Hello! I hope 2026 has got off to a good start. Thanks so much for your New Year wishes especially those if you who dared to step out of the shadows and bravely left a comment, it's lovely to meet you!
Without further ado, here's a roundup of what I've been wearing this week...
On Tuesday I met up with a lady who had some vintage clothing for sale, coming back with a sackful of pretty decent stuff. I wore my vintage Kate Beaver velvet dress with my maxi length waistcoat made from the Morris &co. Golden Lily curtains I bought from a charity shop last year.
After watching Nuremberg the night before ( if Russell Crowe doesn't win an Oscar for his portrayal of Hermann Göring there really is no justice in the world!) we decided that the evenings viewing needed to be a bit more light-hearted and settled on British, low-budget murder mystery, Medusa Deluxe, about a death at a hairdressing competition followed by The War Game, a BBC mockumentary about the threat of nuclear war, made in 1964 but considered so shocking that it wasn't screened until the 1980s (seriously disturbing, not one for the feint-hearted!)
On Tuesday (New Year's Eve) I gave this gorgeous secondhand Naked Generation maxi an outing to another National Trust property (post coming up very soon!) It was a bitterly cold but beautifully sunny morning, one of those blissful days where you feel glad to be alive.
New Year's Eve isn't our thing. We stayed in and watched gothic horror, The Cold Blue Eye and were in bed before midnight. We usually pop down to the pub on New Year's Day but instead spent the day pottering about..dropping off parcels, tackling some mending, tidying up and cracking on with my fiendishly difficult Cold War Steve jigsaw.
I had stuffed this trippy 1970s Courtelle maxi in my festival suitcase but decided it needed to be worn more often.
Film of the day was one from a favourite genre of mine, the neo-Western, Hold The Dark, with the fantastic Jeffrey Wright,
We awoke to snow this morning. It was rather precarious walking down to the baths at 7am but the weather did us a favour, normally, at the start of January , the pool is full of people who've made fitness resolutions (and generally disappear after a couple of weeks) but the snow must have put them off and it was wonderfully quiet. After a Spoons breakfast we had a look around the chazzas and I was delighted to find these stompy boots with the original manufacturer's tags still attached for £2.99.
I wore the
Naked Generation velvet dress my friend
Annie kindly alerted me to when she spotted it on Vinted for £12 along with a vintage Kashmiri waistcoat which used to belong to my friend Cheryl.
Reading List 2025
1. The 19th Wife - David Ebershoff
2. Manson: The Life & Times of Charles Manson - Jeff Guinn
3. Trust - Herman Diaz
4. The Trial - Rob Rinder
5. Milk Treading - Nick Smith
6. Snow Country - Sebastian Faulks
7. Dark Star: The Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia - Robert Greenfield
8. Look Who's Back - Timur Vermes
9. Girl, Woman, Other - Bernadine Evaristo
10. After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell
11. Noddy Holder: Who's Crazee Now? My Autobiography
12. The Various Flavours of Coffee - Anthony Capella
13. What Was Lost - Catherine O'Flynn
14. The Familiars - Stacey Halls
15. Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie
16. The Colossus of Maroussi - Henry Miller
17. When I Come Home Again - Caroline Scott
18. Medea - Rosie Hewlett
19. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
20. My Father's House - Joseph O'Connor
21. American Spy - Lauren Wilkinson
22. The Apparition Phase - Will Maclean
23. Old Filth - Jane Gardam
24. The Winter Soldier - Daniel Mason
25. The Long Song - Andrea Levy
26. The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
27. The Paris Library - Janet Skeslien Charles
28. The Swimmer - Joakim Zander
29. My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
30. The Story of a New Name - Elena Ferrante
31. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante
32. The Story of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
33. The Island of Sea Women - Lisa See
34. Kala - Colin Walsh
35. The Apple - Michael Faber
36. This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messud
37. The Seventh Son - Sebastian Faulks
38. The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Heather Morris
39. The Map of Love - Ahdaf Soueif
40. The Outlander - Gil Adamson
41. Flight Behaviour - Barbara Kingsolver
42. Helen of Troy - Margaret George
43. The Places In Between - Rory Stewart
44. The Bandit Queens - Parini Shroff
45. Ritual in Death/Missing in Death - JD Robb
46. The Night Ship - Jess Kidd
47. At the Edge of the Orchard - Tracy Chevalier
48. The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman
49. Big Jack - JD Robb
50. The Painter - Will Davenport
51. Francis Bacon in Your Blood - Michael Peppiatt
52. Death in Innocence - JD Robb
53. Ruby's Spoon - Anna Lawrence Pietroni
54. Burial Rites - Hannah Kent
55. The Sicilian Carousel - Lawrence Durrell
56. The Schoolhouse - Sophie Ward
57. The Last - Hanna Jameson
58. Cocaine Nights - JG Ballard
59. Black Dogs - Ian McEwan
60. Farewell Dinner for a Spy - Edward Wilson
61. Brotherless Night - V.V. Ganeshananathan
62. The Dance Tree - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
63. Needless Alley - Natalie Marlow
64. Politics on the Edge - Rory Stewart
65. Loyalty in Death - JD Robb
66. How To Kill Your Family - Bella Mackie
67. The Dark Circle - Linda Grant
68 The Drowned City - KJ Maitland
69. The Rapture - Claire McGlasson
70. Scarlet Town - Leonora Nattrass
71. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
72. Underground Railroad - Colston Whitehead
73. The Fraud - Zadie Smith
74. The New Wife - JP Delaney
75. This Is How It Begins - Joan Dempsey
76. The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak
77. The Dutch House - Ann Patchett
78. Evil Eye - Etaf Rum
79. The King's Mother - Anne Garthwaite
80. The Painter's Daughters - Emily Howes
81. Witchbourne - Rachel Grosvenor
82. Mrs Burke & Mrs Hare - Michelle Sloan
83. My Friends - Hisham Matar
84. The Shadow King - Maaza Mengiste
85. Asylum Road - Olivia Sudjic
86. The Quickening - Rhiannon Ward
87. What Lies Between Us - John Marrs
89. Mistress of the Art of Death - Ariana Franklin
90. Sanatorium - Sarah Pearse
91. The Twins of Auschwitz - Eva Mozes Kor
92. All For Nothing - Walter Kempowski
93. The Truth About Melody Browne - Lisa Jewell
94. Candlemoth - Roger Jon Ellory
95. Dear Fiona - Fiona Fullerton
96. Peel Me a Lotus - Charmian Clift
97. The Watchmaker of Dachau - Carly Schabowski
98. The Narrow Road to the Deep North - Richard Flanagan
99. The Two Roberts - Damian Barr
100. Damascus Station - David McCloskey
101. Prophet Song - Paul Lynch
102. The Confessions of Frannie Langton - Sara Collins
103. Femina - Janina Ramirez
2025 was a great year for reading and I managed to get through a total of 103 books. I finished every book I started so nothing dreadful. I've highlighted my favourites.
If I had to chose a book of the year I think it would be the 2019 Booker Prize winner Girl,Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - it was an absolute delight.
Must dash, Jon and I are off for New Year drinks and nibbles with friends and my hair needs washing. See you soon!
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That jigsaw looked fiendishly difficult, I've given up doing jigsaws as a certain cat takes delight in distributing the pieces everywhere. I dropped a bag of stuff, clothes, books, sheets off to the charity shop along with a Lloyd Loom type chair, unfortunately just too big for where it needed to be and nowhere else to put it. Very cold here in Derbyshire and the paths and roads were like skating rinks. Xx
ReplyDeleteVery nice naked generation dress snd i love your green festival dress too. It's freezing here so we are indoors in our jammies watching red eye and looking at holidays in Greece having revisited the advice you anf Jon sent me last year. It's probably going to be Corfu!
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ReplyDeleteThe green outfit is absolutely fantastic. The pattern of the fabric, the colors—it suits you so well.
Happy new Year!
thank you so much for your book list. I will definitely investigate your favoured ones.
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year to you
ReplyDeleteSiobhan x
Lovely post, dear Vix, not only because of some fabulous outfits (I do love that maxi vest and your green outfit, and that last velvet beauty from Vinted!. Gorgeous!) but also because of your book list (thanks for that, I'll have a look at some of them!). So interesting to read about the films you've been watching too!.
ReplyDeletebesos