Photo04_5A by caioelis on Flickr.

Hook Lighthouse, Ireland 

Photo04_5A by caioelis on Flickr.

Photo

I just submitted my visa application!!! WOW!!! Now I’m super excited to see if I get accepted…I really hope I do so I can go to England on time for my concert! Apparently I have to give my bio-metrics details…that’s interesting. I’ve never had my fingerprints done so that will be an experience. I really hope that the Immigration services will let me enter the country on 16 August. That weekend is VFEST!!! If  you’ve never been to Vfest it is a festival of amazing music including: Arctic Monkeys, Scouting for Girls, Tinnie Tempah…etc. A weekend full of music and exciting times. 

Crossing Loch Nevis (by Duncan Allan)

Urquhart Castle

Fun Student/Youth Run Blog for any followers who live in the United Kingdom:

I focus on USA stuff cause I live here. So have fun with this one guys!

Literary Map of the UK

James Fox (United Kingdom 2004)

Frederic G. Cooper. 1917.

Creative agency Young launched ‘Learn Something Every Day’ in August 2009 with the aim of promoting the then-two-month-old agency. They had no idea just how big it would be, but it was an idea they were passionate about so they ran with it, and now it is being published as a book. Visit learnsomethingeveryday.co.uk to find out more and to buy the book.

Above is another of their works, this one is the online component from a campaign they did for the Royal Exchange Theatre promoting the 2011 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting. I am amazed and inspired by their work, so hope you are too.

Literary Map of the UK

Photo

England ;)

For hundreds of years the Household Division has been the most public and instantly recognisable section of the British Army.Since their inception all Regiments of the Army have held parades trooping their colours – or flags – for the entire world to see, but it is the seven Regiments of the Household Division whose trooping remains the most famous, and who parade every year to honour the Monarch’s birthday.

The Household Division are the monarch’s personal guard, and have been for almost half a millennium.They can be seen in and around Buckingham Palace and the London surrounds every single day.Though wearing the ceremonial red uniforms of the British Army of bygone days, every member of the Division is also a fighting soldier who spends half his time on parade and the other in combat in deadly zones such as Afghanistan, fighting often at the forefront of the whole Army.

The Division is split into two Brigades, the Foot Guards and the Household Cavalry.The Foot Guards consist of five Regiments, the Grenadier Guards, Coldstream Guards, Scots Guards (of which my father was a proud member for many years) Irish Guards and Welsh Guards.The Household Cavalry consists of two Regiments, the Lifeguards and the Blues and Royals.Both these Regiments ride horses on parade and tanks into battle, unlike the Foot Guards who are infantrymen.

To list the histories of each of the seven Regiments in the Division would literally take a volume of books, for to do so would be to detail the history of the British Army itself.For as long as there has been an army the Guards have been at the forefront of the fighting.The oldest of the Regiments, the Lifeguards, was founded in 1658.Between them the seven have as many battle honours as the sum total of some other nation’s entire armies.

The wait. by BeboFlickr on Flickr.

“Let’s adore and endure each other” on Flickr.

Fuji chrome provia 400f is my new favourite photography filter

I love its grain, its texture, its kick to the reds&greens and its contrast - especially for night photography

A tribute to it

Scotland - 1993 by Chris&Steve on Flickr.

Sunset on the sea by little_frank on Flickr.

Malarky & Billy — Summer Breeze by Hookedblog on Flickr.

Malarky

http://www.hookedblog.co.uk/2011/06/malarky-billy-summer-breeze-exhibition.html

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A pillar type post box.

The U.K

Nice type of type.

Seb Lester, United Kingdom

Underground on Flickr.

Running with the theme of the last post, last night I had a dream that I was back here. In my dream, I was going about my daily business as if I had never left.

Scotland

United Kingdom and Ireland at night, as seen from the ISS, Christmas Eve night, 2010.
Taken by Paolo Nespoli, and Italian astronaut in the ESA 

The morality of helping the poor family - where does it end?:

David Cameron thinks the UK has a dependency culture and is lashing out at parents who have children who can’t afford them (because they know social welfare programs will take care of them). He thinks people have a values problem.

Join us for the discussion at 12 PM PST or 7 PM PST @ via IRC or in Second Life.

Fuel deposit explosion; #London, #2006

16 hours of shopping, 2 emotional breakdowns & 1 fight (ugh, some people fucking suck) and I am almost ready (still needa pack) for London!

This guy Sampha is so impossible to find songs from. I need to purchase his EP from the Young Turks site. i find him simply amazing. I find here and there tracks but not much of anything in the form of a solid album. Peep some of his shit.

 

Valentine

 

Boiler Room

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I spent the majority of the last academic year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

It was literally one of the worst years of my life in terms of my bipolar disorder.

I arrived in mid-September and slipped into a manic episode several weeks later. I was euphoric, loved everyone in my house, racked up debt on my American Express and Visa cards buying food to make dinners for everyone, bought plane tickets to Switzerland and Northern Ireland on a whim and frequently stayed up all night. I couldn’t sit still, I stopped attending class, fell behind…and then, my stepmother of only a few months contracted a bacterial infection and died.

I felt a tremendous amount of guilt because we didn’t get along. I wanted my father to be happy but I didn’t like her (for reasons I won’t put up on the internet). I felt terrible for my father and her children but I was confused about how I felt about her death, and I was thousands of miles away from home. I fell down from my mania and slipped into a deep depression that kept me from showering, attending class and turning in work.

I knew that I needed to go  to see a psychiatrist because the GPs couldn’t change my medications and didn’t know what they were doing. Still, they refused to refer me, depsite my history of severe mental illness, until I produced a note from my psychiatrist at home saying that was what needed to happen.

It took two months to get in and the psychiatrist was of no help. I went back into hypomania and started dating this guy in my house who was a year and a half younger in age and about 15 years behind in maturity level. I got drunk and told him I was mentally ill and he told me that he always wanted to be there for me and didn’t mind. Against my better judgement we commenced our relationship. He told me he loved me after two days together and with my mania I got caught up in our relationship. This mania turned into a ugly mixed episode.

He took advantage of my generosity. I made dinners for us and let him make me feel like complete shit. He was emotionally abusive and constantly belittled my education, the way I cooked, my clothes and belongings, insisted that he shouldn’t have to pay me back for the food he ate, humiliated me in front of other people and then cheated on me. He was quick to make promises he couldn’t keep and never even bothered to read up on what being in a relationship with someone with a mental illness entailed.

The only way I can explain why I allowed him to treat me this way is that I was seriously ill. I went to bed most nights feeling like there were bugs crawling on me and I felt so worthless anyway that I believed what he said. I had stopped going to school some time ago by this point. He was the one insistent that he wanted the relationship in the first place but I felt guilty for putting him through my mental weirdness so I never felt like I could say anything.

Finally, we broke up and my illness came to its ugly peak. I had an episode where I drank so much tequila that I blacked out and vomited all over a hallway and then a few weeks later I slit my right wrist scissors. After being told by a mental health “professional” at the hospital that there was nothing wrong with me, I was just overreacting, in spite of severe emotional lability and plans to commit suicide, I decided that it was time to go home. I found myself on a plane bound stateside four days later.

That was my year abroad. I tried again and again to work with the mental healthcare system but failed. I got sick of having my problems minimized so I came home two months early. I started seeing a psychiatrist once a week when I got home and will continue to do so until my medication is completely stabilized.

I am so fortunate that I have access to the psychiatrist I do and that I’m still alive in spite of being alone in this awful struggle for seven months.