Alison May's Blog, page 14

Back Online!

Dear me what a drama! In fact I came this close to reaching in to my computer and trying to strangle the life out of my webhost. But at the very last moment they redeemed themselves and hey h BrocanteHome was fixed. This then is just a very short notice to let you know that The Vintage Housekeepers Circle is now back on-line after spending a mammoth five and half hours in a live chat with my hosts as they worked through the problems that have dogged the site in the past two weeks after BrocanteHome was hacked.

Some parts of the site are still looking a little odd and on the Circle at least I cannot yet upload anything without it looking all downright peculiar, but we are getting there and the site is at least now accessible. 

Blogging these days is a right palava and I sometimes think I would be happier driving a lorry. Or stacking shelves in a corner shop. And then I remember what a blessing and a privilege it is to be able to pop the lid down on my laptop and wander in to the garden with a cup of warm courgette and Parmesan soup and a packet of tomato seeds waiting to be planted. To be able to share my very own whimsical feelings and madcap ideas with you, my oh so loyal readers and indeed to have survived ten years of single motherhood because you were right behind me. rooting for me all the way, buying my books and all the downloads I once churned out so prolifically.

Good times are just around the corner. I promise. 

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Brocante Bookmarks

Links I Have Loved This week









Scented Tattly – The Perennial Set

I can barely contain my excitement over the launch of Tattly’s first scented tattoos. The Perennial Set launched yesterday, featuring sumptuous florals by French watercolor artist Vincent…


[image error]  swiss-miss….








Once a Great Sleeper – Berfrois

Kara Jesella: The sweetest part was when I heard Alice wake up 33 minutes later, walked into the nursery, and Alice turned her head and smiled at me.


[image error]  berfrois.co…









Is Kinfolk the Last Lifestyle Magazine?

Two years later, Nathan and Katie, along with another Brigham Young couple named Doug and Paige Bischoff, founded Kinfolk , an $18 minimalist print quarterly that has become the go-to…


  racked.com








My Mother Is Not a Bird

I stood watching my mother’s last bellowing breaths. There were three of us holding her – me, my husband and my father – in the room we’d designed just for her. She was propped up in a…


[image error]  opinionator.blo…









Facing What You Never Expected: A Divorce – Darling Magazine

The promises of wedding vows made with the best of intentions get tested when life – past and present – shows up. We are dynamic individuals growing and changing as we navigate life….


  darlingmagazine…








The Internet is Not Real Life

shot I took above my drawing table a couple of weeks ago: this is real life} A couple of months ago, I was having dinner with a friend. “I’m going to take a break from Facebook,” she…


[image error]  lisacongdon.com






Are You Addicted to Dopamine?



Are You Addicted to Dopamine?

If you visit Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest / YouTube, do you keep scrolling and clicking – even when you want to stop? Do you ever find yourself fighting the urge to look at your…


jenniferlouden….









10 Ways to Do Your Own Impossible Daily | Live Your Legend

As some of you may have heard, I spoke at the University of California, San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. At about 10:55am, I swore to myself I would never public speak again… by…


[image error]  liveyourlegend….








10 Styling + Photography Tips For Decor + Food – decor8

Hi readers, I can’t wait to share the words and photos in this post today because I’ve got fabulous New Yorker Leela Cyd stopping in to teach us her tips and tricks on styling and…


  decor8blog.com








Fashion & Food: Artisanal Craft

Remember ages ago we told you about the cult ethnic dress trend made popular by Ukrainian designer Vita Kin Vita Kin. Previously only sold via her Instagram account, the range is now…


[image error]  thewomensro…





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The CommonPlace Book – At Home With the Jardines

 

“Many curious women do not enjoy housekeeping. I am free to confess that I do not understand why, unless they started out in life with the conceited idea that to bend their wonderful brains upon the silly problem of keeping a house clean and ordering dinners was beneath women of their possibilities on club essays. I often wonder if they attacked the proposition of housekeeping with the intention of seeing how much fun there is in it, of how much pleasure could be got out of making a home, not merely keeping house, and of feeding their conceit with the fuel of a determination to keep house better than any woman of their acquaintance. The simple but fascinating problem of how to make each room a little prettier than it was last week, would keep even an ingenious woman busy and interested in something worth while, and those of us who are sensitive to impressions would be spared the truly awful sight of certain incongruous rooms in handsome houses.”

At Home With the Jardines – Lilian Bell

Download it on Amazon.Com here (it’s free!) and Amazon.Co.Uk here…

The post The CommonPlace Book – At Home With the Jardines appeared first on Brocantehome.

Hills and Valleys

Life is an up and down affair isn’t it? All hills and valleys and bogs and summits.

Last week was one of those weeks. For a while I reminded myself of the old me. She who would/could sit at her computer and exhaust herself until the works she had decided MUST be done RIGHT NOW was done and done it was and both The School of Life and The Kitchen Table were completed and she who had completed them was proud as punch and fit for nothing, for sure as eggs are eggs these days a fit of intensive work will wipe me out and see me lying down and requiring the services of men in togas to feed me grapes and waft me with a fan. Tis no fun at all being at the beck and call of an autoimmune haridan like Hashimoto’s.

Truth be told I was already halfway to bonkers before I worked myself into exhaustion. The house was just not selling. Each and every viewer came in and said the same things…. Oooh its like a Tardis in here! Swiftly followed by “Just a courtyard? No garden?”.

You see it is a truth universally acknowledged that potential buyers will read instructions that firmly state, just a courtyard, no garden, and imagine that somewhere between reading those details and driving to view the house, that the universe would be kind enough to transform said courtyard into the garden of their dreams. Yesarooney: they are eternal optimists these professional viewers, apparently absolutely determined to disappoint themselves by visiting properties without features they seemingly consider essential.

I was at the end of my tether. Ready to smack the next Just a Courtyard type viewer and rather sick of the very lovely, very determined estate agent who assured me I was worrying for nothing and all would be well in the end for if it was not well, it was not the end. Despite the fact that I was ready to tell him that MY end was nigh if he didn’t sell it before I completely and utterly lost my mind.

And then just as I lay cooped under blankets in the midst of a shivery bout of “wiped herself out“, the phone rang and negotiations were opened with a little man called Lawrence, and lo and behold, by the end of the day the house was declared SOLD! and this Doubting Thomasina was quaffing Prosecco and feeling the three thousand emotions one feels when she has given up a house she has loved for a many a year in favor of the much yearned for great unknown.

Never let it be said I am anything other than utterly dramatic. In fact the excitement nearly sent me over the edge and this here puffy, cold, crazy lady was now ever so slightly tipsy and rather terrified of what feels like giving up her security and so I wandered about the bungalow twitching with worry and relief that the whole matter was almost at a close and completely failing to pack my bags for the timeliest of little jaunts around the peaks and valleys of Wales, courtesy of my gorgeous friend Kath who had booked a surprise weekend away for my birthday.

Was there ever a woman more indulged than I? Before I knew it, the Thelma to my Louise had delivered me to a five star decompression chamber: a lovely room at Bodnant WelshFood complete with a private living room and a darling little kitchen. She had brought rose and violet cremes, wine, magazines, wasabi peas, and a beauty treatment that actually worked and left our hands looking frankly like other peoples, so smooth and perfect they became after half-an hour in glove like masks.

That night we nibbled at celeriac gnocchi and drank a rather exquisite Rioja and slowly but surely I became my giggly relaxed self again. We talked until four o’clock in the morning in our twin beds, faces scrubbed and copious amounts of moisturizer applied like a pair of old spinsters without the carpet slippers or head full of rollers, admiring the palest of soothing green paint on the walls, setting both our worlds to rights and trying in our haze to fathom whether or not the UK should be in or out of the EU.

Breakfast was a heavenly combination of parma ham, blue cheese and Eggs Benedict: in short the food they serve in heaven, and I was a woman restored to my own version of normality. So very grateful to Kath. So glad to feel like my body was my own again, and ready to return to my very own bungalow full of boys and the relentless madness of Motherhood. And womanhood. And partnerhood. And bloggerhood. And all the other hoods I haunt.

Though not from now on, my old hood. For that there hood is SOLD! Heavens to Betsey, my house is sold.

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Our Sentimental Garden

Ooooh I have got a little gem for you tonight! Our Sentimental Garden is the quirky little tale of one Agnes Sweetman Castle’s garden. Written in charming fashion in 1914, with illustrations by Charles Robinson, Our Sentimental Garden  is the kind of delight that has me wanting to stop the world so I can travel back in time to Agnes and Egerton’s garden and wander around their lawns in white voile… 

 

 

Written when the country was on the brink of war, the book speaks of a house and garden that the authors admit would have to be sacrificed to become “a home of convalescence for some of our wounded, still unknown, but to be welcomed soon…”

 

 

And so among the giggly little tales of four-legged friends and plants chosen for abundance not gardeners’ pretension, there is nostalgia written between the lines. A sense of capturing what matters before it is lost…

 

 

It really is adorable. While many gardening books from this era are apt to take themselves a little seriously, Our Sentimental Garden weaves all manner of threads of domesticity to form a descriptive and delightful tapestry of a time now lost, with some stories that are laugh out loud funny and others simply sentimental and so very sweet.

 

 

So if you have spent this afternoon pottering around the garden, then this book might just be the perfect companion this evening: a reminder of what it is we endeavor to create and indeed a reminder of the kind of times our hearts yearn for in an era when so many of the simplest pleasures, like gardening,  have been lost to the noise of the internet and yet another box set…

 

 

Enjoy dear Housekeepers. I am getting in bed with a cup of chamomile myself. Dirt still lingering beneath my nails and happy memories of an hour in my own garden today trying to magic beans from seeds and save the borders from the attentions of the grubbiest dog in the land. Night night.x 

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The Housekeeper’s Bookshelf

Welcome to a new incarnation of the Housekeeper’s Bookshelf…

Ordinarily The Housekeepers Bookshelf lives in the sidebar, but very soon that sidebar will be overhauled and my recommended reading will be right here in a monthly blog post you can save for future reference.

Divided into the six categories all my content is now shared across, Sanctuary, Authenticity, Wellbeing, Bibliotherapy, Creativity and The Kitchen Table- in each Housekeepers Bookshelf post, there will one book for each aspect of our lives as Brocanteers. 

Sound good? Then I shall begin…

 

Sanctuary

 

First up Un-Stuffed by Ruth Soukup. I greatly admire Ruth and my participation in her Elite Blog Academy is partly responsible for the changes you are seeing around BrocanteHome. In Un-stuffed she changes her lovely attention to de-cluttering and as I think we are Kon-Mari-ed out, the time seems right for a more heart-centered approach to creating space in our lives…

Buy it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.Uk here…

 

Authenticity

 

“Hygge” is something of a buzzword at the moment. With the Danish concept of embracing cozy all the rage everywhere from the loveliest of Interiors blogs to the darn old Daily Mail. But in The Cozy Life, Pia Edberg shows us that there is more to living well than just snuggly socks and twinkly candles and applies the concept of hygge and slowing down to all aspects of the way we live…

Read it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.Uk here…

 

WellBeing

 

I am obsessed with sleep. Mostly because, unlike the rest of the population I can’t quite seem to do it with a barrage of ungeants and pills and rituals and meditation. So when the power house that is Arianna Huffington steps up with her own extensively researched thoughts on what sleep is and why we need it if we have any hope of thriving, I for one cannot wait to download it to my Kindle…

Buy it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.uk here… 

 

Bibliotherapy

 

Only recently back in print here in the UK, The Long View by Elizabth Jane Howard is a masterpiece and a book I simply cannot recommend enough if you are in the mood for dissecting  the universitality of marriage and its destruction and exploring both extraordinary characters and writing so subtle it sometimes takes your breath away. This then is a book to save to the quiet of your bedside table. For getting in to bed early and losing yourself in somebody else’s life…

Buy it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.Uk here…

 

Creativity

 

The title of this book (and it’s beautiful cover ) intrigued me and I simply couldn’t resist a more feminine approach to productivity and so Sexy + Soul-full by Tara Rodden Robinson is the book I will be reading during my Miracle Morning Hour over the next few weeks. Should it light a fire in my own soul I will be sure to share it with you…

Buy it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.Uk here… 

 

The Kitchen Table

 

Even those of us who could probably blog in our sleep could probably use a few reminders and the occasional push in the right direction occasionally… so step in Miss Dana Fox if you please. Adding new books about the business of blogging to the little mini bookshelf on my desk reminds me what business I am in and I always more than happy to add another…

Buy it on Amazon.Com here and Amazon.Co.Uk here…  

Happy reading Housekeepers!

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Welcome to My Kitchen Table

I think you all know that I am something of a Lady Geek. In fact let it be known that this is the name I wish to go by from now on. I am geeky and proud.

Which is why the mechanics of blogging have fascinated me as much as the way it enables me to both write and create this lovely community. In fact (whisper it) sometimes I love the mechanics of blogging MORE than I love the writing part simply because picking a new plugin or adding a fancy banner takes less out of me emotionally than truth-telling ever will!

And so allow me to introduce The BrocanteHome Kitchen Table: a new section on the blog designed to both help you create a blog of your own and indulge my rather out of control love of the tools, apps and deliciously useful add-ons we can all use to make life as bloggers less ordinary, easier…

 

There are four parts to the Kitchen Table…

The Kitchen Table Directory:  a list of over three hundred (and counting!) tools and apps for all your blogging needs divided in to 42 categories, with everything from Etsy tools to stock images and blog monetisation included (the blog income reports are fascinating!)…
The Kitchen Table Facebook Group: a place where we can meet daily, share our blogs and blogging tips, discover useful tools and discuss how we can incorporate blogging as a means of marking memories, into a life already full with family, homemaking and careers. 
The “Recipe Book”: A weekly newsletter with all the tips and tools I have discovered that week, sharing them with you so we can all learn together and grow blogs that sparkle with personality. Sign up at the bottom of this page…
And finally interviews with bloggers just like us: women trying to do it all and do it with the same dedication to creating a really beautiful, meaningful way of life as they have always had. Wanna be featured? Fill in the Contact Page here and I will be in touch…

Best of all? It’s FREE! So do get involved if you have a blog won’t you? It would be so lovely to have you at my Kitchen Table…

 

So What Does This Mean For BrocanteHome?

Is BrocanteHome changing? Yes and absolutely, NO! Creating a sanctuary for our authentic selves will always, always be my raison d’etre but the blogging landscape and indeed my audience has changed and as a part of my site I simply want to reflect those changes. To acknowledge that more and more of us are pulling up chairs to our own kitchen tables and trying to create blogs businesses that encapsulate our creativity. I want to acknowledge that having a creative life we share with all those with the same interests is a big part of many of the lives of the women who read BrocanteHome and I want to share the routines, rituals and tools that have helped me keep a roof over my head in the ten years after I became a Single Mum. To empower you to do the same…

The Kitchen Table is in fact just one of a number of new ideas I have for Brocantehome now that I have crawled out from under my shell and I am finally ready to embrace my authenticity again, without hiding behind this virtual wall. I want to open up the conversation with webinars and podcasts… to get to know you all. To chat with you in my Facebook groups, and to really hear what it is you are struggling with and how I can help.

So moving forward I want you to look forward to the rejuvenation of the Housekeepers Circle. The new Brocante Living Room that will be arriving in the next few weeks. More about why I am choosing to #Live Clean. A new post schedule, a book club my lovely Mimi will be overseeing and later in the year new books.

There will be things disappearing altogether because they no longer serve me, or bring anything to the site. Other things re-invented for a better BrocanteHome.  So yep there are going to changes but I rather suspect you are going to like them and hopefully the old frustrations of working with a very muddled me will vanish now that I have the support of a team behind me…

This then is Lady Geek signing off: do go have a nice day and I will look forward to chatting to you soon… 

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On a Sunday Morning

Up since six thirty and now three hours later my own little domestic enclave is smiling the contented smile one only ever smiles on quiet Sunday mornings. A peaceful, there is no hurry, pottery, puttery kind of smile.

I am all by myself. Both Finn and Ste away and so this morning has been spent getting to know this new home of mine. Talking out loud as I wander around the rooms (in case my Mum can hear me), touching her things not yet replaced by my own, nibbling at a carrot. Feeling words tickling my fingertips all over again.

This time last year I wondered if my Mum would take my words with her. And for a long time it certainly seemed as if that was the case – My mind a waterless well I was hopelessly trying to fish. Confusing my readers and desperately paddling behind the scenes.

But suddenly life has settled in to the cosiest of armchairs. For the first time in as many years as I can remember our days are without drama and there is time and space to focus almost entirely on shaping my life the way I want it to be. On creating a place of sanctuary in my own head. On re-establishing routines,rituals and time to write properly all over again. I do understand how very much you wish I would write with more consistency. How some months you wish I would write full stop. But I need you to know that I’m getting there. That the trauma of the past few years might now be firmly stitched in to my DNA, but it is no longer clawing my eyes or blinding me to what needs to be done.

Of course things are different now. I cannot hope to go back to the days when blogging was easy: when writing was enough. This is after all a business and it is a business that now exists in an arena where there are so many more offerings to tempt you. I know this. I know it so well and I think about it daily. But I want to write again. I want to write about the things I know. About creativity and women. For that is what homemaking is about really isn’t it? About routine and ritual. About blogging. For blogging is my life and it is one I would choose over and over again for it has given me the freedom to live well.

To spend mornings like this wandering in to the garden in my scary, fleecy nightgown to unzip my little greenhouse full of fledgling seedlings. To talk to them. And water them. To stand with the dog and look at this garden full of gravel and see what it could become. To open the front door and water the pot full of daffodils on the porch. To eat an odd breakfast of tuna salad because lately the fridge is always filled with delicious, nutritional leftovers and it has transformed the way we eat. To hang out an armful of white sheets on a very silly spinny washing line. To re-read Moving On with a cup full of comfort. Play ball with my gorgeous dog. Place my vegetable box order. Open windows wide and push these oh so ugly vertical blinds out of the way. To wander over to the little shop around the corner for milk. To hear the sounds of lawn mowers and hedge trimmers ubiquitous to a proper Sunday morning…

Life is different here. More suburban. The house is relatively new and the walls are straight, the rooms square. Here I am more focused on how we live, less on what that life looks like. For I see now how very much we can let our four walls dictate our days and limit our ability to thrive. A ramshackle house might be the stuff dreams are made of, but we must acknowledge how much caring for that house takes out of us. 

Soon Ste will return and we will get in the car and head up to The Beacon. A great big hill with views as far as the eye can see, so Alfie can roll in mud and run about laughing. For I swear he laughs with delight and greets all the other dogs like long lost friends. And then I will cook. Perhaps roast a chicken. Perhaps a warm salad of roasted courgette, feta and garlic. Perhaps a pan of melted cheese and onion. Perhaps…

Then my Dad will come home. I’m glad he isn’t quite gone permanently yet. That our weeks are splintered with his comings and goings as he winds up his business here and spends time with his friends. So I can check him from head to foot. Pleased to see the results of a less pressured way of life showing on his face. Always ready to share a glass of wine with him and talk until he is sleepy and shuffles off to sleep in the bunk bed under Finley that is the only solution to him staying over. 

Yes. This new life of mine is all kinds of lovely. And though like settling in to a new armchair, it takes a bit of shuffling of ones bottom to get truly comfy, everyday I inch closer to a life less ordinary. So please accept my apologies for what has turned in to a ramble – but heckity-pie it felt good!

Have a lovely Sunday too won’t you?

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The School of Life Re-Born

Remember The School of Life? Well it is back and it is a billion times easier to use and I am so excited I could crush a grape!

It fell by the wayside because I really wasn’t happy with the course software I was using to deliver my two existing courses, but I have searched high and low for something easy to fathom for all of us and lo and behold I give you The BrocanteHome School of Life.

Tag lined “Routines and Rituals for Creative Women”, The School of Life will eventually become a beautiful library of short courses you can take to better integrate the BrocanteHome way of life in to your own routines and rituals, and it is opening today with my FREE Becoming a Vintage Housekeeper course, and access to my second course The Life Audit will happen in the next few days…

I know many of you have already taken this course, but signing up again might just be the kick-start you need to get back on the Brocante wagon, and indeed enjoy the new experience of taking one of my School of Life courses, before we really get going here at BrocanteHome.

 

The Future of BrocanteHome…

 

This is all part of the streamlining and re-structuring process I have hinted at over the past few weeks and I am so looking forward to what the future of Brocante is going to bring. Laying the foundations with a happy little overview of what it is to be a Vintage Housekeeper is simply the beginning… 

Click Here To Sign Up for the BrocanteHome School of Life!

 

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HelloFresh!

Well now meal planning can be a bore can’t it? I know we are self-declared Vintage Housekeepers and thus prone to getting giddy about every aspect of keeping hearth and home, but I for one sometimes feel like I might just lose my marbles if I find myself answering the whine that is “what’s for tea (as we call the evening meal around here)?” on a nightly basis for the rest of my life.

 

Enter Hello Fresh…

Which is why I was a teeny bit thrilled when my friend Debbie popped a voucher for a free HelloFresh box in to my Easter card. Free food! And the very notion of planning the evening meal removed, as these lovely boxes deliver all the ingredients, (right down to the last garlic clove!) for the recipes included in the box and a person neither has to shop for food, nor decide what to cook or how to cook it. No brainer meals with quality, fresh ingredients? What’s not to like?

So I ordered a three meal box for two – The Classic Box – which will usually be £39.00 and this morning a very nice man knocked on my door and handed me a box full of ice chilled goodies, beautifully presented and just right for inspiring the urge to grab my pinny and start cooking with the kind of enthusiasm I usually only reserve for baking Martha Stewart’s Kitchen Sink cookies these days…

Now I am a fussy madam. I like good food from quality suppliers and I was not disappointed by the ingredients delivered. All were perfectly, securely packaged and looked deliciously fresh. The three recipes included were Jamie Oliver’s Grilled Moroccan Chicken, Smoky Cod and Roasted New Potatoes and Surprisingly Filling Mexican Broth. Nothing too scary there is there? And the instructions are clear, concise and provided on good quality recipes cards just right for starting a collection of quick evening meals I will no doubt refer to again.

Everything necessary is included in just the right quantities, so there is no need to fill your pantry up with obscure spices you may never use again, nor bother your head trying to keep a windowsill full of fresh herbs. No Siree: such efforts are not required because the box is complete with absolutely everything necessary for each individual meal, which strikes me as a money saver all by itself.

My Verdict on HelloFresh?

So what do I think? I think Hello fresh is just the ticket for getting you out of a foodie rut. I think it is economical if you are already committed to buying quality, fresh ingredients and I think it is quite the most perfect way to keep your kitchen uncluttered with ingredients you will not use frequently.  

As I am quite the most overgrown child I get rather giddy when ANYTHING is delivered to my door and opening the Hello Fresh box felt rather like Christmas: making something utterly mundane in to something of a joy and having me studying recipes in a way I had quite forgotten how seen as most nights lately, while we are settling in to our new life, I am winging it with whatever I discover lurking in the fridge!

So yes, I will be ordering from Hello Fresh again and if you live in the UK and you want to do the same I am happy to extend my very own voucher code for £20.00 off your first box, so you can get next weeks shopping for half-price. So that’s one of Hello Fresh’s Classic Boxes for just £19.99, delivered to your door, and three FREE boxes you can give to your friends to share the love.

Simply hop over to Hello Fresh, choose your box and use the code VQ88UU when prompted to grab your £20.00 discount instantly.

Or if you are in USA, follow this link to HelloFresh.Com and grab your $40.00 discount there…

Bon appetit Housekeepers!

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