Week Thirteen - Learning Guitar

Imagine the scene: Christmas Day, a 15 year old me and an electric guitar from Argos.
It was at this stage of my life that I thought it was cool to dye my hair pink, wear coloured tights, start an all girl band (we were called Remember Tomorrow, and none of us could play instruments or sing) and go to gigs in Skegness. Not so cool!
Back then, I only lasted a few weeks learning the guitar until I got bored of playing 'Wonderwall' and quit.
This week, I was on a comeback tour and decided to pick the guitar back up and start again!
To start, I googled 'an idiots guide to reading music' and gave myself a quick tutorial in what mean what and what went where. To be totally honest I still don't understand.
Next up came the song choice. Wonder wall is apparently a good beginners song to play, but after playing it so much 6 years ago, I couldn't bear to do it again.
However, I did vaguely recall attempting R.E.M's 'Man on the Moon' and the chords looked simple enough.

After about 3 tedious hours of trying to get my fingers to go on the strings they needed to be on, I had a... I'll call it a remixed... version of the Man on the Moon.
I could just about play the song but at a pace that was around 6 times slower than the original. And it was also very shit.
Unfortunately, I also had very sore fingers and a permanent frown from concentration.

Talent Rating - 3/10 basically, I don't think my talent lies here, don't expect to hear me on Radio One anytime soon.

Fore note: This is not my room, I do not care for football. Or single beds

Week Twelve - Cycling

In year five, I went on a week long school trip to Wales to take part in a series of group activities and sports.

It was during this venture that I had my first trip to a hospital since I'd been born. 

Whilst mountain biking one afternoon, I decided to be a bit of an idiot on my bike which resulted in me toppling off head first, cracking my helmet in half and spraining my neck. 

Luckily, living in the flatness of the Fenland's, I've never since had any run in's with bikes and hills. Until this week. 

Bishops Cleeve is a village near Cheltenham in the south-west of England and home to the 'Cleeve Hill'
A bit of a theme with me is thinking I can do things that are clearly too advanced for my talent-less self. This time around, I had assumed that the 8 weeks on the bike at the gym, the previous summer had been enough practise for me to climb a 25% incline hill. Not so smart.

Seven minutes in and I already made my first stop, to re-hydrate. Although I was already panting and had a slight sweat on I carried on.
However, this was a different story about 10 minutes later. I had not only given up riding the bike but I had also given up with the bike completely and it had to be dragged up by someone else. Even walking up this hill was a challenge for me!
I suppose technically I should of called this post 'walking' but that would be a very low point of life if walking was my only talent.

When we finally hit the top and the sun started to poke through a little, I have to say it was worth it.
Also the next day, my ass was rock solid.

Highlight: The ride back, I don't think I touched the pedals once.

Talent Rating - 4/10 If you count wheezing and swearing as a talent then I'd be rather good.

Week Eleven - THE SKI TRIP day 7-8

Day 7

Today's hangover was one of the most intense I'd ever had. I had to have 3 ibuprofen to simply get me out of bed.
Wiping the remainder of last nights beard away, I decided that today was a spa day!

First up was a trip to one of the many cafes around the resort, for the chocolate-est hot chocolate I'd ever had. It was literally like chocolate mixed with chocolate topped off with chocolate - LUSH!

The spa was made up of a steam room, saunas (in orange, sandalwood and mint flavours), foot spas, 2 pools (one with a waterfall) and jacuzzi's.
I stayed in this spa until my skin was wrinkly, my body was cleansed and my aches had virtually disappeared. It's far to say, I was there for a while.

Tonight's fancy dress: White tee's and sharpies - basically any events (wink wink) that had occurred on the trip being transferred into grossly inappropriate messages on peoples t-shirt! Hilarious!
As the last night, it was only appropriate that we seriously went hard before coming back home!

Day 8

Today was a sad day. After giving it our all whether it be on the slopes or in the bars, BCU Extreme Sports had gone hard and now it was time for us to go home!

Unfortunately, before we set off, everyone had to clean their rooms (which had quickly turned into pits) to a French cleaning standard (the French be clean!) Of course, being students we didn't complain ;)

At 4.30pm we piled back on the coach, all in onesies and pyjamas (travelling in style.) With one last chant of 'BCU, shagged your mum' we said goodbye to the week of dreams.
The atmosphere on this journey was very different to that of the previous. We were half the group we were at the beginning of the week - bruised, sprained, concussed, tired, achy and full of sniffles.

Had it been worth it? Absolutely.
Can I ski? Not really, but it just as much fun!

And the best part of today? Space Jam was played on the way home!

Quote of the journey home: 'You need to have a license to own a farm, but not to have kids'
                                                                                                     A very tired Sean Adkins

Talent Ratings

Skiing - 4/10 am quite good when I'm not crying down the slopes
Drinking - 8/10 one night out missed due to being bed ridden
Representing BCU - 9/10 I chanted, I chanted and I chanted some more

A massive thank you to everyone who made this trip as amazing as it was!

Week Eleven - THE SKI TRIP day 5-6

Day 5

After sleeping for around 20 hours, I was feeling a lot better and ready to get out and onto the slopes!

As previously mentioned, the last time I had been on the slopes was a bit of a disaster and I was determined to not let this happen again!
However my confidence was in pieces, so I decided to spend the morning back on the nursery slopes. After I stopped freaking out, it started to go very well, I was building my confidence back up and having fun with it. This was until, I noticed me and my friend had a stalker.

STALKER ON SLOPES!

This man in the picture above was literally following me and my friend for about an hour. Whenever we stopped, he stopped. Whenever we went down the slopes, he followed.
After about half an hour of this, I went on strike and refused to move until he had left us alone and luckily 20 minutes later it seemed he had given up and buggered off. Thinking it was safe to move again, we went down the slope only to find HE WAS AT THE BOTTOM WAITING FOR US!
Our strike had not worked, so instead we ran away from him.

At around 3pm we made our way up to a green slope via a chair lift and went on our way to Après ski at Bar 360! For those of you who don't know, Après ski is basically one big party after skiing.
This was literally like being at the best party ever at 4 in the afternoon. Everyone there was up on their feet and there were so many confetti cannons going off, that I am still to this day finding pieces in everything I own.

Many expensive pints and a lots of snow boot dancing later we made our way over to the restaurant for our 'mountain meal.' After so far living off noodles and pain au chocolats it was quite a relief to see real food! And a steak fondue at that!
Even though we were sharing portions between 6 people, everyone was so starved that we didn't hold back and had eaten everything in around 10 minutes!

With an extra bottle of wine demolished, I thought this extra dutch courage would bring me down the mountain with ease. Unfortunately, yet again, not the case. I was the last person off the mountain and in my tipsy state it took an additional 3 people and a lot of pole pulling to get me down.


Day 6

Today we woke up to this view! This was going to be a very good day!

Dragging our poorly, tired, near broken bodies out to the slopes we immediately hit the chair lift to have a packed lunch on top of the mountain.

I was determined today to become an excellent skier and so every time I became nervous I started to sing 'baby monkey riding backwards on a pig' and I tell you what, it worked! I only fell over once and that was from just standing still.
Today also consisted of my friend skiing into a pole (hilarious), sunbathing at Bar 360 (lush) and watching another friend spend about 10 minutes getting her ski's on.

Tonight's fancy dress: Gender swap.

It is a rarity that I find myself speechless, but tonight was something else.

We had beards, we had kitten heels, we had socks stuffed into bras and into pants, we had faces full of make up.
We had more wigs than than a group of drag queens.
The only way to properly describe this night was a 'crossed dressed cluster fuck'
To make the night even more messed up we had lady men snogging man ladies and French men buying me drinks! I now know the way to every French man's heart!

And then we had this!

Check tomorrow's post out to hear about the last 2 days of the trip!

Week Eleven - THE SKI TRIP day 3-4

Day 3

The first proper day!
The majority of us all awoke to a banging hangover and slightly orange faces from the face paint from the night before, but with ski gear to pick up we all had to man up and move out!
Many of you reading now, I'm sure, have been hungover before in your life and so you can sympathise with me when went I tell you that having to try on insanely tight fitting ski boots in a shop that had it's heating on full whack with a French man standing over at you judging you and your hangover sweats is NOT the ideal way to start your holiday.
Eventually I made it out and pain au choclat-ing myself up made my way over to the nursery slopes.

In a previous post, I blogged about a skiing lesson I had and basically, how much I sucked at it. Now for some unknown reason I decided that this one lesson I had had was enough practise for me, so it's fair to say I was feeling slightly apprehensive walking over to the nursery slopes.
Luckily, I wasn't alone with my inability to ski!
The tell-tale signs that this wasn't going to be as easy as expected occurred about 90 seconds into putting my skis on, as I was already on my arse.

The nursery slopes are designed for beginner skiers, and within an hour I'd say I was starting to get rather cocky on them. Having mastered the 'snow plough' on my previous lesson, I was starting to learn how to control my speed and turn.
I was very happy with this progress. Happy enough to agree to a friend of mine giving me an afternoon lesson on an actual slope. BIG MISTAKE.

This certain friend of mine and I got a cable car and took the 5 minute journey up to the mountain. Getting out the other side, the visibility was not good, and there were 2 arrows; one was blue and one was red.
Luckily (I thought) I was going down the blue and I'd say for the first 20 minutes I was ok, fell over (and struggled to get back up) a lot but was slowly getting down.
It was somewhere around the 20th fall and with the view of plenty more steep slopes on the horizon, that something inside me snapped. I could not do it anymore, I wanted to get off this stupid mountain. I had also completely buggered up my left knee and foot.
The next 4 hours consisted of a mixture of me crying, being skied down slopes by my extremely talented friend (yes, you George) and sliding down the mountain on my bum.
When we eventually got to the bottom, I was half the woman I was at the top of the mountain! I was also told later that night that this slope was more of a red than a blue!

What I needed to distract me from this horrendous afternoon was copious amounts of alcohol and luckily for me it was two peoples birthdays!
The theme tonight: Slutty Hogwarts - so basically slutty schoolgirl with a scar on your forehead.

The highlight of this night was the fire shots we had at a club called Malaysia. Literally drinking a shot (god knows what it was) on a bar which was on fire with a straw. Those crazy French!

Quote of the day ' All I ever wanted in the world was for everyone to be nice' 
                                                                                                 A sober Kate Hodson


Day 4

Today I woke up with a lot more than a few achy muscles and a slight hangover. The flu had come for me!

Unfortunately the whole of today consisted of me laying in bed fluctuating between being freezing cold and boiling day. A very trippy day.
The only point I did leave my bed was to go eat a crème fraiche pizza and be served by an extremely rude French man (who I still tipped, damn my conscience.)

It was also by this day that I noticed that people were started to blame everything, and I mean everything, on the altitude.
Here's a list of things the altitude apparently affected;

- Drunk levels
- Tooth aches
- Hangovers
- Loss of breath
- Hair softness
- Bigger boobs
- Sexual tension
- Bloating
- Sleepiness
- Hunger levels
- Sex drives
- Anger towards snow

Today was also our first day of 'court.' For our society, if you do something stupid then you are taken to court, where the committee decides on a punishment worthy of your stupidity. Unfortunately, due to being ill, I wasn't able to attend but crimes worthy of punishment ranged from apparent 'bus blozzas' to ski poles being snapped so therefore duct taped to the persons head.

Check back tomorrow for posts about day 5-6!

Week Eleven - THE SKI TRIP day 1-2

Before I tell the story of one of the best weeks of my life, I will tell you now that I will do it no justice; you simply just had to be there.

Day 1

I will start at the beginning (that’s were most stories begin) and paint the picture with 80 students, a beer pong table, a horse’s head and a lot of prisoners jumpsuits. With the majority of us only having a few hours’ sleep the night before due to over excitement and/or dissertation deadlines, the atmosphere was buzzing – we were like a group of excitable school children only minus the morals and additional alcohol.

Our ‘Health & Safety’ chat consisted off ‘go hard or go home’ and ‘make sure you don’t get chucked off the ferry.’ With this in mind, the 2 bottles of lukewarm wine in my hand luggage had never been so appropriate.

Piling onto the coach and pushing our way to the back of the coach (I’m 21 and still need to be at the back of the bus) we set off on our 24 hour journey to Val Thorens.

The sing-alongs ranged from Dolly Parton to Queen and the toilet broke about a third of the way into the journey but the majority of us were too drunk to care. However, the drunkness became a slight burden when we arrived at Dover and onto the ferry. I’m not exaggerating when I say that people were literally walking in Z’s throughout the ferry and it was not very comforting to hear the ferry staff tell us that the waves were 8/10 bad! Lots of heads overboard!

Day 2

Unfortunately the journey continued for the majority of day 2, however we were sobering up, in a now day old, wine coated jumpsuit and on the wrong side of the road.

I personally have never been skiing and being from the Fenlands, have rarely seen mountains, especially snow coated one. I would say that the spectacular views kept me entertained for the climb up to Val Thorens, but unfortunately the fact that THE SPIRALLING, BARRIER-LESS ROAD WAS ON THE EDGE OF THE MOUNTAIN resided me to downing beer at the back of the bus with my eyes shut.

After 24 hours, we finally made it. It was dark, but it was beautiful.

The shower I had after moving into my new home for the next week, made me feel like a new person and the altitude made my hair feel fantastic (more on the altitude later.)

The fancy dress for tonight: BCU Tigers! 

After downing about a quarter of a bottle of vodka and feeling hammered (thank you altitude) we made our way to the 'Yeti' bar. Upon opening the doors we were greeted with a wave of sweat in the air and Dutch men, a frightful combination. 

The highlight of the night? Clocking the 'Show your nipple, get a free shot' sign. How many did I get? 4.

Check back tomorrow to read about days 3-4!

Week Ten - Packing (Pre Ski Trip)

A couple months ago, I mentioned that I had booked myself onto my universities annual ski trip to Val Thorens in the French Alps.
Well, would you believe it, tomorrow I head off!

Also after three to four weeks of absolute hell, the pain in the arse we call a dissertation has been handed in today!
I literally couldn't of asked for better timing.

With life back on resume, I have one night to do a lot of packing!

We meet up tomorrow at the Student Union at 4pm and head from Birmingham to Dover for a 3am ferry, due at Val Thorens at 5pm the next day.
I am going to be so drunk, I might forget who I am.

Here's a little peeping Tom tour of what I'm packing!

 My trusty speakers. Our room will be the partaaaay room!

My food shop. For the week ;)

  A selection of my many hats.

     My helmet. HEALTH N' SAFETY KIDS!

 Lots of warm slouchy trousers.

Every single pair of socks I own.

Some of my fancy dress attire! The jumpsuit is my travelling outfit!

Talent Rating - I'll let you guys rate me on this one on this picture alone...

WARNING: Next weeks post, i.e. post ski trip, will be crazy. Please mentally prepare yourself.

Week Nine - Tie Dye

Once upon a time, the only people to wear tie dye were ‘free spirited’, hippy wannabes and 8 year olds with cheap parents. Now you can’t walk by a vintage shop or an ironically cool club without seeing at least 8 hipsters sporting some kind of tie dye garment.

However, due to being poor, I haven’t bought new clothes in about 4 weeks and am now bored of everything in my wardrobe, so this week I'm giving it a go.

I begin with a basket full of bleach, a concerned looking checkout assistant and some very awkward ‘addict’ jokes from me. 
After the most embarrassing shopping purchases ever (and I've once tried to explain why I'd bought baby oil, wine and a screwdriver at the same time) I headed back home to get my tie dye on.

Picking out a bright orange (some would say amber) coloured t shirt that hasn't been worn since I thought I could pull off the colour, I set to tying my bands to my top.
There are a few different ways you can tie your tops depending on what 'look' you want to achieve.

- Pebble dash - Using different sized and shaped stones tie them in different places on your top securing them with bands.
- Lined - Roll your top either horizontal and vertical (depending on what stripe looks better on you), tie your bands securely up the roll between relatively similar spaces.
- Spiral - The classic look for you tie dyers! Pinch the middle of your top (around the chest area) and scrunch it into a roll. Securely tie as many bands as you want down the roll.

Put your top in a plastic bowl or container (probably something you're not going to eat out of) and squirt bleach over them. I used around half a bottle of toilet bleach and left for about 15 minutes.
When you're happy with your colour, take it out and rinse the top under warm water basically until you can be bothered.

Talent rating - 7/10 not sure if I was relatively good at this or if I was just high from bleach...

The end product!

Afterthought: How on earth do I wash this? Can I put it in the washing machine?

Week Eight - Photography

It’s fair to say that I am a part of the generation that believes because I have a snazzy smartphone and an Instagram account, I am a photographer. Everyone is allowed one cliché in their life.

Also, this week has mostly revolved around being in the library dissertation-ing shit up and there are not many talents you can practise in the library without being thrown out by the extremely bored looking security staff.

I have a small bit of experience with photography. As a part of my BTEC in media, I did a module in photography, so I can safely say I know which way round landscape and portrait are, but that is probably where my knowledge ends. 

For the most part I use Instagram to make a half decent picture of myself, look a little bit better by changing the effects therefore completely changing my face (we all do it!)

However this week, I've decided to stop taking selfies and start snapping some shots of cool things.

Let me know what you think of them!


Talent Rating - 6/10 not quite David Bailey!

  

Don't be stealing my pictures please, else I'll have to sue you. 

Week Seven - Baking

Writing a dissertation is a very discomforting point of life, the sheer size of the task is enough to make anyone go borderline crazy, as well as the realisation that, no I will not be able to do all of this the night before. So this week I've taken up a talent that not only will help me effectively procrastinate but will also enable me to eat my feelings.

Baking.

Now, completely coincidently, one of my very good friends has also turned an age of which I am forbidden to reveal on the internet, so using my clever head, this week I am combining talent finding with birthday cake making! (Also, I'm a student with little money and big imagination)

Scouring the internet for an ideal cake, I settled on a ‘princess castle cake’ to match my friends regal personality (NAAT.)

Next, I set myself off to Sainsburys (not today Aldi!) to buy the ingredients which included food colouring of your choice, to which the 8 year old inside of me screamed in delight at, and vanilla essence, which let's face it, no-one puts in.

Top tip

- Don't rely on the 3G signal on your phone in the supermarket, go all 2002 and write the ingredients down!

As a huge Great British Bake Off fan, I set out a standard worthy of Mary Berry and her ‘no soggy bottom’ rule. So I prepped the kitchen to the cleanest standard you could possibly get a student kitchen and weighted out my ingredients to an OCD standard. 

Then it is a case of simply throwing the ingredients together in some kind of formation until it looks and tastes like raw cake mix should. 

With the base of my cake doing something in the oven and the cake mix bowl licked out, I turned to the fun part - the decorations. 

Every castle has turrets, so using ice cream cones, melted chocolate, sprinkles and a lot of patience I made turrets even Cinderella would be envious of. 

After removing all the cakes from the oven and playing the 'is it cool enough yet' game, I got to building my castle with a knife and a lotta lotta jam - that will probably be the closest I ever come to working in the manual labour trade. I then smothered it in a thick layer of bright green butter icing and put all my decorations around. 

Did it look anything like the inspired picture? In truth, absolutely not. 

Did it taste good? Abso-bloody-lutely.

Talent rating - 8/10 The whole cake was eaten in about 24 hours and only around 40% of that was a drunken food binge.

The end result? WE GOT TEARS!