When a relative stranger stops you in the lane and asks you if BrocanteHome is no more, you know it is time to get back to blogging.

Summer swallows time like no other season can and the longer you stay off-line the more absurd the thought of spilling your guts into space strikes you. Surely too much navel gazing could give a girl a hunchback?

And yet there is so much to share. A week in your sisters. A book that swallowed you whole and for the four hours it took to read it, tainted your world with it’s own brand of gloom. The death, suddenly, of the first boyfriend you ever had, strands of teenage history tangling up in sheer fright at losing one of their own. Entire days spent watching Finn somersault around the house in his pyjamas, just because he can. An electric shock that turns your index finger bright blue. A six foot four man who continues to make you smile. So much to share.

. Finley. Exhausted by the sheer effort of having fun he is struck by the baby blues. He is cross with you on many levels: because Daddy has a new girlfriend who steals his precious alone time with him and the dog he is dog sitting for. Because he is fed up with being dragged to the doctors and poked about with in the diagnosis of anaemia and a skin virus. Because he cannot bear the idea of being six and wants to be a baby for ever. Because he does not want to swallow bitter medicine three times a day for the next six months, nor write a postcard to his new class teacher. Because receiving a school report that says

“Finley is a very special little boy, his indomitable spirit has been an inspiration…” does not alter the fact that having a funny foot makes playing football more difficult than it used to be. Because life is just so bloody hard when you are five and eleven months and your Mummy is an “Interrupter” and an “Argumenteter” . Because, because, because…

Helen. A week in your sisters is a week away from the chaos of your own house. A week in a house where everything is easy and only the madness that is a two year old Beagle disturbs your calm. Helen is an astonishing cook. You didn’t know. You develop a passion for the beetroot you have merrily avoided all your life, and inspired by her thin thighs feel the urge to sprinkle flaxseed on Greek yoghurt at silly o’clock in the morning and scour the internet for Kenny Rogers songs wearing straw hats at silly o’clock at night. Occasionally you glimpse the degree to which your relationship as sisters is defined by your roles as children and you do not know how to separate the two. You wish you lived closer.

Richard. He is six foot four but then you do believe you may have mentioned that. He taught himself to knit on jury service, paints pictures, moves bathrooms from one end of the house to another, adores his friends and creates dinner parties that make his guests swoon. He pinches you and has tattoos and never lets you speak and extends his enthusiasm for surface decoration to the very silly car he drives and moans when you watch Big Brother and forces you to watch horror films and makes you laugh so hard you snort and now he has gone to Amsterdam and you will miss him. But there is no angst. For once there is no angst.There are blueberry pancakes on a Sunday morning, Agatha Christie films, and ludicrous arguments about stolen glasses of juice, but, oh bliss, none of that blasted angst…

You. You think you look look older than you used to. Your Dad, in his infinite kindness peers long and hard at your face and announces that wrinkles are patterning your face in the same way they pattern his. You thank him and resolve to sit across the room from him always. You now have two relentless chin hairs and occasionally find yourself squinting to read. The six foot four man is four years younger than you are and never gives up reminding you. Some mornings you believe ambition is being lost in a long hard game of life, and you and the person you could be, maybe should be, lead parallel lives, never the the twain to meet. But you don’t feel demented by it any more. Some days all you really want is a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and a long chat with Kath. You want sun and light nights and Russell Brand still. A record by EverClear on repeat, smoked haddock and a clean sink. You are not sure you want the week in a Windermere hotel with Mark’s Mum next Monday. Windermere is lined with memories of vintage ringed proposals and plans for an Italian wedding that never came to pass and perhaps Mark’s enthusiasm for sending you back there in the company of his Mother is a little ill thought out but it is what it is: five days in a peaceful lakeside town. A holiday after a long spell without knowing the meaning of the word.

Gratitude remains all. Even hunchbacks know that.

Gosh. Blogging feels good.

"One of the greatest gifts my Mother gave me was that she was a terrible housekeeper. She wasn't terrible at everything, she was just terrible at keeping the house clean, which she firmly believed she should to be able to do.
She was a published poet, a great writer of short stories, a painter, a talented breaker and trainer of horses, a knowledgeable collector of antiques, a seeker into the psychic and the mysteries of the world, a good mother, a true, loyal and devoted friend, incurably curious, an authority on American Indian folklore, an intuitive searcher for precious rocks, fossils and old gems, a defender of everyone's civil rights, and most of all a fascinating and extra-ordinary woman, but she couldn't keep the kitchen floor clean. I was not at all damaged by the state of our house. I was saddened that she sometime negatively judged who she was."

Anne Wilson Shaeff.


My Mum was, and still is an unobtrusive housekeeper. That is to say that she was never one of those women who talked about housekeeping, she didn't judge other women upon how often they were on their knees scrubbing their skirting boards, and I cannot, ever really remember her in a frenzy of housework. And yet the house is always immaculate because she is presumably the elegant swan of all things domestic, floating about on a calm lake, feet polishing past themselves under the surface.

What mattered to her was wrapping us up in warm jarmies when we got home from school and having a plate of crumpets in front of the 1970's three bar electric fire. A neatly ironed school uniform was important but making a creative mess was absolutely permitted. Our house was a home not a museum and that is what I takeaway from her example: not an overwhelming urge to run a white gloved finger over the mantelpiece but that a sense of home as a backdrop for our lives is what matters. That a house that provides a springboard for personal achievement is the ultimate goal.

But I know that every home, every housekeeper differs. When Kath's Mum is due to visit, Kath goes into housekeeping overdrive, not because her lovely Mum is a domestic ogress but because Kath (who is I think, the bestest housekeeper I know) respects the fact that her Mum sets great store by the standards she has always maintained in her own home. Standards that are I suppose instilled in Kath herself to the degree that she is occasionally to be found cleaning the bathroom floor at eleven thirty on a Saturday night...

And then there are the Mum's who go to far. Those whose lives, and worse than that, whose children's lives are dictated by the degree to which their lives depend on having lickable kitchen surfaces. Those who apply anti-bacterial ungents to every surface and forget to play with their kids. Those who insist on no more than one toy at a time littering the floor and stifle every last ounce of creativity in the constant quest for interior perfection.

And at the other end of the scale, there are those like me, who occasionally find themselves so consumed with life and the business of creating a life for her child, that said kid occasionally finds himself trooping into nursery in odd socks, safe in the knowledge that yes Mummy is a bit bonkers and couldn't find matching ones, but odd socks make for a rather delicious sense of confident eccentricity and it is a perfectly acceptable state of affairs and if by some chance, it isn't, he can always blame his Nana for not instilling into his Mother why socks matter more more than books, or joy, or hanging upside down from the climbing frame so every disapproving Mummy in the park can see the scandalous socks in question...

Because plainly it is my Mum's fault and I love her for it. On the one hand she probably despairs of my lackadaisical attitude to running a home (I am a kind of slightly grubby swan, floating without moving a muscle) and on the other she must be so proud of managing to bring up, not one but two incredibly independent, ambitious women. Women dedicated to their respective little boys, and above all else grown up little girls with a sense that beyond the homes we have created ourselves there exists a place where it would be more than ok to kick off our shoes, curl up in a ball and drink tea and Marie biscuits forever more.  
No matter that we are the all grown up housekeepers now who didn't even know jobs like cleaning the drains existed (Our mum was busy inspiring us to start a business and forgot to show us why these things were important). No matter that we only ever remember her peeling potatoes and baking a chocolate chip sponge (that still makes my mouth water) and never really churning up a three course lunch or maintaining one of those excessively stocked chest freezers resplendent with half a cow and the brains of a sheep. No matter because our house was a place where we learned to be who we are. Because we understand how our Mothers attitude to housekeeping, or perhaps more pertinently, to a sense of home, shapes the woman we become. The Mothers we are destined to be ourselves.

Tell me now, how did your Mum shape your role as a housekeeper?