Mates Rates: A friend for every occasion

We all reach that time in our lives when we have to filter out the good friends from the troublesome ones – for some it happens when you leave school, for others when you leave university. For other, it can happen much later, but it comes to us all at some point and usually when we realise that a friend has been taking advantage or we feel a friendship is somewhat one-sided. It’s just a fact of life that some people can become great friends, that they build you up and support you rather than shooting you down at any given opportunity. However, just as there is light and dark, there are also those who use you, make you feel bad about yourself and put their own insecurities on you. Just as it is important to spring clean your home, it is important to spring clean your friendships every now and again.

It can sound scary, the thought of having to confront the problem and to possibly lose a friend who has been around for as long as you can remember. But you need to think of the positive – it will mean you end up in a position where you are surrounded by people who love and care about you and will support you throughout your life. That is far more important than hundreds of superficial friendships with people who won’t be there when you need them most. But this post is not about the wittling down of your friendship lists, because I for one do not have the time to be going through my Facebook friends one-by-one.This post is about the types of friends that you are left with – Looking around at my mates, I have noticed that I seem to be friends with lots of different types of people from different groups. Some of them would not get on if they were to meet, and others just wouldn’t get each other at all. But I like that – I like that my friends are so different and that I can indulge different sides to my personality while with them. We all have such different sides to our personality and we need different friends around us that reflect this – as they say “Variety is the spice of life!” University was a great chance to meet like-minded people from all walks of life, but even in my home town I have met an incredible variety of people – it probably helps having my job!Here are just some of the different types of friends I can identify from my groups:

1. The BEST friends from school who have been there through everything, from the first heartbreak to the first house and everything in between. These friends are the first ones you call whether it’s good or bad news and you know they’ll always be there no matter what.
2. The HOUSEMATES were the first people you lived with other than your family, whether at university or elsewhere. They are the people who taught you the importance of patience and personal space, the ones you partied hard and slobbed out with. Nothing can beat the closeness of living with someone and that friendship will always run deep.
3. The QUIET friend is one of the most valuable. They might not always be up for a night out or want to go to gigs with you, but they’ll always be up for a coffee and a chat, and often they give the best advice.
4. The RAVING BUDDY is the one person you can always rely on to be totally up for going out. A five-minute warning is all it takes and they’ll have the Converse on and the hip flask ready for an epic night out. This is the friend who is always with you on those nights that become legendary when you are sitting out in the road watching the sun come up.
5. The UNIVERSITY GANG is the close-knit bunch of mates you acquire over the three years who basically just like to eat, sleep, rave, repeat the same way you do. Whether you guys like to go out all the time, study in the library or take a year abroad together – the group are all so close that you keep in touch and regularly meet up after you finish.
6. The GIG friend (can also be cinema/theatre/book etc) is one who is interested in the same things as you – sometimes as we grow older we start to have different interests to our immediate mates and meet others through our hobbies. This is great because it means you no longer have to force your mates to come with you to see that band they hate.
7. The LADS are not a group that everyone has, but if you have a solid group of boy mates you are a very lucky girl because they are a source of straight-talking and sanity when the girls get too much. They are messy nights out, lots of banter and good fun, but you know they’ll always look after you.
8. The ONE WHO KNOWS just what to do, the one who has a sixth sense when something is wrong and who will drop everything to travel across the country and be there for you. The one who knows when you don’t want to talk about it but that getting drunk will help, or vice versa.
9. The DRIVEN friends who are always hard at work on one project or another, perhaps you know them through work or through a hobby, but you use each other as contacts and always make sure your name is first on the list for recommendations. You might not always have time to fit each other in, but you know that you are high on their list of priorities.
10. The COMMUNITY is a group of people that have the same interest as you (for me, blogging) and perhaps through social media or group meetings you get to know them and become friends. These will support you and guide you when perhaps no other friends can if they are not also into blogging.
11. The OLDER/MORE EXPERIENCED friends can be those born a few years ahead, those who have already experienced what you are going through, perhaps they are parents and have settled down, perhaps they have travelled, perhaps they are work colleagues who have worked their way up from the same start point. Either way, they can offer good advice and a listening ear when you need it.

I think most friends can fit under one, or more, of these categories. I’ve left out the more negative types of friends because luckily, I think for the first time in my life I can say that I don’t have any one-sided friendships and it is pretty refreshing. It’s well-worth taking a good look at your friends and seeing which ones are true friends, because it really can change your own life to cut them out. Negativity breeds negativity and giving away friendship to someone who doesn’t return it can be exhausting. Why not focus your efforts on the people who care?

Drowning in a tea cup

Photo by Max Charping

Life got just a bit out of control recently. A lot has been happening, too much to deal with really so my response was to stop blogging, because quite simply, I didn’t know how on earth to put it all into words. It’s very rare for me to be speechless, or for anything to put my life on hold, but the shock of everything really did just stop me in my tracks. The shock hasn’t completely worn off yet and things are far from settled, but I’ve missed blogging and I didn’t want all my hard work in creating this little world to go to waste, so here I am.

I’m sure all of us have felt overwhelmed by life at times, I know that I have, I just try not to let it take over and start making plans to deal with things. I’m an organiser, someone who deals with a situation and moves of quickly by finding a solution. It’s just the way I am programmed. So it’s been hard the last two weeks to have my emotions up the wall and feel so scattered – I’ve been getting annoyed at myself for moping around. But when those feelings engulf you, it is very hard to see a way out. I know you all know what I am talking about – if you have ever experienced any real pain or suffering in your life, whether you’ve been bullied, lost a loved one or been through a bad break-up. All of these are devastating and turn our lives from the steady and calm waters to stormy tidal waves that rock the boat we once thought was so safe.

It is so easy to get caught up in our everyday lives, with work and relationships, and to let them seem greater problems than they actually are. We are all guilty of letting a bad situation take over at times, some react by letting it plunge them into depression and others throw themselves into work and other matters to take their minds off it. Normally I am the latter, I throw myself into anything else in order to deal with the problem and move on, but this time things just caught me by surprise and I started to feel like I was drowning in a tea cup.

You might be thinking at this point “what a depressing post, get over it love”, and I am, trust me. But what really helped me was a heavy dose of perspective. It is important, when you start to feel like this, to take a step back from the situation, which can be the most difficult thing. But taking a deep breath and taking everything into account can really make a difference to the way you view things. My perspective came in the form of a terminally ill man who I had written stories about over the past year after he was given a shock diagnosis of a brain tumour and only 18 months to live. He died at the weekend, but only after squeezing every tiny bit of beauty and fun out of life. Writing his tribute was the hardest thing after seeing him so full of beans only a matter of months ago, but it helped to know that I was doing my bit to help the family to come to terms with things.

Something else that has helped me get a grip on things was hearing, from someone I highly respect and have learnt a lot from, that I am an example that he uses of “someone who will go very far”. We had a chat that led to him telling me this and giving me some interesting career advice that has certainly influenced some of the big decisions I’ve been making lately. It was great to be told from someone who is such an expert in their field and has so much experience that he agrees with my plans for the future and encourages them. Definitely gave me the boost I needed to firm up these plans and to make the first move.

I just wanted to highlight the importance of saying things like this to people we work with, people we have relationships with, our friends and families and anyone we come across in life. It really can make all the difference to share a positive and constructive opinion on peoples’ work and careers. When we put so much time and effort into things, it is important to reward this with praise and encouragement because it could give them the push they really need to make their next move. Don’t be loose with false praise because that benefits no-one and only hurts you in the long run when you have to explain people’s failings as a result of these words. But kind words and support when you can see the hard work that has gone in, that can mean a lot to us twenty-something’s and graduates who are working our way up the career ladder.

If you ever feel like the walls are closing in and you’re taking on water at the same time, like it’s all just getting a bit too much for you – try taking a step back. Speak to people, my friends have been a saviour to me the last two weeks and I don’t know what I would have done without them. Talking about it all also helps get a grip on the situation and to work out your next move. Don’t just go into a black hole of despair and suffer alone – I nearly did and it made things even worse. What are friends for at the end of the day?

Photo by Jill Justus

Have you been in a difficult situation lately – what did you do to find a solution and reach the other side?

Some of my favourite pictures of 2013

These first few days of the new year have been spent thinking back over the past 12 months, over the amazing memories, over the mistakes that have been made by both myself and others, and of course, the hopes and dreams I had and achieved, or didn’t. Here are some of my favourite memories of 2013, captured, by myself, in a series of photographs:

House of Boobs visit King’s Lynn

Still not entirely sure what the heck what was going on in this picture but we were all a bit tipsy and had been playing lots of games including a hula-hoop competition that my team won! The university girls all came to visit, and although they are not all in this picture, this one best sums up the chaos and fun of that weekend.

Me and the boys go to Jaguar Skills

An epic, and very messy night, I still don’t remember much of what happened, but I know that I was with my boys and having an awesome time at Jaguar Skills and Matrix & Futurebound earlier in the year at the Waterfront in Norwich.

Glamping at Sedgeford

This picture might not have any faces in it, but it perfectly expresses what my weekend Glamping with the girls was all about – a freebie treat for my best friend’s birthday – it was a great blag and a fantastic weekend filled with barbecues, gossiping, wine and good fun. We drove all over eating ice creams, chilling in gorgeous coastal pubs, and fed the goats on site – it was so much fun and some well-deserved time with amazing friends.

Mr T – loving the sunshine

My gorgeous little tortoise, Mr T, was loving the sunshine this summer and spent hours exploring our garden, testing the boundaries and generally making me laugh by pushing things over. We built him his own enclosure, which he loved, and he spent so much time out there, we even lost him in a few times when he wanted to sleep outside!

At Wyndstock in the summer with the boyfriend

One of the best festivals/events I have ever been to – loved playing lawn games and croquet in the sunshine, eating cream teas at the fete, swing dancing and going to literary talks before watching fencing matches – such a variety and we all ended up dancing with our dirty bass faces in the woods until dawn – Amazing.

Hideout Festival

Partying from dawn until dusk with the ‘we stay out all night’ crew, meeting up with more amazing friends out there in Croatia and making lots of new party pals was an amazing experience that I will never forget. It was also the deal-breaker for certain other friends and I’m glad that it happened, although it may have broken a friendship up, it also forged many others that were far more worthy than this one. Not even half the people who should be are in this pictre, but this sums up the holiday – dancing to Vogue as the sun rose over Zcre Beach.

London Hen Do

Definitely not the most attractive photo of the three of us, but we’re besties to the end and this was an amazing night celebrating my best friend, Rachel Auker’s engagement before her wedding a few weeks later. We headed to London to a posh hotel for cocktail making, a nice meal, spa session, night out and lots of fun. It was a fab trip and a great hen do – the perfect send off for my friend before her wedding! Especially when we ended up racing through Piccadilly Circus at 4am on a rickshaw!

Pig racing – just one of the many crazy moments at Secret Garden Party

Secret Garden Party was an incredible festival and an amazing weekend of fun and madness with the boyfriend – it was like Disneyland for adults and I loved it. Watching Bastille play in the sunshine was one of my favourite moments, and the fireworks after Faithless will always stay in my memory. So much happened at this festival, and so many amazing pictures were taken, but I just felt that this best expressed the randomness of the event. Can’t wait for next year!

Three best friends at the Wedding

Here I am with my beautiful best friends at Rach’s wedding, which was the most beautiful wedding ever, Leanne and I are bridesmaids. It really was the most perfect day for Rach & Vito, they really deserved it after waiting so long just to be together, and we all had so much fun. Such a wonderful day and it really was amazing to watch two people who mean so much to me tie the knot.

Boomtown Fair

The most insane place I have ever been and with a great bunch of people – it was a crazy weekend and one I will never forget. I love this picture, it looks like a vintage photograph of a festival and this was one of my happiest days of the year so I am glad someone captured the moment. I will always remember this day and how amazing it was – the things I saw and did. So much fun and I can’t wait to go back this year.

Sister sister time at V Festival

My birthday present was tickets for me and my sister to go see Beyonce perform at V Festival – such a good present! We had a great day out at the festival and we managed to see loads of amazing acts including a special secret performance by Wretch 32!

Ireland for the Wedding

An amazing long weekend away with the boyfriend and his family for a beautiful wedding with lots of delicious food, Irish music and plenty of booze. It was such a beautiful place and I was so glad we could get away just the two of us after being with so many others all summer at the festivals – some much needed couple time.

House of Boobs reunion

Me and my beautiful ex-housemates were reunited for another weekend of sleepovers, snuggles, food, Disney movies, drinking and dancing – it was a perfect weekend with my girls and gave me the fix I needed to make it through to the next reunion. Still miss my girlies so much though!

Zombies & Sub Focus

A bunch of us went on a Zombie fun run before heading to a Sub Focus gig in Norwich one weekend – it was brilliant! Stupid fun running around in the woods pretending to be zombies before heading to the union to dance the night away to Sub Focu (one of my fave DJs) and get smashed. Such a good night and a great chance for me to make up friends with a girl who I had earlier fallen out with.

Natural History Museum

Me and the boyfriend went on a little trip to London to the Natural History Museum and it was one of the best days out ever! We saw all kinds of animals, learnt loads of facts and just had so much fun walking around getting excited about everything like little kids.

Fatboy Slim

Major Lazer

Basement Jaxx

My three best gigs of the year have to put altogether, both Major Lazer and Basement Jaxx were with the boyfriend and Basement Jaxx was my absolute best of the year – also my birthday present! Fatboy Slim was incredible and all the boys came along – such an epic night!!

Christmas with the family

The year was finished off with the perfect family Christmas – what more could a girl ask for?!

Reliving my HUGE festival summer as the official videos are released

Hideout Festival 2013 on the Island of Pag, Croatia, was the biggest week of my year. I partied around-the-clock for seven days straight with my boyfriend and amazing friends from home and university. I even made some new friends while out there that have since become my raving buddies. It was a huge week and so much fun. I watched the sun rise and set every single day, I danced on stages, sand, in pools and the sea, on buses and boats and anywhere else I could find. I made incredible memories and can be sure I’ll never forget them. It’s amazing to see the final video, but to be honest this is a very tame version of the Hideout I experienced. However, I can’t deny that when I hear that beat and bass kick in, it’s like being back on Zcre Beach! If only I was, instead of in chilly old England!

Boomtown Fair 2013, in Winchester, was officially the craziest weekend of my life. I saw so much while I was there than my brain felt like it was melting and my eyes couldn’t take in any more. The festival was vast, the stages huge and the music was incredible. I loved every second, again went with fantastic old friends and made some new ones there. It was such a peaceful place and yet so intense and mind-boggling. The theatre acts and side-shows were my favourite because they were always what you least expected and transported you into crazy new worlds. I still don’t believe, and can’t explain half the things I saw there. It was like falling down the rabbit hole.

Reunited and reliving those precious memories of university

After a long six months, the House of Boobs girls (as we were nicknamed at University of Hertfordshire) were finally reunited for a weekend of catching up, drinking champagne and cocktails, eating copious amounts of chips and dip, and most of all, making enough memories to tide us over until the next meet-up.

After living together and spending nearly all of our time together over the three years of university – supporting each other through the course stresses and deadlines, cheering each other up over boy trouble, staying up into the wee hours with drunken tears, celebrating each other’s achievements and having each others’ backs on every night out. We’ve been through a hell of a lot together over the years and we’ve all come out of it stronger than ever. Boys truly have come and gone in that time, as have jobs and other friends – but the one thing that has stayed constant is that we are all – without fail – always there for each other no matter what.

After arriving in a village near Chelmsford, Essex, at one of my former housemate’s house, we unpacked the mountains of stuff we had brought along, tucked into a delicious dinner and had a quick catch up before heading upstairs to get ready. We all glammed up in our high heels and fabulous outfits – my top is from Missguided and skirt from Ark – and after a couple of glasses of wine and making sure we had all remembered our ID’s, we clambered into the cars and headed out to Leigh-On-Sea.

Our destination was a bar called Bellinis, which was quite small but served great cocktails! To be honest, we could have been anywhere and I wouldn’t have noticed what was going on around us – we were all having so much fun dancing like loons, drinking Jam Doughnut shots and laughing, a lot! It was amazing to be surrounded by the girls again, because they are all the type of women who I wish existed everywhere – none of them will ever put you down or say a bad word about you if they have your back. It was so nice to be surrounded by such supportive friends who were nothing but happy to hear everyone’s news and celebrate everything going on in their lives. It is rare to find a group of girls who honestly act this way, who don’t put each other down, and I am proud to have friends like these.

I have such fabulous friends. Nearly all of them are in very happy, loving relationships with great guys (not something that they could boast in university!) and the ones who are not are confident and happy in going solo. Some are nearly finished battling through their PGCEs and are now teaching classes of little ones, while another is working in Asos marketing department, another travels to Germany and America regularly for work. Another is heading off travelling around South-East Asia and Australia at the end of the year and another is working as a para-legal and loving it. I am proud of everything they have achieved and have yet to.

Am really looking forward to the next meet-up and hopefully we won’t have long to wait. The main DJ from our old student union is holding a huge reunion party so hopefully we will all make it along to that.

Class of 2010 – University of Hertfordshire – House of Boobs reunited

I am so excited. Today is the day. This afternoon, I am to be reunited with some of my best girlfriends – House of Boobs, as we were nicknamed at University of Hertfordshire – for drinks, dancing, an almighty catch-up and plenty of snuggles. We are all so close, but unfortunately being spread across Norfolk, Essex, London and Ipswich, it is not always practical to meet up as often as we would like, nor is it easy to find a time when everyone is free! I am so looking forward to hearing all about the girls’ summers, their promotions, new jobs, boyfriends, new homes, travel plans and the rest. It is also nice that because I have so much holiday left over I am taking today and Monday off work as a treat, with a spa day booked with mum for Monday. And I’m looking forward to wearing my fabulous new outfit – velvet crop top and tartan midi/pencil skirt when we go out tonight. Will post pictures and an update after the weekend.

Networking: Making new friends at the #EABloggerParty

On Friday night I headed to the beautiful city of Norwich in the rain with two photographer friends and a fellow blogger to the first East Anglia Bloggers Party, organised by the fabulous and lovely Gemma Seager – the woman behind Retrochick.

(From left, Mike Chivers of Rebel Heart Photography, myself, Victoria Arndt of Faerie Wishes and Emily Nichols, another photographer)

Gemma had organised the cocktail party as a chance for bloggers and creative types to meet in person instead of just online and it was a great way of developing a community between Norfolk writers.

Here I am hobnobbing with some of the fabulous writers I met at the party (pics courtesy of Rebel Heart Photography) over some gorgeous 241 cocktails – my favourite was the Freak Friday, although I rather enjoyed a raspberry Bellini as well!

 

It was a really lovely party, Gemma had gone to so much effort in organising goody bags, a raffle and tights competition, and I meet some lovely women. It was refreshing to go into a room of women with such a wonderful atmosphere, everyone just wanted to make friends and hear about your work. Talking about what I do also made me realise the value of all my work by seeing it through other people’s eyes. It is very easy to forget or underestimate yourself when you don’t take a step back to put all your work into perspective.

It was also fantastic to finally meet the woman behind Retro Chick – one of my favourite blogs and Gemma is such an inspiration for turning her passion for writing and all things vintage into a career – when she couldn’t find the job she wanted, she created it.

I’m really looking forward to the next gathering and keeping in contact with the bloggers I met.

For the tights competition, we had to choose a pair to take home and wear, then getting a picture of ourselves and posting them on our blogs to stand a chance of winning a hamper. Here’s my offering – and I love the tights I ended up with – gorgeous lace print!

The tights are by Pamela Mann – http://www.tightsplease.co.uk/brands/pamela-mann/