New beginnings this New Year...

I hope all of you had a very Merry Christmas and Santa brought you everything you wanted. Christmas was a family affair once again for me this year, and back in Birmingham my family and I ate Christmas lunch at a fabulous restaurant at the top of the Mailbox building...

What a treat to avoid the stresses of hungover Christmas day cooking and terrible Christmas TV. While you can't beat Christmas at home, we discovered a couple of years ago that having the meal itself at a lovely restaurant can avoid a partly frozen turkey, tonnes of washing up, and the teenage boredom and angst of my 19 year old brother that comes hand in hand with spending the whole day stuck at home.

I was a very lucky girl this year when it came to presents... One of my top gifts this year was a silver bracelet with my name engraved - which my mum had hidden in a Christmas cracker I pulled at the meal.

When it came to surprises my beautiful boyfriend G gave me a lovely treat... On Christmas eve he rang my mobile and said has my parcel arrived yet, go check the doorstep to see if they left it there. I opened the door and there he was! He whisked me off shopping to choose my prezzie - he wanted to buy me a dress to wear when we go away for New Year, and he needed to have me there really to pick one I loved and try it on. I chose a beautiful purple silk one from Selfridges - I will upload some pics of our New Year night away so you can see it yourselves! I feel a very lucky girl to have a man spoil me so much, but it was more the thoughtful aspect of him wanting to surprise me on the doorstep than the actual gift that meant so much to me. (Didn't tell him that though as I still wanted the dress!)

The gifts I got him were far less poignant and romantic - two PS3 games, and I took him to a football match on boxing day... What can you do though it's what he wanted! I had thought out romantic ideas for presents, perhaps a meal at the restaurant where we had our 1st date... But I know we would have got there and he would have said can I have my PS3 games now. Boys and their toys!

He will have to tear himself away from the PS3 for one night though when we go away for New Year. We've booked into a lovely hotel in Bournemouth to spend New Year. I can't wait, it means a lot to be with him to see in 2009 and Bournemouth as a town means a great deal to me too as I spent 3 happy years at University there.

Our time together is limited as I'm back to London the very next day and we will part at the train station. He can expect tears from an over emotional and undoubtedly hungover me, but I am looking forward to getting back to my fun life in London and seeing what 2010 holds for me...perhaps G will move down before the year is through.

I hope you all have a fabulous New Year and wake on the 1st with a hangover but a smile, who knows what 2010 will bring! x

Merry Christmas

It's that time of year again, when everyone heads back to their roots to be with family, battling the snow covered roads and delayed public transport.

Like so many others I packed up my bags and laden with presents set off back to Birmingham, my home town, to spend Christmas with my family and boyfriend.

This year, in the midst of a recession, I wondered whether Christmas would be a parred down affair. I've read in the news that companies won't have Christmas parties for staff this year, that people are attempting to make their own presents not buy them. Home made or not, drunken Christmas party or not, it appears to me that people are celebrating the season as enthusiastically as ever this year. On my journey back home I was pleased to see most people had gone to town with Christmas lights. In addition to this, the shops do not seem to have suffered this year with Christmas shopping. Which bodes well for my presents - I can't imagine what I would receive should my brother take it upon himself to start hand making gifts.

What are your plans this Christmas? Whatever they are I hope you enjoy your time with family and friends. Eat, drink and be merry. And remember, Santa comes tonight so however merry you get make sure you behave!

Happy Christmas everyone x

Entry to Embassy

Another night another nightclub...

And this time it was the turn of Embassy nightclub in Mayfair to wow me for the evening, with their fabulous Christmas decor accessorised by famous faces at every turn.

How did I, a lesser known mortal gain entry? It's all about who you know, and luckily two of my well connected friends from school were down in London for the night and got the three on the list....

We had a fabulous night, albeit fairly sober due to the drinks prices.

Christmas is the time for festive drinks but I don't want January to be the time for a festive overdraft so I resolved to limit myself to only one or two glasses.

Mingling with the rich and famous it is easy to forget you don't have their kind of resources... anyway, who said a girl can't have a good time sober?

It was lovely being with old friends for the night surrounded by the glamour of a lifestyle not quite in reach.

The best bit of the night though might have been returning to the lovely hotel in Mayfair where they were booked in for the night, collapsing in to the huge super king size bed with them and ordering room service. By 2am we were eating smoked salmon sandwiches in bed and watching sky news as we dozed off...

Such hardcore party animals!

What is your claim to fame?

Everyone loves to be in the spotlight. In the UK we are obsessed with celebrity, we want to know everything about them, aspire to be them, and can't get enough of them.

It makes me wonder how close all of us have got to being in the public eye? While standing at the edges did any of us make it in to the spotlight and what brought us there?

Perhaps for some reading this their moment in the limelight is yet to come. Perhaps for some it briefly shone on them and now they are back among the crowd. And for others, they may never be rich and famous, or mingle with the rich famous and they may never want to.

I personally can't say my life has been filled with celebrity, although it is getting a little closer to that recently...

My (shockingly poor) claims to fave thus far in the 23 years of my life include.....

I dated for just over a year the brother of a famous TV presenter, Giles Vickers Jones. I can mention that on here because I am still good friends with his brother and we often wind Giles up about his so called 'celebrity' life. Presenting for GMTV, E! Entertainment and ITV at the Movies has not made him a mega celeb but he's a little more in that circle than the rest of us.

Before that relationship I once kissed an X factor finalist while I was in my second year of University at Bournemouth and they came to the town on the X factor tour.... it is highly embarrassing. It is too embarrassing to give away the name but it was the year Leona Lewis won, his name began with B and he may have been known for his unconventional hair... Those of you as into X Factor as I am will know who I am referring to. But a lady will never kiss and tell! (she just hints).

Other than these two encounters with the male celebrity species I have been somewhat protected from the glamour and gossip that comes from being immersed in the celeb circuit. That is until now, where my new job means I speak to someone in the public eye every day, and occasionally meet up to discuss work...

It makes me smile if I read his name on the net or a magazine, to think that I know him, I get a buzz from the fact that others can only speculate but I have some degree of insider knowledge into someone high profile's life.

For now, this is the nearest I get to mingling with the celebs, texting and emailing my secret boss, and the occasional overpriced night at Funky Buddha or China white. I'm not very close to being in the limelight, I'm still watching the glamorous few from a distance. But I'm a hell of a lot closer than I was a year ago reading Heat Magazine at home in Birmingham. x x x

New Abode on the horizon - will I finally escape student living?

After three years of house sharing while at university, one might assume that when you collect your degree you leave those days behind you. I assumed this to be the case. How wrong I was.... In the three years since I left uni, I lived a more grown up life of cohabiting with a boyfriend, and even living and working abroad for a year. But necessity spoke and in moving to London, or "emigrating" here as my Grandma described it, I took the easy option of moving in with my student brother and some of his friends.


To be fair we aren't exactly roughing it. This isn't quite the hell hole halls I experienced first time around. My parents took advantage of fallen house prices and bought to rent when my brother knew he would be coming to London for uni.

It is a nice house, I can't complain, but I still do. For I didn't think I would be mixing with quite so many 18 year olds when I was 23. I don't care to know about the student union nights and which societies at Freshers week were giving out the best goodies.

I am past the stage of teaching fellow housemates how to use a washing machine and cook, and waking to find strangers in the house the next morning, not knowing whether the sofa or a housemates bed has been their place of rest.

I am fast tiring of the mother figure role I seem to have found myself in. (Mother figure is how I describe it they call it something all together less flattering.)

It would be nice to get back to some privacy and independence from the mayhem. It would be nice to be able to invite my boss around when we have changes to make to documents. Instead of which we can currently be found huddled in a crowded Starbucks hoping for Internet signal and knocking coffee over the laptop.

A lifeline appeared this week when an old friend of mine from University noticed my facebook status and got in touch saying she was looking for a flatmate to find somewhere in Camden from late Jan.

When I say old friend, we actually lived together for two years of uni along with 6 other girls. Of all of them I got on with Bex the best. She has a healthy appetite for shopping and fun like myself, and if we could indulge these hobbies in Bournemouth just think what we could do together in central London.

Here comes the tricky bit.... Bex and I stopped talking right at the end of uni. She began seeing someone from our course who I had had brief thing with that year. This is before I met G and before Bex was ever interested in this guy. Neither Bex or I had done anything wrong to one another it was just one of those uncomfortable situations. Suddenly our course mate who I had history with was around our house all the time and everyone found the situation weird. Luckily it was only about 3 months until we handed in our dissertations and packed up our lives in Bournemouth for good. But the result of these events meant Bex and the male trouble maker dated for the next three years and she always found it too weird to continue her friendship with me.


I didn't feel any great loss from the situation, I moved to Thailand for a year with G and am embarrassed to admit a lot of my friendships back in the UK took a back seat to my new life there. Once back in England, I heard through the grapevine Bex was working and living in London. About 6 months ago she added me as a friend on facebook. Then 6 weeks ago I noticed she and our mutual male had split up and she was listed as single and looking for fun.

I don't know what happened to break them up it would be inappropriate to ask but I did wonder if it would mean she got back in touch with me. Then all of a sudden yesterday, a voice from the past enquired whether I would like to search for somewhere to live together in Camden.

I am excited on a number of levels - firstly I may actually leave behind student life once and for all. Secondly, it seems as though this is an olive branch offering and Bex and I could still have a friendship despite a three year absence from each others lives. I don't know many people in London and Bex was like a sister until a man came between us.

Funny isn't it, how you come back around to the important friendships in your life, but almost all love relationships have an expiry date.

What would you do?

Me with my cousins daughter aged 2 weeks.

Working for the website http://www.pureadam.com/ I am often on discussion boards and groups where very sensitive issues are raised, and people ask advice about the difficult decisions they find themselves faced with.

Viewing these discussions has made me question my own standpoint on some things, and I thought I would cover this on my blog. Perhaps it will allow you to question what your own decision would be in the same circumstance....


Would you conceive with donated sperm?


It isn't any ones first choice of conception, but for many sperm donation is the last resort to having a child. If I was single and approaching my 40s, or in a relationship with a man who had fertility problems, I have recently wondered whether I would consider sperm donation. The thought of being inseminated with the sperm of a stranger does not sit comfortably with me. However it sits far more comfortably than the concept of a life without having children, so I think that yes, in certain circumstances I would choose sperm donation. In regards to this, I can see why people use a site such as PureAdam. Sperm donation would seem a little less daunting if the sperm did not come from a complete stranger. If you could at least have seen what that person looked like and communicated with them in some way it would be less of an unknown. I believe many of our users feel more confident having hand picked a donor themselves from the site, rather than from a random donation at a sperm bank.


Would you allow your husband to donate sperm?


This has been a topic on some discussion boards I've viewed recently. I must say that no, controlling or selfish as it may reflect me to be, I would not allow my husband to donate sperm. Purely for the fear that somewhere down the line there may be a grown adult seeking a father figure from my husband. However, if I embarked on a new relationship with someone who revealed they had donated sperm in the past, I would accept that as a part of who they were when I met them. In fact I think it would put them in a good light in my eyes - donating sperm is a selfless act and they may have made someones life and family complete by choosing to donate. Ironic isn't it - that I would admire sperm donation as a past act of compassion, but forbid such a move in my own marriage. Well I never claimed to be a straight forward kind of woman...


Would you tell your child they were donor conceived?

A further debate on sperm donation is whether or not to inform the child. The overwhelming opinion on the discussion forums is that yes, most people plan to or have told their child of their unusual conception. My own standpoint? I would tell my child they were donor conceived and hope that they took from that my heartfelt desire to have them. Sperm donation is a length those who are desperate for a child will go to in order to make that wish come true. Instead of feeling embarrassed or confused, I hope any resulting children feel absolutely wanted by the mothers who embarked on such a journey to have them.

Absence makes the heart...go shopping to fill the void!

A strange mix of emotions this weekend as my boyfriend, who I left behind in Birmingham, came down for the weekend to visit.

It feels comforting being with him, like coming home. It has been a long three weeks and many phone calls and texts since we last saw each other and I was thrilled when he turned up after work on Friday night.

My boyfriend, let's call him G, is an engineer back in Birmingham. He doesn't have much interest in moving to London. He is happy in the small town we both come from, Walsall in the West Midlands.

Still living on the road where we both grew up, and going to the same pubs every weekend with the same friends, he is content to be doing what he has been doing for the last 15 years.

I got bored and moved away, but my heart didn't move away from G, and now I hope his follows me to London.

We met during my final year of university - when I lived in Bournemouth, so we know what it is to commute for our relationship. But it was different when I was at uni living with housemates and wanting to go out every night with them. It was different when we were in the early stages of the relationship and happy to take things slowly.

Now, we are three years down the line and have lived together for two and a half of those, including a year in Thailand. It feels weird to be apart, still strange for him not to be the first person I see when I wake and the last when I fall asleep.

So this weekend I tried to show him the best of life in London in a none too subtle attempt to get him to reconsider a move. We did a spot of Christmas shopping on Oxford street where the Christmas market was in full flow. There was a carnival type atmosphere and as it grew dark around 4 o clock and the Christmas lights began to light up the street, it was the first time I have felt the festive spirit this year.

After a successful shopping trip (successful in so far as he bought me some good prezzies) we walked towards Trafalgar Square and stopped off at Planet Hollywood for dinner. Two hours, some food and a fair few cocktails later we dropped our shopping back at mine and were ready for a club, so we got the tube to Pasha in Victoria - never an easy feat in heels and feeling a little tipsy.

Pasha was a hit with G, exactly his kind of dance music, and the famous DJ re mixers Freemasons were there making a guest appearance. Personally, I could have done with a little more cheesy music and perhaps fewer queues at the bar. But then again this weekend was aimed at making G reconsider London as a possible home, and dancing the night away to the 60's Motown hits I love would certainly not have done the trick! Although not my first choice of music (or in fact many girls' - it seemed 80% men in there on Saturday?!) we stayed until they closed at 5am - and then considered visiting nightclub Ghost - which had been recommended by a man dancing wildly next to us at the bar. It apparently opens at 5am and stays open until midday Sunday.

We decided however that this was a little over ambitious for our drinking and exhaustion capabilities so we headed home to collapse into a deep sleep and relaxing hungover Sunday.

Saying goodbye to G on Sunday night was hard but I am keeping my fingers crossed that he comes back down this weekend. Well to be honest I'm keeping my fingers crossed he comes down to stay eventually but we won't push him on that subject too much just yet... a woman knows how to time these things for the maximum chance of success :-)

Wish me luck people! x x

Ooops - a blonde moment at work

Well I almost had a complete disaster today at work. After days spent perfecting the press release for the launch of PureAdam, I was moments away from sending it out to almost a thousand media outlets without so much as a mention of the website address!

I'm sure there could have been a few articles created from such a blooper - I can picture the headline now. Blonde PR girl sends excellent summary of website but fails to include the address.

It could only happen to me! Luckily my boss caught the error just in time and I made a few adjustments before sending it out to the world....

Well now it is out there and we are holding our baited breath. It's like sending your child off to school for the first time and waiting to see how they get on (although poor PureAdam, at least you are unlikely to forget to name your child).

I'm signing off now but just before I forget again - check out the site on http://www.pureadam.com/ !!