WHO would have thought that climate change and crochet would be so closely connected?

Well, no one, probably. But seeing as how everyone else seems to be able to draw conclusions based on data of their choosing, I am going to publish the results of my own research.

The planet is definitely getting colder, and is currently the coldest it has been for 25 years. You can tell Al Gore from me.

I know this because I have had exclusive access to unarguable data received direct from Dawlish.

It's fairly simple: the Dawlish Crochet Group had not missed a single one of their Wednesday morning gatherings, barring Christmas Days, in 25 years before this winter.

And how many did they miss this winter? Three. Three Wednesdays lost to the snow and ice in 25 years and all of them came this year.

Ergo, planet temperature down in line with crochet output. I rest my case. Do with it what you will.

The conspiracy theorists among you might be calling for a full, root and branch investigation into how crochet has been allowed to become so deeply implicated in the climate change scam.

Those of you, however, who can see through the bare stats, to the more human issues involved here, might be thinking something like, 'Hey, 25 years without missing a Wednesday? Crochet must be more fun than I thought.'

So, in the interests of unbalanced journalism, I'm not going to address the former group. There are websites for people like you.

But for the latter bunch, like you I too was intrigued by such an almost unblemished record of attendance and just had to get along to Dawlish Baptist Church on a day very much like today to find out what all the fuss was about.

Well, one of the first things you learn about crochet is that there is no fuss. Unless you actually try to learn how to do it, that is. In which case you are in for a whole world of fuss.

I had not expected to be involved quite so closely, but as everyone else inside the long thin room was hard at work with their hooked needle in one hand and a woollen creation of one size or another in the other, it would have been churlish to use my complete inability as an excuse.

"You want to have a go?" asks Val, the spiritual leader of the group and its founder member when a craft club was required by Dawlish Third Age project all those years ago.

"The sailors in Ireland used to crochet and sell what they made to get enough money to travel to America. If they can do it, you can do it."

Val is busy teaching Pauline, another crocheting greenhorn not, as it turns out, as completely useless at it as me. And so Marie-Thérèse moves around from the other side of the line of trestle tables forming our work surface, brings her chair, and proceeds to show me, at unerring speed, how it's done.

"You old zis like zat," she says proffering a thin, hooked needle and ball of fluffy wool, not for comic effect you understand, but because she is actually French. "And ze wool like zis. Needle goes srew, twist, come back, and zere."

Like most things in life which can be made easy be being good at them, crochet is harder than that looked.

"No, Toulouse and Toulon, as we say in France," says Marie-Thérèse as my wool lengthens and the perfect knots she formed are made loose by my ham fists. "Keep going."

Marie-Thérèse came to England as a nurse in 1958, and married a baker 'because he made excellent French sticks'. "My idea was to marry someone with a lot of dough," she says, with a wink. She is actually a very good teacher, but may be fighting a lost cause here.

At least I'm making the rest of the group feel better. Leslie and Janet opposite are most amused, especially Janet when Marie-Thérèse starts to assess my efforts in her native tongue.

"Janet is learning to speak French," she says. "I taught her all ze swear words first."

I might be practising my Anglo-Saxon in a minute, as I try to add something meaningful to the simple links Marie-Thérèse started.

I feel a bit like Chief Brody in Jaws, the useless crewmate aboard Quint's doomed fishing boat, being taught how to tie a bowline knot by the skipper. "Little brown eel comes out of the cave," says Quint. "Swims into the hole. Comes out of the hole. Goes back into the cave again..."

Brody busies himself until he finally gets it, and upon announcing "I did it!" Quint's reel screams the fact that they have hooked a giant, man-eating shark.

Nothing quite as spectacular occurs when I finally complete my first successful loop. "Very good," says Marie-Thérèse. "Carry on."

Actually, I'm going to quit now I'm ahead and swap my crochet needle for a pen; something I can use almost like an expert.

There are more members here now, all seated around the same group of tables, crocheting, talking and laughing. Some of them are even knitting, although Val is pretending they aren't here.

"Crochet is just so easy to pick up and put down. Not like knitting. Knitters tend to hold their fingers in the air," she says. "Crochet is more like sewing.

"But in 25 years we've never had an awkward person. And the reason we do so well is because we don't have a committee. I couldn't be like I am without the ladies being like they are."

I can't imagine matters getting too heated in here, among the furious and yet strangely silent industry of lavender bag, woolly hat and blanket square production. The ladies (and they are all ladies) talk as they go, rarely making eye contact but not really having to.

"When we started at the Con Club, all those years ago, it was for the retired, redundant and unemployed, and we each paid 10p per week in those days," says Val, to a few nostalgic murmurs.

"The retired and redundant would share their skills with the unemployed to help get them back to work.

"The project has been going 25 years, but it's principle aim was always to share skills and interests.

"The popularity of crochet goes in waves. It was really popular in the 1970s and is starting to come back.

"For me, whenever I make something for somebody they are getting a part of my life."

"When I see one of my 'ats," adds Marie-Thérèse. "I like zat.

"I must 'ave made 500 of zees now. The pattern is just in my 'ead. I followed it the first time, but now I know it off art."

When you get really good at crochet you can follow a diagram, which looks a bit like one of those kids' puzzles where you have to make as many squares from a set of lines by adding only a few more. It makes no sense to me, but to some of these ladies it holds the key to one of the group's rights of passage — The Dawlish Jacket.

There is an example of one near the door. It is kind of what it sounds like: a jacket made from crochet, this one a sort of bluey-greeny colour.

"I did a chart for it to make it easier," says Val. "Once you understand the charts you can just do what you see.

"And if you think ahead you can get away with doing as little sewing as possible.

"A lot of the ladies have done one. Unfortunately we've lost a lot of the good teachers. There's nothing they didn't know how to do.

"But if you're good at maths you can do crochet."

"It's not maths, it's arithmetic," disagrees Marie-Thérèse.

"Actually, it's more like common sense," says Eileen at the other end of the table.

It is a lot like that, in fact, if you consider some of the ways in which crochet can enhance your life.

"Back in France I re-use ze blue tape from ze farmers they use to stop ze cattle wandering off," says Marie-Thérèse. "I made mobile phone 'olders out of it and sold them for two bob.

"And during the war we used to unpick sacks, oh my they were scratchy. We used to make woollen bathing suits, which were all right when they were dry..."

In the name of decency I am not at liberty to finish that anecdote, but a few fellow crocheters can clearly remember what happened when they got wet if the knowing laughs are anything to go by.

"We used to use video tape to make a hat," adds Val. "There are all sorts of things you can recycle."

And then, right on cue, we are joined by Poppy, a walking advert for just that. At 92, she is the group's oldest member, but is also perhaps its most productive one.

Her walking stick is sheathed in a sort of Inca-inspired crochet sleeve, and over her shoulder is a colourful shopping bag, made entirely from recycled plastic bags.

"It's at least 25 bags all ripped up and made into a sort of yarn; one bag makes a small ball," says Poppy, regarding her creation while sitting down beside me. "They are mostly Tesco, with a few from somewhere with a grey bag. It's lovely and squishy and nice to touch.

"Crochet has got a bad image for some reason. People just think of doilies and things. But if you belong to the guild you can see what wonderful things are being done up and down the country, right away from all that granny stuff."

Poppy is one of those 92-year-olds who flatly refuse to act their age, and can get away with using the words 'granny stuff' as though referring to some far-distant stage of later life. Part of that, she admits, is thanks to crochet.

"I spend every day crocheting. I can't get about much, and rely on my daughter to bring me here. So I have heaps of time on my own.

"Without crochet I think I'd have given up by now. I really mean that. I love it so much."

Which is the sort of sentiment which might make Pauline glad she chose to start her education today. It's time for us to leave for another week, but since I have been here, Pauline has made a fairly large square all on her own. It could be a television remote mat, or a cheese sandwich cover. Or just her first effort of many.

"I saw an article in the local paper and thought I'd have a go," she says, having moved down here from Northampton in December. "I've knitted all my life so I thought it would be nice to have a change.

"Knitting got fashionable some years back, but with places like Primark the clothes are so cheap people just go and buy them."

Well, if it's going to keep getting colder, what better way to future-proof yourself than to actually make all the warm clothing you could need, while the rest of us freeze?

That alone should secure the next 25 years for this group.

But there is more to its near-perfect record of attendance than that. As the members make their well-trodden way out of the door, Marie-Thérèse grabs me by the arm to whisper in my ear what I had suspected all along to be the case.

"You know, we don't really come 'ere for the crochet ... we come 'ere for each uzzer."