Welcome To Your Renaissance

I am all of us. I have been foolish. I have believed in things that weren't true and imagined myself capable of much that I am simply not. I have made bad decisions in the midst of struggles I was too ashamed to share. And tucked terrible things deep down inside me afraid of what would happen if I labelled them with what they are. I have tried too hard to mask who I am in case all hell came tumbling down and suddenly, everything, all of it, feels...

Perhaps it is a sign of the times, this nostalgia for moments long gone I am experiencing. A reaction to the deep uncertainty I currently feel. Claustrophobia as a symptom of Covid. The longing to scream out loud my suppressed panic and run like Forrest Gump until I have managed to run away so completely, I am refreshed and ready to start again. 

Perhaps we are all feeling it. For I am noticing now how deep other people's pain is  too. How much ...

 Rachel Ashwell is one of a trinity of women, that also  includes Sarah Ban Breathnach, and Cheryl Mendelson, that I credit with teaching me how to live, when I was a young homemaker, running an interiors business and trying to fathom who I was, and what really mattered to me.

I think I have told you before that when Mark was saving up for my engagement ring, he would insist that we needed to travel to Manchester city centre every weekend, for "...

A few weeks ago a new family moved into the old cottage across the lane. A typical family with two young girls and a happy little cockapoo, they moved in with an eyesore of a trampoline, a boat, and a boy-racer car so noisy it has become my morning alarm clock.

Over the years we have lived here more than five families have come and gone and I have never really taken much notice until recently when I couldn't help but see the oldest daughter who ...

My Mum used to wake up in rather a bad grump. Mornings coloured her outlook on life and seemingly made it impossible for her to see the positives in her day until mid-morning when to all our relief she seemed to thaw her way back to loveliness. It was difficult to live with and something I was too quick to frown upon because it could be so awfully difficult to predict and to navigate when you weren't that way inclined yourself and the moods made ...

The oddest start to the year. I rather feel as though I must offer myself another New Years Eve on January 31st. A personal ritual instead of the obligation to be fun as we all stand together singing Auld Lang Syne in an empty lane - this little village apparently not familiar with traditions so ingrained in my childhood.

I do so hate trying to be fun. I'm utterly rubbish at it. The strain paints a grimace over what must be good cheer. But fun ...

I've been trying to puzzle something out. I have joined groups and scoured hashtags in my efforts to understand, and honestly, I’m still bewildered because it seems to me that the women of the internet have suddenly developed a deep-rooted need not to seek true authenticity, but instead to align themselves into tribes labelled with zeitgesty words that rapidly lose all meaning once those drawn to allegiance prove themselves to have no genuine und...

A glorious morning. We go for a walk hand in hand, kicking leaves and talking the troubles of the world over. There is a peace about us now. The kind of peace that only comes with quiet resolution and I suppose a sort of emotional revolution. A settling in that feels astonishing after the turbulence of deep-rooted anxiety about who he was and who we were destined to be.

We go home and the business of the day resumes. I follow my own daily to-do ...

Well now, one minute you are climbing out the shower minding your own business and the next the bathmat has scarpered and you have nearly split yourself in two with one leg in the bath and the other halfway across the bathroom with only a cold sweat and a screeching pain in the knee to show for it.

Readers, I have done myself a damage and honestly damaging yourself in the age of Covid is no hobble in the park because once you are carted off to h...

Hmm now let’s see: a beautiful Indian Summer’s day? Check. An abundance of vegetables harvested from our teeny little vegetable patch? Check. Naughty nobody’s cat still invading the garden and delivering dead mousey presents? Check. Bathroom tap still being temperamental? Check. No sign of the lost garlic press? Check. Covid related anxiety through the roof now it has been announced that our area and all surrounding regions are back in some sembl...

She arrived suddenly didn’t she? Autumn. Shrugging her way into our lives with all her stylish nonchalance and turning her nose up at the very idea of letting Summer tint the last of the green tomatoes into anything remotely edible.

It is chilly in the mornings now. Although the doors on to the garden are still flung open as we swirl our Earl Grey with a cinnamon stick, even the wasps seem to have given up and bumble about slowly, banging their ...

Continuing on with The Book of Days, this post is designed to encourage you to see the blessings of modern technology for even the most old-fashioned of homemakers and to help you divine which tasks could be simplified and which truly do deserve to be elevated to puttery, domestic art…

This then is homemaking the Brocantehome way.

THE SIMPLICITY MYTH.

In an age of conveniences so modern we can barely keep up with daily advances in technology, ...

There is something rather special about the last few weeks of August that has me lost in a kind of what I can only describe as delighted melancholy. A sadness for a Summer that wasn’t as sunny as it might have been. A tiny bit of self-berating for all that I didn’t do, the carrots that didn’t grow, the walks I didn’t take. And an underlying sense that none of it matters, because our most beloved friend, Lady Autumn is on her way.

All hail Lady A...

I got myself in the most terrible tizz this weekend. Just inside my head, you understand? I wasn’t throwing plates, trolling strangers on social media or evicting the family so I could have a hissy fit in the peace of an empty house, but I did experience a kind of muddly, outraged brain that wouldn’t let me sleep and became terribly cross and rather ludicrously outspoken about all manner of things I would do far better not to concern myself wi...

It is time. I really think it maybe time. I don’t think I want it to be, but I do believe it may be time to pick up the strings of our lives. Not the life that went before, because I hope that I, at least, have learned that there were parts of the life that went before that I do not want back now, but at the very least the resuming of all that we are now allowed to do, with caution, instead of fear.

Yes. I think it may be time to accept that we ...

When the house becomes the extent of your world, however temporary it may be, it is terribly easy to narrow your focus to the minutiae of domesticity. To become obsessed with perfecting the smallest of things and in the process to quite forget what really matters in this world.

At the beginning of quarantine I was heavily focused on keeping my family alive: on stuffing us full of nutritious goodness and making sure our mental health didn’t sp...

It has been raining. Endless deluges polka dotted by sudden, astonishing bright spells when I shove my feet into flip-flops and run out into the garden to see what delight and damage the rain has wreaked. And there they are: strawberries and so many tomato plants. Celery coming up a storm and cucumbers still a leafy mystery. A bed full of unidentified salad leaves apparently beloved of our resident wood-pigeons who cannot leave them alone, and...