Like John Lennon, I read the news today; but “oh boy” hardly seems an adequate response under the circumstances. As regular readers will know, anxiety sits on my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket’s manic depressive cousin (but being Scottish his advice is to “give a little thistle”, instead of a whistle, and I’m not sure that I should “always let pure nonsense” be my guide). But as the loose thread that binds the modern world unravels, I’m beginning to suspect anxiety may be the least of my problems.
Misery, they say, loves company; and so, taking a line from the late, great Ian Drury and the Blockheads, let’s cast it aside and focus instead on some random reasons to be cheerful. First up is the wonderful Star Wars/ Withnail and I mashup, in which some genius has synched Richard E Grant’s drunken, expletive-filled dialogue onto C-3PO, and it’s one of the most joyous things I’ve ever seen. The prissy robot swaggering into the cantina bar and demanding the finest wines known to humanity, then screaming abuse when he’s refused, keeps me warm during the long winter evenings.
What else? Oh, yes. There are millions of animal videos on the internet, but this is one of my favourites. It’s only 10 seconds long, and if your mood isn’t better by at least the third of them I guarantee your money back (and it’s free).
Statue at Nybster – a gansey in stone?
And thirdly—you’re way ahead of me, I collect—the joy of having something to do, in this case knitting. The way I deal with anxiety is to get my head down and knit. I listen to music or audiobooks—Wagner and Dorothy Dunnett’s novel of Macbeth at the moment—more or less obsessively, and just focus on getting the rows done. It may not get rid of the underlying causes, but I do at least finish a lot of jumpers. Speaking of which, there have been significant developments this week: the front and back are now complete, and joined at the shoulders. With the collar almost finished, that just leaves the sleeves; we’re two-thirds of the way there, and another month should see it pinned and formulated, as TS Eliot described his own completed knitting projects.
Signs of Spring
Finally this week, one of the chief bonuses to living in Caithness is that it almost comprises social distancing in itself: it’s easy to find a stretch of beach, a cliffside path, an abandoned harbour, or a river strath to explore, away from other people. (In fact, that’s pretty much the only bonus—Ed.) Happiness after all is where you find it, and I find it there, among other places. To return to John Lennon—one of the few people to write an ode to a takeaway curry in his classic song Instant Korma: he once said: “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” Reasons to be cheerful, part four…
I turned on the television the other day, to catch the latest news about the coronavirus. Imagine my shock to find a stern-faced leader addressing his people from a podium: “Some of you may die,” he said, “but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make”. Blimey, I thought: that’s a bit stark for Boris. Then I realised I’d put on Shrek by mistake.
Handrail at the North Baths pool
So here we are, watching the needle on the anxiety-o-meter creeping all the way up to critical. Football and other sports are cancelled, travel suspended, and the media apparently have no other news. I blew my nose at work on Friday. When I looked up, everyone in the room was staring at the tissue in my hands. I felt like a strange gunslinger walking into the Malemute saloon: the piano player stopped playing, the dealer paused as he dealt the cards. Patiently I explained that this is the same condition I’ve had for a year now, you’ve all seen it, it’s nothing new. Gradually everyone relaxed; but just for a minute there…
Seaweed & Driftwood
The Simpsons captured this mood perfectly many years ago, when a reporter asks a pundit, “Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?” And the pundit earnestly replies, “Yes I would.”
Well, we all know knitting is one way to alleviate stress and anxiety, so let’s have at it. I’ve almost finished the back of the gansey so it’s possible now to get an idea of the overall look of the thing. It’s always something of a risk, knitting a yoke with a specified number of rows, as every cone of yarn knits up a little differently. But, touch wood, this time it seems to have worked out. The coppery tones of the Frangipani Breton yarn really suit the pattern, too.
As for the virus, we know that things will get worse before they get better. But get better they will. So let’s all wash our hands, be safe, and look out for each other. At times like this I fall back on a phrase from James Joyce’s Ulysses, on the importance of remembering that bad things are only temporary, and will pass: “Life is many days. This will end.”
Hamlet once said that he could be “bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”. And I feel much the same. Not that I could necessarily be bounded in a nutshell—I think there’d be quite a lot left over, not to mention something of a mess to clean up—but about the dreams. Why is it that when I remember my dreams, they’re always disturbing?
Stacks of Duncansby
Anxiety has been a constant companion throughout my life. A few days before I took my driving test, aged 18, I dreamt I’d taken it and failed. So powerful was the dream that it took most of the following morning before I realised that the actual test was still in the future, the failure as yet only hypothetical. (I passed first time, by the way: as Linus from Peanuts would say, “I wasted a good worry”.) Just last night I dreamt that I was lying on the floor, helpless and dying after some unspecified disaster, possibly a heart attack. This was actually an improvement on another dream a few months ago, when I dreamt I had just died, and my spirit was detached from my body, occupying the space in the room, wondering what came next. Another time I dreamt that half my face was missing. Every time I read that one of the most commonly reported dreams is turning up to work naked, I think, hey, that sounds interesting; as if even in my subconscious I’m missing all the fun.
Friendly Fenceposts
I don’t dream about ganseys, and given how the rest of my dreams work out that’s probably a good thing. Excitingly, I’ve just reached the point where front and back divides: the semi-gussets are ready to go on their holders, and the foundations of the yoke pattern have been laid. There’s just a narrow diamond border to separate the body from the yoke; I had to condense the band because the body is slightly shorter than the ganseys I knit for myself. It’s fun to be knitting a Hebridean pattern again—they’re such a riot of patterns the whole fabric seems to come alive, like a knitted Book of Kells.
Swan on the Grand Union Canal
And in other news, spring seems to have finally, tentatively, arrived even in Caithness. (As King Solomon once observed, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; though after watching Finding Nemo I presume the voice of the turtle mostly says, “Woaaah, dude”.) So here’s one of my favourite Japanese poems to celebrate. It’s by Ome Shushiki (1668-1725), on the hope that spring brings, even to dry dreamers such as I:
Dead my old fine hopes And dry my dreaming, but still… Iris, blue each spring.
It’s the first day of March, St David’s Day, a date which has always felt like spring to me ever since we lived in Wales; a harbinger of hope with the snowdrops and daffodils coming out, and—in a particularly good year—Wales absolutely stuffing England at rugby. Alas for our times, I duly went for a walk along the river today; and yes, the snowdrops are out, though they look rather as if they wished they’d waited; but as for spring—well, not so much. In the space of thirty minutes I encountered drizzle, rain, sleet and hail, with the sorts of winds that make you look like you’re pulling an invisible sled; indeed, all I needed was some snowshoes and a sense of British pluck and I could have fitted into Captain Scott’s expedition, no questions asked.
I did see an otter, though, and that made up for much. The recent heavy rains have swollen the river to the fullest level I can remember, and maybe that’s made them bold. I was aware of a sleek, dark, whiskery head with a bright black eye bobbing in the swell, looking alertly round. Then it was gone with a *glop! *, only a few silently expanding ripples to show where it’d been. A few minutes later it was up again, twenty metres further off, and seemed to be munching something. It’s always a privilege, seeing an otter; even the ones that don’t look like Matt Damon (honestly, look it up: it’s a thing). They’re another creature who seem to have the meaning of life sorted out—sheep always look anxious, but you never see an otter having an existential crisis—as if the moment your back is turned they’ll be round the back of the bike sheds with the other cool kids, smoking something illegal.
Meanwhile, I’ve almost finished the lower body of the gansey. When I’ve finished the current round of trees and starfish, it’ll be time to start the gussets and the diamond strip separating the body pattern from the yoke. This is the business end of the gansey, so I have to commit to a row and stitch gauge in order to work out how to fit the patterns in the horizontal and vertical planes—and then hope for the best. I’ll say more about patterns as I come to them; for now, let’s just say I wish I’d paid more attention in maths class.
And speaking of St David’s Day, I came across this bizarre fact in my extensive researches (viz., Wikipedia): “by the 18th century the custom had arisen of confectioners producing “taffies”—gingerbread figures baked in the shape of a Welshman riding a goat—on Saint David’s Day”. I mean—what? From the context it’s obviously not supposed to be complimentary; though part of me wonders if we’d dealt with the EU in the same way—a particularly pointed pastry of Michel Barnier, say—would Brexit ever have come to pass? Alas, we’ll never know. Still , we can at least console ourselves with the thought that spring will soon be here—one way or, ahem, anotter…
[N.B., Margaret is off on her travels this week, which is why the photos are below our usual standard; smartphones are wonderful things, but they can’t capture the true shade of a gansey. The other photos are recycled from my phone’s library; I was going to add captions, but I think they’re pretty self-explanatory…]
“… and storms beat these rocky cliffs,
falling frost fetters the earth,
the harbinger of winter; then dark comes,
night-shadows deepen, from the north there comes
a rough hailstorm in malice against men.”
These lines have been in my mind recently—not because they’re the latest weather report for Caithness, though they might as well be, given how generally grim and end-of-the-world-ish things have been up here lately; no, these lines are from the Old English poem The Wanderer (and yes, that’s about as cheerful as it gets). The poem is splendid in its own right, of course, but it’s also fascinating to me how Tolkien incorporated elements of it into The Lord of the Rings.
Down to Earth
For example, there’s a line in the poem about the eald enta geweorc, which translates as “the old work of giants”, i.e., the prehistoric remains in the English landscape. But Tolkien took the word enta, giants, as his inspiration for the Ents, the wise old sentient tree creatures that are the moral heart of his ecology. Or take these lines: Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?/ Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? (which translates as, “Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?/ Where the giver of treasure?”). He adapted these for the moving poem of the Riders of Rohan: “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?” Of course, it’s this level of detail that gives Tolkien’s universe such a feeling of authenticity, and makes it so hard to imitate: the roots of his fiction go deeper than his imitators can hope to follow.
Spring Snowdrops
This, of course, is a familiar feeling to anyone who’s attempted to recreate the more complex ganseys of the past, which brings us to my latest project, the Hebridean gansey. One advantage of horrible weather is that you don’t feel the need to get up and do something more energetic instead. So I’ve been cranking up the heating and beavering away, making good progress up the body: alternating starfish and tree panels, divided by narrow two-stitch cables. I’m using cables rather than seed stitch (which I used last time I knit this) to delineate the pattern panels for a couple of reasons: firstly, because they fit the number of stitches better; secondly because I like them; and thirdly because this is a new batch of yarn, and I won’t know my exact stitch gauge until I’ve knit a bigger sample. (This is important, because it’s intended as a gift, and I don’t want it to be too big or too small. A small variation in stitch gauge can make a big difference over 300+ stitches: but the purl stitches either side of the cables act rather like pleats, and give a degree of flexibility to the ultimate width of the garment.)
Rare Creature
In parish news, while we’ve all been talking Judit has quietly finished another gansey: this one in blue (darker than the photos suggest, but not navy; which is not a colour ideally suited to fine knitting over long winter evenings). The pattern, a fetching diamond and ladder combination, is based on one from Rae Compton’s book, Mrs Mainprize’s pattern on page 56. Many congratulations once again to Judit! (And when is someone going to reprint Rae’s excellent book?)
Finally this week, in my Anglo-Saxon reading I came across the concept of a holmgang, which was literally an “island-going”, viz., a way of going to a special place (usually an island, or holm) to settle your differences “though formalised and circumscribed violence”. I don’t know why this should come into my mind as I prepare to settle down to watch another rugby international. My team usually loses, too: but as the poet of The Wanderer philosophically observed after a particularly disappointing England vs France game: Wyrd bið ful aræd! or, “Events always go as they must…”
Like John Lennon, I read the news today; but “oh boy” hardly seems an adequate response under the circumstances. As regular readers will know, anxiety sits on my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket’s manic depressive cousin (but being Scottish his advice is to “give a little thistle”, instead of a whistle, and I’m not sure that I should “always let pure nonsense” be my guide). But as the loose thread that binds the modern world unravels, I’m beginning to suspect anxiety may be the least of my problems.
What else? Oh, yes. There are millions of animal videos on the internet, but this is one of my favourites. It’s only 10 seconds long, and if your mood isn’t better by at least the third of them I guarantee your money back (and it’s free).
Statue at Nybster – a gansey in stone?
Signs of Spring
