Wouldn’t Life Be Lovelier
With Seasonal Routines, Rituals and Teeny, Daily Celebrations?
Back In September
August has arrived and the time has come for me to down tools and take my annual month long holiday away from BrocanteHome. As you know the past twelve months have been uniquely horrible for me and though I am doing my absolute best to keep going, if I’m totally honest, I’m exhausted and my…
101 More Things About Me (At Fifty)
I have written a few of these posts over the years, and thought it was time for another to reflect on who I am now, at fifty. You can read the others, here (2005), here (2006), here (2007), here (2013), and here (2015). And here we have the latest addition: older and no wiser at…
The Scooby Doo Solution
One of the things that is ridiculous about me (and trust me I am positively abundant in ridiculousity) is my quiet passion for Scooby Doo. In fact sometimes when I am wandering the house wearing my woman on the verge face, a little voice inside my head whispers “How about a little Scooby Doo?”. Where…
BrocanteMe is Now Open!
Today I am thrilled to announce that our lovely new UPGRADED community is finally open and I am here to invite you all inside! Membership is free for all, with access to The Common Room, our lovely BookClub and some gorgeous daily prompts to keep you on track to domestic wellbeing available the moment you…
Goal Setting for Homemakers
We are living in weird times aren’t we? Most of us have grown up in an era when life felt relatively stable and our sense of self and purpose was clearly defined by personal history, values and gentle ambition for ourselves and our family. But now so very much of that certainty has been derailed:…
How Focus Was Lost
I do believe I have just two modes: serene and swanlike or completely off my head. And honestly, completely off my head seems to be the way I’m rolling through most of my days at the moment. It isn’t pretty. I try to be normal. Of course I do. I try to tumble out of…
An Ursula Bloom Season
The Easter holiday is almost upon us and in my house that means I will be inundated with boys lounging around the place, which calls, I think you will agree, for a bookish antidote in the form of the frivolous lovely I can dip in and out of at will when discussions about wrestling and…
Cath Kidston Pyjamas
I used to work for a lady called Sara. I was young, living in my first flat and she had just bought a beautiful barn she wanted me to decorate with hand-painted soldiers marching around her walls and multiplication tables in her children’s bathrooms. As it was one of my first major jobs I was…
Housekeeper’s Diary
It is March. And I am fifty. Two things that strike me as quite impossible for wasn’t it Christmas just yesterday. And surely I am just twenty-eight? Time, my sister tells me, doesn’t exist, so therefore yes, I declare myself under thirty and just about ready to step into the New Year if you don’t…
21 Days To A Calmer You
After the lovely success of the first Brocante Bootcamp, my next Habit-coaching course goes live next Monday, 7th March, a week later than expected, as so many of those enrolled for all the courses have been sick during what has turned out be something of a rather trying Winter for so many… 21 Days To…
The Second Chapter
Sometimes the need for change wallops you in the face. But more often than not, its a creeping sensation. Truth that wraps around you like a vine, tendrils growing around static discontent and moss forming on all the stones so far left unturned. A few months ago I felt it. A vine around my neck….
Housekeeper’s Diary
Good lord. Let us not speak of the fact that It is already the middle of February and I have been missing in domestic action since Christmas. One does tend to rather lose January in a fog of new bath oils, books and big ideas, and then emerge blinking like the mole we must be…