The news is heartbreaking but addictive – we are bombarded by footage that we would rather not see, but can’t switch off.
Sometimes you have to turn away.
A friend has taken up knitting. She enjoys the creativity and the sense of inner peace.
Knitting is a sore point.
As a left-handed seven year old, all efforts were crooked and holey.
My mother tried the old-fashioned rhyme: “In through the bunny hole, round the big tree, out through the bunny hole and off goes she.”
My father smiled, ruffled my hair, called me his “clooty”.
The item to be knitted was a bobble hat. They’ve had a moment in the fashion world.
But pom poms whisk me back to that long ago classroom… cue a distinct shortness of breath and a life-long allergy to cheerleaders.
Perhaps it was the slap that accompanied the bad knitting and the dropped stitches. It was a nightmare until my aunt visited one evening, whipped the needles from me and completed seven inches of hat, just like that.
I trotted up to the teacher’s desk the following day and presented “my work”. She looked at me with a raised Paxman eyebrow in the days before Paxman but figured that even if it was not my work (I was, arguably, genetically related to it), she’d had it with our battle and let me go.
The horrible hat was finished but never worn.
There is a variety of gifts, as the Bible says. But you always want the one that you can’t have, as the Eagles sang.
Knitting, sewing, painting by numbers – failed them all.
There was never enough blue for the sky in the little pot in the painting-by-numbers set. The result bore no resemblance to the front of the box.
Still, when I think of knitting at the moment, I think of Madame Defarge wielding her needles as the guillotine blade sweeps down.
And all this brings me round to the kind of television I watch when I can’t bear to swallow another byte of heartbreaking news.
It has to be The Great British Throw Down.
It’s about a big lump of clay and the creations that are bewitched out of it.
Maybe it’s a take on the Bake Off, but oh it has so much more heart.
There is something about a potter. You don’t have to have watched Ghost.
I speak as someone who demanded a block of clay for Christmas one year and stared bemused at the grey lump of it … O easy for Michelangelo.
When you need heart and warmth then this pottery programme has it in bucketloads.
It helps that Siobhán McSweeney aka Sister Michael from Derry Girls is there …wry, witty with a whiff of Polly from Peaky Blinders about her up - on the staircase in her long coat looking down at the potters in the yard.
It also helps that we have Keith Brymer Jones, master potter, passionate about his art.
He is, as we say in this part of the world, a big lump of a man – appropriate given his love affair with clay – he’s broad and masculine. But his heart is a potter’s heart - soft as putty and he wears it on his sleeve. So much so that when one of the potters creates something beautiful, he brims up in tears.
That’s it … he bowls the rest of us over with him.
Rich Miller, the other judge, is wise, gentle and thoughtful.
AJ is so talented.
Anna who grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland and works with adults with learning difficulties is warm and funny.
Lucinda has a streak of bright red hair. Being a potter is not their real life job, call them passionate amateurs.
And this doesn’t feel like a competition… they share the love, they share the laughter.
Even when the candlesticks are wonky, Keith brings around the bucket and chucks the rejected ones in with a very satisfying thwack and they all laugh.
This is no soggy bottom land, no yearning for a Paul Hollywood handshake. It’s much more elemental than that.
When Christine sculpted herself and her experience of breast cancer, it was beautiful … tears all round and a big bear hug from Keith.
So when the world is too much with us, then perhaps it’s time to change the channel … spend a precious hour of peace, watching potters weaving magic at their wheels.
