Welcome To Your Renaissance

Well now, one minute I was fretting about whether Father Christmas had managed to stuff Finn’s stocking with all that a nineteen year old man-boy could desire and the next, in the flash of a reindeer’s nose, it was over and I have oh too promptly reached the stage of the festivities when I would like a steamroller to come through the house and banish all elements of the season so I can hurtle into the new year!

It has been the quietest Christmas...

I cannot tell you how often I find myself sitting listening to conversations about ageing, empty nests and all the associated delights of the menopause with my friends lately. How often we sit and compare notes about the way we feel about ourselves and our tomorrows. The odd sense that life is over and is somehow now is only just beginning?

I listen and the same thought goes through my head constantly. That we have been stuck in necessary stagna...

While I do adore layering the house in Christmas, there is something deliciously cathartic about its undressing in the New Year, and as this year I want January to signify perhaps more than it has in the years gone by, this week I set about creating The New Year House, the sixth in my Seasonal House series and a gentle, calm guide to embracing renewal and domestic renaissance (my 2023 word of the year!).

Slightly longer and more in depth than my...

It’s been an odd few weeks. As if the reality of what life will now be like has finally hit home and I find myself not quite knowing what I am for. Of course, life itself is going on: Finn appears home a few times a week with news of new girlfriends and WWE kerfuffles and the cat has either learned how to open the fridge or I am living with a relentlessly hungry home intruder. Damn him and his yearning for mozzarella.

And me? I’m quiet and muddl...

BROCANTEHOME TURNED 18 LAST WEEK AND I QUITE FORGOT TO MENTION IT, BECAUSE IN MY PERPETUAL MUDDLE I WOULD FRANKLY FORGET TO PUT MY TEETH IN IF THEY WEREN’T FIRMLY ROOTED IN MY OVER-MOUTHY GOB.

Eighteen years of frills and Finn and stress and frolics and lavender and laundry! How in the name of all things heckity pie have you been putting with me? And hells bells what would I have done without you? You have been a pebble beach full of the rocks I...

Welll now, I think you should now that what turned out to be the astonishing peace of the empty nest was abruptly disrupted when my little fledgling decided five days was long enough to be away and came home to nurse his fresher’s hangover and have his washing done!

And though I rushed to pick him up and had to stop myself from jumping out of the car in the pouring rain and showering him in kisses as he lumbered towards me lugging his laundry an...

Well, I said I would be back in September and while obviously I meant at the very beginning of the month, instead of on this, the 28th, consider me skidding my way to the finish line by the skin of my teeth after what turned out to be a hectic, emotional month, regardless!

So, what’s new? My baby left home and I have got him safely installed in a lovely little university hall flat, which five days later he assures me, is already in absolute chao...

August has arrived and the time has come for me to down tools and take my annual month long holiday away from BrocanteHome.

As you know the past twelve months have been uniquely horrible for me and though I am doing my absolute best to keep going, if I’m totally honest, I’m exhausted and my focus has gone astray as I try to stitch life back together and prepare Finley for university in September.

So as I do every year, I am going to say goodbye...

I have written a few of these posts over the years, and thought it was time for another to reflect on who I am now, at fifty.  Because here I am: older and no wiser at all.

1. I have discovered that having a lady beard is a full time job. Me and my tweezers are best mates.
2. I still can’t stand hearing people breathe. I want to stab them. It’s an issue really.
3. I never sit in direct sunlight. Ever. And if you make me, I moan. A lot.
4. Watching me e
...

I was once crazy head over heels in love with a lovely man who told me that he showered in the dark because he couldn’t bear to look at himself and I remember feeling incredulous. Here was a face I could stare at for hours. A body I adored. And he hated himself.

For a long time I pondered on the discrepancy between who he thought he was and what I saw and I felt bewildered by it, because my self-esteem was high and crucially I liked myself and t...

In Japan, the word akēru means “to pierce, to end, to begin” – the aftermath of something broken making room for something new to blossom like so many cherry trees. And it is this I am embracing now – filling the space created by what is gone, with new ways of being, new rituals, new friends.

And I want you to know that it is astonishing. Initially, of course, it is terrifying: the fear so all encompassing it feels like the deepest, most caverno...

And so I have had to let him go and there is no point talking about it because it has been confusing, terrible and so very, very sad, but at the end of seven years I have no regrets at all because I loved Ste and I still want the very best for him because I know that the only person he is deliberately hurting is himself.

Seven weeks on, I am different. I mean obviously I am still the same: in fact I remain bonkers and have just poured some dry c...

I am wandering around the house in bright red lipstick. A mad bow in my hair and my floaty kimono wafting around me as I skip down the stairs, narrowly avoiding killing myself because my lovely Meep, a carpet of a cat, insists on rolling on each step as I try to get to the front door in all my lipsticked glory, laughing and cursing him as I swing the door open and dazzle the window cleaner.

He stares at me in surprise. It is eight o’clock in the...

So there I was charging along on my treadmill, doing a little giddy dance inside my head as I reached my personal best without having a coronary, while merrily listening to a rather strange book. Yup right there in that moment, all was well (and all shall be well), and I felt, momentarily, as if I had something to be proud of, giving myself a little pat on the back for managing, (and not stringing anyone up or hanging myself from the ceiling fan)...

People are so very kind. It simply never ceases to astonish me how when my world falls down in this way, so many step in to cradle me with concern, wanting so very much to understand and being careful with their opinions as they know I am not yet ready to hear what is I suppose a universal truth: I have done enough now.