I'm so in love with this lamp from BeauVamp…

While I do my best to be of a glamorous nature, there are days my friends, when tying one on makes me feel all sack of potatoes and bosoms... which is such a shame because the images below prove that it is entirely, beautifully possible to wear an apron with all the panache of the hostess with the mostess. Consider then...



..the crocheted pinny, circa 1950...



..the house dress in blue denim...



..and finally my personal winner.. the sackcloth... pertinent proof that elegance is all...

Favourites on a postcard please…

Amen to that Emma Bridgewater. You are a girl after my own heart, especially seen as we are clearly blessed with the same dreams....

After making the decision to collect the Virago special edition Modern Classics, the second one I came across after the rather wonderful Excellent Women (thoroughly charming!) was Valley of the Doll's ,and if I'm absolutely honest it's reputation went before it and left me suspecting that the chances of me enjoying it were about as slim as me wanting to take to my bed with a bedside table heaving with pulp fiction of Jackie Collin's ilk...
But I was wrong. Yet again my inner literary snob (she who read's Heat!) came over all tutty and huffy and successfully managed to keep me apart from a book that has had me using matchsticks to prop up my eyelids for the past two evenings, so gripping it is in a falling apart in the golden era of Hollywood kinda way...
Dear Readers, I wish I was capable of writing an intelligent analysis of the books I recommend to you, but I'm not very bright and thus it is mere enthusiasm I have to rely on to tell you that HERE IS A BOOK I AM ABSOLUTELY LOVING (a book that bears no relation to the film, let it be said here and now!)... 

It's trashy and it's sad and it's fabulous. And yep there's sex, drugs and the Vintage Hollywood/Broadway equivalent of rock and roll, but in this day and age it's potency is diluted and it excesses oddly quaint.

I insist you love it as much as I do.

(P.S: As far as I can tell, the  edition above with it's cover designed by Barbara Hulanicki of Biba fame is not available stateside, but what the heck... in both the case of Valley and the Doll's and Excellent Women it's what's inside that counts, so seek out the oh so kitsch glossy lips edition of The Dolls if you dare...) 

While I am sure the rather knowing young lady in the picture above would beg to differ, I have long believed that a little bit of naughtiness goes a long way to guaranteeing happiness. But it seems the Richter scale of happiness cannot be judged on our ability to behave ourselves, but rather on how much TV we watch, because according to a study by the University of Maryland, truly happy people are just too busy to be watching re-runs of seventies sit-coms...

According to The New York Times...
"Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.That’s what unhappy people do."
Happy people you see are doing something altogether more fulfilling instead. They are  reading and socialising and worshiping and walking, but what they aren't doing is sitting slumped in front of the television truthfully feeling indifferent to the show's they convince themselves they enjoy because television according to the study's author, provides "momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret".

(Heavens. I'm a sucker for momentary pleasure.)

But this is something I have been thinking about  a lot recently, if only because as the night's draw in and I find myself sitting in an albeit cosy living room, more often than not in front of the box, laptop perched on my knee, I do start to feel my mood slipping a little bit, to feel the fringe of seasonal depression lapping the corners of my mind, and in retrospect it could, I suppose be to do with, in my world at least, the correlation between Winter nights and increased TV viewing, necessitated by the urge to sit on top of the radiator, close the curtains on the rest of the world and vegetate in an exhausted fashion after a day of reading for a living and making mindless conversation, mostly with myself...

But no more! I want to be happy! Who need's long term misery and regret? (That's what men are for!) And look! Too much of this misery stuff has got me embracing the exclamation mark in a rather teenage fashion!!! And so what I need is a plan. I looove a good plan.
Thus Winter Survival BrocanteHome style will involve trips to the library for books about all manner of subjects unrelated to my great love Vintage Housekeeping. I will expand my horizons and dabble in books about   erm.. geography. Or hedgehogs. Once again my evening  bath will involve aromatherapy concoctions and more candles than you can shake a great big match at, instead of the token dip I've been currently enduring and one measly tea-light. (There's a credit crunch on don't you know?). Perhaps I will say yes to random invitations. Give up licking my wound's and start dating again! (Be afraid... be very afraid...). Drink white tea instead of black. Turn the day upside down and bake fairy cakes by candlelight. Go to bed at seven thirty and watch only films I have carefully chosen from my DVD club. No more of this spoon fed soap nonsense. I say no more!

I will not be S.A.D, I will be happy! I will not be good, I will be NAUGHTY!
And if the worst comes to the worst there is always Yvette Fielding shrieking her head off on Most Haunted.

Studies In Nerve Cures No: 1: They advised her to try Patience- "Such a soothing game!"

Studies In Nerve Cures No: 2: They advised her to go in for animals to keep her from brooding over imaginary troubles.

Two weeks ago my Dad turned sixty and during the not so surprise party we threw for him at his house, he felt the urge to prove that he was in fact sixty going on six and thus more than capable of standing on his head. (Oh to be as ridiculously gorgeous as he is...).

While Daddy was dragged kicking and screaming into bus pass territory, BrocanteHome also had a birthday (my blogaversary!) and it struck me that those first few days of blogging now seem a million years ago. Vintage Housekeeping as the blog phenomenon it is now, didn't exist, because until I discovered Typepad I had not yet coined the term that would, to my eternal astonishment, eventually spread like wildfire and have women on two continents happy to declare themselves Vintage Housekeepers, mostly now unaware that it is in BrocanteHome that Vintage Housekeeping has it's roots. That is was little old me who invented it! The same little old me that littered her every sentence with the word Scrumptious!

Four years ago my little boy was just one, Mark was still putting in an excellent show as dedicated husband-to-be, and the yellow walls of my living room were a blissfully crayon free zone...
Life felt... certain, in a way I have now forgotten it is possible for tomorrow to be.

Now the world is a whole different shape and nothing feels certain anymore. Though I hate to admit that it is upon a man's head that my security depends, it is absolutely true to suggest that my long held sense of certainty was deeply compromised the day Mark left. And it was indeed this very personal trauma that almost compromised the future of BrocanteHome, for how was I, who defined myself as Finn's Mummy, Marks "wife", to continue writing, when it was possible that life through my rose tinted glasses wasn't what it seemed? I was scared. I was worried you would think me a fraud, when sadly, stupidly, Marks leaving was as much of a shock to me as I know it was to you...   

But you held my hand didn't you? And because of that astonishing cosy blanket of virtual friendship, BrocanteHome in all it's silly, frivolous glory still exists today. And I thank you from the bottom of my stitched up heart for that...

There has of course been much to learn. I am a different woman to who I used to be. Not better. Just different. It would not be true to say that I am glad Mark left us. But I would be lying if I also pretended that there haven't been good times had and important lessons learned in the years since he went. I have after all had to confront myself in a way that I would never have needed to as part of the couple we once were. There is the immense closeness Finley and I have enjoyed. The independence gained. A friendship with Kath that would perhaps have not been quite so strong were it not that we were united in grief for the families we thought we were going to be. And there was Scott wasn't there? There was Scott, and I wouldn't have missed how it feels to be loved like that for the whole of New England.

Throughout it all, there has been BrocanteHome. There has been you. There has been Vintage Housekeeping and though it has meant clinging on by the skin of my teeth to keep it, there has been this house. My home. The very reason this blog exists. And though life was rude enough to get in the way, and my natural giddiness means my work is inconsistent and occasionally a little bonkers, BrocanteHome has not yet reached the dizzy heights I fully expected it to, though my hopes and dreams for it remain exactly the same today as they did when I pressed publish on my first post ...

This morning Finley is, for the first time this term, off sick after eating a cake he didn't know he shouldn't at a party Mark took him to at the weekend.The suite covers are hanging from makeshift washing lines across the dining room after unfortunate run ins with a sick little babba, currently to be found hot,  grumpy and cute, in a ball on my knee. The house is warm and steamy and lit by lots of little tea lights hiding amongst the books on my bookshelves, and we are both still in pyjamas, though both Mark and Kath have called in to drop off essential supplies like butter and crumpets, magazines and sweeties for a little boy who can't face food. Life is as it always has been. Life is how it is in a million little terraced cottages across the land. A Shepherds Pie in the oven and Christmas at Fairacre on my bedside.  Life is OK, it is a little bit lovely and when it hurts and feels uncertain it is because none of us know what tomorrow will bring. The other day Mark said, the thing with you Alison is that you don't seem to need anybody.. or want anything....and perhaps he's right. This has always been enough. I am perhaps a bizarre specimen, spilling out my guts, living out loud, and relying almost entirely upon my own, well honed instincts.

I can't decide whether this is the way to live your life: I only know that it is here with my baby and my laptop on my knee and a house lit with candles that I am at my most content. That I hope the lesson I have taught you all has been that gratitude is what separates those of  us capable of seeking tiny daily joys and those of us who dwell in bitterness and regret.

Joy. That is what I hope BrocanteHome means to you. Because it matters. Joy is what makes my Daddy capable of standing on his head when life is hard and when all is said and done he is, and always has been, my inspiration.
I am my Father's daughter. Though I beg to differ, he insists we have the same noses.

I have recently taken delivery of a large collection of Christmas Edition 1950's women's magazines and while perusing them for Vintage Housekeeping inspiration, it struck me that it is the letter page that is the most telling of it's time...the page that reveals most about the women, etiquette, and relative innocence of the era, while I suspect, showing us that the world really hasn't changed at all...

"I saw her at a sherry party: the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was perfect, from her smooth gold curls to her dainty shoes. Her black dress fitted like a sheath and over one arm she carried a heavenly silver fox cape. This I thought, is how one should look, should dress. I moved closer and heard her saying to the man, "No, no, we won't be going away at all this year- too difficult to leave the hens."
E.W. Dublin.

"I'm a different woman now. Hubby's socks neatly darned (without a last minute plea from him), the Winters knitting taken from the drawer and completed, a library book read within the allotted time, hair carefully set at night, child in bed without fuss- and the reason? The televisions gone bust!!!"
R.C., Ilkley, Yorks. 

"At lunchtime I was sharing a table in a cafe with two ladies, who seemed to be well known to each other. One was very old and looked as if she had little comfort i life and few of this world's goods. Presently the other left, saying "Good Morning" to us. The little old lady then called for her bill. "But it is paid" said the waitress, "your friend paid it." "How could that be? I do not know her." She turned to me and I thought I saw tears of thankfulness in her eyes. "Well she has proved your friend hasn't she?" I said "And I know it has given her pleasure." I gave thanks that there are good Samaritans amongst us still."
D.P., Bristol.

"My Mother knitted my baby daughter a horror of a woollie- in old rose, bottle green and mustard. Two months later, I thought I'd better dress her in it as we were visiting Mother. Removing the child's coat, Mother said: "Goodness! Who on earth knitted that monstrosity?"
Mrs R.B., Kirkaldy, Fife.

"Noise from the neighbours may be tiresome, but I wish you'd try to think of it this way: The slammed car door noises may be the fault of the car manufacturers; the smoky bonfires were meant to flare out, burn the rubbish and then die quickly. One sometimes has to rev the car engine. The noisy door slamming inside was caused by a draught of wind. Have an inward when you hear your neighbours laugh loudly, and wonder what the joke is.
Perhaps the person who hammers in the evening has a very long day at work and is trying to build something that he can't afford to buy for his hardworking wife? Do find excuses for others, you'll be much happier... I know, I've tried."
Mrs. D., West Wickham, Kent.

"When my daughter first started school, I went along to meet her, and found a long line of children waiting expectantly. My child, a sweet look on her face, took me by the hand, and led me up to them, saying "This is my Mummy, isn't she lovely?". The children looked disappointed, because between you and me, I am a plain Jane. Though I have always seen the funny side of this incident, it brought tears to my eyes at the time."
A.M.W., Hastings.

Through bad luck, we have been almost stony broke; consequently, I have only been buying just enough food for husband, myself and two children. The other day- calamity!- we had unexpected guests to tea. In the cupboard was just enough bread for ourselves and a small tin of meat. We talked for a while, then I went to get tea ready. I opened the cupboard and behold! half a dozen tomatoes, a loaf and some biscuits! Staggered but overjoyed, I made quite a good meal. Afterward, the mystery was solved. My sister who lives down the street, had seen my visitors arrive, and, guessing my plight, sneaked in the back way while we chatted and did a fairy godmother act!"
J.W., Yorks.

Oh you lucky American people! You get to have a Shabby Christmas courtesy of this gorgeous new video from Rachel Ashwell. If they only created a version of this DVD suitable for UK format  DVD players I would book myself an afternoon in my living room, pretty jotter and lilac inked fountain pen on hand, while I curled up under a rose coloured quilt and absorbed as much shabby festive inspiration as I possibly could...

As it is I'm gonna have to make do with a rather vivid imagination so consider me so green I'm nearly blue, with envy...

Wowzer, as my dad would say. Have you seen the Kitchen Revolution website, pray tell? Designed to accompany the rather wonderful book, it features weekly menu's accompanying recipes, and print friendly weekly shopping lists designed to maximise variety in your diet and minimise expenditure and time spent in the kitchen...

Says the blurb...

"Tired of deciding what to cook? Want to maximise your meals, with minimum time in the kitchen? The Kitchen Revolution is the life-saving cookbook you’ve been waiting for – home cooking using fresh, seasonal produce, with weekly planners, recipes and shopping lists that will enable you to maximise the weekly shop for you and the family. It’s the ‘back to basics’ approach, minimising waste through thoughtful shopping and a little preparation.

Each week features a Big Meal from Scratch (a delicious, filling meal for the whole family); Something for Nothing (two easy meals that use leftovers in a tasty and inspiring way); a Seasonal Supper (a quick, simple supper made from seasonal ingredients); Larder Feast (for when the fridge is bare, a whole meal just from store cupboard ingredients) and a 2 for 1 meal (a comforting meal that freezes well so that you can eat half immediately, and store half in the freezer)"

Which to me just about adds up to the solution to all of my problems except the size of my mortgage.  

Never again will I read the vitriolic outpourings of one delusional Ms Liz Jones. That I am admitting that I buy The Mail on Sunday is bad enough (I have always adored the interiors and cooking features in You magazine), but to work myself up into such a state about something I read inside it is downright ridiculous.
You see while the rest of the world is up in arms about Russell Brand I have got my knickers in a right old twist about  Liz Jones. Oh yes, to say I am angry is an understatement. She makes me want to spit, and if you know me well, you will know that this is a rare occasion indeed. I'm generally of a live and let live nature except when it comes to Mariah Carey.

For those of you not familiar with Liz Jones, she is the former editor of Marie Claire who turned her marriage to a man a good deal her junior into a four year long column that documented everything from her lies (she shaved a few years off her age) and his lies (He became ludicrously unfaithful) to her obsessive compulsive urge to control every last detail of their relationship and its inherent financial inequalities (He was a struggling unpublished writer, she a prominent fashion and beauty journalist), her housework craze, their brood of cats, his yoga and ultimately their  shambolic, painful marital failure.

Gripping stuff if only because what she was willing to reveal was astonishingly neurotic, desperately human and surely occasionally a little embroidered, because no truly sane woman would have allowed her imbecilic young spouse to treat her like he did and still carry on behaving like his doting Mother.

But then who are we to judge somebody else's relationship? Nobody, that's right, so women across the country groaned every time she let him climb back into her bed after yet another infidelity and secretly rooted for the everywoman we believed her to be somewhere underneath the glossy, silly, paranoid surface.

But Liz Jones isn't everywoman at all. When the marriage finally stuttered to an end she moved into the country with her beloved menagerie and the subject of her column gradually shifted to document her loneliness and regret for the children she doesn't have, the marriage as it should have been and the men she hasn't got, alongside the turmoil of life in the country for a thoroughly pampered city woman. It remains amusing and sad, but is now a little too liberally sprinkled with the bitterness reflected in every word she writes elsewhere...

I first started to feel mildly offended by her when I read this:

" ...do we really want to buy into the idea that women should revert to pouring all their energy into raising children (who, if my nephews and nieces are anything to go by, will turn their noses up at something you spent all day making from scratch) and opting out of the jobs market as soon as child number two comes along?

Where does this vision of domestic bliss leave men, I wonder? I don't often see things from a male viewpoint but I can only think that men, when faced with the prospect of being with a woman who wanted to get to the top, who paid half the mortgage, was able to talk about something other than the huge pile of ironing they had just ploughed through, and gave him the opportunity of being the one to stay home and change the nappies, just might have given a huge sigh of relief to have the burden of responsibility shared for once.

Do thirty-something men have a choice in this new-found fervour for a ridiculously retro domestic set-up? I doubt it.

I have a very hard-working male friend whose wife decided to go part-time as soon as she became pregnant and had the cheek to say to him the other day: "Why am I the only mum out of my group of friends who still has to work?

"When are you going to be a man, and let me do my job, which is to raise our child?" (And before full-time mums write in to tell me how hard bringing up three small children under three actually is, much harder than sitting in an office, I don't care. You chose to have them.)

Women were suckered by feminism into wanting careers above all else. Now they all want to do an about-turn because, surprise surprise, they have discovered something men have known for years: that the workplace is monotonous and boring and hard.

And so along comes all this domestic nonsense, which women are grasping with both hands as a way to get off the treadmill..."

This from a woman who in the absence of children, has dedicated her life to horses so pampered she washes their manes in Frederik Fekkai! This from a woman who compromised her own very well documented "feminism" by allowing herself to become the doormat on which her spoilt ex-husband wiped the yoga shoes she no doubt paid for, on! This from a woman who's very dedication to her pets, (and by the same token the maternal dedication she bestowed upon her marriage), sadly tells the tale of a woman embittered by the lack of a significant other with whom to build the life of domestic contentment she so clearly craves.

So I was already cross with her.

And then, this weekend, in my eyes at least, she blew it all together. Speaking about Michele Obama in the main part of the Mail on Sunday, she said and I quote...

" Michelle Obama is the perfect embodiment of the American Dream.

From a deprived childhood on the south side of Chicago to Harvard and Princeton law schools and a high-earning career, she has suddenly been demoted to organising the Christmas decorations at the White House and the annual Easter egg roll, whatever that is.

While her husband is being likened in all seriousness to John F. Kennedy, Michelle is being held up as the next Jackie O,  an empty-headed, expensively dressed ninny whose first instinct, when her husband was shot in the head, was to try to climb out of the back of that moving car.

I worry whether a woman so intelligent and feisty (her husband learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he was a black militant, but Michelle was always much more confrontational) will be able to melt herself down to fit this new, super-restricting role.

The constant battle she has with her hair, ironing it and chemically ‘relaxing’ it so that it becomes ‘blow hair’, i.e. hair that moves in the wind like a white woman’s, is likely to be played out every day with her fierce intellect.

She will have to suppress her views, her opinions and a loud mouth, which has meant, as one US political observer put it, she has already become ‘a target-rich environment’ in the manner of Cherie Blair.

Michelle Obama constantly has to reassure the American public that her prime concern is being a good mother to her two polite, well-dressed young daughters. ‘Even as First Lady, my No1 job is still to be Mom,’ she wrote recently.

‘My first priority will be to ensure [my daughters] stay grounded and healthy, with normal childhoods – including homework, chores, dance and soccer’.

While middle Americans can, now, accept that a black man is ready to rule the world, the idea that a woman might have interests beyond running a home is still, ludicrously,untenable.

The reason Michelle chides her husband for his bad domestic skills is obvious.

She is not emasculating him; rather, she wants to make him seem more down to earth, more ‘normal’.

But, let’s face it, even Osama Bin Laden must, at some point, shout down the stairs (do caves have stairs?) that he can’t find his turban to some poor, put-upon female.

Being inept at domesticity doesn’t make a leader appear more human; it merely means he is, de facto, oppressing someone else."

And as if this ridiculous, sexist, ill-judged borderline racist rant  wasn't enough she then went on to say...

*Far more revolutionary than electing a man of colour to the White House (will it now be the Black House?) would have been to elect a female at almost the same moment as a woman was being stoned to death for adultery in Somalia (that actually happened on October 28, 2008)"

Will it now be the Black House?? Please tell me she didn't say that. Hell yeah, she said it alright, and whether she said it with a hefty dose of irony is irrelevant to the fact that she spilled out something that in this day and age we shouldn't even think.

I don't pretend to know anything about the politics of America. But I know this: Michele Obama is an intelligent woman in her own right, and that is a fact uncompromised by whether she chooses to put personal ambition aside while she supports her family during what will no doubt be challenging, exhausting, wonderful times for them all.

And more than that how Mrs Obama chooses to style her hair has got bugger all to do with anything and merely the typical, cringe worthy, unintelligent viewpoint  of a fashion journalist full of her own importance and clearly hell-bent on courting controversy while diverting our attention away from the fact that because she has been all too willing to spill her guts about her personal life, we know how very bitter she is, and how very little she has achieved in terms of domestic fulfilment.

The saddest part of all of this is that this so called "feminist" clearly doesn't understand that modern feminism never for a moment asks  us to choose between a high flying career and the instinct to do our utmost to protect our children, while enriching the lives of the family we created. Modern feminism says only do what you have to do now. Do what matters. You always have that choice.

Me, you, Michelle. We have that choice.

So somebody tell Liz Jones, because until she steps off her high, lonely pampered horse, never again will I, and surely the rest of the nation, be able to read anything she writes.

In 1934, on behalf of the nation (and The Hoover Company) a certain Madame Schumann-Heink offered every husband in the country a little piece of her mind...

"Now is about the time you men begin to worry. To say to yourself, "Oh my! What on earth will I give my wife for her Christmas Present?"
Well if you have a good wife - and most wives are good- then you should not think of them only at Christmas, or maybe their wedding anniversary. But all the time, because they are your partners for better, or for worse.
So I say to you men, look back over the past year. Have you done all you could for tha good wife of yours. Have you made it easier for her to help raise your family? To make a place nice for you to go when you are through working?
Maybe you will want to give that wife jewellery or perfume. Or a nice new dress. Or a big, soft, easy chair- for you to sit in.
These are fine presents. She will love you for giving them.But there are some other things too which every wife should have. I know what I am talking about because I am a Mother- even a great-grandmother- and I am an old housekeeper too...

I mean those wonderful things that give your wife more time to take it easy and to play with the children, that leave her back not so tired at night and keep out those old wrinkles.
For instance I am wondering if your wife has a nice new electrical cleaner that keeps the house looking nice and clean? "

Well now Madame Schumann-Heink what a lovely idea, but I think you should be aware that I know women who would wrap the Hoover cord round that "thoughtful" husbands neck and stuff him with chives and an onion on Christmas Day if he shoved a present designed to "help her make a place nice for you when you are through working " down her stocking. Some women, you see, Madame, just don't know they are borne...

Now I have in the past been the recipient of both a food blender and a stock pot at Christmas. But here's the thing: I asked for them. It wasn't that said partner took a long hard look at me and thought, what she needs is an easier way of dicing carrots. Nope, No Siree. What actually happened was that I asked for a food blender and he looked at me sadly and agreed to buy it despite the fact that a set of saucy underwear would have been his gift of choice.

No wonder he left me!

So what's your take on this whole matter? Do you daydream about diamonds or a dishwasher? Would you, like my Mum, never again speak to a man who gave her something even remotely practical? Would an iron be a lovely little stocking filler or the height of all insults?

Should modern man listen to our Darling Madame Shumann-Heink or run a little wild at the jewelery counter?

Occasionally I get to feeling a little jaded by the world of retail, whether it be supermarket or craft stall, it sometimes feels like it's all just the same old same old in a new shade of pink...

And then along comes the Trolley Dolley and makes the world seem spanking new all over again. A little bag that hooks on to your trolley and contains all the bags you need to go shopping for the rest of your life? Fabulous! Room for all the paraphernalia you drag to the shops, including purse, phone, keys and shopping list? Wonderful! Available in a range of both snazzy and understated prints? Even better! And a third off the price in the run up to Christmas so you can convert all the Vintage Housekeepers you know into Trolley Dollies on Christmas Day? A festive dream!

Learn more here, then get yourself one and never again shuffle away from the till in green tinged shame when you have to request a plastic bag or twenty five...