Tuesday, 30 January 2024

Stars on 45



Hola! Our garden might be a bewildering wilderness but it does make a great backdrop for outfit photos. 


On Saturday I messed around with some side plaits and wore a Kharibu block printed maxi skirt with a Monsoon cotton blouse for a day mostly spent reading and doing stuff around the house.


On Sunday I wore my hair in milkmaid braids and donned a Kharibu block printed maxi dress for  a trip  to the clearance charity shop and coffee round at my brother's. On Monday I wore my hair in side twists accompanied with a Dilli Grey midi dress and Dilli Grey quilted jacket (worn inside out) for an exciting coffee date. With who? Well, seeing as you asked......


On the 10:10, bound for Birmingham International back in December, a beautiful woman boarded the train carrying a travel bag. I bet she's not off to Tenerife, I whispered to Jon but, lo and behold, she ended up on the same flight and even more surprisingly, on the way home we were seated next to each other. She told me that she'd pointed me out to her friend and said, I bet that beautiful woman isn't going to Tenerife and we spent the four hour flight chatting. Upon landing and reunited with Jon, I couldn't stop talking about my new friend. Did you swap numbers? He asked, and of course, me being me, it hadn't occurred to ask. Fast forward ten days later and would you believe it, we bumped into each other in town. As soon as I left the airport I was kicking myself for not getting your number, she told me. On Monday we finally met up and spent almost three hours chatting. It's crazy to think that we've lived a couple of streets away from each other for almost a quarter of a century and never met before! 


On Tuesday (today!) it was the turn of a Naked Generation block printed midi dress and pigtails for swimming, 'Spoons and some charity shopping. 

And, talking of which, here's a few recent finds....


A job lot of vintage 1980s mohair hand knit jumpers with the original shop tags which had been donated by the owner of a Birmingham boutique which had closed down several decades ago. I'm saving these for the festivals.


Two pairs of earrings (£1.25 and £1.50 respectively). The green glass ones (they look more turquoise in this photo) are in my ears right now.



I was mad about Art Deco as a kid but these days lean towards the more fluid lines of Art Nouveau. I couldn't resist this 1930s English-made beehive plant pot I found lurking in the 50p bin. I've no idea where Etsy sellers get their daft prices from, there's an identical one listed on there for £60!  


This vintage ceramic pinch jug (£2) is the perfect match with our 1960s Secla, Portugal "owl" mugs  found in a charity shop a couple of years ago. 


I love a wash bag especially when it features the divine Hera print by Liberty and costs less than a £1!




Now taking pride of place in the utility room, these framed 19th Century advertisements were £2 from the clearance charity shop on Sunday. I studied Russian at school & was absolutely useless at it. Mr Köpke's assessment in my end of year report read Victoria does not understand this language. The only word I can recognise on those prints is Moscow


Fellow vinyl enthusiast & lifelong collector, Stephanie asked for a peek at our most recently acquired 45s. As I've mentioned before, we still own almost every record we've ever bought but, as loads of them are tucked away in one of the sheds, sometimes it's easier to repurchase a single rather than risk life and limb rummaging for an existing copy. Several of our local chazzas sell 3 singles for £1 so you can't really say no, can you? 


I was obsessed with Haysi Fantayzee back in the day, I've got their one and only album Battle Hymns for Children Singing (1983) somewhere and bumped into Kate Garner (now a photographer) in downtown Mumbai many years ago. Kid Creole & The Coconuts takes me back to our girls' school discos and The Housemartins remind me of my college years.




Booker T, Mobiles and Haircut One Hundred...more teenage disco memories. 


Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, choon!
 

I'm pretty sure we've got at least three other copies of Up Town Top Ranking buried in the sheds!


Silly Games, another duplicate (or possibly triplicate!) We both loved it even more after watching Steve McQueen's award winning anthology series Small Axe, where it played continually in the Lovers Rock episode. 



Four weeks into 2024 and I'm on to my 9th & 10th reads of this year. I'm had Jan Marsh's Pre-Raphaelite Women for ages but have only gazed upon the beautiful images so far. Like almost everyone I know, I loved the Inspector Montalbano series on BBC4 and the Andrea Camilleri books are true to the show, with intriguing plots and plenty of witty observations.


This afternoon I completed the fifth and final module of The History of Royal Fashion, a free course run by the University of Glasgow. 


Next week I've enrolled on one of the Open University's free courses, Janis Joplin and The Sexual Revolution. My love of learning makes me a philomath (I'm slightly better with Greek than I was with Russian).


Never mind meerkats, meet our beercat! I know we're biased but isn't William a handsome boy?


I'm off on a girls' day out tomorrow, stay tuned for some tales from the city very soon!

Sunday, 28 January 2024

Back To The Old House


Our destination on Friday was Packwood House, a forty minute drive from home. Already one of our favourite National Trust properties, when I was researching Jon's family tree during lockdown, we were excited to discover that his 9 x great-grandmother, Alicia Fetherston(1592 - 1645) was born there, her family being the original owners of Packwood.








Alicia's father, William, built Packwood in 1570. The Fetherstons were yeoman farmers with each subsequent generation expanding the estate until it eventually commanded an area of almost 690 acres. In 1714 upon the death of Thomas Fetherston, the house passed to his sister who was married to a man from Aldridge (the small town in the borough of Walsall where Jon's dad's family came from) and continued down the female line, the last of whom died in comparative poverty (hence the reason Jon's family didn't inherit it!)  








In 1904, Alfred Ash, a Birmingham businessman and confirmed city dweller had, somewhat impulsively, bought the 134 acre Packwood Estate in rural Warwickshire at auction for £4,500 and when asked why, he replied, I bought it because the boy wanted it.

Graham Baron Ash (1889 - 1980)

The boy was his beloved 16-year-old only son, Graham Baron Ash. Baron, as he preferred to be called, was said to be both reserved & courageous with a party-loving generosity. His work with the family firm, which he never much cared for, came to a halt at the outbreak of the First World War when he volunteered for the medical corps. Before joining up he travelled to, amongst other places, Burma, India and Egypt, where he recorded his encounters with the people he met. In his diary he writes of bribing a priest in China to order to acquire an ancient roof tile. This, it is said, was when a lifetime of haggling over antiques begun.


Determined never to go back into the family business, after leaving the army Baron dedicated the rest of his life to restoring Packwood, stripping back the lavish Victorian interior, considered at that time to be hopelessly outdated, and restoring the house to reflect its original Tudor heritage.


Years ahead of his time, Baron set about acquiring architectural salvage from demolished historical buildings and hunting down antique textiles, furniture and artifacts from around the world to furnish his dream country house. There were some modern comforts included, this was, after all, a young man's party pad and so en-suite bathrooms and a sprung dance floor were added to make 16th Century Packwood House the ultimate in Jazz Age party venues.


The windows, updated by the Victorian residents, were replaced by salvaged, period-perfect Tudor originals, some bought from as far afield as Belgium. Unfortunately the render, applied in Georgian times, when the original Tudor brickwork was considered to be old fashioned, could not be removed without damaging the exterior.



A note left in the 1930's visitors book described as A house to dream of, a garden to dream in.


Friday was glorious, with skies so blue that if it wasn't cold enough to require multiple layers and woollen gloves you'd be forgiven for thinking it was mid-Summer. 




After a stroll through the woods, wading through mud which reached our ankles (and questioning the wisdom of wearing a maxi dress), we arrived at Packwood's front door at 11.15am just in time for our pre-booked admission slot.




























Packwood is a textile lovers dream, layer upon layer of prints, patterns and textures which combine to create one of the cosiest and inviting interiors, although I did overhear a visitor saying how ugly she thought the tapestries were (I bet she was one of those people who paint their walls in that godawful "fashionable grey").


Back outside we wandered around the garden which, even in the depths of Winter, was still teaming with life, including masses and masses of beautiful snowdrops.





















In 1941 Baron gave Packwood to the National Trust who were initially not keen on acquiring it, considering it "a fake" because of the Tudorisation of the property but his offer of an additional £30,000 to assist with the upkeep helped change their minds. He also stipulated that fresh flowers from the garden must be supplied to the house every day (which is still evident). 


What a shame Lord Jon's ancestors ran out of money, Packwood could have been ours!