucho Marx never actually said “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana”, and a little part of me died. And it got me thinking (again) about time, and what it truly is. I mean, I know that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity proved that time is money, and they both get spent really fast; but that doesn’t get me very far.
Pendant raindrops
The ancient Greeks had a more nuanced view of time than we do, with two words for it, chronos and kairos.Chronos time is our sort of time, the passing of seconds and minutes and hours, clock time; what the poet Waters meant by “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day/ You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way”. Kairos time, on the other hand, is special time, the right time, the time when choosing to act can change the course of your life. This is the sort of time Ecclesiastes is referring to when he says that to every thing there is a season, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted, etc. Kairos time is deep time, numinous time, the opportune moment, and it’s not measured on any clock. I can’t help thinking it says something about us that we don’t seem to feel the lack of a word for it. (Mind you, the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for leg-spin bowling so I’m not saying there weren’t things they couldn’t learn from us too.)
Snowdrop Galaxy
Well, somewhere between chronos and kairos for me is knitting ganseys, an activity that rather takes me outside time. In fact, it’s possible that I have replaced the clock as a measure of the passing of time with ganseys. Howsobeit, the current project is well on the way to completion, with the shoulders joined, the collar completed and the first sleeve well underway (ah, the joys of 3-hour Zoom meetings with the camera and microphone switched off). You’ll note, by the way, that the sleeve pattern band is deeper than any of the yoke panels; but as this was the case in the original I’m following, I feel it’s OK.
Lookout on the Lighthouse
“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me”, Shakespeare’s Richard II laments after his deposition, as he waits to be executed. (One of the main reasons I chose archivist as a profession as opposed to, say, monarch, was that the chance of another archivist landing at Milford Haven with an army of mercenaries to overthrow me was, I always felt, slim.) And when I look back on my life, ganseys aside, the words time and waste do seem to seem to cover most of it (it’s actually very similar now, only with the word nuclear replacing time). But then, to quote Pink Floyd’s Time again, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the Anglo-Scottish-Kiwi way/ The time is gone, the blog is over, thought I’d something more to say…”
Did you know that we archivists have our own patron saint? She’s St Catherine, the Great Martyr; although, as there are only so many saints to go around, we have to share her with a whole bunch of freeloaders such as librarians and teachers and knife grinders. (This probably explains why she never answers my prayers: “You have reached the number of St Catherine of Alexandria, I’m too busy to come to the shrine right now so please leave a message after the world-weary sigh, honestly how hard is it to keep an edge on a blade—”; but by then I’ve usually hung up.) St Catherine’s qualities are said to be beauty, fearlessness, virginity and intelligence, and if that’s not a perfect description of an archivist then I don’t know what is.
Nets on the quay
Catherine is supposed to have lived around 300 AD. She was a famous intellectual (the sort of person our current Prime Minister would probably characterise as a “girly swot”; I’d always thought of the Billy Bunter books as a series of children’s public school stories, instead of, as it turns out, Cabinet Office papers). One time the Emperor Maximian gathered some fifty pagan philosophers to dispute with her. She not only won the argument, she even converted several of them to Christianity (Maximian, a textbook bad loser, promptly had them executed). She was going to be martyred on a burning wheel, but when it shattered at her touch she was beheaded instead. Now she spends her afterlife rushing about helping, among others, potters, hat-makers, theologians, tanners, haberdashers and Greece. And archivists. No wonder my records contain so many mistakes. I can’t help feeling the church needs more saints.
Wick on a sunny day
I was shocked to learn that there isn’t a patron saint of gansey knitters, probably because several centuries of picking up dropped stitches in other people’s knitting would try the patience of—well, of a saint. (Dare I propose St Gladys of Thompson?) Still, even without divine assistance, the body of my gansey is coming along nicely, just the collar and sleeves to go. Incidentally, if you want to see the original pattern we’ve based this gansey on, you can find the photograph on the Wick Society’s Johnston Collection website.
In parish notices, Nigel has sent us pictures of a very splendid gansey he’s made. The yarn is Frangipani Helford blue, with edging in paler blue merino wool. The pattern is Matt Cammish, an absolute classic, and Nigel’s done it full justice here. Many congratulations to him!
Snowdrops catching the sun
And if St Catherine is one of the busiest, which saints have the strangest responsibilities? Could it be St Columbanus, patron saint of motorcyclists? Or perhaps St Balthasar, one of the three wise men, who looks after playing card manufacturers? The saint with the most challenging caseload is probably St Rita, patron saint of the impossible. Then there’s St Drogo, who has charge of unattractive people and, er, coffee houses (still, it’s good to see Frodo Baggins’s father gainfully employed). In fact, I imagine St Catherine saying to St Polycarp of Smyrna, “Look, you take earaches, I’ve got my hands full with all these by-our-lady archivists complaining their pencils need sharpening (and no, St Fotino and St Hypatius of Gangra, and how many times must I say this, that is not a euphemism!)…”
What a difference a week makes! Last weekend it was winter, we were being hammered by gale-force winds and rain was washing away the ice and snow. The winds blew hard enough to crack the brackets attaching our satellite dish to the wall, turning it, as the repairman observed, from an aerial into a weathervane. For three anxious days we were deprived of television news, only to discover when we were reconnected that not a lot had changed. There may be a lesson in that.
Heron fishing
And now suddenly it’s spring. Everything is blues and greens instead of greys and, well, more greys. God’s got His attic conversion done, and the sky now extends all the way up to the ozone layer. Snow has been replaced with snowdrops. The trees and hedges look thicker somehow, as though, despite it being too early for blossom, they’re getting ready to bud, like athletes limbering up before a race. Children were actually playing in the play area and, what’s more, even seemed to be having fun; the last few months the handful I’ve seen down there shuffled about sullenly like prisoners being forced to exercise in the yard. Walking by the river the other day I saw a heron on the island raise its beak like a periscope out of the long grass and survey the waters, before mysteriously submerging again.
Snowdrops by the riverside
And while I’m sure winter hasn’t done with us quite yet, this will do to be going on with. As I write this it’s a lazy Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining and the sky is filled with seagulls making cries like the laser cannons in Star Wars. It’s windy, of course, but you expect that. Hmm: I wonder what’s on tv…?
=================================
TECHNICAL STUFF
As I mentioned last week, this gansey is being knit using blister (or coin) stitch. On the pattern row, which is every sixth row, you knit 3 plain stitches, then insert the needle through the next stitch four rows down, loop a new knit stitch over your needle, draw it back through the stitch, then, with a gentle tug of the yarn, allow the rows above the stitch you’ve just made to drop. Then you knit the next 3 stitches as before, and repeat the process. (The diamond in the chart shows where to knit the blister stitch.)
It takes a bit of getting used to, this business of actively dropping stitches, but you soon get used to it. It’s both very easy—five rows of plain knitting is always a joy—and slightly stressful. You do have to concentrate: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve, er, lost count, and cheerfully dropped four rows on a stitch, only to find it was the wrong stitch, and had to go back and pick them all up again. Plus inserting the needle through a stitch four rows down is a bit like trying to vaccinate someone while you’re wearing a blindfold.
I don’t really understand how it all works—it seems like the sort of thing that would’ve got you burned at the stake a few hundred years’ ago—but it makes for a very neat, unusual effect. I’m more than halfway up the front (or back; this gansey won’t have a shaped neckline) and should finish it sometime this week, before we do it all again on the other side.
According to the Met Office it’s been the coldest start to a year for over a decade, with an average UK temperature of 2.2ºc. And I can’t help thinking: 2.2º? (Wait, let me say that in italics: 2.2º?) Bah, luxury! It’s been so cold for so long that even a temperature of 0º would’ve been an improvement. Last week Wick fell overnight to -9º, with daytime temperatures around -3º to -1º. Half the river was frozen over, confusing the heck out of the ducks—I checked in case the penguins from The Muppet Christmas Carol were holding their annual skating party, but alas not—while moody seagulls scratched rude words in the ice and waited for spring, and the sun, and tourists careless where they put down their sandwiches.
Ice in the river
The rainwater in the barrel froze, then it snowed on top, then that froze too. If we were pirates, our timbers would be well and truly shivered. I’ve taken to wearing a huge, black, fuzzy Russian hat around the house, leading one work colleague on a Zoom call to wonder how I managed to persuade a baby panda to go to sleep on my head. Even the brass monkeys are resorting to thermal underwear. (Did I mention it’s been cold?)
Last week’s snow
Meanwhile, in gansey news I’ve reached the pattern and the yoke. I’m trying to recreate the pattern on Graeme Bethune’s—whose sheep the yarn comes from—great-grandfather’s gansey, based on the photo in the Moray Firth Gansey Project book. Trouble is, the photo is about the size of a postage stamp, and blurry withal, so it’s impossible to see much actual detail. It could be one of a number of patterns, all similar. So we’ve turned to a photograph in the Johnston Collection of Victorian fishermen for a pattern, one that should give Graeme a distinctive and slightly unusual gansey that’s still pretty close to the original. It involves seed stitch panels, alternating with panels in a stitch that’s new to me: blister, or coin stitch. (“Blister” is the mot juste, as it creates little swellings or pockets, just like the bubble-effect of a blister.)
How pleasing that there are still new things to learn! For I was starting to feel a bit like Ecclesiastes, the Eeyore of the Old Testament: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Also, don’t blame me if it rains.” I’ll post the chart next week. It’s early days, and it’ll show more clearly next time, but it involves five rows of plain knitting: then on the sixth, on every fourth stitch along, you go back four rows and pick up a stitch, then let the stitches above this drop, before carrying on. (You’d think a stitch that has dropping stitches built into it would be right up my alley, but evidently not; I’m only a natural if I don’t do it on purpose.) As ever, I’m indebted to Margaret for this, as she’s charted out the pattern and shown me how to knit it.
Wigeon on the ice
And now, as I write this on Sunday evening, the rain is lashing against the windows, blown by winds of over fifty miles per hour, which I guess counts as a thaw. But then, we do live in the far north of the Scotland, and Thurso, just a few miles up the road, is on the same latitude (59º) as Juneau, Alaska, so the odd bad winter does rather go with the territory. As the soldiers used to say in the First World War: you shouldn’t have joined if you can’t take a joke…
In his final case Sherlock Holmes muses on the coming threat posed by an expansionist Germany and says ominously, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson”; to which dear old obtuse Watson replies, “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” This forces Holmes, not to break a whisky bottle over Watson’s head, as you might expect, but to spell out his metaphor more clearly. (Incidentally, there are few scenes in literature that can’t be improved by inserting Watson into them. Take The Lord of the Rings: “Though I don’t know what the likes of me can do against, against –” the innkeeper faltered. “Against the Shadow in the East,” said Strider quietly. “I think not, Aragorn,” said Watson, taking out his pocket watch. “The sun will have set and it’s too cloudy a night for there to be any shadows, even in Mordor.“)
Well, even Watson couldn’t deny the east wind just now, a bitter, biting wind blowing in rain, sleet and snow fresh from Siberia. It’s been cold so long that when I look up frost in my dictionary it just says, “see perma“. But I can’t stay mad at snow. It always takes me back to my childhood, and the sense of wonder I had, as a child of the more temperate parts of the North Island of New Zealand, at coming to Britain and experiencing snow for the first time. (The child is father to the man, of course; a saying that, taken literally, set me back about six months in biology class.) Even the lightest dusting, the merest pither of snow blown in on a wind as easterly as this, is enough to gladden my heart; however pessimistic it might make Sherlock Homes.
Wind & Waves
New month, new gansey: this is a special commission, requested by Graeme Bethune, whose Caithness yarns I featured back in December. It’s made from his own yarn, and the pattern will be based on that of his great-grandfather, a fisherman from Dunbeath, a little fishing village on the east coast of Caithness. All we have to go on is the slightly blurry photograph that appears in the Moray Firth Gansey Project book, but the pattern appears to be a variant of the classic Staithes/Henry Freeman of Whitby pattern. More on this next week.
Snow in Dunnet Forest
Also in parish notices, Judit has knit another splendid gansey, a very fetching combination of zigzags and moss stitch in a very lovely colour. It’s a Valentine’s Day present, and I was interested to learn that in Finland the 14th of February is celebrated as Friends’ Day, Ystävänpäivä, not just a day for lovers. What a wonderful idea! Many congratulations to Judit and a very happy, chocolate-enhanced Valentine’s Day to all.
Winter Fishing
Meanwhile I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Godfather while I knit, quite possibly the sleaziest book ever written. But it’s got me wondering what would happen if the Mafia ever moved into my own line of work, that of libraries and archives…
The room is in shadow, the blinds drawn. Joyful Sicilian music filters through the window from the wedding party taking place on the lawn outside. The Don is seated behind a large desk. Behind him stands his counsellor, who leans towards him attentively. The Don sighs. “Is that the last of them?” “There’s just one more. Shall I call him in?” The Don gestures weary assent. The counsellor brings in a nervous middle aged man carrying a book. “What favour do you ask of me, my friend?” the Don asks. “I’d like to borrow this book, please.” He holds it out. “It’s Mary Berry’s latest cookbook.” The Don is offended. “You come to me, on this the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you ask me for this favour. But you show me no respect. Why have you never visited me till now?” “It’s only just been published. I thought I might give her bubble and squeak a try.” The Don considers. “All right. I’ll make you an offer you cannot refuse. Bring it back in three weeks and phone the consiglieri here if you want to renew. Fail to return the book and you will sleep with the fishes.” “Look, I only want to cook them, not— Oh, I see what you mean. Thank you, Godfather.” He kisses the Don’s ring and departs. The Don sighs. “When I said we should take over the books on the East Side, I must admit this is not exactly what I had in mind…”
Finally this week, it was a great pleasure to be invited to chat with Dotty Widman and her lovely gansey knitting group of Cordova Alaska. Gansey knitting can be a solitary occupation, and, even in these grim lockdown times, it’s nice to be reminded that a whole community exists out there of like-minded people: You’re not alone, as David Bowie observes (though it’s possible he wasn’t thinking of knitters at the time). Many thanks to Dotty for the invitation!
I’m in mourning this week. Not, let me hasten to add, for anything serious: but I just discovered that Groucho Marx never actually said “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana”, and a little part of me died. And it got me thinking (again) about time, and what it truly is. I mean, I know that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity proved that time is money, and they both get spent really fast; but that doesn’t get me very far.
