SucceedingatFailing

Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

2012-01-25T23:00:00.000Z

There's something so adorably old-fashioned about these two.

Home

2012-01-16T23:17:00.001Z

I was looking through my draft posts and here is one from six months ago that I never finished.

Almost exactly a year ago when I first started this blog I was packing. Condensing a year of university life into a few boxes and preparing to embark on an exciting year in Seville.

Now yet again I have a suitcase open, posters off the walls and am slowly removing all traces of myself from my apartment in Seville. The room next to mine where one of my closest friends used to live is now empty as of yesterday with the keys pinned to the board and shortly I will follow suit. It's odd living as a student because every September you have a new home and every July you have to say goodbye to it and hand in the keys.

Feeling as though your entire like can fit into a suitcase is simultaneously liberating and unfulfilling. How important is a home?

Since writing the above I moved back to England, stayed in my parent's house for the summer and then in September shifted my belongings yet again into university accommodation. I now have six months left here before I will be moving out and this time into the unknown..

In my family home the progression of my thoughts and interests are immortalised on the walls and bookshelves of my bedroom. A miniature museum to my childhood and teenage years. But the last four years have no architectural signature. While I may have seen and experienced far more I have not left my stamp on any physical landmark. I think this is what inspired me to begin this blog almost two years ago. On my very first post I was packing and ready to begin an adventure not only in a different house but one in another country. I blogged furiously during those initial days of excitement and upheaval and when my life developed a more settled tone and I began to have what I could call a "home" again my posts became less frequent until for several months I stopped writing posts altogether.

Recently I've begun considering what to do after university, what jobs to apply to, what country or city to live in and I felt strangely drawn to begin blogging again. But my life has not become more interesting than it was during the summer, if anything more dull, filled with essays and applications, and in the past I always blogged of adventures I was undertaking, new food tasted, clothes purchased and different cultures to indulge in. Why now when I have only university life to report back on would I feel the whim to begin blogging again?

It is I believe because I'm aware that soon I will be packing yet again. With no bedroom walls to blutack my life upon I have unconsciously chosen instead a virtual one: my blog. I've now understood why Facebook calls your homepage a wall. It's not a digital diary, it's a virtual bedroom for you to tack up photos above your bed from your holidays and messages and cards from your friends by the mirror. In a world that for young people has become increasingly filled with upheaval I believe this is why college and university students are the demographic most addicted to social media and blogs. We are creating our own space, a sanctity ensconced in the familiar that we can return to whenever the four walls of our childhood sanctuaries remain out of reach. For many the internet has now become "home".

Mr cool, Mr often cruel

2011-11-29T01:00:00.000Z

Graffiti in Seville Part 2

2011-05-31T01:35:00.001+01:00

It's been a while!

2011-05-14T02:38:00.002+01:00

Hello once more. I took a hiatus from blogging as, to be quite frank, my posts were becoming absolute trite. The more people began to read my blog the more I felt under pressure to incorporate fashion related content into my posts when to be honest I have only a passing interest in the sartorial world. The result was my previous post. Uncreative, unoriginal re-packaged crap. I'm not blogging to make a successful blog, I do it because I enjoy it and I enjoy reading other people's blogs too. But inane commenting is time consuming and most importantly not something that I enjoy and whats the point in doing a hobby unless you enjoy it? So I'm going to make a promise from now on never to write a post unless I actually have something worth sharing :)

Judy Garland once said, 'Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else'.

Wise advice indeed. I have nothing more to say at this juncture other than I'm back! And have a listen to this song as it is a perfect companion to lazy sunny days, broken relationships and the blessings of youth.

Candy coloured madness

2011-02-08T23:34:00.001Z

Gary Pepper Vintage, flowers, gwen stefani, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Alba, Rihanna flower, Rihanna orange, candies, makeup sweets, purple flowers

I'm loving all things pink and colourful at the moment. Particularly lots of things pink and colourful all at once! Like a pink dress, with orange shoes and yellow and blue accessories! Complete and utter colour overload, it's fantastic! Which is pretty much what Rihanna has been doing to the extreme lately, she's looking a bit like a harajuku girl trapped in a bondage sweet shop or something.

Seville Street Art

2011-01-27T18:36:00.007Z

There are two sides to Seville, both equally beautiful. Lining the walk by the river are some incredible pieces of graffiti which in my opinion can be just as fantastic to look at as the churches and museums. I think its brilliant that Spain has embraced graffiti as an art form, in Madrid in particular there are some incredible displays. I will make a trip there and photograph them as well sometime before the year is up. I think this is an example of when you allow a problem to exist it ceases to be a problem. In Seville young people have been given entire areas to graffiti as much as they wish, including initiatives to bring well-known graffiti artists to spray along the river bank in 2010 and the result has been that far fewer buildings have been defaced and the riverbanks are a mass of incredible colour and vivacity. The same can be seen in the Netherlands with drugs and prostitution.. by acknowledging that certain problems may never go away far greater control can be had over them.

Oh and to update, I made a decision on the new flat, I'm going for the charmingly decrepit one with the roof garden!

Lost Girls & Love Hotels

2011-01-23T05:34:00.004Z

Tomorrow I will be making the final decision on my future flat. At the moment I'm torn between a very pleasant flat, with a nice bedroom filled with light but no outstanding features or access to the roof which I would be sharing with a French girl and an Italian girl... or a charmingly cliched Spanish apartment with a dark and dingy bedroom and some fairly dodgy looking fixtures but a beautiful brightly coloured living room complete with a balcony and a roof garden with views of the entire city which I would be sharing with an American girl, Italian girl and Columbian guy. I can't decide!

I also, (amazingly late on the uptake here I know) opened a twitter account yesterday. I'm still fairly clueless as to how it works and am only following Stephen Fry and Olivia Wilde at the moment so if you have twitter please let me know and I will follow you! :) I think that my twitter is http://twitter.com/#!/JoscelineCluff but I could be wrong with that link!

If any of you have yet to read Lost Girls and Love Hotels I suggest you read it now as it set to become a film starring Kate Bosworth in the not so distant future. When I was 16 I worked briefly in Waterstones, and one of the perks was that we were allowed to take home as many proof-copies of books, which were constantly littering the staff room,as we pleased. One such book which I took home and subsequently fell in love with was Lost Girls.. I truly hope they do it justice seeing as the last time one of my favourite books was turned into a film the result was Peter Jackson's horrificly bad, CGI laden, child friendly butchering of The Lovely Bones which has since left me apprehensive rather than excited when news of book adaptations reach me! Kate Bosworth however sounds like good casting for the stick-thin and troubled heroine of Lost Girls and Love Hotels so I'm hopeful!

Wonders of the World

2011-01-20T06:04:00.008Z

I miss my doggy!! Just look at her cutie-pie little paws and nose... :)

Here's a few pictures from the snow back in December as I have my sights set on somewhere beautifully snowy at the moment ;) and my dog. I'm very busy at the moment, I have two exams, yet another twenty page essay and an article to write within the next two weeks as well as search for a new flat and move all of my belongings across to the other side of town. Also there are of course the usual new year's resolutions and ponderings.

A new decade brings with it a whole new set of challenges and opportunities. All I have known so far in life, in my two decades on this planet, has been education. Education I suppose is something of a preparatory course for life, something society feels is necessary for the young to undergo in order to better comprehend and contribute to the state and society (which as Karl Marx says are the underpinning features of the world of man). I now only have one year left before the preparatory quarter of my life is over and I will be thrust into this new decade of work. It's quite a daunting idea as my general attitude towards life thus far has been to drift along wherever the tide takes me, which isn't quite the attitude most employers look for!

Perhaps in reaction to responsibility rearing its ugly head in the near future I've been feeling a need recently to discover as much of the world as possible while I'm still young and carefree.
I'm sure most of you have heard of the Seven Wonders of the World but sadly the only wonder left to see is the Great Pyramid of Giza. So,In 2007 the New Seven Wonders of the World were released and were named as:

The Great Wall of China
Petra
Christ the Redeemer
Machu Picchu
Chichen Itza
Colosseum
Taj Mahal

There were then later attempts to list the Seven Wonders of the Natural World but no list could be agreed upon. The one offered by CNN however was this:

Grand Canyon
Great Barrier Reef
Harbour of Rio de Janeiro
Mount Everest
Aurora
Paricutin Volcano
Victoria Falls

I realised that of all these incredible things that the world has to offer the only one that I have ever witnessed is the Colosseum in Rome. So, yesterday myself and some friends booked some last minute (and incredibly cheap, only £29.99!) flights to northern Sweden where we are going to attempt to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. I've long been obsessed with them since I was a child and read Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy and now I'm so excited to think I may be able to catch a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis.

Have you seen any of the Wonders of the World? Which ones?

Stylish Blogger Award

2011-01-15T04:14:00.003Z

Thank you very, very much to Vee from I dare... for passing on to me the Stylish Blogger Award! Very awesome (and her blog is amazing by the way you should definitely check it out if you havn't already!)

So apparently upon receiving the award you have to share seven new facts about yourself AND pass the award on to 15 other bloggers who you think are very stylish indeed. So.. first off here are my 15 blogs that I think are fab and will be passing the award on to:

And here are seven facts about me:

1. I no longer take taxis as I am incapable of getting a taxi alone without being ridiculously over-charged, regardless of whether I am waving a map at the taxi driver pointing out how my house is in the opposite direction to where he's going.

2.I hate suburbia. Cities are amazing, the countryside is beautiful and relaxing but for me suburbia is just soul-destroying!

3. I took two years of photography, got an A and still don't know how to use the functions on my camera.

4. I have a habit of going to the countries right by ones I've always wanted to go to. For example, always wanted to go to Thailand so last summer I went to Malaysia, had a long obsession with China so I went to Hong Kong and really wanted to go to Dubai but somehow ended up going to Oman.

5. Have written a diary/journal since January 2001 so this month marks a decade of me writing diaries. I have a whole shelf of them at home.

6. My most over-played songs are generally all by Manu Chao and Radiohead.

7. Have missed more flights than anyone else I know, including accidentally booking a flight for 7 hours away rather than in 4 months time, going to the wrong airport and just simply leaving too late and getting stuck in traffic.

Goodbye 2010

2011-01-09T18:46:00.009Z

I have become absolutely terrible at posting regularly! Must have been the holiday fun keeping me distracted but I arrived back in Seville last night and have a month of exams and essays ahead of me so I'm sure you'll see much more of me now as what better way to avoid doing work without feeling guilty than by blogging! Although I wasn't posting over the holiday I did have a wealth of photos that I had taken all ready to be used until last week when my laptop took the very inconsiderate time to die and they were all lost.

These picture are a medly of the photos from the holiday that I luckily did not lose(aka they were all still on my camera card). The fireworks are from New Years Eve when we went to Waterloo to see Big Ben. I was perched precariously on my boyfriends back and my camera kept bobbing about as the crowd got increasingly excited towards midnight however surprisingly some of my blurry shots came out quite well I think. There's also a couple of shots of the Rene Gruau exhibition at Somerset House. Photos were not allowed and as I have a lumbering great SLR I only managed to take two sneaky shots before I was discovered. The red dresses are 1950s haute couture Dior dresses, absolutely stunning. Also on display were the original perfume bottles for Miss Dior and J'adore Dior made from Baccarat crystal as well as the originals of all his Dior illustrations. Personally I prefer Flower Woman to Diorella but perhaps that's because I'm blonde.

"To be inspired by Dior is to be inspired by Rene Gruau. His sketches capture the silhouette and spirit of Dior and a new era of fashion and femininity. His illustrations are timeless, ever youthful, ever faithful to the moment he saw; they capture the energy, the sophistication and daring of Dior, and equally are a token of an enduring friendship." - John Galliano

December Diary

2010-12-29T17:45:00.003Z

Sorry for the disappearance, December has been a busy month, it's been wonderful being back home in the snow. I think in terms of weather my timing has been perfect as I love snow but hate winter drear and it looks like I will be heading back to Seville just at the time when the thaw will come. Christmas was lovely, my boyfriend stayed with my family and spent the entire Christmas with us which was very special, I recieved some lovely presents from everyone, perfume, a camera, a phone, a lovely Tiffany necklace from my boyfriend.. living in another country definitely has its perks when everybody wants to spoil you when you come home! Now I'm just waiting for my Boxing Day sales goodies to arrive in the post, I decided not to face the mad rush and spent online instead.

Elie Saab at Harrods

2010-12-18T18:59:00.004Z

I arrived back in London yesterday in perhaps the most unglamorous style imaginable. As I didn’t have any scales in my flat I guessed, and as it turned out severely misjudged, the weight of my suitcase and discovered at the airport that my luggage was 6 kilos overweight. Utterly unprepared to pay the 120 Euro charge of adding the extra weight or willing to sacrifice any of my beloved belongings I opted instead to wear the entire extra six kilos on my person.

I looked absolutely ridiculous.

Two pairs of jeans, four tops, two jumpers with two cardigans over the top and then I’m not even sure how many shirts and jumpers tied around my waist topped with a giant fur coat, hat, all of my scarves, my heaviest boots, all of my jewellery and then whatever I could fit into my pockets, ranging from pencil cases to phone chargers. In the 15 degree heat of Seville I was so overheated I thought I might faint, I was forced to remove all of my extra clothes and put them on once again in order to go through customs and with the vast amount of rings and necklaces I had piled on I looked like a pregnant pimp but the extreme embarrassment was worth it as I didn’t lose any money or clothes. Phew.

Today, feeling oddly light, I headed to Harrods and met up with an old school friend. She very sweetly treated me to lunch at Laduree, the John Galliano ginger and rose macarron was absolutely delicious and we spent several hours gossiping and sipping tea. Afterwards we did a last bit of Christmas shopping and viewed the Elie Saab dresses on display which were frankly spectacular including the iconic dress that Halle Berry wore in her Oscar acceptance speech, absolutely stunning.

Lady Dior Hip Flasks

2010-12-09T10:14:00.000Z

Oh how I want Marion Cotillard to release an album with Franz Ferdinand!

Anyway after watching the Lady Grey Dior video I am now on a mission to source a cute and feminine hip flask! That would just be fantastic, I've seen a belt where the buckle has an attachable hip flask which is rather cool and within my price range but it's unlikely I'd find that many occasions to wear it. A good quality hip flask to keep in my handbag however would be a welcome replacement for the little plastic bottles of water I always lug around with me and I'm sure I'd carry it with me everywhere. Of course obviously I'd love a grey Dior one.... and also a house in Antigua and my own personal space ship but back to reality.. where can I find a hip flask that DOES NOT have Jim Bean or Jack Daniels printed across the front and what would I fill it with? I truly cannot imagine myself sipping away at whisky or vodka its just not going to happen! Now a hip flask filled with Tia Maria would be an utterly different story but then it would become all disgusting and sticky and impossible to wash thoroughly..
Knowing me I'd probably end up filling it with Evian. Regardless, I want one! This is my new addition to the Christmas List!

Interview

2010-12-06T22:48:00.001Z

Exciting news! The Girl With The Blue Bow featured an interview with me on her blog! :D So go check it out here. She has a great blog filled with interesting posts about film, music and fashion, definitely worth a peek :)

FREEE!

2010-12-04T02:15:00.002Z

Oh god, FINALLY I have now finished all my work yippee!!

I'm so terrible at studying. Last minute doesn't quite apply to me, more like last nano-second combined with a 'can I have an extension pleeeease?'.

I have only one thing that can get me in the mood to work rather than whiling away countless hours on facebook or doing laundry, tidying the house, anything I can think of other than my work.

I usually keep this a secret because, well its serious mocking material, but.. whenever I try and psyche myself up to actually do some work (as in three days before an exam I havn't revised for and its desperate times) I always watch Legally Blonde! You know that part after she gets fooled into going to the party dressed as bunny and she decides to start working and grabs all the books from the library and reads while at the hairdressers? Well works like a charm for me, straight away after watching it I close down facebook and get working. Why in the world I find this scene is so motivational I truly have no idea, I have many friends who just envisage that dream job they're aspiring for or a swimming pool full of cash and it fires them up like nobody's business. None of that works for me, I just need a good dose of Legally Blonde!

Then..after I have finally completed my essays, I have a victory song!

Unmade beds vs Pristine Pillows

2010-11-28T07:36:00.002Z

I recently read Shane Watson's brilliant article from The Times about two different types of women and its so genius I thought I'd share it with you.

"Meryl Streep has dominated the news this month, because she’s 60 and starring in a film where she has sex, turns down plastic surgery, eats carbs all the time, knocks back the booze, wears her hair messy and generally defies all the rules of making it as a modern woman, never mind a Hollywood star. Her fellow star Sharon Stone (presumably panicking that all that work has been for nothing) was moved to describe her as looking like “an unmade bed” — the message being: “Cosy, yes. But nice to show the neighbours? I don’t think so.”

And you can bet that Stephanie Beacham, Ivana Trump, Dannii Minogue, Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole, to name a few, are with her on that one. Because this has nothing to do with age, really. It’s about the Unmade Beds versus the Pristine Pillows — two different types of women with two very different styles. Tilda Swinton is an Unmade Bed, but she scrubs up pretty good for an awards ceremony. So are Helen Mirren and Stella McCartney and Kristen Stewart. The Pillows you already know: they are everywhere.

Unmade Beds have hairdryers, but rarely get around to using them. They sleep with their make-up on. They drink red wine. They eat cake. They get dirty when they go for a walk. (I once interviewed Stella and the soles of her bare feet were green from walking across the park.) They like dogs. They like clothes. They like sex. And sometimes they don’t make the bed, especially at weekends. They would never have hair extensions or nail extensions or any bodily extensions, or refuse a ride in an open-top car because they were worried about twister hair. And they are still carrying handbags, crammed full of stuff, that weigh the equivalent of a small toddler.

We in the UB category have come under a lot of pressure over the past decade to conform to the prevailing PP standard; so, every so often, we’ll have a manicure, or get a really serious bikini wax, or diet ourselves into some impossibly teeny jeans. We’ve even been known to get our teeth whitened. But the overloaded bag is something the UBs will never shake off.

...That’s not to say that Unmade Beds are necessarily disorganised — just less concerned with keeping it small and tight and tidy."

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Which side are you on? I know I'm most certainly an Unmade bed!

A few things that are rocking my boat at the moment..

2010-11-24T21:37:00.013Z

The first thing I'm more than a little excited about is Black Swan.

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I love ballet, I have had a quote about black swans written on the wall in my bedroom since I was a child, Darren Aronofsky is a genius with Requiem for a Dream being one of my all time favourite films, Vincent Cassel cannot put a foot wrong in my opinion and Natalie Portman I have been a fan of since Leon. And Winona Ryder is in it too. With these factors combined I don't think I've looked forwards to a film this much since Memoirs of a Geisha. I'm sure its going to be amazing. More than amazing. I just can't wait! :)

Erin O'Connor's t-shirt collection is so cute, She died of kisses in white is most certainly on my wishlist this Christmas. Rihanna has been spotted out and about wearing these t-shirts not once but twice which cannot be a bad thing in my opinion.

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Also, when the Diesel Fuel for Life adverts came back a few years ago my heart briefly stopped beating when I clapped eyes on the two most beautiful men ever to grace this planet, Matthieu Tribes and Clement Barreda and I just found out yesterday that a new fuel for life advert came out this summer! How did I miss this before? At any rate I am now exceptionally pleased that Mr Sexy Matthieu Tribes has returned to grace my laptop screen once again.

Also Jemina, a brilliant Indonesian blogger with a crazily cool sense of style, has set up a giveaway that I think is amazing. Usually it has to be said that giveaways are a fairly shameless attempt to increase followers (and there's nothing wrong, with that if it works its a win-win situation!) but Jemina has teamed up with Wiloh (http://www.wiloh.com/), an eco-friendly streetwear brand which matches every sale with a donation to a child in need via Kids in Distressed Situation rather than simply giving away something unwanted in ther house! KIDS is a really worthwhile charity that helps children across the globe affected by poverty and natural disasters.

Isn't that brilliant? She doesn't even add becoming a follower on her blog as a requirement, all you need to do is spread awareness about the charity. So, if you'd like to take part here's a link to her giveaway post. Personally I think its the most worthwhile giveaway I've seen so far! :) http://www.jeminajakin.com/2010/11/lets-save-kids-in-distressed-situations.html

In other news this ridiculous 20 page essay I have to do by the end of the week is making gargantuan efforts to sink my boat. As are impending work internship applications. Not fun! I am rather happy that I finished my article for theISSUE yesterday and handed it in, I'm not particularly proud of it as my eyes were closed for much of the duration of its conception and I was too tired to dally around with sentence structures or finding synonyms but its completed and a tiny weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

An Ode to Starbucks

2010-11-22T06:23:00.008Z

There's a Sex & The City episode where Carrie gets driven mad by the racket Aiden is making whilst re-decorating her apartment (very insensitive of her in my opinion but thats beside the point) and she heads down to Starbucks amongst the 'prentious posers' to write.

Today I followed suit.
With a twenty page essay (in spanish i might add) to write by the end of the month and an article for theISSUE on femicide in Guatemala due Tuesday I'm pretty bogged down at the moment. Yet somehow I've been finding endless excuses, many of them involving blogging, to do anything but my work. With time ticking away and the knowledge that being anywhere in the vicinity of a computer spells disaster I turned in desperation to Starbucks.

And strangely the bustling environment and American Christmas classics on repeat provided a perfect backdrop and I was able to read a 50 page article in one sitting.

Now, you might ask why Starbucks when I am currently located in Seville, a cultural city filled to the brim with quaint little coffee shops. Well the answer is that I find the over-priced pocket of globalisation that is Starbucks more welcoming than these more authentic cafes. You can sit and read alone for hours curled up in a comfortable armchair in complete anonymity and obscurity. It's populated by over-whelmed tourists seeking a slice of the familiar, professionals frowning at their laptops and lonely people finding some solace in their low-fat lattes. Local coffee places have uncomfortable chairs, are often quite exclusively for 'locals' with a slightly suspicious glance headed in the direction of any 'extranjeros' and the noise levels are not conducive to sustained study.

Therefore, despite many negatives that could be said about this glorified food and beverages chain I value it not for its products or status but for its ambience of comfort, tolerance and familiarity. A home away from home, a haven for the lost in every corner of the globe.

Ombre Hair

2010-11-20T01:17:00.003Z

I am absolutely loving this hair trend. Not only are some of the most fashion forward celebrities and models sporting it such as Lily Aldridge, Rachel Bilson, Drew Barrymore, Alexa Chung and Jessica Biel but also some of my favourite bloggers. So in the spirit of the blogging community I thought I would post up photos of bloggers with this look rather than actresses!

Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast has had this style for a while now and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

However I think the nicest example I have seen so far has to be Inga of Intrigue Me Now. Her hair is simply breathtaking, helped a lot by the length. I think to really get the most impact with this style long hair is a must.

Constance Philips of Constance Victoria also looks absolutely stunning with this hair colour.

Here Mama's a Rolling Stone magazine explains how its done:

"According to our experts, there are two possibilities: a salon method, or an at-home method. If you prefer to put your trust in the experts, Sacha says, “For starters, I highly recommend going to an experienced colorist who can do bayliage, or hair painting, an advanced technique that is performed at a rapid pace. Basically, highlights are placed into the crown and the ends of the hair simultaneously, but the ends of the hair are done at least three levels lighter than the crown.”... If you prefer to DIY, there’s an option for you too. Naomi Mikami, who has worked with celebrities such as Rosario Dawson, Amber Heard, and Emanuelle Chriqui, says, “The best way to achieve this look is by a technique called sun-brushing... Of course, both techniques require the same simple precaution: “For ombré hair, you must be careful not to leave an obvious line on the ends. Vary the lengths on your end highlights; some shorter, some longer. This keeps it natural,” says Sacha."

The best thing about this style is that it requires minimal maintenance and looks best with a tousled look which is one of the easiest to achieve. What do you think? Are you loving it as much as I am?

How very English

2010-11-17T18:45:00.004Z

For some reason, I'm not entirely sure why, I've always felt a little ashamed to be English, not vastly but I never felt the same patriotism and identification with being British that I noticed many people felt with being French or Italian or Chinese. In fact I always felt incredibly unexotic to be completely English. Growing up I used to wish I were half some other nationality to give it a little zing. English with a hint of Irish doesn't quite have the same yen as mixed race Italian, French and Iranian now does it?

Perhaps it is because since the age of four I was enrolled in international schools and so my peers growing up were spread across the globe and I rarely saw eye to eye with English youths. From there to university where the atmosphere was incredibly multi-cultural and not to mention the fact that I have never had an English boyfriend have all impacted my sense of self within my native country. London I have always felt a deep affinity for but as a separate entity as though it were a little bubble elevated from England which thoroughly embraced the international spirit I had fostered throughout my education and within my social sphere.

It is only since moving to another country have I truly appreciated what a wonderful country England is and felt very proud to be English. There is so much to like.

Today I stumbled across the blog of An English Gentleman and really loved his description of how best to drink tea. Tea is such a frivolous, inconsequential past time but very nice and something I intend to partake in more regularly.

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Living in Spain has highlighted some of the better things in England such as queues. People from other countries complain about the British constantly queueing but I have to say that this is a fantastic and fair system where everybody gets seen to without preferance. The NHS so many criticise but it's free and reliable health care. Who cares if you have to wait a while, it's far better than not being able to afford healthcare at all isnt it?

The rolling English countryside, red buses in London, Kate Moss, tea and tea parties, Alexander McQueen, the white cliffs of Dover, old stately homes, The Royal Family, poppies and daisies, Audrey Hepburn, cider, Hampton Court Palace, fashion, David Bowie, the Houses of Parliament, Nick Knight, roses, Coldplay, univeristies like Oxford and Cambridge, Vivian Westwood, Mayfair, The Rolling Stones, Brick Lane, Rolls Royce, people that love dogs, lavender fields, Princess Diana, pubs, history,whats not to love?

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Prince William has recently become engaged to Kate Middleton and I'm really happy about this event and excited to see the wedding. So yes I am very glad that I have come to Spain as not only is it a beautiful country with an amazing climate but it has also taught me to be proud to be English.

(On a side note I just joined Bloglovin so if you could Follow my blog with bloglovin that would make me very, very happy!)

Seville European Film Festival '10 Closing Ceremony.

2010-11-15T14:43:00.007Z

The Closing Ceremony was indeed quite a spectacle with a number of celebrities in attendance such as Colin Farrel, Paz Vega, Christopher Lee, Ben Kingsley and John Hurt. These photographs were taken in the afternoon just before things began to kick off.
Throughout the week a total of 171 films from 34 different countries were showcased, my favourite of which were undeniably A Prophet and El Secreto de sus Ojos, two stunning films. For a complete movie lover like me a week long marathon of brilliant films in beautiful old cinemas ending with a star-studded event was heaven!

Bright Light and Coffee

2010-11-13T17:07:00.003Z

Beginning the day with some strong coffee and muffins in the centre of Seville. My boyfriend is starting to get more than a little sick of my incessant blog-related chatter! He was originally very supportive but five months of daily statcounter yabber I think is beginning to wear him down. He's still been very obliging as a photographer though which is a bonus.

At the moment we are engaging in some serious movie watching. Today is the second to last day of the European Film Festival in Seville which we have hit hard and when at home I'm forcing him to watch Meg Ryan classics. For some reason I'm having a 90s obsession at the moment and I've been re-watching all my favourite films of the decade!

On the way out

2010-11-11T19:04:00.007Z

Thava has come over to Seville to visit me again and he gave me the cutest surprise! Yesterday when I left my bedroom to make some food I came back to find he'd bought me a stuffed toy, a massive box of chocolates and a card and arranged them on the bed so that the dog was holding the card! Very sweet :)

At the moment Seville is hosting the Festival of European Cinema, sponsered by FNAC which is showcasing some amazing films such as Mr Nice and Flamenco, Flamenco (above are some pics Thava snapped of me as we were on the way to watch a film). The university is virtually derelict this week as most students when posed with the choice of class or film festival have opted for the latter (myself included).

In Blue

2010-11-08T05:23:00.004Z

Alabama Worley

2010-11-07T00:27:00.009Z

I have to say I am in love with Patricia Arquette's outfits in True Romance. She manages to keep them from potentially looking too glam (red dress, leopard print coat) by adding punches of completely clashing bright colours, such as powder blue shoes and a candy pink vanity bag, Love it! Topshop have a leopard print coat very similar to her's which I have in grey ( which you can see me wearing here) but I really want one in actual leopard print now.

Everything about this film is incredibly cool, the cast (stoner Brad Pitt <3), the clothes, the soundtrack and the amazing purple cadillac with a leopard print steering wheel and dashboard they drive around in (Yes Please!)

Perhaps its the inner geek in me raising its ugly head but I just find this scene incredibly romantic, far more so than dinner at an expensive restaurant! Having had an incredibly unpredictable sleeping pattern since I was a teenager I have spent many a night watching old Bruce Lee movies at 4 am and raiding my uncle's massive video collection for classics. If I could, I would go out to the cinema at these times but England just doesn't have the right climate or culture to cater for insomniacs outside of the safety of their homes. One of the things I loved most about Kuala Lumpur was that I could go to the cinema at 1am or 2am and when I came out the streets would still be full, cafes would be open and you could go out to eat at crazy hours with relatively normal and sober people. By this time in London the city is deserted, you may chance upon a kebab shop catering for roudy blokes with drunken appetites but that is all. Quite high up on my list of things to do in life is go to a drive-in movie in America (alongside be a millionaire and travel the world, I think this one is the most achievable!).

1.[Source] 2.[Source] 3. [Source]

Cadiz

2010-11-05T09:40:00.010Z

Can you believe its november!?
Spain fortunately is ignoring this and continuing to shine away like it was June! Can't believe its still possible to to go to the beach! :D

Anyway, I realise that a worrylingly high number of my posts are food related (and not in a great foodie photography, try these recipes way, but in a general bemoaning of my inability to conjure up anything in the kitchen sort of way) but I feel the need to complain one more time about my calorific intake as the decline of my diet is getting worrying! After running out of money to eat chinese takeaways every day a couple of weeks ago I began eating cereal, crisps, waffles (basically any sweets I could find in Lidl) in order to sustain myself with the occasional, barely edible Lidl pasta or out of my current price range Starbucks salad. However, today it has reached an all time low.
I've eaten a loaf of bread.
Nothing on it, not toasted. Just plain bread.
And a whole loaf of it :(

Heidi Klum & Seal

2010-11-03T02:48:00.004Z

They are just so perfect aren't they! Obviously their relationship is about as cheesy as an overripe stilton if you're not romantically inclined but personally I think it is a beautiful return to real romance as opposed to the current Hollywood three minutes marriages. What's not to love about them? They're both incredibly beautiful and talented and unquestionably live the dream. He proposed to her in an igloo filled with roses for goodness sake! They renew their vows every year, are perfectly happy to openly display their love and affection for each other and have made THE most cutesy, adorable performances at Victoria's Secret shows including their rendition of Wedding Day. Oh and that's not to mention their gorgeous 'patchwork' family as its known in Germany. In fact the only person who, quite publicly, doesn't love them is Karl Lagerfeld and he appears to despise anyone and anything that isn't Claudia Schiffer. Enough said.

Besides if you have the fun and guts to dress this unsexily whilst maintaining a megastar status as they did for Halloween this year then you definitely have my vote of approval!

[source hellomagazine.com]

Halloween at La Bohemia

2010-11-01T17:22:00.004Z

For some reason, probably as my friend wisely said because they're not addicted to alcohol and have more respect for the dead, the Spanish don't seem to celebrate Halloween. Instead they have a bank holiday on the following day where they go to Church and visit graveyards and pay respect to family and friends who have passed. While this is indeed a far more respectful and soulful tradition.. its just so much less fun! Where are the ridiculous Halloween costumes? Pumpkins? Horror films? Excessive consumption of alcohol and themed sweets? Yesterday myself and three friends (from England, Germany and Brazil) who were also feeling the loss of Halloween set out dejectedly in search of festivities and after some exploration.. we found them! In this fantastic bar called La Bohemia where in a twist of fate we were suddenly the underdressed ones. The bar is gorgeous, very small but bright pink, with plenty of kooky decorations and candelabra and bottles with multicoloured wax adorning them. And so ensued a very agreeable evening of cake, cocktails and vampires :)

Half Light

2010-10-31T02:12:00.004Z

I've taken to carrying around my camera with me wherever I go and I'm glad I did so today as it had rained and as dusk approached and the lights came on the reflections in the tarmac meant that the city was literally glowing. I didn't have a tripod with me so there's quite a bit of camera shake but I still think you can get a slight feel of the atmosphere. Dusk and dawn are my favourite times, colours in the sky are at their most vibrant whilst objects on earth are least noticeable and for these few fleeting moments while the light is just extraordinary its far easier to think outside of the small fabricated worlds that we have created and take a glimpse at the real one.

Sevilla por la noche

2010-10-29T15:57:00.007+01:00

I realised I havn't posted much about Seville, only my trips to the beaches on the weekends! So my next few posts will be about my life here. Last night I had a fairly unusual night, beginning with two girls banging on my window asking to be let in and assuming that they were friends of my flatmates I opened the door. They were carrying a dish full of tortilla and started putting it in the oven and when I saw my flatmated looking equally bewildered as I was we asked them who they were! Turns out one of them used to live in our flat and she really needed an oven as she was making the tapas for a bar nearby and she remembered that our flat had an one so came over to use it! Very random but we ended up going to the bar with her and then on to botellon and finally a club in the Alameda. The bar was brilliant, the barmen were hilarious, strip poker was going on in one corner and everyone wrote their names in chalk on the bar.

Breakfast with friends

2010-10-26T02:13:00.002+01:00

I think its pretty funky how international my circle of friends are. Just seated round the table in these photos are two Lithuanians, an Algerian, a Polish guy, two Malaysians, a Venezuelan, A Nigerian, a Greek girl, a Russian, a Thai girl and a mixed race Thai Londoner. And me, the English girl.

Desert Island Discs

2010-10-25T05:17:00.005+01:00

For those unfamiliar with English Radio, there is a Radio 4 programme entitled Desert Island Discs which has run since 1942 where celebrity guests on the show are asked to select the 8 tracks they would choose to take with them to a desert island. They then describe the significance of the songs in their lives. I think this is a brilliant idea so I'm going to select the Desert Island Discs I would choose for myself from my life so far. All of these songs both evoke wonderful memories and are great songs in themselves which I never tire of. By the way if you would like to hear the songs, click open in new tab on each title or you will be directed away from this page.

1. Perpetuum Mobile by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra

Up until the age of about 12 my mother always had run down classic cars which only had a cassette player and broke down consistantly on the way to school every day. For several years she had a bright red classic VW Beetle which the gardeners at my school always had to help her jump start as she was leaving! But as a consequence of this car we always listened to the same few cassette tapes over and over again every day. I still remember exactly which tapes we had! Deacon Blue, Beautiful South, R.E.M., Crowded House and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.This piece of music always reminds me of a long drive we took down to Wales one time in blue VW campervan, I thought everywhere looked incredibly green and beautiful.

2. Four Seasons in One Day by Crowded House

This was another song which suffered intense overplay during the school run, but I then grew to have a great love of this group and I remember my aunt and uncle going to America when I was perhaps 10 years old and returning with an album of Crowded House's greatest hits which I still have on my ipod and have listened to probably more times than is healthy!

3. Street Spirit (Fade out) by Radiohead

My first album I ever had I am proud to say was Amnesiac by Radiohead which my uncle bought for me in a Welcome Break on the way to Dorset when I was nine years old and bizarrely I fell in love with it despite the progressive nature of the music which you wouldn't think would appeal to a nine year old but it most certainly did. And since that time I have bought every single one of their albums, adored them all and they are my life-long favourite band. Thom Yorke can do no wrong in my opinion. I remember often going for walks through a cornfield near where I live listening to this song during many summers. There's also an absoultely stunning music video to this song.

4. Ain't No Sunshine by Bill Withers

This song has a great significance to me. For some reason during the last couple of weeks of my last term of first year at uni, which were mostly spent nocturnal and high,I developed a great affinity for this song and played it incessantly. The very last night Thava, John and I sat and listened to it over and over for about eight hours whilst reminiscing over the past year and after that it developed into mine and Thava's song as it reminded us of each other when we heard it and both of us spent much of the summer coming to the realisation that we liked each other as more than friends whilst listening to that song!

5. Me Gustas Tu bu Manu Chao

Never fails to make me happy. It has the cheeriest and most carefree lyrics in the verses, and a slightly more thought-provoking chorus which has made it my favourite song for many years now, mostly when I'm getting ready to go out dancing around my room to it :P

6. Coconut by Harry Nilsson

There is in fact not a single track from the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack which I am not in love with but this one has to be my favourite. Again, a song you can't help to dance around to with a stupid grin on your face. It also features prominently in another of my favourite movies, Practical Magic...Midnight Margaritas!!!!

7. Innocente (Falling in Love) by Delerium

The majority of my teenage years were spent listening to Delerium and this was always my favourite of their songs. It's wonderfully relaxing and should be accompanied by candles, cushions and ginger wine.

8. Dreaming by Zero 7

I can't listen to this without being reminded of my old house in Leamington where I used to live during my second year of university. Thava and I lived in this massive room filled with junk. The bed was broken so we lived on two single mattresses piled on top of each other with pillows and cushions everywhere. We had a cheap seventies globe drinks cabinet which we kept stocked with Tia Maria, cider and gin at all times and our stuff just laid about everywhere on the floor because the wardrobe was too small to fit a coathanger inside!! And everytime we argued Thava would buy me a bunch of flowers but I never had any vases so I would always cut off the tops of one litre water bottles instead and use them for a vase and there would be sometimes three bottles of flowers in the room at once :) The best however would always be perching on the desk at about 6 am watching the sky begin to lighten whilst listening to this song.

Lithuania

2010-10-21T09:57:00.006+01:00

One of my oldest and best school friends is a Lithuanian girl who after she left back returned to her country of birth leaving us with the sticky situation of how to maintain our friendship across two countries. We solved this quite simply by flying over to each others houses every year! Therefore in the last few years I have travelled to Lithuania once or twice each year and she does the same, always making sure we will be there for each others birthdays. In a weeks time however it will be her birthday which I was dead-set on flying over to attend until I realised that there are no direct flights from Spain to Lithuania! Clearly it's not as popular destination for the Spanish as it is for the English and if I wanted to go from here I would have to take a seven hour stopover in Helsinki and the price of the ticket has sky-rocketed to £500!! So today I am going to the coach station to see if I can take a coach there and if not it looks like I'm going to be unable to go for the first time, and as this is her 21st birthday so that is really sad! And the parties are always insane (think martinis and swimming pools) so I'm going to post the photos from her birthday last year to remind myself of what I'm gonna be missing. These photos were taken by the professional photographer she had hired at the party.

Drinks for one Euro!

2010-10-19T20:29:00.005+01:00

Drinking in Seville is a wonderful thing. The weathers so warm that people live in the calle and so at night hundreds and hundreds of Spanish people (young and old) take to the streets for a beer or wine and the most incredible thing is that on average these drinks only cost a Euro, nothing more! It's so wonderfully cheap! The one problem is that it is impossible to buy alcohol in a shop or supermarket after 10pm but alcohol is so abundantly available in cervecerias and bars absolutely everywhere you walk and so inexpensively that its no loss to have your ability to drink in your own home slightly limited.

The necklace that I am wearing in the photo below is one that I made myself from the shells I collected in Portugal. I washed them all thoroughly over several days in order to eradicate the lingering sea smell which cling to them, made holes by tapping delicately with a knife over the area I wanted the chain to go through and voila! I have nice new necklaces that I made entirely by myself! I'm going to buy some ribbon maybe tomorrow because I have some nice ideas for some seashell bracelets :)

To make an apple pie..

2010-10-18T12:10:00.002+01:00

The other day I was drunkenly discussing with a friend how confusing I thought life was and how difficult I'm finding deciding upon a career path when he gave me a pretty awesome quote which sums up everthing that's been bothering me lately!

'If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the universe'
Carl Sagan

I am currently in the point of my life when, if I want to get a graduate level job, I need to decide what career i would like to pursue and then get internships, build up my c.v. and start molding myself to that way of life. The problem is that I have absolutely no idea what I want to do, only what I don't want.

I could.. be a lawyer, which would involve enrolling on a conversion course, getting an internship this summer at a good law firm and spending the rest of my life well-paid, a 'success' but to all intents and purposes over-worked and miserable.

I could.. be a journalist and be over-worked and under-paid but considerably happier. But, what form of journalism? I like fashion but I had to cancel my subscriptions to Elle because the overwhelmingly repetitive frivolity of it all began to make me sick. So if a year's readership was too much for me it's unlikely that I would cope well with twenty years immersed in pink. Alternatively I could work for a respected newspaper and work my way up through the dull as dishwater local news to main features where I'm sure my highlighted view of the hipocracy of the world would also bring me down.

I could..work for a charity, such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace, feel spiritually content that I was doing something really beneficial to the world, be under-paid but have real passion in my work but also just be consistently angry and upset over the cruelty constantly occurring in the world and my inability to stop it.

Another option of course is to ignore my degree and pursue a creative career. Perhaps as a photographer, its something I truly enjoy doing, but also which requires talent I may or may not possess and is very difficult to succeed at. I could just live in the countryside and make home-made soaps. Or become a food taster, a bed tester, all manner of fun and less well known careers.

The problem is there are just so damn many of them it's impossible to know which to take. In the end for me it keeps (which is where the quote comes in) boiling down to where I stand in the world. What is the meaning of life. If life is all there is then I should enjoy in whichever way gives the most instant gratification, regardless of its stamp upon the world. Or I should try and help people because if life is all there is then how sad is it that there is so much of it being wasted second by second with sharks having their fins sliced off by chinese fisherman then tossed back into the sea. Why? Because of soups or souvenirs which are the most pointless reasons for death I've heard. So if life is all there is then valuing it as highly as possible is the best I can do. And it also means that endangering my life helping others is redundant because all I have to hold on to is a tiny glimmer of sun and rain before an endless nothingness and how silly to lose that over a lost cause. All those people who have been burnt at the stake throughout history, what a waste if there was no reward for it.

On the other hand, if life isn't all there is, then maybe I should align my life to agree with whatever would occur after death. Personally I think that a Christian who never swears, wears a chastity belt and goes to church every week but never gives change to homeless people and only looks out for themselves is a far worse person that a prostitute who's had a really rough time but still helps people when they can and not just because they think there will be some reward for them in the afterlife. So maybe converting to a religion, knowing how much of their rules are complete and utter bullshit wouldn't be the best choice for me. Eek!

Judy Garland said 'Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else' which I think is wise advice indeed. But I suppose I have to work out who I am first to do that.. and within the next couple of weeks so I can work out what internships to do. Or not to do..

I microwaved my finger..

2010-10-15T22:30:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, while microwaving my leftover chinese takeaway (healthy I know) I noticed there was a hole in the microwave door, and being the genius that I am, stuck my finger in it. BAD! I got an electric shock or a massive dose of radiation or something, but the result was i got zapped up to my neck and now my fingertip is numb. Estoy una tonta!

More Lagos

2010-10-14T10:50:00.017+01:00

Treasures

2010-10-14T10:01:00.000+01:00

In one of the beaches in Lagos, just a small little enclave that you could only access by climbing through the rocks, the beach was covered with tiny little shells and stones in the prettiest colours. There were pink shells, deep blue and black mussel type shells, pure white, some interesting multicoloured snail shells etc etc. I was fascinated by them and spent a good couple of hours on my hands and knees collecting the prettiest ones to bring home while everybody else was sunbathing or swimming and now I'm very glad I did because I just made a necklace from a few of the shells and I think its very pretty. Many of the shells coincidentally already have tiny holes in that I can just about fit a chain through (my issue is that I only have chains that already had pendants from them so I need to go buy some ribbon and chains if I want to make more) and so its very easy to make a necklace and the shells are all so unique and interesting looking. I also really like the idea that I found all the materials and made it myself :)

Lagos

2010-10-13T19:54:00.007+01:00

Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks..

Capoeira

2010-10-12T02:33:00.005+01:00

Sam and Hanna both coincidentally spent a year in Brazil and Bolivia and picked up some capoeira whilst there so today as the sun began to set on the beach they began practising some moves and I thought it really looked quite stunning so I took some photos whilst they were fighting.

Rainin' in Paradize

2010-10-10T23:33:00.008+01:00

It seems to be turning into a regular event now that come the weekends Sam, Hanna and I drive somewhere for a little European exploration. This weekend marked the turn of Portugal or to be more accurate, England with better weather as The Algarve was entirely devoid of Portuguese people and all signs and menus were all in English. This wasn't quite the cultural experience we were looking for but it's still been a good weekend. Tonight we are in Lagos and being very poor people who cannot afford to go out we are slumming it in a cheap hostel playing cards and drinking supermarket beer which is really quite fun! The weather has been unpredictable but today we went for some cheesy photo ops on the beach in Albufeira when the weather turned nasty!

NEEDS FOOD AGAIN.

2010-10-07T20:39:00.003+01:00

Well, lots of things have happened recently. The Italian girls turned out to be less like lovely friendly people and more like evil Nazis hiding behind bowls of pasta and after only a week it came to a point where an ability to cook can only take you so far so I decided to move and am now living with two Belgian guys who are far more agreeable! The downside is that they are actually as useless in the kitchen as I and it appears have survived so far on milka chocolate and fanta. So.. being incredibly skint as my bank cards, over TWO WEEKS after I lost them, have still failed to arrive, I decided to join them in this sugarry diet and took myself down to Lidl today. This was quite a momentous occasion as Lidl is one place that I once swore that I would never set foot inside (my other oath was that I would never work in McDonald's) and bought myself some large bars of milka chocolate and budget Euro-trash cereal. To be fair its probably not much unhealthier than my diet of pasta and bread at my previous address so it'l do for the next few days until I can afford chinese takeaway again!

I miss vegetables.
And fruit.

Saturday sun and waves

2010-10-03T14:54:00.011+01:00

Thava came to visit me for the weekend so Sam, Hanna, Thava and I drove (well Sam drove while we slept) to Cadiz and we spent the day at the beach, read, ate, drank tinto de verano which I'm coming to appreciate as an absolutely disgusting drink and throughout all this my skin resolutely refused to tan. Everybody else (aside from Thava whose skin really can't get much blacker) tanned or burnt. Not I. Whenever I go out into the sun I will neither tan nor burn BUT a few weeks later I will get a mole. Probably not very healthy when I think about it but I really, really want a tan! So I shall continue to expose my self to the sun in a naive belief that living in Spain I may become tanned and deal with any consequences later!

Beautiful sunsets here. As were watching the sun go down we saw a bride and groom on the beach being photographed and thought awww how sweet, then we saw another pair of newly weds on the promenade and thought huh what a coincidence, then we saw about ten more and after a brief stint of being very confused and wondering whether we were drinking too much tinto de verano came to the conclusion that either the cathedral by the beach was doing high class Vegas weddings and churning out an impeccably dressed bride and groom every 15 minutes or they were all donning their wedding gear again for photographs and today happened to be a popular day. We are still unsure.
Saturday Come Slow

Time

2010-09-29T13:33:00.002+01:00

I'm no good with time, I don't really understand it. I've never suffered from jetlag because I've never aligned my body clock to a specific time zone, sometimes I'm nocturnal, sometimes I'm awake from 5 am to 5pm, sometimes I just dont sleep for days. Being 'on time' is also a concept beyond me. Today I woke up by 10 am, there was a class I wanted to go to at 1, I could easily have made it but instead I've just sat, been online, done some laundry until I'm certain that I've definitely missed any class that I should go to, and now I'm going to head to uni.. I do confuse myself. Lately I've taken to wearing two watches, one with the correct time, the other broken and therefore adhering to my view of time. I think Manu Chao knows what I'm talking about!

Toulouse and pictures of the road..

2010-09-27T11:18:00.002+01:00

I spoke too soon.. Damn gypsies!

2010-09-27T10:48:00.004+01:00

I may no longer be homeless, but I do need food again! My purse got stolen today in a gypsy market and I am now completely penniless and also, most worryingly, lacking in ID. Fucking Gypsies. I'm starting to feel like a real Spaniard now. Prior to my arrival in Spain I always had a romantic view of gypsies and when Spanish people I knew would criticise them my response would always be why?? they have flamenco! Now, after a week in Spain, my view has transformed: sod Flamenco, gypsies are scum!

After some intense pocket/handbag/under the bed searching I have actually managed to scrape together over 30 Euros in loose change (these are the occasions when I am thankful for my disorganisation!) but I'm going to have to wait 7 to 10 working days for new bank cards to travel from England to greet me so there may be desperate times ahead! On the plus side I now have a broken gypsy bicycle to enable me to traverse the city at no financial expense (but at great physical cost, its a mountain bike so the seat is not designed for delicate English derrieres and it doesn't change gears, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou seville for being lacking in hills!).

As I'm on the theme of gitanas here are a couple of photos of an eco-meal I went to the second day here which was in the 'free-spirited gypsy romantic eco-warrior' part of town.

A Very Nice Surprise!

2010-09-25T15:46:00.004+01:00

We had a gathering at our place last night, the Italians girls cooked incredible quiche and a pasta tortilla type thing which was also very good and we had wine and beer and a great time! Then towards the end of the night the lights went off and my flatmates came out with a cake with a 21 candle on it and I honestly thought it was for somebody else!!! It was only when they actually stuck it in front of me that I realised it was for me :D

NO LONGER HOMELESS! NO LONGER NEEDS FOOD!

2010-09-24T22:54:00.003+01:00

I'm getting pretty behind on updating my current new life in Sevilla, I still havn't put up all the photos from the road trip let alone those from my first days here! As of two days ago I have found a place to live with three Italian girls very close to the centre of Seville. And now I have to rave a bit about Italians because first of all they all seem to be so lovely and friendly and secondly and most amazingly good for me..they cook for me! And not only do they cook, but they cook really well! It's an incredibly brilliant situation. I am a fairly useless human being and am so utterly hopeless in the kitchen that I am able to burn soup, an achievement to which few can place their name to! During my first year of uni I survived on the pity of the nice people that lived in my halls who would cook for me until I met my boyfriend who then took over the honours. If nobody is around to feed me I either eat things which dont involve cooking such as cereal and biscuits or I order a chinese takeaway. So...imagine my luck that not only have I found somewhere to live but my new housemates give me delicious pasta every day as well! And when they dont cook, they bring me to the house of another Italian who then cooks for us all. If this is the Italian way then I like it a lot! Yesterday (of which unfortunately I have no photos) was lovely, we went to the house of another Italian who cooked for seven of us, played that game where you are all given the name of a famous person on a piece of paper, stick it to your forehead and then have to guess what it is and then went out for botellon, a Spanish phenomenum where all the young people head to the streets on mass, congregating in plazas, and socialise and drink through to the early morning. It's far superior to clubbing in my opinion although it does require a climate such as that in Seville.

Paris Nights

2010-09-22T08:23:00.003+01:00

Versailles

2010-09-20T23:01:00.005+01:00

This has to be one of the most beautiful places most certainly in Europe, if not in the world and I could happily have spent all day there. Unfortunately we were on a fairly strict time schedule and zoomed round the most important rooms inside the palace which were most fabulous before heading outside to the breath-takingly beautiful gardens. I wish I could have spent longer exploring and seen the grotto and some of the smaller fountains but time was short. When I was a little girl I had a guidebook of Versailles and used to spend ages poring over it wishing I was a princess there and as a consequence of that I now have most of the rooms and gardens memorised!

Happy Birthday to me!

2010-09-19T12:37:00.000+01:00

Its my 21st Birthday today and I am homeless in Seville! Not quite celebrating in style perhaps but there is beautiful sunshine and I have recieved lots of lovely emails and phonecalls from friends and family from home so I still feel loved! Tonight I will be going to a flamenco show with the people from the hostel I am staying in so I think today will be a good day. And I cant think of a better way of showing that I am 21 and independant than celebrating in a new country with new people!

Paris

2010-09-17T11:03:00.005+01:00

So far this road trip has been very fun. We didn't arrive in Paris until quite late tuesday night as Sam and the satnav hadn't quite become compatible yet.. nor had Sam and the other side of the road but eventually we made it to Paris and stayed with my French ex-boyfriend Matthieu. We hadn't seen each other since since we broke up two years ago so it was nice of him to let us stay and thankfully not awkward at all! He was a perfect host buying us all breakfast in the mornings! Despite the fact that we'd all been to Paris more times than we care to remember we spent two very happy touristy days doing the usual touristy things and visited the Louvre, The Pompidou Centre, Berthillion Cafe which has the finest icecreams in Paris, Notre Dame, Versaille etc during the day and at night various bars. The highlight however was undoubtedly dining at Georges, the restaurant at the top of the Pompidou Centre with spectacular views of Paris and delicious food. I'd always wanted to go there since I saw it featured in Le Divorce when Kate Hudson goes there and then of course when Carrie had lunch with Alexandr Petrovsky's wife in Sex and the City in the same place as well!

Fashion's Night Out

2010-09-09T21:00:00.008+01:00

This better continue being an annual thing forever more because its just too good to be true. I got completely wasted on free champagne and vodka caviar, had a free makeover and manicure, saw Giorgio Armani, Claudia Schiffer and Natalia Vodianova (never made it to Stella McCartney in the end so didnt get to see Gwyneth Paltrow) and overall had an incredible time! There was just so much going on such as Christian Louboutin hosting a mad hatter tea-party, photobooths where your picture is taken by a professional photographer and put onto the front page of Vogue as a keep sake and personalised t-shirts made for you as you stand there by designers such as Erdem. Heaven! (Oh and its completely free for the public! No guestlists except for at Armani and the private room at Selfridges).

Secret Cinema Part Two!

2010-09-07T16:52:00.062+01:00

Once inside we walked into the reception area which was spectacular and we were able to buy food and drink in a relaxed environment before heading into the crazy main event.

Once we entered into the main market area it was fiarly obvious what the film was going to be (although to be fair we kinda knew when we saw the camels)

After watching a belly dance show and a live band which I neglected to take photographs of we went through to the main hall where we would be watching the film. And seriously, I don't think it gets much better than watching a film in the central hall of a palace.

This is where all the cushions and blankets we were asked to bring came in handy!

Beautiful stained glass and snacks = amazing night!

Oh and the film was Lawrence of Arabia in case you still hadn't guessed :)

Secret Cinema Part One- Arrival

2010-09-07T15:14:00.006+01:00

Sunday evening (sorry I've taken so long to post this, been veeery busy these past few days) I went to yet another Secret Cinema event. And this one most certainly did not disappoint! In fact I think that Secret Cinema is one of the best things you can do in London.

If you join upto Secret Cinema they send you an email notifying you of when their next event will be BUT everything is in riddles. You aren't notified of the location or the film but clues as to what you will be seeing, instructions as to what to wear and last minute co-ordinations of your meeting point are sent to you in the days leading up to the event. In short you buy your ticket knowing absolutely nothing about where you will be going and what you will be seeing and its all a surprise. And i LOVE surprises so this is right up my street!

These were the instructions and clues that I was sent:

To all tribes,

It is time. Are you ready? There are large numbers of you gathering all over the land, from the north all the way through to the southern territories. The uprising is gathering strength every day. The events take place this Friday 3rd, Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th September.

We applaud the brave members who saved the stranded eastern tribesman and rescued the flags.

We have journeyed a great distance to come together as one, we know the heat has been unbearable and there have been inevitable conflicts between tribes, please keep the peace, the next part of the journey will be treacherous but the promised land awaits my brethren.

Now this is important. We need you to travel in full Bedouin attire and wear a colored headdress relating to your tribal colours.
Meet at 6pm Friday 3rd, 4pm Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th at these coordinates. Do not be late.
Bring rugs, cushions and an item to barter with (no glass), be prepared to haggle. If you require any special arrangements, for your own comfort, contact the tribal elders here.
Good Luck my brethren. See you at the uprising...

Secret Cinema

P.S. Remember. Tell no-one.

Pretty cool huh? The co-ordinates we were given were for Alexandra Park in North London so Sunday evening we drove up there dressed in the bedouin style which looked beyond ridiculous on us (particularly as we improvised with scarves and tablecloths etc!) and made our way into the park!

As we were walking along through the park there were all manner of actors in costume riding camels and donkeys etc and setting the scene for what we were about to watch.

John with a donkey (He's carrying our cushions and blankets in the sack!)

We arrived out our meeting point where we were surrounded by men on horseback carrying machetes!

From this point we were lead on to the secret location..whch turned out to be Alexandra Palace!! :D

It's a good thing Sex and the City 2 came out this year as most women have a pair of harem pants which came in very useful for this occasion!

The guy below was really funny

this guy shouted at me when I tried to take a photo, a very convincing evil army colonel!

Musical things

2010-09-02T12:57:00.008+01:00

Two days ago a friend came over and we went and watched the midnight screening of Avatar. It was the second time seeing it for me and I couldn't help but notice how parts of the soundtrack sounded really, really similar to the score of Willow (one of my all-time favourite childhood movies!). So today I googled it and turns out not only was I right but very similar music has also been used in a bunch of other movies such as Enemy at The Gates and Troy! Turns out the composer James Horner seems to know when he's on to a good thing and has basically used the same score in quite a few of his movies!

Check out this video from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glsyYJksGtg>

I just heard this song below today and I think it's the most heartbreaking song I have ever heard! The singer actually has to wipe his eyes at the end of the song. Really beautiful though. It's about watching his mother suffer with Alzheimers.

Chocolate Genius- My Mom

Notting Hill Carnival

2010-08-31T13:39:00.006+01:00

The Notting Hill Carnival is INCREDIBLE! I don't know why I've never been before, I will most certainlly be coming again! Although now I really want to go to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro..

glug, glug, glug :)

Some of the costumes were absolutely incredible, the woman below was part of a parade that seemed to be inspired by bugs, there was also a man with a giant wasp suit and various people with wings. I'd really love to know who makes these costumes because they truly are something to behold.

The weather was in league with the organisers and was gloriously sunny all day as in the photo below. What with the parades and the food and music I could almost imagine I was in some gorgeous exotic country.

I don't really know what the guy below was doing, he seemed to get pretty angry at a woman next to me, went up to her licked a toilet brush, showed it to her and then marched off!

The people below are daggering which is this dance where you basically hump with your clothes on! I happen to know about it because one of my friends from uni went on exchange this year to Barbados and came back with some hilarious stories. At one point at the carnival I was innocently walking along when a guy came in front of me and started daggering me and then another guy came behind me and then ANOTHER guy came on the side and all three were daggering me at once while i was crying piteously for help until I got rescued!

The people on the floats were havinga dreat time drinking and getting lary! The guy belowed offered me some brandy which I was tempted to accept but he was atop a massive moving lorry so strategically it would have been a tad difficult for me to drink..

I think this parade had something to do with the navy although I don't know what. Regardless it had some great outfits!

Military Odyssey 2010

2010-08-29T21:08:00.004+01:00

The Military Odyssey in Detling is the largest showcase of period costumes in the world and it was really very surreal to watch battalions of World War I soldiers marching by on one side, while American World War II tanks rolled by on the other side and a Viking ship stood proud in front. It was astonishing the sheer amount of people that came and donned past military gear. I like these sort of shows for the goodies you can get though. The hat I'm wearing in the picture below is something I bought there, it's from WWII which I think is pretty awesome to wear something with that much heritage. I also bought an antique mother of pearl bracelet which is really pretty.

The men below who are marching actually engaged in reenactments later. The reenactments are the main attraction of the Military Odyssey because entire battalions will stage famous battles using all the weaponry and exact uniforms of the time and will even fire at each other (although not using real bullets of course).

My gorgeous little cousin and his super-cute spiderman hoodie!

Update on Road Trip

2010-08-27T13:01:00.001+01:00

We are going to be leaving on the 14th of September and we are planning to stop over at major cities along the way which is very exciting! The plan as it stands is:

Home -> Paris ~ Spend the night

Paris -> Bordeaux ~ Spend the night

Bordeaux -> Madrid ~ Spend the night

Madrid -> Sevilla ~ Destination!

But there is an alternative of going to Toulouse and then onto Barcelona instead of Bordeaux and Madrid which I'm personally in favour of but either way its going to be brilliant. So if all goes to plan we should arrive in Seville on the 17th September giving me three days to find somewhere to live before term starts on the 20th!
Getting very worried about my limited ability to communicate in Spanish but hopefully I'll pick it up quickly! And at least the year doesn't count for me :P

Poppy lovin'

2010-08-25T22:05:00.008+01:00

Well I did nothing today so therefore nothing to post but I thought I might put up some photos from the photoshoot we did for Warwick Univeristy's newspaper in January because the photos are fun and I have nothing else to upload :P

I'm reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath at the moment. I know its criminal that I'm nearly 21 and I havn't read it before but I've been pretty rubbish about reading the last few years so at least I'm finally getting down to it and it really is amazing. I love her poetry and I think the whole Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill tragedy is so sad and romantic it should be fiction, or at least I wish it was fiction and although women always seem to paint Ted Hughes as some evil character I feel very sorry for him; everything he touched seemed to wither and die. To have your wife, mistress, son and (possible) daughter all commit suicide I'm astonished he didn't succumb to the same fate.

I took this photo of the poppies in the field at the bottom of my garden. I have a small obsession with poppies, I think they're magical :)

"There are flowers in my room and they don’t need a job, they just need time to grow and die.

And the lovers on their cloud don’t give a shit about the money, they’re here to try to stay side by side

But it’s so hard cause the morning always comes to kill the dream you had the night before."

~ from The Wanderer by Jil is Lucky

Getting in the mood for Spain

2010-08-24T20:48:00.004+01:00

Nothing made me want to go live in Spain more than watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona. When it came out at the cinema I watched it three days running, once even on my own because I was so obsessed with it. So today I've had a nice relaxing day getting in the mood for Spain. I re-read back issues of Vogue Espana that I'd bought in Salamanca in April, made fajitas (not Spanish I know but they're a step in the right direction) and watched the afore-mentioned spectacular Vicky Cristina Barcelona (I love how Vicky and Doug choose to have their honeymoon in Seville. I'm going to be living in a city that's so beautiful people honeymoon there! :D)

And I have to say I just adore Scarlett Johansson's hair in this! The scene where she first spies Juan Antonio in the gallery she has the most amazing up-do.

I'm starting to get really excited about going now and particularly about the road trip there. We'll be staying a night in Paris and I havn't been there for two years now so I'm looking forwards to going to some galleries there.

This song is La Ley del Retiro by Guilia y los Tellarini, amazingly sexy song.

1.4 Billion Reasons why John is rubbish

2010-08-23T11:24:00.005+01:00

John has been working at the Global Poverty Project and helped to organise the London leg of the 1.4 billion reasons tour which I think is pretty impressive so at his behest I headed down to the Richmix yesterday to check it out, at the time at which he told me to arrive.. and it was already over! The complete and utter nonce had gotten the time wrong and we all arrived (himself included) as it was just ending. And he organised the damn thing! Oh and to add insult to injury turns out Keira Knightley came for the presentation so if the bugger had just got the time right... grrrrrr

Anyway so as not to waste a trip to London we went to Brick Lane and went to City Spice and then to The Big Chill. I LOVE BRICK LANE!! It's so great, there's just a vibe when you go there that's incredible. It's like a mix of Soho and Camden only for comparitively normal people. There's an inherant quirkiness and stunning graffiti on the buildings and the clothes people sell on the side of the street are actually really nice (not the awful gang-financed designer knock-offs you usually get) and mostly they only cost about a pound!

Julie Delpy

2010-08-20T22:31:00.007+01:00

A friend from university once forced me to watch Before Sunrise because she thought I was exactly like Julie Delpy in it. Which was very nice of her but Julie Delpy doesn't have a mouth the size of a shirt button whereas I do so it's rather a complimentary comparison. On a side-note I think that's why I am never very attracted to white men because biologically my body senses that if it were to have a child with an Englishman then the poor thing would actually be born without a mouth. Therefore its best for the genepool that I maintain my foreign obsession. (Well that's my justification anyway).

But back to Julie Delpy.I actually like her more for her music than her films (although 2 Days in Paris is one of my all-time favourites and is absolutely hilarious. The fact that she wrote, directed, produced AND starred in it is incredible.) . But aside from that she's just cool. She smokes like a chimney, she's never on best-dressed lists but she still has style, she writes (including the screenplays for Before Sunrise and Before Sunset) and most importantly as every interviewer seems to stress, she just doesn't give a damn. I'm currently obsessing about this song; Something a bit vague by Julie Delpy.

Retro

2010-08-20T21:06:00.015+01:00

You forget that your parents used to be cool. Right now my Mum gardens and goes to work and my father does business things and thats how I view them but back when they were in their 20s my mother was a fashionable city girl and my father was a New York party boy who was friends with Mick Jagger. I found some old photographs of my Mum and her friends so I thought I would upload them for two reasons:
1. It's nice to have them stored online in case anything ever happened to them
2. considering how fashion is now recycled 80s and 90s stuff what she's wearing is bizarrely pretty on trend!

This is a photograph of my Mum in Paris, I like the leather gloves and the bracelet on the outside of her coat, I just hope that's not real fur!

The photographs below are of my Mum's best friend who was a designer and clearly very flexible.

Then and Now

2010-08-20T13:13:00.007+01:00

Spanish woes

2010-08-17T14:16:00.017+01:00

I now have less than a month until I will have packed my bags and left for Sunny Sevilla. Which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Particularly when you take into consideration that I haven't sorted out my accommodation, looked at the university website, practised any spanish or even got my loan properly sorted out. And the plan is to drive to Spain with a guy from Warwick in a Yaris which is probably the most bound to go wrong method of going there I could have chosen.

So altogether I'm really not very prepared at all! And how on earth I'm supposed to fit an entire years worth of shoes and clothes (I'm not even going to bother with cutlery or books!) into a single suitcase is completely beyond me. And apparently I'm supposed to set up a Spanish bank account, register with the medical centre there, choose my modules and a million and one other things that I have simply no idea about. From the looks of things I'll be living in a hostel for the first couple of months!

Oh and I don't have a phone (because it was stolen), I don't have a camera (because I lost it), my laptop has conveniently taken this time to decide it no longer wants to connect to the internet, I don't know how to cook which was fine when I had my lovely boyfriend to cook for me but not so cool when I'm living on my own oh and I can't speak Spanish! :D I'm off to a brilliant start then!

Beauty Secrets

2010-08-11T13:59:00.016+01:00

My great grandmother swore by Almond oil. She moisturised her face with it every day and every night and even when she was 90 and blind her skin was still as soft as a baby's bottom! I tried using it though and it was too rich for my skin and gave me those little bumps but for some skin types such as hers it clearly works marvels. She also said that a woman's hair was her crowning glory and that is should never be short and always be in good condition.

On my aunt's side of the family they all lived to over a 100 years old which I think must be quite rare and their advice was a little unorthodox but seemed to work with them!

They never believed in going to the doctor
Judy would have a brandy at 11 am every day and no other alchohol ever.
Pip would have a sherry at 5:30 pm each day (and also would not drink other than this) and both swore it was good for their health
Use baby oil and baby shampoo for their faces and hair
Washing your hair with beer or vinegar when after shine
Always, always exercise and remian active
Put cucumber over eyes daily

My mother and my gran began creaming ther faces night and day from the ages of 16. Both always cream their necks and chest as well as they say it is equally as important as the face in terms of hiding the sings of aging. Hands are always creamed too. They both also say that a good jawline is the most important thing to maintain and do daily exercises to firm theirs (and to this day both have excellent jawlines, no turkey necks or jowls there!)
There are way more but I can't think of them right now but basically they amounted to

Always moisturise your face neck and chest daily
Always lead an active life

Visiting Abdel and Natha

2010-08-10T15:12:00.014+01:00

With the current rainy weather, staying at home on the computer everyday has just been driving me mad so yesterday I managed to get somebody to watch the dog and I went to London for a break. I met Abdel after he finished work and we had Thai food and then went and watched Inception (second time for me) at the Haymarket cineworld cinema which is like a lovely old theatre and with our big bags of popcorn it felt like the traditional, special sort of cinema trip that's so cliched but actually really great! Cinema seems to have lost its magic a bit for me lately, I go to large multiscreen cinemas with no popcorn and do it regularly, its become only slightly more special than watching tv so this was a nice change and I had a lovely evening. And wow Inception is so good. That scene with no gravity is just something else, I think its the best fight scene I've ever watched, kick's the Matrix's arse! I am however still trying to work out the ending. Personally I think that Cobb is still dreaming seeing as his children are wearing the exact same clothes, don't look any older and are in the exact same place as they were in his memories. What I'm unsure of is how long Cobb was dreaming for. My theory is that he gets shot by Saito in the fifth level and then goes into limbo land..

Anyway it was pretty weird seeing Natha and Abdel. Both of them seem to have gotten their lives sorted out and are working and living in London. Natha has the cutest apartment in Brixton and has just gotten a new job at Lush (all those freebies, I'm very jealous) and Abdel is Mr Big Hotshot Investment Banker at Bank of America with his super swish suit! That's insane!! I'm still living at home and dog-sitting for the summer! And as a sign of quite how pathetic I am currently both of them took pity on me and gave me things. Abdel gave me a phone as I still havn't replaced the one that was stolen in Malaysia and Natha gave me some clothes. I now dress almost entirely in recycled clothes; today I was wearing Agy's jeans, a Topshop cardigan that somebody had left at my house after a house party and never reclaimed, one of my gran's handbags and jewellery given to me as a birthday present from Natha. The only things I'd bought were my top and my shoes.. so bad!

Narnia

2010-08-06T14:43:00.019+01:00

Today I went to Narnia... Seriously! As I've mentioned before I'm spending August living in my gran's house (house-sitting and with greater difficulty dog-sitting) and today the dog knocked open her wardrobe door as she was thundering about the house so I took a peek inside and oh my. Beauty awaited... the HANDBAGS SHE HAS!!! I only ever really see my gran around the house or popping down to Waitrose so I never had any idea how incredible and extensive her wardrobe was! I sifted through her handbags (felt a bit guilty raiding her wardrobe but I just couldn't help myself) and wow there were some finds here. It makes me sad to think that my gran is more stylish than I am but it is in fact true :(

Russel & Bromley

Fiorelli

Mulberry

This gem was the best of the lot, a vintage Mulberyy leather congo bag.

That's not to mention the antique crocodile and snakeskin clutches and handbags she had!

A selection of some of my favourites! And this is just bags, she had belts, scarves and shoes I was lusting after as well! I think for this autumn I may do some shopping in my gran's wardrobe as opposed to the highstreet. Well when I say shopping, maybe I mean begging.. :)

Solar Storms

2010-08-04T09:19:00.008+01:00

Well I was reading the news last night and eek this whole solar storm thing looks very scary/exciting! Apparently last night and tonight we will have been hit by solar flares which would cause the the aurora borealis to occur lower down, maybe even in Britain! I didn't see anything unusual in the sky last night but Ill have another look tonight because that would be a dramatic sight. The negative side of the pretty light display however is that this could be the lead up to a solar storm which some scientists believe could be a 'perfect storm' along the same vein as the one which hit the earth in 1859, destroying the limited communications systems they had back then. So if this can cause compasses to go nuts and bring down telegraph poles imagine what it would do if a surge of crazy current went through every wire on the earth now! I was looking at my room last night and there was a tv, a radio, my mobile phone, a landline phone as well as all the lamps and main lights and appliances like hairdryers around me which really is a lot of wires in my opinion so that wouldnt be so cool! The sun has an 11 year cycle where it does something complicated to do with its magnetic field and a conveyor belt which i dont really understand (science was never my strong point) which means that it has a peak period every 11 years where it has the most flares and then it calms down again afterwards. Apparently it has been exceptionally calm this cycle which they belive is the calm before the storm and around 2013 we could be in for a very big 'solar tsunami' which would cause chaos. Fun times.

On another note while I was reading about solar storms I noticed that Eyjafjallajökull (that name is so complicated i had to copy and paste it here!) might be doing nice things for the Earth since during its inconvenient eruption (I got stranded in Salamanca when the flights were cancelled) it dumped a lot of iron into the ocean (which the ocean was lacking in) and these increased iron levels scientists think will allow more phytoplankton to grow, something that has been on the decrease because of low iron levels recently. These phytoplankton are the things responsible for absorbing carbon dioxide deep into the sea. So altogether the disruption caused by the volcano managed to give us a week less of carbon emmissions from planes and now a counter to our renewed efforts at pollution. So yay, upside! Maybe if Solar storms wrecked the communications systems permanently on Earth and there was no longer a need for oil we might suddenly have less cause for war with the middle east :D

The annoying, untrained, manic bundle of fur that is my dog

2010-08-03T15:53:00.005+01:00

My gran's dog (called Red which I think is quite apt considering the red mist which seems to float across her eyes when she persistently attacks me for fun)is simlutaneously the most adorable and the most annoying, contrary, disobedience piece of lion-sized fluff to ever stalk the earth. Fetch is something completely alien to her, you throw a stick and she just looks at you like you're crazy. The only thing she will consider running after is a bouncy ball, and even then only if its clean and colourful and she wont sprint after it like most dogs, she'll trot after it in a teenage girl I'm too cool for sport sort of way and then disappear off with it.

If you call her name she completely ignores you, walkies will bring her to the door but then you are taking her route and no other or she'll just walk straight back to the house and shouting or cajoling makes no impact. In fact if she senses that you really want her to do something, even if she was about to do it she'll do exactly the opposite just because its fun to tease you. and she craps indoors during the night so that you have the joy of cleaning it up in the morning.

After only two days of looking after her I went down to the library and picked up every dog-training book in sight! Here's hoping I can at least get her to 'sit' or maybe respond to her name?? please!

Beautiful 24 hours in Kuala Lumpur

2010-08-03T14:44:00.015+01:00

As Thava needed to go to his Mum's birthday party on our last night we couldn't spend that time together (and my what a disaster that last night turned out to be! but more of that later..) so we decided to make the second to last night something special and I think it was one of the very best days of my life!

We arrived back from Singapore at 6 in the morning and went straight to KL to find a hotel. As usual this was peskiness beyond measure and it took us about 3 hours and a very patient taxi driver but eventually we got a room in The Regency. And then promptly we went to sleep and spent the rest of the day in bed :) At around 8pm we went to eat at this lovely Thai restaurant, then headed to KLCC to watch Inception for the midnight showing (which was amazing! The scene with Joseph Gordon Levitt and no gravity..wow). However, after the movie finished was when the night became amazing.

Obviously KLCC had closed by the time we came out the cinema so we left and went into the park behind the Petronas Towers (Malaysia's version of Central Park) which is very well maintained with ponds and playgrounds and fountains and started to walk around when a security guard called out to us and told us that the park was closed at night and we werent supposed to be here. But Thava told him that I was English and it was my last night etc and he let us stay and we ended up having the park to ourselves till about 3am! it was the most romantic experience ever! We played on the swings, ran across the fountains and the swimming pools (nobody there to stop us!) and just walked around the park and talked. It was lovely. And after just coming out of a movie about deserted architecture and dreams this really felt as though we were in a very lovely dream where the two of us had KL just to ourselves for a night.

Afterwards Thava was hungry so we went to this busy place that sold traditional chinese food (which is incredible how busy it was with sober people at 4am, this does not happen in England!) and he ate a pretty strange dish and I experimented with the deserts (its so cheap there that if you dont like something you can just order another one until you're content!). Eventually we took a taxi back to the hotel and had a well-earned sleep.

The next day we slept in late and then went and used the hotel's swimming pool. Seeing as I hadn't utilised my opportunity to go in the Olympic sized one at the Rennaisance I figured I'd at least take advantage of the facilities of one hotel before I left! And I think this hotel was far better than the Renaissance one because although it was much, much smaller it was high up in the building, outdoors, and we had a brilliant view of all of KL. And most importantly we had the pool entirely to ourselves except when we were brought drinks :) :)

One of the nicest 24 hours of my life!

Singapore

2010-08-03T14:15:00.012+01:00

I didn't finish writing about my Malaysia/Singapore travels so although it was over a week ago I may as well finish writing about them! At least seeing as I didn't write a diary this blog can serve as a virtual one, complete with pictures so if I forget anything I can always come back and read this and it will all come back to me :)

So.. Singapore was amazing. We got picked up by Thava's cousin and his amazing girlfriend and her equally amazing family. They were so hospitable and nice, I don't actually think I've met a nicer family. The first night his girlfriend's sister, despite having work the next day and needing to wake up at 6 am, drove us aorund singapore showing us all the important sights and telling us about how the country was run and where the different districts were. As it was late so most restaurants were closed and they had heard that I had had food poisoning from eating at fairly dodgy restaurants they drove all the way to the airport so that we could eat at a 24 hour western restuarant!

Then she dropped us by Clarke Quay, an area by the river with the most amazing clubs and restaurants. Unfortunately this was a sunday so most places were closed so we went to an Indian bar instead that was open till 3.

However things got a little dodgy at the Indian club when the men there just wouldnt leave me alone. Eventually one guy grabbed my hand to try and pull me up to dance and Thava's cousin nearly got in a fight with him which sucked. The manager got involved and we had loads of drunk guys trying to mediate but at least it was an experience!

We stayed with Thava's cousin and his girlfriend's family for two more nights which were really fun. One day his cousin's girlfriend (I havnt told them I'm writing this so I don't really want to use names) took me shopping and kept buying me presents! She even bought me an Indian suit which is unbelievably sweet! They bought me a load of fruit so that i could try all the exotic fruits such as mangosteen and durian which are delicious i might add. I really don't get the whole issue with the durian's smell, it's not the sweetest smell ever but its really not that bad that it deserves to be banned from hotels and public places!

The last night we went back to Clarke Quay again and went for drinks which Thava's cousin and his girlfriend kept paying for! I hope that one day they will come to England and we can return the favour because they really were exceptionally nice!

Keep Fit!

2010-08-02T11:35:00.007+01:00

Well today begins my month of dog-sitting! My gran goes to Italy every year for a couple of months and seeing as the dog is only a year old she's still complete hassle (and complete adorableness!) so I'm moving into my gran's house and looking after the dog for the whole of august! The downside is that I can't really go out much now unless I invite people over but I think this is a good thing as I only have a month until I go to Spain (to live!!! :D), I have no money and I really need to work out what I want to do with my life and get organised.

So.. I thought I would begin this by getting my body into shape! I always complain that I only gained weight during university because being around Thava 24/7 I ate exactly what he did and he is a human black hole, everything he consumes get sucked into some alternate dimension and he can eat 6 meals a day and actually lose weight (so yeah I blame him!). But, seeing as I won't be seeing him for a few months this is the perfect opportunity to lose some weight and git fit before I head off to sunny Seville where some traumatic bikini wearing will inevitably occur! if I don't lose weight then I guess I was just being a big fat lazy bum after all :P

Anyway sitting down blogging about losing weight really isn't losing weight so I'm going to try doing a couple of Tracy Anderson's videos. She posts a few on her website for free (mostly the ones she gave to Gwyneth Paltrow to get in shape for Pepper Pots-I'm not complaining!) so I'll give those a go for the next few days and hopefully I'll start toning up. Fingers crossed.

http://tracyandersonmethod.com/video/new

Future Cinema: A tribute to Dennis Hopper

2010-08-01T19:14:00.014+01:00

As sadly Dennis Hopper died at the end of May Future Cinema held a night in his honour yesterday. So last minute John and I decided to go and oh my it was very strange!!! It was held at the Troxy which is the oldest cinema in London and we were all seated at these ballroom type tables while we were given musical entertainment before the screening of the film (Blue Velvet.)

The entertainment consisted of a man playing David Lynch theme tunes with a bunch of inventions he'd made such as 'the stringaling' and 'the hornicator' and something resembling a trombone that was made entirely out of tubing.. very, very odd!

Then there was some music from an Italian woman with an incredible voice. However her name really did sound as though it was Bella Lasagne Calzone although I'm sure John and I misheard because that would be the most ridiculous name in history!

Afterwards there were a short presentations and then the main event, Blue Velvet. It was an interesting experience but I think you truly needed to be a film buff as all the movie references and jokes were going completely over mine and John's heads!

You can see in the left hand corner of this photo where John and I signed the tribute shrine. The photographs which I took with my mobile were very blurry so these photos are from facebook page of the event.

After we left the Troxy we headed to Soho and met with some friends and spent the night at Madame JoJo's which was awesome! They played swing all night and there was a dance off between some incredible dancers.

Johor Bahru

2010-07-27T19:51:00.016+01:00

About a week in to the trip Thava and I took a coach down to Johor where one of his good friends who studies medicine very kindly picked us up, took us for lunch and skivvied us around a bit. We ate at a shopping centre the name of which I can't remember and as I'm currently undergoing a cake obsession they took me to a place called Secret Recipe which I was dubious about at first as chains rarely have as good food as boutique restaurants but the cake was in fact incredible. It didnt look as pretty as other cakes but it tasted delicious.

Anyway after eating as we were walking through the shopping centre we came accross this massive platform with a crowd around it and it turned out to be the national spelling bee competition of Malaysia which was being televised!!! Yet again being the pathetic photo taker that I was I didnt have my camera on me :( Some of the kids could spell words that I didn't even know (such as one little boy who knew stagflation) and it was a bit embarrassing when Thava and his friend were joking that I should be a judge there seeing as I was English and in reality I was being outspelled by 12 year old Malaysian children..

As it was turning night fall we visited a glass temple. It's the only one in the world and quite a sight! The entire interior and exterior with the exception of the floor was lined with mirror making it sparkle intensely. The only problem was that it was fairly obvious that it had been geared up for tourists as despite being a Hindu temple they had some fairly cheap looking statues of Jesus and Buddha and signs saying that it was RM3 to take photos. Nevertheless I'm very glad we visited it.

Afterwards we went to this area by the sea where there were many bars and carnival rides. And it was very clearly the dating spot of the area because everywhere you looked there were couples snuggling up together and having little romantic dates. It was a very cute place. We went and had some ice-cream-esque things, I think one was called cendol or something along those lines and was made of a huge concoction of things with crushed ice and the other, which doesnt sound very appetising but actually was great, was made of coconut milk with beans in it!

Time to grow up

2010-07-27T19:00:00.008+01:00

We stayed in Pangkor for only two nights and three days after which we went to where Thava lives which is a suburb of KL called Subang Jaya. To be perfectly honest that was pretty boring although there were some fun nights, we went out for a drink in this place called AC (which stands for Asian Cuisine I think) which was really fun. It stays open all night and is a massive outdoor food court populated only by young locals, no tourists. I tried my first 'REAL' satay there which was delicious. What I had no idea about previously was that satay is a Malay dish and those chicken satay skewers that we get in England in every chinese takeaway are absolutely NOTHING like the real deal! And the real deal is very, very goood!

Later we went to visit his pilot cousin's condo which has to be the ultimate bachelor pad, second floor from the top, absolutely massive and decorated in that uber minimalist style which guys seem to love (personally i find it lacking in soul) and everything from the furniture, walls, floors, cutlery, EVERYTHING was black and white. There was not one single piece of colour in any room or in any drawer of the house excpet for his cousin's clothes (i checked!!). His building had private access to a sauna, three amazing swimming pools, function rooms, gym, you name it and he was only 22! He'd paid for it all with his job as a pilot and was seriously living the dream already while I am only a year younger and up to my eyeballs in student debt meandering my way through a degree I know nothing about towards a future I can't decide upon! Visiting his flat (not to mention seeing his massive expensive car) was definitely a wake up call that life is not in the future when I grow up, I'm grown up already and its here right now and I'm not achieving yet.

With my list of books I intended to read over the summer I gave myself one silly girly book to read so that is the one I chose to read first: 'I Heart New York', a book which came free with Glamour, very sophisticated :P! Anyway despite being utter tripe it's about a girl who is trying to sort her life together and truly live (she decided to up and move to New York to do this and coincidentally achieves success through writing a blog) so although this may be the crappiest source to gain inspiration from it is none the less working and I'm now intent upon setting my life on course. Time to grow up indeed..

Pangkor

2010-07-27T18:58:00.010+01:00

As I only had two weeks to experience two countries the amount of places I could visit were fairly limited but the places we did manage to see were perfect. The second day Thava and I drove to Pangkor this incredible island off the coast of Malaysia. He had booked us a really nice hotel (The Pangkor Island Beach Resort) which had a private beach so only hotel guests (who were few) could access the beach. It was exactly like the cliche, the sand was white the sea was clear blue and even if you stood fully submerged you could still see your feet, the water was crystal clear! I would love to stay at Pangkor Laut which is an entire private island where they don't even allow jet skis so as not to pollute the water in any way and looks utterly beautiful but..its also one of the most expensive and exclusive spa resorts in the world. Perhaps one day I will be able to afford it...perhaps.

Thava rented a scooter and I hopped on the back and we went round the island looking at the fishing villages and the temples. Pangkor is really under-developed but very beautiful. There were stray dogs everywhere but unlike in other countries I've been to where this is the case such as Morrocco and Oman the dogs looked really healthy and happy, you could just see the grin on the faces as they chilled by the road side or ran after scooters. They looked far happier than any domestic dog I've ever seen so it was nice to watch them free and at play.

The Madness that is hotels in Kuala Lumpur

2010-07-26T18:49:00.013+01:00

After Subang I spent one night alone in KL as Thava had to go home for a night and I stayed in a very swish hotel called the Renaissance which cost a bomb.
And this is where I enter into a justified rant about the utter madness that is hotels in Malaysia. I simply do not understand the way they are run! As it was a last minute adjustment that meant I would be spending a night alone we had not booked a hotel in advance so we (Thava, his pilot cousin and myself) drove into KL with the plan of dropping into a hotel and booking a room. Thava's cousin being a pilot had discounts in all the nicest hotels so we began there with the 4*s and he would go in and amazingly each hotel would be fully booked! We thought wow that's incredible how busy Kl must be and after about the 9th hotel it started to get just a tad ridiculous. So eventually I decide to give it a shot and i asked the woman at the concierge if there were any vacancies she gave a predicted no but i then asked her to call and see if any other hotels in the vicinity had any rooms available and voila yes they did.

The exact same hotels which Thava's cousin had just walked into and been told were fully booked! So i booked the room, arrived at the hotel (The Renaissance) and Thava's cousin asked the concierge

Pilot cousin: 'why do you have a room for her while you told me that the hotel is fully booked?',

Bitch receptionist with a glare: 'we are fully booked sir' (then addressing me) 'would you like a room in smoking or non-smoking?'

Well if I have the option of a smoking or non-smoking floor they're definitely not fully booked! What the fuck is up with that? I thought the idea behind hotels was to get people to stay there or is that not it? :s

And this problem with hotels continued the entire trip, if I walked in the only rooms available were the presidential suite or the executive suite, all double rooms were apparently fully booked. If Thava came in then he'd be informed that there were no rooms available at all. Crazy crazy crazy...

Malaysia Travels- Day One

2010-07-26T18:36:00.006+01:00

Well two days ago I got back from my travels in Malaysia and Singapore and in just two weeks there I really managed to gain some incredible experiences which I will remember for the rest of my life!

I am so gutted that I didn't have a camera with me on the first night because it was so amazing! Thava took me out to eat at a restaurant where I had my favourite meal in the world maggi goreng. Now apparently people in Malaysia view this as fast food along the same standard as we view a burger here but its brilliant!! It's gourmet to me! Anyway we get seated outside and while im tucking into my maggi goreng served on a banana leaf directly across the street from me is a film set and this Tamil superstar (i think his name was Vijay-never heard of him but he's a huge deal in the Tamil film industry!) is filming his latest movie right in front of us!

It was so surreal to be able to have dinner and watch a film set I just wish I had a photo of it!!! Afterwards we went for a drink in this faux Spanish bar which failed miserably at producing cocktails but it was still such a good night and the hotel we stayed at was lovely with a view of KL and a big flat screen tv. Perfection!

Drunken text messages

2010-07-11T10:00:00.009+01:00

..I mg7s t.T:-Dt.Tu pn mtag

I mg$ s t:_)u po much.!

Baby i mich v so mulchii..,

I massu! .tlk

I love u' hyg u not cowshng my call? U optu a sleepibm

I wann to tv ted u:_):) widge are u

These are just some of the epic drunken text messages Thava has sent me over the last year. They make me giggle everytime i see them! I think some are incomprehensible drunken interpretations of i miss you but with the others your guess is as good as mine! LOL!

I HAVE NOT FAILED

2010-07-08T19:30:00.006+01:00

In fact.. somehow... NOBODY KNOWS HOW.. i have a 2.1! it is a 2.1 holding on by the skin of its teeth as I got a 60 but nevertheless it is a 2.1 and I am very happy!! so no failing for me and I get to go on Erasmus YAY! (now I have a massive Seville wardrobe calamity to think about)

Party in the Woods arrives at last!

2010-07-08T18:42:00.011+01:00

Here are some pictures of the pretty people that came. These photos are from Karina's camera so they are mostly of her and Natha cam-whoring (the guys were clearly not photogenic enough to warrant their picture taking attention)

Preparation

2010-07-08T17:24:00.013+01:00

Goodbye Leamington!

2010-06-29T14:29:00.010+01:00

Party in the Woods

2010-06-28T12:29:00.005+01:00

I'm going to be having a joint birthday party with my very good friend John Martinez in less than a week! nay, in 5 days!!! wow I have some serious planning to do!
My birthday is actually in September, but, if all goes well I will be in Spain then, and if I fail, well it gets colder then and I want to party outside so meh. If the Queen can celebrate her birthday in June then I can too!

Anyway, the idea is Party in the Woods seeing as we will be having the party at my house where I have a pretty large garden. Then, when the weather chills off, we are converting what used to be a long chicken run into a sort of garage party, with sheets from the ceiling, duvets on the floor, cushions, fairy lights etc and give it a sort of arabian tent feel. Very exciting! I'm so glad that my results don't come out until after the party or I don't think that my family would be so keen on the idea..

Packing

2010-06-27T05:58:00.001+01:00

I have 5 hours and counting to pack up an entire year's worth of memories and go back to Kent. It's such a strange feeling when you leave a place and you look back at an empty room which used to be filled with so many of your things and which was the setting for so many scenarios. I'm currently gutting my room, posters are off the walls, clothes are in bags and I'm trying to organise the remainder of my cosmetics and various paraphernalia. It's made me think of just how much we use furniture and objects to express ourselves. In the space of a few hours my room has gone from being my world for the last 9 months to four walls and a bad carpet. It's a strange thought that I will never set foot here again..

BUT the worst part is that I'm going to have to wave goodbye to my globe drinks cabinet!!! Despite being seventies crap its awesomeness is just beyond measure.. It appeared randomly in my garage last summer, nobody in the family can work out who it might have belonged to but I fell in love with it at first sight and convinced my mum to let me take it to uni with me. unfortunately now i have accumulated so much stuff over this last year that there is no room for my dear drinks cabinet to make the journey back to Kent with me! Poor trusty holder of my alcohol it is with greatest regret that I leave you behind.. we've had some good times together, farewell!

Secret Cinema

2010-06-26T17:53:00.002+01:00

Last Sunday, on the 20th June I went for the first time to a Secret Cinema showing in London and it was a-mazing! Of course, I had conveniently planned this trip for two days before my Language for Historians exams which was very sensible of me, particularly when I missed both the last trains to Leamington and Coventry and was forced to take a coach back to Warwick at 3 am.. fun times!

[Source]

But, aside from my scheduling blunders, the event was almost worth failing university for! It was incredible. Upon arriving at Canary Wharf we were ushered into coaches with the curtains closed so we couldn't see where we were going by bizarrely dressed actors and taken to a nearby abandoned warehouse where the entire set of the mystery film (which turned out to be Bladerunner) was presented to us. There were snakes, tarantulas, dancing girls on podiums, food stalls, cyber dog clothing stalls, bars, amazing music and punch-ups in wrecked cars. I will most certainly be going to the next Secret Cinema event! The ideas behind it are original and quirky but the funding is large (Coca-cola and Windows Phone) so they truly deliver a spectacular show!

I'll upload the videos I took there soon, until then here is a link to the BBC coverage of the night:

The Inbetween.. and hairdressers!

2010-06-26T17:24:00.002+01:00

Until I have failed for certain, I'm in a sort of limbo land or inbetween world where I cannot plan ahead for either path my life may take.. It's actually quite a nice place to be because I am completely alleviated of reality and the chores and worries that it brings until confirmation is brought to me!

So, enjoying the freedom, I had a very frivolous day: shopping at the Parade in Leamington, lunch at the Corleone Cafe (one place I will certianly miss, listening to the Godfather theme tune while eating crepes is a great experience!), had my hair cut in Saks and am about to head off to a barbecue.

The search for a good hairdresser is something I have been undertaking for many years and although I have come across some who are satisfactory and do as instructed (as opposed to ignoring their clients and snipping at will grrr) that dream hairdresser has still eluded me!

Saks I think is a good compromise between quality and price but i dream of Philip Kingsley! Gwyneth Paltrow is a regular and very contented client of his. But, of course, an appointment with him would be well out of my price range :(
(Here is a moment when the divergent paths my life may take are most apparent, I pass this year and succeed in obtaining a degree then I can have Philip Kingsley cut my hair as often as I like; I fail and I'll be struggling to pay for Saks) ah well.. c'est la vie!

Philip Kingsley Clinic
54 Green Street
Mayfair, London W1K 6RU
+020 7629 4004
http://www.philipkingsley.com/

Can you truly be a failure?

2010-06-26T06:58:00.001+01:00

I just looked on google for any nice failure quotes and there was a lot of junk about you're only a success if you've failed (untrue! There are several areas in life where once you've failed there are no second chances and a whole path of life has been sealed from you) but I quite liked these two:

No man is a failure who is enjoying life. ~William Feather

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. ~Robert Louis Stevenson

I suppose it is true to an extent that you are the only person to judge yourself as a failure and as long as you are happy with your life (isn't that the ultimate goal?) then you can't be a failure. But really that's only true in your own eyes and as far as the wider world is concerned you're still a bum no matter how large the grin on your face!

Potential Failure, bye bye Warwick?

2010-06-26T06:37:00.001+01:00

Well I don't have exact confirmation yet, but, considering the complete lack of work I have put in at uni this year, I am pretty certain I have failed my second year! I walked into those exams attempting to answer historiographical debates with general knowledge (of which I do not possess much that is not of a celebrity gossip nature!) Now if this does happen and I get my expected 2% what am I going to do then??? I'm supposed to be spending a year in Seville for Erasmus starting September, maybe I'll just change the address for my results, tell everyone that I've passed and just move to Spain and work things out there.. it could work.. maybe? Might even be quite exciting!