It Winds The Yarn Out From The Skein Or Else The Ball Unrolls Again

I am probably the last person who should have taken up knitting.

Not because I'm a menace with the needles or a danger to myself or find the mechanics overly challenging. It's a soothing and hypnotic pastime once you get into a rhythm.

But knitting is a craft of patterns and following patterns is not my strong suit.

Well, patterns in language I can follow: recurring words, favoured sentence structures, particular devices, pacing and the like.

Anything visual or to do with numbers though... well...

As an example, this year I've been doing a lot of walking. There's a block near work that I like to do my laps around:

• it's a known length so I can record the distance I'm walking,
  
• it's long enough that I don't feel like I'm going in circles but short enough that I can get back to my car in short order if I need to, and
  
• because of its length, adding on an extra lap is a gentle, incremental increase.

And for every lap I complete I have to mark up one of my fingernails with a lead pencil otherwise I will - no lie - forget how many times I've gone round.

The first lap I remember, the second I'll know isn't the first, but anything after that could be anything from the third to the seventh and without a physical record I could end up going around for hours in a walk trance.

And this is the mind which is now expected to remember how many stitches, how many rows, when to knit, when to purl, when to stop.

It's going to be tricky, it's going to take a lot of stopping and checking, will probably involve a bit of counting aloud and at least once I may end up with a cardigan that has arms long enough to fit an orangutan but unless I want to just keep churning out an endless supply of scarves, I'm going to have to bend myself to the task.

I think I'm up to the challenge, even if it might require me to mark up more than just my fingernails to keep my place.