I am pretty sure that for the whole of my life so far my poor mother has dreaded my tendency towards boredom. As I have grown older I have found productive ways to fill my time; little projects here and there, painting, generally making a mess, but, even now, in my early thirties, Mum still gets the occasional phone call: "it's my day off tomorrow, shall we go out somewhere nice?"
Friday saw us traipsing off to Oxford where I purchased a small set of seasonal candles from Culpeper and some poppy seed heads. I love seed heads and I love the Covered Market in Oxford where you can find all sorts of wonderful things. At Christmas the butcher hangs out whole deer carcasses and rabbits and pigs and I love it! I know that sounds terribly blood thirsty and carnivorous but it does feel so festive and Dickensian.
I also have home grown tomatoes ready for brushetta this evening and two vintage pillow cases purchased from a car boot on Sunday. I don't usually go in for second hand bed linen but these were so lovely and look and feel so old and of such good quality that I couldn't resist. The lady on the stall had a remarkable array of goodies; glass bottles of rose scented linen water, old perfume bottles and original oil paintings of small french villages. I go to enough car boots with Mum to know that these kinds of stalls are few and far between, it makes it worth wading through all that Primark and Matalan crap.