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…
Or you can buy it here…
Fresh off the printer…
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