Seventeen years ago -- you have no idea how it pains me to say that so much time has gone by -- a job came my way through the magazine I worked for then. One of their readers lived in Alaska, and had a cottage industry of selling patterns for cross-stitching.

In case you've never heard of it, cross stitching is one of the things women did in your grandmother's day. It consisted of sewing stitches of coloured thread in a piece of white linen to make pictures. Commercially printed patterns used to be sold for people to pin to the linen and follow.

By 1990 it was a vanishing popular art form. But it was still practised by at least this one reader in America's Great White North. She commissioned six pieces from me. Each is based on a relevant pun. I've some copies of the patterns still, and even a photo of one or two of them stitched.

Sometimes I think they'd make a good colouring book.