It's not all about the flowers

I took these pictures of flowers in the dining room and sitting room and thought that they were going to be the main subject of this post. All of them came in a bunch for £5 - very good value. My mum was a great flower arranger using Oasis and pin holders and so on, but of recent years I tend to just stick them in a vase (feeling vaguely guilty about it). These could all do with some greenery but it was dark when I arranged them, the night before last. It has, admittedly, been light at times since then but somehow I've just left them.

Looking at the pictures, however, also reminds me of various people. The gerberas are in a glass bowl which came from my parents' house. It's very simple and undecorated and I love its little round feet. I'm a great fan of glass. (I'd like a really interesting piece of Lalique... .) To the left of the bowl is a wooden pin dish, also belonging to Mum and made in the Mouseman studios - not, I think, by the original Mouseman - with a crystal paperweight made by my best schoolfriend's grandfather and given to Mum by her when we were at school.

Under the crysanthemums and rose is a Dartington glass cheese board that we gave long ago to Mr Life's mother, who died in 1991, and a crystal heart that we gave to my mother one Mother's Day.

One of the children gave me the left-hand vase above, with others of varying sizes, because I was always tempted* to steal - for a tiny flower arrangement - one of the fairy-sized individual glass Communion goblets shaped like this that we use at our church . And we bought the red vase - actually a tumbler - in a shop in Copenhagen when we were there on a family holiday. It's a much more intense crimson than it looks here.

So the post is actually more about people than flowers; and also about the longevity of objects as opposed to people. One day, O offspring, you'll have to decide what to do with it all. Sorry!

Mr Life - still fragile. Daughter 1 and Grandson - down in London.

* I did not yield to temptation.