So, here we go!

This feels weirdly like starting a new exercise book in school on the first day of term, new pencil - with rubber on top still intact - nice new pencil case and a brand spanking new exercise book. Hold on whilst I underline the date and title with my new red pen!  Oh I used to love that first day of term.

So I thought I'd start off this new chapter in my blogging life by giving everything a bit of context.  I love make up reviews that finish with the eye shadow, or lipstick, or whatever shown "in the context of my face" whilst its a truly weird expression, actually seeing the full face photo makes much more sense of the product and I am hoping that this introduction to who I am and what I will do will do the same thing for my blog.


I am the 45 year old mother of two, Em 19 and Tom 17.  If I have done anything well in my life it's mothering those two, they are a credit to me (oh, ok "us") and all their bad bits are my making too!  I have 1 husband (Steve, or S for brevity) and have had him for 23 years.  That's a very long time and it's sometimes been a bumpy road, that said all the most interesting journeys have blind bends and a flat tyre or two along the way. So we bump along.  We run an 8 bedroom guest house and frankly that's where things start to go tits up.  

I really am a people person. Truly. I genuinely like people, am interested in them, how they think and what makes them tick.  I am just not interested in sharing my home and every waking moment with them.  Which isn't altogether unreasonable, although is a bit of a hinderance if you happen to run a guest house.  My intolerance (we'll call it that for now) is compounded by S's complete and utter inability to see that sometimes for the sake of our marriage and our sanity the customer is not always right.  You can probably see where this is going.

So, in addition to running our guest house, which is apparently a "life style" business (fine, if peed off and knackered are how you want to live your life) we also run 2 other businesses.  This is not because we are workaholic megalomaniacs.  Its because we need to eat and wear clothes and pay our £6,000 annual gas and electricity bills.  I kid you not.  S runs a domestic cleaning business and I work freelance, 7 hrs a day for a publishing company selling advertising and managing a website.  In addition I do a little paid photography, the one area of my income I would love to develop as it's fantastic to get paid to do something you love!

By now you have probably decided that I am the most negative, bad tempered blogger you have ever had the misfortune to read.  Not a bit of it, I am a resolutely half-full kind of a person, who believes that hard work generates good luck, that earning good karma is more important than earning big bucks and that if you smile the world smiles back.  I just struggle to remember this about myself at times!


So that's it; some context.  Perhaps when I launch into a full scale rant about a guests' minor indiscretions - crap parking is a particular bug bear, or leaving the front door wide open, hate that too - you wouldn't go out and leave yours wide open at home, why do it here - you'll understand a bit of where I am coming from!!