On Monday we had a really interesting seminar at work delivered by Mariam Elmirghani from BAWSO, a women's aid service specifically aimed at BME communities, to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Nov 25th). After that we finished off the budget scrutiny session from last week. On Tuesday I had school governors at Maendy Primary, then the once weekly excitement of food shopping.

Thursday I spent pretty much the whole day cleaning the house, though looking around today you'd never know it. My mum had Marianna on Friday night so Anthony and I could go to the Torfaen CLP (Constituency Labour Party) Christmas dinner in Blaenavon. On Saturday we just stayed home and recovered...

☆ READING: December 17th 1949 issue of Picturegoer magazine. I scanned it in for the blog, then sold it on eBay. One down, 70-odd to go...

☆ WRITING: About Anthony's deceptive nature... Read more HERE.

☆ WATCHING: I watched Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) for the first time on BBC4 the other night - I highly recommend it! British comedy doing what it does best. 

☆ LISTENING: Miss Polly Had A Dolly. Over and over (and over) again.

☆ WEARING: Hair clips.

☆ EATING: Finishing off the Japan Candy Box - you can read my review HERE.

☆ FEELING: Tired.

I put together my first media kit and updated my review of the Tippitoes Bouncer with a great video of Marianna, now well over the recommended age, bouncing like her life depends upon it!

Not too long ago my mum came across her old Nokia, complete with the shiniest, goldest, most awful fascia you've ever seen. It got me thinking about my own phone history, which resulted in this post...



My nan gave me this phone after winning it at bingo in 2000, back when I was 11 years old. I was so excited in spite of the fact I had nobody to stay in touch with on it. (Even if it was only 12p a text!) You could get your daily horoscope on it though, so we all used to check it out on our way to school.



Next up was the trusty Nokia 3310, the phone of choice for seemingly everyone. It had cool clip on covers available at every market stall (like that gold monstrosity which kicked this post off) and Snake. Who didn't love Snake?

Mine was silver and blue.

Things were simple back in the day (2004) and I was a huge fan of this phone because of the way it fit in my hand, and the satisfying snap it made when you opened and closed it. Others in my circle were not as impressed and it was dubbed 'the toilet seat' because of its shape...



Part of Nokia's L'Armour fashion collection, the 7373 was released in 2006 boasting a 2 MP camera, 8x digital zoom, and a fabric tag sticking out the side of it. I loved this phone for the way it swiveled - round, and round, and round - though I was most upset when a character on Eastenders got it not long after I did, and turned it into a must have chav accessory. Still, I have very fond memories of the shutter noise it made when taking pictures, and the tinny sound of its speakers as it blared out my ringtone of choice (the Alvin and the Chipmunks theme tune).

Taking a selfie before it was even called a selfie!

I'm not sure which handset it was exactly, but similar to this one.

It was a big shift going from the weighty 7373 to the next one as it was pretty flimsy feeling. It did have a nice clicking sound when you slid it up and down though, and certainly looked more grown up. It didn't have much online capability though, and by the time my contract was coming to an end I was really feeling its limitations.



Getting my first BlackBerry felt like I'd truly joined the working world. I spent all my time texting, emailing, and tweeting with that beautiful QWERTY keypad.




I was never as much of a fan of the 9790 which I got in 2012. I mean, sure, it was more powerful, but it just didn't feel as substantial as its predecessor. It also had a touch screen which I didn't like. What was the point when you already had the track pad? By this time every man and his dog was switching to the all touch screen experience but I'm a) stubborn and b) have a weird dislike of touchscreen typing.



I upgraded to the BlackBerry Passport in April this year. It's taken plenty of flack, I know, but the large screen makes it so useful for work which is what BlackBerry has always been about. With this you don't need a laptop or even a tablet, it can handle agendas, spreadsheets, and is still just about small enough to fit in a clutch bag. ...And it has a keypad. I really hate typing on a touchscreen, so now the Passport is all that stands between me and one of those Doro phones your nan has.


It was weird seeing pictures of something I'd spent so many hours of my life looking at. Each one brought back memories of what I was doing when I owned that particular phone, who I was texting - who I was hoping was going to text me - and how each one provided me with new ways to fidget and ignore the world around me...

How many phones have you had? And which one was your favourite?



For more on the history - and evolution - of the mobile phone, check out the awesome timeline by Tiger Mobiles. Lots of great trivia there! :D

Lots on this week, and should have been more - I missed an extra school governors meeting scheduled for Monday. It's my own fault, I rely on my work email to tell me when meetings are, but school governors' stuff is all on my personal email (not even the blog one) so I check it less often. Tuesday was planning committee and a meeting of Torfaen Labour Women's Forum. It was the first in years and there were loads of ideas for things we can do. Our first project is a donation drive for toiletries and similar to give to the local Women's Aid.

Wednesday was joint scrutiny committee, looking at budget cut proposals. I had a bit of a baptism of fire as they needed all the members of healthier scrutiny (social services, etc) they could get, but I'm such a new member I've yet to actually attend a meeting of that one! The choices are so stark when it comes to social services. Cutting back street sweeping and stuff sucks, but is vastly preferable to, say, stopping nighttime call outs for continence management. Unsurprisingly that committee overran so it will be reconvened on Monday. Community Council was at 6pm but it was really too tight to get there in time, so we took Marianna to see the Christmas light switch on at Cwmbran Shopping instead. We were going to take her to Santa's Grotto but she was having none of it, screaming and crying at the indignity of being out in public, so we just took her home and put her to bed.

On Thursday we had an update from Aneurin Bevan Health Board at work. I complain about work all the time, but it's times like that you realise you are in a very privileged position. I brought up my pet crusade around monitoring of post term pregnancies - as a member of Joe Public the only person listening was my mum, but as a councillor I get the ear of the Chief Executive and the Head of Midwifery and Gynaecology! Not bad, eh?

☆ READING: E. Scott's 'Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential - America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine'. I wrote a post about it.

☆ WRITING: A post for Carbon Monoxide Awareness Week. CORGI Home Plan are running a campaign around it; I'd put my name down and figured they must have already filled their quota, then they got in touch with me on Wednesday to ask if I still wanted to run a giveaway for a CO alarm - cue some quick typing! :)

☆ WATCHING: The Inbetweeners 2. I don't know why I hadn't watched it before, it's hilarious!

☆ LISTENING: Christmas songs! My mum had Marianna on Friday so we did the majority of the Christmas present wrapping to get it out of the way.

☆ WEARING: Wet socks. Every time I've left the house this week I've seemed to end up with wet socks.

☆ EATING: Japanese sweets. I won a Blippo candy subscription box which arrived on Wednesday. Expect a review at some point next week.

☆ FEELING: Tired.

It was a big week for the blog - I finally took the plunge and bought a custom domain name! You can read more about it HERE. I also posted about my dream bathroom, reviewed C'mon Dolly and did the versatile blogger challenge, after being tagged by Amani Lyrical. In other news, I got to be a featured poster at the Frivolity Friday linky and was mentioned at #KCACOLS.

Supplier: C'mon Dolly
Website: www.cmondolly.com
You can also find them on Etsy, Facebook, G+, Instagram, and Twitter. The owner also runs a children's clothing brand called Little Noli.

Reproduction 1st gen Licca on the small pure neemo body.

Products: C'mon Dolly is a fashion doll clothing brand, with its main focus on Blythe sized outfits. I bought a pair of galaxy print tights, a pair of gold leggings, and a pair of metallic blue leggings. I was also sent a pair of pink leggings as a free extra - how sweet is that! :) They were all really well made and great value too.

2nd gen Licca tries out the galaxy tights - this is the smallest pure neemo body and they're a bit big.

Post and Packing: I ordered through Etsy on November 3rd and paid their flat shipping rate of £2.03. My package was sent by first class mail and arrived at the beginning of this week. The packaging was so pretty I saved the cardboard insert for crafting with.

My order.

The lovely Amani of Amani Lyrical tagged me for the Versatile Blogger Award. The process is simple. You a) thank your nominee, b) write out 7 facts about yourself, and c) tag up to ten bloggers of your choosing. I found it really difficult to think of any interesting facts about myself, but finally settled on:

1. I collect old girls' and teen annuals; at the moment I have 115, excluding magazines.

2. According to my AO3 account I have about 600,000 words of fanfiction on the web. My most popular story has been read by over 30,000 people.

3. I have a so-called 'greek toe' (i.e. Morton's Toe, where your second toe is longer than your big toe). It is the only visible feature Marianna seems to have inherited from me!

The only photo I could find of my weird feet...

4. So far this year I've won over 200 prizes from competitions.

5. I asked Anthony for help with thinking up facts - he said I have an unhealthy obsession with bloody murder. Apparently normal people don't find poring over centuries old news clippings about crime interesting. Who knew?

6. Bananas are one of my favourite fruits, but I hate anything banana flavoured. It just turns my stomach.

7. Spiders are my biggest fear, but there is one spider in particular which haunts me: Dickie. That's the name of the girls' pet spider in one of L.T. Meade's school stories. By the end of the novel when they put him in the bully's bed, his body is the 'size of an egg'. *shudder*

That is the question!

I started this blog back in January and have been really getting into it, posting daily and suchlike, since August. Part of my reasoning for setting it up in the first place was it would help with my comping - it means I can enter all those 'write a blog post for x' competitions. Not that I've actually won any of those yet but, still, I live in hope. What I have had is the chance to host competitions for other people which has been exciting, enlightening, and, er, some other adjective which keeps up the alliteration.

But I want more of it - lots more!

The problem is that even as my stats have improved, my blogspot subdomain address has been a millstone around my neck. Lots of people rave about WordPress self-hosted, so I looked into the pros and cons of taking the plunge:

Pros - 

• Top level domain - and the professional perception which goes alongside it. 
• More control over appearance. You can tinker with every part of the code, use more advanced templates, and WordPress.org offers plenty of plugins which bypass the need for manual coding. 
• No or fewer restrictions on type of content, advertising, etc.
• Your content won't be removed without notice for contravening T&Cs.

This exercise confirmed that I didn't want to go self-hosted for various reasons, primarily the cost side of it, and my own understanding of myself. The web is littered with blogs I was once just as passionate about, forever festering in the back-up engines of Livejournal and its long forgotten brethren. If I went self-hosted my fear is that when (not if) I get bored and can't be bothered to keep paying up, all my content would be lost from the net.

A tiny little screenshot I found on the web of a former blog of mine. Ah, nostalgia.
Then I heard about a halfway option. I could stay hosted with blogger and their user-friendly interface, but still have a shiny top-level domain address. This 'vanity url' is like slapping on a coat of fresh paint - everything is exactly the same underneath, it just looks better for the visitors. Even so I ummed and ahhhed over it for weeks, worrying that it would be a nightmare to implement and I'd just end up out of pocket for nothing.

Yesterday I finally took the plunge! I bought a custom domain name from 123-reg.co.uk and got my blogspot redirect all set up with help from the geekalicious blog. It took about ten minutes from start to finish, and cost under £10 for three years ownership of www.babiafi.co.uk. So far, so good!

Are you self-hosted, vanity url-ing, or happy with your subdomain?

We got to go out not once, but twice this week! On Tuesday we went out for a meal with a few of my friends from school who I haven't seen for about two years. It was great to catch up with them, and show Marianna off, of course. It was going so well until she boffed all over herself. Ah, babies.

On Thursday evening I should, technically, have been at my local Labour Party branch meeting (I'm the secretary). But we'd managed to get invites to the opening of the new Cineworld cinema in Newport, so my mum babysat while we went to see the new Steve Jobs film.

☆ READING: January 22nd 1944 issue of Picturegoer magazine.

☆ WRITING: 'I Pay My Council Tax.' Anthony wanted me to write a guest post for his politics blog, The Man Down My Local, because, well, he's too lazy to update it himself. I had no idea what to write at first, but then somebody was complaining to me about their bin not being collected and out came the usual 'why do I bother paying my council tax?' I endeavoured to answer.

☆ WATCHING: Chasing Shadows on ITV catch up. Reece Shearsmith is great in it - and if you do click through to his Wiki, the photo they have up makes the poor bloke look like a serial killer! - but Alex Kingston's floundering act is very annoying.

☆ LISTENING: Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbens. I sing it to Marianna, and she just looks on in bemusement.

☆ WEARING: High heels. I wore them both nights we went out, and soon regretted it. Thankfully I had the sense to bring a pair of flats with me on Thursday to change into.

☆ EATING: Plum, pear and apple jam. It's so tasty! It's out of the awesome Christmas Grande Hamper I won from hampergifts.co.uk this week.

☆ FEELING: Sociable.

I wrote a post for the Debenhams' Dear Santa blogger competition, and did the #BlogaJob CV challenge. My baby bundle giveaway ended with 825 entries and I've contacted the winner, but you can still enter the new giveaway for Chris Holm's The Killing Kind.

Other accomplishments this week was my first go at joining in with a Twitter chat (#UKbloggers), and hitting 500 likes on my Facebook page. Yay!

I heard about this great blogging challenge via Occupation Mother, who got it at source from Nipper and Tyke. Basically you write up your CV, just with all the observations on those jobs you have to leave off the real one...



When it comes to work, and the reasons for it, the [Spunge] song 'Jump on Demand' usually comes to mind for me:


Because there are lots of positives to work, don't get me wrong. There's the camaraderie, the opportunity to learn new things, the routine, and the life experience. (And the money, don't forget the money.) It's just that I'd sooner be a lady of leisure. :)

2004: I got my very first job when I was 16, when I started as a kitchen help at St. Joseph's private hospital. Friday evenings after school, and Saturdays 9am - 2pm. In 2005 I took on an extra shift on Sunday mornings, cleaning on the wards, and then later that year I decided to remove myself from the UCAS process because I was full of existential teenage angst. Not having thought the move through I ended up working at the hospital pretty much full time after leaving sixth form as a member of bank staff, rotating through the roles of kitchen help, ward cleaner, ward hostess (the people who take the food trolley round), hospice cleaner, and canteen girl (operating the till, oh yeah).

Even though it was pretty much just never ending washing up or toilet scrubbing, depending on the rota, I got on well with everyone and I have really fond memories of my time there. I learned lots about food hygiene and the whole thing was a huge help in overcoming my crippling shyness. Plus I was on pretty good money for my age, which is always a bonus.

Taking a break from Christmas dinner service - I was full of festive cheer.
2007: So, I liked the hospital but I really didn't want to be scrubbing suspicious stains off someone else's toilets forever. I reapplied for university and went off to read history at the University of Cambridge, an institution stuck in another time if not another universe. Students may not be in paid employment for more than ten hours a week because, well, you should be rich enough not to need to, I guess. I worked back at the hospital during the holidays and volunteered with the Eating Disorder Mentor project and Linkline, the student nightline, during term time. That mostly involved freezing to death in a grotty office, listening to the regulars ramble. I learned that one day, if I wanted it bad enough, my hand would turn aquamarine blue through the power of thought. That day has yet to come to pass...

2010: When I left university I wasn't at all sure what I wanted to do. Youth work seemed as good an idea as any. I started volunteering with a youth charity; that turned into a work placement, which turned into a full time job - just as I was about to start a temp position with Primark. (I still got paid for their induction training though, so it was a win-win.) The kids were great, and it was really rewarding, but the rest became a bit of a nightmare and I wanted out. I was volunteering every Tuesday evening with the CCYP, my local youth centre, and Vintage Vision, a really cool little business, on the weekends so I figured that was covering my work experience. I was going back to college!

I even got into the local newspaper for my volunteer work back in 2011.
2011: Initially I was going to do a MA in regional history, and that turned into starting a PhD on the Georgian gentry. For money I did a bit of undergraduate lecturing which was awesome and terrifying, and also became a dinner lady at Woodlands Primary School. I learned there that you should never suggest little kids try something they don't like (carrots, in this particular case). They have a bewildering habit of bursting into tears.

2012: After a short stint at the school, I bagged a great job at Journeys, a depression support charity based in Cardiff. I loved it there and wouldn't have left if it weren't for the timing - I had put my name down as a Labour Party candidate in the then upcoming local government elections, thinking it would look good on my CV. Much to my surprise I topped the ballot in my ward and was duly elected. At first I intended to keep my job on but it soon became apparent that I'd bitten off more than I could chew. What with one job, and the other, volunteer positions (I'd joined the board of Maendy Praimary School earlier that year, for instance), and the commuting between everything, I had no time to study, let alone get my head together.

With Cllr Bob Wellington, the leader of Torfaen Council, for pics to go with an article on street name equality. I was asked if I'd put a motion to council by a member of the public, and ended up getting my name in everything from the local rag to The Times!
2014: I finished at Journeys after a few months but, looking back, the damage had already been done. I had a bit of a breakdown and it's only on the other side I can see that I just wasn't coping with anything. I eventually dropped out of my postgrad course which was just about the hardest thing I've ever had to do - I felt like it meant I was a quitter, a failure - and really scaled back my volunteer work.

But the reduced stress had an almost immediate effect. I fell pregnant with Marianna.

2015: Marianna was born on New Year's Day 2015, and I went back to work at the beginning of March. It had been a tough pregnancy so it was nice to be able to function normally again, without having to keep nipping out of meetings to go and be sick somewhere! It was more than enough to be a backbench councillor but I did start to branch out a little into new areas; for example I joined the Gwent Police and Crime Panel, the body which scrutinises the Police and Crime Commissioner, and I set up my very own parenting and lifestyle blog. (You're reading it right now!)


2016: The downside of working as an elected official is that to keep your job, you need to get re-elected! The next Welsh council elections are in 2017, so it is quite a worrying time right now because, obviously, if the public don't want me back I'm going to need to find another job very quickly. This is the main reason I have been working so hard on the blog in my spare time, in the hope it will be able to tide us over if the worst comes to worst.

On the positive side, I was appointed Deputy Mayor this year which has been a real privilege, and if I do get re-elected, next year I will be the Mayor of Torfaen. It would be such an amazing experience, and something I really hope Marianna would be proud of me for. Fingers crossed, I guess!

Just trying to think what I've done this week... We had site visits for planning committee on Tuesday morning so I got to squelch through farm mud in the least suitable shoes ever to see the field where a proposed solar farm might go. At home I've been busy scanning old magazines - I've decided to sell the majority of my collection so I'm scanning then eBaying them.

On Friday my mum, Marianna and I went to Morrisons cafe for dinner which was really nice, then on Saturday it was council advice surgery. Marianna was sick all over my foot so I had to get up in the middle of a complaint about parking to go wash my shoe... This morning we both went to the Pontnewydd Remembrance Parade. Marianna was very good, so much so that I even pushed her pram in the procession back to the British Legion. She took it all in her stride.

☆ READING: UFO Wales by David L. Richards (2013). It's interesting and a great introduction to cases like the Broad Haven Triangle, but could have really used a tighter copy edit. I've added it to my list of books I really need to post reviews on Goodreads for.

☆ WRITING: Milk is Cool for the Cravendale and Britmums #MilkDrinkersMilk challenge.

☆ WATCHING: Unforgotten. I just want to know who did it! I also can't believe that Sanjeev Bhaskar is 52. Whatever it is he ought to be bottling and selling it. 

☆ LISTENING: Half The World Away by Aurora. I'm loving this year's John Lewis ad!

☆ WEARING: A Remembrance Poppy - I keep meaning to get a white peace poppy to go with it. Next year!

☆ EATING: Jacket potatoes. 

☆ FEELING: Cold.

I wrote a post for the Eurotunnel and Arden Grange #Petlovers competition, and reviewed The Dolls House Mall 1/12 scale miniatures. I also posted a round up of all my comping wins in October, and described what my dream (and Anthony's nightmare) kitchen would look like. In other news, I finally hit 150 on Bloglovin! Only 350 to go until I hit my target of 500...