Life | I am a hoarder…

Over the years I have amassed a ridiculously large collection of stuff.  It’s not that I buy an especially large amount; it’s just that once it’s bought, it’s with me for life.

On moving house I discovered that I still had in my possession copies of heat magazine from two years ago - this embarrasses me greatly.  Also about fifty lip balms came out of the woodwork - this embarrasses me even more. I realized that I have carted around the same collection of moisturisers from pretty much every house I have lived in for the past two years because despite knowing that I am not a habitual moisturiser, I still insist on buying more.

It’s the same with hair products. I am and have been for at least six years on a seemingly never ending quest to find a product that will turn my over bleached, over straightened hair into a glorious flowing mane (this will never happen). In pursuing this dream I now have an entire drawer of hair products and yet I still buy more.

The beauty blogger effect is a definite thing, I own far more than I need and yet I continue to buy.

I have decided to have a clear out. Working in fashion and in close proximity to London’s main shopping street has meant that I have a stupid amount of clothes and shoes as well as the embarrassing amount of beauty products.

Here’s the plan:

Beauty products will be used up before any more are purchased. Only when the last lip balm is finished will I buy any more. One person does not need thirty lip balms and five foundations.

Clothing and shoes will be sorted, anything I don’t love will be sold on vinted (my user name is katiepottinger if anyone wants to have a peek)

Wish me luck!

Life | Moving house is stress personified

As you know, if you have read my other posts, I'm from the Wirral (lets just say Liverpool). Then I moved down to the big city of London for university. The first time I moved my life down to our fair capital was stress free, a breeze if you will. This was mainly down to the fact that I was moving from my mums house into a student accommodation building and so it was all explained in a way I'm sure a two year old could of understood. I lived with Unite if anyones interested and yes, before you ask I would highly recommend them to anyone, even if the amount I was paying for rent was a penny over extortionate. I lived in the one in Tottenham Hale and had a jolly good time living there, the sunsets were particularly good as is demonstrated in my beautiful picture.

Anyway enough of that slightly related tangent. This is a tale of stress, not one of a fun, stress free year in the paradise that is Tottenham Hale (jokes). So, me and five of my friends decided that we wanted to rent a house together, to continue our aforementioned fun filled time living in London. This turns out to be way not as easy as it sounds.

Firstly, finding a six bedroom house in London, preferably reasonably central, is near enough impossible on a student budget. Secondly, our rich chinese friends, not racial profiling, factual, had found quite possibly the most beautiful apartment ever. Like, ever. It has a balcony that looks out over the millennium dome (I refuse to acknowledge that is now the o2 arena, it will always be the millennium dome to me no matter what everyone else says). I took that picture from their balcony would you believe. Long story short that apartment is the stuff that dreams are made of, if you dream of very nice apartments that is. It was then clear that anywhere we found to live would look like a pile of rubble in comparison to that place and so we tirelessly continued our search for property perfection.

Then as if by magic we stumbled on what can only be described as a miracle. Two three bed apartments in the same building. On the Thames. With views of the shard and the gherkin. I hope you are suitably impressed. And as if it were meant to be the two were in our budget range. It was a miracle, divine intervention if you will, it was meant to be. Or so it seemed. We paid our little deposit thing to have them taken off the market and then skipped back to Tottenham, well we got the tube back but you get the gist. It was then that things started to get expensive, complicated, stressful and did I mention expensive?

Everything started out well enough we put our references through and sent over copies of our bank statements and all that jazz and it all seemed not too shabby, apart from the three hundred pound referencing and admin fee that we all had to pay. Each. And from this point on more and more chaos ensued. My references failed for like no reason at all meaning that I had to pay an extra hundred pounds to have then done again, may I remind you that I am a poor London student and so a hundred pound is like a million to me right now!

Then before we knew it the estate agents were threatening to pull the deal and leave us basically homeless and about six hundred pound poorer... it took a hell of a lot of complaining and threatening to take this higher up for them to finally see that they should just let us move in to our beautiful new apartment! So all in all the moral of the story is, if your looking for a beautiful apartment on the Thames, don’t go with my estate agent which, for legal reasons I probably shouldn't name... so lets just call them carbon dioxide property management. (if you knew what they were actually called then you would see what I did there, but alas you do not.)

Life | Lessons learnt at university

Let me give you a bit of background on myself to put this little tale into context... I am originally from the Wirral which, because no one ever knows where it is except if your from the Wirral, is basically just outside of Liverpool so practically everyone whose from the Wirral tries to blag and say they're from Liverpool when they're blatantly not because their wheelie bin is green and not the snazzy purple that Liverpool get to have. Anyway, so I'm from the Wirral and desperately wanted to go to London for university, it literally felt like my lives goal to get to go to university in London. I was absolutely desperate so much so that when every decent university said a very polite 'no thank you' to me and then promptly closed their doors I decided that I was so desperate to get down there that I would go to any London university that would take me no matter how bad it was. And do that I did.

I ended up accepting a place at London Metropolitan. Now I don't want to sound all big headed here, I can assure you that my head can fit through doors and all that jazz, but I felt from the minute I arrived at  that god forsaken place that it just wasn't for me. I almost felt like I could do better (I realise that this isn’t doing all that much good for my promising I don’t think I'm the best thing since toast but I promise I really don’t have a ginormous head.) Anyway, I decided to stick with it and just get my head down and do a bit of studying because after all is that not what university is all about? Just realised I haven’t even told you what my degree was meant to be! I was studying 'Fashion Marketing and Retail Management' and I don't know about you but I felt like that sounded kinda fancy! It was only when you put the “at London Met” after it that strangers you met in clubs would say “oh” in a rather pitying tone. It should have been then that I realised that London Metropolitan was most definitely not the place for me. Lesson number one; don’t settle for a blatantly rubbish university just because its in a good city and you couldn't get in anywhere else because you wrote the most boring personal statement known to man.

So, I don’t know about you and maybe it was just me being a very naïve, young child at the ripe old age of eighteen but when I decided to study fashion I naturally assumed that I would indeed be studying fashion and the business behind it. Instead I found myself in lectures that could have been from a maths degree with spreadsheets galore and whole afternoons dedicated to learning how to use Microsoft excel. Another module I suffered through was known as operations management in which we learnt the seven types of waste, don’t ask me to recite them now I'm pretty sure by that point I was heavily into a game of tiny tower on my phone or some other equally as important pursuit. The only decent modules I did on that course were the fashion system and retail environment. Note they both have the name of the degree in the name of the module, no where do I remember agreeing to do a quantitative analysis and operations management degree. Lesson number two; research your degree and its modules extensively before signing on the dotted line, trust me that extra half an hour reading the module outline will save you a year of wondering why you ever took a course that wants you to know the seven types of waste.

Also, I just want to dispel a myth here, an urban legend if you will, like the loch ness monster or big foot. Before you go to university everyone will be trying to reassure you about the whole making friends thing saying that everyone is in the same boat and people will come up to you and just start talking. Lies. Absolute lies. It seems that at least on my course, at my university, everyone was told that exact same lie and so precisely no one went over to people to start a conversation. In fact before our first lecture we all just stood there awkwardly like a bunch of very awkward lemons in absolute dead silence. No joke, you could of heard a pin drop in that dingy little corridor that we had to wait in while the class before us finished. Awful. Absolutely awful. It wasn’t until we were put into partner work that the cloud of silence was lifted and awkward get to know you icebreaker like conversation ensued, incidentally I don’t remember a single one of the fun facts I was told about the people in my class but at least it broke the silence. Lesson number three; just be a man and talk to someone, it can't be as painful as having to wait for a half an hour for your lecture in dead silence because the class ahead of you are late leaving, trust me.

On the subject of choosing universities I would definitely advise to go for one that isn’t, I kid you not, last on the league tables. Now I'm not a university snob by any means, I'm a firm believer in that if you work hard then you can achieve your full potential anywhere. Well, that was until I experienced London Met. Just put it this way, no university that people are actually proud to go to has to advertise the fact that they’re 'proud to be London Met' on every available wall space. You would not walk into Cambridge and see 'proud to be Cambridge' plastered all over the walls now would you? In case you didn’t know the answer is no because everyone and their pet hamster knows that if you go to Cambridge then your proud to be there! Lesson number four; don’t choose a university that has to try and kid you into a false sense of morale and proudness, if your proud your proud, if your London Metropolitan, you're not.