The Importance of Staying Sane

Hello there and welcome to my pretty mess of a blog.

I'm currently working in PR, but my passion is Journalism.

You'll find that I generally prefer the written word than pictures - I'm more appreciative of its brilliance.

One day, I hope to write a novel; an epic classic-type.

My loves are music, fashion and political issues.

I’m back…

…miss me?

Decided that finally…FINALLY (some may get The Rock reference)…I should start writing again. I mean, afterall, it’s been far too long.

Where have I been? Well, I have literally been too busy. I barely get any time to myself, never mind to plonk myself in front of a computer for an amount of time and pour out my feelings to you lovely creatures.

Anywho, I am going to make more of an effort now, since hopefully I won’t be having to get up so early and arrive back home so late soon.

Travelling to and from Preston everyday has been tiresome to say the least. Endless time seeing the same faces, places and dreary depressiveness that is (de)Preston has very much knocked my cheery attitude into touch. Do I love Bolton too much?

I’ve been working as an eCommerce Executive over the past few months, which has been both interesting and exciting, but unfortunately my time there is coming to an end in the not so distant future. 

It’s just the kick I need to get myself thinking about what I  want to do. I actually miss PR and Marketing. Copywriting, I guess, mostly. With so few jobs in Journalism, PR is the closest I could get to it. It’s a shame so many talented people I knew from Uni are subjected to an endless search for jobs. Me too, as it has turned out.

Anyway, enjoy my return as you see fit. Laugh with/at me, ignore me, whatevs. I’m back. That is all.

I really want to buy this book. ↘

faffbag:

astewoids:

I’m turning into Matt Bellamy.

help me

Dude that whole oil thing bores me. I like the whole HAARP and towers things, but the oil thing loses me cos it gets too political (what a thing for a Mod Studs student to say lmao)

Resolutions?

On a more personal note, I don’t usually do resolutions; I mean what’s the point? If you want to change, you should do it earlier rather than just wait for a new year to begin.

However, I will mark out PLANS for this year.

Last year was horrendous; the three closest people to me (mum, dad and boyfriend) were all in hospital with various illness and I myself spent my birthday in agony after having my teeth out. Fantastic.

Also, I lost my job which came quite unexpectedly despite previous warnings. Having just moved out, it’s made my living situation very difficult now and to come just before Christmas was really a crushing blow.

I am determined that this year all this will change. I will make it a good year. My determination wavered slightly after battering after battering, but now I am set on achieving goals I should have been doing anyway.

2011 will be the time I shine, it will be less dreadful and I will aim my focus on getting a better paid job, where I am appreciated and where I can fully shine. 

New Year…and all that

It’s 2011: the Year of the Rabbit (which, incidently, I was born in all those years back in 1987). Does this mean good luck is on the cards? Who knows…

What can we expect then from this year?

Well, we already know it’s going to be a tough one: cuts, cuts and more cuts will be announced and of course the dreaded VAT rise will come into force on 4th January. Oh, fantastic way to start the year.

Finance will be shot to the proverbial; we’ll have to save before we can buy and you can guarantee that the property market will take another fall. Sure enough, it’ll be another recession (if indeed we can actually claim to have got out of it) and of course unemployment is on the rise again, something which I myself have endured of recent.

2011 will be the year everyone will struggle with money.

Any good times ahead?

We do have the Royal wedding to look forward to and exciting new developments for journalists living in the North West: Media City. 

Metal heads and punks will rejoice with the return of System Of A Down and Blink 182.

You never know, good things could actually occur…or then, we could all be heading for a sad last full year on Earth (if we do indeed all die in 2012).

How depressing.

Booky wooks

Books

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9. His Dark Materials/The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

 66 On the Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell 

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Think I’ve read a few more than 6! Quite funny that the majority of which I’ve read are old tales - most read whilst in school, I must confess.

Returning to blogging

So, since this taster of unemployment may go on for longer than anticipated, I think it’s time to start up the old blogging again. You’ve missed me, right?

Well, it comes just in time for the biggest news of recent weeks - a Royal wedding.

Many people my age don’t have the slightest interest in the fact that William and Kate are getting married. Why should we anyway?

We weren’t around for the last big occasion, don’t really ‘get’ the need for a Queen and certainly couldn’t care less that some posh guy and his girlfriend will be walking up the aisle sometime next year.

How sad if this is your view.

Come on, we should be proud of our British heritage. There certainly is not enough of that these days and there certainly hasn’t been any good news for this country since the whole murky recession/election process began. We are in desperate need of something to cheer us up and this could be just the ticket.

If nothing else, think of it as potentially an extra day off work.

Now, who’s up for guessing what she’s going to wear and which celebrities will come?

What to do when you’re 23 and broke

Well, I seem to have neglected this blog for quite some time - shame on me!

Actually, I have been building up my skills as a journalist by becoming the Editor of a website www.supanet.com.

Unfortunately, my time within this role will soon come to an end due to the ‘economic climate’ etc etc etc…

Basically, I’m out of a job.

So, at 23, I now find myself in the situation I was in 18 months ago, except this time I have bills to pay and mouths to feed (well, mine and boyfriend’s).

With Christmas just around the corner, I find myself having to tighten those pesky purse strings, or zip it up so I can’t open it in my case, and look on every job/agency website going.

Hopefully, all this experience I’ve gained since Uni will help me to achieve at least something for the time being. Something, anything so that this winter won’t be a bleak one.

FREELANCE! people are crying out to me or AGENCY! my mother yells, all words which previously filled me with dread and sorrow.

But perhaps these are the paths one must take to success and further experience.

I envy those just going to University, where you think you’re just three years away from the perfect life. WRONG. It never happens. Why would you want it to? But it’s at times like these where you just, for a second, understand the sweet bitterness of naivety.

goshdarnit:

  Modea Paris Ready-to-Wear Spring/Summer 2011   Alexander McQueen  Spring 2011 marks Sarah Burton’s first season as creative director of Alexander McQueen after the designer’s recent passing in February. Burton has said before that she would bring a more feminine and tender quality to the designs, and the garments presented were certainly more softer than previous collections. With the play of silhouettes and textures, it is apparent that Burton is paying homage to the late designer with references to past seasons.  Models: Lindsey Wixson, Karlie Kloss and Jac. http://alexandermcqueen.com

goshdarnit:

Modea Paris Ready-to-Wear Spring/Summer 2011 
Alexander McQueen

Spring 2011 marks Sarah Burton’s first season as creative director of Alexander McQueen after the designer’s recent passing in February. Burton has said before that she would bring a more feminine and tender quality to the designs, and the garments presented were certainly more softer than previous collections. With the play of silhouettes and textures, it is apparent that Burton is paying homage to the late designer with references to past seasons.

Models: Lindsey Wixson, Karlie Kloss and Jac.

http://alexandermcqueen.com

Day 30 - Who are you?

Haven’t you guessed already?

Slightly weird, definately a complainer, damn good journalist (when I can be) and all round fun person.

Big headed?

Day 29 - In this past month, what have you learned

I’ve learned even more so the value of money.

Having to save for the next 8 weeks is going to be tough and I am about to endure being skint again - something which I haven’t had the displeasure of being since I was a student.

Sucks even more as it’s my birthday in October. Even less reason to turn 23.