“Go back to your books, to your armchair. Plant your trees, watch them grow. If more people valued home above gold, this world would be a merrier place.”

— Thorin Oakenshield

Latest Posts


  • A Garden by Moonlight

    Right, here is this month’s instalment from Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer, which I was going to post tomorrow, since one of the ‘entries’ is for June 16. However, tomorrow is my Saturday Snapshots day, so today we will… Continue reading

  • Love, Housework and Happy Endings

    My 1996 Penguin edition of The RoseRevived, with its lovely cover paintedby Pamela Kay There are those who dismiss Katie Fforde because she is a writer of romantic fiction, but all I can say is, they don’t know what they’re… Continue reading

  • Lonely Londoners

    On a grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all, but some strange… Continue reading

  • A House-Husband and a Working Woman

    When my brother and I were very young, my mother used to turn the dining room lino into a skating rink, or the frozen Arctic wastes, and we would slide across the floor… it was years later that I realised… Continue reading

  • A Right Royal Knit-Wit (Saturday Snapshot)

    And now for something completely different for this week’s Saturday Snapshot… a Not The Jubilee Knitted Queen! I spotted the pattern in Fiona Goble’s Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (published last year by Ivy Press) and decided she would be… Continue reading