Yarn Bomb Nation

Wandering through Hay on Wye, you expect books, booksellers, and perhaps the odd performance poet declaiming in a cardigan. What you don’t expect is to find yourself being stared down by a knitted clownfish from the top of a Royal Mail postbox. Yet here it was – a goldfish bowl, lovingly crocheted, complete with blue gravel and polyester coral, plonked on the nation’s most British of pedestals.

The practice of “yarn bombing” began, so the story goes, when knitters decided the world needed cheering up – not with banners or petitions, but with woolly hats for bollards and scarves for trees. It was rebellion with added pom-poms. Somewhere between guerilla protest and Women’s Institute craft fair, it spread like bindweed. During lockdown it really took off, when people weren’t allowed to hug each other but were apparently free to crochet a daffodil for the local lamp post.

And so it has come to this: knitted aquaria balanced on red pillar boxes. The Royal Mail, once the empire’s steel-spined courier, reduced to playing host to a crocheted Finding Nemo. It’s delightful, of course, and utterly British – a mix of whimsy, eccentricity and defiance. Other nations protest with fire and pitchforks. We protest by knitting a haddock.

Still, there’s something profound in it. At a time when the world is run by politicians who can’t string a sentence together, the knitters are at least stringing something. While Farage fulminates about imaginary fleets in the Channel, Mrs. Jenkins from the WI is stealth-installing a woollen octopus on the corner of your street. Which is the greater public service?

So here’s to the postbox aquarists of Hay. They remind us that, in Britain, resistance doesn’t always come in banners and chants. Sometimes it comes in crochet hooks, double-knitting wool, and a clownfish peering from a glass bowl. And if you think that’s silly, remember – the alternative is letting Reform design the street furniture. Now which would you rather?