It ’ s 6.07am and I am sitting at my kitchen table . Apart from the ticking of the big old carriage clock , which also sat on the wall of my grandmother ’ s kitchen , the kitchen is wonderfully , beautifully quiet . This is my time . My secret time . In my head , I call it my golden time : 90 minutes and , if I am lucky , sometimes as long as two hours , when I relish every shining , silent moment at my kitchen table , before my family start peeling in , writes Clover Stroud
Main image photography : Lezli & Rose
I have a big family – Jimmy , aged 20 , Dolly , 17 , Evangeline , eight , Dash , six , and Lester , four – so life can often feel like a chaotic blur of endless laundry , non-stop meal planning , a never-ending hunt for lost shoes or a plaster for minor scrapes . But , running through it all , is boundless love .
It ’ s relentless and , frankly , pretty exhausting . Also , extremely noisy . So that early morning time is particularly precious . I use this time to write , most often . My third book is due with my publisher in April , so I do not have time to waste , but creativity is not always forthcoming . Sometimes , I simply cannot write . When that happens , I work through emails , scroll through the news or just simply sit at the kitchen table , contemplating life , as my two ginger cats press their orange paws against my keyboard or curl themselves around my legs .
How I spend that time doesn ’ t really matter , since when I am alone in the kitchen in the early morning , my hot cup of tea is more delicious than anything I will taste all day , and the silence is exquisite . I love my warm , twinkling kitchen at that moment , and always make a point of lighting a candle when I come downstairs . I delight in the weather that reveals itself to me from the big glass doors opening onto fields beyond our house . I might be blessed with a salmon-pink dawn but , at that time of the morning , even the patter of rain can sound reassuringly lyrical .
LIFE LESSONS OF LOCKDOWN This delight in my early-morning golden time is part of a routine I ’ ve only started enacting in the past year . It ’ s been one of the strange surprises of a year that has seen , as it has for many people , major changes in the way I live and work . In the past , I had often promised myself I would get up and work early before the day started , but the frenetic busyness of life always got in the way . But , just over a year ago , as all our lives changed almost overnight , we have been forced to adapt and change . And while it ’ s impossible not to acknowledge the losses of the last year , spring brings with it a vivid sense of optimism , too .
Lockdown , and life without the freedoms , the family and friends I ’ d probably taken for granted until the last year , has taught me many useful lessons about how to live now .
The past year has taught me , like nothing else in my life before , to love my home . No longer just a house or a location , I have felt my relationship with the four walls of our house changing completely in the past year . This building – a mish-mash of a former cottage in west Oxfordshire we extended to turn into a home large enough for a family of seven – is one I now truly call home .
HOME IS PERFECTLY IMPERFECT Spending so much time at home has often , of course , felt suffocating , but it has also forced me to embrace the home I have . Sometimes , that ’ s meant focusing on fiddly bits of DIY I ’ ve been putting off for far too long , like fixing the curtain rails in the children ’ s playroom , adding shelves to our bedroom to accommodate the teetering piles of books beside my bed , or painting over the marks left by small hands on the stairs and giving the hall a lick of cheerful bright yellow paint .
Favourite habits like losing time in junk shops or secondhand markets have been replaced by hunting for treasures on Instagram , which has become a surprising source of the kind of perfectly imperfect pieces that make a house a home . Recent finds have been a favourite new pink glass water jug , a small needlepoint rug I ’ ve slung over the back of a sofa to make the children ’ s playroom more cosy , and a set of wonky but charming prints I have hung in my youngest son ’ s bedroom . →
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