Wish You Were Here

10 November 2019 09:20 If you had met me 2 years ago, you would have met a calm, funny, outgoing person who was lying to herself about how she was.  Someone who would go home and just sit for hours on end binging Netflix, who had no social outing planned because she felt like she either wasn't really wanted there or just couldn't be bothered to go. Someone who had a husband and loved him, but rarely showed affection because she had so many drugs in her system, she couldn't feel her emotions. Someone who was a shadow of who she was before the medication.  I used to take 3 pain medications for the pain, 2 for anxiety and depression, 1 for symptom control and 2 for sleep. This was how I functioned for 5 years. 5 years of being a shadow and feeling disconnected from myself and numb.  It wasn't until I found out I was pregnant that things changed. I wasn't allowed my medication; it would harm the baby. So, I made the decision to stop all my drugs at once. ...

10th November 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  To all my regulars, you'll have noticed that since returning to University, Wish You Were Here has kind of felt as if it was on the back burner, and it was. The start of this Uni year was so full on and so overwhelming that something had to give and it unfortunately, it was this. That doesn't meant to say that it is the end of Wish You Were Here (this blog means more to me than I could ever put into words,) because it's not, it just means that the day I upload and the frequency of when I upload will change. From now on you get to look forward to hearing from me on a Sunday instead of a Tuesday. The time slot will still be the same, so be sure to be on the look out at 3pm for a new post. For the time being, the frequency of once a week will remain the same, but the closer we get to Christmas and deadlines I may have to cut it back to every other week. In addition to me switching days on you, I am also super exc...

29th October 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  My favourite holiday? Halloween. Why? Not a clue. I have no idea why I love it so much; I don’t really have a reason to. I never got to go trick or treating as a kid. ‘We’re not American,’ my mum and dad used to say, ‘It’s not our holiday.’ The first time I went trick or treating, I was sixteen and it wasn’t the best experience in the world. You see Halloween celebrated all the time in movies and my experience at sixteen did not live up to the hype I had built in my mind. I went with a friend. A girl I am no longer friends with, she didn’t live in the best area of town and there was one so far, we could go. There weren’t many houses that were welcome to trick or treaters and when we did finally stumble upon a welcoming dwelling, they asked for a trick instead of a treat and I was completely unaware that that was even an option, let alone something people did. I remember standing there, rooted to the spot with absolutely...

8th October 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  Now, I know that I have missed the last two weeks so for that I am sorry, but let me tell you, settling back into the swing of things for second year has been hard and chaotic, but I’m here and this week I am here to tell you about a deep love of mine. Writing. I recently decided to treat myself to a new book and I went ahead and pre-ordered The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, and for those of you who don’t recognised the name, we have her to think for the film adaptation of Me Before You . Those that know me know how much I love her work, and I currently have two of her books on the go. Not the best decision I have ever made but totally worth it. The other night I settled down and I read the first chapter of The Giver of Stars and I was struck. Suddenly and out of nowhere I had the inspiration and motivation to sit and my desk and work on my own book that hadn’t been touched since February. I had forgotten ...

17th September 2019  To those who are no longer with me,  I’m late, I know, I know, I’m sorry! This last week has been so crazy hectic and it wasn’t until I was walking out the door for the second time today that I realised I’m supposed to have a post up in an hour and I didn’t have one written. I really do not know what today's  post is about, it’s just a random little chit-chat, I guess. If this was a YouTube video, it would be a ‘Get Ready with Me.’ I’ve been in my new flat now for three days I think, I moved in on Saturday, and, although I didn’t want to love alone, I am. No-one’s fault, there was a mix up with the system and now I’m adulting hard by living alone. I do however, know that I am going to get lonely at some point. But as you know, I have a great system of friends in my life right now that won’t let me isolate myself and I am so very, very thankful for that. Today my timetable for the next academic year was released and I’m not going to lie, ...

10th September 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  My mind has been sufficiently blown. What is breakfast? For years, (and by years, I mean my entire life, up until last night at least) I believed it was stuff like cereal, and toast and bacon and eggs and food of that ilk. According to the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘a meal eaten in the morning, the first of the day.’ Nothing specific noted there! Yesterday it was mums birthday and for it she received Nadiya Hussain’s (2015 Bake off Winner) latest book, and in it there is an entire section dedicated to breakfast, however, no the kind of dishes your mind first thinks of when someone says ‘breakfast’ and let me tell you, this has been the highlight of my year. Breakfast can literally be anything you want, just in a small portion. I could have toad in the hole for breakfast if I wanted (one of Nadiya’s suggestions in her book). I could have Chinese if I wanted. I could have a wonderful fish-finger sandwich if I wanted ...

3rd September 2019  To those who are no longer with me,  There is a plague upon this world, it crawls into the mind of its host and infests it for months at a time, it becomes the source of all procrastination, nothing ever gets done, and then just as quickly as it came, it disappears. Its name sparks horror and chills parents to the bone. It is called The Sims.   The Sims is a weird one, most of us love it, we really do, but oddly we tend to have bursts of energy when it comes to actually playing it. Well, I know this is true for myself. I’ll have maybe a three-month period where nothing gets done because I’ll be so distracted by the Sims and I’ll play it religiously. Then one day I’ll get bored and won’t touch the game for maybe six months or more. Right now I’m trying to get it out of my system, I have a week left before I go back to university for my second year of studying law, and if I thought last year was hard, then this year is going to be like walk...

29th August 2019 I was always under the impression that you had to know someone for years before considering them your best friend, which when you think about it is really weird considering when you’re in primary school, on the very first day you pick a random person and you just go:  ‘You. You’re going to be my best friend.’ Yet, for some unknown reason, I hit secondary school and felt compelled to know someone for a decent amount of time before I could bestow the title of ‘Best Friend’ upon them. Between August 2018 and Augu st 2019 however, everything changed. I decided to go back to university, and found myself living with six other people, and holy crap, I am never doing that again, (why I decided to do that to myself is beyond me.) The people I lived with were some of the absolute best people and some of the worst people I have ever had the pleasure or misfortune to meet. One of those people was the woman I now have the privilege of calling one of my very best ...

20th August 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  My mum has this thing. As children, she could always tell when we were lying. So, she made us prove it to her. As a kid I couldn’t do it. As an adult, I still can’t. Nine times out of ten, she would come down to our level, one hand on my shoulder, my theory so that we couldn’t squirm away, and with the other she would point to her eye and say, “Look me in my beady little eyes and say sausages, sausages, sausages, three times without laughing I did not….” Followed by whatever the hell we were lying about that day. Now, what you don’t understand is, we had to say the whole thing. We didn’t just have to say sausages three times and then the thing we were lying about, we had to say the without laughing bit too. What my mum won’t tell you though, is that she pulls a face. She opens her eyes so wide and leans into you that is impossible to not laugh. I’m 24, and I can be telling the God’s Honest truth and mum will ...

13 th August 2019 To those who are no longer with me, It is three days until my first year of being a university student experience is over. On Friday I move back home for a month because I was unlucky enough to find a tenancy that would overlap with my current one. So, stuff is going into storage and myself and some prized possessions will be going home for a month. If I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I hate packing. I like to think of myself of a somewhat organised person but I am no Monica  Geller  and I cannot for the life of me see the fun side to packing. It is just unnecessary stress for this girl who tends to stress about something before there is even something to stress about. As this finally week progresses and I slowly pack away my belongings into boxes that won’t see the light of day for a month, I look a round my room that now looks nothing like it did the week after I moved in and it’s a little sad. There have been times living in this fl...

6th August 2019 To those who are no longer with me, Story time. I had this friend, this girl that for eleven years, I considered my best friend. A year ago yesterday however, we stopped talking. She was ‘over this friendship’ and I simply said goodbye. Now, I will be the first to throw my hands up and admit that in 2013 maybe 2014, I was a really crappy, terrible friend. I was awful. I did something that involved the guy she liked and it hurt her. We got past it, moved on, everything was hunky-dory. Or so I thought. Fast forward to June 2018. My best friend of eleven years has come across from Cardiff to Boston to see me. Which makes a huge change as I was the one to do the travelling in this friendship. She had just broken up with her boyfriend after finding out he had been cheating on her a few times. So, she needed what every girl needs after a breakup, a night out with her best friend. The only reason that night out happened in Boston is because she couldn’t run into he...

30th July 2019 To those who are no longer with me,  I want to travel, and let’s face it, who doesn't? I want to go everywhere I can possibly can, and again, who doesn't. I love the idea of being free and I think travelling would give me that. Now don't get me wrong, it's not like I've not travelled, I've just barely travelled is all. I've been abroad twice in my life and for this wannabe free spirit that is not nearly enough.  On the Last day in Cyprus, 2013 On 1st May 2013 I went to Cyprus for two weeks, which, as it was with college and we were tour military school and give workshops and putting on shows, was more of a working holiday than anything else. I was great, I loved it. I have so many amazing memories and photos, I'll see if I can find some to add to the end of this post, but, as much as I loved being there, it wasn't a holiday, it wasn't a destination that I had chosen for myself and it wasn't with the people I ...

Hello!  Welcome to a very different post.  This may be a post you see around here from time to time,and I hope you all don't mind.  Say Hi to Paige!  I have this friend, one of my very best friends actually, and she is a crochet genius, among other things. Her name is Paige and today I am here to tell you all about her little business: Minor Creations. When I said that Paige was a crochet genius, I meant it. Not only does she crochet such things as baby blanket and door stops, Paige come up with her own ideas too. Like her new reusable face Scrubbie that she asked me to trial a couple of weeks ago when I popped in for a visit while I was home. The idea behind it was that, being made from 100% cotton it would be soft on the skin, while also exfoliating the skin. I can say, hand on heart, after using it for nearly three weeks: it works! As someone who has sensitive and eczema prone skin, after the first time I used this little Scrubbie, my face...