A summer trip to London

Back in August, we went down to London to stay with my little sis in her very stylish flat for a couple of days. Liv's a wonderful hostess and great cook, who keeps the food and drink coming; just how we like it!

She's a bit camera shy, but somehow I managed to get a few snaps...

We spent a bit of time mooching around, a little trip up to Herne Hill and Brockwell Park, with a nice walk home through all the back streets, admiring the lovely old houses and gardens. London's a great city for walking, especially if you have time and it's a summer's day.

This is a park straight from the 1970s, the glory days of English parkland! You could just see that photo on a coaster, couldn't you? Crazy paving and the miniature houses. That's especially for you, Em.

We had tickets to go and see the Elvis exhibition at the O2. I think I'm right in saying this is the biggest exhibition of artifacts they've ever had, outside of Graceland, from whence they were borrowed.

Such a little cutie. Did you know his 3x great grandmother was a full blown Cherokee? Morning White Dove. Isn't that a beautiful name?

Elvis died on my dad's birthday, when I was ten. They immediately scheduled a season of programmes about him including a selection of his films. Our parents let us have the black and white portable TV up in our bedroom, which we plonked on a chair. My sisters and I spent most of the summer holidays laid on our beds, with the curtains closed, kicking our legs, singing along to the songs and debating who fancied him the most.

Pestering the poor fellow in my 1960s Hawaiian jumpsuit. You have to dress the part.

Looks like it was me!

There was some fabulously groovy posters, but the lighting was such that it was difficult to photograph anything well. But look at this one. The girl to the left of Elvis is in a bikini which looks like it's made from exactly the same print as my dress! 

It's a sign. Of what, I just don't know.

I really like what this telegram says about Elvis as a person:

'Dear Colonel

Please convey my thanks to the various groups in Memphis who have suggested a special homecoming for me when I return to Memphis. However I wish to return to Memphis the same way that any other serviceman returns to his hometown, without ceremony or fanfare. I served as they served and was proud to do it. Seeing the city of Memphis, my family, friends and fans will be the most welcome sight in the world to me. I appreciate their kind gesture and know they will understand and I am glad you are in agreement with me on this.'

It was a great exhibition, with a really happy feel to it. There were loads of fascinating things to look at. You heard his voice, both speaking and singing. It felt like a celebration and everyone came out smiling.

A stitch in time

Do you ever find being a grown up is a bit flippin' dull? Too many jobs to do, not enough fun to be had?

I've been making shortbread this year. Delicious.

My To Do list is a right little dictator. When it's not looking, I manage to squeeze in a bit of what I fancy. And that usually involves eating, drinking, sleeping or making things.

Red and black currants from the allotment combined make a lovely jam

My first ever batch of homemade scones, with our homemade jam. A cream tea is a must at some point in the summer

One of the things I will most miss about the summer, is the ready supply of fresh flowers from the garden

Just as the summer has decided to turn the lights off and vacate the building, I've started making summer wear. I don't give up that easily. My most frequent phrase during the month of September is 'Indian Summer'. In the early days I say it in a jaunty, optimistic tone of voice. Upbeat. By about the 15th, if there's no sunshine I start to waver, but we're not there yet, so it's playsuits all round.

I had a pattern for the shorts, but made the top up as I went along. It turned out OK. That's my best cheesecake pose

I always push it with the fabric, ekeing it out, often sewing bits of fabric together to make a piece big enough to cut a pattern piece out of, but this time I think I've achieved a PB (personal best). Pushed it to the max. There's just about enough fabric left to make a jacket for a mouse.

Once again, my mum was the inspiration for this outfit. Here she is in summer 1966, camping in the Alps, pregnant with me

Also, a while back, I made a bikini! As you do. Well, after a fraught experience in a changing room, I've discovered that vintage bikinis aren't quite cut for my proportions, shall we say. This was a soft as silk curtain from Chesterfield market. It's lined, but yet to see water, so not sure whether it will be like one of those pens where the pin up girl is in a bikini when you hold it one way and butt-naked when you hold it the other way. I'll need to test it out in the bath before I hit the pool. Don't want to be asked to leave. With the leftovers, I made a matching bag.

Hope you are finding the time to squeeze some fun things in amongst all the grown up necessary stuff. Have a great weekend everyone.

The Good Life

Looks like we've been on one of our trips out, doesn't it? To a nice country place, with lanes and cute houses.

It's easy to be fooled.

This is actually in the heart of inner city Nottingham. It's St Anns Allotments, the oldest allotments in the world and a grade 2 heritage site. We went before a while back and came away wanting to be part of it all. So we put our names down and waited.

When we took over the plot last October, we opened the gate and beheld a field of waist-high weeds. The only thing to do was slash and burn. I have pyromaniac tendencies, so spent many a winter day stoking the flames with my eyes streaming, going home smelling like a smoked kipper.

He's done most of the hard work. All the landscaping has been done using the bricks of a collapsed Victorian building found on the site. I wanted to rebuild it, but he's got ideas of his own. That serpentine path is a thing of beauty. My job is weeding. I take it very seriously. I have instigated a war on thistles. Brambles and rosebay willow herb are in my top secret dossier too.

Peas straight from the pod. So sweet. 

Flowers everywhere. Mother nature is kind. We've had wild roses, sweet peas, bluebells, forget me nots, ladies lace. The list goes on. But we also decided to plant a flower border as you come in. I did a patch of cosmos next to a patch of snapdragons. The morning glory hasn't really taken off, but really we can't complain. Practically everything else has.

Those are beans there, Trail of Tears they're called. They are a native American bean, delicious, they squeak against your teeth when you eat them. We've planted them in with the sweet corn, just as they do. 

We've been eating like kings. I think I've consumed more potatoes this summer, than in the last three years. We've had them every which way we can think of. Boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes, roasted, sauted and fried, we've even had dauphinoise. Yeah, check us out!

Beetroot houmous, so delicious and the colour is amazing. That's broad bean pesto in the background. To die for. Seriously.

We have had to give courgettes away to anyone who crosses our path. Again, we have used every recipe we can possibly think of. Although he tells me I need to make a cake next. Haven't done that yet.

Kale with courgette and roasted cashews, with an olive oil, honey and lemon dressing. Heavenly.

Spinach daisy. We're turning into Tom and Barbara. Just need some pea pod wine...!

Apple blossom in spring and plums ripening in the sun. I like the life of a farmer's wife.

When is a chair not just a chair?

A couple of months ago, these lovelies came to Nottingham for a day of chatter, laughter and second hand shopping. It went well. We chatted a lot, laughed a lot and bought plenty.

Our normal fare is vintage clothing. We ticked that box, but when we walked into Sue Ryder in Sherwood, we entered new blogging-get-together territory. I bought a chair!

I'm a bit of a sucker for chairs and this one had just been reduced from £25 to £10, which seemed a bargain. I'm also a bit of a sucker for a bargain, so the deal was done and we carried on.

When I got it home on the Monday, I did a bit of investigating. The back cane was broken and needed fixing and the seat pad needed updating. When I unzipped the cover to see what the pad was like, I squealed with excitement. There right in front of me was a CC41 label. As I'm sure a lot of you will know, that label dates the cushion to the 1940s, during and just after WWII, when most commodities including food, clothing and furniture, were rationed.

I love this postcard of my dad surrounded by his parents in 1941. His father, George, was a Desert Rat and so was away in North Africa for much of the war. This postcard was sent home from Egypt, hence the pyramids.

For me that has a lot of resonance. My father was born in August 1941, in London, in the middle of the war, a few months after the end of the Blitz. I grew up listening to tales from my grandmother who spent the entire war in London. Immediately I saw the CC41 label, I started imagining somebody sat in the chair, by the fireplace, listening to Winston Churchill making all those historic, rousing speeches. That chair went up in my estimation!

Anyway, now the chair was intertwined with my father who was born at the same time as the label. It so happens that he died 20 years ago yesterday, two days after his 54th birthday, so as you can imagine, he has been a lot in my thoughts. So when I started re-caning the chair, I went and changed into a pair of shorts belonging to him.

I used this great video to learn how to cane the chair. Isn't youtube an amazing resource?

Here's a picture of him wearing them, standing on top of a landrover, in the bush on his way down to Juba, which then was part of the Sudan and now is the capital of South Sudan. At the time we were living in Khartoum, the capital, in the North. He was a Diplomat, and during that posting, he was responsible for infrastructure; bridges and roads, and also the physical reality of tourism, so he would go and visit little complexes of huts being built with swimming pools, which apparently always ended up with cracks in them! He loved Africa and he loved that role, because he got to work with the local people for whom he had a lot of respect.

There we are in Switzerland circa 1972, at some friends' house for dinner. That's him on the left, Lambert, David George MBE, and that's me; 3d 1966!

He was a really good man, a dad to be proud of. I often ponder how things might have been for our family had he lived longer, and I often wish he were still here so I could know him as an adult, ask him for advice or listen to his stories. But that's life. We're here, it's now and we've got to make the best of it. So when I look at the chair, I intend to think of him and remember the good times.

I have covered the pad in some 1940s barkcloth from France. That fireplace is the next project. We've got some fab tiles to go in there. 

I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Eyam, the plague village

Have you ever heard of Eyam? It's a village in Derbyshire, known as the plague village, because in the year 1665, the villagers made the conscious decision to isolate themselves so that they wouldn't spread the bubonic plague to anyone else in England.

It arrived innocently enough, in a bale of cloth ordered by George Vicars, the local tailor. The cloth was damp, so he spread it out in front of the fire to dry, allowing the fleas within to be released. They were carriers of the plague, and soon, inevitably it claimed its victims. Within a year, hundreds of people in this small village died.

You would think such a tragedy would permeate everything and that you'd be able to feel the pain in the air and in the brickwork, but you can't. You only feel it in the stark words you read. You imagine it, sitting in the church and passing the cottages of the doomed villagers.

Looks idyllic doesn't it, the romantically named Rose Cottage? Don't be fooled. Nine members of the Thorpe family lived here. They all died. And look, here's what happened to their next door neighbours.

It feels somewhat ghoulish to be posting this, but it's such a memorable part of our history. Who doesn't know about the bubonic plague? Even children's nursery rhymes commemorate what happened.

Mexican embroidered dress accessorised with bags from Em and Krista, because I couldn't decide

And actually for their courage and fortitude in such appalling circumstances, the villagers of Eyam deserve to be remembered forever more.

The villagers who succumbed to the plague weren't buried in the graveyard, instead each family was responsible for its own. The women dragged their husbands and children out into the fields surrounding the village and laid them to rest. Even when life is at its toughest for me, it's never THAT bad. I really want to do one of the walks to pay my respects.

Eyam hall and gardens

Sorry this is such a depressing post. It wasn't meant to be. Eyam is the prettiest little village and Eyam Hall is a lovely Jacobean building filled with treasures from eleven generations of the same family, which means it has that lovely higgledy piggledy patchwork eclectic feel. The family lived there up until really quite recently and left all their stuff there, although they did have the good grace to take their Ikea furniture with them. I can't imagine a Billy CD rack would be quite the thing with all those beautiful flagstone floors and amazing wide floor boards.

Anyway, we had fun, mooching around and finishing up with a picnic. I hope there will be more to come this summer. It's more than half way through July and I feel like I'm only just getting started. Life has been like a juggernaut crashing down a mountain these last few months. I do apologise for neglecting you all. It's not my intention, I just think I need a pause button every now and again.

The village stocks. It wasn't me! Or was it?

I have to finish up with this classic photo of the family pets from Eyam Hall. What song do you reckon they're singing? Answers on a postcard blog comment, please!

Turned out nice again

Sunday was forecast to be raining all day. I was secretly pleased because it would mean I could shirk my gardening duties. My working week now ends at 8.30pm on a Saturday, so more than ever I want the day of rest to be exactly that.

However it turned out bright and beautiful.

So after skulking in bed until mid-morning, I was ousted. I need help, he said.

Once I dragged my reluctant carcass out there, I decided to do some tidying. Sort the paths out, pick up all the endless debris from next door's Weeping Willow, do some weeding and put the pots full of seedlings all in their rightful place rather than where I can trip over them when I'm hanging out the washing.

Oh, but then it started raining. Damn. *big wink*

So, after doing a bit of deadheading of flowers for vases, I skipped inside and took up my needle.

First job: make a cushion and a curtain for the porch from some really pretty 1950s barkcloth I scored for top dollar on ebay.

Now, we all know the laws of the universe; of course there wasn't enough fabric, there never is.

So what do we do?

That's right. Jiggery pokery. That's why the curtain has pink trim top and bottom. By Jove, I think it works.

That curtain is the final touch for our newly decorated porch. Those stained glass windows are one of the few remaining original features, and I love them.

Second up, make a curtain for this little baby blue meat safe. There's the cushion from the barkcloth on the gold chair.

Then there was job number three. I found this gold brocade cocktail chair for £4 a few years ago, at the carbooty, but the grubby seat always bothered me. So last year, after months of sniffing around, I managed to find a piece of fabric on ebay which was a near perfect match, and recovered the seat pad. 

That's a dress I got from Second to None. When I wear it, he always asks me if I've lost my sheep. (Little Bo Peep)

Not easy. Jiggery pokery.

(I feel like I'm writing this blog post in the voice of Micky Flannigan).

Anyway, yesterday I decided to change the pompoms. Those pink ones were looking a bit faded and they didn't go all the way round, so I replaced them with some red trim. Looks very plush now!

So that's it, the house is styled to within an inch of its life tidy, which is good because I wanted to make a positive first impression on her. She only arrived this morning. She's Tehura by our Walter (Walter Lambert). 

Isn't she a beauty?

How about you, anything to report from this weekend?