How the leopard got his spots

The problem with weekends is that I'm always trying to cram too much into them.

There's never enough time for even half the things I want to do. Before I know it, it's Sunday night, and what have I done? Surely, someone has pulled a prank on me and fiddled with the hands of the clock?

My diary is quite full-on for the next couple of weeks, with two housewarming parties, a birthday party, several flea markets and a charity shopping event in the month of March only.

In fact, last Saturday was a one-off, the diary's page for the day blank, to be filled with spontaneity!

Time for some reading, perhaps?

Or at least browsing through some 1970s Country Life magazines found at my dad's.












Now, if the weather would have been fine, we might have used such a day to go for a walk.

But no, it turned out - again! - to be grey and rather cold, one of those days when it's up to me to provide some colour.













OK, the colour is almost all beneath the coat!

Ta-da! I don't think anyone can be grumpy for long wearing this coral polka-dotted Trevira dress!

I added a navy cardigan and tights as well as navy booties, and a shiny wide navy belt, which is part elasticated.

One of my favourite brooches, dating from the 1940s, and a string of red, white and blue plastic beads completed my outfit.

We did a quick round of the charity shops, but since there's a retro event coming up, there wasn't much to our liking.

We did, however, return with a pile of books.

Not that we need any more books, or indeed have the space for them, but since I've rekindled my passion for vintage paperbacks, I keep finding treasures. Apart from the Roald Dahl Penguin,which dates from 1963, they are all from the late 1940s, early 1950s.

They were € 0,25 each, including the April 1952 issue of Argosy magazine.

Speaking of books, we still have a boxful of my dad's to re-home. We've given the bulk of his books to charity, but still ended up with more than enough.

The Ellery Queen magazine, dating from 1953, fits in with my collection, while the one on the left, which was published in 1964, made me smile. Exercising without moving a muscle: now, that sounds right up my street!

This mottled old book, full of Christian advice for the family, is from the early 1900s. I was drawn by its fabulous Art Nouveau style cover design. Isn't it beautiful?

What else did I do? Being appointed the family photo archive keeper, I freed some cupboard space to store the boxes and folders full of photographs and assorted documents.

The sketchbook yielded a few surprises.

At first, we were mystified as to who could have done these wonderful fashion sketches, but then we spotted my dad's initials beside the date on some of them. Who would have thought? He was twenty years old at the time, and I guess he did them from magazine illustrations. I'm thinking of framing a couple of them.

On Sunday, while we continued our clearing of our dad's house, we came across a photo album which belonged to Great Aunt Josephine, my paternal grandmother's sister. She and her husband were quite well off, and I have several pieces of her jewellery, including a string of pearls.

I was admiring some photographs of her wearing a leopard fur coat, when my brother said he'd seen that coat in a wardrobe up in the attic.















Indeed, a couple of minutes later, he returned with a leopard fur coat but, although it had almost certainly belonged to her, it wasn't the actual coat she was wearing in the photos. I would have been surprised if it were, as the photos date from the late 1930s. There's no label to identify the coat's age or provenance, but as she died in 1983, it is surely older than that. Maybe late 1960s, early 1970s?

I'm not in favour of real fur coats, but this one, which fits me perfectly, and has a family connection to boot, I will keep and probably wear once in a while.

There, that's another weekend gone by ...

What did you do with yours?