Punk Knitting

"So this is how punk ends - not with a bang but with a jumper. Today, all over the world, thousands of punks, goths, emos and other ferociously tattooed, face-pierced miscreant folk-devil scum will take to the streets to protest their disgust with war, oppression and bourgeois conformity by crocheting hideous green twat-hats with stupid ear flaps.

I'm talking about World Wide Knit in Public Day. Which, by its very name, suggests that knitting is a sordid and disgusting practice best done behind locked doors and drawn curtains. Which it is.

On at least four continents muscular youths possessed of the sort of surly disposition and fashionable facial disfigurements that persuade old folks to cross the street, muttering under their mint-humbugged breath about the return of national service, will be sat in parks and on street corners, cheerfully nattering to one another and churning out skull-festooned jumpers that proclaim the need for anarchy. The sickening truth is that knitting is hip - and Western youth culture is knitting its own death shroud.

This decade's mods and rockers don't cluster at Brighton and Hastings for fisticuffs. Instead they mail each other patterns for socks. Which in some ways is obviously an improvement, granted. But, blow me, nobody's going to be making a movie about it in 20 years time. They even have their own knitting Woodstock, called Woolfest.

In every bookshop in Christendom there are sections dedicated to the nauseating premise that arts and crafts are edgy and alternative. They are ram-packed with punk-chick adorned books with edgy titles like Stitch'n'Bitch and Anticraft (subtitled "Knitting, beading and stitching for the slightly sinister.")

We've gone from screaming for anarchy, rocking against racism, storming the US Embassy and picketing recruiting offices, tuning in and dropping out and rutting like pigs on Viagra to taking up the favourite hobby of senile old grannies everywhere and declaring it radical. Which was hilarious for about five seconds about five years ago.

The knitting craze is the death of both alternative culture and feminism. But it's even worse that that. Scratch a knitter - discover a Knit Nazi. Like the Nazis, alternative knitters have no sense of humour.

The last time I claimed in print that the concept of radical knitting is as absurd as radical dusting or radical toilet cleaning, I received hysterical and barely literate death threats from the ferocious, fanatical, froth-gobbed and swivel-eyed knit Nazi massive. This time I suspect I might not survive.

Nonetheless, the truth must be stated. Germaine Greer didn't articulate her disgust with women's oppression by knitting a lavender and yellow toilet-roll holder. Dr Martin Luther King Jr didn't say: "I have a dream ... set of place mats that I crocheted using a pattern I got from a magazine." Jimi Hendrix didn't take to the stage at Woodstock wearing a nice orange and puce cardigan (with a reindeer on it) that he made using a job-lot of wool he got at a jumble sale. And Sid Vicious didn't crotchet his own stupid mock-Tibetan hippy-dippy ear-flapped bobble hats. And neither should you. If you need a hobby, take up spitting."

-Steven Wells via the Guardian