I have to say, single life is growing on me.

I don’t miss anything much about being in a relationship to be honest, apart from cups of tea in bed. I feel happier than I have in a long time – relaxed, peaceful – I like it. There are very few things that I feel I can’t do perfectly well either for myself or by myself.

Apart from cars.

Everything about cars fills me with dread to the point that I don’t even like putting in petrol. I put it off and put it off until my petrol light has been on for about two days and the stress of potentially embarrassing myself by running out at the side of the road ultimately outweighs the loathing of the task ahead.

It’s one of the only times when I find myself fantasising about having a boyfriend. He would be the kind who notices that my fuel is low and goes and fills it up, ready for next time I want to use the car, possibly leaving a tin of peach flavour travel sweets in the glove box just as a little extra.

The main reason I put that satsuma in front of the engine warning light was that I couldn’t bear the thought of having to DEAL WITH IT. I didn’t want to phone a garage, talk to a human, take in the car, talk about things I don’t understand, go back to fetch it…

God what a faff. I don’t know what it is but the whole process makes me feel kind of hopeless and weird.

What I really need when it comes to car maintenance is some sort of service that you can book online, where someone reliable and trustworthy just turns up at your house and gets on with things. No phone calls, no scary garages with Heart FM blaring in a tinny way at a ridiculous volume, no awkward wandering about the streets waiting for them to call and say you can come back and pay a MILLION POUNDS to pick up your car. Just nice and simple, no effort required.

OH HELLO THERE TYRES ON THE DRIVE.

Basically Tyres on the Drive is the service I would design if I could design my own tyre fitting service. You simply visit the Tyres on the Drive website, pick your tyres, pick your time slot and away you go. They’ll come to you at work or at home, operate 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and even promise to beat any like for like quote.

What, quite honestly, is not to love? View Post

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It’s that time of the year again that I love – the run up to Christmas, where the nights draw in, and it starts becoming socially acceptable to eat mince pies for breakfast.

Oh, and I get a hacking cough that lasts for weeks and Belle starts to hate me.

Evenings in our house go something like this.

Me: COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH

Belle: *frowns*

Me: Sorry. It will stop in a minute – COUGH SPLUTTER – would you like me to go upstairs?

Belle, sternly, having had to pause her Netflix vampire programme: Yes.

See? She hates me.

It soon switches around though when SHE gets a cold and starts her wretched sniffing. (Which you’d think, now she’s 15 years old, would be behind us.) I say sniffing, although often it’s less of a deep, satisfying sniff, and more of an irritating attempt at one.

‘Mum, listen,’ she’ll says, trying unsuccessfully to sniff, ‘I can’t breath.’

‘Yes, thank you, I can hear that.’

‘But listen,’ more sniffing attempts, ‘my nose is all blocked up.’ A bit more sniffing, until my shoulders are suitably tense.

CUE OLBAS NASAL SPRAY. View Post

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In association with Poundworld

About a month ago a new shop opened in our town. A Poundworld Plus. To say that Belle was excited is putting it mildly – discount shops are on of her very favourite things, alongside delivered pizza, shows about vampires and chocolate chip brioche.

One of the first things we bought in our new Poundworld was cat harnesses. Basically Belle wants a dog, but I don’t want a dog, so she’s convinced that she’ll be able to take the kittens for walks, if only she can get them excited about wearing a harness. Unfortunately, as we discovered when we got home, it’s actually very hard to get a cat excited about wearing a harness, especially when at first you put it on wrong, and they can’t walk properly.

That said, they were probably more excited about it than they were when Belle tried to get them interested in going for a walk in a kitty carrier.

cat in a cat carrier

Have you ever seen a cat look less impressed?

The most exciting trip to Poundworld to date though has been the one that Belle made with the rest of the prom committee from school. They are organising a year 7 Halloween party to raise money for prom, and it coincided with Poundworld asking if we wanted to check out the Halloween collection in store, and well – how perfect?? The rest of the committee were VERY excited to have a decorations budget, and so off they went.

I have to say, that I was genuinely impressed by the Halloween range in our Poundworld store. Normally with these kind of things you get maybe half an aisle, with the usual slimy spiders and pumpkin shaped baskets for trick or treating, but the selection was VAST. There must have been a good 20 metres of shelf space taken up with Halloween things, and loads of stuff that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Plenty to get the (year 7 ) party started. View Post

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Today I have another guest post from the lovely Jon at The Money Shed. Every so often Jon likes to share handy information/mildly mock me, and today he has an excellent cheap web-hosting deal for you. Have a read!

cheap web hosting for a blog

Have you ever read Jo’s blog on here and thought ‘I’d like to give blogging a go!’

Maybe you’ve read one of her many angry posts about signs outside coffee shops or some other middle class problem you can totally relate to and thought you could do an even better job!

Blogging is a fantastic platform to not only connect with other people but also one you can earn a HUGE amount of money from in the long term.

Usually to earn that money though companies who want to place content on your site will want you to be what is called self hosted. That means that you are in full control of the blog you are running and aren’t just hosting it on a 3rd party website such as Blogger or Blogspot.

A lot of people hold off on running a self hosted blog because they worry about the cost involved but trust me, you can worry no more as I can show you how you can host your blog(s) for only £2.99 a month (although it’s actually less but more about that in a bit) with the amazing UK hosting company Kloudhost. View Post

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I have never been very good at keeping my clothes tidy. As a teenager my bedroom was so obscenely messy that I once trod on my guitar and didn’t realise until a few days later.

Not any more.

No more puddles of clothes on the floor or stacks of washing needing a home. Oh no. Because I have THE WARDROBES OF DREAMS. (Otherwise known as my new built-in wardrobes from Sharps.)

I admit that I was nervous during the planning process. (Read about that bit here.) I’ve never had proper built in wardrobes before and I was worried that they might look a bit, I don’t know, tacky maybe? I’m not even sure that’s the right word, but hopefully you know what I mean. I think it was just that built in wardrobes felt like such a grown up thing to have – how could they be cool at the same time??

But OH MY GOODNESS they are SO cool. (Or my definition of cool at least.)

Here’s the space pre-fitting:

Sharps built in wardrobes review

You have to empty the room and take the carpets up before your fitter arrives. They don’t fit wardrobes on top of the carpet because they need a firm, sturdy surface. The space like this looks pretty small, but here it is with the wardrobes: View Post

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We have a joke in our family.

Bee: What do you call cheese without a face?

Me: I don’t know, what do you call cheese without a face?

Bee: Normal cheese.

(We’re hilarious.)

My point is though, why WOULD you want ‘normal’ anything if there was an option to have it WITH a face?? You just wouldn’t, which is why I wanted to try out the cordless Henry vacuum cleaner. I’m not especially drawn to housework as a rule, but this vacuum cleaner has a FACE remember. I feel like cleaning the bathroom would be more fun if all the spray bottles had faces. In fact, the more I think about it, the more genius of an idea it is.

Now you may have noticed me casually drop in that this is a cordless Henry, which means he runs on a rechargeable battery pack rather than having a big long cable. There is a look on his face too, like he KNOWS he doesn’t need plugging in and he’s pretty smug about it.

Henry vacuum cleaner review

See what I mean?

‘A PLUG? Don’t be ridiculous darling, that’s so 2016. I’m CORDLESS.’ View Post

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We’ve been in our new house for about seven weeks now. It feels like WAY longer, which I’m taking as a good sign because that must mean it feels like home right?

One of the things that I’ve been meaning to do since we moved in is to put up a picture on the plain white chimney breast wall in our living room. We had a family photo shoot done before we moved with Life is Crawsome, so I had been thinking that one of those photos would be nice. But then I was a bit nervous about having a giant ME smiling down while I watched TV, so I decided a mirror might be a better option.

It was brilliant timing actually, as Exclusive Mirrors had been a touch previously asking if I fancied taking a look at one of their mirrors, so I said ‘yes please thank you very much’ and picked the Claremont round gold mirror.

‘This Claremont round gold mirror is oh so stylish with its uniquely designed frame,’ the website told me. ‘The stunning mirror is finished in a luxurious gold and comes complete with wow factor frame. Perfectly suited to either a contemporary or traditional setting the mirror is extremely versatile.  Customers have the option with this Claremont round gold mirror to feature it either on its own or alongside other stylish furniture and accessories to create a fabulous appearance.’

Luckily the quality of the mirror is not reflected by the quality of the description writing.

(See what I did there? REFLECTED? I’m so good at this.)

Here it is, with me in it obviously:

review mirror exclusive mirrors

Isn’t it beautiful?

It’s just over a metre in diameter and so fills the chimney breast perfectly. I loved the fact that it looked like a huge flower. I painted the wall this lovely turquoise colour especially to really make it stand out and I love how the colour comes through each of the petals. View Post

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Who is your local hero?

Take a minute to think about it, because there always IS one. It might be that mum at school who is forever organising fundraising activities for the local playgroup at the same time as being a foster parent, or that guy a couple of streets away who you know spends his weekends collecting donations for refugees.

Perhaps it’s someone who came to the rescue in your hour of need. It might even be a whole group of heroes – a local community group who use their spare time to make a difference in the lives of others. Or maybe you work for a local charity and you have one volunteer who always goes above and beyond.

Whoever they are, they could be in for a treat. Pork Farms wants to throw them a party! Hoorah! 

To give you a flavour of things, here’s what happened at some of last year’s pop up parties:

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I’ve lived in Taunton on and off now for nearly twenty years and in that time there have been certain shops that have probably always been there, but which have passed under my radar.

And then you buy a house and suddenly you start noticing things and thinking about things that you’ve never thought about before, like boiler insurance and bespoke shelving and built in wardrobes.

We have a Sharps showroom in our town centre, but all this time I honestly thought it was just one bed and a wardrobe, just casually in a shop window. Oh and sometimes balloons advertising special offers.

Sharps fitted wardrobes review

When we knew we were buying this house, and that we were going to go from having big built in bedrooms cupboards to NOTHING, I decided to pop in to the Sharps showroom with Belle and my MIND WAS BLOWN. Turns out it isn’t just a bed and a wardrobe. That place goes back for MILES. Okay, maybe not literally miles, but a long way. I smelt a nice juicy blog project…

Let’s back it up a bit first though.

Let me set the scene in our bedroom so you can see what we have to play with.

It’s not a massive room – roughly 4m x 3m – but part of that is a fairly deep alcove, approximately 2 metres wide. I was VERY proud of myself remembering to take a photo of the empty space before we moved in: View Post

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Okay, straight up, this is a review of a bin. I’m not gonna lie to you.

But when is a bin more than a bin? When it’s a waste separation and recycling system.

The JosephJoseph Totem 6o waste separation and recycling system in fact. Like this one, which now lives in our kitchen:

JosephJoseph Totem 60 review

Ooooh!

As you know, we moved house a few weeks ago and although in some ways we have a lot more space, like a garage and a garden and a loft, we do have a smaller kitchen, and you can’t keep your kitchen bin in the loft can you? NOT handy when you’re cooking tea.

In fact, in the weeks leading up to the move I started to freak out a little bit about the kitchen. Belle must have been sick to death of me talking about where we were going to put a table, and I’d say that by the time it came to moving day she was DONE with all talk of recycling storage options.

(I don’t blame her. I was BOOORING.)

In the old house we had a big space under a worktop where we could keep all that kitchen crap like carrier bags and recycling and potatoes, but in the new house we don’t have anything like that. What I needed was some kind of genius system where I could keep rubbish and sort recycling without it taking up any more space than a regular bin.

OH WELL HELLO JOSEPHJOSEPH TOTEM 60! View Post

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Peanut butter cookies – post in association with Salter Cook. Looking for a Salter discount code? Then read on!

I really enjoy a spot of baking. I find it relaxing – weighing out the ingredients, following the instructions and, of course, eating the mixture from the bowl with my hands.

(The best bit.)

Normally when I cook though it goes something like this:

  • Get all my ingredients out.
  • Okay, 100g of flour? Excellent.
  • Get to scales. How much flour was it again? Check in recipe.
  • Repeat for every ingredient.
  • Forget something crucial and don’t discover it until the end.
  • Every time I reach a new step, read through the whole recipe again to remember where I was.

It’s a bit of a kerfuffle.

What I really need is a helper. Someone to organise all my recipes for me, get the oven temperature sorted and tell the scales how much of everything I need so that I don’t have to remember. They could cross things off as I go through the recipe and then set a timer for me so I don’t get distracted looking at Instagram and burn my cookies.

WELL HANG ON A MINUTE!!

The Salter Cook app, pro bluetooth kitchen scale and bluetooth cooking thermometer do ALL OF THOSE THINGS! It’s like they were listening, and designed a range of products just for me.

Salter Cook scales View Post

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Did you see my OUTRAGEOUS CONFESSION on Twitter the other day?

I’d been sent some Flip & Dip from Philadelphia – these cool, new, topped dippy cheese things – and they wanted to know whether or not I was a double dipper.

Philadelphia Flip & Dip

At first I wasn’t sure what they meant. How else are you meant to eat dip?! You dip in your carrot baton, or whatever it is, take a bite, dip it back in, take another bite… that’s how it works right??

Apparently not.

Apparently this WHOLE TIME – (39 years, although probably I didn’t eat a lot of dip as a baby) – I have been committing a hideous social faux pas which, unbeknownst to me, has probably been making my dip companions recoil in horror and disgust. According to research from Philadelphia, 60% of Brits consider double dipping a complete no-no. Luckily for me though, we’re all so horribly repressed that no one is likely to say anything, to my face at least – 62% of us would rather suppress feelings of discontent and suffer in silence or gossip with other guests about the double dipper in question.

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