Alison May's Blog, page 10

Last Months Salon and Living Room Giveaway Winner!

 

Last month’s Salon and Living Room competition prize was a gorgeous Cath Kidston planner and today I am here to announce that the winner has been chosen by random number generator and the results are in!

 

 

Kate I do believe it is YOU! And as soon as you send me your home address I will be popping your planner in to the post…

Next months prize? The Complete Book of Home Organization by Toni Hammersley because I do believe we could all use a little more organization couldn’t we? And as so few of my Living Room members actually got around to entering the chances of winning are staggeringly high!

The Prize Thread will open in our lovely LIVING ROOM Facebook group next week, but remember you have got to be a member of either the Salon or the Living Room to enter our lovely monthly prize draw….

Congratulations Kate: may you spend many a happy hour planning the next twelve months…x

On Delivering Life To Your Door

Even those of us who deeply adore our homes find cause to leave them daily. Not always because we want to, but often because we must: to ferry children forwards and backwards, to attend jobs and visit friends and family, and though shutting the door on our only little safe havens is occasionally a wrench, entering the big wide world is simply part of being alive – something we must do if only to allow the sun to sprinkle a little vitamin D across our ghostly palour…

So yes: there is always reason to close the door on our lavender scented havens, and it simply wouldn’t do at all to declare ourselves shabby little hermits and avoid the world outside our four walls altogether even if our homes remain the centre of our creative universes. But we don’t have to abandon the house and all that it has to offer us in terms our nurturing our souls and kick-starting all our dreams just to go do the dull stuff.

We can reserve outings, and the time, creative energy and money they consume for children, work and family. For creative excursions of the Simply Abundant kind, for treasure hunting, walks in the forest, picnics with friends, tra-la-laing through the village with our baskets swinging from our arm as we simultaneously take our daily exercise and shop for an armful of flowers. For the pretty and the precious things in this life, but never for the dull stuff.

Supermarket shopping you see was invented to scramble our brains. To make us believe that debating the merits of two for one offers are what we were put on this earth for. Queues at the bank and post office were invented to make grown women weep and resent every single aspect of a life that seemed blessed before one finds oneself in a stuffy mono-toned nightmare. Costco was invented to inspire homicidal tendencies in otherwise sane housewives.

And we don’t have to do any of it. Not the bank. Not the council office. Not the out of town bookshop. We don’t have to give entire Sundays over to the DIY shed or drag whining kids up and down the freezer aisles. We can instead make all that come to us, and save time and indeed, plenty of money that might otherwise be squandered on frivolous temptation, while refusing to allow the ugly to inflict upon our carefully orchestrated lives.

While it is true that all I have mentioned above is in the long term the most blissful way to keep the mechanics of our lives ticking over, setting up the means to have life delivered to our door comes with one caveat: in the beginning it takes a whole lot of mental elbow grease and those of us impatient with modern technology are usually the ones quickest to throw in the tea-towel and declare ourselves absolutely willing to give all those hours we could be crafting or cooking, puttering or reading over to pushing a cage on wheels around a fluorescent lit warehouse.

This is clearly madness of the time steal, soul destroying kind and I, as she in charge of your housekeeping health simply will not allow it, for today is the day to take a look at your typical week and decide exactly what tasks and moments can be liberated by the interweb. To spend many a fuddled hour setting up a basic grocery list on the supermarket sit and setting it on auto-pilot. To ring the local farm and arrange delivery of an organic veg box. To arrange to have your milk delivered. To seek out a parcel delivery service that will come to you. To use Amazon for bulk purchases and a program like Mint to manage all your financial accounts in one place. To order presents on-line in tune with a calendar. To look into local on-line council services and speak to your doctors about email appointments, prescription services and local pharmacy delivery.

All of this and much, much more is available at our fingertips and when we make the decision to utilize modern technology to our advantage, and further make the effort to set it up to work for us, we offer our vintage housekeeper free reign to play without being bogged down by the worst kind of domestic stuff and nonsense.

The time is right my Darling to start living an old-fashioned life by terribly modern means. Anything else is merely creative deprivation.

Introducing the Get A Grip Program!

 

Ladies I hear you.

I have listened. I have prowled around the Living Room listening and I have read the answers you have provided on your Salon questionnaires… and I hear you.

I know you are struggling.

I know kids, and life, and jobs, and ageing parents, and money problems and errant husbands and falling down houses and various bodily ailments are standing between you and domestic bliss. And I know that sometimes you must feel like telling me to stick my puttery treats where the sun don’t shine because you can barely find clean underwear let alone find the time to sit down and embroider your tea-towels. Darling, I know.

 

And I want things to be different for you.

 

I want you to feel in control.

I want you to feel peaceful even when the world is standing on its head.

I want you to find solace in the kind of routines that will sustain you.

I want you to put YOU top of your to-do list.

I want you enjoy what it is to be organised.

I want you to stop letting exhaustion or domestic depression weigh you down.

I want you to stop doing what others want you to do.

I want you to feel like there is more to this life.

I want you to be able to align domesticity with the path to authenticity.

I want you to feel fulfilled by domesticity and all its possibilities.

I want you wake up feeling alive.

I want you to go to sleep certain that you have done all that you can.

I want you to stop feeling tired. Downtrodden. Compromised. Bored. Or frustrated.

 

So I am in the midst of creating a new Brocante program that will change everything. That will show you how to create a blank slate. Domestically. Emotionally. Physically. 

A blank slate on which you can re-write the terms of your own life. A blank slate that will allow you to see all your frustrations and irritations and disappointments as nothing more than what they are: emotions you can either use as a springboard towards betterment or emotions you can use to destroy any hope you have of ever finding inner-peace.

 

Because here’s the thing…

 

Inner-peace is more than a buzzword oft thrown around the interwebs. It is a real possibility and it is at the root of everything.  Inner peace helps you come to terms with what is while providing you with the strength to reach for more. Inner peace says here is where I live now and here is what I can do to make it bearable. Inner peace says I am more than my exhausted reflection. I am more than my job. Heck I am more than a Mum.

Inner peace says I can be more. I can live better. Feel better. Be better.

 

But…

 

Inner peace doesn’t come easily. Heckity pie no. It is in fact something of a slippery customer. Dodging you so very often that it becomes all to easy to chuck in your lot with never ending chaos and declare the good fight over and done with never to be chased again…

 

And that Darling is where I come in…

 

Because I am going to help you GET A GRIP.

I am going to whisper get out of bed and when you don’t I am going to scream right there in your tender little ear GET OUT OF BED.

I am going to call time on excuses. On not looking after yourself. On living half-a-life. And I am going to say ENOUGH ALREADY to the state of your house. And your hair. And your marriage.

I am going to ask you tell the truth about your life. About how lethargy is ruining it. About all those things you choose to procrastinate on a daily basis because it is easier to slump in front of the TV. About the excuses you are making. The way you use family obligation as a buffer between you and your wildest, tamest, loveliest dreams. The endless round of mindless tasks you indulge in so you can keep on putting a life less ordinary off…

Somebody needs to stage an intervention right? To save you from yourself? To help you get organised once and for all…?

 

Welcome Gorgeous Lady  to the GET A GRIP PROGRAM.

 

This m’dears is part instruction manual, part love letter/major screechy outraged missive from your bossiest friend. The one who loves you enough to say life doesn’t have to be this way. YOUR life doesn’t have to be this way. 

It is the biggest download I have created in years with the most important message I could ever hope to share.

I want to help you get a grip because I am living proof that inner peace is absolutely possible even in the face of a litany of horrible things. I am living proof that you can survive yukky life stuff, run a business and keep house beautifully. I am living proof that inner peace will help you weather the worst of storms: that you can always be more than who you are right now.

I KNOW not just how to survive, but how to THRIVE. How to be brave. How to keep on keeping on. How to GET A GRIP when your whole world feels slippy…

And I want to show you that stripping away all the nonsense is the way forward. That GETTING A GRIP of yourself is the answer.

 

Are you brave enough??

 

The GET A GRIP program launches at the end of July, and before then I will be doing a GET A GRIP countdown right here on the blog that you can only take part in if you are all signed up, either just for the program or as a member of my lovely SALON.

Why am I telling you this when the end of July is four whole weeks away?

 Because if you sign up today you can get $10.00 off the $40.00 price of the program with the pre-launch price of $30.00…
 Or because if you sign up by midnight tonight (30th June) you can get the GET A GRIP program as part of your Salon Membership and get all the other goodies with it too. That’s LIVING ROOM MEMBERSHIP, over 50 DOWNLOADS, and free access to PEP-TALKS, WEBINARS AND PODCASTS… and right now you can get 20% off the price of Salon Membership with the code “BREXIT”! ( Just head over here, choose your plan and apply the code when requested and you will be in! )
And because if you don’t sign up tonight you will miss the countdown that begins next Wednesday, and you won’t get the most inspirational download I have ever wrote at the end of July…

Gosh.

I’m kind of shaking with excitement here. It is an absolute blessing have the kind of platform that allows me to change lives and this WILL be life-changing. This I now for sure… because you know what? Yesterday afternoon when I sat down to flesh out my plans for this program as I sat in bed ill with a very silly, very painful Hiatus Hernia, I started to cry. I sat crying over my own words.

There I was: a jibbering wreck because I knew I was writing something important. I know that when you finally get to read the GET A GRIP program you will understand why I cried. You will understand why now is the time to up your domestic game so that you can live a life less ordinary and you will know for sure that every word I have committed to paper in the GET A GRIP program comes from the heart…

This feels like my life’s work. It feels THAT important to me…

 

Ready to sign up?

 

Click here to get the GET A GRIP PROGRAM for the pre-launch price of $30.00…

Or here to sign up for the SALON and use the code BREXIT to get 20% off the full price of annual or monthly membership…

It’s time to get a grip!x

 

 

 

Using Your Lifestyle Shopping List

Hello Sweets. let’s begin to think about getting into the habit of shopping for a scrumptiously pretty lifestyle without overwhelming ourselves with tall orders for obnoxiously rare or expensive items…

The trick to successfully using a Lifestyle Shopping List is to bring your most regular puttery treats in line with your regular shopping habits. So for example deciding that the lavender oil you can buy in your local health food store will do the job equally as well as the darling little vial of French lavender oil your Great Auntie Mabel brought back from a week in Provence in 1995.

While it is wonderful to aspire to loveliness, there is very little point in building your routines and rituals around items that you will have to move mountains for, or spend bucket-loads of pennies on, to make happen again. In this way you merely set yourself up to fail. So first up, we have to get real about what is available to us to make life that little bit less ordinary and then we have to commit to those same puttery treats if they are to become rituals we adore.

On your shopping list there should be just six or seven spaces for listing the components of your chosen rituals for each of the main rooms in the house. You see it is absolutely essential that you do not get carried away stuffing your life with ritualistic puttery treats: for this I know for absolutely sure- the minute you feel overwhelmed with the organisation of more than a few treats, is the minute before you will throw in the tea-towel and decide that a life of pot noodles and Special Brew is the life for you.

So don’t go mad. If you followed my instructions last time, you will have in your planners, a list of all the treats you want to include in your life. Today I want you to take out that list and study it with a realistic eye. Which of the treats are truthfully never going to happen? Which cost too much money to happen on a regular basis? And which of those treats can be re-invented so that they are possible on a daily or weekly basis?

This may mean that you have a bunch of farm shop bucket daffodils on your bedside instead of the hard to find, single white cabbage rose you visualise: but the point is that you are still indulging your eye, still providing a tiny bit of floral happiness for that eye to rest on. So the treat stays the same, but it’s components alter to take into account availability and ritualistic possibility. And so it goes on as you work your way through your list, altering your expectations so that you can enjoy the ritual of the treats without getting hung up on on it’s pernickity, finniky, hard to come by details.

Now this isn’t to say that I am saying you must look at your life and downgrade it at every turn so that your whole life can be chucked into a trolley at the supermarket, I am simply saying that in order to fill our days with small pleasures, we need to adjust them according to what is on our doorstop, to ingredients we can discover and replace routinely, without adding unnecessary excursions and expense to our lives.

This still leaves room for luxuries, the kinds of little somethings you are given, or buy for yourself on special days out, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I am advocating the abandonment of the many teeny tiny puttery joys we seek daily as Vintage Housekeepers, I am merely saying that when it comes to lifestyle, less is more: because we build the routines that dictate the aesthetics of our lives by repetition and commitment and we can neither repeat nor commit to a ritual dependent on components we have do not have regularly at hand.

What, then, will you put on your lifestyle shopping list?

On Creating A Lifestyle Shopping List

When we have worked hard to create a lifestyle that reflects both our intentions and our ambitions it is essential that the housekeeping we undertake supports it by automating the provision of all that we need to make it happen.

We can’t for example, whip up a constant supply of lavender sleep balm if there is never any lavender oil in the house. We will not be able to relax in a softly lit living room if the pearly 40 watt light bulb blows and the only thing we have ever got in-stock to replace it is a clear 100 watt shocker. We can’t start our mornings with lemon water if we forget to add lemons to our shopping lists and we will never be able to talk ourselves into an every-evening bath if we do not make the collection of a pampering set of bath oils and salts a priority.

The problem is that these are not the kind of things we remember to add to our shopping lists on a weekly basis are they? If we are lucky we might just remember to chuck that little bottle of essential oil into our basket when we nip into the health food shop for vitamins but otherwise lifestyle happens in fits and starts and we find ourselves making do and frittering away money on items that DO NOT support our bliss instead…

So we tell ourselves that we prefer the shock tactic that is instant coffee instead of the lemon water that makes us feel good. We say home-made cleaners were just one of our passing fads. That we haven’t got time for a bath. That the scrapbook system we were truly adoring was too much effort and that dim lighting is bad for our eyes don’t you know? We make excuses because we are not organised and as such we find ourselves muddling through instead of working through each and every one of days with mindful attention.

What opportunities we waste Housekeepers! Just because we aren’t organized! So maybe it’s time to get busy?

You see I have had an epiphany. What we need is a shopping list that incorporates all the routines, rituals and teeny celebrations that happen in each and every room in our house. So that we will never again be able to make excuses of the “haven’t got it in so I will bake a chocolate cake instead kind. The self-sabotaging decisions that get in the way of letting us be who we want to be.

And so my today my darlings, I have got a little task for you. I want you to create a Lifestyle Shopping List, so that you can take one more step towards living the life of your dreams. Think of it as lifestyle automation!

This is going to be a two stage process, because if we try to rush the creation of a list we will forget needful things. So for this week I want you to wander around with your Housekeepers note pad and make a provisional list of all the little things you need to make life feel lovely: from the wattage of the bulbs in very room to the type of secret chocolates you prefer to keep in your comfort drawer. Where are the candles you light daily? Which scent is your absolute favorite? What soap do you want to always have available? Is there a shop bought organic air freshener that makes your heart sing? A biscuit that has you doing an elevenses happy dance? Write it down!

Write down the Bach remedy that helps you sleep. The aromatherapy oil you use to massage your feet at bedtime. Write down where all the vases are in the house and the minimum of teeny little bouquets you would like each to hold at all times and the names of the magazines you anticipate each and every month.

Don’t rush this list. Let it happen organically. Just go about your usual business and as you remember or use something that contributes a little puttery joy to your day, write it down!

Very soon we will be one step closer to living in a way that reflects our authentic selves on a daily basis...

On Creating A Lifestyle

All too often we get to feeling that we are wasting time. That we fritter away hour after hour on the unnecessary or the frivilous, while all that we should be doing: all that would improve our lives if we did it, goes undone.

And we are not wrong: we DO waste time. We stare into space and gossip with friends. We tweet ourselves silly and lose precious hours social networking. We pace around shops, flick through magazines, read trashy novels, fill our minds with “news” that is of no consequence to us and waste hour upon hour dithering over a million and one decisions when in most cases relying upon the instinctive would suffice.

We waste time and if we have time to waste then we are entitled to enjoy such luxury. But the truth is most of us don’t. Most of us are walking around feeling somewhat frustrated. Somewhat panicky about all that we are not achieving. About how it can be that all that remains undone still so often stands between us and what we WANT to be doing.

And there it is in a nutshell: we aren’t doing what needs to be doing and more than that we very definitely aren’t doing what we WANT to be doing. It’s outageous and it’s unfair and it’s all our own fault because we are far too busy filling our pretty little heads with a lot of nonsense that just don’t pay rent when it comes to Getting Things Done.

So in must step routine to save the day. Because this m’dears is exactly what routine is for: not to tie you to a life resplendent with the dull stuff, but to make sure that all that needs to be done is done and to guarantee that all that you want to do has it’s very own moment in time carved out for that and for that alone.

In this way we feel as though we are striding towards a future unencumbered by guilt or frustration. Because guilt and frustration are killers. Guilt and frustration give us heavy legs and heavy hearts. Guilt and frustration have us throwing strops at the dinner table and waking up wanting to cry because we know we are about to face another day where we will achieve very little of significance and still fall back into bed that same evening with an ironing basket ready to topple over.

Thus we have to get mad crazy committed to forming and following a routine, no a way of life: Yes, that’s it, we have to get mad crazy bonkers about committing to creating a way of life that helps us tick all the boxes we need to tick to feel as though we are doing more than treading water in the murky waters of domesticity and are actually both thriving and indeed striving towards what some might term a lifestyle.

Ugh. Yuck. Now there’s a word that leaves many a women cold, casting as it seems to aspersions on those of us who are merely muddling through our days without so much as a fleeting thought about the holes we are sporting in last years jeans! But the concept of lifestyle as far as we should be concerned goes way beyond a centre spread in a glossy Sunday supplement and ultimately becomes about the choices we are making in every aspect of our lives and how those choices feed each other to help us create a life we deem worth living.

So yes: we should be throwing every inch of our being into creating a lifestyle. A lifestyle supported by solid routines that speak loud and clear about our priorities. A lifestyle that says to anyone who cares enough to look upon us closely enough: this is me… I’m a vintage kinda girl, (an organic kinda girl/prairie kinda girl/footballers wife) embracing old fashioned values and not just talking the talk, but walking the walk too, living the lavender dream, watching old films, eating simple food and living frugally with all this old pretty. You see once we understand exactly who it is we are, and back that up with images that describe to our soul exactly who it is we want to be, it is easier to put in place routines that help us support our chosen lifestyle. Routines that are flexible enough to allow us to squander time should it be necessary, but simultaneously provide reigns to pull in our natural impulse to waste time on doing all those dilly dally kinda tasks that pay no more than lip service to our way of life.

What does this mean then for those of us ready to commit to a lifestyle of our own scrumptious choosing?

1. It means committing to a routine that allows us to keep housework to the bare minimum.

2. It means carving out time to do the things that matter to us whether it be needlepoint or zumba.

3. It means reducing the noise from outside influences like our Twitter stream to only those voices that reflect and inspire our personal passion.

4. It means putting down the trashy novels in favour of reading that enhances and educates our minds.

5. It means gaining control of our social lives, so playground drop-off doesn’t turn into impromptu coffee when we should be vacuuuming the living room and tending to our lovely sunflowers.

6. It means making shopping choices that reflect our way of life and support our intrinsic values.

7. It means giving up gossiping because gossip is for the idle mind and there isn’t an aspirational lifestyle on the planet enhanced by idle natter. On-line or off it.

8. It means abandoning browsing and accumulation as a way of life and actually doing all that we are pretending to prepare for.

9. It means living the dream instead of just planning for it.

10. And above all else it means creating and maintaining a home that inspires us daily to be who we were always meant to be.

It means my Darlings, putting our sense of “home” above all else for there is no clearer marker, nor indeed reflection of a so called “lifestyle” than the way we choose to live.

My First Living Room and Salon Giveaway!

 

Welcome to the first of my monthly Salon and Living Room Giveaways! What’s that you say? First you have heard of a monthly giveaway? I know! I kept it a little secret as a nice flower sprinkled surprise for those of you signed up to either Salon or Living Room membership…

So here’s the deal: each month I am going to go shopping an buy two teeny little somethings: one for me and one for one of you. If you are a Living Room or Salon member you will have a week to leave a comment on the giveaway post in our lovely Facebook group and then each of your names will go into an online random generator and that months tiny little puttery treat will be sent to the winner! (Yay!)

This month’s lovely little prize?

This happy August 2016 to July 2017 Cath Kidston planner, resplendent with shopping lists, a year planner, weekly layouts, note pages, films and book pages and much more: making it just right for plotting our journey towards a life less ordinary and quite the perfect place in which to keep our domestic life on track…

But m’dears you have got to be in it to win it!

This giveaway, (and each of the monthly ones that will follow it) is ONLY open to members of the Living Room or the Salon, and it is just ONE of the many, wonderful and life-enhancing benefits of being part of a community that is already making such scrumptious impact on the lives of its members…

Ready to Sign Up? Click Here to Learn More!

 

A Quiet Sunday

A headache making me squint. A brunch of haddock roasted with teeny cherry tomatoes. The papers. Ste bent over the computer filling in yet another job application, worry etched in to his forehead.

Lots of tea. A glass of ice cold orange juice. Bad news about the house that had the estate agent texting at ten 0’clock last night. That headache. All this uncertainty. A curry in the slow cooker for the most atypical of Sunday evening meals. A house without children.

A film with Pauline Collins. (Because she reminds me of my my Mum). Rain. Three trips to the washing machine in the garage and wet laundry strung everywhere. Come Dine With Me. Work. Because I never stop working. Because there is no line between life and BrocanteHome. A glass of lager and lime. The Enchanted April. The first Father’s Day I have ever spent so far away from my Dad.

A headache. Honey body lotion. Peppermint oil dabbed on to the back of my neck to cool me down. Beds changed together in companionable silence. Fingers crossed that despite the odds against it now, this bungalow will be ours. That we will survive the two months we have now been informed it will take before the sale of my little cottage is complete. A reminder to each other that right now we are ok. Right now, in this moment we are ok. Frightened but ok.

A light-bulb that keeps popping. An ear that keeps popping. Rain puddled across the kitchen floor. A wet dog. (No point in mopping again). Football in the conservatory. Mrs. Miniver in the living room. Tiger lilies bursting into lovely life on the kitchen windowsill. A child returning home carrying a thank-you card and a bar of chocolate for the man who isn’t his dad, bought by the man who is.

Another panicked email from the estate agent. Too much Brexit. Too much headache. Lavender rubbed in to my temples. A play-fight with Finn. School uniform ironed. So much laundry folded. The spicy stench of a curry house in the kitchen. Yoga on the living room floor. A magnesium bath to stave off restless legs.

Talking Ste away from the computer because there is only so much job-hunting he should do on this, a day of rest. A hug we walk into in the hallway. Talking Finn out of the shower. A bottle of rioja waiting for darkness. For candlelight. For pyjamas. A foot massage?

An almost perfect day despite the worry, the fright and the curry that tasted terrible. A man I couldn’t love more. This damn headache. And time to switch off the computer.

Goodnight all.x

Thunder and Lightening

The sky above this little bungalow of ours is being splintered by flashes of bright light. Our sniffly dog glued to my side in horror and Ste – who loves “weather” – transfixed by the performance nature is putting on for him.

I do not like thunder. I think it is proof that the Gods that be do not like what is happening to the world they so generously bestowed upon us. I do not like how claustrophobic, grey and moody the house becomes before the very first clap. How my entire head tenses in anticipation. I do not like the shock of rainy tears that falls afterwards. I do not like the way thunder makes it even more impossible for me to hear now that my ears will not work: fluid swooshing around them all the time as if I am living underwater.

When I cannot hear the world doesn’t feel safe to me. When beautiful people are shot in penance for their mere existence, while simply out to enjoy themselves in a nightclub, the world doesn’t feel safe to me. And when a woman, a local MP, doing important work for all our sake’s, even if we do not necessarily take her side in the argument, is shot dead, stealing her away from her children and leaving politics a wretched, wicked shambles – the world doesn’t feel safe to me.

But then the world has become an unthinkable place hasn’t it? I can barely fathom it anymore. There is too much evidence of the mass destruction of both empathy and kindness. Too many heads warped by hatred. And religion. A propensity for violence in the name of sport. Too many guns. Too many young men with no respect for humanity. Too many old men with no respect for children. Yes. The world has become an unthinkable place.

We exist in the most selfish of society now. A society in which vacuous young people strangle each other with leather belts in sexual games played out on reality TV. A society in which selfish Mothers spend countless hours sharing memes that declare their apparent, all-consuming, relentless love of their children on Facebook (Look at me! I love my children more than you love yours!) and then fail them in ways that emotionally cripple those very same children for always. A society in which we value football over literacy and insist upon our right to arm ourselves against an imagined apocalypse without any consideration for the damage those weapons will do long before the apocalypse has arrived.

We have forgotten how to love. We have forgotten how to worship. How to protect the most vulnerable in our society from allowing the fear we all feel to disturb their desperate minds with sickening consequences. We have forgotten that media isn’t truth. That our children need freedom, not the cotton wool we have no choice but to wrap them up in if only to protect them from heads turned evil. We have forgotten to police the incubators of hate for too many angry young men and forgotten to make those same young men matter so that this kind of hate cannot take root in their bitter stomachs.

It is raining heavily now. A dancing storm  of outraged protest. All our windows have been thrown open and Finley keeps sticking his head out and letting the rain drip all over his face.

He is still young. Cannot get enough of the rain.

But I have had enough. I want it to stop. I want it all to stop. I want the world to be a safe place. For me. For you. For us and for our children and though my heart is always hopeful I cannot begin to understand how we can begin to drain the poison infiltrating so many sectors of our society.

My heart is always hopeful. But my head hurts.

On Over-Serving

I have a friend who regularly riles my inner vintage housekeeper by declaring that as she rarely finds time to read a newspaper article let alone an entire book, because keeping house keeps her up most nights until long after the midnight oil has burned down, I, who downs tools the minute the dinner dishes are dried to indulge in all manner of frivolous follies, must surely be doing something wrong, or worse, she implies, not doing something at all…

Heavens to Betsy, there stands a brave woman. For sure, cast aspersions on my loud mouth, my terrible taste in snazzy shoes or even the occasionally unbecoming behaviour of my one and only child and I will take it in my pinny wearing stride but start lashing ridicule on my methods of keeping house and before you can say “come bleach my loo” I’ll be sueing you for slander…

For when it comes to keeping house we women are surprisingly touchy. We cannot abide even the most minor of home-making critiques and cringe at the very idea that next door but one there is another woman keeping house, feeding her family and nurturing her children better than we will ever be capable of.

While we might not say anything and even perhaps, profess not to care about the state of our homes, inside each and every one of us harbours the kind of minor shame disproportionately exacerbated by the throwaway comments of women who know no better than to define themselves by the polish on their silverware.

For what the housework police fail to understand is that there is a difference, a huge difference, between being a model housekeeper and keeping a model home. While the model of perfection in housekeeping might be shine and hygiene, the model in perfect home-making is something subtler: something those only able to judge a house by the white glove test might just oblivious to, because it cannot be accounted for in hours of scrubbing or months of pre-meditated meal plans.

A sense of home is not defined by floors you could eat your rice pudding off, but is instead about creating a cocoon for those who seek sanctuary in it and while cocoons might be spun with care and dedication their success lies not in the spick and span efforts of those exerting themselves only to win points towards imaginary prizes but for those who think first and foremost about the life inside the cocoon and treat housekeeping only, and rightfully as an afterthought.

There is you see something often inherent in the mind of she who confuses keeping her cocoon with nurturing the life inside it, and that is the tendency to over-serve. It is the reason why my friend stands at ironing board every single night and has done for as long as I can remember. It is why she seems proud to declare how very little time she has to give over to the proper pleasures and why she is all too quick to judge the home-making exertions of every other woman she encounters. She has long defined herself by how she services her home and family and has come to believe that polishing and scrubbing and cleaning and ironing are the finest gifts she has to offer herself and her family.

But housework is not love.

Love is time and laughter and hugs and listening. Love is self-nurturing the strength and energy nurturing others requires. Love never demonstrates resentment for it never seeks gratitude. Love simply is. While is there is much to be said for the woman willing to work her fingers to the bone for her family, one day she will understand that there isn’t a child on the planet who gives a damn whether his underwear is ironed but really cares about having to endure a shouty, exhausted Mummy apparently hell-bent on micro-managing every aspect of life within their families four walls.

So this then is my message for today: by all means scrub your toilet when you could be lying deliciously in bed with your husband, and yes, go ahead and frazzle yourself into an early death obsessing about your skirting boards, but understand this: housework is not love and neither the universe, not those who you consider your nearest and dearest will ever say thank you. Choosing to go to bed early is the kind of personal kindness that will pay higher dividends for your family than any amount of late night drawer organising will ever do.

If you LOVE housework, do it for yourself: do it not because you believe that the Gods will judge you if you don’t or because you have convinced yourself that housework is what marriage or Motherhood is about. Do it with pride and joy, but never, ever (NEVER, do you hear me??) allow an immaculate house to make you feel superior to other women until you have walked a mile in their shoes…

Life is hard enough without judging our best friends.