Jinny Blom: Why We All Need Somewhere to Hide

0:01Jinny Blom.

0:02Jinny Blom:My dad left when I was six and then my mother left when I was 13. So I was on my own from when I was 13. And that has a very particular effect on you. I just faded out of existence, I would say, and I spent most of my time hiding.

0:21Jinny Blom:from really early in my life i've wanted to have control of my environment i dreamt always of having my own house and my own space and peace i think peacefulness is very important to me and not too many people not too much activity the idea of a garden where there's a lawn with stuff around the edge does my head in because why would you want to sit in a kind of blast zone of grass I want to be in amongst the plants and everything that they've got to offer you know the bees the smells the brushing against things you know it's so nice I feel lucky to have had a crazy life really

1:11hello welcome to a new episode of homing i'm matt gibbard today's guest is the landscape designer ginny blom ginny previously worked for many years as a psychologist and psychotherapist and she now explores the relationship between nature and health her sky garden at chelsea in Westminster Hospital is a natural space that promotes recovery. And she's also worked with King Charles to create a healing garden using medicinal plants. We recorded this conversation at Ginny's extraordinary home in Oxfordshire, which is a converted threshing barn dating back to the 16th century. It's never been shared publicly before, so I was very grateful to her for hosting me.

1:57As always, there's a house tour to accompany the episode, which is available to subscribers on Patreon. I hadn't met Ginny before, but I was really, really touched by her honesty in this conversation. She tells me about a childhood which was marked by abandonment and abuse, how that shaped the way she experiences architecture and landscape, and also why every garden she designs begins with some sort of search for safety. We talk about the childhood hiding place that still influences her work today, the unusual rules she follows when designing a garden, and also how creating beautiful places became a way of making sense of a very difficult start in life.

2:39Here it is, and I hope you enjoy listening. Hi Ginny. Hi Matt. Thanks so much for doing this i really appreciate it i didn't know what to expect today because actually your your home is not somewhere that's really online it's not publicly available and i feel massively flattered because i've got here today and you've shown me around the house and it is just phenomenal i really and i don't say that lightly i go to a lot of homes this is just it really blown me away so i really appreciate it gosh thank you well the tour will be available to subscribers on patreon run as always i know you very sweetly are a subscriber yourself so you'll be able to watch yourself oh god i probably won't do that i'm dying to ask you about this house but we always you know start at the beginning so tell me where you grew up i grew up in um royal leamington spa

3:32Jinny Blom:which is a very beautiful uh georgian spa town and my uh i have family from birmingham so a facet of my family are Welsh Quakers and had built Birmingham and then as that sort of dynasty was sort of fading people still lived in and around the area and so my parents when they got married lived first in Worcestershire in a tiny village and then they moved to Leamington because it's sort of spitting distance to Edgbaston where everybody else was and so I kind of grew up in this extraordinarily beautiful place and it one of my first ever school projects when I was five was and I was trying to find a book to show you um was a was a treatise on the new built town because I became really fascinated by the fact that the place was so complete and so beautifully laid out and that you could still find the original sort of 16th century cottages of which there were four that were the original bit of the town and then the whole thing had sort of expanded when spa water became popular it had a very particular spa water with lots of magnesium in it and a pump rooms and the bath houses which i used when i was older living on a boat and so we grew up in in this very beautiful beautifully proportioned place and I think it it um had an intense effect on me go on tell me well I mentioned I have this sort of sinusthesic thing and I and I'm very affected by proportion so if being born and brought up in a beautiful place doesn't really prepare you for horribleness For the outside world.

5:31No.

5:31Jinny Blom:And so I remember once being in the back of the car with my dad and it was pre-seat belt. So I used to stand behind him with my arms around his neck while he was driving. We were driving to Stratford and I suddenly saw this row of 30s terraced houses. And there was something about this oblique angle and the monotony of how they looked that really affected me. And I threw up down the back of his neck. You're kidding. No. Hang on, so you had that reaction to the built environment? Yeah, really dramatic. And he said very quietly, couldn't you have warned me? And I couldn't have done. It wasn't that the houses were horrible, there was just something kind of very unfamiliar and unsettling about the way.

6:22Jinny Blom:Do you know how they sort of stack terraced houses sort of obliquely down those roads in the 30s? They were very odd. And it's important to say here, what you're not saying is it's not a snobbery thing. What you're saying, because actually this house here, it's not an enormous house. It's not a palace. The proportions of the house itself are pretty modest. We're in your studio here, which is very tall. Yeah. But the house itself, the rooms are modest in scale. It's not a very big garden. No. But you were saying to me outside that there's something about the rectilinear nature of spaces whether they're indoors or outdoors that somehow calms you or settles you down can you explain that yes i mean i don't know it's instinctive um i think it's funny because it isn't to do with size and light and things this is actually quite you know we're in a barn and it's quite quite dark um but the proportions of this house are are very well considered i mean the architect of this house was a notable modernist and really knew what he was doing.

7:30Jinny Blom:So I think where there's that level of consideration, somehow it helps one feel comfortable and at peace. Whereas, you know, I don't know what the current house building that's going on in this country is doing to people. I don't like it. I don't like the way inadequate thinking and inadequate detailing is being pushed onto the population in this mania for having houses you know why not dignify people with something good and there was that thought you know even the victorians i don't like the proportions of victorian houses but there was a sort of desire to dignify people with their with how they lived and where they lived i think you mentioned your synesthesia Oh, yeah.

8:17Jinny Blom:Wish I hadn't now. I can't describe it. Yeah, go on. So, well, what's the definition of synesthesia, firstly? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, it's a sort of scrambling of the senses. There's probably a sensible way of describing it, but it affects different people differently. So you can hear music and get weird tastes in your mouth or you can, you know, It's just strange dissonances with your sensory perception, really. But mine has a lot to do with colour and space and proportion. And less to do with sound, really. So I'm very sensitive to colour. And I don't know, you might have noticed when we're going around the garden, there isn't tonnes of colour.

9:05Jinny Blom:I quite like green. I quite like form of things. And I don't want too much. I can get overloaded quite quickly if there's too much going on. It sounds odd because you walk around the house and there's quite a lot going on, but it's quite considered and carefully put together. Is it the fact that it's under your control somehow? Yes. I think from really early in my life, I've wanted to have control of my environment. Really, from when I was really small. I dreamt always of having my own house and my own space and peace. I think peace is very, peacefulness is very important to me and not too many people and not too much activity, really.

10:00Does this relate to something from your childhood? Do you think a particular event or the way that you were brought up or is it instilled in you from birth? What do you think?

10:13Jinny Blom:Yeah, it's very difficult to describe my upbringing. It was extremely stimulating on lots of levels. It was also extremely traumatic. And both of my parents were war children. They're both from emigre families. So this is all a post-rationalization for me. You know, I became a psychologist and you don't do that for the unmitigated joy of madness. You do it for a reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair. Yeah. And so I think quite a large proportion of my younger life was spent trying to get to grips with what on earth had been going on in the human element of my upbringing. with my parents. My dad left when I was six and then my mother left when I was 13.

11:11Jinny Blom:So I was on my own from when I was 13. And that has a very particular effect on you, really. And I think, I'm not being particularly articulate about this, but it's somehow difficult to know who you are when you're a child and there's a lot of traumatic stuff going on around you. and because I'm quite quiet I just I just faded out of existence I would say and I spent most of my time hiding. I've spoken to a good friend of mine who's a historic buildings architect and we had very similar experiences as kids where you have a very volatile kind of quite narcissistic mother. You become quiet and you become observant so I used to just sort of hide and look at things in great detail.

12:03Jinny Blom:So my favourite place in the house was under the piano and I could spend hours and hours and hours under there, really. I found it very comforting. And I said to you outside, I still like to make places where you can go and kind of be completely still and quiet and not found. Wow, that's such a powerful image. God, there's a lot to talk about. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, the idea of your childlike self being, you know, yeah, contained under a piano. Hmm. That sounds a lot. I mean, so your father left when you were six. Hmm. Do you know why? Yes. I mean, my mother was quite volatile.

12:55Jinny Blom:Actually, who knows, actually? I mean, you know, who really knows what goes on between the adults when you're a child? There were four of us kids. My little brother was nine months old and my oldest brother was 13 and I was six. And then I have a second brother who was 11. And I just imagine he'd had a terrible time, my dad. He'd been very, very ill as a young man during the war. And I think he just, I think probably he'd never felt like he'd lived. and so he ran off with a flame-haired opera singer. Okay. Yeah, who turned out we believe to be schizophrenic, so that didn't last very long. And I think he just wanted to, I don't know, I think he probably wanted to live a life that wasn't, you know, they got married very young.

13:50Jinny Blom:I think mum was 22 when they got married and had four kids. And then he wanted to be an inventor. He was an inventor. What did he invent? He invented all sorts of things. He was also very musical, so he wrote various operas that were published. And he worked for Massey Ferguson. He designed tractors and he was desperate to be a farmer. But he came from a very academic family and my grandfather didn't want him. Legend has it that Grandpa said, couldn't you at least be a dentist? which is a dagger through the heart of somebody who wants to make things. Because making, you know, I mean, we're all right these days being makers, but it wasn't considered a suitable job, was it?

14:39I mean, it was very judgmental times, really.

14:44Jinny Blom:Anyway, so he made tractors while we lived together. I mean, he was extraordinary. So he would make a full working scale model of a tractor about this big for the Royal Show on the kitchen table. Very, very detailed. So I think I got into detail with him. So he was an engineer and he also invented an early word processor, which he was very excited about. He was saying, look at this, look at this. You can type and you can rub it out with a little liquid crystal display. I was going, wow. How amazing. How amazing. But couldn't you just be nice to us for a bit? So I think there was that dissonance.

15:24Jinny Blom:So I have a very low expectation of other human beings in terms of care or protection or anything like that. But I don't ultimately think it harmed me because I became very interested in other things. You know, I just became interested in light, landscape, music, the written word. I love reading. and I started to, I think if you don't feel formed, well formed as a human, you start to find your own way of finding out who you are and I started mapping. So I think I've been mapping since I was very small. So to wit the book about Leamington and wanting to do this, getting really involved as a five-year-old in the construction of the town I lived in was kind of quite a retrospectively quite a weird thing to be interested in but I found it very settling I loved the fact that the Georgians had thought well if you know the main parade runs here and it runs north south up this incline with a river at the bottom and then radiating off from that you have the lesser streets and you the house size is a proportion to the configuration of this town you must understand all this you've brought up with it too I imagine and it becomes really fascinating so I my favorite book when I was little was the new Louris mythology and I'd just read about all the mythologies I can't remember any of it now but I used to know them all inside out and I thought how interesting that you know the Sumerians and the and the Scandinavians have the same gods they've got the same archetypes they've all got the same personality archetypes running through them and I suppose that's why ultimately I became a Jungian because it made a lot of sense to me.

17:28I see so your surname Blom yeah where does that come from?

17:32Jinny Blom:uh well it's scandinavian i've got a family tree upstairs which is longer than the table and it's fascinating so on the french side of my family we all know each other everybody knows each other nobody ever stops talking on the scandinavian side um nobody knows each other and nobody ever started talking so they but they wrote it all down so so that's the difference yeah So you said that you were 13 when your mum left. She went back to France with my little brother. Yeah. Okay, so leaving you and? Me. Just you? Just me. Are you serious? On your own? On my own. Where were you living? I lived with the neighbours, so I had this really weird displacement.

18:17Jinny Blom:So my neighbours were academics. My mother thought if somebody was an academic, that made everything all right because she'd always wanted to be one. but it didn't actually make everything right you can't leave a 13 year old girl alone in a bedsit in somebody else's house with no income and no food it doesn't it doesn't bode well So I had quite a difficult time, really. And I think through it, I sort of realised that you have to take responsibility for yourself. And I didn't really trust other people very much, if I'm honest. You must have had to grow up very quickly. Yeah. Yes. And at the same time, you're a very naive, you know, child.

19:15Jinny Blom:You know, I mean, I look at 13 year olds, I quite often look at 13 year old girls and marvel. You know, it's a very weird time in a child's life because you're not really a teenager yet. You know, you're not really hitting puberty properly, you know, or you might be, but you are very much a child. Well, it's funny you say that because my eldest daughter Indigo is 13. Is she? So I really, you know, seeing it through that lens is horrifying for me because Indigo is, as you described, she's sort of discovering herself now, you know, I think in a way that's probably not happened before, but at the same time she still goes to bed cuddling her little rabbit.

20:05Jinny Blom:Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, you're still a child. You are. And all these things that are surging through your body and coming at you from the outside world are a lot to process, an awful lot to process. So I was having to sort of get myself up, go to school. I was very badly bullied because people don't like kids who are odd. And so I was odd, you know. um and then I discovered that a lot of people would say that they were round at my house um to their parents so that they could get away with going and doing whatever they were doing and I just I found I would you know I mean for a quiet child I became very quiet really and sort of sank into nothing and then I uh they didn't come back for ages not ages and this was pre-mobile phones there was no no communication so I got a job at the weekend so I survived on my school lunches I went to a liberal arts school so that was also kind of I mean had I been in a in a more kind of normal school perhaps somebody might have said something but this was the 70s so nobody was talking about anything to do with how you look after your children yeah that came later but if you can imagine anything that you can anything that your imagination might describe as going wrong for a 13 year old on their own it went wrong so I had a pretty horrific time of it and um and then when my mother came back I was 16 and I just I moved to live with a friend of mine and she went absolutely postal I mean she lost it because she was very controlling so that sort of thing of being very controlling and very neglectful is is a weird dichotomy that I've never really kind of got to grips with I mean I have now but and it's funny because I I started thinking about well why is she the way she is and I think it was a lot to do with her abandonment because her parents sent her to England when she was six and didn't see her again until she was 18.

22:21Are they still alive, your parents?

22:22Jinny Blom:No. No? No. Did you ever ask your mum why she left you at that age? You know, there were some conversations that just weren't worth having. And, you know, we were very, weirdly, we were very close and at the same time we're completely different people and she's quite a damaging person to be around and um it's funny because the rosalie de merrick paintings that i was showing you in the house rosalie de merrick was that kind of mother and when i read her daughter's book about growing up with her i thought i'm never going to have to write this down because julia has done such an absolutely standout job of describing these people who are fascinating I mean my mother was fascinating in a million different ways and if you met her you would you would agree you know um so it's very difficult to only see it through a prism of of damage and and misery because there was so much more to it than that and yeah one of the things that's so uh interesting about this is that you started off by describing growing up in very grand beautiful surrounds most certainly you know and on the you know it's incredible isn't it that on the surface can be so at odds with what's happening underneath oh it totally perfect table manners uh i know which knife and fork to use you know middle middle she liked to say upper middle class standards will get you a long way okay so she was quite a snob yeah you know but our family was on a on a downward trajectory you know in terms of everything um and when dad went he took all the money so you know she was a redoubtable woman i I mean, she's suddenly out of nowhere.

24:17Jinny Blom:Went from cocktail parties and couture to driving a butcher's van and turning our house, our beautiful Georgian house, became a guest house. So we were suddenly sort of surrounded by people we'd never met before. And I found it all very destabilising, but I just went quiet. And I remember reading about Ariadne's thread and I remember thinking right that's me I've just got to fix my I remember I was quite small and I think all I need to do is grow up because then I'll be able to make my own decisions and my own choices and then it'll be fine so I'm lucky that I had that streak and that's what I've done and you know I come from a singular family on all sides they're non-conformists socialists you know um the the danish lot the same you know the very uh you have to make your own path in life kind of people so i i don't have a close family of immediate human beings now but i feel very much part of this collective of people who've had to do extraordinary things with themselves yeah you know and I really like that it's kind of comforting as you were talking I was thinking about a conversation I had with Julia Samuel the psychotherapist and she was saying how I suppose a third of emotion sits on the surface and two-thirds sits kind of underneath which I thought was really interesting way of looking at it like an iceberg and I have a really clear picture of you as you say learning to conform learning to have the manners and do things in the right way but also such a complex inner life you must have had yeah I've got a very big inner life I bet you have yeah and um yeah I mean I'm a I'm a true introvert yeah really and um I think people find me a bit odd I think people have always I've got used to the fact that people find me old do you think that they do how how why do you how do they show that well maybe it's it could be me i you know i don't really have a great deal of understanding of of how society works how people hang out with each other you know i've never had i think being bullied makes you wary of people Do you have close friends?

26:54Jinny Blom:Yes. But I don't see people a lot. You know, Mark and I are very close and we see each other a lot. And we're quite similar, you know. We don't need a great deal of external stimulation. Yeah, no, I mean, I've got some really amazing, fascinating, good friends. but I'd rather have a deep and long-lasting relationship um one of my best friends is an artist called Kathy Haynes she's extraordinary we've been through extraordinary things together we've known each other for 30 years and we don't see each other that often but it's very deep and profound and um okay so so the depth of the relationship is an important element yeah yeah for me I get that I get that yeah okay well so let's move on to um you you mentioned you touched on it but you you went into psychology psychotherapy didn't you initially is that right professionally uh yeah I mean because I was on my own so from such a young age I couldn't do anything in the normal route um so I've always worked I've been working since uh my Saturday jobs when I was 13 and then I didn't go off the rails.

28:11Jinny Blom:I've been seeking things all my life, you know, and so I was a good old-fashioned stoner for quite a long time. That was my first career, you might say, and then I was doing a bit of plumbing with a friend of mine and I decided that I needed a trade so I uh I thought I'll go to um I'll go and learn HND plumbing then I can always have a job I needed a portable skill I felt so I signed up to go to the local FE to do plumbing and when I got there my mother was still in France at this point um they went oh no no no you're not your name's not on this course and I said well these are it must be and they went no no no you're um i'll leave it with us oh yeah no you're you're doing drama i said what no i'm not i'm doing plumbing no no it says here on your forms and then i noticed the unmistakable hand of my mother who had altered the course no daughter of mine's going to be a plumber and she signed me up to the drama theater studies well that is quite narcissistic isn't it yep yep very so I did it and during it I couldn't act you know if you haven't got a sense of who you are you can't pretend to be somebody else I think is the fundamental thing so I got very involved in doing all the sets I did the sets the lighting and the sound and I realized that I very much like making the environment in which other people perform and I didn't know at the time but that is actually what clearly I'm doing now but also I wanted to do art and drama therapy I thought but at that stage you had to have an arts degree a science degree and then do a further thing to become a therapist well I mean I just couldn't I hadn't got any money I hadn't you know I was living in my flat with my friend Ian and another very important place for us both really so it started a long old journey really and lighting and sound and set that was fine from there I went to live in France.

30:35Jinny Blom:From France I came back here. Then I opened, then I moved to London and opened a shop, had a deli. Then I met my ex and we bought our first house, which I've still got in South London. Okay. And then his ex-wife, she was an ex-addict and she was working with ex-addicts and we met and she was French. And she said, oh, Ginny, you should be a therapist and I said oh yeah and she said yeah yeah I went to this course but it's shit for me but you could do it and so I went yeah okay and I went off and I ended up um joining this training uh and I became a transpersonal psychologist and psychotherapist and that took me nine years and at the same time she'd also got a job working at this charity in brixton working with people with psychosis and she was oh i hate this job but it'd be really good for you so brigitte in in in her extraordinary way um actually just put me exactly where i needed to be it was quite extraordinary actually so obviously what you needed though yeah and that's happened to me a lot i mean things like that have happened a lot and i and i think it's really important to keep your eye out for people oneself and and help people in that way actually because everybody's looking for something and not necessarily clear on it yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah okay so how long were you a therapist for well I I wasn't in the traditional sense I worked in this charitable residential charitable trust for men with schizophrenia and PTSD and OCD the real thing I find it very difficult when people talk about mental health problems like it's having a Veruca sure because it isn't so this yeah this sounds pretty hardcore this was hardcore yeah um and we had three residential houses in Brixton and I've always felt that I mean you need to be in it you know you really need to be in it and I think anyone who goes into that line of work definitely has stuff to sort out for themselves and I think the really critical thing is own it know it you know know it know the difference between what you're experiencing and what the other person is experiencing because I think there's a lot of very unfortunate transference that goes on okay And so one of my good skills was I was very good at hiring people that weren't mad because quite a lot of crazy people apply for jobs in places.

33:19Jinny Blom:You know, I mean, the thing you are, you're attracted to the thing that you are, if you like. So you have to be quite vigilant in all of these child care or mental health or any of these things. You have to be careful. So I did that for 12 years. Oh, wow. And I started off as a part-timer and I became co-director. It was amazing. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And from there you pivoted to landscape. Yes, I did. And I did because, well, I mean, it's very difficult to describe a life because so many things happen simultaneously. And at the same time I was doing that, the majority of my friends were gay and the majority of them had HIV and full-blown AIDS and so Ian who I mentioned who I was at drama college with he became very ill we were very close um Terry our other best friend he turned up on the doorstep where I was working one day having a full full-blown breakdown um because he'd been diagnosed and he hid under my desk there's quite a lot of hiding under things in my life.

34:31Jinny Blom:I don't hide under things anymore. And I had to hoik him out, stick him in the ambulance and drive him off to Lighthouse and get him looked after. And he died shortly after. Then Ian became very, very sick. And so did his partner. And, you know, it was very stigmatising. And so I was the only person who knew they were both ill because his partner was very much in the public eye and didn't want it known. And so that was quite difficult. So, yeah, that was all going on. My partner had become a drug addict, unbeknownst to me, and I was running a charity with 40 schizophrenic guys and it became quite a lot.

35:19Jinny Blom:And so I ploughed on through it. All my friends died. And my four closest friends died and my four pets died within months of each other, which was quite a lot. And then I sort of suddenly thought, actually, I don't feel right. So John and I went on holiday to the Picos de Europa in Spain. And I had a prophetic dream, which I wrote about in my book. And this little, I was in a stadium full of people. It was a Madonna concert, actually. And everyone was screaming and somebody was trying, this little person was trying to say something to me. And I said, what is it? And they said, please, can I be a gardener?

36:02Jinny Blom:And so I thought, bloody hell. And I woke up and said to John, I've just had this mad dream, you know, please, can I? And he said, well, why don't you just do it then? And after that, everything just sort of fell into place and it all happened. and so I went back home handed my notice in which was kind of a big deal because I was director um and became a gardener wow that's extraordinary yeah well it's as mad as that how would you explain um because you've done a lot of work around you know nature and and therapy kind of combined how do you personally explain that link between how a landscape can make someone feel better i mean one of the things that really struck me was when ian was ill and one of the reasons i still do a lot of work at chelsea and westminster it's a phenomenal hospital um and so the big aids ward was in chelsea and westminster which was a new hospital in the early late age I think it opened in 1990 so around about then um and one of the things was that the room he was in was it's very nicely situated that hospital because it's in Fulham and it's very close it's not high it's not a big high building and it's a modern building so it had good windows and he was lying in bed um sort of parallel to the crown of a big sycamore tree so you got this sort of beautiful sky with all the you could see the sky and you could see all the birds flying you know these flocks of sparrows and things and the wind moving the sycamore tree and everything he was lying I mean literally skeletally unto death in bed and just that thing of being able to see the non-prescriptive nature of nature you know the light changing the clouds changing this you can't predict it you can't tell what's coming next and going back to the garden outside there's something about the window frame that that you know the the framing of that with the physical structure of the hospital and then with this moving life going on outside I think something very profound happens to a human being and and I notice it now because we've just built a garden for the ICU that people want to go and die in the garden they want to go and be in the garden that we've built it's inside it's an indoor garden but there's something about it just knowing that this is a bigger thing than you that it's it needs nurturing it needs care and all of that sort of thing it just seems to have a very profound effect yeah couldn't agree more yeah it's like it's it's the idea isn't it that we're somehow part of we're a living organism yeah like plants are and we're part of that ecosystem and you know we will sort of in the end we'll just kind of decompose into the ground yes there's sort of safety in mortality somehow for me i said to you earlier my mother thought she was immortal like ursula andress in she and it doesn't surprise me now you tell me more about okay yeah well you know we know you're going to live forever mom but in the unlikely event that something happens what should we do with your mortal remains so but you also said that you do not feel like that so how do you feel about mortality i feel fine about it yeah yeah i feel fine about it i've had three near misses so i i kind of you know i mean we go to sleep at night we're unconscious you might never wake up again would you know the difference i don't think you would so just enjoy it you know i love being alive but um yeah i'm not going to panic about not being yeah um we've got to talk about this house oh yeah something about this place what when does it date from actually this house first of all oh the barn is from 1593 which was the year Richard III was first performed in London, which we quite like the thought of.

40:23Jinny Blom:How amazing. Isn't it? Yeah. Excuse the quick interruption. Firstly, I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast. The response to homing has been far beyond anything I've expected. I've really, really appreciated all the messages of support I've had and the many people who've taken the time to tell me how much they connect with the show. A special thank you, of course, to everyone who signed up on Patreon. Those memberships genuinely do help keep the lights on and make it possible for me to continue creating the podcasts and filming the house tours. Secondly, as the audience continues to grow, I'm beginning to look for a small number of partners for the show.

41:05If you're involved with a brand that shares homing's interests in design, nature, well-being, and the way we live, I would really love to hear from you. You'll find my contact details in the show notes. Thank you very much and back to the conversation. I described it earlier on as having some quite small rooms and what I mean by that is there's an intimacy to it and I suppose it does remind me a little bit of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and that's partly because you have so much art on the walls and also, you know, small maquettes on surfaces. you know you're obviously great collectors so tell me about the art and why that's important to you

41:52Jinny Blom:oh it's so important I collected a few things before Mark and I met and then as I said to you we didn't want to live when we decided we were going to live together which sounds like we decided it but we'd actually bought this house before we'd ever lived together so as we drove up the motorway here to here, we thought, well, what are we doing? Because we haven't actually discussed it. So you bought the house before you decided to live together. Yeah. That's brilliant. Yeah. I think we'd sort of obviously cottoned on to the fact that we were going to have a go.