Last year was supposed to be the Year of the New Kitchen, to be followed by the New Flooring, and New Sofa Covers.
For various reasons, none of those things happened. The kitchen continues to fall apart, the carpet has almost achieved antique status, and I drenched the sofa in red wine a few weeks ago. Going backwards and forwards to see Mother in hospital, check out nursing homes, and simply working, meant other bits of my little home were also neglected, and boy does it show. Continue reading
I smiled hello at the girl when I saw her, but she looked straight through me. She’s about eleven-years-old; year 7 I’d say from her still tidy school uniform. I see her in the mornings when I am trying to get Not Cat to come in. She has started to ask me about him. Maybe it’s because she has red hair and feels kinship.
Today, being Saturday, she was wearing jeans and a pink jumper; not the best colour for her hair. And I saw her on the main road, just by the big supermarket and the pedestrian crossing. Not Cat was in the garden. Without him I meant nothing to her; I was another invisible, uninteresting adult.
The first week in December unleashes a host of Christmas fairs in London. Artists’ Studios are open, the Cattery has its do today. They are far more relaxing places to buy presents than the hurly burly of the West End.
I bought a couple of things from ceramic artist Lucy Smith http:/lucysmith.org.uk both of which I’d love myself. She kindly said she’d post them for me, so I don’t even have to wrap them them.
I love Barbara Wakefield’s ceramics too, /http://barbarawakefield.co.uk/and I am considering buying a piece on these lines for a musical friend next year. You can commission a particular extract from a favourite work.
The shop windows are full of Back to School posters, but it’s a few years since I’ve needed to mark the start of autumn with a navy blue skirt, so I had a different shopping goal.
Given my extreme customer loyalty to Marks and Spencer, it is perhaps surprising that I’m not one of the massive number of British women who head there to buy their bras.
I don’t have a lot of frontage. Cleavage is just a word in the dictionary as far as I’m concerned, and to be honest, bras are not something I’ve been fantastically interested in, or concerned about, particularly as this is about the only part of my anatomy that doesn’t seem to have succumbed to gravity.
But my good friend Sarah, who has a bust A listers would die for, became a woman with a mission to make me change my ways.
“What on earth are you wearing?” she’d demand. Then, as I was still wondering how my blouse/shoes/skirt/jumper/trousers had offended, she’d unceremoniously put her hand up the back of my top so that I felt like an oversized glove puppet.
“This,” she’d say, pulling at the back of some poor bra whose elasticity was a thing of the past, “is the wrong size.”
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