Hello friends! I have decided that I'm going to be leaving livejournal. I created a new blog, That French Girl. I already have a post there and I think I'll be posting there pretty regularly because... I don't know, it feels more like an actual website? Which, by the way, I'm trying to get sorted out but my dad is being most unhelpful, as per usual. I think the only thing I'll really miss (apart from YOU GUYS!) is the option to do friends only posts, but I guess if I really need to write about something private to someone then I can email them directly.

I really hope you'll go follow what I'm doing there, but I totally understand if you don't want to. I don't know if I'll really be looking at my friends page here, because honestly I can't remember the last time I actually did (which is part of the reason that I'm leaving) but I don't know if I'll be deleting this journal just yet. I'll miss littlethieves. Although I do still have that username on youtube and tumblr (wowwww how many social networking accounts do I actually need/use?)

Love xo

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but I really want to follow a band around the South of the US and take rolls upon rolls of photographs on my trusty SLR. I want to drive with the windows down and the music blasting. Especially if it's Ryan Adams. I'm obsessed with that concept at the moment. I opened all the windows downstairs this morning and blasted out one of Ryan's albums as I was cleaning and all I wanted to do was get out on the road and take photos. The whole thing started when I watched the Manchester Orchestra podcasts like 4 years ago and I haven't let that dream go since.

This evening I'm watching Almost Famous and listening to the soundtrack. I really do love music from the 70s, I love the feel of it, the authenticity of it, the way you can hear all the instruments. I don't know if it's because I was brought up on it every time I went to see my father (my mother was more an Elton John kind of girl if she ever listened to the older stuff when I was growing up) but I have all these memories attached to it and... they're basically the only memories I have of him that are actually good. I can distinctly remember the first time I heard I Am The Walrus by The Beatles, standing in my father's flat in France, I can remember him teaching me how to use his record player and explaining how it work and being absolutely fascinated by it. He'd be proud of my taste in music, I think. Or at least this part of it, because I really do have the strangest taste in music - I mean in my library I have all this stuff from the 70s alongside a bunch of pop, metal, disney kids, dubstep and classical music. Go figure.

I'm pretty sure I've written this here before, but I don't know where and I just found this lying around in my room so I'm typing it up again. I'm sure it won't be of much interest to anyone, but here it is;

always take the weather with you. building a fort in my room out of bedsheets and having tea parties. the insect net that i genuinely believed turned me into a princess. having baby in a "high chair". that book where everything was backwards and i forced mu, to make it a reality with us. playmobil with home-made indian camp like in pocahontas. when my mum was in the audience for a tv gameshow. winter olympics and begging mum to lift me up like an ice skater, even though she was busy with the ironing. learning how to spell "angleterre". watching the fireworks from the balcony after dinner. watching the fireworks display with both mum and dad and then doing a drawing about it. doing dolphin drawings for mum with a dolphin sounds cd playing (i liked dolphins). talking to mum about growing pains when coming back from the after-school club/ceramics. painting sets at the after-school club. my tamagotchi morphing into another animal in the foyer of the after-school club. DPAM. pains aux chocolat. gymnastics classes with the teachers who knew the words to the macarena. sunday mornings watching aladdin cartoons before going to the swimming pool. milka in baguette on the beach in bernières. putting on shows in the garage with my cousins and forcing all the parents to watch. the swing in melanie's garden. my red dress. spinning around in my flowery dress before going to the crèperie with dad. going to see billy elliot on new years eve and pretending to be a ballet dancer with the table as the barre for the rest of the week. ( moar )

So, after my little "I miss my family! It sucks that I don't live in France anymore and therefore can't see my girls as often as I'd like!" moment on Facebook, I get a message from Marie saying:

Coucou les cousines! Vous allez bien?

J'ai eu une idée: ça vous dirait de fêter notre 21ième anniversaire à Claire et moi à Bernières toutes les trois avec Grandma? On pourrait partir le vendredi 19 août dans l'aprèm et rentrer le dimanche 21!
Je sais je m'y prends à l'avance, mais c'est mieux de le prévoir pour les billets de train et pour voir avec Grandma et Steph (pour la voiture) etc...
Dites-moi si ça vous dit! :)

Gros bisous

Which loosely translates as:

Hello cousins! Are you both good?

I had an idea: what would you think of celebrating mine and Claire's 21st at Bernières, the three of us with Grandma? We could go Friday 19th in the afternoon and come back Sunday 21st!
I know I'm getting a bit ahead of myself (because it's FOUR MONTHS AWAY (she didn't say that but I am because I can't believe it's that far away/that's all I have until I'm well and truly an adult)) but it's better to plan ahead for tickets and the train and to see with Grandma and Steph (for the car) etc...
Tell me if you're interested! :)

Big kisses

To which I immediately interrupted the tidying up of my room to say "HELL YES!!" except not in those words exactly but that was the general feeling of my message. I said how I had been planning on going to Rome but I could instead go to Paris a few days before and hang out in my city and go around taking pictures with Amy and generally being annoying to everyone crossing us, then we could meet up with Marie at Steph's to get the car and drive down all together, spend a few days at Bernières having a lovely time because you know how I feel about Bernières, I have written about it and come back to England with Marie. Then I can pack again (or stay packed) and meet up with Robyn/Roisin (whichever, lawlz) and get back on a plane to go to Roma for a few days!

I'm so excited it's crazy. It can only mean good things for my soul to have plans to get excited over. And I insist on at least one photo of us looking like my icon right now. Just sayin'.

I'm in kind of an odd mood right now. I really want to be on holiday. I just put a status up on facebook about it and everything. It's maybe kind of telling about my family (in a really good way) that being on holiday for me means being with my family, hanging out with my cousins. I want to be at the beach in France. I have this really vivid view of the situation I want to be in at the moment; coming back from having spent the day at the beach, all salty skin (when we used to wash our feet off with the hose in my grandma's garden so that we wouldn't get sand all in her house and the Whiskey the dog would go nuts for the water, sigh) and salty hair, sitting in tshirts over swimming costumes in the garden with a barbecue going (not that we ever did that there, but that's kind of not the point) playing cards and enjoying the sun warming our faces. Maybe even drinking a Force 4 because I miss them like burning sometimes. I want to go around with them and get a pizza from the little man in his van making pizzas there and then. It's something that is so French I can't really explain it here and that frustrates me. It's weird, I can just picture it and feel it perfectly well and I want it so much it hurts. I think it's because the sun has been shining so beautifully and uncharacteristically for April that I'm automatically in Summer mode and it kind of sucks that I'm gonna have to wait so long (another FOUR MONTHS) before I'm actually on holiday. I'm going to just have to spend all my days off pretending I'm on holiday until I actually am.

I'm currently listening to two songs by MC Solaar on repeat that just... scream holidays for me. They're both incidentally partially in Spanish, and I never went on holiday to Spain as a child (unless you count the 2 times I went there with my grandparents and father when I was like 12... and I don't. Although those were good holidays too) but these songs automatically make me feel like I'm on holiday in the South of France or in Bernières.

I never mentioned here but I decided in the 2 weeks that I have off work in August (IN FOUR MONTHS) I had decided I was going to go to Rome with either beffy (kissclean) if she can come and it's not too difficult with getting a job and being a productive human being all the way up in Aberdeen, or with Robyn for 2 weeks and it was gonna be awesome. I bought a guidebook and everything. Now I kind of want to go to Spain, kind of, because of the songs I guess, but mostly I want to go to the South of France again. I still want to go to Italy and I don't want to spend the entire 2 weeks down in Toulouse, but I think maybe we should get the Eurostar to Paris, hang out there for a couple of days and hang out with Matthew and Amy and maybe have dinner with them and their parents (let me just take this time to mention the fact that my entire family has always been very close and I am always so thankful for this fact, all my cousins are great people/kids and I love hanging out with my aunts and uncles as much as I do hanging out with them. It's pretty sweet) at Hippo (only my favourite restaurant ever!!!) and then head down to Toulouse on the train to hang out with the fam down there by their pool and all the beautiful scenery there. We could stay there until the Saturday, which is my birthday, and I'm sure my cousin Marie would come down to be with her family at least for then because it's her birthday too because she's gonna be living and working in London from June this year but yeah. And then after our birthday, I'll go on to Roma with whoever I'm travelling with. It could be a pretty awesome two weeks.

Of course I haven't discussed this with anyone yet, I just thought about it and invited myself and a friend to impose ourselves on my family, but I'm sure it'd be fine with everyone (because like I said, my entire family is awesome). I just really, really want to do it now.

I've been wishing a lot recently that I had a sister. It's because I watched a couple of videos on youtube of sister vlogs of the girls that I subscribe to and it made me kind of sad because I don't have anyone I know that well or that I can hang out with like that whenever I want but then I realised that I have the next best thing: really close cousins. Especially Marie - we were born 12 hours apart and were really close when we were little, always seeing each other and playing together and obviously sharing a birthday, and then we kind of grew apart when we were teenagers and I got a little bit closer to Amy because I got a little bit less girly and Amy has always been a tomboy (although we were all always close just... got less close) and then I got more girly but we stopped seeing each other so often when me and mum moved to England, but then there was the time Marie came over here to spend 2 weeks in England, went to school with me for the last week of term, and then there was last summer when we spent all week hanging out by the pool and driving around Toulouse and going to the beach and it was just... like old times. And looking back on it all now, I realise that those girls are my sisters. And I miss them. And it sucks that I have to wait so long to see them again. Gonna have to get some bonding time in with Marie when she comes over. Take lots of pictures and videos and force her to vlog with me, that'd be fun. And do the same with Amy when I impose myself on her and her brother. I love my family.

Sigh.

I'm kind of devastated right now. I've been trying to get tickets to see McFly and obviously, obviously, it's a week before the show so they're sold out but for some reason I was silly enough yesterday to think there'd still be some left. I've been out of the loop with them for ages and I haven't really been paying attention to them, but yesterday I randomly went on a huge McFly kick, listening to their music all day long and looking at pictures of them and interviews on youtube and remembering just how much I loved them and now... nothing.

So what's the moral of the story kids? PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR FAVOURITE BAND. All the time. Never let your eyes off them and book tickets to see them as soon as you can. Seriously -_-

So... I signed myself off work for five days.

The last week has been all kinds of hectic because it was the first week since Kaylee left and Alex was officially my manager again and I miss her terribly, and I hate that I've been forced into even more of a management role than I was in before. A role that I didn't ask for and I absolutely do not want. I don't think there was a day this week that I haven't cried, apart from maybe Tuesday but that's only because I wasn't at work.

I went to the doctor's on Thursday because I keep getting really strong headaches in the front quarter of my brain, and then a couple of times I've had surges there and it wasn't really worrying me until I realised that it was in exactly the same place as where my mum's aneurysm was, so I was going to see if I could get referred to get a scan or something. We were talking and my mum was there because I didn't know if I was going to be pushy enough to ask for a scan in case the doctor fobbed me off and she asked if I was stressed. All I managed to get out was "I'm extremely stressed. I've been pushed into a management job that I don't want" before I started crying and I couldn't really talk much more. She went on about possibly doing some tests and trying to eliminate all the stress factors and all that when my mum asked her if she thought some time off work would do me some good, trying to get her to sign me off or something, and the doctor said that I can self-certify for 5 days if I want to take some time to relax and all I needed to do was sign the form and site stress and send it off to the relevant people.

So I did. And now I don't have to go back until next Thursday, but I'm kind of terrified of going back. It was really sudden and I got a text message from one of my colleagues that night all kinds of pissy because he was left to do stuff and it wasn't fair that not everyone was pulling their weight (which I thought was a bit fucking rich because I bend over backwards for that place) and it cost him an argument with his wife. I don't want people to be pissed off at me. I know I can go back sooner but I don't want to, I just don't want people to be angry at me, even though I know I did the right thing because I have to think of my health first; it's not right for me to be in a job that makes me cry every day because I'm so stressed and ridiculously unhappy.

The whole point of writing this post was not to talk about all of this, though. It was to say that I have been spending the last couple of days (save for a few hours this morning where I was working on a freelance graphic design gig I've landed myself - I'll explain later) watching films online. I know, I know, illegal, but I love films and they were all either old or French or both, so it's not like I could have gone to the cinema to see them. The latest one was the second Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants movie, which had its cheesy moments but all in all was really good. The last few minutes were spent in Greece and at the beach and it made my chest hurt with missing being at Bernières, which I will always consider my beach because it is my happy place and is the one constant house/destination that I have had my entire life. I grew up there and I love it in its complete and utter unspectacularity. If that's even a word, which Google's dictionary tells me is not. Just thinking about it makes my chest tighten; I can smell the salt and the algae, which admittedly is not the most pleasant smell when you're there, but it's a part of it. I can see the sunset and I can feel how small I feel when I look out and realise how big the world is out there. It calms me, which is something I so desperately need right now, and I need to be there so much it hurts. I was about to say almost but that would be a lie because I actually want to cry right now with not being there. That might be because it's ten to 1 in the morning, but I wish I could go to sleep and wake up there, go out in the morning and put my feet in the sand and watch the tide come in and go to the boulangerie to buy breakfast things.

But alas, that's not going to happen, so I'll just have to make do with the few hours I'll have of sleep and hope I dream of it.

Tomorrow I have to finish my graphic design piece. I'm really excited about it but completely not in the mood to talk about it right now, so hopefully you can forgive me for making you wait to hear some really awesome news.

Good night, loves xo