Bittersweet September

Hello there! Are you ready for another trip in the time machine?

A little update before we embark, though: Jos is doing - and most importantly, feeling - great. We've been on a couple of short outings, I've been doing some vintage shopping, and we've resumed making outfit photos on my non-office days. We're not completely back to normal yet, but we're definitely getting there.

For now though, I'll be taking you back in time to Sunday the 15th of September, exactly two months ago to the day.

My journal tells me it was a day of sunny spells and highs of about 20°C, and that we went for walk in Solhof Park, in our neighbouring village of Aartselaar.

I was initially wearing my denim jacket, but that was quickly removed as it was more than warm enough to do without. Underneath, I wore a long-sleeved peasant-style blouse, originally from Zara but picked up in a charity shop in Shrewsbury back in June.

My green and white plaid textured polyester skirt was an old Think Twice find - and a firm favourite at that - while both the multi-coloured wooden beaded necklace and the sage green suede Mephisto boots were charity shopped. The fuchsia suede belt was a bargainous buy in the Summer sales last year.

Solhof Park was originally part of the pleasure grounds of a castle, laid out in Capability Brown inspired English landscape style. Now the municipal park, it is deliciously wild and unkempt, its compact size perfect for a Sunday afternoon stroll.

Those of you who have accompanied me here before might remember the gazebo built on top of an abandoned ice house. You can just catch the merest glimpse of it in the photo on the bottom left. As usual, I started making my way up towards the gazebo, but the narrow winding path spiralling up the mound was so overgrown with creeping bramble stems attempting to catch me unawares, that I gave up and returned to the safety of the woodland below.

The week that followed continued to be gorgeously warm and sunny, with highs into the low twenties, even if most days had a chilly start and it often took a while for the sun to show her face.

The perfect weather to squeeze in some of the items in my Summer wardrobe which had so far remained unworn. 

For some reason, however, the above dress - yet another vintage find from Think Twice - always seems to come out of hiding on balmy late Summer or early Autumn days. Perhaps it's the cornucopia of fruits (I detect apples, pears, cherries and grapes) among its floral print?

My favourite green suede ankle boots - in the running for best charity shop find ever - came out to play as well, although for some reason they were giving me gyp that day. Aaargh! 

Another day saw me taking the blue and orange white-trimmed King Louie blouse I'd charity shopped earlier that month for its first outing. It found its perfect companion in a floral vintage skirt which has been living in my wardrobe for many years. I can't for the life of me remember whether it was a charity shop or a Think Twice find.

Both the orange beaded necklace and white celluloid flower brooch were charity shopped, as were the denim blue Tamaris shoes, which I picked up back in August. Yet again, my belt was the only retail buy in my outfit.

It was near the end of that week that Jos started feeling unwell, losing his appetite and being generally down in the dumps and complaining of tiredness. 

At first we weren't unduly worried, as the same had happened to him about twelve years ago, at exactly the same time of year and under similar circumstances, so that we were convinced it would only be a matter of time until the episode passed of its own accord.

Nevertheless, that weekend was a quiet one. To take my mind off things, I indulged in some pottering, catching up with blogland and photographing my latest finds. In all honesty, I'd completely forgotten about these two until I started editing the photos for this post, as there wasn't even any mention of them in my journal.

The lilac woollen item is a tank top which I picked up at 70% off in the closing down sale of the Belgian Terre Bleue label which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Even with 70% off it was a bit more than I would normally pay, but I couldn't resist its gorgeous colour. Plus, I've got a bit of a thing for tank tops lately ...

The green and peachy orange Diolen dress was found at Think Twice that same week. I'll have to schedule another wearing of it soon, so that I can show it to you properly and in more detail.

My actual outfit of that day - we were Friday the 20th of September by now - was built around this multi-hued millefiori patterned dress sprinkled with blowsy cream roses. You can see a close-up of the pattern here.

I also finished the Antonia Fraser memoir I'd started during our September holiday, after which I selected another memoir, by Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn from my reading pile. Both were picked up from National Trust second hand book shops in June. 

While I was working on a blog post on Saturday morning, my sister called me to ask if I was at home and if she could come around. Turned out she wanted to show me some photos her son had sent her from Scotland. They were of the place in the foothills of Ben Nevis where he'd scattered the remainder of my Dad's ashes. After planting a biodegradable urn with his ashes, which also contained seeds of a tree, on All Saints' Day in 2016, we kept some of his ashes behind in a miniature urn exactly for the purpose of scattering them in the place where he lost his heart many years ago. 

Even after all these years - he passed away eight years ago this August - I'm getting quite emotional just writing this, so that I'm staring at my computer screen through a veil of tears. 

Saturday's outfit was another Summery skirt and top combo and a mix of Think Twice, charity shop and flea market finds.

Grey, olive green, red and white floral skirt: Think Twice

Olive green t-shirt, red beaded necklace, red pleated belt and red Kiarflex shoes: charity shopped

Glass ring and vintage celluloid Scottie brooch: flea market 

Fast forward another week and, after struggling with his appetite all week and resorting to protein drinks to keep himself from going under, Jos suddenly started eating again. It would only a be short-lived relief, although thankfully we had no idea of what was to come at the time. We even booked a couple of nights at our favourite B&B in Beernem near Bruges for the last weekend of October.

The temperature had taken a dive from its Summery heights by Friday the 27the of September. A gloomy and very windy day, it felt much cooler than the 15°C shown on the thermometer.

I had a hairdresser's appointment that morning and ended up with goosebumps in spite of wearing a jumper. I even had to nip into the charity shop near the salon to buy a faux-fur gilet to wear on top.

The jumper in question is by Belgian designer Nathalie Vleesschouwer, charity shopped last Autumn, while the black floral Diolen skirt was a Think Twice find back in the mists of time. My mock-croc ankle boots, cat brooch and blue squishy belt with its square buckle were all retail buys.

I was a bit early for my appointment, but much to my delight the entrance gate to what is basically the the back garden of Antwerp's St. Paul's church was open, so I that I could nip inside for some local sightseeing.

I wasn't the only one visiting the Lourdes grotto, which dates from the beginning of the 20th Century, although I might have been the only who wasn't offering a prayer to the illuminated lady in her mock-rock cave. In hindsight, perhaps I should have followed suit.

The garden is located in the former orchard of a Dominican monastery which existed here from the13th Century until 1797, and whose romantic ruin is the focal point of this peaceful oasis in the city.

So, that was it for now. I'll be back with a final journey back to troubled times shortly. Hope to see you soon!

Goodbye to the West Country

Once again, thank you so much for all your lovely comments on my last post. Jos is doing well and getting better day by day, although I guess it will be some time until everything is back to normal. But although the latter might have received a bit of a battering and changes are still ongoing - which, as an HSP person I'm not finding particularly easy to deal with - our resilience has rather caught me by surprise. 

As I was writing my last post, I was reminded of the fact that in the past blogging has more than once saved my sanity, and in fact my heartbeat instantly slowed down as I sat in front of my PC and shared my thoughts and feelings with you.

For obvious reasons, no outfit photos were taken, nor did we embark on any adventures during the past few weeks, so I think I'll just continue where I left off, and take a couple of trips in the time machine back to before our lives went pear-shaped.

As I still owed you the final episode of my travelogue, why don't I start with that?

Admittedly, I had to rewind and reread my previous travel posts to get back into the moment. What with everything that has happened since, it's a bit like looking through a pair of inverted binoculars, shrinking and slightly distorting my memories of our week away. 

Anyway, here goes ...

We've arrived on Friday the 6th of September and, after treating us to a blustery and granite grey day at the seaside on Thursday, the weather gods had now dropped all pretense at good behaviour. 

According to our weather app, there wouldn't be any let-up in the rain any time soon, which meant that we would have to get our thinking caps on. After all, having spent the first week of September in the area since 2012 we had exhausted most of its wet weather options. 

But fear not, we did find exactly what we were looking for at the Bakery Museum on the outskirts of the town of Veurne, about 30 minutes from our cottage.

The rain clouds were taking a breather as we arrived, so that we managed to make it from our car to the museum's entrance without getting wet. Once inside, I donned apron and baker's hat and briefly joined the line-up of Confiserie Vanbelle's personnel.

The museum is located in the former buildings of the 17th Century Zuidgasthuishoeve, one of the guest houses in Veurne which used to care for the poor, the sick and the elderly.

The museum, which is recognized as a regional museum by the Flemish Community, opened its doors in July1985 and has undergone a major renovation and expansion in 2001. 

The museum's collection comprises a mind-boggling 24,000 pieces relating to the baking trade and baking culture in Flanders from the 19th Century to the present.

The collection was started in the 1970s by Walter Plaetinck (1931-2018), a travelling salesman who collected the materials from the hundreds of bakers who were his customers.

As well as everything to do with making bread, the museum displays ice-cream, speculaas and chocolate moulds, waffle irons and other baking equipment. 

There's a replica of a 1960s bakery shop, where you can listen to the latest gossip, or you can take a look behind the scenes in the baker's pantry, where you can marvel at the array of ingredients and try your hand at a scent guessing game. 

Afterwards we sampled some strawberry tarts accompanied by the ubiquitous cappuccinos in the museum café.

Having finally run out of steam, the rain clouds had decided to call it a day after we arrived back at the cottage, offering the perfect opportunity to show you my outfit.

My favourite denim maxi skirt was joined by a Finnish peasant-style blouse - both picked up from Think Twice - and a charity shopped orange Zoë Loveborn cardigan. My necklace was charity shop find too, while the green stretchy belt with its faux-bamboo buckle was last Summer's sales bargain.

We were happy to see that hop-picking had commenced in the hop field across the road, the proceedings of which we watched from the comfort of our first floor perch for a while. 

Later that evening the sun, who had been conspicuous by her absence for days, finally managed to get a look-in, painting a golden glow on the horizon just before going down.

All that moisture had left a misty morning in its wake, which the sun soon made short shrift of, promising a perfect Summer's day. 

The temperature was on the up from Friday's mediocre 18°C and would climb to a balmy 23°C by the afternoon.

We had plans for that afternoon - the only ones which were set in stone that week - but as we had oodles of time to spare in the morning, we decided to go for a walk in the woods.

I've lost count of the number of times we've been for a walk in the local Helleketelbos, which is about 10 minutes drive from the cottage. However, one way or another, and in spite of the numbered markers and handy map, we always manage to get lost here.

Knowing this, we threw caution to the wind this time and started our walk on a path we'd never taken before. One which wasn't indicated by a marker ...

Although this should have been a recipe for disaster I'm happy to report that we didn't get more lost than usual. We might not have ended up where we thought we would, but we soon came across some of the landmarks we remembered from our previous visits, such as the tiny half-timbered cottage (two collages above, bottom right). And no, I didn't add a photo from one of our UK holidays by mistake (above, top left). 

While walking on one of the main paths, I noticed a flash of bright orange in the undergrowth of the woodland to our right. Thinking it must be some kind of fungus, we decided to investigate and clambered through the thicket of unruly shrubs and thorny bramble stems. Might this be Orange Peel Fungus (Aleuria aurantia), I wonder? 

Later on, we spotted this peach-lookalike specimen on a tree trunk. My search for its name remains fruitless, so I'm hoping one of my knowledgeable readers might be able to help me out. Kezzie, I am looking at you! 

Having arrived home without any further hiccups, we had lunch and then took a little siësta before proceeding to our afternoon destination, which involved a mere couple of minutes's drive from the cottage: the house of local sculptor and ceramist Lucien De Gheus (1927-2013).

The artist was successful in the post-war fifties and sixties, his main oeuvre consisting of sculpture,  ceramic objects and bas-reliefs. The peak of his success was reached at Expo 58, the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, where he won a gold medal for ceramics.

Right from the start the house, which was built by the artist himself, was meant to be a sculptor’s home, with a large and high hall/exposition area, a heatable winter studio and a summer studio with high windows to the north to let in neutral light.  

Lucien and his wife Suzanne moved into the house in August 1962 and stayed there until their deaths. The “Gheuzenhol” (transl. Gheuze's hole), as the artist called his home, exudes his soul in every corner and keeps fascinating visitors to this day. The house is a  sample of all the artistic disciplines he excelled in: stained glass, paintings, glazed floor tiles, ceramic windowsills, furniture and chandeliers.

By will Lucien De Gheus left his house and possessions to the foundation Private Stichting Lucien De Gheus – Druant, in order to open up his artistic legacy to the public. 

He also stipulated that the foundation promoted contemporary art by organizing Summer exhibitions in the Museum House. This year's exhibition was called Fuga's en Pimpelmezen (transl. Fugues and Blue Tits) and I even recognized the work of one of the artists. It's the sculpture two collages above, bottom right, and it's by Sharon Van Overmeiren (b. 1985), whose work I'd admired at Middelheim.

We absolutely loved the juxtaposition of the various works of art with the paraphernalia of daily life as lived by Lucien and Suzanne, who was his muse.

Also, I could have moved lock, stock and barrel into this wonderfully spacious 1960s house.

It's simply mind-boggling that, in spite of having holidayed in the area for so many years, this was our very first visit to this fascinating museum. But it definitely won't be our last!

So, that was it, our September getaway all wrapped up. Finally!

Before returning to the here and now, I'll be taking another couple of trips in the time machine. I hope you'll join me for the ride.

See you soon!

Checking in

Hello dear friends and readers! I'm back ... sort of!

First of all, thank you for your lovely and heartfelt comments on my previous post, most of which made me cry - in a good way, I hasten to add - to some degree. I cannot even begin to express what your support has meant to me.

I know I more or less promised to keep reading your blogs and try to comment now and again, but  unfortunately this never happened.

At times, it was as if I was living in a paralell world, where blogland felt like a foreign country, one I used to visit many years ago rather than the couple of weeks of my absence.

After a dismal Spring and a decidedly under par Summer, the weather gods decided to treat us to a spell of Indian Summer, with skies of the deepest blue, glorious sunshine and temperatures which at one point climbed to an unseasonable 21°C.

Deep down, my battered brain must have registered all this as I somehow managed to take a handful of photos with my phone's camera while I was going through the motions. Old habits die hard, I guess, even if everything I did was on autopilot.

You see, in the week after I published my last post, Jos's conditioned got much, much worse, until on the Friday of that particular week he was rushed to A&E. Apparently, the antibiotics he got for his UTI hadn't managed to clear the infection, resulting in complications which ultimately lead to sepsis.

His son stayed with him while he was put on a drip and submitted to test after test until finally at around midnight he was allocated a night room in A&E.

Thankfully, his blood values had improved significantly by Saturday morning, when he messaged me to say he'd had a good night's sleep and had even - wait for it - enjoyed a proper breakfast. 

While I was visiting him that afternoon, he was moved from A&E to a room on the urology department, where he would stay until the end of the week, getting better and stronger every day. They actually wanted to send him home earlier but there was no way he would be able to tackle the dangerously steep staircase up to our first floor bedroom so that we needed to find a way around that first.

My days were a whirlwind of ticking tasks off my to-do list, working half-days at the office, then rushing home for an hour and a half before taking the bus to hospital. And although Jos's condition continued to improve, I kept lying awake with worry half the night.

The hospital, designed in 1975, and ultimately opened in 1979, is a typical 1970s concrete structure, juxtaposed with imaginatively planted green spaces, which I couldn't resist photographing while walking along its endless corridors to Jos's third-floor room.

It was obvious that Bess was confused and missing her Dad. She slept on my bed for most of the night and insisted on napping on my lap as I lay trying to read on the sofa. 

I'd started Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue but it was more than my brain could tackle, so I selected some easy feel-good reading from my pile in the form of a Maeve Binchy novel charity shopped in Shropshire.

After much head scratching, a solution was found for the sleeping problem, so that Jos would be able to come home on Saturday. 

It was decided that a hospital bed would be installed in our dining room. Having a small and full to bursting home, this posed some logistical problems, as it meant we would have to put our dining room table and Lloyd Loom style chairs in storage. Enter our lovely neighbours Wes, Michèle and Karin, who helped me dismantle the tabel and take it, as well as the chairs, to Karin's spacious garden room.

Although initially it looked quite sterile and unappealing, I managed to make things look cozy. So much so that Jos now has to share his bed with Bess! In fact, I think it might be her current favourite spot as she is reclining on the bed as I type!

As I don't drive and the nearest supermarket is just under a kilometer away, I am now the proud owner of an upmarket shopping trolley which, now that Jos is able to drive again, might soon become obsolete. 

I still did the honours last Sunday, which was his first full day back at home. I even made a slight detour to the local park along the way, as obviously I needed to thank the lady in the shrine for her good works!

For the first time in weeks, it actually felt good to be alive again, so that I could finally enjoy the glorious sights and scents of Autumn.

We even went for a short walk up the street that afternoon ...

Fast forward one week, and things are definitely on the up, although there will still be a long way to go.

The main thing is that Jos has got his lust for life back and is eating like The Very Hungry Caterpillar :-) All the rest, I'm sure, will follow, step by step.

If all goes well, I'll be back to blogging regularly, starting where I left off, which are the final two days of our September holiday. I'm sure it will be weird going back in time knowing what I do now...

I'll also try to comment on your posts as soon as. Thank you so much for bearing with me, i's good to be back!

Time out

Holidays aside, I've never left it this long between posts. 

By rights, I would have published the final episode of my travelogue by now, telling you all about what we did on the last two days of our September holiday. I even made a start with editing photos and making a batch of collages.

Alas, all is not well in our world at the moment, so that I'm obliged to take some time out.

In the weeks after our return, Jos started feeling unwell, slowly but surely sinking into a depression. We initially attributed its trigger to the less than perfect circumstances of our holiday, although I'm sure the time of year, with the dark Autumn and Winter days ahead of us, must have had its role to play.

And then there was his impending birthday. He definitely wasn't looking forward to turning 77 in September, particularly since there is no denying that he is starting to feel his age. So much for saying that age is just a number, there's just no stopping the hands of the clock.

As in times of stress the first thing to go is his appetite, he started eating less and less, until we were forced to get him some protein drinks from the chemist to tide him over.

As if by magic, his appetite briefly returned around his actual birthday, only to dwindle again after less than a week. He constantly needed reminding to at least drink plenty of fluids, so it was almost a given that at some point he contracted a nasty UTI.

This made him finally see sense and go to his GP, who promptly prescribed him a course of antibiotics and started him on anti-depressants.

We are now one week later and thankfully he's got the worst of the infection behind him, although he's not out of the woods just yet. 

His appetite is yet to return as well and it's a constant struggle to get him to eat, as apart from some cut up banana, tiny pots of rice pudding and small bowls of soup, he just isn't able to force anything down.

As a result, he is feeling constantly exhausted which, according to his GP, will improve once the infection is gone completely. 

As I went for a walk in the park on Sunday morning, I implored the lady living in the shrine (below) for a miracle or two. Surely, it's not too much to ask to give him back his appetite and joie de vivre, both of which seem to have done a disappearing act at roughly the same time.

Meanwhile, we are waiting for the anti-depressants to work their magic. We were told that not only would this take a couple of weeks, things might even get worse before they get better.

I desperately miss blogging, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed this time out won't be taking all too long. It's just that my energy is currently being diverted elsewhere.

In the meantime, I'll keep reading your lovely blogs and try to comment as much as I can, as I would hate to be out of touch completely.

See you soon!