We climbed off the damp and steamy 82 bus and hurried home under a shared umbrella. My Grandma lit the false flames of the gas fire, pulled out the smallest of her nest of tables and set down a tray of cups, biscuits and her favourite teapot. Outside, a genie’s lamp of silver engravings; inside,
A few weeks back, in the interval at an event where I was speaking, I bumped into a woman I knew. She’d been a student on The Insta Retreat so this was our first time meeting in real life, and we did that strange thing where you slide straight from ‘hello, my name is…’ into the
If there’s one plea I hear more than any others right now, it is from people saying ‘help! I’ve been shadowbanned on Instagram‘, and asking what to do. Unlike the incident earlier this year, where it was only a handful affected, now it seems to be much more widespread – and affecting a greater range
When I was aged 7 or 8, I fell in love with a hideous sundress. It was in this store my mother dragged us around on a weekly basis – an outlet for cheaply-priced factory seconds and unsold stock from larger highstreet chains. We didn’t have a lot of money and my Mum had 3
This post is in collaboration with and sponsored by Lenovo, but all thoughts are my own, unchanged and unedited. My previous life in the NHS For most of my time working in speech therapy, I didn’t have a child of my own. I was clued up on child development and had clocked up hundreds of
This week Instagram began rolling out their much-anticipated ‘Branded Content’ functionality, starting with Verified users, and like most changes to the Instagram world, it’s caused a bit of a stir. I’ve also seen quite a lot of confusion going around, so I thought I’d set down what it’s all about. Why the change Instagram have
Oh hey, remember that time I got married? It was a year ago, to be precise – and if you’d asked me then I’d never have believed it would take me a whole 12 months to get around to writing about it. Even now, I’m not sure why it did. Because I wanted to hold it
One of the things I hear most often from people stepping into the world of sponsored content is that they find it awkward. We worry our readers resent it, that it sounds false and salesy, that nobody will stop to read what we have to say. And honestly? A lot of the time that’s true.