Fun in the days before computers
I’m usually the kind of person who gets cheesed off by irritating noises.
It used to be chalk squeaking on a blackboard and that kind of thing, but nowadays it tends to be tinny music leaking from someone’s headphones when you are trying to do something peacefully on a train.
Oddly enough, though, there’s one kind of background noise which can be really soothing and re-assuring.
For some it’s the sound of the sea or whale song, but for me it’s the subtle click-clack of knitting needles.
It probably brings back a time when, as a lad, I was playing or reading at home while my mum was well into her latest knitwear project.
You don’t seem to see it around so often now, but there was a time when most relatives seemed to have a ball of wool and needles on the go.
It wasn’t just the ladies either; my granddad was a dab hand at so-called “French knitting” and my brothers and I were taught how to do it at quite a young age.
If you’ve never seen it before, it was wonderfully simple but, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember how to do it now.
The kit was very simple and consisted of a discarded wooden cotton bobbin with four tacks pinned into its top.
I don’t even know if you can get wooden types any more – I guess they are all plastic today which would make carefully tapping the tacks in pretty difficult.
The bit I couldn’t do was the start off, usually left to mum or granddad, but you kicked off with a length of spare wool which you wound around the pins and fed down through the hole in the bobbin.
Eventually a kind of neat woollen sausage would emerge and, after a few days, you would have something a few feet long.
As you ran out of wool remnants, new colours were tagged on and my final efforts were a real rainbow.
As I remember, the resulting long wool sausages of many colours were coiled, stitched flat and used for household essentials like holders for hot teapots.
It was strangely therapeutic and satisfying in the days before computer games and, most importantly, you tended to chat while you were doing it.
How odd – families having chats!
The female half of the family did the really serious stuff with two grey needles, sometimes four for the clever projects, and could knock off a sweater or whatever in days.
In the winter, we were provided with balaclavas which covered most of our faces and special gloves connected by a wool string across the shoulders so that you couldn’t lose them.
News of a baby due in the family led to a flurry of knitting and, in the days when you couldn’t know the gender of the child in advance, they were usually knitting baby clothes in any colour except blue or pink to avoid being sex specific.
Knitting even had a language of its own and, as well as the mysteries of knit one, purl one, you could “lay wool away” to keep your colour in stock in case you ran out.
And do you remember an early TV ad which ran “while you are sitting, you could be knitting”?
I’m told that knitting is making a comeback in these austere times, so perhaps that lovely clickety click will be more common in these parts soon.
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Weather for Hartlepool
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 8 C to 15 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: East
