I have always wanted to live in Bristol. I’m not sure when the feeling started, but it has been there as long as I can remember – a sort of tingle of excitement, mixed with a happy contentment from knowing a place is just right for you.

The move was a long time coming – Bee started using air quotes whenever she said ‘when we move to Bristol’ – but I had to wait for the right moment. It happened though, and although it wasn’t easy moving to a new place, especially with the Chuckle Brothers as our moving team, I never doubted my decision.

Circumstances conspired unfortunately to make living in Bristol difficult for me last year, and so we moved back to Somerset. It sucked at first. I’m adjusting, but I still miss Bristol and hopefully one day I will go back.

While I don’t want to sound negative about Somerset – it has plenty of good points – Bristol is, I’m fairly certain, the city I love most in the world.

Here’s why: View Post

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That’s a difficult question to answer isn’t it?

Sometimes I will be in the middle of doing something, something really simple like reading a good book and drinking a cup of tea, and I will be overcome with contentment and will think to myself ‘this, this is it. Remember this for when you are next feeling sad.’

Quite often I will make a physical list of things that I know I enjoy doing to refer back to as required.

And then I will have a moment where I feel really sad and I will look at the list with scorn, wondering how I could have ever been so shallow as to find comfort in tea. ‘Pah!’ I will say to myself, ‘What was I thinking? I am way too sad to be cheered with an episode of Friends. This is it now for ever, I will never be happy again.’

Of course I am happy again though, and often within minutes of feeling like there is no point even bothering to get up because the human race is so doomed to fail, and it really is the little things on my list that can make all of the difference, especially at the times when you feel like they won’t.

Here are a few of the things I have done this morning, several not necessarily because I wanted to, but because I knew I should: View Post

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*RANT ALERT*

I get a lot of shit press releases.

Here are some stats I made up to give you an idea of the sort of thing that lands in my inbox every day:

  • 63% are written in a font so small I couldn’t read it even if I wanted to
  • 92% are at least twice the length that any decent press release should be
  • 87% of release titles include a terrible pun
  • 74% think that a very original and never been done before angle is the fact that the product was designed at a kitchen table by someone who has given up a high paid job to follow their dreams. What those dreams are exactly we aren’t really sure – create an awful product that doesn’t sell and become penniless perhaps?
  • 54% tell me all about this wonderful thing I absolutely must try – my life will not be complete until I have it – and then they offer to send me high res pictures. Now I know this is the done thing for print journalism, but I write a blog and don’t even need high res images. I want the THING. Don’t tell me how my readers would love for me to share it with them and then only send me an image. I’m not a teenage boy collecting pictures to hide under my mattress.

I had one press release this morning though that really wound me up, not because it was especially badly written, but simply because the product it was trying to sell was, as far as I could see, a complete rip off.

It was basically one small log, but for £25.

You heard me, £25. View Post

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January is a mix of fresh starts, fitness regimes and credit card bills, so my favourite things this month are about looking after yourself rather than just buying yourself pretty things for around the home.

These are four of our favourite things this month:

January favourite things View Post

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Who’d have thought I would ever stick at this blogging lark so long that I would write a thousand posts?

More importantly, who’d have thought I’d use an exclamation mark in a headline like that? It’s like working at a very cheap newspaper. This is a very special occasion though, so if ever a post warranted an exclamation of any kind then this is it.

One thousand posts.

*heavy sigh as though I have literally just written them all right then and now need a jolly good rest*

How many words do you reckon I write in average in a post? (Definitely something I should know rather than you, unless you count, which is weird.)

400 maybe? 500 if I’m being generous? That would be half a million words, which is officially A LOT OF WORDS. Just to put that into some sort of perspective, that’s enough words to fill 17 Olympic sized swimming pools or two and a half football stadiums. If you laid all of those words out next to each other they would cover an area roughly the size of Wales.*

Also, the average mystery novel is around 80,000 words, so I written the equivalent of five or six books**. I am basically Agatha Christie.*** View Post

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I love a good fad.

Some days I decide that soup is going to be my new thing and I drop everything to rush to the kitchen and chop some limp vegetables. Other times I vow that I’m going to start journalling every day and I buy a new notebook. I write my first entry – ‘So hello and welcome to my diary!’ – and then I find six months has passed and I have to write another entry apologising for the intermission.

(I don’t know why I do this in diaries, but I do always write with half a mind to someone else reading it. I like to set the scene. Heaven forbid anyone actually did.)

I started this month (vaguely) determined to complete a dry January, but I think that was mainly because I had drunk so much in December that I felt slightly queasy at the thought of even just a small sherry. Suffice to say it didn’t last. I’ve only had a couple of glasses of wine on a couple of social occasions, so I’m not exactly rolling in the gutter, but it demonstrates nicely my usual lack of willpower.

Today however is day five of my involvement in the Halfords #31FitterDays challenge. The challenge involves a different exercise every day and there is a plan for beginners and those with a little more experience, so you really have no excuse. I’ve been using my new  Garmin Vivofit as part of the challenge to help me track the number of steps I take and generally give me a bit of focus and motivation. (I know it’s the 12th already, but there was a bit of a delay in the arrival of the Vivofit and everyone knows you can’t throw yourself properly into a new fad without the right equipment.) View Post

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Belle went out for lunch yesterday for a friend’s birthday and afterwards they went into town to browse Poundland for hours and laugh at pigeons or whatever it is young people do nowadays. When I picked her up she was a little over-excited; a mix I suspect of the coke she had with her pizza and the thrill of being in town with someone other than her mother.

She immediately started to tell me about this toy she had seen in Wilko.

“It’s amazing!” she trilled. “It’s a tiny basketball hoop inside a ball and every time you get the ball in it cheers. I really loved it!”

“Well that sounds lovely,” I lied.

“Can we go back and buy it?” she asked. “I didn’t want to get it without asking you as I didn’t know if you would think it was a waste of money.”

This made me a teeny bit sad. Am I really that controlling that she won’t spend £3 without my approval? And if so, why won’t she do the dishes without me practically having to twist her arm up behind her back?* View Post

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Belle and I have enjoyed many a UK mini break together over the last few years. Some we enjoy more than others, Belle being less keen on places with previous food on the cutlery or disorderly bacon queues. One thing we do both enjoy though if we are staying at a holiday park is a trip to the amusement arcade.

(Classy and sophisticated as I am.)

I’m not saying we dump our suitcases and rush out to immediately spend all of our holiday money on the tacky grab machines or anything, but there is something sweet and nostalgic about half an hour spent slowly feeding a handful of two pence pieces into one of those games where they gradually nudge their way towards the edge of the shelf, rewarding you sporadically with the clatter of coins into the tray below.

I’ve never given it a lot of thought from a moral point of view, but with the emergence of more and more online gambling style games aimed at children, it has got me thinking. I don’t imagine for a minute that the 2p slot machines are laying the foundations for a gambling addiction, but are we being too relaxed about introducing children to gambling? Could we be setting our kids up for a fall?

gambling

Photo credit – Free Bingo Land View Post

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I have opened up WordPress this morning ready to complain.

Not in a witty and charming way about something like car air fresheners, I mean properly rant about something, anything at all really. I can feel the tension across my shoulders, drawing them up closer and closer to my ears. I can sense that my jaw is set in a mildly scary way. If anyone was to get my order wrong in a restaurant right now, unlikely as that is at 8.59am, they would not feel good about themselves afterwards.

But as I mull over what vitriol to spew over the pages, sighing and snorting impatiently all the while, I stop myself. How helpful would that actually be? Would working myself up into a literary rage about something really do anything to solve my angst?

I doubt it. The act of writing is cathartic of course, but aside from that, wouldn’t it be better to channel things in a more positive way?

I agree with myself, although I am still full of stress and rage so in my head it comes out as cutting sarcasm. ‘Oh Josephine, aren’t you so very wise? People are definitely going to be reading this and commenting to themselves on how you are the first person ever to discover the power of positive thinking.’ View Post

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How careful are you when it comes to protecting yourself against fraud?

I have one of those fancy shredders that shreds things in two different directions, but it’s under my bed, not plugged in, which isn’t very helpful. Normally I will build up a pile of things for shredding – a pile which I will store alongside the shredder under my bed until it begins to spill out onto the floor – but sometimes I am just too lazy to walk upstairs and will chuck the odd thing in the recycling.

I have ex-Boyfriend’s voice in my head the whole time of course, scolding me over my careless approach to fraud protection, and depending on my mood that can go one of two ways; either I accept that he always was more sensible about stuff like that and I make the effort to climb the stairs, or I think ‘well sod you, I don’t have to do what you say any more’ and it’s all I can do not to post my sort code and account number on Twitter. (Which again just proves that he is generally far more mature about things than me.)

I digress.

Fraud isn’t just about people rummaging through your recycling for old credit card bills of course. It can happen to anyone, any time, and it’s important therefore to understand exactly how you might be at risk and what steps you can take to prevent becoming a victim. Did you know for example that £27.5million of cheque fraud is committed every year in the UK? Who even uses cheques any more? Surely just the presentation of a cheque as payment for goods or services would be enough to make anyone suspicious?

Natwest have put together some tips in the form of the funky little graphic below, so you can get up to speed on the risks.

Have you ever been the victim of fraud? What do you do to protect you and your family?

Credit – Natwest

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It seems that the older I get, the more important it is for things to be nice.

I don’t want any more drama, I don’t want complicated, I just want everything to be nice and normal. I want people in my life who are reliable, kind and who make me feel good about myself, I want things in my home that I enjoy looking at or that are a pleasure to use. The shelves in my kitchen for example, that are full of pretty glasses and tea cups, make me very happy:

pretty glassware

One very simple thing that I can get a lot of pleasure from is a good cup of tea in a mug I like. (I really am a very cheap date you know.) I’ve talked before about how I ‘impressed’ my last boyfriend with a lecture on the importance of mug shape and rim thickness and I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s fussy about what they drink out of.

I particularly like a nice cup of tea if it’s someone else making it for me and I happen to be lying in bed at the time, but I do also like the ritual of making it myself, especially since recently acquiring a new teapot. There is something very soothing about the act of pouring golden brown tea from a pot into a cup. It’s far more relaxing than squeezing a tea bag in a cup and trying to get it to the bin before it drips.

perfect cup of tea View Post

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This week I hired a carpet cleaner and cleaned all of my carpets.

That sounds like a bigger project than it actually is – my house is pretty tiny and only has four fairly small carpeted rooms – but it still took me about four hours of furniture shifting and emptying bucket after bucket of filthy water into the bath. It is Christmas after all, the time to really treat yourself.

I felt pretty good about it, never having cleaned a carpet in my life before, and my bedroom carpet in particular came up really nicely; the beer stain is completely gone now. (Don’t ask.) I even think it counts as exercise.

Now my carpets are your bog standard plain colours, nothing fancy here, so I was intrigued when UK Flooring Direct got in touch with me to ask me to take at look at what they think could be the flooring of the future – printed floor designs.

Dum dum dum dum!! View Post

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