Tag Archives: blog

A Basic Christmas

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“At the beginning of December I’m going to go all out with the Christmas decorations,” I said to The Bloke last month. 

We’re moving house at the beginning of January and so it is going to be the last Christmas we have here. I had every intention of making a huge effort – Christmas over the last few years has been haphazard and last-minute and both The Bloke and I have felt like we’ve just gone through the motions rather than actually feeling festive and celebrating. 

And then at the beginning of December I got covid. I’ve been pretty careful at trying to stay as safe as possible, but I met up with a friend at the end of November and must have picked it up on the bus on the way home – there were lots of people coughing and spluttering and because it was minus temperatures all the windows were closed. 

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The Benefits of Being Productively Unproductive

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On Friday night I logged off and sank back into the couch. Last week wasn’t particularly bad, but it was certainly intense in the sheer volume of work that appeared on my daily lists. While everything got done I was left feeling mentally and physically exhausted. 

Additionally, my sleep patterns have been all over the place (thank you, peri-menopause), and this has resulted in lots of my working hours being conducted through what has felt like a hazy fog behind my eyeballs recently. 

Working for myself has a number of positives… in theory. I don’t have an awful daily commute, I can set my own hours, choose who I work with and I don’t have a micro-managing, passive-aggressive line manager to deal with (of which I have experienced many). While these are all things that I appreciate on a daily basis, I have found that as my client base has grown, an increasing level of fear has accompanied it… 

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The Universe Steps In… Again

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Isn’t it strange how, when you find yourself in a difficult situation, the universe seemingly steps in and shows you the direction in which you need to go?

I discussed recently about the challenges that The Bloke and I have faced this year, particularly with the death of various family members and my mum being ill. We’re both tired and a bit stressed, we both struggle with depression and anxiety on occasion and both of us have found ourselves getting through the day on autopilot when things have got really tough. 

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Time for a Change

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On 1st January 2023 The Bloke and I sat on an enormous couch in a suite in a nice hotel. We were surrounded by our favourite snacks and were watching a film while talking about our hopes and expectations for the coming year.

“It’s going to be amazing, I can feel it,” I remember saying, and at the time, I believed it. After the world shut down in 2020 things had plummeted, and 2021 had been tough, so had 2022. Surely 2023 couldn’t get any worse, could it?

As it turns out, yes it could. 

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My Father Died

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It’s taken me over a month to write this. I’ve been back and forth with myself, repeatedly drafting and deleting, hoping that the urge to write would fade… but it hasn’t. So today I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and post – albeit a much more concise, less angry version of my initial ramblings – but at least I’ve transferred my thoughts and sent it out into the universe. I may decide to delete it later, but we’ll see. 

My father passed away at the beginning of July. 

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Ten Years and Counting…

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Just over ten years ago I was writing furiously in my journal after having a crappy day at work. I was into my seventh year of teaching, hated almost every minute of it and as a result had become severely depressed. One thing that eased the dark cloud was writing my thoughts down and I had developed a habit of buying notebooks and spending hours of my evening scribbling down my frustrations of the day. 

The Bloke, perhaps a little overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of my ever increasing collection of notebooks that had started to litter the house, suggested that I start an online blog. My knowledge of blogging was minimal, but I signed up for a free WordPress account and began to write. There were no expectations behind it – I was careful not to use my real name and avoided including too many personal details and discussing anything that would get me sacked should the school discover it.

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2022: A Year in Review

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At the beginning of 2022 I set up a double page spread in my bullet journal titled ‘Memories and Highlights.’ This created a space where I could record all of the individual exciting things I experienced throughout the year and served as a reminder that this year hasn’t been as bad as I thought. 

Because let’s face it, in terms of the year from a national perspective, it’s been a dumpster fire with a dose of accelerant thrown on top. Three prime ministers in a year, the worse economic position in decades, food, gas and electric prices skyrocketing to the point where people are having to choose between heating their house during the winter or feeding their children while utility companies boast about record profits, workers from our postal service, trains, nurses, paramedics have been forced to strike… and to top it all off our Queen died. So many of us are tired, worried and angry. 

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Christmas Burnout

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Usually in the build up to Christmas I post at least something about getting ready for the festive season, what I plan to watch and comments about our wonky tree (that is now so ancient I’ve started to refer to it as ‘Old Faithful’). 

This year, however, I was whacked by all the flu and cold germs flying around and my body semi-shut down and went NOPE for several weeks. I know exactly where it came from too – in early December a woman who had a raging cold sat next to me on a train when I went up north to visit my mum and for the entirety of the trip she was coughing and spluttering and wiping her nose on her sleeve. I started to feel ill about four days later. Nice. 

Combined with the fact that I had been caught in multiple downpours and the freezing temperatures that hit the UK, I also think that I was burnt out. The last few months in particular have been ridiculously busy and I haven’t been great at taking care of myself. In a way, it felt like the universe was stepping in and telling me to rest. 

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It’s Been a While…

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Back in July I acknowledged how much my working life had taken over and decided that I needed to break out of the little work / sleep / work / sleep bubble I had created for myself. Thankfully, I have been able to do just that, but this hasn’t freed up much time or improved my ability to sit down and actually write about it. In a desperate attempt to catch up, here’s three months of life experiences in a single post, just in case I don’t get the chance to write another one for a while. 

I have still been able to do my regular reviews at the theatre which I look forward to. It’s a great way to spend the evening – a lovely team, great building, and when you get a show that absolutely blows the roof off, it leaves you with a buzz that can last for days. 

One of those shows has been Bat Out of Hell. Within the first five minutes when I saw it in January I knew that I was watching something special, despite that fact that I had absolutely no idea what was going on for some of it. Just like my RENT obsession that developed some years ago, I have fallen equally in love and decided that I absolutely had to see it again. So, I booked The Bloke and I tickets to see it at The Winter Gardens in Blackpool and a hotel room for the night.

It’s been a few years since we last visited, so we set off super early to avoid any potential M6 traffic hell, and found ourselves stood on the pier on a dull, but very warn day at 8.00am. For the rest of the day we were shameless tourists – we went to the top of the tower (during which The Bloke mustered up enough courage to actually walk on the glass), won prizes on the horse racing game and played on the 2p machines in the arcades, ate junk food and bought snacks from a shop where the guy behind the counter was actually wearing a bullet proof vest. And then we saw the show, it was amazing, and I was so overwhelmed that I cried on the way back to the hotel. It was just fabulous, even with the drunken men who decided to sing so loudly that two rows physically moved to get away from them. 

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Press Review: The Osmonds, A New Musical at The Alexandra Theatre

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One Family. One Hundred Million Records.

Decades before the boy band explosion of the 90s was The Osmonds, a clean-cut, all American family of musicians who grew up on the television. From their star residency on The Andy Williams Show to the arrival of Donny and Marie, The Osmonds lived a remarkable life recording chart topping albums, selling out vast arena concerts and making record breaking TV shows – until one bad decision cost them everything. 

Directed and co-written by Shaun Kerrison, written by Jay Osmond, the story of The Osmonds is told through the eyes of Jay in a series of flashbacks from their beginnings as a group under the watchful eye of their military father, the success of Merrill (Ryan Anderson), Alan (Jamie Chatterton), Jay (Alex Lodge), Wayne (Danny Natrass) and Donny (Tristan Whincup) as a band, sister Marie (Georgia Lennon) and little brother Jimmy (Samuel Routley), their meteoric rise to fame and subsequent fall, and the trials and heartbreak that accompany being a member of one of the biggest musical names of all time. 

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