My weekend in a Holiday Cottage in Lancashire

I've just got back from a great weekend in rural Lancashire. Me and my old Lancaster Uni mates rented a Holiday Cottage in Lancashire, in the middle of nowhere, between the villages of Pilling and the amusingly named Cockerham.

It was great to meet up with everyone again. Lots seems to have happened and this might be the last time we can do this type of holiday for a while, as two of my buddies, Sarah and Mary and are pregnant.

It's going to be weird when friends my own age are starting to have babies. I don't even have a boyfriend, and I'm a million miles away from wanting children psychologically. The problem is, if we have this type of holiday again, they either can't make it, or they will have screaming babies, which will inevitable ruin the late nights and peace!

My highlights were a walk in the Forest of Bowland, which was absolutely beautiful on a cold Lancashire day. We also stopped off in Clitheroe for a great pub lunch and went shopping Preston. We stayed in a great self -catering and pretty cheap holiday cottage which was really nice..

I'd recommend a short break in Lancashire to anyone. Great countryside and friendly people. Pity this might be the last time we can all do this!

He went to London for Rhinoplasty, or a nose reshaping!

I knew he looked different. I wasn't sure why, but now he's admitted it. He's come back to work after a long break not with a tan, but with a new nose.

Now he's a good friend and also the Graphic Designer where I work, and so I'm glad he's back for both reasons. But he didn't tell me why he was taking such a long break, just said something about going to London. It turns out he's been planning a nose job all along.

His nose is/was a bit on the larger size, but I never realised it annoyed him. The thing is, his new nose isn't actually that different, it's only slightly smaller. It must be a pretty conservative operation. He says he feels much better now though, so I guess he must have been insecure, and so it's helped his esteem. I know what it's like to have low self-esteem, so I can't be critical.

I wanted to asked him how much does a nose job cost, but I thought I'd spare his blushes and look online. I found the clinic he went to in Highgate, north London. He must have saved up his bonus for a while. I guess he won't be buying that new iPhone now.

Apart from that, not much new to report. I went down to London the other week to a gig in Soho, which is probably the best thing I've done recently. I'll try and be a bit better with this blog. I'm sure a nose job, or Rhinoplasty, shouldn't be the first reason I've had to make a blog post in such a long time.

Bye bye!

Using the Hyphen and the Dash

One of my passions is reading, and although I'm OK at writing myself, I'm not great. That's why I've been trying to improve my skills, and one area I've been working on recently is improving my knowledge of the dash and hyphen.

Now, I'm not afraid to hyphenate, in fact I can hyphenate like the best of them. I know that the hyphen is mostly used to join two words together into a compound word. Check this out:

Time to jump-start my day-to-day use of the well-known hyphen!

You can also use the hyphen to split a word that comes at the end of the line, but is so long that it would look off if you push it down to the next line. I also like using the hyphen for prefixes or pre-fixes. Look at me hyphenate some prefixes below:

She managed to recover her cushion.
She managed to re-cover her cushion.

Well, I cheated, I took the above from this website guide to using the hyphen, but I thought it illustrated the power the hyphen really well. Look at the two sentances. By hyphenating the prefix, the whole meaning of the sentence has changed. Pretty good huh?

Now I have to confess I've been guilty of using the double hyphen in the past instead of the dash. Apparently, this is a cardinal error. You should use an actual dash and not a double hyphen and especially not a hyphen."What?" I hear you ask. "There's a difference?". Yes, there actually is. The dash is not a hyphen, it's a longer thing, and that's what you should use when the need to add a pause to a sentence.

To makes things more complicated, there is actually two types of dash, the en-dash and the em-dash. The en-dash is the shorter one – it looks like this, with no spaces on either side. The em-dash looks like this—much longer and without any spaces. You can pick one as you fancy. I quite like the em-dash I think. Remindes me of my old double hyphen. Anyway, finding the dash on a the keyboard is a toughy, but I've linked a guide there for you. That's the biggest single reason why people use the hyphen instead of the dash.

I hope you find my post useful—I know I learnt from researching it (see the dash I just used instead of the double hyphen!).

One small step for Ellen

We have take off. I'm starting my Blog today, and I really will keep it up-to-date. I promise!