We believe that looking lovely goes beyond how you dress and whether you wear makeup. The truly important part is what is on the inside, and how you act towards others.
Reaching Out and Keeping in Touch
Many years ago when I was a Brownie (in the Girl Scout movement) I learned to sing a song that began “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.” The words may sound trite, but this is pretty good advice for anyone who wants to live a happy life.
Sometimes it seems easier to spend all of our spare time at home, either occupied with chores or flopped in front of the television of computer. We have so much to keep us busy, and a bounty of free entertainment. Sadly, none of these is emotionally rewarding.
I think you have to put in effort to reap a result, and that is probably truer for relationships than anything else.
This month I will be making time to catch up with some old friends, and I hope to keep up the impetus through the coming season.
Earlier this summer I contacted a woman that I had corresponded with on the LinkedIn website. I had worked out that she lived near Cambridge, and that I was going to be staying in Cambridge for a few days.
We all see warnings to be careful of people that we meet via the Internet, but I couldn’t see any serious danger in meeting a woman who had caught my attention by making lovely raincoats.
I met Sally Guyer in Cambridge Botanic Gardens. We had a very interesting chat over tea and cake and she told me about the challenges she has faced in setting up her business.
To my delight she had brought along a sample raincoat for me to try on. She had guessed my size from photos here on Look Lovely, so the coat was a tiny bit too big, but I still thought it the most elegant raincoat imaginable.
I hope that we might meet again the next time I am in Cambridge.
So if you are feeling a long distance from your friends, or you have just moved, why not use the interest as a means to meet some new people. Sally and I took the precaution of meeting in a very public place, and I suggest that anybody should consider personal safety when setting up a meeting. But why not give it a go?
In Praise of Postcards
 I realise that I grew up in a different era. When I left home the personal computer had not been invented, so there was no email. Mobile phones were decades in the future, so there were no text messages. Old-fashioned telephones were not universal, and long-distance calls were considered to be prohibitively expensive.In the age before electronic communication, letter-writing was the chief means of communication. When I left home, my father told me that I should send a letter to my mother every week.
With the emotional knowledge that I have painfully acquired, I wish that I had written every single week. However, I did send a letter almost every week for 30 years, from when I left home until my mother died.
Of course, my mother wrote back and many of my friends from home sent letters too.
The pleasure of seeing a hand-written envelope in amongst the mundane bills and bank statements is in no way matched by the electronic voice of my computer telling me “you’ve got mail”.
I acknowledge that it is not possible to turn back the clock and that it would be futile to campaign for a return to letter writing.
Postcards are another matter. Postcards are a little scrap of evidence of a holiday, a bit of seaside fun sent to friends and family back home. It is not such a chore to write a postcard, as you only need to think of a few sentences.
I like getting postcards: I prop them up on the mantle shelf in the dining room and leave them there for weeks.
When I go away I try to take a list of addresses for those to whom I plan to send cards. Some people even take prepared sticky address labels, so as to save time.
I try to send cards to people that I know will appreciate them, such as my elderly neighbour who gets little post, or my friends’ children who adore receiving something just for them.
Writing cards and buying stamps may feel like an inconvenience, but the pleasure that postcards give to the recipients make it all worthwhile.
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