I still can’t write, so I thought for a little while you might enjoy the voices of a few carefully selected, downright wonderful women?
For today, Suzanne Lipschutz from New York vintage wallpaper purveyor, Secondhand Rose. Listen to that gravelly voice, rich I reckon with the kind of stories that could make us all howl! Oh and the wallpaper, oh my, the wallpaper.

I’d sell my teeth to spend an hour or two prowling around Secondhand Rose listening to stories about Barbara Striesand, wouldn’t you?

Read the full interview on Nowness here.

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I suspect it might be rather well documented that I do not have a garden, I have a postage stamp: a teeny, tiny decked Victorian cottage yard that once had a quarter garden behind my next door neighbours until the man who lived in the house before I did, sold it to the local Scouts.

And so while the other three cottages in our little row are the proud owners of lovely long gardens, I sit between them with just enough room to swing my little kitten…

Luckily I’ve never been one to view my glass anything but brimming over with something scrumptiously bubbly, so a postage stamp is what I’ve got and a PRETTY postage stamp is what I am going to have!

So I have been busy and at my side Richard has been available with a hammer and a whole lot of can-do and overnight there is a potting bench with a lift up lid and room for my recycling buckets underneath, created from my sketchy description, a pile of left-over timber and a spoonful of clever man genius…

For the first year in the eleven that I have lived here I have a little diddy something calling itself a greenhouse in which radish, lettuce, tomatoes, chillies, garlic and spring onions are rapidly growing, with me fussing over them morning and night, popping them out to sunbathe on warm afternoons and tucking them up tightly when the sun goes down.

Beyond the tiny seed tent as the diddy greenhouse will hereby be known as, I have got eight pots of different lavenders so I can, once and for all, establish my favourite fragrant variety, pots of succulents so I don’t have to fuss too much over them too, strawberries in hanging baskets, raspberries growing against the wall, a herb crate on the potting bench near the kitchen door, a little rose bush I have been lovingly pruning for ten years and a darling pink hydrangea, which is a recent addition owing to the fact that I rather neglected the one I had been cultivating for years, and it shook its pale blue head in sorrow and withered away and died.

There is a folding metal table and chairs and a little black log burner on which to char summer evening pizzas. Oooooh and joy of joys, I now have a garden tap! Plumbing to me is as mystical as brain surgery. I simply can’t fathom how a person knows which pipes should attach to which, so this darling brass tap is something of a minor miracle and I feel like doing a giddy little tap-dance every time I turn it on and hose water over all the garden! (Bless me)

This then has been a labour of love. I am so grateful every time I step out the back door to hang out the washing or drink a cup of tea at the table under the window. Though Richard has been laughing at the fretting I do about my seedling babies, I know he knows how delighted I am with the magical way he brings my little dreams to life…

 So here is to a beautiful Summer. This here postage stamp is my very own patch of sunshine. It’s tiny and it’s mine.

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Housekeepers I am about to type a sentence I suspect you never thought I would ever type.

I have spent the weekend knitting. Yep. Knitting. Going clickety clack with some pretty red needles and feeling immensely proud of myself and insisting that everybody applaud this huge achievement and worrying ever so slightly that I looked like an old lady every time I sat down and picked up my needles again and feeling absolutely astonished that I could become so thoroughly absorbed in something I have long considered absolutely impossible.

On Saturday morning, Lisa and I set off to take a beginners work-shop in knitting at Knit Wise in Ormskirk. I wasn’t holding out much hope for success. My Darling Mum has shown me how to knit, ooh maybe a hundred times in my lifetime and everytime I have watched, knitted a few rows and declared it impossible. I once even went so far as to take my self to John Lewis and spend many a pretty penny on bamboo needles and gorgeous yarn, only to knit half a garter stitch scarf and promptly abandon it in favour of sitting on my bottom and doing nothing at all.

So there we were, Lisa and I, speedily equipped with a ball of pink yarn and a pair of needles and sent upstairs to learn the mysterious art of casting on with Myra, the owner of Knit Wise and a woman impossibly patient with those of us who can barely fathom something utterly natural to her. There were just three of us trying to learn, me, Lisa and a lovely fellow blogger, Lo from La Folie Emilie who charmed us all with her French accent and frustrated groans as she tried to muddle her way through the bewildering business that is knitting.

And so we began by casting on. Something that befuddled me entirely because I had always cast on by tying the wool around the needle and making a stitch and Myra wanted us to learn the Cable method and I couldn’t find the right stitch everytime and generally fussed and proved myself to be a terrible pupil and Myra was shockingly patient and Lisa laughed a lot and Lo concentrated and a I waffled and before I knew it I was knitting. And to my utter shock purling. And then alternating the two stitches and making pretty patterns and dropping a stitch or two because I was talking too much and showing off a little bit…

I simply couldn’t believe I was knitting. It has been such a long time since I was taught anything scrumptiously new in a workshop setting and I had forgotten how wonderful it feels when something clicks in your head. It was clicking! I was click-clacking past myself. Lisa was deliriously excited as you can see below, and before we knew it we were casting off and signing ourselves up to a pattern reading course in May because patterns may as well be in double dutch, but that too might click right??

And then it was time to go home and Lisa trotted off to look after a husband ailing with man-flu and I delayed going home long enough to do a little shopping and while I was trawling the aisles of W.H.Smith a Cath Kidston knitting tin jumped out at me and the combination of Cath with knitting was too much to resist and before I knew it I was sitting at home casting on 180 stitches to make a Cath Kidston inspired scarf in rather lurid stripes and getting adventurous by throwing in a couple of rows of slip-stitch to this garter stitch pattern and planning on adding a few vintage buttons and avoiding the rather enthusiastic attentions of both Finley and Jimmy the kitten and knitting my way through Britain Has Got Talent and for the first time understanding why an addiction to knitting could become as all consuming as an addiction to crack cocaine…

For tell me this and tell me no more: how is a person to fit in the time-consuming business that is knitting? Will my house go to rack and ruin as I sit and master the art of moss stitch? Will I need to re-mortgage the house to afford all that much coveted yarn? Will my housekeeping readers abandon me in droves as I wax lyrical about my latest obsession?  Will Richard leave me for someone who doesn’t sit around in her dressing gown with a ball of wall flung over her shoulder? I mean really, where will it all end??

Ooops. I got carried away there. Do excuse me, this post is clearly nothing more than the exalted ramblings of a convert.   But readers, I am sooo excited. It feels nothing short of wonderful to finally understand something that has bewildered me always, and I am truly astounded by the almost meditative act of sitting quietly and just knitting…

I’m off to join Ravelry. Happy Monday Gorgeous.x

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Once upon a time a girl happened upon blogging and her life was changed for always. She found herself creating a scrapbook full of all that she loved and she felt her heart do a happy little skip when she realised that there were others out there just like her. And so she wrote for them. And for her son who was at the time just one year old. And sometimes she wrote to the man who left or the one who couldn’t stay no matter how much he wanted to. Or she needed him to.

But mostly she wrote for herself. She wrote and she collected pretty pictures and even prettier thoughts. She let what was unhappy tinge her days in sepia and looked at her life through a rose-tinted lens regardless. What she was creating was a scrapbook of all of her days. Her hearts desires. Sorrow, gratitude and joy. And sometimes she lost whole afternoons just to scrolling through all of her own yesterdays, shocked to know that were versions of herself she had left behind without even realising she was casting them off. Surprised by the evidence of her own growth.

At first blogging was a difficult business, requiring much fathoming of bewildering computer language and dalliances with cameras that wouldn’t do what she wanted. Then for a while the words and pictures seemed to flow right out of her hands on to the keyboard, so fast she couldn’t keep up, blogging two or three times a day and feeling inspired at every turn. But suddenly, as blogging became more prevalent elsewhere on-line, this girl grew shy. Too aware of herself. Questioning the value of every sentence and worrying that somehow those who read her could SEE her: that they would come to know her as a fraud, a pretender, a charlatan dressed in scarlet roses. That they would look at her and see straight through her to her vulnerable, cobwebbed heart.

And then someone big and tall and as vulnerable as she was came and blew away the dust from her house. And he made her happy. And deeply sad. And so proud of herself and her home and her son she could barely breathe sometimes. Look what you did, he would say smiling. And she started to see it. Despite it all. Despite the sadness and the fear and the worry and everything else. Despite it all, she saw that somewhere along the way what was just a scrapbook had become a way of life: that all the values she eschewed on-line where a huge part of the way she lived, with kindness and gingham and roses and so much gratitude. That her art and her life had merged into one lovely polka-dotted bubble and it might just be alright after all.

And so she started taking photographs of everything. From the new toaster to the violet pastilles always in her bag. The kitten and her latest bedtime reading matter. She snapped away daily, taking her own lovely ordinary and seeing it all afresh. And though she couldn’t blog it all (for she still felt a little shy), she would sometimes sit down and look at her life on-line in the same way she viewed other people’s: through a lens. Isolated parts of her day snapped to make up one lovely whole. A little boy with curly hair. A kitten with great big eyes. An A for Alison. Everything including the kitchen sink. All there in a way she could see and appreciate, not the blurry fuzz of everyday life, but snippets of her own authenticity on a tiny phone sized screen.

There would always, always be blogging, but now there was also Instagram: little love letters to her own heart, captured daily so she could treasure them always.

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Ah Valentines Day. You are a funny little duck aren’t you? On the one hand I rather despise the red satin heart of you and on the other hell hath no fury like me should Cupid decide to shoot his arrows in the wrong direction. I have high expectations you see. Not of diamonds and Agent Provocateur lingerie. But of  sentiment and emotion. I don’t want presents, I want feelings and conversation. Time and acknowledgment. Hands that cup my face before I am kissed.

Dear Valentines Day I would like to re-invent you. I want to banish the tawdry and say ta-ra to the tacky and deliver to every woman in the land the merest smidgen of precious feeling. For what if we gently shifted the focus on this day of hearts and made it about friendship and personal well-being? What if today we delivered a box of Strawberry Shortbread Hearts to our best friend, phoned Dad to tell him we love him and took the afternoon off to take a long bath and a country walk, holding hands and talking about all our tomorrows? No Dine-In’s, cheap red roses or meaningless cards but real togetherness. Plans for time spent together or a night without the television, just talking. Gosh I like talking. Talking is my favorite thing in the world.

So yes. A quiet night, blanketed in pure intimacy please.  Perhaps a little cupcake or two baked with love?

A love letter stitched or scrawled on to a vintage handkerchief, like this one by artist Rosalind Wyatt…

A rose and ylang-ylang scented Epsom Salt bath and my favorite Rumi love poem, read out loud.

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along…

Or the honour of sitting next to someone reading in companionable silence. For me, tonight, the corny romantic innocence of The Rose-Garden Husband complete with a heroine who finds that love can no more be imagined, than it can be quelled when it finally arrives in the most unlikely of cloaks. A light-hearted read to enjoy while he  puzzles over another Agatha Christie mystery and we both sip at one perfect glass of wine.

So yes, let’s re-invent Valentines Day and let it not be heavy with anticipation of satin  seduction and aphrodisiacs. Let it instead be a reminder to treat each other gently, be kind and let the intimacy of all the years gone by tell their own story.

Happy Valentines Day Housekeepers.

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