Knitting, and friendship, and getting through

From January 2025

This week, I want to tell you about me and knitting, which is also telling you about me and everything else.

First, a finished project.

I bought the pattern some years ago; 2018, I think. It’s the pattern for the shawl Beth wore in the Little Women film. So already I’m connected to a book I loved as a child. I used to read my grandmother’s copy, which was a small hardback with her maiden name, Isobel MacIntosh, in loopy cursive handwriting in the front. When I close my eyes I can see it all, like a photograph: the book, the handwriting, my hand on the page.

My Mum and I went to see the film together; there’s another layer of memory. (We went to an afternoon matinee, which was entirely populated with women in their forties and fifties and their mothers. At one point, when Amy March is in Paris, every single mother turned to every single daughter and said, ‘Ooh, insert name of daughter, isn’t that a beautiful cape?’ and every single daughter said, ‘Yes! Shhh!’)

Last year, when I went to Oregon to see my son, he took me to a shop that sells both books and yarn. (He is an excellent host.) I (obviously) bought some books and some yarn. (Hey, I don’t make the rules). I started a couple of projects that didn’t work out, so I applied the important knitter’s principle (OK, I invented it) of Sometimes You Have To Wait For The Yarn To Decide What It Wants To Be. When I was getting ready to go to London in December, for a trip that I knew could be long and involve a lot of sitting around, I looked through my patterns, and realised: the yarn wants to be Beth’s shawl. Of course it does.

I knitted a lot of that shawl in London in December. I knitted it while I watched TV with my best friend; I knitted it while I sat with her in A&E and we talked about how she really, really didn’t want to die in the run up to Christmas; I knitted it while she slept on a ward and I watched over her, as though I was somehow keeping her alive. I knitted it on the train home, while crying. When I got home I put it away, because I couldn’t bear to look at it.

We spent New Year in London with my friend and her family. I didn’t take my knitting, because you can’t really knit when you’re holding a gin and tonic.

I was back in London just over a week later. My friend could no longer talk to me, but I could sit and knit and talk to her. We (I) talked a lot for the next five days. We (I) reminisced about our university days; I talked to her about how well she had done to Not Die at Christmas; that there was nothing else she could do now, and that though we did not want to be without her we would manage. I told her that she had prepared us well. Knitting made it so much easier to keep my voice steady.

I wasn’t sure I would ever look at the shawl again once it was finished, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Because it’s full of good memories and important moments. It’s full of my grandmother and my son, and sunny Oregon days and the cinema with my Mum, and knitting in my daughter’s flat and at my best friend’s bedside and at home in the first days of sadness while the people who loved me kept a weather eye. It is also a reminder of the most important thing I have ever learned: you get there, if you take it stitch by stitch.

Now, a new knit.

I started a project on the 1st of January, loosely based on the idea of a temperature blanket. I allocated colours for different types of activity: thinking/planning a book, researching a book, writing/revising a book, editing my own work, writing services (mentoring, writing reports, line editing for others), writer in the world (events, meetings, bookshop visits), admin, non-working days. And every day I’m knitting two rows (there and back) to capture what the main part of my day was about. There’s also a neutral colour, for edges and breaks at the end of every month.

By the end of the year, I will have a probably quite odd-looking scarf that will show me how I spent my time.

In the bottom of the photo you’ll see the cast-on (neutral), followed by non-work and admin days at the beginning of the year. Then I threw myself into some client work (the mottled yarn section). Then I headed for London for my friend’s last days. My best friend has always read all of my work, so while I was at her bedside, and I wasn’t knitting, I wrote. To my surprise, I wrote a lot. I tried not to think about how my friend would never read this finished book. Then I did think about it, and I switched to dictation mode and spoke my writing, because what a privilege it was for me to have her hear it, even (especially) in it’s bumpy, gnarly, barely-even-a-first-draft form. Those are the red rows of knitting. (Those amongst you with minds like steel traps may remember the yarn from last March’s failed socks.)

Then there is a single row of green. It’s leftover cashmere, from that very soft hat I made for my friend, when I imagined her head might be cold. It’s there to mark the day she died.

Love your people, my friends.