The things I miss are so random. I'm pootling along, day to day, in my reduced little world, and all of a sudden it hits me how much I miss something I used to do. Not the whole thing, just a little detail of it.

Today, I miss knitting on trains.

There's a whole bigger thing about missing travelling by train and the expectation of it and all the things I'd be looking forward to at the destination, or the frustrations of bus replacements, or the time waiting for a change, or the overcrowded trains from Cambridge into London. Or, most of all, the people I'd see at the other end.

Today's detail is knitting. I'd always carry a small knitting project with me for train travel, something with a simple repeat where I wouldn't have to keep referring to the pattern. Something without complex charts. Something without beads. Something that only takes one skein of yarn and could be tucked easily into a messenger bag. (I'm bad at handbags, I always want to carry far too much with me.) There was something meditative about knitting on trains. It's a fixed, dedicated period of time where the mechanics of travel were someone else's problem to worry about, and all I needed to do was fill the time while waiting to arrive somewhere. Maybe I'd listen to an audiobook through the earbuds that have sat unused in their case for the last year. Maybe I'd just watch out of the window. But I'd knit, and when the train arrived at my destination or my changing station, I'd have made visible progress on turning yarn into a thing.

I saw my mother last week, when we met up for a socially distanced walk around Sheringham Park just as the rhodedendrons are beginning to come out. She was wearing a scarf that I'd knitted from yarn I'd been given as a birthday present in 2014, and that I mostly knitted on the train to and from Edinburgh Yarn Festival in 2016. This morning, I finished knitting a pair of socks that would usually have been a train knitting project, but is now a long Teams meeting project.

I miss knitting on trains.