Between the Margins

The past few months of my masters have been a little grim and far too worky for my liking so fun has been pretty minimal but here are a couple of pics of the odd times when I didn't have my face buried in books...

Excuse the bobbly ankles of my tights in the above pic :) It's me reclining on the couch in my sitting room in Ireland in front of a roaring fire in March. The fire is still burning (and I'm still reclining) in late May. My boyfriend calls it the Biblical flame as the fire hasn't actually died in years - my parents put ashes on it every night and then resurrect the embers the next morning.

My friends came to visit me in Aberdeen back in March bearing gifts in the shape of Lindt bunnies - so cute you feel bad eating them but they taste delicious. I subsequently bought one treble the size of these guys with a little bow around its neck that jingled. I actually couldn't bring myself to eat him, he was so cute he became a little like a pet - until my boyfriend got hungry and sneakily ate him and pretended he'd ran away!

I brought my friends to a whiskey distillery and my friend Alan was having a hard time patiently waiting for his comlimentary dram of whiskey :)

Duthie Park in Aberdeen and its lovely Victorian bandstand.

The Arid House section of the David Welch Gardens in Aberdeen - full of plants that almost look too crazy to be real!

The village near my home in Ireland opened a memorial park in April to commemmorate villagers who died on board the Titanic. Above are two bronze statues about to board the Titanic in the distance. The village apparently lost the most people per capita in the tragedy.

Celebrating the end of assignments Tequila style with my two favourite classmates!

I'm home in Ireland now for a little while and have swapped the stress of assignments for that of wedding planning.Where's JLo and her wedding planning prowess when you need her. After the past 9 months of barely having time to think about the wedding with all the study, I'm realising just how much I have to do. Eeeek. But I'm sure it will all fall wonderfully into place! And as stressful as wedding planning is, it beats assignment planning. Plus there's the honeymoon to help me unwind at the end of it all :)

Forest Dweller

 

These photos were taken last weekend on a spur of the moment road trip with my boyfriend. Ah the luxury of being able to be spontaneous after weeks of being chained to my assignments. We spent the morning at an amazing car boot sale (more on that in a future post) and with the sun shining (a rare occurrence of late in Scotland) we decided to hit north to Inverness, a town near Loch Ness where the Loch Ness Monster supposedly abides…alas we didn’t have time to call on him on this particular trip.

The drive up was so pretty – the roads lined with forests and crazy neon yellow fields full of flowers that are used for biodiesel. They’re insanely yellow and reminded me of the Wizard of Oz (this is the second blog post running with Wizard of Oz references :)

This is a rather quick post as I’m currently in a hotel in Edinburgh en route home to Ireland for a glorious few weeks. I think I may leave my heart here in Edinburgh though…it’s one of the prettiest cities I’ve ever been to. There’s also a 50/50 chance I may be moving here in October (it’s between here and Glasgow) so that makes me look at the city in a whole new light.

Anyway, I hope the sun is shining wherever you are and that you all have a lovely weekend :)

 

 

My boyfriend becoming as one with nature :)

Outfit: Top, Urban Outfitters; skirt, vintage; necklace, Etsy.

Creative Spaces

I’ve just managed to clamber out of a month-long assignment vortex (hence the blogging drought) so the last thing I should want to blog about is work/study spaces. But seeing as my study set-up has been so rubbish it’s made me a little green-eyed of other people’s spaces and the creativity they must inspire. In fairness though, it doesn’t take much to beat my pitiful trio of back-breaking work spaces and accompanying routine! I’d generally start the day sitting on my couch, laptop on lap, moving to a rickety half-table set-up around mid-afternoon, followed by my bed in the evening time – where I’d grow increasingly horizontal as the evening progressed (and increasingly Quasimodo-like as the month progressed).

The Guardian (an English newspaper) ran a series of articles on writers’ rooms a few years ago that I absolutely loved. It was really interesting to get a peek into the ‘habitat’ of some of my favourite writers, to hear about their writing routines and to imagine them hunched over their desks labouring over their work. It was a bit of a Wizard of Oz moment with the curtain being drawn back to reveal a regular person pouring their blood sweat and tears into producing something extraordinary.

Below are some of my favourite rooms and favourite writers – though Sebastian Barry’s could do with some serious de-cluttering!

Seamus Heaney's writing space.

Sebastian Barry's writing space.

Anne Enright's writing space.

Anne Enright's writing space. 

Anne Enright's room isn't actually one I'd pick for myself but I love her writing too much not to throw it in. This room is exactly how I would have pictured it before seeing the Guardian article - a little sparse and bleak like her prose.

David Lodge's writing space.

The next batch are my dream offices via my Pinterest account! Especially the first one. I love bright rooms with walls covered in inspiration! I'm moving (yet) again in October to a new city so a spare room to use as an office is going to be a must. In the meantime, I'd be really interested to see where any of you guys blog/work from. So if you have any links to your space please leave them for me so I can gain added inspiration/grow increasingly green-eyed :) I was also considering doing a series of posts on bloggers' work spaces so if anyone would be interested in guest posting and giving us a mini Cribs-like tour of their space then drop me a line at theheadlessmannequinblog[at]gmail[dot]com. In the meantime, here are some pics of offices which I think might have made my assignments marginally less painful to write...

A couple more picture frames splashed around the walls and this work space comes close to my idea of office perfection!

Take away the weird dangly light bulb and I could see myself getting a lot of work done in this office :)

I love the bright colours and cheeriness of this lovely office space.

 I love the contrast of the minimalism and clutter of these frames.

Simple and pretty.