Alison May's Blog, page 19
January 7, 2016
Escape
Today I have woken up feeling alive. As though for once I have slept all night despite my Fitbit telling me that I have managed just four hours and nineteen minutes of undisturbed sleep. (I think my Fitbit lies).
The dog is restless. Though the wind is chopping up the air outside my door I do believe a walk suitably wrapped in a warm coat and a scarf wrapped three times around my neck might just be refreshing for both of us. I need to get out the house, to escape the drone of the news I can’t switch off while simultaneously resisting shopping. You see lately I cannot resist the lure of all manner of shops, wandering around them aimlessly, buying nothing and feeling irritated by the remnants of sale time. So a walk through the wet leaves of this little town is the answer for there isn’t a shop to speak of, and even I can resist the charm of the post office counter.
But before that I will fashioning little pasties. Short crust pastry enfolding mushrooms, potato and brie to serve for this evening’s meal with a salad of warm cherry tomatoes and smoky beetroot. A perfect nibbly tea for a blowy January night, eaten in front of the television with a glass of non-alcoholic mulled cider.
I love January. I always have. Though I am frequently told that it is the most awful of months, I cannot help but revel in the opportunity to hibernate, to indulge in the gentle bliss of hygge and to gather myself after the whirlwind that is December. I like the silence of the days. The lack of social obligation. The possibilities of the New Year. I like having casseroles slow cooking throughout the day and the fire blazing in the hearth. I like welcoming home family with faces pink from the cold and getting in to bed at silly o’clock to read Nigel Slater and sip spicy, warming Yogi tea.
For I love Nigel Slater too. His books have become January. There is always his latest tome stuffed in my stocking and as, to my mind, no one writes about food with more atmosphere than Nigel, there is nothing I like better than whiling away the quiet hours of each Winter evening with the latest of his Kitchen Diaries, comparing and contrasting our taste in food and endlessly admiring his ability to fashion a meal out of what I would usually consider fridge remnants.
Gosh. I cannot stop thinking about food. About how we are programmed to believe what constitutes a meal. I cannot stop thinking about the way we allow unspoken rules to shackle us. And I cannot stop thinking about moving house. Though this house is showing no sign of shifting and the receiving of viewers is nothing short of a demoralizing drama, in my mind I have already left. As if the marriage is over and I am only waiting for the decree nisi to be signed. As if the sale is but a formality when the heart has already flown on to pastures new. I want to be gone you see. Before Richard is released and takes it in to his head to come looking for us. How odd to want to escape a house I have loved for so long. For that is it: I cannot stop thinking about escape.
Tonight then we will escape to my Dads house. For he will be gone again to my sister’s house and his big, warm bungalow will once again welcome us, pasties and all, for the weekend. So after our walk I shall close the door on this house, neat as a pin, take my Dad to the railway station and then spend the next few days wandering around rooms that do not suffocate my thoughts but instead offer a kind of emotional freedom I did not know I was missing.
We do not know do we? We do not know to what degree our surroundings shape our thoughts until we escape them.
So tonight I am running away, and taking mulled cider, candles, my favorite yellow quilt and the heaven that is January with me.
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January 6, 2016
Living Locally…
Like my Mum was, I can be rather stubborn. I can get it in to my head that something is of no interest to me and from there on in no amount of persuasion will convince me otherwise. Case in point, the little farm shop I drive past everyday and never, ever go in because it says “butchers” on the sign and I don’t buy much meat and thus decided that there would be nothing to interest me in this apparently thriving little store.
And then my Dad took it in to his rather daring head to visit it, having experienced many years of my Mum feeling the same way I did about it, and lo and behold he came home carrying fish and pate and singing the praises of a little shop he said was like a miniature Booths.
Readers I swear, the snobbish little Madam in me, stopped in her tracks.
Like Booths you say, said I?
Just like a little Booths, you know, sells proper food and nice things? said he. So you don’t need to go to Booths anymore, seen as you drive past Taylors everyday.
Booths you see is what supermarkets are probably like in heaven. It stocks locally sourced food, alongside brand favorites and stocks them all with so much merchandising panache I find myself wandering around wanting to lick everything. But it is expensive. And it is a supermarket, which means you go in to buy two things and come out with twenty. While Taylors is a farm shop and I visit another farm shop just a few miles down the road and could quite easily be persuaded take my trade elsewhere, since the selection on the shelves there seems reduced by the day.
Trouble is I don’t hold out much hope for local farm shops. While the ones in the Cotswolds, close to where my sister lives are blissful odes to what food shopping should be, ooop North as they say, things are rather more basic. But when it comes to food, my Dad is a man who knows of what he speaks and so yesterday I decided to trust his judgement and visit a shop I had managed to avoid for at least four years. And despite the fact that I noticed I was wearing my trousers on inside out on the ride out there and had to find a deep, dark corner of the car park in which to shimmy them down my legs and back up again, and being thoroughly aware that no self-respecting business would probably encourage me to darken their door again, I wandered in to Taylors full of doubt and trepidation and within moments my eyes were out on stalks at all the wonders to be beholden.
For there was all manner of healthy foodstuffs and deliciousness to be had with none of the ready meal, additive laden nonsense it is so easy to be tempted by in supermarkets. I bought Belgian biscuits and vanilla coffee, Lancashire cheese and local roast beef, rose lemonade, one perfect specimen of a celeriac, and (oh joy to the Mama of a Coeliac) gluten free sausages for a child who would happily live on them if only I would let him! And I was so excited I waffled on in rather mental fashion to the girl behind the counter and then ran out to phone my Dad to congratulate him on a fine discovery.
So the moral of this story is not visit Taylors and all your shopping dilemmas will be solved, which is frankly ridiculous when more than 70% of you live in America and would probably find a daily shop in my local farm shop a bit of a bind, but is instead a rallying cry to NOT BE LIKE ME. Stop being so stubborn, and start investigating all the little treasures probably to be found on your doorstep. Stop the car at the farm shop you drive past everyday and see what they have got in store! Visit the local bookshop you eschew all too often in favour of Amazon, and take a trip out to see the antiques mall you have heard so much about but have never got around to visiting.
Do as I say Darlings, not what I usually do. For even the stubbornest of elephants can change her spots, don’t you know?
The post Living Locally… appeared first on Brocantehome.
January 5, 2016
BrocanteHome in 2016
Welcome Lovely People, to a fresh, rather rainy New Year on BrocanteHome. It is nine thirty in the morning and after shuffling one uniform clad child out of the door I am now nibbling on a coffee flavored hot cross bun and writing this, my first proper post of 2016.
Christmas has been the kind of gentle, quiet holiday I needed to restore my soul and I have high hopes for this year. I have high hopes that trauma and calamity will decide to give me a miss this year and allow me to blossom in the midst of a happy relationship and eventually a new place to live. I have high hopes that such stability will wrap a soothing blanket around my shoulders and allow me to just be, without terrified anticipation of yet another blow. I have high hopes, Dearhearts, that my work will not be so fractured, that I will be able to write again from a place of truth and that exhaustion and fear will no longer compromise my promises to you.
More of the same with a lot more continuity.
So what can you expect from me in the next twelve months? More of the same with a lot more continuity. I know you see that you enjoy what I do here on BrocanteHome, that you like the same things as I do and that you simply want more of it in a more predictable fashion. I know this. And this is the year I am committed to providing it, with the help of my very own little dream team (yes, I have finally organised help!), a spanking new laptop and camara and a few rather grandiose ideas for world domination…
I kid of course. World domination could not be further from my mind. While my head is full of new ideas I hope you are going to love, I simply cannot get on board with all the magical shenanigans and bloggery trickery apparently required to get each post pinned a billion times or to climb to stratospheric heights with generic list posts, and the kind of “fifty ways to boil a potato” posts now so ubiquitous in the blogosphere. I just can’t do it. And so I have made the decision not to waste any more time on creating the “perfect pin” or planning out three years worth of social media posts in advance and instead to simply do what I used to do: write as part of my daily routine, write as a ritual I can share with you, write because I feel like it, and write as and when the mood takes me.
We all have skill and talents in different areas and mine do not lie in social networking. I am too shy. Though I will still be tweeting, facebooking, instagramming and pinning when the mood takes me, I am simply going back to a time when I did all those things because I had something to say, and not because I felt obliged to say something or indeed anything at all…
So What Will I Be Doing?
Instead I will be concentrating on creating new downloads for my lovely Vintage Housekeepers Circle, getting some of my existing downloads on to Kindle, and writing about essential oils in my wonderful new community. I will be collating all 100 days of the Christmas Countdown in to a new download for all those who subscribed, issuing The Spring Home in the middle of February (and the Summer and Autumn Home later in the year to complete the set) and writing The Vintage Housekeepers Book of Days throughout 2016.
Here on the site I will be offering more snippets – tiny site only posts, to include books to read, pretty things to buy, puttery treats to enjoy and tiny little recipes to bake. I will be starting a new, personal column, called The Pillow Book, another on Blogging as a Lifestyle, and I will be continuing with old favorites like The Housekeeper’s Carousel and The Life Audit. I will also be bringing back Housewives In Art and for my own pleasure, collating more examples of domestic wisdom from the vintage books that I hoard. Finally, I will be writing spontaneous pieces about my life here at Chez Brocante, and no doubt documenting my house move should I ever manage to sell this shabby little cottage!
Phew. What was I saying about not exhausting myself??
A Thank You.
Before I get to the end of this post and haul my bottom off the sofa and in to the kitchen to tackle the thankless task that is cleaning out the fridge, I want to say express my gratitude to all those of you who have signed up to the circle or taken part in my Pay What You Can offer. Your support keeps a roof over my head and I am well aware how very blessed I am to be able to exchange my words for your hard earned pennies, and remain humbled by the commitment to BrocanteHome, of all those who buy everything I write.
The offers included in my Christmas Gift to You will end on January 10th so time is running out to Pay What You Want, join the Better Me Program from the beginning, or indeed grab Vintage Housekeeping Membership for HALF PRICE – so if you want to be involved do be quick won’t you?
And now without further ado, let’s raise a cup of Earl Grey to a brand new BrocanteHome New Year and get on with creating lives less ordinary and homes that nurture our souls…
Ooh and while I have still got your attention can I just issue a quick plea to make sure that if you order a download or join the Better ME program that you must let me know if you want it delivered to an email address other than that associated with your Paypal account. So many of you are getting in a muddle!
January 3, 2016
The Better Me Program
December 31, 2015
What I Wish For You in 2016
December 17, 2015
My Christmas Gift To You
December 16, 2015
Housekeeper’s Diary
December 15, 2015
5 Things You Can Save Money On During Christmas
December 8, 2015
Life Audit
December 4, 2015
Housekeeper’s Noticeboard
