My touching faith in The Gingerbread Lady, plus advice on How To Catch A Man

Readers, I have faith. (Swelling music).

I have faith that possibly the ugliest granny square known to mankind (which is actually a rather perky flourescent green. You can’t see it in this photo. My camera, which is normally very biddable, balked. I said, it balked)

Practice those grateful faces, family, that's right, teeth gritted

will become something rather cool. This pattern, which I am not going to link to yet as it is for Christmas for someone, is by The Gingerbread Lady and is one of those ideas which is simple (well, ish – me and granny squares, hmm) and comes together into something really cool, in a how-can-no-one-have-thought-of-this-before kind of way. So I have faith that my alien-snot-green and black squares are going to be transformed into something rather funky, yet retro and ironically urban. Moreover, I have faith that I will be able to produce enough of them without going out and poking people with my crochet hook in frustration.

Knitting Noro stripes stresses me out of all proportion. O my God! I've got two pinks coming up together!

And as well as faith, I also have advice. Ladies: would you like to meet the kind of men who, urbane and charming as they may be in their day-to-day interactions, go out of an evening to watch things on large screens in pubs, and grunt? Do you feel starved of male attention? Do you sometimes think, gosh, if only I had a group of men drinking lager sitting close by watching me with avid attention and making semi-explicit jibes in an aggressively playful kind of way? Because if you have ever thought that, then, this is what you must do. Go out and sit in a pub with other women and knit/ crochet something. Because, I have joined a small knit group, and last night we sat in a local pub near some men who were so fascinated they could not wholly give their attention to Sky Sports and pints of Stella. ‘Oy! Oy! Oy! Love!’ they said. ‘Knit us a cock sock!’. There is only one response to that: it is, we don’t like knitting tiny things, and one of our number gave that response straight away so really there wasn’t anywhere to go from there. But that could not be the end of it, because, they were just fascinated, and every time I lifted my head up from my sparkling mineral water (look, I have to go to yoga today. Have you ever done a down dog with a hangover?) I could hear mutterings about what we could knit for them or how we should give them what we had made or things like that. Readers, I know those men were just dying to be taught how to do a treble cluster and would have been thrilled but look, I had just done with the bomb squad, I did not have the energy. So, for anyone reading this who is doing a feminist PhD on gendering of public spaces and threats to masculinity I am happy to be interviewed, and for the rest of us, you know you read those mad stories on the internet about how people whip out their wool and cause a commotion, and you think, no, surely, that does not happen? Well, it does! (and people find grenades in their gardens as well!).

Shall we all go out and find someone fly fishing and heckle them to get our own back?