Alice Catherine

Hello Hello! *wipes dust off laptop screen and tries to remember blog url…

It’s been a while since I’ve connected with you guys around these parts and I’ve really really missed it! This blog space was always my true passion when it came to content creation, and over the last couple of years, it’s slowly morphed into somewhere that primarily holds space for my travel focused content.

I think this is due to mixture of components – the rise of short form video content in recent years and the whole ‘blogs are dead’ rhetoric that haunts me daily. It’s never nice to be hit with the realisation that something you love isn’t popular or held quite as dear anymore but that shouldn’t be a reason to feel shame about doing it. One of my main goals this year is to pour more love and attention into my blog, I want to write again! It cuts out a lot of the noise in my head when I go through the process of creating a blog post and that’s reason enough (for me) to keep doing it.

First of all, a huge round of applause for surviving January! We did it, the worst is over and I feel like things generally start to pick up a little bit once February arrives. We start to defrost and (hopefully) look more optimistically at the blank slate that lies ahead…

January was a weirdly hectic one for me. I moved into the first house that Sam and I bought together last summer so most days have been quite chaotic and scattered with tubs of paint and giant dust bunnies.

We had been in our city centre flat for six ish years so it was the longest I’ve lived somewhere that isn’t the house I grew up in. That flat is where so much growth happened – so many tears, many a existential crisis and the absolute chaos of a global pandemic. So much happened there and yet I’ve barely given that flat a thought since we moved. Not because I didn’t love living there but because our time there was well overdue. We had dreams of moving pre pandemic so you can imagine how eager we were to shake things up during the last couple of years.

We had long outgrown that place and as we eagerly started the house hunt, the flat felt less and less like home with every house we viewed. Once your mind starts wandering to a new place and imagining a new way of life, it causes this sense of niggling and yearning for something different. I hadn’t felt settled for a long time and I think I’ve only realised this fully since being at the new house.

I love this house so much. It’s weirdly the exact same house number as my childhood home. It has the same small bathroom that makes me feel pines of nostalgia for my teenage years every-time I take a bath. The little bathroom window is even fitted with the very same leaf print glass that adorned my childhood bathroom window. A window thats since been updated but one that I still enjoy daydreaming out of when I visit…

The house we bought was built in the twenties so it has tonnes of character (and needs some serious TLC) but thankfully it’s mainly been cosmetic changes so far. We actually secured the keys from the first week of December but technically we were still paying for out flat until mid Jan so we decided to take full advantage of the overlap and get the majority of the big painting work done pre Christmas. This meant that the move went much smoother and it also allowed us to become familiar with the house before being thrown into a totally new environment with a tonne of boxes to unpack.

By the time we moved in and spent our first night on our new mattress (a right of passage when moving, along with floor pizza!), we were too exhausted to feel sad about the little flat we left behind…

I know I’ll look back on that place fondly but I’m too distracted by this new chapter to feel sentimental at the moment. I think the past few weeks might be the most present I’ve been in a long long time. Having a long list of very physical tasks to complete every single day layered with making decisions about colours and ordering new appliances (adult life ha), it’s really pulled me out of a place I think I’d trapped myself in.

When I look back at the last couple of years, a lot of my brain power was spent anxiously considering things or trying to perfect things rather than just showing up and just going for it. I think somewhere along the way I stopped trying to be messy and that only ever dulls the possibilities available to us… 

This year I really want to throw myself into things and learn more about myself. I’m in my early thirties now and I still very much feel a stranger to myself at times. I’m a creature of habit and anxious by nature so that combination can be deadly when it comes to growth. I want this year to be the year that I stop getting in my own way. I’m not entirely sure what that will look like but I know that it means being less considered at times and showing up when I don’t always feel like it. If I’m being honest, I feel quite daunted by the year ahead but I also feel really excited – I’m grateful for both feelings in equal measures because we often can’t have one without the other and that’s okay! It’s this quiet (or loud) mixture fear and excitement that we tend to start the year bundled up with that makes us hopelessly human and romantic about life.

I also started a new interiors account where I’m going to be sharing more of the everyday/behind the scenes bits of the new house process so I’d love for you to follow along over there if you’re a fan of paint chat & all things homeware related.

If you’re finding 2024 hard then please know that you have a whole year ahead of you and things can change very very quickly. Be gentle with yourself and don’t beat yourself down with resolutions that aren’t underway or for having made none in the first place. Everything we do in January is to hopefully with the good intention of make the hardest month of the year a little more bearable for ourselves, we are creatures of habit and routine but that doesn’t mean that resolutions are necessary or important. Whats’s vital is that you offer yourself patience and kindness. Naturally, this year will be different from the last one and challenge you in different ways – trust that tour future self will handle it and try not to look too far ahead. If you’re not making changes right now or can’t quite face the changes you want to make… the time will come & I have no doubt you’ll do wonderfully!

Sending lots of love for the new year & beyond, 

Alice x 

Find my home account here: @alicecatherinehome

All photographs taken by me using a Fujifilm X-S10