Tatting

Say the word "shuttle" and most sane, normal people will

immediately think of perhaps the space shuttle,

the Eurotunnel train service or even a shuttlecock,

that strange, feathered flying object that badmington players

seem hell bent upon beating to death with their rackets.

 

But what's it for?

 

But not me.  For me it can mean only one thing - tatting,

and I still, to this day, bear the childhood scars of my close

encounters of the tatting kind.

 

Very pretty, but I ask again, what's it for?

 

My mother, as I think I may have mentioned once or twice,

was a formiddable woman of ample proportions,

an iron will (she left everything to the foundry)

and a penchant for Black Russians and Passing Clouds

both of which were varieties of cocktail cigarettes.

The former named because of it's colour and country of

origin and the latter, I always assumed, because of the

banks of smoke which reguarly enveloped her as she

persued her sixty a day target with customary gusto.

Ah, those were the days.  No wonder I was such a sickly

child, but I digress.

 

Just watch me and you'll soon learn - fat chance!

 

On wet afternoons once the lunch things had been washed

up we would settle down in the front room on the brown,

overstuffed sofa where, in certain lights, it could be quite

difficult to distinguish where the cushions ended and

my mother began.  Then out would come the dreaded sewing

basket and the torture would begin - tatting lessons for

tiny tots.  As terrifying as it was illiterative.  They always

ended in tears and nothing good ever came of them.

 

My shuttles weren't nearly so nice.

 

She would press the wretched shuttles (yes, there were sometimes

two of them) into my pudgey little hands while at the same time issuing

a physically impossible string of instructions in the expectation of

miracles which, as we all know, seldom if ever happen.

 

The ends could be quite sharp in the wrong hands!

 

Listen With Mother and Woman's Hour on the radio would

come and go; the dusting of cigarette ash gently falling upon

her tightly corsetted bosom would grow into drifts; and we

were usually well into the afternoon play before she finally

conceded defeat and I was let off the hook to persue pleasures

of my own choice.

 

The poem lies - it's just propaganda spread by my mother!

 

I never did master the Josephine knot or the tedious picot loop

and, do you know what?  I don't really care!