Thoughtful presents: Detective Bob and Bev

Buying Christmas presents can be a tricky thing as you’d always like people to use your presents and not just give them to a charity shop on the first instance. For my parents Christmas present I thought I’d create a joint present that they would both use.

They both like watching drama series, and regularly recommend ones to watch, and so I thought of something that could assist with their TV watching.

Now the picture only shows the remains of the present as I didn’t get round to taking a picture of the rest of the contents of the gift. I simply bought them 5 of their favourite snacks and drinks that they like when watching TV. Sweet chilli crisps, ginger beer and chocolate covered raisins were a few things I got them.

Because many of the shows they watch are crime related I also got them notebooks addressed as case books so they could write down who they think had done it on the series they are watching.

It just goes to show that presents don’t need to break the bank in order to be liked. The snacks were eaten pretty quickly and the notebooks don’t take up too much room either.

Thoughtful presents: Binging boxsets

My friend Hayley also known as Rock turned 30 back in August. I didn’t get her anything straight away as I couldn’t figure out the perfect gift. But an off comment she said in a message a few weeks ago gave me an idea.

She gets through TV shows at a rapid rate. Rock got through 12 series of Greys Anatomy in an extremely fast time, I did wonder if she got any sleep! With this in mind when she said she’d run out of boxsets to watch and was thinking of rewatching Greys Anatomy again for the 3rd time, I knew I could do something.

Getting a Netflix subscription for a year could be costly, and sometimes too much choice is even tougher than not having enough choice. And for me it just didn't seem a personally thoughtful gift. So I thought to get her the first series of a several different TV shows of different genres. A taster of them, and if it turns out she likes any of the shows then she can go on and watch the rest of the series on her own accord.

I got the boxsets from the ever trusty Cex, and it cost me roughly £10. I remember a time when a boxset cost me £30 each!

Challenge within a challenge: To be tidy and have less; once and for all

Every year since around the age of 10 I have given myself the new years resolution of wanting to be tidy. And every year I fail. I always find something better to do than tidy up. I also have a problem in that I have a lot of stuff. I’m not a hoarder, but I just seem to have a lot of things. I’m not a shopaholic, yet I always have bags of things to be sorted.

I guess the main time I accumulated a big amount of material posessions was when I was at uni, and I have thrown out a large amount of these items since. But life goes on and you need new things as you acquire new skills or new tastes.

I’ve seen those challenges around of chucking out one thing per day and increasing it during a 30 day stint. What I want to do is have throwing out things as part of my daily routine. As bold as it sounds I want to throw out 2-5 things everyday. It may seem bold, but I’ve started doing an audit of exactly how many posessions I own. I haven’t finished that task as it’s a working progress, but with close to 150 DVDs and 45 items of gym wear, I know I can start getting rid of stuff easily.

It won’t be straight into the bin. The things I throw out will be either given to charity or recycled.

Following my journalism degree, I’ve always had a large amount of magazines and paper in general. Years ago I used to collect In Style magazine as I thought it made me sophisticated. And I thought piling up my collection, like Carrie Bradshaw did in Sex and the City with her Vogue magazines would be stylish. What it looked like was a mess and that I was a hoarder. And I decided to weigh my collection which was around 4-5 years old, and it weighed half my body weight!

Today I watched a great documentary on Netflix called Minimalism: A Documentary about Important Things and it was really interesting. And while I may not reach true minimalism, it’s made me realise that most of the stuff I have, I don’t need. I thought this for a while, but now is the time to truly attack the mass of possessions that I own.

I’ll keep a log of what I throw out. Throwing out rubbish such as packaging waste for recycling won’t count as it’s general waste. I think that the first few weeks it will be easy, a bit like with weight loss, the pounds go down a little faster in the beginning. It’s the weeks and months that follow that it slows down. But I hope if I build this little task into my daily routine, my mind-set may shift and hopefully I will own a lot less by the end of the year.

So let 2018 begin, with more tidying and hopefully less possessions!