It's a rare trend that I sit out. I once took against the prevailing love affair with capes, and simply waited until the moment passed (12 days). I refused last winter's call to wear Ugg Boots (thank the Lord. I was pregnant at the time and would have looked like the back-end of a pantomime bison). And I have, so far, resisted the biggest fad to hit your home since pebbles on the hearth.
Call it the New Domesticity. Call it a craving for Home Comfort. Either way, the current vogue is for fake pearls and tweed jackets, twinsets and tarts - Bakewell tarts, that is, rather than the tarts who have dominated the catwalks for the past three years, bum cracks and nipples ahoy. It is for braising and tatting, preserving and starching. This autumn, we should be wearing neat, discreet fashion and talking in clipped, Celia Johnson voices about tea caddies and how marvellous carbolic is on stains.
If you are on the sharp tip of the trend, you will probably be wearing Marigolds right now. Or doing the ironing. Or perhaps you could knit instead - Scarlett Johansson and Sarah Jessica Parker do it between takes - the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.
In the States, the books flying out of Barnes & Noble are one part anti-Bush to two parts pro-needlepoint. My personal favourite is Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson, which ruminates upon how to iron a dress shirt, how to make up a bed with hospital corners and how to do all the basic sewing stitches: 1,500 words are taken up with how best to fold a duvet.
Clearly, what people want most these days is a little piece of comfort in a cold, cruel world. They want a floral ironing-board cover and peg bag from Cath Kidston. They'd give their eye teeth for a laundry room. But most of all, they want a larder, stocked with jellies and jams, pickles and preserves. A truckle of Cheddar and a salted hock of ham, studded with cloves.
Some hope. My kitchen cupboards, like yours, boast a maxipack of Wotsits, six tins of beans and a tube of Pringles. The raspberry jam in the fridge illustrates precisely why I'll never get the domestic thing quite right: it is 40 per cent sugar to one per cent toast crumbs. It has the merest hum of Marmite, which must have piggy-backed in on the last knife to poke around in its interior. My 'home-made' preserves were possibly made in somebody's home, but it sure as eggs wasn't mine.
Which is why, in an effort to catch up with the New Domesticity or at least try it on for size, I'm hulling strawberries in the John Lewis demonstration kitchen on Oxford Street. It is a wonderful place - a fully functioning slice of home life parked slap in the middle of small electricals. Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton are here to promote their very timely new book, Preserved, and to teach me the new and fashionable relevance of pickling, bottling and salting.
Nick, a man who will gladly soliloquise on the setting point of jam and the peculiarities of pectin until you halt him with a pithy riposte, boasts a smoke house in the garden of his west London home and keeps hams in his chimney flue. He home-cures pancetta and bresaola and knows exactly what to do with a glut of damsons.
'It's worth every effort,' says Johnny, pointing out, rightly, that there's a distrust of the preservatives in supermarket food, 'and a real backlash against impersonal, mass-produced junk'. Nick is keen to stress the astonishing flavour that can be captured in a preserving jar, together with a sense of time and place, of 'seasonality', which is the latest catchword to hijack the nation's kitchens. It's something, says Nick, that our grandmothers had down pat.
My own grandmother was indeed forever pickling and potting. But then again, she wore girdles and kept monogrammed hankies and Devonshire toffees in her handbag. I keep a packet of Extra and a Nokia in mine. The only blackberry I encounter can send an email to my laptop and do a Google search. Yup, this domesticity lark will blow over soon. I'll just wait it out, scoffing Pringles under my carelessly folded duvet cover.
· Preserved, by Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton, is published by Kyle Cathie, £25
