Posts Tagged With: Lent

This is somewhat of an ambiguous writing prompt. I’m not sure if it’s asking if I agree with them on an ethical level or if it’s asking about any tattoos and piercings that I have. I’ll do both and cover both bases. 

First of all, let me take you on a body modification tour of myself. At the tender age of 11 (well I disagree it was a tender age, I wish I’d been younger) I had my first piercings in my ears. At 14 I convinced my mum to let me have a second hole in my ears, my dream was to rock the one stud, one hoop look… Oh yeah! However, because of my stupid school’s rules about absolutely no jewellery, and my ear’s relatively slow healing skills, those second holes closed up and I was a bit gutted. 

At 18 I decided to pierce my own nose. It was a boring Friday evening, it seemed simple enough. I got the needle through the first couple of layers of skin, but couldn’t pop it all the way through. Turns out it’s quite hard to pierce one’s own nose. The following week, I went and had my nose pierced professionally and have been in love with the little chunk of metal in my schnoz ever since. Well apart from when I have a cold. 

Also at 18, as a treat for finishing school and passing my driving test, I stretched my ears for the first time. I’m now at a 12.00mm gauge in my ears (just about big enough to fit my little finger through). My stretched ears are of endless interest to my nephew. 

At 22 I got my first tattoo. It was using some money from my grandad which was meant for “something that would last and that I’d always wanted”, in my head that obviously meant a tattoo. I have a small Chinese symbol on my left arm, it says mum. I love it. 

A couple of years ago, while out for the day with some friends in Oxford, I got my tragus pierced on a whim. I fall more in love with this piercing every day and desperately want my other tragus done, so I match. This was my first cartilage peircing though, and the most painful to get done and healed of anything I’ve had. 

The latest addition was my new tattoo that arrived on New Years day this year. A quill on my right wrist to celebrate publishing year. It is the design of the guy who did it in Camden and it is completely beautiful. I love it. 

So to summarise, it pretty much goes without saying that I’m relatively for tattoos and piercings. I’d be the hippoest of all hypocrites if I said I was against them!!! 

Lex xx



My biggest guilty pleasure, one that I partook in this very evening, is that if there is no cream/ ice cream/ custard available I put milk on cakes and puddings. I was going to take a picture of my pudding this evening to illustrate how beautiful and not gross this particular guilty pleasure is, but it was too good and I ate it before I took a photo. 

People react very strongly to my guilty pleasure, in fact it has caused people to publicly disown me. But I argue, don’t knock it until you try it. Its a habit I learnt from my uncle, so I’m also arguing that it’s genetic. 

I could write more about my guilty pleasure, like my secret love of Mrs Brown’s Boys and American Pie, microwaved cheese sandwiches and the feeling of taking an eyelash out of my eye (it’s almost worth putting them in, just to take them out), but I’m crazy tired and need to hit the hay. Night night.

Lex xx



My earliest childhood memories are pretty fragmented. I remember bits and pieces from pretty early on in life, a fact that I find frustarating as someone with a generally very good memory! 

Probably the earliest thing I can remember is half a memory from when I must have been about 2 and a half. I know I was that old because it is our old house and I turned 3 in the house in which I currently live. I say half a memory, because that is really what it is. I remember a storm outside. I remember being in bed and being scared. I remember my mum sleeping in my bed with me. That’s it. 

I remember my 3rd birthday cake, it was Zippy.

When I was about 3 or 4 I remember having my photo taken while on holiday and suddenly realising that while I was posing for the photo I had been sat in an ants nest. I literally had ants in my pants. 

I remember racing my brother down the (ridiculously steep) stairs in out new house. We were racing to watch the Adams Family, important obviously. I fell down the stairs. 

I remember a holiday to France when I was 5. I fell out of bed in the middle of the night, banged my head and got a conclusion, a French doctor came to talk to me which was more disorientating than my bumped noggin. That same holiday I watched some cows being milked, I got poo all over my new pink shoes. Theirs not mine. 

Rest assured my memory has got a darn sight better over the years, but thanks for meandering down memory lane with me. 

Lex xx



A: Auntyhood… I love being someone’s slightly mental auntie, it’s the best things I’ve ever been 

B: Bootcamp… I love crawling around in the mud

C: Cheese, of any variety other than blue. 

D: Driving

E: Ears, my ears. My ears and their additions. 

F: Films

G: God

H: Helping (Ooh that was twee wasn’t it?!) 

I: Ice cream

J: Jelly… I flipping love jelly. 

K: knitting 

L: Laughing. Simples.

M: Murder mysteries

N: Nigttime. When it’s bedtime and you get to sleep. 

O: Ovens… When I’m cooking in them or on them. 

P: Peanut butter- seriously the way to my heart. 

Q: Queuing… For something exciting

R: Reading… Currently ‘Billy & Me’ by Giovanna Fletcher

S: Smiling

T: Tattoos… Mine, other people’s.

U: Ukuleles 

V: Vans… And by that I mean VW campervans

W: Writing… Look I’m even doing it now, I’m happy! 

X: Xercise…. Ok that’s one cheating slightly! 

Y: YOU!! You’re probably my friend, you make me happy.

Z: Zzzzzzing… Do love my sleep, I’m headed that way soon. 

Nice and simple today

Lex xx



I live my life through quotes. Whether it’s asking, when someone shouts “stop!”, if it’s hammer time or in the name of love; forever screaming pivot in people’s faces; telling people they’ve got red on them, or working on my night cheese. Whether it’s telling people they’re a wizard, wishing someone would tell me that I’m a princess (shut up!) or reminding myself that I’m a dude, I’m a hunky dude, I’m a badass hunky dude. Or if it is simply delighting to remind people that they don’t even go here! I love quotes. 

(Incidentally if you can name all the movies/shows/songs the above quotes are from, I might marry you) 

So being asked to write a blog about my favourite quote is like asking me to write a blog about my favourite child… Although harder because I don’t have any children, but you know what I mean. 

And it isn’t even just the countless, frankly ridiculous, nods to film and television that litter my supposed adult life. I love serious quotes from theologians and inspirational people. As something of a wanna be wordsmith, and someone who sees beauty in the written and spoken word, I love a good quote. One of my (not so hidden) talents is that last year me and a friend taught ourselves 150 Shakespeare quotes and the plays they appear in (we had some time on our hands). Nothing pleases me more (or makes me feel more high brow) than littering my thoroughly mediocre interactions with other people’s beautiful words. 

If asked to plump for just one though, I think I’d have to come back to the quote that I found 8 years ago when searching for something to kick off my personal statement for UCAS. It sums up my belief about God and continues to bring real truth and comfort to me about his character and faithfulness. It is from the timeless C S Lewis… 

“I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun. Not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” 

There are times when you can’t actually see the sun, but it is by it’s light that we are able to see and carry on living. There are times, during the dark night of the soul,  when it seems impossible to see God. But it is by his light that I can see and carry on living. 

Lex xx



Ooopsie, missed another day, sorry about that! But, in my defence there is a bit of method in my madness. I saw a way to group these two prompts together, so I went with it. 

Do you know what little word I like and think gets a bad press? Nice. I really like the word nice and think it is underrated. Let me explain…

When I worked in boarding, the day I used to hate most were Sundays. Even on weekends when I wasn’t on duty, I hated Sundays because I had to go back to work at 4:00. I spent the little bit of afternoon that I did have clock watching, packing my stuff up for the week and resenting my stolen Sunday afternoon and evening. In fact, the whole weekend used to feel a bit weird. Because I lived at school during the week, not having normal evenings, I used to feel pressure to try and make my weekends as awesome as possible, cramming all the friends, all the events and all the fun I possibly could into my one precious day. 

But now, now I have a normal job, now I don’t live in a convent, now I have evenings, I have nice weekends. I don’t feel the pressure to squeeze it all in to one 24 hour period and have awesome, incredible, unforgettable weekends; I’m ok with having nice weekends. Chilled, relaxed, simple, gentle weekends. Sometimes they are big and crazy, but it’s ok (and often needed!) just to have a nice weekend, full of space. Sunday afternoons have become my favourite time of the weekend, post dinner, when I know I have a full afternoon and evening to relax befor work starts agiain.Having spent two years without that, I value that time so much. 

So nice is the one little word I’ve chosen to write about today. Nice. Its quiet. It’s gentle. It’s relaxed. There’s no massive expectation in nice, meaning there’s little disappointment in nice. It is what it is. 

I’ve had a really nice weekend. I’m having a really nice afternoon: there is a new book, there’s a teapot, there will be cheese on toast later. Nice. 

To illustrate the niceness, here is my nice self portrait for day 12…



Lex xx



Over this blog project there will be hopefully four guest blogs. I will give a short introduction to each, like this one, so you know who is writing. But will leave everything else to them. These blogs will vary in their subject matter, just like all the ones I’m writing. And the writers vary in their backgrounds and their relationship to me. Today’s blog, however, is still relatively personal to me and written by someone I’m very close to… My big brother Simon.

Write about siblinling rivalry…

What an eye-rollingly obvious topic, eh? Perhaps, but it’s notas if I could reel off a thousand examples of competitions and fights between Lex and I. Our relationship has constituted many things over the years, but I’m not sure that “rivalry” really features.

My wife Nicci and I have recently been debating the pros and cons of various age-gaps between siblings, and it’s emerged – probably not surprisingly – that we’ve both been influenced heavily by our own experiences. A gap of 1 or 2 years, such as my wife’s to her older brother, means that playing together and sharing toys is a lot more likely. From a parental point of view (where being even a tiny bit selfish is a rare treat), there’s a lot more chance that they’ll basically keep each other busy and therefore out of your hair for longer as well!

She definitely found her brother annoying at times, but the relationship from her perspective was a lot about admiration, emulation, and trying to match him skill-for-skill. In physical terms this was never going to work (as you’ll know if you’ve met them!), and all too often games ended with Niccicrumpled in a heap and her brother emitting a panicked “don’t tell mum!” They were academically close enough together, though, for rivalry to emerge on things like their daily times-tables and spelling challenges. Undoubtedly this pushed them both forwards. As a result of all this (and many more reasons I won’t go into), she favours leaving – as much as you can ever be in control of it – a smaller gap between children. [Calm down Lex, step away from the knitting!]

For Lex and I, the gap is 4¾ years – a virtual lifetime in child terms. Somewhere near the top end of primary school I worked out that our parents were separated by 8 years, andthat the equivalent for me at that point would have been marrying a literal toddler! Too weird. At school, fraternising with anyone outside your own year was just not the donething. Sunday school and family friends might widen the acceptability somewhat, but I don’t think Lex and I were ever that close to being on the same page.

I can’t really remember us ever playing something together that we both enjoyed and in which we were equally invested,so there was never really a contest. I do, however, remember very clearly bartering with Lex on the subject of playtime. I would offer half an hour of my time to her (playing what I couldn’t tell you) in return for me getting a human GranTurismo opponent for one race. Keen to actually make it a race, I would pick a car with around 20% of the horsepower of hers. I had also discovered a handicap feature which would put me 1km further back from the start line, and with those two tweaks in place … I only beat her by maybe 30 seconds.

Rivalry is, I suppose, determination to best another person at something. In the example above, I knew I was going to win and Lex didn’t care. Trying to think about when her skills and abilities have frustrated me, it’s family holidays that come to mind.

If there’s one time when siblings have no choice but to stick together and make their own fun, with limited stuff and often in limited space, it is these times. And many of ours were *special* holidays; I mean, tiddly cottage in a field behind the sea wall near Great Yarmouth, anyone? How about a wind-whipped cabin in the wilderness outside York? But even in these desolate places, Lex somehow managed to find a similarly-aged friend, a kindred spirit, among the neighbouring, desperate families.

Every time.

Quicker than you can say “oh look there’s a cupboard full of knackered board games!” she would be gone, leaving me with no play companion for the remaining 6.9 days of the holiday. I never hated Lex as a kid, but boy did that frustrate me.

So does a big age gap guarantee there won’t be sibling rivalry? I don’t think so. When it gets really nasty is in those families where one or both parents are, say, doctors, and two or more kids feel inclined to follow the same path. No matter what the age gap, that kind of pressure married to ease of comparison is going to end in tears. But, for Lex and I, it’s not exactly easy to score ourselves against the other.

Different secondary schools, different subject choices. Totally different approaches to further education. Shameless corporate career versus a (probable) life in charity, church and the public sector. She a published author and avid blogger, me … not. Unless you count video Press release.

But then again, at the first whisper of an invitation to get myself published by her royal blogness I leapt at the chance, determined to show that I can write something good too. Maybe she is a rival after all…



Hello you, 

I’m you, 8 whole years down the line. You might not want to listen to me, but please take a minute, I’ve got some things to tell you. 

Oh Lex. Brace yourself little girl, things are going to get rough. I know things right now have just tipped upside down, you don’t know which way is up and you feel like nothing makes sense. I hate to say this, but get used to that feeling. You will continue to lose your footing, fall on your bum and feel pretty lost for the next few years. 

I’m not gonna tell you what happens. It’s not my place to, I don’t think you’d believe me and you need to face it all to learn. But I’ve got some pointers and advice to pass on you from 8 years in the future. 

Don’t stop talking. Don’t stop expressing yourself, telling people what hurts and saying what you need. The moment you stop talking things will get so much worse. So find the right people and talk to them, use your words. 

Don’t fall in love with him, you know who I mean. Guard your heart, don’t be naive, don’t lose yourself trying to chase him, he won’t ever love you in the way you want him to. He’s gay (ok, I know I said I wouldn’t tell you what happened, but that one doesn’t count, cos you won’t believe me and will still fall hard). 

Know who your friends are. Don’t forget people who have been with you for so long, just because of a new face. It won’t last. That isn’t friendship. 

Don’t stop dancing. Don’t stop acting. Seriously. You will miss it SO much. 

I know you hate school at the moment, that gets worse over the next couple of years. It’s ok to hate it, it’s not great. Just don’t curse the building and all it stands for, vowing never to set foot there again. I’m not going to tell you why, you just never know what will happen in the future. 

Now, and this is the biggie, are you listening? Don’t forget anything. You are going to use everything that’s happening right now. Use it ways that you can’t imagine. Use it ways that you wouldn’t dream. You’re going to write a book, can you believe it?! (Ok, sorry ruining another surprise, but you always knew you had a book in you, right?) Your story, your words, your message comes out of a really painful place, I’m not going to lie. But use that pain. Harness it, let it drive you, don’t let it make you hard. Let it change you; make you softer, more compassionate, more reflective… (I’m going to use that word you hate) let it make you braver. 

You’ve got a big future in front of you little chum, don’t rush the next few years. You need the hard times to knock a few edges off and give you more motivation that you can ever imagine right now. 

Lex xx

P.S. Could you do me a favour? Come out. You’d save us a few years extra heartache and it really isn’t as scary as you think it will be! 



(Brace yourself, it’s thrilling) 

5:45am- My first alarm goes off, I turn it off and go back to sleep.

6:00am- My second alarm goes off, I turn it off and go back to sleep. 

6:15am- My third alarm goes off, I turn it off and go back to sleep. 

6:30am- My fourth and final alarm goes off, I turn it off and get out of bed. (I believe in the psychological benefits of getting to turn alarms off and go back to sleep, hence the 4 alarm system!) 

6:45am- I exit the shower and start to get ready. I have no ironed work trousers, I get cross at myself. I remember I’ve got to take my gym stuff to work and should have packed my bag last night, I get cross at myself again.

7:15am- I shove some lunch in my work bag and make breakfast. Normally I read the paper over breakfast, but today I had yesterday’s blog to write and upload, so over my tea and toast I wrote. 

7:40am- I leave for work.

7:50am- I arrive at work, turn my laptop on, check emails, check my planner and remind myself of what on earth I’m doing today. 

8:40am- Morning briefing. Stand awkwardly in/on/by a box. 

9:05am-  This morning is unusual in that we have whole school mass. So I get to not teach year 11 first thing on a Tuesday (huroo hurray) today and instead head down to the sports hall for mass. 

9:45am- Head back to the office and manage to waste a precious extra free drinking tea and randomly shuffling books around, get cross at myself. 

11:15am- Head to my classroom to teach year 8. Considering they’d just got out of mass they work well, we get lots done and I’m pleasantly surprised, a rarity with this class! 

12:15pm- After break I teach year 10. I really enjoy teaching this lot and we have a good lesson. 

12:55pm- Head into a department meeting. Fun times! 

1:35pm- Lunch time. Noodles are good for my belly and good my soul. 

2:15pm- On Tuesday afternoons everyone else teaches, so I get the office to my self. I crank up some tunes and try and get loads done. I get less done than I’d hoped, I get cross at myself. Starting to feel a bit poorly.

3:35pm- End of the school day and I head into a second department meeting. I know, how lucky can one gal be?! 

4:45pm- Leave work, feeling pretty rough. Was going to meet a friend at the gym but she couldn’t make it, so nip into Sainsburys on the way home to get some dinner. 

5:30pm- Catch up on personal emails (big day with lots of emails from publishers today!) over some dinner. 

7:15pm- Head to Bootcamp. Realise I’m the only one who’s turned up, so wind up having a personal training session! It’s tough, I nearly throw up, but make it through in spite of feeling really ill. 

8:15pm- Come home, grab a protein shake and find some ominous looking white spots in my throat. Oopsie! 

8:30pm- Put on Greys Anatomy and settle down to some marking. 

10:30pm- Get ready for bed and settle down to write Day 7 (but you know that, you’re reading it!) 

11:30pm- Post Day 7 and hit the hay. 

Lex xx

Haha, so I’ve not yet made it to double figures and I’ve already managed to miss a day! For those of you that can count, day 6 was indeed yesterday (Monday) and I am posting this today (Tuesday). Ooops! I was marking until about 11:30 last night and I just couldn’t take an extra half an hour to blog before hitting the hay. So I’m doing an early bird special today which also means you’ll get two in one day (I’ll post day 7 later on). I spoil you ambassador with this blogging goodness. 

The reasoning behind choosing today’s prompt is twofold. One, because day 5 (the vlog blog) took me forever to sort and day 4 was a bit more of a thought provoking piece and two, because I’m writing this quick before I go to work. 

So what is in my bag…? One sec, let me get my bag… 

1) Half a bottle of Diet Coke: I drink it a lot and there is normally some remnants in my bag. 

2) Two pairs of 3D glasses: I go to the cinema a lot, so always need to be prepared. I also have a very forgetful friend who always forgets hers. 

3) My purse: I needs the money. 

4) My film journal: See the afore mentioned “lots of films”. I’m writing down and reviewing every single film I watch in 2015 and my Moleskine film journal makes me happy to be alive. 

5) A small pharmacy: I used to work at Boots and since then seem to travel with the medication for all manner of accidents and emergencies, just in case. 

6) Lip Balm: I do not currently wish to disclose how many lip balms are in my bag. I have a bit of a problem/obsession with having a lot of lip balm with me. My sister in law once counted 12 in one handbag. 

7) Perfume: Although this is a bit useless currently since my epic 2 1/2 month (and counting) illness marathon has rendered me temporarily anosmic. 

8) Tissues: See the afore mentioned illness. There is much nose blowing afoot right now. 

9) 2 Beanie hats: I always carry a hat just in case. I think I forgot there was already one in there. 

10) Inhaler: It’s in there for show really, I don’t need to use it much. Although on days, like yesterday, when delightful children decide to spray deodorant all over my classroom, I’m glad it’s there! 

Well that was exciting wasn’t it?! Check in later for Day 7. 

Lex xx