This website is the home of my columns. I started them last year, writing for my student magazine, and want to continue them now I am a postgraduate at Cardiff University studying Magazine Journalism. I will be updating both the columns and the news regularly as I launch my professional career. This is going to be a very exciting (and somewhat scary) next twelve months for me, and I’d like to be able to share my news, as well as my writing.

The course has just started: over the next nine months I’ll be learning all kinds of new skills, which will all help equip me for my career. I’ve had my first lecture in shorthand this morning, which was challenging, but I’m confident that with practice it will become second nature.

 If you’d asked me a year ago how I felt about marriage I would have told you firmly that there was no way anyone would be able to get me up that kind of aisle. I don’t need a piece of paper to want to be in love with someone.

Hell, I don’t even want to live with anyone else, and given a choice I’d live on my own with no flatmates. I like my own space, my own company and I don’t need a wedding. If I want a really nice dress one day, I’ll buy or I’ll make one, and wear it round the house and to every party if I want. If I want to hold a huge expensive party, I’ll do that. And if someone really loves me, then they’ll love me enough to not push me into getting married regardless of their feelings about marriage.

They say all little girls plan their wedding. I never did; I couldn’t imagine it ever happening.The only reason for getting married, I thought, would be for emigration purposes, or to ditch my hideous surname!

At the time, I was with a man who felt even more strongly against marriage than me. We used to regularly propose to each other, and say no. We thought it was hilarious. I also have a mother who told me never to get married, and that if I did she wouldn’t come to the wedding. Even at the time I was a little freaked by that; I don’t often change my mind, but I like to keep my options open.

And on this occasion I have changed my mind. I never had a problem with other people getting married, if that was right for them. My step brother got married last year, and I’ve never seen anything so emotional and real and heartfelt. He cried throughout the vows, his voice cracking; his future wife smiling and holding his hands. He suffered a horrible divorce between his mother and my father; for him, deciding to get married must have been the most frightening thing ever, but it was clearly something he really wanted to do.

And then my friend at uni decided to get hitched. At university? Are you mad! Clearly he probably was but you know what – I spoke to him about it and his reasons seemed good to me, if that’s what they wanted. I went to the meal afterwards and it was really special. All these things combined, it doesn’t seem so shallow or stupid anymore. I’m not saying I want to get married right now; or that I see it as a ‘must do’ of life; I’m just saying that I think…it might not actually kill me.

 Since I rediscovered my intense love of reading, I’ve also developed a taste for a genre. Previously I’ve read bits and pieces. I love Hitchikers to death, as my copy testifies, and Memoirs of a Geisha, and almost every other book I’ve ever picked up, but something happened to me when I read The Mists of Avalon. It’s full of politics, love, trechery and above all, cruelty. I love that book despite this. It’s a long book. It also has a threesome between Gywnfyr, Arthur and Lancelet. Something for everyone.

Looking for something vaguely similar, I stumbled upon Elizabeth Chadwick. Courts, lords, ladies, kings, medieval politics, chivalry and honour. A slice of heaven as far as I’m concerned.

It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure though, yet one I’m more than willing to indulge. Part of me says I shouldn’t feel weak at the knees at the idea of honour and chivalry. It also says I shouldn’t long to wear cumbersome dresses, and veils and corsets, and put up with my lot as a woman.

But the other part of me revels in feeling like these women. Chadwick gives them resourcefulness, and skills, and resentment, and ambition. I wonder how unfeminist is really is. When the men are injured fighting, they somehow ride home to ther wives who are skilled in healing. They heal them, and make their clothes, and organise huge households when they are away. They marry young, and try to have children rather than trying to avoid it.

However, I know that in reality this isn’t the life I’d want. I don’t want my husband to don armour and ride off to war and return, largely to attempt to impregnate me like a mare. But then Chadwick’s men are varied, and colourful, and often seem to care about more than that.

I love the clothes, the strange courtly ways and the way they all seem to drink wine the entire time, and yet never die of liver failure or dehydration.

The men and women portrayed by Chadwick have to rely on each other. I think I like the idea of being needed, yet cared for, and that’s what I feel empathy with – but that is something I can have in my life, without prancing around wearing a veil and trying to get my father to give me a dowry, or a king to grant me a boon.

I Google everything. One of my favourite lecturers just left without any warning, so what’s a girl to do? Naturally, I Googled his name and areas of expertise and followed up all leads that looked credible. I got one clue from the university web site, and after that it was easy. This weekend he will be giving a seminar at a certain place for a certain office to probably some very clever people and also most probably some very distinguished dignitaries.

So now I know. But why did I do this? The first reason was that I did it because I can, let us face it, I’m nosey. Plus he was an incredible lecturer; possibly the best quality lecturer I’ve so far experienced, and part of me wanted to find an email where I could thank him. Another reason is that last time I saw him we were discussing future plans for the department, which he has now left… just like that.

Basically I’m sulky, because dammit, I need good teaching! Stop leaving me! I’ve started taking this personally. He’s not the first one to do it. Do they not want to teach me? Am I an awful student? First I blame them for being callous, then I despise myself for driving them away (obviously, they all hated me in particular, whether I’d ever spoken to them or not, my reputation must be preceding me these days), and finally, reality sets in.

The problem with university is that everything is so cosy, you assume everyone has found their dream job and is busying carving out a wonderful little academic hole for themselves here in Swansea. And Swansea’s so fabulous; I can’t imagine why anyone would want to leave, surely? What I always seem to realise last is that actually, these people are on their way up, that Swansea is, for some, a stepping stone. And that I should be proud to be part of that stepping stone.

Who knows, perhaps, during a conversation with a lecturer, maybe they thought, ‘now here’s a young talented lady who simply doesn’t need my help – I can see she could do it all on her own. You know what, I should move on, where the students are not so brilliant. What a shining star she is’. Yes, well, maybe that’s stretching the imagination. But still. I’ll never know, so I think I’ll stick with that, thanks.

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about me; I used to want to be an actor. Not an actress, of course, (how unprofessional!) but an actor. A Shakespearian actor at that. So what went wrong? I discovered politics. Politics and I fell in love, and that was that. I gave up my dream, and made the (very sensible) decision to study International Relations.

However, I am left with certain things from my drama days. I love accents. I’m completely fascinated. I was trained to copy accents like a parrot. Being lucky, I’ve travelled a lot, and wherever we went, I picked up the accent. We’d been in Canada for two days when my mother lost her temper with me for ’speaking Canadian’. I couldn’t hear it, but I’d slipped into the accent within hours. It was the same when we visited Australia for three weeks, except that this time it stuck. To this day, when people meet me for the first time they often ask if I’m Australian. Clearly, all those elocution lessons I had from the age of 5 didn’t work. My mother didn’t mind, so long as I didn’t pick up my native Plymouthian accent, which she hated with a passion.

When I applied for university, I looked to Scotland first because I love an Edinburgh accent. Or most other Scottish accents when it comes to it. Just think; David Tennant. Ewan McGregor. Incredibly sexy accents. But, Scotland is a long way from home, and Wales had the better courses. So Swansea it was. Everyone said to me “Swansea? Ah, that’s barely Wales, you’ll never hear a Welsh accent there.” How completely wrong they were. I hear so many different accents here every day. What I didn’t realise before I got here is how unbelievably attractive the Welsh accent can be. Not all of them, but give me a good Pembrokeshire or a devastating Valleys accent and seriously, I’m yours. Kelly Jones, Huw Edwards, Iolo Williams; all vocal pin ups for me.

And yet I still can’t pick the accent up. Not properly, and not for the want of trying. Andrew, who was my editor on my student paper, has an awesome accent (and he knows it). I tried so hard to ‘catch’ his valleys lilt from him in the hope that one happy day, people will stop asking if I’m Australian and accuse me of being Welsh.

All this writing about breasts for Breast Cancer Awareness Month has got me obsessed. Like I wasn’t before. The breast cancer campaigning got me thinking about how I feel about my breasts. Not hugely body-confident, I’ve always got on quite well with them. They’re the one thing I’ve never been embarrassed about. I’m lucky, because I’m genetically programmed to have huge knockers.

You’d be forgiven for thinking some of the women in my family were the result of a freaky threesome with a pair of watermelons. Christmas is the worst – despite the best minimiser bras money can buy, my Nan and her sister get stuck sideways in the doorway by the sheer volume of their combined chests. Anyone who thinks you can’t have too much rack is lying, and hasn’t met my mother.

Yet I have been blessed with a generous handful. I am a massive fan of anything low-cut, balconette bras, and square necklines. The phrase “is this top too low in the front?” has never passed my lips, my mantra being that if you can’t see my nipples, then it’s fine.

More important than the actual size of your breasts, is how you wear them. I’m talking cleavage. Any woman that pushes her breasts together so there is a permanent line doesn’t deserve boobs. There’s supposed to be a gap! Gasp! Where else are you going to keep your emergency taxi money / lipstick / MP3 player / glasses / boyfriend? No, the best cleavage is taut, subtle, deep and therefore, meaningful. Not in your face (or anyone else’s, unless they’ve asked for it nicely) but well controlled.

Despite my affection for cleavage and low cut tops, I rarely find men talking solely to my breasts. Either I’ve met a lot of polite men, or I don’t notice very often. Either way I don’t think I mind. I have chosen the way I dress and clearly, if you can see it, then you can look at it. Reading about women who had to have mastectomies because of cancer, I realised that in their position, I would be completely devastated. And yet they speak with remarkable bravery, which gives me hope that even I, the breast obsessed, could survive, if it came to it. Just don’t expect me to put them away anytime soon.

Recently I’ve managed to find time for what used to be my favourite thing – reading. I read freakishly fast, which I find somewhat bitter-sweet, as when I get going, it’s over so quickly I feel disappointed. I want books to go on forever, to last a few weeks rather than a few short days.

How this came about I’m not sure. My father read to me when I was small every night: we must’ve read hundreds of books, but I remember Heidi the most. He did comical female voices, and our pet parrot would sit with me on the edge of my captain’s bed, asking for tickles, and clicking his beak, before falling asleep, like me.

When I was a little girl, I remember going to bed and being up late reading. Every night – rarely did I not fall asleep holding a book. My grandmother kept all my mother’s books from when she was a girl. She had loved Enid Blyton, and I devoured the books, feasting on the adventures of the Secret Seven, sighing with envy at the girls of St. Clares, and getting my first fiction crush on Dick of the Famous Five.

I read on average one book a day. It was therefore a good thing that my mother had passed down an extensive library. At school I mystified my teachers, by trying to use punctuation and speech marks like I’d seen in Ms. Blyton’s work long before we were taught about it in class.

When they encouraged us to read more, by putting up a poster of the solar system and encourging us to read our way around the universe, I orbited around more times than anyone else, gaining the suspicion of classmates and puzzled looks from teachers who would quiz me on my books. I did ‘Booktrack’ in the local library in irritatingly short time, reading eight books a week. You could only take out four at a time, so my long-suffering mother took me twice a week.

Fortunately, book wormishness wasn’t a sin at my school, which prized academia above all else. My heavy reading meant I was good at english, although my heavy absorbtion of ‘artistic license’ with regards to grammar left me somewhat confused.

When I read, all my other senses shut off. I dissapear into my own head. Narrators have a voices which I hear inside my brain. Characters become real. Their emotions, feelings and activites I feel too, so acutely that coming out from the book I feel like them. I don’t feel hungry, or thirsty –I literally feel filled by the scenes I see. I often, afterwards, talk in the language of the book, and am left with the mood the characters in the book had.

I haven’t had the time to read many books in the past seven years. Now, having read three in rapid succession, I feel like I’ve re-discovered some of the joy of my childhood.

I have an odd relationship with make up. I have terrible skin. I’m not the kind of girl who exaggerates. If I say I’m rubbish at something, or that I haven’t revised for an exam, I’m telling the truth. If you ask me how an interview went, I won’t lie to you. So you can rest assured that for the last decade my face has been covered in pimples.

So my making-up started early. And badly. Of course, I made mistakes. Orange foundation. When I persisted with the orangeness, my mum caved and bought me better coloured make-up to match my deathly pale skin. ‘001′ was normally the colour I needed. She also bought me eyeshadow. Brown eyeshadow. Even then I knew I wasn’t meant for brown eyeshadow – well, not until I’d learnt to cake it on, with liquid black eyeliner, and smudge it into grey with silver highlighting, anyway.

So, eventually, I learnt how to cover my spots, and until 6th form I wore full make-up daily. By then I’d accumulated eyeshadows of blue, lilac, grey, navy blue, pink, and the ever-memorable golden-yellow. I still have that one. It’s a BarryM dazzle dust, and it now has about a dozen friends in rainbow hues.

Eye make-up was always my weakness. First: eyeliner. Second: choose eyeshadow – one for outer corner, one for inner corner, one for blending in the middle and another for highlighting. I used to cover my eyes from lashline to eyebrow in a pale colour, and then add more at the inner corners of my eyes to make them appear larger. Then I’d blend across with the blending colour, and finish with the darkest colour on the outer corners. So I was self-taught with the makeup, but looking at me, you’d probably think I’d been to the Dame Edna School for Apprentice Drag Queens.

I had to draw in my blonde eyebrows because I couldn’t see them (and neither could anyone else). When I was in a bad mood or wanted to be assertive, I wore grey eyeshadow with white sparkly powder and black eyeliner. When I felt bubbly, I wore the sunshine yellow.

I loved putting makeup on in the morning – it felt like the only time I had to myself, almost a meditation while I prepared myself for school. Now, I still match makeup to my mood and clothes. I have tried to tone it down to avoid the drag-queen look, but am still dramatic in my choices. My love affair with green eyeshadow has lasted six years – long before Chantelle was on Big Brother – and has no sign of abating.

One thing has changed – I don’t wear makeup often these days, as I think it’s good to give my poor skin a rest, and I don’t want to feel I ‘have’ to wear it everyday. I love wearing and putting on makeup. For me it’s a treat, not a chore, and I love how it can lift my mood, enhance my confidence and stop people in their tracks – it’s surprising what a quick flash of bright green eyelids can do.

 I was brought up to have it all. Not just to believe that I could have it all, but to go out and get it all. ‘All’ is the Life Plan. It means you get a fantastic degree from a good university, possibly followed on by further study, then on to high-flying job with a great income, possibly exceeding that of my fabulously successful husband, with whom I have a wonderful relationship, and a beautiful family. I also work out at the gym several times a week, by the way.

If you can’t do all this you have failed. I was never good at failing. Which is when panic sets in. Oh my god…how am I going to live up to this? My mother was a housewife, how can I escape? I don’t have the genes to cope with this! And even if I can, how long can I sustain it? And exactly who am I supposed to be doing it for? For my own self-esteem? I don’t think so.

All the Life Plan does is make life become a constant disappointment; because I know I can’t do all of this, all at once. In actual fact, the ambition starts earlier than you might think, for me, around the time of my GCSE’s. Working myself into an emotional wreck, the school which prided itself on ‘pushing the best out of people’ eventually came to realise that I was one person they’d pushed too far. It’s ok, I push myself perfectly well. Being made to feel inadequate despite my good grades pushed me over the edge, and my A levels testified to my exhaustion and anger that they would make me feel so awful about myself.

University saw me back on track. With a 2:1 under my belt in an academic subject, and a place on a postgraduate course to study journalism, I’m again faced by the ‘All’ which is dangled in front of young women. As usual, I’m making life harder on myself, by wanting to prove something (what, I’m not sure, but it’s probably because I feel that I’m ok at lots of things, but not great at anything) to the world. Plus a belief that if I ever have children, then I’ll be do the parent thing properly, whatever it takes.

I’m beginning, slowly, to realise that actually, not stepping to the top of the career ladder isn’t always failing. And being adequate at everything isn’t necessarily failing either. In fact it might be my saving grace, which allows me to adequately fulfil all the things I actually want to – without losing it all in the process.