Zen and the art of crochet. Expressing political opinions!

Adrian Chiles was writing in one of the papers online about his experiences with public transport. I’ll skip over the incident with the drunk who was sick on his shoe and move directly to the crochet lady story:-

“I also became engrossed in a woman’s crochet work this week. I was sitting opposite her on a tube train, rattling west towards what GK Chesterton called the sunset side of town. It was her intensity that drew me in. It became as hypnotic for me as it seemed to be for her. She conjured up one square after the next, starting each one slowly, accelerating to a ferocious pace before stopping abruptly to produce some very severe-looking little scissors to trim the thing off. It says something for her focus that she never once spotted this large bloke staring at her, slack-jawed in admiration.
Eventually, I had to ask her what she was up to. She didn’t seem to mind having her trance broken. “I’m making a blanket for my niece’s first anniversary,” she said. “I must make 260 squares for it.” She told me she was Polish, and I started blathering on about my Croatian nan’s crochet, hoping to elicit something similar from her, but no joy. “I learned from YouTube four years ago,” she said. “It is good for calming down,” she added. “Because when you do this, you can’t think of anything else.”
(....)
I asked the Polish woman if Polish men did crochet. “No,” she said.
 “Too macho?”
 She shook her head.
“Too lazy.””

Knitting and crochet are funny things. I once read that in the Scottish islands it was always the men who knitted. Surely the women must have knitted too. Or did they only do things like chopping logs and building walls?

 Knitting and crochet are a dying art form. Or they have been until recent years when suddenly a vast range of magazines encouraging people to knit and crochet woolly toys. Last Remembrance Day the centre of Oldham was decorated with crocheted poppies. Sometimes whole village centres are decorated with crocheted stuff. This is all rather weird as it must get very messy when it rains. I wonder who eventually cleans it up. But not a lot of people seem to knit actual garments any more. When I was a child it was a standard thing that your mum or grandma knitted your school cardigan for you. It was cheaper than buying one from the uniform shop. Nowadays the opposite is true; hand-knitted garments usually work out more expensive than shop-bought. How odd!

I learnt to knit as a small child, small enough to still play with dolls and want to make garments for them - very good training, by the way, for knitting actual people clothes. I think I completed my first actual people garment when I was about 10, under guidance from my mother.

I taught myself to crochet in my twenties. (My granddaughter has done so, by the way, using youtube videos.) While I was expecting my first child I crocheted a shawl for him. I used to take it along to ant-natal appointments at the local hospital as I regularly had to wait for ages for a 5 minute check-up. On one occasion I found myself surrounded by Asian ladies curious to know what I was doing as they had apparently never seen anyone doing crochet before!

The lady Mr Chiles spoke to is right about the calming effect of crochet. It’s a sort of zen thing. You empty your mind of other things. While knitting I can read, watch TV, get involved in complicated discussions, play board games. Crochet needs total concentration!

It’s also a lot easier to take and to do on public transport. Knitting needles impinge on other travellers. Besides, you can probably just about get away with taking a plastic crochet hook on a plane, although I am not quite sure about that, whereas knitting needles with their pointy ends are a definite no-no!

Enough of that!

We have had local elections here. Good citizens that we are, we went along and voted. Nobody asked us for ID but that might be because the people sitting in the doorway asking for voter registration numbers are old friends and presumably would vouch for us if necessary. I have never had to provide proof of who I am but I heard of an old lady in her her late eighties who was turned away from the polling booth in her ward. She had been told she needed photo ID and had misunderstood, taking along with her a photo of herself. And they would not let her vote. How sad!

Unless something happens with Brexit we will vote again in a few weeks time in the European elections. And quite right too! While we are still Europeans we should be represented. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as rightwing activist Tommy Robinson has been put on the campaign trail. Surely he has a criminal record; is he still allowed to stand for election? Be that as it may, he is out there and on two occasions has met with opposition in the form of having strawberry milkshake thrown over him, once in Bury and once in Warrington.

Some may have been tempted to go and slap him or punch him but I cannot help feeling that covering him in strawberry yoghurt is a much better way of expressing one’s feelings about him and his kind!