Crinoline Robot's vintage week (and then some)

A lottery win and a bigger house and I'd buy 'em.

On Saturday I met up with Liza (The Vintage Knitter) and Gisela (Miss Magpie's Musings) for a day out in Bath. I know, everyone comes to Bath - I'm very spoiled with not having to travel far to see people! One of these days I'll actually have to take a proper journey to visit someone. Anyway, we had a fab day out, ponking round the farmer's market at Green Park Station, eyeing up the amazing vintage jewellery in Bartlett Street Antiques Market (this was yer actual gold, not costume jewellery) and ambling up Walcot Street to look at the vintage shops.

Bath's a bit rubbish if you need practical things like a washing up bowl or a mop, but if it's Edwardian earrings or giant bronze cat-things you want, the city's got you sorted. The Christmas Market starts this week, which is a fortnight of hell for those of us who live/work there as coach parties converge on the already-congested centre. I avoid the city centre during the daytime as much as possible for that period, and try to avoid catching the train if I can (nightmare) but will take wanders round it after work, when most of the coaches have gone and you can actually enjoy your mulled wine as you browse around Tat In Sheds.

It's not Christmas without these.

I didn't buy much, but I did get these mushrooms, from high-end ribbons and trimmings shop VV Rouleaux. When I was a child, my dad was in the Royal Air Force, and we were based in Holland and Germany. While we were out there, mum got some mushrooms that she wired to the end of the Christmas tree branches every year, and they're an essential part of Christmas for me - but, of course, eventually the wires snap, and nowadays the urchins like to try to chew them up, so I was running short of them. I was so happy to find more! Hopefully Ziggy and Pippin won't destroy these ones.

A good day!

I haven't done much else of late, in case the silence on this blog wasn't a giveaway. I'm into my mega-deadline period at work - I had three in the past three weeks, though none this week, thank goodness - and it hit me that while I didn't feel sad as such, I was behaving very much like someone with depression, in that I was finding the basics increasingly difficult. I'd been doing big cook-ups at weekends so I'd have something nice for us to eat during the week, but was falling back more and more on ready meals and takeaways when it wasn't Mr Robot's turn to cook, and I had clean clothes but wasn't really putting much effort into looking nice, and it was obvious that if things slipped much more my life would be a MESS. So while I had wanted to take my stress tablets only when I felt really bad, I've put myself on a regime of one every weekday morning till my early December deadlines, at the very least, are out of the way. Touch wood it seems to be working; I'm coping a lot better. Parental birthdays are SORTED and half of Christmas is too, so we're all on track. Just my three remaining magazine deadlines to get out of the way now, and some more blog posts for you if I get my act together!