Welcome To Your Renaissance

Well now. You know who you go into something imagining it will be one way and it turns out to be something entirely different? You start off painting a room and when you are done it looks absolutely nothing like the way you pictured it, but you start putting the room back together regardless and as you add each piece, and hang each picture, all of a sudden it is a million times better than you had visualised??

Well yes, that. That is what happen...

Today, in a throwback to the way things were, Finley has got fatface and I am confined to barracks creating the kind of scrambly egg and mashed potato he can swallow and trying not to laugh as he stalks up and down the kitchen quietly livid about not being able to get up to his usual daily shenanigans, until he laughs at himself and hugs me and bashes his fatface on mine and growls all over again.

Oh we do have fun!

 And so I am here pottering....

 Well now, it is usually around about this time of year that I announce my August break because my little one is off for the Summer holidays and requires my attention, but this year my little one has become a big one and has been home from university since the end of May and if I took all the time off he would like me to have (his jealousy of my laptop is I think well-documented), why I do believe I would have to sign myself off until mid-October...

 What if today was the day you did all the things that are scratching the back of your mind?  What if instead of dwelling you started doing? What if you made a list of all the things you could do to make life feel better TODAY, not tomorrow, or some day, or three months next Tuesday, but right here and right now, and then spent the rest of the afternoon, ticking things off?

What if today is the day you decide to say sorry. To be the bigger perso...

And then the child arrived home and the battle was lost. And the house was lost and I was lost and he was found. Found everywhere. In the spare room where everything he owns is piled almost to the ceiling. And in the living room where bizarrely he steps out of his clothes and leaves them in a puddle. In the hallway where shoes and rucksacks and random books pile up and in the kitchen where he makes midnight snacks and then apparently throws them ...

One of the things I want you to know about my Renaissance is that it is not all plain sailing. That sometimes it plunges me into the kind of abyss cunningly disguised as a daisy sprinkled meadow and when I find myself spiralling down a craggy hole, I no longer try to grasp at the tangled branches of its walls, but instead just let myself fall, because once I hit rock bottom I know the only way is back up.

Last weekend a man I have long respected...

I had the oddest of nights last night. I had cancelled an evening out because it was hot. Well no, of course I can't possibly come out tonight, it is sweltering. Are you an ACTUAL idiot? But thank you kindly, truly, madly, deeply. I like you most sincerely.

Now where were we? Ah yes, it was hot. The type of stupid hot that makes your blood sizzle and the walls sweat. The sort that has got the cat flaking in a dead swoon as he wanders across the ...

Wander around any Mediterranean village early on a summer morning and you will see housewives in floral headscarves brushing their steps and paths with a vigour I have never applied to anything.

There is something deliciously ritualistic about this greeting to the sun that I adore. Essential housework acknowledged without frippery or fuss. And while I try for the most part to stick to a routine, it isn’t done with quite the same earnest nod to t...

N.B My lovelies: The Sale was due to end tomorrow but as I moved sites in the middle of it it seems only fair to extend it for another week, so that now you can see how everything links together in the Library you will have a better idea of why it might just be the best idea EVER to grab your Library ticket today before my prices double and the Lifetime ticket vanishes...

Here's all the details...

Oh yes, it’s that time of year again! The Summe...

You have asked, so I have sat in the pickling heat bringing back the original BrocanteHome Calendar just for you (because you asked so nicely!)

You will probably have noticed that everything is now almost completely streamlined here on the site (boring backend stuff I'm sure you won't care about!) and that meant that I needed to find a way both to help you understand the flow of the routines and rituals I share with you here and point you to all...

I am going to turn in to a tub of Greek yoghurt. I live on the stuff and lately I have been dabbling with turning it into bagels and muffins and chucking it willy-nilly on this, that and everything else. I’ve never (thankfully) managed to cultivate a true addiction to anything at all but I am prone to foody fads and for a while nothing else will do beyond my latest obsession. I used to feel the same about cucumber. And latterly pineapples. Though...

Heavens its been a heck of a month. First came Covid and then I scraped (SCRAPED!!) an eye-pencil across my waterline and did myself a terrible damage, resulting in a number of visits to a much perplexed casualty and two weeks of one eye getting yukkier and blinder by the day, so I had to sport an eye patch (and greet me hearties with a parrot on my shoulder), until it was discovered that it was more than the tear they thought it was and was inst...

When we decide to commit to our own Renaissance, we are saying to ourselves, we are still possible. We are more than the sum of our mid-life parts, we are in fact a kaleidoscope of experiences, wisdom, knowledge and emotion we can decide to bring to all that we do from this day onwards.

But I know that sometimes it feels like we are treading water with feet tangled in the reeds of the stream. Stuck. Destined to watch life floating past us with o...

In all fairness I would have been happy with a Thorntons egg with my name piped on it, but no, this year the Easter bunny went the extra mile and brought me a dose of Covid as an extra special treat and I became a woman in possession of a sick person’s bedside table.

Oh yes. For a day or two my bedside was preposterously piled high with all the accoutrements necessary to overnight survival when a person gets to feeling a tad weird but decides we...

Well now, it’s as though I was ambling through a quiet Winter apparently destined to last forever and then boom, Spring arrived and life started running amok. AMOK I tell you!

I’ve been hither and thither, with people in and out the house, a child back from university with what must surely be all seven of his flatmate’s laundry, a garden that looks like a jungle and a house apparently determined to do her own thing and showcase her shabby side a...

The flowers are wilting now but they were beautiful while they lasted. (How true that is of too many things). A hand-painted glass jug Mum and I found the one and only time I can remember her being in a charity shop, a jug we tussled over and she claimed, but which would eventually be mine to fill with a rainbow of roses exhausted by the heat from the radiator.

On the kitchen windowsill, a wild bouquet, fancier than it has the right to be with t...