See my blog tomorrow or Saturday 20th

Dear Angharad,

I think if one looks into it, it is more an indication of which generation someone comes from. Looking into my own relations, in my mother's generation Every Girl learned how to sew, darn socks, knit booties and jumpers and gloves and socks and wee hats etc. They all played with baby dollies, and later with dress up dolls. They nearly all had siblings including sisters and were expected, at least in the working class my lot belonged to, to take on some of the work their Mummies should be doing with the new babies.

In my own generation, we were taught at primary school, girls AND boys, how to darn socks, how to knit, and how to sew... The actual dressmaking was only taught to girls though. I remember being forced to do Woodwork instead and getting my thumb hit with a hammer, and being called a cry-baby!

I had a one year older girl cousin who lived with us sometimes, and she taught me dress-making etc.

When I married and we had two daughters they were totally disinterested in clothes-making and mending skills, and to this day they are unable to cut out a pattern and make their own dresses. My Grand-Daughter to the best of my knowledge has never even threaded a needle. I have checked with friends and colleagues, and it seems about the same in their families too. It is widespread. Clothes you do not make, you buy them in shops or through a catalogue.

When I was growing up there was a war on and importing any cloth was difficult, wool from British sheep was available however, and turning it into yarn with a spinning wheel was normal in a household. We all had spinning wheels, and sewing machines that were driven by a pedal with the feet.

Since then people have become better off, but mainly through the women of the house going out to work too, which leaves them little time for learning and applying any clothes-making skills. We live today in a throw-away society, with our own clothes-making industry defunct and cheap and shoddy dresses, shirts, undies, even shoes all being made in poor, third-world sweat-shops, often where child labour is used and people are practically slaves, locked in and forced to work long hours for almost nothing, and the profits going to factory owners, and to middlemen who market and export/import the goods, and by the chains of clothes shops...

We no longer even have SHOES repaired, they just get thrown away instead. There are no Cobblers, anywhere. In the whole of the archipelago I live in, there is but one lady who can do Alterations and Repairs to clothes, and she is very old and wants to retire - when I lived in Germany (West) we had one in our village but she was Polish, the job was called an Aenderungsschniederin (Ae is A with 2 dots over it, pronounced like a long e, but I cannot get it on an English keyboard)
I don't think there is even a word for such a person in British English!

Apart from a very tiny High Fashion scene, we have, in Britain, lost all the skills that we once had and that made us the Number One Manufacturing and Trading Nation in the world...

It will all end in a Catastrophe, this wasteful throw-away society. Mark my word.