Last year, I did a Bad Thing.
It started as a Good Thing, but like so many Good Things, it ended badly: I set the wrong programme on the washing machine.
Now, I am the washer, dryer and putter-away of washing in our house. I change the beds, pair the socks and fold the pants. My laundry routine is sacrosanct and good. Yet I failed.
And not only failed, but failed in the matter of a cashmere sweater belonging to my partner Susie.
Now cashmere, hand combed from the bellies of himalayan goats, is one of life’s great pleasures. To slip on a cashmere sweater on a chilly day is to be caressed by luxury.
But to slip on a cashmere sweater that has been washed at 60 degrees is, tragically, impossible.
I have seldom felt the grief and guilt I did when Susie gazed, crestfallen, at the now-child-sized pullover she had once loved. I was so, so sorry.
For some months, the tiny, shrunken jumper languished in my sewing box (yes, I have a sewing box) and I longed to find a use for it that might somehow atone for the destruction.
Then, one cold morning last winter, I was struck by a blinding revelation.
And the revelation was mittens.
I cut off the diminutive sleeves and sewed them up as mittens.
I could hardly have been prouder as I presented them to Susie. But this pig’s ear/silk purse story of repurposed laundry redemption had gone as far as it was going.
Susie did not want the mittens. My son Silas could barely look at the mittens without expressing something between pity, amusement and contempt. So the mittens went away, and were not spoken of.
Now Christians believe that nothing we do is unforgivable. But we also believe that nothing we do can make up for our shortcomings. We just have to be sorry and try again.
So the real story here is not of a moment of triumphant restitution but a gentler one of slowly regaining Susie’s laundry trust by, well, doing the laundry right.
And also, perhaps, as I am reminded every time I slip my hands into my strange, cosy, cashmere sleeve-mittens, a story of the warm possibilities of being sorry.
These are the mittens.
And I had to photograph them one hand at a time.