Tom Baker stepped into the TARDIS in 1974 like some wild-eyed prophet striding out of the desert, scarf trailing behind him like a banner of mad liberation, and – who among us wasn’t hooked? Well, all right, some of you. Those who preferred sensible things like indoor hobbies, stable realities, and cardigans that didn’t threaten to strangle you at thirty paces. But for the rest of us wide-eyed children, he was Revelation in curly hair and a greatcoat.
And that scarf – good heavens, that scarf! I had no earthly idea why I was so enthralled by it. Perhaps it was its absurdity, perhaps its colours, or perhaps – like the rainbow covenant set over Noah’s drenched world – it was a kind of promise: that the universe was larger, stranger, and far more forgiving than the school playground suggested. I was eight, after all, and great dreams frequently attach themselves to great impracticalities.
Money I had none. My parents, loving though they were, were in no position to bankroll woollen eccentricity. Feeding us was theatrical enough; clothing is a kind of slow Victorian tragedy. So there was no hope of acquiring such a scarf – even if they were sold, which I doubt. You couldn’t buy myth. But you could, perhaps, make it.
And so the child that would one day grow into a funeral director, existentialist, and licensed pessimist had an idea.
My mother knitted, as so many mothers of that stoic age did: industriously, absent-mindedly, sacramentally – like the Fates themselves, though with more swearing. And around our house were scattered the remnants of her woolly labours: scraps and ends and multicoloured entrails of half-forgotten projects. The detritus of creativity. The leftovers of hope.
I would knit my own scarf.
After earnest (and, I suspect, manipulative) pleading, I persuaded my mother to teach me the rudiments. Cast on, knit, aim vaguely for straightness – which I didn’t achieve. Casting off was irrelevant; that implied an ending, and I was eight and hadn’t yet learned that all things end, that even scarves must one day stop growing. No – I wished mine to go on forever, like eternity or the BBC licence fee.
And so the quest began. A woollen pilgrimage. A tiny boy, brow furrowed, tongue pressed to lip in heroic concentration, manipulating two grubby needles with a rhythm that felt almost prayer-like – click, click, click – the rosary of the secular child.
Weeks passed. The scarf lengthened into a misshapen testament to perseverance and early delinquent craftsmanship. On occasion I’d stretch it across the living room floor like some multicoloured medieval banner, riddled with holes, dog-legged and lopsided – my own Frankenstinian monster, stitched together from scraps. Richard the Lionheart’s Crusades were no match for my dedication. Even Frankenstein would have applauded my monstrous patchwork.
And then – because every myth requires a tragedy – the quest came to an abrupt, catastrophic end.
The villain?
A priest.
Father M will remain nameless on account of his continued survival (at the time of writing) and my continued sense of self-preservation. He was already ancient when I was a child, and as far as I know he remains in that condition – a living reliquary. A cheerful man: fond of whiskey, fond of visiting without warning, fond of cigarettes (though never his own). He never drove; priests rarely do in childhood memories – they simply appear, like prophets, angels, or bailiffs.
On the fateful day, my knitting lay abandoned in the recesses of the sofa, the needles protruding innocently from a ball of rejected wool – a trap laid not by intention but by destiny. I wasn’t knitting; I was elsewhere, being small and distracted.
Father M, however, arrived in his usual breezy, whiskey-scented fashion and – God help him – flung himself down onto the sofa with all the carefree goodwill of a man who has never once suspected a hidden knitting needle in his path.
The sofa, structurally unyielding and possessing the flexibility of a marble tomb, gave no quarter. There was only one direction for the needles to travel.
Into him.
Straight into the sacred hinterland.
‘My God, they’re lodged in his arse!’ cried my mother. Her words, not mine. I would’ve chosen something more poetic, but the moment didn’t lend itself to refinement.
The living room erupted. Father M shot up as if struck by the Holy Spirit – or perhaps as if smote by it. He danced, shrieked, clutched his offended region, zig-zagging like a man performing a drunken Riverdance in mortal peril. My mother pursued him with equal parts horror, guilt, and that uniquely British panic that arises when one must confront both nudity and theology at the same time.
It was, objectively, biblical.
After much shrieking, hobbling, and near-blasphemy, the crisis stabilised. Some time later, the scene concluded thus:
Father M: bent forward, trousers about his ankles.
My mother: standing behind him with a tube of Germolene and a ball of cotton wool.
The atmosphere: somewhere between a confessional booth and a veterinary emergency.
‘Ooh, that looks nasty, Father…’ she murmured.
‘Turn into the light so I can see the hole.’
Thus died the scarf. Thus ended my heroic quest.
And thus began my understanding – confirmed repeatedly across a lifetime – that human beings are, at best, gloriously ridiculous creations; and that even priests, like prophets and children, are vulnerable to the hidden needles of this world.
God forgive me.
But He won’t – He’ll laugh first.
Wording 