Support Gansey Nation -


Buy Gordon a cuppa!


Many, many thanks to those of you who have already contributed!





Week 4: 12 – 18 October

chart2Some people, looking back, measure their lives by the growth of their children; others, their pets or their holidays. In my case, alas, migraines are my yardstick.

High on the list of Great Migraines I Have Known would be the time I saw an “energy ribbon” across my line of vision, like the nexus that saw off Captain Kirk in Star Trek Generations, and which mucked up my speech without me being aware of it, so that I was told later that I tried to pronounce “barbarians” as “blahbeeurugh”. Then there was the time I recreated the famous scene from the Acts of the Apostles, being helplessly sick into a gutter outside the Arndale Centre in Manchester at eleven in the morning, while passers-by made disparaging comments about my being obviously drunk so early in the morning*.

So when I was stricken on the train coming back from a meeting in London last week, you might think I’d have been ready for it, like the werewolf who recognises that a full moon is upon him when he finds he can’t use a can opener with those paws. But no. Somewhere around Preston I was suddenly overcome with sweating, nausea, headache and a kind of paralysis that prevented me even getting out of my seat for the next 2 hours, which will go down as some of the most miserable of my life, especially when you consider I had a Snickers flapjack tantalisingly out of reach in my bag. The fact that it a thick mist and drizzle had descended so I couldn’t see out only added to the experience.

Ah well, so it goes (just like my breakfast that day around 10.45am – what goes down must come up).

All of which goes some way to explain a quiet week on the swatching front, since the migraine took a couple of days to wear off, and one of the symptoms is tired eyes and slightly blurred vision. However, I do have another pattern to share with you, taken from the same panel in a Maori meeting house as the last one. Unlike the previous pattern, this doesn’t have an obvious parallel with a traditional gansey pattern, so we are starting to paddle ourselves out into deep waters. Hopefully I’ll have a knitted up version to show you next week.

The original is shaded two different colours of brown, which I can’t really replicate, even with moss or purl stitches. On the other hand, I’m hoping the addition of the thin cables in the boxes will make for a distinctive effect. We’ll see.

(*Yes, I know that scene of the Acts of the Apostles is set in the Holy Land, which isn’t really a description that applies to Manchester even on a Sunday – quite the reverse – but you know what I mean.)

4 comments to Week 4: 12 – 18 October

  • =Tamar

    I like the restrained use of the cables. Sorry to hear about the migraine; I hope it doesn’t recur.

  • Gordon

    Yes, this will be the first time I’ve ever done a cable that wasn’t 6 stitches across, I think! And the migraines, like the poor, will I fear be always with us…

  • Suzanne

    The panel looks very promising. For the body? The small cables should definitely impart a ‘carved’ quality.

    I’m so sorry to hear that you had another miserable episode in transit (by far the worst – it is preferable to be wishing oneself dead in the comfort of one’s own home).

    Wasn’t a good week here either. The old diabetic cat is no longer monopolizing the bed. After 18-1/2 years of nights spent with a soft, breathing, hot water bottle, spooned in the curve of my body, I’m not sure I remember how to go to sleep without one.

  • Gordon

    Hi Suzanne,

    I just happened to be catching my evening dose of liberal opinion from The Guardian online newspaper when I saw your comment. I’m so sorry to hear about your poor old cat – a loss is always a sad loss. There was a time I was very interested in the universe, and time and space, and the most comforting theory I read (plausibly based upon real physics) is that the universe is eternal, every second of every hour since the “dawn of time” (as we would see it) does exist and has always existed. But time is an illusion – it’s just the way we experience the universe, since not being gods we can’t cope with the reality – and so, in order to make sense of things, our consciousness rides the seconds and hours like a switchback car rides the rails in a funfair.

    The point of all this, of course, is that it allows for the possibility that everyone, and everything, that has ever lived, is still alive and still in existence in their own time – it’s just that we have the illusion of having left them behind as we ride the rails, as if they got off at the last stop. But they’re still there, as in fact are we.

    And, as Hamlet says, I do, in part, believe it.

    Gordon