AS I WAS ARRANGING THE WHITE LILAC I HAD CUT FROM THE GARDEN FOR YESTERDAYS’ POST, I KEPT THINKING OF MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE BEAUTIFUL GARDEN SHE HAD WHEN I WAS A CHILD. My grandparents’ house dated from the 1920’s, a solid suburban red brick and slightly tudoresque affair, blessed with a large plot to…
Category: Vintage
Vintage Childhood #3 – Teddy Bears and Storybooks
I can remember as a very small child, long before my schooldays, sitting curled up on my mother’s knee as she read to me. “Read some more, read some more!” I would say as the final page was turned and she would smile and open another book and continue reading until it really was time…
Glass, Glamour and a Vintage Dressing Table
My mother has a beautiful old dressing table. Since I was a small child I have been fascinated by it and all the shiny, glittery items that sit on top of it. A wealth of 1950’s glamour is captured in this piece of feminine furniture. A glass top to reflect the cut glass trays, jars,…
Man Stuff #1 – Leather Jackets and Aviators
Some while ago in our previous life, we had a project to build a large shed at the bottom of our very tiny garden, to house Mr H’s tools, Mr H’s motorbike, Mr H’s racing bike and assorted items of Mr H’s abandoned gym equipment. The day before we pooled our joint resources to purchase…
Kings, Queens, Knaves and Aces High
There is something exceedingly mystical about a pack of playing cards. The notion of kings and queens, jokers and knaves, aces and hearts, spades and diamonds, even the language of cards is exotic and enticing, hinting at the medieval world of courtly love and ancient fairytales. Somehow all of life is here in symbolic form…
Vintage Childhood #2 – Dinkys, Corgis & Lesneys
A small homage to the vintage childhood when imagination was more valued than the microchip. Once long ago , before the invention of iPods and iPads and SuperMario Game Boys and Nintendos, my younger brother received for his birthday a very fine model garage. It’s most distinguished attribute was a state of the art toy…
Chopin, Nocturnes,Sheet Music Part 2 – The Power of Memory
In which we pursue our dream of mastering the piano without the aid of the Brownies and without a piano Family legend has it that one of my great uncles – inevitably on my father’s side, for it was my paternal grandmother who boasted the mad inventor father and 13 siblings – was so talented a…
Vintage Childhood #1 – Monopoly
PLAYING Games My family ancestors have always been a rather competitive bunch even when at play. My mother relates wonderful stories of Friday evenings spent with my father’s family in the 1950’s surrounded by the numerous aunts and uncles (all 13 of them plus assorted spouses) engaged in the serious business of a game of…
Chopin, Nocturnes, Sheet Music and the Brownies
As a small child I was encouraged by my mother to join the Brownies, an institution she had relished so much in her own childhood that she had gone on to be a Girl Guide and the veteran of many a Brownie and Girl Guide camping expedition. At the time as a seven year old…
Classic Chassis Part Two
When I passed my driving test and it was time to look for a suitable car to buy, I soon realised that I didn’t really want a suitable car atall but a totally unsuitable one. I trawled the local garages with my dear Dad desperately hoping to find something that wasn’t a dull old Ford…
A Classic Chassis and the Mad Inventor
Once upon a time there lived a mad inventor who had the particular peculiarity of retiring to his bed at the end of the cricket season, refusing to get up again until the sound of leather on willow announced that another new season had begun. The inventor had 14 children – no doubt something to…
Cinderella Girl – Part 2
Even as a small child I was never very comfortable wearing traditional girlie costume of ribbons, frills and dresses. A pair of trousers and boots was always much more my style and has remained so ever since with one or two notable exceptions. As a student I collected all sorts of vintage items, amongst which…
View from a French Hillside 