A Welsh Walk

I had a rather lovely (if sort of frantic) three day weekend dashing around doing nice things - on Friday I went to the Globe with my friend Miriam to see The Last Days of Troy, which was an excellent take on the myth (and funnier than I expected!). We also had a delicious lunch at Theo's Cafe, which belongs to the Globe, including the best vegetable tart I have ever had and at a super reasonable price - perfect for a quick lunch before a performance. Then me and Michael spent the weekend looking after his parents' dog, visiting my parents' cat and having a BBQ with friends on Sunday before heading back to Guildford. Here are some photos I managed to grab of our lovely (and tiring!) Saturday afternoon walk through the woods.

This is Rufus the crazy friendly  Welsh springer spaniel - he's only 18 months old so still loves running/jumping/exploring/licking/play-biting. Lovely but exhausting!

Lovely countryside just outside the suburbs of Reading.

"Surprise carrying!" Rufus was way too interested in some old bonfire of random rubbish and wasn't listening to reason (read: us firmly shouting "no" a lot and looking stern), so drastic action had to be taken...

Over The Weekend

Look at me, I'm on a blogging roll! (*touches wood*) I'm hoping to make it more of a regular thing...I have said this before, but the lovely weather/longer days help with taking photographs worth posting, and I'm definitely feeling a lot more of those positive/creative vibes right now. Anyway, here are a few pictures of my weekend...

My impromptu tulip purchase enjoying the sunlight...they're certainly looking a bit more faded now but hopefully we'll get a few more days out of them!

Shopping! Having done some experimentation in the last year with a few different brands of face washes/scrubs/moisturisers to combat my spot-prone skin and dark circles, I think for now I'm going back to these beauties. Currently I'm using No 7 Beautiful Skin foaming cleanser and their day and night creams for normal/oily skin, as I think my skin was the most spot-free when I used these products before, combined with the St Ives Blemish Fighting Facial Scrub a few times a week for a really good exfoliate to combat blackheads. Also I've just taken the plunge and re-purchased the Benefit It's Potent! eye cream, as while it didn't really make much of a dent in my huge dark circles when I sued it before, it leaves my under-eye area feeling super hydrated and is a good base for their wonderful Erase Paste; if I can't get rid of the circles at least I can hide them well!!

Ahem....I promise I'm not actually turning into a beauty blogger... ;)

Finally, I spent a relaxing Sunday afternoon browsing the M&S home catalogue and their May/June magazine; I often forget they have such lovely trend-led pieces, as clothing-wise my local store seems to cater more for the discerning middle-aged lady rather than younger people.

Hope everyone out there reading is having a great week in the sun - or as much as possible when not at work!

Sweating In Style

In the last couple of months I've gotten really into going to exercise classes at my local gym (Virgin Active Guildford) - for ages I was too scared to take the plunge, but one day I just thought, "Well, I have to start some time!" I really wanted to get into exercising regularly and not taking a week or two (or more!) off because I don't feel like it. I do love a good session on the crosstrainer but doing that three times a week can get reeeeally boring. I've been to lots of classes now, including body combat, body attack, zumba toning and normal zumba (love them all, though body attack is a killer!). It's so much fun being led through different energising exercises to music and I already feel fitter AND happier.

Anyway, after that much-longer-than-anticipated endorsement for organisedly (don't think that's an actual word...) jumping around to music, down to the actual subject of the post: showing off my lovely new workout gear!

I've been meaning to get new things to exercise in for ages, but kept putting it off, asking myself whether I could really justify spending more than £100 on workout gear. Then during one class the instructor advised me to get new trainers so I had more support and voilà, I was provided with the perfect excuse - if a professional is telling me to go shopping, who am I to say no, right?

At the top of the pile of stylish workout brands I felt sure I could trust my feet to was Nike - I've admired their gear for a long time and it's obvious a lot of research and care is put into building the right shoes for the right activity. I went with the Nike Free 5.0 TR Fit 4 Breathe (yep, that's a mouthful) because it seemed to tick all my boxes: breathable, supportive and designed with gym training in mind. I also got these capris, this top and these socks.

I've been using them for a few weeks now and I'm really pleased with what great pieces of kit they are; the trainers are comfortable and cushion my feet when I'm doing all that jumping around, and the clothes feel like a second skin so I avoid the distracting t-shirt -riding-up moments I used to have while doing push-ups etc. I'm already eyeing up my next purchases!

Inside Lacock Abbey

A few weeks ago I promised more posts on Lacock Abbey, and finally here's the next one! As well as the older monastic part, there's also the house which used to be home to the Talbot family and run a full staff. It was given to the National Trust in 1944, when times were hard for many wealthy British families and they found themselves having to sell off their great houses (probably a familiar theme to any other avid Downton fans out there!). Here are some of the more interesting bits and pieces I noticed on our tour:

I loved the Household Wants Indicator; I could definitely use one of these for my kitchen! The detail was so ridiculous, with four different types of fruit (dried, fresh, glacé and tinned) and meat (cooked, extract, fresh and potted) and some things I couldn't work out, like isinglass and minerals (vague much?). Trying not to think about what 'meat extract' might be...

So many books! This was just a small selection...

Imagine having that rug in your nursery - I know I'd be too terrified to play in there! That rocking horse looks pretty fun though (if also a bit angry).

This helmet was one of the odder things in the house; it looks like something out of Game of Thrones - has anyone else ever seen one like this? It must be purely decorative, right?

This was my favourite room! I love the blue colour of the walls and most of the pieces (save maybe the ornate 18th century paintings and mirrors...) wouldn't look out of place in a vintage-loving home of today. 

Next up: Lacock village itself - hopefully in less than 3 weeks this time. ;)

The Wild North

Hello! Back from a small unintentional blog hiatus - life just somehow got rather busy! But this is my week off, and to start it (and March) off right I made a trip to visit my best friend Aisha in Manchester at the weekend.

Sadly on my one full day there it was pretty gloomy, but thankfully it didn't rain until the evening. I could definitely tell that Manchester is a city in a whole different league to tiny Guildford; all the buildings were so tall and the roads were so wide, and it was a lot more multicultural too. I've never seen  an Armenian Church before!

We sensibly spent the day on indoor activities, such as visiting Manchester Museum, where I had  the biggest latte of my life with hazelnut AND amaretto syrups, all for the bargain price of £2.60!

Of course, there was the usual fare of dinosaurs, mummies, and beautiful Roman and Egyptian artefacts ...

...but also some really interesting animal exhibits, both stuffed and real (!)...

This is the yellow-banded poison dart frog, or 'bumblebee frog'! There were apparently a number of different coloured poisonous frogs hanging around, but we only managed to spot a couple.

After the museum we made a quick stop at The Trafford Centre, Manchester's amazing shopping centre which is like a mini town itself; sadly we only got to spend an hour there because it was Sunday, but I did manage to buy 100ml of tasty peach liqueur from Vom Fass, where you can choose the bottle you want your drink to go in as well as the drink itself! As well as alcoholic drinks you can buy things like balsamic vinegar and oils, and everything looked pretty amazing.

To top off a great weekend, I arrived home to this amazing rainbow:

The photo doesn't do it justice - it was probably the biggest rainbow I've ever seen!

Lacock Abbey

As I walked home across pavements that had been turned into small rivers, while the wind tried to make an impromptu balaclava of my hair, my thoughts turned longingly to the glorious summer of 2013 (which I really hope can be recreated this year)...

In June 2013 my mum and I visited the lovely village of Lacock in Wiltshire and its great house, Lacock Abbey, a National Trust property. Lacock Abbey is a country house made up of an interesting jumble of architectural styles, built on the foundations of a nunnery! You can definitely sense its medieval past while wandering around the cloisters.

Lacock Abbey was also where bits of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were filmed, so of course that made me even more excited to visit!

It only got better when I found out  this place was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, who created the first photo negative in 1839...can I move in please?

This place was so beautiful and the weather was so perfect that choosing which photos to share was incredibly hard. I was planning to do a second post on the village of Lacock, but I might have to do a third one on the inside of the house itself as well, there were so many interesting things!

War Books Wishlist

Is it weird to want enough books centred on World War I to be able to devote an entire wishlist to it? This isn't even all of them! I've always been fascinated by the first half of the 20th century, especially World Wars I and II; so much so that my best friend from secondary school used to say that all I read was war books! I don't know exactly why I find that era so interesting - I think it's a combination of the radical change the wars brought about (especially for women) and the romantic idea of a different, more earnest time with simpler lives and (sometimes misguided) unquestioning patriotism. Doing a WWI literature module for English Lit A Level only fuelled this little obsession, and so considering 2014 is the centenary of the beginning of the First World War I thought sharing some books on the topic would be appropriate!

The Eye In The Door and The Ghost Road are the sequels to one I read for my English Lit A Level, Regeneration, a book I would definitely recommend to anyone! It's about a group of soldiers in 1918 at Craiglockhart War Hospital and their army psychiatrist, and it's a really fascinating exploration of the damage of war on the psyche. I've heard that the rest of the trilogy is equally good, so maybe I'll finally get around to reading it this year...

Wake - Five Days in November, 1920: As the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way home from the fields of Northern France, three women are dealing with loss in their own way: Hettie, who dances for sixpence a waltz at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who toils at a job in the pensions office, and Ada, a housewife who is beset by visions of her dead son. One day a young man comes to her door. He carries with him a wartime mystery that will bind these women together and will both mend and tear their hearts. A portrait of three intertwining lives caught at the faultline between empire and modernity, Wake captures the beginnings of a new era, and the day the mood of the nation changed for ever.

The Lie - Set during and just after the First World War, The Lie is an enthralling, heart-wrenching novel of love, memory and devastating loss by one of the UK's most acclaimed storytellers. Cornwall, 1920, early spring. A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life. Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about to step into the unknown. But will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?

Public Schools and The Great War - The book examines the impact which the Great War had on the Public Schools and the sacrificial contribution made to the victory which came in 1918. The war consumed about a fifth of all the public schoolboys who fought, while the survivors were scarred by the loss of so many friends. Based largely on source material from school archives and histories, it moves from the naive excitement of the summer of 1914 to the many moving stories that emerge from the carnage of the Western Front. It looks at school life in those war years, boys with their futures on hold and the prospect of death always very close, Headmasters and staff devastated by the loss of so many young lives.

So those are my top five books I'd like to read to commemorate the centenary; anyone out there got any other recommendations?