Browsing Tag

London

Ten things I love about London

Posted on 28th March 2014

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you will look back and realise they were the big things.

Public Transport – it’s rare for me to be a fan of public transport, when it comes to me and proximity to strangers. But here, it’s great; London really have public transport how it should be in every major city in the UK. It’s fast, reliable and you really don’t have to wait long. You find yourself complaining because the next train is in four minutes instead of one, 1st world problems eh?
Shopping – it’s so strange to have immediate access to all the stores in glossy magazines, previously those clothes were some what out of reach without get effort or ordering online. No more do I need to take a day trip to London for the ultimate shopping experience, it’s just a short tube trip away.
Restaurants and takeaways – oh my! The options are endless, you can easily go out to eat but if you feel like staying in then there are so many vast menus to pick. Not only is the selection great but they are usually pretty good when it comes to throwing in freebies or deals with their food. I guess when you have so much competition you have to try and find something to make you stand out, but no complaints here it’s great!
Sight seeing – it’s really easy to go and spend a day out seeing the sights in London. I really must try to see more but even if you don’t use it, it’s great to have that choice. You don’t need to plan a day out in advance, although it helps!
Not needing to drive – I guess this kind of fits under my first point but it felt like it needed it’s own section. When you don’t need to nominate a driver everyone has fun, you can have a nice alcoholic drink without excluding anyone.
Diversity – London is so diverse, it almost feels like a different country. I like it because you get authentic food and retail and hearing the variety of different accents and languages spoken makes a nice change.
Weather – this is a weird one, is it just me or goes it feel warmer here? It seems like the sun is out here more than the south west.
Work – If I wanted to work full time there are plenty of opportunities out there for me.
Recession? What recession – if your lucky you haven’t felt the pinch of the recession, but you would still hear about it from those who have. Here it seems like the recession never happened, money is being spent everywhere.
Access – everything is here, whether that be great health care to brilliant beauty salons you can get access to the best of everything in the UK.

Next on the list coming soon, ten things I don’t like about London – I don’t want to say hate as I don’t think that would be the right word.

Time, where does it go?

Posted on 14th March 2014

When you are working it’s easy to assume that time is something that the working world consumes, only releasing it’s grasp on those long awaited weekends or authorised holidays away from work. With the age of retirement slowly creeping up as humans stick around for longer on this earth work can start to feel like an endless cycle. You get up, go to work, come home from work where you then spend the evening catching up on all the things you need to do before you finally retire to bed; all this for the cycle to continue again the next day.

Somewhere mixed into life there is time, I’m not talking about all twenty four hours of the day time but instead your own personal free time. From listening to others it seems that we in general blame work for the lack of free time in our lives, but I’d argue that whatever amount of free time we happen to have we would fill it with things we have to do.

Once you fill your time with things you have to do like work, chores, child care then it suddenly loses that label free time. Those who are retired will tell you they have less free time now than when they were working, how can that be?

I think this happens because when you work you are given a routine, let’s say for example you work Monday – Friday with the weekend and evenings as “free time”. Your week is very defined, you might choose to take some of your free time and make it into things you need to do. For example lots of people have a cleaning day, or they have to look after their children during certain times. But once this is done you have the rest of your time defined as free.

This routine I think allows you to relax, you’ve worked really hard the rest of the day so you feel no guilt in spending your free time watching TV or reading a book it’s deserved. Those who do not have such a structured routine, they don’t have specific times to move into the relaxation phase and switch off.

Take for example a house wife, if you are cleaning, cooking, looking after children when do you actually get that break off point? You work every day of the week including evenings and you don’t have that same guilt free “that’s it my hours are up time to clock off” moment. Of course throughout the day you do have down time but it’s usually very disjointed and fits in between other tasks.

There is always a silver lining though, if you don’t work and you still keep structure in your life then I think you can have the best of both worlds. I’m slowly moving into this, I now only clean on certain days and make sure I have plenty of time each day just to myself – bliss!

Hats off to mothers with young babies that work, I imagine that would be the most demanding routine! Of course none of this applies if you enjoy your job so much that it’s your hobby, although I haven’t met anyone who wouldn’t prefer to be on a beach sipping a cocktail rather than at work just yet.

Lifestyle Pre Baby Uncategorised

Coffee Shops the new meeting rooms

Posted on 26th February 2014

The coffee shops where I live are an extension of the board room, this makes them very busy most of the day and I wouldn’t want to attempt a lunch time trip again. It’s rare to see the usual coffee crowd, you know the guy sat reading a book alone, the students or the two mothers having a catch up while their children mush food around their faces.

Pretty much everyone here wears a suit and when they are sat around a coffee table they are usually talking business. The only other exception is when professional couples take a moment to remove themselves from their busy lives and they meet for a coffee. But even then they are still in suits and usually business talk isn’t far from their minds.

I am the exception, I do occasionally see a casually dressed soul or two but there is certainly a different vibe here. I have to admit it is strange, I suppose because even outside of the coffee shops the majority are wearing workwear.

Usually you can hear what the nearest tables (while drinking your coffee of choice) are talking about. Right now two professional dressed people are talking about a wedding, what suits to order and the bridesmaid dress style. I can’t quite work out if I’m listening to the soon to be bride and groom or just a interested work colleagues sharing updates about their personal lives.

Either way it’s fair to say if you sit in this coffee shop long enough I’m sure you could work out what major project every company in the financial sector is working on. Having now exchanged the professional world for a slower paced life as a house wife, I have to admit listening to professional talk the talk sounds almost comical and staged to me. When I say that, it’s not to dismiss the important of talking professionally in the working world.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved meeting and enjoyed bouncing around the technical lingo. But when you are removed from that and become an onlooker listening, the huge constrast to the way you might speak at work and the way you speak in more casual settings is very different. So when listening to professional meetings you can hear the this new project is so important that if it’s not done and X, Y, Z dependancies aren’t done exactly on time then it’s the end of the world.

Which it’s far off the truth for most, if you want to stand out in this busy world of work you need to make sure you are meeting your deadlines. Often heard at this time of year are people talking about their internal professional development reviews and what grade they are currently on. Just now I heard one guy saying he was hoping for a raise because he had met his requirements for his this year.

Wouldn’t it be odd if we all spoke as we do at home at work? If a professional attitude never existed, it never occurred to me how staged it sounds when you are no longer being professional five days out of seven in a week.

Lifestyle Pre Baby Uncategorised

IKEA – Please hold while we steal your soul away…

Posted on 18th February 2014

I have always liked IKEA, as long as you accept what it is then I think it fills a great hole in the current market. Usually I like it for the neat storage ideas and for inexpensive items which you don’t mind getting lots of wear and tear. Since moving to London my experience of IKEA has really changed, back in the south west I was close enough to visit their store.

I actually used to enjoy the walk around IKEA even though they pretty much force you to look at their stuff, rather than the conventional stores where you have a choice. Even with that, I saw the whole thing as an event in itself; something to enjoy and hey? why don’t you stop off at their cafe while you are at it, really make a day of it.

It’s not quite as easy to visit their store when you live in London, sure if you live right next to one then great. But the nearest to me is around a fifty minute drive away and thats assuming there isn’t traffic. You know that traffic you experience that google doesn’t warn you about when you find yourself driving through CENTRAL LONDON. Or even just driving anywhere inside the M25 circle seems to be quite congested, specifically the north side anyway.

The last few times I’ve ordered online, you usually have to add quite a few items before they will deliver it which is fair enough really. It’s quite annoying then that IKEA take an age to actually ship your goods, it’s the longest time ever. The last order they had missed one single trouser hanger, no biggie it’s literally worth nothing much but you would think they would still correct it right?

Well no, you spend about thirty minutes on the phone (which by the way is not a free number) waiting for someone to pickup. I eventually gave up and tried submitting my problem online. Ha! That’s a mistake because they quote at least six days to get back to you. In what world does a company take six days at least to get back to a customer service query? I don’t think I know of any company that has openly quoted that long. At least they are honest I suppose!

So to the bring the story along to more recent ventures, they called me back and told me they will send the items out immediately. Did it ever arrive? No. Could I be bothered chasing it up again? No.

Then onto my second experience of ordering online with IKEA and perhaps my last! I thought that maybe the last phone call I made had long waiting times on the customer service line due to the time of year (christmas). Anyway the order arrived today and I immediately can tell it’s not going to be all roses. One of the boxes made a noise when I took it out of their poorly packaged larger box. I ordered some ceramic plates, I spent quite a while trying to decide whether to order cheap or go for hand made but we’ve had dinnerware from IKEA before and it’s always lasted ok.

So I ordered a complete set including pasta dishes, start to unbox and see that three pasta dishes are in pieces. The next box I opened had two little side plates in the same state.

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Immediately I call the IKEA customer service number, I’m warned that I’ll need to wait at least twenty minutes. It’s like 1-2pm, not exactly peak time so I wait and it hits about thirty – forty minutes some guy picks up.

The poor guy has a terrible cold so they must be understaffed if he’s still working being that sick, I explain the situation and he tells me that it would be too expensive for them to ship the items again. Wait? We paid you for delivery in the first place, the items you sent are broken, give me my items. Blah, Blah, “courier known for throwing items around a lot” Why use them then?

Anyway the guy goes to speak to his manager and is pretty set that we have three options.

1. We go to the nearest store with the broken items and a case number, they throw in a gift card and some free food vouchers so we can “make a day of it”.

2. They refund the plates (this sucks because I want a set of six for a reason).

3. They send the items from their distribution centre but it’s going to take two weeks and they can’t guarantee that the items won’t be damaged again. They way they said this made it sound like they expected it to get damaged?!

So I went with option 1 but I honestly don’t know if it’s even worth bothering with, once you factor in the cost of the plates against the cost of petrol. But mostly I’m more annoyed that I had to listen to their terrible music for forty minutes of my life.

Beauty and Health Reviews

Product Review – Joico K-Pak Reconstruct Shampoo and Conditioner

Posted on 14th February 2014

I have had such good results with this product line that I wanted to share a review. Over the last three years I have had my hair foiled with highlights, then bleached and toned. The bleach really had taken a toll on my hair quality and when I moved to London my new hair salon recommend that I need to get protein into my hair straight away.

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They recommended I have a Joico treatment which at the time I had never heard of before. I thought that damaged hair was pretty much done for and might as well be cut out or lived with until it was long enough to grow out. However things have really come along in hair care and the reviews online seemed to be very impressive. I went ahead and ordered the Joico K-PAK Shampoo and the Joico K-PAK Conditioner, but I also paid for the full treatment which included the additional re-constructor treatment from the range twice over the space of three weeks.

Firstly the shampoo and conditioner smell amazing, I was expecting to smell like chemicals but no it’s very nice. Since using the two together for a few weeks I have noticed drastic improvements to the quality of my hair. It is pretty much back to how it was before the damage. Now that I’ve got it back to how I want it, I’m slowly going to reduce how often I use both the shampoo and conditioner as you do not want to put too much protein into your hair.

Price wise the two together are not the cheapest on the market but if you have damaged hair then it’s an investment to get your hair looking better. I paid about £45 for the two in the 1000ml size, so they are huge and will last a long time!

This is a product that really does work, if you are willing to spend the cash and put in the time it takes to really treat your hair then you can make your hair look at lot better while it grows out. I’ve been able to finally get my hair coloured again, this time I’ve gone much more dark blonde using low lights which I hope will be much healthier for my hair in the long run.

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Pre Baby Trending Topics

February Tube Strike Madness

Posted on 7th February 2014

As I am sure you have heard this week there was a tube strike in London for 48 hours, personally I have been able to avoid the strike and stay indoors. However this is the first tube strike that I have been in London for, although I have seen them on the news back when I lived in the South West (SW). I could not believe the massive impact it had on London, everyone here seems to be so used to the tube being excellent and when it was taken away people struggled trying to find any way into work.

Having been on the outside looking in previously tube strikes that were plastered over the news invoked very little sympathy from me, London is the rare example of excellence in the UK for public transport. Back in the SW buses don’t always show up and you usually have at least 10 – 15 mins if not much longer to wait between them, many of the buses only come every 30 mins or each hour. The trains were always cancelled and late, my husband used them for about five years and they were more often late or cancelled then on time!

People generally drove to work, I certainly did! Some of my best memories are sat in the car waiting, did you know that Bristol is the most congested city in Britain? Traffic would be pretty terrible if there were any accidents on main roads but you just a few routes in your head which you could take. Oh route A is blocked? I’ll take route B, or C, or D .. you get my drift, of course everyone else would try and take those routes too. So when we would see that the poor Londoners had to wait longer than 1 – 5 mins to get a tube which would get them to work in record time, forgive us but we did not have much sympathy.

Now living in London I can see how much London just caves when the tube is not working, I can’t believe that the tube employees can even go on strike. Everyone panics because they are so used to good public transport via the tube that they just don’t know the bus routes, they don’t drive very often so they don’t know the roads. They don’t have a route B, C or D to rely on and suddenly everyone starts trying to get any bus they can.

On Wednesday morning tube stations which should have been open were shut, people were queueing to take a boat, queueing to take a bus, all the bikes were gone and people were actually dusting off their cars to try and drive. Of course though London is set up to give right of way to public transport over cars, so the traffic by car just added to the mess.

I’ve never seen all the offices over the road totally empty on a morning, I would put the level of frustration on par with snow days in the SW. People just could not get to their destination, they would have to take a boat then a bus, then another bus. The other transport methods just were not able to cope with the amount of people trying to use their services.

They think that it has costed London 50 million pounds each day of the strike and who knows how many people had their plans totally ruined. Sadly we have it all to look forward to next week again! Crossing my fingers that the strike doesn’t happen. Hopefully David Cameron will get his way and make the Tube a essential service!

Beauty and Health Reviews

Beauty Review – Body Shop Hemp Foot Protector and Routine

Posted on 28th January 2014

It’s winter in the UK right now and one way of telling that might be to look at your feet. If your feet have been dried out with all the cold air, long walks and post summer fun then listen up.

My feet used to be in excellent condition, I never needed a pedicure because my skin was perfectly soft and I rarely had to do anything but polish and tidy my nails to keep them looking healthy. Then I moved to London, in our new apartment we have hardwood floors, both myself and my husbands feet have taken a battering. Seriously, hard dried out skin is not something you want to sporting and definitely need correcting ready for spring/summer.

What products do I recommend?

You are going to need three things to really kick dry skin where it hurts:

A good foot moisturiser – Body Shop Hemp Foot Protector it’s £10 from the Body Shop but totally worth it which I will talk about in a bit.
A foot file – Body Shop Foot File £5 from the Body Shop is what I used because the reviews were so good, I wanted to try it for myself.
Cotton Socks – Body Shop Thirsty Feet Moisture Socks they are £7 from the Body Shop but you could use plain cotton socks if you want.

Body Shop Feet Products

The Hemp Foot Protector has been designed to really hydrate dry skin on your feet, it is amazing and will be a staple in my beauty bag until I find something even better! If you have dry feet and don’t know what product to buy, just buy it as it will fix your dry skin and quickly.

The Body Shop Foot File is a great replacement if you are looking for a new foot file, I used to use the VIE at home foot file during those summer months but as VIE at home is no more and mine needed replacement. This is an excellent replacement and it removes the dry skins from your feet in a gentle way.

Thirsty Feet Moisture Socks fit nicely for a variety of sizes of feet, mine are 6/7 and I wasn’t sure whether they would fit. They are made with The Body Shops community trade natural cotton from Mauritius which is nice to know, as well as this you can wash them in the washing machine on a 40 degree wash – Great!

How do I use them?

Use the foot file first, pretty much exactly how it sounds file your feet. This will remove the hard skin, I found the foot file to be really effective at this. Some of the files I have used before have broken, this one seemed pretty sturdy just don’t get it wet!

Once you’ve filed both your feet, focusing on the hard skin areas (ball of your foot, front pads and any toes with hard skin on) then you want to go ahead and take some of the Hemp Foot Protector. You don’t need very much of this, so just rub a little into both feet making sure to cover the worst areas really well.

The Hemp Foot Protector is where the magic is going to happen, I have tried lots of creams for your feet. Many of them don’t really feel like they have sunk into your skin and just feet greasy forever. This one however seems to be really great quality, not too bad of a smell either and sinks in quickly.

Next take your cotton socks or the Body Shop Thirsty Feet Moisturise Socks and keep them on for at least an hour. For best results do this routine before bed and sleep with the socks on. As they are cotton they will allow your feet to breathe while still allowing maximum potential for the Hemp Foot Protector to work.

You should notice afterwards an immediate improvement in the texture and smoothness of your feet, I would advise that your repeat this at least once a week during winter to keep your feet soft and gorgeous. If your feet are quite far gone then you might want to repeat the routine twice a week until things improve.

I would highly recommend all three of these products, they do what they say on the tin and you can’t ask for better than that. Perfectly winter fix at home after running around all day shopping in London and if you have time you could follow this routine up with a nail polish and file.

Lifestyle Pre Baby

The Rug is Lava! – Pandora & Tiberius

Posted on 24th January 2014

We recently bought a new rug and I noticed that both our cats would not step on it. I’ve been training them by putting treats on the rug and tempting them onto it, Tiberius has taken to it much more than his niece Pandora who is much younger.

Check out this mornings progress!

Pre Baby Recipes

What’s cooking – Halloumi Couscous salad

Posted on 20th January 2014

Now I have more leisure time on my hands I have been trying to hunt down some new recipes to try. It’s all to easy to get yourself stuck in a rut, eating the same meals each week purely because those are known to be good.

I should also mention that I don’t eat meat, I wouldn’t really call myself a true vegetarian as I do eat shellfish and fish. My husband on the other hand does eat meat, so I try and balance that where I can.

So this evening we tried a new recipe called Halloumi Couscous Salad, I modified the recipe slightly as I did not make my own couscous. I bought some lovely ready made Moroccan style couscous from Tesco which was awesome, my husband rated this highly and he really enjoyed the cranberries and raisins they add.

Everything else was followed as described here at the BBC Good food website. You pretty much just add small tomatoes, I found on the vine to be the best flavour and also courgettes to bulk the recipe out. We also ditched the mint in the dressing, so I can’t say whether that is nice or not but I’m not a huge fan of mint myself.

What we are both great fans of however is Halloumi cheese and I’ll be sure to show you my Halloumi stacks which I do as an alternative to burgers shortly.

This recipe is one that we are going to put on our list of favourites, why don’t you try it out and let me know what you think below?

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