O ne of my sons picks up a copy of Heat magazine. "What's the white nose gang?" he asks. I snatch it from his grasp. It features unflattering images of Kate Moss, Sadie Frost and Sienna Miller, each appearing to have white blobs up their noses. What do I do here - lie? Make up some baloney about some people's nostrils being naturally white on the inside? I'd imagined that our kids' childhoods would be filled with Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Not the other kind of Charlie. I shouldn't even be reading Heat. As a supposed grown-up I should be reading Tolstoy or learning Italian in my spare time.
It's a relief, therefore, to take my six-year-old daughter to a craft show at the SECC. What better antidote to the torrid pictures in celeb magazines? Craftspeople are painting silk and fashioning rugs from fragments of carrier bags. There's an abundance of chunky homespun jumpers and a talk about découpage. No one is snorting cocaine, as far as I can make out. Certainly, nobody seems to be rambling in a nonsensical fashion, thrilled by their own wit. My daughter and I shuffle into a tented area to see a movie. It's about Scottish felt-makers who went to Mongolia to learn about their techniques.
Mongolians are serious about felt. They make entire homes from the stuff. In the film, a gigantic sheet is being dragged around a field by a cow. "Can we make some?" my daughter asks.
"Of course," I say, picturing us gathering sheep's wool from fences which we'll dye naturally, using onion skins or crushed beetles or whatever, and making, er, the kind of things you make out of felt. A house seems a tad over ambitious, though. A pair of felty pants, maybe. My only fear is that our garden isn't big enough for a cow to run around in.
"It's really easy," insists the felt maker, who is demonstrating outside the film tent. It's not a save our felt' kind of demonstration but a step-by-step guide to making your own. Indeed, it does look easy. You don't even need a cow. Just a felt starter kit which we buy eagerly and bring home.
I'm so revved up about our activity that I forget about our previous craft enterprises. Like our salt dough models, which had to be baked in the oven for something like 17 weeks, doubling that quarter's gas bill and emerging as unrecognisable lumps, the kind that occasionally rolls out of a toddler's dungaree leg. Or the time my daughter's friend came round, and we painted marzipan teddies with cochineal. Visiting child's bear looked as if it had appeared in some horrific slasher movie involving chainsaws and dead people propped up around the dinner table. A week later, I asked her if she'd enjoyed eating it. "It went bad and we threw it away," she said ominously.
Plus, we have enough kids' home-made things already. Mantelpieces are crammed with pottery owls and hand-painted jars, wrecking our chances being featured in Wallpaper* magazine. So vast is our stash that I fear it'll reach critical mass and explode, sending a shower of broken glassware and owl beaks into the street.
Still, this is what childhood is about - encouraging creativity. I read the felt-making instructions and feel panicked. We have laid out our merino wool on the net backing. Now we learn that, to mat the fibres together, we have to roll it around 450 times. 450! I'll be dead by then, or at least keeled over and riddled with RSI. It's like charging into a recipe and coming to the bit - 10 minutes before your dinner guests arrive - where it says, "Now chill the pastry base for at least 24 hours".
Still, we roll and we roll. "D'you want a go?" I ask one of my sons as he wanders past.
"No thank you," he murmurs. My daughter, too, has mooched away. I am rolling alone on a balmy spring evening when all our neighbours are lighting their barbecues and sipping wine. I fear that I'll still be rolling morosely as our children leave home, striding past me with packing cases filled with their possessions and saying, "I see Mum's still faffing about with that dumb felt. At least it gives her something to do. And it's probably therapeutic".
The term therapeutic' is given to any task involving mind-melting repetition with paltry results - ie, weeding or tidying a cupboard. Miraculously, having reached the point of near unconsciousness, I announce that the felt is ready. It's almost - although not quite - as nice as the felt you can buy in John Lewis for 99p.
At least my daughter has the decency to look interested. "What shall we make out of it?" she enquires.
"I don't know," I say.
Fiona's new novel, Lucky Girl, is published by Hodder, £6.99
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