general chit chat

September 19, 2025September 18, 2025

dear diary ~ back in time for 70’s fashion student

I promised you some interesting news and this is something that took me quite by surprise back in early April when one of my blog readers, who happens to be the curator of a museum in Cheltenham, contacted me through the comments section on my blog.

“I love your blog, especially the pages about you being a student in Cheltenham in the 1970s. I am the Curator at the Holst Victorian House in Cheltenham http://www.holstvictorianhouse.org.uk and this summer we are planning a pop up 1970s bedroom as part of our exploration of the house before it was a museum. We want the bedroom to belong to a 1970s fashion student! We would love for you to be involved if possible, for example sharing your memories of your time at the college and advising us about the type of room you had. If you are interested, please get in touch with me at curator@holstvictorianhouse.org.uk.

Many readers who have been following both this blog and my previous one might remember I have mentioned before that I was a student in the 70’s at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design on the Fashion and Textile degree course and have talked briefly about my life during those few years in Cheltenham. It was a very memorable time for me and packed with fun and hard work in equal quantities.

Intrigued, I replied to the comment and during these past few months I supplied the curator with a few key items for use in their room set display as well as providing a narrative about the life of a fashion student, which must be so different to the experience of today’s students, especially their super deluxe living accommodation.

The pop up exhibition at the museum centres around a fashion student’s bedroom as the owners of the house at that time rented out rooms to fashion students from the college and they have tried to emulate this as well as they can with items they already have in the museum and additional pieces they have sourced from the same period. I wasn’t actually one of the students living at this particular house, nor do I know anyone who did, but it was very similar to the first house I lived in on Prestbury Road.

The photo below is actually of my real life student bedroom in the early 70’s… taken on my 21st birthday at our little house in Grosvenor Terrace – note the mattress on the floor, quite common back in those days and more comfortable than the old fashioned bed springs on some of the beds supplied by landlords. Most accomodation came furnished with some quite old and battered furniture – some with the addition of woodworm! As you will notice there is quite an assortment of tastes – the Indian cotton print bedcover behind me from the Black Market, purple sheets from Woolworths beneath a bright green checked duvet from the Co-op.

Our living room was of the brown and cream era which was the equivalent of the grey period we are presently living through. We stuck thick chocolate brown cork tiles to the chimney breast to display my grandma’s flying ducks. I was much more into old junk shop finds at the time, and influenced by BIBA and Laura Ashley with a bit of modern Habitat thrown in. We all had to endure a tiled fireplace of one kind or another and a cut moquette settee, and I won’t even mention the quality of the carpets (usually threadbare and with a dark stained floorboard surround) so the whole appearance was rather drab on drab.

Looking for pictures and information to send to the curator brought back such a lot of memories. I can’t believe I only spent 3 years of my life there – it seemed far longer and I made some life long friends too.

A very young me on the bike with my friends – as you can see beards were very much in fashion too back then.

When I look back at some of the outfits I made they do seem quite crude and not anywhere near the more outlandish designs produced by students today, but they were more wearable and the whole course was geared up to us getting a job at the end of it as jobs in the fashion world were not easy to come by. I know a lot of people watch and enjoy the Great British Sewing Bee – I only watched it for the first time a couple of weeks ago as I switched over from another program that had finished and I can vouch for the effort that these people have put into making each garment.

So I thought I would show you a few pictures from my time on a fashion course in the 70’s but promise not to laugh!!

This is me in the picture above – I am modelling one of my very first dresses at the end of the first year. It was hand printed on an ivory silk. I was quite proud I had even got to the end of the first year – the drop out rate was very high. 46 started on the course and only 13 of us finished.

Me again, caught in the corridor modelling another students outfit in the third year with much shorter hair and much higher platform shoes!

And below I think this was our second year final show – I always got roped into modelling no matter how much I objected.

We often undertook projects set by fabric manufacturers to advertise their new ranges.

This design above using a new Crimplene fabric was made into a garment and I was lucky enough to get my design chosen for a mention in the Fashion Weekly magazine.

Our final show in the third year was in London with professional models and many top fashion names were invited to view.

My collection was based on luxury resort or cruise wear – some made with hand printed fabrics. The collection included a swimming costume in a relatively new stretchy fabric called Lycra – now a staple in our wardrobes in one form or another.

This was a picture in the press and 2 of my garments were chosen, centre and far right.

The exhibition which includes the 70’s fashion student’s bedroom at Holst Victorian House in Cheltenham will run until Wednesday 31^st December. If you live anywhere locally do go and see it.

I am especially excited to be going down myself to see the exhibition next week and spend four days in Cheltenham where DH and I can relive some very happy memories. Sadly, the house in the photo with me on the bike at Grosvenor Terrace has been pulled down and is now part of the LIDL carpark and the wonderful sixties fashion block at the college in the lefthand photo at the top of this page has also been replaced by a more modern building. I am sure though it won’t detract from the visit; the Promenade, Everyman Theatre, Pittville park and Pump rooms and Montpellier remain the highlights of the Cheltenham I remember.

Back soon x

September 14, 2025

dear diary ~ back so soon?

I know I surprised myself that I am able to write this post so quickly after the last, but I wanted to say as soon as I could thank you for all your kind words – I haven’t answered them individually as I have to be conservative still with my time at the moment. It was so good to hear from you all and that you are still reading in blogland….there has been so much movement over to places like Instagram, YouTube and Substack it is good to know that bloggers are still relevant.

It would seem by the abrupt change of weather that summer has now drawn to a close and I am sad to see it go but at the same time I am engaging in all that autumn has to offer. I have already taken the opportunity to switch out my summer outfits of sun tops for a few warmer fleece tops and lightweight jumpers.

And the warmer brushed cotton duvet cover has made its way onto our bed.

My pantry shelf has an abundance of autumn colour – it is a joy to walk in there – baskets of apples (given by my neighbour) and dishes of plums and tomatoes – none home grown I might add, this year I stuck to courgettes only as they do manage to take care of themselves and gave us a nice little yield.

Despite being hopelessly late in sowing the seeds I did grow some annuals, pure white cosmos and glorious vibrant calendula, but my favourites are definitely the mixed jewel colours of the zinnias, and surprisingly all of them continue to flower through the recent downpours, thunderstorms and hailstones we have had over the week. Even the Japanese anemones have stood firm.

The garden has taken a back seat again this year, our hopes to turn it around after ignoring it completely last year whilst selling the cottage are now on hold until next year. Our motto is fast becoming not another project for another day, but another project for another year…or maybe two!

Everything preys on my mind at the moment and feels like I am on overwhelm. As you can imagine, where time allows, I have done a lot of thinking about what and where I go from here since letting go of our cottage and our retirement plans to live there. My vision of the future is still rather a blank screen at the moment and I am finding it hard to find myself, let alone know what I might do…I even bring into question what it is that I like doing anymore. And of course since I hit 70 last year I have become acutely aware that time is in short supply and quite precious. Making a wrong move or decision now could cost us dearly and I don’t mean financially.

I have another tale of woe to add to the one about the cottage but that is for another blog post, another day. For now I will just tell you about my little accomplishments here and there over the year.

My mum has been rather good this week, which is fortunate. No complaints or outbursts and has been complying with the carers to drink her water and take a little walk with her walker to exercise her legs and keep a little strength in them. We visited her on the Saturday of last week and took her to the local park for a sandwich and a chocolate muffin at the council café followed by a large ice cream cone. Her appetite for an elderly person is enormous – she can eat far more than I do – is this a clue to her reaching 100 soon I wonder? The weather remained dry and sunny so in all it was a pleasant day and worth the 6 hour round trip to see her.

She always has a few tears when it is time for us to go and it is worse at the moment as my sister is away on holiday and won’t be popping in to see her during the week. I still continue to ring her every day just before the final carer goes to put her to bed at 6pm. The conversation now is very limited as she is in cognitive decline and little short term memory. She asks over and over when my sister will be back and when I will be going up to see her again. It can be so wearing. This week has been good because I haven’t had endless calls from her in a panic during the day to ask the same questions, which means I don’t have to keep breaking off from things I am doing to answer her all the time and I can catch up with a few jobs here.

Presently, it is almost impossible for me to form any kind of routine in my life and until we have my elder daughter moved completely and her old house on the market I am reluctant to start any projects of my own. We have finished all the decorating we intend to do in her new house and have now moved on to resurecting the garden at her old house ready for the sale pictures. Not easy during these sudden outburst of rain and goodness knows we need to get down to some cleaning, decorating and gardening here at home…it is well overdue. I realised the other night that my only hope is to break down projects into smaller tasks of no longer than an hour.

My bedtime reading at the moment is a book I noticed on the bookshelf (The Success Principle by Jack Canfield) and it caught my eye as I don’t think I ever got round to reading it fully. When flicking through I noticed in the list of contents a chapter headed ‘Clean up your messes and your incompletes’ and I immediately thought this is what we need to do as I feel like we are in one big mess and it is overwhelming, mainly because we don’t have the quantity of time to match the size of our mess!

So it has given me the momentum to try and get some of the items on my list completed. The ironing pile was the first under attack… and some got done after sorting it into smaller piles of sheets, pillowcases, t-shirts etc. There are surfaces, shelves and cupboards that also need attention – ‘stuff’ accumulates quickly; items that have not been put away after use and those that never had a home in the first place. I need to get back to my efforts to minimise our stuff – even though I buy very little I feel it is creeping in again… even seeping in again under the doors at night as we sleep! I really don’t know how it comes in other than by fairies.

I have managed to offload quite a few things since January – clothes on Vinted, bits and pieces on Ebay and a whole box full of old photos belonging to my MIL and given to my SIL after we scanned them onto our computer. She also took away an old retro chair that was intended for the cottage and we have no room to keep here.

However, today we will not accomplish very much on the home scene as we are actually having a day off to ourselves and going on a short journey with a packed lunch over the hill to Greater Manchester to visit the Moravian Settlement in Fairfield, Ashton under Lyne which is open as part of the Hertitage Week.

Oh well, as they say – Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Have a good week everyone x

PS…I have some interesting news as well, but again that will be another post, another day…maybe later in the week.

August 19, 2025

dear diary ~ still here, still busy

Hi there, how are you all? It seems an age since I ventured here…I have almost forgotten how to edit a photo and write a few words.

So sorry to those readers who have been patiently waiting for a new post to appear, I could say that I have no excuse for not writing sooner other than my life is really very far removed from the peaceful retirement DH and I had planned and we find ourselves with no time to spare after fulfilling obligations and appointments. And that is partly true, but there is another reason I have not been able to write recently, one which has been a bit distressing and is the main news of this post.

It is with a heavy heart that I can now say that there will be no more stories from our beach cottage in Scotland. Many of you will have followed our adventures when we visited the cottage …all the ups and downs and the drama of the flood in 2014, but as many of you know it had gradually ceased to be our happy place since the little caravan site neighbouring our property was taken over by a young man who had desires from the beginning to drive us out. Within months he had managed to get rid of the people who had been on the caravan site for some years, removing their older caravans at a cost to them and gradually replacing them with expensive new ones sold on to new people at a higher rent. Where there were two or 3 caravans sited just below us he changed this into boat storage instead. As we left he had increased the number of boats and the sea angling competitions he organised to one a month during the season. Some of the villagers are quite annoyed at the extra noise and activity down on the local beach where they launch the boats with a tractor but can do nothing about it. It appears that anyone can run a business using a public beach.

Our cottage and land was his only means to expand his business further into a larger boat storage facility and he tried every type of bullying during the last few years, crudely chopping down our hedge alongside the lane (which earned him the title of machete man), putting a barrier across the lane (our only access which he wanted to keep locked), installing a huge noisier extractor fan on the back of his kitchens only yards from our back garden, blocking the access into our drive with boats and tractors, allowing greasy sewage from his kitchens to spill out of the drain and run down our banking, hiring a bird scarer pointed at our woodland and also putting up security cameras that directly looked over our property. Other than that just generally making a nuisance. Every time we went up on a visit we became more anxious wondering what we would find next.

We had originally bought the cottage with this stunning sea view in 2004 to renovate ready for our retirement but sadly this dream has now come to an end. There were numerous reasons why we really needed to give up the property but safeguarding ourselves from the toll of the mental stress was foremost. After much soul searching we decided there was no point in continuing to deal with this person that made us so unhappy no matter how beautiful a place it was.

There were other factors too…we recognised that my mum might be one of these people that live well past 100 and going to live further away in Scotland would just not work out. She is now 99 and very needy; her memory is getting quite bad and as soon as we have made a visit she forgets and is asking when we will be seeing her next as if we have never been. Presently, we travel for 3 hours (including a short stop) to see her for a couple of hours between the carers visits and wheel her to the nearby park and back and then travel back home for 3 hours. We do this as often as we can, one snag is that she likes us to go on a Sunday so we leave Saturday free to prepare for the trip and then Monday to recover.

With more frequent visits we were finding it difficult to fit in a visit to the cottage and stay for any meaningful length of time. With 3/4 of an acre of garden it needed a lot of attention from us, attention we gladly gave as we have a passion for gardening but not being there often enough it was soon becoming unmanageable. The first and only time we tried to go for 3 weeks we were called back after the first week to help with a family emergency at home. We never tried again! To add to everything the journey up there was more tiring for us even with the hotel break overnight at Carlisle to rest my back.

Everything felt right to let it go but equally everything felt wrong, but in the end we had to let our head rule over our heart this time and reluctantly last May put the cottage up for sale. We made our final visit last October, the caravan site owner, as expected, made an offer for our cottage and land when we put it on the market and we accepted. We had other interested parties, (one of whom came from a neighbouring village here at our Yorkshire home) but in the end our conscience would not let us sell to some unsuspecting person who would think they were buying an idyllic place only to walk into a load of unknown problems in the future. It is probably for the best that the neighbouring caravan site and our cottage and land have been reunited as a whole as they once were at the beginning of last century when it was a Creamery.

We were heartbroken to leave this sleepy little village down on the Mull of Galloway, the place that once seemed like a little piece of paradise. Packing up after 20 long years and finding new homes for all the things we couldn’t bring down home took quite a bit of time. Our static caravan in the garden, which had become our refuge after the flood of the cottage, had to be sold too and a lovely lady purchased it and transported it to sunny Spain. Saying goodbye on the final day to my beautiful garden and the sound of the sea was indescribable and even now tears are very close to the surface all the time…we are both still grieving for a life that was almost within grasp but we couldn’t cling onto any longer in the hope that our circumstances would get any better soon.

And they haven’t….we are as busy now as ever and never on anything that we would ideally choose to do as it has been a year of helping other members of our family. Mum has been increasingly worse…not in health more in her moods and endless complaining. In addition both our daughters decided to move house this year, one moved unexpectedly over Easter and is now more or less settled. The other is presently in the throes of moving. We are decorating and gardening at her new house and providing childcare while they pack up the old one. Hopefully they will be installed before the new school term in a couple of weeks.

We may still go back to Scotland for a holiday, after all it was my husband’s home town, and he has family there. He was born in Stranraer and lived at Castle Kennedy Gardens on the estate for a while with his grandma and grandad (who was head gardener there) so there will always be ties that bind us to this area. We decided not to go this year though, it would still be too emotional for us especially as we heard shortly after leaving that nearly all the trees in our little wood have been chopped down and soon the cottage will be demolished too as the new owner has made a planning application to build a new house on the spot.

So now my journey is on a different course…I am not sure where it is taking me to but when time allows I will be back blogging, leaving a written account of my day to day travels.

We have just returned from our family holiday in Scarborough. We had the best weather, dry hot and sunny. No rainy day amusements for the grandchildren required this year.

And now… this week….. back to the decorating of course and more childcare, oh and a visit to see mum at the weekend.

I do hope you are all having a lovely summer, I do drop in to read your stories when I can and try to catch up with your news, I might even comment occasionally.

Bye for now x

December 20, 2024

dear diary ~ creating a very simple Christmas

Just stopping by to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas.

My life is rather chaotic at the moment and has been all year…so many times I have tried to write here…. but to no avail. I am ever hopeful that I will be able to continue blogging next year, though January is already looking busy with dental, hospital and MOT appointments together with two birthdays (one a very important one as my mum will be 99), and a trip to the pantomime with all the grandchildren.

I have so much news as there have been many changes to my life over the year and mum continues to be quite challenging as her memory continues to decline and her rather complaining nature increases, as well as the amount of care she needs.

It will be a quiet, contemplative Christmas for us on Christmas Day. We have chosen to stay at home whilst my two daughters spend Christmas with their respective in laws and partners. I think we will be glad for an enforced stop and a chance of a rest. We will however be gathering together as a wider family for our ‘Not so Secret Santa’ buffet and present swapping festivities on Sunday. The four grandchildren are so excited and can hardly contain themselves…it is a joy to be with them.

As many of my readers will know my Creating Christmas posts have been a record of my activities up to Christmas and full of crafts and Christmas ideas and should you wish to see these click on the picture below. This year I have done very little worth posting about and what I have done was in such a rush I didn’t even have time to take a photo.