Category: Handwork

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The Joy of Eccentric Nightwear

It is a fact fairly widely acknowledged, that those who wear quite sober clothes (whether for professional reasons or otherwise) often make an exception for novelty socks. Others, even more covertly, wear brightly patterned underwear (generally a secret unless you get hit by a bus). I myself go in for lively nightwear.

“What could be more fun than a prim floor-length nightie covered in rocket-ships, say, or jelly-beans?” So I wrote back in 2018, and I have not had cause to revise my opinion, barring a minor alteration to ankle-length. It did, however, take some time for my psyche to recover from the epic battle which was the Stripy Nightie of 2018, but time is a great healer (and Covid a great eraser of memory) and here we are.

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A Holiday Assortment

being a selection of crafts, games, incident and etymology which have enlivened the holiday season for me and may well perform the same service for you.

We don’t usually have a Christmas tree in this household. I don’t like plastic and I don’t much like felling trees either. We did try a living tree in a pot, but keeping it alive proved more than we were capable of. Thus the usual absence of tree. This year, however, as I was hanging out the washing on Christmas Eve, I accidentally broke a branch off the rosemary which grows beneath the washing line. So this year, we had a tree, albeit not a very large one.

A spiky green branch of rosemary in bud rises from a yellow plant pot on a white shelf. Around it are a small corked ceramic jar, a sheathed paperknife, and a small metal model of a camel.

It did manage to bloom at one point – you can see the buds in the photo above if you look carefully – but alas, it didn’t put down roots in the soil provided, and it did not long survive the Twelve Days of Christmas.

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How to Live Without TV (a Past Post)

This post was originally published over five years ago, but it echoes a book I am currently reading (or possibly the book echoes the post – they were published in the same year). In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport writes, “you’re more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide. For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.”
Oof.
I feel Past Me provided some good advice here for Present Me on how to not get sucked into the small screen. So, bearing in mind that we’re not just talking about TV here, how do you live without TV?

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.
black and white drawing of a TV dumped in a rubbish bin


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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