Saturday 27 April 2013

A brief encounter with Mr. Tom Hardy himself.. sort of

Wow, shit loads of you read my last post.. My newly single tragic life must make a good read - I'm fine with that by the way haha!

So as you often do when something significant shifts in your life, I've decided to make some changes. These changes started today at promptly 9:30am, when I was stood on my lonesome in a cold studio at the gym. After reluctantly dragging myself out of my lovely warm pit an hour before, I'd donned my sports bra and trainers for an hour of ass-kicking, Body Combat style.

I'd barely wiped the grotty bits of sleep from my eyes before I was jumping, kicking and karate-style chopping my way through a painful hour of pure sweatiness. I did find myself thinking - on more than one occasion I might add - why the hell am I up at this time, after not getting home from Dan's after work till gone 2am. But, as you should know by now I'm a 'silver linings' kind of gal, so it was nice to be up, calories burnt, showered, dressed and sufficiently protein shaked before noon.

Now I'm not going to pretend it was plain sailing; I was sweating from crevices I never knew existed to put it politely, but there was one slight detail which made the whole ordeal much more enjoyable. And that there my friends, was the Tom Hardy lookalike instructor. Yep. You read right. Tom Hardy lookalike. And I don't know about you girls, but I don't think there was a better use of bold text than that statement right there.

Not wanting to look like a complete exercise-phobic pussy, and wanting to give off a 'gym bunny' style vibe, I gave 120%, and pretty much nearly died in the process. Totally worth it though.

At the end of the torture, erm.. I mean, hour, I coyly enquired as to whether he took that class every Saturday morning. And guess what? I see myself being preoccupied every Saturday morning for the forseeable future. Score.

Safe to say a swift text to wingwoman Throopy, who I knew would appreciate such a detail on a Saturday morning, soon followed when I got back into the changing rooms!

Friday 26 April 2013

Life has a habit of...

...biting you on the ass when things seem to be going swimmingly.

Well what a long month it has been. Brilliant highs and some serious lows.

A roadtrip to Amsterdam with my dad for some quality father-daughter time was great. We camped for 4 days, drank beer, saw some sites, ate alot and just generally hung out. Something I miss out on alot with us living 2 hours apart, but all the more worth it when we can fit it in.

Another high point - although I would've called it a low at the time - was finishing my first 10k race in 1 hour and 10 minutes. I know that's not an impressive time, but for a girl who's been working on her beer gut at uni for the last 18 months, I was pretty chuffed.

Great nights out with friends have been strewed across the month too, and the sun has even seen us pay the occasional beer garden a visit.

But just as life has a way of balancing itself out, there have also been some lows. Wednesday saw me and my fella of 4 years split up. And along with that I've lost my second family, a home and a gorgeous - but naughty - Beagle pup. But just as every cloud, apparently, has a silver lining, my inner monologue is going stir crazy with all the funny and slightly tragic anecdotes I will pen when the time is right to laugh about this.

Right now though, it's not. So I'm working to my deadlines, going to work, writing about everything and anything, getting drunk with friends and trying to instill some normality back into my life between all of that.

Updates to follow, as always.

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Paris Brown: leave the girl alone


First of all, apologies for not posting for so long; I've just been so busy with other projects, but I'm going to try and post more often from here on out!

My first thoughts upon hearing the news of Paris Brown’s foul-mouthed tweets were actually that of sympathy.

I can’t help but feel that everything has been blown well and truly out of proportion. The teenager’s tweets were from quite some years ago, and chances are she was a young, impressionable child, showing off to her friends online, as so many kids do nowadays.

If you haven't heard about this story, you can have a look here

In a way I sort of feel her pain. The Internet has changed in recent years; it’s no longer exclusively for chatting to friends, shopping or playing games. It’s a much more powerful tool, especially when it comes to employment and upholding your reputation.

Over the past year or so I’ve really used the Internet to my advantage: I’ve gained loads of experience writing for online newspapers and blogs, and I’ve started to build my reputation as a journalist. And one of the things I’ve done to create a more professional online presence is vetting my Twitter. I removed tweets that could be deemed as offensive or taken the wrong way, and I changed my handle from the rather girlish and ditsy @graciebabesxo to a simpler @gracehutch28. I’m not sure if I can say yet whether doing any of the above will have helped, but at least I have my own piece of mind that something I posted on Twitter years ago won’t come back to bite me on the ass.

Whilst I understand that there are endless cases of racist/threatening/abusive tweets and messages posted online by the likes of celebrities/politicians/footballers and the like, but they have one thing on their side which makes these tweets less excusable: age.

With age comes experience, and with experience comes common sense; both of which Paris was obviously lacking when she posted about hash brownies and drinking binges. But we all make mistakes, and most of them are made when we’re young and naïve. And unlike Miss Brown, most of us get to make them out of the spotlight and away from media scrutiny.

So before you judge the 17 year old crime tsar – as the Daily Mail today dubbed her – just think back to when you were in your teens, making whatever mistakes you did and only having your parents to answer to, not the entire British population.