The Ultimate University Check List!

For many of us university is our first taste of independent, grown-up life. Suddenly you're solely responsible for buying your own food (and working out how to cook it without giving yourself food poisoning), paying your own bills, ensuring your passport doesn't end up discarded on the bathroom floor of a dodgy night club that smells like mouldy cheese etc.

Seriously, adulting is hard you guys!

To ensure the transition from your parents' spare room to a home of your own (if one can honestly call a 4 square foot box with a wet-room a home of one's own) as easy and successful as possible, it's best to be prepared. For anything!

You'll be surprised how often even the most obscure objects come in handy while you're at university!

And, if nothing else, being the girl who had everything made it really easy to make friends in the first couple of weeks. Whenever my less prepared housemates needed a spatula or some safety pins, I could come to rescue. After all, nobody wants to traipse to Tesco halfway through pre-drinks because no one in the flat had the forethought to bring a corkscrew.

So, to make sure you have absolutely EVERYTHING you could possibly need for your big move to university, I have the ultimate check-list for you.

Documents:

• Acceptance letter from the university
• Student loan documents
• Any housing documents/home insurance documents you may have
• Bank account information
• Medical information/prescription medication information
• Passport 

Review: BBC's Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets

Recently I've been trying my hand at cleaner eating. I've been doing my best to avoid processed food and to fill my plate with food that comes from the Earth as is instead of food labelled "pierce lid several times before microwaving on full power for four minutes", but I'm not quite there yet. The occasional biscuit (or seven), chocolate orange yoghurt or french fry still manage to find their way into my mouth.

Hence cleaner eating. Cleaner than it was, but not exactly clean clean.

I'm still new to the world of clean eating and I'm still trying to get my hands on as much information as I can to inspire and educate me. So when I saw the BBC had brought out a documentary called Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets, you can bet I was all over it. I like to be well-informed!

Unfortunately, this documentary does not seem to share that passion for being well-informed.

According to the BBC, this 34 minute long documentary follows Youtuber, Grace Victory, as she "investigates Britain's latest extreme diet craze", which kind of threw up red flags for me straight away.  After all, if clean eating is eating whole foods in their most natural state without all the artificial colours, additives and chemicals, food that comes from the Earth instead of a lab or a factory, then how is that an extreme diet craze? Surely that's just the natural human diet that we lived on for millions of years before the days of fast food, brominated vegetable oil and GMOs.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the documentary isn't actually about clean eating at all. In fact, throughout the entire programme I struggled to understand what it was about!

Grace says she's investigating "plant-based diets that are dairy free, sugar free, gluten free, meet free, JOY free", but throughout the documentary she jumps from one diet to the next in an almost haphazard way, not explaining their differences and instead sloppily labelling them all as 'clean eating'. Hello! Living a vegan lifestyle is not the same as clean eating. Not all clean eaters are vegan and not all vegans are clean eaters! Nor do gluten or natural sugars have any part to play in whether or not you're a vegan or a clean eater. I'm sure there are sugar free, gluten free clean eating vegans out there (who may or may not have joy in their lives), but these dietary preferences aren't all co-dependent or one of the same thing.

It turns out that what Grace is actually condemning investigating is veganism, which she deems "very middle class" because it's so expensive.

Now, I'm not a vegan myself so correct me if I'm wrong, but a trolley full of vegetables and rice surely can't cost as much as a trolley full of ham, beef and chicken breasts. And, again correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure you'll find that the world over it's the poorest people who are living on a plant-based diet while the middle classes are tucking into their sirlion steak with side of peppercorn sauce. Vegetables are not reserved for doctors, lawyers and Jack Will's wearers.

Grace cites and chats with various bloggers and Youtubers throughout the documentary, including Brianna Jackson. Brianna suffered from an eating disorder for five years and, in an interview with Whole Lifestyle, she says, "if I hadn't found raw veganism, I don't think I'd be alive today...whole unprocessed foods really helped me trust food again". But, rather than heralding veganism as the reason for Brianna's recovery like she does, the BBC documentary almost makes out that Brianna's diet and her illness are connected, using her eating disorder story as a segway into a section on orthorexia.

(In case you're not down with the lingo, orthorexia is a medical condition that causes sufferers to avoid certain foods that they consider unhealthy.)

Brianna is a vegan advocate and certainly doesn't consider herself to be orthorexic. Needless to say, Brianna was more than a little upset when she saw the documentary. You can watch her response video here:


It's clear from the get-go that Grace's intention is to condemn and undermine a lifestyle that she blatantly doesn't understand and openly refers to as "a cult". She openly says "I don't want this lifestyle", she wants the diets she tries (for how many days is never really clarified) to fail and she wants to go back to her old, processed, microwavable ways. And that's fine! You do you girlfriend! (I just ate a Milkybar, who am I to judge?) But if you're going to make a documentary exposing the negatives of something, it needs to be researched, well presented...make some fragment of sense!

Overall the documentary is a poor attempt at cramming too many topics (anorexia, orthorexia, veganism, blogger influence, the regulation of the term 'nutritionist', a potato cleanse...whatever that is) into a measly 34 minutes. All these different aspects of what Grace confusedly terms as 'clean eating' are quickly glossed over without any real exploration and then sloppily thrown together into half an hour of misinformed confusion.

Rant over!

Clean Eating's Dirty Secrets is currently available for you to watch (and roll your eyes at as you see fit) on the BBC iPlayer.

Monthly Musings: July

Look everyone! Monthly Musings are making a comeback and, whats more, they've had a bit of a revamp! Please contain your 'oohs' and 'aahs' as far as possible.

July has, for the most part, been a bit of a strain on my poor, fragile nerves because my parents decided to pull apart the kitchen and fit an entirely new one. In fairness, it was crying out for a makeover. Those counters were here when we moved in 14 years ago and they weren't even fashionable then (nor, if you ask me, were they ever).

But, as excited as I was at the promise of an oven that wouldn't burn all my cakes and a Tassimo machine for a never-ending supply of vanilla lattes available in the comfort of my own home, the dusk til dawn drilling, the dust, having to wash all the dishes in the bath and living off extremely questionable microwavable sausages and powdered soups eventually took its toll!

The main thing is I survived! And, beige diet and general kitchen drama aside, July has been a pretty good month!

Magical Moment

At 24 years old I'm still a festival novice. The mud, lack of running water and the whole sleeping on the floor thing really put me off. But this month I donned my wellies and obnoxiously large flower headband and attended the extremely exclusive Wellifest. Never seen it advertised in the Rolling Stones magazine? That's because it's a festival that my (extremely creative and slightly bonkers) cousin, Elinor, throws in her back garden every year. We had bands, we had hay bales, we had pulled pork, we even had an impromptu dance floor! And, amazingly, it didn't even rain...until everyone was a few cans of cider too many to notice.

I had such an amazing afternoon and took so well to the boho-chic festival style that I might even go to an actual festival next summer. You know, if I can get over my aversion to porta-loos by then.

#FAIL of the Month

The sheer amount of straw I managed to get in my Jack Daniels during Wellifest. I mean...how?!

This month I'm obsessed with...

Crips that aren't really crisps.

Since the kitchen has been off limits, I've been pretty much living on snack food (or at least that's my excuse). So imagine my delight when I came across a delicious alternative to crisps that I could exclaim, through a mouth full of crumbs, were in fact pretty good for me...well, better than ordinary crisps at least. This month I discovered a brand called Eat Real, which produces all kind of gluten free, vegetarian and vegan friendly crisps made from lentils, hummus, quinoa and veggies. My personal favourites are the Sour Cream and Chive Quinoa Chips. Nom!

Photo|EatReal.co.uk

If you're reading this and thinking, "quinoa crisps...really?!" then to you I say, "Yes! Really!"
They taste delicious, satisfy my midday cravings and have the same satisfying crunch as those deep-fried potato crisps without the guilt.

Book

This month I've been reading *The Count of Monte Cristo and, to be entirely honest, I think I'll still be reading The Count of Monte Cristo for a good few months to come. It's a impressive 1300 pages long, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's some kind of meandering Victorian novel that spends the first 500 pages setting the scene by describing the colour of the grass and the noise of the birds (though, in all honesty, I do enjoy those kinds of books too). It jumps pretty much straight into the action and it's fast pace, intriguing characters and the unexpected twists and turns of the plot have got me totally hooked.

Photo|BarnesandNoble.com

In case you're unfamiliar with the story, a young sailor named Dantes is accused of treason by his jealous acquaintances and is imprisoned for 21 years before he escapes and vows revenge on the men he thought were his friends. I'm only a third of the way through and I'm struggling to put it down!

Youtube Channel

 LeahXO

This month I was lucky enough to be part of a collaboration with a group of small Youtubers. I thoroughly enjoyed it since, not only was it a great way to find some new channels to binge-watch, but I got to meet some lovely new Youtube friends too!

So this month's Youtuber of the month simply has to be the lovely lady who organised the collaboration and got us all together. Leah's channel is all things makeup and beauty related. She has a really sweet personality and a Northern accent that makes me want to listen to her talk all day long. Is it just me or is listening to a Northern accent like cuddling up under a nice, warm blanket somehow? No? Just me? Ok.

Photo of the Month

Here's me living the life of a real-life fairy princess at Welliefest. I AM the Snapchat filter!

Instagram: @aimee_oddball

The soundtrack of my month was...

Miranda Lambert - Gunpowder and Lead

Not that I personally want to go out and shoot anyone (though there were a couple of times during traffic jams...). But there's nothing quite like a good old sassy country song to turn up nice and loud on a summer afternoon.

This month I discovered...

There are only 880 wild Mountain Gorillas left...in the whole world!

Photo|WWF.org

I've been on a bit of a Netflix documentary binge recently (there's only so much time you can waste re-watching That 70s Show after all) and last week I came across Virunga. It's a 2014 documentary film about the work of conservation workers in Virunga National Park, a 7,800 square kilometre World Heritage site in the Congo, which is home to lions, elephants, hippos (basically the entire cast of The Lion King) and 25% of the remaining Mountain Gorillas.

You see the gorillas, how adorable they are, how the conservation workers dote on them and literally give up their lives for them and you begin to think, "Well surely no one's so thoroughly evil to the core that they'd consider hurting these poor, beautiful little balls of fluff."

Cue the arrival of the British! (There's a reason all movie bad-guys have British accents.)

A company called SOCO International barges in and starts exploring for oil (which is totally against international law). Throw in a rebel army, some tanks, a French journalist and a member of the Belgian Royal Family who is prepared to lay down his life to protect the park and you've got yourself one heck of a documentary. It will have you screaming at the TV and despairing at the greed and selfishness of the human race (even more-so than you do when you're fighting your way through the January sales).

Definitely go and check it out!

(Affiliate links marked with *)

My Back to School Giveaway!

I know school just finished and we're all busy enjoying what I guess is technically summer (constant rain and fog aside), but get your brain back into school-mode for a few seconds because I'm running a Back to School Giveaway on my Youtube channel.

I'm giving away everything you'll need to go back to school in style including pens, pencils,
notebooks...excessive organisational goodies. And even if you're not heading back to school in September you can still enter because, let's face it, we all love cute stationery!

You can enter here:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Now, get out there and enjoy summer and good luck in the giveaway!

Boring information:
1. In order to enter the giveaway you must be subscribed to my Youtube channel. Extra entries can be gained by following me on social media etc, but these methods of entry are optional.
2. The giveaway is open until 12am 1st September 2016. The winner will be announced in a video that I'll be uploading to my channel on 2nd September 2016. The winner will be contacted directly via email and will have 3 days to respond before I offer up the prize to another winner.
3. Entrants under 16 years old must seek permission from a parent/guardian because I will be contacting the winner directly.
4. This is an international giveaway. The prizes will be sent via Royal Mail delivery, but it's worth noting that some countries have customs taxes and the cost of this will not be covered. I can't be held responsible for the condition of the prizes once they leave my possession (I will wrap them up nice and tight to protect them against heavy-handed postmen though!)
5. Extra entries can be gained by following me on social media or tweeting about the giveaway, but I reserve the right to disqualify people for entering on multiple different email addresses or not playing fair. I know this doesn't apply to the vast majority of you, but it has been an issue in the past and I want everyone to have a fair shot of winning!

Toys Every 90s Girl will Remember

I've been feeling a little nostalgic lately. Maybe it's because I've found the whole 'being a grownup thing' particularly challenging over the past few months what with quitting my job and having to go through the painful process of deciding what I actually want to do with my life all over again. Then again, maybe it's just that this sudden Pokemon craze that's descended has brought out the 90s kid in me.

Either way, in an attempt to throw off the shackles of adulthood for 20 minutes or so and the make the most of Throwback Thursday, I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane and make a list of all the best girlie toys from that glorious decade (that, much as I loved, I hope will never be repeated fashion-wise) we call the 90s.

Polly Pocket

Before Polly Pocket had a movie or wore rubberised shoes, she lived in houses that really could fit in your pocket! I was obsessed. I had the treehouse, the church, the funfair, the waterpark that I had to play with on top of a tea towel because it continuously leaked. The fun never ended with Polly...until someone stepped on her.

Tamagotchi

When Tamagotchis first hit the scene we all thought 'the future is officially here!' I mean, the pixilated little cat or dog on the screen could tell you when it was hungry or sick. This was practically artificial intelligence! (Bear in mind that this was before anyone had even conceived the idea of mobile phones with built-in cameras.)

Baby All Gone

She ate the cherries! She ate them right off the spoon! It was magical! Sure, within 2 weeks of being out of the box her hair made her look kind of like a troll doll, but it was magical all the same.

Puppy in my Pocket

They were adorable! And it wasn't just puppies. We had the kittens, the ponies, the bunny rabbits! And then there were the Baby Surprise bundles! I could barely take the excitement of opening up one of those to see how many babies were in there. It was more than my teeny little brain could bear!

anthill/ Via eBay

Barbie

Sure, Barbie has been a staple in every toy box since the 1950s, but there were some pretty fabulous Barbie dolls that came along in the 90s. Remember Workin' Out Barbie, Doctor Barbie, Teacher Barbie with the talking blackboard and what about Barbie's beloved canine friend, Ginger, who actually walked? Memories!

monsdollshop / Via eBay.com

Beanie Babies

Collect Beanie Babies they said. They'll be worth a fortune they said. How many of us still have a bin bag full of these in the attic, still waiting for the day when we can finally cash in on them?

Cabbage Patch Kids

To this day I can't decide whether they're creepy or adorable, but I loved mine all the same. Angie Peg was not just a doll. She was a member of the family!

ivy19342010/ Via eBay

Teddy Ruxpin

AKA my best friend for the first 6 years of my life. AKA live-in babysitter. I would sit for hours and listen to him tell the same story over and over again. To this day I don't know why my parents didn't consider investing in more cassettes because I can only imagine how grating "My friend, my friend, is what I'd like to be" got after several thousand renditions.

panddsstore/ Via eBay

Dream Phone

I actually still have my Dream Phone and have been known to bring it out during girlie get-togethers after a few glasses of wine. It's just as crushing to be rejected by an automated fictional man in my mid-twenties as it was when I was nine.

Lovable Bears

A step up from the Tamagotchi since you could actually hold it in your hand, it was scented like some kind of fruit and it couldn't die!

Vivid/ Via Amazon

Sky Dancers

I can imagine that modern-day health and safety would have something to say about anything so pointy that's designed to fly through the air at speed and, if you were ever unlucky enough to get hit in the face with one, I'm sure you'll understand why.

Furby

What was the must-have toy of 1998 also turned out to be the most pointless toy of all time.

vintagebywinters/ Via eBay

Fashion Wheel

The combinations were endless! (Or at least it seemed that way to a six year old.) And we all had that one head we hated that we'd only ever match with ugly outfits as some kind of punishment for daring to exist. No? Just me?

barbiegirl1232011/ Via eBay

Talkgirl

(Although some of us ended up getting the Tallboy for our birthdays even the the Talkgirl was pink, said the word 'girl' on it and was therefore infinitely more cool.) I distinctly remember recording several takes of Lou Bega's Mambo Number 5 on mine. Luckily for everyone that tape is lost forever.

Spice Girls Dolls

You know, to go with my Spice Girls lolly pops, t-shirts, bag and (wait for it) fluorescent orange puffa jacket.

You know what? I enjoyed that little slice of nostalgia! It was nice to sit back and think about the good old days when other people were responsible for washing the dishes, paying the bills and waiting on hold for 45 minutes to be connected to HMRC. Alas, now it's time to return to the grown-up world...as soon as Finding Nemo is over.

Pokemon No-Go: My Pokemon Go Experience

In case you (somehow!) haven't heard, Pokemon has made an almighty comeback recently with the release of the new smartphone game, Pokemon Go. The world is going crazy for it, partly because, let's be honest, who doesn't love a Jigglypuff and partly because the game features augmented reality, which is basically just a fancy gamer way of saying you can use your phone camera to see the real world around you, but it's full of Pikachus and Squirrels.

My initial reaction to the news that the entire world was suddenly overrun with people rushing around trying to collect virtual Pokemon was, "Wait...what?"

Aside from the fact that the whole thing seemed completely bizarre to me, I wasn't exactly thrilled to see another time-draining app hit the market that would have us all glued to our phones. I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I'm getting tired of the glazed expression on my niece and nephew's faces as their brains melt into Minecraft, Roblox and the never-ending drudgery of flinging resentful birds at smug green pigs.

What ever happened to the pure joy of an entire afternoon spent playing with a cardboard box?

But, as Pokemon fever continued to spread and more and more people tried to convince me of the benefits ("People get out and about more when they're looking for Pokemon. If anything it encourages a healthy lifestyle!") I decided to give it a go. After all, I am a nineties kid. In my heyday I had 5 shiny Pokemon cards!

So I downloaded the app. I have to admit, when I first saw a Squirtle prancing around the living room my inner child squealed with joy. Into the Pokeball he went and (ta da!) I had my first Pokemon!

...Now what?

I could see there was another Pokemon hanging out at the end of the street so off I trotted and caught myself a Pidgey. It wasn't as fun the second time. Perhaps the novelty had already worn off or perhaps the fact that it was a Pidgey of all things was just too bitter of a disappointment. Either way, I lost interest and cut my Pokemon hunt short.

By the end of the day I had five Pokemon and had spent an entire car ride shouting at my mother, "Slow down! They're all getting away!" But I was already bored of staring at my poorly dressed avatar running aimlessly through the streets. And what was I even meant to do with these Pokemon now that I had them? I'd spotted some kind of Pokemon Gym during the car journey, but what was it for? And would I have to hang out on the M4 slip road to access it? Surely that's not safe!

My Pokemon adventure was short lived. By the end of the day I was totally over it and deleted the app to make room for a 'gym playlist' I made for a workout I know in my heart of hearts I will never actually get around to doing. I tried to get excited about all the Jinxes and Pidgettos that were loitering around, but I just couldn't get into it. I didn't like having my nose pressed to the phone screen, waiting for the next adorable little virtual weirdo to pop up. And let's not even get into the whole 'people accidentally walking off cliffs' thing.

I'm sure my opinion won't matter much to Nintendo though. Pokemon Go has already added more than $7 billion to the company's market value and I think it's fair to say that in many instances the game has already reached full-blown obsession mode. When I saw the video of hundreds of people swarming Central Park to catch a Vaporeon I had the same sense of confused disbelief as I did when the Spice Girls announced their reunion in 2007.

Once again it seems the 90s are coming back to haunt us. I guess if I can get over seeing a 32 year old Mel B trying to make metallic knee-high boots work in the twenty-first century then I can get over watching my adult friends running through the streets chasing Charmanders. But, seriously you guys, I draw the line at the return of Manpris.

I'm Back (And in Desperate Need of a Latte)!

I'm back! I've crawled out from the corporate rock I've been stuck under for the past few months. I've thrown off the shackles of business meetings, conference calls and tossing and turning in a pool of sweat at 3am wondering if my new shoes for the office strike the right balance between 'I'm a corporate highflier' and 'I'm a Margaret Thatcher look-alike'. I'm slowly weaning myself off the 5 gallons of caffeine a day it took me to get through my working day without falling asleep at the wheel (sure, there's still a lot of twitching going on, but slow progress is better than no progress).

 I'm finally starting to feel like myself again!

 It's been a while since I last sat down to write a blog post so I apologise if I'm rusty. It's not that I purposely discarded my beloved blog or forgot about all you wonderful people who enjoy a little dose of my madness every week. The truth is, I was so swamped at work that, slowly but surely, without me even realising it, my blog ended up in in the pile labelled 'things I used to do when I had the time'. It was a hefty pile. Yoga was in there too along with reading, going to the gym, spending time with my fiends and, increasingly, eating meals and sleeping.

 There weren't nearly enough hours in the day!

 

So, I took the plunge (for better or for worse), discarded my 'sensible' boring, black, low-heeled shoes, and quit my high-flying, corporate job. As tempting as the image of myself as a fancy business woman with a bank account healthy enough to justify a closet full of Laboutins was, at the end of the day, I'm not a fancy business woman. I hate graphs. And schmoozing. So in September I'm heading back to university to train as an English teacher. Because what could be better than talking about books for a living? Except, of course, talking about books for a living and getting paid enough to justify a closet full of Laboutins.

 But, hey, you can't have it all!