an evening beach walk

Since Rosie took me on this lovely walk from Mudeford to Highlcliffe it's slotted it's way in to our weekly routine and we now find ourselves religiously walking along the shore, catching up on our days at work, enjoying the sound of waves and warmth of the evening sunshine.

Everything seems to be going 1000 miles per hour at the moment, so much so I've even started getting up at 5:30 in the morning (who knew that time even existed!?) to go to the gym. I'm sorry that this also means I'm blogging less, I promise you're not missing anything exciting!

What've you been up to lately?
How have you been enjoying the sunshine?
xo

the australia update - 100 days!

Way back in March I posted our first Australia update, time has flown by and now it's only 100 days until we leave the UK behind! Here's what's happened in the mean time:

• Danny managed to land himself a nice job to get him started when we arrive which is brilliant news. 
• Garuda airlines went and cancelled our flights without telling us, then offered us a different flight with 2 stop overs with huge waiting times, eventually we managed to cancel with them and have re-booked with Emirates. 
• We've just applied for our Australian bank account, luckily HSBC will open one and send you debit cards and transfer your money for £100, whilst we could have waited and done it in Australia for free we wanted it sorted ASAP, we'll have our debit cards in our hands and our money in Australia before we even land, which puts my mind at ease a little more. 
• We've started clearing out all our posessions, I've made a list of everything we need to sell between now and the day we leave, including my macbook, televisions, my mulberry bag, louboutins (both are never used) and our cars! We've been marking days on the calendar where we both wont work and instead will do carboot sales and jumble sales.
• We found out that our good friend Becca  is pregnant, and due before we go, hooray!
• I've become totally addicted to crossfit (more on that one day)
• We've been spending lots of quality time both together and with friends and family, and I finally got to meet ony of my favourite bloggers Catherine Lux 

It's all feeling so surreal now that the end of UK life is in clear sight! 

See you at 50 days for another update :) 

xo 

falling out of love with blogging

It's my day off and I'm sat typing this crossed legged on the sofa, on my lap my beat up macbookfrom circa 2006, complete with fake replacement battery and charger, is whirring away slowly burning a hole in my thighs. I check twitter and bloglovin' to stay up to date with everything that's going on in the huge world of blogging and every other tweet reminds me why I'm writing this post....



I was talking with some fellow blogging ladies whilst I was in London last weekend about blogger meet ups away from the big city. I constantly see non-Londoners complain about the lack of meet ups away from the big city and this led to running local meet ups with the help of some lovely fellow blogging girls, but I've noticed that people's motives for attending these things has changed so much over the past few years. I remember attending my first meet up and bouncing off the walls with excitement that I could photograph my cocktail and not get a funny look from the woman sat next to me, that someone else understood me when I spoke about the importance layouts and html and everything else...we shared local restaurant love, our favourite bloggers and spoke about how fun blogging is. But the past few meet ups I've attended have been about SEO, how much to charge per post and anticipating how much the goody bag will be worth. I remember leaving an event with a blogger once who exclaimed ' I won't go to another of their [a large beauty company] events again, the goody bag is terrible'.

I remember spending days trying to sort out lifts to get to blogging events, but recently I've noticed people wont even attend an event that's a £12 train fare away...it has to be on their terms in their city and needs to have a goody bag. It doesn't feel like it's about meeting other people any more.

The twitter chats really annoy me to, I almost forgot about them when I had my social media free stint, however I realised I was missing out on chatting with so many of you that I cam crawling back and there's even more blogger chats- bbloggers, fbloggers, lbloggers, tbloggers, fdbloggers, fblchat, bloghour and so on...and each week they're all pretty much about the same thing, getting more hits/followers/cash/free things. In fact I noticed quite a 'large' blogger bring up the topic 'who's your favourite blog right now?' in one of the chats a few weeks back, since when did that have to be a topic...surely the whole point of twitter chats would be to share the blogs you love the most and ask for a little bit of advice now and then?

And the expensive technology thing....please just stop. You do not need a macbook pro and canon 5dmIII or any other DSLR at that to blog. IF you do insist on buying a DSLR please fucking well learn how to use the thing. I worked 3 jobs to afford my first camera and it pains me to go to events and see 100 people whip out a £700 camera and use it on auto. 

I also feel the need to just mention gurugossiper, I dont even know if it still exists but hearing about the horrific things said about one of my friends on that site made my blood boil. Slagging bloggers and youtubes off is not okay, they might have 10000s of followers but they're real people too, with real feelings and it's not okay...

And I'm sorry to moan, I just feel that I needed to let it all out and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. I don't ever want to stop blogging, in fact I think all this falling out of love with blogging business has taught me to only blog when I want to, to get out and enjoy my life and make my blog work around me and my life and not the other way around.

So here's to blogging for blogs sake, without any blogger politics. Blogging because it's a great way to share a new restaurant, to share beautifully sunny pictures from your holiday to brighten up someone's dreary day in the office, to reccomend an amazing new product you discovered by pure accident, not because someone sent you a box full and a £50 topshop voucher, and to tell that funny story from when you ended up rolling down a muddy hill in the middle of nowhere. Here's to blogging because we want to, not for hits or followers or google rank, not to get PR emails landing non stop in inboxes. Here's to blogging because it's an amazing way to learn about how other people live no matter if they live in Nottinghill and instagram pictures of deisgner eclairs or live in a commune in Bali and spend their days practising yoga in the jungle, to make new friends; the kind of friends you can be yourself around, who don't laugh when you take 1000 selfies and delete 999 just in case Ryan gosling happens to find your instagram, who don't start eating until you've got that picture.

Have you noticed blogging has changed since you started?What's your biggest blogging bug bear?
x