A Sunny Vintage Weekend

I used to be a Winter person. I used to laugh at my Mum longing for sunny days and try to convince her that the best days of our lives didn’t arrive until the nights drew in and we could close our curtains on the rest of the world and hibernate through the coldest months of the year.
But this Summer feels different: this summer reminds me of the one after Mark left when I was blindly feeling my way towards a whole new life. This too is a Summer imbued with emotion. With simple pleasures and (oh bliss) sun!

This weekend there has been a barbeque: scrumptious vegetable kebabs, chicken basted with tomato pesto, red cabbage mustard coleslaw, and twirly chorizo sausages. Then a really silly lemon tart topped with rice paper flowers, mint leaves and strawberries, surrounded by raspberries, more strawbs, and rose and lemon turkish delight and served with champagne cream. Abundance on a floral plate!

And there we sat into the early hours, chatting to the neighbours and making each other giggle by the light of citronella candles, till our   guests left, and still we sat, playing soft music and watching Alice cross the table between us, trying to find a comfy place to settle in our laps, but too easily disturbed by the moths gathering under the light of the patio heater to rest…

The next morning there should have been a  car boot sale and certainly yet again, the sun was cracking the flags but this here Vintage Housekeeper had indulged in a little too much of everything and couldn’t open her smudgy eyes so the morning was lost until I was able to rally myself and head to the car to drive to Bygone Times in search of a velvet footstool and leaving  instead with a pretty floral plate with holes in the centre to drain soft fruit…

Then it was a picnic in the car of chicken left over from the barbeque, stuffed between layers of rye and drenched in mustard mayo and roasted vegetables, and within moments we were pulling up outside Cedar farm delighted to find a Vintage Fair in full swing…

There amongst the usual fayre of vintage loveliness were a few things gorgeous enough to stop my pretty-loving heart: namely the wares of Rose & Lee Vintage Living: scrumptious be-ribboned soap, hand-made candles in all manner of  vintage vessels and piece de resistance… tiny old carafes filled with bath salts and gathered together so beautifully I wanted to take them all home…

In the end we bought two brandy, lime and ginger cupcakes and drove home to eat them with big mugs of inelegant tea sitting in the sun and admiring the newly finished diddy little tool shed, fashioned from left over roof tiles and bits of wood..

And then Finn was home and we all sat, his Daddy, Richard and I laughing at him as he posed in a cowboy hat, before lying down on the decking for a short little sleep apparently exhausted by a weekend spent splashing in the paddling pool…

Ah sun! You are lovely. I will miss you when you go away…