A stitch in time can save your peace of mind

Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

by Anne Lamont (Hodder & Stoughton, £9.99)

In this wise little book, popular writer Anne Lamont draws on the now almost lost art of make and mend which our grandmothers so firmly believed in. A stitch in time can save not only that favourite garment, but also, she suggests, your peace of mind. These days, as people so often say, they are “worn ragged” by daily life in a frantic and frenetic age.

Spiritual fabric

But suggests Anne Lamont we can make ourselves whole again: “By collecting the ripped shreds of our emotional and spiritual fabric, and sewing them together, one stitch at a time.”

She evokes the use of a darning egg used in mending socks in the 1950s, before everything was thrown away. Of repairing a sock she says “this is a sort of miracle – good enough again. Wow. You’re weaving, in effect, starting with ragged edges, going back a bit to the one spot that can still hold a new thread. It definitely helps to have a darning egg as you go through life. Trust me on this.”

This is a charming book, which draws on everyday experiences everyone has shared, to find that pattern of meaning, the warp and weft of life, which God has implanted in us, but which we must care for.