On the table, a workbox opens like a small domestic theatre. A hoop holds a half‑formed vase of blue, the printed pattern waits beside it, and two pairs of glasses rest as if they’ve stepped out of the scene for a moment. Nothing here is finished; everything is in motion.
If revenge is a dish best served cold, then mine has had half a century to chill. I grew up in a school – and a society – determined to press me into a narrow shape. Because I was a boy, I was funnelled into woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing. I was predictably terrible at all of them. What I was good at was attracting homophobic jeers from teachers and pupils alike. But even then, I was stubborn. I insisted on taking cookery, refusing to waste any more timber or scorch any more metal, and quietly preparing for the day when I would no longer be living under my mother’s roof. I needed to know how to feed myself.
Even I knew I couldn’t push things much further than a Victoria sponge. I failed the exam anyway – not for lack of skill, but because I served pork with pears. “You can’t put meat and fruit on the same plate,” the examiner sniffed, until I reminded her about pork and apple sauce. By then I already had a reputation for being “difficult” and “answering back.”
Asking to join the girls for sewing or knitting would have made the local paper. So I taught myself to sew on a button and left it at that.
Decades later, having escaped the small island and lived several lives in the Netherlands, I was recovering from an illness when I wandered down a spring‑speckled Dutch street and stepped into a craft shop. The owner couldn’t have been kinder. A man asking how to begin embroidery – she didn’t blink. She taught. I learned. I brought home threads and fabric and needles and hoops, and with them, the quiet satisfaction of cocking a fifty‑year‑old snoot at those vile teachers.
Embroidery didn’t begin as a craft for me. It began as revenge – and as permission to do something I’d forbidden myself for half a lifetime. Now it has become a way of making a small, steady place to be. A way to occupy the hands when the world feels too loud. A practice that rewards patience rather than speed.
A hoop, a pattern, a pair of glasses, a tangle of threads: the beginnings of a discipline that teaches me how to look, how to slow down, how to stay with something long enough for it to become mine.
Every stitch is a small decision to stay. This is where the peace begins – in the quiet work of making something that didn’t exist before.
Queer After Everything 