My Pocket

mist and snow

Britain has been showing a very characteristic face of autumn these last couple of weeks with grey hazy skies and misty valleys. I love the muted colours and peaceful air that this weather brings and it's so green still.

I like winter in England so I suppose I am not your typical Swede. I love snow with its slow, magical floating down to earth on a dark afternoon, the excitement of suddenly seeing the first snowfall from the window, the soft silence that envelops everything and muffling even the sound of cars, the crisp, clean and bright white of a morning walk or making a snow lantern as the light fades and it's time to go in and thaw your mittens. I love all that and I go home every christmas to get that feeling as well as going skiing.

However, where I grew up this lasts far from forever as it's too mild by the sea for the whiteness to remain. A lot of the time you trudge through streets of grey mush, pass hard and dirty piles of snow and get your shoes soaked by the slush. That's why I prefer it here, where it's mild, drier and greener. The ivy on the trees even gives you a feeling of still having green foliage in the woods.

We do have a sprinkling every now and then however, and I'll be one of the first to catch snowflakes on my tongue. D is the one to run around rolling snowmen though, since after all, being Swedish I can't show myself to get that excited over something as ordinary as snow. :)

Most of the time it looks like this however.

And I like that just as much.

evening light comes early

room inside

This is the last of the posts on our place, from the outside. I told you already that we live on the first floor, up the stairs, and that we share the cottage with other people. There are four flats all in all in the house you see, and within one flat (unless there is a couple like us living there) there are two staff members of the community living in one room each and sharing a kitchen and a bathroom. So basically we know all our neighbours very well, working with them over at the School or the Centre, which is lucky as the walls and floors are very thin! :o)

There are entrances to the bottom floor flats on the other side of the house as seen below and our porch opens up to the field and woods. Must admit we don't do much at all to keep the flower beds tidy... It's one of my absolute favourite places of our home, that porch step when the door is open. Half inside, half outside, listening to the birds and lapping up the sunshine.

There is a small building, the annex, behind our cottage (to the right in the picture above) and it has two rooms for mature students at the School.

That's our common laundry room behind the little door to the right in the photo. The cottage is surrounded by lawn, apple trees, plum trees, raspberry bushes and of course the woods running the length of the garden to the left.

It's a lovely little wood, with oceans of bluebells covering the floor in the spring, cherry blossom petals drifting out across the field like snow early summer, copper beeches turning dark wine red in the autumn and dusky green ivy covering the trunks of the trees in the winter.

Well, that's the end of the corners of my home to show. Hope you enjoyed it - I did! I'll be away at college this weekend, so I won't see you for a couple of days. Wishing you well. May the small things in life make you happy :)

room to cook

Last of the rooms, the kitchen. My least favourite room unfortunately. When we first viewed this flat I gasped as we looked into the kitchen with its 70s wooden slat cupboard doors, brown sink and irreparably grotty tiled work surfaces. I need inspiration and inviting surfaces to do my cooking. D was the one to gasp when we got to the wood panelled bathroom sauna - he loves his showers. Since then the kitchen has been refitted a bit, not looking much better, but at least it's clean. I don't feel like showing more pictures of the place though, the window is the best part, a breathing hole in that tiny cramped space. It's a lovely feeling standing right by the open window while cooking, looking down at what is going on in the little open patio below.

We put up shelves a while ago, which made a big difference to how I felt about being in there. Having everything accessible and presentable in old fashioned glass jars just gives me good vibes of quality and simplicity. I think it might partly be due to being Swedish, feeling fussy, I've still not got used to the British standards in accomodation - drafty, poor maintainance and more often than I'm accustomed to: *cough* bad taste. The house in itself is lovely however and there are many old houses here that are wellmade with little flourishes to please the eye and with lasting quality. I love the metal handles on the windows for instance, the small swirl (you can see it better in the bathroom photo).

To finish off I wanted to show you my new lunch box! Isn't it great? I like thermos flasks, I used to bring my lunch in one every morning at uni. I like the autumn leaves on this one and it makes it obvious to people when I leave it in the school fridge that it is mine, no mistake.

room for sleeping

On the other side of the stairs is our bedroom. We both slept on floor level beds before we met, have done so together for years now and we still love it, especially being under the window. I have the sun lighting up the room in the morning to wake me up and at night I might watch the stars for a while.

Actually a lot of things are floor level at our place. We used to sit on the floor to eat our meals or on a cushion in front of the window for a long time before we got a dining table this spring. We've both done yoga for years (though I haven't for quite a while now) so we both have our yoga mats, blankets and props lying around.

I've only recently 'grown up' and felt a desire to have proper tables and chairs and D wanted some arm chairs. Since I was young I've wanted things simple, spartan and tidy. I didn't need reminding to clean my room - I remember age 8 straightening the tassels on my rug, it being the only untidy part left in the place. That's a bit embarrassing... Took me years to relax my standards and for signs to begin to appear in my living spaces that someone was actually living there, using the facilities. :o) As a teenager I removed all furniture except the mattress and a stereo on the window sill to have a room with perfect emptiness. I loved it. White walls, large window and wooden floors. I went through most of high school homework lying flat on my tummy with my books strewn around me.

Nowadays, well it's a different story as you can see from the pictures. I still like having a tidy-up regularly and I like my living area light and spacious, but the cleaning is on the backburner unless someone is coming over and I take silly pride in being a bit cluttered and disorganised, not having been able to do that for so long. Having belongings doesn't freak me out as much though I still have times when I ruthlessly go through inventories in my mind as to what is actually essential and what needs to go to lighten the load. I'll think of Thoreau's quote of men "creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty" and shudder. I'm still very much inspired by gypsies, nomads and the Japanese - having few, simple and functional belongings and very few pieces of furniture, spending much time on rugs or mats on the floor.

I'm so glad D has the same sense of simplicity and quirky sense of interior decorating as I do. I began this stone collection blue-tacked to the wall above the light switch and he has added to it.

And, he doesn't mind my friends hanging around.

room for washing

This be our bathroom. :o) I love the view out the open window in the mornings sitting in the bath tub. Am I the only odd girl sitting down for her shower? Surely there must be others too. I do it because I like it - it's warmer and less splashy. And because I can't stand shower curtains near me, don't like 'em.

The entire bathroom was covered in dark stain wood panelling when we moved in. Not much we could do about that so we just painted the walls white to keep it from looking like one big sauna. It turned out quite nicely, I think. I didn't do any cleaning or tidying for this photo session by the way. Oh, ok so I did do a bit, but not much. The strange blue tea pot on the cabinet is my neti pot, a vessel for pouring salt water through your nostrils in the morning, a yoga body cleansing thing. It's lovely, but I won't try to convince you.

The photo next to the sink is of my summer washing place on the island. It's just around the corner from my little cabin, on a shelf in the smooth rocks going into the water. I can stand there and keep my schampoo and conditioner bottles in little nooks above water while I wash in the water that's up above my knees. The water is clear and not very salty at all. When I need to rinse my hair I just dive in further out and swim underwater for a while. When I'm done I sit on a towel on the warm rock until I dry in the sunshine. My favourite shower ever.

room for living

This week I thought I'd show you around our place. Starting in the living room/study/dining room/craft room, the first of our two rooms. We live on the first floor in a typical British cottage that was built sometime in the beginning of the previous century. It has been split into two levels, the door to the downstairs living areas is bricked up which creates two flats.

This room is our living room where we have our meals, where I do my acupuncture studying and where I have my craft corner. I have a perfectly well suited, spacious desk to do my studying at (bottom right corner in photo) but I quickly made myself comfortable at the dining table as it has the most wonderful view.

Note the piles of college handouts on the floor, I just swipe the table top when it's time to eat. :) I love watching and listening to everything that goes on outside. There's a yearling deer venturing out of the woods several times per day, the wild rabbits are always out hopping around, the doves swoop over the trees and yesterday there were two young boys galloping their horses up the field.

The leaves hanging in the window is a mobile of sorts that I make every autumn. I hang a piece of thread with a glass bead at the bottom to weigh it down. Then I take leaves I've found that have turned vibrant colours and I wrap the thread around the stem to hold the leaf hanging. It's very easy to do and doesn't require any tying but it's a bit difficult to describe. I'll give it a try anyway - you hold the leaf upside down, stem down, let the thread wrap from behind the leaf to the front (basically just crossing the stem once) and then let the leaf drop to hanging down, which should twist the thread into place, holding the leaf in the same place. Err... or you just do it anyway it works! I like having the leaves in the window where they feel like they're still on the tree and the light shines through them.

sunflowers

Hello you! Life is sweet for the moment, but fast. Wrapping things up at work, sewing the last of the 25 curtains (phew!), getting the library into reasonably fit shape before I go (after a year I still haven't got used to the idea that I'm a, well part-time, librarian. Never saw that one coming), fitting in as much homework as I can (lying in bed in the evening with laptop on my tummy reading about asthma...), writing on those assignments and enjoying good walks (the more I have to do the more I need to take time for that). I like being busy and having less time to think and worry about stuff, just get on with it. I just need something to work towards, I'm definitely a deadline person.

I've been experimenting a bit with cropping my photos, I'll show you more tomorrow. I'm still loving my camera, but I got into a bit of a rut lately and had to come up with a different angle or project. I wanted to get my landscape pictures to come out differently, it seemed none of them were done justice by the camera so here's my first attempt:

the vegetable garden

Hello! I am here, just been a bit busy. How are you? Good I hope. We've had sunshine and I've been so happy for it. I'm off for a walk in it after this. I've just been wanting to show you the vegetable garden that is right outside the school, have a look at a view from above here if you like. It's all organic and the main part is kept by the two gardeners, but the students have their own plots too, learning about gardening in a special compulsory class called Care for the Earth. They can grow whatever they like, be it vegetables, flowers, grass or all strawberries, as long as they take care of it. Oh, or tadpoles, because one of the plots is all pond. The garden has two greenhouses, an orchard (you've seen the apples already), a strawberry patch, raspberry shrubs and rows and rows of vegetables like lettuce, beetroot, broccoli, broad beans, parsnips and leeks.

I like the rainbow chard.

And the spinach.

The greenhouses have sweetcorn, peppermint, sweet basil

and runnerbeans

cucumbers (they're so sweet! So hard to eat shop-bought ones after that)

tomatoes

of all shapes and sizes

and chillies. Though I never have any of those. Do you?

I hope you are well and enjoying yourself, maybe having some summer fruit?

swimming : studying

The pool is looking more tempting now that the temperature is up and the sun is out. This weekend is a college weekend though, so swimming will have to wait. I'll be back on Monday! Have a great couple of days!