Animal Lover

I came across Martin Usbourne's beautifully wistful photographs of dogs and feel in love with his work.

His book, The Silence of Dogs in Cars, has gone straight to the top of my Christmas wishlist.

Reading his website further, I found out that he'd set himself a year-long challenge to see how many animals he can save - and as is the modern way, has a blog charting his progress.

And if it wasn't enough that he is a brilliant photography, his writing is frank, funny and inspiring.

If you like animals, but don't consider yourself an out-there animal activist, I wholly recommend reading his blog.

The Happiness Workout pt 2

Last week at work was an absolute stinker. Rotten to the core. Its not very interesting so I'm not going to go into it now - but I can't promise I won't have a rant in the future.

So now seems like a good time to do the Happiness Workout.

1. I had a great weekend in Glasgow - brilliant bars, fabulous food and great gig
2. I've had my haircut and even if I do say so myself, it looks good - at the beginning of the year I had it cut into a sleek bob - a big step for unadventurous me, but it suits me and even subsequent trims have been good
3. After a period of apathy, I managed three swims last week - for the second week in a row.

And a bonus one - I read three brilliant books last week

Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Dog Stars by Peter Heller
Where'd you go Bernadette by Maria Semple

All very different, but all from last year - I'd recommend them all.

Other cities

I spent the weekend in Glasgow. Which in retrospect was rather a long way to go for such a short amount of time and I wish I could have stayed longer.

The purpose of the trip was to see The Stone Roses play. It was a great gig, despite the British summer hailstones.

We made a similar trip to Manchester last year. Besides seeing the same band, what both trips had in common is that I would love to live in those cities.

London has some great things going for it and I do find it annoying when people dismiss it entirely, but having done my time living there, I'm rather over it now. But I'm still a city girl at heart and I'd love to live in one of our country's other cities.

Manchester is probably my first choice. Generally I'd take the post-industrial over the quaintly pretty - so Glasgow trumps Edinburgh and Sheffield would be preferable to York.  Breaking with that rule though, I still have a soft spot for Norwich and have only ever had a horrible time in Leeds.

But here I am in my fake-rural, no-longer-really-a-village village, which I do love, but sometimes I miss city life.