“My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.“

In an article in the London Evening Standard on 9 February 1946, George Orwell goes into delightful detail about a pub you can’t help but want to follow him into. Amongst other things, the Moon Under Water’s barmaids know their customers’ names, it’s quiet enough to talk, it’s “obliging about letting you use the telephone“, has china as well as glass and pewter cups, and a small passageway that leads to a garden.

One of the things I love most about this heavenly pub, is that even though Orwell confesses that he knows of no such pub existing and plainly has no plans to set one up himself, he still regarded its dreaming-up and writing-about, as worthwhile. In the years before I opened the shop, I had an equivalent list of qualities I imagined for my ideal wool shop… The shopkeepers would remember you and want to see what you made since you last came by, they would take your knitting seriously and give solid expert and trust-worthy advice, they’d welcome kids with stories and knitted toys that were there to play with and not just admire, they’d sell real wool that wasn’t bank-breakingly expensive to knit sweaters in, there’d be a place to swap out unwanted stash, and loads of samples so you could try things on before you chose which pattern to make. There’d also be a garden or terrace so you could sit outside and knit in the summer, and a great big table with room to fix mistakes and get on with your project.

And the name I gave this imaginary wool shop? Wild and Woolly of course!

I don’t know if Orwell felt resolved to never finding his Moon Under Water – at least we got a good read out of his fruitless mission looking for it. But as far as my imaginary Wild and Woolly yarn shop was concerned, the more I dreamed about it, the more restless I felt about making it happen, until one day late in 2013, when I decided that at 42 and half years old, I’d better bloomin well just do it, or stop wondering about it.

I talked it through with anyone who had the patience or kindness to listen. At some point I realised that even if there were 87 reasons why it might be a bad idea to give up my secure job and start a business in an industry that I had no experience of, there were at least 88 reasons why it also made perfect sense. 

Now I’m telling this story 11 years later, in the stifling heat of our London summer. Was it really a good idea to follow a day dream and open a wool shop? And whatever happened to the part about the garden terrace for knitters to sit outside and knit in the summer? I looked around the shop: there was a knitter at the table mastering her new skill at yarn-over button holes on a nearly-finished cardigan for her baby grandson, an American tourist had unexpectedly fallen in love with our newly arrived Hebridean Birlinn wool and was engrossed in choosing between multiple permutations of different colour combinations, a child was deep in conversation with the little Nibbles rabbits having just put the ducklings to bed on the shop bench. A young crocheter was rummaging in the Stash Depot drawer for yarns to make into squares to add to their left-overs blanket. And I was being asked to check the fit of the top part of another knitter’s top-down sweater to see if it was a good time to separate for the sleeves.

Was it really a good idea? Abso-bloomin-loutely! But yes, I’m sorry we never managed the garden terrace for summer knitting. It would have been lovely.