Gansey Nation

When I was at university, round about the time Queen Victoria was celebrating her diamond jubilee, I went out for a time with a girl who was a devout Christian. One evening at her flat, when the question arose as to what two young people of mixed gender without a television set might profitably do to pass the time, she proposed we try the sortes Biblicae, the exercise of opening the Bible at random to seek divine guidance. Now, this was not exactly what I’d had in mind, especially as I knew the chances of striking one of the riper passages in the Song of Solomon were fairly remote; but her mind was made up and she went first.

Drying in the sun

I can’t remember exactly which passage she hit upon: one of St Paul’s, I think, about it being a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Then she pushed the book over to me. ‘Your turn,’ she said. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, but opened it about halfway through at Isaiah chapter 13, verse 15, and to my horror read aloud: ‘Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword.’

Unsurprisingly the relationship didn’t last. And ever since I’ve taken the message to heart, determined not to be found, moving from place to place like a latter-day Job (but profiting by his example and staying on dry land; though I did have some anxious moments at Seaworld a few years back). But always secretly hoping for a sign of forgiveness.

Violets on the canal bank

Well, I’m delighted to say that last week it finally arrived. We were in the Milton Keynes shopping mall—as good a place as any to receive a missive from the Other Side, it being a near-death experience in itself—and I bought a couple of greetings cards. I didn’t think any more about it, and used the receipt as a bookmark. Happening to glance at it a few days later I received a sudden shock: for on the receipt were printed the words: Stay Positive. We Need You To Do Stuff.

Now, a cynic might suggest that all this means is that the receipt showed an abbreviated version of the text on the cards; but I absolutely reject this: I think it’s a sign. It may have taken almost 40 years, but I think my celestial amnesty has finally come through. 

I expect some of the stuff they need me to do is to knit ganseys, and another one has just rolled off the production line, gleaming with polish and ready to be taken for a test drive. (I did take it with me to my parents’ after all, and got a whole sleeve done.) Seeing it whole, blocked out to size, it really is a splendid pattern, one of the very best, and the deep colour of the yarn sets off the pattern beautifully. By the way, I made the cuffs 6 inches long, instead of the usual 3, so that the recipient can roll up and adjust the cuffs to achieve his desired sleeve length. I have, inevitably, already started my next gansey, but I’ll say more about that next week.

In the meantime I am, of course, staying positive: well, it would be flying in the face of providence not to.

What, I hear you ask, is the most annoying thing about BBC weather forecasts for the far north of Scotland? Is it the way the presenters airily refer to 60-70 mph winds up here as “a bit breezy”, but when England and Wales are affected they adopt the tone of grief counsellors and warn of “severe winds causing possible structural damage“?

Or is it the fact that they’ve devised a weather map based on the curvature of the Earth, only exaggerated, so that London and Cornwall are huge but Caithness disappears over the horizon in such a vanished perspective it’s essentially two-dimensional? (Honestly, the only way I can even see our forecast these days is to stand on a chair and tilt my head so that one ear rests on my shoulder.)

The Castle from the seaward side

No, it’s neither of these. Instead, it’s the fiendishly misleading BBC weather app on my phone, which is so inaccurate the only explanation I can think of is that it’s managed by a disgruntled imp inside the device, like one of Terry Pratchett’s disorganisers. Locals of course just laugh when you point this out, and tell you that the only reliable way to tell the weather up here is to stick your head out the window; but I keep falling for it, like a mark who’s bet the mortgage money that the ball must lie under the last cup.

So it was that when the app forecast a fine, sunny day last week and we decided to revisit the ruined castle of Old Wick, jutting out into the North Sea on another of the distinctive local promontories, or goes, we got soaked in a brutal shower of sleet and hail. You approach the castle along a track near the cliff edge. This is boggy country and the ground absorbs water like a sponge; it’s like walking on a sponge, too, dark water oozing up over your boots and bubbles of mud swelling and popping with an asthmatic sigh with every step, like a hyperborean Rotorua.

Not the Old Man of Wick

The castle dates back to the 12th century, when Caithness was under Norse rule and (he says smugly) is one of the oldest castles in Scotland. Only the base of the Tower House remains, though once it would have been four storeys high. Any other buildings that would have covered the promontory have disappeared, so that the tower juts up from the land like a broken tooth; so distinctive that fishermen used it as a landmark, and called it The Old Man of Wick (a soubriquet I feel I am not far from myself).

We didn’t linger—the hail was painful, like three or four devils flicking their sharp fingernails in your face, and the wind was bitter—but the weather held long enough for us to catch our breath and pace the ruins. We’re so used to the great castles of the later middle ages it’s always a shock to realise how small most early castles were (a historian once described the early Norman castles of mid Wales as being more like tipis than castles). In fact, when I think of a castle, I think of something like Gormenghast: not something smaller than my house.

TECHNICAL STUFF

“One of the best Filey patterns” – Gladys Thompson

The pattern is from Gladys Thompson, page 33, “Filey X”. The chest is 46 inches in the round, so I cast on 336 stitches for the welt ribbing, increased after 3.5 inches to 368 for the body, which is plain until the yoke. That gives my standard 183 stitches per side, plus 2 seam stitches.

To make the pattern fit the number of stitches usually involves some finessing of the various panels, but this pattern was a very close match. I knew I wanted a central chevron (or herringbone as Gladys calls it), so it was a question of working out from there. I left the cables and moss stitch panels alone, not least because moss stitch is a fiddly pattern and I didn’t want more of that than I could help; but I found that by making the chevron panel 17 stitches wide instead of the original 13 I had a total of 185 stitches per side. I therefore increased each side by 2 stitches at the start of the pattern to give me the right number.

I decided to open the chevrons out from the original. This was partly practical, as the start of the next chevron comes on the last row of the one before, so it’s easy to keep track of; but it’s also aesthetic,  as it think it fits the wider chevrons better.

The sun happening to shine one day last week we packed up our troubles in our old kit bag, took it down to the river, filled it with a choice selection of heavy stones and threw it in. After waiting several minutes for the bubbles to subside—for if you’re going to drown your sorrows it’s as well to do it thoroughly—we went for a stroll over the ruined Castle of Sinclair Girnigoe.

Gordon explores the goe

It’s situated just a mile or so north of Wick, commanding the entire sweep of Sinclair’s Bay in a half circle from the stacks of Duncansby all the way round to the tip of the promontory of Noss. (Noss Head juts out in a narrow spike between Sinclair’s Bay to the north and Wick Bay to the south; with the ocean on three sides and the wind blowing it’s like standing on the bowsprit of HMS Caithness under full sail.)

Sinclair, or Girnigoe Castle is stunningly sited on one of the fingers of land that splay out from the coast in these parts (the name means the green goe, or inlet). Standing on the narrow sliver of rock, looking down at the sea angrily churning away at the base, the weight of centuries concentrated in just a few square yards of floorspace, you can’t help wondering how many men were lost down the centuries when they sleepily got up in the middle of the night and popped out to relieve themselves, never to be heard of again (only the sound of a medieval fly being unzipped, a despairing scream and a distant splash). Quite a lot of the castle survives and it’s obvious that, unable to expand sideways, the only way was up. Now after centuries of conflict the ruins are home to nesting seabirds—which seems appropriate, somehow: visiting a ruined castle is like looking at old school photos; it’s pleasant to be reminded now and then of something you’ve outgrown.

I have meanwhile started my next gansey project, a Filey pattern in Frangipani claret for an old friend. I love this colour: like so many gansey yarns, it changes hue with the prevailing light. Sometimes it resembles red wine spilt on a tablecloth; but then the sun floods the room with sunlight and it glows with a sort of ruddy luminescence, as though I was knitting a wooly cover for the Holy Grail. I have perhaps another week of plain knitting at this rate before I start the yoke.

Finally this week, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who’s been in touch, both below the line or by email, wishing me well in recovering from my present illness. Depression is an isolating feeling, and it means a lot to know that so many people care enough to let me know. So thank you; people can be very kind. And speaking of which, I’ve been thinking a lot about an old Cambridge University anecdote Stephen Fry relates in one of his books: as a philosophy of life it seems pretty good to me right now. It goes like this. One day a new Fellow of the College was being welcomed to the senior common room by the other academics; one took him aside and said, “A word of advice: don’t try to be clever. We’re all clever here. Only try to be kind.”

Castle Sinclair Girnigoe