Knit yourself a new mindset and you can give up the pills

Yoga, mindfulness, running – each week brings news of some miracle panacea, guaranteed to increase the sum of human happiness.

The most recent addition to the list of remedies for the melancholy of the human condition is knitting. A report commissioned by the charity Knit for Peace claims a remarkable range of health benefits, from reducing depression to slowing the onset of dementia. So extensive are the virtuous side-effects of knitting that the report suggests the NHS should consider prescribing it as an alternative to drugs.

This isn’t the first time that knitting has undergone a rebranding. A couple of decades ago, the Stitch ’n’ Bitch movement reclaimed knit one, purl one for feminism, while the subversive practice of “yarnbombing”, or decorating cities with knitted graffiti, lent a fierce urban edge to this gentle pursuit.

Perhaps a certain anarchic quality is part of knitting’s appeal for a new generation. Its shadow side is well documented in literature, from Dickens’s implacable Madame Defarge to the fateful knitters of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In a 2013 New Yorker essay, the novelist Alison Lurie warned of the notorious sweater curse – “a superstition which many personal accounts support”. Apparently, “if you start knitting a sweater for any man in whom you have a serious romantic interest, he will break up with you before it is finished”. So knit for health, knit for charity, knit for anarchy – just don’t, on any account, knit for love.

On the letters pages of the Daily Telegraph, a correspondence has been gently seething about that modish comestible, sourdough bread. It started with a cri de coeur from Michael Stanford, who wrote that he was “baffled by the current obsession with sourdough bread”. Mr Stanford issued a plea for “bread… that tastes of bread and not vinegar”. Cue a flurry of letters, mostly agreeing that sourdough does indeed taste of vinegar, with a single dissenting voice, whose praise for the “culinary perfection” of the stuff was only slightly tarnished by the fact that it emanated from a company that sells starter kits for home baking.

Commercial sourdough can be memorably nasty – leathery in texture and so full of holes that it scarcely qualifies as bread. But homemade sourdough is another matter. On the top shelf of our fridge there lives a sourdough mother, known as “Audrey”, after the rapacious plant in the musical, Little Shop of Horrors. Once a week she emerges and the resulting loaf is a thing of beauty: close-textured, fragrant, bread as bread used to be. And not a whiff of vinegar.

Last week, I had a meeting with a man who coughed at me for half an hour. It was unpleasant, but I assumed that my cast-iron immune system would protect me. Alas, it didn’t.

Even the healthiest of us pick up the odd bug from time to time, but this was an entirely avoidable act of infection, with a baleful cascade of consequences that extends far beyond my own malaise: the elderly relations I haven’t been able to visit, the Mother’s Day meal with my son that I had to cancel, the work obligations that I have been unable to fulfil.

It seems odd that we righteously ban smoking in public places, but don’t extend the same disapproval to the Typhoid Marys of the flu virus, who spread misery with every pestilent cough and splutter.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion