31 January 2026

Our street is very long – a mile at least. Apparently, when someone is recruited to work as a postman in the local area, they are automatically told to deliver the mail in our very long street. It’s like a rite of passage. Everyone has to do it.

It means that we get to know quite a number of the postmen and, at least, one postwoman. A lot of people like to know their ‘postie’ by name and we do too. One of our friends, told us about theirs. One day, he asked her if she knitted. She hesitated for she hadn’t been knitting for a while. ‘Yes.’ she said shakily.

The next time postie visited, he had a big  black bag full of wool. It came from a shop clearance. Our friend was astonished. What was she going to do with it? She began by knitting a knee warmer. Postie gave it to a relative who took it to a nursing home and gave it to a resident.

On a subsequent visit, he brought a photograph of the resident with the knitted blanket over her knees and news that she loved it! A neighbour was knitting blankets for the maternity unit – a hundred stitches over a hundred rows. Our friend passed on some wool.

She decided to knit gloves for her friends as Christmas presents and one who was a gardener got fingerless mittens. And so it went on …. This big  bag of wool began to weave  its way around the community to the benefit of knitters, premature babies, older people in nursing homes, a gardener, friends etc.

It all started with the postie or was it our friend who had a  well-established relationship with  the postie, knew her neighbours, reached out to others, had the imagination to see how sharing a bag of wool can knit the world together and create something new like the house that Jack built!

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