Grey days

 The months of January and February are grey times for me. When the Christmas decorations have been taken down and packed away for another year the rooms look rather spartan.  It is cold outside, but worst of all, grey. I find low light levels, day after day very depressing. 

In the light of the frightening rise in Covid cases I doubt there will be a local seed swap this spring so last night I placed my order online. My, what a price packets of seeds are when you have to buy them rather than store and swap! I think another full country lockdown will be announced any day soon, so I'm pleased that I had a good two inches lopped off my hair before Christmas. The fringe I can attack anytime with craft scissors.

I am hugging the fireside and doing lots of reading, dressed, in tune with the weather, in grey; a Gap blouse, a cashmere jumper and my cosiest wool and alpaca trousers from Nicole Farhi. The trousers are  big and baggy and gloriously comfortable. They are years old and the fabric is now dangerously thin in the bum - good job I'm not going anywhere! I regret that Farhi is no longer designing clothes but now works as a sculptress. I love everything I have that was designed by her.

A friend  sent me the Patchwork book by Claire Wilcox, an autobiography described through a series of short written pieces or more appropriately, 'patches', as her career is in the fashion department of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Several well-known people are mentioned in the book but not named, so in places it is a bit of a guessing game and it did make me feel that I was viewing her information rather cloudily through carefully wrapped tissue paper. 

I did a short study course at the V&A when I was a student in London and have visited many times in the years since to wander through familiar rooms or to see special exhibitions, including  the Frieda Kahlo which was co-curated by Claire Wilcox.

This month the book club in Yorkshire, now held on zoom, will be discussing 'Lark Rise to Candleford', the semi-autobiographical trilogy of country life in Oxfordshire in the 19th century written by Flora Thompson (1876-1947). I bought this illustrated copy for my mother, since when it has gravitated, together with other family books, back to me. The red and white spotted cover copies the pattern of the large cotton handkerchiefs that could be tied at the neck or used to wrap up a chunk of bread and cheese for lunch out in the fields.

I enjoyed the book although I did think that the life she described was over sentimentalised or over-sanitised in places. She writes of the menfolk of the hamlet never getting drunk a biography states that her father was an alcoholic. She also states how healthy all the children were, despite them often going hungry, yet I seem to recall that when young men were called up for the First World War a great many of them were found to be severely malnourished.

It is going to be interesting to hear what the other book group members think of it. They live in a rural part of Yorkshire and may well consider that some aspects of Flora's life still continue in much the same way today.

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The illustrations comprise old photos, reproductions of period paintings and pressed flowers and they cheered me up - the promise of spring to come!