Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

and coffee and cake, just to get out of your home and leave the dishes and the kids behind, but now they’re really going strong and people are really making things. I don’t think many women now would go out without something to do. This has just become part of women’s culture in Iceland.’

‘Women’s culture,’ I say.

‘Well, there are men who knit, of course. And sew. My uncle, for example, he’s had a sewing circle for twenty years with his male friends and they do sew. They’ve done it all these years.’

I tell her about an exhibition about lighthouse-keepers that I saw at the Maritime Museum in Falmouth. Lighthouse-keepers knitted, impossibly complicated Fair Isle, the kind of thing you might do if you found yourself in solitary confinement for a couple of months with only knitting needles and yarn.

‘Of course,’ says Ragga. ‘That makes sense. My great-grandfather knitted. He was a fisherman, and when the sea was too rough to go out, he and my great-grandmother just sat and knitted, socks and sweaters, until the storm passed. My grandfather remembered going to sleep and hearing the click, click of the needles. There’s a lot of knitting on that side of the family. My grandmother died in Hofsós, and we’ve kept her house just as it was. I was there in February to record my DVD about knitting, and it was so much fun just to be in her house again. We’ll return there this summer, looking at knitting and the locale, following the wool from sheep to sweater on one farm.’

I long to watch this, suddenly, although my parents keep sheep and my mother not only knits but used to wash, card and spin the wool she picked off hedges and barbed-wire fences. I know perfectly well where wool comes from, and anyway I don’t like to wear it.

‘How old is the Icelandic sweater?’ I ask, partly to see if Ragga is selling false consciousness.

‘It’s not very old,’ she says immediately. ‘It’s really become the symbol of Icelandic knitting. We often talk about the three pillars of Icelandic knitting heritage: the sweater, the shawls, and the rose-pattern shoe-inserts. The inserts are a very special part of Icelandic knitting. They are very intricate little designs, complex motifs in interesting colours. In those days people wore sheepskin shoes, and they put these soles into them. It was a craft of women, in the days when people were wearing only grey and brown, homespun colours, everything very dull, and then there were these bright decorations hidden inside their shoes. They were for warmth, really, they had a function. And then there are the shawls.’

I have one of ‘the shawls’. I’m wearing it as I write this, on a clear January day in Cornwall. On a similar day in Iceland, a little later in the year, I had a meeting with Katrin, who was writing her MA dissertation on American feminist biker narratives. Katrin is one of those women whose appearance reminds you that Titian wasn’t necessarily exaggerating, and she is rushing to finish her dissertation before the birth of her third child, as well as working full-time. Sometimes, she confides, she takes her motorbike out in the early hours of the morning, just for a break, just for an hour away from the kids and the work and the studying and the dishes. Even when you’re pregnant? I ask, remembering how hard it got to balance a pedal bike in the last few weeks. She shrugs. Sure, I’m still a person. Anyway, she says, look, I have something for you. She opens her shoulder-bag, which is bulging but light, and hands me a lapful of knitted wool, creamy as porridge and dense and springy as summer turf. I begin to unfurl it, can’t tell what it is. I made it a while ago, she says, and it’s been waiting in my cupboard for the right person. When you were talking about how cold your house in England gets in winter, I thought you were the person. See, you can wrap it like this, your arms and hands are still free to write but it’ll keep you really warm. She helps me drape it, a cloud of wool in my vinyl and concrete office, and I recognise one of those rare objects perfectly designed for a simple purpose. The shawl is stiff enough to hang away from my body, heavy enough for the points to stay crossed over my chest, light enough that I don’t feel it on my arms as I type. There, says Katrin, I knew it was for you. It’s lovely, I tell her, but I can’t accept this, all those hours of work you put in. Of course you can, she says, it’s been waiting for you for months.

I stroke the shawl while we talk about feminism and biking – not a combination to which I have previously given thought. As it warms in the radiator’s heat, the smell of sheep blooms around me. Tell me, I ask Katrin, tell me how you made it? Oh, it’s very easy, she says. They’re very traditional, everyone knows how to make them. You just start at the point and increase until it’s big enough. Some people like to make fancy borders with lace stitches and colours, but I wanted to keep this one plain.

‘I have one,’ I tell Ragga. ‘But I still don’t really understand how they’re made. It’s as tall as I am, knitting needles don’t come that big.’

‘You start in the middle, at the back, and increase every other row, and at the edges so it grows both ways. It’s a good project for a beginner. In its simplest form, it’s just garter stitch. You can decorate it how you like and you can use any kind of yarn, and you end up with something really functional that you actually wear a lot. I use this pattern a lot when I’m converting people – I mean – oh, you know