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…
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