Jazzing up the town

Fishguard's annual Aberjazz festival weekend was livened up this year by an explosion of colourful knitwork adorning signposts, railings, bollards, public seating and even the church.

This sort of creative enterprise is usually known as guerilla knitting or yarn bombing, both terms capturing something of the anarchic exuberance of the result. Unfortunately the main organizer of the project chose to refer to it as 'granny graffiti'. Now, the use of granny as an adjective makes me seeth: it's both sexist and ageist and rarely accurate to boot, as in this case where the knitters were all ages and not all women.

This particular decoration on the railings outside Seaways bookshop was one of the most ambitious. I think it represents seaweed because dangling from it were flat stones labelled with the names of local beaches and coastal locations, appropriately enough for name of the shop. It was gorgeous and whatever the age or sex of the maker there was nothing remotely grannyish about it.

(A One Street contribution)