Thursday 22 June 2017

Decorating Trends - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I love home decorating. 
I love poring over Country Style and House and Garden magazines.
I can lose myself in Pinterest for days, searching for white kitchens, rustic dining tables and farmhouse gardens. 
A quirky little home wares store will suck me in like a vacuum cleaner sucking up a fluff bunny.

And for the last two and half years, I have wallowed in design and decorating ideas because we have been working towards building our own new home.

I love, love, love home decorating and decor daydreaming.

But there are a few trends that I just don't understand. Some that I abhor. I know it's simply a matter of taste but the decorating recesses of my mind are full to overflowing and I have to speak out! 

These are my personal ickies:

The butler’s pantry where the sink, the dishwasher and the oven all live. 
What on earth is the kitchen for??? 
Who wants to spend hours cooking and cleaning up in a dark and pokey little space when you have a lovely large, open kitchen to work in? 
Of course, if there's a real live butler hanging out in the pantry doing all the work, that changes my opinion completely...

At the other end of the crazy kitchen spectrum is the outdoor kitchen, fully-equipped with Taj-ma-barbeque and fridge and sink and dinner sets and wine glasses and napkins. 
Come on! How many kitchens can you use at once? 
And what’s wrong with a rusty, dusty barbie propped up against the back wall and keeping it simple? I've never met a person (or dog) who doesn't love a sausage and sauce sanga. 
And don't get me started on having to clean two cooktops, two fridges, two sinks ...

Orange. 
Nobody really wants to decorate their home in orange. 
Except for my mum and dad in the seventies. They splashed it around like it was going out of fashion. And, pretty soon, it was! 
If you want a touch of orange, fill the fruit bowl with mandarins ... buy a bunch of gerberas ... plant some marigolds in a window box. But don't plaster the walls with orange mosaic tiles or cover the kitchen benches in orange Laminex. (Really, Mum, don't!)
Don't even buy an orange cushion. 
I mean it.
Toss it out of your shopping basket. 
Now. 
Buy something blue or green or yellow, even. 
But not orange. 


The home theatre. 
Okay, if you’re a soiree-holding kind of person, I can see how this might be quite nice. ‘Do join us in theatre at 8pm for a delightful  evening of light classical music, pink champagne and muted laughter.’ 
But a room for just watching the tellie? 
It’s like having a room dedicated to just thinking, or just  knitting, or just reading. 
Oh, hang on. A room for just reading sounds brilliant! 
They even have a name for it.
LIBRARY!!!


Those fires that hang from the ceiling like some sort of overgrown cocoon. 
They look a little bit scary in a sci-fi sort of way. 
And they look daft. Even if you’re going for the hipster dufus look.
My husband, the Great Dane, thinks they're cool. Then again,  he tucks his T-shirt into his jeans and still thinks 'Smokey and the Bandit' is the best movie EVER!!! 
Cocoon fireplaces are just not right. And you can't tell me that someone's kid won't swing from it and burn their derriere before wrenching the whole contraption out of the ceiling. 


Rectangular free-standing baths. 
They give me the creeps. 
Too much like sarcophagi. 
As soon as I see one, I start developing a murder mystery plot where someone dies in the bath. Not terribly uplifting. 

Toilets that open onto en suites that open onto the master bedroom.
I dig the bathtub that looks straight across to the bed (unless it’s a sarcophagus tub!). But the toilet with no solid door between the user and the bedroom…
Think about it!
It’s not good.
For anybody.

So what do I love? 
White.
Floorboards.
High ceilings and exposed beams.
Big windows and French doors and natural light.
Wide verandas made for lazing and sipping coffee and reading a book and chatting with friends over a glass of wine.
Hills hoist clotheslines.
Fresh flowers.
Book shelves filled with well-thumbed books.
Gardens filled with blossom trees.
Log fires that are anchored in the wall or on the ground and don’t look like they’re about to split apart and launch an oversized cockroach or cicada into your lounge room that will then bite your head off and spit it out into a sarcophagus-shaped bathtub.

Feel free to disagree. 
Except on the orange thing!
What do you love in a home?
What gives you the ickies?



You can go here to my Pinterest page to see some of my home decorating fantasies.





Friday 9 June 2017

The truth about Book Club


It's time someone told the truth.
Loudly.
Boldly.
And, truly,  it surprises me that it even needs to be said.
But it does. 
Because there is  a big fat myth still floating around in some sick circles.
So here goes. The truth:
BOOK CLUB IS NOT ABOUT BOOKS.*

Sure, there might be some vague discussion revolving around a book. 
There might be a passage read or, at least, a pair of reading glasses perched upon someone's nose. One likes to look the part. 
There might even be a Dymocks catalogue or a book review, torn from the newspaper, tossed elegantly onto the coffee table.
But the idea that Book Club is a gathering of people for the primary  purpose of discussing and analysing a book, is soooo wrong. 


Let me make it simple. Book Club is about the five c's: 

  • champagne
  • chocolate 
  • cake
  • cuppas
  • chitter-chatter


Of course, there is some disagreement between various book clubs as to what the 5 c's truly represent.
Some claim that the first c is not for champagne, but for chardonnay ... or even cabernet sauvignon. Others substitute  chips for chocolate, cheese for cake, cackling for chitter-chatter. (I heard that one book club tried to substitute carrot sticks for chocolate and coconut water for champagne, but they did not survive beyond their first meeting. No surprises there!)

But no matter how you interpret the five c's, books start with b so, obviously, do not feature in the list of the five most important things about Book Club.

Unfortunately, there are still a deluded few who have missed the point. 
The ones who believe that Book Club is primarily - or even exclusively - about books. 

My local library gathered all its registered book clubs together one year - just for a happy pre-Christmas fling. 
What a delightful idea! 
Significantly, it was held in a conservatory full of flowers and we were served wine, cheese, bickies and summer fruit. There was not a book in sight! 
Never the less, I still met one lost soul who obviously belonged to a dysfunctional book club, i.e. a book club whose members took themselves seriously. This poor man asked me about the roles we had in our book club. He said 'roles',  but I heard 'rolls'. I was just about to explain that we didn't normally eat rolls, but I was quite open to the idea of incorporating sausage rolls, or even spring rolls, into our gatherings, when he started muttering about author biographies, plot summaries, character analyses and a whole heap of other literary and grammatical stuff that I didn't even understand. The members of his club actually had roles to fulfil (not rolls to fill) for each and every gathering. Scary stuff!

And then there's the sad tale of my friend, a supremely talented and charming woman who works in a coveted role in the publishing industry. 
She was expelled from her book club. 
Expelled!
For not reading the books. 
She just wanted to go along and chat and eat cake. 
And they wouldn't let her!!!



Let me tell you about my book club. 
A typical gathering  begins with hugs and kisses and everyone talking over the top of each other as we arrive. 
We drink tea and champagne and we nibble chocolate, liquorice allsorts, bickies, cheese, olives, sun-dried tomatoes ... you get the idea. 
And as  we nibble, we talk about our families, our jobs, our holiday plans and the disturbing trend towards corset-type underwear. 
An hour or so into the gathering, someone might casually suggest that we talk about our book. Typically, ten or fifteen minutes of literary discussion will take place**, then we'll pop the kettle on, bring out a cake and start talking about  how much we like our host's new cushions, our cholesterol levels, our gardens and  which movie we're going to see next time we gather for Book Club. (See how free and easy we are in interpreting the word 'book'?)


The point is, BOOK CLUB IS NOT ABOUT BOOKS.


It's about books and friends and laughter and cake. 

If you belong to a  book club that is sinking into the Slough of Deep and Serious Literary Discussion Which Goes On and On for Far Too Long, I have created a valuable tool for you to take to your next gathering:


And because I am kind, I offer here my list of short but fabulous books. If you get your book club  reading these and introduce the flow chart , you can have your cake and eat it too.

SHORT, HIGH QUALITY BOOKS FOR BOOK CLUBS:
The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly, by Sun-Mi Hwang
Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett
The Arrival, by Shaun Tan (No words. None at all!)

Happy book clubbing.
X


* Just as Craft Group is not about craft. 
CLICK HERE to read more.

** We did have a book discussion, recently, that went for almost half an hour. But that was mainly due to the fact that I had failed to grasp something quite significant about the theme and structure of the novel  -  My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, by Fredrik Backman - and my companions were trying to explain it to me between their gasps of laughter and their expressions of wonder at how obtuse I had been!