In defence of private holidays, household ceremonies and entirely unnecessary joy…

I have made us a calendar. It isn’t the sort that nags about the dentist or the council tax, or informs you, two days too late, that your passport expired sometime around your last decent hairdo. It won’t improve your productivity. It won’t monitor your habits, count your steps, or insist you drink a sinister quantity of water before breakfast. Sorry.

Rather, The BrocanteHome Book of Days is a perpetual calendar of household traditions, private holidays, seasonal ceremonies and lovely excuses. Some of them lovely, some frankly daft, a few of them terribly necessary. One for every day of the year, issued in twelve monthly editions, the first of which I am offering here…

September opens with the Ceremonial Sharpening of Pencils and ends with the Closing of the September House. In between we honour the Beautiful Emergency, Saint Edith’s Emergency Biscuit, the First Autumn Lamp, the Peculiar Little Jug, the Good Pear, and Our Lady of the Five-Minute Lie-Down.

This is obviously daft.

It’s also, I think, a bit serious?

For isn’t it true that we have always divided time by deciding that certain days mean something? We’ve marked solstices and harvests, saints and victories, births and losses and the slow return of the light. We’ve lit fires, carried branches indoors, baked the cake that only gets baked once a year, rung bells, fasted, feasted, and walked round fields behaving symbolically. In the case of the Morris men, a little ludicrously.

But the calendar was never only a system for counting. It was always a way of making our days feel inhabited…

We should count our blessings then that we can still say that modern life still has its ceremonies, though a good many have been outsourced, or hollowed out, or quietly emptied of the sort of meaning shaped like intimacy. We have national occasions and religious festivals, birthdays, anniversaries. We also have promotional observances dreamed up by people who would very much like us to buy a doughnut or feel passionately about stationery. And this pleases me probably more than it ought to, but I do so enjoy a little whimsy with my brreakfast…

But where is the ceremony for the first evening the lamp goes on before supper? For the cardi that has crept back onto the arm of the chair, where it will now live until March? For the pear that has finally reached its seventeen minutes of perfection? Where, I ask you, is the feast day for the woman who has been coping quite long enough and requires an emergency biscuit and a locked bathroom door?

Ordinary life is full of thresholds that pass without witness.

So the Book of Days appoints us as our own witnesses. In fact, consider this your badge and lanyard.

Its ceremonies are small, because most days are stuffed with enough onsense. Some take five minutes. A few will happily eat a whole afternoon if you let them. Most ask nothing more strenuous than lighting a candle, wearing the dress you’re saving for an occasion that shows no sign of arriving, eating toast off a proper plate, or writing down the thing you’d otherwise have forgotten by teatime.

This isn’t about pretending life is lovely when it isn’t. Ceremony has never belonged only to happiness. We ritualise grief because sorrow needs somewhere to go. We mark endings because otherwise they leak into everything else. We make a gesture at beginnings because courage often needs something to do with its hands.

A candle can’t solve loneliness. A pretty bowl won’t mend a difficult marriage or make the bank statement less alarming. And sharpening a pencil has so far exerted no measurable influence on world affairs. But small acts change the weather inside a house. They interrupt the trance of simply getting through. They say: this happened, I noticed, I was here…

That’s what ritual does at its best. It gives form to feeling AND licenses a certain amount of glorious absurdity.

Silliness gets treated as the opposite of seriousness when it may be one of the cleverest responses available to us. The world is difficult, the future is makig no promises, and the dishwasher continues to make a noise nobody wants to talk about. Under such conditions, declaring an annual Festival of the Household Signature seems entirely reasonable, surely?

You see private holidays hand a little sovereignty back to us. The official calendar records what the culture has agreed to care about. Ours can record what matters inside one life, one family, one friendship, one house…

Maybe your kitchen always has music in it. Maybe there’s a supper you make when somebody needs consoling, the one you could cook with your eyes shut and a glass in your other hand. You might buy daffodils every time you buy milk in February, eat strawberries standing on the back step, phone the same friend when the clocks change.

Some of these customs are inherited, some improvised, a few entirely accidental. Repetition does the rest. Do a thing three years running and it joins the household mythology. Eventually somebody says “but we always do this” in the tone of a woman quoting scripture, and a tradition has been born without anyone siging up to anything at all.

So the Book of Days is an invitation to make more of them…

Not because every ordinary pleasure needs promoting to the rank of Occasion. (That way madness lies, carrying seventeen matching napkins). The idea is to lay a few small stones across the year, so the months stop rushing past as one long administrative blur?

September SHOULD feel different from April. And a woman should be allowed to announce that tonight is the Feast of Toast, and therefore nobody is cooking anything requiring more than one heated element.

Joy is rarely delivered as a grand and permanent condition. It turns up in flashes, at odd hours, usually while we’re managing everything else. The trick is to become more available to the sheer just because of it all?

How to use the Book of Days

There’s no register, no attendance record, and no ceremonial ribbons.

Each monthly edition holds one BrocanteHome tradition for every day of the month. Read them all at the beginning and circle whatever intrigues you, or open the book each morning and let the day surprise you. Print the pages and keep them where you’ll see them. Copy the titles into your diary. Write down what happened in your commonplace book, or cut the whole thing up and glue it inside…

Observe every tradition if the mood takes you, or choose one a week, or simply enjoy reading about a parallel September in which your tatty but beloved cardi holds courtand pears are honoured for their treacherous ripeness.

Adapt anything that doesn’t speak to you. Move a celebration that depends on weather we haven’t been given. Swap out food you hate. Invent household variations. Ignore a day entirely because you have work, a migraine, visitors, despair, or no earthly inclination to ceremonialise anything at all..

A ritual freely chosen can be a joy. A ritual performed out of guilt is just one more thing to add to an over-burdened list.

Alongside our invented traditions, each edition carries Also Observed This Month, a small register of genuine holidays, cultural commemorations, awareness days and curious excuses gathered from Britain, America and further afield. Some ask us to think about peace, literacy, memory, or what women are paid. Others propose cheese on toast, a forgotten silk scarf, or the semicolon. A civilised calendar has room for the lot doesn’t it?

Because this is how a life is actually lived.

The profound and the ridiculous don’t arrive in separate compartments. Grief sits down beside the shopping list. Political conviction coexists with strong feelings about biscuits. We can contemplate the nature of time while wondering whether the pear is ready. Honestly we can?

The Book of Days takes the whole mixture seriously. Knows that this is how we build a life and stuff our days with meaning. It grants the ordinary day a little ceremony without making it solemn. It offers permission to make meaning where none has been officially assigned. It understands that pleasure needn’t be earned, beauty needn’t be useful, and the house will do very nicely as a small theatre for our most private acts of attention.

September is ready. There are pencils to sharpen, lamps to light, pockets to search, books to annotate, and one excellent pear waiting for its moment.

Let the ceremonies begin.

*

An introductory price

The September edition of The BrocanteHome Book of Days is $5.00 to begin with. Thirty original household traditions, a calendar of real-world observances, pages for reflection, and a sheet of seasonal ephemera, all gathered into one printable monthly book. It’s deliberately affordable, because I’d like the Book of Days to become a small ritual we share as the year turns…

Buy The Book of Days Now

Subscription maths (And a WONDERFUL offer!)

The Book of Days is also included FREE to all my subscribers (in fact if you are a subscriber you will find it at the end of this here post). But if you aren’t a subscriber yet, then do pop over and read about why this is the loveliest and most valuable of all memberships here on Substack (it’s honestly truly special), then come back and choose your subscription: BrocanteHome membership is usually $29 a month, $99 a year, or $399 for lifetime access.

But for a short while, in celebration of me FINALLY moving house (oh YAY!), I’m offering my Founders one-time Lifetime Membership at $299!

Ten months at the monthly rate would cost you $290. So for $9 more, you can step out of monthly payments altogether and have BrocanteHome for as long as it exists. Eleven months would be $319. Three annual subscriptions would be $297, which means that if you can picture yourself still here three years from now, the sums have already made themselves. After that, every new almanac, Book of Days, Gazette, correspondence packet, Atelier gathering and curious BrocanteHome invention is simply yours.

It’s also £100 less than the usual lifetime price!

I know $299 is a meaningful sum, and I don’t expect it to be the right choice for everyone. Monthly and annual membership stay exactly where they are. But if BrocanteHome already feels like somewhere you intend to stay, this is the most generous price I can offer, and the last membership payment you’ll ever make.

BrocanteHome has been my life for 21 years ago and I’m truly not going anywhere, so please know your investment in BrocanteHome and indeed in yourself, will pay off in spades over the years to come…

So click the button below and choose the Founders option, and access to everything here in Substack, and all the courses, downloads and community in my lovely Atelier are yours for the taking, for always.

Get LIFETIME Access Now

Lifetime BrocanteHome membership: $299, one payment, no renewal.

And a calendar full of Brocante days…

Learn More About BrocanteHome Membership

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And finally, rain. Proper rain. Sideways, hammering, turning the whole afternoon the colour of dishwater. The kind that shrinks the world down to the room you’re in.

Which is what’s happened to me anyway, so hey, here’s the weather catching up!

Two years of shrinking. Two years of everything stopping and coming apart in my hands and staying that way. And me not hating it, in the same way I always welcome rain.

And this, absurdly, ridiculously, is the week I got the first of two Substack bestseller badges. I’m thrilled. And baffled. And doing the thing I always do, holding the achievement at arm’s length like it belongs to somebody else and I’m just minding it for her.

Because I’m still here. Still waffling. Still, (sort of) in bed at twelve in the day with a laptop propped on my knees and a cheese and ham baguette going stale somewhere near my hip. Still thinking, yes, but what does it mean?

The doing I understand. The hours. The sentence that wouldn’t come and then did. The next thing and the next thing, all the things…

But achievement itself feels theatrical. Somebody hands you a badge and says look, and I look, and think, yes, but I was only sitting here in my nightie, spilling my brain so I could make sense of myself…

(What is it FOR? I don’t know what it is FOR.)

Maybe I should rename these diaries Notes from Bed?

That’s where they come from these days. I used to think it was scandalous to still be under the covers at ten. Some woman in my head with her coat already on, appearing at the door, whipping the duvet off. Right. Enough of that. Go and be useful. I know where she came from. It haunts me. Eight years of the phone going at the side of the bed and it being somebody downstairs, in my own house, ringing up to tell me there was a cup of tea made, to wash away my dreams. Written down, that sounds almost sweet doesn’t it? A tender invitation to inhabit the day.

It wasn’t.

Come down. Dressed. Be available. Be the woman I’ve decided you are. Listen to me. Make me feel better. Always that, “make me feel better”, as if I was made of spells.

A cup of tea can be a summons. Anything can, if it’s asked often enough and always in the same voice, and by the time I wandered down bleary-eyed, deep in the midst of ugly menopause, the tea was already cold and obligation laid out on the coffee table next to the sugar bowl.

Here there’s none of that: No obligation anywhere. No proper furniture either.

A squeaky bed. A sofa so small it barely takes one of us, never mind two of us and a menagerie. Over a year of it now. We asked the agents whether we should do the work, put money into it, make it what it wanted to be, and they said no, don’t waste it, a house like this will go in weeks.

Weeks. Ha!

So we didn’t. And it didn’t. And there we were, living in the space between somebody else’s confidence and our own bank balance, in one room, with our lives in boxes and a bed in the middle of it, ready and oh so willing to fly the nest, as we will, finally, next week.

So we live in the bed. Wrapped round each other half the day like a pair of teenagers. Fingers walking up and down arms. Our hair in the same tangled mad state by four in the afternoon, both of us like something dragged out of a hedge. Reading, typing, arguing, sipping, staring at the faces on the ceiling.

The ceiling is pale terracotta plaster and absolutely crawling with faces.

Actual faces. I am after all, a woman in possession of pareidolia. Always greedy for faces.

I see them everywhere. Pavements, grass, cracks, damp stains, the grain in a door. Little people looking back at me. There’s hardly a landscape in anything I love. It’s all portraits. Women looking out. Women caught looking. A man I have christened John with the sharp jaw of Errol Flynn.

I have said it before, but the ceiling makes me think of the woman in Gilman’s yellow wallpaper, watching the patterns shift and something moving behind it. Shadows thrown from the old Victorian street-lamps on this unadopted cobbled lane, making the faces come and go. Company at four in the morning when Ben’s asleep and I’m can’t, in a room getting stranger by the day, because we’ve started gathering the things we’re taking with us. Doris, half hidden between the legs of a table. She’s a bronze, a Sylvia Warman, bought for me by my Helen, and she sports a flat cap when the mood takes her, and something of a pouty lip when it doesn’t.

The terracotta one is on the floor behind the drawers with her face to the skirting board, sulking. She’s mine. I bought her for the shop I had in my twenties, priced her, put her in the window, and then couldn’t let anybody have her. She’s come with me to every house I’ve lived in since, wrapped in a towel, cradled on my knee in the passenger seat, and somewhere along the way she’s taken a chip out of her cheek. I don’t know which move did it. I only know she left one house whole and arrived at another one damaged, which I suspect might be true of all of us who leave certain houses behind?

Then the animals, which came down out of the loft. Ben’s parents’, we think, though there’s nobody left to ask. A bronze dog called Sydney, neither of us approve of. Two hunting dogs walking along beside each other, going nowhere in particular for eighty years. A bronze chicken.

Dead people’s ornaments and my own thirty year old love, all gathering round us like we’re about to be buried with them. The room emptying and getting weirder as it empties. Bin bags full of odds and sods. Plastic boxes now heaving with floral china.

Not long now, so something in me has loosened and I’ve started using the good things up. The jam I wasn’t touching in the fridge. A body oil made of almonds. Yet another candle I was “saving”, because I’d decided it was for our next life.

Why?

No idea. As though the next life had earned it and this one hadn’t. As though I had to turn up there holding proof that I’d gone without. Look at her, a martyr in a shabby green cardigan.

Yesterday that felt so stupid I could have wept.

So I lit it, with the rain going at the windows again, because I wanted cosy. I wanted the old feeling. That thing I used to have in a proper house when the evening came down and I knew exactly what to do with it.

And it worked. Annoyingly. Beautifully. One small flame and some old part of me came back into the room and sat down. Candles do that. Candles and cats. Two arbiters of my mood, neither reliable but still my old familiars.

Light a candle and declare the day finished, whether it’s finished or not. Light a candle and the cats come slinking round it with their tails up so they don’t singe themselves, very holy and ceremonial, right up until one of them nearly tips the whole thing over and we shriek dramatically. That’s what I’ve always been trying to do with BrocanteHome, really. Mark the ordinary until it stops being ordinary. Birthdays and rubbish weeks ending and reading and winter afternoons and getting through Wednesday. All those small hours that go past unremarked if you don’t put a flame to them. Commiting the shrieks to the screen.

Meanwhile I’m galloping. Work-wise, absolutely galloping! My head is stuffed. Posts, courses, pages, ideas at two in the morning that I have to write on the back of my hand. Trying, finally, to give the thing the occasion it deserves, despite my sabotaging self.

And I know this state. I know it can go. I said it a few weeks ago. I could wake up on Tuesday and drop straight down one of my ridiculous existential pits and decide none of it matters, and I’ve wasted my life, and who the hell do I think I am. But for now I feel purposeful. And I need that. It makes me feel here.

Because I need this time to have been for something?

Gosh. That sounded grander than I meant it to. I just want to be able to look back and go, ah. That was why. That’s what those years were doing while they were doing nothing.

I think I’ll come to see them as suspended animation. Everything paused. Everything tipped out.

Mine and Ben’s lives emptied on the floor like two battered jigsaws, no picture on the box, pieces missing, pieces splintering, and half of them clearly belonging to somebody else’s puzzle altogether. And somehow, through the talking and the sadness and the days I thought were the end of us, our hands deep in the bloody mess of it, we’ve muddled ourselves into one picture.

Sort of. Sharp bits everywhere. Corner’s catching on things. Money catching. Family catching. Neurodivergence catching, both of us, all the time, in that particular way where you’re each other’s mirror. Fear catching almost constantly. The old versions of us catching worst of all, standing in doorways they don’t live in anymore

We’re forever snagging on something. So we sand with conversation. That’s what these two years have been. Two battered lives sandpapered back to something we can actually live inside. Sometimes lovely. Often not.

Livable.

And so much of it looks like nothing from the outside. Two people lying on a bed talking. Still talking. Christ, still talking. Going over it. Going under it. Trying to work out what happened, then what comes after the happening. A whole day gone that anyone else would call wasted. And we will not apologise because this, the tangle, the jigsaw, the sanding, we needed it.

Sometimes now, I look round this daft little room, at the plaster ceiling and the bronze chicken and the chaos and the cats and Ben, and think, good God. How have we coped?

But we have. we have. we have. we have.

And maybe that’s what this whole chapter has been for. To make the world small enough that I could finally see what was in it. Work out what I want to make and who I am with nobody standing over me telling me who that is. Singing it out loud, like Ben is now. Coming up the garden, clearing his throat before he starts, and I like the throat-clearing better than the song. Those small human noises that tell you exactly who’s near before you’ve seen them.

Nobody rings me from downstairs anymore. Be will come in with the tea in his hand and put it down beside me and go away again, and it’ll be tea, only tea, nothing wanted for it.

My mum used to clear her throat.

I do it now, halfway up the stairs, and it’s her. Her exact sound coming out of my own body. She’s been dead years and there she is,

in my throat, clearing it for me.

And Finley used to open his bedroom door every morning and sneeze. Every single morning, without fail, a sneeze and then that throat-clearing, and I’d know. He’s up. Day’s started. Person present.

With no idea that for years it was the sound I measured my whole life by.

Now. A face in the plaster. A candle burning down on a shit afternoon. A cat going through a strip of light. A bronze dog waiting to be wrapped in newspaper. A man clearing his throat in the rain. A boy sneezing behind a door.

You were here. This happened.

And this weekend I’m going back in time for a while, before we head to Abersoch and leave this house behind for good. Back to Finley, for a night watching wrestling, an early birthday with his mum, sausage ad mash, Doctor Who and Peep Show. All the glorious relentless chatter of him.

Back to the town where I had my first shop, Rooms. Where I walked him to nursery in the rain. Where some earlier version of me pushed a pram and bought milk and lay awake worrying about things I’d give anything to be worrying about now.

I’ll stand in front of my beautiful boy, who is somehow about to be twenty-three, and I’ll clear my throat, and my mum will be in it, and he’ll be taller than both of us. And then to Abersoch. To let the sea cleanse us of the years for a while.

Hell. How did any of this happen?

Rain on the windows. A Bestsellers badge. A candle pooling. Twenty-three years. Two years. One room.

All this life carrying on while I was still trying to work out what it was for. Perhaps I am made of spells.

In the Atelier This Week…

A tiny little dispatch from my subscribers only community

The September Domestic Almanac

(Learn More here)

And some Teeny Tiny Bunting to Welcome Autumn Home Again

Visit the Atelier Now

Not Got a Brocante Subscription Yet? Click Here to Join Today

🌸

The September Domestic Almanac Is Here…

The second of my monthly Domestic Almanacs has arrived, carrying a floral housecoat over one arm and a scrumptiously cheerful attititude to the changing of the seasons over the other.

Every month I’ll be making a playbook for this lovely ordinary life of ours. There’ll be pages to write on and pages to cut out. Seasonal observations, reading recommendations, tiny rituals, artists to discover, things to notice, ideas to borrow, little projects to enjoy on rainy afternoons, recipes, and the occasional rabbit hole because I simply don’t trust anyone who never disappears down one.

You’ll be able to print it, scribble on it, stick bits of it into your journal, fold the corners over, spill something on it, tuck pieces into your commonplace book and, I hope, return to it long after the month itself has disappeared.

Perhaps that’s all I’ve ever wanted BrocanteHome to be?

A place that quietly accumulates delight…

So in September’s Edition?

The September Domestic Almanac is a richly illustrated A4 collection of seasonal reading, domestic experiments, literary pleasures and glorious old-fashioned paper play. It’s designed to be printed, written upon, cut up, coloured in, altered, pinned to the wall and slowly inhabited as summer gives way to autumn.

September’s particular obsession is the housecoat.

I’ve wandered through its history, considered what it means to dress for the private self, and reinvented it for those of us whose domestic uniform is less quilted nylon and more black vest, yoga trousers and a magnificent floral kimono.

There are tiny experiments involving housecoats, lamplight and proper letters. There are books for cooler rooms, pages for recording what the body knows, colouring pages, and paper projects sufficiently elaborate to occupy an entire wet afternoon.

And then, because September is really two seasons sharing a hallway, there is a complete Changing of the Season Appendix for noticing what is leaving, preparing what is coming and deciding what can remain gloriously unfinished.

Inside you’ll find…

At the Threshold ★ A Note for September ★ September at a Glance ★ The Principles of September ★ Things to Notice ★ What Helps in This Weather ★ Your September Body Forecast ★ Small Seasonal Care ★ In Defence of the Housecoat ★ The Great Housecoat Rabbit Hole ★ The Housecoat Through Time ★ The Modern Housecoat ★ The September Kitchen ★ The September Table ★ Recipes for the Turn of the Season ★ Domestic Fieldwork ★ The Reading Room ★ The September Reading Shelf ★ Reading Notes ★ The September Reading Room ★ September Labels & Bookplates ★ September Marginalia ★ September Experiments ★ The Housecoat Hour ★ One Lamp, Three Evenings ★ The September Letter ★ Pockets, Envelopes & Little Keepers ★ The September Field Notes ★ Cut & Keep Field Notes ★ The Playground ★ September Tickets, Tokens & Promises ★ September Bookmarks ★ Quiet Colouring Pages ★ The September House at Dusk ★ The September Correspondence Folio ★ Tiny Writing Papers ★ Complete Folding Envelopes ★ Seals & Address Labels ★ Autumn Pantry Labels ★

And in the Changing of the Season Workbook Appendix…

The Season in the Hallway ★ The Threshold Inventory ★ Summer Out, Autumn In ★ Use It Before It Turns ★ Repair, Mend, Replace ★ The Unfinished List ★ The Beautiful Form ★ The Room Where Summer Keeps Its Secrets ★ The Still Room Handover ★ Weather Permissions ★ The Seasonal Contract ★ First Leaf, Kept ★ Until October ★

It is lovely…

This second Almanac has become richer, stranger and more confidently itself. It contains things to read and things to do with scissors. There are places to think properly, places to make a mess, and pages whose only ambition is to make an ordinary September afternoon feel a little more interesting.

I do hope you enjoy it.

August taught me that there are women who want this sort of monthly paper world. Women who still like printers, pencils, handwritten notes and projects that leave little scraps all over the table. Women who understand that making life lovelier is serious work, even when that work involves hand-labelling the jars in your pantry…

Do remember though, that we are pick and mix women and we only ever have to take what we find relevant and can leave everything else behind…

The September Domestic Almanac is the second in the collection. My paid subscribers can find it at the end of this post…

Or you can buy it here…

Buy the September Domestic Almanac

Fresh off the printer…

Read more

I’ve never really thought of BrocanteHome as something you simply subscribe to.

It’s a way of life…

A place to come when the house feels stale, when you’ve lost your rhythm, when your creative self has wandered off without leaving a note, or when you simply want to spend a little while among women who understand that tending to a life is complicated, absorbing and occasionally ridiculous work.

For more than twenty-one years, I’ve been creating BrocanteHome around one central belief:

Home is not where life ends. It’s where it begins again.

BrocanteHome is for women who want to live with more beauty, rhythm and intention, without turning themselves or their homes into another exhausting improvement project.

And now, your paid Substack subscription opens the door to far more than the posts arriving in your inbox.

It gives you access to the whole BrocanteHome membership.

Not just a newsletter

When you become a paid BrocanteHome subscriber, you receive the complete paid Substack archive, including all my essays, almanacs, notes, seasonal writing and the work I’ll continue to publish here.

But your membership also includes complimentary access to the BrocanteHome Atelier, my lovely NEW, private Circle community and the place where the wider BrocanteHome world lives.

This means you aren’t paying for one stream of articles and then being asked to buy every course, printable or gathering separately. Your subscription brings them together in one warm, ever-growing place.

There are no scattered downloads hiding in the murky depths of your inbox. No trying to remember which course you bought in 2017 or where on earth you saved that printable. Everything is gathered inside the Atelier, ready whenever you are.

Come every day. Come once a week. Disappear for a month and return when you need us. Nothing here requires perfect attendance.

From the Library to the Atelier

Some of you will remember that my Circle community was originally called The BrocanteHome Library.

The Library was the place where I began gathering the courses, printables, almanacs and twenty-one years of BrocanteHome work into one home. But as the community grew, the name began to feel too quiet for everything happening inside it.

A library is somewhere we browse, read and gather what has already been written.

An atelier is a place where ideas are still being made.

So the Library has become The BrocanteHome Atelier: a living, working space for women creating homes, selves and lives of their own. The archive and all the lovely resources are still here, but now they sit alongside conversation, participation, new projects and work in progress.

Nothing has been taken away. The house has simply been given a name that better suits the life going on inside it.

Why am I bringing everything together?

Because I want you to have the whole BrocanteHome experience.

For years, my work has lived in different corners of the internet. There have been newsletters over here, courses over there, printables tucked elsewhere and conversations happening on yet another platform.

I have ADHD, and I’ve finally realised how confusing and draining that splintering has been for me. If I sometimes struggle to remember where everything belongs, I can hardly expect you to follow the trail of petals across the internet.

Bringing Substack and the Atelier together gives BrocanteHome one clear front door. It allows me to create with more focus and gives you a much richer, easier way to experience the work.

Most of all, I want you to have access to what I’ve learned and created across twenty-one years. I don’t want the courses, ideas, rituals and beautiful practical things I’ve made gathering dust in forgotten cupboards. I want them to be used, enjoyed and passed from one woman to another.

This is me gathering the pieces together and saying: here it is. Come and have the whole thing.

Inside your Brocante membership

🌸 The complete BrocanteHome Substack archive

Every paid post, essay, almanac and subscriber edition, along with all the new writing still to come.

🌸 The Seasonal Almanac

Weekly almanacs, seasonal rhythms, gentle practices and printables to help you notice the year as it passes and live inside it more deliberately.

🌸 The Commonplace Book

A growing cabinet of words, books, quotations, ideas, cultural curiosities and beautiful things worth carrying forward.

🌸 Paper Ephemera

Printables, sticker books, colouring pages, journal sheets and paper collections for those of us who remain stubbornly devoted to real pens, lovely paper and the small thrill of printing something unnecessary.

🌸 Gloriously Messy Me

Warm, honest companionship for women who are still becoming. This is a space for the unfinished self, the neurodivergent self, the midlife self and the woman who has finally grown tired of pretending she has it all beautifully under control.

🌸 The Household Ledger

Recipes, domestic rituals, household systems, creative housekeeping and practical ways to make ordinary life feel more like your own.

🌸 The Brocante courses

Your membership includes complete courses and ongoing projects such as The Brocante Way, The Edited Woman, Brocante75 and How to Be a Glorious Mess.

These aren’t challenges designed to march you briskly towards a shinier personality. They are invitations to understand yourself, edit what no longer belongs and create a life that feels more sustaining.

🌸 Morning Coffee

An open gathering place for everyday conversation, small discoveries, encouragement, domestic confessions and the sort of chat that begins with a book recommendation and ends somewhere entirely unexpected.

🌸 The Chat Room

Real-time conversation with women who get it. Ask a question, share what’s happening, show us something lovely or simply sit quietly and read until you feel ready to join in.

🌸 Brocante Betty

Your own delightfully opinionated BrocanteHome consultant. Betty is part housekeeper, part sanctuary-maker and part no-nonsense woman in a cardigan. She’s there when you need help beginning, choosing, sorting, planning or finding your way back to yourself.

An ever-growing sanctuary

I’m building the BrocanteHome membership as a living body of work.

New essays enter the archive. New pages are added to the almanacs and courses. The paper cabinets grow. Conversations inspire fresh ideas. Members bring their own stories, questions and ways of seeing.

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In times of stress only malted milk biscuits and a cup of Tetleys’ will do, so away with your Yorkshire nonsense. Put the kettle on, gather around and let me spill my week like so much milk on to the windowsill where we are oft to be found half-dressed and sleepy, pouring water on tea from a kettle which cannot be trusted to pour in one direction and instead splurts boiling liquid in the direction of our nether regions, making every cuppa a hazard.

(Never has the sentence, you only had one job been truer).

It has been a week. There was Molly. Then there was Finn, starting a new job he liked, then he hated, then he loved. (And he says he might hate it again tomorrow because some days are hating days and that my friend is that). And he’s half moved into to his friend’s house, which is downright weird as said Harry is child of the singing gardener I used to date and I don’t know what to do with that so I’m pretending it’s not happening. And then his little cat was sick. And it was touch and go for a night. And Ben and I had a ridunculous little argument about nothing at all. And I’ve got a post that has taken on a life of its own and that has somewhat horrified me, because all those people, ya know?? (The pleasure I get from winning a bet is to lose…). And we might be moving in no time at all now and that means change and ugh, change. And and and…

So I’ve gone biscuit and cheese mad, because if you can’t eat in a crisis when can you eat, so malted milk and a herby roule it is. Not together obviously but sort of lined up like a main course and dessert?

Anyways, daft argument over and Ben is having a laundry crisis because my favourite dress is being held hostage by a washing machine door that won’t open, and if we switch it on it trips the electrics that fire up the boiler so not only do things go dark but we don’t get any hot water either, so while working himself up to cantilevering the door open with a crowbar, without smashing the whole caboodle in, he has filled the bath with all the washing that has piled up in the meantime and has made what he is a calling a wet mountain, and I’m really not sure I’m up to going to look at whatever that might turn out to be?

I am a woman on the verge. I LOVE that dress. It makes me say silly things in public because people come up and congratulate me on it, and I get flustered and say crazy things like, oh my thank you, this is my sunshine dress. I mean really? My SUNSHINE dress?? It’s a neck to floor, long-sleeved green and white affair and there is nothing sunny about it, but talk to me in impromptu fashion in the street and find me totally incapable of taking a compliment, whispering thank-you over and over like you have just saved my life, or yes, declaring dresses weather. I’m sorry. I do try to be normal, honest, I do.

What else? Oooh yes, while singing a made up song about a man called Cecil he denies singing at all, Ben took a wrench to the cupboard that wouldn’t open and found a glorious Royal Albert dinner service he seemed as surprised as me about despite this being his house. Think stacks and stacks of pretty floral plates, tureens, sandwich platters, cake stands, teeny tiny plates teenier than saucers, milk jugs, gravy boats et al! Can you imagine? There was a shop full of pretty vintage china in the cupboard under the stairs! Ooh and a fabulous pair of silver serving forks! I was giddy excited until I remembered we will be living on a boat, not filling mahogany cabinets with china in Downton Abbey. Damnit. The slings and rose painted arrows of choosing a life onboard.

What has possessed us?

Adventure? Madness? The absolute certainty that having lived in one room without any mod-cons for the past twelve months, we will be absolutely fine limited space wise once we are people in possession of a working loo, and thus the likelihood of one of us pushing the other into the canal is slim. But heck, reaction to the very notion of our narrowboat life has been mixed. Some humour us as if this isn’t a thing that is actually going to happen. Finn laughs out loud everytime I mention it, my Dad thinks life’s short and we should follow our dreams and it doesn’t matter if we hate it, and Ben’s family just nod wisely and say yes, this is what he needs now…

So I’m picking through the dinner service choosing the bare minimum for joy. Chucking all the clothes I’ve been dragging around with me for years. Trying to resist having to keep the rather wonderful books Ben is still bringing down from the loft. Questioning everything about what makes a home and how indeed I can be absolutely sure that what we choose to take with us will allow me to create home in my own image uncompromised by the chaos of what might just turn out to be clutter after all.

*

I made a mistake. I went to look at the wet mountain. As if I was an inspector.

It wass worse than you are imagining and better too, because there is something impressive about a bath filled to the brim with sopping towels and jeans and ALL my knickers, all of it steaming faintly like something that might hatch. And I didn’t know what to do about it, so I nodded and said mmm, yes, wet mountain, and went back to my sofa for another malted milk, because what else is there to say to a man who has solved a laundry crisis by inventing a small damp geography in the family bathroom?

I can be quite calm about selling a house, about a boat, about a boy half moved into somebody else’s spare room, and then absolutely undone by a green and white frock trapped behind a door that won’t open. I have wept over less and I have wept over nothing, but if my sunshine dress comes out mildewed I will not be responsible for my actions.

Anyway. The Royal Albert. I said the bare minimum for joy like it was a phrase I’d thought about, and it wasn’t, it just fell out of me the way things do at midnight. Because how many plates does joy need? Four? Six, for the fantasy that is guests we will never have room for? And are probably too shy/unsociable/ridiculous to invite anyway? Two, because we are two people who mostly eat crumpets and will happily pop them on teeny-tiny saucers and butter them with that there fancy fish slice. I don’t know, but let’s face it this isn’t about choosing plates at all really is it?

This is me choosing who I intend to be on the water, and that’s a big ask because I haven’t met her yet. Haven’t even really made her up in my head, though I can tell you clearly and decisively who she probably isn’t? Because let’s face it, I’m not about to become a woman with six identical grey dresses, one beautifully weighted spoon and a single artisan bowl enjoying eighteen inches of tasteful breathing space, now am I? No, I do believe that would make me all kinds of sad. I would immediately wonder where the other bowls were, whether they were lonely and whether the shelf wouldn’t look better with a stack of books, a wonky lamp and a bronze bust of a woman I like to call Doris. I like abundance, evidence, rooms that confess to the life going on inside them.

In fact give me a room, any room, and give me a fortnight, and I will have made it into a nest so specific to me that a stranger could walk in and read my whole self off the mantelpiece. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done. But there is, I think a difference between making a home and hoarding the evidence of one, and twelve months living more or less in one room without a kitchen or a proper bathroom has taught me something I would rather not have learned, which is that I did not miss most of it. Not the mahogany. Not the surplus. Not the billions of mugs. Not the clothes I have apparently been keeping for an Alison who attends garden parties in fitted jackets because she doesn’t exist and garden parties make me naughty. And there isn’t a shoulder-padded blazer on the planet that could have me holding that naughtiness in and isn’t it time I was honest about this sort of thing, so I don’t embarrass us all by my eating too much cake and trying to seduce the vicar?

Ayway. I digress. Trouble is everything I own is entirely ordinary until somebody suggests it might go, at which point it becomes a priceless family heirloom and I am clutching it to my bosom like Miss Havisham on Antiques Roadshow.

And herein lies the problem: Because I didn’t miss most of it. So if I didn’t miss it I don’t need it, but that’s not true because I need it all, like dogs need bones and girls at festivals need Hunter wellies. I’m such a liar. I need it all and I’ve missed the little things. The tiny plate for the butter. That little heart-shaped bowl I ate chilli from through the whole of my forties. A lamp switched on in the afternoon before the room has properly decided to be gloomy. The little stuff of days familiar to me. None of them essential. All of them small hooks a life hangs off, and I can’t for the life of me tell you which of those hooks I will want at four in the morning on a wet stretch of canal when the wind is up and I’ve made my son laugh at me and my Dad proud of me in the same breath. I don’t know what that home needs yet, so suddenly everything is auditioning for the role of home itself.

Not usefulness. Home. There’s a difference isn’t there? A wooden spoon is useful. A ridiculous little rose-painted plate that makes me smile before I have even put anything on it is something else entirely. The sunshine dress is technically clothing, except apparently it is also weather, confidence, identity and an emergency requiring a crowbar. Spoon useful. Rosy plates and sunny dresses, home.

And that is what I mean by bare minimum for joy. Not austerity, or making a case for owning less, as if owning less is somehow morally superior, because I have spent all these years making an argument for the tiny foolish beautiful things that make domestic life worth inhabiting. I mean choosing hard enough that the things which remain become visible again.

One little plate instead of twenty lost at the back of a cupboard.

The books I might actually reach for instead of the ones I feel guilty about not becoming the sort of woman who reads.

The dress I wear until strangers stop me in the street and I panic and start calling it weather

Enough cushions to make the boat recognisably mine without causing us to list dangerously into the bank.

I might hate it of course. I might discover that what I thought was romantic is actually damp, that canal life involves far too many conversations about waste tanks and that living seven feet from the person you love means there is nowhere to go when he starts singing improvised songs about Cecil while insisting, with his whole chest, that he is not singing. We might spend January asking what possessed us and April convinced we are geniuses. Probably both. I am terribly fond of ducks.

(Most things worth doing seem to contain a small period of what the hell have we done? somewhere in the middle, don’t they?)

This then is me processing it all. Life on a boat, a bath full of laundry, a floor full of rosy porcelain and my favourite dress in solitary confinement, third day now, a herby roule and a stack of malted milks, while deciding what constitutes joy in a space seven feet wide, as the future becomes considerably less theoretical than I would like and ch,ch, change is just around the corner.

Kettle’s boiled.

Splurted at me again.

Some days are hating days, my Finn says, and some days are processing days, and that my friend is that.

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I am large, I contain multitudes. Walt Whitman

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Ralph Waldo Emerson

I. Exhibit A

I’ve been an artist. I’ve been a writer. I was, for one sincere stretch, a transcendental meditator, and I still dabble in twenty minutes here and there repeating a gibberish word to myself because it works. And for a short while I was a hairdresser’s receptionist and I’m not sure they would give me a reference for that.

I’ve played games. I’ve been bohemian. I’ve been mad, in the way a woman is permitted to be mad for a year or so provided she does it without much fuss and keeps up with the laundry. I’ve been Mother Earth, wholesome and frizzy-haired, fond of hummus and lentils. Telling friends off for being over-reliant on kitchen paper towels and announcing myself consideribly purer than thou. I’ve been a pouting seductress, which took much humiliation and a line in pink bras, doused in essential oils, or doused in Obsession, followed by a brief period when I wore both at once and surely knocked anyone who came near me, clean out.

I once went out dressed to the nines, and stood at the bar, and looked down to find both arms covered to the elbow in paint the colour of that day’s work. I didn’t wash it off. I’ve never quite washed it off.

Woman, with paint. Hang me in a gallery.

I’m neurodivergent, which I understood about myself a great deal later than everybody else would have liked, for isn’t it true people like to be able to neatly box us off… but no, not possible, because I contain facets and I contain facades, and I can’t fathom which is which, and suddenly find myself thinking that maybe if you can’t either then maybe that’s a YOU problem? There’s madness in the mix and there’s intelligence in it, and there’s trauma and there’s fright, and every last bit of that has gone into making whoever it is that types this.

A homemaker and a feminist (bite me). A mother and a terrible friend. I’m so sorry. I don’t do it on purpose. Not religious: spiritual. My own brand of spirituality, the kind I’ve made up and cobbled together from the universe and astrology and witchiness and Buddhism and crystals and every Sunday of my childhood spent sneaking into the congregation at St. Judes because my Nana was chronically late for everything, and because it all makes sense to me and it is mine and I can’t and probably won’t explain it.

And speaking of spirituality, I don’t know whether my spiritual home is a cottage, a manor house, or a skip. Because I want it all and I want to squeeze the whole lot on to a 68ft narrowboat, please and thank-you kindly?

I could go on, because there’s the woman inside me who once did the school run in yesterday’s mascara with a coat over her nightie, and the one who ate nothing but cheese for a whole day, and the one who cried in a garden centre car park over something so small I’ve lost it completely, and the one who stood at a window somewhere far away and thought, oh, I could be somebody else here, and wasn’t, and so I came home, and put the shopping away.

There’s no ONE me. There are billions of little bits of all the women I’ve been stealing from for fifty-four years, and I can’t stop the stealing and I’m never giving any of it back. Arrest me, why don’t you?

II. The Counter

All of which begins, as these things do, at a sweet counter in Woollies.

The scoop was silver and and nobody ever used it. You used your fingers. Or the little tongs if the woman with scary make-up was watching.

Nobody asked you to explain your selection. Nobody said, I notice you’ve taken three flumps and a fried egg, shall we talk about it? You put in what you wanted. You avoided the coconut mushrooms because the coconut mushrooms were an act of aggression.[^1] And then you handed the bag over to be weighed, and the woman in the tabard didn’t look at what was inside it, because why on earth would she, and you walked out onto a wet high street with your own assembled brand of all that is sweetness and light shoved into your pocket.

III. Somebody

Most of us have endured an extraordinary amount of time being invited to become somebody. Not ourselves, exactly. Somebody. A recognisable somebody. A type. Boxed off and tied with a bow!

The sensible woman. The creative woman. The SWEARY one. The woman who has her life together. The woman who has opted out and let. herself. go. The woman who doesn’t need anybody. The woman with three identical white shirts hanging like proof she is hygenic, neat and probably minty fresh. The woman who rises at dawn and drinks grass. The woman who has rejected all that nonsense and lives entirely on Serrano ham and Fab lolly-ices.

There’s always, somewhere, a blueprint. Yep, even for the ham lady.

Choose a label (look for the “cores”: norm core, cluttercore, faerycore, fishermancore - no really FISHERMANCORE) and you’re apparently expected to choose the accompanying beliefs, clothes, books, breakfast, bathroom, attitude towards money and preferred method of storing beans. We’re surrounded by complete packages. Everything arrives as a set. Milk jug, sugar bowl et al.

But one of the quiet pleasures of getting older, I’ve found, is working out that you’re under absolutely no obligation to buy it all in one neat package. You can be a fisherman faery if you want to. Or you can say phooey to the lot of it and do Alisoncore or Dianecore if you’d rather.

You can have the lipstick and kick the patriarchy into next week.

You can have the old wooden table without wanting the old social order that once gathered around it.

You can believe fiercely in women earning their own money and still want somebody to bring you tea when the day has been vile.

You can read feminist theory in bed underneath a ridiculous floral eiderdown, because why wouldn’t you?

You can reject the notion that housework is women’s work and still get an almost embarrassing satisfaction out of polishing a sideboard until it looks wet.

You can despise beauty standards and still stand in Boots at half past four on a Thursday wondering whether you might, after all, be the sort of woman who needs plum-coloured eyeliner. (Answer: probably. It is kinder to ageing eyes than my beloved black kohl).

You can want solitude and company inside the same hour. You can have spent twenty years rejecting something and suddenly decide you rather like it. The sky doesn’t fall in. Your membership card to womanhood isn’t revoked. Nobody worth knowing appears at the door with a clipboard.

And yet you’re braced for the clipboard. Look at you. Still braced.

Yes. Alright. She’s here now, the one who lives down the side of the page. She’s been there for years. Sarcastic and a little bitter. Try and ignore her if you can?

IV. An Incomplete Catalogue of the Ways We Have Recently Asked Women to Identify Themselves

Personality quizzes. Aesthetic categories. Archetypes. Style identities. Attachment styles. Love languages. Hormone types. Body shapes. Colour seasons. Work personalities. Erotic blueprints. Housekeeping styles. Which of the four autumn palettes are you. Which goddess governs your money. What your handwriting says about your capacity for intimacy. Which fictional village would suit your nervous system. What kind of tired you are. Whether you’re a lark, an owl or a third bird recently invented by a podcast. Your decluttering personality. Your grief style. Your rest archetype. Your gut biome’s preferred cuisine. Whether you’re a fig woman or a pomegranate woman, no really, tell them which, their bank balance depends on it. Choose! They want you to choose!

The algorithms are mad fond of all this. They want to know who you are because once they do, they can show you more of yourself, or rather more of what women like you are supposed to like. Watch one woman buttering her own sourdough in a long white dress and your phone becomes convinced you’re days away from a smallholding. Show an interest in strength training and you’ll be pursued around the interwebs by women carrying enormous bottles of water.

The categories are occasionally useful. They give shape to something previously unnamed, and there’s in recognition, the click of ooooh, that’s a thing, other women have it too. I’m in a gang!

But the label/gang/scary woman in charge soon starts issuing instructions.

You choose an aesthetic, an idea, a way of living, and then, without ever deciding to, you begin editing yourself so that you belong to it. (Because we tell ourselves BELONGING is EVERYTHING and we don’t know it means absolutely nothing until we are almost too old to care). We imagine we pick identities because they express who we are. And then, almost imperceptibly, we start interrogating ourselves in ways that protect this imagined, adopted identity.

Would a serious woman care this much about cushions?

Would a feminist want somebody to open the door for her?

Would a creative woman be this interested in cleaning?

Would a woman committed to slow living be allowed to adore the madness of Manchester?

Would the spiritually evolved woman still want revenge?^2. Because HELL I want revenge!!

Women contain rooms nobody puts on Pinterest, don’t you know?

There’s a room in you with the curtains shut and the light on in the afternoon, and nobody has ever once asked about it.

V. la chineuse

I wonder if we’ve confused authenticity with consistency?

Authenticity is one of those words rubbed cheap by handling. Be authentic! Live authentically! Find your authentic self, as though somewhere beneath the accumulation of everything that’s happened to you there’s a pristine woman waiting to be uncovered. Here I am, she says, arms crossed, I was buried underneath the ironing!

I’ve stopped believing in her.

I know I’ve been ranting about finding her for years, but she’s not the shape I thought she was. She’s either an idea, ie. not something attainable: a fantasy - OR there may be no one true self waiting underneath at all, because maybe a self just keeps being made, not invented falsely but assembled honestly, the way you’d build a room over fifteen years rather than order one from ikea?

And something else… the authentic self might not represent a collection of things a woman has chosen. It might be the woman actually doing the choosing. Because surely it is odd to imagine that we are anything but authentic in the first place?

Yes. That makes more sense doesn’t it? Because the chooser can change her mind. The chooser develops appetites she didn’t possess at twenty-three. She can abandon entire selves. She can return to things she once dismissed, loudly and slightly merrily at a dinner party. She can discover her mum was right about some things and gloriously wrong about others. She can find pleasure where she once saw only oppression, and call out oppression where she once saw romance.

And we mustn’t call it inconsistency, when we should be calling it consciousness.

VI. An Inventory of the Women I Have Been Invited to Become

Women have always been offered models of correct womanhood. The costume changes, but the inspection remains and it is brutal.

The good wife. The superwoman. The domestic goddess. The girlboss. The tradwife. The woman ageing defiantly. The woman who has absolutely no intention of ageing at all and has the hairline scars to prove it.

Every generation believes it has escaped the previous model and then, double quick, manufactures another. There’s always a right way to be free. (Even liberation arrives carrying instructions). Isn’t that appalling? Not on your own terms, Darling. Don’t go rogue, now will you Sweetheart?

You must want the CORRECT freedoms. Reject the correct traditions. Be sufficiently independent without becoming cold, sufficiently desirable without appearing vain, sufficiently maternal without misplacing yourself entirely, sufficiently ambitious without letting ambition deform you into something with an obnoxious jaw. Modern womanhood presents itself as a buffet, and then somebody follows you around commenting on your plate.

You’ve made that joke before.

So shoot me.

VII. Nothing Explodes

Two things said out loud, together.

This then, is why I’ve become interested in women who are difficult to categorise.

Interested in interesting women.

Women whose houses are full of contradictory evidence. Women who keep serious books beside giddy ones, or dirty ones and don’t shelve them apologetically. Women who care deeply about politics and wallpaper. Women who can spend a morning thinking about mortality and an afternoon looking for precisely the right shade of moss.

Women who aren’t interested in demonstrating that their pleasures are morally useful.

I fancy myself as Carrie Bradshaw and I fancy myself as Miss Marple, and I think they would have got on rather well, given a decent bottle of plonk and a body in the library. I want a long rainbow scarf of the Doctor Who variety. I’d wear it with a tutu if I had the legs, and there’s a real chance I’ll try it anyway, because the legs are only going to get worse and the scarf is my spirit animal.

(That last part matters more than the rest of it because we’ve developed a habit of requiring women to justify pleasure. If she likes baking, it’s got to be therapeutic. If she likes clothes, it must be self-expression, art even, not for the vacuous sake of it. If she loves housekeeping, it must be mindfulness. If she buys flowers, they must be an act of self-care, as though we are only allowed beauty on prescription).

Sometimes a woman wants ranunculus because she wants ranunculus. True dat.

I resent it all, but the ludicrous expectations around domesticity seriously stick in my throat, because the domestic world is packed with ideological traps. A woman says she loves her home and within minutes someone is poking at her politics Does she think women belong there? What’s she hiding? Is she performing, ye gads, playing HOUSE? Is she succumbing to nostalgia, that great charge, always delivered as though nostalgia were a controlled substance?

Or is SHE the controlled substance managed into obscurity by a man tightening reins around her and only yanking her back into life when his appetite needs satisfying.

Ugh. Ick. Ugh.

Maybe. Or maybe she likes being at home, and that’s the end of it?

Maybe she just likes washing that gingham tablecloth and smoothing it back over the table. Or finds the small arrangements of daily life satisfying in a way she’d struggle to justify to Betty Friedan, while still believing that every adult in the house should be doing a fair share of the bloody work.

Careful.

Both are true. I know because both are true in me. I’m interested in housekeeping as creative discipline and I believe there’s real meaning in paying attention to the place where our ordinary

Say the other half.

where our ordinary life happens.

AND

I don’t believe a woman owes anybody a clean house.

There. Nothing exploded did it? Boom!!!!

VIII. Salvage

The Pick and Mix Woman isn’t simply eclectic. That’s too simple in the reckoning. She’s suspicious of total and absolute systems. She’ll take a practice from somewhere without swallowing the doctrine wrapped around it, because women are so often told that enjoying one aspect of a tradition means endorsing the whole of it.

But human culture has only ever advanced by salvage. We inherit and we discard. We adapt, we rescue, and we steal shamelessly from the blessed dead.

Why should womanhood be different?

I’ve learned little bits of everything but nothing in me has ever wanted the whole course. It only wants the bit that shines. Aromatherapy. Yoga. Tantra. Breath work. Nutrition. How to stick on a false eyelash without blinding myself. Books, please. Scooby Doo now.

This is intellectual pick and mix, and I like the thought of a woman rummaging through ideas the way she’d rummage round the flea-market. Picking something up. Turning it over. Checking whether it’s still useful. Looking for cracks, and then looking at the cracks more closely, because sometimes the crack is the reason to buy it. Taking it home if she pleases. Leaving it there if she doesn’t. Not revering it because it’s old, and not rejecting it for being dilapidated either.

We’ve become slightly frightened of contaminated ideas haven’t we? If something comes from a tradition whose politics we dislike, we decide we’ve got to chuck the baby out with the bathwater. But women have always made lives out of imperfect inheritance. Tis the history of us. We’ve always taken recipes from women whose marriages we’d never have tolerated. We’ve inherited sewing baskets alongside warnings. Jewellery alongside silence. Good sense sitting right next to appalling prejudice, in the same drawer, in the same handwriting.

A life can contain both gratitude and refusal. We know that. Surely we know that.

And a woman can contain the people she came from whether she agreed to it or not. I am my mum. I am our Barbie. I am a lady called Tuesday and another called Mrs Brown who lived next door and wore her hair in a currant bun, and who I don’t believe I ever had a conversation with about anything more searching than whether I’d had a nice day at school. Something of her got in anyway. The cottage in her 1950’s semi-detached maybe? That’s the thing nobody warns you about inheritance. You acquire it like osmosis.

IX. The Catalogue of the Sweet Counter

A rough guide to what’s actually on offer, for those of us approaching with a paper bag and no fixed plan for sweet satisfaction.

The wellness jar. Rest, walking, attention to the body, food that makes you feel properly alive. Also panic, purity, endless self-surveillance and a barely disguised terror of getting fat or old. Take the top layer. Leave the rest.

The domestic jar. Ritual. Care. Hospitality. Making something out of very little. Seasonal attention. The pleasure of keeping things well. Right at the bottom, obedience, gone slightly sticky. Take the ritual. Bin the rest.

The glamour jar. Almost entirely delight, with a hard centre of comparison. Suck slowly. Try not to choke on it.

The religion jar. Ritual again, and the words people reach for when somebody dies, and a great many rules about women. You know which parts you’re taking. Everybody does.

The feminism jar. Language that saves us. Also arguments, fractures, whole generations of women disagreeing loudly about what freedom ought to look like. Good. A politics that couldn’t survive women disagreeing with each other would be a very flimsy politics indeed.

The capitalism jar. Forms of ambition we may honestly enjoy, sold to us bundled with the exhaustion. Nobody has yet worked out how to buy the one without the other. Report back if you manage it.

The Nana jar. Knowledge dismissed for being domestic and therefore assumed to be small. Enormously undervalued. Fill your bag.

The jar with no label, at the back, that the shop has stopped ordering in and can’t tell you the name of. That’s the one I want.

The coconut thing. No.

X. The Archive

When I was younger, identity felt declarative.

I am this/I’m not that. I believe this/God NO, I would NEVER do that. Are you actually mental?

Never is one of youth’s favourite words. It goes beautifully with everything, and we mustn’t sneer at it, because younger women need tough edges to survive the necessary work that is separating themselves from parents, peers and teachers expectations, the version of yourself other people have already started writing on your behalf. Definition is necessary. Mine/not mine/yes/no.

But middle age is dragging an archive. Pages already curling. Yellowing like her teeth.

There are so many former selves by then. The girl who thought she was Pollyanna. The young woman performing a version of adulthood she’d seen somewhere. Boss-girl, shop-owner, shoulder pads, clipboard. Mother Earth. The woman who survived something and will NEVER discuss it. The woman who wanted something badly and got it. (Damnit). The woman who wanted something badly and didn’t. (Thank-God).

It gets harder and harder to believe in a single pure self, and all of a sudden it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. At fifty-four I’ve got no interest in identifying the REAL ME. I’d rather wander through the archive with the bag open, discarding bits of me here there and everywhere, and snaffling only those parts of who I have been that strike me as something I can take into my next lifetime…

Ah yes. Her! I liked the earrings. Terrible, dreadful, boyfriend. (Keep the earrings).

And there. That woman. She worried too hard, but she knew how to get things done. Take the competence, leave the anxiety.

That version of me was funnier. I’ll have some of that.

This one was frightened almost all of the time. Fragile. Be gentle with her. Wrap her up in cotton wool now and carry her home gently, please.

This one mistook being lusted after for being loved. Put that down, and put it down properly, not in a way that means going back for it in five years.

This one had gumption I’d forgotten about. In the bag it goes!

And then towards the back there’s a shelf of women I can’t do anything with at all, the one who apologised to a counsellor for feelig too much, the one who laughed at a joke a dull man told about wanting to park his bike between her breasts, while his pious wife sat and looked on as if those very breasts were asking for it, the one who said she didn’t mind, and said it so often and so convincingly that for a while she didn’t, and the one who let too many friendships go without a word because picking up the phone had become a thing too large to lift, and I can’t take anything from them, and I can’t throw them out either, and they stay where they are with the dust settling on them and their hands folded and I love them and I hate them.

Becoming yourself is partly an act of retrieval, I think? Not just becoming new. Recovering, reconsidering, choosing again, going back for something you left on a shelf twenty years ago because a man you no longer remember said it was silly.

Going back to fetch yourself off the shelf he put YOU on. Shame on him.

XI. Commercially Inconvenient, and Rather Pleased About It,

The internet doesn’t much like this kind of woman. She’s difficult to sell to.

Identity converts desire into equipment. Once we know what sort of woman you are, we know what you’re required to own in order to prove it, and the dress and the powders and the blonde highlights arrive in the post like a starter kit. There’s pleasure in that game. I’ve played it with both hands.[^3]

Oh yes, make no mistake, the Pick and Mix Woman is commercially inconvenient because she won’t buy the whole aesthetic. She wants your candlestick, not your worldview. She likes the dress and has no intention of moving to Provence. She takes the perfume and declines the kind of reinvention programme you can pay for on Klarna, because it costs more than her mortgage and she might be gullible, but she is’t actually STUPID, age has at least given her that.

So she buys one thing and then escapes back inside her own head. Because it’s nice there and she can hang something avant-garde on the William Morris wallpaper and refuse to dress in anything other than a lace nightie and a tatty mohair cardigan.

She can wear a crown while she boils the milk for coffee if she wants and that right there is soveriegnty.

XII. Appetite

Here’s the other reason I like her. She makes room for appetite, and women are taught to distrust appetite almost from the beginning.

Not only appetite for food. Appetite for attention. Money. Sex. Beauty. Solitude. Power. Rest. The ridiculous. We’re taught moderation before we’ve discovered what we want, which is an efficient way of ensuring we never quite come to know who we are as women on our own terms and I hope you think that’s as appallig as I do?

The Pick and Mix Woman asks a different question. Not what should I like. Or what would make me admirable, or what is gram worthy, or what have my bestest friends agreed constitutes good taste, because we live somewhere nice and nice has rules, nice women don’t break.

Rather, they ask, what delights ME?

Because a great many women can tell you exactly what their family prefers long before they can tell you what they prefer themselves. Ask a woman which restaurant everybody likes and she knows. What time everyone needs to leave. Who hates onions. Which child will only eat the sauce if it’s kept separate and served in the correct small dish. What her partner considers too expensive. What her mum considers vulgar.

But ask her what she wants and find yourself blinking into the awkward pause.

I’ve sat inside that silence myself, in a restaurant, holding a menu, unable to locate my own preference, and I remember thinking with something like anxiety, that I’d mislaid something and didn’t know when, or even really what? And I have turned to men sitting next to me and said what do you think I will like? And let them choose for me, because honestly, my brain was just too exhausted to pick for myself.

What to do about it? The exhaustion, the not knowing? Teach yourself to hear the faint yes.

So here’s mine, and I know it’s no help at all really, but I think it useful to be be able to set my multitudes in stone: I want to live in France and be a Parisienne, thin and unimpressed, neck kissed by a Gitane mouth, and I want to live in Ireland and hide in a hovel deep in the forest and become the stuff of small village legend, and I want to swish my way through Thailand, in a cheesecloth skirt with the dust coming up warm through my sandals, and I want to stay in bed, and I want to live in Chelsea and pretend I was made there and I want to live on a boat with the water knocking all night against the hull and everything I own inside one damp cupboard, or else move lock, stock and barrel into the wild abundance of a National Trust property and refuse to be shifted while I make a life out of foraged jam[^4] and Liberty print dresses and a great deal of unnecessary jelly in rabbity moulds, and I want all of it, and I want it soon, before my knees go. But be quick, because the right one is already shrieking.

Every one of those wants is real. Not one of them cancels the others out. This is what I mean about being confined and confused by the muddle of it, because I contain multitudes I haven’t begun to understand, and some days I’d give a great deal to be a woman who wanted one house.

You’d last a fortnight.

I’d last a fortnight.

That. More of that. Not that. Never again. I thought I liked this and it turns out I don’t. I used to hate this and now I get it.

XIII. (this one got away from me)

There’s danger here.

Because we mustn’t turn the Pick and Mix Woman into yet another aspirational woman. God forbid. She shouldn’t become a woman who has curated herself into a cliche, standing at the counter with a beautifully designed checklist, choosing her contradictions with impeccable taste. That would defeat the whole point, and it would also, within about eighteen months, be commercialised into a heap meaningless nothing.

She gets things wrong. She confuses desire with aspiration. She buys into things. Ludicrous, ridiculous things. She changes her mind. Some days she wants to hand the whole lot back and ask for a refund and a lie down. Other days she wants to start a riot. Or a movement. In a tutu.

And she isn’t equally free to choose, because none of us are. We live inside money, bodies, histories, caring responsibilities, class, culture, race, health, geography and luck. Some women stand at counters that run the whole length of the shop. Some are handed three grim jars and told to be grateful and that’s not politics, its

VIOLENCE

and we have to stand up for those women who are fighting so bloody hard for choice beyond entrapment.

So she doesn’t deny circumstance. She looks for agency inside it.

For some agency is enormous. But for other it amounts to nothing more than choosing which teacup to take her morning tea in while the rest of her life burns, and we mustn’t sneer at that either, ever, because an extraordinary number of women have survived by making tiny choices inside lives that didn’t offer them enough large ones. Finn’s Nana rearranges her tiny front room roughly every six weeks. And I finally understand why.

XIII and a half. On the Coconut Mushroom

No. Still no. I mean, seriously what the hell?

XIV. The Tangle

Feminism gave us the language to ask who benefits from the rules. But feminism itself contains disagreement, fracture, whole generations of women arguing about what freedom ought to look like.

Good. Isn’t that how it should be? A politics that couldn’t survive women disagreeing with each other would be a very flimsy politics indeed. And tearing it aprt and putting it back together in our own likeness is surely what we have long been fighting for?

So what I want now is feminism roomy enough to hold women making choices I wouldn’t make. One that can tell the difference between coercion and preference, and can ask hard questions about why women want what they want without requiring every answer to be politically spotless. Or religiously immaculate.

Because sometimes we ARE shaped by patriarchy. Of course we are. And sometimes we just like the skirt. Mostly the two are tangled past separating, and there’s no laboratory anywhere in which a woman can discover what she’d have wanted if nobody had ever influenced her. We absorb approval and disapproval before we learn to speak for ourselves.

That doesn’t make desire fake. It makes desire worth being curious about.

Which is a different thing from interrogation. Why do I like this? How interesting. Not: prove that you’re allowed to.

I’ve been trying to find the line between the two since I was nineteen and I will probably still be rooting around in the dirt of it all when I’m ninety.

XV. I Haven’t Decided What This Means Yet

One of the liberties I increasingly want for us is the freedom to say: I haven’t decided what this means yet.

I’m so tired of absolutes.

We’re living in an age that demands instant positions. Everything must be interpreted, categorised, declared, and preferably declared within the hour. You can’t just have an experience. You’re expected to explain your experience while it’s still happening to you. Or hand the whole shebang over to ChatGPT and let her hand your entire self back neatly labelled.

Don’t. Let the whole idea that is you remain unfinished.

I think I believe this, except for that bit. I can see why she feels that way. I don’t know. I haven’t read enough. I changed my mind.

Those sentences have become strangely radical, the last one especially. We treat changing one’s mind as weakness, when it may be the clearest available evidence that a mind is still running wild and active.

What sort of adult arrives at fifty holding precisely the opinions she held at twenty? Imagine it. Terrifying.

I hope seventy-year-old me looks back at something I believe passionately today and says, Alison, baby girl, what on earth were you thinking? There should be development. There should be embarrassment. There should be abandoned certainties lying around the place like old hairstyles. And I know this to be true because I’ve been blogging for over twenty years and there are is a whole host of Alison’s lurking in those pages and not all of them are who I would choose to be now.

Which is why the language of pick and mix appeals to me so much more than the language of reinvention. Reinvention has become an industry of its own. New year, new you. New decade, new chapter, become her. Erm, No?? I don’t want to become her. I’m not sure I trust her? She’s almost certainly waking at a quarter past five, owns matching luggage and a Smthyson passport cover in panama green don’t you know?

There’s something violent in the fantasy of continually replacing oneself, as though each new version requires the previous woman to be quietly dismissed. I’d rather accumulate. Take what still works, repair what can be repaired, leave a few things frankly shabby, add something nobody saw coming.

Keep the evidence.

I like women who show evidence. A life should leave marks on the woman who’s been living it.

Show your work?

XV and a bit. The Shelf by the Door

Two hooks, one loose. A pink bobble hat I’ve worn twice. Keys to a house I don’t live in. A tin that says biscuits and holds batteries, most of them dead. Reading glasses. Reading glasses. Reading glasses. A postcard of a painting I stood in front of for half an hour and can’t now remember the name of. A dish of foreign coins. Somebody’s glove. A carrier bag of carrier bags. Three ticket stubs. A conker from an autumn I couldn’t date for you now. A pot of hand cream gone solid at the neck. My Mum’s loopy writing on the back of an envelope, and on it, a shopping list, and on the list, cream.

XVI. Brocante

Because brocante was never about matching.

It’s about recognition. That peculiar little pull towards an object a hundred other people have walked straight past. The tarnished frame, the scrap of fabric, the almost beautiful thing. The smell of a stall in the rain, which is damp cardboard and cold metal and a perfume bottle gone bitter in the years since she died.

Which is why the skip stays on my list of possible spiritual homes. Nobody curates a skip. Somebody has died or moved or finally lost patience, and the whole of a life goes in together, the occasional table riding on top of the ruined mattress, and you stand at the edge of it in the rain working out what’s worth wet hands. And how it would look draped in fairy-lights.

You gather objects that were never intended to live together, and then over time they begin to look inevitable. And they could only belong to you. Sarahcore! That’s taste. Not conformity, but relationship. The objects change each other simply by being placed side by side. A solemn painting loosens beside something daft. A polished table makes a chipped bowl look deliberate. A room acquires character because nothing in it arrived as a set.

We allow rooms this freedom. But we won’t allow it in ourselves, or heavens, in other women who we can be almost repulsively judgey about, if something about them doesn’t make sense to us.

Nobody walks into a beloved, complicated house and says: I’m terribly sorry, but your aesthetic appears ideologically inconsistent. The velvet chair conflicts with the modern lamp. The floral curtains contradict the abstract painting. You have failed to establish a coherent personal brand.

No. We stand in the doorway and we say: it feels like her.

That’s what I want for women. Not coherence. Recognition. The sensation of looking around a life and thinking, yes, this feels like me, even though I couldn’t give you a neat explanation of why. And that, yes, that is her.

And perhaps there’s a stage beyond even that, where she stops worrying about whether any of it represents her at all. Where a woman no longer converts every object and habit and pleasure into identity. I wear this because I like it. I cook this because it tastes good. I stay home because I’m tired. I go out because I suddenly want to. I’m not assembling evidence for the prosecution.

Selves get lighter when we stop asking every small choice to carry them.

Leave the other women alone.

XVII. the bag

Think how much energy we spend making ourselves understandable.

We explain. We dilute. We put little footnotes around our appetites. I know this sounds silly, but | I know it isn’t very feminist, but. | I’m probably too old for. | I know I said I’d never.|

Who exactly is the explanation for?

Maybe there comes a point when we can drop the defence altogether.

Yes, I like that. No, I don’t. Yes, those two opinions feel the same to me. Yes, I have contradicted myself and you can’t stop me. No, I won’t be submitting revised documentation.

Revised documentation. Listen to yourself!

Because a woman doesn’t owe the world philosophical coherence. That sentence still feels almost naughty to write, since coherence is so highly prized. Coherent arguments. Coherent politics. Coherent identity, with a suitable tasteful colour palette if you don’t mind?

But a human being isn’t an argument.

We are appetite, memory, hormones, history, imagination, fear, conditioning, rebellion and half a biscuit found at the bottom of our bag. We’re porous. We change. We contradict ourselves because life keeps contradicting us.

And there’s something astonishing in refusing to become predictable even to yourself. I want the possibility of surprise. Don’t you? I want to keep finding out that I’ve turned into a woman who loves something my younger self would have tutted at. Gardening. Opera. Tinned sardines straight out of the arty little tin. No, not sardines, weird boney bits, weird slimy bits. Sleep taken shamelessly at three in the afternoon with the light coming through the curtains orange. Bed at nine. Up until two with something scandalous, bourbon, sex, dancing. All three at once please?

We talk about self-knowledge as though the goal were to know ourselves completely, and what a dreadful prospect that is.

I hope there are whole territories in me I’ve never visited

I hope I can still astonish myself at seventy.

Annie Dillard wrote that how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,[^5] and I’d only add that how we choose is how we spend our days.

The Pick and Mix Woman leaves space in the bag for more of who she is becoming. Her muchier, experimental self.

XVIII. The Counter, Again

So here she is, in a shop that shut years ago. Wet shoulders. Paper bag. Paint to the elbow, because there’s always paint somewhere on her by four in the afternoon.

She takes the thing she’s wanted since she was nine.

She takes the thing she swore off in her thirties for reasons that have since evaporated. Maybe gluten? Or liars?

She takes two of something completely inappropriate. nice.

She takes something because it’s the colour of toxic waste and for no other reason she’s prepared to give.

She stands there a full twenty minutes because she can’t decide whether she still likes cola bottles. She decides she does. Chucks six in a bag.

She leaves the coconut. Obvs.

Then she folds the top of the bag over, and she pays a woman with pink splodgy blusher who retired a long time ago, and might already be dead and then she walks out into the wet with the whole strange muddle of it all knocking about together, and

nobody weighs her.

Nothing to add.

[^1]: Coconut mushroom, so: somebody must have loved them, because they kept making them, and that somebody was almost certainly a woman born before the war who also liked coltsfoot rock. I don’t have to like a thing to notice it was loved.

[^3]: I’ve changed my mind about this paragraph since I wrote it, and I’m leaving it in because I’d rather you saw the join.

[^4]: I have made foraged jam twice. The first batch never set, so I poured it over ice cream, called it coulis.

[^5]: I’ve had that line pinned up in every house I’ve had.

Enjoyed this Post? You Might Like Housekeeping As A Creative Discipline Too…

And some mornings you wake up with your head smushed into a sour pillow and you know before you open gritty eyes that this might be a goodbye day and so it was, and so it is and saying night night to a dog is all the terrible and beautiful things there are in the most ordinary of Mondays.

There should be a grander day for it, really. Thunder in the distance. A sky full of signs. Clocks stopping. Instead, we ran out of milk, my phone bleeped with endless notifications, cars continued passing the window and the world failed to notice that one beloved creature was about to leave it.

Maybe you will remember how Ben brought Molly to me when she had just had a litter of six beautiful babies and for a while my whole world was swallowed up in the bliss of squirming tiny puppies, and then the mayhem of the first few months until one by one we found homes for them and sent them off with tiny collars in all the colours of the rainbow.

She arrived in my life already at the centre of something: a mummy, a working dog, Ben’s beloved girl. She came with a history written in fields and whistles and muddy paws, and then calmly allowed me into it.

And through it all she was the epitome of calm Mum. A highly trained, stunning gun dog who was both Ben’s pride and joy, and testament to his skill and who managed the delicious chaos that was the tumble of her own babies with such natural grace it put me to shame when I thought about who I was in the aftermath of the birth of my own little one…

She seemed to instinctively understand that motherhood was both devotion and the occasional need to lie down somewhere nobody could climb on your head. She fed them, watched them and endured them, then looked at us with the patient expression of a mummy who had already worked out that panic was pointless.

How proud we were of her. How lucky I felt to have experienced those few gorgeous months. It felt like a gift.

The Ben I got was a package deal: four working cocker spaniels, two beautiful girls and an orange cat, and while they are all a little bit of wonderful, I don’t think any of them would disagree when I say Molly was the best of them. Obedient to a fault, affectionate and more than that so gently caring in her own doggy way, that if we were walking on the beach and I fell behind, she would linger to check I was ok, instead of dashing into the sea to chase a ball with Raffy, and her two wildly fun little pups, Winnie and Willow.

That was Molly. She noticed. Amid all the barking, running and glorious doggy commotion, she kept a quiet account of where everybody was. She knew when one of us had fallen behind. She understood that a walk wasn’t complete unless all her people came home from it.

She was kind and gentle and an absolute rascal. Open the door and she would be gone, dashing off on adventures the other dogs wouldn’t have dreamed of going on, resulting in much drama as having made her crazy fast escapes, we would find ourselves searching high and low for her, until the kind people around us would report her found and Ben would run out to fetch her, only to find her a few houses down seemingly having the time of her life and charming the pants off those who clearly would have kept her in a heartbeat if he wasn’t so keen to have her back.

Apparently, even the most devoted dog requires a private life. Molly’s included sudden expeditions, new acquaintances and brief attempts to move in with strangers. She could be wonderfully obedient until she decided not to be, at which point she became a small brown streak with no forwarding address.

She was naughty, but heck we loved her so.

And perhaps that is why we loved her so. Goodness without mischief would have been far too saintly for Molly. Her kindness was real, but so was her appetite for an unscheduled adventure. She was gentle without being dull, loyal without surrendering her own mind… a girl after our own Brocante hearts.

But she was getting older. Slower. Her coat duller and her eyes a little droopy, not with sadness but with, I suppose, the kind of quiet exhaustion you only see in the eyes of old ladies sitting on buses. She had had enough I think?

There comes a point when loving an animal asks something unbearable of us. We have to look beyond our own frantic wish for one more day and listen to what their body has been trying to say. They can’t explain it. They simply become quieter inside the life they once charged through, until we understand.

So today we took her to the vets, where it was confirmed that it was time, and they took me to a little quiet room and I sat on the floor with our gorgeous girl on my knee and they gave me biscuits to feed her, and just a few moments later she was gone, and it was, as my dad told me it would be, both beautiful and something of a privilege to be there as she went.

It was a goodbye day, a night night sleep tight day, a doing right by her day, a thank-you for being so utterly perfect day.

There I was, sitting on the floor on an ordinary Monday, doing the last thing I could do for a dog who had spent her life quietly keeping track of all of us. She didn’t have to wonder if she was loved.

And afterwards I walked back to the car to Ben who has seen too much grief, but knows above all else that the life he gave Molly was all that it should have been and her sweet beautiful nature such lovely reflection of him and his family that he can always, always believe that we get the dogs we deserve. That dogs are the mirrors of our soul and that a dog who was never happier than when she was snuggled up as close to our faces as she could get, truly was a reflection of the goodness and silly joy of her owner.

We will find her everywhere, always. In the muddle of the other dogs piled up in a silly stack. In the pause before opening the back door. In the beach walks where somebody must remember to look back for the person who has fallen behind. In the strange new emptiness left by the kind of little dog who took up no more than her own small patch of floor, yet somehow occupied whole rooms in our lives.

Six squirming puppies. Rainbow collars. Escapes and adventures. Her long, astonishing ears. That wild little fringe. The warm weight of her pressing as close to our faces as she could possibly get.

We will miss her so very much. But it is true, saying night night to a dog truly is all the terrible and beautiful things there are in the most ordinary of Mondays.

Sleep tight Mol.x

This week I’ve been gathering everything that has passed through the Office of Beautiful Things: what I’ve made, what I’ve read, the ideas I can’t stop worrying at, and the ordinary bits of life happening around the edges.

I’ve turned it all into five spreads from my imaginary commonplace book. They aren’t a progress report or a polished account of the week. They aren’t even supposed to make sense to anyone else but me. They’re simply evidence of what was noticed, made, loved, broken and carried forward. What it is currently skipping around my mind…

I’m sharing them because I think our working lives deserve to be kept in all their glorious mess. And because your week deserves keeping too, I’ve made four sheets of paper scraps, quotations, washi, pressed flowers and blue-biro doodles for you to print, cut out and rearrange in your own commonplace book.

There are no rules. Snip wildly. Scribble over everything. Keep what matters…

🌸

Week ending 15 August | Baguettes, hot chocolate + Edith Piaf | Ben humming in the garden | Missing Finley | Meep’s cut that won’t heal | Air fryer dead | Washing machine versus boiler | The future boat editing the house | Commonplace Book, coming soon | Tea + Tenderness | Brocante women in blue biro | Housekeeping as creative discipline | Remaining interesting to oneself | Pretty things + serious thought | Margaret Drabble on ageing | Margaret Olley’s rooms | Enid Marx | Iris Murdoch’s secret art room | Betty Crocker’s changing faces | Muse extremely present | Loving Substack | House malfunctioning, creative life gloriously alive…

🌸

| What if a woman designed the house for herself? | Begin with her body, work, pleasures + habits | Domestic function without domestic sainthood | Unfinished housework isn’t failure | The Woman the Size of a Car | Made from lists, newsprint + former selves at university | Marginalia stuck down | Beauty + feminism | Pretty doesn’t mean thoughtless | Jouissance | Female pleasure beyond usefulness | House of Me | The Kitchen That Ate the Morning | The Cottagette | Hélène Cixous | Remaining interesting to oneself. Again. | Marjorie Child Husted | The epic domestic novel | Rooms as portraits | Lucy Porter | Jane Green’s Rewinding | Domestic evidence | The secret-self room | The inner life of the house…

🌸

| WHO WAS THAT WOMAN? | Going through my archive | Astonished by who I’ve been | Recognising what I endured | Real trauma dressed in garlands | Missing notebooks, underlined books + good pens | Clothes that knew me when I felt bolder | Forgotten belongings in storage | Retire | Reissue | Annotate | Gather into collections | Let some things rest | Old posts + printables | Recurring questions | Some old work still knows something | What We Call Trifling | Women’s domestic work, writing + pleasure matter | Old work with new marginalia | Alison-now writing beside Alison-then | Forgotten rituals | Early Brocante language | Proof I have changed | Proof I am still myself | Not nostalgia. Evidence. | Don’t tidy the past too much | Keep the crossings-out…

🌸

| Eclipse crescents on the plaster walls | McDonald’s with Finley | Ben singing Ave Maria while making tea | A good piece of cheese | The muse arriving with her suitcase | Some days strong + certain | Some days worried + waiting | Both are true | The house unfinished | Still full of boxes | Ordinary life harder than necessary | But also where this week’s work happened? | The boat in paper, measurements + imagination | A smaller home, a larger life? | Housekeeping as Creative Discipline opened the next room | The muse is here | Enjoy her | Don’t make her prove her worth | Don’t turn joy into a deadline | What can wait without being lost? | Keeping the work connected | Connection + completion | One central idea: many small doorways | Substack as a room where my strange mind makes sense. Finally? | More questions than answers | Evidence that life was noticed

🌸

| The Scented Almanac No. 2 : August Dusk | Soft light + open window | Put away three things | What can be left until tomorrow? | The Five Minute House No. 2 | A calmer bedtime | Make the room easier to wake up in | A Very Brocante Year : One small invitation for every August day | Small enough to do | Lovely enough to remember | Brocante Book of Days… (coming soon) | Excuses to celebrate + notice time passing | The Still Room | Gloriously Messy Me Pack Two | Come in | Settle down | Create a life | Cream paper | A page, scent or five-minute ritual can change an ordinary day | Finished | Enough for this week…

🌸

CommonPlace Scraps For My Subscribers

Download It Here…

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There are plenty of ways to measure a life that make a woman feel as though she has somehow failed to operate herself correctly.

This isn’t one of them. (Though unfortunately it isn’t an operating manual either?)

The House of Me is a monthly ritual for noticing how it feels to be living your life, as the woman you are, right now. It takes all those enormous, woolly questions about contentment and turns them into a house you can wander through.

There’s a Kitchen, where we look at nourishment and energy. A Bedroom for rest and restoration. A Drawing Room for friendship and belonging. A Study for the things that light up your brain and feel meaningfully yours. There’s the Dressing Room, where body and identity live together rather awkwardly sometimes, and the Hall, where the bills, paperwork and practical business of being alive tend to gather in an accusatory heap.

There’s a Parlour for pleasure. A Garden for possibility. An Attic for everything we’ve carried with us and might, perhaps, be ready to stash away and forget…

There is the Hearth too, asking whether home itself is supporting the life you are trying to live.

And eventually, behind another door, there is the Secret Room.

NB: That one belongs entirely to you.

Each room gives you a tiny handful of questions to answer according to how life has actually felt this month. Not how it ought to have felt. Or how well you think you should be coping. And definitely not about how your life might look from the outside, becaue we are not inviting outside opinion here, heaven forbid.

Just: how is it in here? And here? Are you feeling ok here?

And from those answers, a picture of your “House” begins to emerge.

Perhaps your Study is positively glowing while your Bedroom has thrown itself dramatically on the chaise longue and announced that it cannot go on like this.

Maybe your Garden has gone a little fallow. Or your Parlour is having a marvellous time. Or a meltdown. Perhaps the Hall would rather you stopped pretending that brown envelope isn’t sitting on the table?

None of this is a verdict.

The point is not to produce a woman with a score of 100 and hand her a small trophy for Successful Living.

The point is to notice.

Because it is surprisingly easy to wander around with a vague sense that something is wrong without knowing quite what. When we separate life into its rooms, we can sometimes see that actually quite a lot is lovely. Or that the dissatisfaction we have been calling everything really belongs to one particular corner of the house.

And that changes things.

Where The House of Me belongs

I want us to think of this as part of the wider BrocanteHome ecosystem of noticing.

The Almanacs help us notice the season. The Commonplace Book helps us notice what catches at our minds. The Brocante Way teaches us what matters.

And The House of Me asks us to notice ourselves.

Not endlessly. I don’t want us checking our emotional temperature every five minutes. Once a month is enough.

So choose a day. The last Sunday.Or the first quiet morning you manage to steal for yourself. The evening when you change the calendar. Whatever begins to feel like yours.

Make a drink if you want one. Shut the door. Find a pencil.

And wander through your House.

Over time, you will begin to see things you couldn’t possibly see from one month alone. What repeatedly sustains you. What drains you. Which rooms flourish in summer and disappear altogether in February. What changes when you are busy, lonely, excited, frightened, creatively alive or thoroughly fed up.

That, I think, is where this little bit of printable BrocanteHome becomes far more interesting than its flowers and paper scraps initially suggest.

Because yes, it is deliberately pretty.

Of course it is.

I believe beauty makes us want to return to things. I believe a page can be useful without looking like it escaped from the Human Resources department. I believe serious thought is perfectly capable of coexisting with a brass key, a pressed flower and a scrap of mauve paper.

The prettiness is the invitation.

The noticing underneath it is the work.

Now, about how you are supposed to use it…

You aren’t.

Because this is Woman’s Club and in Woman’s Club the rules are of course, that there are no rules.

• Print the whole thing and bind it beautifully.

• Print only the pages you feel like using.

• Rip them out.

• Fold them up.

• Stick one into your Commonplace Book.

• Write your scores directly into your Commonplace Book and never print a thing.

• Use the booklet once and cover it in notes.

• Use pencil and return to the same copy every month, rubbing out the old marks and beginning again.

• Keep only your monthly House Measure in the tracker at the back so that one little number becomes a breadcrumb through the year.

• Write your room scores on scraps of paper and lose them in your handbag if that turns out to be the system your head can manage.

There is no correct relationship to these pages.

You might enjoy making the House of Me into a proper monthly ceremony. You might complete it when your entire life is in the bin and you need a little rational thinking. Both count.

You might spend half an hour thinking deeply about every question. You might answer on instinct in seven minutes.

You may discover a room you want to tend.

You may decide that absolutely nothing requires tending and what you actually need is to go and watch something ridiculous on YouTube?

The House notices. The woman chooses.

That is the important bit.

You do not have to turn every uncomfortable truth into a project. A low score is not a command. There will be months when the most intelligent response to noticing that something is difficult is simply to know that it is difficult.

There may also be months when one small thing suddenly becomes obvious.

Ask for help.

Go somewhere new.

Rest.

Spend the money.

Stop doing the thing.

LEAVE THE BLOODY THING ALONE

Start the thing.

Or leave the room exactly as it is for now.

The House of Me is not asking you to renovate yourself. It is simply giving you somewhere beautiful to stand for a moment and look around.

To notice what is warm.

To notice what feels draughty.

And to remember that some rooms are already full of lovely things.

And once a month, to ask yourself one quiet, surprisingly radical question:

How at home am I in my own life?

The House of Me is available now for my paid subscribers, at the end of this post.

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This is the first of two. Part one is about how my mind works, while part two, which I’m finding harder to articulate, is about how it affects everybody else in the room…

Creative misery. Too many ideas. Poor me. I know how daft and pretentious it sounds. Writer has too many things she wants to write. Woman who makes things cannot stop thinking of things to make. Yeah. Call in the violins.

But know that abundance has its own cruelty.

Because having ideas and being able to bring ideas into the world are two entirely different things. And somewhere in the muddle of my AuDHD brain, I’ve got almost endless capacity for the first and a far less dependable capacity for the second, and it’s an awful place to be.

Make no mistake about it, I hate it here.

I have spent twenty years being praised for my chaotic, sometimes even shambolic productivity by people who have no idea what it actually costs, and who remain privately convinced that I’m getting away with something. So I want to take the lid off the muddlefest and show you the workings, because I think a great many women are rooting through the same muddle and calling themselves lazy. Or worse, stupid.

The slippery mind

Skippety is the charming word. The one I say at parties.

But SLIPPERY is probably the more accurate one?

Because it isn’t only that my attention hops from one bright thing to the next like a woman crossing a river on stones, which sounds lovely and purposeful and speaks of she who knows what she is doing. No, it’s not just the attention issue, it’s that things won’t stay held? I put a thought down for one second, one actual second, to answer a message or find my glasses or take a sip of water, and when I come back the thought has gone, not gone somewhere, just gone, and I’m left in the middle of my own head with my hands out like a woman who has dropped a bowl and is still, absurdly, in the position of holding it. A woman frantically rooting through the debris of her mind, because there is no peace there. None at all.

And then it all comes at once, because that’s how it arrives, never in a queue: the post I’m supposed to be finishing and the woman whose name is written in the front of that book and whether I’ve thawed anything and the fact that the phrase counting house is beautiful and nobody uses it and could that be a title, and underneath that the low hum of the seventeen unfinished things, and underneath that, my mum saying something in a doorway once upon a time, cigarette in hand and underneath that the sudden absolute certainty that I should reorganise the entire shop, all of it, today, from scratch, into seasons, and wouldn’t that be better, and shouldn’t I just quickly see, and there goes the morning, there goes the essay, there goes the woman in the front of the book who I won’t think about about for four months until she surfaces at eleven at night like something worrying rising in a canal.

This is what I mean by slippery.

Not butterfly.

Not sparkly.

Eel. (Stupid, lazy eel).

In love with hyperfocus

And then, sometimes, it lands.

You need to know how good feels, because we can be so busy talking responsibly about neurodivergence that we forget to admit the ecstasy. And the ecstacy is why I donn’t want it medicated out of me.

I am in love with hyperfocus.

Not fond of. Not grateful for.

In love. The stupid kind. The kind that ignores its friends. The kind I am head over heels in now and that may or may not pass again into the silence underneath it.

Eel.

Because when it comes, the noise stops. All of it. The eel goes still. Every scattered piece of me faces the same direction at the same time, and for once I’m not dragging myself towards the work like a woman pulling a heavy case uphill. I’m being pulled. I don’t need timers or lists or stern little talks in the mirror, and the hours go by in what feels like about nine minutes, and I look up and it’s dark and I’ve built forty pages of something that would take other people three months, and I feel clean and vast and unmistakably myself.

Skills worthy of the CV I have never had:

Excellent communication skills. Works well independently. Hyperfocus.

What it actually means for me is that my brain occasionally chooses something and informs me that this is what we’re doing now. Not what I planned to do. Not necessarily what needs doing.

This.

I’m not being disciplined. I’m being carried.

That’s the difference between rowing and being swept.

It’s also why I can build something enormous on a Sunday and fail to answer three emails on the Monday.

The ability didn’t disappear. The power did.

And awareness of that distinction makes all the differnce, because for most of my life it was read as a character reference. Look what she can do when she wants to. As though the Sunday proved the Monday was a choice.

As though I want to be eel.

Wanting is not liking

This then, is the distinction that changed things for me.

Wanting something and enjoying having done it are not, in my experience, the same thing. I have an enormous capacity for wanting. Which means anticipation is where I live.

The idea at eleven at night, unwritten, unformed, still made entirely of light, is intoxicating. It will almost always be better than the finished thing, because the finished thing has edges and the idea has none. The promise is enormous. Delivery is strangely quiet. A thud of absolute nothing. A death of sorts I have come to despise.

So the shape of my working life makes a horrible kind of sense.

Beginnings: paid in all consuming curiosity.

Middles: not paid. Terrible.

Endings: the money never arrives, and I stand there like a woman who has done a full week’s work and been handed an envelope with a card in it. And no pound coin stuck inside with sellotape.

(the pleasure I get from winning the bet, is to lose)

And then the wanting, which is fine, which has had a marvellous time, turns to me and says brightly: shall we start something else? And back on the merry-go round I get.

Once I understood this about myself, once I realised that if wanting is unreliable as a guide to what matters, then it cannot be the thing I steer by, I had no choice but to come to the understanding that wanting is a magnificent engine and dreadful compass, and I’ve spent my formative life trying to use it as both.

Which brings me on to this: obsession is not hyperfocus

I muddled these together for years, and separating them has helped me understand my own working life.

Hyperfocus is a surge.

It arrives, it lasts hours, it can’t be summoned, and in my case it will attach itself to absolutely anything. I’ve hyperfocused on a chapter of a novel and I’ve hyperfocused on finding one particular shade of green. The surge doesn’t care about the subject. It only cares that something switched on.

Obsession, or special interest, is the wiring.

It’s in the walls. It’s live whether or not anything’s lit. It survives boredom, house moves, illness, three businesses and one entire personality change, and on the days I can’t focus at all it’s still there, sitting in the corner like a beloved peculiar.

Hyperfocus without obsession is enormous power going nowhere. You burn eleven hours and end up with a beautifully organised drawer and no career. A relationship without passion.

Obsession without hyperfocus is love without opportunity. You carry the thing for a decade and never create anything useful. Nothing that wholly expresses the meaning of the thing consuming you. A stalker of a thing.

But when the surge meets wiring, that’s the work. The fire. That’s every good thing I’ve ever made. And it happens perhaps just six times a year. And the rest is just all manner of nothing.

Six.

I’ve built twenty- one years on six days a year and a stupid, foolish, irrational sense of stubbornness, and I feel shame and pride and anger and joy: because it took so little to create so much and I would be so much more than I am if only hyperfocus would marry obsession and stop playing this relentless game of cat and mouse.

The one practical thing I’ve found, is the Big List. Ideas I might, just might, no pressure now, do, or write or fashion into being should I manage to get hyperfocus and obsession down the aisle.

Not tasks, and nothing with a deadline attached, because you’ll see later what happens to anything with a deadline attached. Just things that might matter if I got to them.

Because the surge will come, I have enough faith at least in that, it will come whether or not I’m ready, and when it comes I have about ninety seconds of choosing before it decides for me. If there’s a lit runway, it lands on the runway. If there isn’t, it lands in the airing cupboard, and I lose a whole magnificent day to scenting towels with lavender.

a small interlude, in lower case

(this is how it goes)

the idea comes in wearing all its lights on and says come on

and i say yes because i am not a woman who says no to a lit thing

and we run we run we run

and somewhere near the middle the lights go off one by one

and i’m holding a thing in the dark that i built and cannot see and no longer care about and want to imagine never happened and i don’t care, i don’t care

stupid, lazy eel

The withering

Nobody warns you about this part. The withering isn’t giving up. Giving up is a decision, and decisions have dignity, and you can be talked out of a decision.

This is not that. I cannot be talked out of abandoning something my entire body is violently now opposed to.

This is going back on the Wednesday to something that on the Monday had you awake at half past four with your heart going, and finding it has gone grey. Not wrong. Not bad. Grey. Somebody has bleached the colour out. You read your own notes, the ones in that scrawl you only use when you’re excited, with the underlining and exclamation marks and the little flowery box drawn round the good bit, and you feel nothing. You may as well be reading somebody else’s love letters. There’s the evidence of a passion. There’s the handwriting of a woman having the time of her life. And you can’t reach her, you can’t disagree with her, you can’t get it back, and the worst of it is you can’t even mourn properly because nothing has died, it just isn’t lit any more, and a thing that isn’t lit any more ceases to exist.

Then the second wave, which is worse. You did it again. You promised people. You told him. You told readers. You bought the domain. You made the folder and the folder has a lovely name and inside it there are eleven documents and one of them is nearly finished and you will never open it again.

What kind of woman does this, over and over, and how many folders is it now, and how do you have the nerve to sell anybody anything about intentional living when there’s a graveyard on your desktop?

Two things about that, in this order.

I no longer believe it’s a character flaw. I know this pattern too well now. I know how differently my attention behaves when something is new and lit and how difficult it can be to reach the same work when it isn’t.

You aren’t lazy and you aren’t a liar and you didn’t mean a word of it dishonestly. You meant all of it, at the time.

That’s what makes it so bewildering to everybody, including you.

And: some of those folders should be opened anyway. Not all. Most are compost and always were. But there’s a small number, and they’re grey not because they’re finished with you but because you reached the middle, and the middle is unpaid.

Which means the middle has to be done unpaid, by an ordinary woman, on ordinary days, without the lights on.

Waiting for them to come back on isn’t a strategy. Sometimes you have got to summon everything you have got to get up (and it’s harder than it might seem to those capable of living in a straight line) and flick the switch quite independent of your own head.

Adaptations have to be made and ableist opinion set aside. And that too is harder than it seems.

And then there are the things that won’t let go

Special interests aren’t simply subjects I enjoy. They are territories mapped in my mind.

I want to discover them. Know what lives there. I want the obscure book and the forgotten woman and the footnote everybody else skipped. I want the history behind the history. I want to collect. I want to connect.

And then, inevitably, I want to make something from it. I want to write its way into my truth.

Homes. Women. Housekeeping. Old magazines. Midlife. Forgotten writers. Why a room feels wrong. Why a sentence feels right. Why women keep things and why women throw things away.

I can see connections between all of these things.

That’s the joy.

I can see connections between all of these things.

And that’s also the problem.

Because there’s no obvious place to stop. Every rabbit hole contains another rabbit hole. Every book has a bibliography. Every woman has a history and every history touches another history.

Keats had a phrase for the quality he thought a great mind needed: the ability to sit inside uncertainty without an irritable reaching after fact.

I’m the irritable reacher.

My brain does not naturally say thank you, that’s sufficient.

My brain says:

Oh my God. Look!

A digression, because that is the point

Let me show you rather than tell you, because telling you is a lie about how it works in here.

I bought a book for two pounds and somebody, one Doris Cecil, had written her name in the front. Just a name and a year, in ink, in the careful hand of a woman who wanted it known.

And I sat on the edge of the bed and thought: she claimed it. In a house where possibly very little was hers, she took a pen to the one thing that was.

Which made me think about how much of what women have written down was written in the margins of things belonging to somebody else. Flyleaves. Recipe cards. The backs of envelopes. The inside covers of account books.

Which made me think that household accounts are autobiography if you read them slowly enough. What she bought. What she stopped buying. The month everything got cheaper. The year there’s suddenly an extra name.

Which made me think about how many women have gone into the ground without a single person asking them one question about what they knew.

Which brought me back to her, to Doris Cecil, whose book I own for two pounds, and who I will never know anything else about, and who I think about most weeks.

Which made me realise that this is what my work actually is. Not homes. Not housekeeping.

Women, and what they kept, and why, and the fact that the keeping was a kind of writing that nobody read.

Which is a better description of what I do than anything I’ve managed in twenty years of trying.

Do you see?

That was a wander. That was me going off. That’s precisely the behaviour I’ve spent my working life apologising for and trying to manage with systems. I despise systems. And they hate me.

And yet, this bothersome, erratic wild dance of a head eventually produced this sentence, and I’m repeating it again here, because I want to stash it in my heed and keep it for always and forever…

“Women, and what they kept, and why, and the fact that the keeping was a kind of writing that nobody read.”

I wouldn’t have got to that sentence directly. There’s no route, so I have to go all round the houses. I’ve tried sitting down and asking myself what my work is really about, in a nice notebook, with a candle lit, like one of those floaty homemakers on Instagram, and I get bland little abstractions that could belong to anybody. The good stuff only ever arrives sideways, at the end of a chain of eight things that had no business being connected.

The wandering isn’t a failure of the process: it IS the process?

Which is why I’ve stopped calling the good days the productive ones. The productive days are the ones where I did what I said I’d do. The good days are the ones where I went off, and came back with something I couldn’t have gone looking for. A prize of sorts!

Everything that interrupts

They break differently, and knowing which is which is useful.

Hyperfocus is broken by noise. A doorbell. The phone. A perfectly reasonable question in a perfectly reasonable voice from a perfectly reasonable person I want to punch. The realisation that I have to leave the house at two. Not the leaving at two: the knowing about the two. The surge cannot survive a future appointment. An afternoon with one small thing in the middle of it isn’t an afternoon, it’s two useless stumps.

It’s also broken from the inside, which nobody talks about, and which is harder to be gracious about because there’s no one to blame. Hunger, eventually. Needing to go to the loo, though I will have been ignoring that for a good few hours and rotting my bladder in the process. A bad night three days ago arriving late to make me feel sick or sorry or miserableƒ. The bit of the work that requires a decision I don’t want to make. And will never make and if you try to make me I will scream and scream and scream until I’m sthick. The moment the interesting problem is solved and only the tidying is left.

(And then there’s the cost of coming back. A two-minute interruption doesn’t cost two minutes. It costs the two minutes plus however long it takes to get back in, which could be anywhere between twenty minutes and never, and which nobody can see from the outside, and which sounds to everybody else like an enormous fuss about two minutes. And makes me sound precious and ridiculous to myself and that’s because I am and while I feel as if my neurodivergence is something I should protect, I also have to see beyond the beauty I find in it, to the more ludicrous elements of the impact it has on me).

Obsession, on the other hand, is broken by almost nothing. It waits. It’s what’s still there after four months of admin. Interruption barely touches it, because it isn’t a state to be broken, it’s the wiring in the walls.

It’s broken by one thing only. By being made compulsory.

My whole brain says no

Here’s the civil war, and it took me until around about last week to see it clearly: the same head helplessly in love with hyperfocus contains a ludicrous brain that will flatly refuse demands. Any demand. Including, the ones I issue myself.

I experience demand avoidance as something much more physical and immediate than deciding I don’t want to do something. It’s an automatic no. Something in me reads the word must and puts up a wall before I’ve finished the sentence. Trying harder rarely gets me over it. Mostly it just makes the wall higher?

Here’s what happens - The idea comes. The lights go on. I’m in love. I’d do it for free. I’d do it instead of eating cheese.

And then I make one small mistake: I tell someone. Or I put it on the calendar. Or I say to myself, in a kindly voice, right, I’ll finish this by Friday. No pressure, you hear me, no pressure at all Sweetheart.

And in that instant the thing I loved becomes a thing I owe. And debt scares me. And my whole brain says: no. Not I’d rather not. Or I’m tired. A flat No. A preposterous sense of absolutely NOT. The shutters coming down, and there I am sitting in front of work I was ecstatic about eleven hours ago feeling something close to physical revulsion, unable to explain to anybody, least of all myself, why I now cannot fling the laptop open upon work I loved yesterday.

Do you understand what a bind that is?

The only thing that reliably kills my joy in the work is committing to it. God I hate it.

Love and the refusal live in the same head and use the same door and I’ve been called inconsistent by people being generous and flaky by people who weren’t, when what was actually happening felt more like a small savage nation defending its borders against a tyrant it had correctly identified as me.

There’s no cure, so I exhaust myself creating smuggling routes: I don’t announce. I say possibly, and I’m toying with, and there might be a thing. I lie to myself in a language I find plausible. And I keep the beloved work off the list, always, because the list is a demand and the demand contaminates whatever it touches. It never goes next to descale kettle. Because computer say no to descaling the kettle. EVER.

So I approach at an angle, pretending to be interested in something adjacent, like a woman edging up to a nervous animal, hand out, while very obviously looking at the sky.

It’s ridiculous.

But it turns out you CAN kid a kidder and it works about seventy per cent of the time, which is more than any system ever managed for me?

Not every obsession is an instruction

So what do you do with a mind like this, assuming you’d rather not be at war with yourself for the rest of your life?

Very little, is the answer, and most of it depends on a change of belief rather than a change of behaviour? Because interest is not instruction. And excitement is not obligation.

A new idea doesn’t automatically deserve a new project, and a special interest can be allowed to feed the work without becoming the work. But when something lights up my brain it feels important. And I get crazy greedy for it all, more, now, again. And then this is it m’lady!! The intensity seems to prove something. Look how alive you feel. Surely this must be THE thing?

But intensity is information, not orders, and I just can’t seem to get my head around that, because yes, sometimes a rabbit hole is JUST a rabbit hole and I could simply seek the pleasure in it without turning it in a project, couldn’t I? And sometimes the obsession will pass, leaving three useful paragraphs and a peculiar amount of knowledge about a woman born in Mill Road Hospital. And it’s not failure as such. It’s just how my mind gathers material and I think I have to stop beating myself up about it?

And something less flattering while I’m here. Because some of the wanting may not be appetite at all. Sometimes I wonder whether it is a sophisticated way of never being finished, because a finished thing can be looked at, and judged, and found to be exactly as much of me as I was able to give. An unfinished thing gets to remain potentially magnificent. Or declared appalling or worse meh. I dread the meh. Surely we all dread the meh?

Perhaps that’s why starting the next one can be easier than standing still beside the last one. Running away from it is too enticing because it avoids other people and I am scared of other people?

The shop in my head

I used to describe all this as a warehouse, and it was the wrong word entirely. Too cold. Too high. All that concrete and nobody’s ever made a cup of tea in it.

It’s a shop. With splendid rosehip tea on tap.

A brocante, obviously, with the bell over the door and the smell of old paper and beeswax, and rooms going back much further than the rather gorgeous, decaying bow-fronted Georgian frontage would suggest (and yes, if you are from Liverpool you know the exact shop I mean). There are books piled to the ceiling and strange drawers full of somebody else’s buttons and scraps of ribbon and ideas from when you were about thirteen and sentences I haven’t found a home for yet, and rooms up the back stairs I haven’t been into in years.

I love it in there. That’s the thing I need you to understand. It isn’t a burden and it never was. What I got wrong was thinking that everything in a shop is stock for sale or wool for knitting my way to a different life.

Some of it is furniture. Shelves to hold the dreams. The counter, the chair by the window, the lamp you’d never part with, the thing on the shelf behind the till that three customers a year ask about and the answer is always no.

Some of it is out the back, waiting, because it isn’t ready and might never be. Some of it is there because it makes the light nicer.

And some of it, a very small amount, is in the window this week.

That’s the whole discipline, and it took me twenty years. Not what shall I make of all this. Just: what’s in the window, what’s furniture, what’s out the back, and what’s simply mine to squint at and adore.

You see the shopkeeper who sells the chair she sits in has misunderstood the business.

What the machine costs

A skippety mind ravenous for beginnings and much less interested in endings. A surge that can’t be summoned and wiring that never goes off. A withering nobody warned me about. A refusal that fires hardest at the things I love most.

And I could stop here, and maybe you would feel seen too and I’d feel briefly and genuinely useful. But it would be a lie by omission. Because everything I’ve described is written as though the only person paying is me. My mornings. My exhaustion. My folders. My magnificent unfinished business. As if the whole thing happened in a locked room with nobody outside it.

There are people outside it.

There always has been.

And that’s the part I’ve been avoiding for eleven years: it isn’t just about me. The skippety eel develops tentacles and wraps her neurodivergence around other people and whether I like it or not, I have to own that…

Not lazy. Or stupid. But still someone with responsibility?

So part two, next week: the man at the end of the sofa, the small boy in the garden, and what it means to be homesick for your own mind.

Welcome to the next interview in my new series on BrocanteHome: At Home With Gloriously Messy Women, in which I will be pottering around Substack, knocking gently on interesting doors, and asking lovely women to tell us the truth about home.

Not the glossy truth. But the deeper, more useful truth: how home holds us, shapes us, unsettles us, heals us, and occasionally asks why there are seven mugs on the bedside table...

This week I’m delighted to welcome Pidge, whose answers made me sit up a little straighter, laugh out loud, and feel the peculiar relief of encountering a woman who has absolutely no intention of sanding herself down for public consumption.

Pidge writes about home as the place where the mask comes off. As an AuDHD woman, she describes a lifetime of performing a more socially acceptable self, and the slow, radical work of discovering that home can be the place where she is allowed to be delighted. Not politely interested. Not tastefully expressive. DELIGHTED. By little gothic joys, pop-culture tchotchkes, Conrad Veidt, vintage Gucci heels, a properly placed tea cabinet, and the kind of desk that holds not only writing, but meals, crumbs, cats, research tomes and the ghostly rings of afternoon Pimm’s.

What I love about Pidge’s version of home is that it refuses the modern gospel of blank space. She is’t here for rooms that look as if they’re waiting for a doctor to call your name. She wants evidence. Taste. Objects chosen with intention and enthusiasm. A home stuffed, not randomly, but meaningfully: with memory, humour, fandom, inheritance, longing, and a very particular fondness for early-1980s British upper-class aesthetics (which is ALWAYS the kind of specificity I live for).

There is richness here, but it isn’t decorative fluff. Beneath the wit and the glorious excess is something much more telling: burnout, recovery, neurodivergence, marriage, the work of making beauty easier to reach, and the quiet intelligence of arranging a life so the desired self has fewer obstacles in her way. Pidge understands that comfort is not a grand reveal. It is the tea moved nearer the sink. It is spaghetti ingredients kept together because Violet loves spaghetti. It is a candlelit lavender-rose bath when the world has become too much. It is accepting that the woman you love may shed objects like weather, and that the little piles are a small price to pay for sharing a life.

And then, because every gloriously messy woman eventually delivers a piece of wisdom so practical it should be embroidered on a tea towel, Pidge tells us to save the appliance manuals.

Reader, I was converted.

So come in. There are gothic shelves, a house steward’s uniform, rice and beans, a half-table with a complicated family history, one surviving wedding flute, a desk with downtown Oklahoma City in view, and a tea station arranged exactly where the hands know to go.

Here is Pidge on home, masking, beauty, burnout, comfort, glorious disorder, and the tender business of making a life that finally lets you be yourself.

You can read and subscribe to Pidges’s Notes From Your Feathered Auntie at thefeatheredauntie.substack.com

Ten Questions About Home, Ritual, Writing & The Glorious Mess…

1. What does home mean to you emotionally, and how do you recognise the feeling of truly being home?

My idea of home has really evolved recently. I used to think I could never feel truly safe and settled unless I had a place I actually owned and no plans ever to leave it. I’m beginning to understand home is just the place where the mask comes off completely.
As an AuDHD woman, most of my life has consisted of wearing a mask. It’s only recently I’ve felt safe enough to truly remove most of my masking behaviors around anyone, including my wife. Home is somewhere I don’t have to perform a socially palatable version of myself.
It means I’m allowed to be delighted. I can fill the shelves with gothic nonsense and pop culture tchotchkes, spend twenty minutes explaining why the work of Conrad Veidt matters so much to me as a gay woman to an unsuspecting visitor, and turn to my wife and say, “I should have eaten an hour ago. Could you microwave me some rice and beans?” without worrying I’ve become too much.

2. What is your home like on an ordinary day, and what might it reveal about you unintentionally?

It’s hard, because we’re in the midst of a seismic shift from total disorder to livability. It might say that I tend to prioritize little luxuries over purely practical things, as we’re in need of a couch but well before I considered that I bought a proper tea set.
My home, I would say, reveals a contradiction. I like things very organized, but not minimalist. I don’t really buy the assertion that the eye needs blank space to settle on. I think it needs nice things to settle on, and if blank space is a nice thing to you, that’s fine. But it’s not, to me. I’d much rather sit in a small room stuffed full of well-arranged evidence of life and taste than a large one with very little in it. Such places make me feel like I’m waiting in a doctor’s office.

3. Which objects in your home tell your story or hold the greatest memory, meaning or comfort?

I grew up around the dining table my mother inherited from my great-grandmother. She made the decision about a year ago to cut it in half and gave us one of the halves. Every time I look over to it, I’m both grateful to have it and a little heartsick that such a beautiful table was cut in two.
We have a single engraved champagne flute from our wedding--a cat somewhere along the line broke the other one, I’m afraid.
It’s hard to pick one or two things, because everything is selected with great intention and enthusiasm. But if I were saving something in a fire, it would be my Gucci heels. They’re late 1970s-early 1980s, with a snaffle and gold-tone inset in the heel, the kind that appear no fewer than three times in Ann Barr and Peter York’s Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. I have an inordinate fondness for the aesthetics of the British upper class in the early 1980s for a working-class millennial from Oklahoma.

4. What small rituals help anchor your days, including one that serves no productive purpose?

I’m in the process of building my ordinary rituals and routines. I’ve been gradually climbing out of burnout since April of this year, when I quit working, and I’m finally at the place where I can start doing that in earnest. I typically dress in what I call my “house steward’s uniform,” of a blouse and skirt and snaffle flats, clip my chatelaine to my waistband, and make breakfast while my wife starts her work-from-home job. Lately we’ve been about toasted egg and tomato sandwiches. Then I’ll write for a while, flitting between essays and whichever novel currently has hold of me. At some point I’ll make tea for us both.Eventually I’ll get bored and wander off to putter. Wash the dishes, sweep, whatever needs doing. I’d like to be more intentional and structured about it, eventually. But for now my “routine” absolutely reveals my ADHD.
When she gets off work at four, we tend to take a nap in the winter, but in the heat it’s been so hard to sleep we try to go to bed as tired as possible. We typically spend the evenings either gaming or watching comfort media. Lately it’s been a lot of the US Traitors and, most recently, all 14 hours of a playthrough of 007: First Light, which my wife beat and loved. I would say our watching habits reveal what pop culture figure we’re currently pining over--we’ve both always been terribly boy crazy and unapologetic about it. For her, it’s Alan Cumming. For me, much to my embarrassment, it’s Gen Z James Bond.

5. Where do you retreat when you need sanctuary and the outside world needs to wait?

The bathroom. I’ve spent the most decorating energy on it. Everything in it is very intentional. If my home is the place where the mask comes off, the bathroom is the place where even baseline expectations of adulting cease to be. Expensive vintage perfume coexists with big box store towels, classic novels with silly framed comics. I can often be found in a candlelit lavender-rose bath when it’s all too much, listening to whatever playlist currently soothes me.

6. How does your home affect your creativity, and does the place where you actually write resemble the space you once imagined?

I feel much more free to be creative when the state of the apartment isn’t tugging at me constantly to tend to it. The experience of being genuinely bored has been foreign and almost fantastical, but it gives me space to percolate ideas. I would’ve once imagined something directly out of a Dark Academia Pinterest board, an antique desk facing a window. I do have a window now, but the desk is IKEA. And that’s fine with me. Building a furniture collection you love is a lifelong endeavor.

7. What beautifully imperfect object or area of your home represents its glorious mess?

Probably the desk, again. It’s where research tomes get stacked, where notebooks get scrawled in more often than not, where posts and chapters get hammered out on a keyboard in need of cleaning. It’s where tea gets taken and packages get opened and most meals get eaten. It’s where cats bother me endlessly and I have my lovely view of downtown Oklahoma City. It’s where crumbs gather and rings from glasses of Pimm’s layer over one another in the afternoon.

8. What have you stopped pretending to have under control, and how do you distinguish creative disorder from mess that is quietly affecting you?

I’ve stopped pretending I can in any way curb my wife’s tendency to explode into a constellation of objects wherever she sits down. When it starts to get to a point where seeing it out of the corner of my eye is giving me anxiety, I’ll gently prompt her to tidy it. It will stay tidy for about an hour, but that periodic restoration to baseline functionality is good for us both. She is also ADHD, so I typically have to remind her a couple of times to tidy things. It’s a small price to pay to share this space with her, the little piles that accumulate like mushrooms after rain. As far as when either of us cross from creative disorder into disheartening mess, well...I can’t really put a feeling on it. There’s simply a sort of interior knowing--this is no longer functioning.

9. What have you learned about creating genuine comfort, and what experience-based homemaking wisdom would you share with other women?

I’ve learned that comfort is a collection of tiny accumulated choices. I just moved my tea cabinet next to the sink rather than across from it--it changes the entire process. The same with keeping all the pantry ingredients for spaghetti--Violet’s favorite--in the same place rather than the tomatoes here, the pasta here, etc. I’ve learned a comfortable bed often looks less like a hotel’s perfectly-placed bolster and more like something that actually works for the people sleeping in it and the season of the year.
I struggle to think of myself as possessing homemaking wisdom, but I have to say this: save the appliance manuals. I know they seem like clutter and most things are straightforward to operate, but just...save the manuals. Opening a drawer and rifling through a stack is a lot faster than trying to google the correct manual or go to the computer and pull up a pdf. I’m a big believer in embracing technology, but sometimes you just need the analog option.

10. What are you enjoying most in your home at this particular, ordinary moment?

The tea station in the kitchen. I finally moved everything exactly where my hands naturally reach for it. Making tea has become so easy that I do it almost without thinking. I have to make beauty and ritual the path of least resistance. The easier I make the life I want to live, the more often I actually live it.🌸

Pidge’s Tiny Joys…

The scent of home?

Onions and garlic sauteeing.

The mug you always reach for?

Being extra as I am, I have a Titanic 1st class stateroom service replica teacup and saucer that my tea goes into. I have a burgundy scalloped mug for cocoa, etc.

A household task you secretly enjoy?

Scrubbing grout. It’s so satisfying to make it sparkle.

A household task you avoid until civilisation collapses?

Dishes. We’re waiting on our landlord to fix our dishwasher right now, and I just can’t stand dishes. I always get soaked for some reason.

The view from your favourite window?

The view from your favourite window?
Downtown OKC, with a foreground of neighborhood trees.

Three words that describe your home?

Loved, in progress.

Learn more about Pidge on her Substack…

Notes from Your Feathered Auntie

For people who suspect there is something sacred hidden inside their obsessions. Musings on the things we secretly want, the stories we tell ourselves about those things, and how to build a life around them.

By Pidge DePeche 🫖

PS: Want to take part in my Gloriously Messy Women Interview Series? If you are a midlife or neurodivergent writer I would love to talk to you, so do DM me won’t you?

Read my last interview with Rebecca Harrison from Simple Life Explorers here…

On disappearing work, stolen attention, pink cacti, and what happened when I finally got Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s kitchenless house and discovered I didn’t want it

The first time I read this story I was lying in a bath in a house I loved.

A little terraced cottage. The first place that was properly mine. Too small to be a house and too pretty for any of the words we had for it, so really, a cottagette.

And the kitchen at the end of it had been built by hand. Actually by hand, by my son’s dad, ~~with a bit of help~~ no, by himself, over weeks, with the radio going and plaster dust in his hair and me bringing tea in and being told to mind the wet bits.

So picture me, if you will. In the bath. In a house whose kitchen was a love letter with a sink in it. Reading a story about a woman who has a kitchen put in and then watches her entire life stall because of it.

I didn’t understand it. Not really? I thought it was interesting and I filed it under sad old story about somebody else, got out of the bath, and went down to that kitchen and was happy in it.

It took me most of a life to understand it.

And I understood it, in the end, standing in the kitchen we haven’t got at eleven forty-three in the morning holding three things…

a jug, a hammer and a shoe.

I’d woken at seven with a thought in my head. A good one. A thought that arrives already lit, that wants to be written down or drawn or simply followed to see where it goes, and I thought, right, I’ll give that a poke after a cup of tea. Because tea before everything, obviously.

Then the dog. Then the parcel. Then the thing in the fridge that was starting to look like something that can’t be explained, and somewhere in all that the thought fizzled out, the way a candle does when a door opens in a different part of the house.

I couldn’t tell you when. And I think that’s the bit I resent really. Because it’s not the losing, its the not knowing how it was lost?

Four hours and nothing to show for it. ~~Nothing.~~ Except of course everything: the house running, crumpets toasted, the small machine of continuance oiled again. It’s only that by nine tonight not one visible trace of the morning will remain, and this is the whole problem, the problem underneath the problem.

We only count the work that leaves a body behind.

the house that was built without a kitchen

In 1910 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published the story I was reading in that bath. It’s called The Cottagette, which is of course where I got the word, and I have been savouring it ever since. And missing my own little cottagette for always.

Calling All My Library Members

If this has made you want to read The Cottagette for yourself, the complete BrocanteHome Library edition is waiting for you in the Library, with Gilman’s original story alongside my full Reader’s Companion: field notes, context, questions, commonplace prompts and plenty of places to scribble in the margins. Read the story first. Then come back and argue with me about the kitchen…

Download It Here

Malda and her friend Lois take a little house for the summer up a mountain. Too small to be a house, too pretty to be a hut, so they invent a word for it, which is already my favourite kind of woman. Lois plays the piano. Malda makes things: embroidery, designs, hours of absorbed intricate work, and she is happy in a way that’s almost shocking to read at this distance.

The house has no kitchen. And this is no oversight: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, much lauded author of The Yellow Wallpaper, spent years arguing for houses built without them, meals arriving from a central kitchen run by people paid properly to run it, and in The Cottagette the food comes down from the hall up the hill. So Malda’s mornings belong to Malda, and nobody’s hours are being quietly siphoned off to keep everybody else fed.

Then Ford Mathews starts visiting and Malda falls in love. Then Lois offers the advice women have handed each other like a family recipe ever since: men will fall for anything, but what they marry is a homemaker (hmmm).

So Malda has a kitchen installed.

Nobody forces it in. There’s no husband banging a table. She arranges it herself, pays for it herself, walks into it of her own accord every morning and cooks beautifully and gets tired and watches her own work thin out to almost nothing while she does it.

She builds the machinery of her own disappearance. And then she stands in it, wondering why her mornings have been tugged away from her.

And here, at last, is why I didn’t understand a word of it in the bath.

Because my kitchen wasn’t machinery installed to stifle me. It was made by somebody who loved me, in a house we couldn’t really afford, and I have never in my life been given anything better. I cooked in it, and I was happy in it, and I’d have that kitchen back tomorrow.

And it was also, at exactly the same time, the room where certain years of my attention went to die.

Both of those things are true. But it has taken me most of my adult life to be able to hold them in the same hand without dropping one, and the reason women can’t talk about any of this properly is that we keep being asked to choose which one we meant.

I meant both. I’ve always meant both. I loved it and I knew there were sacrifices in it’s having.

Gilman, being kinder than life, gives Malda a rescuer: Ford proposes, but only on the condition that she gives up the cooking, because it was the woman who made things he fell for, and he’d like her back please. It’s the least convincing thing in the story. Most of us have to do our own withdrawing, without a man appearing on the porch to explain that our work was the interesting part all along.

(I’d read that story. Sequel. The Cottagette 2: Nobody Come.)

an art whose medium is vanishing

Domestic work might be the only art form whose material is time and whose finished piece dissolves on contact with the world.

A meal cooked and eaten. A floor cleaned and walked across. A bed made and unmade. Clothes washed and worn and back in the basket by teatime. The labour is entirely real. The evidence is always on loan.

Whereas creative work accumulates, and flatters us accordingly. A page becomes ten pages. A sketch becomes a painting. Squares become a quilt. You can point afterwards and say there, I made that, and be believed.

I’m thinking about Penelope of The Odyssey fame, at her loom, waiting twenty years for a husband who might well be dead, with a houseful of men downstairs eating her food and demanding she choose a new one. She tells them she’ll decide the moment her weaving’s finished. Then every night, by torchlight, she quietly unpicks the day’s work, so that the weaving is never finished.

Three years she got away with it.

We’re told she did it to hold them off, and she did, and I’m thinking it’s also the most exact description of housekeeping anybody has ever committed to paper.

work done in daylight. undone in the dark. begun again in the morning.

The colossal patience of it never once mistaken for art, not by her, not by anybody, not in three thousand years.

there are monks who spend three weeks bent over a mandala made of coloured sand and then sweep the whole thing into a river and we call it profound.

women do very nearly the same thing every single day of their lives in kitchens and we call it nothing at all.

And I’m thinking too of the beef stew in the middle of To the Lighthouse, if you’ve never been near it. Virginia Woolf, 1927. A woman called Mrs Ramsay is holding a summer house full of guests together on a Scottish island, and the whole novel gathers itself around a dish that has taken three days to make. She gets it to the table. The candles are lit. And for about forty minutes everybody in that room is happy at the same time, which almost never happens in a life, and Mrs Ramsay knows even while it’s happening that it’s already going.

Three days of work. Forty minutes. Nothing left by morning but plates.

Woolf knew precisely what she was showing us: that the making of an evening is real work, and that it will not survive the washing-up.

the oppression was never the saucepan

There is a long and unfortunate habit of confusing the cage with whatever the woman happened to be holding when she was locked into it. So cooking becomes suspect. Sewing becomes suspect. Housekeeping becomes evidence of a (trivial) mind that hasn’t yet caught up, and decoration becomes frivolity you were supposed to outgrow the moment you got serious about anything.

But it’s a strange sort of politics that declares an entire category of work worthless on the grounds that women were the ones doing it, surely?

There is nothing oppressive about a saucepan.

Nobody was ever pinned to the laundry room door by a jar of lavender water.

The oppression lives elsewhere, always: in compulsion, in economic dependence, in the assumption that domestic labour was naturally female and therefore hardly labour, and in the quieter and far more corrosive idea that a woman’s attention may be interrupted at any moment because nothing she is doing could possibly outrank a request.

could you just.

sorry, quick question.

where’s the.

have we got any.

And plenty of us love the work. Not obediently. Nobody insisted we love it. We just do. We love houses and food and old plates and redwork linen and the small polka of laying a table and the satisfaction of a room that has finally feels right. So it would surely be a peculiar sort of liberation that asked us to distrust that because our grandmothers had no choice about it, would’t it?

The useful question was never why are you making the dinner.

It’s do you still belong to yourself while you make it.

things i have done instead of the thing i meant to do

(with apologies to Sei Shōnagon, a woman at the Japanese court a thousand years ago who kept a “pillowbook” full of lists: things that make the heart beat faster, things that have lost their power, things it’s frustrating to be in the middle of. She made lists for the same reason we all do, which is that a list is a way of proving a life happened.)

1. Rearranged the spice jars by height, then by mood.

2. Read the label of a cleaning product all the way through, including the bit in German.

3. Discovered a receipt from a shop that no longer exists and stood there being sad about a shop.

4. Watered a plant that was already dead resting.

5. Deleted eleven photographs of the same window.

6. Went on a mission to find a letter I lost twenty years ago.

7. Looked for the good scissors.

8. Looked for the good scissors.

9. Wiped a surface that a passing stranger would have described as clean. Thrice.

10. Thought about the woman I’d be if nobody could get to me before noon, and felt something in my chest go tight and hot and slightly violent, and then put the kettle on.

housekeeping as authorship

A woman keeping a house is handling material: light, warmth, colour, texture, food, scent, season, memory, rhythm. She edits composes takes things away.

Move a lamp and the emotional temperature of a room changes.

Put a meal on a table and an evening becomes an occasion.

Open a window in February for four minutes and the entire house resets.

Give a tired friend her tea in the good cup, and something gets said between you that neither of you would ever put into words, and both of you hear it.

this isn’t decoration. it’s the deliberate handling of atmosphere, and atmosphere goes to work on people whether or not they can name what’s happening to them.

We all know within seconds when we’ve walked into a house that’s cared for. We know the other thing too: the room that’s frantic, or over-controlled, or gone quiet in the wrong way. You can read an entire household from its hallway. You can read a marriage from a fridge door.

Not everything qualifies, obviously. There is nothing creative about scrubbing the loo. But housekeeping in the larger sense, the making and the endless remaking of a place to live in, holds an enormous amount of creative possibility, and here I mean:

building a Christmas your children will carry into houses you’ll never stand in.

making peace with an ugly bathroom by hanging something ridiculous in it.

finally understanding that you need a chair by the bedroom window because that is where you think, and that this is not a whim, it’s a working condition, and men have been calling such things the study for centuries and having doors fitted.

And it isn’t obedience. It’s authorship. Choosing. Editing. Writing yourself in to your own story.

the trouble with “finding your creativity”

There’s another trap out there and it arrives dressed as encouragement, which is how the best traps always arrive isn’t it?

you must find an outlet. they say.

there’s always an outlet. ideally something involving clay. They say.

The modern woman apparently requires a hobby, a practice, a notebook, a sourdough starter, a morning routine involving light, and a small business selling hand-thrown incense holders before anybody will certify her as fully alive. She must be making. She must be pouring into her cup. She must have a thing that’s hers, and it must be photographable, and ideally it must eventually turn a profit, because a pleasure that earns nothing has started to look like a moral failure and I would like us all to question when exactly that happened. Was it Instagram?

Because we have turned creativity into one more form of self-improvement, which is the very last thing exhausted women need handing to them at fifty-three.

You don’t need a novel in a drawer.

You don’t have to take up watercolours.

You don’t have to monetise your knitting. ~~Please don’t monetise your knitting~~ Hell, monetise your knitting if you want to, I’m not the boss of anybody, but do it because you want the money and not because you’ve absorbed the idea that unpaid delight is a waste of a woman.

You DON’T have to re-discover yourself in your “art”. There might be nothing to rediscover, because possibly nothing was lost. Possibly you have been making things all along, in forms nobody ever taught you to recognise as making:

a birthday. a ritual. a garden. a family language, the private vocabulary of a household, words your children will use in their forties and have to explain to their partners (bappels and passels in our house). a way of welcoming people through a door. a Christmas morning three generations now perform without knowing you invented it. a life. an actual life, which is quite the object.

And if you’re making nothing at all this year, that’s permitted too. There are seasons with ideas falling out of your pockets and seasons when what you need is sleep, and the second kind is not a failure of the first kind.

creativity isn’t homework.

I’d underline that twice but she doesn’t like it when I shout.

the inventory

what making things and keeping a house have most deeply in common is attention.

A writer notices what everybody else walks past. A gardener notices the soil turning before there’s anything to see. A woman keeping a house notices the room: the light’s wrong, the fruit needs using, somebody’s gone quiet, the place smells shut up, the afternoon’s turned cold.

This has been called instinct for about a hundred and fifty years, which has been a marvellously convenient way of not calling it labour. It’s learned. And it costs. And the price is this: the woman who notices everything becomes responsible for everything she notices.

but there’s a stranger cost underneath that one and it’s the reason i keep going back to gilman’s little story: the noticing doesn’t switch off.

somewhere behind whatever else she’s doing, an inventory is running. it counts the milk. it knows how many clean towels are left. it wakes at four in the morning to review the dentist and the birthday and the thing she said in june that came out wrong and the fact that there’s something in the freezer that’s been in the freezer since christmas.

She writes her paragraph with one ear on the washing machine.

She thinks with a portion of her mind permanently rented out to other people at a rate nobody ever agreed.

So the problem was never only the quantity of the work. It’s what the work does to concentration. Certain things simply cannot be made in fragments. There are depths you can only reach with a long clear run at them, and a woman who has been interrupted every eleven minutes since 1994 has not been given one.

So we as a species. adapted, becoming extraordinarily good at working in ten-minute pieces and there is something heroic in that adaptability but I refuse point blank to romanticise it into a virtue, because a virtue is a thing you can then be expected to keep providing. And I don’t want to. And neither should you.

Sometimes the door has to close.

Sometimes the family can find its own socks

sido’s cactus

Colette was a French novelist, and the great subject underneath everything she wrote was her mother, a gardener in a Burgundy village, known to us all as Sido.

I talk a lot about Colette and Sido because I’m fascinated by. their dynamic, not least of all i the tale I am about to tell.

Sido was invited, in her seventies, to spend a week at her daughter’s house, but she wrote back to say she couldn’t. Colette kept the letter and put it into a book years later, where it has been quietly detonating in women’s hands ever since.

She couldn’t, Sido explained, because her pink cactus was about to flower. It flowered rarely, once in several years, and she was old enough to know that if she went away and missed it there might not be another.

An old woman refused a journey to a daughter she adored.

For a flower.

You can read that as eccentricity if you want to. But I like to think of it as the most complete statement of sovereignty I’ve ever encountered. Sido worked out what deserved her that week and it wasn’t duty and it wasn’t habit and it wasn’t even love. It was the one thing on the entire list that could not be rescheduled.

because almost everything a house asks of us can be rescheduled. almost all of it. that’s the secret nobody hands you at twenty-five and most of us don’t work it out until the far side of fifty, standing in a non-existent kitchen, holding a jug and a hammer and a shoe.

an interlude in which everybody goes slightly mad, and rightly so

Somewhere around here I want to put a book into your hands, and I want to do it badly, without explaining it properly, because explaining it would spoil it.

Leonora Carrington was an English girl who was thrown out of two convent schools, ran off to Paris at nineteen with a surrealist painter, and spent the rest of her long life in Mexico making paintings full of horses and hooded women and animals doing things animals shouldn’t. In her fifties she wrote a novel called The Hearing Trumpet.

Its heroine is ninety-two, deaf, has a small beard she rather likes, and is given an ear trumpet by a friend, through which she promptly overhears her family arranging to put her in a home. What follows involves the institution, a great deal of very bad food, and eventually the end of the world, and it’s the funniest and most serious book about old women I know.

Carrington cooked constantly, and fed her guests things that may or may not have been dinner. There’s a story, probably improved in the telling, about an omelette made with hair cut from her sleeping visitors. I don’t much care whether it’s true, because the story is doing real work: the kitchen as a laboratory, the pan as the place where things become other things, and the old woman not as a used-up servant but as the one who knows what goes in and what comes out.

We used to know this. The Greeks gave the hearth its own goddess, Hestia, and she took the first offering at every meal and the last, and no household could be founded without carrying fire from the old hearth to the new one.

Then somebody quietly reclassified the lot of it as chores.

I’m not suggesting we return to anything. I am someone who wants to live in the ow and explore it’s possibilities. But I am suggesting that the woman at the stove has been, at various points in human history, considered the most powerful person in the building, and that the loss of that idea has cost us more than we’ve noticed.

a brief defence of neglect

There are mornings when the most creative domestic act available to you is refusing to do any domestic work whatsoever, and this is worth saying and remembering

leave it.

leave the beds.

leave the pile.

let dinner be eggs and let everybody cope.

not forever. just long enough.

A house is remarkably resistant to catastrophe. It will survive you, in fact it fully intends to. Very little in it is anything like as urgent as it looks, and one of the more useful discoveries life finally gets round to whispering is that the washing will still be there tonight, but the thought might not.

Prioritise the thought!! Preserve the fragile thing before you tend the durable one. Please?

Because the house is durable, but the idea flickering behind your eyes is a moth in a draught. Catch it. The sink can have you later, the sink is always going to have you later, the sink is not going anywhere and I cannot promise it will ever leave you alone. Come to terms with that and choose what is calling to you regardless.

Sometimes the correct domestic decision is to abandon the domestic. To show the house who is boss. To let things go so you can let yourself BE.

but the kitchen is not the enemy

There is a real danger in taking Gilman’s problem and solving it only by escaping domesticity’s clutches, and I want to slow down, because I’ve watched women talk themselves out of the ordinary pleasures.

Sometimes chopping onions is exactly where the mind unknots itself.

Sometimes kneading dough is the thing that brings a woman back into her own body after a week spent almost entirely in her head, in her phone, in other people’s opinions.

Sometimes you’ve been at a screen for four hours and the single most intelligent act available to you is to go and peel potatoes and let the hands work while the rest of you sorts itself out underneath, which it will and we might ever know why, we just have to trust the process.

And creative work consumes too. We don’t say so nearly often enough, because creative work carries prestige and prestige buys silence. And accomodation.

But

The unfinished book eats the evening.

The business eats Sunday.

The project eats the marriage while everybody stands round admiring your dedication.

A life can be overrun by absolutely anything, including the thing you love most, especially the thing you love most.

So the goal was never to rank creativity above domesticity. The goal is sovereignty. Choosing, as often as circumstances allow, what deserves you now. The paragraph or the potatoes. Desk or duster. Sex or sleep.

There’ll never be balance, thank god.

balance is terribly still. life is a dance. I want to keep dancing.

gilman got her wish and it arrived on a moped

Ok. Here’s the thing I’ve been circling for four thousand words, and I know you know but I need to keep re-visiting it.

I live in a house with no kitchen.

Not as a philosophy, or some clever experiment I set up to see what would happen. I live in a house that’s half taken apart and we are in the fourteenth month of a sale that keeps not happening, and the kitchen is one of the many things this house currently doesn’t have.

So we eat the way Malda ate before Lois got hold of her. Food arrives from invisible kitchens, cooked by people I will never see.

Gilman imagined a central kitchen, professionally run, the labour done properly and paid for properly, so that a woman’s hours could be given back to her. She thought about this for years. She wrote whole books about it.

And it’s here. It came. It’s on my phone.

Now. Two true things I can’t make proper sense of.

The first is that it works. It works appallingly well. I’ve got the mornings back, all of them, whole and uninterrupted and mine, and I have never in my life been more focused or made more work or thought more clearly than I have in this ruined kitchenless house. Nothing needs defrosting. Nothing is soaking. There’s no six o’clock closing in on the afternoon like a tide. I sit down at seven with a thought and at one o’clock I’m still holding it.

The second is that I hate it. Not the food. The food’s fine, passable, ok, the food’s the least of it. What’s gone is the choosing. I miss the choosing.

Deciding what we’d have. Standing in Booths working out what the day tastes like. Buying something seasonal because it looks good and then building the rest of the week round it. Making an occasion out of an ordinary evening because I felt like it, because there were candles, because somebody was sad, because it was raining, because I love him. Feeding people with my own hands and watching their faces do the thing faces do when the ordinary pleasures take possession of the evening.

Not labour: authorship, and I’ve had it taken off me by a building site.

Gilman couldn’t have kow, so this isn’t a criticism of a woman who’s been dead for ninety years. Her kitchenless life had a hall in it. A long table. Everybody’s food carried to one place and eaten together, cooked by workers with proper wages and proper standing.

what i’ve got is a box at a door, all too often delivered by those who have no choice, and I’m uncomfortable with that.

Same idea. Opposite soul. The collective bit, the community, was deleted and what’s left is the convenience and the solitude and somebody on a bike being timed to the second so my hours can be given back to me. That’s a bargain I never agreed to and can’t currently get out of. And I repeat, I’m uncomfortable with that.

So no, I’m not going to tie this up in a pretty ribbon because I’m trying to fathom what is true here.

I’ve spent more than twenty years writing about the beauty of domestic life and I’m now obliged to report that I’ve made more work, and better work, in the months since it was taken away from me than in any year I had a kitchen. I don’t know what to do with that. I turn it over most days. I keep waiting for it to resolve itself and it won’t.

And there’s a worse possibility, which I’ve been carefully not examining.

It’s the fourteenth month. The house is half taken apart and we can’t put it back and we can’t leave it and the sale is’t movig and I’m tearing my hair out. But a woman whose life has stopped will find somewhere to put herself, and I have put myself into the work.

so perhaps i’m not focused at all, PERHAPS I’M STUCK, and focus is only what stuck looks like from the outside.

I don’t think that cancels any of it. The work’s good. I know it’s good, and it exists, and nobody can un-write it. But it does mean I ought to be careful about the conclusion I was so very nearly about to draw, which was that the kitchen had been robbing me blind for thirty years.

Maybe the kitchen was never the thing holding me back.

Maybe I’m just a woman in a house that stopped, working like the devil because the work is the only room in this life with a door that opens.

What I’ve got so far is this, and it’s small, and it’ll have to do.

The thing I lost was never the cooking. It was the deciding, and the deciding is portable. It’ll live in a plate and a candle and a cloth on a table and a delivery box tipped into an actual dish because I’m not an animal. The authorship survives the kitchen. It turns out the kitchen was only ever where I happened to be keeping it.

And I want the kitchen back.

Both. I want both. I’m old enough now to know that wanting both isn’t greed. It’s just the correct amount to want. And I am allowed to want, no matter what obligation virtue creates.

the house as self-portrait

Look round your rooms. Properly. The way you’d look at somebody else’s, with that faint delicious judgement you’d never admit to. (I see ya. I see myself)

You’re already there. In the books and the colours. In the objects you couldn’t explain to a stranger. In the chair everybody else thinks is hideous. In the cupboard full of jars. In the neglected corner and the stack of notebooks and the entire visible evidence of your obsessions, including the ones you’ve abandoned and the ones you haven’t yet got organised enough to start.

A home doesn’t represent identity. It records it. And it changes as we change, sometimes across a decade, sometimes across a single unhinged Saturday afternoon.

A woman leaves a marriage and paints the bedroom the colour he hated.

Her children go and the small room becomes a studio.

She turns fifty and finds she cannot bear the dining table she has tolerated for nineteen years, cannot look at it, cannot sit at it, and by Sunday it’s gone.

She buys yellow curtains. She throws out thirty mugs. Twelve. Thirty. She grows herbs on the sill, stops entertaining people she doesn’t like, moves the bed under the window so she can see the sky when she can’t sleep, which is often now, which is fine, which is a different essay.

the house moves with her.

And what it produces isn’t a portrait of the self. It’s the conditions in which a self can carry on becoming, which at our age is the only thing worth building.

the art of doing it again

Domestic life is repetitive, which is both its great insult and its great beauty.

again. tea. again. beds. again. morning. again. again. a-bloody-gain.

Our culture prefers completion. We like finished things: the ending, the signature in the corner, the degree awarded, the certificate, the launch, the done. A house refuses closure entirely. There’ll always be another meal and another morning and no ceremony is ever held, no medal struck, nobody claps.

But recurrence has an artistry of its own, and it’s slow, and it works on the people you love while they’re too young to know it’s happening. The gestures we repeat become the substantial, necessary, beautiful stuff of memory.

Saturday breakfast. The lamp switched on before dusk. The smell of polish in a hallway. The radio going while the dinner cooks. Clean sheets on a Sunday. The little plate left beside somebody’s bed. The teey present tucked uder the pillow every Friday night. The specific sound of your Mum in the kitchen, which you’d recognise anywhere, thirty years later, in a stranger’s house, and have to sit down.

Nobody announces that these things matter while they’re happening.

Then twenty years pass and they turn out to be almost everything anybody remembers.

Perhaps that’s the hidden power of domestic making. It doesn’t produce objects. It produces continuity, which is the only thing that’s ever genuinely inherited, and it’s made out of mornings exactly like the ones you should be fighting tooth and nail to make your own.

and tomorrow morning

Tomorrow morning there’ll be evidence of yesterday waiting in your kitchen. There always is, and I’d give my left arm to have some. A mug. A crumb. A tea towel slid off its hook. Something requiring attention.

You may attend to it. You may even enjoy attending to it, window open, coffee made, the day beginning properly, and if that’s the morning you want then take it and take it gladly, because that is also a life well spent. The daily round.

or there may be something else, calling louder.

your commonplace book

a dress you want to alter.

the half-read novel with the vintage postcard holding your page.

a letter you owe somebody who won’t be here forever.

a business idea you’ve been carrying round for eight months without once writing down, which is a thing i’d like you to think about, honestly, eight months.

a glorious hour of nothing useful whatsoever.

And when the inventory starts up its patient little list, you might remember that the house exists to hold your life, and your life does not exist to satisfy the house.

Some days you’ll give yourself to it.

Some days you’ll make something inside it.

Some days you’ll make the house itself, which is its own kind of authorship and always was.

And some mornings, wonderfully, unreasonably, you’ll leave the kitchen exactly as it is, jug and hammer and shoe and all, and go back up to the bed under the window where the thought is still faintly burning, and shut the door behind you.

Somewhere a long way back there’s a young woman getting out of a bath, holding a book she’s fairly sure is about somebody else, going down to a kitchen a man built for her with his own two hands.

I wouldn’t warn her. There’s nothing to warn her about. The kitchen was beautiful and she was right to love it and the boy was worth every hour.

I’d only like her to know, ~~for later~~ for much, much later, when she’s standing in this empty kitchen holding a jar and a charger and one shoe:

the house was always meant to hold the life.

and never the other way round.

because the morning is yours.

and you have other work to do.

I’ve been standing at this metaphorical sink for twenty-one years now. Not continuously. Even I sit down. But there have been weeks, whole seasons, when it’s felt very much as if I have: as if somewhere around 2005 I plunged my hands into the washing-up water and simply never took them out again, while behind me a child grew, relationships came and went, four dogs auditioned for the role of Captain Chaos, and a woman I only half recognise wrote several million words about the whole carry-on.

And still, every single time I come back to this sink, there’s a teaspoon in the plughole. One teaspoon. Always one. Placed there, I can only assume, by domestic poltergeist

Twenty-one years at the sink. You’d think they’d give you a carriage clock.

Twenty-one years ago, on a cold November afternoon when Fin was one and I was still living inside a version of domestic life that seemed solid enough to name, I made a small home on the internet and called it BrocanteHome. And because I needed language for what I was doing there, because housekeeping on its own sounded grey and dutiful and faintly cross, and homemaking arrived carrying a tray of buns and a husband whose shirts she ironed voluntarily (and, worse, gladly), I put two words together and called it vintage housekeeping.

I didn’t mean pinnies. I didn’t mean simpering. I meant burglary.

I meant creeping into the great lumber room of the past with a torch between my teeth and taking everything worth taking: lavender among the pillowcases, books by the bed, puttery treats and emergency cake, the consoling click of a well-stocked pantry, the whole gorgeous apparatus of domestic pleasure. And leaving the corsets, the drudgery and the marital obedience in a heap on the floor for the moths.

I meant life, love and vintage housekeeping.

And then the phrase wriggled out of my hands and legged it down the road without a backward glance.

It travelled across blogs and Pinterest boards and book descriptions. Women called themselves vintage housekeepers. Shops used the words. Writers used the words. My own books trotted them out into the world, and by the time The Spring House was published it could be sold as part of a twelve-year tradition of vintage housekeeping I’d apparently founded, which gave me such a funny turn I had to sit down with a custard cream. The phrase became internet furniture. People sat on it, put their feet up on it, spilled tea on it, without ever knowing who’d first dragged it home from the kerb and covered it in faded velvet.

Did I mind? Sometimes I minded so much I had to go and lie face down on the bed about it. Women are forever being told that influence should be payment enough. That we ought to feel flattered when our language is borrowed, watered down and sold back to us in a nicer font at three times the price.

But there was wonder in it too. I’d named a thing and the name had made room for other women. That matters more than the credit or financial success does. (But do ask me again on a bad day, won’t you?)

And now, twenty-one years later, here I am at the same metaphorical sink with my hands in entirely different water, ready to name something again.

Not a trend. Or aesthetic. Not another pleasing phrase destined for a tea towel, or aything that ends in “core”.

No. This time I want to name an entire discipline.

Housekeeping as creative discipline. The art of making a life worth inhabiting.

There it is. Put down the duster. Read the sentence again.

Housekeeping is the creative discipline of making a life worth inhabiting.

Not merely clean or organised into submission. This isn’t about decoration, or rooms destined for The World of Interiors.

Inhabitable: a life we can walk into and recognise as our own. Even at three in the morning. Even in the bad weeks. Even when the bin needs taking out and it’s raining sideways and there’s a cheese in the fridge strong and tempting enough to have us doing Nigella impressions at two in the morning.

And suddenly, oh suddenly, the doors fly open and every room in the house starts shouting at once. And for the first time in twenty-one years, I can hear what they’re all saying.

*

The medium is the life

Every creative discipline has a medium.

The writer works with language. The painter works with pigment and light. The gardener works with soil, weather, growth and death. (Mostly death, if we’re honest). The musician works with sound and the charged silence around it. The cook works with appetite and transformation. The dressmaker works with cloth and the inconvenient, magnificent fact of the human body.

The housekeeper works with daily life.

Her materials are rooms and hours. Light at four in the afternoon, which is a different substance entirely from light at ten in the morning, and she knows the difference in her wrists. Money. Mud. Towels. Memory. Other people’s shoes, which breed by the front door in the night. The objects we inherit and can’t look at and can’t part with. The things we buy at midnight because for eleven giddy minutes we genuinely believe a fluted glass storage jar will turn us into a calmer woman with a marriage we arre committed to in both heart and head.

She works with flour and fatigue. With family mythology and floorboards. With grief and Sellotape. With neurodivergence, leftovers, lust, lists, and the mysterious smell under the sink that nobody else can smell, and everybody else is lying, and one day it will be found, and it will probably turn out to be related to the Blacksticks Blue.

She works with what’s there. What’s actually there. Not what the magazine insists SHOULD be there.

And this matters, because creativity has been sold to us as the act of producing something new. A novel. A painting. A ceramic lemon squeezer shaped like Frida Kahlo, forgive us all. We worship the moment of invention and look away, pointedly, fingers in ears, from everything that keeps the invented thing alive. We applaud the opening night and completely ignore the woman who unlocks the theatre the next morning, sweeps up the programmes, wipes the sticky off the seats and replaces the toilet roll. Without whom there’s no second night. No run. No theatre. Just a locked building slowly filling with spilled popcorn.

We’ve confused creativity with novelty.

Centuries of philosophy and this is where we landed. Honestly.

Housekeeping offers another model entirely, and it’s been offering it, patiently, at volume, for all of human history. Preservation can be creative. Repetition can hold imagination the way a bowl holds broth. Repair can be authorship. Setting a room back in order after life has happened in it isn’t evidence that nothing was achieved. It’s evidence the room was lived in. Gloriously. Probably with tequila and a woman screeching I WIll Survive at the top of her lungs.

A song isn’t pointless because it ends.

A meal isn’t a failed sculpture because somebody eats it.

A clean floor isn’t a foolish investment because a spaniel is at this very moment dragging half the canal across it.

Transience is part of the form. Ask any baker. Ask any florist. Ask anybody who’s ever iced a birthday cake for a five-year-old and watched three hours of work demolished in nine minutes flat, and been glad.

Glad in her bones.

*

Repetition with its hair down

A creative activity becomes a discipline through return. Through going back. Through turning up again, weary. and determined, and beginning.

The pianist plays her scales. The dancer goes back to the barre. The writer writes another sentence after yesterday’s marvellous sentence flatly refused to write today’s for her. The diva.

Housekeeping has always contained this discipline, but repetition has been used as a stick to beat it with. You’ll only have to do it again tomorrow, they say. Triumphantly. As if they’ve caught the whole enterprise out. As if this reveals the stupidity of washing a cup, rather than the cathedral-sized fact that life continues to require cups. That we’re still here. Still thirsty. Still handing each other hot drinks across kitchens as an act of love.

Yes, it’ll need doing again tomorrow.

That’s tomorrow’s work. Do mind your own business, and take your domestic resentment elsewhere. Repetition is zen and you me darling are not.

There’s no such thing as a finished house. There are only houses between events. Before breakfast. After the bath. During the flu. Five minutes before everybody arrives. And three days after Christmas, in that strange loose week when nobody knows what day it is, the cheese has reached a stage best described as assertive, and we’re eating chutney with everything.

Housekeeping is the rhythm of return. We come back to the bed, the table, the body, the budget, the neglected corner, the promise we made to ourselves in the dark and hoped nobody heard. And because we aren’t machines, because the day is never quite the same and neither, thank heavens, are we, every single return requires judgement. Fresh judgement. Judgement with the price still on it.

Which is where discipline parts company with routine. They were never really friends anyway. Routine repeats an action. Discipline deepens a relationship.

You can make a bed for fifty years and still discover, aged fifty-four, that what you actually needed all along wasn’t tighter hospital corners but softer sheets, fewer pillows, a hot-water bottle waiting under the eiderdown like a small buried sun, and full unconditional permission to climb back in at two in the afternoon with Barbara Comyns and a violet creme and no intention whatsoever of explaining yourself.

Discipline isn’t punishment. Yes. Cross that idea out.

Discipline means making yourself do what a better woman would do.

No. Fetch the ink again.

Discipline is devotion practised often enough to grow clever.

Sometimes devotion looks like polishing silver until you can see your own raised eyebrow in it. Sometimes it looks like ordering chips because everybody’s exhausted and tonight love stinks of vinegar and comes wrapped in paper. Sometimes it’s filling the freezer against the future. Sometimes it’s admitting the elaborate freezer system has become aburial ground for unidentified slabs of meat, and grabbing a bin-bag to get rid of the lot.

The disciplined housekeeper doesn’t ask, what would the perfect woman do?

She asks, what does this life require now?

Then she wanders into another room to fetch something to write with.

Forgets why she’s there.

Finds an old photograph.

Cries a bit.

Ties a ribbon around a pile of letters for reasons she couldn’t defend in court.

Has a small argument with a drawer.

And eventually remembers that the pen was in her hand all along. Where it had been the entire time. Warm from her grip.

This too is practice. Congrats. You made it into the advanced class.

*

Attention is the first household tool

Before any creative person can make anything, she has to learn to notice. Not just glance. Notice.

The painter notices the blue hiding inside a shadow. The novelist hears the lie curled up inside the way somebody says fine. The gardener sees that one corner of the border is sulking and has been since June.

And the housekeeper, that unsung field naturalist of the domestic interior, notices E V E R Y T H I N G.

She notices that everyone has stopped sitting at the table and drifted off to eat in separate rooms like a family of hermits. That the bedroom is making her sad, and has been for months, quietly, the way a dripping tap makes you mad. That the hallway has become a physical record of every decision she’s postponed since March, an archaeological dig of good intentions, with a bag for the charity shop near the bottom that’s been “just going” for a year. That she keeps buying food for a fantasy self who marinates things midweek and owns a fish kettle, while her actual self stands stooped, eating toast over the sink like a heron in a dressing gown.

She notices the good towels have never been used. Not once. They’re being saved. For whom? For what visitation?

She notices there’s nowhere, in her entire house, to put her own bag.

She notices she’s holding her breath in her own kitchen. And has been, possibly, for years.

This is why housekeeping can’t be reduced to cleaning. Cleaning can be prescribed, delegated, bought. Attention can’t. No universal checklist on this green earth can tell you what a room means in the life being lived inside it. The same pile of books might be clutter in one house, a working library in another, and in mine, a load-bearing wall that also functions as a bedside table and, in emergencies, a step.

So the creative housekeeper begins with observation rather than accusation. Curiosity before the courtroom.

Pause. Notice. Name. Tend.

What’s happening here? What keeps happening here? What has this room quietly become while I wasn’t looking? Is this disorder or abundance? Grief or poor storage? A body without enough energy, or a family without enough time?

Because we’ve been trained, (oh how thoroughly we’ve been trained), to read every domestic difficulty as a personal failure. Particularly if the person failing is a woman. The drawer sticks because you lack discipline. The laundry’s behind because you haven’t optimised your morning, whatever that means, presumably it involves five a.m. and a smoothie the colour of pond. The house is cluttered because you’re emotionally defective and require a skip, a label-maker and a very expensive course taught by a woman whose countertops have never once, in their entire marble lives, met a charging cable.

But creative practice is curious before it’s cruel. It treats problems as information. The way a detective treats a footprint.

Perhaps the mess means there’s simply too much to maintain, and the answer is less, not more effort. Perhaps the room you consciously avoid has outlived its old purpose and is standing empty like a stage between plays. Maybe the chaotic mornings mean the household rhythm was designed for people with entirely different brains. Possibly for people who don’t exist at all??

And perhaps, perhaps, the neglected self means a woman has spent so long making life inhabitable for everybody else that she’s vanished clean off her own floor plan. And nobody’s noticed. Least of all her.

There. That last one.

Write it in the margin. Draw furious little stars around it.

*

The housekeeper as author

To call housekeeping a creative discipline is to hand the housekeeper authorship. It’s about time somebody did. Here. Take it.

Not ownership in the estate-agent sense, mind. Plenty of women live in houses they don’t own, in rooms they can’t paint, with money that won’t stretch to the wallpaper they love and lie awake thinking about anyway. Some live in temporary accommodation. Some in houses arranged entirely around disability or care. Some among other people’s possessions, like polite ghosts. Some WITH ghosts. So creative discipline has to begin with actual materials, actual rooms, actual budgets, or it’s nothing but fantasy with a shopping list stapled to it.

Authorship means relationship, choice and interpretation. It means reading the house and then, crucially, talking back.

Because a house is never neutral. Walk through any front door and you can read the place like a novel: who sits where, what gets hidden when the doorbell goes, who has privacy and who has a corner of the kitchen table, whose work matters, what kind of life is expected to unfold there, and who wrote those expectations down, and when, and whether anybody’s checked them since the seventies.

A dining room can become an office. A box room can become a sanctuary with a lock on the door and a biscuit tin nobody else knows about. A kitchen can hold nourishment, exhaustion, conflict, inheritance, loneliness and burnt onions.

To keep house creatively is to read those meanings and then revise them. Ruthlessly. Tenderly. And by your own hand.

It’s to say: this room no longer serves the woman I’ve become, and I’ve become her, so the room neeeds to catch up, thank-you kindly.

This cupboard contains a fantasy that’s costing me actual money.

This tradition is lovely and shall remain. Protected. Funded. Beloved.

This tradition is unpaid theatre performed annually for relatives who criticise the potatoes, and it’s hereby abolished by royal decree. Effective immediately.

This chair belongs by the window because I do.

This then, is composition, but composition in motion. We place objects, establish rhythms, alter atmospheres, edit possessions, prepare for what’s coming. Then somebody gets flu or leaves home or comes home or enters menopause or buys an air fryer the size of a small wardrobe, and the whole composition has to change. And change again. Forever. Amen.

The house is NEVER the finished artwork.

The work is the evolving relationship between a woman and the life she keeps.

*

Aside: In which I’m going to lose my temper

Because housekeeping isn’t only a creative discipline. It’s a political one, and anybody who tells you otherwise has never once wondered where clean socks come from.

You can’t speak seriously about domestic life without speaking about women’s labour. You can’t admire the gleaming table while politely declining to ask who cleared it, who remembered the milk, who noticed the child’s shoes were too small before the child did, who booked the appointment and the follow-up and the appointment to discuss the follow-up, who changed the sheets after the fever, who keeps every birthday in the family lodged in her head like shrapnel, and who lies awake at half past two conducting tomorrow like a frantic invisible orchestra that never, ever tunes up.

Here in the UK, women are still doing nearly an hour more unpaid work every day than men. That’s the Office for National Statistics saying so, not me being dramatic, though heaven knows I’m capable of both. A whole hour a day. Every day. For a lifetime. Do the sums and then go and stand quietly in the garden for a bit. And worldwide, women do roughly three quarters of all the unpaid care work there is. These aren’t antique grievances hauled out of a trunk smelling of mothballs. They’re current measurements. This morning’s facts.

The world is propped up by work it has carefully, deliberately, expensively trained itself not to see.

It calls that work natural when women do it and skilled when a man can invoice for it. It calls the woman at home lucky. It calls the woman cleaning another woman’s home unskilled, as if there were nothing to know. It calls the mother not working. To her face. At parties. It calls the carer economically inactive, which is a phrase I’d like taken outside and dealt with. It calls the utterly exhausted woman bad at self-care, and then it sells her a scented candle and tells her she’s empowered.

I’m tired of this language. Tired right down through my slippers and into the floorboards.

I’m tired of an economy that behaves as though workers arrive each morning spontaneously fed, clothed, soothed, raised and emotionally repaired by woodland creatures. By elves. Or Mary Poppins. By some unpaid backstage crew it has never once thought to name, though it would notice within the hour if they downed tools. Oh, hell yes, it would notice.

A man spends six hours perfecting sourdough and he’s an artisan. He gets a stall at the market and a profile in the weekend supplement. A woman feeds a family every day for twenty years, through fussy phases and grief and gluten discoveries and the year somebody would only eat beige, and she gets asked what she does.

And I’m tired, so tired, of the false choice between the idealised homemaker and the liberated woman. As if there were only the two costumes and we must pick one and be buried in it. As if liberation must be performed by hating aprons. As if loving home means handing in your power at the door like an umbrella.

I want the apron and the bank account. I want sanctuary and sovereignty. I want women free to love domestic life without being trapped inside it, free to reject domestic labour without being shamed for it, free to share it without having to issue instructions like a woman managing a particularly reluctant intern who claims not to know where the hoover lives. Paid for their paid work. Recognised for their unpaid work. And free, entirely free, to decide which forms of care belong in the lives they’re making.

Other women got here long before me, and I want their names in what is fast becoming a rant (sorry!).

In 1972, Selma James stood up at the Women’s Liberation conference in Manchester and demanded Wages for Housework, and I like to imagine the room going very quiet and then getting crazy loud. Housework, the movement insisted, wasn’t some innate female impulse floating up from our ovaries like scented steam. It was labour. And invisibility was the trick. The oldest trick in a very old book. Silvia Federici opened her famous pamphlet with the line that still stops me at the sink: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”

Say that one out loud. Roar it.

The women who built that movement, women of colour, disabled women, queer women, sex workers, single mothers, pushed the argument far beyond the tidy nuclear household and out into the whole world. The kitchen, it turned out, had a door that opened straight into the entire economy. It always had. Somebody had just hung a calendar over it.

So let this warning hang above the stove where the sampler used to:

Creative housekeeping must never become decorative propaganda for women’s servitude.

It mustn’t sprinkle rose petals over exploitation. It mustn’t ask an exhausted woman to regard scrubbing the lavatory as sacred feminine magic while everybody else watches television in the room she also cleaned. It mustn’t convert structural inequality into yet another personal development project with a workbook and a hashtag. Buy a better planner! Wake at five! Decant your despair into matching jars and label them in violet ink.

No. Even I got that one wrong, and I’m truly not to big to admit it.

If housekeeping is a creative discipline, then the housekeeper holds creative authority. All of it. Authority to set the standard. Authority to distribute the work, actually distribute it, not delegate-and-then-redo-it-at-midnight. Authority to refuse it altogether. Authority to decide a task doesn’t justify the life-hours it swallows. Authority to make something beautiful for the pure animal pleasure of it, and equal authority to serve fish fingers on paper plates when beauty would be a burden, and to feel, while doing so, absolutely magnificent.

Feminism doesn’t require us to despise the domestic. It requires us to ask who’s free inside it.

Keep asking. Ask it at dinner. Ask it until somebody passes you the answer along with the salt.

*

Maintenance isn’t the opposite of art

In 1969, an artist called Mierle Laderman Ukeles became a mother and discovered that the art world could imagine the heroic male genius, splattered and important, far more easily than it could imagine an artist changing nappies. The art world, in other words, had a very small imagination and a very large opinion of itself.

So she sat down, furious and brilliant, and wrote a manifesto declaring washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing and preserving to be the substance of an art practice. Not the interruption of one. The substance. Later she went out and shook hands with thousands of New York sanitation workers, every single one, and called it art. Because it was.

I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum as I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby (right, or if you don’t want me around at night I would come in every day) for the duration of the exhibition, and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soapsculpture, wall-paintings”), cook, invite people to eat, clean up, put away, change light bulbs. I might save and make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse. The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view. My working will be the work.

(Read that, and tell me it doesn’t make you want to cry. And cheer. And cry again.)

Her great question still lands like a dropped saucepan in a silent house:

“After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

The revolution loves a banner. Monday morning loves a bin bag. Somebody has to hold both.

Development, the creative act itself, gets to be exciting: invention, progress, the ribbon, the scissors, the photograph. But maintenance is the work of keeping people, objects and entire cities alive after the ribbon’s been cut and the dignitaries have gone home to houses somebody else keeps. Our culture rewards the first and hides the second, and Ukeles hauled the hidden work into the gallery lights and refused, arms folded, the insult that she saw as treating necessity as the enemy of creativity.

I’d have her manifesto read aloud in schools.

BrocanteHome belongs in this conversation, though it turns up carrying something smaller and warmer.

I’m not proposing that every emptied dishwasher be exhibited at the Tate. Though if the Tate would like to discuss funding, I’m available on alternate Thursdays and my rates are reasonable.

I’m proposing that the intelligence spent keeping daily life going has creative value. Real value. The kind you could weigh! That the home is one of the great unacknowledged studios of the world, where human beings practise composition, preservation, improvisation, ritual and care, daily, for decades, unpaid and largely unphotographed.

I’m proposing that (house) keeping is a form of making.

Lean in, because the distinction matters. Making is culturally glamorous. Keeping is quiet. Making produces the object; keeping preserves the conditions in which objects and people endure. Making gets the photograph. Keeping dusts the frame, remembers why the photograph matters, knows who everybody in it was, and wraps it in a tea towel when the family moves. And unwraps it first in the new house. Before the kettle. Before anything.

The world desperately needs new things. It also desperately needs people willing to care for what already exists, and it should say so out loud. With flowers on a Friday, if you please?

Our homes know this. The planet knows this. And our bodies certainly know it, particularly at fifty-four, when they’ve started ringig increasingly specific alarm bells.

*

The carrier bag, the basket, the drawer full of string

Ursula K. Le Guin. I come back to her in my work a lot because she spoke for all of us.

Once she suggested that the first human tool might not have been a weapon at all. Perhaps civilisation didn’t begin with a spear thrust heroically into the world by a man who then expected dinner. Perhaps it began with a container. Something for gathering. Carrying. Bringing things home. She called it “the tool that brings energy home”, and I wrote it down and turned it over and over.

Because women have always known the significance of a bag. We’ve been trying to tell you why what we carry, and more pertinently, how we carry it matters.

A bag, a basket, an apron pocket, a drawer full of string too short to use and too long to throw away, a biscuit tin containing buttons and one mysterious key, and a commonplace book containing everything else. Domestic culture is stuffed to the gunwales with containers, because keeping requires somewhere for the kept things to go. We gather fragments. We carry knowledge. We preserve what might be needed later, and we’re right about it roughly once a decade, and that once justifies everything. We understand the civilisation-saving importance of a small plastic bag full of other small plastic bags, even if aesthetically we’d prefer a French market basket and morally we’re trying very hard to stop acquiring the bags in the first place. And failing. And forgiving ourselves. And acquiring more, because somebody stop us.

The BrocanteHome commonplace book is a carrier bag for a woman’s mind.

Into it go recipes, quotations, complaints, sketches, overheard sentences, paint colours, medical questions, menus, desires, evidence, grudges lovingly pressed like flowers, women we want to remember, and the name of the book we absolutely must read, which we then fail forever to identify because we wrote only “blue one?? woman on train perhaps murder.”

This gathering isn’t clutter, whatever anybody says while looking over your shoulder.

It’s studio practice.

Artists keep sketchbooks. Gardeners keep records. Scientists keep field notes, and nobody asks the scientists to apologise. And women have kept household books for centuries: accounts, remedies, recipes, births, deaths, weather, the whole deep knowledge of a place and a family written down between interruptions. In snatched minutes. In pencil. At tables that needed wiping.

The mind at the kitchen table is still a mind. I want to write that again: The mind at the kitchen table is still a mind.

The notes made between interruptions are still thought. A woman’s record of daily life isn’t trivial just because daily life was assigned to women without consultation and then marked down for being feminine.

Quite the reverse. The reverse with bells on.

The everyday is where history takes its coat off and shows you what it’s really been wearing all along. And it isn’t always pretty. But it’s always the truth ad the truth, even in a society made complex by. smoke and mirrors, still matters.

*

Home can oppress and home can resist

Feminism, though, has excellent reasons to be suspicious of the home, and we’re going to sit with every one of them. No fidgeting.

For many women home has been a workplace without wages. A site of violence. A place of confinement dressed up as a haven. Privacy conceals cruelty as easily as it protects intimacy, and the net curtain works both ways. And the sentimental home, the one on the biscuit tin, has so often been built on somebody else’s labour: the servant, the enslaved woman, the cleaner, the badly paid migrant worker, the daughter expected to care because she was the daughter, the poorer woman quietly absorbing the work that lets a richer woman “have it all.” Any serious discipline of housekeeping has to look directly at class, race, disability and power. And keep looking. And not flinch. And not change the subject to cushions.

But abandoning the home as a subject doesn’t liberate the people still living and working there. It just leaves them alone in it.

bell hooks wrote about the homeplace Black women made under the daily grinding violence of white supremacy: a place where people could be restored to their own humanity, built with soup and clean sheets and locked doors and love. Home wasn’t outside politics. Making it was political work of the first order. A room can be used to confine you. A room can also be made into somewhere the dominant world doesn’t get to define you. Doesn’t even get in.

Because I need you to know this: home isn’t automatically sanctuary. Sanctuary is made, with hands, and sometimes it can’t be made without money, safety, privacy and other people’s help, and pretending otherwise is cruel. A candle can’t fix damp. A ritual can’t redistribute labour. A pretty notebook can’t treat depression. Lavender water has many virtues, I’ve catalogued them personally, but it has so far proved bitterly disappointing against capitalism. And I say that as a woman with three bottles of it.

And yet and yet and yet…

I won’t surrender the emotional, imaginative power of home just because it’s been misused against us. That’s exactly the sort of surrender they’d enjoy.

I know what it is to need the house to hold me. I know the stabilising weight of one familiar mug when everything else has become unrecognisable. The way your hand goes to it in the cupboard without looking. I know that putting clean sheets on the bed can be both an ordinary task and a declaration, witnessed by nobody, that tonight I will be cared for, even when the person doing the caring is also the person whose mascara is halfway down her face. I know the tenderness of keeping a child’s strange little treasure, a stone, a bent badge, a terrible clay something, long after the child has become a man with a beard. And I know the peculiar resurrection contained in dragging a chair towards the light.

Home isn’t where life ends. Whatever they told our mothers.

It’s where life gets to begin again. Daily, if necessary. Hourly, in the bad patches.

That has always been the radical hope inside BrocanteHome. Hiding in plain sight among the ribbons. I hope you have always been able to see that?

*

Beauty without obedience

I believe in beauty. I really do.

I like faded florals. Ribbons. Old paper. The glow of a lamp switched on in the middle of the day, which feels like getting away with something. Trays. Tiny bowls that hold nothing and mean everything. Books with deckled edges. Objects whose practical purpose left the building years ago and never wrote, and who are welcome here anyway. This is that kind of house. I believe a violet creme eaten from a saucer can improve an afternoon well beyond anything the available evidence would suggest. I believe a proper cheese, the kind that announces itself from the hall, belongs on a proper board with a proper knife, and that this is not fuss. It is civilisation.

But beauty turns dangerous the moment it’s converted into obedience. Watch for the moment. It’s quick.

The beautifully kept home has too often been entered as evidence of the beautifully disciplined woman. Her morality measured in shine. Her love measured in visible effort. Her worth staged for visitors and then judged in whispers on the doorstep afterwards. And don’t pretend you haven’t heard the whispering. We’ve all heard the whispering. Some of us have done the whispering, and are very sorry.

Creative housekeeping refuses this trial entirely. Case dismissed.

Art isn’t always beautiful, and beauty shouldn’t be a standard we maintain to prove our goodness. It’s a material we use, like flour, like paint, like light. A room might need beauty. But maybe it needs warmth, accessibility, privacy, storage, noise, darkness, laughter, or nothing more elaborate than one surface cleared enough to put down a mug more and knowing which is the entire art.

Good judgement matters more than good taste. Embroider that on something. Hang it crooked.

Ask what the beauty is doing. Working questions. Tradesman’s questions. Does it welcome? Console? Stir something low down? Mark a season? Express a private eccentricity nobody else needs to understand or even see? Or is it just another object to dust, another small daily audit, another reminder that she has once again failed to become the woman who arranges figs?

We’re allowed to edit the figs. We’re allowed to keep the ridiculous china bird.

This is beauty with its corset flung over the banister. Beauty laughing in the pantry with flour on its nose. Beauty that forgot to plump the cushions because the book got good. Beauty with dog hair on its skirt and ink on its fingers and no explanation prepared.

Beauty as nourishment. Never examination.

*

The discipline has methods

Every discipline develops a practice, a language and a body of knowledge. Creative housekeeping is no exception.

It doesn’t become serious by having its whimsy surgically removed. It becomes serious when we recognise the intelligence inside the whimsy, the engineering inside the enchantment, and give ourselves ways of growing it.

First, attention: ALWAYS attention. Attention before breakfast.

Then interpretation: What does this house, this room, this repeated maddening irritation tell me about the life actually being lived here? As opposed to the life on the mood board….

Then imagination: What else might be possible, with the materials I actually have, the money I actually have, the energy I actually have?

Then tending: One intervention, small as a stamp. Move the chair. Change the lamp. Cook twice as much and freeze half, and label it this time, we’ve discussed this. Put the medicine beside the kettle. Abolish the ironing, yes, all of it, I’ll sign the paperwork. Ask somebody else to clean the bathroom, and then withstand, white-knuckled if necessary, the thrilling discomfort of not supervising.

Then living with the change long enough to learn from it: Which is longer than a week. I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. Actually I do round here don’t I, so trust me, it’s longer than a week.

Then revision.

Then writing down what we’ve learned before we forget it: Which we will, by Sunday.

But even as I set this out in a tidy row I want to scribble arrows all over it, because the method isn’t a staircase. It never was. It refuses the upwardly mobile. It’s a kitchen dance. We notice while tending. We imagine while furious. We revise before we’ve begun. We forget what we learned last February and rediscover it in October, underneath a supermarket receipt, and greet it like an old friend, and lose it again by spring.

So perhaps it’s simply this:

pause, notice, name, tend

and again

with more kindness this time.

Technique belongs here too, and don’t let anybody with clean hands tell you otherwise. Stain removal. Soup, both the making and the strategic deployment of. Budgeting. Mending. Lighting, the most underrated art in domestic life. How to air a room. How to welcome a guest. How to feed yourself when appetite has gone peculiar. How to keep a cheese at its correct and lawful distance from the butter. How to recognise the exact moment an object passes beyond reasonable devotion into hostage situation.

Domestic knowledge is real knowledge. Tested harder than most laboratory findings and cited less. Some of it was passed hand to hand between women at sinks and gravesides. Some was written in household manuals with astonishing confidence. Some got lost. Some deserves careful, grateful recovery. And some deserves a ceremonial burning at the bottom of the garden with drinks afterwards and a short speech about how far we’ve come.

We’ll examine all of it. Everything gets weighed.

Vintage housekeeping was never about moving backwards. It never once was.

It was about rummaging intelligently. Elbow deep. Sleeves rolled. Torch between the teeth.

RUMMAGE.

*

A BrocanteHome school of thought

When I look back now, from here, from the twenty-first year, I can see that BrocanteHome has been circling this one discipline the entire time. Like a dog turning round and round and round before it finally, finally lies down with an enormous sigh.

The rituals were studies in meaning.

The routines were studies in return.

The puttery treats were tiny acts of domestic composition. Five-finger exercises for the housekeeping soul.

The seasonal work treated time itself as a household material. Something you could fold, air, and put away sweetened.

The Housekeeper’s Diary recorded the practitioner inside the practice. Frequently mid-crisis. Frequently losing her keys. On too many occasions, almost, losing her mind. Bless her silly heart.

The archives aren’t old content. They’re the collected notebooks of a woman thinking her way through domestic life across two decades of motherhood, loss, reinvention, financial strain, love, neurodivergence and the persistent, unrepentant acquisition of books.

The Commonplace Book is our studio notebook.

The Household Ledger is where imagination sits down, at last, with money, food, time and whatever energy’s actually left in the tin.

The Still Room holds the material knowledge: salt, wax, oil, cloth, herbs, scent, folklore, and the gentle chemistry of tending things that reward tending.

The Edited Woman practises selection. The bravest domestic art. What comes in? What stays? What am I keeping because it serves my life, and what am I maintaining because an imaginary woman in my head, and she has a clipboard, holds very strong views about matching storage?

The Brocante Way becomes the method.

The Library becomes the studio.

And Betty, part housekeeper, part high priestess of sanctuary, part magnificently unbamboozled woman with her spectacles on a chain and her sleeves already rolled, becomes the tutor who looks at you over those spectacles for exactly as long as it takes, and then asks whether this is truly a cleaning problem, sweetheart, or whether you’re trying to dust your way out of dreadful relationship.

She’ll wait. She has all day. She’s seen everything.

It all belongs. It has always belonged. I just hadn’t found the corridor.

I thought I was making a great many separate things, because my ADHD mind runs ahead of me scattering projects like a flower girl at a wedding. But perhaps I’ve been building one thing all along: a body of work about the imaginative keeping of a life.

Not a content empire. I’m the world’s worst influencer. A school of thought.

Not a perfect system. A living discipline. Breathing. Shedding. Occasionally knocking things over.

Not seventeen unrelated Circle spaces, so Alison, step away from the “create new space” button, and put your hands where the community can see them.

One house. Many rooms. And at long last, a corridor between them all.

*

The house must hold the woman

This is what matters most:

The woman doesn’t exist to maintain the house. The house must be kept in ways that help maintain the woman.

Shall we pop that in capitals and shout it from the rooftops?

THE WOMAN DOESN’T EXIST TO MAINTAIN THE HOUSE. THE HOUSE MUST BE KEPT IN WAYS THAT HELP MAINTAIN THE WOMAN.

If a housekeeping practice repeatedly empties the housekeeper, it goes on trial. If a standard consumes more life than it supports, it’s a bad standard, and out it goes with the recycling. No last words. If a ritual delights only the people watching while exhausting the person performing it, then it’s theatre, and the cast should renegotiate their contracts before the next matinee. Or bring the curtain down entirely.

None of which means we never do tiring or unpleasant things. Care contains effort. Always has. Love frequently involves cleaning something we’d rather not inspect at close range, and doing it anyway, breathing through the mouth.

But the work has to serve a larger intention: nourishment, dignity, welcome, continuity, beauty, rest. We should know what we’re serving and why, and be able to say so out loud without our voices going strange. And the housekeeper herself must be counted among those served. First, on alternate days.

Her body belongs in the household ecology. Not as staff. Her sensory needs matter. Her work needs a room of its own, or at the very least a corner with a decent lamp and a door that shuts. Her rest is not what happens once every other requirement has been met, because as every woman alive knows, every other requirement wil never, ever be met.

And all of this becomes urgent at midlife.

The arrangements that carried us through one life may not carry us through the next. Children grow. Relationships alter. Parents need care. Bodies change their terms and conditions without so much as a consultation period. Hormones rewire the whole household overnight and don’t label the fuse box. The woman who could once clean the entire house in a morning may no longer wish to, and here’s the greater revelation, the one that takes decades: she never owed anybody that morning in the first place. Not one of those mornings. They were hers all along. An entire stolen archive of mornings.

Midlife housekeeping is revision. Glorious, ruthless, line-by-line revision!

We look again at the rooms and roles we inherited. We ask what still fits. Actually fits. Not fits-if-she-breathes-in. We stop maintaining identities whose occupants moved out years ago and left no forwarding address. We make space, real square footage, for intellectual life, pleasure, solitude, friendship, work, eroticism, rest, eccentricity, and whichever self has been knocking from inside the airing cupboard for the past thirty years. Patient as a saint and twice as cross.

Open the door.

She’s furious and she’s magnificent.

*

There will be no domestic goddess

Let this be formally recorded, witnessed, stamped, and read aloud at the next available solstice.

The creative housekeeper is not a domestic goddess. I knew it then and I’m doubling down on it now.

Goddesses are decorative, exhausting and rarely shown taking the bins out in the rain with a anorak over their nightie. The domestic goddess is just another impossible woman, focus-grouped into existence to make actual women feel vaguely sticky. She cooks from instinct. She cleans as she goes, whatever that means. She resents nobody, needs nothing, and owns both a waist and a utility room.

We’re finished with her. She can see herself out. She can take the fig-arranging woman with her. They can share a taxi.

The creative housekeeper is a practitioner, and practitioners get to be human and take days off when the muse has taken herself on holiday. She’s allowed to be a beginner at fifty. She’s allowed to develop dazzling strengths and remain gloriously, permanently hopeless at other parts of the work. A great novelist may be unable to draw so much as a convincing cat. A brilliant cook may dress from the floor. A woman may compose rooms of such emotional intelligence that guests feel held the moment they cross the threshold, and still fail to return phone calls or understand a single one of the washing machine symbols. Which were, let’s be honest, designed by somebody who hates us and lives far away.

Discipline doesn’t demand mastery of everything. Only devotion to something. It asks for attention, curiosity and a willingness to revise.

Nor does it belong only to women. Housekeeping is human work. Men, children, friends, lovers, communities and entire institutions all take part in creating or wrecking the conditions of everyday life, and they can jolly well take part on purpose. Feminism isn’t out to crown women the superior natural keepers of everybody. We’ve had quite enough coronation. It’s time to end the arrangement in which women are assigned the work, denied its value, and then blamed, personally, by name, for its failures.

A creative discipline can be shared. Taught. Practised in every kind of household there is, in every configuration love comes in. It lets us negotiate standards out loud, at the table, instead of inheriting them in silence. It turns “helping her” into taking responsibility for the life one also, conveniently, happens to inhabit and eat in and sleep in and shed socks throughout.

The house doesn’t belong to the person who notices the dirt first.

*

What I’m claiming now

I’m claiming housekeeping as a field of creative intelligence. Out loud. In daylight. With my name on it.

I’m claiming maintenance, atmosphere, preservation, rhythm, domestic memory, material knowledge and ordinary beauty as subjects worthy of serious thought.

I’m claiming the right to be sentimental about a chipped tumbler and political about who washes it. In the same breath.

I’m claiming the kitchen table as a thinking place. One of the great ones.

I’m claiming the commonplace book as an intellectual tool.

I’m claiming the seasonal ritual as an act of attention.

I’m claiming the drawer of string

the emergency supper

the lamp switched on before dusk

the budget rewritten

the sheet changed after grief

the room reclaimed

the standard lowered

the standard raised

the thing mended

the thing finally, blessedly thrown away

the cheese, entire and unrepentant

the door closed

and the woman inside it allowed, at last, to rest.

I’m claiming all of this while refusing, absolutely and forever, to romanticise the burden. I won’t call exploitation sacred. I won’t confuse cleanliness with goodness. I won’t make a religion of exhaustion. And I will not, not while there’s breath in me, hand women a prettier whip. No more of that. No more.

I’m also claiming joy. Loudly. Because joy gets called frivolous whenever women find it somewhere that doesn’t generate sufficient profit for somebody else.

There’s joy in a well-made bed. Joy in knowing how to care for old wood, how it drinks the oil. Joy in a stew, stewing and waiting for tomorrow like money in the bank. In the first fire of autumn. The clean window. The car boot saucer under the pot. The note tucked in a lunchbox and found years later in a coat. The shelf arranged like a private poem nobody else will ever scan.

These things don’t solve the world. They’re among the reasons the world is worth solving.

*

Begin where you are

Creative disciplines are never completed. Nobody finishes writing and receives a certificate confirming there are no more sentences. Nobody completes gardening. There’s always bindweed. Bindweed will attend the overheated death of the universe and still find something to climb.

So there’s no final state called A Properly Kept Life. I’ve looked everywhere for it and it doesn’t exist no matter what social media optics might be saying.

There’s only practice.

So begin with the actual house. The ugly one. The rented one. The unfinished one. The house containing too much, or too little, or people who leave wet towels in a heap as avant-garde comment on shared responsibility. People who apparently, don’t give a damn.

Begin with the actual body. Its energy. Its fear. Its appetite.

Begin with the money there is. Not the money in the fantasy. The money in the tin.

Begin with ten minutes, one corner, one single recurring irritation.

Look without accusation. Or judgement.

Ask what would make this small fragment of life more inhabitable.

Maybe you will move the chair. Or perhaps you will make a list. Maybe you will wash the blanket, cancel the tradition, light the bloody candle, ask for help, eat the violet creme, cut yourself a proper wedge of the good cheese and eat it for breakfast, open the window, close the window again because actually it’s freezing, and begin again.

There’s always beginning again.

Keep notes.

Keep what matters.

Keep yourself.

Twenty-one years ago I coined vintage housekeeping because I needed a way to describe the old knowledge, domestic pleasure and rebellious loveliness I wanted to gather into BrocanteHome. The phrase travelled further than I ever expected. Further than I did, most weeks. And it gave women a name for something they already recognised in themselves and had been waiting, some of them for decades, to hear said out loud.

Today I’m naming the deeper work.

Housekeeping is the creative discipline of making a life worth inhabiting.

Its medium is daily life.

Its practice is attention.

Its method is tending and revision.

Its politics are feminist, because the freedom, labour and authority of the housekeeper matter. Full stop.

Its purpose was never a perfect home.

Its purpose is a life we can enter without abandoning ourselves at the door.

Come in. Settle down. Move the dog if you need the good chair. There’s work to do, and it’s wild and ordinary and smells of lavender, and occasionally of burnt onions, and occasionally, magnificently, of the cheese. All of it the smell of somebody both alive AND living.

There’s a woman here becoming the author of her own life.

And a house being taught, room by room, how to hold her.

Welcome home, Sweetheart.

Welcome to The Archives: a gathering-up of twenty-one years of BrocanteHome: old essays, forgotten ideas and the small domestic philosophies that have been quietly waiting to be rediscovered. I’ll be returning to these pieces not simply to republish them, but to reconsider, annotate and occasionally argue with the woman who wrote them, asking what still feels true, what has changed and what deserves carrying forward.

We begin where all good revivals should: with our foundations, in BrocanteHome Values, Twenty-One Years Later…

In January 2005, when BrocanteHome was barely six weeks old and Finn, little more than one, I snuggled up on my red velvet sofa and wrote a manifesto.

I called it BrocanteHome Values, which sounds improbably grand for something written by an exhausted woman with a mad babba, an unreliable grasp on the housework and absolutely no idea that she was building a body of work she would still be wrestling with twenty-one years later.

There were six values.

• Have integrity.

• S…

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And then there are the good weeks. The weeks that seem to flow via their own volition with no pushing and shoving from me. The weeks that bring little parcels of better news and stir spoonfuls of clarity into my coffee.

Today. A slow morning turning over the ins and outs of our lives in rambling conversation. Tea and crumpets. Working in bed like the invalid I am not because the sprint to the office that is the sofa across the room struck me as all a bit too much on a day when there doesn’t seem to be any bones in my legs. Oh what fun we have!

It has been a busy week. Great strides have been made. My lovely site is wearing a new dress. And The Library has a new home because a change is as good as a rest now isn’t it and I’m a fancypants don’t you know? And speaking of change, the original buyer has now announced he will …

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A little while ago I was lying on the bed on the drowsiest of Summery melting days when I heard the little girl next door announce to her younger brother that she had invented a new game.

“We’re going to play the Office of Beautiful Things.”

She’s about seven, I think. Her brother is three or four, at that glorious age where your older sister still knows absolutely everything about how the world works. She explained, with the kind of bossy confidence I don’t think I have ever had, that the Office of Beautiful Things would be responsible for making life really, really PRECIOUS. That there would be things to make, things to write, and lots and lots and lots of things to print! Her little brother, she announced, would be in charge of the printer because there would apparently be a LOT of printing.

(She clearly still believes that printers are magical while us grow-ups know they’re mostly vindictive lumps of malfunctioning plastic!)

I was totally enchanted so I crept off the bed to peek through the window and watch her blowing bubbles across the garden while simultaneously appointing departmental heads, and felt something inside me quietly click into place. Not one of those cinematic moments where violins begin swelling and suddenly everything makes sense, but smaller than that… like recognising an old friend after years of thinking you’d forgotten their face.

“Oh,” I thought.

Not, how clever. Not even, what a little darling she is (because she is)...

But... oh. That’s what I’ve been trying to build!

I’ve been thinking about the office of beautiful things ever since. It’s funny, isn’t it, that she called it an office? (though rumour has it her Dad works in the tax office). Such a serious little word for such a tiny person! It conjures filing cabinets, sensible shoes and a fussy woman called Sheila who has worked there since 1984 and can produce an invoice from seventeen years ago in under thirty seconds. Yet the word originally meant duty. A calling. The work entrusted to you. And I rather like that. It makes me wonder whether we all have an office of our own. Some people seem to run the Office of Feeding Everybody. Some have been appointed to the Office of Remembering Birthdays. My mum, I think, held a senior position in the Office of Are You Warm Enough and Proper Roast Potatoes. And perhaps, without quite noticing, I’ve spent the last twenty years working in the Office of Collecting Interesting Things and Leaving Them Where Other Women Might Happily Trip Over Them.

Because that’s really all BrocanteHome has ever been?

Not a business, exactly? Definitely not a lifestyle brand, cos it turns out I couldn’t quite manage to conjure one up. More a conversation that gradually accumulated bookshelves, pinboards, recipe cards, quotations tucked into drawers, and the sort of recommendations that begin, “You absolutely must read this...” before descending into ten minutes of waffly enthusiastic joyful review. Because I don’t think I’ve ever really wanted to teach women how to have a perfect home? Heaven save us from another woman explaining how to fold a fitted sheet while looking suspiciously well rested please? No. What I’ve always wanted is to pass things on. A writer. A recipe. A way of looking at the light through the kitchen window at five o’clock in November. A curious fact about an obscure writer from the golden age of domestic fictio. A notebook that makes you itch to begin filling it.

To be a curator of the curious and the lovely and the interesting and the fascinating and the pretty and the old and the downright bloody wonderful!

But the past two years have been... well, muddly. I can’t think of a better word? “Challenging” sounds as though it belongs on a motivational poster in a conference room somewhere. But muddly is what it actually felt like?

There have been houses and uncertainty and menopause and discovering, rather sadly late in life, that my brain has been playing by an entirely different set of rules all along. There have been weeks when I couldn’t tell whether I was writing in order to think, or thinking because I needed something to write. Quite a lot of it spilled onto these pages. It had to. Looking back, I don’t think I could have written my way out of this particular patch without first writing my way into it…

But somewhere amongst all that noise, I drifted away from something so obvious that it took a seven-year-old to point it out…

I just want to make life lovelier. Even if life has got us tearing our hair out daily.

Lovelier. Not prettier. I don’t mean immaculate kitchens with matching storage jars and women who bake galettes in white linen dresses without getting blackberry juice down the front. No, I’m talking about the quieter, muchier, deeper pleasures that don’t photograph particularly well because they’re over almost before you’ve realised they’ve happened. Finding a Barbara Pym novel in a charity shop when you’d actually gone in looking for a casserole dish, so you skip out the shop as if you have found a suitcase full of gold. Copying a quotation onto the back of an energy bill because it happens to be the nearest bit of paper, then discovering it again years later when you’re sorting out a drawer. The butter dish that’s chipped on one corner but has survived four house moves because it is home, and your Nana, and teatime around the table when no meal was served without bread and butter. The sound seagulls make on warm afternoons.

Those tiny moments don’t change your life.

They deepen it. And I want to help you collect them in the pocket of your pinny like so many fallen apples.

Because I’ve spent more than twenty years collecting things like that. Books that deserve more readers. Writers who ought to be household names. Quotations. Odd bits of history. Printables. Curious rabbit holes. Recipes. Strange psychological studies. Beautiful notebooks. Tiny domestic rituals that somehow make Tuesday afternoon feel less anonymous. Every so often I panic that none of these things belong together, because the internet seems to believe everybody should have One Clear Message.

For I’ve always envied people with One Great Subject. Imagine deciding, aged twenty-three, that medieval pottery or Roman roads or marine biology was going to occupy your imagination forever. There’s something wonderfully monastic about it. Meanwhile, I sat down with a cup of tea last Tuesday intending to read about Swedish death cleaning and somehow ended up learning why crows recognise human faces, then wandered into Japanese pillow books, then Victorian laundry blue, before finishing the afternoon wondering why we ever stopped starching tablecloths. And I regret absolutely none of it, for it felt to me like time well spent, feeding my curiosity and making my brain feel deliciously fizzy. For I think it’s what home has always been for me. Not one subject at all, but the place where every subject eventually wanders in and shares her what’s and her why’s?

(Which is probably why every time I’ve tried to build one enormous course, one grand programme or one perfectly coherent system, I’ve quietly started suffocating).

I keep thinking the answer is to become more focused, when perhaps the answer is simply to become more myself…

So I’m changing things.

(Or perhaps returning to them?)

Instead of trying to produce ever bigger things, I want BrocanteHome to feel like visiting a friend who always has something tucked away for you.

“Oh,” she’ll say as you’re putting your coat on. “Before you go...”

And out comes a printable.

Or a book recommendation.

Or a curious essay about the history of wallpaper.

Or a page for your commonplace book.

Or a seasonal recipe.

Or some tiny observation that makes you look at your own bedroom differently when you get home.

That feels much more like the sort of place I’d want to visit.

Which brings me to the Domestic Almanac.

Every month I’ll be making a playbook for this lovely ordinary life of ours. There’ll be pages to write on and pages to cut out. Seasonal observations, reading recommendations, tiny rituals, artists to discover, things to notice, ideas to borrow, little projects and rituals to enjoy on rainy afternoons, recipes, and the occasional rabbit hole because I simply don’t trust anyone who never disappears down one. You’ll be able to print it, scribble on it, stick bits of it into your journal, fold the corners over, spill tea on it, tuck bits into your commonplace book and, I hope, return to it long after the month itself has disappeared.

Perhaps that’s all I’ve ever wanted BrocanteHome to be?

A place that quietly accumulates delight…

So in August’s Edition?

The August Domestic Almanac is a richly illustrated A4 collection of seasonal reading, curious diversions, domestic inspiration and proper old-fashioned paper play. It’s designed to be printed, scribbled upon, cut up, coloured in, left beside the bed and slowly inhabited throughout the month.

At the Threshold ★ A Note for August ★ August at a Glance ★ The Principles of August ★ Things to Notice ★ What Helps in This Weather ★ The Body Forecast ★ Small Seasonal Care ★ A Small Defence of August ★ The Great Rabbit Hole: Forgotten British Puddings ★ Why Puddings Disappear ★ A Pudding Family Tree ★ Begin Here: Books & Archives ★ Make, Find & Notice ★ Rabbit Hole Notes ★ On Keeping a Recipe ★ The August Kitchen ★ The Late-Summer Table ★ Blackberry & Damson Compote ★ A Proper Summer Pudding ★ The Small Preserving Project ★ Domestic Fieldwork ★ One Room, Closely ★ The Household Experiment ★ Repair, Mend, Replace ★ Field Notes ★ Before September ★ The August House Walk ★ The Reading Room ★ The August Reading Shelf ★ The August Cabinet ★ August Observations ★ Household Ledger ★ Marginalia ★ Paper Keeper ★ The Uncatalogued ★ Your August Body ★ August Stickers ★ The Playground ★ Cut-Out Paper Dolls ★ August Tokens ★ The Paper Fortune Teller ★ Colouring Pages ★ A Fan for Warm Days ★ A Tiny Closing Ritual ★ Keep What Delighted You ★

It’s truly scrumptious…

And I am absolutely thrilled with it and I hope you will be too.

I don’t know whether that little girl next door has any idea she accidentally named the next chapter of my working life. But I do hope she never loses that instinct. The instinct that believes making life lovelier is serious work, that somebody should definitely be put in charge of the printer, and that there ought always to be another beautiful thing arriving on somebody’s kitchen table.

The August Domestic Almanac is the first one. And my subscribers can find it at the end of this post…

Subscribe now

Or you can buy it here…

Buy It Now For $20.00

Fresh off the printer…

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Welcome to the next interview in my new series on BrocanteHome: At Home With Gloriously Messy Women, in which I will be pottering around Substack, knocking gently on interesting doors, and asking lovely women to tell us the truth about home.

Not the glossy truth. But the deeper, more useful truth: how home holds us, shapes us, unsettles us, heals us, and occasionally asks why there are seven mugs on the bedside table...

For most of my life, I’ve thought of home as something fixed. Bricks, foundations, a familiar view from the kitchen window. Somewhere you settle and, if all goes according to plan, stay.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether home has to mean any of that? Whether we do ourselves a disservice by limiting the very shape of our lives?

As you might know, we are considering making a narrowboat home, so I was thrilled when Rebecca Harrison, who lives aboard Arwenack with …

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How to Find What You Actually Want Under Decades of Should

Here’s the question I want you to sit with today: when was the last time you wanted something without immediately editing it?

Not wanted something reasonable. Not wanted something that fit neatly into your existing life. Not wanted something small enough that nobody would be inconvenienced by it.

When was the last time you wanted something wild and impractical and possibly selfish and didn’t immediately talk yourself out of it?

I’m guessing it’s been years. Maybe even decades (Lordy… where have we been?).

Because here’s what happens to women’s desires: they get buried. Layer by layer, year by year, under sediment of should and must and can’t and hell’s bells what will people think.

You wanted things once didn’t you? Remember? Big things. Inconvenient things. Things that didn’t make sense. Things that would have required other people to adjust. Things that might have upset the whole careful balance of your life!

But you learned, very …

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Hello, and welcome to Week Three.

If you’re here, you’ve done something extraordinary. You’ve looked at your performances. You’ve let something die, you’ve practiced strategic neglect and you have withdrawn your energy from things that don’t deserve it.

And now you’re standing in the space you created. The space where the dead things used to be. The space where you used to spend all your energy maintaining corpses.

And you’re probably thinking: now what?

This week, we’re going to answer that question.

Not with another list of things to do, nor with a new performance to master. But with a question so simple and so terrifying that most women spend decades avoiding it:

What do you actually want?

Not what you should want. Not what would be sensible to want. Not what you’ve trained yourself to want because the real thing seemed too much to ask for. Not what your mother wanted for you, what your partner needs from you, what your children expect from you, what society tells you a woman your age sho…

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You’ve done hard work this week. You’ve looked at what you’ve been maintaining that’s already dead. You’ve named the friendships, the standards, the obligations, the performances, the youth you’re trying to preserve. You’ve calculated what it costs to keep watering corpses.

That’s brutal work. It’s necessary, but it is BRUTAL. And if you actually started letting something die, if you withdrew your energy from something you’ve been maintaining for years, you’re probably feeling raw right now. Exposed. Or as if you have done something terrible.

But you haven’t. You’ve just stopped lying.

So before we move into Week Three, here’s something to help you carry what you’ve learned. Something to help you keep letting things die even when every instinct screams at you to start maintaining them again.

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