A plucky knitting man.

Turning up at Bowral Rail station for yet another trip to Sydney, I bought my ticket on a cool autumn morning. This time without Helvi, she decided to attend to domestic stuff. The bathroom needed wiping and there was ‘dust everywhere’.

I needed some tuning to my hearing aids as the level of irritation from repeating even the simplest utterances by others were not audible enough for me to respond to satisfactory to those doing the uttering. This I get done in Sydney. Hence my date with a train this morning

 I bought a return ticket, and as the Bowral Southern wind was blowing and the temperature indicator in the car was 11c, I took shelter in the waiting room. There was another person seated there and he was knitting. He was a man of about 40, neatly dressed in a tweed Colbert and nicely pressed pants, shirt and tie, smart footwear. I was surprised but not as unsettled as some that entered this waiting room and quickly left when spotting the male in the act of knitting. The knitter had a ball of green wool in a plastic bag and, as far as I could make out, had progressed to having about 20 cm of a knitted length of some garment. I thought it might have been the beginning of a scarf. It brought back memories of my introduction of knitted stuff many years ago. When about 3 or4 my dear mum knitted our underpants. The trauma never left me and I remember the itch as if it was only yesterday.

When the train arrived, I was further surprised that the knitter also travelled with a bicycle. The bicycle was parked outside the waiting room and I had already, prematurely as it turned out, thought the bike belonged to a young man with heavy boots and a vast arrangements of rings through his lips, nose and eyebrows. I was badly mistaken!

The well dressed knitter clambered aboard and hooked his bike vertically in a special little compartment that the train provided. He sat down and took out his plastic bag, continued knitting.

I am not as distant from knitting as most of you, although I hate to make presumptions. All kids in Holland were taught knitting when I went to school. I can still knit but reverted to only the simplest of stitch or knot. I got corrupted by a knitting machine when living in Holland with our kids, and used to turn out smart little garments that were snapped up years ago at the Balmain market stalls.

Strange, how knitting seems to have died out. People now seem to do the pearl and knit on their mobiles. On the way home, from Central to Revesby a woman behind me had a continuous conversation without a breather. I looked around, she was on a mobile!  An attractive dark girl was also talking loudly but into the air, she had a kind of clip on her blouse that must have absorbed or amplified her talking. When that stopped she was furiously pushing her mobile buttons, non- stop till Campbelltown.

 Who pays for all that, I wondered?