Sunday roundup

This week's activities were as follows:

Listening to - Daughter, Bastille, Florence and the Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Beyonce

Watching - Revenge, 90210, A Year of Making Love (I thought Cherry Healy would have had a more prominent role in this series actually), Modern Family, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Flakes, Jonathan Ross, Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway!!

Baking - rainbow fairy cakes (turns out food dye is gross), cheese and onion scones (yum), disastrous cookies with an Oreo cookie in the middle (too terrible to document visually as it turned out to be one huge cookie/more like cake - how can this be resolved?!)

Cooking - Toad in the Hole (first time), a really average honey and mustard chicken meal which I have made before really successfully but this time substituted creme freche for natural yoghurt and it all went wrong), steak and chips (yum) with the chips made following The Londoner's recipe

Eating out - more sushi at Wagamama, as well as trying gyoza for the first time - DELICIOUS

Painting - dotted patterns, photographs of Venice

Reading - "One Day" by David Nicholls, a book about pain management, finished Blade Runner" by Oscar Pistorius and various travel guides about Edinburgh.

Hope you've had a lovely week too x

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Lovely LUSH treats

And by "lush" I mean the company/noun, not the adjective that pre-uni I thought was only used to describe valleys and greenery but is increasingly employed as a synonym for "lovely". Am I the only one whose tongue it just doesn't roll off that naturally unless talking about grass?

ANYWAY, this post is a beauty-inspired post which is fairly uncharacteristic, mostly because I have no knowledge of cosmetics/beauty whatsoever. I have only just, at the tender age of 22, plucked up the courage in recent months to buy make up from one of those fancy make up concessions in a department store...yes, THAT is what we are dealing with here ladies and gents, a makeupophobe (no that is not a real word, you klutz)

My university friends will tell you that I don't know the difference between foundation and powder (what actually is the difference?), can't apply mascara without smearing it across my face and have no idea how to use a make up brush. Luckily this meant that getting ready for nights out was a lot less lengthy for me as I either stuck to basics (mascara and Vaseline HA!) or avoided it altogether. So no, this post won't be about make up as I truly have nothing to offer in that field whatsoever. Anybody who wishes to give me a tutorial in beautifying myself then please feel free; I will not be offended!

Instead, and only because they were (very generous) gifts (ie. I did not buy these items with a view to reviewing them), I thought I would share my latest LUSH items with you. Mostly because they look and smell yummy and in any case, they aren't cosmetics really.

In all honesty, the shop gives me a headache when walking past, let alone venturing inside, but I am beginning to think that it is worth it to retrieve a golden gem of a product. The individual items smell wonderful! The following items (bar the soap) smell good enough to eat which I suppose is on the whole fairly acceptable as one is honey flavoured (are non-edible things "flavoured"? Probably not), one is for the lips and the other smells of sweets!

The "Sweetie Pie" shower jelly is probably my favourite product as it is in a pot and needs to be kept in the fridge, which are interestingly characteristics shared with another of my favourite things - hummus. It also smells like it tastes of jelly babies so it is very aptly named. I also like things that are unconventional in nature like the fact that it is not a run of the mill standard squeezy bottle. It is a pot. For instance, I have a tin saying "biscuits for my sweetheart" on it, but which actually contains a mix of felt tip and fine liner pens. Gotta keep my sweetheart on his toes.

"The Kiss" is a very clever little item, I think. Perfect for those occasions when you ask somebody what they would like for their birthday and they respond with "just a kiss!" Gift sorted! It tastes sweet and delicious too and unlike the countless other lip items I own or have tried (ok, ok, just the Vaseline!) it makes my lips look happy and shiny.

Do my lips look happy? Sorry you've not caught them on a good day... Cringe either way.

I've not tried out the soap yet but it scores points on its excitably-patterned wrapping, and the shampoo is apparently ideal for brunettes. Perfect for mountain bears.

Wash time just got fun again! And the rabbits are happy too :) :) :)

Have you got any insightful comments to make about LUSH products that aren't to do with how they smell, the admirable ethics of the company or what they taste like?

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Eating Disorder Awareness Week

This week marks a national effort to raise awareness about eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa, bulimia and binge eating. This sensitive topic is not often spoken about openly and I think this may be due to a lack of general understanding about what it means to have an eating disorder and failure to comprehend that it is a mental illness, severe and deserving of the numerous efforts to help sufferers. It is really striking that anorexia accounts for the highest number of deaths out of all mental illnesses.

The trouble with mental illness can be that it is not always obvious that a person needs help and there is an old-fashioned misconception that there needs to be blatant visual evidence for something to be wrong. This is clearly wrong. There is a lot more to eating disorders than just physical appearance. There are complex intricacies involved which need careful attention to remedy.

The charity BEAT's slogan for this week is "everybody knows somebody", reflecting the statistic that eating disorders are found in 6.4% of adults (Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, 2007) and 1.6 million people in the UK. Often it is difficult to know how to help a sufferer and I am by no means anywhere near an expert on the issue but think it is important that certain misconceptions are dispelled which may help with trying to understand the point of view of a sufferer.

For example, recovery is a long and difficult process which, on average, can last 6-8 years with relapses. It is not just something that goes away overnight, nor is it a choice in the first place. However, during the recovery period, the fact that a sufferer is eating or has put on weight does not mean that they no longer have an issue or no longer need support.

I have come across a couple of websites/blogs which do a great job of painting a clearer image of what it is really like to have an unhealthy relationship with food to the extent that they suffer from an eating disorder. These include tobehonest.org.uk and raisingawarenessuk.blog.com. I find it sad that some think that a person needs to be a certain weight to have an eating disorder and indeed a tragedy that health resources do not stretch to all sufferers.

Charities like BEAT and Anorexia and Bulimia Care exist for the purpose of helping sufferers and their families, running support groups, providing information to the public and campaigning to raise the profile of efforts to tackle eating disorders. This Thursday (14th) Caroline Nokes MP will be speaking in the House of Commons with the aim of raising awareness of eating disorders. You can find out more at www.b-eat.co.uk

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My trip to Ipswich

Last week I mentioned that I had been to visit a uni friend (an old housemate in fact) for a few days. I actually went the furthest east I have been in England! Gosh I have been adventurous recently....furthest north in Leeds, furthest east in Ipswich....maybe I am doing the "travelling" that I wanted to do in my year out after all...

Fiona lives in a cute little village where there are no street lights and a bus only visits three times a day on certain days of the week. So in some ways I felt a million miles from home where there is nothing but light pollution and a gazillion modes of transport, but it was so lovely to spend time in a different part of the country and to see where Fi lives!

The train from Liverpool Street, albeit a little on the rickety side (step up your game East Anglia trains!), got me to Ipswich in 1 hr 20 mins which is nothing when you have the world of a good book such as "One Day" by David Nicholls to immerse yourself in. Lauren and Fi met me at the station with the car because it is too far to walk to the house and there is no convenient public transport which I found baffling for a while but the drive was about 20 minutes so it was very nice really that peg leg and I weren't subjected to such a trek :)

In the fashion of my previous post about Leeds, here is a list of five things I enjoyed in Ipswich (other than the fantastic company and excellent hosting):

1. The Orwell Bridge is pretty magnificent, with little cows/bulls chilling in a field underneath

We visited the Suffolk Food Hall which sold local produce and also had a garden centre, gift shop and cafe. We enjoyed some coffee and cake as a treat. Oh okay, the whole weekend was treat after treat after treat!

2. The smallest house that somebody actually lives in, in Aldeburgh.

I also enjoyed:

And this sign:

It was super windy but I love being by the sea :)

3. Kwan Thai restaurant in Woodbridge.

We had a delicious starting platter and I had a yummy Massaman curry and sticky rice.

4. Achieving some "firsts" on this trip! Before Ipswich I had never been to a Thai restaurant (although I have tried the food before so I was excited about this), I had never watched an 18 rated movie (this one I was less excited about) and I had never seen "The Sweetest Thing" which is apparently shocking but really made me laugh! Oh and that brings me onto....

...5. Making Slutty Brownies a la The Londoner finally! This was a February resolution so I can tick that off the list. And yes they taste as good as they look, if not better, and no, I don't feel it inappropriate to make a whole batch again only to be consumed by two people :) :) :) :) :) :) Much better than my cake pop venture ;)

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