Christmas cards - attempt no.1

It's that awful time of year again. I've got to come up with some ideas for Christmas cards. Here's what I've come up with so far - not quite suitable for the in-laws, I suspect...

 

I was kind of going for a  'Christmas brain' kind of theme, you know, good food and alcohol, the joy of family, the giving of gifts and general warm conviviality. Needless to say I couldn't summon the good will. I might have puked down my clothes.

the unmentionables

Everywhere you go you find people with passions about chairs, tables, lighting, desks, sofas. I am one of those people. But today I wanted to talk about the unmentionable pieces of furniture, the ones that everybody ignores because they don't know what to do about them - namely television cabinets and wardrobes. Have you ever met anyone who has a thing about wardrobes? Have you ever found a TV cabinet, or something that can be used as one, that you really like?


We are having a bit of a dilemma about these things at the moment. We are badly in need of a wardrobe or two, with our clothes currently being rammed haphazardly inside suitcases and boxes. But I find shopping for wardrobes really difficult - they are usually too ornate, too bulky, too shallow, too expensive, the wrong wood, too big to get round a couple of tight corners in the house, or any combination of the above. I've never bought a wardrobe before, having had built-in ones in all the places I've lived since I left university. Have I found any that I love? Well, there are the early 20th century gentlemen's wardrobes with sweet labels on the shelves for ties, underwear and hats, but they are often ugly on the outside or too shallow to have a sensible amount of hanging space in the other half of the wardrobe. I do like very simple linen presses, or old school cupboards - I would just have to adapt the interior with a hanging rail. But I also have a fear of too much wood or, if the piece is painted, I get nervous about veering too close to the 'shabby chic' look. Industrial style lockers are an attractive option to me, but I wonder if they are too hard, too dark, too loft-stylee for a farmhouse? I am bewildered, to say the least.

Get this one here on eBay for £420.

The photo below is of the locker we bought the other week in Manchester. It needs a little bit of love, but I was rather taken by the cheery turquoise and those little red triangles on the front. It's currently languishing in our garage until I grow enough muscle to help the husband bring it into the house (or until we can collar one of our masculine neighbours to help!).


The TV cabinet is a different kettle of fish. Firstly, I don't like large televisions and I hate having them in a position where they're the first object you see when you enter a room, I think they are ugly things that should be put somewhere obscure. Secondly, I pretty much hate anything that is purpose-made to put them and their accompanying, multifarious boxes on. It would be OK if any old cabinet would do, but the thing is, you need at least an open shelf or a glass-fronted door so that the magic moonbeams from the remote control can get to the boxes. So annoying! I suppose you could put the boxes to the side or something, but they are so ugly I would rather have them half-hidden at least. Oh, and then of course there's the cable issue - having to have a hole, or to drill a hole if you can bear it, in the back wall of the stupid thing so you can get your cables through. These kind of things should really not bother me so much, but they do. It's how I am.


This haberdasher's cabinet, from eBay, works for me. Shame it's £700!

So. Tell me your secrets. Anyone. Please. Tell me what to do. What have you got your clothes in? What do you stand your telly on? More importantly, does it look good?

Images from various sources: eBay UK, Pinterest, Maisons du Monde, oh Hello Friend, Design Sponge amongst others. Sorry I haven't credited them individually.

a manifesto for life

Moving house and making a fresh start in a home that we hope to live in for many years (or certainly more than five :-)) gives us the opportunity to furnish, decorate and live in a way that I have been aspiring to for some years now. In our last house, we were a little restricted by space and we always knew that we would move away from it after a couple of years, so there were things that we didn't or couldn't do.

I thought I would set out here some principles and ideas by which I wish to make our home - ideas not only about how I want it to look and feel, but also about how I want to live.

I want to:
Live simply, without too many material possessions
Not be so sad that we have no money to buy expensive furniture (!)
Buy used or recycled where possible
Only buy things that I love or need, preferably both at the same time.
Make more of my own clothes and soft furnishings
Learn how to make pickles
Be better at admin
Keep up with the maintenance of the house
Recycle and compost everything that I can
Get a wormery
Keep chickens
Use fewer nasty chemicals (our septic tank will thank us)
Speak to the neighbours more
Grow more of my own food
Learn how to make sourdough bread
Not be a slave to fashion and trends (says she, talking about sourdough and wormeries...)

I believe that we could all do without mountains of gadgets and big televisions. We have too many cheap clothes, too many unwanted gifts (for the love of god, people, stop giving me idiotic, cheapo crap gifts - I just give them to charity or sell them at the car boot). I feel like I need to spend more time working with my hands, being outdoors, looking at things that aren't on my computer screen. This return to a more traditional way of life - a thrifty, humble life - is what I yearn for, even though I will still want the things that make my life better (uh... dishwasher, car, computer, books). I hope to keep these things to a minimum. I don't own an iPod, iPad, iPhone or any similar time-wasting gizmos - nor do I want one. Austere self-denial is probably a fitting description for the state I wish to live in. Sounds kinda rubbish now I've put it down, but that's just how I am.

It's a bit like this manifesto from The Idler, only less poetic and strident:


Or perhaps it's something like the Pedlars manifesto:

Hey, maybe I'll even edit mine and lay it out as a poster or something. One of these days when I get some time...

I hope you are all well. I will start drawing again soon, I promise.

Excuse me while I go and hide in a corner

I'm a gibbering wreck this week. As I'm typing now, my hands are shaking. They have been shaking all day and I feel like I'm on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I don't really want to talk about it here, but right now I just feel like I want the whole world to go away, and to crawl into a corner and slowly turn into a puddle of sweat and tears. Please excuse me for a few days whilst I have a mini meltdown. Meanwhile, thanks for visiting! (Don't worry, it's nothing major)

tired

I know you probably have worked this out already but I am having a tough time at the moment. There are so many things going on in my life and consequently my head, that sometimes I feel like I'm going to burst and collapse into a big, weepy pile. The combination of work and house-selling/renting is driving me to the brink of my already limited sanity. I just wish I could escape it all for just a little while.


If I could, right now I would like to:
1. Eat pierogi and borscht at Veselka, New York.
2. Play on the beach. Any beach.
3. Make silly stop-frame animations with my teddies. Pure idiocy.
4. Go swimming somewhere hot, or in the lake at Annecy.
5. Go hiking in Scotland.
6. Gorge myself on panzanella and trippa alla Fiorentina (that's tripe, oh yes) at the amazing diner in the Mercato Centrale in Florence.
7. Go home and get my Dad to teach me all, like, EVERYTHING, he knows about Chinese cooking because he is so talented and I want to cook like him.
8. Go somewhere out of my comfort zone (and no, that doesn't include moving house to somewhere 250 miles away): Indonesia, South America, India. Somewhere fabulous. But armed with insect repellent.

The husband and I will be away on Thursday and Friday, looking for a hovel to rent up north. Have a good couple of days, and enjoy the weekend! Wish me luck.

wastefulness at the dump

So on Saturday the husband and I were at the local dump getting rid of some garden cuttings. For months I had been meaning to have a snoop around the 'household waste' section to see what people had thrown away, ever since I spotted some beautiful plywood school chairs a while back. You know what I found? A Minolta SLR camera in its case, plus a tube of pristine matching lenses. I nearly died, they were so good.

I picked them up to sneak them back to the car... But NO! Some bloke in an orange jacket apprehended me as I sniggered gleefully over my armful of treasure and wagged a prohibiting finger. Get this - the managing company's policy does not allow people to take things away from the dump for various stupid reasons. After some wrangling with the first guy's supervisor I still left empty handed. Mortifying.

What I want to know the most, though, is WHY on earth someone decided to throw those things away instead of eBaying them or at least donating them to a charity shop where they could have done some good! So wasteful.

Ah, health and safety, eh? Nonsense.

modern art? another rant

I saw a report on the news about the furore that has been caused by an exhibition at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art. The point of the exhibition was about how people can feel marginalised by the Church for whatever reason e.g. sexuality, and how they could 'write their stories' back into the Bible. So to this end, the artists who devised the show presented a copy of the Bible and invited visitors to write in it. Of course (dur!) what happened was that they defaced it with obscene language and inappropriate messages - not quite what the artist intended. This resulted in demonstrations outside the gallery, denouncing the fact that the gallery had allowed this to happen (imagine if it had been any other holy book?), and now the book has been placed under glass, and any comments are to be written in a separate, blank book alongside it.

What bothered me much more than the defacement of the Bible itself (after all, I am a raving atheist), was that this had all been presented as modern art. Another exhibit was a video of a woman ripping pages out of the Bible and stuffing them into her mouth, bra and underpants - some reference to 'word as power' or some such rubbish. I cannot articulate how angry this stuff makes me sometimes. I don't think it's art, it's just bollocks. I don't care if you think that 'art' should encompass conceptual stuff like this, I still hate it - it's pretentious, pointless, provocative self-indulgence.


This news show was followed by another episode of Imagine with Alan Yentob, the second of a two-part programme discussing the place that art has in times of recession and other socio-political trouble. This second installment explored the role of funding of the arts, its history and future. It was quite interesting, if a little highbrow for 10.30 at night :-), so I lost patience when they veered into the realms of theatre. I learnt a couple of good things though - most interesting to me was the story of the 'pitmen painters' or the Ashington Group in the 1930s, which was a group of miners who taught themselves how to paint, and chose to depict scenes from their everyday lives. There is a pleasing naïveté to much of the work, and real accomplishment in some of the paintings. You can see a collection of their work at the Woodhorn Colliery Museum in Ashington, Northumberland - the website only has very small but enticing images so now I feel compelled to go and have a look. If only it weren't so far away!

All of this led to Mark and I having a lengthy discussion about the importance of arts funding today. I moaned about the lack of encouragement for people to go into the arts - I was discouraged at school and ended up studying sciences until I realised at the age of 20 that I was bored to tears with it. I also had a moan about how exclusive a lot of arts funding is - the money is usually for people who want to create pretentious fine art, you know, proper artists. I'm just a commercial drudge, me, and I make enough money (apparently) through the sale of my soul to the media, so I don't deserve to be encouraged.

Rant over. Sorry. Maybe I'll have something more fun to say this afternoon.