A quick title.

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anais nin, day journal, hedgehog, inspiration, life, quote, strange idea, titles, tutor, writing, writing style

Thanks to WordPress i have now managed to find an explanation for this quite strange post i am about to write. Those little quotes they give you after each post, along with details on how many posts you have written have given me the words to explain the strange idea that has been swimming about in my head for a few weeks but that i couldn’t seem to find a way to voice.

“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living” Anais Nin

Over the past few weeks whilst i worked, whilst i shopped, chatted with friends, cleaned the poop of my adorable hedgehog’s wheel i have come up with many little ideas for posts and titles for those posts. As you can tell i have a neat little habit of all my posts being “A quick…” so this gives me quite a bit to ponder over whenever the inspiration to put down one of my ideas becomes concrete. What on earth am i going to call this one?

So instead of pondering this over by myself i thought i would write down a few of those titles which i have thought of “in the midst of living” and leave to you to ponder what they may have been about. Because to be honest i cannot remember what half of them were really going to be and i am ashamed to admit that my creative writing tutor’s annoying obsession with keeping a Day Journal now does not seem so stupid…

A quick scout around.

A quick clean up.

A quick rant about the youth today.

A quick bit of advice concerning drunken texting.

A quick thought on butter.

A quick download.

A quick thought on loss.

A quick quote from Harriet Walker.

A quick plug.

A quick pluck.

A quick question concerning frames.

A quick coffee alone.

A quick change of mind.

And so on and so on… Now i am of to be me a day journal!

A quick bit of post.

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Coffee Shops, Cup of Tea, daytime tv, Dr Quinn, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, jeremy kyle, Parcels, Pjs, post, Postman

I honestly believe the most exciting thing about staying home all day is the possibility of what the postman might bring today!

Now i know that is a bold claim to make what with the astounding brilliance that is day time TV – i mean seriously Jeremy Kyle? Dr Quinn Medicine Woman? where would we be without these gems.

My claim also ignores the fact that staying home allows you to simply wear the most comfortable clothes on earth fluffy pyjamas and walk around with a quilt wrapped around you – even in the summer.

Oh but that is also ignoring how being in the house all day mid week means a million cups of tea made by yourself this is true, but at least you know that they will be just right! And yes this may mean copious amounts of washing up and tea stained kitchen sides but at least you arent being charged some ridiculous amount in a darkened coffee shop to get it in a pretentious mug covered in caramel goop.

But anyway back to my claim, post is the best part of the day. It could just be a letter from said darkened coffee shop with free samples, or a letter from some long lost relative who has decided you shall be the heir to their million pound fortune (i wish). Or in my case a long awaited parcel from Amazon. Yes, you heard me right a parcel from Amazon. What is that? Oh its a knock at the door! I can almost taste the excitement in the air as i run and fight the two idiots who try to beat me to the door (the idiots being my over excited german shepherds) but no! This is MY parcel i can feel it.

And YES!!!!

I knew i loved you Mr Postman.

Now excuse me whilst i immerse myself in the world of George R.R. Martin.

A quick explanation.

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bookworm, commitment, hedgehog, reading, single

After what seems like forever i have finally returned to my long quiet blog to give a quick apology and try to make a small explanation. I know it has been such a long time since i have posted and i will hopefully be better at keeping up with this in the future.

But for now i would like to say that i have been going through an… interesting… few months which havent been the best time of my life but hey it wouldnt be life if it was all smiles and bunny rabbits?

So i return to you now as the quickly aging single girl who reads way too much and pretends that the future is eons away and not knocking frantically on my door screaming at me to let them in.

As a testament to this i have begun to read more books than i even managed at university in the hopes of escaping into someone else’s world and have included a new little man into my world. My pet hedgehog Brian!!!! He is my three month old little ball of grumpy spikes who snores when he falls asleep on my chest and eats scrambled egg like it was his last meal.

So here is a picture of my little cutie and an almost solemn promise to be much more committed to this blog in future!

A quick homage.

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adventures, australia, brother, fosters, jack sparrow, jealousy, kangaroo, life, rum, travelling, University

I am ridiculously jealous of my baby brother. And i know when i say baby brother it sounds like a little bouncing bundle of puke and poop that women seem to coo over for some random reason; but my little brother is actually 19 years old, six foot odd tall, a rugby player, a bit of a slag and obviously someone im jealous of. Now i could be jealous because he got the perfectly curled blonde hair and good looks of the family where i got the short, fat arse and flat as pancake mousy brown hair genes. But no those are not the reasons i am jealous, the reason i am jealous is because he is 3 years younger than me and seems to have a life so fun, so adventurous and so sorted that it actually makes me sick with envy whenever i think about it.

He is currently oh so very far away in the land of fosters, cork hats and kangaroos living his dream of travelling for three years before he comes home and has to be a grown up. Even now, when he is doing his allotted farm work for the aussies he still looks like his life is far more sorted than mine.

He spends his days drinking, adventuring and meeting new people – i often imagine him having Jack Sparrow type adventures only with fosters and a cork hat rather than rum and a pirate’s hat. I know this probably seems a very odd image but just think about it, sat wherever you are right now doing whatever you are doing; imagine this annoyingly tanned lancashire lad sat on a beautifully sunny australian beach somewhere having a bbq and drinking enough beer to make even chasing a kangaroo look like an interesting way to spend the night. Aren’t you jealous? And if you aren’t you are probably lying.

Like most of my fellow school mates i worked my butt of in crappy part time jobs saving the pennies for university, and i thoroughly enjoyed my three years of poverty drinking and deadlines. But now that its all over, now i have come out the other end with a relatively decent degree, and im back home in the cold and rain and perpetual boredom that is my home town; my university experience is starting to feel like it was all one big con. Where is my fantastic career that i can easily walk straight into? My weekends off at the pub with my grown up friends? Or my house with the expensive duvet set and a dog that insists on covering it in mud?

In short I am jealous of my baby brother. Yes he is young and he is living his dream, much like i thought i was doing at university. But at the end of those three years he will come home to wonderful memories, work experience, friends from around the world and the confidence in himself as he did exactly as he always wanted. Whilst i sit at home knocking back the vodka trawling the online job sites and whining down the phone to my friends who are in the same situation about where the hell did it all go wrong?

Even here he looks like he is having more fun =(

A quick point of fact.

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actions, eitiquette, keeping up appearances, manners, modern society, old fashioned manners, pen pals, people

As a child with a large family – so large indeed that even at 22 i am still unaware of how many people i am actually closely related to – my mother introduced me to writing letters and collecting pen pals in order to keep in touch with distant relatives and probably other educational benefits such as keeping me out of her hair for a few hours a week. However, as she would attest to, this didnt always work, whilst i am a great lover of the written word and strangely enjoy sitting down to write (or these days type) out a letter designed for that distant friend and relative who i miss greatly. I am pretty rubbish at it.

Now don’t get me wrong i can witter for England and do find the most minute facts of other people’s lives fascinating and love it when i have a letter all for me that isnt a scary bill or a credit card company trying to make me believe i need MORE borrowed money. But i am pretty rubbish at the whole social etiquette of being a pen pal – which also translates into this blog and my long suffering readers will realise this – as much as i love to write away my hours i can very rarely make myself actually sit down and commit to a certain amount of time a week to do it. Instead i tend to write in fits and over smaller concentrated periods of time rather than a blog or letter a week i will probably do two or three in a few days then nothing for months.

With this little shortcoming of mine i am fully aware i probably drive many people crazy and greatly frustrate them whilst they wait for some communication from me, but i think in the grand scheme of things my fault isnt that bad. I say this because in my current workplace i am a customer service person, so much fun, but it means i get to spend all day observing people and their habits and the way they treat other people and i have to say i find it thoroughly depressing.

 

 

Now i am not naive enough to say that periods of time where eitiquette ruled society were much better places than modern society but i have to say i miss the day where i could talk to twenty/thirty people a day and at least half of them were polite and even pleasant. As it is i spend much of my time imitating Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances telling people to speak up, tutting at men who insist on talking to me with their hands down their trousers and getting angry and middle  aged men and women who think that i am something they have trodden in and not another human being who deserves to be treated politely.

This lack of social etiquette in modern day life i know is one which is much debated in the terms of the responsibility and actions of the youth in such events as the recent riots and hate crimes. But i for one do not blame only young people alone, in my work i often receive abuse from young people but more often than not the people who are the most impolite and the most difficult to deal with are adults who should know better. They ignore you, talk over you, belittle you, refuse to even look at you whilst you are trying to assist them and many other things which i find very difficult to understand when they are the ones setting the example and teaching the younger generations how to behave in such social situations.

I am not saying that every single person i come into contact with are impolite and rude; i understand that many people have very stressful lives which often come out in the way they deal with strangers and people working in their local supermarket, restaurant and even pass on the street. However, i challenge you to evaluate your own behaviour and see whether or not you have been as polite as you could to that grouchy looking girl at the checkout – maybe she was just fed up of people ignoring her all day – or whether you were indeed rude in your short answers and sighing as you wait to be served?

A quick test.

Tags

codes, confusion, identity theft, pin numbers

How many numbers do you think are lodged in your brain? Whilst at work today i stood for five minutes putting in the code to get through the staff door, getting rather annoyed because it was wasting my break time, that was until i realised – they changed the bloody code the other week and i’m still putting in the old one. With this in mind it made me wonder just how many codes, pins, passwords and usernames i have to remember just to be able to cope with daily life.

So i tried to remember as many different codes, pins, passwords and usernames as i could; and even the list of how many i could remember became another number that messed with my head! From the door alarm code, to my clocking in number, to the pin numbers for my debit cards, my boyfriend’s and my parent’s, numerous phone numbers and so many online accounts with passwords and usernames that i totally lost count. It made me wonder why so many numbers were necessary in my daily life.

Of course in this modern world technology and banking are places where the bad guys can easily pretend to be me and go spend way too many pennies on freddos or post on twitter that i like to pretend to be a chicken in my spare time. Who knows what else they could do that my innocent little mind could not think off?! With this thought, i do understand that all these numbers are in place to protect my few pennies and to stop people from pretending to be me. But in the words of Drew Barrymore’s character ‘Mary’ in He’s just not that into you – “I miss the days when you had one phone number and one answering machine”

And i have to agree with her, i do miss the time in my life where it didn’t take me an hour to do the most simplest of tasks just because i have forgotten the appropriate pin number to do it with. So on a final note, just how many numbers, passwords and usernames do you have to remember for everyday life? And does it drive you crazy too?

Right now im off to find the stupid logging in machines so i can remember the codes  to use them so i can log on to my internet banking…

A quick planning session.

Tags

organised chaos, planning, projects, writing

Having survived three years at university, two years at college and what felt like a lifetime at highschool i, like most people, have developed a way to ready myself for any major essay or project.

And it drives my mother crazy.

Although i someday dream of owning my own house with a little room where i can fill three walls with books and the fourth with a giant desk which i can arrange in whatever insane fashion i prefer. For now im stuck at home having to use my bed as my little work environment. And here is where the problems with my mother begin.

I begin by placing my laptop smack bang in the middle, and then surrounding myself with whatever relevant papers, books, notepads, diaries or any other scrap piece of paper i feel will be necessary to complete my task. Alongside this wide array  of paper and books i also make sure i have the necessary provisions such as snacks, drinks and magazines in case i lose interest in my project. Then just to make sure i am fully ready to begin my work i scatter a few random things around such as the things that surround me now – my kindle, my hairbrush, the tv remote (even though it is turned of at the plug), my handbag as well as a blanket so i don’t get chilly.

So now i am sure you can imagine the chaos that surrounds me, and yet this is what i need to be able to make my mental juices flow. To be able to fully concentrate on what i am writing or researching i need my own little brand of organised chaos. Even though it will forever cause disagreements with my mother, room-mates or future husbands.

Now i wonder, what little arrangement do you need to help you concentrate on your projects?? Or am i the only little loony who needs a complete mess to help her concentrate.

A quick complaint.

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accents, chorley, discrimination, lancashire, leyland, london, pride, queens english, yorkshire

I do NOT have a broad lancashire accent.

For all those who might think this is a bit of a daft personal rant rather than an interesting blog post, hear me out. Everyone from every part of the world has an accent – it is unavoidable. There are high pitched ones, slow ones, fast ones, squeaky ones, completely and unavoidably annoying ones, and there are posh ones. But no matter what your accent is i feel that you should be proud of it. It is part of you, your life and heritage; where you grew up, the people who raised and befriended you, the places you visited or moved. It is a part of person which will forever be with you, no matter how many elocution lessons you take.

However, what does drive me insane is the way that people use accents to belittle and mock those around them. Coming from a part of lancashire that has a wide variety of accents, from the very broad to the shockingly posh, i find it important that whilst we can jest and enjoy our differences; that they do not become rallying points with which people can cause hurt and discrimination.

In the town next to mine, the famous Chorley (forever immortalised by Peter Kay) most people have a very broad accent that can be both endearing and amusing to those of us who have friends and family from there. Even though the distance is not more than 15 miles at the most, the accents can be seen to be of such a great contrast that i have heard on more than one occasion my chorley friends calling my accent posh and my leyland friends calling them common. Such a small distance becomes a gap made huge by the differences in accents.

 

 

Anyway back to my point, after the years and years of people in television and the public eye being forced to use the Queens English in order to seem proper to appear before the general public, i think it is important that in these modern days we embrace our accents.

 

 

So in that light, i would like to say that – No i do not have a broad lancashire accent; i have an accent that encompasses my mother’s yorkshire influence, my step-father’s london background, my leyland upbringing, my many friends with thick  “chorley” accents and the suprising ability i seem to have in picking up random accents the longer i am around them. In short, my accent is NOT a broad lancashire accent, it is MY accent and i am proud of it and all its influences.

A quick greeting.

Tags

catching up, christmas, greetings, ideas, new year, notes

I would just like to say hello to one and all after the festive season my brain is now finally back up and running. I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year and are coping with the prolonged hangovers gracefully!

As for myself i had a lovely few days of over christmas and have pretty much worked every minute since, i am still waiting for a moment to transfer all my little random notes on my iphone, scraps of paper in my purse and in my day journal (which is always forgotten when i need to make a quick note of an idea) into fully fledged blog posts and i hope i will get the chance over my day off tomorrow.

Anyway just wanted to say “Hi!” and that i should be back in business shortly.

A quick story.

Tags

Adventure, musing, pens, silliness

For anyone who knows my family they will be able to easily believe this little story.

In my house, most, inanimate objects are attributed with names and personalities – and become very sad if you try to abandon them or leave them alone in the house. I can already hear the disbelief, an example of this is when I was in my early teens we went to Blackpool pleasure beach and my mum found a rubber frog toy on the road with nobody in sight, it would be simply impossible to leave him alone when it would be dark soon. That frog is now still sat in our family bathroom and regularly talked to by passing visitors.

As such it often makes me wonder about the story and lives of other objects in my house, like my favourite pen at the minute a simple Biro from a Blackpool institution – that may or may not have been accidentally acquired from someone else. This pen was lent to me by my beaver scout leader, and was innocently not returned (I’m so sorry) by accident of course. So already this pen has had several owners and traveled lancashire, has been rescued from my boyfriend trying to steal it for work and my mum trying to steal it to write Christmas cards. And I wonder where else this seemingly un-important little object will end up before it ends in a landfill, oh no sorry a recycling plant.

So next time you find yourself with a pen from god knows where, I hope you remember my little story and entertain yourself for a while imagining the life behind that wandering pen.

Just have to hope that it doesn’t have a similar life as this one told by Cult and Paste!