For many women of my generation, jam-making has always seemed like the ultimate expression of domestic drudgery. My mother, who came of age in the late Sixties, would far rather spend September soaking up the last of the summer’s rays with a gin and tonic than slaving over a hot pot, skimming off froth and washing endless sticky muslins.

For her generation, jam-making was an activity that only bored housewives on Valium and the fiercer members of the Women’s Institute indulged in. It was laborious, exhausting, just another redundant domestic activity that she was only too glad to be shot of.

How curious then, that in this fully liberated age, home-made jams appear to be enjoying a resurgence. Waitrose reports a boom in sales of preserving accoutrements, plums (up 140 per cent) and preserving sugar (181 per cent). Moreover, the most commonly downloaded recipe on its website is for jam — crab apple, to be specific. There’s a fine line between old-fashioned and retro-chic, and jam-making appears to have crossed it.

It is part of a wider trend for domestic nostalgia. At the end of last year, the WI reported a 60 per cent rise in interest for its cake-making courses; now it is hoping for a sell-out edition of its new WI Book of Preserves. This year at B&Q, sales of fruit trees have doubled, while sales of strawberry plants are up a scrumptious 60 per cent.

According to a survey by YouGov, 74 per cent of allotment owners are either already growing or planning to grow fruit — and even the urbanites are getting in on the act, with 18 per cent of flat-dwellers replacing flowers with fruit in their window boxes.

At Lakeland, the ever-popular home wares catalogue, sales of preserving equipment have taken off hugely. This year alone the company has sold more than half a million jam jars and over 300,000 lids (an increase of nearly 40 per cent compared with last year).

Overall, preserving is proving to be such a growth area that Lakeland recently reintroduced the old-fashioned Kilner jars to its range. Last year, when it launched an electric jam-maker, it sold out immediately, resulting in a four-week waiting list. A waiting list? For a jam-maker? It’s as though feminism never happened.

There is no official explanation for this outbreak of domestic goddesses (or gods: the figures don’t tell us how many gentleman jam-makers are out there), but conventional wisdom would immediately point to the economic downturn, and the very real need for families to save money.

Personally, I’m not so sure. If you think about it, it’s not as though buying a pot of jam from a supermarket is prohibitively expensive — not yet, at any rate. Making the stuff yourself, on the other hand, can lead to a substantial financial outlay. By the time you’ve bought the jars, the muslins, the waxed jam-pot covers, the special jelly strainer set and goodness knows what other gadgets catch your eye, you’d probably have enough money for a year’s supply of Bonne Maman. What you wouldn’t have, of course, is a lovely, warm feeling of self-sufficiency.

So while there may indeed be a financial root to this trend, it is also a lifestyle choice, fuelled by a desire to return to a simple, more wholesome life.

And it really is in the air: it’s come to something when even I, who could no more identify a setting point than ride bareback in a Texan rodeo, find myself harbouring fond fantasies of presenting friends and family with pretty jars of glistening fruit this Christmas, in place of the usual shop-bought tat. You have been warned.

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