A Right Royal Rumpus!

Unless you've been living under a rock, there's only been one piece of news dominating the last 36 hours - The Royal Baby. Exciting the world's media before he'd even left the womb, every news channel was providing wall to wall blanket coverage and #RoyalBaby was trending worldwide.

As the announcement was made that the third in line to the throne had arrived, social media exploded. People around the world shared, tweeted & commented on the news that there was a new prince in the royal household.

Originally, the Royal Family had said they would make the announcement using the centuries-old traditional method, where the easel is placed in front of Buckingham Palace with a written statement.

However William and Kate decided to break tradition and announce the arrival via Twitter.

Within minutes, the tweet had been retweeted over 15,000 times. A royal frenzy hit the world and Royal Baby birth related tweet activity was approximately 25,300 tweets per minute.

The royal baby has had over 2 million mentions on Twitter, the most tweets of a world event since Obama was elected in 2009. The Mail Online  reported 487 million people read or shared social media content related to the birth of the royal baby.

The royal baby has been born into new a digital era. It only seems fitting his birth reflect the times.

Dinner at a Spainard's House

Anyone who knows me knows I love food. A lot. Especially good quality, homecooked food. During our holiday in Spain, we were invited to have dinner cooked for us by one of my mum's friends. Never one to turn down free food, we popped on our glad rags and headed over.

The weather was warm and we arrived to be greeted with lemonade. Not from a shop mind you, fresh homemade lemonade with mint and a selection of cheeses.

 

Utterly refreshing and the perfect antidote to the Spanish sun. Our host pulled out several bottles of Rioja and we tucked into our meal as the sun set over the Valencia mountains.

Amazing pastry with tuna, egg, pepper & tomato

Traditional Spanish Gazpacho

Served in non traditional crockery - soup in china cups!

Egg with salmon and wild mushrooms

I can NOT get enough of Spanish bread. Especially with ali oli

Rocking my Black Milk Galaxy Maxi Dress

Watching the sunset from the terrace

Maxing, Relaxing....

A Spanish sunset

After our wonderful meal, we spent the rest of our short break lounging on our favourite beach, Javea where I got stuck into the Game of Thrones novels. The Red Wedding has completely destroyed me - I almost don't want to carry on reading!

Hasta Leugo!

Too much slogging, not enough blogging

It must be said, I have somewhat neglect my blog a little! Between Parklife, visits to Surrey and my job, I've literally not had a moment to stop. Don't get me wrong, I loved everyone one of those things, but sometimes you just need a moment in life to breath!

Having my usual healthy snack at work!

Luckily, I was due a break to Spain with the family for a long weekend and some much needed R & R (though I did break ranks occasionally and run off to find a source of internet - social doesn't stop for anyone).

Our house is in a beautiful little village in the Costa Blanca and to me, it's heaven on earth. Good food, good wine, glorious sunshine and the company of locals. On this particular trip, we were invited by a friend of my mum's to visit the most equisite garden.

The owner, apart from being terribly wealthy, is passionate about the botanics of the local area and bought acres of land with the aim of protecting the local flowers and plants and encouraging them to prosper. His efforts have attracted the attention of the Universidad de Valencia and they are collaborating to create a Spanish equivalant of Britain's National Parks Trust.

Perfect for a production of Romeo & Juliet!

The gardens often play host to wonderful outdoor concerts with guests sitting under the beautiful natural canopies of plants and flowers whilst listening to strains of classic musical weave amongst them like vines.

A plant called, believe it or not, Wolf's Fart....

The sweetest wild strawberries I've ever tasted!

I spent the whole day there and still didn't get to explore as much as I would have liked!

Hasta leugo!

The Internet is down so I'm outside today...............

Apologies for the serious lack of blogging. It's been all about new beginnings recently - a move to a new flat (a gorgeous two bed that I've furnished with several mahogany bookcases), a new job (bloody loving it too) and ditching a load of old clothes, pointless Facebook friends and bad habits.

I was lured over to BT after promises of huge download and upload speeds (needed for my new current addiction, Game of Thrones but more on that later). The Boy was also seduced by the promise of BT sport and in connection with our new Sky package being able to get this on the go and for free. It all sounded so good.............

Until 

They came to install it and promptly said they couldn't there was a problem. That problem later turned out to that someone has fiddled with the phone lines in the green boxes at the end of the street and whilst our phone line was activated, someone else was merrily making phone calls to Lisbon and Lithuania at our expense. Nice one BT. They also failed to bring the equipment out to set up the broadband - urm WTF? 

3 engineers later and we still don't have our own broadband. Our new neighbours have graciously allowed us to share their internet connect though I feel like some sort of digital vampire, slowly sucking the life out of their broadband with our million and one devices! Tends to be a bit of a issue when you work in social media, there's no off switch. I might as well marry my iphone - sometimes I spend more time tweeting, facebooking, whatsapping and snapchatting that I forgot to connect with people in the real world!

Having said that though, there's something to be loved about fantasy. More specifically, Game of Thrones.

I resisted watching it for so long - it seemed like something everyone jumped on the bandwagon about and I refused to conform to it. At the time, I was more than happy with my Marvel films coming out every 5 minutes. However, whilst on the aforementioned NY trip, I watched the first episode,.

And then the second one. And the third. I was lost. I was addicted. I downloaded the entire first season and watched it in less than a week. Virgin Media were not impressed when I said 90% of the reason I was leaving them was I'd become addicted to Game of Thrones and needed Sky Atlantic.

Sorry Sean Bean. Had too. I'm now nearly halfway through Season 2 and becoming more obsessed by the day. Well something has to fill the gap until The Hobbit Part Two!

Today whilst pottering around at work on Twitter (ah the perks of my job), I stumbled across this bad boy

Have a nosy here

Day. Made.

Parklife!!

Anyone who lives in Manchester (and several others from other reaches of the UK) knows about Parklife.

Originally a festival for the students of Manchester and hosted in everyones favourite park, Platt Fields, it has grown in popularity, commanding bigger acts and bigger stages. Platts Fields couldn't contain it (and was almost destroyed last year after thousands of wellies turned it into a mudbath) and so the aforemention festival moved to Heaton Park in North Manchester.

The weather decided to perk up for the occasion, my friends from Surrey made the ardous three hour journey squished together in a single car and after an excitable first night in my new flat, we headed off to Parklife - the bonus of my new flat is I am less that 5 minutes from the nearest tram!

Before the carnage began!

We arrived sweltering in the midday heat after several hours (an accident on the tram line has caused serious chaos for all festival goers) and were greeted by a queue that stretched as far as the eye can see. Consider the gates had been open for well over 5 hours, we were not best pleased.

 

Several of our party in the words of Simon Pegg, went 'the pub to wait for this all to blow over' and in doing so, discovered an entrance on the other side barely being used by anyone. We got into the festival and well, the rest is a bit of a blur! 

 Suffice to say, the music was good, the company excellent and I can't wait do it all over again next year!