Loner: January blues buster #3: 9 obvious but fabulous things you can do to make your Monday bathtime feel extra dreamy

If there is one really good thing about January, it is the amount of time we have (as Christmas has made us too poor to go out) to lie around in bubble baths. Most of us are not rich enough to take our Monday night post work, run, dinner and laundry bubble bath in Richard Branson's Mahali Mzuri safari resort in Kenya (pic above), but here are 9 things I did to my bath tonight which made my bath a little closer to this stay-in-it-forever £2600 one, at a snip (0.0000000000001%) of the price:

1. Prepare your bathroom - cleaning your bathroom from top to toe is the last thing you want to do on a Monday night no? But just chuck all the shower gels, shampoos, razors, that weird back scratcher you bought once but never use, into a plastic bag for now, it just makes your bath feel cleaner and more relaxing without the effort of de-limescaler.

2. Prepare yourself - take your make up off, maybe oil up (ooer) with some baby oil, argan oil, coconut oil if you have some, it will make your skin even more dreamy and soft when you come out.

3. You know those flowers you were probs going to chuck away in a few days anyhoo? It won't really destroy your bouquet if you pick one out and put the petals in your bath and it will make your bath vaguely resemble this one...

Vaguely.

4. In fact take the whole bloody bunch in there (not in the actual bathwater just put your vase in the bathroom) in a place where you can look at it. Your boyfriend is not going to be appreciating its aesthetics whilst he is playing the playstation. If you squint a bit and look at it, makes you feel like you could be in a nice hotel. Or at your parent's house, either way, relax o' clock.

5. You know that expensive bubble bath your great Aunt got you for Christmas, that you put aside for some sort of weird bath "special occasion" and will come across when you are moving out and it has all gone off? Put it in now. I crumbled up a good 70% of this Lush bar which was £2.75, but hey, as treats go, that isn't an excessive one. Live a little, it is just a bath.

6. Get your snacks prepared. A glass of prosecco maybe? A little cherry beer. Both have been great bath companions of mine before. But tonight I am making a delicious cup of peach gingersnaps tea as I am trying to avoid alcohol on weeknights... however, I am using my poshest of herbal teas, so that is almost as relaxing as a glass of fizz. And maybe, if you don't find it disgusting to eat in the same room you go to the loo in, you could have some food. It gets a bit difficult to avoid it getting soggy, but I am pretty sure my really low day during glandular fever when I ate melted red leceister and cheddar toasties with cracked black pepper in a bubble bath basically cured me of it. Basically.

That dark stuff in my jam jar is I because I attempted to make basil water - I wanted to add something spa-ish to my water (important to hydrate whilst you are at a spa) and didn't have any cucumber, lemon, lime or mint so I decided to go with basil. Basil water, that's a thing no? Well it should be, it doesn't taste that weird. (It does taste weird, don't try it)

7. Get your bathtime activities ready. A book, a magazine, a relaxing cd. A book and a magazine and a relaxing cd. I enjoy this one. And do you know what I am going to listen to it on? My bloody laptop. That's right I am a crazy rebel who takes their laptop in the bath. Well not in the bath because then I would almost definitely electrocute myself and die. Or at least break my MacBook Pro, and that would be a very bad bathtime. But I bring it in the bathroom without the cables and place it somewhere safe and secure where I can see. You haven't really felt relaxation until you've snuggled into a bubble bath whilst watching the latest episode of New Girl, trust me, if you haven't laptopped in the bath before, you should. But safely, and charger free.

8. Put a face mask on. I have not been a fan of those little one time use face mask you buy for a couple of quid from Boots ever since I had a terrible New Year's eve where my face puffed up so my eyes were like little rat eyes amid my massive cheeks, and my skin went red and raw and shiny (the photos from that NYE are not flattering - that I'd attempted to dye my light blonde hair chestnut brown with wash in wash out sachets which had turned my hair a weird strawberry blonde/ purple didn't compliment the raw swollen face). So now I like to get a tube or jar of face mask which I trust, as the chance of puffy face is basically nil if it didn't happen in the first use, and it means that I always have something already in my bathroom cabinet for when I want to treat myself to something special. At the moment I am loving Una Brennan's Rose Hydrate mask, as I am worried my attempt to overpower the colony of spots that has permanently moved into the left side of my chin is drying out the rest of my skin, and I want something to add that moisture back in. I recommend it, if you like it when your face smells like roses.

Or if you don't have a facemask, try making some of the ones on here - they all look pretty delicious and don't seem to have too many ingredients that you never would have in your fridge. Or easier still, just get a piece of kitchen roll, cut out holes for your eyes, nose and mouth - sprinkle with water and dab with moisturiser and that works pretty well. A trick I found on Hannah Gale's lovely blog, which terrifies anyone who comes across you wearing one as you look like the person from scream, but feels pretty swell.

9. And finally - light every candle in your house and put them in your bathroom. Every damn one.

Don't actually leave so many candles near your hair if you made one. Once I'd taken the photo I moved some of these babies away from the head end. Singed fringes is not a relaxing way to end a bath.

Happy bathtimes!

Not so much of a sit around in a bath doing nothing person? What about going for a run? Read my post on why I love (and sometimes hate) running here: Loner: go for a run...

Copyrights: the first two images I found on pinterest. Let me know if they are yours and you would like them credited or removed.

Friend: 9 ways to be a better pal in 2015

Ok, so I am not really qualified at all to tell you how to be a better pal. I have no degrees or A-Levels in pyschology or anything to do with human friendship and interaction, however I did just spend 43 minutes dragging my arse (which seems to have grown by realistically 1 stone but feels like 147 over Christmas) around Victoria Park trying to distract myself from all the pain of my first January run by thinking about the things I do that make me good and bad at friendship. So that is something. I think when it comes to me and friendship, there is certainly room for improvement. I am not a bad friend in an Eastenders way - I am not sleeping with my friend's boyfriend and plotting to kill them - just I could do better. I could be the one to text first more, make myself more available, be a little more supportive. So I guess this post should really be called "How I am going to be a better pal this year" but I am hoping there are some thoughts in there that anyone who reads this can take with them too.

Over Christmas I watched Sex and the City the movie for the first time in years and then inspired dusted off the box set. The big love stories in that series aren't between Carrie and Big, or Charlotte and Harry, or Steve and Miranda, they are between the girls themselves. And it made me realise, I don't have friendships quite like that. I do have many wonderful wonderful friends, who I really love and who make me laugh, make me cry, make me want to be a lovelier person; but I don't see them or speak to them every day - which the SATC crew seem to do even though they don't live together - , not all of them know the most up to date and most intimate details of my life, I don't know who I'd pick as my bridesmaids if I was getting married tomorrow, nor indeed who if anyone would pick me.

In a lot of sitcoms around friendship - Friends, How I Met your Mother, the Big Bang Theory, Sex and the City people seem to have practically no friends outside of the group. Who in real life has that?? 4 friends of course would be pretty manageable, but in reality we have loads and the numbers just grow and grow as we get older, when our spare time gets smaller and smaller (and if you are me, your bedtime gets earlier and earlier).

Easy peasy to put time into your friendships when you are 12. Sure you are not so dramatic and fall out over your friend copying you and buying the same pencil case nowadays, but back then take you really did put in the hours. You had to - you were legally obliged to go to school, which handily is where all your pals hung out. At university, sure I had a little side project - "getting a degree" - but whatever, my main project was friendship, and I had all the time in the world to work on it. And indeed the energy - I was never so tired at the end of the week that watching TV, eating pizza and going to bed at 11 seemed like a better idea than going out.

But now the hours each day I put into working, and indeed sleeping, has increased ten fold (ok that is an exaggeration), and I have a boyfriend. Bloody hell, and that is a drain on your time and energy if ever there was one. And cocktail nights with the girls cost like 6 times as much now we are no longer satisfied with mixing white wine, vodka and red bull in a mixing bowl, and pouring it in a glass with an umbrella in it.

So how can you have friends like Friends, whilst living in the real world? Well, I am not sure whether it is always possible, but these are the 9 things I am going to vow to do in 2015 to make me a little bit of a better pal.

1. Respect my friends are different from me, and that is ok. So I was tempted to put a collage of me and all my pals on various drunken and silly nights out, and then I thought, "hey my friends might not want me to post unflattering photos of them tipsy on the internet for anyone who wants to to see" so ta da. No collage. I am not really the most private person, so posting my innermost thoughts on the worldwide web isn't particularly scary for me. Similarly I'll tell my friends everything and anything, and I associate that open-ness with friendship. But actually, everyone is different and just because your friend doesn't fancy sharing intimate details of their sex life/ that they are applying for a new job/ how much they hate their future mother-in-law etc doesn't mean they're not a friend. People are different, my friends are different from me, that is what makes the world, and our friendship, interesting.

2. It is never weird to send that text/card/email etc. You see a picture a celeb posts on instagram that reminds you of a trip you've taken with your pal, but you haven't spoken in ages. You remember it's your friend's birthday and you see a card they would find hilarious, but you don't send each other cards, you normally just text. You see a cute little present which is super cheap, and is perfect for them, but there is no occassion. The number of times I haven't done the nicer thing because I am wary of coming over too nice - creepy. But unless the person who is sending me pictures/cards/texts because they "thought of me" is actually some weird man I gave my number to 4 years ago, I don't find it creepy, I find it flattering and sweet. So this year when I have a nice thought, I am going to act on it.

3. Do one better. Not as in "oh thank you for your £10 gift voucher here is a £50 0ne", trying to do one better than you friend, but make a bit more of a quality contact than you normally would. Eg. if you're friend has taken a fun photo on instagram, and you're about to place a comment, why not send a text instead, saying how you love it and asking how they are? If you're friend asks whether you are free one night and you're not, instead of sending a text explaining why you can't make it, why not call them, explain on the phone and have a little catch up? Obvs you can't do it every time, and of course there are types of contact which are completely out of proportion to what you want to say (don't ask your friend to meet you for cafe just to tell them you found their tweet lols galore).

4. Speaking of which...use a phone. I always text or meet up with someone, but there is a middle ground which is nicer than a text and not as time consuming as going for a coffee and that is the phone. The blooming phone. In 2015 I am going to start using minutes again, you know those things people put on your phone contract alongside data and texts.

4. Give better gifts. I think here is one where I don't score too badly - I am, as I waffle on about constantly, a fan of the experience gift, but you can't afford and it might be a bit showy if you were constantly taking even your mate you only saw a couple of times a year to afternoon tea at the Ritz. But there are always those pals you give chocolates too, or random earrings from New Look who you could get more thoughtful gifts to, without it breaking the bank. Instead of buying a bottle of wine, what about making your own amaretto? (It's really easy).  Perhaps make them a salt scrub, instead of getting them bath bits.

5. Manage expectations. Originally this post was going to be about a hoola hoop festival I was going to with my friend Rowan, because even though I was busy pretty much all of Saturday with prior commitments, I told myself and Rowan I'd swing by for a couple of hours. Of course I bloody couldn't, my time is like my money, I am always trying to spend more than I have. From now on I am going to take Will's advice from his time selling kitchens: tell people expectations you can definitely meet, and then you have the chance to exceed them.

6. Merge your social circles. When I was younger, the worst thing in the world was when my "best friend" started hanging out with someone else, especially if I thought that someone else was closer to me. Two friends who I met first hanging out without me was to be avoided at all cost, but now I am all about the merging. Inviting uni friends to work friends drinks if they are passing by, inviting a school friend I've just had coffee with to come with me on a night out with my old housemates, and inviting Will everywhere, the lucky man. Having compartmentalised groups of friends means you are spread way more thinnly.

7. But on the flip side - still make time for one on one time. A lot of this post has been about the little things, but they don't undermine the importance of the big things. Dinners where it is just the two of you, old style girly sleepovers and spa breaks are going to be the things that keep you feeling like they are one of your best friends.

8. Be creative when it comes to finding time. My friend Rowan (the hoola hooper) work relatively near each other, but slightly too far apart for a lunch break together and we move in completely different circles meaning regular group trips to the pub, or dinners out are not so common. But we breakfast. Get up a little earlier for work, and we normally go to Dishoom for a chai tea and bacon naan roll which is more than worth setting your alarm early for starters, but getting to start your day chatting to your mate is absolutely worth missing 30 mins snoozing your alarm for.

Dishoom. Mmmm.

9. Be more supportive. Cheer more marathons, applaud more performance, eat more bake-off cupcakes. But I also want to be more supportive in the humdrum every day - not be as argumentative and not be so quick to pick holes in their ideas. I don't mean to be critical of my friends, but it is my tendency to be argumentative (not in a confrontional way, but I do like playing the devil's advocate) and I like to share what is on my mind. But instead my mantra for this year will be "does it need to be said and do I need to be the one to say it".

The bit that always makes me cry in "It's a wonderful life". Waaaaaa Christmas is over.

Phew that was a long one! Fancy something shorter and easier? This one is basically all pictures...well GIFs even better...Lover: the pros and cons of moving in with your boyfriend as told by Beyonce's Visual Album

Lover: January Blues Buster #2: Escape the city to eat jam and look at boats and feel lovely

Apparently, the most depressing week in January is the last one, and the most depressing day specifically is that last Monday - just before payday, everyone is poor from the holidays, yet the glisten of Christmas has completely dulled to a distant memory, and you are very far away from either Christmas, or even the summer coming round again.

Whilst I can see why that week of January has it’s cons, for me personally, this week is the week of the year I struggle with the most. To have to work for the first time in yonks for 5 straight days in a row, without even a long prosecco “it’s Christmas time” lunch or an office cheese board to get me through the 9-5 is pretty tricky for me. I think the most depressing day is the Sunday beforehand, as the suspense of a full working week is probably worse than actually doing it. When it comes to it, running around in a frenzy at work isn’t really that bad as you are all too frenzied to realise, damn it it is 2pm and I am only half way through my working day and not at home in my pjs eating quality street, having just woken up. Rats.

Anyhoo, to avoid the last-weekend-before-it-is-officially-the-end-of-Christmas-and-you-are-going-back-to-work dread, I decided to drag Will an hour or so’s drive further east, to somewhere deep down by the Essex coast. I am not gonna lie, the place exactly I chose was more based on the fact that I found a good deal on Secret Escapes, and it was somewhere Will and I could agree on, as apparently he honestly didn’t enjoy that facial he once had, and therefore refused to go to some of their wonderful spas they always have on offer. (He totally did love that facial, I will break him soon).

We went to Henbridge Basin, near Maldon, a town which comes alive in the summer when Londoners flock to nearby Osea island for what seems to be basically the Hamptons of the UK, but in the winter Henbridge is pretty sleepy and quiet.

It is set on the estuary going out to the sea, which is surrounded by a couple of pretty pubs, and lots of boats caught on the sand by the tide. It is also right near Tiptree, where Tiptree jam comes from, so after mooching around in the estuary-side pubs and walking on the front for an hour or 2, I went to the Tiptree tea rooms, right on the water’s edge for a cream tea with their famous jam.

A new year's resolution idea from Tiptree...

Every jam flavour any jam lover would ever want...I went with rhubarb and ginger. YUM.

We stayed in Le Bouchon Brasserie, in a tiny little beautifully decorated room with tulips in it, and drank (several too many) cocktails in their own little cocktail bar and had a really scrummy 3 course meal in their restaurant.

Lobster ravioli and champagne to start? Don't mind if I do...

 I am not gonna lie, there aren’t zillions of tourist attractions in Henbridge which mean you should cancel your 3 week trip to Thailand and book your holiday there instead, but for an overnight trip, so close to London, it does make a welcome break from the hustle and bustle of the big city. I for one, am really loving little English countryside trips at the moment. I’ve always been one to spend all my money going to far flung places, which I don’t want to stop doing, but recently – since visiting Hay-on-Wye and Whitstable last year, and loving them both - I’ve started to think I should start earning more money (/increase my overdraft) so I can spend some on little trips to discover new corners of the country I’ve lived in all my life. 

Getting out of London reminds me that the world does not begin and end with London, which I think is a worthwhile lesson it is easy to forget when you’ve lived here too long. But more importantly, I just love being closer to nature. Ok so maybe not nature nature, I don’t mean a tent in the middle of nowhere with no people or mobile phone signal about, but anywhere is more natural than Bethnal Green road, E2. It makes me feel relaxed and refreshed, and sort of all nationalistic and wanting to break out into the chorus of Jerusalem (in a “how lucky I am to live in a country with so many beautiful fields and rivers and seas and seasons” not in a BNP or UKIP way just to clarify).

Being in the great outdoors makes me feel all lovely and insignificant and yet significant at the same time. Being in London you are used to looking around and everything you see has been made by a man or woman, and that is interesting and important, but when you look across a field with the sunsetting, or you look out to the horizon at the end of the sea it makes you realise how much more there is to this world than just people, and how small our part is in it, in a good way I think. It made me realise in 2015, one of my resolutions will be to escape London a little more often.

Beautiful on even the greyest of grey days.

So how much will it cost you for a break like this one?

I wouldn’t say Will and I really did this on the cheap in the end, as after a glass of wine and 2 cocktails on tummies only lined with scones and jam, going all out on the steak front in the restaurant seemed like a good plan.  This is how much we spent, but of course, you can definitely do it a lot cheaper than this! Nonetheless £130 each I don't think is too much for a weekend of relaxation and yummy food, and I could quite easily spend on a weekend going out in London if I wasn't watching too carefully...

Another post about the loveliness some spots in the UK outside of London - my first ever one! Loner: Go to a Literary Festival 

Loner: A big HIYA to 2015 (Janxiety fixer number 1)

Happy New Year everyone! So this "loner" post is more of a musing about what 2015 will hold, rather than something nice to do all by yourself, but then I guess musing is a nice thing to do on your lonesome, especially if you are tucking into a melted camembert as you do it, which I am. (New year, new heathly me is clearly going excellently).

The upside of loving Christmas like I do is I have a bloody good time. The downside is January gets me in a little panic. This morning I was doing my laundry and I had to take a break and perk myself up with a SATC boxset after having to wash the pjs I last used on Christmas eve, as it made me nostalgic to remember, well, last week.

Why is it that January makes us so blue? If anything our lives should be better, now we've received all our goodies from Christmas and now have Topshop knee high boots/Jo Malone candles/ personalised jars of nutella (enter your favourite gift as appropriate) in our lives. If anything that we have January blues is actually quite a nice thing because it must mean Christmas really is more about the season of goodwill and the time spent with loved ones than the presents, and actually you can be joyful and make time for your friends and family all year round.

Nonetheless, January blues are a thing, and as such, I am going to make all of my January posts about busting January blues, by looking at little lovely things you can do in January.

But I guess the first blues busting thing, which fits a new year very well, is vowing for this year to be the best one yet. One of my favourite quotes is from one of my favourite books - Anne of Green Gables - from one of my favourite characters - Anne, herself. "Tomorrow is always a fresh with no mistakes on it". Well, when it comes to a new year, right now a whole year is a fresh with no mistakes on it. You are yet to pick a silly fight with your boyfriend, eat pizza for breakfast instead of a green smoothie, not be bothered to do a nagging task and procrastinate watching tv you don't even care about instead. I mean it is the 3rd January, so naturally I have now done all those things in 2015, but you get my point, standing where we are in 2015, it has the potential to be our best year yet.

Sometimes making new year's resolutions can seem a bit depressing, lots of telling yourself not to have something, vows to be a better person which sort of implies you are not good enough already. I want to make my resolutions saying yes to things, not saying no. Making habits which are going to help me have more fun, be more present, be more grateful, be more mindful and generally be happier.

I've decided - as resolutions don't just have to be a January thing - that my first resolution of 2015 will be to keep on making resolutions. I am going to have a little focus each month (as it takes 30 days for something to become a habit) to form happy new habits. This month, I am going to focus on feeling like I have more time, and to put a stop to those little naggling stresses which are easy to ignore, but you suddenly remember and make you snap over silly things like a 6 minute wait for the central line, or your jumper being itchy. Therefore this month, I am going to go to bed and wake up earlier, so I start my day as I mean to go on (rather than running down the road eating nutella on toast wearing the first thing I saw in my wardrobe, as happens far too often). The second resolution I am making is to spend half an hour every day tackling nagging tasks - setting up direct debits, emailing landladies about damp, all those things that I never bother to put down on a to-do list outside my mind and therefore never do. But yeah, basically my resolution is to try and make 2015 the best year yet, though it has a few amazing ones to beat.

Hope you have a lovely 2015 too, and I am going to leave you with some inspiration - this TED blog my friend Jas sent me about some possible new year's resolutions, and a handful of inspiring quotes and memes I've collected. Do all things with love is accidentally there twice, sorry, but hey, I reckon it is an important one!

 
 

What about taking up running this new year? It is one of the best things I do. Read more about it in this post Loner: Go for a run.

All quotes are from pinterest or google images, if you want yours credited or removed just let me know. Thanks!