Wishing all of my readers a very merry Christmas! As is tradition, I’ll be uploading a couple of book reviews over this festive period while I spend time relaxing and celebrating the season of goodwill with family, friends and a pint-and-a-half of Baileys.
Merry Christmas! AEB x
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A summary of December and all the delights of the Christmas aisle.
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A slideshow of my time relaxing off-grid in deepest Somerset (England).
A delightful mini-break and time very much well spent reading and writing.
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I am getting so many of these spam emails at the moment. They go like this, an individual presents me with the opportunity to become a best selling author. The catch? Only the email’s sender has the ability to secure me this success and I have to pay them to get it.
Oh and by the way, I don’t even have a book to promote.
I’m guessing that some ugly crawler bot has been over my website, seen the words / posts that feature my book reviews for self-help guides on Reedsy Discovery, and from that decided I must be a struggling author.
Honestly, there’s throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and then there’s throwing the pots and pans.
To all these people who are using bots to spam me, just stop. I know exactly where you’re based and you’re wasting your time. Everyone else, please don’t be fooled by these emails, these people are awful scammers that don’t deserve a minute of your time. You’re worth more, so much more.
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So, here it is, after eleven eventful years it is finally time to lower the curtain on my time in Swindon.
When I moved to Swindon in August 2014 I knew nothing of the town and its people. Swindon was just a place to work and rest my head, my first job after graduating from university weeks beforehand. Rocking up to my new home, a House of Multiple Occupancy (HMO), I was introduced a colourful array of housemates, including a lady who hated children but wanted to be a teacher, a reclusive journalist with a dark interest in knife crime and, of course, a woman who dressed up as a mermaid on the weekends. In the summer of 2014 I had no expectation I’d be in Swindon much longer than nine months, tops.
That was the plan.
On November 11 2014 a random thought struck me while I was deciding between which brand of toilet roll to purchase. I messaged my housemate to ask her if I could title a website around her career as a mermaid actress. Had I not decided to rent that room, in that house, in that town, or had Becki said no then who knows if I would have ever started a blog. My first post, “The Birth of the Grimgrad”, had all the positivity and excitement of someone making their first steps in the real world while also making a throwaway reference to military activity in Ukraine. Hindsight is cheap.
Months turned into years. The fixed-term job was extended, then made permanent. The permanent contract was the final piece of the stability puzzle and by the Spring of 2017 I had my foot on the ladder and bought a house…the house next door to the one I rented. There is a whole series I did at the time on the process, “The First Time Buyer Diaries”. I scanned through it a year or two ago and can confirm the writing quality is all very much true to brand for a hobbyist, with the hideous lack of editing that comes with it. One day I might do something more with it, in the same way there’s a whole drawer of clutter I have been meaning to sort out since 2015.
Also in 2017 I entered the world of Financial Services. For two and a half years I found my flow, bouncing between Swindon and the City of London, being single, in a relationship and then single again. Never staying in one place for too long. Swindon though, Swindon was always there, the constant in my life kept pulling me back (and never being quite sure why). Sure, my time in London was fun and exciting, but Swindon was chill, a non-descript place and the driveway where I parked my car.
When the pandemic happened I did the same as many others the world over and headed back to my family home for what I thought was going to be a couple of weeks. As we all know, things ended up lasting longer and by the end of it there had been a revolutionary shift in what it meant to be an” office worker”. I often wonder how things would be now had the events of 2020 not taken place.
When I fully returned in 2021 Swindon was not the same town. Yes, the buildings were there, as was the job and the office I’d been attached to, but things were different. The friends I’d had, forged over coffee catch ups in the office and midweek meetups, they’d all gone. They were still accessible via WhatsApp or social media but in the few years we’d been apart they’d all either moved elsewhere or moved on. That is what angered me about Covid-19, that alongside everything else it robbed me of those precious years when we were all carefree and geographically close. At the very start of 2022 I left the company and moved to another Financial Services provider.
In early 2022, 7.5 years after moving to Swindon (and 7 years longer than planned) I met Ben. There isn’t much I can say of this man beyond what he already knows and what would be considered terribly cliché, but meeting him was the single best reason for remaining in Swindon. To keep the story simple, we both happened to meet each other at the right time in our lives, with me making the first move. “I see you like cooking. I routinely burn carrots to the bottom of saucepans, is that going to be an issue?” (Thankfully it was not.)
The weeks and months rolled on. A lot of dramatic stuff happened, a lot on undramatic stuff happened. I visited the high street less frequently and, when I did go, I only felt pity for what was once there before. Swindon’s town centre had once been a place of comfort and choice for me, but now it felt like a landscape of coldness and desertion. My friends had gone, the excitement had emptied, my attachment to the town had fizzled away to flecks at the bottom of a barrel. When Ben moved in with me in the autumn of 2024, that was when we started to reflect on the future and by Christmas of that year my house was on the market.
I won’t bore you with all the details surrounding the sale of my Swindon house (and the stresses that came with it). Very long story short, my Swindon house sold and a new house was bought. In July 2025 we packed the final items into the back of a removal truck and I locked the door for the last time on the three-bed mid-terrace, my first home.
The days leading up to the event had been so busy, a flurry of packing and telephone calls, there was barely the time to process what was going on around me. As I sat in the car I was suddenly hit with reality. This was the street I’d lived on for eleven years and now I was leaving it for good.
Raw emotion took hold as I made that last and final car trip out of the town, a one-woman parade of mourning in the pouring rain. While driving silently along that familiar route of mini roundabouts someone cut in front of me and I couldn’t help but let out a chuckle between the tears. Swindon’s drivers always were a law unto themselves, they were giving me a send-off in their own special way.
Swindon will always hold a special place in my heart. Eleven years of crazy highs and unbelievable lows has taught me so much about myself and, when I look back at some of the things I posted in Swindon I genuinely think myself as lucky that I didn’t “blow up the internet”.
As I type this, somewhere far outside Swindon, I can look out the window of my new office and smile. Smile because Ben is in the garden, dragging out some kind of half-dead rose bush that he’s had his eyes on since our first viewing of the house, smile because the birds are singing and smile to myself at all the Swindon memories that led me to this very spot.
Swindon has been an utter, life-shaping, blast. Now it is time for it to shape a new type of hapless, coffee-spilling graduate. She’ll be easy to spot, just lookout for the weirdo intently studying the ply thickness of toilet roll on a weekday evening. Find her and tell her I said hi.
AEB x
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So…a lot of crazy stuff has been happening in my personal life recently. Without saying too much, here’s a little photographic hint.
Stay tuned for the blog post that will give you the full low down (you won’t want to miss it, it’s going to be a juicy one). Expected publication date – two weeks today.
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Not long back from a lovely relaxing week at Center Parcs Longleat Forest. There was coffee, there were cocktails and there was a lot of food, all with zero cares.
From hours in the tropical swimming pool, to a full day at the Aqua Sana Forest Spa, Ben and I had a great time exploring and strolling around every inch of the site at a leisurely pace. A well-needed break from the craziness of reality.
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I don’t know if it’s because of the heat we’ve had in the UK all summer (combined with woeful lack of air conditioning), or because there’s a lot of personal stuff on the go right now causing me no end of stress, but this picture, this is me.
Credit goes to TK Maxx for this one and zero credit goes to boyfriend Ben who flatly refused to let this exist in the same house as us. To be fair, given how much stuff* (*putting it politely) I have, I tend to agree. Ben has also reminded me that I routinely sit / sleep in positions similar to this and call it “comfortable.”
I think he’s trying to hint that it would be cheaper for me to just continue being me, sans human-sized cushion.
TK Maxx, if you’re reading this, my door is always open for an Alice/skeleton cushion collab. Just don’t tell Ben.
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The music, the editing, the vibe; this introduction to Swindon title sequence from the 1990s has everything going for it.
Hailing from a time (now long since gone) where many medium sized towns had their own cable TV station, I don’t know how I stubbled across this Despite that, this 30 second clip has since become a video that I absolutely love and adore for all its total cheesiness. It lives in my head rent free.
Thinking ahead, I might feature this clip in another Swindon-related piece, or I might choose to feature it in every single thing I say and do from now on. As intros go, I think this is unashamedly low-budget and utter class. And now I have shared this delightful earworm with you as well.
What can I say? You’re welcome.
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From my writing class scribbles, a quick 10 minute starter activity penned in response to the prompt “tell a story through a list”. Enjoy.
(Writer’s note: this piece is intended to be satirical. Please don’t do any of these things at home…including #1.)
How to call in Sick for Work
(From my notebook. First draft penned 07/05/25)
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My Housemate's a Mermaid 