Dartmouth: my happy place
I'm alive! (As you will know if you're unfortunate enough to follow me on Twitter, where I never shut up).
Apologies for the ENTIRE MONTH I had off from blogging, but quite frankly I needed it. Things have been super brilliant, scary, exciting and stressful over at Decorum and we have, in fact, *drum roll* just moved into our very own office. This is rather unbelievably exciting, because it's a bit like all my childhood fantasies coming true. Do you remember playing 'shops', 'post offices' etc as a kid? No? That was just me then. Well, just BELIEVE ME, there can be little more exciting than a Staples-run to buy stationery for a real-life office, that you can set up exactly as you please - it made me feel about eight again as we stacked envelopes on shelves and opened packets of highlighters.
However, the success of Decorum has meant that I've developed a bit of an allergy to Wordpress. I look after six blogs for work now, all on Wordpress, so the thought of spending my free time also resizing images and fiddling about on this delightful platform became less and less appealing. Hence me avoiding poor Life by Lotte.
But it's 2014! January means one thing to me: getting older. Last week I celebrated my THIRTY THIRD birthday. This is very strange because I definitely haven't been alive for that long. But anyway. For the first year in forever, I decided not to have a birthday party. Instead I escaped to my happy place: Dartmouth. I hope to die in Dartmouth. Weird thing to wish for I know, but I am weird - I wrote a book about suicide.
O and I spent two nights staying in the wonderful Dart Marina. We always stay in the apartments because they are only a little bit more expensive than the hotel rooms and it means you get a bathroom each (which is always nice eh girls), a proper kitchen for making snacks, a fire, a cosy living room and you don't have to stress about having dried your hair in time for breakfast. I heartily recommend it.
Dartmouth is the best place in the world. I don't really want to talk about it too much because it already gets busy enough and even mentioning it makes me nervous of even more people turning up and hogging it, but there's nowhere on earth like it. It's stuffed full of independent boutiques, restaurants and lovely people with dogs who chat to you as you walk past. And opinionated seagulls.
The air is fresh and the views are incredible. I spent my birthday eating coronary-inducing amounts of cheese and cake and buying myself things from the wonderful galleries. It was perfect, and the perfect start to a new year.
2014 is going to be brilliant.