The Cottagecore Apocalypse

I have always said I was preparing for the apocalypse. I don’t like guns, I’m overweight and out of shape, and I think everyone always thought I was rather strange for saying so - but I always said it would be knowing how to grow veg, sew clothes and repurpose the things from the times before into what we needed in the moment that would be most useful in the apocalypse. I joked that if you gave me a sheep, I’d be able to shear it (no evidence that I’d manage that whatsoever!), dye the wool, build a loom, weave the cloth and make you an outfit, and make you dinner too!

I thought I was joking too, till this slow apocalypse actually happened. 

There’s fewer zombies than I’d imagined, which is a blessed relief, as I’m still unfit and overweight - even more so after a year at home, truth be told- but there’s been a lot of bread making, sewing, making gates from palettes and gardening, just as expected.

I’ve had a fascination in how to do things from scratch since I was very young (I have recently been made aware that this may be something to do with imposter syndrome and competence types). To take a scrap of fabric and a needle and thread and create something beautiful was wonderful! 

To embroider a gift for my grandmother (a letter H for Heather that my mum has framed on her wall today!), sew a doll for my brother (aged 7, from lining fabric, stuffed with lining fabric and face drawn on with felt tip, also in the possession of my mother) or help make a patchwork quilt for my cousin (by then, aged 12, the embroiderer of the family, I oversaw my siblings embroideries as well as providing my own for each corner of my mums patchwork- I believe she still has it to this day!) was enticing, but always the next step seemed better and more important. 

To take the yarn and weave a swatch of fabric? Marvellous! 

To take a fibre and spin it into yarn? Self-sufficiency!

But what if a spinning wheel was not available? I must learn to make a drop spindle!

I must learn to dye, to make dye, to grow or forage the plants that make the dye....

Each skill has always, for me, spiralled into the next and the next, I am never happy until I think I could do it all in a post apocalyptic world, without any help if need be.

And now...... now the apocalypse isn’t as scary or as absolute as I had imagined? Now it is taking place slowly, in the 21st century? Now all the crafts and traditional skills that I loved and leaned upon have become part of Cottagecore. Only in this Millennium, only in the age of instagram, only with a species so competent and incompetent at the same time, could we come up with such a concept. 

For me, perhaps there is comfort in the fact that David Beckham is keeping bees and George Clooney sews his children’s clothes. Perhaps I always felt a little as if I would have to know how to keep the world going. Now I have two important pieces of information I didn’t have before.

1. This apocalypse is happening slowly, and there aren’t zombies.
2. George Clooney can help shoulder the burden of mending the worlds clothes.