Move over Great British Bake Off – the new thing is Darning Wars
Early January can be a trying time of year if you are moderately content with your life. You may feel no desire to give up meat, sugar or alcohol; the prospect of training for a marathon may fill you with antic dread; while the notion of abandoning your day job to reinvent yourself as a life coach/novelist/artisan butcher may strike you as entirely deranged. But when the pages of every newspaper and magazine are filled with bright-eyed busybodies chivvying you to do just that, it is hard to resist their blandishments without feeling timid, complacent and dull.
How to find some modest project of self-improvement that offers no imminent threat to appetite, limb or income? There are the usual suspects, of course: join a choir or a book club, research your family history, take up painting in watercolours. But if none of them catches your heart in the way that a satisfactory pastime should, how about a spot of darning?
In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph, Mrs Page of Caxton, Cambridgeshire, lamented the decline of this useful skill, which she had learned some 70 years ago at boarding-school: mending her socks and stockings on Sunday afternoons “while the housemistress read out loud from an improving novel”. Her 18-year-old granddaughter, “au fait with sewing and… soon to study textile design at university”, was mystified by the darns on Mrs Page’s woollen gloves. To illustrate this lament for vanished domestic craft, the Telegraph’s picture editor chose a photograph of schoolboy evacuees, darning their socks under the supervision of a redoubtable person in sensible shoes.
I am a keen and surprisingly competent darner. My grandmother taught me when I was young and I have been mending my holey jumpers ever since. Satisfying as it is to resist the gnawing of moths and the demands of commerce to throw away what is damaged and replace it with something new and expensive, there is an extra philosophical consolation to be found in mending: a gesture of defiance against the tendency of everything to decay.
Still, these are arcane pleasures, and I wouldn’t have put money on a darning renaissance, had not notifications from the Pitt Rivers Museum and the V&A simultaneously appeared on my Facebook home page. On February 10 and 11 I am invited to Oxford to attend classes in darning at the Pitt Rivers, run by Tom van Deijnen, whose website, tomofholland.com, is an exquisite celebration of the pleasures of advanced mending.
For a fee of £95 I will learn Swiss and stocking darns, and make a tour of the Conservation Lab, taking home “a comprehensive hand-out, two darning needles and a beautiful darn as a badge of honour”.
The V&A, meanwhile, urges me to make my own “boro” bag, inspired by an ancient rural Japanese mending technique whose practice is infused with mottainai, or the sense of regret concerning waste.
Along with the charm of discovering that my fondness for mending – ruthlessly mocked by my family – has a fancy Japanese name, I sense the stirring of the Next Big Thing. Farewell, hygge; move over, Great British Bake Off. Welcome, Darning Wars.
Meanwhile, if you feel an urge to darn and haven’t got £95 to hand, try asking the nearest grandmother – or schoolboy evacuee – to show you how it is done.