Tag Archives: ramblings

Hello 25

Well well well, a long overdue blog post to celebrate another year of me.

I’m quite open in my feelings on my birthday – I’m not the biggest fan, but 25 feels like a kinda significant one and I’m full of thoughts today.

For starters, this is the first birthday I have not spent with my family, which is a pretty big deal for me. It’s the first birthday I’ve spent in our current house, and given that we’re moving house very soon (another story for another time, I don’t think I’ve shared that on here yet), it’ll also be my last. Someone was *nice* enough to remind me yesterday that 25 is half way to 50 – I mean, just want I wanted to hear, right? But that got me thinking.

We often see the new calendar year as a new, fresh start in our lives, but not so much when we move into an actual new year of life. So here I am, officially at the mid-20s point of my life, and I’m ready to take some things into my own hands.

I want this to be the year that I will actually do all of the things that I have told myself I’ll ‘do this year’ for the past however many years. I want to properly look after myself after years of overlooking my physical and mental wellbeing and really make 25 year old me the best Lottie I’ve ever been.

Just over 4 years ago, I wrote a small bucket list of things I wanted to do before I turned 25, and I’m pretty proud to say that I’ve achieved all of them except one – with that one being that I didn’t read all the books I wanted to have read – and one changed slightly as my life has but was still achieved, so I’m pretty proud of myself for making these things happen, and now I’m ready to carry this momentum on for another wonderful 25 years and then some!

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Why I’m Not Going to See Toy Story 4 in the Cinema

So apparently I want to branch out from already being a ‘bad’ blogger to also being a ‘bad’ Disney fan, but hear me out on this one.

I think we can all agree that this has been a mega year for new movies. From Avengers Endgame already smashing a tonne of box office records to the highly anticipated Star Wars Episode IX coming soon, film boffs will most likely be spending more time in the cinema in 2019 than ever before. And out of all these films, I think Disney has had the most fingers in the pie than any other production companies, with some huge films having already hit the big screen and many more still to come.

This is all very exciting for Disney fans; we’ve seen some of our favourite animated classics have a reimagining as live actions, and also some pretty huge sequels, one of which closest to the hearts of my generation being Toy Story 4. 90’s kids like myself have grown up with the adventures of Andy’s toys, many of us sobbing FAR too many tears over *that* scene in Toy Story 3, so we were all good and ready when a fourth film was announced to be hitting our screens.

I was ready to go and see it, don’t get me wrong, and I am excited for when I finally do see it, but I’m not going to the cinema for it, and here’s my reasoning..

While the experience of some films is heightened by seeing it on an enormous screen in a pitch black theatre with surround sound and no talking, I personally think that other films are somewhat ruined by it, and Toy Story 4 is one of those for me. Give me all the action and adventure on the big screen, give me stunning cinematics and world class special features, but when it comes to a feel-good family animation, to be quite honest I’d rather be curled up on my sofa at home with a blanket and pile of snacks, being able to laugh out loud when I want to without getting evils from the rest of the guests.

And as awful as it sounds, I truly do get bored watching some films in the cinema. If its not a super gripping storyline or visually incredible, I find myself sat in the dark wishing it would hurry up and be done with sooner so I can get out of there, which I probably wouldn’t be thinking if I was watching it at home – y’know, unless it was a rubbish film in the first place.

So there’s one hell of an unpopular opinion for you I’m sure, but its something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and honestly, I stand by it. Anyone else feel the same? Let me know in the comments!

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What Come Next?

Yes this is the second blog post in the last few months where I’ve taken the title from a Hamilton song and yes it was intentional but it also does have a lot of bearing for this post so there.

How many times in the last year or so have I said that I’m going to get back on tracker properly with my blog? I mean I could go back and count but no one actually needs to know that figure; it’s a lot.

I feel an incredible sense of attachment to my blog, but I just haven’t felt the urge to write at all lately. Every now and then my blogging brain kicks in and I mentally draft blog posts in my head, and I think about putting my thoughts onto the metaphorical paper that is the internet, but when push comes to shove I’ve just not been bothered to do it.

So I don’t know exactly what to do.

This blog has been with me through the most important time of my life, which is probably why I feel such a sense of connection to it, but the fact of the matter is that my life is very different now, and I do struggle to find the time, or if I do find the time, I struggle to find the want. The blogging world is changing a lot, and maybe I just haven’t been able to keep up. Maybe this blog doesn’t fit into my new and different life.

I can tell you for a fact that my blog won’t go anywhere. If nothing else, it will hang around on the internet for people to stumble across when searching for some of the strange things that my analytics tell me brings people to my site. But will I keep posting? I want to, sure. I do have a big feeling of want in my to keep things going, and I think there’s definitely still a part of my brain that’s dedicated to it, but the honest truth is that I don’t know if I can, and all I’ve done in the last year is build myself up to then only end up disappointing myself, and there’s just no fun in that.

I guess the purpose of this post is to clear my head of some of the negative, in the hopes that positive stuff will fill it up. Side note: man it does feel good to sit and type out a whole blog post without stopping, maybe the reason I’ve not been so dedicated is because I forgot what this buzz was like? I’ve distracted myself.

Anyway, I’m hopeful.

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Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile – My Thoughts

I just want to prefix this post with a potential spoiler warning – I personally don’t think a film based on true life events can necessarily have spoilers, but if you don’t want to know anything about this film then stop reading now.

When the trailers for the Ted Bundy biopic featuring Zac Efron as the notorious mass murderer hit the internet a few months back, I told myself it was a movie that I wouldn’t be watching, but as being a Sky customer meant I could watch the film on the tv in the comfort of my own home on the same day it hit cinemas, I found myself putting it on out of sheer curiosity.

I have never been into this sort of thing. I’m not into murder documentaries or true crime and I refuse to watch anything that glorifies or romanticises abusive relationships or domestic violence and I figured those themes would be inherent in this film which was why I was put off, but I had some reasons behind why I found myself hitting play.

Firstly, the response to the trailers had me interested. My twitter feed was divided into two types of people: those who were going googly-eyed over Zac Efron, as so many of my generation do, and those who were incredibly annoyed by the former, concerned that this film would romanticise the real life character of Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered so many young women. I guess I fell in the latter, and I really wanted to know if this film would be turning viewers into living versions of the heart eyes emoji – hoping, of course, it would not.

Not I don’t know if because I went into this movie with concerns that I was immune to it, but I certainly did not feel like Ted was made to attract the audience. Sure, the part was played incredibly well by Zac Efron, and his character of the deceptively sweet-talking and certain man that his namesake was was very clearly portrayed, but at no point did I feel like many people would be swooning over what I was watching. I think that knowing the true outcome of the case that shocked a generation was the main factor in all of this – we go in knowing that the man is guilty – so my initial concerns were put to rest.

Through the whole movie I knew he was a lying, manipulative criminal and all I wanted was for Liz, played by Lily Collins, to get the happy life away from him that she deserved.

As for the rest of the film, I don’t know if impressed is the word but I respected it. The acting was incredible, the storytelling was clever and when during the end credits they played actual tapes from the real trial, I couldn’t not feel like hats off was due to the director who had really made many of the scenes from the film like for like. There were no proper scenes of any of the crimes committed – which I appreciated very much – only one brief and partially shown incident was in the movie, which I thought showed some respect to the real life victims.

Will I watch it again? Probably not, but my curiosity was satisfied and I am glad it was made in the way I hoped it would be.

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Has Blogging Changed?

 

Having just returned from my accidental blogging break, but more importantly having felt slightly detached from blogging for the best part of a year now, as I have been starting my attempt to rediscover my blogging ability, I can’t help but notice that there are many things in the blogging world that seem to be different to how they were a year or so ago.

I mean, of course there is always going to be change. We live in a world where technology changes and improves on an almost daily basis, so of course the blogosphere will be reacting and evolving with the ever-changing environment, but there are a lot of things that haven’t evolved, but seem to instead have become extinct.

You see, while I may have slipped from posting on my blog, I definitely have not been away from Twitter, which I would say is my main source of interaction with the blogging world, and the majority of the people I follow on Twitter are bloggers or linked to the blogging world. I would probably also go as far as to say that Twitter is the main site of blogger interaction, would you agree?

Twitter brought my blog out of the depths of the internet and into the view of so many of my readers – I was super late to the Twitter game and started this blog over a year before I actually got Twitter. It is one of my biggest sources of traffic, and I have always taken advantage of that fact by being as active as I could on Twitter. I used to try and schedule 4-5 tweets a day to share new and older blog posts, tagging as many retweet accounts as I could and hoping that I would get those shares, and I was not alone. My Twitter feed used to be full of scheduled tweets (sometimes the same ones EVERY DAY..) but now as I scroll through I feel like I’m seeing fewer and fewer of them. I mean sure, this could be due to the ever-changing Twitter algorithm, or the fact that I’m following a more diverse range of accounts, or, as I feel it might be, it could be that scheduling constant blog promotion tweets has become a thing of the past..

Why does this matter, I hear you ask. Well, it leaves me confused as to what is acceptable for me now as I re-enter the blogging world – not that I truly left in the first place but still. If I go back to my old, 5 posts a day ways, will I be the minority, or worse still, will I be considered annoying?

Also on the subject of Twitter, where did all the blogging chats go?! I remember a time where everyone who was anyone was present for as many Twitter chats as they could possibly manage; I myself would be at my laptop with 3-4 tabs open so I could keep up with the sometimes hundreds of people weighing in on these chats and it was insane but it felt FAB. The term ‘blogging community’ has been somewhat tarnished of late so I don’t really like to use it, but this truly felt like just that – a proper community of people all wanting to talk, all wanting to be friends, all wanting to feel like part of something. I worry now that everyone is too busy trying to become better than others that they’ve forgotten that blogging used to be something that so many of us turned to because we wanted a way to express ourselves and the community made us feel like we weren’t alone.

This has become a bit of a ramble, so I’ll wrap it up. I guess I just need to feel my way around for a while and find my own blogging way again. (But if anyone wants to clue me in on current etiquette, hit me up)

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‘Where Have You Been?’ Uh, France.. and other places

If anyone out there is still with me after all this time, then hey. Also, I hope there are a couple of Hamilton fans out there that appreciate the title of this post.

Six weeks. This has been the longest semi-accidental blogging break I’ve ever had, and I call it accidental because I didn’t really intend to take all of this time away, but the fact is there has just been a whole lot going on and in all this time I haven’t had the time, motivation or inspiration really to be writing 4/5 posts a week. I’m not going to apologise for this – I doubt anyone cares that much anyway. I call it semi-accidental because I did realise this a few weeks back, but I decided I’d wait for a new month, clean slate, fresh start etc, and for me there’s nothing more satisfying than a month that starts on a Monday.

So I’m back. Is this an April Fool? Who knows, we’ll see if I can actually keep it up this time, y’know, after I’ve been saying for the best part of the last year that I would get back on top of blogging and failed every single time I tried, but I think I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Blogging certainly doesn’t hold the same place in my life that it used to, but I still think its a pretty big part of who I am and I’m not ready to let go of that just yet.

All jokes in the title of this post aside, since the last time I touched base on the blog, I have actually been to France, and by that I mean Disneyland Paris. I’ve also had my best friends come to stay at my house for a weekend for the first time since we moved in, I’ve been on a little staycation in Kent with my family and Matthew and I went on a weekend trip to Berlin a week ago, so I have been all over the place really, and even when I haven’t been moving around, I haven’t exactly had time to stop. My business has truly taken over my life, but its been super exciting and I’ve spent the last two weeks working on my very own shop website, which launched on Friday.

Time to relax now? Well, I’m pretty excited to say that next week I’m headed for Disneyland! I don’t yet know if I’ll be live-blogging or will post trip reports once I’m home – I’m trying pretty hard to live in the moment right now – but I’ll definitely be sharing everything that will be happening on this trip, including my first ever Dapper Day! It does mean that this week I might do a little ‘pack with me’ type post showing you some of the outfits and park essentials I’ll be taking with me, but honestly I’m just becoming super overwhelmed with excitement as its been almost 2 years since I was last in Disneyland, which seems insane to me.

What else? To be honest, I’m not too sure if I’ve missed anything out – I know this post has been kinda super rambly – but the long and short of it is that I’m still here, and hopefully I’m back for good this time *crosses fingers*

TTFN

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Hi, yes, I do care about my Instagram followers thanks

I know I’ve written a similar post to this in the past, but in light of the recent Instagram ‘glitch’, and that my opinion on this now comes from a slightly different standpoint, I thought I would come out and say this again.

Yes, I know that social media is just that – a website or an app – and followers ‘shouldn’t matter’, but I’m gonna be straight with y’all here: they do to me.

You see, in the last 9 months or so, my social media pages have become less about me personally, and more about my small business. I took my Etsy shop full time back in July after leaving my accounting job to relocate, and it’s been absolutely wonderful. It’s always been my dream to be self-employed, and being able to do something creative and to my own rules to boot, I’ve loved every second*

*Except, ironically, the accounting.

It’s also no secret that the way that people are swayed by trends and products now is mainly through social media. Brands now focus a lot more on social media marketing, full-time bloggers and influencers have become a legitimate thing and I’m honestly just so grateful that I had a blogging background when I decided to start my shop as it meant I knew all of this from the start, and so my Instagram page has become less about my blog and life, and more about my business, which I am totally cool with.

BUT this does change the pressures on it. Yes I am still very much me on Instagram, and I still use it as a social outlet, but probably 80% of what I consciously do on Instagram now is promote my business. The more I grow, the more people see my creations, the more people become potential customers, and as a small business this is SUPER important.

During the Instagram glitch, I lost almost 200 followers. No big deal, some might say, right? So I’ll just have to wait a bit longer until I hit my next follower milestone, that’s not the end of the world? You might think that and honestly I’m not offended if you do, but from my perspective, that’s 200 potential customers lost. That’s 200 people who may not have seen that I released a new product yesterday. That could be the difference between me being able to pay my mortgage this month or not.

My business aside, there are so many full-time bloggers and influencers out there who could lose out on work if they lost their followers. I may have only lost 200 followers but I know of others who lost thousands. That could be the difference between working with a particular brand or not.

I know this might all be sounding a little dramatic, but I just want to reduce the stigma around people being upset about losing followers, or even just not being able to gain them. We all know how hard it can be to gain followers on Instagram these days, so even if you’re not reliant on your follower count for your income, you’ve probably still worked pretty hard to get to where you are with it, right? Just be mindful about slamming people for something that might be important to them, even if it’s not important to you.

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February Focus

I tell you what, if you ever want January to go quickly, go on holiday. I’ve never been so shocked to find that we’re at the end of the month.

February is always a decent month in my eyes. Its just 4 little weeks that always seem to fly by, not to mention one of my favourite national holidays (I know its not a real holiday) Pancake day. Its just really manageable, y’know? And much like how I feel about Mondays, I always enjoy the fresh start that a new month brings, and having come back from an amazing holiday with a renewed sense of motivation and drive for the rest of the year, I’m bringing all that energy into February with some new goals and plans for the 4 weeks ahead.

Reorganised office

Towards the end of 2018 I was so caught up with finishing up Christmas orders and then making sure I had everything ready for our trip in January that I let my office get a little chaotic and a messy work space is not helping my productivity BUT I am already in the process of sorting it all out. I’ve got shelves that I still haven’t put up since moving in, so that’s first on the list and then I just want to streamline and tidy everything up so that I can take the rest of the year by storm.

House to-do list

In the last week Matthew and I have been trying to make a dent in the to-do list for the rest of the house – basically the stuff we’ve been putting off because its not vital – but there’s still quite a bit left to do and I’d really like to get through as much of it as we can while momentum is on our side.

Mini-goal weight

One of my New Years resolutions was to regain the body confidence that I lost in 2018, and for the first time in ages I’ve actually been successfully losing weight over the last few weeks. I’m already 5lbs down on what I weighed at the end of December, and although I know that the number on the scale isn’t everything, I’m also feeling so much better. I’m not following any particular plan, just eating better and hitting the gym as usual but I seem to be doing something right, and although I’m not going to divulge the number, I have a particular weight that I would like to hit by the end of Feb and I’m feeling pretty positive about getting there.

Work and save

If there’s any month that’s best for setting a spending ban, its February. January sales are over, there’s no more parties or presents to buy, and if nothing else, its shorter than every other month so you’ve got a better chance of sticking it out for 2-3 days less. So the plan is to get my head down and be too busy with work to spend any money, and just pray that I don’t stumble across anything that I’ll want to break the ban for!

Happy times and happy habits

With January being a bit of a blur for me, going into February I am ready to hunker down and get myself into a good routine with self care, positivity and life in general. They say it takes 21 days to make a habit, and I’ve got 28 to get it right, so let’s go February!

Are you up to much this coming month?

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Why I Won’t Write About Saving for A House

Its now been almost 8 months since Matthew and I got the keys to our first home, and truthfully I thought I would have written a lot more about the process by now, but between everything else going on in my life and my minor falling out with blogging last year, I just haven’t got round to it.

I have, however, been thinking a lot about the sort of posts that I wanted to write about this, and while at first I thought a ‘Tips on Saving for Your First House’ post would be a great idea, the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I was getting with the concept of that post. Here me out.

Its no secret that our generation, ‘millennials’, are renting for longer, if not indefinitely, and the percentage of homeowners under 30 has dropped more than significantly in the last 10-20 years. I count myself as a minority for becoming a homeowner at the age of 23 and I’m very aware that while I could write about how Matthew and I saved up for our house, there are a whole tonne of circumstantial reasons why this wouldn’t be relevant to a lot of other people.

House prices differ MASSIVELY throughout the country

As a born and bred southerner, I have lived my whole life with a notion of what I thought was the price of a house was based on what house prices were like around where I lived. I started saving as young as I could because I knew that I wanted to buy my own place at some point in my life, and I knew that wasn’t going to be cheap.

But Matthew is a northern boy, and when we did start looking at houses seriously, we knew it would be up north. I was left dumbfounded when I discovered that we could buy a detached house for less than what a 1 or 2 bedroom flat would cost in Bournemouth. Suddenly, the deposit money I had been saving all these years was more than enough for a house, despite being nowhere need what it would need to be in my hometown. The fact is, most people aren’t prepared to move across the country just to own a home, and we were lucky (if that is even the word) to be relocating for Matthew’s job, because the chances of us being able to buy somewhere down south without significant help were slim.

Not everyone can make the ‘sacrifices’ we were able to

I never moved out of my parents’, and Matthew moved in with us 9 months before we bought our house. We both worked at the same place, so it was pretty easy for us to share my car. It would be pretty easy for me to write a post saying that to help save for a house you should move in with your parents, share/sell a car etc, but I know that those options aren’t always an option for everyone.

We all have different histories

I started working at 16, and I didn’t go to university after sixth form, so I had the luxury of no student loans. I always knew that I wanted to buy a place, so I started saving super early, even before Matthew was in the picture, AND Matthew and I were able to buy together, when not everyone can split a mortgage.

We also have totally different histories to previous generations. My parents were married by my age, not fighting for jobs in overcrowded industries like so many people are today AND the housing market was a totally different place to how it is today. We just can’t compare ourselves.

Home-buying incentives and schemes

Because we bought a new-build, we were eligible for the government Help To Buy loan for up to 20% of the value of our house which is interest free for the first 5 years. If you’re not buying a new-build, you can’t apply for this, and to be honest, without this we wouldn’t have been able to afford the house we fell in love with. There are also other options, like shared ownership and Help to Buy ISAs, but again, these aren’t always options for everyone.

Now none of this is to say that people under the age of 30 can’t save enough to buy houses, I mean we’re living proof that it is possible, but I’m just a little fed up of all these clickbait articles saying that its because we love avocados (which we don’t all love just FYI) or some other ridiculously false reason, when in fact its because we’re stuck at the bottom rung of the property ladder with baby boomers stomping on our hands and so many real factors are actually affecting our generation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, so drop me a comment!

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2018: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

It would seem that this end of December break from blogging has become somewhat of a regular occurrence, but honestly it does me a whole lot of good, and here I am, back and ready to take 2019 blogging by the metaphorical horns.

I’ve probably said this a hundred times this year, but 2018 has been a total whirlwind. Its been full of major highs and also some pretty sucky lows, and while I’m not normally one for looking back at the end of the year, there’s a lot to be said about the past 364 days.

The Good

Well, its been a year of BIG things. Matthew finally finished his pilot training and started flying, we bought a frickin’ HOUSE and we got the most beautiful puppy in the world. We visited San Francisco and spent a week living it up in the beautiful Aulani Resort in Hawaii, as well as becoming Disneyland Paris annual pass holders.

This year I also took the leap into self-employment, turning my small business into a full-time job which has been an absolute dream come true, I’ve managed to grow my Instagram more than I imagined would be possible and I’ve spent some of the best times with my closest friends.

The Bad

As I’ve mentioned several times throughout the year, blogging has taken a major back seat for the majority of 2018. I started of the year stronger than I ever have before, but life and many other things got in the way and although it wasn’t easy for me to admit, it was easier for me to let blogging go a little while I focused on the new things that had become more important.

There’s also been a whole lotta change that will take me a little bit of time to adjust to. I’ve moved so far away from my hometown and my family, and that’s still something that I need to work on getting used to, and there has been so much going on that we’ve hardly had time to stop and breathe, so there’s been a lot of feeling constantly overwhelmed.

The Ugly

2018 has also had some pretty sucky times. I’ve struggled a lot with body image, which after such a positive 2017 felt even harder than it could have. I haven’t always talked about it as much as I could have done, but its done a real number on my mental health, and breaking my ankle back in April only made things worse. Honestly, I’m fed up of feeling the way that I do, and I’m determined that 2019 will be the end of it.

I’ve also spent far too much time in 2018 comparing myself to others, so much so that I let an incredible achievement – being nominated for the 2018 UK Blog Awards – go practically unnoticed because I was so sure that compared to the other nominees, I stood so little a chance that I didn’t even think I should ask for people to vote for me.

The Future

I’ve decided that 2019 will be the good, the better and the best; no bad, no ugly, just happiness. I already know that its going to be so full of magic and love and friendship, so I just have to keep filling it with only good things and positive energy. Tomorrow I’m going to be sharing my New Years Resolutions and goals and these are just going to be the stepping stones that make 2019 the best year yet.

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Rebuilding

You ever see those funny triangle diagrams floating around on the Internet, where each side is labelled with something we aspire for in life, like ‘good job’ or ‘social life’ or something similarly cliche, and then it’s captioned something like ‘you can only have two, what do you choose’?

These viral posts tend to have their comment sections full of people saying how much they relate to the ideas suggested by it, that we can’t ever seem to really have it all, but I never subscribed to that belief myself.

I always thought that I could have it all. I was *that* person who prided herself on working full time AND maintaining a blog AND being able to go to the gym every morning and while I’ve never really had much of a social life, that was mainly down to the fact that I never lived near to any of my friends, but I still found the time to go and see them and we still talked every day, but I also lived with my boyfriend and I saw my family every weekend.

Reading that, you’d think that I did have it all; it sure as hell sounds like it. But behind all that, there are some shortcomings: I still lived with my parents (not that I ever really minded that), and I worked in a job that didn’t truly make me happy, and that wasn’t a career for me.

Fast forward to today. I now own a home with said boyfriend, we have a puppy and I am living my self-employed dream. The social life aspect hasn’t really changed, although I am a little bit closer to some friends now so I do get to see them more often. This is all wonderful, and I am truly happy for all of this, but some of the walls of that triangle (or more like a hexagon) are crumbling. It would only take you a few minutes of scrolling back through my blog to see that I’ve gone from posting 5-6 times a week to going over 3 weeks without writing anything. I now live 250 miles away from the family that I adore, and as for going to the gym every morning, I can’t actually remember the last time I got in a workout.

I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining, because my life is incredible in so many ways, but each one of these things is an aspect of who I am, and I feel like by losing these things I am losing sight of who I am, and I’m now becoming one of those people retweeting that triangle diagrams saying ‘I feel attacked’. I don’t want to believe that these silly little sketches are true, I want to go back to feeling that little bit smug thinking that really I do have it all.

My life has changed a lot in the past 6 months, and I guess if anything I was naive to think that it would all be easy, because nothing about it has been, but what’s the fun in things being easy, right? There’s no shame in being vulnerable, but I’m ready to start rebuilding these aspects of my life, and rediscovering the person that I used to, and want to be.

She’s in here somewhere, just under a nice little layer of comfort podge, y’know, from avoiding going to the gym for too long, but she’ll be back, just you wait.

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Its Okay That My Blog Has Taken A Back Seat

I’ve talked a lot lately (or at least it feels like it) about how I’ve been struggling a little with blogging; not finding the time for it, perpetual writers block and general lack of focus and motivation. I’ve blamed so many factors, then promised myself I won’t let it happen again, and then it does, and the cycle continues.

I’ve been thinking a lot of about it, and I think I’ve finally come up with an explanation that I’m happy with.

For so long, my blog has been my life. Its been the constant source of pride and happiness in my life when my life hasn’t always been perfect. I worked for so long in dead end jobs that didn’t make me happy, so I loved having something that gave me a sense of purpose, and so I dedicated myself to it; if I wasn’t working, I was working on my blog, and that made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile.

But things have changed now. My life feels fulfilled in so many ways. I have a house, I have a job doing what I love, and there are so many things in my life that make me happy now, so the happiness and sense of fulfilment that my blog used to give me is already there. I don’t feel like I NEED to blog to be happy.

Of course, I still love my blog. I love writing and it makes me happy, so its not something that I think I’ll ever really give up, but I think I can finally let go of the need to publish 5-6 new posts every week like I used to. I can let go of the pressure to create content and go back to just loving creating the content when I do.

Now that I have realised this, I have found a sense of peace with my blog that I think I really needed. I was starting to think that because I couldn’t keep up with my old posting schedule that I should just give up altogether, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, its whatever I want it to be, and I want it to be the thing that makes me happy again.

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Would You Change Your Online Self?

Image from Channel 4 website

I don’t know about you, but I have been glued to The Circle on Channel 4!

If you don’t watch it or know what it is, The Circle is a reality TV show where a group of people are living in the same building, but are only allowed to communicate through a specially created social media platform, and because they never see each other, they can choose to be whoever they want to be, with the aim of the game being to be popular. Some people are being themselves, some are hiding or changing certain aspects of their lives/personalities, and some are being completely different people altogether. Every few days, players rate each other, and the most popular players get to choose who out of the least popular players get ‘blocked’ and have to leave the show.

As well as obviously being entertaining, I’m finding it fascinating. We, the viewers, obviously get to see exactly who these people really are, and see what they actually do, say, think and act like when they know the other players can’t see, and it is really interesting to see what goes on behind the screen.

Being a person who does put so much of myself online, I know of course that I don’t share everything, and I would hope that most people know that. I don’t share all the bad stuff, and I often don’t share all the good but mundane stuff that happens in my day to day life, but personality wise, I am completely myself. But this show got me thinking: would I ever change myself in order to be more liked?

Well, without wanting to sound big-headed, I like to think that I’m not disliked online, or at least if I am its by people who aren’t vocal about it, or who are mature enough to just unfollow me and be done with it. Equally, I could probably be more popular. I could have tens of thousands of followers who all think I’m amazing, but I can’t help but think what or who would I have to become to do that? I like who I am (for the most part), and I don’t actually know what I would need to do to become more popular. Would I be more liked if I was the same person, but prettier? Do I need to change my personality to be more liked? Its so hard to say, but when I think about it, if I was anyone but myself, they wouldn’t be liking me for who I really am, and I don’t want that.

Comparing myself to players in The Circle, I definitely think I’m most like Kate. I try to be nice to everyone, and I do prefer to keep some opinions to myself rather than stirring the pot, choosing instead to confide to my close friends rather than openly bashing the beliefs or opinions of others that I don’t agree with. I personally don’t think any of these things make me a bad person, and these traits are what made Kate so popular for the first few ratings, but now a lot of players are finding her niceness annoying, which makes me worry a little bit whether everyone thinks I’m annoying. Its interesting and terrifying at the same time!

So I put this to you, people of the internet, would you ever portray yourself differently online, just so people liked you more?

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Doing Nothing

In recent months, I’ve noticed an interesting shift in myself. Obviously there’s been so much change in my life in the last few months, and I know that that’s exactly the reason why, but this has felt like such a significant change that I haven’t really known what to do about it.

That change? I’ve learnt to enjoy doing nothing.

I know it seems totally harmless, and probably a little strange too, but pretty much since I was 16, I’ve always filled my time with as many things as I possibly could, and for the last few years even more so. For the last (almost) five years, I’ve been blogging alongside working full time, as well as running my various small businesses, so when I wasn’t working, I was working for myself or writing. Days off were never really days off, but I was cool with that. In order to fit everything into my days, I would be up at 5.30am most mornings, and I had no problem with that at all because I was doing it for me.

Since we moved, all that has changed. As I’ve taken my small business full time, I haven’t needed to cram everything into every hour of the day because I now spend my 9-5 doing all the work I used to fit into evenings and weekends. Suddenly I have all the free time I used to complain about not having – but would always fill with stuff even when I did get it – and the thing is, I’ve started to like it. This might seem totally ridiculous to some, but its such a new thing to me that its thrown me a little.

While it may not seem like a problem, its starting to become one, as the motivation and drive that used to push me to do everything I loved is ebbing away. I now LOVE having lie-ins, so I don’t get up and go to the gym in the morning. I now spend my evenings watching rubbish on TV and scrolling through Instagram videos for longer than I care to say. Its wonderful and frustrating at the same time, because there’s still something in my head that feels like this is wasted time when I should be doing something else, but I also don’t really have that much else to do. Its like I want to be doing more but at the same time I really love the nothingness, so there’s a constant conflict in my head.

Am I being crazy? Well probably – only I would feel guilty for enjoying myself! I know that I still have so many things to adapt to, what with turning my life upside down a little bit, but everything takes time and as Winnie the Pooh said in Christopher Robin: doing nothing often leads to the best kind of something.

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Why Can’t I Write Anymore?

I tell you something, the number of times that I have opened up a new blog post to write something, only to stare at the screen for 10 minutes, then find something else to do to distract myself from it and eventually close it again in the last few weeks is unreal. I even sit with my blog planner to brainstorm new post ideas and my brain is just empty. It sucks.

I swear this always happens when I actually have the time to write. Now I’m self-employed and working from home, I thought I’d have so much more time to dedicate to my blog, rather than just cramming it into evenings and weekends, but I’m actually just finding so many other things that are taking up my time, and even when I do sit down to blog, I’m hit with a brick wall of no inspiration.

I guess the fact is that maybe I just don’t have anything to write about right now. In the last month I haven’t really bought any new products to review, as most of my money has gone into house things, and I’ve been so back and forth between Bournemouth and Cheshire that I haven’t really got out and about either, plus with Matthew being away for the last 6 weeks, progression on house decorating has been fairly non-existent. I guess maybe my life has been too boring to be a lifestyle blogger.

The good news, however, is that next week I’ll be in Disneyland Paris, so there’ll be 4 days of live trip blogging, plus hopefully a trip away will bring back some inspiration for new content! I’m also taking a little bit of time away from working this week while Matthew is home, so maybe if I’m not using up all my creativity at my sewing machine I’ll have a little bit more juice to put into blogging. Maybe now I’ve ranted about my inability to write, the universe will send some ideas my way. Who knows, right?

Anyone else go through major writers block phases?

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1000 Blog Posts Later

This is it, blog post #1000.

In reality, this blog post is no different to any other post I’ve written, but it does mark an incredible milestone in my blogging life. Honestly, there are not many things in my life that I have stuck with for this long.

This year has probably been the hardest year for me in terms of blogging. In previous years I have always maintained at least 5-6 blog posts a week, which I know is a pretty impressive achievement considering I’ve always done this along side working full time, but this year there has just been so many other distractions and changes in my life which have got in the way.

D’you know what? That’s ok. The things that have distracted me from blogging this year have been mainly wonderful. So much time has gone into buying and moving into our house, but as the the biggest adventure of my life to date, of course it was going to take priority over blogging, and the great thing about it is that I now have a whole load of new content ideas because of it.

A huge portion of my spare time this year has also gone into my Etsy store. At the start of the year, I set myself a little target of what I wanted to make from my store each month, and when in January I surpassed it within the first week, I knew that something good was happening, and things just got better and better. Well, long story short, now we’ve moved, my Etsy store is now my full time job, along with my other small businesses. In my wildest dreams I did not think I’d be doing this back at the start of the year, but we’re only just a week into August and I’ve already covered my mortgage payment, which makes me so frickin’ proud. It also means that I’m not squeezing custom orders into my evenings and weekends, so hello more time for blogging again!

So 1000 posts later, I’m still here, and I’m still loving this little corner of the internet of mine. In October, Lottie Does will be 5 years old, and of course I’ll be celebrating big time then, but this post is a little mini celebration for me!

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How Relateable Do Bloggers Actually Have To Be?

I’ve been thinking a lot about bloggers and relate-ability lately. Let’s face it, the aim of the game for most bloggers is to create content that people are going to want to read, right? But do readers always want to see something that they can relate to?

I recently read a really interesting post by Hannah from The Giraffe’s Life about why Zoella is considered by many to be unrelateable, and I agreed with many of the points put forward; personally I’ve never really been that bothered by Zoella anyway. But regardless of whether or not her millions of fans actually relate to her life of million pound mansions, jetting off to 5 star hotels and being on the cover of every magazine under the sun, they still want to watch her videos and read her posts, which got me thinking about whether or not bloggers do actually need to be relateable?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I kinda like reading about things that I would never actually be able to do myself. Clickbait-y titles like ‘I spent £700 in Primark’ are intriguing, and I can’t help but want to see what on earth was purchased to rack up that receipt total.

From my own stats, I know that my most popular posts are my holiday diaries, especially when I’m in Disney parks, and while I’d love to live in a world where being in Disney parks is considered everyday, I know that it isn’t.

And yes, on the flipside I do love a high end makeup dupe, a budget city break and quick, easy recipe posts, but I’m also super nosey and would love to see what it was like at the latest Spectrum release party, because it’s something that I’d never get to experience myself.

I think also that there’s a huge difference between the relate-ability of a blogger and the relate-ability of their content. A relateable blogger could do the most unrelateable activities, and I’d still read what crazy stuff they’d be up to, but an unrelateable blogger could buy five things under £5 from Primark and I’d have that little meh feeling when I read it, so I guess in that respect relate-ability is kinda important.

These are just my own personal musings on the subject, I’d love to hear your thoughts so drop me a comment!

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The Reality of Relocating

Moving house can be a stressful time for anyone, whether it’s your first or hundredth time. Ok, so maybe you’ll have it nailed by your hundredth time, but you know what I mean.

You are, quite literally, packing up a life, and all of the moments and memories that go with it, into boxes and bags, and taking that life somewhere else. For a lot of people, that somewhere else probably isn’t all that far from where it was before, but when you’re relocating, that life of yours in boxes has got a hell of a way to go.Choosing to relocate wasn’t actually a difficult decision for me because I always knew it was coming, I just didn’t necessarily know exactly where it would be to, but quite honestly, the relocation side of things got a little bit lost in the excitement of buying the house, so it’s only been since actually moving in that the reality of relocating has actually dawned on me.I have to use a satnav to drive EVERYWHERE. The only place I can get to without it is the supermarket and even then I’m lucky because I only have to drive down two roads to get there. I don’t actually know where my nearest A&E department is, so here’s praying I don’t need it any time soon, and I also need to find a GP surgery, dentist and opticians nearby because I can’t really drive the 4 hours back to my current ones..I also have an endless list of things I need to update, from my driving licence to my bank accounts, credit cars, car insurance plus delivery addresses on all of my regular online stores. I’m quite lucky that my previous address is my parents house, so if any posts ends up there it’s not the end of the world, but it’s such an important thing to sort out if not.Criminally, I now have no idea what the good takeaway places are. So far I know we have a Dominos, and we’ve had a decent fish and chips, but there’s been one awful Chinese and that makes me quite sad. I do feel a little isolated. It’s the first time I’ve lived away from my family ever, and as even Matthew’s been working away over the last few weeks I have been somewhat on my own. I mean, I’m pretty good with my own company, but it’s a little bit hard not knowing where I am too well and also not having anyone to explore with, but these things will come with time.Now none of this is to say that this has been a bad experience for me at all, in fact I’ve relished the challenge of it, but it is a completely new life that I’m having to make now, and I think until that life is built properly I probably will feel a little displaced, but you know that they say, all good things to those who wait..

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My Life With A Lisp

So something that hardly anyone will know about me, because you only read what I say and don’t hear it, is that I have a lisp, and as far as I’m aware, I have done my whole life.

I say as far as I’m aware because if I’m being perfectly honest, I can’t remember what age it was when I realised I had it, but it was a LOT later in life than you’d think; I’m pretty sure it may not have been until I was in my teens. Now I’m sure you’re thinking ‘how on earth could you not know you have a lisp for all those years?’, and well, I think I thought the same thing, but when I started to think about the reason why, its actually pretty amazing. Quite simply, I never knew, because no one ever made a fuss of it. My family never mentioned it, or treated me any differently (with the exception of my nan, who I remember trying to train me out of it when I was very little, except at the time I had no idea that’s what she was doing), and I think that’s a pretty great thing, because I think had I been treated any way but normal, I’d have been so much more conscious of it, and felt a lot worse.

Fast forward to the point that I discovered my lisp, and I felt a lot of questions got answered. I knew there was something about the way I spoke that wasn’t quite right, but I could never put my finger on it. I had been teased a little in primary school, but never understood why, and I just became increasingly nervous about talking in front of people that I didn’t know. When I realised that I’d been speaking with a lisp all these years, it made sense, but it didn’t solve my problems.

I have what I guess is considered the ‘normal’ lisp, where I don’t quite pronounce the letter ‘s’ correctly. Being aware of it only made it harder. At this time, I was doing a lot of singing, and I quickly found myself worrying about song lyrics, trying to avoid songs that had too many words starting with an s, and I even started doing this with general conversation. While talking, I’d be rapidly thinking ahead to the next few words I knew would come out of my mouth, and often rewording phrases on the spot so that I wouldn’t use words starting with s too often. My brain was like a constant thesaurus.

Being aware of the ‘problem’ meant I was also that much more aware of the little comments or jokes that I’d previously been able to naively brush over. As a teenager I had a lot of guy friends, and while the majority wouldn’t dream of making fun of me, there’s always a few teenage boys who think they’re funny to make little digs, and of course I’d never let them see that it was bothering me, but it did, and this just drove me further into avoiding the letter as much as I could.

I also can’t remember at what point I got over this. Who knows, maybe I haven’t and I’ve just got better at it, but I certainly don’t feel in any way as self-conscious as I used to. I do also think I’ve maybe started to grow out of it more over recent years; I’m certainly not going to kid myself into believing its totally gone, but I do feel like I notice it less. But the fact is, there is nothing wrong with the way I talk. It my voice, slight hiss or not, and I’m learning to accept it. I think back to the many many years when I had no idea I even had a lisp, and I’m actually so grateful that I was never treated differently, or taken to speech therapy, because if anything I’ve owned it for so long that I’m not going to stop owning it.

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The Test of Time

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I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately. This is mainly because I’m leaving the town I grew up in, and am faced daily with the question of ‘aren’t you gonna miss things?’. If I’m being honest, leaving Bournemouth has always been a fairly easy decision for me because other than my family, I haven’t felt like I have that many other ties to this place. I’ve quite honestly felt like I’ve had no friends in Bournemouth for quite some time now.

I was one of the only people in my group of friends who didn’t go to university after sixth form, and I maintain to this day that that was the right decision for me, but it did mean I isolated myself quite early on. Even before we left school, I was getting a bit sick of hearing everyone talk non-stop about what uni they were going to, sorting things out etc, and although they’d probably never admit it, I know that my friends judged the decision that I made in choosing not to go.

So I left them drift away. I kept in touch with a few, and there would be the occasional gathering when people were back at Christmas or in the summer, but again I tended to steer clear for fear of that inferiority feeling I would get around them. Just over two years ago was the last time I went to a party with these friends, and to be honest, it was great, and I was starting to feel a little more confident about being around people again, but then a personal situation messed everything up, and I pulled myself away again because there were two people in the group that I couldn’t face seeing again. I’m still in a group chat with all these people, but I stay silent, and I can’t bring myself to show up to any of these gatherings.

But that’s just back story, and not what this post is really about.

Yesterday I ran into an old friend in the supermarket. He was one of my best friends during my last few years of school, but he went off to uni and although we’d occasionally chat on Facebook, it’s been about 2-3 years since I saw him last, and even those times would have been fairly brief.

So when I saw him in the supermarket my head went two ways. The first was ‘oh my gosh I need to go and talk to him’, and the other was ‘he probably really doesn’t care about seeing me’. Luckily, the first won out. We stood and caught up right in the middle of an aisle in Sainsbury’s, and d’you know what? It was so good to talk to him again.

We talked like old friends, which is exactly what we are, but it wasn’t one of those conversations you have with someone you used to know, where you just blurt out whatever’s happening in your own life and don’t really pay attention to what they’re saying back, it was a proper conversation. Old jokes from years ago were being thrown about, nothing was fake or forced and I walked away at the end of it with the biggest smile on my face.

I guess through all the recent years where I haven’t felt like I had that many friends, I forgot about the friends that are still there even when you can’t see them. The true friends that no matter how many miles are between you or how many months or years go by will still always consider you to be a friend, and treat you like a friend, and sometimes it just takes an unexpected moment to remind you of those things.

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Long Distance to Close Quarters

They say time flies when you’re having fun. Well I’m here to tell you that it frickin’ rockets when you’re in love.

Two years ago today I wrote a super personal post, telling the internet about this guy that I had been on two dates with that was flying out to New Zealand for at least 4 months, and that we had taken a fairly big leap of faith in committing to try and make it work. That was the day that I became Matthew’s girlfriend.

Two years later, we have been living together for almost a year, and in only a week’s time we’ll officially be moving in to our own home after a couple of stressful months.

I’m in no way the perfect girlfriend. I can be stubborn, I get hangry and I steal the covers sometimes, but I want to be better because I’ve never been happier. I’ve found the person who shares in my excitement of going to Home Bargains, who reminds me at 9 o’clock every evening that Love Island is on if I’ve been distracted by something, and patiently (and sometimes not so patiently) takes 400 photos of the same outfit until I’m totally happy with them.

We didn’t get to where we are today on the same normal path that most relationships take, but I wouldn’t change it for the world, and our adventure is still only just beginning. I don’t believe that anything in life is easy, but it’s a whole lot easier when you’ve got the right person standing there with you, no matter what.

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My Best Self

I’ve been thinking about myself a lot recently, but not in a narcissistic sort of way. You see lately, I haven’t always been liking myself that much.

Its no secret that there is a lot going on in my life right now. Matthew and I have just bought our first house, and I am in the process of moving away from my home town, which has been massively drawn out as I’m still working my notice period in my current job. I’ve felt in a real state of limbo over the last few weeks, and honestly its been getting to me a bit. I feel so on top of certain aspects of my life, while simultaneously drowning in others, and this position has been messing with me more than anything else. To put it simply, I just haven’t felt like I’ve been my best self lately.

I’ve not been doing the things that make me happy. I love going to the gym in the morning, and normally that’s at least 4 times a week, but lately I’ve been struggling with managing twice a week due to just feeling overwhelmingly tired and unmotivated most mornings when my alarm goes off. There’s a little voice in my head that tells me I should go back to sleep instead of getting up, and it just keeps winning out.

I haven’t even been making an effort with my appearance lately. Makeup has been absolutely non-existent on my face, with the exception of a little eyebrow maintenance, and instead of dressing how I like dressing, I’ve just been throwing on whatever I can find, which primarily has been baggy, stretchy trousers and loose tops, and I tell myself that it’s more comfortable but I just end up feeling like a slob all day.

This just isn’t the me that I want to be. I’m losing confidence and it’s all my own doing – like another part of me is sabotaging everything that the good part of me is trying to do. I keep telling myself that it’s just a phase that I’m going through while everything is up in the air, and I just hope to god that that’s true and that it will all sort itself out very soon, but I’m not going to stand by and wait for it to happen; I’m making changes.

Sometimes it’s not always possible to be your best self, and that’s completely ok, but when it’s making you unhappy, you don’t have to just stand by and watch it spiral out of control. I’m going to do my best to by my best from today onwards.

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Reasons Love Island Isn’t Total Trash

We’re now a few weeks into what is either considered the most important 8 weeks of summer telly, or the least important, and no, I’m not talking about the World Cup (mansplainers, I don’t care if my football statements are wrong).

Love Island completely splits the nation into those who are in front of ITV2 at 9pm every single evening for weeks on the trot, and those who couldn’t give two figs about who’s grafting who and think a melt is a term for a type of toasted sandwich. And d’you know what? That’s okay. Everyone is entitled to their opinions about the show, and even I, a watcher, still think its total trash, but whether you like it or loathe it, here are a bunch of great things about the show that you might not have thought about.

It creates a community

Last year was the first year that I watched Love Island, after a number of people on my team at work talked my ear off about how good it was, and getting into it opened me up to a whole world of conversations that I would have otherwise been left out of. I’m now in a Love Island group chat with work people, plus almost the whole of my Twitter feed is full of people gossiping about the goings on of the villa. Even my boyfriend, who last year wouldn’t be caught dead watching it, has been watching it with me so he can keep up with all the talk with the people he works with.

There’s no slut shaming

Of course the environment in the villa is not at all organic, and in any other situation most of the islanders would probably act very differently, but when things start to heat up, there isn’t a smidge of judgement from the other contestants, or even the viewers. I’ve not once seen a slut-shaming comment from a genuine viewer, and there’s not a bad thing said by the islanders about any antics that do occur.

Power is in everyone’s hands

Girls pick, boys pick, girls dump, boys dump; it might alternate a little bit but everyone gets their turn at the controls.

It makes people think about serious dating and relationship issues

Unfortunately, we have to see it to start talking about it, but actions of the islanders can raise some serious discussions about toxic relationships, gaslighting and so much more.

There are some incredible characters

Just looking at this season alone, you’ve got Jack who will inevitably leave the island and become a comedy act doing impressions, Alex who is the purest little soul and we’re only two weeks into getting to know them!

What are your thoughts on the island?

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To My Former Best Friends

They say the average friendship has a lifespan of about 7 years, and while this seems like quite an upsetting figure, I’ve come to accept it.

What this fact doesn’t really seem to consider, however, is that just because a friendship ends, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing left behind. Some friendships end for the wrong reasons, leaving sadness or bitterness in their wake, while others just fade away, leaving happy memories and nostalgia, and I really think that no matter what causes a friendship to become a thing of the past, that person will have always played a really important part of your life, and there will never be any truly hard feelings left behind, especially when it comes to the best friends.

To my childhood best friend..

I don’t even remember how we became friends. We met at school and things must have just clicked. We did so many things together, both in and out of school, and we were inseparable. I felt us start to drift when you moved schools, and I didn’t get to see you every day. You made other friends, and even though we still saw each other most weeks, I just knew that these friends were a bigger part in your life than I was. It was ok. You were destined for popularity, and I just wasn’t, and when we made it back to sharing a classroom again in secondary school, I just decided to stop clinging on. We were still classmates until we were 16, but all the years of friendship seemed to be forgotten, or at least we made it seem that way.

I still think of all those years with happy memories. We made a girl band, we knew each others families, and for so many years we came as a pair. Nothing changes that, and I really just hope that you’re happy.

To my teenage best friend..

You were the first person that I thought would be in the running for my maid of honour whenever I got married. We met through mutual friends, and although we were part of a larger group, we gravitated towards each other and there was just no stopping us. We went through boy troubles together, so many school exams, first nights out and so much more. But we were two very different people, we always were. I always thought that was why we worked, but over time our differences took over. I think we both tried to stay friends after we finished sixth form, but when we only saw each other a handful of times in that first year, I think we both stopped trying.

I saw you the other day. In fact, I think we’re working in the same building, and I think you saw me too. I don’t know if you didn’t recognise me or just didn’t want to say anything, but either is ok. I have so much to thank you for, you were my rock for so many years and I have accepted that our friendship faded out. I think it was best for both of us, but I still think of you often, and honestly with you all the happiness in the world.

To my first ‘adult’ best friend..

I thought you were a little crazy when I first met you, but I quickly got past that, or at least I liked the crazy. We made quite the pair. Despite being adults, the friendship was very similar to my younger friendships – we dealt with the boy problems, work problems and everything else along the way. You cut my hair in return for baked goods, and taught me how important it is to fill in my eyebrows. I never minded that you started going out with my ex. It had been so long since we’d been a couple and you were much better suited for him anyway. But I warned you what he could be like, and every time you came crying to me about it, I couldn’t help but think I told you so, and then you’d just run back to him anyway.

I let you drift out of my life because it was easier for me. You stopped showing any real interest in my life, and only wanted to come to me with your problems, or to make a competition out of things. I don’t like the term toxic but I felt like you weren’t in it for me anymore and it was draining the fun out of it. You don’t need me anyway, you’re headstrong and independent and it makes you stronger than I think you realise sometimes.

We had so much fun, and I’m sad it had to come to an end but it did. You seem happier now anyway, and I hope that continues for you.

My best friends now are very different to the ones that have left my life. I feel like I’ve got it right now, and have friends in my life who are gonna make it past the 7 year mark. I am happy, and I hope that my old friends have found friends who make them feel the same way that I do now.

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Things I’ll Miss About Bournemouth

I’m currently sat in our new house, on our new sofa that was delivered on Wednesday. I am content, but a little sad to know that we’ll be driving back tonight and that its still another 4 weeks until I can officially this place home.

Whenever I’m at home in Bournemouth, I miss our house so much, but I know that in a month’s time when I’m done with work and Matthew and I permanently move up north, besides the obvious things that I’ll miss like my family, I will miss the beautiful south coast that I grew up on.

The beach

Growing up in a town with one of the UK’s most beautiful beaches, I think I’ve taken living by the sea a little bit for granted. People always ask me if I spend all my time at the beach in the summer, and quite honestly I really don’t, and tend to actively avoid it in the summer because its so busy, but it is one of my favourite places to run in the evenings and I do think I’ll feel that little twinge from not being a 20 minute walk away from the water.

My gym

It seems like a really silly thing to miss, but I love my gym in Bournemouth. Its a 25 minute walk away, which I love doing, and I love knowing my way around the gym and seeing familiar faces every morning, and although I know that a gym is a gym, I’ll be really sad leaving.

Local shops

As a good little millennial, I do most of my shopping online to avoid too much human interaction, but there are some stores in Bournemouth that I won’t be able to visit anymore, like my two favourite fabric stores.

Bournemouth Air Festival

Every summer the world of aviation lands on on Bournemouth beach, and even though in the last couple of years I haven’t always made it down to the beach itself, the whole town gets to experience the festival as the planes fly over, so I’ll miss randomly spotting the Red Arrows, or feeling the ground shake from the engines of the Eurofighter Typhoon when it goes over.

Southern weather

Sure, the UK doesn’t always have the best weather, but its normally always just that little bit warmer down south at least, and now I’m heading further up the country I think I’ll miss those few degrees, especially in the winter!

I know that I’m going to have such an adventure living somewhere totally new, but Bournemouth will always be a very special place to me.

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The Danger of Influencers

This is a post that I’ve been thinking about writing for a long time now, but so many things have happened recently that I just can’t keep my mouth shut.

This week, Kim Kardashian has set the internet on fire with her Instagram post promoting ‘appetite suppressant’ lollipops. Now you don’t have to be a genius to read those three words and think wow what a joke, right?

Well, the problem is not everyone will think that. Celebrities and influencers all over the world have been promoting nonsense like skinny teas, waist trainers and now, it would seem, these ridiculous sweets for years now, and as much as I had to say this, they wouldn’t still be doing this if these companies weren’t doing pretty well for themselves out of it.

Unfortunately, these influencers have absolutely no regard for the danger caused by what they post. Their loyal fans, especially when the person has a particularly young fan base, will support anything they do, and often believe a lot of what they say, or at least want to give it a try themselves, and all that leaves is a whole bunch of people sat on the toilet regretting how much ‘skinny’ tea they bought once they realise that everything they consume is just making a speedy route through them.

But it’s also about more than just the products they promote. Last week a photo emerged on the internet of a ‘behind the scenes’ view of Charlotte Crosby’s Instagram post, in which she’s wearing a tight yellow leather skirt, and in the post she says this is from her new collection at InTheStyle, but the reality of said photo is that the skirt isn’t even zipped up at the back because it won’t.

So tell me how this is from her new collection if it doesn’t even fit her? Now I don’t have a problem with the fact that she can’t fit into whatever size she’s wearing – we’ve all been there – but what I do have an issue with is that you just know that website is gonna say something like ‘Charlotte wears a size X’ and women are gonna not only be believing that, but ordering based on that assumption, and as someone who has spent a lot of time lately crying over clothes that don’t fit, I hate to think about the number of people this could affect.

I get the whole making a living out of being an influencer thing, but I just wish that some people would have more sense to reject offers of promoting products that can be harmful to their followers. It’s not like Kim K has the body she has just purely thanks to lollipops and an overpriced neoprene corset..

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Why Disneyland Is So Special To Me

On this exact date last year I arrived home from the most amazing trip to Disneyland, and I’m feeling a little bit sad about that. If I could go anywhere right this second it would be there.

One of the questions I get asked the most when I tell people that I’ve visited every Disney park in the world is ‘what’s your favourite?’, and I always decline an answer as its impossible to single out just one park as being better than all the rest, but Disneyland is the park that has a special place in my heart; the sort of place that has me crying when I enter and when I have to leave.

I was fortunate enough as a child to spend a lot of time in Walt Disney World and Disneyland Paris, even making more than one visit some years, right up until I was about 5 or 6 years old, and then the Disney trips stopped. My sister and I were old enough to appreciate what the rest of the world had to offer, and so that’s exactly what my family did, and I wouldn’t change that for a second, but it meant that I actually had very few Disney memories other than what I’d seen in pictures or could vaguely remember.

In 2008, we went to California for the first time, and part of this visit was to go to Disneyland. I was just coming up 14, and I remember both my sister and I being ridiculously excited when my parents told us. This was where my first ‘adult’ Disney memories were made. We went back again in 2010, and again I remember just feeling so excited and happy, and at home when I stepped through those gates. There was magic.

As I’ve grown older, and my love of Disney has quite clearly grown also, I’ve come to realise other reasons why Disneyland is so special to me. This was Walt’s park, although he would say that Disneyland is our land *stifles a sob*, and you can feel that nostalgia through the whole park. He walked down Main Street USA, he stood in front of that beautiful little pink castle, and you just know that this was exactly what he created, his vision.

There’s a different feel to Disneyland than there is to WDW. It feels calmer, more effortless. From the Disneyland park to California Adventure, there’s not a single fault in my eyes, and even though it was 10 years ago now that I saw it all for the first time, I feel like I’m seeing it with fresh eyes every time.

Disneyland, you are perfect.

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A Pledge to Myself, Right Now

The last few months for me have been a bit of a rollercoaster. Hell, the whole of 2018 has been a total blur. To say I’ve been overwhelmed would probably be an understatement, and the probably with that is the good old saying: something’s gotta give.

So I’ve been letting things slip. I’m not proud of it, but I know that its true, and the problem hasn’t so much been that I’ve been dropping a few little things from my schedule, its that I’ve been dropping some things that are actually pretty damn important, not necessarily for other people, but for myself.

My skincare routine has diminished to me just barely washing my face in the shower, and there are days where I don’t even fill in my eyebrows. My face has hardly seen any makeup in the last few months, with the exception of when I was on holiday, and when I went to a wedding a few weeks ago, and while I have no problem with not wearing makeup, I really enjoy doing my makeup, and not doing things that I enjoy has really been affecting me.

More recently, I’ve realised that I’m not even wearing the clothes that I love to wear. I’ve gone from wearing outfits that make me feel cute to wearing whatever I can throw together that morning and avoiding looking in mirrors. Suddenly I’m finding things like posting on Instagram feel like the biggest chore on some days, and my blog has been suffering massively because feeling under pressure really hinders my ability to write. I’ve also been neglecting my body; not eating well, avoiding exercise some days and feeling totally sluggish as a result. I’m not ok with this.

So here it is, a promise to myself:

I must remember to take time out for my own happiness. If something’s gotta give, then that’s ok, but don’t let the things I love disappear.

I will look after my body, from getting back on track with eating a balanced diet and remembering to stay active, even if that just means taking a walk at lunchtime. I will drink more water. I will take those extra few minutes each day to look after my skin.

I will not let myself get caught up in negativity, and spend more time reflecting on positive, happy moments in my life, and looking forward to the amazing upcoming events that the rest of this year has to come.

I will try to always be better than the person I was yesterday, because lots of small steps are just as effective as one big one.

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Can We Stop Pretending That We Don’t Care About Exposure?

As a blogger, there’s nothing worse than opening a PR email and thinking it all sounds pretty fab, only to find the classic excuse of having no budget but offering exposure on social media. We read it, we sigh, we tweet something about exposure not paying the bills and we either kindly (or not so kindly) decline the offer, or just ignore the email altogether.

Now I fully agree with this stance on exposure being considered a form of payment, especially when I think about the amount of time that goes into writing, editing and taking photos for a blog post, but I’ve been thinking a little bit about exposure, and how despite bloggers as a whole complaining about it when brands offer it, we also crave the exposure that brands can give us.

I mean, if you’ve put together a killer outfit, nailed your hairstyle and spent half a day trying to get that perfect Instagram shot, are you trying to tell me that you’re not gonna be tagging every single thing you’re wearing down to your setting spray? Sure, we do this a little to avoid the inevitable ‘ooh where’s this from?’ (even though at least half of the comments will still be asking that exact question), but I know that I for one would be lying if I wasn’t hoping that said photo will be spotted by at least one of the tagged brands. I also have no shame in saying that there’s a little part of me praying that I might get a regram, not only for the great feeling of knowing that they loved my post so much, but also because hey I might gain a bunch of followers from it.

So why do we pretend that we don’t care about social media sharing? We all need exposure – I mean, it literally means to be put in the light – but it seems to have become a dirty word in the blogging dictionary. Yes it’s an unacceptable form of payment for hours of work, but it does still offer a lot to a bunch of people who make their side hustle (or even full time hustle) from putting ourselves online to be seen..

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How A Beach Holiday Actually Boosted My Body Confidence

I’ve not kept it entirely secret that I’ve been struggling a lot this year with negative thoughts about my body, and while they lapsed in February/March time, when I broke my ankle at the start of April and was unable to walk without pain, let alone go to the gym or continue my marathon training, I started to gain weight and the negative feelings came back worse than ever, as the time when I really wanted to be ramping up my training before my trip to Aulani, was now time I had to spent with my foot elevated and iced.

The hardest part in all of this was that I’ve always been a firm believer in body confidence, and if anyone I knew was feeling the same way I felt, I’d be heartbroken, so part of the reason I’ve not talked all that much about it is because I didn’t want to seem like a fraud, or make it seem like I think gaining weight is an awful thing, because it isn’t. I just couldn’t listen to the reasonable voice in my head.

So there I was, with my dream beach holiday getting ever closer, swimsuits and outfits planned, becoming equally more excited and more upset every time I caught a glimpse of my stretch marks in the mirror, and I was starting to worry that this perfect holiday was going to turn into one big panic attack.

Well, I was wrong. The first day of our stay, I put on the bikini that I was most worried about wearing, and we headed to the beach. I was nervous to take off my cover-up, but it was so hot that we had to get into the sea asap, so I whipped it off and ran across the hot sand into the water. No one stared, no one whispered, hell, little old me was probably the last thing that all these people enjoying their holidays probably cared about.

The next day, I put on my favourite bikinis. I hadn’t wore it in about 8 months and I was nervous that I’d look like I’d been stuffed into sausage casing. Sure, it didn’t fit as well as it has done in the past, but I’ve also looked worse in it, and I was actually pretty happy with how I felt in it, and I held my head a little higher than the day before as I walked around the pool area.

Besides my own body bringing me a little more confidence, I also started feeling super empowered seeing other people out in their bathing suits. People of all shapes, sizes and colours out loving life on their holidays, who are too busy having the best time to stop and worry about whether they’ve got any wobbly bits. I took this energy and rolled with it.

And the confidence grew exponentially. Each day I felt the worry subside and the sass build, and by the end of the third full day of our stay, I posted a photo of myself in my swimsuit on Instagram, which is something that I’ve only ever done once before in my life. The response? Incredible. The nice comments from people made me feel amazing, but what made me feel even better was the people who were relating with the message, because unfortunately the way I feel is a way that a lot of women feel. My caption said that all women’s bodies are amazing, and the number of people who thanked me for telling them that made it all worth while, and to be honest, I just felt like a million bucks in that photo.

So all that worry about how I would look in a swimsuit? I guess you could say I’m over it.

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Just Because

I can’t imagine that there’s anyone who hasn’t been told at least once in their life, and most likely by their mother, that ‘just because *this person* did that, doesn’t mean you have to. If they jumped of a cliff, would you follow?’ while you rolled your eyes because it really wasn’t a big deal.

These were always things that we wanted to do; places we wanted to go or styles we wanted to copy, not things that we felt obliged to do, but as you get older, everything suddenly becomes more about what you feel like you should be doing, rather than what you actually want to do. Sure, some of these things are things that we think we should be doing for good reasons, but then there’s also a good number of things that might not always be good for us, and these are the things that we should maybe give a miss, at least every now and then.

Just because other people stay late at work, it doesn’t mean you have to

When I started my new job, I thought that just because the guy who sat next to me came in an hour before me, and often stayed past when I left, it meant that I wasn’t doing my job well enough, and frankly that’s just not true. So long as I come into work, do the hours I’m contracted to do and complete all the work that needs to be done, that’s good enough. If others want to come in early, stay late or take on extra work, that’s on them, but I did enough of that in my previous jobs and now I like that I’m able to walk away when 5 o’clock hits and not have a care in the world.

Just because you’ve made plans, it doesn’t mean you can’t cancel them if you’re not feeling it

If you’re tired, having a bad mental health day or for whatever reason you don’t feel up to it, you shouldn’t feel bad about cancelling plans. People might not always understand it, but that doesn’t matter. Put yourself first.

But as well as the things you shouldn’t be doing just because you thin you should, there are also things that you can do even though you didn’t do what other people did..

Just because you didn’t go to university, it doesn’t mean you can’t get to the same place as someone who did

I’ve actually just started working with a girl I went to school with. She went to university, and got her job through a graduate scheme. I went straight into work after sixth form, and after gaining skills and working hard, I am just one level below her, and with another year of experience and study support through work, I could move up into the same position she works in with a university degree. Sometimes there’s more than one path.

Just because you haven’t got a huge following, it doesn’t mean you don’t a good following

You could have a million followers, but if one a few hundred actually bother to support you, then you might just be better off having a few hundred followers who cheer you on at every possible moment. I mean, the Instagram algorithm is screwing us all over anyway..

There are however many billion people in the world and every single one of us is unique, so just because one or two people make you stop and think you’re missing out on something or doing something wrong, do you think that’s right?

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Disney Fan Theories – The Best and The Worst

As with every major fandom, the Disney world is filled with theories and fan fiction, and they range from surprisingly plausible to utterly ridiculous, fuelled mostly by the internet.

Now I haven’t come up with any of these theories myself, they’re all ones I’ve seen online or heard from others, and because they are so spread over the goo ol’ world wide web, I can’t credit the original person because I simply have no idea who that might be, but here are a few of my favourites, and some of the theories that really grind my gears.

The Best

Riley has gender identity conflicts (Inside Out)

During the 2015 Pixar movie, we get to see inside the heads of two characters other than Riley herself, and that’s Riley’s parents. Both parents have the same 5 emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – that Riley does, but in Riley’s mum’s head, all of her emotions have female personas, and Riley’s dad’s emotions all have male personas. Nothing unusual about that, right? Well no, except Riley’s emotions take on both male and female personas, and the theory behind this is that Riley doesn’t identify as one specific gender, and this is Pixar’s little nod to all those people in the world who feel the same. I personally really hope that this is true.

Emily from Toy Story 2 is Andy’s mum

In TS2, we hear the sad tale of how Jessie is abandoned by her kid, Emily, but some fans believe that Emily grew up into our favourite cowboy-loving kid’s mum. You see, the cowboy hat that Andy wear as he plays with Woody is the same style as that sported by cowgirl star of the second film, and its possible that this hat belonged to his mum, or was at least bought by her in a nostalgic moment. I just love thinking that not only did Jessie find a loving home after Emily, but that she did actually make it back into Emily’s life.

The Worst

Tarzan is Anna and Elsa’s younger brother

Personally I find the whole ‘Anna and Elsa’s parents were going to Rapunzel’s wedding when their ship sunk’ thing a little bit overplayed, but when I read an addition to this theory that suggested that they did, in fact, survive the shipwreck, and washed up on the island as per the opening scene of Tarzan, making him their younger brother, I just thought that this was too much. For starters, the Tarzan ship went down in flames, on relatively still water, rather than the crazy storm shown in the movie dragging the ship under, but also Tarzan was a baby at the time of the crash, and unless the queen gave birth onboard the ship, in which case we would have seen that she was pregnant as she left, they would have had the baby before leaving, which they did not. Sorry, I’m not buying it.

Carl died at the start of Up

So some people believe that Carl actually passes away before the big adventure of the movie takes place, and that from the balloons going up, we’re actually following Carl’s adventure into the afterlife. I’m sorry, but that’s a big ol’ nope from me, this film is already sad enough.

Hit me up with your favourite (or least favourite) fan theories!

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Are Instagram Pods Really The Answer?

Just to prefix this post, I have absolutely no qualms with Instagram pods or people who use them, these are just my musings!

The humble Instagram pod; a supposed way of boosting engagement on the platform that we all want to love and love to hate at the same time.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the term, an Instagram pod is simply a group chat within Instagram DMs, where friends/fellow bloggers/like-minded people chat and share their latest posts, with the idea being that other members of the group will then head on over to the post to like and comment to give the image a better engagement than it might of done otherwise, for example if thanks to Instagram’s notorious algorithm meant that it wouldn’t have otherwise shown up on their feed. Sometimes people in these pods will also do shout-outs for the other accounts in the group on their Stories in order to help each other out with followers.

When it first became a thing, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t scroll through Twitter without seeing a good few weeks of people asking if anyone wanted to join their pod, or people asking if anyone had room in their pod for them, and of course naturally it led to a little bit of drama as well, with some people being told they couldn’t join certain pods, or people complaining about pods etc. Twitter loves a bit of drama.

I myself have never been part of an Instagram pod, so I can’t really vouch for their effectiveness, but as an outside-grammer, it can become quite easy to spot a pod if you pay attention. Sure, you’ll always see friends supporting each other as much as they can, but you start to notice the same people cropping up in the comment section of every post by the same group of people. Now I love my friends and will always try to like every single one of their posts, but I wouldn’t comment on everything and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to do the same for me.

Yes, statistically the posts seem to have a higher engagement, but as a person who likes to look a little beyond just the photo, it all looks a little inorganic, especially when the comments just say things like ‘oh this is a great photo’ or ‘you look fab’. The same goes for story shout-outs. Sure, I do shout-outs for my favourite accounts, and often I might feature the same people, but I do try to mix it up every time, however when the same group of people only seem to share each other on a weekly basis, it just screams pod to me and I can’t help but feel like its a bit forced, plus if I didn’t follow those accounts the first 10 times you mentioned them, chances are I won’t follow them after the next 10..

Now these are just my own observations, and I really don’t mean any shade to anyone who does use pods, especially if they’ve worked really well for you (if they have, I’d love to hear your experiences so do drop me a comment!), I’m just curious to know if anyone else feels similarly, and given that they seem to be talked about a whole lot less than they used to, are Instagram pods fading out again?

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Why I’m Struggling to be a Fitness Blogger Right Now

Fitness is a big part of my life, and I’ve always tried to include that side of my life in this blog, but the keen-eyed regular readers would know that its been quite some time since I posted anything properly fitness related. I mean, I’ve done a few reviews, and a handful of retrospective posts over the last couple of months, but that’s been about it, and while I miss writing about a subject that plays such a big part in my life, I’m struggling for a few pretty good reasons.

I personally feel like the fitness industry itself is so massively flawed. We’re forever having ideas pushed upon us like fad diets, ‘skinny’ products, how we need to look like this celebrity or why those extra pound we’re carrying are the worst thing in the world, and I don’t believe in any of this.

I’m a firm believer that fitness and healthy living is for everyone, no matter how old you are or how much you weigh. I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t be creating negative associations with certain foods because carbs are super important and some fats are healthy and the world is trying to convince you that the only thing you should eat is kale but you can absolutely have that pizza and enjoy it and not feel like you need to spend the entire next day in the gym hating yourself for it. I hate the terms ‘cheat’ and ‘treat’ and anything that suggests that enjoying life is unhealthy. I believe in body positivity and I cannot stand for ‘fat shaming’ or ‘skinny shaming’.

I don’t believe that the sole purpose of fitness is about losing weight or changing the way your body looks. I think that just wanting to get a bit more active, or become a little bit stronger is absolutely enough if that’s what you want to do. You can run that 10K and have the takeaway without having to justify it as something that you ‘earned’.

Its because I believe in all this that I’m finding the words so difficult to get out, because I would hate for anything I write to sound like anything I don’t stand for. I would never want anyone to think that I believed in or encouraged any of the damaging things that the fitness industry preaches, and I’d rather not say anything than say the wrong thing.

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Quality over Quantity

I’ll always befriend a cat

I was in primary school when I first realised that I didn’t have to be friends with everyone to be happy. Year 6, to be precise. Despite going to a tiny little school with small classes, it was already subject to a bit of cliqueyness, and I decided that rather than making myself miserable by clinging onto a group of girls who I had convinced myself didn’t really like me, I could sit by myself, or with people in lower years who I got on with better, and while that didn’t make me particularly ‘cool’, it did make me happy.

Even before then, I knew what it was like to have distant friends. My closest friends while I was in primary school were either in the year above me, so left for secondary school, or had moved to other schools a few years previously, and I got to see them on weekends or at mutual after school activities, so not seeing my best friends every day was quite a normal thing for me.

As I went into secondary school, as is fairly normal with an all girls school, I learned more about how fast-moving friendship groups could be. I started off in the ‘popular’ group in year 7, but quickly learned that I wasn’t actually happy there and moved on, and that pattern continued through my school life – when I wasn’t happy anymore, I found myself drifting away and I moved on. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t skipping from friend to friend by the day or week or even year, I was just quick to pick up when things weren’t working anymore, and I was ok with not having hundreds of best friends at the same time. I picked up some great friends over this time though, many of whom I would still consider as friends today. You see, the good ones stick.

I’ve just never felt the need for fake friends. You know, the ones you see at parties every now and then who pretend to be super interested in your life, when you know they don’t really care about you, or the ones who are only there when they need something from you, but god forbid you should ever go to them with a problem. I’d rather have 10 really good, real friends, than 100 people who couldn’t tell you anything about what’s going on in my life. It might make it seem like I’m a real loner when I say that I have no friends in my hometown anymore, but its the truth and I really don’t mind. I have wonderful friends scattered across the country, and even some across the world. I might not see them every day, or even every year, but they’re there and they’re there for me through whatever.

They matter to me.

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We’re Too Easily Offended, Huh?

We are almost one fifth of the way through the 21st century, crazy right? We live in a world that’s more advanced than even our own grandparents could have ever imagined, yet the advances that we’ve made, especially over just the last few years have been about a lot more than just technology.

You see, we now live in a world where acceptance is becoming more important and more common than ever before, and while unfortunately this still needs to see some improvement, it is now more ok than ever to be different.

I say unfortunately, because there are still more than just a handful of people who refuse to be accepting. These are the people you see on social media saying things like ‘this is political correctness gone mad’ or my personal irritant ‘people are too easily offended these days’, you know the kind. More extremely, these are the sick people who are behind shootings in gay clubs, acid attacks on members of the trans community and the people who blame the rape victims, but I’m not going to even give those people the time of day in this post.

I want to get you thinking about the comments made by the former. You see, I clearly don’t agree with them, but for very logical reasons. Take the ‘people are too easily offended these days’ comment, not only does it imply that it’s the fault of the upset person that they feel that way, but it’s also suggesting that we’ve not made any sort of advancement in the way we see things and feel about them. It’s not that people are ‘too easily offended’ by your racist/homophobic/sexist/whatever comment, it’s just that we finally live in a world where we’ve realised that it’s ok to voice our opinions and and stand up for what we believe in.

So many people throughout history have been oppressed, whether that’s been due to race, gender and identity, sexual preference, or quite frankly anything that hasn’t fit the so called ‘norm’ of a particular era, and we’re finally passed that oppression, or are at least getting there. So it’s not ‘political correctness gone mad’ when an establishment has toilets that aren’t gender specific, and women aren’t ‘too easily offended’ by the suggestion that what we wear is to blame when a man can’t control himself when he’s around them. It’s just that we now know that we can voice the fact that some things aren’t ok, and if that upsets you and your backwards way of thinking, that sounds a hell of a lot like your problem, and not ours.

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What’s Been Distracting Me From Blogging

You may have noticed, or you may not have done, but over the last few weeks my mind has been far from blogging, and I’ve certainly noticed. I’ve always prided myself on consistently posting at least 4-5 times a week, and that just hasn’t been happening, simply due to the fact that my time and my brain power has been used up elsewhere.

Now its definitely not to say that it hasn’t all been bad, there’s been plenty of good stuff too, but some things have just taken over a little bit more than I had expected, and you know what they say, something’s gotta give..

House stuff

If you caught my week of daily blogging, you’ll know that a few weeks ago Matthew and I put down a holding fee on a new build house that’s due to be finished at the end of May, and from that moment onwards, there’s been a lot of excitement but also a lot of stress.. We’ve been having to do a lot of the boring stuff – sorting out the solicitors, going through mortgage and Help to Buy applications (which involved a 3 hour meeting with a financial adviser on a Friday night which was a little painful) and thinking a lot about money, but there’s also been a lot of decisions and planning which has been a mixture of stress and excitement.

Because we’re not moving locally, we want the move to be as smooth as possible so that we don’t have to make a whole bunch of trips back to Bournemouth, so we’ve probably spent at least a little bit of time every single day working out details. We’ve decided on most of our furniture (spoiler alert: my office is going to be the cutest thing ever), Matthew has already started sourcing things like internet and tv so we have an idea of budgeting as well, and I’m trying to start packing some things up that I won’t need in the next few months.

Creations

While blogging has always been my main creative outlet, my Etsy work has taken over recently and I’ve also got a bunch of custom orders on the go, so evenings and weekends have been dedicated to whizzing up anything from skirts and dresses to matching top and shorts sets. I’ve been making so many new things which has been really great, but it also means that I’ve been having to put a little bit more time into unfamiliar designs. You can see some of my latest makes here!

Migraines and more

I’m a fairly regular sufferer of migraines, and these last few weeks have been full of them. They’ve not been my worst, but I feel like I’ve basically had a continuous one for the last two weeks. Combine that with that time of the month and all the various stresses of life lately, I’ve been quite run down and have been struggling to motivate myself to do anything after getting home from work other than wanting to get into bed.

And its not just been my blog..

Sure, I think my blog has faced the brunt of this little slump, but I’ve been slacking in other aspects of my life too. I’ve not been keeping up with social media, especially Instagram and I’ve been forgetting to schedule tweets, not to mention my skincare routine going out the window and I haven’t put any makeup on in at least a week, if not two, and there was a whole week that I didn’t go to the gym once, but this is just a phase..

These kind of slumps happen, and its ok. I mean, they suck at the time, but they never last forever, and I’m hoping that I’m coming out of the other side of it now. The hardest part of the house buying process is almost over, and everything else is practically planned to a tee, I’m working my way through my Etsy orders nicely and I’m feeling my writers brain kicking back in, so I hope you guys haven’t been enjoying my somewhat silence too much, cos I’m coming back!

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Time Is Money

Its an age-old saying. Sure, its got some pretty cliche connotations now, but cheese aside its 100% true. I mean, would you sit 9-5 in an office if you weren’t getting paid for it? You probably wouldn’t, right?

Well, its the same for small businesses. You see, creatives don’t like working all day and not getting paid for it – the only difference is, we’re doing something that’s maybe a little less traditional. Graphic designers, hand-makers of all different and wonderful things, cake decorators, bloggers – you name it, there are people trying to make money from all kinds of ventures, but the one thing they have in common is that time goes into everything. Hell, I’d love to know of a way of making money that doesn’t take a second of my time.

I LOVE my Etsy store. I love designing and making things and I love the fact that there are people out there that are actually prepared to buy the things I make. I say ‘prepared to buy’ for a very particular reason. You see, day in, day out, I get messages from people asking me about custom designs, or they’ve seen me wearing something on Instagram and want to know how much it would cost to order it from me, and you’d think that I would love getting these messages, right? Sure, I get a little buzz from someone loving my stuff, but I just know that that is the last message I’ll receive from them, because as soon as I let them know the price, they’re gone.

You know, 9 times out of 10, I actually respond to these messages with a price that is lower than I should charge, just on the off-chance that they might go for it. Spoiler alert, they rarely do, even though I’ve already dropped the price. Why do I do it? Well because while its not the best business sense, I hate asking people for money. Worse than that, business sense-wise, it leads me to under-value my time – I mean, there is a skirt for sale on my Etsy store right now where the fabric itself actually costs me more than the price I have the skirt for sale at! I make a loss on that straight away, and then I spend 1-2 hours making said skirt from said fabric.

I blame what I refer to as ‘Primark prices’, even though its the high street in general. You can buy a dress in New Look for £10, so when you see a skirt on Etsy for £30 you feel like its priced a little steep, right? Well ignoring whatever the fabric costs the maker, when you combine the amount of time it takes to design the skirt, cut the fabric, sew it all together, hem it, fit a zip/button/elastic/whatever, you’re maybe looking at a couple of hours of work. So lets put some random numbers to that – say supplies cost £10 and designing and making took 2 hours – and you don’t want to pay more than £20 for it cos ‘that’s what you’d pay on the high street’, well that’s your non-direct way of saying that you think its ok for that maker to get paid circa £5/hour. That sound like a decent wage to you?

You see, I don’t think it does, yet I’ve been under-pricing my creations so as not to seem too steep. Well, I’m done with that. If people don’t want to value my time, then that’s fine, but I’m going to. My time is worth money, and so is everyone else’s.

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Let’s Talk About High Street Sizes

So yesterday I was super excited when I got notification to say my H&M parcel had been delivered. Well no, that’s not exactly true because the email came from Hermes and I knew that there was a strong possibility that my parcel would be closer to the moon than my letter box, but that’s not what this is about.

I had ordered three items from H&M: a ladies t-shirt, size ‘S’, a pair of mom jeans, size 12 – because I’m a 10-12 and I figured I’d size up because jeans can be notoriously tricky to get right – and a hoodie from the kids section, aged ’14+’ – because I loved it, I’m quite petite so there was a possibility it would fit me, and I figured worst case scenario I’d just return it. Quite a mixed bag, right? Well, I figured I had a pretty good chance with everything fitting.

The first thing I thought I should try on was the kids hoodie, and I was super pumped to find that it fit me perfectly, yay! From the photo on the website, it was supposed to be a loose-fit style for kids, and it was a little more fitted on me, but it definitely didn’t look like I’d squeezed myself into a kids shirt. Win. I had no worries about the t-shirt fitting, but if anything it was a little looser than I expected, and then there were the jeans..

Remember how I said that I sized up? From the moment I stepped into them, I just knew that they weren’t going to fit. Despite being ‘mom jeans’, they just barely made it over my thighs, and there was absolutely no chance of them doing up. So tell me, why can I fit into a kids size item, and then not an adult size from the same store?

But this isn’t just about me complaining about my H&M order, this is about what high street stores are doing to girls and women every day. The industry is typically infamous for producing unrealistic body expectations with the use of tiny models, photoshop and various other things that make the average woman feel like a slug, but even if you take away all of these things, you’re still left with something that can be potentially so harmful, and that is the massive discrepancy between the supposed same sizes, not just between different brands, but even within the same store.

Let me put it this way: I bought those jeans a size bigger than what I am, and the size bigger than what I am did not fit me. Some of the thoughts that instantly go through my head are ‘oh my gosh, is it me?’, ‘have I gained weight without noticing?’, ‘could I actually be 2 or even 3 sizes bigger than I think I am?’. After this flood of negative thoughts about my own body, I talk myself down and remember that H&M is particularly infamous for big sizing issues, but before I could get to that explanation, I spent a few minutes feeling like absolute crap.

One time, I bought two pairs of skinny jeans from New Look – both size 10. One pair was a good fit, although actually a little looser in some places. I still have those jeans to this day. The other pair wouldn’t even go up my calf. My arm barely fit into them. Same number on the label, same shop, two completely different actual sizes.

I mean, I get that it might be completely possible to have a totally unified system, for whatever stupid reason the stores always give when challenged on this, but its not the fact that I can vary from a size 8-14 depending on where I’m shopping – I can live with that – its what this does to my confidence. Even Asos now has a ‘size recommendation’ feature, which is designed to give you a better idea of what you should order based on your personal details and previous purchases, and when I first saw it, I thought ‘hey, what a great idea!’ Well, that was until one time I saw something that I liked, selected my size, and the little message popped up saying, and I paraphrase, ‘um, you’re probably not gonna fit into that, why don’t you get the next size up?’ – yes I exaggerated what was actually said, but it actually made me feel so bad about myself that I just stopped shopping and closed the window.

In case I haven’t made my point clear enough – this is damaging. Brands can use all the curvy, un-edited models in the world, but if the size of their products doesn’t reflect some sort of consistency, girls and women everywhere are still going to be subject to the effects that the fashion industry has on body image.

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‘Stop Being So Anti-Social’

The world we live in today is very different from the one I remember as a child, and that is for a number of reasons. I am, although I hate the connotations that have been linked to the term, a millennial; 90s born, 90s-00s child, and well on my way to adulthood when the 2010s came around. In my lifetime I saw cassette tapes replaced with CDs, CDs replaced with mp3s and now we just stream everything. If you showed my younger cousins a VHS tape or a floppy disc they probably couldn’t tell you what either of them were, yet I still remember the pain of waiting for my Disney films to rewind to the start before I could watch them, and my dad’s office being full of these weird little plastic and metal squares.

I remember my parent’s mobile phones going from big to small to tiny – all Nokias because that was basically the only phone company in those days. I remember my mum getting her first colour screen mobile, and then the first camera phone which took the grainiest photos you could imagine but it was still just the coolest thing. I remember when mobile data became a thing, and my sister accidentally racked up a big bill because we had no idea that this super cool new internet function cost the earth to run, even though it took 4 hours to load a page. Fast forward to today, and I’ve seen every cool new development in technology, and I just know that even the tech we use today will be old news before the next few decades are out.

Our phones have gone from being our life-lines to just being our lives. Its not just keeping important numbers saved, its how we do pretty much everything these days shopping to banking, but ultimately it does tend to always come back to communication, which is strange because its considered so ‘anti-social’ to be on your phone nowadays.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely not for people being glued to their phones 24/7, or kids preferring to play on their parents phones instead of going outside and playing, but there’s a real element of hypocrisy when people make those comments like ‘why don’t you get off your phone and have an actual conversation?’

Here’s the thing, the majority of the time that I am on my phone, I am probably talking to someone, or a group of people, or my Twitter followers, or someone on Instagram. The fact is, socialising is so much more than just having a conversation with someone these days. I mean, if someone was in the middle of a phone call, would you tell them to get off the phone and ‘be more sociable’? No, you wouldn’t, because talking to someone on the phone is being sociable and having a conversation, yet if I’m 20 mins into an hour long Twitter chat and haven’t put my phone down the entire time, its eye rolls and tutting.

What bothers me especially, and this is probably gonna sound super tragic, is that I don’t actually have any friends in my hometown. To be honest, this doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should because I have so many friends that I talk to all the time either through Whatsapp or Twitter or Instagram, and I’m totally blessed to have incredible online friends. I am closer to some of the people that I’ve only ever met once or twice than the people I grew up with and don’t talk to anymore, and my three closest friends are scattered across the country and I’m lucky if I see them every few months.

And all these amazing friends that I do have that are a mere text or tweet away? I met them online. I met them through blogging or through Disney trips or through following each other on Instagram. I would not have met these wonderful people without being online, and the only way I can keep up with them when they are not only all over the country but all over the world, is by, you guessed it, being on my phone a lot.

So the next time you see someone glued to their phone screen, maybe instead of jumping to judgement you should think about what they might actually be doing, who they might actually be speaking to. Just because there are words coming out of their mouths, doesn’t mean conversation isn’t flowing through their fingertips.

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On Why Finally Putting Myself First

One of my main New Year’s resolutions for this year was to put myself first more often, and while I did put that into practice a little bit in January, now I’m really ready to commit to this, and myself.

I’ve always been the person that picked up the extra shifts that needed covering because someone else was sick, or that stayed late dealing with a customer while others ran for the door. You see, I have this awful affliction where I find it almost impossible to say the word ‘no’, and the thought of letting someone down just seemed impossible to me. Now there’s nothing wrong with being a good, reliable person, but the problem for me is that after years and years of doing it, its starting to take its toll.

Despite having started my new job, which I absolutely love, over 2 months ago now, I’ve still been doing overtime in my old position to try and earn a few extra pennies to put towards various things this year. It always seems like a good idea at the time, but in reality I end up getting super stressed out and over the last few months this stress has actually led to me being fairly unwell – in fact, I’ve been off work twice already this year due to illness which is just so unlike me. So on Saturday, I finally finished the last of the overtime I’ve pledged, and while I’ll no doubt miss the extra cash landing in my bank account each month, I think this is going to be so much better for me. I went from working 12 hour days in my old job, to going back to normal 9-5 hours in my new job but still doing overtime in between, and now I’m ready to just work normal hours, in a job that I actually like getting up for.

Ultimately, I know that I need to work on my health and my happiness. The migraines that I suffer with have been becoming more frequent over the last month or so, I keep getting coldsores, and I’ve also been battling somewhat silently with some body image issues that have been really getting to me as well. Now I have more time on my hands, I can not only get myself feeling better physically but also mentally and I think this is going to be so good for me.

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Hello February

Well if it wasn’t enough that we’re in 2018 now, we’re already into month 2, wowzers.. I’ve seen a lot of people on Twitter saying how January felt like it went on forever, and I felt that a little bit but I also have no idea where the time has gone.

It wasn’t the totally stellar beginning to the year that I hoped for; I’ve been ill quite a lot and my mental health has been quite up and down, especially in the last few weeks, plus my family got some bad news this month, so I’ve dropped off the high of the new year buzz a little, but now I’m ready for the fresh start that a new month brings. That said, January wasn’t all blue – we celebrated Matthew’s birthday, had a weekend away in Bath and I’ve been so happy with blogging and my small businesses this month, so I can’t complain about that!

I always think that February is such a funny little month, I mean, its only 2-3 days shorter than any other month but it seems that way. It just seems more manageable, y’know?

Well I plan on filling February with fun and positivity, and here are a few things I’m looking forward to..

Harry Potter and The Cursed Child

I am FINALLY seeing The Cursed Child in London in a few weeks time, eek! I did read the book, so I know how the story goes down, but even that seems like so long ago now that I can’t remember every little detail, and I’m not going to refresh myself so I can experience it all on the stage.

Meat free days

With it being a little bit shorter, I thought this would be the perfect month to put myself to the challenge of doing at least one completely meat free day each week and expand my food repertoire with some more veggie options and dishes.

No more overtime

This Saturday is the last day of overtime I will be working for the foreseeable future, yay! This is despite having said the same thing every few weeks for the last 8-9 months, but this time I mean it because technically I left the job that I’ve been doing the overtime for two months ago, and its been causing me so much stress in the last few weeks that I’m just gonna put myself first and work normal days and normal hours from here on out.

More creations

I’ve launched a brand new product on my Etsy store today, and there are some fab deals and other new products that will also be appearing in the coming week or so, so stay tuned! January was an incredible month for sales and I’m so proud of that, so bring on another month!

Another Instagram milestone, maybe?

After what feels like the longest time trying to get there, I finally hit 2,000 followers on Instagram just under a week ago, and by some miracle I’m already up another 50 from there! I set myself a fairly modest, although still potentially unreachable goal of 2,500 for 2018, but if I keep going like this then maybe February will at least see me at 2,100..

Booking another Disney trip

I have no Disney park trips on the cards for 2018, but January 2019 is gonna be a good’un! DVC home resort rules means that we can book our stay at Disney’s Polynesian resort 11 months in advance, so hello booking time!

A big push for fundraising

On said 2019 Disney trip, I’ll be running my first full marathon, and I’ve decided that I might as well do something good with this madness, so I’ve set up a Just Giving page where you can sponsor me, with the money going to Cystic Fibrosis Trust, a charity very near and dear to me – even if you donate just £1 you can help me make a difference, and if you fancy it, click here.

Here’s to a great month!

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The Outtake Reel

I certainly hope that it doesn’t come as a shock to anyone when I say that I am not perfect. No one is, and that’s just life.

And despite being a blogger, someone who spends most of their time taking photos with the sole purpose of sharing them online, I don’t quite have the knack for being in those photos all the time. That’s an understatement: I am grossly unphotogenic at times, and that means that for every good photo you see, chances are at least 10 other photos were taken. And out of those many, many photos that get taken, a handful are on their own level of awkwardness.

Want to have a giggle with me? These photos are all completely unstaged and accidental, and with the exception of the first photo which my boyfriend edited for the lols, these are totally unedited.

Excuse me, I seem to have lost my chins, have you seen them?

This is what happens when my go-to pose involves putting most of my weight on one leg, and you’re on a rocking cruise ship..

Why doesn’t Rapunzel have as many problems with her hair as I do?

Oh, there my chins are..

I’m awkward, you’re gorgeous. Wait what?

Some imagination?

Oh look, Royal Friendship Faire is on!

‘Yes, but have you got ALL of this in the background?’

This is but a handful of the truly spectacular facial features that I am capable of, and as they’ll never see the light of Instagram, I hope you’ve had a good laugh at my expense!

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About My Younger Self

This was me, aged 15. This photo was taken about two or three days after I had been dumped by my first long-term boyfriend – we’d been together around 8 or 9 months – by text, at around 2 o’clock in the morning. Yeah.. My two best girlfriends had slept round mine, and we had gone to a local summer festival where we tried to get as many free things as we could, ate food that came from trucks or stalls and just had some fun.

In those days I always carried a camera. More often than not it was my dad’s because he had much better ones than me, and phone cameras still took grainy, low quality photos. My phone at the time was a slid-up LG thing with buttons. Yep. I would take so many photos, most totally silly but every one a memory that I would painstakingly upload to Facebook in groups of 5, caption individually and tag, so that everyone could see. I still have every single one saved on my computer.

My two best friends were everything. Our lives revolved around sleepovers at each others houses and trips to Primark. We sat together in every class but still text each other under our desks, and we were there for each other through every breakup, fall out or family problem. We all had our own style and our own likes and dislikes, but we all respected each other. I never thought there would be a time that we wouldn’t be friends anymore. Well, we drifted apart in the end.

In those days I knew very little when it came to makeup, and I certainly didn’t wear it every day. When I did it was probably just blue eyeliner and mascara – I think by 15 I had given up on my Dream Matte Mousse in 3 shades more orange than my face actually was. My eyebrows were never filled in, nor did I ever pluck them (but that was partly because I’m quite lucky with my natural shape), but my nails were always painted. My nail varnish collection was my pride and joy and every week at school was a challenge to see how long I could make it before a teacher eventually noticed my navy blue tipped fingers and made me go to the office to take it off. Most gave up bothering.

Even back then my style was different. I wore skirts and shorts with knee high socks and high-tops – Converses were basically the only shoes I owned, and still are. I wore dungarees and band t-shirts, and actually knew who the bands were. I knew what I was wearing wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I almost thrived from it. I guess the fact that I didn’t try and blend in back then is what makes my style what it is today. To be honest, when I look back I still love every outfit.

Younger me went through a lot. I look back at some of it and wish some things had been different. I wish I could have told myself so many things about how life would be in 5-10 years time but I also applaud that version of myself for getting through it all. I almost feel like I don’t know that person anymore, but she was great, despite not believing it herself.

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Let’s Talk About Luck

Luck (noun)

“success or failure apparently brought about by chance rather than through one’s own actions”

I feel like this says it all, but because you don’t know the point I’m trying to get across, here’s some backstory..

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you achieve, there will always be someone who says ‘oh wow, you’re so lucky!’. Whether you’ve just tweeted about a promotion at work, or you’re Instagramming beach pics from a fabulous holiday, so many people jump to luck. Now don’t get me wrong, 9 times out of 10 this is probably meant as a compliment, but that’s just the thing. Unintentional as it may be, claiming luck invalidates the accomplishment.

Take bloggers for example. I follow so many incredible bloggers on Twitter, all of which produce great content, take photos that could easily appear in magazines and pour so much effort into their posts that they deserve every opportunity they get, but whenever they tweet in gratitude about one of their favourite brands reaching out to work with them, so many of the responses that come flooding in are ‘oh my gosh, this is amazing! You’re so lucky!’. Yes, it is amazing, but look at the definition of luck (see, I put it there for a reason), these things came about through hard work and determination, so that’s far from luck.

Personally, I hate being told that I’m lucky whenever I go on holiday. Sure, I guess I’m fortunate to have a job that pays well, but I earnt that job and I work hard in that job, plus I put in so much overtime for the very purpose of being able to pay for said holidays. And I suppose it helps that my outgoings aren’t too high, but again, that’s because I’m very careful with money, budget like a pro and know how to find a bargain. Yep, these are all sounding like my own actions..

I’m not saying that I’m not grateful for every opportunity that comes my way, because I am. I am so grateful and so thankful for everything I have, and there are so many things that I do think I’m lucky to have, such as my amazing family, incredible boyfriend and wonderful friends, because apart from somehow convincing them to be in my life, my actions had nothing to do with them being who they are, I just wish that we didn’t devalue accomplishments by suggesting luck has anything to do with it.

What do you think?

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Things I Learned When I Tried To ‘Fit In’

I don’t think there’s a single day that I don’t see some tweet about how someone doesn’t feel like a ‘proper’ blogger because they don’t use a marble backdrop, rose gold props or whatever style is currently being conceived as a ‘typical’ blogger thing.

There’s a number of reasons that these sorts of comments bother me, and I’m not going to get into all of them now, but the biggest one for me is that people think that you have to conform to a particular style to be a blogger. Yes, there’s a bit of a stereotype and a lot of bloggers make jokes about being ‘basic’ or ‘cliche’ but the fact is, its just a popular style and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In my early years of blogging, I didn’t know much about my own style, or even anyone else’s for that matter, but when I started to discover more of the blogosphere, I started to feel a little bit of a tug to replicate these pretty photos I was seeing all the popular bloggers post. I started brightening my photos, doing more flat-lays and I even made myself a fake marble backdrop. And what happened?

I never used the marble backdrop

After going to all the effort of making my backdrop, it has never actually graced the pages of this blog. I tried, but I realised that it just wasn’t my style and I didn’t want to compromise myself just to look like everyone else.

I discovered more topics that I like writing about

I created this blog original to just talk Disney, but now its so much more than that and I love it. I discovered that I actually really like writing about beauty, even though I never thought I’d be a beauty blogger, and I’ve learned that there are a million other things that I can use this platform of mine to discuss.

Flat-lays are a true art form

And one I have yet to master! You may look at a flat-lay and few products laid out on a nice backdrop but oh my gosh is it so much more? I have so much respect for the bloggers who nail them every damn time, and I aspire to be even half as good as them!

I like my own style, and I like not ‘fitting in’

So I don’t fit the so-called stereotypical blogger style, and I am 100% okay with that. I like bright and colourful and that is me. Blogging is all about being your own person and doing your own thing, and I have known that all along. And yes, I love rose gold and shiny beauty products, and I like marble and pastel and pretty stationary and anything else that makes me a ‘basic’ blogger, so sue me?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you don’t have to be anything but yourself to be a blogger. A blogger is just someone who has a blog, simple. Love it? Own it.

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Things My Travel Disasters Have Taught Me

I always say I’ve had the travel bug from a young age. I was very lucky as a child that my parents took my sister and me to so many different places and I have experienced so much of the world already, and that need to see it all has never gone away.

Now in all my years of travelling, you wouldn’t expect that everything’s always gone 100% smoothly, and you’d be right, it hasn’t. There have been plenty of slight holiday malfunctions and mishaps over the years, but as a child a lot of these didn’t seem like problems – probably because my parents always did a pretty good job of covering them up – but in more recent years, my travel nightmares have led to a lot of discovery.

Even if you’re travelling hand luggage only, make sure its a suitable bag

This is a fun story from a year ago now. I went on solo trip to Disneyland Paris and after a wonderful weekend away I got to the airport to discover my flight home had been cancelled. The airline were nice enough to get my on another flight, but this was at a different airport which I had to get a coach to, and then after walking the entire length of the airport to the gate for the second flight, that one was also cancelled. Long story short, I spent the majority of my day walking back and forth through a huge airport, and the bag I had chosen for my weekend’s worth of stuff? A shopping bag, kinda like a bag-for-life/Ikea blue bag style thing with a little grab handle, so I couldn’t put it on my back or over my shoulder, and my hand hurt so much by the time I got home – 9 hours later than I should have.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help from airport staff

On a flight to Japan, my sister and I had a VERY tight transfer time in Dubai, and by very tight I mean too tight. Thanks to a delay in our first flight, we wouldn’t have had enough time to make it to our next gate, so we did the somewhat sensible, someone stressed-fuelled thing to do and ran through the airport shouting for someone to help us. Well, we ended up on one of those little golf-cart things that the airport staff use and got shuttled right to where we needed to be, just in the nick of time!

Just because trains are reliable, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check the timetable

This is another Japan story. Japanese trains are the most reliable in the world; they so rarely run late that you actually need a note from the train company to take to work with you to prove it was actually late. Well we never experienced a single late train, but we did assume that all trains ran super regularly, when in fact the train to the airport only ran once an hour on the day we needed to take it, and we got there 5 minutes after a train had just left. Another mad run through the airport..

Set yourself a reminder alarm on any train journey

So I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m super stressed out my body likes to shut down and make me sleep whenever the opportunity arises. Well this occurred once after I stressed about my Eurostar home from Paris being late once, and as soon as I got on the train, I fell asleep. Luckily, I kept my phone in my hand the whole time, and a friend of mine who was sat in a different part of the train had text me to ask if I was ready to run of the train at our connecting station, which woke me up, but had I not I would have missed it altogether and rode that train all the way to Brussels. Oops.

Always check the pockets of bags you haven’t used in a while

This is one of my favourite stories going back to when I was in secondary school. I was in cadets, and had used the same rucksack to take away on a cadet camp early in the summer that I used as hand luggage for a family holiday. It goes through the scanner and gets pulled for inspection, where the security guard asks if I would have anything sharp or metal to which I proclaimed that I just remembered that there were some safety pins I’d forgotten about that I would have had in there from camp. Well it turns out I also had forgotten about the pen knife that I took to camp, which the guard then pulled from my bag. Yep..

Well I certainly hope you’ve been entertained by my little cautionary tales, if you haven’t learned anything from them yourself! Have you ever had any major travel faux pas?

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Why Has ‘Fit Shaming’ Become A Thing?

No, that’s not a typo in the title.

I, for one, cannot understand the shaming culture that we have created. We’ve had ‘fat shaming’ and ‘skinny shaming’ and unfortunately we still see this unnecessary viciousness every day, but what has really shocked me in recent months is what I personally like to call ‘fit shaming’.

This is something that I have personally experienced for a little while now, but whenever a new year comes round, I see this increasing across the likes of Twitter, and this is the bizarre concept that people seem to think its okay to try and make people feed bad about trying to be healthy. Not trying to be skinny, not fad-dieting or specifically trying to lose weight, this is just the act of trying to live a vaguely healthy lifestyle by going to the gym every so often, making a healthier food choice every once in a while or just trying to be more active.

Are you as confused by this as I am?

We all know that one of the most common New Years resolutions is people aiming to be a bit healthier or get fitter. Whether you manage the whole year, or just the first day, I think its a great resolution to have, and I don’t think anyone should be made to feel bad about setting this goal, New Years or not. Despite this, though, the keyboard warriors of the world love to try and make people feel crap about it.

Me? I’ve been teased by people I work with. Yep.. Snide comments about the fact that I went to the gym that morning, laughing about the fact that I packed a salad or teasing me and other colleagues when we compared Fitbits.

WHY IS THIS A THING?

I don’t really care about people making stupid little comments, but I just cannot comprehend why anyone thinks there is anything shame-worthy about fitness. I mean, I don’t think anyone should be voicing judgement on other people’s personal choices and decisions, but of all the things I just do not understand this behaviour.

I’m just gonna say it louder for the people in the back: LET PEOPLE LIVE HOW THEY WANT TO LIVE.

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Working 9-5

It doesn’t feel like all that long ago I wrote about how I ditched regular working hours in favour of 12 hour shifts, but time’s a-changing again folks! No, I didn’t get fed up of the hours – in fact, I really did love doing the whole 3 days a week thing – but your girl’s gone and got herself a new job!

I’m still working for the same company, in the same building, but I have finally clawed my way out of customer service and I’m pleased to announce that I will now be an accounts administrator in the finance department, and that means Monday-Friday, 9-5, and for the first time ever in my working life.. NO MORE WEEKENDS! The job comes with better pay, better hours and more opportunities, and I already love the work.

And while I did love my old shift pattern, I finally have total stability; no more working Monday-Wednesday one week, then Monday, Thursday and Friday the next, and then throw in a few random weekend days each month. I’ve also been given the gift of some flexibility – if I need to come in a little later one day, I can do that and stay a little later. I’m not having to be in for an exact time and take my breaks at the set time I was given, and better still, I don’t have to speak to customers anymore, yippee! (I have worked in customer service for over 5 years and while I somewhat enjoyed the work and like the majority of customers, some can be downright rude)

I normally hate change, but this change is going to be so good for me. I’m already so much happier to go to work every day, and excited to get back to a proper routine of eating meals at normal times, and not being totally exhausted when I get home. I’m excited to have time to go to the gym in the morning and still have time to do my makeup rather than just running out of the house with my eyebrows just barely filled in. I’ll have time to catch up with people on social media and promote my small businesses and just feel a little bit more like my life is together.

This is going to be good for me.

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Are We The Next Generation of ‘I Remember When..’?

Last Saturday I walked into the Apple Store in Southampton’s West Quay shopping centre to pick up my iPad Pro. Said iPad Pro had been ordered online the day before, and courtesy of a Black Friday deal I had been emailed an £80 gift card which I was going to use to buy an accompanying Apple Pencil.

Upon entering the store, I approached a staff member with an iPhone, who simply entered my order number and within minutes another staff member appeared from a back room with my iPad (pre-paid) and an Apple pencil. He scanned the barcode for my gift card straight from my email using his phone, and I paid the remainder by putting my card into a device attached to said phone. I entered my email address on the screen, my receipt was sent to that email address, and I was free to leave the store.

During my entire time in the store I did not have to go to a single desk. There was no collection point or checkout, no lines or waiting areas, but also no chaos, and I couldn’t help but think, is this the future of retail? Will shopping become as simple as walking up to someone with a handheld device and getting an email confirmation of payment before I’ve even walked away?

Naturally, my brain went to all sorts of extremes, and I started to think about all the other things that have changed in my relatively short lifetime. As a young child I had cassette tapes and experienced the struggle of going to watch a movie only to find that no one had re-wound it back to the start after the last time it was watched. Now, I have DVDs and Blurays that I’ll often ignore if I can watch the same movie on Netflix.

We spend our childhoods listening to our parents and grandparents telling us to be grateful for x, y and z because they didn’t have that back in their day, yet already we’re saying the same thing to those who are as little as 5-10 years our junior.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s always going to be things that don’t translate across age groups. There will always be TV shows that only aired for a few years, or crazes and fashions that died out as quickly as they appeared, but think of the enormous lifestyle changes that technology has brought us – I’m talking going from brick-phones to flip-phones to smart-phones, from the days where you could probably only pay by cash or cheque to now not even having to carry your purse because you’ve got ApplePay..

Things are moving so quickly that I can’t even fathom how things will work in even just another 10 years time. Will we even have to consciously pay for things or will technology become so advanced that you can just pick something up from a shelf and walk out and be charged automatically? We’re moving so far past what we’ve known so far, I don’t think we can even try to predict the future anymore..

Sorry for the ramble but does anyone else ever think about these things?

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