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Domesticity

It is a quarter past five on Saturday morning on this last dark morning before the clocks go back. The house is airing out, because I am the only one who is awake. Not so! Says a mrrow as a cat leaps up on the settee where I’m writing this with my feet up, a quilt over my lap and a hot pad on my horribly sore joints. He is followed by his mother, the sleek and beautiful Catling, and little Lucyfurr who joined the family last year, so now I have cats snuggling against me and enjoying the silence alongside me.


The table is laid for breakfast, because that’s one of my ‘things.’ I collected oddments of old china that have meaning for me. Poole Pottery, partly because I live in Poole, partly because the names are of places I know and love. Kimmeridge, where we went fossil hunting and Amy, inevitably, found a body. Cranborne, where my husband’s grandmother was born. The rose patterned china that was my grandmother’s special china and the Twintone, ice blue and green that my mother loved her set of. You knew it was a special occasion when that came out, and so I smile when I lay the table for breakfast with it. By doing it early, I can con myself that I am coming in to a delicious breakfast at an elegant bed and breakfast place. Today, because I have been defrosting the freezer ready to stock up on my favourite Christmas things, there are some vanilla pastries, part baked from Marks and Spencers, so there’s next to no effort required. I've used a set of Poole Pottery china called 'springtime' because I feel like the blue flowers on cream stoneware today.


And why, I hope I hear you ask, am I thinking about this? Because, you see, I am researching another Amy. Swansmere was rebuilt in the Georgian era so of course she ought to have a Regency Ball. I know that the Prince Regent came to Weymouth to take the waters. I know that they welcomed him with open arms, to the extent of hiding a band in a bathing machine so that as he went into the water they began to play ‘God save the King.’ History does not record what he thought of that, but I can’t help wondering if ‘bloody hell, not again’ might have come into it!


Swansmere is based on a mixture of Kingston Maurward and Kingston Lacy and I know Kingston Maurward clad the front of the house in stone to try to keep up with the neighbours. Doesn’t that sound familiar? The plan is that they have a Regency weekend over a Bank Holiday which means there’s an extra day off. There are weekend classes for the month before so people can learn to sew the projects Jane Austen would have sewn. There’ll be food of the era, there’ll be etiquette and dance classes and then, during the weekend itself, there’ll be a story unfolding, played out by costumed interpreters or re-enactors as I’ve always known them because living history is a passion of mine. And, obviously, I have to find a way to get my young hero Luke to re-enact ‘that’ scene from the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Yes, I know it doesn’t appear in the book, but I can’t resist it.


So as the days get shorter and greyer and wetter and windier I am taking refuge in history and my imagination and reading biographies and my favourite fiction and treasuring the days when I can get out for walks. And on the days when I can’t then I’m planning my Christmas gift to myself… and I’ll tell you more about that on Wednesday. Right now, I’m off to Swansmere. The sun is shining, there is tea and cake waiting after a lovely Sunday lunch. Amy has looked at the project she’s planning to teach, seen how fussy it is and mutinied quietly and decided to offer a simpler option as well. So till we meet again, may I encourage you to mutiny and take a simpler option and then have a little time for yourself?


And here's today's picture. In the background is the Studland peninsula and the Purbeck Hills and that's a rowing boat from the sea rowing club. And, of course, it's called 'smuggler' because the Georgian period is also the Napoleonic Wars and our smugglers may well also have been spies.



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