Hello Housekeepers, this is a drive by post to point you in the direction of a new set of free dividers for your Housekeepers Planner. The dividers are simple in design and split your planner into eleven categories:

Calendar and Routines
Addresses and To-do's
Meal Planning and Recipes
Housekeeping and Care Instructions
Shopping Lists and Receipts
Insurance and Inventory
School and Medical Records
Financial Records and Banking
Decorating and Puttery Treats
Miscellania and Grace Notes
Blogging and the Internet

You can download the dividers here and for those of you who have requested a few screenshots of the planner itself, please find  afew examples from the sixty pages included, below...






And if that doesn't persuade you that life is scrumptiously easier when you are the proud owner of a BrocanteHome Vintage Housekeepers Planner then I'll be darned if I know what will!

Don't forget that you can download the free set of blank planner pages that accompany the planner here, and by special request I am working on a new PDF scrumptiously packed with every home-made cleaning recipe I have ever mentioned on BrocanteHome and many more besides, so keep an eye out for that in the next few days...

Have a gorgeous day Housekeepers, and as always, please accept my great big thank you kisses for supporting BrocanteHome. I hope you all know how very much my little Finn and I appreciate it...

By the time the hurly burly of another weekend is done and dusted and I have spent an efficient hour or two making sure the rest of the week will run as smoothly as my Housekeepers Planner suggests it should, I am usually thoroughly exhausted and ready for my bed. You see I believe that Sunday evenings were designed to be spent in bed with a period drama on the DVD, and the scent of lavender spritzed upon our nighties...

Tonight spend a while organizing your week, then put the house to bed and go upstairs to run a bath. Run it as hot as possible, then add five chamomile tea-bags to the water and allow to steep until the temperature feels bearable...

Play something suitably soothing (I favour Mozart's Prussian String Quartets: No.21 and 22) and then get into the bath for a ten minute soak: no more or else the water will go cold and we want to take the relaxing benefit of this warm, chamomile soak back to bed with us.
 Climb out, pat your skin dry and climb immediately into nightclothes warmed on the radiator. Then go to bed and read or watch something gentle, (I am watching Berkeley Square this evening.) while sipping on more chamomile, a drink named after us all by Old England, for whom Chamomile once meant "woman"...  

Goodnight Sweethearts.x


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And The Housekeepers Pencil Case From March 11th

To my mind the start of a new season should always include a trip to the stationery store: because (bless my cotton socks!) nothing makes me feel quite so efficient as owning new paper and pencils...

Tonight while about to sit down with my spanking new Vintage Housekeepers Planner it struck me that I could do with a really rather scrumptious version of the schoolgirls pencil case: stationery all of my own unlikely to be pilfered by my resident six year old...

And so this weekend I am setting us all a little project... to fill the prettiest all grown up pencil case we can find with our very own collection of essential bits and bobs for journaling the bestest parts of our day.

1. Start by choosing a pencil case. Take yourself shopping with something scrumptious in mind, re-purpose a make up bag, or sew the simplest envelope style case from a scrap or two of fabric and hold together with a couple of vintage rhinestone buttons or a ribbon...

2. Now add your very favorite kinds of pens and pencils. I like a certain kind of ever so cheap, extra fine propelling pencil that I buy by the dozen, and always have a gel pen in a range of pretty colored inks or six available (I favour green or violet ink, while the most stylish woman I know signs everything with a dash of pink), so a couple of both these pencils and pens will go in my case...

3. Next up I suggest a tiny roll of double sided sticky tape, a small pair of sharp craft scissors, and if you can get hold of them, a pair of wiggly edged children's scissors that turn every little bit of scrap paper collected into a work of art. (Don't forget to add a little loop of fine ribbon to the handles of both scissors so no-one is in any doubt as to whom they belong!)

4. Find a glue stick and wrap a pretty sticker around the tube, add a small stapler, a box of staples, and a craft knife.

5. Then seek out the tiniest vintage pill box you own and fill it with paper clips.

6. And finally treat yourself to the prettiest, silliest pencil eraser you can find: they come in the most fabulous designs and their sweet smell will send you hurtling back to your childhood every time you open your pencil case...

Have fun Housekeepers!

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Should the Puttery Post take your fancy you can sign up for a years subscription on Etsy, (the cheapest option!) or pay by monthly subscription here and get my emails delivered direct to your in-box or should you prefer you can simply download each months Puttery treats for $3.00 a month below...

Happy April Housekeepers!

Happy Friday Housekeepers! 
Today for your home-making pleasure, those of you who have bought the Vintage Housekeepers Planner can download ten pages of blank forms to customise to your hearts content, absolutely free of charge. Based on some of the planner pages already included in your download, but with all Brocante formatting removed, you can now plan anything you like: from what to pack in your holiday suitcase to what you have got stored in the deep, dark cupboard under the stairs...

Download the blank planner pages here and as always stay tuned: I've got more pages for your planner coming very soon.

P. S: Apologies to those of you who had been trying to buy my 550 Puttery Treats Download on Etsy, I hadn't realised it had sold out, but have now re-listed it. Easter is just the perfect time to get a little puttery isn't it?

Oh what it is to be organized Housekeepers!

"In the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists were fascinated by synaesthesia: the way some people perceive sensations joined together, like seeing letters of the alphabet in a range of colours or hearing music as texture. Victorians named it after the Greek for union (syn) of sensations (aesthesia). In the west, the research fell out of fashion in the mid 20th century, but since the 1980s it’s been rediscovered, helping neuroscientists to understand how we separate and combine sensations.

Classic synaesthesia is something people are born with; cognitive synaesthesia happens when our minds join different sensations, based on our experiences. It’s used by perfumers in the creative process; for example, fragrances are often inspired by listening to music. It’s the psychological side of aromatherapy..."

Synaesthesia is further described by Lush as the "Union of separate sensations" and merely watching the video above has me feeling more relaxed: mostly because I suspect I both underestimate the power of music and have become lazy about using it to reflect my mood...

While the treatment looks bliss all by itself, what struck me most was how we could use the word "synaesthesia" as inspiration for creating the kind of homes that stimulate us: homes that cocoon us and bring all our senses alive to the degree where we are truly mindful about how very powerful our four walls can be in the pursuit of atmosphere...

Watch it and be inspired.

While I may rather insist that as Mrs Beeton suggested, the Mistress of the house should be an early riser if there is any hope at all of her winning the battle against all things domestic, in reality getting up early nearly kills me and at the slightest opportunity I will bury my head under the quilt and shut the world out for another five minutes or sixty five.

You see I do believe that this here body of mine was designed to rise at nine o'clock and not a minute before. That the world is up and doing it's business long before that is sheer misfortune and merely serves to remind me that I am always at odds with what is the correct way of going about things.

Half term doesn't help. Being the darling little cherub that he is, Finley resets his body clock during the school holidays and instead of charging around the house at the ungodly hour of 6.15am, as he is prone on a school day, he instead, lies in until the beautiful hour that is 8.30am, then wanders into my room and languishes under my quilt, relaying the kind of school playground gossip all Mommies secretly love to hear if only so that they can firmly establish the pecking order of their babba's in the ranks of the cool kids. After which, following a game of tents, where we both pull the duvet over our heads and share the silliest memories from Finley's babyhood, we  pull on dressing gowns and make our way into another day.

This slow, snuggly hello to the morning suits me, and I feel good and alert and not constantly as if the world has dragged me kicking and screaming out of another pleasant dream and forced me to tackle an unwilling child into uniform or my own shivery body into the shower long before we are awake.

But such is life, and everyday can't be holiday and there are morning routines to be performed and childish outraged outbursts to be endured and work to be done and a life to be lead and and try as you might you can't wash the dishes in bed, nor present yourself and pyjama clad child in front of the sternest of headmistresses wearing a nightie and a dreamy expression.

Boring as it may one simply has to get out of bed.

And so I do. I get up horribly early, and don my Domestic Goddess head and perform my routines because if I didn't the world would fall apart as I so blissfully let it during the holidays,  and I make breakfast and cajole a moaning child and wipe surfaces and stuff laundry into the machine and pack school bags and rub concealer under puffy eyes and forget important things and truth be told, there is a little bit of me that resents every minute of it, until the clock strikes nine and I give the universe permission to force me into enthusiastic action!

So how about you? Do you get up with the lark, joyfully whistling a happy tune, or do you growl your way through the morning, cross with the world until you feel awake? What does your morning routine look like? Is it hectic or heavenly? Are you organised or the housekeeping equivalent of Mad Mary??

Oh and tell me Sweethearts, am I the only Vintage Housekeeper in the land who secretly wishes, that on the subject of early rising, dear Mrs Beeton had kept her mouth shut??

While I rather feel like a school ma'am rallying her troops, I wanted to set a little project for all those taking part in the Seasonal Scrub this week. You see I believe the Scrub is a rather wonderful time to take stock of your home: to look at it with an honest eye and say this is what needs to be done now. This is what I need to replace or fix. This is what I can no longer live with and this, this is how I want the house to feel everyday.

This isn't about massive transformation or keeping up with the Jones's. You see I think too many of us focus on how our house looks and forget that by focusing on the way our home feels and by being true to our authentic needs we can create a home that both nurtures our souls AND pleases us aesthetically...

But I do understand that it is difficult to identify what to do, or what to buy that will make all the difference between feeling irritated by your home and feeling thoroughly and utterly, scrumptiously delighted by it.

And so I believe that we need a system: something that helps us to identify what it is that is bugging us and thus I recommend collating a set of Mission Lists: three to-do lists you write in your Housekeepers Notepad as you start the scrub in earnest. something I have been committed to doing since 2005, and something I credit for the constant, reassuring sense that life is both constantly moving on and simultaneously improving.

As always remember that the method I describe below is of my own devising and you can make your lists in whatever way you choose, because it is your your house, not mine and only you know what will work for it...

"I start by taking an inventory of everything that is driving me mad from the moment I open my eyes in the morning till the moment I climb back into bed and just for one day I go about my business in the house mindfully: I open my eyes and notice that the screech of the alarm clock makes me feel shaky; that I have to walk across the room cold and naked in order to fetch my dressing gown and that there is a stain on the carpet by the door. I stand in the shower and notice that the soap is hard to reach and when I do it doesn't smell particularly wonderful, that some of the towels in the bathroom are a little frayed and my toothbrush jug needs a thorough scrub...

And so it goes on: the doorbell makes me jump, there is no proper home for the abundance of teeny tiny toy cars littering the floor and I would like to be able to sit down and read a book on the armchair without having to bring cushions over from the sofa. The fresh coffee keeps spilling in the fridge, I don't have a little
milk-pan for making decent hot chocolate and I can never find any bin bags. The light in the laundry room blinds me, there is a tear in the blind above the kitchen sink and the tap drips relentlessly...


I notice all of these things because they make my life uncomfortable, but I don't notice the scary green wallpaper on the landing or the lampshade I would like to change, because for the moment these things serve the purpose for which they were intended and therefore do not make it onto my list..."

So for today simply take your housekeepers pad and as you scrub, or take your elevenses, note down everything that is bugging you. Don't worry if you don't see much initially, these things often don't strike you till you are in the midst of a task: just make an effort to notice and eventually you will see that the things on the list fall into three distict groups:

1. To Throw Away and Replace.
2. To be Fixed, Cleaned or Re-Purposed.
3. To be Bought.

Over the next few days, start to divide your lists ready to form your mission lists in the Housekeepers Planner: ultimately they will form the basis of your action plan for the year, serve as shopping lists when you are treasure hunting and hopefully serve as a reminder that creating and maintaining home isn't about fashion or buying the kind of clutter that will not fill the gaps in your life...

P.S: this isn't to say that you are only allowed to think about need rather than want: BrocanteHome is, at its heart about the frivolities of life and there will be a chance to divine what your heart truly desires when the house is functioning as it should, but just as the seasonal scrub provides a blank canvas for making life pretty, the mission lists give us a map, and the Seasonal Scrub, a time when we are crawling in and out of all the nooks and crannies in our home, is the best time to draw it.

Happy scrubbing Darlings!

I'm rather late with Housekeepers Question Time this week.
I got a little waylaid de-cluttering the bookshelves and boxing up more than one hundred books ready for who knows what and then my fragile little ego took something of a battering when a random nasty stranger, going by the names of both Don't Clean and Dirty_Girl took the time to email me and with all the literacy of a stoned baboon informed me that BrocanteHome was "a waste of time an easy way to make money get a job and get a life" and as a result I wasted all of Friday night feeling oddly shaken by the ramblings of a cowardly lunatic, dithering about where one buys a life and wondering just how mad you would have to be to imagine that choosing a writing life has ever been an easy way to make money.

Truth is I'm not sure the word easy describes a single aspect of single mothering a scrumptious, but spirited child with a little collection of small but significant health issues of his own, while keeping a roof over our heads, answering my creative call and still being available to run to school should poor scissor skills result in yet another bloodied finger, or the accidental ingestion of gluten, in projectile vomiting. Life is hard. All day every day. And I am truly grateful that the small success that is Brocante allows me to improve life one day at a time for both my family and yours, regardless of what any old grimy nay sayers might spout.

Still, even the snarkiest of wounds heal and so by yesterday I was so over feeling irrationally weepy and my precarious emotional state had progressed into fully-fledged "if it's standing still, bin it" mode, to the degree that poor darling Richard nearly went for a Burton as a result, with P.M.T. making me susceptible to quite the most vicious of clear-outs, of the kind that three hours later, horror at what I'd done, had me leaning into the proverbial wheelie bin at midnight in search of a little something I was mad to throw away!

So it has been a funny old weekend, but all this hysterical book chucking, loony tolerating nonsense is by the by now, when pre-scrub, rather random curiosity is burning me to such a degree I can't help wondering, sitting here on the quietest of Sunday afternoons, what you will be wearing to scrub in: whether you my Darling Housekeepers come from the grungy, or glamorous school of home-making?

You see every morning, I get up, get showered, apply a full face of make-up and get dressed and then, and only then am I able to contemplate pulling the laundry out of the machine or running a duster over the mantle-piece.
I just can't clean if I feel dirty, and truth be told if I haven't clogged up my pores with foundation, climbed into clean underwear and pulled on my really scary spotty slipper socks, then dirty is exactly what I feel and without motivation I will skulk around in my nightie with a large mug of builder's brew in my hand until the early hours of the afternoon, achieving exactly nothing and mentally berating myself for being a layout!

I need to feel pretty to make pretty.

My Mum on the other hand is only really, capable of housework prior to showering and once she has washed away the home-making grime dusting her skin, she simply wouldn't dream of cleaning the oven in her best frock and lip-gloss. To her one gets the housework out of the way, then gets dressed and attends to the more important business of having a life beyond one's four walls.

Where her role as a housewife has clearly defined boundaries, my day is the carefully orchestrated jumble common to those who work from home. Housework fits in amongst everything else and one can quite easily find oneself running in from delivering a child to school (where it isn't the done thing to arrive in your dressing gown on the premise that you have got to get back to the ironing!), taking coffee with a friend, baking a quiche, doing three loads of laundry, writing five thousand words of literary genius (ahem), doing an impromptu cleaning of the loo, pulling out some weeds, talking to the headmistress and dashing to the post office before it closes: all in the same clothes. All in the kind of eye make up that says "don't mess with me Dishwasher/Headmistress/Ex-Husband/Laundry Basket", scented by a rather charming combination of Obsession and ammonia and wearing the kind of trousers that will neither tear nor reveal my bottom should I have to get down on my hands and knees to crawl under a bush on the playground and rescue the water bottle my six year old son has seen fit to use as bowling ball.

But it isn't just the fact that in my very own housekeepers uniform I am ready to battle with whatever comes my way: there is also a question of self-esteem. Somehow my senses are more alert when I feel nice. I am less likely to half-do a job in a dozy fashion when I dressed and wearing eye make-up. Add high heels and I am a housekeeping wonder shimmying around like the lady in the Shake and Vac advert and ticking off boxes on my to-do list with all the efficiency of a shoulder pad toting businesswoman. Throw a snazzy coat into the mix and I dash around the house as if my life depended on it.

And so to get to the point my friends, my question this week is are you with me or my mum? Do you wear make up to de-fluff the tumble dryer? Do you feel the urge to bathe after you have cleaned the bath? Do you water the plants in your nightie or do as a friend I know does and keep a cupboard full of "cleaning clothes"? Do you have a housekeeping uniform?  Do you clean the shower naked in a nod to multi-tasking or hoover in your knickers aka Rita Konig?

Ok Sweetie Pies it is time to go scrub-shopping! If we are going to get down and dirty during the seasonal scrub we need to have all the right products and equipment at hand.

Remember when I said that when it comes to Scrub Club, the rules are there are no rules? Housekeepers, I lied. There is a rule, and break it m’dears and you will be damned! Ready for it?


No bleach! Ya hear me?? No bleach!

No Mr Muscle. No Jif with bleach. No Cillit Bang (Please Lord, no Cillit Bang!). Nothing mean at all. Nothing that gets up your nose and burns your delicate little nostrils. Nothing Housekeepers, that MAKES YOUR HOUSE SMELL LIKE A SWIMMING POOL!


While I don’t expect everybody to have the time, energy or even the inclination to make all their cleaning products themselves, you simply won’t get the best out of the Scrub or indeed the BrocanteHome way of life, if you don’t choose non-toxic, or indeed organic cleaning products. There are so many good non-toxic options on the market now that there really is no excuse for using anything else!


While there are some quite simply darling cleaning product lines available from the rather wonderful Mrs Meyers, to Method, and the utterly scrumptious Good Home Company, using those products exclusively would cost a small fortune, so it makes a lovely compromise to choose one or two favourites from the luxury ranges, supplemented with a few products from a budget green range like Ecover, (which is almost fragrance free and thus rather wonderful for adding your own aromatherapy oils to), and a range of basics like household soap, soap flakes, lemon juice, white vinegar and a pail of elbow grease.

Tomorrow I will provide a more detailed list of home-made cleaning product ingredients and the day after a lovely little list of Housekeepers Tools of the Trade…


Scrub a dub dub Honey Buns!

A month into the Puttery Post and I truly hope you have been inspired by some of the scrumptious little puttery treats I have popped into your in-box. The printable download of all the January Post should now be in your in-box and will, I hope, over the course of your subscription form a rather lovely little encyclopedia of home-making loveliness.

Over the past month we have made personal promises, set domestic goals, hidden treats to be discovered next Christmas, fed the birds, taken quite the most divine shower anyone ever thought up, found a rather fabulous way to store current magazines, mixed up some home-made laundry brightener, cosied up the bed, added a silk hanky to our polishing arsenal, created a Laundry Crisis Tin, drank the BrocanteHome Bedtime Brew and much more besides! It really has been a joy to dream up and indeed test the treats as I post them and day by day my commitment to the BrocanteHome way of homemaking is once again being affirmed...

My favorite treat from the Puttery Post in January?

January 12th...

It is National Letter Writing Week. Seven days much called for when the pleasure that was once the thud of a thick envelope stuffed with news has almost gone by the by.


Letters don't have to be novels. They can be dashed off while you wait for the kettle to boil because the shortest of sentences still have the power to make someone's day. So this evening might I suggest you create a tiny space dedicated to writing little bits of love?


We don't have to make a song and dance out of this scrumptious little treat. We merely want to make the notion of letter writing that little bit more accessible. So unless you have the space to spare do not worry about creating a dedicated writing desk, I rather think a pretty vintage tin containing all you need to write a variety of different letters could be offered a permanent home on the kitchen table making morning notes to teachers a breeze, and spontaneous love letters to your partner a possibility with your morning elevenses.


Today find a pretty tin, line it with scented paper and collect A5 buff coloured linen paper, tissue lined envelopes, a little book of stamps and a pen that makes a deliciously pleasing scratchy sound as it dashes across the paper.
And there you have it: everything you need to make National Letter Writing Week a treat by dashing off one heartfelt greeting or thank-you every day for the next seven...


P.S: Should you be cultured enough to be able to use a fountain pen with pananche, you can scent your ink by mixing one teaspoon of vodka to 2 teaspoons of aromatherapy oil and adding this solution to your ink before shaking well...

Puttery Treats you see are all about making life that little bit lovelier by embracing ritual, paying attention to the teeniest of details and committing to doing one tiny little thing everyday that improves your way of life...

If you haven't yet signed up, you can choose to pay $3.00 by monthly subscription here, or pay for twelve months of Puttery joy here for a substantial reduction...

I've got so many lovelies planned for February and it wouldn't do to miss out!

I do something very, very naughty. Something people frequently tell me, makes me a bad person. And I must confess that I do it daily and I do it with abandon! I do it, my little Kettle Chips, just because I can!

This terrible misdemeanor makes visitors to my house shake their heads in minor disgust. I try to explain myself and they look at me as if to say you poor misguided fool, and then they go back to their immaculate lives safe in the knowledge that they would never dream of writing in books. Because yes Housekeepers, that is what I am talking about: writing in books. May I rot in hell.

I write in them. I scrawl my thoughts in the margins. I take a propelling pencil and mark great big circles around paragraphs I like, and if I am feeling particuarly vexed I doodle elaborate flowerscapes between sentences. I note down the dates I started and finished the book on the last page and write my name and the date I happened across it on the first. I stuff the pages full of heart shaped post-it notes and vintage postcards with quotes scrawled on the back. I stick ad-libris stickers on the inner cover and tie fine ribbon around the pages to mark my place and hold all my bits and bobs of paper in. And worst of all sometimes I fold back the corners of pages I want to read again and fail to panic should the pages be stained with who knows what.

It is not that I do not have respect for the written word, it is in fact because I consider them to be living, breathing entities crying out out to be interacted with, that I fail to consider it sacriligious to be slightly more at one with my current reading matter than I probably should be.
And further to that, I consider the books I so call "ruin" to be mine and do not wish to operate a public lending library from my living room (though for the sake of all the librarians amongst us, I promise I don't do it to books borrowed!).
 I like it that I can pick up a book once adored and merely from the dates inside it or a phrase underlined with occasional nib-breaking venom, read not only the book, but a moment in my own personal history. I don't want to kiss them goodbye and bow my head in shame when she who is after borrowing them reads my occasionally private responses to literary wisdom. But then those I am willing to lend are not usually those that have inspired such outrageous behavior in the first place and thus I am happy to bin them or lend them or recycle them and thereafter never give them another thought.

Is there something wrong with me? Is this the kind of confession I should have made to the literary equivalent of a priest? Have I gone down in your estimation or are you are a book scribbler too? Are we, the book scribbling few, a menace to society and so utterly unable to contain our thoughts we have to spill them out wherever we can??

You tell me Housekeepers...

Darlings the BrocanteHome Seasonal Scrub will commence on Sunday the 7th of February for all those interested in getting your house ship-shape for Spring!

I will be posting all manner of scrub related wot-nots here over the next three weeks and for those of you who have never done a Brocantehome Scrub, nor taken part in the Vintage Housekeepers Circle,  I have put together a fabulous new download detailing both a week and a month long top-to-bottom clean from previous seasons on the Circle...

What's Included in the Download?

27 Pre-Scrub To-Do's
Tiny little puttery treats you can do today!
Cleaning Arithmatic
28 easy-peasy recipes for home-mad cleaning products.
Order of Works
 A fabulous framework for cleaning the house the Brocante Way!
The Quick Fix
 A scrub you can do in just seven days...
The Month Long Scrub
 Detailed instructons for doing a truly thorough scrub over a period of four weeks (with time off at weekends!).
58 Post-Scrub Puttery Treats
Because a little celebration is always in order after a good old-fashioned scrub!
Good Habits
A final note on maintaining scrumptiously fresh order long after the Scrub is done and dusted... 


Sounds fabulous mais oui? Just what you need to turn a chore into a celebration? Good, I'm so glad!

Order the download here for just  $5.00 and don't forget to pop over as often as you can to BrocanteHome for more puttery treats and good old fashioned advice passed on from one housekeeper to another...

Oh my. While I am all about embracing domestic routine to free you from the tyranny of housework, this is the kind of demented idea liable to have me burning my entire underwear collection!

Imagine having to clock in and clock off the housework. What would happen if (horrors!) the clock revealed you weren't a good girl at all, but a very bad housewife indeed, what then pray tell?? Would Mr Jones dock your housekeeping money or bend you over his knee??

It's no wonder the Feminist movement gathered such huge momentum a decade later is it?

"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?