Wisdom's a gift but you'd trade it for youth

Mama and Papa T came to Leeds for a little visit this weekend in honour of my new found oldness. As per, we didn't actually spend much time in Leeds at all, instead using their trip as an excuse to get out and explore the beautiful places in Yorkshire that I don't normally get to visit due to my lack of a four wheeled vehicle to call my own.

This time, we took a trip over to the other side of West Yorkshire to Haworth. I've been to Haworth once before and thought it'd be the perfect parent friendly sort of place to visit. Lots of steam trains to keep my Dad amused, a lovely, quaint village feel to keep my Mum happy, and an abundance of cafes to keep us all happy (we do have a tendency to pick our days out based upon whether we'll be able to get a good slice of cake out of it...). 

Haworth gets a lot of visitors for two main reasons, firstly its where the Bronte sisters lived so there's lots of literary heritage to geek out on, and secondly the railway line has a lot of Railway Children links as the film was based around Haworth and Oakworth stations. My Dad tried to get me to recreate that scene from the film where the eldest daughter sees her father appear through the steam on the platform and shouts "MY DADDY" when a train arrived on the platform at Oakworth. Funnily enough I decided against it given that there were three carriages full of train enthusiasts sat poised with their cameras facing the platform we were stood on. 

Other than that little trip out of the city, I've mostly spent this weekend watching Breaking Bad. I signed up to Netflix the other day but must have missed the warning that I was signing my life away in the process. Its a good job my parents came over or else I probably wouldn't have moved away from my laptop screen all weekend!

Step- Vampire Weekend

One thing's for sure, we're all getting older

Yesterday, I had the slightly unfortunate job of turning 24. I'm still struggling to comprehend why I'm not 17 anymore, but managed to stop myself from dwelling on this too much by spending a weekend with lots of my most favourite people, eating lots of food, drinking lots of wine and dancing like a loony (there really is no better way to spend a birthday weekend as far as I'm concerned!). 

On Saturday, we went to The Pit in Leeds for food- its one of my failsafe options in town for food, especially as it has a great atmosphere (and Rekorderlig cider on tap). Part of the reason we went there was so we could have a cheeky game of ping pong too. Sadly that didn't actually happen... it was definitely something we should have considered doing before ordering a table full of burgers, pulled pork and onion rings as we could barely drag ourselves out of our chairs; we might have been a tad optimistic thinking we'd be able to run around after a ping pong ball afterwards.

In the evening, my friends came over to my house and my lovely friend Charlie had put on an absolutely incredible spread of afternoon tea style cakes for the party. What a star! I'm really gutted I didn't manage to get a picture of it all, I was just too excited to start eating it all! Plus, my housemate Kathryn made a really yummy cocktail in a teapot to accompany it all! That may have been partially to blame for the hilarious dancing that ensued later in the night!

My actual birthday was a far quieter affair (there may have been a few hangovers in the building...) but it involved lots of food, eating lots of cake at Iron Cupcake (conveniently held on my birthday!) and admiring my looovely birthday presents. My friends are such a lovely bunch and gave me some lovely treats, they all know how much I love decorating my bedroom and so I was really excited to open lots of homey gifts (as well as some other awesome presents which will no doubt feature in future posts!). Here's a little selection to satisfy all of you nosy people out there :)

Pelican: The Maccabees

Whenever you want it, wherever you want it

Well, that was a fun weekend. Its been pretty non-stop but not being the sort of person who likes to sit in one place for too long, it suited me just fine! 

I had a jolly little time drinking cocktails on Friday night and then fell asleep on the sofa watching 500 Days of Summer (even though I've seen it about 782000 times, I'm still gutted that I slept through the end!). 

On Saturday I went into town with one of my buddies to book a holiday for us and one of our other friends... I think the travel agent was almost at breaking point when she asked us where we wanted to go and what we wanted to get out of our holiday as our answer was "Ummm.... the sun?". Eventually though, she did manage to establish that we didn't want to go anywhere that would likely feature on Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents and so we've booked to go to Corfu in August. Its my first proper holiday in a few years so I'm massively excited already. 

Saturday night was spent celebrating my housemate's birthday with lots of lovely people, then Sunday was largely built around a lazy day and a ginormous plate of cheesy chips and beans before I headed out again to see Bombay Bicycle Club play at the O2 Academy in Leeds. I've seen Bombay Bicycle Club a few times over the years (one particularly memorable show was at Leeds Festival in 2012, when Bombay somehow inadvertently became the band that had the most topless girls on people's shoulders in the crowd... surreal doesn't even cover it) and they're one of my absolute faves to see live. They manage to move seamlessly between super-chilled out songs and crazy guitars in others and bloomin' hell it works. The new stuff sounds great and the old favourites were still as awesome to hear as ever. Some bands I'll just never tire of watching, and Bombay Bicycle Club are definitely one of those. Absolute perfect way to round off the weekend. 

Roll on next weekend, its my birthday on the 9th so I've got plenty of birthday activities planned... hopefully it'll be even better than this weekend was! 

Hope you've all had a good one :)

Whenever, Wherever- Bombay Bicycle Club

Is your bed made? Is your sweater on?

Yesterday was an incredibly jam-packed day of fun with one of my new housemates. We started off the day with a pretty impressive run (I definitely can run further than I thought- it just took a running buddy to give me the motivation to push myself a little further) followed by a hilarious game of tennis in our local park- I'm not sure you could really call it tennis when we spent 90% of the game running after the ball after missing our shots. We decided to leave on a high when we'd managed to get over 10 successful consecutive hits going...I'm embarrassed to admit how long that took!  

Later on, we took a trip into town via the magical world of Hobbycraft to buy some green food colouring paste for the baking we had been plotting for the evening (I'll post about it soon and the reasoning for the green paste will be revealed!). We couldn't resist refuelling before heading back into town with a quick brownie pit-stop at one of my favourite cafes, Out of The Woods in Granary Wharf, as we passed- we'd definitely earned it after all of our exercise earlier in the morning! 

A few hours of shopping later (I seemed to get most of mine done in the time my housemate spent buying a new phone- I'd like to think I'm a speedy shopper but in reality it just showed how long phone shopping takes!) and we headed home just as the rain began to pour- thankfully it held off for most of the day as you can see from the photos below I'd been a tad optimistic with my bare legs (I'm just determined to get as much wear out of my sandals as I can before Autumn creeps back in!). 

Hope you're all enjoying your weekends too!

dress: (c/o) Clothing at Tesco, belt: Topshop, shoes: Topshop, necklace: River Island

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa- Vampire Weekend

She may contain the urge to run away so hold her down with soggy clothes and breezeblocks

Hello lovely people! It feels like its been forever since I last posted. I've had a pretty hectic month with moving house and everything else that's been going on (big thank you for your kind comments on my last blog post too- it really meant a lot to read them), and all of that teamed with no internet in my new house didn't exactly mean prime conditions for giving my blog some attention.

My first post was going to be a little tour of my new room now that its finally all sorted out, but it might have to wait a little while as I got back from an incredible weekend at Latitude Festival yesterday so my bedroom is currently buried under a huge pile of dirty clothes, wellies and camping equipment. Instead, it seems very fitting to share a few photos from my weekend (I don't trust myself with even my decent compact camera at festivals so apologies for the rubbish quality of a lot of the pictures but at least you get the idea!).

              

I'd been to Leeds Festival a few times already so was really looking forward to going somewhere a bit different, and was definitely not disappointed. Latitude is such a pretty festival and they really put in an incredible amount of effort to make it a unique and exciting experience with a lovely atmosphere, unlike Leeds where there generally isn't a great deal to see other than the bands and the nightlife.

We spent hours wandering around the site catching glimpses of so many unexpected things from a hot air balloon moon floating above us to multicoloured sheep grazing down by the lake aswell as floating around on a gondola and a strange experience of witnessing a huge crowd waving reeds that they'd pulled from the lakeside at a 2am DJ set, meaning that there was never a dull moment in between watching loads of brilliant performances. Alt- J, Foals and Daughter were some of my absolute highlights, I can't believe I hadn't seen Alt-J live before- I'll definitely be jumping at the chance next time they're playing in Leeds. 

We also got to see so many hilarious things in the comedy tent (another thing that makes Latitude so unique as they had some really big names from the comedy world) largely due to the crazy heatwave that we experienced for most of the weekend. I don't tend to watch much stand up on telly as I find it easier to get into when its live, I found myself crying with laughter on a few occasions across the weekend because everything seemed so much funnier when I was surrounded by hundreds of other people all laughing hysterically!

Anyway, I'm off to get dressed now (and yes, it is now 2pm. A whole day of travelling yesterday in horrendous heat whilst feeling sorry for myself after a night of dancing, running around the festival site and drinking too much vodka meant that a lazy day today was very much deserved and highly essential for my survival).

Breezeblocks- Alt-J

(My festival buddy and I had this song in our heads for the rest of the weekend after seeing them on Saturday night). 

We spit blood at the sun, spit blood in the ocean

I say this all the flipping time, but I REALLY REALLY LOVE WEEKENDS. 

As much as I do love my job, there's just nothing better than a weekend full of fun to let off some steam and escape the stressful real world for a few days. This weekend was filled with a few quiet drinks (which inevitably morphed into a full blown night out... we're just not grown up enough for quiet drinks yet), lots of shopping and catching up, plus a Mexican night with waaaay too much food and competitive tequila fuelled Mexican hat games. 

This weekend was a far cry away from the last, which was a far more sensible family affair in Edinburgh which you might have seen me post about earlier in the week here. As I was too busy dancing to my favourite music (and the Mexican hat dance) this weekend to think about taking pictures, I thought I'd share a few more pictures from Edinburgh and our visit to the National Museum of Scotland. 

We spent hours and hours in the museum and probably only went in about half of the rooms, there was just so much to take in- plus we spent half of the time on the roof terrace looking out over the castle and the city. I spent forever in the Animal World gallery, it was incredible being able to get so up close and personal with the animals (I definitely prefer getting inches away from a stuffed lion to a real one thank you very much... far less risk of becoming a delicious lion snack). Although having so much to look at did cause a bit of a safety hazard, I walked right into my Dad because I was so busy staring at the sharks hanging from the ceiling. Not sure how factually accurate they were mind you- I've never noticed any sharks or whales flying above my head in Leeds before, maybe I just don't look up at the sky often enough.

Bloodshake- Peace

Iron Cupcake: Be My Valentine

Some of you might remember my last post about the monthly Iron Cupcake competition that takes place in Leeds. For those of you that don't know, its a monthly competition for bakers who are given the challenge of creating a set of cupcakes based around a given theme. Then fatties cake enthusiasts like me get to sample the selection and give marks to each cake based on their taste and appearance (not an easy task when there's such a talented bunch of bakers but someone's got to do it!). 

This month's theme was "Be My Valentine", and I was expecting table after table filled with pink, flowers and hearts and not a lot else. And, ok there were a lot of hearts. But they were all so beautifully presented that I didn't mind. Plus there were some slightly less traditional ideas floating around too, particularly the 'last rolo' cupcakes which I thought were a fab little idea (as far as I'm concerned, sharing your last rolo is what romance is all about!). There was another great take on this cheesy holiday from Charlie who made a savoury cupcake that was made of cheese upon cheese with a puff pastry cheese heart on top (the Valentine's cynic in me gave her the inspiration for that little number when moaning about the holiday!). 

This is just a little snippet of the cupcakes the bakers brought along, the full line up will be on the Iron Cupcake website if you fancy a gander. 

If you're in Leeds on the 10th March and enjoy cake as much as I do, then come along and judge- its a great excuse to allow yourself to eat a tonne of cake and not feel in the slightest bit guilty about it... after all you need to sample them all to be able to crown a winner, its only fair!

And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

With the exception of little old me over here in Leeds, the majority of my family all still live on or very near the Wirral. Since half of the family live within 5 minute walking distance from my parent's house (we're an adventurous bunch!) it doesn't leave many exciting places to explore as we just have to nip up the road whenever we want to see them. But I do have one Uncle who doesn't live in Merseyside, he lives up in Edinburgh. Without a doubt one of the best places I could possibly have a reason to visit on a fairly regular basis. Well done Uncle, great choice of city to make your home in.

Since we haven't all been up to see my Uncle together for a year or so we decided it would be a nice thing to do for my Mum's birthday. And, although I did go up to the 'Burgh back in August with my buddies, I really don't think I could ever tire of the city. Its flipping beautiful. In just a weekend we saw so much, going up Calton Hill, driving around Arthur's Seat (it was way too wet, cold and windy to even think about walking up there...), going up to the roof of the museum to admire the view, and so much more!

 I love how diverse Edinburgh is, from the castle you can see old buildings, new buildings, water, mountains... nowhere else could you walk to the bottom of one of the main tourist streets and end up in the middle of a country park complete with hikers and crazy runners speeding up the hills.

Even on horrible grey days like last weekend, the city still looks absolutely stunning. 

EDINBURGH, I LOVE YOU.

Pompeii- Bastille

I'll be home for next year darling, I'll be home for next year

Last weekend (wow, this week has flown by!) I took a little trip to Golden Acre Park in Leeds with my lovely friend Coral for a bit of fresh air and adventure. I'm a big fan of Roundhay park, which is nearer the city centre and an obvious choice for students and city dwellers wanting to escape the hustle and bustle for an afternoon, but there's only so many times you can wander around the same lake without longing for a bit of something different. And so, we headed out in the other direction from the city to see what Golden Acre had to offer. 

We had a great little time exploring the nature reserve within the park, despite lots of funny looks about our poor choices of footwear from the rest of the park population who were all kitted out in full walking gear. My chelsea boots were soon completely unrecognisable under the thick layer of mud, but they did come clean (eventually). 

This has become yet another addition to my list of places to revisit in the summer as it'd be lovely to sit by the lake with a picnic on one of those sunny days we very occasionally get. 

Next Year- Two Door Cinema Club