Stories Everywhere #3
Come with me to a knitting shop.
I’m writing this three days post-operation, with an extremely fuzzy head. I can’t sit up for more than ten minutes without feeling woozy, so if the iPad took a photo at this precise moment it would show a deeply flattering view of my double chins, nostrils and eyebrows as I perch it on my lap, reclined at the only angle apart from horizontal that makes the room stay put.
I will write about the surgery soon, and the diagnosis seven years on from when I first complained to my doctor about period pain, but for now I’m in a sort of cocoon, warm and safe and looked after while my body heals.
For now, please enjoy a small adventure.
London is an ever-expanding map of possible adventures. You take a different route and something new will find you. Sometimes it’ll be a bicycle with no wheels, pedals, handlebar or chain, a mural, the house of the person who invented anaesthetic. Different markers of wealth rub up against each other like patchwork. There are council estates and lumps of concrete from the sixties next to a gracious Georgian terrace that wouldn’t be out of place in Notting Hill. There are glassy flats that remind me of the Pompidou Centre in Paris with their industrial design, and old wooden house boats with steam pumping slowly from their chimneys, moving gently as they resist the tug of the canal’s current.
My friend and I were on a very specific mission on this particular Saturday afternoon that might seem odd considering our age – we were on the hunt for wool.
For reasons beyond me, I’d had a serious urge to pick up knitting. When I was little, my grandmother had tried to teach me, and it had not stuck. This time around, having more of a tendency to become obsessed by projects, I knew this was it. My knitting era had dawned, and I was ready to step into the light.
I also knew that while I could probably get yarn and needles on Amazon, I was in London. The city where you can get pretty much anything with a good old wander and a high enough concentration of shops. It was time to venture past the doorstep and out into the real world.
Fuelled by brunch, we wandered from Farringdon to Islington (middle but slightly north London to slightly more north London) for our first port of call: charity shops. How often have you wandered through charity shops and seen an enormous pot stocked with needles and crochet hooks of all shapes and sizes? In my head, it was a fairly common occurrence, but perhaps I was mistaken.
Three charity shops yielded no results, so we went into a narrow Oxfam, partially hoping to have more luck there and partially to avoid the shouty man with the Jesus sign telling us we were all going to hell.
While the book section was lucrative, nary a knitting needle or yarn was to be found, so I pulled out my phone and did something that maybe I should have done from the start – type ‘knitting’ into Google Maps.
A two minute walk away – the Jesus man had disappeared – and we found ourselves at Loop, self-described as a ‘gorgeous yarn shop’. Located in a hidden alleyway off the high street, it’s a three-storey, old shop with wooden floors, walls packed with different coloured yarn and baskets full of needles for every need.
We were extremely excited. My friend opted for crochet supplies, choosing a mustard yellow yarn, while I headed upstairs to ask one of the very cool women working in the shop how exactly one knits and which wool to pick for my first project.
After accidentally knocking half the wool in one of the cubby holes onto the floor, I settled on ‘Snefnug’, ethically sourced wool from Denmark. Snefnug is an excellent word meaning snowflake, and true enough the wool is soft and delicate, made of baby alpaca wool, cotton and merino wool. I chose an orange colour and needles made out of driftwood. We joined their loyalty scheme, paid and left, feeling extremely triumphant.
This hidden alley yielded yet more surprises as we walked past the TikTok famous ‘Buns from Home’, with the scent of cinnamon drifting through the air, crystal shops, the reappearance of the Jesus man trying to get into a hairdressers to spread the word of God, and a pop-up market, where a Russian lady in a black fur coat was selling earrings with dangling fruit or vegetables made out of glass. My friend bought pak choi while I stayed on theme and bought the oranges. Also on offer were chilli peppers, bananas, lemons and aubergines.
For the knitting itself I turned to YouTube, finding this lovely lady who went through the basics of a casting on (how to start the first row bit) and then the knit stitch.
I’d like to make a scarf, so I started by guessing roughly how many stitches I wanted for the width. I had not counted on the knitting expanding, which it did, so then I had to knit with pencils for a day or two before giving up and starting again, as the scarf was wide enough to be a blanket at that point.
In the end, I restarted six times.
I’d also noticed myself double-screening – watching TV and going on my phone, my attention zipping between the two like a restless fly. When I’d knitted a few rows, I could do it pretty much without looking, so now I knit while watching TV, making something instead of reducing my attention span.
The simple, slow repetition of the same movements is deeply meditative for me, especially as I do struggle to meditate in the first place. There’s a calm focus that has been really beneficial while the world feels like such an overwhelming place.
Knitting is a lesson for all perfectionists, especially at the beginning.
It isn’t going to be perfect. While the finished result is rewarding, the real joy has to come from the act of making itself. Loving something because you made it. Loving something even if the lines aren’t straight or there’s a rather obvious hole in the middle. It’s still worthy.
