Finding The Sparkle In January

Front garden tour | Twelfth Night dragons | A frosty walk | Straw Bear Festival | Pega’s Well
Down the muddy lane - and it’s a little further than you think it will be - you come to the flint
cottage and former village shop that I call home.

Here at The Old Shop I document my days through the seasons as I follow the old ways
and do my best to build a creative and nourishing life which I can then share with you.

I try to put a sparkle into each day, to benefit both the inhabitants of the cottage and the
wildlife that abounds within and without its old flint garden walls.

These late January days often stay leaden grey from daybreak to sunset - and the wind,
as they say in Norfolk, is a ‘lazy’ one that blows right through you rather than taking the
trouble to curve around. I’ve noticed that the snowdrops in Dancing Bear Wood are late
this year in revealing their green and white spikes. But when a watery sun does break
through it’s a moment to treasure, to jump onto the heath and take a few deep fox-musk-
and-gorse-blossom scented breaths.

In this video the star has to be the Whittlesey Straw Bear but I hope you’ll find the annual
January spectacle as extraordinary and worth documenting as we did. Apart from that,
there’s a glimpse of the very wintry front garden, a beautiful little walk in the shimmering
frost and another, longer walk to revisit the place I believe to be the source of a tiny stream
that goes on to grow and grow until it tumbles into the North Sea in the far east of Norfolk.

If you enjoy the videos I would be so grateful if you felt like buying me a coffee now and
again to help me to keep it going (this channel isn’t currently monetised). Thank you - the
link for Buy Me A Coffee is: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imogenashwt

Also if you enjoy the videos, you might like to subscribe to my Substack newsletter
Bracken & Wrack, a magazine-style offering for each new and full moon. Landscape,
magic, recipes, seasonal musings, the weird and the wonderful: there’s less focus on the
cottage and more on the folklore under our feet. It’s delivered straight to your inbox, is free
to subscribe, and you can sign up over at https://imogenashwin.substack.com. The next
new moon edition is due soon, and there's a growing archive.

On Instagram and Facebook I’m @theoldshopnorfolk if you’d like to say hello there.