A MAN! A man is knitting! Stop press, haud the bus, rewind.

So much excitement over Tom Daley with his needles out, giving it a bit of knit one, purl one at the side of the pool.

Congratulations to Tom and his diving partner Matty Lee on their Olympic gold medal, very nice work indeed. However, headlines were not purely reserved for his sporting success, there was breathlessness about the fact the chap knits.

It's not news. Daley has an Instagram account where he details his craft projects, from a little pouch to keep his medal safe to a knock off Gucci dress for his pal.

At the end of the Games he revealed a rather dashing Olympic-themed knitted jacket with some very impressive embroidery.

But, while talented, he's Tom Daley, not Tom Ford.

Twice last week there were breathless radio segments discussing whether Daley had injected some pizzazz into knitting. Poor old knitting. You take a ball of long, flaccid nothing, two skinny sticks and you turn it into a useful item. Isn't that pizzazzy enough?

It isn't, and I'll tell you why. Knitting still has the reputation of being something done by grannies. A pasttime routinely done by women is suddenly interesting and reinvigorated because a man's doing it.

We went through this in 2013 when Ryan Gosling mentioned that he likes to knit. It would, he said at the time, be his perfect day - knitting from morning til evening and having a keepsake at the end of it. "An oddly shaped, off-putting scarf," he said, likely underselling his talents.

On one of those radio segments there was a representative from a purveyor of wool who informed listeners that even the women of Bletchley Park - code breakers, no less, serious people - used to knit. Of course they did, there was a war on.

The suggestion was that we might be intrigued and surprised that knitting wasn't only done by wives and mothers forced into drudgery.

On the other segment there was a chap who loves to knit, has done so his whole life. Now he knits for money, making hats he sells. He told the presenter how he only recently has worked up the gumption to knit in public because over the years he's found people judge him. A double take here, a pointed comment there.

He likes to take his knitting on holiday but he sits in the hotel room to do it.

Tired old gender stereotypes, clinging on. It's not newsworthy that a man likes to knit. It should be entirely unremarkable for a man to knit, sew or crochet as his heart desires.

Knitting still has an image problem, hooked on the fact it's seen as a hobby done by women. Not just women, old women and housewives - the worst, most easily dismissed kind.

It's an ancient skill that has travelled across continents, refining and progressing into a workaday skill fallen out of favour. The V&A has a pair of socks in its collection from Egypt that date from the 3rd to 5th century AD.

All the way from there. knitting became a vital accomplishment for any refined lady and a suitable way for a gentlewoman to earn money. My mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and the women gone before them could all knit. I am a modern failure, the first in the line to be useless at it.

If I learned now, as some of my peers have, it would not be because it's a prosaic skill akin to learning to darn or cook, but because it's become a hipster pasttime. Cool, but in a sort of ironic way.

Of course it's a boon that Tom Daley is an ambassador for knitting, but not because he's a man - because he's good at it and he shows it can be fun as well as useful and meditative.

Being interested in a subject because a man's doing it but we think of it as a women's work is just reinforcing stale gender stereotypes, and haven't we all had enough of that.

Certainly I have - it really rips my knitting.