Basket Case (Thanks Nige)

Damn

I can see this is going to take several goes to get right for a techno nube like me. I have now lost versions 1 and 2 of this, my first posting, and I can see the impact of the whole affair is lessening , rather like a fading rainbow ( see above picture).

Third time lucky maybe.

My mind is about to empty so put down a dust sheet and stand back.

Hopefully this blog will sometimes make you think, laugh, take action or at least come back another day. It is called Flemish Field Because that was how I signed off my letters when I first moved to Belgium ( in the days befor I could use email/ blog etc
and it was what I could see from my lounge window- see photo). It also reminded me of the poem 'there is forever a corner of an english field etc. etc.'

Anyway baskets are taking over my life. They are supposed to be part of my attempt to tidy up our life. However they seem to have a life of their own , their little wicker arms reaching out for each other in the night , making wicker love, weaving new baskets that in the morning seem to have been placed all over the house. There's the basket for the electricals (phone chargers and headphones of which there are many in my house), the one for the jams and preserves in the kitchen cupboard, the ones in the en suite bathroom because the cupboards are not big enough and since last week the grand daddy of them all ; the laundry basket. My friend said it was too big in the shop and she was right. 'Oh no I said I need one this big'. I was wrong.

Since I read some years ago about Maeve Binchy, I think it was, doing what she called 'an Irish Tidy' I have fallen in to the basket trap (almost literally in the case of the laundry basket). Maeve would sweep aside, in to the nearest box, any rubbish lying around her house if she saw an unexpected visitor coming. After a few months if the things in the box had not been looked for or touched she could ditch them in the bin.

I however, have been seduced by the middle class version of the 'Irish Tidy'. All those pretty baskets in Cotswold Company magazines, with their pretty checked linings and promises of a country kitchen. SO aspirational.

My friends position them oh so prettily in their downstairs loo with delicate objets or at least ornamentally placed loo rolls in them. However, what do I see when I look down into our basket in the en suite? Ozzy Osbourne staring back up at me. Cover your eyes Ozzy please!

A couple of weeks ago I relieved a friend of mine of 3 more baskets; she had to sneak them round to the house when no one else was home. They are all men at my house and don't seem to have noticed they'll probably have wires of some sort in by the end of the week (not the men, the baskets). At least one already has the cats' toys in.

My ideal of a feminine house with lovely little baskets that mean I know where everything is all the time is evaporating . I just have a series of wicker nests, posted around the house. There was even one out on the pavement this morning, rejected by the bin men as they passed by for the 'big rubbish'.

Tomorrow my friend is coming round and I had thought about asking her advice on this subject, but she is a basket case herself, so maybe not. I now even find myself looking at wicker (albeit plasticised) garden furniture. Where will it all end ? On a Hebridean island with a young scottish policeman; let's hope he's played by Ewan McGregor.

Enough about the baskets


Until Next Time - Yours In A Flemish Field