The Apple Basket: Heroes and Cakes

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

I hope you are all well and thriving; I have had an interesting week, as you will see. So let’s get right into it.

The Apple of the Week is a story about a hero and a treasure hanging in a tree, much like a golden apple can do. This is only some of his story; large parts are hinted at or outright ignored. Enjoy!

How Jason got the Golden Fleece

Jason is a hero from the old days, even though he doesn’t really want to be a hero. But that is just the way things are. Jason meets all the requirements for a hero: he descends from a noble family, he is handsome and strong, and he gets to go a perilous journey.

You see, Jason is sent on a mission by his uncle Pelias, the king of his homeland Thessaly. He is to travel far away, almost to the end of the world to retrieve the Golden Fleece of a ram hanging over there in a tree (the fleece, not the ram). This was a magic ram, who could both talk and fly; but even magic rams do not live forever, particularly when they ask to be sacrificed to the gods. So now, its Fleece hangs in a tree. It is still magic, though, bringing peace and prosperity to the land; and since the man who brought it there was the cousin of Pelias, it is only fair that it be returned to Thessaly.

So runs the argument, and it does sound reasonable. So Jason takes on the task, gathering fifty-odd other young men and sets out on the good ship Argo to find the far end of the world and the Fleece.

What Jason is not aware of is that uncle Pelias has planned for this to be a suicide mission: he believes that Jason wants to be king and accordingly does not him to come back safely.

After many weeks of sailing and many dangers – among these an island filled with murderous women – or heroes reach Kolkhis at the end of the world (these days we call it the Eastern shores of the Black Sea, but back then it was the end of the known world).

Their plan, such as it is, is to go to the king, Aietes, and ask nicely to have the Fleece and bring it back home to Thessaly, where is rightly belongs. What they are not aware of is that Aietes is even more brutal and dangerous then uncle Pelias back home: he routinely suspects any strangers of wanting to seize his power and so plots how to kill them, before they get a chance to kill him. He is, however, sufficiently well-trained and cunning to not murder them outright, but their request gives him an opportunity: he sets Jason a challenge to prove himself worthy of the Fleece. Jason must yoke two of Aietes’ bulls, plough a field of a certain size, and sow the seeds he is given. Everything must be accomplished between sunrise and sunset on the following day.

This is a demanding, but not impossible, task; and Jason accepts it. What he is not aware of is that Aietes’ bulls are made of bronze and breathe fire; and the ‘seeds’ to be sown are dragon’s teeth from which issue undead and practically unkillable warriors that spring from the earth fully armed and programmed to attack the first person they see.

So, the next morning before dawn, he is ready to begin. All of his comrades from the Argo are there to cheer him on – even though several of them privately think that they would be better for this job – and Aietes himself presides, chuckling to himself, because he is confident of how things will proceed today.

What he is not aware of is that his youngest daughter, Medea, sat in a corner of the hall yesterday, when Aietes ~~interrogated the prisoners~~ interviewed the visitors, and she looked at Jason in the way a young girl can look at a young man. And Jason certainly is worth looking at.

Afterwards, Medea convinced herself that Jason had really come to Kolkhis to woo her, and that the whole story about the Fleece was just a silly excuse. She knew all too well that the challenge her father had set Jason was likely to have a grim and bloody end, because Aietes’ challenges usually do. And so she had to keep Jason alive, and probably also help him get that Fleeces, since it seemed to mean so much to him. Consequently, she offered him her help, and he did not refuse to take her home with him.

Medea is not your common or garden variety princess: she knows something of magic spells and herbal remedies (or whatever you want to call them), in other words, she is a witch. Not a fairy tale witch with the warty nose and the black cat, either: the kind who walks into the graveyards in the dead of night to pick those herbs that stretch their roots down through the corpses.

Medea mixed a balm that would protect Jason from the fiery breath of the bulls, and gave him a tip on how to deal with earth-born warriors.

So, Jason yokes the bulls – not without difficulty, but without being burned alive – and sets to ploughing. It is strenuous work, even though the bulls do a good job of it, once they are subdued; and it is a long, dry day under the sun. Late in the afternoon, when the sun in sinking towards the west, Jason is done with the ploughing and hastens to sow the seeds. Before he has thrown the last handful, the first of the warriors are there, ready to attack. Jason’s comrades protest and begin yelling accusations of cheating, but are restrained by Aietes’ guards. They watch Jason as he bends down and seems to look for something on the ground – and then he throws a stone into the midst of the warriors, confusing them so that they attack each other instead of him.

Technically, Jason has now completed the task and thus won the right to the Fleece; but Aietes knows full well that he had help, and from whom. So they have to act quickly to pick up the Fleece and get to the ship, before he can strike back at them.

What they are not aware of – but ought to have known – is that the Fleece like so many other gold treasures is protected by a dragon; this one sleeps all day and awakes at sunset. So, the exhausted Jason has to get back into it. He fights bravely, avoiding the venomous bite of the dragon, until at last he chops its head off.

Finally, he can grab the Fleece and run towards the ship, pursued by Aietes’ soldiers.

When they are all on board and ready to cast off, Medea comes running: she reminds Jason of what he promised her – everybody looks puzzled at this, including Jason, which does not escape her – and that she will be severely dealt with by her father, if she stays at home after what she did. The only decent thing Jason can do is to bring her along. And anyway, they haven’t got time to stick around and discuss the matter, since the severe dealings of Aietes are pretty much closing in on them. So, Medea is allowed on board, even though there are murmurs about it being bad luck to have a woman on a ship.

Thus, our hero claims both the treasure and the princess and can sail homewards with them both ...

What he is not aware of is just how much Medea will turn out to be capable of.

So, I survived another birthday this week; a big one, even, if one can trust the numbers. I try to downplay the whole thing, claiming that ‘round’ birthdays are totally random and only interesting because we happen to employ a decimal numeral system. This worked fine, until a learned friend of mine waved his ten fingers at me. Okay, then, the decimal system may not be entirely coincidental. But still, who says a life can reasonably be divided into decades? Big changes can occur at other intervals: some claim seven years to be the appropriate basic unit into which to order a life.

Anyway, I am waiting to find the answer to life, the universe and everything in two years’ time ...

A lovely friend gave me a knitting book: Magnificent Mittens & Socks by Anna Zilboorg, published by XRX. I had never seen or even heard of this book before, so that was a lovely surprise.

It has a plethora of colour work patterns for tip-down mittens, with instructions for three different ways to do the thumb. At the back of the book is a section on socks – according to A. Z., converting mittens to socks is only a question of putting in a heel instead of a thumb.

I have lately been pondering one of my goals for this year: to become properly acquainted with (let’s not yet mention the word ‘mastering’) Fair Isle colour work, so this mitten & sock book comes at just the right time. I will return to it in more detail, once I get round to working with it.

For now, I am still plugging away on my monochrome projects: the Blues Riffs socks and the Juniper jumper.

Oh, and the Splendid Striped Cowl, which of course is not monochrome. But it has the simplest possible colour work: stripes; and I am cheating and using a multi-coloured yarn with a solid for even more easy colour play.

On the socks, I had to tink all of the heel and a bit of the gusset, because it was too big for Victor’s foot. And looking through projects on Ravelry for this pattern, the Riff Socks by Lise Brackbill, it seems to me that a lot of people have the same issue with the gusset and/or the heel being too big. Maybe it’s the pattern, or the designer’s row gauge being tighter than most, or ... I don’t know.

So I spent hours and days laboriously un-knitting small, twisted stitches. Not fun. I find unpicking knitting really depressing, particularly twisted stitches on size 2 mm needles ... slow going. But that is done now, and I am knitting forwards again. The heel is redone, I am crawling up the leg (that makes me sound like a bug), and the end is in sight. The end of the first sock, that is. Once again, I remind myself that the second sock will be much quicker.

This kind of knitting is most suitable for audio book listening: it takes too much concentration for pretty much anything else. So a lot of this sock pattern I now associate with Book 5 of the Dresden Files, Death Masks; the fifth book in the series by Jim Butcher about the modern-day wizard, Harry Dresden, living in Chicago and working as a PI. These books are great fun, even to the point of alleviating the pain of tinking a sock; and the audio books are read by James Marsters, whom we of course know and love as Spike in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And he as a great reading voice.

After that, I turned to a different kind of detective novel: one of the latest Ian Rankin novels; he wrote the series about the Edinburgh policeman John Rebus and had to have him pensioned after twenty years, when he turned 60. So he started another series with a quite different protagonist, Malcolm Fox. Where Rebus spends his lonely nights in an armchair, drinking and smoking and listening to old rock music while pondering the current murder mystery and ancient ghosts, Fox does not drink at all and so far works with the Complaints, investigating complaints (hence the name) against police officers. This, of course, does not make him and his colleagues very popular among the general police staff.

I am listening to the second Fox novel, The Impossible Dead; the next in the series, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, has Rebus show up again. Now, that should be interesting.

And my catching up on CraftLit has brought me to Dracula ... I have read it ages ago, but it is always fun to revisit a classic, particularly, of course, with Heather’s learned comments accompanying it. So again, I recommend a listen; there is a parallel podcast called Just The Books, if you don’t want the crafty part of it – if you’re reading this, you probably don’t mind the craftiness, but still, chat about trips and Rhinebeck and whatnot going back almost seven years now may feel slightly irrelevant.

So, that’s it for this week; I am a bit tired today after spending Friday afternoon baking, all of Saturday morning and afternoon baking, cooking, tidying (even ironing! a table cloth), in preparation for my birthday dinner party. And, of course, spending Saturday evening with friends, which was lovely.

I had decided instead of a regular dessert to serve cakes with coffee (and tea), so I made three cakes: a Sachertorte, which is a chocolate cake layered with apricot jam and covered in chocolate (while doing the covering, I was listening to the bit in Dracula where Jonathan Harker is found by the three voluptuous ladies and longs for the sensual 'kiss' - very fitting); a New Yorker cheese cake (my first cheese cake); and an oatmeal cake with berries on top, very Nordic. That all went very well; and I haven’t heard of any subsequent heart attacks ...