All Tied Up In Knots

From a bowline to a tangled rats nest, knowing how to tie a decent knot is an essential life skill that John Wright is still trying to master

BEING a practical sort of a fellow and a one-time Leaping Wolf, I’ve always been ashamed of my almost total inability to tie a decent knot. More capable souls look on with disdain, and not a little smugness, when they watch me tie my crab pots in a line, each hitch being an over-engineered mess reminiscent of a set of earphones that have been left to their own devices for more than three minutes.

I could tie knots once, more than 50 years ago, and still have a badge on my 8th Portsmouth Scout’s shirt to prove it.

Mourning my lost skills and safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be as hard as, say, learning to play the concert organ, I determined to plug this embarrassing gap in my knowledge. With the inspiration of Lucy Davidson’s newly published 40 Knots and How to Tie Them, I’m now mentally back in the hall behind the Church of the Holy Spirit in about 1963, learning and practising.

Knots have a very long history and, even in the modern world, are encountered almost everywhere. Shoelaces are an obvious example and one that, apparently, I’ve been getting wrong since 1956 (which explains why mine come undone three times a day, but refuse to do so when I want them to).

Knitting is the making of complex knots, cables in electronic gear would come apart without knots, wire fencing is made of knots and bread is sometimes baked in a knot. And there’s the knot of the tie, which, according to mathematicians with time hanging heavy on their hands, can be tied in 177,147 ways—most of them hideous, obviously.

The 40 knots inMiss Davidson’s book seemed too many to tackle, so I restricted myself to ones I might need for repairing my shrimp net or, of course, tying my crab pots together. It could have been worse. The Ashley Book of Knots, published in 1944, describes 3,800, most being for specialist purposes such as fishing, climbing, decoration or surgery.