BrocanteHome

A Gathering of Flowers

Alison — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:14:22 +0000

Evidence

Bought the flowers. Told him they were reduced.

Bins.

Envelope. Phone number on the back, no name. Why??? No, WHO??

*

You, Full of Paper

or, a gathering of flowers

a pencil stub with your own teeth marks in it.

a woman outside the chemist. Carrier bag, and a face like she’d just remembered something. That’s all. The woman I’ve been writing for, for all these years.

The apologetic little laugh, we all know the one. Oh, I’m a terrible hoarder. Said fast, before anybody else can say it for you. I’ve done it at the school gate and the hairdresser’s and at funerals: a small pre-emptive strike against myself, and it has cost me a fraction of a second and about forty years.

NOTE TO SELF: Maybe you should have a clear-out? There’s a leaflet in that suitcase for a wine bar that shut before Finley was born and a birthday card from somebody whose handwriting still lifts your shoulders half an inch toward your ears. I’m not defending everything. We’re women of discernment, not a channel five documentary. Women. Of. Discernment.

Hoarding says I might need all of it.

Gathering says this one’s alive.

The trouble is they look identical from the doorway.

Doctor, 11.20, the horrible one. The one who turned away from me.

*

florilegium. From flos, flower, and legere, to gather. A gathering of flowers.

That’s what they called it, the monks and scholars, when they went through a stack of books and lifted out only the sentences that seemed lit from inside. Discernment, remember? This line and not that one. This odd little thought. This description of sorrow. This instruction for living that looked, on the page, like an invitation?

The world was the meadow. You wandered about in it with your skirts scooped up and took what you couldn’t bear to leave.

locus communis, which came later. The shared place. The common place. Recipes. Prayers. The price of petrol. Jokes. Remedies involving honey and something weird. Excellent insults. Whatever was worth keeping.

Erasmus told his students to keep one and organise it under headings. Locke published a whole indexing method in 1706. Vowels in columns. A diagram. The mind as a filing cabinet that had merely not been taken in hand. Very beautiful. Useless to anyone who has ever written the scrap of a thought on a crumpled business card and shoved it into the abyss that is her handbag.

Auden kept one and called it A Certain World and said it was as close to an autobiography as he was willing to get.

A life told sideways, in other people’s sentences.

Wrong.

No, not for women it isn’t.

Here’s the bit about the florilegium that j’adore: two women can read the same book and pick entirely different posy’s from within it. One notices every mention of obedience, the other every whisper of rebellion. One gathers consolation, the other appetite. So a florilegium was never really a record of the books. It was a portrait of the woman holding the basket, painted in other people’s words, and she, poor thing, probably didn’t know she was even sitting for it.

Sei Shōnagon, a thousand years ago, at court, making lists. Things that make the heart beat faster. Things that have lost their power. Hateful things, which is the long one, and the best.

She wasn’t building a legacy. She was noticing fast, with a wicked eye, getting it down before it went.

Hateful things, 2026

The word journey. Though I keep sticking it hither and thither. Anybody who says we must catch up properly, meaning never. Liars, all of them. Being told I’m brave when what I am is tired. Group photographs. Any photographs. Nah,count me out. The silence after the truth. Bunting. Used to love it, now meh. Men who explain my own life to me. Popping in. Sit yourself down here, Poppet (after Mr.Lamb, the dentist, circa 1986). The phrase at my age, particularly out of my own mouth.

Things that have lost their power

New Year. Being liked by everyone. The opinion of women I might once have been intimidated by. Hangovers, in that I no longer get away with them. A certain kind of compliment. Misogyny thrust at me in accusation, when what is being called out, is on examination, my god-given right to stand up for myself..

Said I’d read it. Have not read it. Will nod.

At art school there was a woman on my corridor who kept everything anybody gave her in a shoebox under her desk, including bus tickets, and a poem I had scribbled on a slip of paper. We all thought she was

I was going to write odd. She wasn’t odd. She was the only one of us keeping a record.

You won’t get two clear hours in a library. You will steal eleven minutes in a car park, a paperback in your bag, and a thought that will vanish unless you catch it by the ankle, so write it down, write it on the back of the parking ticket if that’s what there is, because our heads are too busy to wait for the good notebook and the thought will slip away before we get to it anyway, and because the good notebook is a trap, the good notebook has been loitering in your comfort drawer for three years now, because it’s too good for you and you’re saving it for the woman you’ll be when you deserve it, and she isn’t coming. I keep telling you. She isn’t coming. Or maybe she’s been and gone, couldn’t stay because she didn’t fit in.

Write it on the parking ticket. Write it now. Write she isn’t coming. Write, how silly I am. What tomfoolery there is in imagining she is more important than I.

She isn’t coming.

Women have always done this. They do in secret. Disguised as wife, mother, daughter. The recipe book with a remedy for croup in it, and a poem copied out underneath, and a line about somebody’s sister’s wedding that isn’t quite kind, malicious even, but she had to get it out of her head, because it was starting to taste like SPITE. Household accounts with a sentence in the margin that has nothing to do with budgeting. Dreadful word, budgeting. BITE. Cuttings folded into drawers. ACHE. A phrase copied into the back of a cookery book because it finally gave words to something that had only ever been an ache under the ribs, ad it didn’t do to write it on the family calendar. YEARN. That flower pressed between pages that said all too much. Don’t ask.

Nobody called it thinking. It went about in an apron so nobody would notice it had sovereignty of its own. It was thinking, though. Put fragments together and you start to see patterns, and a woman who has noticed a pattern is halfway to a theory, whether or not anybody ever lets her near a lectern.

Half past seven in September and the whole street the colour of a struck match.

The sky. That colour! That other woman on Instagram.

the part where I tell you to get the woman out of the room

She sits just behind your right shoulder while you write. Wittering. Depending on the day she’s your mum, your sister-in-law, that biatch from school, an editor who’s never heard of you, or whoever will go through your things when you’re dead.

Because she’s there, you write lovely when you mean I wanted to vomit.

You write finding things a bit tricky lately when what’s going on is closer to rage.

Get her out. (nobody needs judgemental mouthy disappointed)

Then spill your WHOLE head. Warts and snakes et al. Be reckless. Write the ugly version, the one with the terrible terrible terrible line about your marriage or your child or your own body in it, in blunt words, no arranging, and then write the next sentence, because the flinching sentence is nearly always camouflaging the true one. Swear. abandon grammar and capitalletters and correct spacing and Oxfordcommas. Stick em-dashes everywhere and confuse the bejesus out of those who cannot conflagulate their appearance with something not written by AI. Repeat yourself. repeat yourself. add stars willy-nilly * And lie. Do lie won’t you? Make yourself laugh. Play a game with future you who may well have forgotten.

Create an entire alphabet of hand-drawn emojis.

Stop halfway if you’ve lost the thread. Let is stop. There’s no rule anywhere that says

Ate it standing behind the fridge door so no-oe would see me.

Wanted her to fail a bit. Not badly. Just a bit. Wanted it to hurt.

God. It’s me. I’m the biatch.

Marilyn Monroe. (Woman) in. bits.

When her notebooks and loose papers came out as Fragments in 2010 there was no polish in them at all. Lines broke off. Words crossed through twice and replaced with worse words. A list of things to do sitting directly under something that reads like the bottom of a very bad night. Poems that were never going to be finished. Hotel stationery. Handwriting that sometimes just gives up.

What’s extraordinary isn’t the glamour. It’s the total absence of performance. The most photographed woman of the century wrote privately like somebody with no audience whatsoever, and so you can watch her thinking, changing her mind, being frightened, being funny about it a minute later.

This is what we take away from her a beautiful women in permanent mask- it isn’t about making a work of art. It’s about forgetting you are wearing it.

You’re collating. curating. collecting and working out what matters to YOU, so the second you start shaping it for a reader you’ve swapped your mind for hers and you won’t notice you’ve done it.

Chose the nicer word? Put the first word back. Be more Marilyn.

My feet were dirty. Shame on me.

on the question of who else can read it

Now. If you don’t take anything else away from my ramblings here, I want you to take this section with you: because everything I’ve just told you assumes a thing some women can’t assume.

That nobody will read it. That you can guarantee your right to a private self. Even a secret self. (And there is a difference).

Some of you can put a journal or commonplace book on the kitchen table face up and go out for four hours and come back and it will be exactly where you left it, unopened, because the person you live with regards your interior as none of their business, which is correct of them, and rarer than it ought to be.

And some of you can’t. How I hate that for you. How furious it makes me.

Some of you have had it read. Someone has helped themselves to your interior self, in the same way they might help themselves to coins from your purse. Maybe once, years ago, with an explanation afterwards about how he was worried. Maybe it was framed as a joke. Maybe a line you wrote at two in the morning about wanting to get on a train came back at you in an argument eighteen months later, word for word, so you know she’d learned it, letter by bloody letter.

You’ll have stopped writing after that. I would. We all would. And it felt like giving up a hobby. But it wasn’t. It was an abandonment. Evacuation.

Asked what I was writing. Said shopping.

Told him it wasn’t his dad, it was always his mum. She was the very bad thing that lived in his house.

*

A thing I’ve heard said out loud, by grown women, more than once

“I don’t write anything down I wouldn’t want found”.

Ouch. Read that again and notice what it’s describing. Help yourself to a bit of my RAGE, then let this be an acknowledgment of all you cannot say and do whatever you need to do to protect the meadow that is your mind.

One. The dull cover wins. A notebook that says nothing on the front, kept among the recipe books, in the middle of the bookcase, is invisible. Interest is what gets a thing opened. Never write Private on anything. Private is a key to the lock.

Two. Initials. Code. Cipher. Say what you need to say and guard it anyway you see fit.

Three. Two notebooks. One dreadfully dull and left where it’s findable, full of shopping and appointments and what might to the un-seeing eye, be regarded as female trivia. And one that isn’t. It’s NOT deceit. Don’t tell yourself that it is. It’s the same instinct that made women sew things into hems.

Four. If it’s digital, give the file a name so boring the eye slides right off it. Not diary. Not thoughts. Something like tax 2019. Password on it. (Make it OBSCURE).

Five. Paper can be destroyed, which is one of its advantages over the phone. A page can be read once and burned and still have done its whole job. The writing was the point. The keeping is extra. It’s not all of it. Don’t think of it as all of it.

Six. There is no six. It’s PRIVATE. SECRET.

Seven. Some of it you should keep at your sister’s. Some of you should not allow a partner to insist on full access to your phone. It is not a point of marital principle, it is YOUR RIGHT to protect access to the those parts of yourself that need an outlet beyond your head.

Three days in and neither of us has mentioned it. It’s either a skill or wound. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Somebody behind me in the queue: she’s got a lovely house and not one single thing in it she chose

Once wrote a poem about stitching prawns into his curtains. No regrets.

And now the harder thing, one woman to another. LISTEN.

If you’re reading that list and finding it useful, if you got to the bit about hems and felt something settle because yes, that’s it, that’s exactly what I do, then the diary isn’t the only thing worth thinking about.

A woman who can’t keep six inches of private thought in her own house is being told something about her life, and she’s usually the last person allowed to say it, and the commonplace is where she says it anyway, in a sentence she crosses out immediately or pastes a slip of washi over. Not because she is frightened of her own mind, but because she know there is potential for it to be weaponised and used against her.

I’m not telling you what to do with that. It isn’t mine to tell. I’m saying the page gets there before you do, and its not mysticism, it’s just what happens when you stop censoring yourself. And if it worries you, it should, but not for the reasons worry is mithering you about.

(Sovereignty is an enormous word for something so little. Six inches. A drawer. A file called tax 2019. The right to think a thing in a tangle of text without anybody standing behind your right shoulder asking what you mean by it).

Learn to, dare to, say “mind your own business”.

This is YOURS. So guard it the way you’d guard money. The way you guard your babies.

Woman to a child, patiently, three times: I know. I know. I know.

…and the whole time he was talking I was thinking about the

Kept for reasons

A conker from 2011, now the colour and spite of a knuckle. A key to nothing. The stub of a ticket to a life I walked out of. A hospital wristband. Three pebbles, two of them identical. A crumpled newspaper image of man with “living so large it hurts” stitched onto his bomber jacket. The memory of my Mum’s raised eyebrow long before I understood.

Most scraps reveal nothing. Some scraps are just scraps you see? And we are allowed to keep them because sometimes scraps have roots in memory we cannot yet access.

A page needs bewildering rubbish in it. So does a life.

£4.65. His blue eyes. Finn’s brown ones.

But then.

You notice you’ve copied six separate things about women alone in rooms. You notice you keep saving abandoned houses, unrepentant old women, sponge cakes, storage cupboards, the ache of needing to leave. The key. The swallow. The dressing gown. The lamp left on in a window in case he comes back.

The same ideas circling round again and again, in different frocks.

(Useless.)

That’s the moment a commonplace book is really for, and you can’t make it happen, you can only keep gathering until it does. Two scraps you picked up months apart, from places that have nothing to do with each other, turn out to be about the same thing. You thought you were collecting willy-nilly. But that was never true. You’ve been walking the same field for years, picking the same flowers, and they were yours all along, you just hadn’t looked inside the basket.

Please know then, repetition isn’t failure, or proof of a dull mind (Trust me, your mind is not dull). It’s a language, and you’re learning to read it slowly, the way you once learned to tell your dad’s footstep on the stairs from anybody else’s.

I used to say we’ll see and it always meant no.

Looked her up. Looked her up again. Looked at the husband. Understood too much.

the second one, not the first one, the second one is the

(no idea. none at all. it pickled my flesh)

*

We’re all collectors now aren’t we? The internet made magpies of us and gave us nowhere to build the nest.

We can save a hundred pictures before breakfast and open forty-seven tabs and subscribe to every clever woman going and tuck whole articles into drawers we never open again. We’ve got very good at pinning and saving and keeping and often absolutely rubbish at knowing what we’ve kept. And even worse at remembering to go back and look at it like so many museum exhibits.

Then the ache, around ten at night. What was any of that for?

More folders aren’t the answer. More folders are a way of postponing your life with snazzy dividers.

Go and touch the thing you found. Give it a page, a sentence, a filthy, terrible question. Why did this stop me. Why today. Who would I not show this to. What’s it got to do with the other thing, the one about the woman and the church.

Everything in moderation?

Yes, but whose moderation. And who’s doing the washing up while we’re being moderate?

Do’t know about you, but I’m done with polite?

Know this too: a line becomes yours not because you pretend you wrote it but because you answer it. Yes, but. This reminds me of. I don’t believe this any more. A florilegium isn’t a shrine you kneel in front of. It’s a kitchen table, and other people’s sentences are round it, and you’re allowed to interrupt and argue and detest and shriek and weep and cover it ALL in doodles and walk right away from it and dissect and destroy and believe and abandon and gulp like gravy straight from the jug..

Assimilation, not accumulation. The small inward movement by which a thing becomes yours. Not owned exactly. More like eaten?

Woke at 3.40. Again. Wondered what would happen if you put a whole egg in the microwave. Said it out loud apparently. Made him laugh.

We talk about commonplacing as if it needs indexes and categories and colour-coded tabs, until the notebook starts to look like a filing cabinet. Because Locke told us to? Probably. Ignore him and he might go away.

So think of the page as a meadow instead of a ledger…

Bellis perennis. Prunella vulgaris. Lotus corniculatus. Rhinanthus minor.

Some of what grows in it will be grand and philosophical. Much of it will be tiny and bizarre and no use to anybody. A sentence from Woolf beside the name of a Little Green paint colour, (because your head said they are the same thing, the way the number eight and the month of October are the same thing). A scrap of folklore on the same page as something profound your son once muttered in fury at the sensory overload that is the supermarket. A café menu. An old woman’s tweed coat. A sudden conviction, written in capitals, that your life needs fairy-lights. Because of course.

It doesn’t have to be beautiful. Oftentimes, beauty gets in the way, because isn’t it true that the most interesting rooms have terrible taste? But beauty isn’t the point. And contrived beauty is often worse, don’t you know?

So stick the ugly fluorescent sticky note in. Use the pen that works, or the propelling pencil. It doesn’t have to be pink. Allow a page to be a scream. Allow it to be one sentence and a drawing of a tulip. Allow I don’t know what this means because there, right there, is where meaning turns her face to the sun…

not free exactly. unbothered?

Find out what happened to that mug.

A blank page wants invention out of you, on demand, from nowhere, and that’s why it’s scary. A gathered page only wants an answer. You don’t have to sit down and announce that today you’ll have an original thought. You can start with whatever’s already snagged a corner of your brainn. Copy the quote. Stick the picture in. Put something obscure right next to it and watch opposing ideas strike up a conversation.

Latest obsession: hauntedhouses. Who am I kidding? Latest. Always.

That’s plenty. For a woman with too many fascinations and too many half-read books and too many special interests devoured and abandoned, it may be the only way in there is.

Gather first. Understand later.

Meanwhile let real life live in the margins. In the note you make after a bewildering conversation with the woman who told the man in WHSmiths you were harassing her, because she asked YOU what magazines you were going to buy and where you live and whether you have a husband. In the book you underline far too much. In the recipe that led you sideways into your lost mum’s arms. (She lives there now. You can keep her safe for always). The mad list you made waiting for the toast to pop: Greek bedroom tiles, tangerines, words for anger, places to go alone. run. away.

NOTE: None of this has to be proof you’re clever enough, and this here be you recording your creative genius for prosperity. Nor is it about self-awareness. No, this isn’t what this is at all. Instead it is a way of becoming present to your own intelligence without sticking it self-consciously on display, so the trick is to allow yourself the gift that is observation as if someone at a distance———

I was here. I saw that. This touched me. I’m not sweeping every thought I have up with the vegetable peelings.

Was rude to the woman in the post office and she was only doing her job. But eye contact, you know?

Brocante has always been about rescue. The chipped plate at the bottom of the box I had to crawl under a pasting table to reach, a scrumple of faded ribbon, the women whose lives got written off as ordinary. You lift the thing up and hold it up to the light, inspect its nooks and crannies.

A florilegium does that to thinking. Rummages through the whole enormous jumble sale of what people have said and made and written, and pulls out the bits your own life can’t do without. And then there they are, in an arrangement nobody else could have made, because nobody else went round that particular meadow, yesterday or last year, with your gold-flecked eyes.

going back through it, years later, you may find her, the woman you’d assumed had gone. But she’s written in the repeated obsessions. the teeny-weeny handwriting. the bits where you objected, loudly, in purple biro. the words hoarded like gold. everything you were drawn to before you could wander round your mind and label its whys and wherefores.

Clues. For years. Were we too blind to see, or were we just not looking because society all too often regards female self-examination as cringeworthy evidence of the trivia of our minds?

A woman outside the chemist. Carrier bag, and a face like she’d just remembered something. That’s all. Again. Her.

so

Don’t buy seventeen matching notebooks. Or design an elaborate index. Not wearing yourself out on a system before a single flower’s been picked matters.

One scrap. One sentence that won’t leave you alone, one screenshot, one small object that survived because some part of you thought, this mattered enough to keep.

Put it on a page. Where you found it, and the date. Underneath, write why did I save this, and then a few lines back, nothing clever, nothing you’d publish.

Tomorrow, another. The day after, more

Do it now. Make a page today. Let yourself feel self-conscious, shy even. Don’t improve your life on it. Don’t try to make it worthy. Three things from the past week that stayed with you for reasons you don’t want to explain.

A line. An image. A fury. A small domestic fact. A tiny sketch of a daffodil. Your very own meadow.

Carry it all home in the scoop of your skirts. Make a posy. Record a life.

florilegium

Be more Marilyn. Consider it precious.

The October Domestic Almanac #printable

Alison — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:12:38 +0000

The third of my monthly Domestic Almanacs has arrived with a treacly biscuit concealed about its person and goose-pimples because in the early hours of the morning, the dressing gown hanging on the back of the bedroom door is looking a bit too human… (Spook!!)

October, my Darlings.

The month when the house begins to acquire an evening life of its own. Curtains close. Something simmers. We rediscover wool, moan about draughts and become disproportionately pleased to find that there is something good in the biscuit tin.

And so here is another paper world for this lovely, peculiar ordinary life of ours.

A richly illustrated A4 collection of seasonal reading, domestic experiments, recipes, literary pleasures and gloriously old-fashioned things to do with scissors.

Print it. Scribble on it. Cut it up. Tuck pieces into your commonplace book. Make something on an afternoon when the rain has cancelled your ambitions. Leave it open beside you and allow one small idea to wander into the day.

There is quite a lot to wander into.

So, in October’s Edition?

October’s particular obsession is the Houseprint.

The impression a life leaves upon a room.

The books that gather beside your chair. The objects you use until their edges fray. The thing you keep moving because it has never quite found its place. The beautiful possession still waiting for the occasion you imagined when you bought it.

I’ve been thinking about what our houses give away about us, and what happens when we begin arranging them for the lives we actually lead.

There are pages for mapping one room, noticing its handwriting and bringing an unused treasure back into circulation.

There is even a dinner party that never happened. Because some of us have entire cupboards devoted to the social lives of women we have yet to become. (I see you…)

October offers the usual domestic fieldwork, too: a house walk, a repair ledger and experiments in making the ordinary workings of home more useful, more pleasurable and more distinctly ours.

Nothing requires a new personality. You may keep the one you have. (It takes years to get this weird doesn’t it?)

And in the kitchen…

There is a Mushroom, Butter Bean & Thyme Pot, Ginger, Black Pepper & Treacle Biscuits, and Apple & Rosemary Jelly.

Food for the earlier evenings. Something substantial, something sweet, something with a little bite for cosy Autumn morning elevenses

There are kitchen pages to keep, observations to gather and an October supper to plan for a little company, or splendidly alone.

Being alone does not disqualify an evening from having pudding.

The Reading Room has its own October shelf, a reading journal, bookplates, labels and marginalia. There are pages for considering what your body needs this month, and places to collect the sentences, scraps and small discoveries that might otherwise disappear between one chilly morning and the next.

Then there are the scissors…

The Playground has become a rather splendid place to lose an afternoon.

There are, tickets, tokens and little promises. There are 1930s-inspired Halloween paper dolls, three Halloween eye- mask designs ( a glorious cat, a haunted house and a moth at the window) and a floral cover for the fireside matchbox.

There are pockets for keeping October’s small remains: a receipt, a photograph, a leaf, a sentence written down before it escaped.

And the Quiet Colouring Room offers three domestic still lifes: The October Table, The Mending Basket and The Evening Tray.

Small, absorbing occupations for hands that would otherwise reach for a screen.

The House After Dark

September had its changing-of-the-season appendix. October has The House After Dark.

An entire little gathering devoted to the rooms we inhabit when the windows turn dark.

There is an evening inventory, a record of the house’s peculiar habits, Halloween memories and an illustrated October mood page full of ghost stories, ginger biscuits, velvet, old keys and something simmering.

In The House’s Night Shift, the rooms conduct their private business while we sleep. The stairs rehearse their one alarming noise. An old suitcase declines to comment. The cat takes the best chair without consulting anyone.

The October Still Room gathers small comforts to prepare and use. The Unfinished List considers what still deserves attention before the clocks change. The Beautiful Form looks at the arrangements that make ordinary tasks easier to live with.

And The October Agreement offers a few terms for the longer nights:

“I will allow a little mystery, and investigate the draught.”

A reasonable household policy, I feel.

Inside you’ll find…

At the Threshold ★ October at a Glance ★ The October Cabinet ★ The October Index ★ October Observations ★ Houseprint ★ What a Room Gives Away ★ Map One Room ★ The House’s Handwriting ★ The Dinner Party That Never Happened ★ Houseprint Commonplace ★ The October Kitchen ★ From the October Kitchen ★ Seasonal Recipes ★ Domestic Fieldwork ★ The House Walk ★ The Repair Ledger ★ Body Weather ★ The October Body Forecast ★ What I Need This Month ★ The Reading Room ★ The October Bookshelf ★ The Reading Journal ★ Labels & Bookplates ★ October Marginalia ★ The Houseprint Test ★ One Tray, Three Days ★ The Unused Treasure ★ Pockets & Field Notes ★ The Playground ★ Tickets, Tokens & Promises ★ Halloween Paper Dolls & Masks ★ The Quiet Colouring Room ★ The October Ledger ★ The October Commonplace ★ Notes from October ★

And in The House After Dark…

When the Curtains Close ★ The Evening Inventory ★ The House Has Its Habits ★ An October Supper After Dark ★ October: The House After Dark ★ Halloween Memories ★ The Unfinished List ★ The Beautiful Form ★ The House’s Night Shift ★ The October Still Room ★ October’s Small Remains ★ The October Agreement ★ Fireside Matchbox Papers ★ Until November ★

It is a little stranger this month…

There is more mischief in October. More shadow. More evidence that a domestic life can be practical, thoughtful and faintly unhinged all at once.

There are things to read slowly, things to make badly before you make them better, and things whose usefulness may only become apparent when you find yourself enjoying an afternoon you had otherwise written off.

That is part of what I want these Almanacs to offer: somewhere for your attention to go that leaves you with something afterwards.

A supper. A repaired thing. A page of memories. A paper theatre on the table.

Perhaps merely the discovery that the good afternoon was there all along, waiting for you to sit down.

Do remember that we are pick-and-mix women. Take what delights you, use what helps and leave the rest. Nobody is coming round to inspect your completed worksheets. Even the paper dolls have other engagements.

I do hope you enjoy it.

The October Domestic Almanac is the third in the collection. My paid subscribers will find it on Substack.

Or choose the individual edition from the shop for $15.00

Fresh off the printer. A little October, ready to inhabit.

Subscribers, Pop Over To Substack To Download Your Free Copy

Download It Now

Premium Post: A Christmas Commonplace

Alison — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:01:17 +0000

One hundred ideas for a beautifully whimsical, meaningful Christmas. The first of ten weekly instalments, carrying us through to the week before Christmas…

Somewhere, a shop has already put up a Christmas tree. Fully lit and terribly. tasteful. Probably beside something stupidly unromantic, like a rack of wellies, because shops tend to group the practical with the entirely whimsical and call it Winter, don’t they? And there it is again: that hiccupy tummy lurch. Because apparently Christmas has already got going, and here we all are, still in recovery from an over-heated, lethargic Summer…

But we are beginning here regardless, right here in the middle of October, with ten weeks in which to gather a Christmas we actually want to live inside. I want us to take our time, to have a little rummage through our expectations before we go rummaging through the decorations. To ask a few awkward questions while there is still time to do something about the answers…

Because by now we know how to make Christmas happen don’t we? We can conjure a showstopper of a Christmas Dinner, remember the person everyone else forgets, find an extra chair and produce a present for somebody who assured us they weren’t doing presents this year. Because we have got skills. Some of them are practically circus skills. And somewhere among the juggling, our own pleasure has acquired the status of an optional extra.

So this is where I want to begin: with the woman about to make the first of about three hundred lists…

Take a pencil and a sheet of paper slightly too lovely for the purpose. Write down what usually happens between now and the first week of January. The food, the cards, the visits, the things you buy because you have always bought them. The carol service you adore. The journey you resent. The pudding nobody eats but everybody insists would be missed.
Keep going until you reach the things you feel faintly disloyal writing down. And at the end of it discover you are holding something both honest and true…
Put a small cross beside whatever you would be glad to give to the birds. A star beside whatever gives you that lovely inward settling: yes, this, this is what I meant. Decide nothing immediately. Let the marks sit there. You may discover that the festive neighbourhood brunch has a cross and the ten minutes alone with the tree has a star. You might discover that you would be delighted to abandon the turkey (I did and have never looked back, no regrets, non, Je ne regrette rien ). Trust me, the turkey will get over it.

Then go and look at October.

The rosehips, the dusty bloom on a sloe, the beech leaves moving towards copper. A seed head with the delicate bones of something once extravagant. There is so much to borrow before we buy anything: a colour, a shape, the way a branch leans. Pick up a fallen treasure where collecting is permitted, or bring home a sketch created on a park bench instead instead. Put it on the table and look at it over breakfast.

I want some of that richness in our Christmas this year? Tarnished silver. A dark ribbon. Flowers with a little history in them. A room that looks as though somebody interesting has been living there. And yes, a proper dose of glamour: the lipstick, the earrings, the pomegrantes eaten slowly with a pin, the way your Mum used to. There is pleasure in making a small thing sumptuous isn’t there? And I do believe the slow pleasure there is in enjoying a pomegraate slowly, wrapped in blankets with something cosy on the TV really does whisper of all the pleasures of the festive season.

There is also the budget. The actual budget, with January still attached to it. We can speak plainly about that without making Christmas sound apologetic. Choose where you want abundance. The table, perhaps. Or the books. Or one glorious thing to wear. Let the choices have edges; otherwise every shop window gets a vote.

Books can keep us company while we choose. Laurie Lee’s boys go carol-singing through the snow in Cider with Rosie. Dylan Thomas gives us uncles and aunts, presents and streets and the exuberant muddle of a child’s Christmas. I like the particularity of them: the things remembered because they happened to somebody, in a place, among people who could be annoying as well as adored (ahem).

That is the Christmas worth dreaming up. Including the person who does the work. Borrow all the country-house splendour you fancy, but have a look at the staffing arrangements before you commit yourself to six courses and a houseful of people who cannot apparently identify a dishwasher.

And do leave room for what is tender won’t you? We need more tenderness in this life of ours.

The name you no longer write on an envelope. The grown child sitting at another table. The family arrangement that has changed. You may want to write about it. You may want to keep a familiar recipe, or hear somebody’s voice in an old letter. You may want to leave it alone for today. All of those choices belong here.

So our first hundred ideas are an invitation to begin gathering. Some are practical; some are deliciously, stupidly extra. There are traditions to investigate, clothes to try on, things to make and questions to ask. You can circle three. You can scribble a better idea beside mine. You can read the whole lot in bed and do absolutely nothing until November, letting Christmas stew for a while…

For now, choose one small pleasure and give it a place in the week. Use something you already own, or buy something wonderful if the money is comfortably there. Hang the dress where you can see it. Put the book beside your chair. Tie the ribbon around the notebook.

Let there be something in the preparations that you are looking forward to touching.

Twenty-five ideas, free for everyone…

1. Bring home a fallen conker and a seed head and set them side by side on the windowsill. Two small specimens of October. Look at them over breakfast and see what colours they suggest for December.

2. Choose the smell that means Christmas to you: oranges and cloves, a particular pudding, the M&S pot pourri your Mum always tipped into a bowl on Christmas Eve. Find a simple, affordable way to have it in your home. Memory has expensive tastes sometimes, but it can be persuaded by an orange.

3. Say no to one tradition. Practise the sentence aloud, sitting by yourself in the car if necessary. Then tell whoever needs to know, kindly and in good time. You are allowed to change an arrangement you have spent twenty years sustaining. I promise the sky won’t fall in, even if their lips are tripping them.

4. Choose a book to keep beside your chair through the coming weeks. Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles (aff) offers dated winter entries, food, observations and seasonal pleasures and it is HEAVEN. Read an entry at a time, with something cosy within reach.

5. Choose what you might wear on Christmas Day and try it on now. In Icelandic folklore, the Yule Cat threatens those who have received no new clothes for Christmas. A fearsome argument for a new pair of socks I think?

6. Trash it or treasure it: the tangled lights. Untangle them and inspect them. Keep a sound set; replace one with damaged wiring or other faults. We can tolerate a knot. We need rather less tolerance for a frayed electrical cord. And we’ve gott no time at all for a row of popped bulbs.

7. Polish Christmas Eve suppers traditionally include an extra place for an unexpected guest. Consider laying one at yours. Think about who might genuinely welcome an invitation, and ask them while there is still time for them to say yes.

8. Count the glasses and plates. Decide which mismatched survivors you love, and which pieces are too damaged to use. A heart-stopping table can accommodate several different decades acquired at car boot sales and a bonbon dish that once belonged to your Nana.

9. Put panforte on the list if it appeals: Siena’s dense confection of nuts, candied fruit, honey and spices. Check the keeping instructions before buying it early. Tuck it away somewhere cool and dry, with its whereabouts recorded in your Christmas Commonplace. Forgotten treasure is less useful when nobody can find it.

10. Find a short poem that catches something of the season: a lit window, a journey home, bare trees. Note it down in your Christmas Commonplace. Read it aloud once a week. Let familiarity gather slowly; you needn’t turn pleasure into a memorising exercise.

11. Light a single candle and sit quietly for half an hour. Keep enough light to move safely. No notebook required, no revelation expected. You may simply sit there and enjoy having ceased to arrange things.

12. Decide what you can comfortably spend on gifts, including postage and wrapping. Write the figure down and discuss it with anyone sharing the spending. January is coming too, with its usual cheerful collection of bills. Don’t pretend she doesn’t exist.

13. Open the wrapping drawer. Smooth the good sheets, fold the ribbons and turn small scraps into tags. Make a little stock of what is already there before buying another roll with precisely the same glittery stars on it.

14. Press dry, clean leaves between sheets of absorbent scrap paper, beneath a heavy book. (Check them as they dry and replace damp paper. Use a book you can spare from active service; nobody wants leaf stains halfway through a beloved novel).

15. St Nicholas’s feast falls on 6 December. In Germany, children commonly leave boots out on the evening of the 5th for treats the next morning; Dutch children set out shoes during the Sinterklaas season, with the main gift evening on 5 December. Make your own small shoe-sized surprise for someone.

16. Check your best coat. Sort the loose button, the pocket lining, the cleaning it actually needs. There is something satisfying about meeting winter in a coat that knows it is appreciated.

17. Ring someone you haven’t spoken to for a while and ask what Christmas looks like for them these days. Don’t pry, simply let the answer be different from the one you remember. An invitation can follow…

18. Fashion a reading and festive planning corner for the season: a chair and a lamp, with three unread Christmassy books stacked on the arm. Sit in it for ten minutes tonight, and read the first page of each.

19. Begin the joy that is the Christmas Dinner table with something you already own: a linen cloth, mismatched spoons, an old gravy boat. Keep a cracked vessel for decoration rather than hot food. Let the objects with a little history tell you where to go next.

20. Make dried orange slices using a reliable method, such as the National Trust’s low-oven instructions. Allow several hours, check them as they dry, and let them cool before threading. Hang them in a window and enjoy the light passing through the flesh.

21. In Denmark, dancing around the Christmas tree is a familiar part of the celebrations. Borrow the pleasure on a smaller scale: choose a song, clear a little floor space and have a kitchen dance. Anyone who wishes to remain seated may provide the chorus.

22. Keep a Christmas complaints book. Record the overlong journey on that scary motorway, the dish that took forever, the tradition whose principal contribution was washing-up. In January, read it with a pencil. Some grievances will have earned a change of arrangements for next year.

23. Write yourself a letter to open on 6 January 2027. Describe the house as it is now, what you hope for and what is troubling you. Seal it, put it somewhere sensible and note the location in your diary. Future you has enough to do without a treasure hunt.

24. Book the things that sell out before November ends: the carol service, the pantomime tickets, the supermarket delivery slot, the hairdresser. Write them in the diary now and cross them off as they’re done.

25. Choose the room, or corner of a room, where most of your Christmas pleasure will happen. Give that space your attention first. Consider the light. You need somewhere to enjoy what you are preparing. Layer it with festive love before the first decoration goes up.

And Seventy-Five More, For My Subscribers Over On Substack…

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Housekeeper’s Diary

Alison — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:04:14 +0000

State of current play: I am eating a pistachio Magnum in Hanna’s house, dog-sitting Mabel and cat-sitting the best cat in the whole wide world, Dorothy, along with two other grey fluffy cats whose names, to this day, I still don’t know. Suffice to say, one has yellow eyes and one has blue, so Mabel, Dorothy, Yellow and Blue it is.

Consider me a pig in muck.

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Endless bathrooms
Sky TV (special mention to the mean Housewives of London!)
Internet that does not rely on my phone
Complete silence beyond the tippety-tap of my fingers on the keyboard
Pistachio Magnums (my latest obsession)
Knickers spinning merrily around in an actual washing machine
And Marks & Spencer on speed dial because I. STILL. Cannot. Get. Enough. Cottage. Cheese.

Actually, no. Consider me the opposite of a pig in muck.

Let’s go with a cow in a palace.

Anyways. What else?

Well now, the house saga rumbles on, so no news there sadly, and at this stage we are getting perilously close to simply accepting that this is our lot in life: occasional dalliances in Airbnbs, followed by a return to the building site, and punctuated by bursts of dancing like nobody’s watching whenever we are called upon to house and girl and cat and dog sit at Hanna’s.

It’s a life of sorts.

“Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it.”
Edna O’Brien

Gratitude matters and all that jazz, mais oui?

And really, perhaps things mustn’t get too good, or else we might begin to get ideas above our station and start imagining that houses are routinely supposed to contain bathrooms and kitchens and functioning plumbing, and honestly who are we to dream such outrageous dreams?

Gosh. Whinge, whinge, whinge. I do apologise.

Cheery stuff, then. We’d all rather have that, I think.

Well now, I am reading a wonderful book, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien by her son Carlo Gébler.

It is tragic and terrible and painful and beautiful and true.

It is about ageing and dying and writing and mothering and the strange shrinking and enlarging of a life as it moves towards its end. It contains an intimacy I think perhaps only a son could put into words, that particular mixture of irritation and tenderness, observation and grief, all tangled up together.

And I am completely wrapped up in his writing now, and in Edna herself, who was so beloved by my own mum.

Which makes the reading of it feel oddly doubled somehow.

I am reading about one woman growing old through the eyes of her son while remembering my mum loving that woman’s books when she herself was still alive, and there is something almost unbearably tender in that little bridge between them.

Is loving a book that is essentially heartbreaking a cheerful thing?

Have I already failed the assignment I have set myself here? Is loving it enough? Is being moved enough? Is the peculiar joy of recognising something true, even when the truth itself hurts, cheerful in its own fashion?

I don’t know really. Maybe cheerful is too small a word for some pleasures. Though perhaps being entirely absorbed in something beautiful counts?

Ok, more cheerful things, you say? Heck. This is tougher than I imagined.

Yellow cat has just wobbled rather nonchalantly through the back door and deposited a dead mouse at my bare feet, so there’s that? A tiny furry review of my house-sitting performance!

And Ben, after a terribly trying day, has just told me he is on his way back and would like to order Ping Pong Tots in compensation for said terrible day. And I want you to know that this is a very cheerful thing indeed. Cos I’m not entirely sure what Ping Pong Tots actually are, but in my head they are blissful little balls of potato goo sent from heaven to reward people who have spent too long without reliable kitchens. Even if there is irony in the fact that we actually have a kitchen at our disposal tonight, and Deliveroo will still be bringing us our evening meal

because,

in the course of typing this diary, and in the tiny stretch of time since I wrote that there was no news on the house front…

WE HAVE ONLY GONE AND SOLD THE BLOODY THING.

Dear me. There’s a whole bucketful of cheer right there isn’t it??? We have a deal! And it is not a terrible deal. And it is Friday. And Ben is on his way back. And there will be Ping Pong Tots sprinkled liberally in hope and celebration. And for tonight, at least, the house saga has stopped being a saga and become a sentence with an ending.

Not the ending, obviously.

There will be paperwork and solicitors and boxes and decisions and undoubtedly some fresh nonsense waiting in the wings.

But still.

Sold!

We’ve only gone and sold it! (again)

And what more could we ask for, really, beyond the good health and happiness of our children, who one by one seem to be going through the most awful of times, with jobs and joy and relationships all seemingly threatened by the state of a nation that even the superhero who seems to be Andy Burnham might struggle to straighten out?

It is hard, watching your kids become adults in a world that feels increasingly expensive, precarious and mean. You want to sweep ahead of them with a broom. Clear the road and have a word with capitalism. Or ring somebody in charge and demand that life be at least a little bit kind and reasonable.

But you can’t.

All you can really do is stand nearby with tea, money if you’ve got it, unsolicited advice you promise yourself you will not give and then absolutely give anyway, and the fierce conviction that they will somehow find their way through.

So perhaps that is all the cheer I need right now?

Just a few blessed things moving in the right direction. A book I can’t put down. A washing machine full of clean knickers. Cat and mouse shenanigans

Dorothy somewhere nearby being perfect. Ben on his way. Potato goo incoming.

And a house that, after all this time, finally, almost, belongs to somebody else.

The October Book of Days

Alison — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:56:39 +0000

October has always seemed to me less like a month and more like a house with the lamps already lit. You step into it carrying September’s last flowers and find the rooms altered: darker at the edges, richer in colour, faintly scented with apples, leaf mould, candle wax and something substantial simmering on the stove. The blankets are stacked. The log basket is waiting. We begin shutting doors we barely noticed standing open all summer…

And so the October edition of The BrocanteHome Book of Days has arrived.

It contains thirty-one new household traditions: one for every day of the month, alongside a calendar of real October observances, tiny accompanying instructions, a month-end Household Record, and a sheet of cut-out pocket ephemera for those of us who remain convinced that life is improved by mysterious labels tucked into coat pockets.

Do remember, this is not a planner won’t you?

Like September’s edition, The Book of Days ask you to maximise October, optimise autumn or emerge from the month with reorganised cupboards…

It is a book of occasions, and we all LOVE an occasion don’t we (as long as we don’t have to pop a party frock on, am I right?)

The case for private ceremony

Most of adult life takes place without witnesses doesn’t it?

Nobody applauds when we make the first bowl of soup (rude!), bring the eiderdown out of its summer exile or notice that the last flower in the garden is still valiantly carrying on. There’s no award for retrieving the hot-water bottle, making proper gravy or finally admitting that the mending may not, without a significant pushing and shoving, get done.

And yet these small acts are the substance of a life. And it pays the to bless it with ceremony, because ceremony says: this happened, and I was here for it.

It takes an ordinary gesture and pops a small frame around it. It distinguishes one evening from the three hundred other evenings when we lit the fairy-lights, made tea and wondered what on earth we had come into the kitchen for.

But ceremony need not be solemn. Indeed, some of the best rituals are magnificently daft. Solemnity has enjoyed quite enough attention. A woman ought occasionally to declare a household amnesty, conduct a census of resident ghosts or take supper so seriously that gravy becomes compulsory.

Silliness is not the opposite of seriousness. Often it is how we bear seriousness without allowing it to flatten us completely…

Inside October

October begins with The First Bowl of Soup and The Gathering of the Conkers: two modest declarations that the season has changed and we are prepared to meet it with spoons and tweedy dresses with lovely pockets.

There is The Feast of the Baked Apple, The Inventory of Warm Things and The First Proper Gravy. There is a day for giving thunder its full theatrical due, another for finding the reddest leaf, and one for becoming The Woman with Mud on Her Shoes.

We air the eiderdown, preserve what matters and sit at the kitchen table and listen for what an ordinary October morning remembers.

Midmonth brings The Great Autumn Appetite, The Day of the Unbeautiful Vegetable, The Festival of Old Wives’ Tales and The Mending Basket Amnesty, because wisdom, appetite and the decision not to patch a worn out tea-towel all deserve their own feast days.

Later, as October grows a little weirder, we arrive at The Day of Necessary Mischief, The Ceremony of the Last Flower, The Household Ghost Census and The Feast of Toasted Things.

We recover the lost hour. We honour the crow. We allow the house to become a story. We open The Cabinet of Small Mysteries and consider The Woman at the Window.

And on the thirty-first, we gather for The Supper of Beautiful Shadows: not a plastic carnival of shrieking pumpkins, but an intimate observance of darkness, memory, mystery and the lovely unknowable quality of our own homes after the lamps are lowered.

October is a little spooky like that. It begins with soup and ends with the unseen.

How to use the Book of Days

You may observe every day, but you certainly shouldn’t feel like you must: this book is an invitation, not a summons from the domestic courts.

Read the day’s page over breakfast. Choose the teeniest version of the ritual. Adapt it to the house, body, budget and attention span you actually possess. If the tradition asks for a walk and you cannot walk, sit at the window. If it suggests cooking and you are wiped out, buy the thing ready-made and put it on the good plate. If you miss the date altogether, perform it later under the ancient BrocanteHome doctrine of nobody being in charge of you, cos you m’lady are the boss of you.

Some days ask only five minutes.

Find one leaf. Light a candle. Write down one line of poetry. Toast a handful of nuts. Ask an older woman how she knows when a cake is done…

Other days may expand to fill an evening: a supper, a story, an old household skill relearned and recorded…

Use the book alone, with your family, or with the friend who understands that “Come over for the annual consultation of the weather glass” is a perfectly reasonable invitation. Write in the margins. Spill tea on it. Cut up the ephemera sheet. Ignore the pages that do not speak to you. Return to the ones that do.

A well-used Book of Days should gradually become evidence: of what you noticed, what you enjoyed and the woman you were during one particular October.

So be sure to scribble your life in the margins, won’t you?

Also observed…

Alongside our invented household festivals, this edition includes a separate calendar of curious real-world observances from Britain, America and beyond..

There is World Porridge Day, Apple Day, World Menopause Day, National Black Cat Day, World Pasta Day, Dictionary Day and Mole Day: the scientific celebration, not a compulsory garden visitor (hell forbid him rocking up and turning the grass over!)

Each comes with a tiny instruction:

Look up one beautiful word.

Eat an apple with blissfully blue cheese.

Speak about the change plainly.

Admire a small domestic panther. (As you do).

Apply unreasonable Parmesan.

These additional observances create a second route through the month: factual, eclectic and occasionally totally off their respective chops. Humanity has officially commemorated almost everything, which is both bonkers and rather touching, I think?

At the end of the month

The October Household Record offers a quiet place to gather what the month delivered, what warmed the house, what you want to remember and what you are ready to let go of…

It asks what the darker evenings taught you, leaves room for one teeny brave thing to carry forward, and closes with the words:

October was here, and I paid attention.

And that, really, is the purpose of the entire Book of Days?

Not to make life more elaborate, but to prevent it becoming invisible.

And definitely not to become a better woman by November…

Simply to inhabit October while it is here.

The October edition

The BrocanteHome Book of Days: October is an A4 printable collection containing:

Thirty-one original daily household traditions
An October-at-a-glance page
The Also Observed in October calendar
Two curious observances and a tiny action for every date
The October Household Record
A cut-out Pocket Ephemera sheet

It is designed to be printed, kept in a folder or read directly from your screen. You can follow it faithfully, dip into it whenever the day needs rescuing, or simply read it as a tiny piece of domestic literature…

The October edition is available here for £5.00

Come in. Light the lamps. Let the house tell its stories.

Subscribers can download it below.

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Subscription maths (And a WONDERFUL offer!)

The Book of Days is also included FREE to all my subscribers (in fact if you are a subscriber you will find it at the end of this here post). But if you aren’t a subscriber yet, then do pop over and read about why this is the loveliest and most valuable of all memberships here on Substack (it’s honestly truly special), then come back and choose your subscription: BrocanteHome membership is usually $29 a month, $99 a year, or $399 for lifetime access.

But for a short while, in celebration of Autumn, I’m offering my Founders one-time Lifetime Membership at $299!

Ten months at the monthly rate would cost you $290. So for $9 more, you can step out of monthly payments altogether and have BrocanteHome for as long as it exists. Eleven months would be $319. Three annual subscriptions would be $297, which means that if you can picture yourself still here three years from now, the sums have already made themselves. After that, every new almanac, Book of Days, Gazette, correspondence packet, Atelier gathering and curious BrocanteHome invention is simply yours.

It’s also £100 less than the usual lifetime price!

I know $299 is a meaningful sum, and I don’t expect it to be the right choice for everyone. Monthly and annual membership stay exactly where they are. But if BrocanteHome already feels like somewhere you intend to stay, this is the most generous price I can offer, and the last membership payment you’ll ever make.

BrocanteHome has been my life for 21 years ago and I’m truly not going anywhere, so please know your investment in BrocanteHome and indeed in yourself, will pay off in spades over the years to come…

So click the button below and choose the Founders option, and access to everything here in Substack, and all the courses, downloads and community in my lovely Atelier are yours for the taking, for always.

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