Christmas, courtesy of the Usual Shop

How cosy does this look? Got my tree  up and here, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t going to make it round, is Christmas Usual Shop-style.  This isn’t a styled scenario (obviously): just an honest point-and-shoot as-is.

Centre-stage is the £10 Indian coffee table (found in July).

To the right, various retro-print, velvet and embroidered cushions made from jumble-sale fabric or found ready-made; a couple from my grandmother’s.

Cream leather sofa, £60 from Brighton station car boot sale about 10 years ago.

Woven paisley-pattern cashmere throws over sofa, 10 euros each from flea market in Brussels seven or eight years ago.

Cream leather armchair and (in foreground to the left) matching footstool, £40 from Brighton station car boot sale, seven years ago.

Wicker log-basket, pottery, fake flowers and candlesticks: all from jumble sales over the years.

Rubber plants: one donated by C, the other an offcut from that plant, plus yucca from my granny’s neighbour.

Sheepskin rug, £5 from car boot sale, time immemorial.

Feather eiderdown over back of armchair, car boot sale, ditto.

Cream curtains, from another neighbour of my granny’s. I’ve tried patterns in the living room, and darker colours, but cream is the only way to accommodate all the other textures and patterns and still maintain a semblance of sanity.

Purple flower fairy lights on the tree:  inadvertently stolen by D from the wonderful What’s Cookin’ club when he played a gig there. He claims that they were wrapped around his pedal-steel and he packed them by mistake. Sorry, Ali.  Tree decorations also include red apples bought at a Gothenburg craft market (whilst playing truant from a corporate event at the Volvo factory), a few oddments from the family collection and pieces from a broken glass chandelier.

Caramel-coloured ceramic bowl on coffee table: a present from my friend Mary. It was made by a potter who exhibited at the Kensington Church Street gallery where we both worked at the time (around 13 years ago: a whole lifetime away).  I have long since lost the card that came with it detailing the potter’s name and credentials, but all I know is that it’s not a Grayson Perry (the only contemporary ceramicist I could name) and therefore it’s probably OK to store finger-picks, capos, guitar tuners and bottlenecks in there.

Hidden from view but lighting the tableau: a 1950s glass chandelier (£50 from Martlets Hospice charity shop, six years ago) and the Anglepoise lamp I found in the street.

So there you have it: just about the only things bought new in that scene are the log-burning stove and the double bass. And the garden-centre tree – I’ve never managed to keep rooted trees alive for reuse in subsequent years, to my regret.

Bowls and pots

I can justify these randomly-chosen crockery purchases (20p each from Bonfire Society jumble sale): I’m potting up hyacinth or tulips for everyone this Christmas. Whether they like it or not. The Seventies brown and cream earthware dish/ashtray/eyesore (a whole extortionate 50p)  is entirely gratuitious, however.  Perfect for crisps, and no doubt I will be eating plenty of those over the festive season. Somehow piggery seems more civilised if you put the junk food on an interesting retro plate.

Hey cowboy

D has amassed a fine selection of Western shirts during our various travels in the US, but this one turned up for 20p at a jumble sale in Sussex. I suspect the two pairs of straight-cut Seventies Wranglers (also 20p each) had belonged to the same bloke. Were I more cunning, I would have hidden this shirt and wrapped it up for Christmas, but no: it’s joined the collection already.

Dead man’s suits

These probably belonged to the same old boy; two 1960s grey three-button suits for Ian (£1 each) and brown car coat with suede-effect edging (50p), from the Bonfire Society jumble sale. They’ve been hanging somewhere untouched for a while – a till receipt in a pocket read 1971 – and have the whiff of dead man’s clothes.

My grandad was one for a car coat; these were square-cut and designed specifically to go on over a suit for the Sunday drive,  to be accessorised with string-backed driving gloves and a tartan picnic blanket.  They were a product of the days before effective car heaters, and also for keeping warm whilst enjoying tea from a Thermos by the side of the road in the rain.

These are  the clothes of a man who, like Grandad, would have owned an Austin Maxi.

Eighties glam

Two fine pieces  of Eighties vintage: chiffon dress with geometric pattern and luridly green Emmanuel pencil skirt, 20p each from Bonfire Society jumble sale. The dress reminds me of my deputy headmistress circa. 1985, and as soon as I realised this, I knew I could never wear it. And I can’t get into the green skirt.

Miscellaneous matter

All my best intentions to curtail the collecting for a while were waylaid at a rather fine Bonfire Society jumble sale in Ringmer. From top right: bad flower picture in a good frame (20p); an old Virago edition of Diary Of A Provincial Lady (20p); Barbara Kingsolver short stories (20p); bundle of knitting needles for Polly’s craft workshops (50p); hand-knitted scarf in a lovely licheny olive green (20p); aubergine  lambswool tank top for D (20p); as-new Primark raffia wedges for next summer (20p); a 1982 edition of the very excellent Terence  Conran House Book (50p).

I’ve had copies of the House Book before and it’s source of much inspiration; this one touches on the worst excesses of Seventies patchwork, brown and orange swirling patterns and artisan accessories,  but makes it all slightly more palatable with white walls, open-plan areas and a general backdrop of minimalism. Bit like my house then, only tidier. It edges into dangerous territory with early references to avocado bathroom suites and matte black furniture, however.

Suit, satin and other sundries

Disaster has struck in the Usual Shop’s house… well, I am rather dramatising this, but as is inevitably the case when one lives in a Victorian house in Brighton, we’ve had an attack of damp, mildew and mould. We’ve spent much of the weekend trying to kill off the mould spores, misting all our clothes with anti-bacterial spray and brushing fabrics frantically. The mould’s got into D’s best suits, my oldest and most precious vintage dresses, our leather shoes and belts: pretty much everything that’s not been worn or exposed to fresh air lately. Serves us right for being too tight to turn on the central heating. Any tips for salvaging these clothes and getting rid of the smell, anyone?

The upshot of this is – as was the case last winter when this happened – that we have been forced to have a serious edit and cull of our wardrobes. The mould’s less likely to take hold if the clothes actually have a chance to air and aren’t packed solidly together, and we have turned out items we haven’t worn in years. So I’ve been exceedingly restrained this week on the accumulation front, going only to one jumble sale in Plumpton and being very selective.

The week’s finds are: a pale brown two-button man’s suit; a black cardigan with beaded detail on one shoulder; a super-80s yellow satin shirt with tie-bow detail on the sleeves; a pale grey earthenware pot; and, most randomly of all, a 1976 book called The Evolution of Electronic Music (from oscillators and theremins to synthesizers and computer-generated sounds via Stockhausen and Cage), by a David Ernst.  It’ll make a good Christmas present for someone…

My mother’s fake fur

My mother is a very different height, shape and size to me, and the Swinging Sixties rather passed her by, therefore I never got to inherit a wardrobe of cool original vintage dresses or indeed, anything much worth having clothes-wise. I did have one of her ’70s  sheepskin coats for a while when I was a student, which was ruined in a beer-spilling incident, and a very elegant brown rabbit-fur which I never dared wear, but no chance even on shoes – she’s a size 5, and my feet are a whopping seven-and-a-half. Then out of the blue my granny found this fake fur bolero with suede trim; the sleeves are a bit short, but otherwise it’s a good fit. My mother thinks she bought it in the late ’60s, and it probably hasn’t seen the light of day in at least 30 years. I’ve been wearing it all week.

Sheepskin and tweed

The awful weather put paid to the car boot sales this weekend, and we didn’t make it to a jumble sale, but C and I did go to The Secret Animal-Rescue Charity Shop, where everything is little more expensive than at a jumble and laid out in a series of interconnecting rooms  filled to the ceiling with a very random mix of trash and treasure. She came out with picture frames, a red linen skirt, a couple of cotton tops, plant pots and a large painted wooden cut-out of a mallard duck (don’t ask) for the grand total of £8. I bought D a single-button tweed suit with excellent pleated-front 1940s-style spiv trousers (£3) and for myself, a 1970s sheepskin coat with fantastically fluffy lambswool collar (£4).

I’ve bought and  then sold  so many coats like this over the years, mostly scruffy, ill-fitting or just plain inappropriate at the time, but this  is quite the best yet and thus probably a keeper. Sadly, I found the suit was pretty manky once I got it out of the dingy shop and saw it in daylight, but I’d have happily paid £7 for the coat alone, and the tweed may come up OK yet under Ian’s steam-cleaner.

Paisley and patterns

My grandmother has resumed her decluttering with a vengeance. This week’s finds from the depths of the boxroom are three men’s paisley shirts (D kept the skinniest-fit, the other two went to boys in his band), and for re-homing, a rather nasty 1970s nylon baby-doll negligee and a selection of 1960s knitting patterns. Polly, any good for the craft classes and clothes-customising workshops?