When I was growing up, my mother knitted. She was the sort of knitter who worked without a pattern, creating jumpers or cardigans in whatever shape or pattern she wanted. She’d been taught to knit the old fashioned way, knowing how many stitches to cast on, how long to keep going before decreasing for the sleeves, and how to finish off the garment to perfection. I used to watch her working, marvelling at how the garment would take shape. When a knitted garment had lived past its usefulness, my mother would never throw it away. Instead, she would unpick the stitching that held together each piece, and then unravel all the wool.

I used to love helping with this. It was such fun watching each piece growing smaller and smaller and my ball of wool getting bigger and bigger as I pulled out row upon row. The wool was not smooth and straight as I’d seen it creeping up towards the needles when it was knitted, but crinkly, like it had been put through a hair crimper. Once the jumper was completely unravelled and the yarn wound into balls, my mother would then use the back of a chair to wind the yarn into a wide loop (I think it’s called a skein), which she would secure by tying it in several places winding, before she hand washed it. Once dried, it would be wound back into balls. That was my job again, and there was an art to making a ball that was shapely, not lumpy, and which you would constantly rotate as you wound the wool. This gave it a tidy, geometric look, with perfect little ‘nests’ indenting each pole.

Before all that, when I was really little, I used to watch my grandmother (my mother’s mother) knitting socks. Socks, of all things! She used to knit them for me out of white cotton yarn in intricate, lacy patterns. After a few washes, the cotton would shrink, and get stiff, and I remember how difficult they were to put on.

All this watching, and no knitting on my part. Only fleeting attempts at mastering plain and purl, which were for the most part, fairly boring and unsatisfying (I wasn’t actually making anything but a sort of lumpy, sort of uneven strip of knitting).

And then, when I was nineteen and at uni, I had a friend whose mother and sisters all knitted. That was the height of the Eighties’ knitting craze, and it was the coolest thing to be wearing a multi-coloured Jenny Kee type creation or a batwing sweater emblazoned with a blobby cockatoo nestled among a sprinkling of gum nuts and leaves. This was so modern and exciting compared to my mother’s traditional rib, basket weave or cable designs that I just had to give it a shot. Plus, there was none of that figuring out how the garment would come together. It was all done for you in these amazing knitting pattern books that showed you what it was going to look like at the end. I was in heaven dreaming of what I could create if only I could learn.

So I went to my mother and said, ‘I want to learn to knit.’

She said, ‘You won’t have the patience for it.’

Thanks very much, I thought, almost believing her. But then I thought about it, and realised in that moment that although my mother thought she knew me inside out, in fact she did not. And that made me even more determined to succeed.