Oh, Narcissus

I'm quite partial to a house magazine now and then. As I also have a soft spot for the overuse of the term "bespoke" and pictures of lovely leafy, rosy, willowy gardens, I like to occasionally get the British Homes and Gardens.

I feel that I should draw your attention to this fellow:

His name is Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Well of course it is! You don't cultivate a look like this and call yourself Bruce Bloggs. He is an interior designer and appears to be somewhat of a minor celebrity in the UK. I'm sure that he's a perfectly decent person in real life but they have really made him look an absolute twit here.

Photographed to endorse various companies making "bespoke" furniture; the advertisements are memorable but not in the way they intended, I'm sure. . . I actually look for the ads each time I get a copy of this mag but couldn't actually tell you what the rooms look like as I can't take my eyes of Laurence.

In his awkward, overdressed glory.

Here he is looking relaxed in a kitchen. Just about to whip up a batch of scones...obviously.

Hey, hey in a bathroom. Oops someone maybe should have cropped out the chinless profile reflection.

And my personal favourite, "Chika chika boom,  ladies here's a bedroom...with me in it". I'll just make it look like I'm buttoning up my jacket - next to this purposely tousled bed (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Snort!

LOVE

18 years ago today I sat on the Historian's doorstep waiting for him to come home.

It was a really beautiful, clear blue day but my stomach was a knot of fear. He rode up on his motorbike, took off his helmet and looked at me and I thought I would die from the electricity between us.

We both knew the gravity of this meeting. It was time to face up to how we felt and either choose to be together for the rest of our lives or walk away and vow to never see each other again. 

While being together was going to be enormously difficult; to be apart was actually impossible for us.


When you find your soul mate, you have to hang on as tightly as you can.


I   love   you.

Quite the Artist

Astrid LOVES to create "art". She is always busy drawing, painting, gluing and cutting and her volume of output at both school and home is astounding.

I have to admit that her "art" has up till now had a vaguely alarming skeletal horror type look to it that makes you a little uneasy and requires some tact in appraising.

"Look mamma, it's a bunny"

"Arrrrrrg...I mean, that's really lovely sweetpea. I didn't know that rabbits had such long claws, fangs and...so many...um...teats?"
"That's fur mamma"
"Oh. Well she certainly has a lovely smile" (I hope I never meet her in a dark alley though).

"The princess is riding on a unicorn"

"Well now, isn't she beautiful? I don't think I've ever seen a princess quite like her. Such lovely hair" (Doesn't look in the least bit creepy or like an Apocalyptic Horseman).

Remiss

I've been a bit quiet lately and it was terribly remiss of me as I should have posted about the lovely gift I received from the incredibly sweet Lauren at Grubby and Green.

Thank you so much Lauren, receiving this "warm fuzzy" from you was a bright shiny moment in a pretty blah month.

This wonderful little Liberty print purse is finished so beautifully with lining and a hand embroidered label, the letter set is ingeniously made from recycled milk cartons and there's a hand-made card with a lovely message. The patience and attention to detail put into these things is inspiring and brings into pretty stark contrast the sloppy, lazy mess that makes up EVERYTHING else around me at the moment.

All spark has been sapped, SAPPED out of me by: the horrid weather, the never ending saga that is our dining room, the Historian having to travel away from home too much and that I seem to have become allergic to our poor old geriatric cats. I say "poor old" as I'm constantly escaping from their attentions at the moment and Nori has been ejected from the bedroom at night...but seriously, cats, it's far too hot to be canoodling up to me at the moment anyway (stuffy, drippy sinuses or no).

So, my aversion to the heat has already been documented here but that won't stop me having another whinge about it as we start Autumn (which is really just more Summer, seasons?...HA!). We have just had our hottest summer on record - YAY -  (average temp 32C) and there's not much relief in sight. We have had 26 consecutive days with an average of 34C, although, what the statistics don't tell you is the heat starts really early (our night-time average is over 20C) and then stays all day. There's no building slowly to the peak in the middle of the day and then cooling off as the sea breeze comes in. It's far too uncomfortable to be outside between 7am and 7pm, except of course you have to go out so there are a lot of grumpy, exhausted and slippery with sweat people out there.

It's deflating and that's just how I feel: like a wrinkly, sad balloon with only a few puffs of air left in it.

After months (not an exaggeration) of scraping and plastering and painting we have finally got some colour on the walls of the dining room and while the "end" is in sight, it seems at times like one of those never ending hallway scenarios...you know, where you run and run and the end keeps telescoping away from you.

In other never-ending hallway type news, I have 360 more squares to do on the blanket for our bed.

Yeah, probably not an issue as it won't be required for some long, long, very long time yet!

Picky

Do you know the adorable Charlie and Lola story where Lola refuses too eat a tomato? In fact she doesn't like lots of things, she is a "very picky eater". In the story Charlie convinces Lola to try new things by making it into a game, peas become "green drops from Greenland". 

Very sweet and bares absolutely no resemblance to anything that could happen in real life. 

I often think that Linus and Astrid could be the inspiration for Charlie and Lola. Linus is conciliatory and patient and Astrid is stubborn and prone to extreme flights of fancy; she would happily live in  "uʍop ǝpısdn" and Linus would be right there with her encouraging her and building a complicated machine to stop the blood rushing to their heads.

Astrid is a "very picky eater" and it drives me BONKERS at times. The idea that you could trick her into eating something by saying it is, "cloud fluff from the top of Mount Fuji" is beyond ludicrous.

Things are either "too crunchy" or  "too squashy", "too greeny" or "too how can I possibly be expected to eat THAT-y!". 

And how you mount a persuasive argument against someone who contends that something is "too medium-y" is beyond me!

Comedy Food

Oh look, Spaghetti Bolognaise, a staple weekly dish for many. Wait, but you're vegetarians, how can this be?. 

After my experiment at Christmas making vege Swedish "meat"balls, I made this recently with Quorn mince. We laughed and laughed with every bite, it was so preposterous. Looks and tastes so much like meat it's quite unnerving (or maybe it doesn't, it has been 18 years since I've eaten it).

As funny as it was though, I don't think I'll be doing it again. For me, vegetarian food isn't something inferior that secretly aspires to be animal meat and it felt weirdly wrong to be eating it.

Warm Fuzzies Rule

We have a friend who gets hate mail. I find this all kinds of cool, though of course it's not so pleasant for her. She's a token left-wing journalist writing an opinion column for a right-wing newspaper (you know, just to show the Murdoch press isn't biased). Unfortunately for her the readership of said newspaper has also fairly right-wing leanings, so just about anything that she writes spurns a tirade. Write a balanced article about our first female prime minister...KAPOW tirade, her personal struggles with breast feeding...BLAM tirade, the alarming sexualisation of small children by the media...KABLOOIE tirade.

She recently wrote a thoughtful article about forms of communication and their effects after getting a nasty note from a neighbour in her letter box. She merely suggested that had the neighbour first spoken with them personally about her grievances that the whole matter could have been dealt with rationally and civilly. Once pen was put to paper emotions were allowed to stew on both sides, notes were fired off in retaliation, the situation was blown out of all proportion and made all concerned feel really awful. This article unleashed the bile of many readers who saw fit to send venomous missives about how "stupid" she was. Of course you would write a mean note rather than have a friendly chat with your neighbour (yeah, I didn't say it was "quality" hate mail). Ironic really.

This got me thinking about "Warm Fuzzies" and "Cold Pricklies". We did these at a school camp to boost self esteem and encourage people to make new friends. A Warm Fuzzy is a nice little note about how you like someone's hair or some such, while a Cold Prickly is. . .you can work it out. Getting or sending a Warm Fuzzy makes you feel really, really good, while getting or sending a Cold Prickly makes you feel rather wretched.

We recently received a lovely Warm Fuzzy from our own neighbour who was moving out and wrote a little goodbye note thanking us for being good neighbours and praising our parenting! Yes, we were shocked too. Our children are the world's loudest children (a hypothesis that we have tested by going over seas and making scientific comparisons). We spend a lot of time shushing them. Obviously a glass-is-half-full-silver-lining type of woman, she said that she loved the sounds of our children "laughing and screaming" in the backyard and congratulated us for being exemplary parents and teaching our children to play.

This Warm Fuzzy made us feel wonderful, full of goodwill and pride in our children and ourselves. I crocheted a housewarming potholder for her new home and wrote an equally Fuzzy note back (so that she too could feel all warm and fluffy). Spreading the LOVE.

Then Astrid came home from her second day back at school with this Warm Fuzzy from her teacher.

"Resting nicely" (if you know Astrid you will find this as hilarious as we do). I'm so proud and Warm and Fuzzy. I'll be sending a potholder post-haste.

And I think I'll send our friend a Warm Fuzzy and tell her I like her hair.