Nothing rhymes

We were blessed with a string of bright sunny days last week. Still a wee bit too chilly, courtesy of a persistent, at times frosty wind, it nevertheless made the world outside our windows look a little less hostile.

In spite of this, I had quite a wobbly week, choking up and getting all teary-eyed at the oddest of  moments and usually at the most inconsequential of things.

Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the glorious weather with what is slowly but surely being considered as our new normal that hit me in the solar plexus? I mean, how can it be Spring when everything else is awry and nothing rhymes? Things are so surreal that I keep expecting to wake up from this nightmare any moment.

But wobbles are just that, brief moments in time when our hearts can no longer cope with all the pent-up emotions, and we have to let off steam. Then we pick ourselves up and carry on. Never did the famous Keep Calm and Carry On slogan ring so true.

So, I tried to keep calm and carried on wearing my most colourful outfits. And while the first bit wasn't always a success, I'd like to think I nailed the second with my choice of outfits!

If I remember correctly - sorry, head's a bit of a jumble too - this is what I was wearing on Monday before last.

The outfit was built around the exuberantly dotted aubergine blouse, which I was determined to wear as a pick-me up. From its print, I picked orange for my cardigan, and yellow for the flower corsage pinned to it, as well as my belt and tights. Both orange and yellow were combined in my vintage beaded necklace. The one that always reminds me of bubble gum balls!

My skirt is vintage St. Michael, and is part of a suit, with a short-sleeved belted jacket. See here.

Picking a final colour from the blouse's dots, I added a white poodle brooch. Isn't he the cutest?

I hadn't been out of the office during my lunch breaks for over a week but, after feeling particularly wretched on Wednesday morning, I needed to clear my head and thus walked to Antwerp's botanical garden again.

The sky was an almost surreal blue, contrasting most picturesquely with the sunlit buildings, with Antwerp's famous Art Deco skyscraper (top left) dwarfing my office building, which you can just catch a glimpse of in the bottom right corner.

Making a slight detour through some traffic free shopping streets spacious enough for social distancing, I passed a covered gallery of shops (bottom right) where weirdly enough music is gently tinkling from the sound system all day even though all the shops are closed.

Where the traffic free streets end, I happened to look up and spot an umbrella hanging from a branch of a tree.  

Dodging the traffic on the busy street I'd arrived at, I briefly retraced my steps, then walked past the magnificent neoclassical Bourla theatre (top right), completed in 1834 and topped with statues of Apollo and the nine muses.

Then, after rounding a corner, the decorative stone balustrade bordering the botanical garden soon came into view. Topped by a series of ornate lampposts, it offers a bird's eye view of the sunken garden, a haven of serenity away from the chaos.

Dating back from 1825, the botanical garden was used for medical purposes for the adjacent St.Elisabeth hospital. Legend has it that its little pond was used to keep bloodsuckers which they used at the hospital. 

The garden, affectionately known as Den Botaniek, has been managed by the city of Antwerp since 1926 and in 1950 it was listed as a valuable landscape for the city of Antwerp and its inhabitants.

There was no sign of the tulip with my name on it, but at least the label made me smile!

Not that you'd notice, as I was wearing my scarf doubling as a makeshift face mask.

Despite its small size, the botanical garden still houses an incredible 2000 plant species, with some artwork dotted among them. 

Feeling refreshed and in a galaxy of my own, courtesy of the starry night print of my dress, we did some outfit photos in the garden after work.

Thanks to our heavy duty pruning, I was able to stand in the small paved sunken area in the middle of our garden, where even Phoebe had trouble getting into before, as it had become completely overgrown.

I was actually waiting for a spaceship to pick me up and zoom me over to a virus free planet, but none came so I gave up in the end.

The dress is vintage and once again it's one that's been in my wardrobe forever but hadn't been worn for a silly amount of time. It is made of a swishy rayon fabric, made even more swishier because of its lining.

I wore Monday's orange cardigan on top to which I clipped another one of my flower corsages.

While we were out in the garden, I had the opportunity to take a rare portrait of Her Majesty in which she isn't a blur or has just closed her eyes. You can see the little chink in her right ear, made when she was picked up and neutered as a one-year-old stray, before she was adopted by us.

Another view of my dress, without the cardigan this time. The squishy blue belt with its rectangular buckle is an old retail buy, as is the turquoise birds-in-flight brooch. The mottled blue beaded necklace is one of a plethora picked up in a long-gone vintage shop.

Putting on my Smiling Princess act here, but this can change in the blink of an eye.

When I went for a little walk during next day's lunch break and came across this heartbreaking scene in front of a cavalry group sculpture around the corner from my office, tears once again blurred my eyes, making me cut my walk short and flee back inside.

Today was my last working day of the week, so I'll probably have a bit more time for blogging now.

I promise to return shortly with photos of another, more successful, lunch break walk. 

Until then, stay safe my friends xxx

Everything depends upon how near you stand to me

Like a virus, fear is contagious. Perhaps even more so. It spreads like wildfire, as neither social distancing nor quarantine can stop it. It worms its way inside your head until the outside world feels like an alien country full of potential predators. It eats you up and then spits you out in tiny little pieces: a jigsaw of what once upon a time was you. Several pieces seem to be missing so that you cannot make yourself whole again. Fear makes you want to flee - which is virtually impossible in this current crisis - or fight. But it seems you're fighting against giants. Only when you realize they are actually windmills will your heartbeat finally slow down.

So I'm giving the middle finger to all those who are kindling fear with gloating gusto. I'll be banishing their black-hearted messages by wearing colour. Lots and lots of it, so there! I do hope this will make them crawl back under their rocks! And as for those at the other end of the scale, who still haven't got the message and keep putting others at risk with wanton abandon: may you all be turned into pillars of salt.

But even if things are looking bleaker than ever, and if I certainly do not always feel like practising what I'm preaching: we mustn't give up, and keep on aiming for that light at the end of the tunnel.

The 16th of March was the start of our first week of semi-lockdown and the day of my last journey by public transport. Schools had closed, so that I was absolutely fine in the morning, having an unprecedented amount of space on the tram. 

I was wearing a seldom worn red vintage dress liberally sprinkled with blue and white crescents. There are blue and white stripes at its yoke as well, which has three buttons proudly bearing an R. The R is short for Romy, as that's the name mentioned on the dress's label, which is also bearing a picture of the Eiffel Tower, giving it a certain je ne sais quoi.

The dress's classic red, blue and white colour scheme was reflected in my choice of accessories, as well as my cardigan and tights. Even my blue ankle boots came out to play!

Back to that fateful Monday. Non-essential shops were still open - they would be forced to close for the duration on the 18th - and by midday it was fairly crowded in the city centre. I fled back to the office in disgust when, out for a breath of fresh air, I was almost overrun by people carrying Primark shopping bags. People who obviously had to go home when I did. That evening, Jos and I made the wise decision that he would take me to work and pick me up again by car, which went a long way in reducing the fear factor.

Our car journey to work takes us past Antwerp's botanical garden. In spite of this being a less than ten minute walk from my office, I hadn't been there in years, so on Tuesday I took advantage of the gorgeous springlike weather to head there during lunch break.

There were only a handful of people about, all keeping the appropriate distance and, after walking around to see what was in bloom, I sat on a empty bench luxuriating in the sunshine and indulging in a couple of minutes of normality.

Apart from plants, there's some art dotted around the garden. These are by sculptor Monique Donckers, and called "Greening II". When I was looking it up on the Internet, I came across some photos taken in Summer, when grass was allowed to grow around them, almost obscuring the last one. I'll have to go and photograph them again in a few months' time, hoping that by then all of this is only a bad memory.

This is another of that week's outfits. Now that the days are getting longer there is once again opportunity to take outfit photos after work.

This classically shaped, box pleated frock, with its green flowers on a white and mottled green background, was another one which was long overdue an outing. I chose a medley of red and burgundy to accompany it. 

I didn't feel like venturing out again during lunch break that week. To be honest, I was finding the routine utterly exhausting: putting on latex gloves to take the elevator to the ground floor and opening the building's front door, then getting rid of the gloves and get out the hand sanitizer, and then having to do it all again coming back in. As I was once again putting on gloves, I started humming the song Hand in Glove by The Smiths, stopping short when I came to the line which became the title of this post. How very, very apt. Never mind that it is preceded by the line "we can go wherever we please"! 

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, even if a stinging wind did its best to throw a spanner in the works.  I was feeling surprisingly chipper that day, which was greatly helped by wearing one of my favourite ever frocks. The green 1940s style dress with its blowsy flower print originally had cheap looking plain white buttons which once again I replaced with more likely candidates from my stash.

In my opinion, blue and green should certainly be seen, so I added a sky blue cardigan, squirrel brooch and ring to accompany the blue flowers in the dress's print.

Further accessories were a tan belt and translucent beaded necklace, and I pinned a Welsh daffodil brooch to my cardigan in honour of the first day of Spring.

Teal opaques and my snake print ankle boots completed my outfit. The latter were only worn for the photos, though. 

When the rays of the sun started pouring into our little walled garden, I exchanged my outfit for an old pair of jeans, pale yellow top and denim gardening apron for a spot of heavy duty pruning.

We cleared an area of some of the rampant ivy and the dried remains of last year's ferns, and pruned our winter jasmine within an inch of its life. 

Having lost our winter flowering Clematis armandii, as well as its host plant, our long suffering lilac, there's not much in flower yet, apart from the yellow flowers of our ineradicable Ranunculus bush and the frothy sprays of white Spirea flowers.

Our cast iron weather vane appeared from under a mound of ivy, and I accidentally knocked our stone sun plaque from our garden wall. No harm done, though, and she, as well as the weather vane, are currently awaiting new spots.

Meanwhile, Jos had been tackling the remains of the dead lilac, so that we can now see the shed at the back of our garden from our kitchen window. I'd almost forgotten the makeshift gingham curtain and the row of wooden tulips I put up many years ago to cheer things up.

Still in a good and productive mood, I then put away my warmest Winter coats and dresses, exchanging them for the first batch of Spring stuff, a task made much lighter with the help of you know who!

We'd intended to continue in the garden on Sunday but, although it was looking gorgeously sunny, the wind had turned decidedly icy and unpleasant, which kind of put paid to our plans.

In the end, we only stepped into the garden to show you my outfit, which was based around another dress I hadn't worn in years. 

It's a handmade one, with three-quarter sleeves with elasticated cuffs, and a slightly psychedelic flower print in orange, lilac and purple on a white background.

I pulled out all the stops by accessorizing it with a purple woven belt, a fuchsia cardigan to which I clipped a row of flower hair clips, a multi-coloured wooden necklace, and an enameled Iris brooch pinned to my dress's collar.

I was wearing the ankle wellies I picked up at a charity shop back in December and which have been a godsend for my gardening activities.

In the week that followed, I had quite a few wobbles, and as it now seems that starting from next week I will be on reduced hours, I will have to find a new routine to keep my mind out of mischief. 

Meanwhile, I wish you all well, and hope to see you in my next post!

Linking to lovely Nancy's Fancy Friday!

Strange days indeed

In the first weeks of my blogging career back in March 2016, on the day following the terrorist attacks at Brussels airport, I published a post called Could Life Ever Be Sane Again.

Part of the lyrics to a Smiths song called Panic, this kept playing over and over in my head in the days following the attack, as it expressed exactly how I felt: a kind of numbness mixed with disbelief and above all, a feeling of powerlessness, a reality check in a time when daily realities seemed to be ever shifting.

How very apt that post title would have been now!  As if on cue, it has wormed its way back into my subconscious ever since the dreaded Coronavirus has reared its ugly head. The situation has become pretty dire here and it's hard to stay positive when faced with the relentless scaremongering the media bombard us with, causing panic and paranoia all around and seemingly throwing all common sense overboard.

For the last couple of days, I feel as if I'm about to lose my sanity. Numb and powerless, I can only stand and watch as reality is shifting yet again, and Belgium is going into the first stages of lockdown. Strange days indeed!

Ironically, I also wrote a post called My Corona back in 2016.  I'm not joking! It's here and it's about my grandfather's typewriter!

On top of that, sunny spells are still rarer than hen's teeth these days, but at least there's a cure for the rainy day blues!

And if wearing colour doesn't kiss it all better, it certainly goes a long way in making me feel marginally better and, perhaps, anyone seeing me wearing it too.

Giving preference to those items which haven't been worn yet this Winter, I unearthed this 1960s purple floral shift dress from my wardrobe. Yet another old Think Twice find, it has a dropped collar and a row of tiny decorative self fabric buttons at the yoke.

Trying to keep a sunny disposition was aided by adding yellow in the mix, a first for this dress which in the past I always wore with either pink or mustard.

I was surprised at how well the purple seemed to work with the amber yellow of my tights, cardigan and necklace. And look how the pansies in my brooch are bringing the colours together! As a final touch of sunshine, I added an orange flower corsage to my long-line cardie.

In February's final week, the weather had been particularly fickle.

One afternoon at the office, I looked up from what I was doing to see a flurry of snowflakes drift by my window. Much to my relief, the snow didn't stick, but it still managed to cause even more disruption than usual to Antwerp's feeble excuse for a public transport system.

On my way to the bus stop the next morning, I was sufficiently entranced by the delicate morning sunshine illuminating our village church that I took a photo with my phone's camera.

I did the same the next day when we were once again treated to the usual foggy drizzle. What a difference a day makes!  

The weekend, as weekends tend to do, couldn't have come sooner. 

You've already seen Saturday's purple and yellow attire at the start of this post, but not my outerwear.

I didn't have much use for my Princess coat this Winter, so I'm taking the opportunity of any chilly day to give it an outing. Recently, I was asked why I'm calling it my Princess coat. Well, at the time it made its first appearance on the blog, back in December 2017, somebody remarked that it was a coat fit for a Winter Princess, and so the name stuck.

That Saturday, we did our usual round of the charity shops, where I found a fabulous pair of hardly worn brown boots, with a kind of decorative elastic panel at the back. Their heels have just the right height for them to be wearable for me, so in our basket they went.

Next up was a pale green suede belt with the most gorgeous buckle. You'll see me wearing it in my next post!

A handful of necklaces also made their way into our shopping basket. Surely a girl can't have enough of those?

People have been asking me about the background fabric I'm using to photograph most of my jewellery finds. This is actually a quilted plaid I found in a charity shop years ago, consisting of  large alternating pink and white printed rectangles. The quilt covers our antique linen chest and its position in front of one of our upstairs windows offers the perfect light for photographs as well. I love the faded grandeur of the fabric, the faded bit greatly helped by the fact that it's one of Phoebe's favourite sunbathing spots!

Enter Sunday the first of March, and a brief respite from all the rain. I don't remember if it lasted all day, but I don't think so, as we didn't leave Dove Cottage's confines.

The dress I was wearing that day, with a repeat later that week, was a re-discovered one and no, I haven't got the slightest idea why it was neglected for so long. I don't think I wore it at all for at least two years!

It's got a generous pleated skirt which invites a spot of twirling, a tie collar, which I tamed by pinning a multi-coloured stone brooch to it, and bishop sleeves closing with two red buttons at the wide cuffs.

If I remember correctly, it also came with a self fabric belt, but I used a grey leather one with an oval leather covered buckle from my collection instead.

Everything I'm wearing here came from my existing wardrobe, except for the pinkish pearly brooch, which was twinkling at me at Think Twice a couple of weeks back, and the boots, which are the ones I picked up at the charity shop on Saturday.

Well, that's it for now. I'll be returning with one more post of outfits and finds before entering an enforced period of charity shopping abstinence, as all shops except for those selling food - and toilet paper, if it's not sold out - have to close in the weekends until the end of the month. As for flying visits to Think Twice during my lunch breaks, I somehow don't think I'll have the heart for them.

But it will pass, I'm sure it will. Do stay safe and healthy in the meantime!