There is SUN in Brussels!

What excitement - it is February and today we have the first day in weeks with a bright blue sky and in fact real sunshine here in Brussels. I have already planted today those forgotten tulips in the flowerbed in front of my house, in an attack of spring activity. The dogs are lying outside in the sun. Pity, my bloody Photoapparatus does not work.

And I have to think about lunch very soon for the troops, but was in such a good mood, that I wanted to share this happy event, "SUN in Brussels", with you.
For better or worse!!

Old dogs like the sun!

Get out, clean the terraces, plant those long forgotten bulbs, take a mug with lovely hot black coffee and dump yourself for 10 minutes in the sun, simply purring inside yourself as a cat would do. Or a Lion. Live the moment. Life is good!
Cleaning the bathroom and doing those mashed potatoes for lunch can wait.
HAVE FUN!

Colours and Rooms - 3 -Bedrooms

On goes the musing about colours and rooms. This time, I want to think about bedrooms and their colours. Question of tastes, as usual.

 It is amazing, how often people do not take the care they take in decorating their living room into their privacy area - which, after all is a very important one. It is like the person who does not care to put the butter on its proper dish when alone, but instead eats out of the package, to avoid "work".... I have seen installations for sleeping, which were little better than a dumping room or an additional attic, without any care for beauty or comfort. Again: a question of tastes???

The most important choice in colours is - in my humble opinion -  for a soft and cosy scheme. As always I advocate not more than two colours, with an additional third one for fun and lightness of touch. Naturally it depends also on the country you live in! A white and cool blue bedroom is wonderful in Greece, but can be terribly uncomfortable in grey Brussels and its rainy weather. Beautiful but a little bit daring is the soft powdery brigade of old roses and some grey - with white bedsheets a truly unbeatable combination. Or warm green and a lovely Toile de Jouy. Or simple white and grey, with a touch of soft reds, or greens. I would strongly object to too intensive colours for a bedroom, it is not calming but too exhausting to wake up every day in a neon orange nightmare.

To make it even more cosy, why not put a nice carpet on the floor, preferably in a natural material and perhaps fluffy, to have the luxury of getting out of bed on a cold winter morning and not have your feet freeze immediately. Another great asset is a soft throw over your bed - which can double in a very cold nights as additional blanket. Preferably in a calm colour and soft material - a friend of mine has some fur on her bed and it looks stunning.

Another thing: I personally have never liked to have a bed directly put to the wall - it is cold and uncomfortable. As a child my mother used to hang nice cotton curtains on the walls next to our beds, which gave it always the feeling of additional cosiness.I still do it today.
Bedlinen is another thing - for me there is nothing other than white - crisp, lovely white. Best is still Egyptian cotton, the thread is fine and high. It always looks fresh, wonderful inviting and gets better the more you wash and use it. I have succumbed to coloured bedlinen in Ikea many a time, but then I have always regretted it - anyway, it was always for the children, because I myself hate multicoloured bedlinen. I much prefer having a crisp white duvet and putting a lovely wool wrap on top of if for the colour splash.

I remember vividly the wonderful feeling of simple crisp cotton sheets in the small Italian hotel in Grado, Italy, where I spent a couple of weeks with my parents in the 1970ies. It was so simple and yet so comfortable - a simple white room, no schnick-schnack, a simple metal bed, with a cushion, white sheets and a simple wool blanket, like a monks cell. Part of the fun was, for certain, my brother and me sneaking of to the roof terrace of the Pensione and playing between the white long bed sheets, which were hanging there to dry in the lovely June Italian summer.
Anyway, the idea of ironing should not keep you from using good stuff, because if you take a little care in how to hang it properly to dry, you just have to fold it firmly and it looks the part.

Another big No No is plastic and polyester stuff - please don´t. Ever. Not only is it not comfortable for sleeping -it is horrible sticky and gives you a rash, cooking in your own juice ... brr. Out with it, immediately!

In the end it is so simple. If you get the ideas, i.e. the ingredients right, than you do not have to work a lot for it - it goes alone and long way. I should write a post about breakfast in bed.... Always looking for that ideal tray for writing, having a cup of tea and a telephone on it...

Thoughts about a Bed

It is so important to have a good bed and a quiet place to sleep - it is the best and most natural way of recovering from a strenuous life, hectic and stress: if you sleep well and sound, you are a different person during the day, whether you sleep alone in your bed or in a crowded way.



Moons over Brussels

First of all I advocate enough space to sleep at ease. I always wonder, how  couples can survive on a bedwidth of 140 cm? When you get every move of the other person into your bones and worst of all, have to share ONE blanket... Maritial bloodbath guaranteed. So one of the first luxuries is to have some space for yourself and perhaps a blanket for yourself as well. I personnaly do not like any artificial stuff and whenever I can, choose good old wool or downs over the cheaper syntetic versions.  What leads us to the holy grail of bedlinnen - of course white is the answer and cotton as well. Basta.

A good mattress is always expensive but one of the best investments you are going to do in your life - just remember, you will spend a good part of the later in this bed! Essentials for me which make all the difference in a bedroom are light, air and quietness - so you can sleep with the window open. You do not need necessarily a big room -  even an alcove is perfect, if airy. It is lovely though if you have a view out of the window if you wake up. I KNOW. Luxury! Remember I am talking so often about being woken up in the early morning by busy birds greeting the new day? So much nicer than having the horrible shrillness of an alarm clock going off next to your poor old head. What a start in the day is this?

A bed is for recovery, security, fun and homeliness, but I do reject very strictly the unholy habit for watching television there - why should one fall happily asleep after having watched several murders and other terrifying things in the dark? No thank you. Definitively no TV in my bedroom. There might be some advantage of working with your laptop there or having a nice telephone conversation, snugly curled up in the eiderdown. If I am not wrong, Winston Churchill used to work every day in bed until midday. Just imagine the country governed by Mr. Churchill from his bed - and it was not to their very worst indeed. But I do confess that when young, I used to hear radio in my bed in the evenings - mostly classical music though. But if you live not alone and share a bedroom this is a pleasure you have to forsake. Only recently I have discovered the bliss of an ipod - heard some concerts on Musique 3 and loved it. Actually  I have asked the children for a smallish radio for this Christmas - and got it! A question of tastes, as I say...

On decision making

Well, here we are, in the NEW YEAR. How about your resolutions? The ever pending question... It seems, that resolutions are there to be broken. But I took only one for this year and will try to keep it faithfully going: taking decisions at the right time, in my time.

There is a saying attributed to Katherine Hepburn, another of my heroes in life:
"What the hell - it might be right, it might be wrong - just do not avoid!"

How right she is. How much time do we lose in our lives in not making decisions? It is a fine art to know the difference of simply not taking a decision because of consideration and decisiveness, or to let things simply happen and take no responsibility and not owning what your decisions are. After all it is your life - and you should take decision in your own little manicured hands? We have produced so many fears and buts and whens during the last 50 years, that decision making has become highly dangerous, or so it seems. If you do that, then a whole avalanche of negative things might happen. Or not.

Deciding what and who one is needs courage - courage to confront oneself in the mirror and recognising what is great about ourselves and what is definitely not so great. We have both in us and with the courage of taking decisions the good parts get stronger, because we define ourselves more and more and the world around us knows with whom to count on in situation which can be tricky.

I speak not of blind deciding ones fate, like getting engaged  after 2 weeks, or hanging on to a decision simply because it was made and the fear to get out of it is too big to admit. How often have we  hang on to dead decisions which make us not happy, nor will bring us or the people we live with some fruitfulness and happiness. So to speak.

Happy new year!

The Eye has to travel, Documentary, 2012

I have been confined to my home for a bad back - which has the great advantage, that I can really do nothing else than watch telly, read and sleep. Actually I sleep and think a lot. Yesterday I finally watched a DVD which has been waiting for my attention already quite a while. I think the film was just showed very shortly here in Belgian cinemas, but it is a must for every style conscious person, who happens to be interested in beauty and art and fashion.

The film is quite short, a little bit over an hour, and is a documentary about the "empress of fashion", Diana Vreeland - the women who was for decades editor in chief for American Harper's Bazaar and then American Vogue. It was her who made those magazines into some form or art, not only talking about fashion, but about society and fashion, about stars, new technologies and everything a wide awake woman was and should be interested in.

For her style was something which came with self-education and curiousness for life, not only throwing money at interior designers and fashion popes. The most interesting bits are of course the moments when we hear her speak in an interview she gave already in her 80ies in 1983.  What glamour, personality and what a sharp mind. I was really flabbergasted and got a rush of regret, not to have lived in times like that - for  me the 60ies are perhaps not the ideal adult time zone to have lived in, but the 2 decades before would have been worth inventing a time machine right now on the spot.
All she says has to do with all we live, still today. Off course she is the master of exaggeration - not all is to be taken literally, which sometimes people don't get. "The eye has to travel" - indeed, imagination is something of a wild animal which has to be tamed and then used for bring more fun, more conscience of beauty and more longing in our lives.  Exaggeration for her was the instrument to highlight those  of years gone and years to come. If you note her clothes in the interview, they are always the most simple cuts and colours - nothing loud there. The background is full of colour and fun and wisdom. Today, much of what she did as an editor would not be possible, simply out of economical reasons: who will ship 500 orchids to the Arctic for a single photo shoot?

I watched the film with my daughter, who is in her teens and not particularly - yet - interested in fashion - but she got the essence of the film: Beauty matters and the live we want to live is the life we have to create our selves. In times of internet-shopping and floods of information, cheap heaps of cheap clothes, the art is to source for the things which MEAN something to YOU. Dare it, be somebody,  be yourself, the best self you can be, not just a weak copy of a some magazine's make over story. Dare to be somebody of your own. That is her message, in a nutshell.
If you can get your hands on a copy, watch it.

Interior Decoration

In a next life, I will decorate houses in the dozen. Not just clippings out of magazines and a house in my mind, but the real thing - in the country, in town, at the beach, on a mountain and one in France, too. Preferably an old winemaking chateau. Or better an old and desperate country house in England, or Bavaria?

Interior Decoration is something which never bores me, never. I just feel elated when I get hold of a good interiors decoration magazin, can snuggle up the sofa and have a good read. After this I am refreshed and would like to start right away - but alas, there are nor will be all those houses to provide for all those pleasures. One cannot have it all: the dreams and then the reality..
So I go on doing it in my mind and until now have not been bored with this neither. The advantage: It involves no costs ( unless in the foreseen future we have to pay to have a right to think for ourselves?) and all is possible - you have always to see the bright side of life.
I have changed houses many times in my life, but almost ever I have lived in nice places. (A dear friend told me once, that I would owe him a new addressbook, if we would keep up the speed of moving - his M-Page was full in a mo!) Not big houses or appartements sometimes, but nice. In my childhood I had the privilege to grow up in a big house with much space and a huge garden. There were not enough rooms for each of us, but it did us no harm to share. I had also the privilege to see and take in many old country houses, some of them now altered unrecognizably, some still intact - with the oldfashioned courtousy and Gastfreundschaft which is a rare relict of olden golden days.

When I started to study, I was lucky as well: in Munich I lived always in a nice neighbourhood, in Nymphenburg, in Schwabing, then more or less on the Maximiliansstrasse and at last in the upcoming quarter of the Johannisplatz. I have always felt well in my flats, as small as they were - and I enjoyed to live in a WG  ( Wohngemeinschaft - shared flat) - even if this meant that the chap living with Lilli and me never cleaned the bathroom, considering this to be a girls job. It also meant, that my expensive face cream was shared as was the milk I bought. But the company was great and the fun we had together is unforgettable. The start of a wonderful and still ongoing friendship.
All my rooms and interiors seem to look the same - I have very early developped a style of my own, being more "mine" as the years advance and I see the world. Or at least I hope.

Entree of House Wittgenstein in Vienna

Recently I get more and more interested in modern art and architecture - most of it is still a mystery to me, but I could imagine to live in a very modern and streamlined house - but only with my own furniture and my own way of arranging it. It could look very interesting indeed. The idea is not mine - alas. I picked it up most certainly in the fotographs of the interiors of the villa Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. One of the most refined interiors I have ever seen - timeless, elegant and without any dust and historic ballast. Shame, that the house nowadays is only to be visited in its empty shell - almost impossible to imagine the interiors as they were meant to be as such. ( for  more information about this marvelous house, please have a look in wikipedia and also on www.wien.info/sights) . The pictures of this post are all found in Google.

Why don' t you....? Miscellaneus...

 Yes, several things:

- Cut your hair yourself? No need to pay huge amounts of money for some fringes and "degradees" - start slowly and get lost.

- Buy a long evening dress at Zara, H&M or Mango - great stuff out there, for very affordable money. After all it is mad to spend huge amounts of good cash if you do not walk the Red Carpet in Cannes on a regular basis. And then the girls there always rent their clothes....

- Find a seamstress ( and then please share the adress...) and get going to design your own dresses? Look out in magazines and make a lookbook for yourself alone.

- Promise never again to buy coloured loo paper? White is the colour to have. Basta.

- Give 5/10/20/ $/ £/ Euro for a good cause in your area ( easy to be found out if you ask...) and once a month give an afternoon to help out there. You know where the money goes to and the feeling of doing something good will do you good as well.

- Think about purchasing a real carpet? They should be as big as you can squeeze in your living room and not, I repeat, not 1 meter long and 50 cm wide. Go to auction houses, there are thrown out there at a prices which make me weep.

- Start painting and pottery and gardening in your sparetime instead of going only to the gym? So much more refreshing and food for thought too.

- Invent a new signature dish and cook it at least once a week? I learned only late in life that I have a son who for years and years lives on Nutella,bread and milk but loves Curries in all varieties. Off we go!

- Promise NOT to use Botox. It ALWAYS shows.

- Use organic oils to moisturize your face instead of  super expensive face creams? So much more natural and cheaper - and great value in skin maintainance too. Go in an organic shop and have a look for Macadamia or Sesame oil, Hazelnut or Wheat germ. Mix your own stuff.

- Laugh more?

- Hear  your old Charles Aznavour and Yves Montand Cds on a rainy sunday afternoon while cleanining up your desk?

- Sleep with open windows and let the light and birds wake you up at dawn - use the time as "Me-Time" before the rest of the house has to get up. ( Ok, better advice for summer, but until then I will forget).

- Throw out all bedlinnen made of polyester? Gasthly stuff. Nobody wants to sleep in it. Money is no excuse ( I only say: Ikea...). This is a horrid mistake in good taste.

- Edit your summer clothes, now, as the winter months have started.
Get rid of everything, which does not fit/please/talk to you any more, is not in pristine condition and make ROOM for thought, not old clothes!

- Allocate Beauty in all its forms a much more prominent place in your life? Every day of your life counts.

Anyway, your life and happiness lies in your own hands.