It’s the smalls things

Five years ago someone (my fifty-year-old male boss actually!) told me the most efficient way of folding a fitted sheet. Simple brilliance! It really shouldn’t still give me a tingle of wonder when I fold a sheet now but the Fifties-housewife domestic goddess hidden, deeeep, inside me loves it (she’s a slattern, by the way, she should be ashamed of herself.)

Anyway, a second ray of illuminatingly obvious storage perfection shone on me today. I’m slightly apprehensive about mentioning it in case everyone already does it and the only possible comment that one could leave on this post is ‘Seriously, you don’t do that? Give your so-called inner housewife/slattern a slap from me’. But here we are anyway:

So, when you’re putting your (freshly pressed? Pfft!) underwear in your underwear drawer – in order to keep matching bras and panty-garment-type things together, to save the ‘getting ready in a rush sweary panic’ whereby all underwear scarpers, leaving you with one stripey sock, those pants with the snapped elastic and a terrifying tangle of opaque black tights – simply fasten the back strap of your bra through the leg hole of said panty-garments. Hurrah! They are now locked together forever in a tidy and organised union, or at least until your deign to wear them.

I know, it’s pathetic. I know I need to take delight in more significant things. I know this makes it seem as if the only delicates I wear are perfect matching sets (so not the case). But it made me happy!

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Bump in the road

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’ve recently escaped (after much/constant begging for release) from hospital and am at home being pampered to a slightly ridiculous degree. I’m feeling much better.

Not being well, being in hospital and everything involved in what that means for the future has been a real bump in the road for me. When you’re whizzing happily along the path on your (fantasy) bicycle – mine has long rainbow-coloured streamers flying from the handlebars and is named Juliette – it’s easy to be too wrapped up in watching the clouds overhead or calling to fellow cyclists behind you to notice a bump in the road. And when you hit the bump, and therefore the ground, it comes as much more of a shock than if you’d had your eyes to the ground, waiting for it.

A bit of me is angry at myself for being so blase about how lovely and easy the going was. And my assumptions that the path would always be smooth and lead exactly where I imagined.
But now that I’m clambering back into the saddle, I’m sad at the idea that I won’t be the person whistling along without a care in the world. That’s up to me though really. From now on, I’m going to make a concentrated effort to look closely at the pretty things around me and appreciate the people along for the ride. And when other bumps in the path appear in the future, I can’t say how grateful I am for all the friends and family I have who are waiting with magic cream, sticking plasters and homemade honeycomb!

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A place to make

I’ve finally got round to finding a wee nook for all my craft stuff. What a relief! I say ‘all’ my craft stuff, and that’s not quite true. There’s a load of lesser used material in a trunk in my bedroom but for the moment, here is the new home of my day-to-day sewing stuff.

Just need to paint it white and put on a beautiful new jewelled drawer handle I got at Bombay Duck and I’m done! Hmm, maybe retake the shot in daylight (when we get some) – it’s every so slightly fake-tan orange, no?

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A roof over our heads… Or not?

I live in a one-bedroom flat just now and, as much as I love the place, we definitely need some more space. We’ve been looking for a bigger flat/house for about a year now and still haven’t found it. This may be because I swing wildly from loving decrepit townhouses in the West End, that need years of work and upgrading, to Arts and Crafts cottages in the country that I’d need a 4×4 to get access to each day. Not the most practical house-hunter.

Anyway, I’ve decided that I just want to hurry up and find somewhere so I can move in this year. And to be honest, my (now not-so) secret reason for really, really wanting a house is so I can have one of these in my back garden.

Oh yes, it would be nice for our nieces and nephews to play in. A humorous retro nod. It would be a decorative item, really, a silly indulgence.

Except it wouldn’t be, at all – it would my sanctuary. I would sit in here every weekend and read Danny, Champion of the World and be in heaven. And during the week, I’d be inside – cooking or somesuch grown-up activity – and look out and imagine I was inside my caravan reading Danny, Champion of the World.

Strikes me as a bit ironic, though, that I can’t live my Romany, wanderlust-caravan fantasy until I have a bricks and mortar house and a patch of land to call my own. Hmmm.

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