A new year

For me there are two new years – one in January and one at the start of the autumn term. The beginning of September makes me think of new pencil cases and bringing home stacks of text books to cover for homework. Dave says he had new brown paper to cover his books. In our family we used wallpaper oddments.

I’ve just made a shoe bag for my grandson to take to nursery school: he starts this week. The yellow fabric is cut from an old curtain, the orange stripey bits are from a jumble sale dress in my patchwork box, and I scavenged the black cord from a carrier bag that arrived on my doorstep carrying bereavement flowers last year. My mother would surely approve.

She once made me a rucksack out of an ancient gaberdine mac. It had zips reclaimed from long dead trousers, and a cord from a pair of tattered pyjamas.

Ma’s 1001 ways with a pair of old tights is so well documented in the family annals, that whenever we see a pair adrift in a hedgerow, Dave will say “This must be one of Ma’s old haunts.” Someone even suggested we should use old tights to knit a rope, to lower her coffin into the ground. She'd have loved the suggestion, and laughed along with the rest of us.