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Travel Whitstable

Mudlark

The smell of damp tweed.  My collarless shirt and felt braces.

A mantle with fabric that may or may not be Bloomsbury.  Mismatched luster wear cup and saucer.  Chipped.  These things used to delight me. Treasures found at the edge of the Thames.  When did I cease to be a mudlark?

Is it Duncan Grant or Vanessa Bell?

  • I bought the fabric from a junk shop in Stamford a month ago. Would dearly love to find out who it’s by… 

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    Simon I’ll check in a book on Bloomsbury textiles at work. It could be one of those designs they did for the Queen Mary that were then mass-produced. That would be v exciting! 

    7 hours ago
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    Christopher It’s Bloomsbury I sure of that 

    5 hours ago
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    Christopher My only other thoughts is that it could be by Cressida Bell but I do feel it has something of Vanessa about it 

    5 hours ago
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    Ed How exciting! I think it’s possibly more Vanessa in style too.

White linen bed sheets, feather pillows, pale pink, satin, quilted, stuffed with down.  Hot water bottle.

Laying the table for breakfast.  Poached eggs.  Marmite on my toast.

That tribe of gay men still delight me.  I used to know them.

My cottage in Whitstable was full of tiny, beautiful things.  With more money came larger, expensive things.  Now I sit under a decade long avalanche of avarice.

More stuff.

Remember when we didn’t have radiators in the cottage?  Frost in the sitting room before we lit a fire?  The smell of coal and crackling kindle.  Wrapping up warm before we left the bedroom?

I think this is how one might start again.  Renting a room at the back of a house by the sea.  I don’t have to live in Whitstable.

I am wondering hard again.  Torn between two worlds.

The conversation from Facebook (above) that I have taken the liberty of reproducing made me feel homesick for small mercies…for a butler’s sink, for the sound of a mop bucket.  For the back stairs in a country house.  For sea views that may include the ghosts of women once dressed in white tulle and parasols.

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