Photo An Hour: Saturday 26th August 2017

I remembered Photo An Hour two months in a row - hooray! It's a rare occurrence for sure. Last year I missed it, but in August 2015 I was at my mum's for Photo An Hour with Thomas, who was playing in a football tournament and opening his birthday presents. 

This year? Sunshine, cat time, an afternoon jaunt to Rugby, and lots of food. Oh, and I had problems with both my camera memory card and my iPhone Photo Stream, which means that some of the pictures here aren't the ones that I Instagrammed. Oh well.

9.30am:

A slow start to the day. Missy very kindly allowed us a long lie-in before coming to ask for her breakfast.

10.30am:

After spending an hour cleaning the house, we rewarded ourselves with banana pancakes with lashings of the maple syrup my uncle brought us from Canada last month when he came for the wedding.

11.30am:

I've finished cleaning the bathroom; now it's time for a shower. 

12.30pm:

Obligatory Photo An Hour picture of my outfit. Today it's a thrifted midi skirt, Primark tee, Fuck The Tories necklace and my favourite Make Zines, Destroy Fascism tote bag, because I'm never subtle in my politics or my fashion.

2.30pm:
My photo for 1.30pm - some plants on a stall in Rugby market - has disappeared entirely. So onto 2.30pm, when we'd just bought a bargain Ercol chair and were browsing the secondhand books in British Heart Foundation.

3.30pm:
A late lunch at the Bacco Lounge in Rugby. The Lounge chain have a reliably great vegan menu and often seem to have venues in smaller towns where otherwise we'd struggle to find vegan food - that being said, I am eating an extremely non-vegan steak & cheddar ciabatta here!

4.30pm:

Complete lack of inspiration for a photograph so it's the Insta-cliche of my feet. I am so completely in love with my new tan Saltwater sandals.

5.30pm:

Home after a diversion into Home Sense just outside Rugby that yielded some Orla Kiely bedding and the best smelling scented candle ever (Olivia Black Wild Pumpkin & Nutmeg). Excited about my bargain finds (and trying not to think about the £££ I've spent), it's time to find the new chair a home, and it fits perfectly into the office/craft room at the back of our house. 

6.30pm:

Ok, I know I'm biased, but isn't this the most beautiful cat?! She sometimes holds her pose so nicely while I take a picture, like she's auditioning for America's Next Top Cat Model.

7.30pm:

Neither of us are hungry yet (well, we did have lunch at half three after all) so we're using the time wisely and making a start on thank you notes. The beautiful linocut cards show our ceremony venue and I fortuitously stumbled upon them in a bookshop this week. We're saving them for our families: everyone else gets the beautiful Thank You stationery designed by my cousin, who also made our invitations.

10.30pm:
Oops, missed a few hours there! We had dinner and watched Jonathan Creek, then spent a while messing about staring at our phones in an annoying manner, before coming to bed to read for a while.

A Short Break In Wales

As we're still waiting for our wedding photographs to be ready, I thought I'd start at the end: with our post-wedding trip to Wales. Unfortunately, we were both in the opening stages of the virus that's been kicking my ass for the past couple of weeks, so it wasn't quite the romantic mini-break we'd envisaged. Rather less champagne-on-the-veranda and more catarrh-on-the-sofa, but we still had a lovely time.

We started off with a night in Hay-On-Wye, Wales' official book town and somewhere I always enjoy visiting. We'd booked into Radnor House B&B and would heartily recommend it: a reasonable price for an insanely luxurious room in the centre of Hay, and the most incredible breakfast (French toast for me, a vegan fry-up for Thomas).

We spent some time on Thursday afternoon and again on Friday morning pootling around the town, popping into all of the (many) bookshops and picking up some bargains. I usually visit Hay during the festival, and it's always nice to see the town a little calmer and quieter (albeit lacking the exciting buzz of festival time). 

Having struggled to find vegan options for Thomas on Thursday, it was a relief to stumble upon the marvellous vintage shop/independent makers' marketplace/vegetarian cafe/venue space at The Old Electric Shop. Fully fed and watered, we set off to drive to our final destination on the west coast of Wales.

A three hour drive later and we were in Aberporth. I'd read about Wendy, the vintage train carriage-cum-holiday let located on the cliffs at Aberporth clifftop, years ago on Gemma's blog and had bookmarked it because I knew train-mad Thomas would love it. By some strange quirk of fate, the usually fully-booked carriage happened to have two nights free the weekend after the wedding: it was meant to be!

Wendy was just as charming as I'd expected, full of cute vintage details that had Thomas fantasising about living in a train carriage full-time (two days later and the reality of being a 6'4" man in a small space had sunk in and he wasn't so keen!).

After a week of rain, Saturday dawned bright and sunny and we took advantage of the weather to walk the coastal path - which runs directly in front of Wendy - to the nearby village of Tresaith for lunch at The Ship Inn. The coast of west Wales is just stunning, reminiscent of Cornwall at its finest (although with significantly fewer crowds), and the stretch from Aberporth to Tresaith shows it off at its best. After a pint or two, we retreated back to Wendy and spent the afternoon reading some of our Hay book haul, log burner lit for extra cosiness.

It was a lovely few days away and just what we needed after the wedding. And although it's a shame neither of us were well, it does give us a good excuse for another honeymoon!

What I've Been Reading Recently

July and the start of August haven't been great for reading: in July I was mostly incredibly busy and stressed with wedding and family stuff, and almost immediately after the wedding I fell ill and still haven't properly recovered. As a result, I've mostly been rereading for comfort - lots of Miss Marple mysteries and the whole Georgia Nicholson series - with a small sprinkling of new release thrillers and dystopias.

Fever*

Deon Meyer

Rating: ****

When I was at school we read Z For Zachariah and I was completely absorbed by its presentation of not just the dramatic events, but also the minutia of daily life and survival after a nuclear incident. Fever provides something of the same reading experience, dealing as it does with the establishment - by narrator Nico Storm's father, Willem - of a new settlement in the South African Karoo desert following a disastrous global pandemic. There is a refreshing focus on the mundane realities of survival, from planting crops and building irrigation systems to producing diesel from sunflower oil. The challenges of not just scraping by, but building a successful community, are made clear to the reader without the narrative ever feeling bogged down with detail. Excitement is provided by the regular incursions by groups of piratical raiders on motorbikes known as the KTM, and the battle scenes have a harrowing realism. Meanwhile, tension is derived from the fact that reader, from the first few pages of the book, knows that we are building to the murder of Willem Storm. Meyer is best known as a writer of Cape Town-set police procedural thrillers (which are, in my opinion, criminally under-read outside of his native South Africa) but this departure into dystopian post-apocalypse fiction is hugely absorbing, combining Meyer's knack for characterisation with his ability to pile on the narrative tension.

No Dominion
Louise Welsh
Rating: ****
Welsh's Plague Times trilogy has been a timely and inventive example of post-pandemic fiction, spreading the action across three books of varying tone: the first book in the series, A Lovely Way To Burn, was a masterful murder mystery-meets-disaster novel and introduced us to the character of glamorous TV presenter Stevie. The second, Death Is A Welcome Guest, followed stand-up comedian Magnus' attempts to get out of plague-hit London and to his  childhood home of Orkney. No Dominion is the final book and opens ten years down the line, with Stevie and Magnus both on Orkney, where a settlement of survivors has been established with Stevie as president. The teenagers of the settlement, however, are getting antsy and difficult (as teenagers do), and when a group of new arrivals turn up, events are set in motion which mean Stevie and Magnus have to leave the islands and head to Glasgow. Essentially a dystopian road trip novel, No Dominion was grippingly brilliant and it was a real pleasure to be back with the characters of Stevie and Magnus. As is typical of the road trip genre, there's an episodic nature to it which I thoroughly enjoyed (with their encounters at the castle of Lord Ramsey being a particularly enjoyable episode, with what I assume was a deliberate take on Game Of Thrones as modern dystopia).

True Love At The Lonely Hearts Bookshop*

Annie Darling

Rating: **

Verity Love, our titular heroine, is a vicar's daughter. We know this because we are told it repeatedly, in lieu of providing her with an actual personality. She's also an introvert, something that we're again repeatedly told - with introversion presented here as a pathological condition unique to our heroine, instead of a way of being for approximately 50% of the population, Seriously, there's even a whole scene where she solemnly sits the hero down and explains this terrible affliction called introversion. She has a cat, likes Jane Austen, and is so much a romantic fiction stereotype that I wanted to scream. Anyway, one day she has a meet-cute with handsome architect Johnny which leads, inevitably, to a summer of being each other's dates at various weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, etc. Love, of course, ensues. As does boredom, on the part of the reader at least. Romance is not a genre I know particularly well but one author I do like and respect is Sarra Manning, so it was on her recommendation that I decided to read True Love At The Lonely Hearts Bookshop. After this experience, I think I'll accept that romance isn't my genre and move on.

The Good Daughter*
Karin Slaughter
Rating: ****
I'd been craving a properly involving, gripping thriller that wouldn't make me shout in frustration at ludicrous plot twists or grit my teeth at sympathetic depictions of police brutality, and The Good Daughter ticked all my boxes and then some. Slaughter's standalone novel, set in smalltown Georgia, is on the surface about two tragedies within the community - a family attacked 30 years ago by masked gunmen, and a subsequent school shooting in the present day - but it goes much deeper than that, asking challenging questions about guilt, complicity, family and trust. Refreshingly for a US crime novel, the town police are portrayed not as highly trained investigators who'll always save the day, but as bumbling at best and trigger-happy at worst, while the central characters are all entirely believable and utterly sympathetic.

* This title kindly provided for review by the publishers via NetGalley

I Have A Wedding Hangover

Our leftover confetti, as seen the next morning when we went to clear up

I have the hangover from hell: a wedding hangover.

Two weeks ago today was the day Thomas and I had spent the previous three years planning and now I'm looking around my house, empty at last of wedding supplies, and feeling a bit empty myself.

Because it turns out that all of those old cliches are true.

It will go by in a flash.

Enjoy every moment, it goes so fast.

It's the best day of your lives.

This last I had been especially resistant to in the run-up to the big event. "Best day of my life," I scoffed, "I like to think my life is more interesting than one in which participating in an ancient patriarchal ritual is the best day I ever experience."

Well, don't I have egg on my face. What I should have realised was that, for us, the ritual isn't what makes it the best day ever, but the people who came to participate in it.

I can't properly describe to you how beautiful it was when I looked around the room and saw my family, who'd travelled from five different countries, the Nijmegen gang who'd decamped to Leicester for the weekend, Thomas' Scottish friends & family, and my local pals, all gathered together to celebrate with us. It's humbling to be faced with such love and affection: people who care so much about our stupid selves that they travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to share in our joy.

I'm tearing up writing this, realising that never again will that strange, wonderful combination of people come together, never again will we get to experience such a special day. So my advice to anyone planning a wedding at the moment? It will go by in a flash, enjoy every moment. And it is the best day of your lives.

Note: many more wedding posts to come, don't worry! (She says, as if you're all so desperate to read more of me boring on about it. Well tough cos I'm gonna). But I'm really sick at the moment so it'll have to wait until I'm better.

The Buyer's Archive: June

Since February 2015, inspired by Elise's Buyer's Archive project, I've been keeping a record of all my clothing purchases in an effort to track what works and what doesn't and - in theory - cut down on my spending. 

Apart from this post being extremely delayed, I actually didn't do too badly last month.

Denim skirt, Primark £7

I really can't explain why I bought yet another denim skirt: I think this is maybe my seventh? And not even black, like I wanted. It was a panic buy, a desperate grab at the only denim skirt near to my size (oh yeah it's also a size too big). Not my smartest ever buy, but I have worn it a few times, with a belt to prevent it falling down, so I'm trying to get my money's worth.

Grey marl t-shirt, Primark £2.50
Steff alerted me to the brilliance that is Primark's slouchy tees and I am so glad. This dark grey marl one is one of my buys of the summer: I wear it constantly, tucked into a variety of vintage midi skirts. This is a size 12 (and I am a size 16/18) so their size range would fit well into plus sizes.

Tote bag, Black Lodge Press £7.50 (bought with Etsy vouchers)
Isn't this just THE best bag you've ever seen? I've had Etsy vouchers burning a hole in my pocket since Christmas, but hadn't spied anything I really wanted to spend them on until I saw this on Black Lodge Press's Instagram feed.

Tan loafers, Clarks £25
I've worked my way through a variety of uncomfortable and ill-fitting tan loafers from fashion stores like Dorothy Perkins, and thought it was more than time I invested in a proper, leather pair. So I was thrilled to find the Griffin Milly loafers in the Clarks sale (they don't seem to be online anymore but they might still have them instore). Once autumn hits, I'll be wearing these non-stop with my skinny jeans.

I'm finding at the moment that either there aren't any clothes in the shops that interest me, or that I don't feel like I *need* new stuff, which is great. Could it be that my addiction to fast fashion and shopping is starting to wane? We'll see... But with six months of 2017 gone, I'm almost exactly on target to achieve my goal of spending only £600 on clothes, shoes and accessories.

But  June 2016 was a different story: I went on a real shopping spree and ended up spending a whopping £131.99. Of what I bought then, unfortunately nothing has been particularly well-worn with the exception of the ASOS T-bar shoes. I ended up having to sell the cat t-shirt because Missy hated it(!), and the turquoise midi skirt also got sold on. The polka dot skirt hasn't yet found its way into my regular wardrobe as I can't ever quite figure out what to wear it with. And I've found it hard to wean myself off my tote bag habit, so the Fjallraven rucksack - although a bargain - doesn't get used a huge amount. So yeah, overall not a terribly successful month of shopping.

Total for June: £42

Total so far for 2017: £291.69

Total this time last year: £334.63

Look out for the #buyersarchive hashtag on Twitter and Instagram to see the other bloggers taking part.

A Photo An Hour: Saturday 15th July

I finally remembered to participate in Photo An Hour, after a few months of consistently forgetting, hooray! To be honest, when I woke up I felt like I wasn't going to bother with it but then I saw that Becks - who I was meeting later in the day - was taking part and it spurred me on to start taking my photos.

10am:
A shamefully late start to my day. I don't know why, but I am just so tired at the moment and feel like I could just sleep and sleep every morning. Anyway, finally up and I have a cup of tea and a bagel to fortify me for my trip to Nottingham.

11am:
Getting dressed. I really wanted to go to Weirdo Zine Fest in London today but train tickets from Leicester are ridiculously £££ and I just can't afford to go much anymore. Instead, I'm representing for zinesters with my brilliant new tote bag from Black Lodge Press: Make Zines/Destroy Fascism is a great slogan to live by.

Midday:
On the tram into Nottingham from the Park & Ride. I was meeting up with my friend Becks for the first time in months

1pm:
Can you believe I didn't know that there was a Sostrene Grene in Nottingham until today. Just loooook at all this beautiful yarn! And I don't even use yarn in any of my crafts. Never heard of Sostrene Grene? Imagine Tiger, but both cheaper and classier.

2pm:
Becks had heard about a super special secret bar hidden away in Hockley and was in the process of telling me about it when we literally stumbled upon it by accident (so maybe not so super secret after all). Inside was an incredible candle-lit space that reminded me of Budapest's ruin bars.

3pm:
Pizza time! I had a the garlic bread with cheese and it was amazing.

4pm:
My timings are a bit screwy here - at 4 I was actually driving home, so instead have this picture I took at about half 3 in the Sue Ryder Vintage shop. I can never resist a vintage typewriter.

5pm:
My vintage shopping haul. I've been after a pleated polka dot midi skirt for ages, so I was especially excited to find this one.

6pm:
Missy has shown to inclination to sit on laps since it got warm a month ago, so the fact that she plonked herself down on mine almost as soon as I sat down was very exciting. Never mind that it delayed dinner by a good hour, I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity for some quality cat time.

7pm:
I'm a real creature of habit, and Saturday evenings don't feel quite right without the following ingredients: the Funk & Soul Show on 6 Music, a glass of wine, the kitchen fairy lights lit, and something bubbling away on the stove.

8pm:
I'm feeling completely wiped out lately - underlying wedding planning stress maybe? - and last night I didn't feel capable of anything more intellectually demanding than a terrible comedy, so Role Models it was.

11pm:
Missed a couple of hours as we were finishing the film, but 11pm found me in bed with a book and about to turn off the light.

I Will Not Be A Perfect Bride

I will not be a perfect bride and I will not have a perfect wedding.

I will be a size 18 bride, as I am a size 18 woman. I haven't slimmed for the wedding, haven't tried to turn myself into a different, smaller version of the person Thomas fell in love with. I understand why, in a society in which fat-shaming and diet culture are pervasive, many brides choose to diet. But I won't, I didn't. I will wear my double chins and my back fat and my stomach with pride. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a scarred bride. I am blemished and tattooed and scarred and I will not cover them with clothes or with make-up. I will wear the marks on my body because they are my history, each one bringing me closer to the person I am today, the person who Thomas knows and loves. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a bride with a chronic illness. I will be carefully attending to my medication regimen and diet in the next three weeks but, nevertheless, I will be a bride who needs the loo a lot on her wedding day. I will not be a perfect bride.

I will be a bride with as little anxiety as possible, which means that I will not have a perfect wedding. It will not be very Instagrammable, nor will it look like a Pinterest board. It will be simple and ramshackle and DIY. But it will also be silly and fun and oh-so-very 'us'.

Because while I will not be a perfect bride, I will be a very happy bride. I will be surrounded by family and friends, who are collectively travelling a total of 61,000 miles to be with us in Leicester. Every aspect of our day - from the reception venue to the cakes to the photographer - involves people we know and love. And, most importantly, I will be with my boy. The one who goes into another room to eat crisps because he knows I can't stand the noise. The one who took six weeks to kiss me when we started dating. The one who thinks my most annoying quirks are not just tolerable but actually cute. And while he won't be a perfect bridegroom, either, he will be - and is - perfect for me.

One Year

Today marks one year since Thomas and I brought Missy home from the RSPCA.

It has been the most wonderful 12 months with her and, at the risk of sounding like a total cliché, neither of us can remember what life was like without her. Although we'd both lived with cats before, they'd always belonged to housemates which, it turns out, isn't the same thing at all.

Missy chose us, rather than the other way round. We went to the RSPCA a couple of days after Brexit, desperate to take our minds off the horror unfolding around us, and wandered around the cat section admiring puss after puss, completely baffled as to how we were meant to choose just one. And then a black cat with yellow eyes pushed herself up against the glass of her pen and 'rubbed' her head against my hand to say hello, and we were smitten.

Missy is mercurial. She is assertive. She can be very aloof and she can be very affectionate. She loves being brushed more than anything else (apart from perhaps Dreamies) and she loves to greet us when we come home from work. She will only sit on a lap if you first put a yellow cushion on said lap: no cushion, no lap snuggles from Missy. She'll hiss when displeased and occasionally strike out, but she's always careful not to use her claws on us. She's an awful wimp who makes a song and dance out of jumping onto a table, and will run away from other cats rather than confront them. She does, however, like to hunt flies. To our great disappointment, she's never shown any interest in boxes, nor in sitting in small and amusing places. Her happy place is the back garden, where she can nibble plants and watch insects to her hearts content. Most importantly, she is - as we tell her often - the best little cat in the world and we could not love her more.

15 Facts About Me

Months and months ago Rachel tagged me in a post on Instagram challenging me to share a selfie and 10 random facts about myself. And then I totally forgot about it until Sarah wrote a post recently with her facts. I've done fact posts before but I know I always enjoy reading other people's, so here goes trying to think of 15 new facts about myself.

1. My favourite subject at school was drama and I usually took the lead role in the school plays and musicals.

2. Show tunes are my not-at-all-guilty pleasure. I love listening to the Elaine Paige show on Radio 2 on Sunday afternoons, and on long car journeys will blast the soundtracks to Wicked and Rent while singing along at the top of my voice.

3. I also have a fondness for grime and, despite the incongruity of a 30-something white woman bopping along to Stormzy in a Ford Ka, it's another of my favourite driving soundtracks.

4. Speaking of age, I turn 40 next June and I am not at all happy about it. It sounds like such an enormous milestone (frankly, it just sounds so old!). So yeah, there's lots of denial of the ageing process going on around here at the moment.

5. I was once on local television talking about zines. I was only 17 and it was about as awkward as "teenager interviewed on local Bradford cable channel" sounds.

6. My mum is deaf, so I have (rudimentary) BSL skills. However, as she lost her hearing in her 50s, none of us are exactly fluent.

7. I have multiple diagnoses - Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Chronic Pain Syndrome - that impact on my life in various ways. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to get through the wedding and start my MA course without a combination of the three causing havoc.

8. I don't particularly like chocolate, and especially not chocolate cake.

9. The best gig I've ever been to was Joanna Newsom at Manchester Palace Theatre in 2010, closely followed by Joanna Newsom at Manchester Albert Hall in 2015. Whenever I see her live I spend the entire time completely rapt, so I'd heartily recommend trying to bag tickets when she next tours.

10. I secretly quite enjoy supermarket shopping.

11. Before getting Missy, I'd never owned a pet. Nope, not even a goldfish when I was a child.

12. I have too many disgusting habits to name, but probably the most unappealing is picking dry skin off my feet and then chewing it. I know, I disgust me too.

13. I've never been afraid of going to the dentist but, until a few years ago, I had a phobia of going to the hairdressers.

14. I've lived in three cities as an adult - Bradford, Manchester and Leicester - the latter for 20 years. I will leave one day... maybe?

15. Things internet people have recognised me by when meeting in real life: my fringe, my Feminist Killjoy bag, my tattoo, my red hair and, on one memorable occasion, by boobs.

To Gift List Or Not To Gift List? That Is The Question

Recently a lot of people have asked us about gift lists: Do we have one, and if not, what do we want? And it's turning out to be a thornier issue than we at first thought.

When we started planning the wedding, Thomas and I were absolutely adamant that we didn't want a traditional gift list; asking guests to first pay to travel (90% of guests are coming from outside of Leicester, with 50% of those travelling from overseas) and then to splash out on some fancy kitchen gadgets from John Lewis just didn't sit right with us. Unlike in times past, when a couple getting married would almost invariably be setting up home for the first time, Thomas and I have lived together for four years and we have pretty much everything we need. So, no gift list.

We did ponder asking for charitable donations in lieu of gifts (I was particularly keen to support the at-risk-of-closure Leicester Rape Crisis), or perhaps for Canadian dollars ahead of our planned trip next summer. But, again, we came back to the fact that asking people to cough up cash in addition to plane fares and hotel bills felt unfair. While some guests would, I am sure, be more than happy to contribute, we didn't want people to feel obliged.

As we count a huge number of talented artists amongst our friends and family, we next toyed with the idea of going with the classic mum line, "Anything you've made would be lovely." But then how would those without artistic skills (or with the skills but without time to commit to a project) feel? Again, we didn't want there to be a sense of obligation.

A few alternatives have been suggested by friends: an Etsy gift list, perhaps, or sharing our Amazon wishlists and getting books as wedding presents. In the end, though, we've gone with what's probably the least satisfactory solution from a guest's perspective - an embarrassed shrug and a muttered, "You don't need to get us anything," when asked. But we're still not entirely sure if this approach is the right one, or whether our attempts to ensure people don't feel obligated to give us something are just making it more complicated for guests who do want to give a present. So let me know: what do you think of wedding gift lists?