Charlie…the one with the best blog name ever. This guest post is a sneak peek into the mind that is Mess and Merlot. In there you’ll find cake, and Sean Maguire. What more can I say…other than I once saw Sean Maguire perform at a Radio One roadshow Charlie. But let’s save that conversation for another day 🙂

Enjoy!

x MMT

Hi, I’m Charlie, you can find me over at www.messandmerlot.com yapping away about whatever happens to be bumbling around my brain.

I started my blog 5 months ago as a new challenge, something to keep me busy now my youngest had started BIG SCHOOL, the trauma excitement of our building work had finished and the festive season had come and gone. With absolutely no experience in writing and very little idea of how to ‘blog’ it certainly was a challenge and continues to keep me out of trouble while the kids are at school (or football, ballet, Scouts, asleep, on the loo….)

In this short time I’ve managed to figure a few things out, mainly that there’s a lot of stuff I still need to figure out but also that blogging is very, very addictive.

Hard work, but addictive.

I say hard work, I mean obviously there are people who do this properly,  for a living, but I’m still very much in the novice camp. Although I love it, I’m aware that I really was clueless as to just how much ’blogging’ actually entailed. Sharp learning curve, Baptism of fire, Rebel without a Clue, whatever you want to call it, I’m still glad I decided to go for it.

So 5 months in and here’s the craic:

• I’ve discovered the magical world of linkys where you get to read and be read. Halleluiah!! Without them I seriously doubt anyone would be reading my nonsense.
• Through these I’ve found so many brilliant blogs/bloggers and discovered that the blogging community is welcoming, supportive, funny, honest, basically awesome.
• Social media has become my main source of entertainment. Twitter steals way too much of my time, Instagram is a thing of beauty and Pinterest is my fantasy mind palace. I don’t do the Facebeak yet, maybe one day. Twitter chats are a relatively new discovery but great fun a brilliant way to discover or get to know more about other bloggers.
• I’m actually writing. I mean, I’m sure there are real writers out there cringing at my too-long sentences, grammatical errors and poorly arranged paragraphs but I’m not gonna stress about it anytime soon.
• Blogging has become a much bigger part of my life than I imagined it would. It can be challenging and time consuming but you gain so much in return. I’ve found blogs and read posts that have made me laugh, made me cry, allowed new discoveries or made me question my opinions on matters that I would never have considered otherwise.
• Writing a blog is like free therapy. It can be a form of escapism or a way to face reality and work things out, with a little help from my blogging friends.
• I’m excited to see where my blog goes from here. I wrote a whole post about this but for now it’s early days. I’m trying not to focus too much on how my stats are looking or what ‘niche’ I fit into (unless you consider ‘Fabulous’ a niche, in which case…).

Everything you need to know about me:

• I was born in Dublin’s Fair City where I lived as a child before moving to N. Ireland. I went to university in Wales to study Fashion Design before moving to London where I met Himself. We now live in beautiful Bedfordshire with our two little scamps Spud (7) and Flump (5)

• I love cake! I bake LOADSA CAKE but rarely get to eat any because they’re usually for other people. After I left full time work I decided I wanted to start a home baking business, so I did and four years later I’m still fiddling about with fondant.

• Aged 5 I decided I wanted to work in Tesco. A neighbour found me there arranging packets of sausages and promptly returned me to my Mother, who by the way hadn’t even noticed I’d been gone. To be fair to her, Tesco wasn’t that far from home and it was in the days when kids were just turfed out to play with traffic between meals.

• Not long after this I cracked the code on my brother’s safe, stole his money and headed back to my previous place of employment to spend it all on the kiddy rides. Well if they wouldn’t let me get a job what’s a girl to do?!

• I was obsessed with Sean Maguire as a teenager and on a trip from Belfast to London with my parents, made them take me to Ilford, Essex where I used my SCARILY VAST KNOWLEDGE to track him down. Yes he was home. It basically made my life.

I think that covers all the really important stuff for now!

You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or of course my blog.

Cheerio for now!

Charlie. X