My Roaccutane Story - The Beginning

This is a new topic on here and something I've never really talked about on my blog before. It's not as glamorous as travel, or design, or art, or photography but right now I just have this feeling that this journey is something I want to document. I'm hoping it might help somebody going through the same thing, but I'd also like to record my thoughts and feelings over the months to come too.

The Film Roll I Thought Was Destroyed

2017 has gotten off to a pretty unforgettable start for me. I celebrated my 21st birthday on the 18th February and was lucky enough to go away with my boyfriend and family to Iceland. We spent 3 nights in the Reykjavik area, touring the Golden Circle and dipping into the blogger-famous Blue Lagoon. The following weekend, I was blown away with being surprised by my boyfriend with a weekend in Paris! We travelled down on the Eurostar from St Pancras and had a wonderful couple of days exploring a few of the main sights and exploring a little off the beaten track. While Paris was a surprise, I had planned to take some 35mm film with me to Iceland to capture some of the memories. After doing some research into whether my film roll would be damaged by passing through the airport x-ray scanners, I concluded that for my purposes it would be ok to pass through the hand baggage scanners a couple of times (once on the way out and once on the return journey). Apparently the x-rays they use for checked luggage are far stronger and so it's advised never to put film roll in hold bags. I knew that I may experience some fogging but I wasn't too concerned. What I didn't account for was Paris. Given the security situation in the city, most museums and attractions required me to put my camera though an x-ray machine. Add this to the security checks for the Eurotunnel, I thought that my photographs would be all but destroyed by the time it came to developing. I estimate that this particular film roll passed through x-ray scanners around 10 times, and since the damage cased to film by x-rays is cumulative, I didn't have high hopes. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the results. Of course the x-rays have had some visible effect on the photographs, but there's something quite lovely about it. I thought I'd share a little mixture of photographs from the two trips.

My 2017 Reading List

Ah, reading. I have such a complicated relationship with you. On the one hand, I love books, I see tremendous value in reading, I love book shops and I always have a never ending list of titles on my to-read list. On the other hand, I am quite possibly the slowest reader of all time, which makes it very difficult for me to make a dent in even the smallest portion of my list. You may have seen in my 2017 resolutions post that one of my goals for the coming year is to start waking up much earlier, which got me thinking about how I might spend my extra hours in the day. Reading was one of the first things that sprung to my mind. I always seem to have some sort of reading goal on my resolutions list which normally goes something like "read X amount of books this year". And I fail every. single. time. This year, I'm scrapping the number and just focusing on making more time to read. On my 2017 reading list I have quite a range, from design, to health and nutrition, to beauty, fashion and more...

2016 Highlights

Happy New Year everybody! So I think we all know that 2016 wasn't peoples favourite year, and probably with good reason. But all that negativity aside, it's always nice to look back on the positives from the year just gone by. On a personal level, 2016 was actually a brilliant year for me, potentially the best of my life. As some of you might know, I spent the last 4 months of the year living and studying in New York City which was obviously an incredible experience. But I was also lucky enough to travel to some other beautiful places, meet some wonderful people along the way, plus we welcomed a new puppy into the family! Here are some of my highlights from 2016...