Fish vs. Bunnies.

I've decided I need to take control of my pathetic social life. 

That's a powerful opening statement isn't it... Nevertheless, I mean it.

On the weekends, all is rosy! I'm surrounded by family and friends and I cram as much as I can into 2 little days as is humanly possible.

Weekdays however are a different story.

I've gotten into the nasty (and rather pathetic) habit of finishing work roughly around 5pm, heading back to the flat, triple locking myself in, having tea, watching the soaps and going to bed.

My 82-yr old Nanna has got a better social life than me.

True, she spends a lot of time playing bingo, something which doesn't really appeal to me, but even so, she's showing me up!

So I concocted a plan. Like with all my plans, it was fairly half baked, but stay with me here.

I had 2 little lightbulb moments about a week ago regarding my mission to get out more and meet some more people of Leeds. The first lightbulb moment plan... Has been fruitless.

Here comes the cringey part... DO NOT LAUGH.

I signed up for online dating.

Yes, it's tragic, but I clearly stated on my little profile thingy that I was only looking to make some new friends because I was new to the big city. I've no real interest in actual dating!

However, somewhere in a mans brain, this must be interpreted as "this girl is footloose and fancy free", because in the first hour, I had more requests for one night stands than I've ever received in my life!

So I deleted the profile immediately. Seedy buggers.

Which brings me to lightbulb number 2, much less appealing and the factor I've been dreading the most... I'm going to have to join a gym.

If you've been following my blog for a while, you will know that me and general appliances don't get on, so imagine me surrounded by gym machinery... It's my worst nightmare.

Also, I hate the people who go to gyms!

There's the stereotypical meatheads, who have more muscles than brains and stare out the 'competition' from their mirrored corners, grunting like sea lions every time they do a squat.

Then there's the gym bunny, the female equivalent of the meathead. Typical blonde, busty, wears neon pink lycra and full make up and barely breaks a sweat despite running for an hour full out on a treadmill.

So now I have to befriend these people?!

I'm going to have my work cut out!

I brought all of my old gym gear back to the flat with me after my excursion home last weekend, full of good intentions of signing up this week, but due to unforeseen non-drunken fall related knee injury, this has been postponed to next week.

Or maybe the week after...

Or the week after that?

L x

The Daily Grind.

So I'm about 3 weeks into my Leeds adventure now, I've settled into the job really well and I've made a few friends in the office. Home life is still a bit of a struggle but I guess I'm still in the 'adjustment period'...

It's amazing how quickly your brain can fall into a routine and adapt to a change in daily structure whereas your body seems to lag behind. When I was still living at home, an early morning wake up call constituted my puppy Ollie running into my bedroom and diving on my head around 10am for his morning walk.

In Leeds however, I'm having to get used to the delights of the silly o' clock iPhone alarm wake up call.

Depending on how disheveled my hair is looking, the alarm time varies between respectably early, 7.30am and hideously wrong on all levels early, 6.45am.

It doesn't matter that it is technically just "quarter to seven", that little number 6 makes ALL the difference and my body is simply refusing to comply with the abuse.

I CAN'T STOP YAWNING!

I swear, I actually closed my eyes for a minute in the middle of a meeting last week. I hope nobody saw...

Anyways, after making myself appear less like a zombie and wolfing down something nutritional (like a double chocolate frosted sugar loaded poptart) for breakfast, I leave the flat and set off for work.

Now the interesting thing about the location of my flat, is that it's situated in what is known as the 'legal and banking district' of Leeds. So basically, I step out of the front door of my building and am instantly engulfed by penguins.

Not real penguins of course, Leeds doesn't have penguins silly, but hundreds of identically dressed men and women in suits of every shade of black imaginable. All of these penguins seem to be in a massive hurry every morning, and always in the opposite direction to the way I'm walking, so I always end up playing a game of dodge the penguin on the way to work.

I'm typically one of those irritating people who likes to look at their feet while I'm walking because making eye contact with strangers makes me uncomfortable somewhat, but this is very hard to do in a busy city!

Crossing over City Square opposite the train station close to 9am on any morning is pretty much taking your life into your own hands. If you don't become lost in the hustle and bustle of penguins, some numpty on a bike or blind as a bat bus driver is sure to get ya! Despite this, every morning without fail, there is a man cossack dancing around playing a penny whistle next to one of the little decorative statue thingys, hoping to score a few pennies out of the stuck up suited and booted.

I have no idea if he is homeless or simply eccentric, but he is quite possibly one of the strangest dressed people I've ever seen in my life (and I've drank in Newcastle's Bigg Market on a Saturday night!)

Military boots up to his knees, above which is some form of fluorescently coloured and patterned pyjama pants, covered over by a huge khaki green parka coat and on his long grey hair covered head, is perched a rasta hat. The man is awesome.

I don't know whether it's because he has actually started to recognise me as I shuffle past him day after day, or its because he recognises a soft touch when he sees one, but he never lets me pass by without wishing me a good morning. I very rarely have a lot of change to give him, but when I do, I like to give him what I can, simply for his politeness (his musical talents are questionable at best).

The rest of the walk from this point is fairly uneventful. There are a lot of homeless people in Leeds it seems and a lot of them congregate around Park Row where I work. It's sad to see but I can barely afford to feed myself, let alone half the city!

The hours at work fly by and before I know it, I'm walking my route in reverse.

It still doesn't feel like home, but I hope it will get there one day.

L x

Trial and Error.

Dearest readers... I'm going to begin this blog with a few much needed apologies. Firstly, I have lied to you, the shop underneath my flat is not a Tesco Express as previously stated, it is in fact a co-op! 

Apology two comes in advance for the length this blog might turn out to be... I have a lot to divulge about my first week living in the big bad city.

So if I pick up where I left off in my last post, sat in a hotel room wondering what my first day at my new job was going to have in store for me... The answer was... A brain overload! I got to meet my fellow interns who are both lovely and then the rest of the team... And all of the managers... I then had meetings with said managers and each one gave me a "brief" overview of what they did at the company. 

I'm being sarcastic when I say brief. If you hadn't already guessed.

To add to the madness, I also had to sign for my flat keys and move in on the same day! This worked out slightly better than expected with the help from my wonderful parents, who travelled down from Newcastle to pitch in, and my lovely concierge man Adrian, who I can tell already is going to be like a substitute Grandad to me... If only with an accent so thick it's hard to understand sometimes!

After day one, things at work really picked up and I can honestly say I love my new job! I got my first articles published on the website on day three and I really feel like I'm making a difference to the team and being useful for the first time in months.

My home life however, has not been so plain sailing.

As the majority of my friends could tell you, the phrase "domestic goddess" would never be used to describe me. And on Tuesday night my little studio flat really put me to the test.

If walls could talk, they'd be wetting themselves laughing.

So my little kitchen in my little flat comes equipped with a microwave/grill and a 2-ring electric hob, which is all touch screen and LED lights techno-modern (aka alien to me). 

Armed with a variety of instruction manuals, it still took me over an hour and a half to cook some pasta. Starving and tired as I was, this was the flats first offence of the night.

The second offence came from the electric radiator heater attached to my wall. Again, I was armed with an instruction manual (which may as well have been written in Swahili for what use it was), but I couldn't fathom the thing out!

Switching it on was easy, however it decided that it was set to a timer schedule and wouldn't actually provide any heat until Thursday night at precisely 23:59. This was Tuesday. This was no good.

So I shamelessly resorted to the good old tactic of switching it on and off at the mains a few times and hitting the thing until it did what it was told. I think it got scared of me because it did eventually spring into life and warm the place up.

Fed and warm, the only thing left to do before hitting the hay was to sort an outfit for work the next morning. Which brings me to offence three... The ironing board.

It's one of these old-school contraptions with a little lever on the underside which is used to adjust the height and make the thing stay up.

I pulled the lever, pushed the lever, swung it side to side, the thing would not stay up, and clattered to the floor with a loud bang at least a dozen times before I really started to lose faith in my abilities as a human being.

So I did what any girl in this situation would do and rang my Mam in tears. One hand holding the phone and the other supporting the demon ironing board, my Mam tried her best to explain to me how the thing worked... Before it fell and hit me in the eye.

So I cried some more.

Tuesday was probably my lowest point of the week so I was happy to be coming home on Friday night.

It is now Sunday and I'm typing this on the train back to Leeds with a heavy heart. I know things are going to get easier, but until this happens, saying goodbye is agony.

Knowing you're travelling back to an empty flat leaves an inexplicable empty feeling somewhere between your stomach and rib cage which can't be filled by any amount of comfort pizza or ice cream.

This week is a short week with the Easter weekend looming, so I know it won't be long til I'm doing this journey again in reverse. 

I'm sure I'll survive... Unless the appliances in the flat have other ideas!

L x

Moving Day.

So here I am... In my pjs, in bed, in a travelodge, in Leeds!

Moving day finally arrived after what feels like years of planning and packing. It is the day that I have been simultaneously dreading and looking forward to for so long, it's arrival and passing has been rather a blur.

After finishing off the final bits of packing (including safely transferring my goldfish Dora and Sunny into a travel sized tank suitable for adventure), I caught the train from Newcastle to Leeds with my one way ticket.

I'm not going to lie, I cried like a baby for the first 20 minutes after I said goodbye to my Dad on the platform. I then cried some more as I battled to get my "train friendly" suitcase into the overhead storage and nobody offered to help.

However, as the train sped towards Leeds I really started to look forward to the adventure ahead.

Tomorrow is new job and flat move-in day so it's a pretty big one on my little life calendar so far. The parents are driving down with my endless boxes and bags of stuff to help me with the transition, then I have to say goodbye to them all over again!

It's going to be emotional.

Wish me luck!

L x

Stuff.

So this is the blockade I'm creating inside bedroom doorway in protest to my family's plans for my lovely room after I leave at the weekend.

My brother is planning to buy a pool table and use my bedroom as a hustler lounge. My Dad has other ideas and wants to create a "guitar room", so I figured sod it, I'm blocking myself in! 

I'm kidding. This is only a small example of how much stuff I am taking away with me! Pillows, duvets, kitchen utensils, bedding, bins, lamps, salt and pepper shakers... Literally everything but the kitchen sink currently resides in carrier bags littered all over my house. 

 

I don't leave until Sunday, but I have already started packing everything into boxes just as a way of reassuring myself that everything is going to fit into one car!

 

I knew I had a lot of stuff, most of it completely useless but of huge sentimental value to me. I knew I was going to have to be ruthless in deciding what to take with me, but along with all this new stuff, I'm really not sure my poor little studio flat is going to cope under the weight of it all!

 

Not that I think the floors are going to cave in or anything... I hope.

 

Something else that has thrown all of the "stuff" into question this week has been my endless online search for home contents insurance; again, something I have never had to think about before. How am I supposed to know what all my stuff is worth put together?

 

With the exception of my Kurt Geiger high- heeled shoe collection, which I have made the difficult decision to leave in Geordieland where they belong, I'm a fairly Primani budget kind of girl, my entire wardrobe could probably be covered for a couple of hundred, but Compare the Meerkat wouldn't hear of this, and instead offered me a quote that would cost £11,999 a year to insure £1500 worth of stuff. Logical.

 

So I am still at square one! With the exception of this, everything else is pretty much sorted now. As hard as it is going to be to say goodbye to friends and family, I'm really looking forward to getting settled in my new little home now, surrounded by just a few home from home comforts...

 

 

L x