Space

16-03 by Mrs Bovary

I remember once having a lot of ambition but recently I seem to be lacking it. This struck me yesterday while I was doing something in the kitchen. So I sat down at the table and thought about why that might be. I stared at the opposite wall and my eyes fixed themselves onto the A1 poster of the Solar System we put up for Hubert and I studied all the planets.  Did you know that Pluto is no longer […]

Categories: Motherhood, Parenting, Uncategorized • Tags: drawing, illustration, space

Reception

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

  Open Day. Colet Court School, Barnes. This is where Mr Bovary wants to send Hubert when he is seven. For much of the morning the baby and I sit in the Reception. It is perfectly silent and still until the boys are let out of their lessons and come running through during break-time, at which point it becomes tumultuous. As the boys swarm about us, the baby and I play a game of Who Will Be The a) Love Rat b) […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: drawing, education, illustration

Woodstock

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

Bedford Park – to the uninitiated – is a residential enclave located between Stamford Brook and Chiswick in West London. It is not technically a park. It is the world’s ‘First Garden Suburb’. Wow! Nineteenth Century paradigm of suburban development, featuring Norman Shaw-designed Queen Anne-style houses.  There are trees and pavements and other things like that. It’s nice. John Betjeman called it: The most significant suburb built in the last century, probably in the western world. And you know that […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Bedford Park, Chiswick, illustration, London, Property

Values

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

On Saturday I saw Tom Parker Bowles walking out of the M & S Food Hall on the High Road so I said to Mr Bovary: ‘If ever one needed a sign to stay in Chiswick that is it .’ Mr Bovary didn’t know who he was so he muttered something about us having ‘different values’ and shook his head. Then I told him who he was and he said: ‘where where where’ charging the buggy through the shop, mowing […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Chiswick, drawing, illustration, London

Grind

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

Everything was fine until I broke the coffee grinder. After I broke the coffee grinder I gathered together in my head all the things that had previously caused some mild irritation and aggregated them so that they formed a great, painful mass. Here they are: The eggs Florentine I ate last Friday that caused my bowel to shut down. Joan Bakewell in The Times on Monday. She was saying how women shouldn’t be ‘professional mothers’ and how she sees these […]

Categories: Uncategorized

Cornish Cove

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

I can report that I have scraped the gravelly depths of maternal discombobulation! What? When? The event occurred at the Marks & Spencer Simply Food (Food Hall!) on the Chiswick High Road in front of the manager at the Collection Point desk at the back. I told him in no uncertain terms that his stock management system was a disgrace. It will not do, Sid Islam, manager of M&S Simply Food, Chiswick. (I think he made up his name when […]

Categories: Uncategorized

Insanity Boots

16-02 by Mrs Bovary

The first sign of madness: buying boots you can neither afford nor can you wear in any practical fashion. The second sign: Painting a picture of them. The third: Putting the picture you painted of the boots on the blog you continue to write but that no one ever reads. For one reason or another madness abounds. It abounds mainly due to the delirium caused by catching a particularly malevolent cold from my new friend, Francesca*, during a richly traumatic […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Boots, dicker boots, fashion, Isabel Marant, style

Pool

16-01 by Mrs Bovary

‘Lilli’ in gouache and charcoal. Illustration copyright Mrs Bovary. There is a little swimming school whittled out of the railway arches of Stamford Brook Underground not far from where we live. It is where Hubert is learning to swim. The school is only for children. As such it has an air of doll’s-house absurdity with its pastel colours, miniature furniture, little gates forbidding access to little rooms … It is at once perfect and dreadful. The heat from the pool […]

Categories: Uncategorized

Bovary’s Sunday Style – 36* Rosanna Lonsdale’s Handmade Lamps

15-12 by Mrs Bovary

We are renting at the moment so when it comes to essential homely features like lighting we are very much not at home. Landlords have a knack of providing the very worst type of lighting; perfunctory, stark, overhead. Inhumane! I yearn for lamplight. We have lamps! We are not savages. But the plugs don’t fit the sockets. There is little point in changing these if we are not planning to stay. Don’t go away! I realise this is beyond boring […]

Categories: Design, Interiors, Rosanna Lonsdale • Tags: decoration, home accessories, homedecor, homestyle, homeware, interiors, Lifestyle, Rosanna Lonsdale Lamps, style