Knitting is the thing I do when I can’t bring myself to do anything but I don’t want to feel like a waste of space. I have a specific knitting project for myself when I am in this state. It’s a big oblong that I make up as I go along with whichever stitches take my fancy in the moment. The most taxing part is making sure I keep the same number of stitches to a row. It’s perfect. If I do something I didn’t quite intend to do, I just leave it. Sometimes I turn it into a new thing. But I never think very hard about it. Soon, it will become a poncho-kind-of-thing, and then I’ll need to start a new mindless knitting project.

I’ve done a lot of poncho knitting today. I did a few other things too, but mainly today has consisted of eating snacks and knitting the poncho while watching throwaway programmes on Amazon. If it wasn’t for the knitting, I would find it difficult to give myself a break about it. But I knitted like an extra foot of this thing today, so I can prove I did something, at least. At least one simple act of creation.

I’ve always been a ‘fits and starts’ kind of person, and as much as I have tried to fight that, I probably need to accept it. But as long as I keep moving on something, I keep moving. And that is the aim.