To my dear Mother,
I know better than anyone that gushy, soppy statements are not your thing. You’re from Middlesbrough and it comes with the territory, so I’m told. (Joke).
But since it’s almost Mother’s Day, and you’re actually rather bloody great, I thought you deserved just a little bit of thanks for all the lovely, generous things you have done for me these past 22 years. Not too much though, because, you know, sentiment is for losers.
My family has a renowned dislike of gushy sentiment. So this one’s for you, guys.
They say “you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family”, and boy did I get lucky. I landed myself an fantastic set of parents, and not just one but two fantastic younger brothers. I won the lottery AND I got the rollover jackpot.
It’s funny – I was once desperate to escape my crummy little hometown and move away to a bigger, better place. As teenagers, my best friend and I set our sights on moving to London and living in a super-chic apartment in the heart of the city. A dream home to supplement our dream jobs; Alice’s in the music industry, mine in journalism. We’d host incredible parties and spend our nights in the best bars and clubs meeting all kinds of cool, interesting and sophisticated people.
2014 has, like any other year, been a blend of the good, the bad and the downright mad.
Knee deep in essays, novels and deadlines at the start of January, December has certainly offered a dose of the unexpected. Early morning lectures have been replaced with early shifts serving coffee. Instead of fuelling late night library sessions with caffeine, I’m now pouring it into a cup and asking if sir or madam would like a croissant to go with their medium cappuccino today.
It’s July and can you believe the sun is shining?! ☼ ☼ ☼
This past month has been a bit up-and-down. A few weeks ago I decided to get a nose piercing, which has now gone after I accidentally knocked it out a week later. One Friday I had arranged to go for lunch with my best friend, and to cut a long story short, it concluded with me sat on a bench in the local piercing shop with a needle going through my nose.
With my holiday history on record, it’s obvious I am certainly not a well-travelled individual, primarily down to my constant lack of money and terrible organisation skills. I’ve been to France and Germany a few times and I’ve even visited Greece on a couple of occasions before it got economically flushed down the toilet. However, until last Thursday, I hadn’t actually been on a foreign holiday with my family for 11 years, so when my parents suggested a trip to Rome to celebrate their 25th Wedding Anniversary, naturally my brothers and I jumped at the chance.
You’ll have to excuse me; I’m typing this with a slight hangover. However, I find writing is often so therapeutic that it works as the best kind of cure, so that’s why I’m here instead of hiding in a dark room under a duvet. Weird, I know, but from me are you really expecting any different?
Just to give anyone that cares a head’s up, I’m giving my blog a bit of a temporary break for now until my exams are finished. This makes me quite sad (I’d insert an unhappy face here if Blogger let me use emoticons) but it’s a sensible thing to do. Being sensible is not something that comes naturally to me, but I thought I’d give it a try. And hopefully by the time the exam period is over, I will have found something worthwhile and interesting to write about instead of aimlessly babbling like usual.
There’s no easy way to say this, but my recent efforts at blogging have been pretty shambolic. This post has no particular topic other than to say hi, I’m alive and haven’t forgotten how to use a computer, so I’ll apologise in advance now for being super boring for the next few paragraphs and rambling on like the complete nutter that I unfortunately am.
It’s New Years Day on Tuesday a.k.a. the ending of one year and the beginning of another, and it’s always at this time that we start to reflect on our achievements, experiences and regrets of the last 12 months and begin to speculate what the next 12 months has in store for us.
