Bloggity Blog….

I have always loved to write. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it if we are being completely honest, but I have always liked writing things down, having something tangible instead of purely thoughts. This could mean something as simple as a to-do list, but it could also mean a journal about my adventures in foreign lands, my attempt at children’s literature, or most recently, recipe book writing.

I will freely admit that I was that annoying kid at school that went a little over the top on their coursework hand-ins, but in all honesty, I just loved that side of school. I hated speaking in front of the class, I wasn’t great at exams, and I sucked at anything sporty. If you left me to it, and didn’t limit my time, I could write and create for days, adding bits all the time, bulking out projects and essays with newly found information and quotes. I loved researching and collating and putting them together to create something. I’ve kept many of my school essays and projects that followed this method – my particular favourite being from year nine where I was tasked with a project to illustrate and map out the history of the drill (exciting stuff!).

At university, we were tasked with creating a character taken from an already existing book, film, television series etc. - I did Model Design and Special Effects at university, specialising in Character Creation. Not content with simply making something that someone else had thought up, I decided to write and print a whole new book, complete with twenty-six separate characters (one for every letter of the alphabet), their own descriptions and illustrations, and a back story for the book itself, all so I could create one character in three-dimensional form. I then went on to use this book as the base for my final project (an art’s course version of a dissertation) where I created 12 cuddly toy characters from the book, complete with labels, presentation boxes and tags. It earned me a 1st class honours degree, of which I am still immensely proud, even though I don’t use it.

Anyway, I digress….back to the writing! As a coffee shop owner, there isn’t much call for essays and coursework. It is a very physical job, being either behind the counter, interacting with customers, staff, suppliers, and everyone in between; or being in the kitchen, baking the next day’s treats. It was a natural progression I guess, to venture into recipe book writing, but it still took me by surprise. So many people asked for our recipes, and as I say in my books, I am no baking prodigy. I just find recipes that work, and just somehow know how to manipulate them, altering them to suit the needs of our customers.

We have been running over 7 years now, and two cookbooks in (the first published in 2019 and the second in 2024), I want to take a break from the recipe books for a couple of years and instead focus on something less intense. I still want to write, so I thought a blog might be the way to go. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing sensational; just me writing a couple of pages here and there, sharing new recipes, new ideas, and thoughts that strike me in the moment.

I’m sure blogs might be seen as a bit old-fashioned now, with YouTube and TikTok and Podcasts aplenty; but that’s perfect for me. If you have ever been to Number Thirteen, you know how well we rock the retro vibe. Plus, I do not enjoy being in front of a camera if I can help it, nor do I particularly like the sound of my own voice. So, a blog is the way to go for me.

It won’t be every week, I am too busy running a coffee shop to write about it all the time, plus with a four-year-old in tow, it adds an extra element of frazzled organised chaos to proceedings. However, I want to keep the gears turning, and who knows, this blog could just turn into the next book, a mash up of everything Number Thirteen!