I love…

• Fridays
• Nursery rhymes
• Tea dresses
• Invitations
• A-line skirts
• Tennis
• Sunshine
• Camping
• Living the good life
• Leaving the country
• Smiles
• The river
• Hugs
• You

Careers

There must be something in the air, but almost everyone I speak to is either questioning what they are doing for a job, or they are questioning what they are going to do.

I fall into the latter category; I’m just entering into my final year at university and graduate jobs are already opening – it’s  ridiculously competitive I’ll be up against people that have literally breezed through university with firsts for every year. Needless to say, I’m not one of them. But, I love to learn, I love to find more out about my surroundings, to ask questions and enquire and I love to impart my knowledge and learn with other people.

One of my ideal jobs, I think, is teaching. Not because I have all the answers, I really don’t – but because I understand somebody’s passion to learn. I know how frustrated people get when it doesn’t transfer into results, but I would love to help keep their passion for learning. Ironically (as a maybe future teacher) I don’t think it’s all about the grades. Yes, I realised they’re important, but more important are the life experiences that gently shape a person into becomming who they are.

If I do get into teaching I hope that I have enough experiences outside the classroom to make a difference inside it. In my opinion, some of the best people to capture a classes attention are those who have real life to draw on, a wealth of experience outside the classroom. And I think I’m lucky enough, through various things like youth work, kayaking, DofE and rugby, to have some of those experiences.

I suppose it also means, if I don’t get into teaching there’s still a lot more I can do with my life that I’ll enjoy.

The image is from Public School.

My new life begins in two hours…

In two hours applications open for one of the graduate jobs I want.

This is scary for a few reasons, the main one being that I am still a year away from completing my degree. Yes, a year.

But… if I get it, at least it reduces the pressure in my final year. And also it’s for teaching, which I’ve been in love with ever since I used to play schools with my sister/ cousins.

As important as graduation

(Picture of brooch and badge via)

Tomorrow is a big deal for my family.  My younger sister is getting her Gold DofE presented to her at St James Palace and somehow the whole family is going (not that she knows that yet), which is amazing because, apart from the crazily tight guest list, getting your Gold DofE is the equivalent of getting a 1:1 when you graduate university.

She’s also managed to get her DofE leader invited -  there is always a chance for someone who has been important in your DofE journey to come up to the Palace as well. Tomorrow you will be hard pushed to find a prouder party of four in all of London.

There’s a lot more to be written about DofE at a later date, but right now I’m stoked to see my little sister at St James Palace getting her Gold DofE because she has worked so hard for it and completely deserves it.

100 foods to try before you die

I love trying new food and cooking so I thought I’d to the ‘100 foods to try before you die’ list as seen on Vasta’s tumbleblog. I wanted to highlight what I need to start eating (and cooking). My most recent culinary advetnures have included black pudding, fresh cray fish and crab when I went out for a birthday meal at the Beetle and Wedge in Moulsford.

Without further ado, here is my list – the ones I’ve eaten in bold for skimming ease.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (yes, and infact, I’ve made my own. It was my DofE skill for Gold; I almost perfected Blackberry wine)
19. Steamed pork buns (when I came back from China these were the first ‘real’ chinese food I cooked)
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries (the best pancakes I have ever made were in Quetico Park, Canada, where we forraged blueberries to add to a packet batter mix and a packed maple syrup mix – this was day 13 of 14 with no food drops)
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O shot
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Single malt whisky (my grandad aka POG, got me tasting whisky at the tender age of 8.)
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (I wimped out of trying these when I was at the food stalls in China… maybe next time)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (it’s on my list of things to do, namely the Fat Duck at Bray…. heaven)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (I might have eaten horse on one of my many “I don’t speak the language but it’s cheap” moments. Who knows)
90. Criollo
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
100. Snake

It looks like I’ve eaten 58 things on this list (maybe 59 – I’m rubbish at counting things on a screen). I had to look some of the things up because I had never heard of the name; normally because I’m ordering them in a foreign restaurant because I enjoy ordering when I don’t know what I’m getting.

I think that I would also include: roast chicken, dim sum, stilton and a toasted cheese sandwhich. How about you? What do you think is missing from the list?

Things I like (not comic sans)

• sunshine
• circles
• love hearts
• the fingers of guitar players
• hope
• the absence of colour

I really really don’t like Comic Sans. I used to, but that love affair is long over. I don’t know why, but me and comic sans, we have a thing going on. In fact, I can’t even take emails seriously when they’re written in comic sans. It offends my eyes a little bit.  If this font were a women, it would be the one we go back to out of routine, her bed smells of stale cigarettes and you know that you’re not the only one who does this. She laughs at you and mocks you, because she holds this elusive power over you. Hate or love. 

I can’t write in comic sans, it gives me brain ache.

I once got a letter from an organisation, it was written in comic sans. I couldn’t take it seriously, and it was telling me some serious stuff. If you want a clean, easy to read font why not use Arial. Arial answers prayers.  If the devil could write in a font, I think he would choose comic sans because it looks all naive and innocent, and almost fun – but it’s not. It ruins the words that are written.

I’m not sure I should feel so strongly about a font…. but I do. Is that wrong?

What is beautiful? #6

I’ve been a bit quiet on this blog recently. The main reason is that I’ve been busy recently, and have been prioritising my other blog other this one. But I’m still around, and can be found on twitter too.

I found this on Flickr, and it’s rekindled a love affair for type writers, which in my mind, make my poetry better and lull me to sleep with the sound of fingers typing.

(via) check out more of Eric’s work, I think it’s beautiful and amazing. I want to drink tea and just look at it.

On exploding doorstops and bomb detonators

When I was two, I tried to blow up my aunty’s house.

I had gone to play at my aunty’s house with my cousins and her daughter. There was four of us, all girls, running about and playing in an indoor Wendy house. Have you ever seen a Wendy house? They’re little canvas houses that you can put up in the garden and pretend to live in. Similar to tee-pees, but for girls. And this Wendy house was inside, it was a tiny children’s house inside a humongous house for adults. And it kept us out of mischief, and allowed our heavily pregnant mothers (about 8 months) time to sit down and have a cup of tea.

….. (this bit here, this is called suspense).

All of a sudden they heard a loud bang. And then silence.

With four girls under the age of four silence isn’t common, so they came in to see what had happened and were met by destruction. The living room was black, the Wendy house ruined, and I was standing there at the scene of the crime.

But it was ok, neither mother went into stress induced labour. Panic over?

In my wisdom of a toddler I decided to pick up the doorstop that was holding the door open, and apparently it was heavier than I was expecting because I dropped it. And then it exploded. Exploding door stops aren’t quite the novelty item you think they could be.

It turned out that the doorstop was a detonator from a First World War bomb, which was still live and no-one had realised… or maybe they had realised and thought this would be a great game… I’m fairly sure it wasn’t that one though.

My Aunty realised that she had another one of these doorstops/ detonators in the house and obviously fearing this would happen again she called the police who dispatched the bomb disposal team. Imagine, a house in suburbia with a bomb disposal team outside it! They had to close off the entire road, so roll on a few hours later when my Uncle was trying to get home from work. First he see’s the road is closed, and then he see’s that the bomb disposal unit is outside his house. Outside his house with his pregnant wife and young daughter inside. If he was pregnant, he would have been going into premature labour right about then.

Luckily everything was fine, the other detonator was ‘dealt with’ (I think they mean a controlled explosion here. Not sure why they needed a whole team for this, they could have given it to an errant toddler again), and the house was fixed. We never did have an inside Wendy house again, and for some strange reason, my younger sister hated loud noises until she was five or six (all older sisters need to inflict some psychological damage, and that was mine. I like to think I was caring to get it out of the way so quickly. I think it’s ironic, how I wasn’t harmed in the slightest even though it exploded in front of me, buy my sister, who was waaaaay out of harms way was.)

love can hurt

(via) Sometimes love, being loved and loving others, can really hurt. Most of the time it’s great though.

So I’ll wait until it’s great again. And just be reassured, that feeling strong things actually is part of the loving process.

Menu for Mothering Sunday

My sister and I have decided that instead of buying a casserole dish or flowers to show our mum how much she means to us, we will invite some of our family over and cook for them.  We’ve decided that this won’t be any old Sunday lunch, this will be a Sunday lunch of epic proportions, or, almost epic proportions. And to mark the occassion I am off to buy some beautiful stationery tonight to write invitations and the menu on.

And the menu is as follows:

Starter: Butternut squash ravioli and pesto

Main: Herbed rack of Dorset Lamb on a bed of potato gratin. Served with seasonal vegetables, gravy and onion sauce.

Desert: Rhubarb fool with amoretti biscuits

The best thing, is that it’s all homemade (with the exception of the amoretti biscuits). Oh, and we’re also baking our (almost famous) lemon drizzle cake, and decorating it in fresh flowers; it seems you can cover the flowers in sugar water and they look yum… we might even use edible flowers.