An Airfix kit for girls!

As a boy, around this time of year post Christmas I’d be sat on the floor, busy cutting out parts from a Christmas gift Airfix kit. You’d cut out the parts, then glue them together.

I’m doing one this year at 44 years of age, but a cloth one. Alright it’s a teddy bear needlework kit! A gift friends purchased from Tchibo, you get fluffy cloth and a paper outline to cut, yarn, and fluff to fill it. Initially I didn’t want to start, but the wife gave her usual disparaging comments about me, and I stubbornly decided to see it through. What is happening during its making though is wonderful.

I’m sitting there breathing, concentrating, creating, solving problems, in fact all the stuff perhaps my Mum might have “just got on with”, but in our X Factor world today we’ve completely lost. Well I at least have. There is something profoundly meditative about the whole experience, the occasional frustrations, then the relief at the resolution of problems, which the digital world just doesn’t give.

Put me in my other fireplace room /we call it the tile stove room as it used to have a ceramic stove which we took out for a cosier looking glass fronted fire), some candles (four naturally!) and it takes me back to 1940s Britain. One only needs one of those huge radio cabinets with Dick Barton Special Agent, some Ovaltine and we’re back in the days of the Blitz!

I’m going to give him when he is complete to my son. Today during a moment of calming him down after he slipped, fell and cried, I asked him what we might name him “Teddy” he said. I told him the original name of teddy bears was Edward, so could we name him Edward? He agreed, so Edward when he is finished will have a birth certificate which came with the kit, and will be the new arrival in our household.

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