Get hippie

After our slightly psychedelic gig experience last week myself and C, fellow housebunny, have come over all 1969.

C has taken to wearing silk Hendrix headbands over her curls and her burgeoning collection is strictly second hand or home made. I spent the weekend baking and S was happiest strumming on one of my collection of vintage guitars - truly the weekend passed in a kind of idyll. Now it’s over but here are the lessons I have learnt from our pseudo-commune.

To market, to market: Saturday was market day. I bought many ‘recycled’ items which would have set me back many, many, many pounds in a tarted up vintage shop. Instead, 1 x floral belted dress, 2 x dirndl skirts, 1 x pair of diamante embellished Dita-esque shoes, 1 x bottle-green Roberts radio and 3 metres of sumptuous silk stung me all of £13. Take lots of loose coins, attend market and repeat.

Bake, rattle and roll: It’s not all about occasion baking. I made Banana muffins to use up stinky black bananas; I whipped up chocolate cookies as a procrastination device. Baking takes president over most things, especially tidying up breakfast rooms. S and C left me polishing my halo and packaging up bags of charity shop bound clothes and returned to find me in a sinful cloud of cocoa powder and flour. Dee-licious-lightful.

Get your rainy day book out: This weekend, we went back to schoolday hobbies. Coloured pencils, sketchbooks, plenty of paper, dressing-up boxes, sewing - the idea is that whatever you were good at á l’ecole, you’d probably still get stickers for. I’m getting arts and crafts out of my past and starting a new rainy day book. I’m looking for inspiration for the future.

Do stuff a bit local: Monday night, rainy sky, West End far away… turns out there’s a divine Indian right on our doorstep. Hurrah. The joy of this, of course (apart from the fact that hippies went to Goa and we went to Bombay Brasserie) is that - unless you live somewhere a bit upmarket - things that are nearby are generally independent, or as this wonderful website will have it, Unchained. From now on I’m patronising the locals as a priority and hoping I’ll get my £1 coins back as change in the Post Office. What comes around, goes around.

Let’s all become Nu-hippies. Or Post-rebels. Or something.