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On the existential crisis of the weekend

  Weekends used to be what life was for. Two days of freedom and relief from the weekday routine, from the grind of office life, from waking up with an alarm. The sweet, giddy euphoria of a Friday night was made all the more intoxicating if you had plans to socialise, go to a gig, watch a film, eat at your local Italian. Not only did you get your socialising/culture/food fix in, but you then had two more days of doing the very same thing. The weekend also offered endless pottering-around-the-house hours since usually it was a space you scarcely saw during the week. A Saturday started with a little light cleaning was one sure way to make you feel as if you were ahead in the productivity stakes, and made the Netflix binge that followed feel earned.   Friday night was balanced out by the cold sweats of Sunday evening but still, the weekend was always worth it, regardless of whether you didn’t move from the couch after Friday night work drinks, or because you p
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On my first trip abroad

  I took my first overseas trip when I was in year eleven. It was to Noum é a, New Caledonia and it almost didn’t happen. The trip’s purpose was to improve the French language skills of those of us insistent on studying French during our last two years of school, believing the subject a necessity for our futures when we would most certainly be in Paris living our best French lives being all Parisian and speaking fluent French and just being all chic in our Frenchness and you get the picture. The first step on this road to being so Frenchy so chic, was a week’s trip to this South Pacific island wherein we would live with the locals, have 3-hour French lessons each day and immerse ourselves in the otherworldness that comes with visiting a place far removed from that in which you live. But whether it was the 3-hour lessons or the 3-hour flight, not enough of my classmates put their hands up to make this trip a reality. Cue teenage woe-is-me angst, the shedding of many tears, threats
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On learning a new skill

So how many new skills have you mastered during this Covid-19? Are you fluent in Latin? French? Turkish? Is your personal brand lighting up Twitter/Instagram/Facebook as you sell the wellness candles you cooked up in the kitchen after you created an online festival but before finishing a new dress made from scraps around the house you can wear when you next meet a friend for ‘exercise’ with a keep cup full of ‘coffee’? Spoiler, it has wine inside. Thought so. But guess what. It seems that if you haven’t managed to generally improve yourself, and a substantial number of people online, during this dire time of unprecedented crappness, then apparently you’re doing it wrong. (Bonus points if said improvement was expressed in a language other than that with which you were born). Having missed this chance at enlightenment earlier in the Covid-19 mayhem, this week I decided to give it a go. To change up lockdown life for the better. I vowed that no longer would I spend my
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On Madonna’s True Blue

Like the rest of the virus-ridden world, my life adventures have become very, very small and very, very specific. Who knew there would be a time when we would simultaneously carry smartphones in our pockets that allowed us access to the world and to perform actions that seemed impossible only a few short decades ago, AND count down the minutes until it was time to visit the mail box. Yes, the humble mail box. (Junk mail now arrives into our home to delirious applause and whoops of joy.) Gone are those heady London days of riding on the top deck of a double-decker bus , or spending the day at Ascot or popping over to Bath . To distract myself from the apocalypse, I have eschewed the 1000-piece puzzle in favour of unpacking boxes from my childhood. A sort of time capsule exercise in reverse. It gives me a chance to remember a time when life was lived outside, when we could touch things and people with carefree abandon, and it helps me not count down the days, hours, minutes un
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On winning (but mostly losing) at Royal Ascot Ladies Day

A full English breakfast with a side of hash browns and two bottles of prosecco (shared between five others, promise). They do say begin as you mean to go on and this meal seemed the right pitch for my first ever visit to Royal Ascot.  Ascot! When we left the café, smugly happy with our mature decision to line our stomachs before our race day began, we joined the well-dressed throng headed to the racecourse entrance. We immediately diverged from those of a higher class, and joined the masses in the Village Enclosure. With a perfectly blue sky above and a blanket of glistening emerald grass below, the air crackled with expectation that memories were about to be made, memories that would last a lifetime. Taking in the surroundings, a plan was quickly established. Booze. Beth. Bets. The line for the bar was weirdly under control and it took no time at all for us to get our hands on a couple of bottles of rose (this would, of course, never be the case again
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On the return

Still not quite sure why I left Melbourne... It's been a long-time coming, but reader(s), I'm back! The best way I can sum up my six-month absence is... with a list. Because, deep down, we all know we would read a lot more if everything came in list form. So! Here we go: 1) At the start of this year, I went back home to Melbourne for six weeks 2) Said six weeks was filled with perfect: summer weather, food, booze, friends and family 3) Coming back to the UK post-Beast from the East was difficult 4) Coming back to the UK was made all the more difficult because I knew I had to get... a job 5) BUT I also returned to London to see not one, but TWO manuscripts that I had written published into physical books that I could hold (and NOT sleep with clutched in my hands) 6) I managed to figure out I wanted a job in a bookshop 7) I trawled through countless job websites looking for said job in a bookshop 8) Nando's was also hiring 9) I GOT A JOB IN A BOOKS
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On Christmas... and being M.I.A

For anyone familiar with London during December, you will know that once the temperature drops, and the light dims, the city takes on what I like to call the Christmas-Threw-Up-On-Me look. You can't wander down a high street, visit a park or shop without being assaulted by colourful lights, Mariah Carey's singing and mince pies. Also, drinking. Even if you aren't attached to an office and their Christmas festivities, you can find yourself caught up in their merriment just by being in the same pub, bar, or restaurant. It's a very real hazard. Which brings me to why my blog has been on the quiet side the last couple of weeks. The first very real excuse is that I have been toiling away at the library, eager to finish a draft of my manuscript before the festive season completely takes over (and when I will find myself in France which I canNOT wait for!). The second very real, though less worthy, excuse is that I have, yes, been caught up in the drunken merrimen
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