Something I've always lusted after is one of those huge roll-top baths...especially the free-standing sort where all the nasty plumbing is hidden away...it'd have to have a shower head of course...a big one that has different choices of flow.
Our shower does...isn't quite the same though and Himself always has it on the vicious flow that pounds you...rather like Molly when she kneads my tummy in the evenings.
Another item I'd love is a four-poster bed or even a half-poster...it'd have to be a proper one though, with provenance , from an antique dealer. It would come with wooden steps concealing a pretty painted potty...thick linen sheets and an eiderdown of the sort filled with feathers...
And I'd have to have the dining-table we saw in an antique shop in Lavenham in Suffolk...couldn't take my eyes off that table you know...it was almost black with age and the patina of two hundred years of polishing...the man in the shop told me to touch it...stroke it he said...so I did and he said it was beautiful and I said it was...it wasn't fancy...no curved legs or anything like that. It was stout and sturdy...made for pewter platters of roasted beef and flagons of ale...bawdy jokes told and the piss-pot passed round the assembled company when they became too drunk to venture outside...
A walled garden would be lovely...old bricks smothered in climbing fruits...Apricots perhaps, or Figs...ancient sweet-scented Roses...a neat herbal somewhere, edged in Lavender bushes that the bees love so well...there would be worn stone seats surrounded by Jasmine and Night-scented stock where white moths would gather as the sun went down...
I must have a proper vegetable garden with glass cloches to protect the tender plants and a greenhouse filled with a Grape vine bearing bunches of purple grapes...cut with special scissors kept solely for the purpose and displayed with pride on the beautiful table...
There would have to be a 'lady who did'...she'd come from the village on her bicycle every day to beeswax and starch and her favourite saying would be 'I know my place'...and a gardener of course, with a lad who did the rough work...they'd sit side by side on the seat by the potting shed and eat cheese and pickle sandwiches for their lunch...the old man would smoke a Woodbine and the lad would drink a can of Coke and read the Mirror...
I would have to have a river...a proper river with reed-beds and water-lilies...some Swans perhaps or those brightly hued Mallard ducks...there might be the occasional Kingfisher...certain to be the gorgeous Dragon-Flies darting here and there...
And the house...it'd be a Tudor Manor house with wooden floors and a bit of a list where it's gradually sinking down...not for me a modern place on a gated estate where there are security men checking you in and out and the average price for a dwelling is 14 million...not for me the exclusive apartment in the South of France...or the suite in a grand hotel.
My wants and wishes are a combination of places we've been and gardens we've seen...all mixed up to become my ideal place to live...
