Ding ding – seconds out – round two!  Seems I’m not the only one unhappy with Kirstie’s latest televisual offering.  In a recent Twitter outpouring of venom,  Sally Bercow has launched an attack on Kirstie’s ‘broadside’..and Kirstie being Kirstie has responded full square (why celebs think it is ok to ‘out’ their true personalities on Twitter is beyond me, but that is another piece of analysis waiting!). 

 

In the Blue (because it suits her marital status to be) corner we have Sally Bercow, famous for being married to the Speaker of the House and yet seems to be speaking more than he does.  Her beef is that craft is for ‘bored, middle class’ people. 

 

 However Kirstie in the even bluer (‘cos that’s the way she was born and she can play the class card!) corner thinks that Sally is misguided and lacks understanding.

Most revealing was Sally’s comment  “Kirstie is unreal, who’s got that much time on their hands FGS! Condescending, too good to be true, middle class nonsense IMHO”. 


Firstly let’s get something straight and debunk one important myth before we go any further. Kirstie doesn’t have the time. She’s paid vast amounts of money by a production company to be the ‘face’ of crafts.  She doesn’t make them herself, let alone create the ideas.  Her role is to go in smile, laugh and pretend to get emotional, but then let somebody else make it properly for her….at vast expense.  It’s a money making endeavour and not a way of life.  So to a certain extent Sally is right, very few people do have that sort of time to indulge themselves in their ‘hobbies’ that these programmes lead us to believe.

HOWEVER – having said that I’m not saying that Sally is right either. To me THEY ARE BOTH WRONG.  They’re both missing a valuable point, somewhere in the midst of this argument is an important kernel of truth.  Take out the yawnworthy ‘love Kirstie, hate Kirstie’ argument completely, and you have a much more fundamental issue.

We’re living in the worst economic environment that we’ll ever see in our lifetimes and we need to embrace some of these ideals not be demeaning or misrepresenting them. 

We’re a nation of makers and one of the reasons we’re in this mess is because we have absolved ourselves of this fact, shipped our manufacturing abroad and chosen to see basic everyday ‘making’ (and mending) as somehow not worthy of our time and effort.  Kirstie’s programmes attempt to address this, but in truth they only serve to embed this myth and represent ‘making’ ( as La Bercow followers called it on Twitter)  “pretentious attention seeking dressed up as ‘austerity chic’”). 

Making and mending is not about ‘bored, middle class housewives’ filling their lonely hours, but about good basic economic sense.  If you make and mend things you make your money go further, and you can create things that you might not have been able to afford otherwise, have unique, individual items that give you a huge sense of satisfaction, and aren’t clogging up our landfill sites with items that could so easily be revived.  This is shouldn’t be a class issue but that Kirstie’s presentation does seem rather to exclude the non-middle classes.

More importantly if we did more of this and represented it properly we could be helping a new generation not to get into the mess that we have got ourselves into. We should be teaching our children some valuable skills that will help them to stay out of debt and encourage a greater sense of individual satisfaction.   Living within our means doesn’t mean we have to live in an austere environment, it can be fun and stylish as well…and perhaps most of all it could save a fortune on those anti-depressants!

So come on girls, get over yourselves, put your time to better use and start to fight a worthwhile battle.