Falling Behind and Falling Asleep…

Do you know how long it’s been since I blogged?

WordPress has logged me out. It’s been that long since I posted something, that I had to actually log back in this time. What’s going on there?

In fact, it’s been that long, that I haven’t blogged since I was 18! (Admittedly, I’ve only been 19 for a week today, but I couldn’t resist using that joke).

So… surprise surprise, I’m ill again. I’m seriously considering giving up on my body; it’s doing its best to give up on me. More tests await me – a blood test next week to find out if I could be coeliac, and it’ll apparently take a few weeks for the results to come back, but at least it’s another thing crossed off the list. I’m more interested in how long it’ll take to hit a vein – last time, it took five jabs before it actually went in. I’d like it to be less this time, but I’m not holding my breath.

The play is going well so far! We’ve had fair sized audiences, and good feedback. There’s two shows left now – tomorrow and Monday – so hopefully they’ll go just as well if not better. I’ll be honest, it’s the first time I’ve kind of thought “I’m looking forward to it being over”. It’s been a stressful one, but it’s not enough to put me off acting, or the theatre group – I love them too much to just disappear!

I think the hot weather has got us all feeling bothered; which may contribute to us wanting the play to be over. Those dressing rooms are HOT, and have you tried wearing pancake when you’re sweating buckets and it’s 30 celcius outside? Goooood grief, it’s been incredible, but we need a rain shower to freshen everything up! I’m lucky; I live on the coast – we’ve been spending a lot of time in the sea – but I feel sorry for those further inland.

On the writing front; was doing Camp NaNoWriMo but I think I’ve fallen too far behind; I’m still writing though!

Not an inspirational post, but an inspirational person.

“The man rode up, higher and higher into the sky in the balloon, watching the world grow smaller below him as the sky began to darken, as he passed through clouds – higher than planes, higher than the tallest mountain in the world. Around the world, people waited, hardly daring to breathe, their eyes glued to the television screens. Then, with the knowledge that what happened next would change everything, the man leaned out of the balloon and jumped, from the edge of space”.

Sounds like something out of a kids book, doesn’t it? Something you read to your four year old before they drift off to sleep and dream of being an astronaut and doing the same as this seemingly super-human man. Of course, as he gets older, that child will realize that it’s impossible – you can’t fall from the edge of space, you’d die! And going up there in a balloon? As if anything but a rocket would get you there alive! It’s impossible!

Maybe for others – but not for Felix Baumgartner. Felix is the integral part of Red Bull’s “Stratos” project – a project which, if successful, will break a number of world records and also provide some vital information for the designers of  full-pressure suits – known to most as spacesuits. The world’s media hasn’t held back on regaling us with the many grisly ways in which this project could end badly for Baumgartener – with very little consideration for his family and girlfriend, who must no doubt be going through hell right now. If successful, Baumgartner will be the first ever parachutist to break the sound barrier.

There’s a couple of reasons why I think this man is inspirational and, as such, is why I’ve written this (short) post. The first is that he’s risking his life to help others in the future – to help save astronauts in the event of a disaster, and to make space travel and discovery of worlds other than our own easier. The second reason is that he’s an inspiration to all those little kids who lie in bed at night and dream of new planets, of soaring through the sky in a rocket, of the eyes of the world being on them as they blast off and land. When they wake up, adamant that they want that in real life, they won’t say “It’s impossible” – they’ll say “Felix Baumgartner did it, so why can’t I?”. And with that inspiration – and the advances this project could give us in that spacesuit design – Felix might be the reason that a generation of kids achieve their dreams.

The “story” at the beginning is by Maddy Matthews, all rights reserved.

Just a note – this is my 200th post on this blog! If you’re reading this, I hope you’re enjoying reading my blog – don’t forget to like, comment, whatever – all feedback (as long as it’s not offensive) is welcome!

I LOVE THIS WEATHER!

At the moment, much of Britain is having a heatwave – well, what Britons would describe as a heatwave, whereas many other countries would see it as a chilly day. To be fair, it has been lovely and warm, I’ve been out in my training vest and shorts, getting some walking and jogging done ready for the half marathon in October (www.justgiving.com/madison-matthews), we’ve been out in the garden today and I’d imagine the beach has been packed. I didn’t dare venture down; the sight of tourist flesh overhanging too-tight budgie smugglers is vomit-inducing at the best of times, and I knew that the beach would be full of it today. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be going for another beach jog with my fiance (www.justgiving.com/dafydd-williams09), I’m really desperate to get this training going well because it’s a big thing now – information on the run and our fundraising is in the local newspaper, so people know about it and I have no excuse not to train! Fundraising is going well but we’re still shy of our target, so if anyone can donate, please do!

On another, slightly-related note to the fundraising, I’ve finally decided on my tattoo. It’s the logo of Birmingham Children’s Hospital. I know where I want it done (as in, on my body), just got to decide what shop to get it done at! I’m thinking probably a local one because I don’t fancy a long car ride back from the nearest city, seeing as the area I’m getting done is where the seatbelt strap goes in a car!

I haven’t gotten much writing done because it’s been so lovely outside, but I’m going to try and get a bit more done over the next few days. I don’t want to lose interest in this new project – ideally I’d love to get back to the old one and do some work on that, but I’m not sure if that’s going to happen. I’m considering starting over with this current one – the same basic plot, same characters, but a different format and just doing things a little bit differently. Stay tuned for more updates!

Also, you can buy Christopher Maine’s two books, Dragon Flight Renegade and Dragon Flight Wrath at amazon now, just search for the book titles and you’ll find them! You can also follow his blog at www.christophermaine.wordpress.com .

And another thing…

Welcome to June! Hope it is a lovely, sunny month for you all. For us, the weather isn’t looking so promising – we’ve just emerged from a heatwave (well, a British heatwave – highs of about 32C, nothing compared to the usual 40C temperatures of places like Australia but hey, a lot of us are pale or ginger over here and we don’t deal with the sun very well) and entered what looks set to be the British summer, plenty of rain and cold temperatures and not much else all summer! Personally, I don’t mind – I’d like nice weather, but I don’t want it to be sweltering all the time. If we can have a week of nice weather for when we go on holiday, that’ll be peachy keen.

I hope all other aspects of June are happy for you all, just like I hope every month is happy for my lovely readers and followers 🙂 for me, the month will consist of finishing my exams and struggling to adjust to life without homework or revision for the next three months, and starting to worry about results day no doubt. I’ve also got the sponsored midnight walk on June 30th – you can find out how to sponsor me on the page called, well, “Sponsor Us” (at the top of the blog), and please do sponsor us because it’s such a worthwhile cause – so I’d better get in training for that, and hopefully this will be the month where I really see a major improvement or, even better, the complete disappearance of this pain and illness 🙂

So, pinch and a punch, first day of the month – happy June, everyone!

An apology…

I haven’t posted for a couple of days, and I apologize. On Friday evening, I had to go to the doctors and it turns out I’ve got a kidney infection (they had to call the pharmacy and tell them not to close to make sure I could get the antibiotics I needed!) which, if anyone has ever had them before they’ll know, is horrible. I can’t remember the last time I felt so ill, and thankfully the antibiotics are starting to work but the pain is still agony – it’s one of the worst pains I have felt for such a long time, and I just can’t get comfy, so I’ve spent much of the weekend hiding away under a quilt feeling sorry for myself.

Today I finally got myself outside in the sunshine, which was nice – it has made me feel better, but I am still hurting a lot so once again, I apologize for the lack of blog posts. I had my drama performance evaluation on Friday and it went as well as it could’ve done considering how ill I felt! Hopefully I’ve done alright though, because I can’t re-take that exam! So it’s been quite an eventful weekend this weekend, but not in a good way. I’m also really missing my boyfriend, who’s having a training weekend ready for his medieval group, but I’m hopefully seeing him tomorrow so I’m all smiles on that front 🙂

I can’t get over how beautiful the weather is. It’s so warm and sunny, and apparently the beach has been pretty busy, and it’s so hard to believe that it’s only March! British Summer Time is here and in full swing, but I don’t know how long it’ll last! Knowing my luck, we’ll have this beautiful week of sunshine when I’m too ill to really enjoy it, and then BOOM, we’ll have three months of constant rain and thunder and cold weather. But I don’t want to jinx it, so I’m going to be happy for now and say, YAY SUNSHINE! Heard Louise Dearman’s first single, “Here Comes The Sun” today, and it’s so lovely and summery, it really got me feeling happy 🙂

Hope you’ve all had a happy, sunny, smiley weekend!

The village-mouse and the city-mouse.

Sorry for that crude re-hashing of the title of an old story – I think it’s one of Aesop’s Fables – “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”. My attempts at writing witty titles are, so far, failing miserably.

I’ve lived in a really small village in Wales since I was two and a half, and before that, I lived in a town in the West Midlands (for those of you who are geographically challenged, like me, it’s somewhere near Birmingham). Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my village (well, apart from most of the people who live here), but sometimes you just can’t beat a city. So, this is

MADDY’S CITY VS VILLAGE LIST

Basically, I’m going to write down what I like best about cities, vs what I like best about villages. Just because I can.

First of all, I’d better say what cities I’m basing my opinion on. The cities I’ve been to are –

• London
• Birmingham
• Cardiff
• New York
• Madrid
• Manchester
• Bangor (a very small city!)

And my experience of villages is basically that I have lived in one for as long as I can remember.

 

WHAT MADDY LIKES ABOUT CITIES

• It seems that very few people know you. If you’ve ever lived in a village, you’ll know why this is a very good thing.
• There are so many shops to go to! Including Primark! *sigh*. The nearest Primark to me is two and a half hours away in a car! It’s against my human shopping rights 😦
• Starbucks. I am determined that my village needs a Starbucks; it has been so long since I’ve had my old favourite (caramel frappuccino with extra cream and chocolate sauce).
• The hustle and bustle. There always seems to be something happening, compared to villages which are usually boring. The good news never gets spread because apparently that’s not worth knowing about, but the minute something bad happens to you, you can guarantee you’ll be the hot topic of conversation at the post office *cough*, school gates and everywhere else, and suddenly everyone will have an opinion on you (and it’s rarely a kind opinion).
• All the different things you can do – cities usually have big cinemas and big theatres where tours of musicals perform. Our nearest cinema that has more than one screen and actually shows new films is almost two hours away, and the same for our nearest big (as in has touring musicals) theatre.
• You can walk to places! The nearest school or college is a walk or a very short bus ride away, you can get to the shops easily etc. Our nearest supermarket is five miles away and tiny, the nearest secondary school is five miles away, the primary school is in the village but the nearest sixth form/college is my college, half an hour away! Villages are isolated.

Now, here is my list of village advantages. Note that I live in a village/near a town which are both fairly popular in the holidays with tourists from the Midlands because we live on the coast, and the town is apparently the closest town geographically to the West Midlands, which is why we all end up calling it Birmingham-On-Sea in the summer months.

• In the summer, you might be able to get a job on a holiday site or in a restaurant because of how many people are there.
• In the winter, the roads are pretty empty.
• It’s quiet (in the winter).
• We sometimes get sunshine. (but not in the winter).
• The countryside is beautiful, no matter what time of year you see it 🙂 this is probably my favourite point about living on the Welsh coast is that we get the best of both worlds – on one side, we have the beach and the sea, about a mile from my house. On the other, a few miles from my house, is hills and lots of pretty scenery.

It’s probably easier for me to explain the drawbacks of living in a village.

• In the summer, trying to get anywhere is a nightmare. Most people who live in places like ours end up becoming hermits for six weeks during the school holidays, because holidaymakers see fit to wander lazily along 60mph roads at 20, tootling along to admire the scenery. They forget that not everyone is on holiday, and a common insult to them is “They forgot to pack their brains in their suitcase”.
• The tourists in general are a nightmare. They’re loud, they’re boisterous, they’re dirty, they think they’re the only ones who matter (seriously, they think that because we live in a holiday destination, and they’ve come on holiday here, we all automatically work for the “Great God Of Holidays”, and our days revolve around doing things for them, giving up our roads for them, putting up with them walking three abreast down a path that’s made for one. They’re rude and don’t seem to give a toss about the fact that other people have lives to be getting on with, they’re on holiday so stuff everyone else.
• In the winter, it really is far too quiet. I mean, I know I complain about the noise in the summer, but the winter is ridiculous, it’s horrible to see the whole village and the town looking deserted, all the smaller shops close leaving only a few open.
• Village life is absolutely horrible. As I said earlier, everyone wants to know everything bad about you, and the second you need help they all mysteriously disappear and make themselves unavailable. People seem to think that village life is all about community spirit and people sticking together, but the most community spirit we’ve seen in the 15 years we’ve lived in the village is from our lovely next door neighbour, who gets my siblings involved in tending to plants and brings around fruit and veg to say thank you – and she moved from near Birmingham a few years ago!
• The schools here are crazily Christian, and don’t even think about not having a religion. In primary school we had to pray twice a day on most days, three if there’s assembly – once in assembly, once before lunch and once before going home. Everything seems to have a Christian basis – and you can’t even choose to NOT go to a Christian school! They’re not church of Wales schools, they’re just regular state primary schools with a massive Christian bias. By the end of it I used to not pray, I didn’t care if I got dirty looks.
• Public transport is stupid. At the best of times, there’s a bus to my college every hour. There’s a bus to the nearest town, which is where I need to get to to CATCH said bus to college, once every couple of hours – and it’s usually late so you miss the connection. In the summer, the trains are always crowded with people who are travelling alone, but see fit to ignore the luggage racks and decide they want a table to themselves, putting all their stuff on them so that when you’re coming home from school (the school I went to was a half an hour train ride away) you have to stand around for ages and crowd up the aisles and get told off for it!
• The weather. I know the Welsh weather is legend for being awful, but it’s not that bad. We do have some really terrible days, but when we get sunshine, it is gorgeous – already this year we’ve had a really lovely, warm day. Plus, when we do get the beautiful weather, we’re only a quick walk away from the beach and the sea!

 

There are probably a lot more I can add, but they escape me now. I hope you have enjoyed my quick foray into the world of village vs city, and if you’re ever thinking of moving to my village, if you value your privacy and don’t want to be living near a bunch of people desperate to ruin your life so they’ve got more to talk about at the school gates and in the post office *cough*, for goodness’ sake, DON’T!