My Sentimental Heart

Trying to distil this year into one word is essentially impossible, isn't it? So much so, that we're faced with sixteen words of the year rather than just the standard one. Unprecedented times indeed. 
I think if I were to unpick how to describe 2020 in a nutshell, it would be uncertain. The…

Hello hello! Live and direct from the final stretch of 2020, aka the most inconsistent year in living memory! I thought that the multiple elections of the last few years were tricky enough to navigate, but, in hindsight, I think that they were probably just a practice-run for the total rollercoaste…

*looks around tentatively, as if I do anything else these days!* Happy Wednesday everyone-if indeed you're still able to keep track of what day it is. I don't know about you, but time feels like it's been all over the place of late, and it'll be a long while before I think I'm a…

As we near the end of the year, I'm sure that I'm not the only one reflecting on what 2020 has meant. Having a December birthday makes this time feel all the more pertinent, as I look back on what I wanted to achieve over the last twelve months, in my 30th year. Well. The best laid plans, e…

With life looking like it's going to take a fair few months yet to re-adjust back to some semblance of anything familiar to us in a pre-Covid world, it looks like any grand travel plans which we might have made for the imminent future are set to be curtailed for a while longer. As a true Sagitt…

Everyone hanging in there ok? Two weeks down, two weeks (hopefully) to go...we shall see what December brings. I'm trying no to to focus too much on what next month might mean, especially as the mooted end of lockdown 2 is the same day as my birthday! It feels like only yesterday that I was in …

I've loved walking for as long as I can remember, but over recent years my stepping sojourns have become gradually more intense, with last year's Big Urban Trek for Trekstock and all of the training I was getting in for their (now sadly postponed) Hadrian's Wall Trek. At the start of th…

Happy Friday friends! How is everyone bearing up after week one of Lockdown 2? If I'm being brutally honest, I think I'm finding this one a bit tougher than the last- and I'm pretty sure that my overall outlook about things back then was definitely on the sunnier side, and I felt like I…

What. A. Wild. Time. To. Be. Alive. Living through history is a pretty stressful experience, isn't it? Good grief. 2020 is definitely serving peak disaster movie feels, but I'm not sure that even the wildest script could have predicted everything which has happened this year. Amidst electio…

Well, here we are again friends. Winter lockdown life after a one serious rollercoaster of a year. I don't feel in any way surprised that we find ourselves here again, but there's something about heading towards more restrictions at this time of the year which feels just that little bit mor…

The day before we entered into our second lockdown, and by sheer lucky coincidence, I had booked tickets to visit the National Gallery for their much-anticipated Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition. It's one which had been on my radar since the very beginning of the year, and after being delayed b…

In the words of the Backstreet Boys...oh my god, we're back again. Back, that is, in lockdown as of tomorrow. It feels like this was almost inevitable, but it's heartbreaking to see so many small businesses and industries having to close down again, especially as many of them were just star…

Well here we are again in a situation which is becoming more and more uncertain, seemingly by the minute. I didn’t think things could be more disconcerting than they were back in March and April, but you live and learn, don’t you? As anxiety-inducing as this all is, one of the things which has real…