I spent a good deal of my 30s standing at bus stops, screwing my eyes up into the middle distance trying to work out whether the approaching double-decker had the number 55 on the front or not. Those were the days before transport apps, when all you had was the hope that there’d be one along soon. It was during those sometimes long waits, that I realised a strange thing: The longer I waited for the bus, the more difficult it was to give up on it. Walking the 45 minutes home was easily a more logical option than waiting all that time, but this wasn’t about logic, this was about some absurd sense of not wanting all the waiting to have been a total waste of time.

Thanks to a change in career, Citymapper, and live arrivals displays at bus shelters, I’m thankfully no longer waiting for the 55 bus. But somewhere along the way, the absurdity has arrived at my knitting. Last week I found myself casting off the final piece of a beautiful Julie Hoover pattern called Lohman. I laid it out to prepare for sewing up and saw quite plainly, that the garment I’d made was big enough for someone almost twice my size. The stupid thing is that I’d suspected the fabric was too big, rows ago, skeins ago, weeks ago! So why didn’t I quit earlier and undo it? Because I’m ridiculous, because I’d knit so much already and was too stubborn to concede the stitches I’d done so far and start again. I know that me and my knitting will get there eventually but this is a route number I definitely don’t recommend!