Happy Banana Day Everybody

Posted on April 10th, 2013

It is* 380 years to the day since the first bananas went on sale in the UK. It’s important that we all celebrate this because bananas are excellent.

Let’s review:

1. Bananas are yellow (thanks, cartenoids!). Yellow is a fine colour. Nobody doesn’t like the colour yellow. Nobody except 32% of people on this website here. But what you have to remember is that 32% of people are idiots. And I’m not trying to say it’s the same 32%, but it definitely is.
2. That shape. You can’t feel sad looking at a banana. Even an abandoned and decomposing banana skin will raise a smile. Try saying the same about an apple core. Bananas are nature’s jesters.
3a. You know that cliché about there being a party in your mouth and everyone’s invited? That was invented to describe what it’s like to eat a banana.
3b. I know what you’re thinking, though: is there ever a time when a banana doesn’t taste good? Yes: when you’re the wrong side of hungover. But apart from that, any time is a good time for a banana.
3c. Wait, actually, while I don’t doubt that it would still taste good, you definitely should not eat a banana on a train while reading 50 Shades of Grey (memo to lady I once sat opposite on the train). Also, if the BBC is filming something in your office and you can clearly be seen in the background, probably best to hang fire. But apart from those specific instances, it’s always a good time for a banana break.
4. It is never not funny to pretend to use a banana as a phone when you are a grown-up.
5. They are really good for you. Twitchy eye? A potassium-packed banana will clear it right up. High blood pressure? Two bananas a day will help regulate that. Bones feeling a bit unhealthy? I prescribe banana. Stomach ulcers? Soothe those bad boys with some banana. Bit tired? Get some natural banana-flavoured sugars in you. Feel blue? Have a banana – quite aside from the sunny colour, delicious taste and comical shape, they make you feel better because of vitamin yay or some kind of science or something. Whatever. That’s not why I’m here guys, Google it yourself.
6. I haven’t read this:

But the answer is no**.

7a. Ryan Gosling once had a banana. Lucky banana.

Gosling and a banana: a match made in heaven

7b. If ladies are more your style, good news! I risked my good name and gave pageviews to terrible lads mag lists by googling various questionable search terms like “hottest woman alive” (Fuck you, FHM! Bore off, Men’s Health!) and “mila kunis dressed as a banana” to bring you this:

That doesn’t seem to be a thing that has happened yet.
8. Bananas come in their own perfect natural packaging.
9. Other fruits are ok, but apples can hurt your teeth, there are always pips in oranges and grapes, you get orange nails from peeling satsumas and the less said about grapefuit the better. I am partial to a pear. But, really, come on, let’s face it, none of these can hold a candle to the majesty of the banana.
10. Something something bananas cats*****.


Here are some recipes you might like to try:

Mashed banana sandwich

  • 1 banana
  • 2 slices of bread
  • (optional: Nutella, second banana)

1. Mash banana
2. Put in bread
3. Eat
4. DIE HAPPY

 

Banana caramel surprise

  • 1 banana
  • 1 Cadbury’s caramel egg
  • (optional: helper, second banana)

1. Peel caramel egg
2. Peel banana
3. Take a bite of banana
4. Take a bite of caramel egg
5. ENJOY

 

Banana for beginners

  • 1 banana
  • (optional: second banana)

1. peel banana
2. eat banana
3. REJOICE

 

Here is a playlist:

Of banana-related songs (yes, it took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with Bananarama).

So now. Please. Go out. Pick up a bunch of bananas and share them with your loved ones when you go round to wish them a happy Banana Day. Then kick back with the banana playlist on loud and crack one open. Maybe later have another. Try not to think about the many potential innuendoes and unintentional double entendres there are relating to the world’s best fruit and thank christmas for Thomas Johnson seeing the potential of the humble banana back in 1633.

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*Apparently. This anniversary showed up in our work calendar under ‘tech events’, so we’re kicking off from a fairly questionable classification to begin with. After some pretty standard Googling (guys, I am a professional), I found this which says that the first proper refrigerated banana shipment arrived in June 1902. That also sounds plausible. But wait! What’s this? A mid-15th century banana skin unearthed in Southwark in 1999? Basically, let’s not ruin Banana Day by overthinking things. Any time is a good time to celebrate the banana.

**I am not a doctor. If you eat a thousand bananas and die, do not sue me. The cause of death would be RAPTURES*** anyway.

***Again, I have literally no medical training of any kind****.

****Lie. I am a doctor’s daughter.

*****This is the internet, after all.

[The banana image at the top of this post is the sterling work of keepon on Flickr.]

A handwritten history

Posted on March 11th, 2013

I have very suggestible handwriting. Some people soak up accents, I absorb scrawl. Even as I write this in my notebook I can identify certain people, peering back through decades to see the influence of some who played only a minor role in the teenage act of my life. Yet there they are, represented in the loops and swirls of my words.

There’s Cat, an enigma of a girl loved by all but herself; I’ve barely spoken to her in the last ten years but I see her all the time in the shapes of my hs and ns and ms. Something like a defiant, almost aggressive arch, slightly too wide with an angular peak challenging you: and what? With a minor flick at the end – not quite a flourish – that says oh this? I just do this for fun. I don’t care if it’s right or you like it, this is just how it is.

An ex-boyfriend, Alex, annoys me from every long-tailed Y and G I make – a weirdly effeminate, thoroughly obnoxious garnish designed to impress but unwilling to concede any ground even when proven to be wrong. My erratic, loopy Os are all my sister Angela, as are my uppercase As with a swaying backwards swoosh echoed throughout my almost entirely plagiarised signature; a flashy show of adolescent ego echoing through the years.

I’ve worked hard to eliminate them but sometimes my lower-case a’s lapse into Bethanys. From the once exotic twist of the upright style with its unnecessary overhead curl that we thought set us apart from the italic style milieu to the obnoxious pregnancy of her contrary italics. A destructive, confusing friend, we exchanged countless destructive, confusing notes in our ever-changing teenage script. Sometimes we wrote to each other upside down, for no obvious reason. Other times we highlighted letters in text books or wrote notes consisting of only the first letter of each word. Cyphers that weren’t cyphers, tests that proved nothing.

My parents are hidden away in the mechanics of my handwriting; the joints between letters, the slurs between words. They aren’t always there but they show up from time to time, always with a signaturial look that reminds me of signing my homework diary on their behalves every Monday morning.

My loopy lower-case ks are courtesy of Sadie and every so often there’s a flash of heavy-penned Jess and a hit of nostalgia for all those mixtapes and heartfelt notes about how terrible everything was and how wonderful each other were, pacts made and broken, and sweeping, wide-eyed optimism for how great it’ll be when we’re older and we can get away from here and everything will be fine.

There’s evidence of Rachael, who was the envy of my junior school class before my handwriting was advanced enough to take hers on, chameleon-like, as it did in later years. I just have to think about Emma and her beautiful copperplate before I feel myself channelling it as I write, the letters widening, the loops sweeping across the page with over-the-top romance. And just occasionally I spot the precise, metered timbre of Miss Chrimes’ notes jotted on piano scores that I haven’t even looked at since I was 16.

I like it, my scrapbook handwriting. It ebbs and flows with my mood. I wonder whose I’ll take on next, who of my current acquaintances will make it in – or if anyone even will. Now that we only email and text, maybe that’s the end for my calligraphic roll-call; in which case it’s destined to be a snapshot of my teenage correspondence forever.

The best and the least worst of the London 2012 Opening Ceremony

Posted on July 28th, 2012

Nobody really knew what to expect from Danny ‘Trainspotting but also 127 Hours’ Boyle last night but I don’t think many of us predicted a The-Queen-starring Bond skit and a mad Victorian Industrorave. After weeks of Boris-toned Olympics nonsense so lacking in common sense and civic decency it sounded made up, we came not knowing the particulars but fairly confident that we’d see the ceremonial equivalent of a cringey town-hall wedding that descends into a drunken brawl, your mum weeping in the loos and your uncle trying to get crunk on the dancefloor.

How wrong we were: the ceremony was non-stop brilliant from start to finish (ignoring the boring speeches and Seb Coe as history will). Even the neverending procession of Olympic athletes was diverting thanks to the continuing brilliance of Twitter.

The whole thing left us all with a mildly confrontational look in our eye that says, “Yeah, world? You wanna come to our party? Obviously you do, we’re insane and we’re British and we’ve had quite a lot of gin, possibly a spot of drugs and it’s going to be fucking excellent.”

It was a competition with Beijing 2008 and we won it hands down. It was a pre-emptive competition with Rio 2016 and we basically won that hands down too, although they’re known for a good carnival and they’ve got four years to add some acid-magic to whatever they’re working on, so you never know.

We should have known that the London Olympics wasn’t going to stand for any of that kumbaya rubbish since the day they unveiled that weird logo, a jazzy number that speaks of a creative team brought up on CBBC and a history of mind-altering substances with, let’s face it, balls of steel because literally everyone hated it. Some still do – personally, I quite like it and even more so after last night. I mean, come on. Look at Rio’s and Beijing’s. Megayawn.

London’s logo is a big fuck you to that happy clappy let’s all hold hands around the world and light candles and don’t worry if you don’t win, it’s the taking part that counts. Sorry, no, it’s the medals. It’s absolutely the hardware that counts. Also, did we mention that we just took gold in opening ceremonies? Forever?

That’s not to say that last night didn’t nail “lefti multi-cultural crap”, as presumably soon to be fired Tory MP Aidan Burley put it. Oh no. We’re the most culturally diverse city in the world, check out our inclusive nature. We’ll take anyone as long as they stand on the right and walk on the left.

Three MCs and one DJ

Posted on May 4th, 2012

It is 1998. I am a painfully uncool 13-year-old who isn’t sure who she is yet. My older sister is in love with Keanu Reeves so I am in love with Keanu Reeves. Everyone at school likes the Spice Girls so I like the Spice Girls. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The days are filled with schoolwork that I conscientiously avoid doing and the nights are a blur of CBBC and Australian soap operas, oven cooked meals and hours-long sessions spent taping chart music off the radio.

Saturday morning is usually given over to gym club, but this Saturday morning I am at home.

I don’t really like the chart show because music videos don’t really interest me, but today I am watching. Maybe there is nothing else on. Maybe I am watching the chart show because my friends watch the chart show. Either way, I am sitting on the chintzy floral carpet in the living room surrounded by mismatched furniture and just happy to be free of any obligations on my time.

Suddenly, a plastic robot is hurtling towards Earth. Some men are pretending to be scientists, but their costumes are terrible, the effects laughable – so laughable that it catches my attention. A Japanese girl feigns horror at the approaching robot and suddenly there’s this synthesised hook intergalactic planetary planetary intergalactic and the Beastie Boys prance forth in their safety inspector boiler suits and yellow boots.

It is simultaneously the stupidest and most thrillingly brilliant thing I have ever seen and heard.

The beat kicks in and I am rapt. The rapping starts and I am officially a Beastie Boys fan. It is the first song I think I have ever truly liked simply because I like what I hear.

My flowery living room in a Midlands suburb, my worries about homework and who’s friends with who and whether a boy will ever like me couldn’t be further from the Beasties’ world whether they’re running amok around Tokyo or their much-loved New York City, but it feels like this is my song, my music, my band.

It is months before I save up enough money to buy Hello Nasty (£13) but it is worth it. I feel like a real person, buying that CD. It sits in my small collection somewhere between the Backstreet Boys, the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and Hanson’s classic debut Middle of Nowhere, completely out of place but completely at home.

It gets a lot of use, Hello Nasty. I spend hours trying to trick my CD player (a chunky boombox made by Bush and covered in stickers from Smash Hits) into playing just the little Spanish skit that precedes Remote Control to fill up space on the end of pretty much every tape I make. Brace yourself, BOOM. I’m intercontinental when I eat French toast. Sure, I can take or leave the freeform jazzy numbers towards the end of the album but those first ten tracks: wow. I didn’t realise there was music like this and that I am allowed to listen to it, buy it, love it. I mean, they’re rapping. Listen to those beats. And that bass.

For a while, that CD was my favourite possession. It is, quite possibly, my oldest CD, its cardboard digipack now creased and tired in the same reassuring way a book would be tired after 14 years of repeat reading. I put aside BSB and Hanson but I am listening to my beloved Hello Nasty right now.

So yeah, Paul’s Boutique is a rose-tinted masterpiece, and I love License to Ill, which was my gateway drug to the host of crappy (and brilliant) punk rock bands I listened to throughout my teenage years – I even like the verging-on-schmaltzy To The 5 Boroughs. But it was Hello Nasty that I reached for today when I heard that Adam Yauch had passed away and it is Hello Nasty that will always be my favourite Beastie Boys album.

RIP MCA.

–

P.S. I also have the Beastie Boys to thank for facilitating my most badass story to date (and that’s a fact that will remind you that I am still that same lame 13-year-old girl once you read it): Six years after that chart show session, I was at university in Portsmouth and working in a crappy kitchenware shop. One day I went to see the Beastie Boys in London instead of going to work. It lost me my job and I’ve never regretted anything less.

Back to the kitchen, ladies

Posted on February 12th, 2012

Let’s watch this advert for The Sun, one of Britain’s biggest selling tabloid newspapers, intended to build national pride in 2012 Year of the Olympics.
Here is an athlete who is good at running. He is also a man. He is soon overtaken by a man who delivers milk and followed closely by a man who is a chef, a man who saves lives as a doctor and two more men who save lives as firemen – and look, here comes a woman!

The other Kate Solomons

Posted on September 6th, 2011

Occasionally, it’s nice to check in on the other Kate Solomons. But it’s best not to do this too often because I always end up with a severe case of life envy. Here’s why:

Kate Solomon the film producer

It’s easy to be a little bit jealous of Alternakate number one. I, for one, envy anyone with an IMDB profile.

But not only is Kate Solomon The Film Producer (KSTFP) a film producer, she’s a very glam and gorgeous one whose career is obviously on the up.

She was recently named one of BAFTA’s 45 Brits to Watch after working on two films with Paul Greengrass (United 93 and Green Zone). She’s now “developing projects” with Working Title and Film 4. Those are both companies that people have heard of, you guys!

Not that I’m easily swayed by shiny, celeb-attended Hollywood dos, but KSTFP was also photographed attending a very swank-looking BAFTA party in LA a couple of months ago, also attended by Prince William and that other Kate – I’d post pictures but fear that they’d result in my being sued.  Suffice to say, if you Google Image Search Kate Solomon, all the ritzy Hollywood looking ones are KSTFP and all the ones that have phones in or are actually of R-Patz are down to me.

Related: I went to a posh sleb do recently. Some orange people from The Only Way Is Essex were there.

Kate Solomon the bee-keeping business-owning Harvard graduate

It’s admirable that Kate Solomon the bee keeping business owning Harvard graduate (KSTBKBOHG) founded and runs her own company of organic hair- and skincare products for children, but it’s the two years and seven months she spent in the Peace Corps that interest me most.

During this time, according to her LinkedIn profile, KSTBKBOHG taught beekeeping to rural women farmers. Beekeeping! Women farmers! Peace Corps! I’ll concede that I’m easily impressed, but this is quite a line up. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in the world who has taught female agricultural workers the intricacies of bee keeping or, you know, been in the Peace Corps.

She was also Senior Director of Marketing at L’Oreal before she left to found Babo Botanicals, which sounds quite a bit more impressive than Staff Writer at Tech Website.

Other notable Kate Solomons:

Kate Solomon the cancerous widow scammer, Kate Solomon the London beekeeper, Kate Solomon the horseback special constable and Kate Solomon the amazing knitter.

Envy them all I may, but hey – I’m top of Google for the term “Kate Solomon”; that’s got to count for something, right?

On buying a house

Posted on September 5th, 2011

Before you buy a house, you will hear old wives’ tales and made up statistics about how it’s the most stressful thing you can do in life.

Pah, you may say. I buy stuff all the time. Hell, I even bought a car/three-seat sofa/plasma TV/holiday and that cost multiple thousands of pounds. No way can buying a house be more stressful than that.

Soon you’ll realise that you were wrong.

First, the hunt. You find a house you like the look of online and visit it. It is either a poky little hovel that has been Photoshopped into looking like a halfway acceptable home, or it’s the most perfect thing you ever saw in your life and you’ll feel that without owning this house you will be unable to enjoy even a millisecond of the remaining years of your life.

Meanwhile, the credit check. The days of nail biting anxiety as you await the mortgage agreement in principle, wondering if the bank is judging you unable to afford a mortgage because you put a £3 cinnamon and raisin bagel on your credit card on Tuesday and haven’t paid it off yet.

Then, the offer. You look at the asking price, realise you’ve been completely over-optimistic in your budget and should never truly have viewed the house at all. You take a punt and put in an offer of exactly half. You’ll justify this to yourself in a number of ways – none are valid. The offer is rejected. You offer a bit more; there’s a bit more rejection. You offer again but the vendor has accepted another offer.

Heartbreak. You mourn. You go through the seven stages of grief, spending more than is socially acceptable on ‘anger’. You say ‘que sera sera’ a lot.

You return to Rightmove. You find a house you like the look of. You go through it all again two or three more times, with two or three further floorplans made to scale in Illustrator, with scale models of your furniture variously arranged throughout your hypothetical home. You come up with decorating schemes. You ponder which walls you could knock through. You consider loft conversions, installing a food disposal unit, opening up the chimney for an open fire.

Finally, just when you feel there isn’t a single house on the market that suits you, you come across a wildcard. Panic sets in. If you don’t get this house, you’ll never get any house. If you don’t make an offer now, someone else will get this one. If you don’t get the chance to two rooms into one in the next six months, you’ll explode.

You make an offer.

You wait.

You dial the estate agent’s number for an update and hang up before they answer. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.

At last, success! Your offer is accepted. There’s champagne and interior design magazines. You are overflowing with good will.

You feel like you’ve won the war, but it’s only half time in the first battle. Next comes the actual mortgage application. The repeated requests for the estate agent to take the house off the market. The constant fear of gazumping. The shock of how much solicitors charge. The suspense of the survey. The inability of anyone to give you a straight answer.

That’s where we are. There has to be a better way.

E-book readers – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Posted on July 10th, 2011

When e-readers first became a thing, they were pretty easy to write off as a needless technological gimmick that people would grow to regret buying, like 3D TVs. But, in the manner of a particularly robust terrier, they’ve refused to relinquish their grip on the old sock that is popular culture.

2010 was (arguably) the year that the e-reader finally took off and now Amazon is forever bleating that it’s sold a zillion e-books and Mr Unknown Author has made his first million by self-publishing one. Although history has proved time and time again that vast groups of people can be wrong about stuff (Nazi-ism? Titanic deserving 11 Oscars? The whole world-being-flat thing?), when it gets to the point when some other would-be novelist is making millions instead of me, it’s time to check it out.

And so, having been a staunch and fairly vocal resister of the electronic reading revolution for several years, I went to Amazon cap in hand and asked to borrow a Kindle. It very kindly agreed, and so “my” Kindle has accompanied me everywhere for the last few weeks.

My previous position was this: e-readers are technology for the sake of it. There can be no better reading experience than of print on paper. Not even if you paid a seventy-three-year-old cave-dwelling monk to engrave the entire text of the Harry Potter books onto slabs of gold which come complete with cup holder, masseuse and three-storey town house in Manhattan could you have a better time reading it than if you just picked up the paper and ink books.

“But hey!” cried the technology gods. “You can’t plug a book in and charge it up every night! We can’t sell you a book that you’ll need to replace with the same book in a year’s time! You can’t carry eight hundred books at once! You can’t not read a book in direct sunlight! You don’t need a warranty or extra personal contents insurance for a book! Unless it’s super old and rare, that is! How can you people live like this?”

The outlandish success of the iPod didn’t help – if Apple can do it for music, someone really ought to do it for books, right?

Well, they may – may – be on to something. I’ll admit that I haven’t hated using the Kindle.

The print is not too offensive to the eye, rendered as it is in e-ink rather than on a brash LED-lit screen that you might use on an iPad. And yes, using an e-reader on a packed tube carriage is far more convenient than wielding The Pale King at my fellow commuters, trying out a million innovative and completely unsuccessful ways of turning a page without moving either of my arms.

Kindle with some more books

The easy reading experience meant I raced through a good few books; Capote’s In Cold Blood which was, obviously, excellent, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen which reminded me, inexplicably, of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Tina Fey’s not-as-good-as-I’d-hoped Bossy Pants before I stalled on War and Peace – well, I thought I ought to read something massive to make the most of it. At the time of writing, I’m 6% of the way through. It’s only ok so far.

Having been prepared to loathe and resent the e-reader, I was surprised at just how much I didn’t hate it. In fact, I genuinely liked using the Kindle.

But I’ll tell you what; after the novelty of having a new toy wore off, I really missed books. If you’re anything like me, you get a bit excited about turning the page of a book, physically preparing the action when you’re still paragraphs away from go time. When all you have to do is press a button to turn the page, it can result in quite a few premature page-turning scenarios, which then leads to quite a few lost places and frustrated guesses at how many pages 42% of the way through the book equates to so you can use the Go To function.

There’s a reason why books have survived hundreds of years of industrial and technological progress; it’s because they’re brilliant. There’s nothing quite like a book – the comfortable familiarity of an old worn-out favourite and the sheer potential and new-book smell of a just-purchased one. Not to mention the beautiful cover art and painstakingly perfect typesetting that some books come with.

Each e-book I tried came with the same drab fonts and a tiny black-and-white thumbnail of the cover art offering no visual excitement whatsoever. Real books can be big, little, square, rectangular, pristine, misshapen, tea-stained, annotated, dog-eared and always truly yours. Any e-book could pretty much belong to anybody.

Last year a few of my late gran’s books passed into my ownership, with her handwriting, her notes and the knowledge that these well-thumbed pages had been made so by my much-loved grandmother’s thumbs. I’m sure my great-grandchildren (optimistic) will be thrilled to have my Amazon account passed down to them in my will, complete with the one passage I highlighted.

E-books are too expensive as well* – partly because we’re charged VAT on e-books in the UK but not on real ones. There’s no way this will change, unless it’s a change that sees VAT applied to physical tomes as well and that’s not really what I had in mind. But it’s also psychological; I’ve paid £100 for this gadget, but every time I actually want to use it, I’m shelling out another eight quid for something that I can’t even touch and hold and put on my shelf to look cool and allow others to admire my impeccable literary taste (ignore that copy of Twilight, I’m just looking after it for a friend).

Granted, I didn’t use the Kindle for very many weeks, but I never once found myself glad to have eight books with me instead of the regular old one; and I’m more than happy to lug several books away with me on holiday, just as I’m ok with shoving fourteen pairs of shoes into my suitcase rather than settling for just flip flops.

The other issues came down to availability; the first book I’d wanted (The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson) wasn’t available. You can go on about how many hundreds of thousands of books you can get on Kindle or any other brand of e-reader ‘til the cows come home, but it’ll never equal the number you can get in actual book form. Then I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Bossy Pants and she asked to borrow it – while you can lend Kindle books to friends in the US, it’s not allowed in the UK yet. So it was either say no or lend her the whole Kindle. So I said no (sorry Kat).

It’s kind of depressing for the people-watcher getting the tube these days. Instead of being able to judge people by the paper they read, you’re simply faced with a sea of rustling freesheets, and instead of being able to judge people by the book they’re reading, you can only judge them for the kind of e-reader they have – and on the District Line’s Edgware Road branch, they all have Kindles and iPads. Very dull.

I can’t speak for the rest of the country, or indeed the Underground, but on the District Line we’re turning into indistinguishable people-shaped blobs hiding behind our anonymous grey plastic slabs and that’s just no fun. Even if we are all secretly reading Mills and Boons on them.

–

*Well, that’s a fallacy actually, because if you think about the blood, sweat, tears, time and talent that go into penning a novel, I think you’ll find you’re getting a bargain.

How the internet taught me to knit

Posted on February 24th, 2011

Balls of wool

Knitting is brilliant, and – as I discovered – there’s no better teacher than the internet. If you don’t already know how, you should let the worldly wise web teach you. Here’s how I did it:

Like a lot of people, I first learned to knit at my mother’s knee. I was probably about seven the first time I tried. After a painful half hour I sort of got the hang of it, knitted about three rows, got bored, gave up and went outside to make potions or climb something or generally play at getting muddy and making a lot of noise.

Over the years, I think I asked my mum to teach me again several times, sessions that always ended with me in a huff because I wasn’t getting it and mum yanking the yarn from me in exasperation and doing it herself (NB: I may well have invented this memory, my mum is usually a very good teacher).

Honestly, I don’t know why I kept coming back to it. Somewhere in my soul there was a bullish element of Well, if old people can do it then I must be able to do it which is ridiculous, of course, but then brains can think the stupidest things from time to time.

Video tutor

After a good decade and a half of trying it, hating it, trying it again and hating it some more, I finally got the hang of it. To this day, I couldn’t tell you how or why but something just clicked into place and eureka! I could knit.  And I have YouTube and a pair of bamboo needles to thank for it.

Bamboo knitting needles

These are my two top tips for anyone learning to knit: use online video tutorials and get yourself a pair of bamboo needles. Videos are so much easier to follow than a book and you can shout at them in frustration as much as you like and they’ll never get upset; unlike, say, mothers.

Meanwhile, bamboo needles grip the wool much better than metal or plastic sticks, meaning you’re less likely to let all your precious stitches slip off when you’re not paying full attention. Trust me, I am the world’s greatest stitch-dropper.

At last I had mastered the basic knit stitch and, to celebrate, I very slowly but surely knitted myself a lovely mustard coloured scarf. I love this scarf very much and wear it all the time.

Having conquered the knit stitch, I stopped. Stopped knitting, stopped learning, stopped lusting over particularly delicious shades of wool. And that was that for almost a year.

Purl, purl, then purl again

For some reason, I was scared to learn how to purl.

You must never be scared to learn to purl! Once you can knit and purl, the world is your cuddly knitted oyster.

Eventually, I manned up and tried it (thanks again, YouTube) and it wasn’t too bad. I’m just about as comfortable purling now as I am knitting, and that’s after a year or so of practice. The only hard bit for me now is starting a purling row and even that’s not hard, just different.

Once you can purl you can do proper knitting. Stocking stitch (knit one row, purl the next, repeat) is wonderful – it’s so flat and uniform and neat and lovely – and being able to do ribbing (alternating knit and purl stitches) means you can make hats and legwarmers and things. Honestly, you’re not properly knitting until you can knit and purl.

Then you can go on to the really exciting things, like knitting the same stitch twice to increase the length of a row, or SSK which is my own personal favourite (you slip two stitches on to the other needle, then knit and whip the slipped stitches back over). Once again, video tutorials are you friends; always look for a video for something you don’t understand.

Ravishing Ravelry

Here’s where I suggest you join Ravelry. It’s an amazing network of knitters and crocheters (you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to), and plays host to reams and reams of amazing patterns created by users.


A lot of them are easy to follow and free to download and then you can make all kinds of brilliant things. Ok, so yes, there are a lot of scarves and hats on there but some more exciting garments are featured in the easy sections too.

Making exciting stuff is the best way to learn the more complicated-sounding techniques; sometimes it’s worth practicing with some spare yarn first but often you can just dive right on in. One of the best things about knitting is that if you go wrong, you just unpick it and try again. No probs.

Quick wins

Knitted mouse

When you’re starting out, knitting can be a bit of a slog. It requires a lot of counting (not my forte) and a bit (read: a lot) of patience, especially if you’re working on something big. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about here – at the moment, I’m knitting a cushion cover and it’s taking for-bleedin’-ever.

To avoid losing your knitting mojo, break the project up with a couple of small, quick wins. Like this tiny mouse I made when I couldn’t take any more cushion cover knitting. He took me just a couple of hours to make and now I have a little friend to keep me company in my knitting den. Please note: I am not insane.

Another option is to make something in super chunky yarn that has lots of holes in, like a huge scarf or something. Chunky yarn works up much quicker than skinny and makes you feel like some kind of invincible knitting machine, if only temporarily.

Buying stuff

Knitting needles

Obviously there are some essential pieces of apparatus you’ll need to get started: needles and yarn.

Don’t go to a proper knitting shop for your needles, you can easily nab some from a charity shop (you might need to ask), eBay (such bargains!) or Freecycle – I got a huge bag full of needles of all sizes by simply posting a wanted ad online.

Yarn is a bit trickier. In London, it’s outrageously expensive. In other places it’s just expensive. Charity shop yarn is hard to come by and tends to smell a bit like old ladies’ cupboards.

Ideally, I’d get a sheep and a spindle or whatever it is you need to spin your own wool, but I’m not sure my landlord would approve of my keeping livestock in the spare room and I clearly have no idea how to get the wool from sheeps-coat to, like, yknow, wool.

As far as I know, you’re pretty much stuck with yarn shops and online wool sellers. I’ve never really got a great yarn bargain yet, but I do live in hope.

That’s that

And thus, young padawan, I have taught you all that I know which the internet in turn taught me. Now go forth and knit stuff.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll want to knit all day every day. Sometimes the urge to knit will hit me at the most inappropriate of times, like during important meetings or while dropping off to sleep. I’m not very good at the moment, but I’m getting better and faster all the time. You will too, I promise.

I’ll leave you with this essential piece of advice: If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to never ever ever try to K6tog. Honestly. Even if the internet tells you to. You’ll thank me in the long run.

Images: Some photos in this post are taken from flickr. Please click the images to visit their sources.