It is half term and two days in, already I am banging my fevered brow against the walls of the proverbial cabin.

Oh that I was not so resentful of the time stolen and the mess created!
I tell myself that childhood is short and Finn won't be my baby forever and that everything that is so darn loveable about him more than makes up for the mess and the noise, the relentless questions and six year old theories, the bumping and the banging and all the rest of  the general chaos he and his cousin Gabriel manage to inflict upon heart, head and home during every school holiday. I tell myself off for being so downright bloody intolerant: for wondering what life must be like for the Mommies of angelic little girls; for wishing him back to school when he is so very, very thrilled to be at home...

And then instead of joining in the lunatic games of Pokemon and referring to Wikipedia when he wants to know anything from who invented God to how you make sugar, I make myself a moving target: I wrap myself up in needless chores and flit past him and his cousin like the kind of domestic busy bee I am certain both of them want to swat!

All this while I steal moments to read "Little Things Long Remembered", a gorgeous little ode to Puttery Parenting, from a woman who would probably never dream of telling her children to boil their heads when they have lost yet another essential piece of Lego, (the size of an ant and just about as useful), and set about implying that you who were minding your own business on another floor of the house altogether were no doubt responsible for their carelessness regardless.

But enough already with my kvetching, instead indulge my hypocrisy and allow me to sing the praises of Susan Newman's little book, because even I have my golden parenting moments and this book makes it easy to fit teeny, tiny little indulgences around working family life and full time domesticity, for even the grumpiest of Mama's...
Laid out in eight chapters, the book reads rather like a long list of my own Puttery Post, with treats and ideas for different periods of time: whether it be five minutes or an entire weekend you have to spare for making your children feel special. Though many of the reminders are very, very simple and for many will sometimes seem terribly obvious and indeed occasionally nothing more than the basics of instinctive parenting: dig deeper into the book and with more than four hundred ideas listed, I defy any family not to find something that will become a long term ritual throughout the course of parenting any number of scrumptious babbas.

My own favorite idea's from Little Things Long Remembered?

Sunday Papers
Read your children's favourite comic strips to them until they can read them to you...

Dyno Power
Definition: Imaginary extra strength children get magically when a parent needs help with a job. Call for "dyno power" when you need something retrieved from upstairs, wood for the fire, or the dinner table set. This silly concept somehow overrides the fact that you have asked for help...

Problem Central
Call yourself the "Complaint Department" and "be-open" before final tuck-in so your child can get what, if anything, is bothering him off his chest.

Dear Laura
Send your child a quick note or letter once a week or once a month that details what she's been doing or the fun she's been having. Save the letters.

It really is a lovely little book and it has been a long time since I happened upon one stuffed full of ideas I felt were manageable: parenting idea's that did not presume I have no life or emotions of my own, nor work that must be done or grown up relationships that must be worked at.  That some of the ideas are so simple doesn't strike me as patronising or even unnecessary because being a Mum is hard: sometimes when we are growling with barely suppressed resentment we need a little reminder to remember to look to our little people and tend to the hearts they wear so vulnerably on the sleeves we stayed up till midnight ironing.

I for one need reminding daily which is why Little Things Long Remembered will be joining Simple Abundance on my bedside table hereafter, and in the meantime, me and my munchkins are off to flip pancakes and talk about the whys and wherefores of Pokemon...

Wish me luck Sweethearts!

Gosh how a month swooshes by when you are in the kid leather soft glove of a book by Barbara Pym! A Glass of Blessings was the first of the twelve books in my Domestic Fiction 2010 Read-Along and just as I expected it got our year of cosy reading got off to an auspicious start with a book so quietly and often hilariously telling it was hard to put down, though I suspect I shall have great  trouble reviewing it in a way that really does such well mannered writing justice.

Wilmet Forsyth is  "rather bored". She is in fact politely bored of almost everything, from her marriage to the shadowy, almost irrelevent Rodney, to her situation as a well behaved middle class wife with very little to occupy her mind beyond the comings and goings of the local clergy and the mindless gossip doing the rounds of various church functions. Which I think you will agree, really rather spells trouble.

But Darlings this is middle class London in the late 1950's and trouble is hardly the minx she would be today. Trouble in fact for Wilmet comes merely in the form of a swooning crush on the enigmatic Piers Longridge, (though how enigmatic a man who spends many an hour collecting car plate numbers can be is debateable), a man whose charm lie's almost exclusively in his vagueness. But regardless, Wilmet fancies herself in love and so begins a comedy of errors, cringeworthy in both their affront to the polite society Wilmet and Piers reside in, and because in Wilmet herself we find too much of ourselves and our own willingness to cast ourselves in fairytale roles that will never come to pass.

While the supposed love affair is central to the storyline, it is the cast of supporting characters who are the real joy in the book. From Rodney's Mother Sybil who speaks her mind at every turn,  to the kleptomaniac Mr Bason, the clergys housekeeper, who cannot help himself but cast aspersions on all those who do not share his love of beautiful things and finally the really rather fabulous knitting pattern model Keith, a man who ultimately, despite the most unexected of odd's, Wilmet cannot help but take to her heart:  it is the supporting characters and the hilarity they so very often bring to the story (look out the Faberge Egg kerfuffle!) that are in striking contrast to the innate, perhaps essential blandness of Wilmet and her like, who never quite struck me as fully fleshed out: but then perhaps that is the difference between a well drawn character and a caricature which is what the really quite mad Mr Bason almost certainly is?

Clandestine affairs (even the desperately innocent kind to be found in Barbara Pym's books) are never unexpected in domestic fiction, but what struck me most about A Glass of Blessings was the casual approach the two civilised, well bred couples in the book took to the tiny betrayals intrinsic to many a marriage, flinging about the notion of  "taking a lover" with genteel abandon, and tolerating spousal wandering eyes with a lack off the kind of moral outrage that one would have expected from both the time and the class in which the book is set. Wilmet herself is not immune to the overtures of her best friend's husband and she isn't particuarly offended by her husbands parallel overtures, seeming almost to regard these small indiscretions as part and parcel of enduring the well dressed bars of middle class marriage.

Furthermore she does not seem to question the morality of her feelings for Piers in light of her deep rooted attachment to her beloved Anglican Catholic religion, though it has to be said that Wilmets devotion is reserved more for the community of the church itself than it is for any God and it is the rights and wrongs of the clergy, their funny little quirks and traits and the congregation as a source of gossip that most enthralls her and her readers.

"I also noticed two well-dressed middle aged women with a young girl, whom I remembered having seen in church sometimes. All three were chinless, with large aristocratic noses. Near them stood a thin woman with purple hair and a surprised expression, as if she had not expected that it would turn out to be that colour. She wore a good deal of chunky jewellery, and I felt she had gone a little too far in showing churchgoers need not necessarily be dowdy. She was rather surprisingly in conversation with a group of nun's from the convent in the parish. The nuns were of two two kinds, short and motherly looking ot tall and thin with steel-rimmed spectacles, pale, waxy complexions and sweet, remote smiles, that had something a little sinister about them."


That Wilmet imagines herself somehow emotionally superior to the more earnest women of the congregation and often cast's herself as the outsider looking in, is ultimately what she sees as her undoing. She is blind too much that is obvious because she is too busy entertaining notions of romantic grandeur she cannot imagine other, duller women are capable of,  and this arrogance finally bites her on the nose until she has no choice but to come down to earth with a soft, mildly embarrassed bump, and accept her life for what it is and what it has the potential to be.

All in all, this is a quiet gem of a book and Barbara Pym the kind of writer capable of conjuring up a world where plot hardly seems to matter when the characters are so beguilling, and the writing pitch perfect. Though at times I wondered out loud what it was that makes Pym's books so enchanting to those interested in mid-century domestic fiction, with their almost obsessional affinity to parish life and hero worship of often the most eccentric of clergy, the fact remains that I am never happier than navigating the social minefield of Pym's imagination, and I thought A Glass of Blessings was a joy, so I would love to hear your opinion...

P.S: In February I will be reading Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather For the Wedding and you are of course invited to read along...

You know the latest issue of Lonny is online don't you Housekeepers? What a treat!

It is a rare day indeed that I find myself chucking a book into a shopping basket full of sausages and pomegranates, but occasionally the book fairy taps me on the shoulder in the most unlikely of places and whispers, Psssst, there! That one is for you! And I tell you, my little fluttery literary advisor is very rarely wrong...

Because though Julia Williams book is blessed with the kind of cover that would usually conjure up nightmares of the sanitized country-life chick(en) lit kind, I was seduced m'dears by the double whammy that is a) adding another little book to my Christmas novel pile, and b) happening across a story that features a woman who makes her living peddling domestic advice on the internet!

You see, Catherine Tinsall (gedditt??) the heroine of Last Christmas is otherwise known as The Happy Homemaker, the internet Goddess of all things Domestic and this is the tale of the Christmas her carefully stitched up life begins to come undone. Featuring a cast of  characters rather cheesily named Noel, Gabriel and Marianne all of whom are muddling their way through the festive season in a village called Hope, I can't say I've got high hopes for great literary shakes but methinks there is a time and a place for the cosiest of Christmas stories and that time, my Darling Housekeepers is now when nothing, but nothing, sounds snugglier than climbing into bed early with a cup of piping hot spiced chai, a Lindt reindeer and a hop and a skip into a festive tale guaranteed to have a fairy lit happy ending.

Night Night Sweethearts.x

"I houseclean my books every Spring and throw out those I'm never going to read again like I throw out clothes I'm never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the bestsellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don't remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. They way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on a shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON'T THROW IT OUT!  NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not?  I personally can't think of anything less sancrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book."

Helene Hanff, letter to Frank Doel, 1952.

I knew it! I knew that that at some moment in history there must exist a person who held the same philosophy on books as I do. Give them away. Put them in the recycling box. Sell them on Ebay. But don't stockpile them because I promise you there is no badge of honour for prolific reading, no judge or jury going to come knocking to see whether you have endured the latest "must read". Nothing. Just words that have mattered to you lining your veins. Sentences stored in your sub-conscience. And knowledge. Knowledge absorbed until it beomes a part of who we are. If you loved it, it is in you. If you didn't you don't have to keep dusting it.
So I am declaring a rubbish book amnesty. Go chuck 'em. Now.