Welcome To Your Renaissance

There is I think a kind of pregnant pause peculiar to the end of February. All of us, runners crouched at Spring’s starting line, eager and somewhat quietly desperate for the whistle that says, NOW, now you can live again! Go!

Imagine then washing lines swaying and doors flung open to banish the stale of Winter. Lemons scenting the kitchen instead of the warming spices of the season now almost bidding us adieu. Imagine walks that don’t demand st...

Friday night. My plans are cancelled and my eyes tired and dry. So after lying rather dramatically across the sofa with a hot flannel on my face in an effort to revive them, I decided to throw myself a little old time Alison party in compensation. A festival of fairly lights and lemon and mint soda, a woozy, odd, ephemeral Australian drama, floaty pyjamas and a swipe of Dr. Lipp’s Nipple Balm across my lips as it is the only thing soothing them a...

I feel as though I am about to tell you something you already know. Or at least something you should already know?

You see to start our journey through each and every one of the mandates in the BrocanteHome Manifesto, here in my Love Letters, I am choosing the one thing that everything else depends on.

 Something so very important, and something far too many have us have allowed to crumble into dust; something children understand and perhaps th...

If I was a butterfly I would be the kind who spends most of her days tight in her cocoon, only occasionally popping out to flutter her wings through the night skies, before retreating to swipe off the make up and exist in her cosy bubble thereafter, happy with her lot and pleased to have enjoyed the walls beyond her hidey hole, but always glad to make her way back within them.

But then sometimes life gets all kinds of silly busy and this butterf...

I got myself in a muddle yesterday. Dwelling on what the world is becoming. How frightening everything seems. How much anger there seems to be bubbling under the surface of almost everything. How resentful we are. How conflicted by media, politics and the looming, slightly wonderful threat that is surely AI. How the world has become so very exhausting for women. How hard we are having to fight for almost everything. How sad it is that our right t...

Hi, Welcome Back to The Love Letter. Last week in the first edition of your commitment to your own Renaissance, I talked about why now is the right time to make your body your hobby, and today I want to finetune that advice and offer you a place to start - a list of to-do's to gently shift your mindset away from the busywork of life, towards something grounded deeply within you.

You see I know you imagine that making your body your hobby will be...

Well now I’m having an odd and somewhat sad week, and so rather than dwell on it, as always creating even more Brocante ease and joy is the answer.

So in my on going efforts to streamline everything I do here, last night and frankly stupidly early this morning, I took up Amazon’s invitation to open an Influencer store (Ha ha, me an influencer. I can barely influence my self, let alone the rest of you!) and lo and behold BrocanteHome Loves was bo...

One of the biggest lessons I am taking away from my fiftieth year is that the years we spend in fallow, or indeed Wintering are just as important as those years in which we experience the kind of growth that sprinkles joy over our future. That there are indeed periods in our lives that if cannot get around, we must get through, but that there is huge difference between fallowing and going to seed in the meantime.

One of the things I value most highly here at BrocanteHome is that so many of us have reached today together. Eighteen lovely years of knowing and growing side by side. Our paths quite different but the emotional framework of our lives so very much the same. An honour I will never stop adding to my daily gratitude list.

I started BrocanteHome when Finn was one, and he is now nineteen! It was of course at the very beginning of blogging as a way o...

I had quite forgotten how long winter lasts. How interminable the nights can seem and how January rolls into February and there still seems so very much of it left. Before Christmas there is much to do and then there is nothing and the nights stretch ahead, getting shorter as Spring dips her toe into still frozen waters, but still needing the curtains closed upon them once dusk settles if I am not to be watched by passer’s by looking in as if I h...

The sky is a creamy blue and the rooves dusted with icing sugar. And in here, in the flocked walls of home, I have been quite certain that the whole world has fled to warmer shores and forgot to tell me, so isolated do I feel. But isolation isn’t necessarily a terrible thing is it? Though we want to bind alone to lonesome, they are different and it is quite possible to regard isolation as a gift: a temporary state we might just miss when it passe...

Welcome to my first love letter: my hopes and dreams, guidance and inspiration  packaged in to one encouraging email and sent with a spritz of perfume and a velvet ribbon so that you can tuck it away in your comfort drawer and read it again whenever you need reminding that YOU matter.

Most of you know me from the eighteen years I have been writing at Brocantehome, and in that time I have gone from she who created the term "vintage housekeeping" ...

I have lost my voice again. I open my mouth and nothing comes out, though the words exist fully formed and spoken. I have lost my voice and somehow found it: a clarity I have not been afforded in the past twelve months and have now discovered in this odd, liminal period of waiting. But it is yet, all in my head. Words jammed there like so many tumbling marbles.

I have been struck dumb like this too many times. If we are too believe in the power ...

My sister gave me a walnut box for Christmas, filled with tiny little somethings: fortunes cookies and teeny golden shoes, Lady Macbeth’s soap (out damned spot) and a literary tea-towel, a tiny tin of Alice In Wonderland mints, old (and silly!)postcards. a Sylvia Plath finger puppet, and a 1935 edition of The Woman’s Weekly Bedside Book.

While I was totally enchanted by it all, it was of course the book that thrilled me, filled as it is with the...

One of the things that I am committed to seeking is awe. That mysterious emotion we cannot chase but have to happen across. An emotion that stops us in our tracks, and forces us to step out of our own heads and let a sense of wow take over. And it isn’t always astonishing sunrises or other gifts from Mother Nature we all too often take for granted, but is instead, for me at least, found in the kind of talent that says hear me, see me, find yourse...