Published 19 November 2007 – Malachy Tallack  (New Statesman) wrestles with his desire to knit, a practice synonymous with his Fair Isle home.

A strange and unnatural urge has come over me this week . . . I am thinking about knitting a jumper.

For the past two years, a knitting machine has occupied the corner of our kitchen, and I have barely looked at it for most of that time. But suddenly I find myself compelled to create something on it; a desire that is neither sensible nor entirely explicable. Particularly since, for the brief period when I did use a knitting machine, not long after we first moved to the island, I was terrible at it. And it nearly drove me mad.

For most people, Fair Isle is synonymous with knitting and knitwear. The brightly coloured, banded patterns that are now associated with the island first came to prominence towards the end of the 19th century, though their origins are less clear. Because of their alleged similarity to certain aspects of Moorish design, legend had it that the patterns were borrowed from the Spanish sailors who were stranded here in 1588, when the Armada vessel El Gran Griffon wrecked on the island. But that is not a theory that is given much credence these days.

In fact, original Fair Isle patterns bear an uncanny resemblance to the traditional patterns of certain other sub-arctic regions, which makes some sense, though it is not obvious why the patterns here should be so different from traditional patterns in Shetland. It is not a puzzle that is likely to be solved easily.

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