Last Christmas

 the OH bought me a Dolls House.

I can't remember if I have mentioned this before. A semi-thorough look back at last December/January seems to imply not. This was possibly because. for complicated reasons, it couldn't be delivered to Orkney and therefore went to Glasgow and so I didn't actually see it until March/April this year and we didn't get it back to Orkney until August. 

It was hand built by a specialist company and I spent hours and hours choosing all the details of floor coverings, wallpapers, coving, ceiling roses, light fittings - and so it went on - it got quite exhausting because it was like redecorating your whole house all at once after it had been stripped back to bare walls and floors. 

To use one of my favourite expressions, it wasn't cheap, but then I had wanted one for decades and had denied myself because when you have children luxuries like dolls houses for Mum quite rightly come so far down the priority list as not to feature. It's a different thing when they're grown up and you're retired. 

I had a dolls house as a child. My grandfather made it for me one Christmas  or birthday and also some of the furniture that went inside it. I loved it and I played with it lots and one afternoon when I was  playing with it with some friends I left the room for a couple of minutes and when I came back one of them had poked her fingers through every single cellophane pane in the windows on the front. Even now, not quite six decades later I can't help feeling a bit cross and thinking 'spiteful cow. She wasn't a girl who could cope with other people having things she didn't, although of all our group she probably had the most stuff and ,as an only child, was spoiled rotten. 

 I suspect that my wanting a dolls house so badly when I grew up, apart form an inbuilt fascination with small things and a love of social history is to do with my original one getting spoiled like that and also not remembering what happened to it. I expect it was given away when we moved house from the North to the South, which happened when I was twelve. 

Anyway enough of the psychological speculation and sadness tinged childhood memories. here are some pictures. 

Yes it's massive, and will cost a fortune to furnish. I have bought a few pieces for the kitchen and scullery, which I will doubtless show off in a later post. 

And coming back to this a day later I was so horrified by the number of typos I'd made, I have corrected them all!