Beautiful and free to download at the lovely PoppyTalk. The perfect Friday morning project methinks...

Hibernation. You know that is what you are doing and you tell yourself that it is permissible in February. You do not shop, you do not walk, you barely write anything worth writing and can't bring yourself to go through the rigmarole of dating. Some days it is all you can do to take a shower. And yet how odd that your body retains the ability to sink into this black hole on an annual basis. Wrapping misery up in blubber. You are sad. Things entirely unrelated to your world are making you sad. At the Post Office Batman Dave says something mean about Jade Goody, poking a finger at her face on the front of a newspaper till you want to lean over the counter and bash his nose in. You are a lovely man, but you don't get it do you? But it turns out you don't have the courage of your convictions and in a queue of people bearing witness to your cowardice, you nod in agreement and shove her beautiful, brave, bald head into a white carrier bag. Oh that we should ever have to bear even one minute of that kind of pain, when even something as commonplace as sciatica is making life feel impossible. Everything feels difficult, more exhausting than it should considering you have so much energy pulsing through your veins: so much you almost suspect that this is the cause of it: a knot of energy pressing on your delicate nerves. You lie poker straight on the floor, comfortable for once and your little boy asks, eyes wide, what he should say when he call's 999. Two minutes later you are sitting up playing Guess Who. You do not care to analyze the cause of this depression. You only know that once the soft light of March flutters by you will feel better. And so you do not seek a cure for this temporary madness: you wallow in it because you know you are not alone. You see it written grey on the faces of the women everywhere. You eavesdrop on their conversations online and off, and wish you could hold their faces in your hands and say that this too will pass. It's ok to feel this way. It's alright to say it out loud. You who can hold nothing in at all. You who cannot stop wanting to Mother the whole wide world while your own inner life, dissolved by doubt in what you have to say crumbles overnight so life becomes one long round of the kind of starting again you secretly despise. You grimace as the window cleaner appears at your bedroom window, invading your privacy and demanding a chirpy smile. I'm alright Mr Window Cleaner. Look, I smiled: I'm alright. Don't tell my Mum you caught me napping in the middle of the day. (I'm not napping, I'm resting: there is a difference). You spend an inordinate amount of time justifying who you are and what you do: to yourself, to your Mother, to ex-partners, window cleaners and passing dogs. You think perhaps you just need a holiday. Thirteen years is a long time to go without stepping out of your everyday life. Perhaps this is just how tired feels. You tell a man you know purely in a professional capacity that to leave his wife for you is bloody ridiculous. That he is compromising his position by calling you over and over and over again. That you would no more think of drinking coffee with him, than you could contemplate having his fingers on your skin. You envy the sanctity of marriage but all too often are given cause to doubt it: so many men all too willing to drag off the ties that bind on a romantic whim of their own conjuring. You are a single woman: a signed up member of the easy prey club. It is both boring and repulsive and worse than that it pits you against other good women in a battle they do not know they are fighting. You bake more cakes. Teeny one's infused with the juice of two ripe oranges. You squeeze a lemon into a bowl of boiling hot water and crawl around wiping down the skirting boards like you did when you were pregnant until your son squeezes into the gap where he used to be, and you find yourself hunched over him, your entire body crossed over his: his need to touch you always so urgent. You tweet, you tumble, you text, you blog. You will blog this later. You know you shouldn't. But blogging is your own brand of sooth and nothing else will help. You are all too aware that recently your posts have been blessed with snark. Truth spills out your fingers and for that you are a little ashamed. Self absorption is never pretty. (Never waste the pretty). You need a book to fill the gaping hole inside you. The kind of book with answers to this degrading absence of pleasure . Books you see, find you, you don't find them. They hunt you down and say Now is the time to swallow me whole. It is just a matter of waiting. You are good at waiting.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

While it is a damn shame my French isn't good enough to truly establish what is being said over at this lovely blog, to my eternal gratitude, pictures, and in this case, show stoppingly scrumptious vignettes, very definitely speak louder than words.... Go sneak a pretty peek and while you are there, find yourself thoroughly inspired by all the beautiful images in the albums on the left hand side: then go have a lie down. Let's face it, there is only so much gorgeousness we can take in one day isn't there?

Oh Sweeties, I know: you would prefer it if I was regaling you with the eccentric combination that is juicy titbits from my non-existent single Mommy love life and seven thousand things to do with a salty lemon, and some days that is indeed what is foremost on my mind. But today I can't get enough of these rather fabulous Silhouettes from the The Bazaarium. I make no apologies. They are funny and beautiful. Victorian art, traditional skills and the kind of humour that tickles the funny bone I keep tucked behind my ear. Once I wrote about my urge to be an accomplished woman. Being accomplished, I declared, in anything, would do. Cross stitch, piano playing, calligraphy, skipping rope, seduction, anything. Today I want to be an accomplished silhouette cutter but the fact that I would find myself swimming in the divide between accomplishment and art would make me miserable. Wilhelm Staehle is an artist. I am a wannabe. So I am off to see He's Just Not That Into You instead. And yes I agree, that is something else I should apologise for. So I'm sorry. On all counts. Have a nice day.

We could pretend we were ice skating! Oh the fun we could have Housekeepers with a pair of those strapped to our pearly pink painted tootsies...

I am so in love with Mary Ruffle. I just had to tell you so you could fall in love with her too. It's nice when we are on the same page isn't it?

Which is more important? Which should be your priority? Do children matter above all else, or does solidifying your relationship by working at perfect spousedom mean that children will be guaranteed security and contentment regardless? Should your partner come always first? I have been muddling this question around in my mind ever since I was seduced by a pretty blue gingham cover, into buying The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands shortly after Finley was born and shortly before Quazi-Husband went walkies with a Wiganer, never to be seen playing the part of practiced upon perfect spouse thereafter. Did he go because after fifteen years together my priorites had changed dramatically following the birth of a child who in the second year of his life nearly died of mal-nutrition owing to a harrowing case of undiagnosed Coeliacs Disease? Should I have been performing sexual gymnastics inbetween changing the twenty four stinky nappies a day Finley was then producing? Was my failure to support his change in career at that time not simply down to the fact that as a Mother I was absolutely bloody terrified and that in the aftermath of the babies not very life threatening after all diagnosis, I simply glad he was still alive and thus temporarily lost in a talcum powder cloud of God forsaken gratitude?? Hells bells. Aren't we glad I got that little lot off my chest? This isn't bitterness talking. Mark and I are now good friends to the degree that we have been more than able to look at what happened from every which way and downright ugly angle without coming to any conclusions at all, apart from that had he not left it would not have been too long before one of us was buried under the patio. He knows and regrets the devastation he caused but we remain head over heels in love with what we created regardless and so we move forward in a relationship based on utter respect for each others parenting skills without the complication or competition posed by romantic entanglement: but still I wonder... I wonder what kind of Mother I would be if I also had to be a wife. What the synergy of those two roles would create in me. Whether once we had adjusted to Finn's Coeliacs as of course we all did, I would have been capable of being the kind of woman able to differentiate between being a Mother and being a wife, or whether, as I suspect, life would have been the gently blissful mash of family life I always imagined it to be, with my favorite partner in crime along for the ride? In December, however, Vogue writer Alice Thomspon put paid to the myth that putting Motherhood before wifely duty is either acceptable or even particularly desirable. Comparing the Fifties wife and Mother: "Then women were perfectly groomed, managed a limited household budget welcomed their husbands home in the evening and settled him into his armchair, while her two well-disciplined children curled up at his feet..." with her modern day equivalent: "By the time we've finished work, put the children to bed and crawled under the kitchen table for the Lego, we've barely got the energy to text our husbands to buy some milk before we flop in front of the television..." ..she comes to the conlusion that it is because "those brought up on feminism are embarrased to admit we may want to nurture our husbands the way we nurture our children" that we throw all our energy into lining the family coffers and being maternal Goddesses instead and that ultimately it is because we now expect too much of our husbands, and consider ourselves rather too precious indeed, that marriages are suffering and divorce is now rife: "He must be the perfect Father, he must cook, shop, and probably clean up afterwards, too. He must be the breadwinner (most wives, even if they work, do not really entertain the idea of a househusband), provide sex on tap (even if we won't), remember anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine's Day, do the school run, buy flowers on a regular basis, deal with the car, pay the bills, do the gardening and provide us with a stream of compliments." Ah diddums. But yes I agree that more is now expected of husbands and indeed men in general: but it is only because societies expectations of both women and what constitutes a healthy marriage has changed. A society in which, as an article in the Sunday Times a few weeks ago put it, the bar has been raised and a good wife must now "have a job of her own (or at least some serious charity commitments), be able to raise a family and keep house, plus be arm candy when required, smart enough to step in and give a strategic fillip to her husband's career, publicly attentive and privately supportive-and that's just at the entry level." Heckity pie. What happened to mutual support? Teamwork for the common good of the beloved family? And ye gads hold on a minute- arm candy?? Even the language used in the discourse of modern day marriage is somewhat abhorrent, let alone the flurry of raised expectation, especially when it is all too easy both, morally and legally for said husbands to bale, or perhaps even worse, stay and wear a badge of indifference towards the woman who senses her failure and his consequent distaste on a daily basis and is often no more capable of re-inventing herself as arm candy than he is of running for President. Well whatever.That's what I say. This my Darlings, is just one more reason to feel guilty, in a media-driven world that consistently fails to acknowledge the contribution good mothering makes to society and undermines it at every turn, and that more than that still objects to women being first and foremost themselves undefined by whatever role they may or may not be playing. Moreover the modern women doesn't have to feel at odds with feminism when she nurtures her husband: she does it because grown up human beings needs nurturing as much as children do; because in decent marriage she is just as likely to experience what it is to be nurtured; and because nurture itself is implicit to all the ties that bind us. Women who expect less do themselves an injustice. Adoration of our children, even at the risk of everything else in our lives, is never squandered and we have every right to expect a partner equal in emotional intelligence to ourselves.

Almonds. I can't get enough of the scent of them. It started with Method's Almond scented polish and one too many compliments from visiting friends. (As if it was me doused in the the gentle dust of these fragrant nuts). And then it was Almond Fairy liquid, a few drop's of almond essence added to my BrocanteHome surface cleaner, and the battle to create macaroons of my own making that are actually edible. As if anything I ever make is edible. Tesco's. Though I promise Nick I will never again darken their door due to their penchant for outrageous business practices, it seems me and promises were never a match made in heaven and the rebel in me cannot resist the pull of all that easy gotten scrumptiousness under one roof. I come away with Singapore Rose cordial I will later pour drizzle over vanilla ice cream, a bar of Green and Blacks Gingerbread (oh my!) chocolate, an over-sized box of baking soda from the cleaning section (at last!!) and the terrible taint of consumer driven guilt I will wash way with an amber coloured bar of Pears soap. Home. The occupational therapist insists Finley must be seated at all times with his feet firmly on the ground. He needs to feel grounded she says. He needs to be wearing tighter underwear. An underwear hug if you like. He needs reminding where his body ends and the rest of the world begins. I re-arrange his bedroom in the quest to free up his little vintage desk and chair and do myself a damage dragging it down the stairs. For the first time he eats a meal without falling or jumping on and off his chair and I go into the kitchen and slap myself about the heart for not having made his life this much easier before. Conversations. His insight never fails to astound me. He's crawls into bed with me, him in flannel pyjamas, me in the nightie I wore the day he was born. Mum, he said, you know you think I was invented to drive you bonkers? Yes, baby? I replied... Well it isn't true, he said, straddling my chest and looking straight into my eyes, I was invented to open doors Mum. What kind of doors Sweetheart? Doors to whole new worlds Mummy! I was invented to open doors to a whole new world just for you Mummy... I know it's true. But do not know how it is possible for a five year old to put it so lucidly into words. Later he is draped across the rug colouring in, when he looks up and asks, Mum do you think God draws pictures? Well probably baby, I say, ignoring the voice of my appalled inner aethiest. Maybe, he says, excitement making his eyes dance, maybe he drew us! Maybe we are Gods pictures! Wow, I say, you could be right Finn, watching even as I say it, doubt cross his face. No Mum. Pictures don't move. We move, we are more like a film. There is a pause. Then: That's it Mummy! We are actors in God's film. We are all just actors!! We are all just actors.

The very very very scrumptious VintageHome is two years old today and in celebration the site has a fabulous new design positively stuffed with the kind vintagey gorgeousness that make me want to cry... Congartulations Clare: it is absolutely gorgeous and two years joyfully thriving is something more than worth doing a happy dance for!

All the children stood in a heart clutching heart shaped red balloons and surrounding Jennifer- a very special little girl with a heart condition the whole school had gathered together on the day before Valentines Day to raise money for. And there she was: a little girl holding a blue balloon in a sea of red hearts. On the count of ten the children released the balloons and amongst the noise of so many excited wow's we watched the sky dot with love, Jennifer's heart floating amongst them like the beacon of hope I suppose it really was. A beautiful moment during what is so very often a commercially vulgar holiday. This week a man asked me what I would be writing about Valentines Day. He needed idea's for the French woman he was trying to woo, he said. And I replied that I found it impossible to write about today without a warped smidgeon of bitterness and regret that really wasn't becoming. And we laughed. Because I find myself ridiculous and other people rather adore it when I speak my ludi-ocrisy (I made that word up) out loud... Especially when it isn't true. What I feel isn't bitterness or regret. It is a yearning. It is impatience and frustration and a simple ache for someone to lift up my hair and tickle the back of my neck. That is all. There is nothing ugly about it. Nothing you couldn't bear to look at it if you stood beside me. It is what it is. There has been the top 50 love songs this morning, poached eggs and a self inflicted hair cut. There have been phone calls and Country Living. Kath (my very own plus one) and I will be going to the cinema this afternoon. Us and our popcorn. And tonight there will be a bath taken in milk powder. A bath taken in silence with only the ripple of opaque water to entertain me. And a card. Yes indeed, there has been a Valentine card. A beguiling card from a "Long Time Admirer" which has got me thoroughly flummoxed. What constitutes a long time? Four months? Three years? Two decades?? You, my darling admirer, tell me, because I'm not Scooby Doo and I was never good with mysteries. (Is that you Daddy?) You see I prefer my romantic declarations on a plate: preferably a pretty, gilt edged plate. The sky may be dotted with love but I want to be able to see the blue heart amongst the sea of red ones if you please, so stand up and be counted immediately: wear your heart on your sleeve or you will cause me sleepless nights suspecting all manner of undesirables and I'm sure you don't want that on your conscience. So risk it Mister. Risk everything... Happy Valentines Day Housekeepers. Happy Valentines Day Long Time Admirer. Happy Valentines Day me.

Wouldn't a length of this gorgeous ribbon be absolutely delicious wrapped around our Gratitude Journals? From Etsy seller, TeaCup Design...

Part of the reason why I moved from Typepad to Blogger was because I wanted to find an easier way of organising my online life in one place. In some ways it has not been successful: I have of course lost many many subscribers who haven't yet re-discovered the path to Brocante and the blog is, for the moment, quieter as a result. But it was always a risk and one that I was willing to take in order to make the whole business of blogging more intuitive and less of the headache that the mere updating of my once inflexible sidebars was, and thus create a space that better reflects my creative interests. And I have to tell you, that though I am both still in the process of designing the page and indeed establishing a rhythm, I really rather love it... The oddest part of all of it is how my blogging environment is shaping those interests: as if moving away from the blog of the previous four years represents closing a door on who I was and allows me, to a degree to re-invent my little online world. All of a sudden I am being seduced by blog candy. I don't feel quite as introspective as I once did, and I am spending hours on end wandering, on something of a beautiful odyssey, through the kind of inspirational images and words that are tickling something inside me: something I half suspected had shriveled up and died. Wonder. That is what I think it is: wonder! Much of the former Brocante still exists. I will still be writing about my personal life as and when I feel the urge. My love of Vintage Housekeeping will never die and indeed is alive and well in both my Circle and my Salon, and I will over the next few months be putting together a new Housekeeping planner and a pocket sized book of all the most scrumptious of puttery treats so it can sit on your bedside and remind you on a daily basis to do something lovely for yourself and your home, but I will also be focusing a little more on all the gorgeous creative things that are going on around the internet, the things that inspire me, vintage images and advice that makes me smile, words that make me tingle and the women who make me want to be a better person... And so for a start, please go have a look around my new Pinboard (In the link bar at the top of the page): a daily inspiration board of gorgeous links and images from around the internet that will I hope start you on something of a scrumptiously inspirational skip around the minds of some truly creative people, and indeed help you create the home of your dreams... Which, has of course, always been my raison d'etre... I'm excited!

Dear Eddie Ross I love you and I love (love, love, love, love) your Butlers Pantry. Have a nice day. Yours in eternal admiration, Alison.

I am suffering from a severe case of bloggers amnesia and can't (for the life of me) remember whether I have told you, that should I ever come into money the first thing I will be doing is gonna get me one of Colette Calascione's paintings for all the stories that they tell, the history painted into the line of each portraits subjects body, the references to so much art gone before, embroidered sexuality and secrets destined to forever remain untold.. Oh and the colour and pattern... did I mention the glorious overlay of colour and pattern? I did? Forgive me: age is catching up with me. Thirty seven in a few weeks, twelve years old just yesterday.

Ohhhh look! Never in my wildest dreams could my limited imagination have conjured up such a scrumptious re-purposing of vintage doillies... Absolutely beautiful. From Etsy store Nice.

Quick sticks Housekeepers! Niki Fretwell of Nostalgia at the StoneHouse fame has, this morning uploaded fifty deliciously whimsical new additions to her shop. Hope, the happy little patriotic fairy is already destined for some lucky vintage soul, but there are oodles more scraps of loveliness to be had....