Glitterfest

Funny how trends come and go. A decade ago I wouldn't have been seen dead with a pot of glitter in my hand but now I can't get enough of it. Maybe it's an antidote to the economic gloom and dark nights or maybe I'm just transported back to my childhood when Christmas came accompanied by a healthy dollop of the stuff. Christmas cards and advent calendars would be festooned with it . I can even remember the smell of it in its little glass red rubber- stoppered phial , that and the aroma of 'gloy' which would be used to transform the toilet roll tube choir boys with the ping-pong heads. Happy days.

I was therefore more than happy to spend an evening surrounded by the stuff last night at Attic - my favourite shop's Christmas shopping evening. If Santa's reading this - one of everything please. In fact , better still, I may just dispatch the boys there one weekend to choose for me. Even if you blundered around the shop blindfold ( not suggesting that they do of course ) - whatever you laid your hands on would be beautiful. The knitted tree in the background came from Next but the other lovelies are all from Attic.

I remember my mother having an ancient tin of christmas cake decorations which came out year after year which included plaster santa figures and bottle brush trees just like the ones below. If we were lucky they'd still be encrusted with the previous year's icing which we would nibble. I don't think salmonella had been invented back then.