Spring, do you even remember what that was?  It's the start of Meteorological spring on Thursday and it's forecast to snow every single day this week, I mean, really?  What fresh level of Hell is this?  I thought I had prepared for winter, I had savings so that I could take most of January off and then I've worked on only a couple of occasions outdoors during February and now I can't even take on work for this weekend because I know that outdoor sunny photo shoots are more than unlikely.  I may yet offer snowy sessions but we'll see how it goes, I'm not sure prolonged exposure to temperatures which feel like -15c is a good idea

It's certainly a worrying time for business owners like me who need to be outdoors, I guess I'm lucky in that I can still do things from home and I have other areas of business I can work on, I can't imagine it's very much fun if your whole business eco system depends on decent weather though.

My life in general at the moment is pretty brilliant minus the irksome weather, my face is settling down after Friday's Facelift and I'm happier with no filters than I've been for a long time, it was even noticed on Saturday night , I guess it's easier for others to see it rather than me although I can definitely notice subtle differences, there are a couple of tiny areas I'm going to discuss with Dr Uzma and her team at my next appointment at the Queensway Skin Clinic but it was always the plan to be sensitive and then be topped up because it's much easier to have a little more than it is to start taking the fillers out again.  The swelling has completely gone now which is amazing and more than ever I'm trying to work on getting to the cause of Rosacea and although I know there's no cure I know there are products out there which can help massively.

This really was just a quick update, It's hard to write every day when life is going so well as it's not necessarily interesting for you to read articles which just say, life is good, life continues to be good, there's nothing groundbreaking and there are no huge plans, it's just nice though, steady and good and though there are some things I don't really talk about here, I will say that life is personally pretty perfect right now, I'm smiling a lot these days!

Snow, Holly Bobbins and Seasonally Affective Disorder

I've had seasonally affective disorder for as long as I can remember but in the last 10 years of being a photographer and self employed I find it's the only month of the year when I want to hide myself away and hibernate until spring.  I've found throughout the years that I have formulated various coping strategies ranging from actually hiding way like a hermit until the light improved to going out as much as humanly possible, I bet you can guess which worked best.

I recorded a video out there yesterday morning in the snowy sub zero temperatures but I would have had to walk Holly Bobbins anyway and I wanted to embrace the snow, feel some light on my face and get my circulation going.

This is the start of my weekly vlogs and I hope that you'll tune in either here or over on my YouTube channel

Obviously as we get further on I hope that my videos will improve but at the same time I think I just want to keep it as one woman sharing her thoughts on life, love and everything in between, it's the same as my blog really but now you'll be able to see me a little more.

The best thing about my job and my life as it is now is the travel element, I'm due to go away to a luxury cottage for a weekend in Alnmouth on a travel assignment at the end of January and I can't wait to share that with you in photos, in writing and also in video.  I've recorded video snippets throughout the last 10 years, my favourites are the ones of the girls growing up, especially the ones of Looby in our living room when she was a tiny dot, I did those with my first ever video enabled camera, it wasn't even a DSLR, it was a Fuji bridge camera which was terribly heavy and really not very good, I only had it for about 6 or so months before getting my very first DSLR, a Canon 350D, fond memories...

When I think about the way I live my life now I notice the one big change that brought about so many other little changes, it wasn't becoming a single parent in so much as it was about becoming myself and the arrival of a certain 4 pawed arooing beagle by the name of Holly Bobbins, I love my dog, she truly healed me in many ways than one, she saw inside my heart and reached into my soul and embraced every inch of her human mummy.  I will never stop being grateful for her love.

I still have seasonally affective disorder now but I have great friends who come over and with whom I go out with and I go out and make my legs work and my heart pump when I walk Holly in the park, sometimes I even get that winter sunshine on my face and I can feel it tingling in my soul promising me that one day soon the warmth of spring will return once more and I'll feel on top of the world.

Will 2016 be the year Mandy Charlton finally conquers YouTube?

Every year I set myself some goals, things I want to do both personally and professionally and for the most part I do try and complete them.  This year of course is the year of adventure and so I want to find more interactive ways to reach people.  YouTube seems the obvious choice, I've had an account with them for a very long time, in fact I'mm one of YouTubes early adopters, it's my 10 year anniversary this April, it's my 10 year anniversary of my blog at the end of February, makes me feel quite old when I think about it like that, YouTube itself only launched 11 years ago!

So, when I was on my travel assignment for Cruise International magazine on board the Norwegian Epic I shot some videos and they're all going to go live to coincide with the publication of the article which comes out on February 12th 2016 and I'll finally be able to tell everyone about it, it's been killing me to keep it under wraps for so long.  Last night though I created a trailer with a preview of some videos yet to come, it's a bit of fun and it's not 20th Century Fox quite yet but I do hope that many of you will give it a watch and if you're also on YouTube or you have a Google account you can subscribe to my channel

I honestly don't know where this journey will take me and it's just a bit of fun, it's there to help me engage even further with you, the dear readers who turn up here to read my blog and take the time to email me or leave comments.  Nothing in my 10 year journey would have been possible without you all.

It's snowing outside my window currently, Holly Bobbins didn't seem too keen on the flaky white cold stuff bleaching down from the skies and it really has been pretty much a constant blizzard since I got out of bed at 7.30am and according to the weather it's not likely to stop until this afternoon, in the words of a very famous film heroine "Do you wanna build a snowman?"  I really hope it doesn't stop so that Looby and I can build a snowman when she comes home, I am definitely borrowing her snowy moon boots (Ssh, don't tell her, she's at school and she'll never know) and taking Holly Bobbins for her very first proper walkies in the falling snow.  There's been very little in the way of snow since I adopted her but I'm guessing with all of the sniffs she loves she's going to get a very cold beagle nose today, don't worry, you can be sure that I'll make a video of her first proper time in the snow.

Have a great day everyone, wrap up warm, go have a snowball fight with someone you love and then exchange warm hugs over some creamy hot chocolates, the ones with the flakes and marshmallows and the cream!

Suffocation and Becoming an Experientialist

an early winter morning walk on the Wallington Estate owned by National Trust

I touched on this in my last blog post about living more with less, I'm currently reading a brilliant book by James Wallman called Suffocation, Living More With Less, it's about our constant need for stuff and how in reality it's making our lives much worse, more stressful and less memorable.  Now I took the quiz in the book to see if I was even near to becoming an Experientialist and before I took the quiz I did think that I already held some of the values required to become an active experientialist, you see all through my life as a parent I've always believed in giving the kids as many new and unique experiences as I possibly could, all of the time during our marriage one of the things Paul and I did with the kids was take them to places, museums, walks they would complain about, National Trust properties, English Heritage momuments, even in the days when we had next to no money we would clamber into our tiny Fiat Panda and go out for picnics and away days.  I've always held true to my own values that memories are the most important thing we take forwards in our life.

I also believe that being a grown up can sometimes be, well a bit rubbish really so it's up to you as parents to make sure that childhood is as fun and carefree as it can possibly be and filled with memories instead of stuff.

Now obviously because I mainly try to overcompensate for all of my failings I never go away anywhere without bringing home the kids presents (or the dog for that matter) but I've always spent much more on holidays and mini breaks than I have on brand new furniture or the latest in expensive wallpaper, let me just say I have no wall paper and pretty much everything I own is vintage and second hand because I hate new plastic furniture.

Holly at Wallington, a definite experience, she got wet and muddy and had a great time!

So it could be that I am already near to the point of being someone who only cares about experiences rather than things although I did disagree with one of the fundamental points about not needing to take photos because we hold the memories in our minds, well that's just a lot of rubbish in my opinion as I think photographs last far longer than memories or they can prod memories throughout our life, they're a kind of memory trigger to relive those amazing picnics and away days, oh and yes I mean actual proper photos, not digital images which clog up computers and rarely get printed (something I am as guilty of doing as the next person).

You know I've mentioned in the past about our family to-do board which has new suggestions on it every week, well I go that long before I heard of James Wallmans book, I wanted to have fun things every week we could make new happy memories with and mostly Looby is the one who writes the suggestions on and checks them off as we do them, it's been the biggest success of anything I've tried to introduce over the last year and it's definitely here to stay.

My suggestion for all of you who are working towards a life of experience instead of a life of stuff is to go and buy a chalk board this weekend and then write some suggestions or even better get your kids to do it, they have the best minds for this kind of thing.  Amazing things will happen because of this board, even if you get to Friday and you haven't done any of the suggestions you will try to find ways of making them happen over the weekends, we might actually fail a bit this week as we wrote a snowy to-do list and I only managed 2 of them due to the lack of snow, I think the building a snowman and snow beagle might have to wait for the arrival of more white and flaky stuff (and I'm not talking about the curse of an itchy scalp here).

So, this weekend go do stuff, make memories, take photographs and above all, make sure you spend time with the people that you love because all of the stuff in all of the world hasn't the same value as quality time.