The Commonplace: Edition No:6

This week, The Commonplace takes us all back to our Brocante roots, with a nostalgic list of terribly old-fashioned little pleasures, from sweet peas, to Victoria sponges, swirly dresses and more. All the tiny somethings that used to consume my days when I lived in my little cottage when Finn was tiny. If you are reading this, you too probably own at least three floral aprons, grow sweet peas and can throw together a delicious pie faster than most can pour a bowl of cereal. But we are not delusional, over-romanticising the past, or escaping our own reality, we have simply decided, with full and cheerful awareness of our own absurdity, that pretty joys are still values worth defending in a world that keeps trying to make everything utilitarian and grey.

So welcome to one hundred ways to make life feel prettier. Books from the golden age of domestic fiction, recipes for the kind of food that should always be eaten outside on a blanket, bathroom rituals involving rose water and very old soap, ideas for dresses and hair and the sweet scent of roses and lavender. All of it slightly impractical. All of it completely worth it, for joys sake!

The first twenty-five are for everyone. The rest are for the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. The door is, as always, open.

1. Buy sweet peas. Not for any reason except that they are the prettiest flowers available between June and August and they smell like the word delicate made botanical. They require a vase with a narrow neck and a windowsill with morning light and absolutely nothing else. If you have never grown them yourself, next year buy a packet of Matucana seeds in January and push them into compost in February and by July you will have more than you know what to do with. The growing is not the point. The cutting and bringing inside is.

2. READ: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (1938). A dowdy governess stumbles into the glamorous life of a nightclub singer for one extraordinary day in 1930s London. Funny, warm, entirely charming, and containing within it a quiet argument that beauty and pleasure are not frivolous but necessary and that the woman who reaches for them, even impractically, even improbably, is doing something important. Published, forgotten, and republished in 2000 to immediate and well-deserved delight. Miss Pettigrew is all of us.

3. RECIPE: Proper cucumber sandwiches, made the correct way, which is to say: white bread, thinly sliced, crusts removed, very cold unsalted butter applied so thickly it is almost embarrassing, cucumber peeled and sliced on the diagonal so thin you can see through it, a very small amount of white wine vinegar, salt, and white pepper. Cut into fingers. Arranged on a plate lined with a paper doily if you have one and not mad about it if you don’t. Eaten immediately before the bread has time to become the wrong texture.

4. RITUAL: The morning face wash with cold water and a bar of proper soap. Not a gel, a foam, a balm or anything that comes from a pump dispenser with a Scandi-minimal label. A bar of soap in a proper soap dish, something with lavender or rose or violet or nothing at all except glycerine. Maybe buy a bar of Pears and transport yourself back to your childhood? Then wash your face with cold water and nostalgia every morning this week…

5. Grow something in a pot on a windowsill that you can eat. Not for self-sufficiency purposes. For the specific prettiness of a terracotta pot of herbs on a kitchen windowsill, which is one of the most reliably pleasant domestic sights available and has been since the Romans. Basil, thyme, a small rosemary, a pot of chives with their purple flowers left to develop because the flowers are edible and extremely pretty on a salad. The pot does not have to be terracotta, but I think it helps enormously if it is?

6. READ: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by Cleone Knox, which purports to be the diary of an eighteenth-century girl but is almost certainly the work of a young Irishwoman called Magdalen King-Hall, who was twenty-two when it was published in 1925 and apparently enjoyed the conceit enormously. But it doesn’t matter. It is witty, warm, full of descriptions of dresses and assemblies and country house visits and the particular comedy of a woman navigating society with intelligence, style and ludicrously memorable lines like: “Men are such Damnable Fools, there us no saying what they will do in a fury!”

7. RECIPE: Victoria sponge, made correctly, which means equal weights of eggs, butter, sugar and flour, beaten by hand or by mixer until pale and airy, baked in two tins at 180 degrees for twenty-five minutes, cooled completely before filling with whipped cream and the best strawberry jam you can find. The sponge should be served on a plate that is slightly too beautiful for the occasion, dusted with icing sugar applied through a small sieve, and eaten in the garden if the weather permits.

8. BATHROOM RITUAL: The rosewater splash. Keep a bottle of triple-strength rosewater, the kind from a Middle Eastern grocer (or Tesco in the cosmetics aisle, no really) in the bathroom cabinet. After washing your face, pour a small amount into your palms and press it against your face and neck and breathe in for three seconds. The smell of it is the smell of a bathroom that belongs to a woman who takes small pleasures seriously.

9. Buy a floral apron and wear it without irony. Cos-play for homemakers…

10. READ: Miss Read’s Thrush Green series, beginning with Thrush Green (1959). A village, its inhabitants, the slow turning of the seasons, a doctor, a schoolmistress, a vicar’s wife, several gardens, and the particular quality of life in a small community where everyone knows each other’s business and everyone is, underneath the gossip, essentially kind. Miss Read (pen name of Dora Saint) wrote thirty-three books about Thrush Green and its neighbouring village Fairacre. They are comfort reading of the highest order and contain within them a quietly radical argument that the small, local, domestic life is as worthy of literature as any other.

11. RECIPE: Potted shrimps on toast, made with brown shrimps from Morecambe Bay if you can find them, warmed gently in a great deal of butter with a pinch of mace, a pinch of cayenne, a little nutmeg, and tipped into small ramekins to set. Turned out onto hot brown toast with a wedge of lemon and eat at the kitchen table or, ideally, outside at a table covered with a cloth. J’adore…

12. HAIR RITUAL: A weekly hair oil treatment, applied the old-fashioned way. Warm a tablespoon of sweet almond oil or coconut oil between your palms, work it through dry hair from mid-length to ends, wrap your hair in a warm towel that has been held briefly over a radiator, and leave it for forty-five minutes while doing something pleasant. Read. Listen to something. Sit in the garden if the temperature allows. The oil treatment is not primarily about the hair, though the hair will be the better for it. It is about the forty-five minutes of deliberate, unapologetic doing nothing, occupied with the specific pleasure of attending to oneself.

13. Find a vintage tablecloth at a car boot sale or a charity shop or on eBay and use it for picnics. Not the wipe-clean kind. A proper cotton one, ideally with a printed pattern of some sort, cherries or checks or a faded floral, slightly worn at the folds from decades of previous use, and carrying in its fibres the memory of a hundred other afternoons on a hundred other lawns.

14. READ: Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson (1932). The diary of a British army wife in 1930s Scotland, managing a small household, a pair of children, and a series of social situations with a wit and warmth and complete inability to take herself seriously that makes it one of the funniest domestic novels of the century. Mrs Tim Carries On is the second in the series and possibly even better.

15. RECIPE: Strawberry jam, made in July when the strawberries are the correct kind of ridiculous, which is to say plentiful and slightly past their best for eating raw and absolutely at their peak for jam. Equal weights of fruit and sugar, the fruit hulled and halved, the sugar warmed in the oven, the two combined in a wide heavy pan, brought to a rolling boil and tested on a cold saucer for set. Ladled into warmed jars and labelled in your best handwriting. Then kept on a shelf where it looks, for the rest of the year, like evidence that you are the kind of woman who makes jam. So yeah, move over Meghan.

16. BEDROOM RITUAL: Fresh flowers on the dressing table. Not necessarily expensive ones, not even necessarily from a florist. Whatever is available and pretty: a stem of cow parsley in a small bottle, three sweet peas in a bud vase, a handful of lavender tied with a piece of ribbon, two stems of white allium. The dressing table with a small vase of something seasonal on it is one of the prettiest domestic arrangements available and it costs between nothing and three pounds and changes the character of the room entirely. This should happen every week without fail from April to October. Make it domestic law.

17. Wear a dress on a day you would normally wear something functional. Not for a special occasion, not for work, or for anyone in particular, but for the pleasure of moving through your own house and garden in something that swirls, something with a print, something that makes you feel, when you catch your own reflection in the kitchen window, like the heroine of your own story rather than a supporting character in everyone else’s. A summer dress worn in the garden while doing ordinary things is one of the small and entirely available pleasures of being a woman. Just make sure it has pockets, obvs.

18. READ: The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann (1936). Olivia, divorced, living in a bedsit in London, falls into a love affair with a married man and the novel follows the whole of it, the beginning and the middle and the end, with a closeness and an honesty that was almost shocking in 1936 and remains completely, uncomfortably real. I have long regarded Lehmann as one of the great under-read novelists of the century and this is her best.

19. RECIPE: Lemon drizzle cake: a loaf cake made with the zest of two lemons in the batter, baked until golden and immediately, while still hot, pierced all over with a skewer and soaked with a mixture of lemon juice and caster sugar that seeps into every hole and sets into a sugary crust on the top. Eaten slightly warm with a cup of properly made tea. Kept wrapped in baking paper in a tin. (Nb: Gets better on the second day, and perfectly ripe on the third).

20. SCENT: The classic English floral perfume is not lavender, which is too medicinal in its undiluted state, and not rose, which everyone expects, but sweet pea, which almost nobody makes successfully, and the reason for that is fascinating: the actual flower produces a stress hormone when cut that destroys its own fragrance, which is why every sweet pea perfume is an interpretation rather than an extraction, a perfumer's best guess at something that refuses to be bottled. When the guess is good it smells exactly right: light, slightly powdery, vanishing before you have fully apprehended it, so pretty it is almost impossible not to smile. Look for Jo Malone's English Pear and Sweet Pea, or Demeter's Sweet Pea.

21. Get a wicker basket for shopping. Not an insulated bag, or a tote bag with something written on it, and definitely not a supermarket bag for life, ye-gads! A proper wicker basket with a handle, large enough to carry vegetables and a small loaf of bread, light enough to carry on one arm, beautiful enough to hang on the back of a kitchen door when not in use.

22. READ: The Provincial Lady in Wartime by E.M. Delafield (1940). The funniest and most human of the Provincial Lady series, in which our heroine attempts to contribute to the war effort with the same cheerful competence and self-deflating humour she brings to everything else.

23. RECIPE: Egg and cress sandwiches, made with the crustiest granary bread you can find, hard-boiled eggs mashed with just enough mayonnaise to bind, a small amount of English mustard, salt, white pepper, and a generous amount of mustard and cress grown in a tray on the kitchen windowsill specifically for this purpose…

24. BATHROOM RITUAL: A proper bath, once a week, made into the occasion it deserves to be. Not a quick one. A bath filled deep and hot with a handful of Epsom salts, which cost £2 from any chemist and soften the water in a way that expensive bath oils approximate but do not equal. A few drops of neroli or ylang ylang added for the scent. A good book propped on the bath rack if you have one, a folded towel on the rim if you don’t. A glass of something cold on the floor beside the bath. The room heated before you get in. No phone. The bath this week as a ritual rather than a function, which means: no hurrying, no thinking about what comes next, no checking anything. Simply the hot water and the quiet and the specific luxury of a warm room and nothing required.

25. (NOTE): The romanticisation of daily life is not delusional. It is not naive. It is not the province of women who have not read enough or thought enough or suffered enough. It is a philosophical choice, made in full awareness of everything that is difficult, to insist that beauty is worth attending to and that the pretty dress worn in the garden on an ordinary afternoon is not a distraction from the serious business of living. It is the serious business of living. The woman who makes a Victoria sponge and arranges sweet peas in a vase and reads a novel on a rug in the garden is not escaping her life. She is furnishing it. This is the whole argument. It fits on a Post-it note.

The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers. The door is open.

26. READ: High Wages by Dorothy Whipple (1930). Oe of my favourite books ever. A young woman in a draper’s shop in a northern town who works and saves and persists until she has the life and the shop she imagined for herself. It’s honestly wonderful and I do believe it should be on the shelf of every woman who has ever made something from almost nothing through sheer refusal to stop.

27. RECIPE: Syllabub, made the old way with a glass of white wine, the juice of a lemon, two tablespoons of caster sugar, and a pint of double cream, whipped together until it forms soft, billowing, slightly boozy peaks that hold their shape but only just. Spooned into your best glasses. Kept cold. Eaten with shortbread fingers on a summer evening as a pudding that requires no cooking, no oven, no particular skill, and produces the impression of considerable effort and elegance.

28. Collect pretty tins. Not to hoard. To use: for the biscuits, the loose-leaf tea, the pins and buttons, the dried herbs, the miscellaneous small things that otherwise accumulate in drawers developing a vague sense of disorder. A good tin collection on a kitchen shelf or a bathroom windowsill is one of those domestic arrangements that looks as though it has been there forever, because the best tins have a quality of having always existed, of being found rather than bought. Crawford’s vintage biscuit tins on eBay. Twinings centenary editions. Any tin with a floral or botanical print from any era. Collect them slowly and use them daily.

29. HAIR: Learn to do one vintage hair style properly. Maybe not the full victory roll, but something from the same aesthetic universe: a soft chignon pinned loosely at the nape of the neck with a few pieces left out around the face. A side-parted wave set the night before with large velcro rollers and combed out in the morning. Or a simple braid with a ribbon woven through it. The effort required is fifteen minutes.

30. READ: Greenery Street by Denis Mackail (1925). A young married couple move into a small house in a London street and the novel follows their first year there, domestic comedy at its most charming, completely preoccupied with the small pleasures and irritations of setting up a home together. Long out of print, recently reissued by Persephone Books, and one of those novels that does the very rare thing of making ordinary domestic happiness feel as though it is exactly sufficient…

31. RECIPE: Potted cheese, which is the most useful and underused thing in the English food canon. Take whatever hard cheese you have that is getting slightly dry, crumble or grate it into a bowl, add a generous amount of softened unsalted butter, a teaspoon of English mustard, a splash of port or sherry, a pinch of cayenne, a grating of nutmeg. Beat it all together until smooth and pack it into a small pot or ramekin. Serve it at room temperature on oatcakes or toast with pickles alongside. It is the thing to produce when someone arrives unexpectedly, the thing to eat at a picnic, and the thing to make when the cheese board has become tired. It improves in the fridge over two days and keeps for a week. Yum.

32. Make paper doily bunting. A length of ribbon or twine, a packet of round cup-sized paper doilies, folded in half over the ribbon and secured with a dab of glue or a small stitch. Hung in the kitchen, across a window, along a shelf, or above a table set for something. Take it down when it becomes tired and make a new one, because doily bunting is the kind of domestic decoration that requires no budget, or particular skill, and produces a happy little string of pretty.

33. Buy proper notepaper and use it to write actual letters to people. Not cards, not emails, not WhatsApp voice notes. Letters on paper with envelopes and stamps, written in your best handwriting, sealed and sent to people who will be briefly and genuinely delighted to receive them because nobody does this anymore and it is a small, beautiful, entirely recoverable art…

34. READ: Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson (1934). A village woman of modest means writes a novel about her village and its inhabitants, thinly disguised, setting off a chain of comic consequences that are wonderfully and warmly resolved. Follow it with Miss Buncle Married, which is equally as good, and then with the rest of Stevenson’s forty-odd novels, because once you have started you won’t want to stop.

35. RECIPE: Raspberry buns, made the way they appeared in every school cookery book from 1920 to 1970: a scone-like dough enriched with a little extra butter and sugar, a teaspoon of baking powder, formed into rough rounds, a small hole pressed into the centre of each with your thumb, a teaspoon of raspberry jam placed in the hole, the edges pressed gently up around it, then baked at 190 degrees for fifteen minutes until golden and slightly jammy and smelling of something that could only be described as a proper afternoon. Eaten warm.

36. Bring back the powder puff. Not talcum powder in its commercial form, which has had a difficult decade scientifically, but a cornstarch-based body powder, either made at home by sifting cornstarch with a few drops of your favourite essential oil and a pinch of dried orris root to fix the scent, or bought from one of the small companies still making it properly. Apply with a large velvet puff to warm dry skin after a bath. The gesture of it, the cloud of scented powder, the softness left behind, is one of those domestic beauty rituals so completely out of fashion that doing it feels quietly, pleasurably subversive.

37. Set up a proper tea tray. Not a mug grabbed from a cupboard. A tray, a proper one, with a teapot that you have warmed first by filling it with hot water and emptying it, cups and saucers rather than mugs if you have them, a small jug of milk, a sugar bowl if you take sugar, a plate of something worth eating alongside. The tea tray is one of the oldest and most civilised domestic rituals available in England and has been largely replaced by the bag-in-a-mug approach, which is efficient and somewhat joyless. Restore the tray. Use it once a day. Carry it to wherever you intend to sit and receive it from yourself as a gift.

38. READ: The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson (1931). Three sisters living in bohemian near-poverty in 1930s London who have constructed, over years, an elaborate shared fantasy life involving real public figures and a cast of imaginary friends whom they have made so real that encountering them in ordinary life becomes genuinely complicated. Strange, funny, and unlike anything else.

39. RECIPE: Gooseberry fool, made with the first gooseberries of summer, which arrive in late June and are sour and plump and look like tiny watermelons and are one of the most underused fruits in English cooking. Top and tail them, cook them briefly with a very little water and two tablespoons of sugar until soft, push through a sieve, cool completely, fold into double cream whipped to soft peaks. The result is the colour of very pale seafoam, tastes of summer before it is properly summer, and should be eaten in small glasses with a thin shortbread beside it. Make more than you think you need. You will want more…

40. LISTEN: The soundtrack to Chocolat (2000, Rachel Portman). Not the film, though of course, it is lovely, but to the score alone, played on a Sunday morning while doing something slow and domestic, because Rachel Portman's scores have a quality of warmth and domesticity that very few film composers manage…

41. SCENT: Violet. The most literary of all English scents, worn by Edwardian women and by fictional heroines and by the kind of grandmother who kept a cut-glass bottle of something sweet on a mirrored dressing table. It is powdery and green and slightly strange and it smells, when it is good, like a wood in early April when the actual violets are doing their brief and easily-missed flowering under the hedges. Seek out a perfume with violet top-notes and wear it on a Summery day.

42. READ: Mariana by Monica Dickens (1940). A young woman grows up, goes to London, falls in love, makes mistakes, goes to a house in the country, and becomes gradually and entirely herself. Monica Dickens wrote with a directness and wit and complete absence of sentimentality that makes her domestic heroines feel more modern than heroines written seventy years later. One Pair of Hands, her memoir of working as a cook-general, is equally good and funnier. Both are in print. Both should be read on a wet weekend with a blanket and something warm.

43. RECIPE: Anchovy toast, which sounds less pretty than it is and tastes more extraordinary than it has any right to. Think the sadly no more Gentleman’s Relish, spread very thinly on hot brown toast cut into fingers and instead make do with a tin of anchovies laid across hot buttered toast with a squeeze of lemon and a little black pepper. Sophisticated nom.

44. BEDROOM RITUAL: The cold cream cleanse, conducted at the dressing table rather than the bathroom sink. A jar of proper cold cream, the old-fashioned kind that has been removing makeup and cleaning skin since Helena Rubinstein put it in a pot in 1902: Pond's Cold Cream at £4 from any chemist, which is the same formula it has always been and works as well as it always has. Massaged into the face in slow circles, removing the day completely, tissued off with a square of muslin or a soft cotton cloth, leaving the skin clean and faintly dewy in the way that no foaming cleanser has ever quite managed. The cold cream cleanse at the dressing table, by lamplight, is not a skincare routine, it’s a nightly ceremony of putting the day down and becoming, briefly and completely, just a woman at her mirror…

45. Plant a window box. Or revive the one that is currently a receptacle for dead compost and a single survivor of whatever was planted there in 2021. Trailing lobelia in blue and white. Geraniums in the geranium pink that is not quite red and not quite pink but completely itself. White bacopa for the froth of it. The window box in full flower is one of the most purely cheerful things a domestic exterior can offer and it costs under £15 for the plants in May and it should be done every year without fail.

46. READ: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey (1932). A young woman is about to marry a man she should not marry and the novel follows the morning of the wedding with a precision and dark comedy that is absolutely nothing like the cheerfulness its title promises. Extremely short, extremely good, beloved of Virginia Woolf, and one of those Persephone titles that makes you wonder how an entire century passed without it being studied in schools as a masterclass in observational writing.

47. RECIPE: Lavender shortbread, made with good butter, plain flour, caster sugar, and a teaspoon of culinary dried lavender, sold specifically for this purpose and which adds to the butter and sugar a floral note that is specific and unmistakeable and makes the shortbread taste exactly like eating something from a very good farm shop in a part of the country where they know what they are doing. Cut into hearts or fingers. Bake low and slow and pack into a floral tin.

48. RITUAL: The airing of the bedroom. Once a week, strip the bed completely, throw the windows open as wide as they will go, turn the mattress if you have the strength for it and the inclination if not, and leave the room to breathe for two hours while you do other things. Remake it with clean linen, the sheets pulled tight and tucked properly at the corners and get into it that night reminding yourself that you have given yourself something genuinely worth having.

49. GARDEN MEAL: A proper picnic, not the compromised kind assembled from supermarket meal-deal components in paper bags, but a prepared one, carried in a basket, eaten on a cloth spread on the ground. Sandwiches made at home in fingers, wrapped in greaseproof paper tied with string. A thermos of something hot. A tin of something sweet. Cold hard-boiled eggs with a twist of salt in a screw of paper. A small something for pudding: two pieces of shortbread, three plums, a handful of raspberries in a box. A picnic assembled with care and carried to wherever the weather is kindest is one of the great available pleasures and it is being lost to the delivery app. Let’s claim it back.

50. READ: The Priory by Dorothy Whipple (1939). A large house, a complicated family, and a series of romantic misadventures resolved with warmth and intelligence. Comfort reading at its best.

51. RECIPE: Elderflower cordial, made in late May or early June when the elder trees are in flower. Dilute with icy sparkling water and sip slowly in the garden because it is truly one of the things England does best. Make it once and every year for evermore after that.

52. BATHROOM RITUAL: The French women’s trick of cold water on the face after washing, which is not the ice-face-dunking of the internet wellness cycle but the simple splash of genuinely cold water for thirty seconds, which closes pores, brings colour to the skin, and produces an immediate and lasting sense of having woken up properly rather than drifted into the day via a screen. Follow it with a small amount of facial oil patted gently over the skin while it is still damp.

53. Press flowers, instead of fashioning dried flower arrangements, which have a certain Miss Havisham quality when not done well. Frame them behind glass in a simple clip frame, use to decorate the fronts of cards, or press into a journal alongside the date and a brief note about where they were picked. The only equipment required is a heavy book and time. The result, done well and framed simply, is one of the prettiest ways to capture memories and preserve the pretty…

54. READ: Saplings by Noel Streatfeild (1945). Four children during the Second World War, their parents, their house, the way the war disassembles a family and what is left. Streatfeild is known for Ballet Shoes and it is excellent, but Saplings is the book that shows what she could really do when she stopped writing for children and aimed the same precision and unsentimental warmth at an adult subject. Widely regarded as one of the most quietly devastating domestic novels of the century.

55. RECIPE: Scones, made with buttermilk rather than milk, which produces a tenderness and a slight tang that the standard recipe does not. Rubbed butter into flour until it resembles breadcrumbs, add a generous pinch of salt, a teaspoon and a half of baking powder, and enough buttermilk to bring it together into a soft dough that is not sticky. Patted out to an inch thick, cut with a cutter pressed straight down without twisting, brushed with egg wash, baked at 200 degrees for twelve minutes. Eaten within twenty minutes of coming out of the oven, split and spread with clotted cream and jam.

56. GARDEN MEAL: Afternoon tea in the garden, served on the kind of mismatched china that accumulates in any house that has been properly lived in, each cup from a different set, each plate slightly different from the others, the teapot not matching anything else on the table, the whole arrangement looking, in the afternoon light, like a painting by an artist who understood that the prettiest tables are never the ones that were professionally arranged. Sandwiches, scones, one cake. A proper pot of tea. Music from inside drifting out if the window is open. Nobody hurrying anywhere. This is the thing to do on Saturday in the summer and the thing to remember in the winter when Saturday is less accommodating…

57. Iron something. Not everything, not as a chore, but one thing, deliberately, as a ritual. A good blouse. A linen tablecloth taken from the cupboard specifically for ironing. A cotton dress that has been waiting for attention. The ironing board in a room with the radio on, the iron making its particular noise, the smell of hot clean cotton, the gradual transformation of something crumpled into something smooth and cared-for. This is not domesticity as oppression. This is domesticity as the specific pleasure of applying attention to an object until it becomes what it was meant to be. There is a kind of meditation available in the ironing board that other practices charge considerably more for.

58. And while you are at it: starch something. A cotton blouse collar, a linen tablecloth, a set of pillowcases, a cotton apron. Spray starch from any good ironmonger or online, applied to damp fabric before ironing, producing a crispness and a body and a specific smell, clean and slightly botanical, that fabric without starch simply does not have. The starched collar was the domestic standard for the better part of two centuries and it was abandoned not because it stopped working but because it required effort, which is the reason most good things get abandoned now really isn’t it? The effort involved is approximately four minutes. The result is a garment that holds its shape all day, resists staining, and smells specifically of a woman who irons things properly, which is a smell and a quality that the world has largely stopped producing and which is, for that reason, all the more worth recovering.

59. WATCH: Cranford (BBC, 2007). A small town in 1840s England, its women, its drawing rooms, its tea tables, its economies and its small dramas conducted with complete seriousness and considerable wit. Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Julia McKenzie and Imelda Staunton in a production so beautifully dressed and so perfectly lit and so completely inhabited by its cast that watching it feels less like television and more like being permitted to sit quietly in the corner of a room where something both giddy and slow is happening.

60. RECIPE: Iced gem biscuits, made at home, which sounds very ambitious and is actually not: a simple butter biscuit base made with butter, icing sugar, egg yolk and flour, rolled thin, cut into small rounds, baked at 170 degrees for ten minutes, completely cooled, then topped with stiff royal icing tinted in the palest possible pink and yellow and piped on in small rosettes using a star nozzle. Homemade are more beautiful than the shop-bought version, taste considerably better, and produce in every adult who encounters them the specific memory of childhood and penny sweets and things that were good before they had to be good for you too.

61. HAIR: Invest in a good natural-bristle hairbrush and use it properly. One hundred strokes before bed is the Victorian prescription and while one hundred is excessive, thirty is not, and the effect of a natural-bristle brush on hair that has been styled or tied up all day, distributing the natural oils from root to end, and producing a smoothness that no serum can quite replicate, is one of the small and entirely available pleasures of womanhood.

62. JOURNAL: Start a household book. A notebook kept specifically in the kitchen or the sitting room, not hidden away, in which you record the domestic life as it actually is: the recipe that worked and the adjustment you made. The name of the paint colour in the bedroom and where it was bought. The variety of sweet pea that did best this year. The date the first rose opened. What was served at the dinner party in September and whether the syllabub was a success. The household book was standard practice in any well-run English home from the sixteenth century onward and has been entirely displaced by phone notes and screenshots, which do the same job less beautifully and cannot be found in a drawer fifty years later by someone who wants to know what your life looked like from the inside. Write it by hand. Date every entry, and in twenty years it will feel precious…

63. RECIPE: A proper trifle, made in the largest glass bowl you own so that the layers are visible from the side: sponge fingers soaked in sherry (not orange juice, or elderflower, but proper sherry), spread with good raspberry jam, then a layer of raspberries, then proper egg custard made on the stove and cooled completely, then double cream whipped to very soft peaks, then, on top, the decoration which is the great creative freedom of trifle: crystallised violets, hundreds and thousands, silvered almonds, glacé cherries arranged in a pattern, or nothing at all except a dusting of something. Trifle made with care and kept cold and served in proper pressed glass trifle bowls really is the epitome of old fashioned desserty joy

64. RITUAL: Start collecting one small, specific, inexpensive thing and collect it with intention. Not generally, not vaguely, not whatever catches the eye. One thing: Victorian transferware in blue and white. Edwardian needle cases. Vintage tea strainers. Small ceramic animals of a particular period. Pressed glass butter dishes. The collection that has a defined subject is the collection that turns a Saturday morning at a car boot sale into a purposeful expedition, and produces over the years a gathering of objects so specific to your own taste and curiosity that it constitutes, without anyone having planned it that way, a self-portrait in miniature.

65. RITUAL: An afternoon of pottering, scheduled in the diary with the same seriousness as any other appointment and protected with equal firmness. Pottering is not tidying. It is not organising or decluttering or doing jobs. It is the specific activity of moving through your own home with no particular agenda, picking things up, putting them down in slightly better positions, noticing what is there, rearranging a shelf because the arrangement pleases you, finding the thing you had forgotten you owned, sitting for ten minutes in a room you normally only pass through, moving on when you feel like it and not before. An afternoon of pottering has no measurable output and produces the kind of contentment that is, among the most meaningful of domestic pleasures.

66. LISTEN: Nina Simone's Feeling Good, not as a power anthem, but played quietly, in the early morning, in the kitchen before anyone else is up, with the first cup of something hot and the light that belongs to the first twenty minutes of a day that has not yet been claimed by anything. It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me. Nina Simone didn’t sing small thoughts. She sang the largest possible version of every feeling she touched and Feeling Good is the largest possible version of the specific domestic feeling of a morning that belongs to you and a day that is, so far, entirely uncommitted and thus, still stuffed with the possibility of a whole host of tiny joys.

67. RITUAL: Take up embroidery. Not the complicated kind requiring a hoop the size of a cartwheel and seventeen colours of thread and a pattern that takes six months to complete. The simple kind: a small piece of linen, a needle, a skein of stranded cotton in one colour you love, a transferred design of something botanical, a sprig of lavender, a single rose, a bee, a small running stitch border around a tray cloth.

68. RITUAL: The weekend baking morning. Not every weekend, not as an obligation, but occasionally and with full commitment: a morning given over entirely to making something from scratch, with no particular hurry and the radio on and flour on the worktop and the smell of butter beginning to warm in the oven. A loaf. A cake. A batch of biscuits. The specific pleasure of baking is not the result, though the result is good, but the quality of the morning it produces: absorbed, present, smelling wonderful, producing something where there was previously nothing.

69. SCENT: Rose geranium, as a domestic scent rather than a personal one: a few drops of this heavenly essential oil in a diffuser or on a cotton wool ball on a warm radiator fills a room with something that is rosy and green and clean and faintly medicinal in the best possible way, the way that old-fashioned pharmacies used to smell before they became beauty halls. It is the scent of a domestic interior that is being attended to by someone who knows what she is doing. Be her.

70. Make a meadow in a pot. A large terracotta pot, filled with decent compost, sown thickly with a wildflower mix that includes cornflowers, poppies, ox-eye daisies, and field scabious. Watered and left in a sunny spot and thinned once. By midsummer it will be a small and perfect chaos of colour that looks like a piece of a field has been lifted and placed specifically on your doorstep or patio or balcony. The meadow pot costs less than a bunch of flowers from a supermarket, lasts all summer, self-seeds into the next year if you let it, and is the single most cheerful container gardening available.

71. Take up botanical illustration. Not the accomplished kind requiring years of training and a steady hand and proper watercolours on stretched paper, but rather the amateur, un-self-concious kind: a sketchbook, a pencil, a small tin of watercolours, and whatever is growing in the garden or sitting in the fruit bowl or available at the market this week: a single daffodil. Three gooseberries on a white plate. A rose hip in November.

72. RECIPE: Coddled eggs, made in proper egg coddlers if you have them, the small lidded ceramic pots made by Royal Worcester since 1890 and still available on eBay for buttons. Butter the coddler, break in one egg, add a teaspoon of cream, salt, white pepper and a few snipped chives or a sliver of smoked salmon. Screw on the lid, lower into simmering water for six minutes, lift out with a cloth and unscrew at the table. Eaten directly from the pot with a teaspoon and a finger of buttered toast. The prettiest way to eat an egg available. Revive it immediately.

73. BATHROOM RITUAL: The monthly deep clean of the bathroom conducted not as chore but as a ceremony of restoration. Everything removed from every surface. The surfaces wiped down with a cloth wrung out in very hot water and white vinegar, which cleans, disinfects and descales simultaneously and smells, once dry, of nothing at all. The mirror polished with a dry cloth until it shows you clearly rather than through a veil of accumulated steam. Everything replaced, but only what belongs there, only what is used and loved? Fresh flowers if the windowsill permits. A new bar of soap unwrapped from its paper, and of course a stack of towels fluffed in the tumble dryer.

74. Collect recipe cards. Not recipes printed from the internet, not screenshots, or bookmarked pages, but recipe cards written by hand on index cards, kept in a wooden box or a tin or a small file, organised in whatever way makes sense to you. The handwritten recipe card is one of the most satisfying domestic objects available: it records not just the recipe but the handwriting of whoever wrote it, the amendments made in pencil, the grease stain at the top of the card that proves it was used, the date if you write the date, the occasion if you note the occasion. A little box full of domestic memories.

75. NOTE: The woman who romanticises her daily life is not performing for anyone. She is not a character in a lifestyle brand. She is not doing it for Instagram, or at least she is doing it primarily for herself and secondarily, if at all, for Instagram. She is doing it because she has understood, at some point in her life, that the alternative, which is to move through the days without attention, without sweetness, without the occasional unnecessary flower or impractical apron or biscuit eaten in the garden purely for the pleasure of eating a biscuit in the garden, is a considerable waste of what is, after all, a finite and mostly quite good life. The sweet pea in the bud vase is not an indulgence. It is stance. Hold it firmly.

76. READ: The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp (1937). A delightfully disreputable woman turns up in a Swiss hotel to attend her daughter’s respectable engagement party and causes the kind of gentle havoc that only a woman with absolutely no pretensions and a complete lack of self-consciousness can cause. For the woman who wants her domestic fiction with more glamour and fewer scones.

77. WATCH: I Know Where I’m Going (1945, Powell and Pressburger). A determined young woman travels to the Scottish islands to marry a rich man and is delayed by weather, a whirlpool, and a naval officer with better values than her fiancé. The landscapes are extraordinary. The interiors are beautiful. The heroine is one of the most complete female characters available in British cinema, being simultaneously wrong about everything that matters and completely, and oh so authentically herself throughout…

78. RITUAL: Make a posy. Not a bunch, not an arrangement, but a proper Victorian tussie-mussie: a central flower, a rose or a sweet william or a single dahlia, surrounded by concentric rings of smaller flowers and herbs, the whole thing bound tightly with a damp piece of kitchen paper at the stem end and then with a length of ribbon tied in a bow. Given to someone or kept in a small vase on the kitchen windowsill where it will last three days and look, for those three days, like something from a painting. The Victorians assigned meanings to every flower in the posy. You can just celebrate the gesture.

79. RITUAL: Make lavender bags by the dozen in July when the lavender is at its peak and the smell of cutting it fills the garden. Dried, stripped from the stem, poured into small cotton or muslin bags, tied with ribbon, and placed in every drawer, every wardrobe, every linen cupboard, the pockets of coats that will not be worn until October. The lavender bag is the oldest domestic aromatherapy available and has been placed in English linen cupboards since Tudor times on the entirely sensible grounds that clean linen that smells of lavender is one of the reliable minor perfections of domestic life and costs, when you grow your own, next to nothing.

80. Find a vintage pattern for something you could make: an apron, a tea cosy, a pair of curtains, a simple skirt. (Etsy has thousands of original 1940s and 1950s sewing patterns). The act of making something from a vintage pattern is the act of participating in a continuous domestic tradition, the thread that runs through every woman who has ever sat at a machine and made the thing she wanted from the fabric she had, which is most women in every era before this one. You do not have to be a skilled seamstress. You just have to want to try?

81. READ: The New House by Lettice Cooper (1936). A family moves from a large old house to a smaller new one and the novel follows the emotional and domestic consequences of that displacement with a precision and a sympathy that is quietly extraordinary. For anyone who has ever understood that the grief of leaving a house is a real grief that nobody quite knows how to validate, and that the relationship between a woman and the home she has made is one of the great under-examined subjects of domestic fiction.

82. RITUAL: The afternoon nap. Not sleep, unless sleep is possible and welcome. The horizontal twenty minutes, taken after lunch on days when you lie down in a quiet room with a light blanket and close your eyes and do absolutely nothing for twenty minutes. The French call this the sieste and consider it civilised. The Spanish call it the siesta and have built an entire daily architecture around it. The English tend to feel guilty about it and take it in secret if at all, which is exactly the kind of unnecessary self-denial that this list exists to address. Rest, woman! Openly and without apology.

83. RECIPE: Lemon curd, made on the stove in a double boiler because the direct heat is too fierce and will scramble the eggs. Zest and juice of four lemons, four eggs, 150g butter, 300g caster sugar. Everything in the bowl over simmering water, stirred continuously with a wooden spoon for fifteen minutes until it thickens to a coating consistency. Poured into small jars while warm, sealed and kept in the fridge. Used on toast, inside sponge cakes, and spooned directly from the jar at moments of low blood sugar with no shame whatsoever. Lemon curd made at home is to the commercial product what a real garden is to a photograph of a garden. The same in name, but entirely different in experience.

84. Make the bed with a top sheet. The top sheet, that most continental-European of domestic concepts, largely abandoned in England in favour of the duvet alone, is worth recovering: a flat sheet placed between the body and the duvet, tucked in at the foot with a proper fold, cool in summer, an extra layer in winter, and washable at a higher temperature than the duvet cover, which means the actual sleeping surface is clean in a way that the duvet-only bed never quite manages? The bed made with a top sheet looks, when done properly, like the bed in a very good country house hotel in about 1955, which is the aesthetic we are aiming for and makes the turning down of it in the evening the kind of domestic ceremony I yearn for…

85. READ: Clothes Pegs by D.E. Stevenson (1930). Another recommendation for Stevenson on this list, and another truly worth your time, I promise. A young woman takes a job as a companion to an elderly lady in Scotland and the novel that follows is warm and funny and romantic in the old-fashioned sense of that word, meaning: full of the romance of ordinary domestic life in a beautiful place.

86. RITUAL: Sing while you do the housework. Not self-consciously, and definitely not performing for anyone, but the full unselfconscious sing-along that Doris Day made look like the most natural thing in the world: a song you know entirely by heart, sung at full volume while making the bed or washing up or peeling something at the kitchen counter. The woman who sings in her own house is a woman who is completely at home in it, which is, I do believe, the whole point of having a house...

87. EAT: Make a jam sandwich. Properly: two slices of bread, white or the best brown you have, generously buttered on both sides, a thick layer of the best strawberry jam in the jar applied with a spoon rather than a knife, the two slices pressed together, and then cut into two triangles. Eat immediately. Drown in the nostalgia of it.

88. Do one thing every day that makes the house smell wonderful. Not the same thing every day, not by default, but deliberately chosen: the bread baking on Monday, the furniture polish on Tuesday, the bunch of narcissi brought inside on Wednesday, the slow-cooked something on Thursday, the linen dried outside and brought in still cold on Friday. The house that smells of something specific and good every day of the week is a house that is being actively lived in rather than merely occupied, and the woman who arranges this is a woman conducting her domestic life as though it matters. Because it really does you know?

89. BATHROOM RITUAL: The old-fashioned manicure, conducted at the table with a towel down and proper equipment. A good nail file, used in one direction only, which is the rule that prevents splitting. A base coat, which protects the nail and makes the colour last. Two thin coats of something pretty, a soft pink, a pale coral, a clear with a slight shimmer, applied with patience and left to dry properly between each coat, which means a minimum of five minutes, which means sitting still and doing nothing for five minutes twice in a row, which turns out to be the hardest part. Then a top coat. The hands, for the rest of the week, looking specifically and quietly cared for in the way that only real painted nails do.

90. RITUAL: Make a welcome for yourself when you come home. Not for guests, but for yourself: a little something that means the house is pleased to see you! A lamp on a timer set to come on at four o'clock in the winter so the house is lit when you arrive. A candle ready to be lit in the hall the moment you come through the door. Something in the slow cooker that smells of supper already in progress, or a small vase of something on the kitchen table that nods hello as make your way towards the kettle…

91. RITUAL: Keep a dedicated laundry basket for things that need hand washing and deal with it once a week rather than letting it become the pile that generates guilt every time it is looked at. Sunday evenings are probably just right for this: a small basin of warm water, a slick of delicate wash liquid, the silk blouse and the cashmere and he lacy smalls dealt with one at a time, rolled in a towel, laid flat to dry overnight. Thus the Sunday hand wash becomes a twenty-minute ritual that keeps the best things in the wardrobe in the condition they deserve and produces the particular satisfaction of having attended to the things worth attending to before the week begins again…

92. READ: No Surrender by Constance Maud (1911). One of the earliest novels about the suffragette movement, written by a woman who was a part of it: about factory girls and the women who supported them and the specific courage required to demand what you are owed when the entire social structure is arranged to convince you that you are owed nothing. Read it for the reminder that the choices we are free to make, come to us a gift from the women who made themselves extremely inconvenient for several decades, so that we can.

93. RITUAL: The Sunday baking of something that will be eaten during the week. Not a full production. One thing: a loaf of soda bread, which takes twenty minutes and no kneading. A batch of flapjacks or simple fruit cake made in a loaf tin with dried fruit soaked in tea overnight. The Sunday kitchen producing something for the week ahead is one of those domestic habits that does not sound transformative and consistently is: it means the week contains, at some point, the specific pleasure of eating something that was made in your own kitchen on a Sunday when time permitted and effort was worth it.

94. BUY: A good set of cake tins. A proper round tin with a removable base for celebration cakes, a reliable loaf tin for bread and loaf cakes, and a square brownie tin for the obvious. Because proper cake tins, used and washed and used again across years, are those domestic objects that accumulate history. The dent in the corner. The slight discolouration at the base from the time the brownies went slightly over. The thing that is yours in the way that only used tools can become yours.

95. LISTEN: Peggy Lee’s Fever, which is not domestic in the obvious sense but which belongs in a kitchen at ten o’clock on a Friday evening when the supper has been cleared and there is a glass of something cold on the counter and nobody is watching, beyond that one person likely to be enthralled, because the woman who plays Fever in her kitchen on a Friday night has decided that the kitchen is as good a stage as any other and that she is leading lady in her own life, and she is enchanting. Because NB. Domesticity can be sexy too…

96. Buy a jug. A large, beautiful, ceramic jug in a colour you love, wide enough to hold a decent bunch of flowers without crowding them, heavy enough to feel like something worth owning. Use it exclusively for flowers. The jug of flowers is more informal and more alive than the vase of flowers and requires less arrangement because the shape of the jug does the work.

97. GARDEN MEAL: Cheese and wine in the garden at the end of a summer afternoon, when the sun has moved off the hottest part of the garden and the air has that particular quality of a day that has been warm and is now becoming something softer. A board with whatever good cheese you have: something hard, something soft, something interesting? Oatcakes or beetroot crackers. Grapes or figs or a small pile of walnuts. A cold glass of something white or a light red, whatever the evening asks for. Nobody arriving, nobody leaving, nowhere to be for at least another hour. The prettiest possible version of a Tuesday just before dusk.

98. Make your handwriting better. Not necessarily copperplate, but simply more deliberate: slower, more considered, with the pen held properly rather than gripped in the way that produces the cramped hand of a person who has too many thoughts in her head. The handwriting that is your best handwriting rather than your fastest handwriting? Used for labels, for cards, for the recipe cards in the tin, for the letter you are going to send this week. Remember, good handwriting is not an affectation, it speaks of both accomplishment and respect.

99. READ: Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson (1939-1943). A thinly fictionalised account of growing up in an Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s that is the finest evocation of English domestic life in the literary canon: the food, the gardens, the interiors, the seasonal rhythms, the social world of a small community at the end of a way of life. It is not nostalgic in the sentimental sense. It is observational in the anthropological sense, recording what was there with complete clarity and complete love. Read it slowly. It isn’t a book to rush.

100. NOTE: The prettiness of a life is not in any single object or ritual or recipe or dress or scent or flower in a jug. It is in the accumulation of small decisions made consistently in the direction of beauty, pleasure, and the specific kind of attention that insists on finding the extraordinary inside the ordinary. It doesn’t have to be tidy, and can be as gloriously messy as you need it to be, because nobody is expecting perfection, more a celebration of all that is lovely in this life? Garden flowers cut at their peak and put in water before they fade. The apron put on before the cooking begins. The tray laid properly for the one cup of tea that belongs entirely to you. The jam made in August because August is when the jam is made. None of this is difficult. All of it requires only the decision that it is worth doing because it make your heart feel glad…

The Commonplace returns next Friday. One hundred more things, on a different theme. Bring something to write with.