AUTUMN KNITS

Sat, curled up in the armchair, I was knitting. I was knitting so that I wouldn’t text a man who referred to himself in the third person, which felt like something I was in danger of doing, having just been set up on a blind date with someone who did that. That was before I had hobbies, though, which is something I had decided I needed after that last set up. I wanted something to show for my spare time other than a burgeoning sense of apathy.

I had started that winter with quilting. I was going to make a throw for my sofa, or my bed. Maybe both

– who knew, I could be a prodigy. There was a brief talk

(in my head) of craft markets I could attend with my quilts. It was inspired: I wouldn’t even have to buy fabric; I could go through my wardrobe and cut up old clothes I didn’t wear anymore. I would literally weave in the memories, or whatever you did when you made quilts. When I finished, I would have something practical and meaningful to show for it. I was halfway through cutting up a silk skirt that didn’t fit me properly when I realised that I’d borrowed it from my sister and had never returned it. My next hobby was searching for the exact same skirt on eBay – and avoiding my sister.

I moved onto painting. I loved to paint. I had painted my bedroom three times, before I got a professional in. It was only when I started my first class that I remembered I can’t draw hands. There’s a portrait of my grandmother somewhere that I made as a child in which I eerily foreshadowed her arthritis. I tried to explain this to my instructor, but he wasn’t interested.

“This is a still life,” he had said.

Then there was The Incident, which is how I refer to my attempt to take up beekeeping. That had ended in hospital with what I had suspected was a heart attack but what turned out to be a panic attack. That’s all I’m willing to say about that.

This time, though, I was fairly sure I had discovered my craft. Knitting was cosy. Knitting was autumnal. Meryl Streep knits. Besides, my dog, Alfie, really needed a scarf.

And so I knit. Whenever I had a spare few minutes, I would pick up my needles and my wool and lose myself in my stitches. I learned how to cast on and off, the basics of garter stitch (which I was told is as basic as it gets), much like Meryl before me, probably. I even learned how to knit in stripes from a woman who worked at my local fabric shop. She had shown me a very helpful YouTube video.

At one point, I thought I might be inducing early arthritis myself after I woke up and found my hand had seized into a claw and gone numb. But it was all worth it, because

I had found my craft. And finally, after three months of counting stitches and rows, I was finished. I lifted up the scarf and examined my masterpiece.

Ok, fine, it wasn’t perfect. In fact, it was wonky. It was also wider in the middle than at either end and there was a hole I didn’t remember putting there. But that didn’t matter: it was a scarf and I had made it myself.

I knelt down and wrapped it around Alfie’s neck. He sniffed it, then pulled it off and tried to eat it.

There was a ripping sound. Then he walked off.

I picked up what was left of the scarf.

Perhaps I should try crochet…

Amy Lavelle grew up with a passion to become a writer (despite her dad’s best efforts to make her a dentist). Based in Brighton, she’s now a freelance journalist, and her debut, Definitely Fine (Orion) is a funny, surprisingly uplifting novel about grief and growing up.