You know your friend is taking her divorce badly when she starts 'crafting'.

One minute she's acting completely normally – screaming at the children, downing industrial-sized bottles of vodka, weeping uncontrollably and burning her ex's vinyl collection in the street – the next she's sat at the kitchen table knitting cakes and threading ill co-ordinating beads on to a piece of wire and calling it jewellery.

On the face of things, it's easy to assume that such a hobby is A Good Thing and that your friend should be encouraged to pursue creativity in the (desperately unlikely) hope that she might actually find some one day. But this is a short-sighted view.

The rubbish she's manufacturing on the table? Where do you think it'll end up? Yes, eventually it'll be on Etsy or Ebay or at a craft fair full of worthy women and beardy men selling the kind of pointless tat that deserves to go straight to landfill, but in the meantime? Three words: birthdays and Christmasses.

Four words: YOUR birthdays and Christmasses.

I had some homemade presents this Christmas (and am fairly convinced this column won't reach the giver of the very worst offender, although if it does, THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD) and for once, the majority were quite brilliant, mainly due to the fact that the makers were professionals who make a living selling what they make.

Then there were the hand-knitted cakes presented on a pile of woollen vomit (apparently a woollen 'plate') and, to gild the excrement further, the cakes were stuffed with pot pourri.

The gift-giver's ex-husband has a lot to answer for: when they were arguing and living a life of untold misery there was no time for my friend to knit. How I miss those days.

I have informed my nearest and dearest that if I ever show any signs I might start knitting cakes or making jewellery in a fug of hormonal insanity, or scrapbooking, or decoupaging papery rubbish on the front of cards, then they can refer to my living will and buy me a one-way ticket to the Dignitas euthanasia centre in Switzerland. It's kinder that way.

* COMING SOON TO EBAY: Six knitted cakes that smell like the bottom of a hamster's cage presented on a pile of woollen vomit. I am open to offers.