Today I visited the Brighton Craft Fair with Relly.

I could tell from the brochure for the fair that there would be some pretty high-end stuff on display, and indeed there was. It was arts and crafts with the emphasis most definitely on the arts. The people displaying their creations weren’t dabblers like me, they were clearly professionals who engage in their craft for a living and are therefore very, very good at it.

The beautiful objects on display were correspondingly pricey, so Relly and I mostly wandered around and admired things from afar. There were 99 stands brimming with jewelry, textiles, ceramics, paper crafts, leatherwork, woodwork and metalwork, so there was plenty for us to ooh and aah over.

There were a few artists in particular whose works caught my eye: there was Caroline Jacques, who had scrumptious felted handbags; Michael Lythgoe, with his wonderfully serene fish and bird sculptures; Simeon Smythe, who was displaying lovely, harmonious metal fish sculptures; and Catherine Aitken, who had some rather tasty Harris tweed bags and apparently even a Highland cow bag which, had I seen it, I would have been sorely tempted to buy, because—Highland cows!

So, clearly, I’m a sucker for fuzzy bags and fish. But I managed to resist buying either fish or fuzzy bags and was in fact on my way out of the fair with Relly (who also hadn’t succumbed to lure of any of the crafts) when there it was, in the last stand we passed, my ultimate weakness, my terrible addiction, my enduring passion: Fake. Food.

And not just any fake food, oh no. Fake knitted and crocheted food. It was the stand belonging to Cardigan, a Brighton-based company, as it turns out, which not only makes quite beautiful knitted and crocheted things to wear, but also breathtaking—and breathtakingly expensive—fake comfort food. I was utterly taken with the sparkly sardines on toast and some plates of knitted fish and chips on newspaper, but since I couldn’t really justify spending £325 (yeah, you read that right) on knitted fish or, indeed, a full crocheted breakfast, I settled for a small snack of crocheted ham, egg and chips. On a keychain. So, like, it’s practical.

I may not have splashed out on a full fake meal today, but I made sure to take a Cardigan “menu” with me (featuring “freshly knitted cod”, “embroidered tomatoes”, and “rainbow trout, crocheted today”) so if, at some point in the future, I find myself hungry for some woolen victuals (and I have some money to burn), I’ll know where to go.