Crinoline Robot's vintage week

My boy has been poorly but is all better now

Yup, it's another roundup of my bimblings. I haven't quite managed to take photos every day, owing to the Bank Holiday weekend making me forget, but I did put some effort in nonetheless. I wanted to get images of some books for the website, and hit on an idea for interesting backgrounds: papers from my papercrafting stash. I don't do much papercrafting, Halloween cards aside, so it's good to find another use for those lovely papers. And it definitely does make the books look nice, because I was able to pick colours and a style to match each one, though I could still do with working on the lighting. Much nicer than plonking them down on tatty old Victorian floorboards, anyhow.


On the subject of tatty Victorian floorboards, work on the bathroom is progressing. I think Dan the plumber has been quite startled by how keen Mr Robot and I are to get things finished. Over the Bank Holiday weekend Mr Robot sanded the bathroom floor, and then I gave it a couple of coats of dark walnut varnish. I'd feared it would look patchy, but it turned out looking very nice. I used proper floor varnish, so it would be hardwearing. Who wants to varnish floors regularly? Not me! Best to use the hardwearing stuff. When we repainted the bathroom I'd worried that the orange walls looked overwhelmingly warm, but now the floor is much darker and the tiled bath surround in place the orange isn't quite so overpowering.

Ziggy was poorly over the Bank Holiday. Poor little man. He eats all sorts of crud (slugs, woodlice, junk mail), and we think he might have been eating sticks, which made him sick. After a day looking sorry for himself, but not in immediate need of vet's attention, he seemed to perk up again and was back to swatting Pippin's tail. I swear one day we'll have to take him to have pebbles removed from his gut; he's that sort of animal. If he'd stayed in the wild, he wouldn't have lasted long, so it's good that he ended up with us.

One thing I did enjoy over the weekend was rewatching a couple of Joan Hickson Miss Marple episodes. Is it possible that your first Marple is always your favourite? Joan Hickson was mine. I remember my mum watching the BBC/Hickson episodes in the 1980s; the first couple of notes of the theme tune is enough to hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Nowadays I can see the 1980s influence in the younger characters' costumes and hairstyles – as I mentioned in my thinking about costume dramas recently, every decade reproduces past ones under current influences – but I don't mind that. There's something quite enjoyable in the slight anachronisms. (There's that nostalgia again.) I've shunned rewatching the series in recent years because it had become too familiar, and so watching it this time, it all felt fresh again. Funny to think that we're now as far from when they were filmed as they were from the 1950s when the programmes were set...

So, who's your favourite Marple? Or are you actually more into Poirot?