Simply Life

5 Days. 5 DAYS! Not long to go now before we are in our own space with our own things around us and settling into our familiar routines. I keep trying to tell myself that I should enjoy not having to do the laundry or cook meals but I quite enjoy doing those things. I'm a homemaker at heart and have always enjoyed keeping home and finding beauty in those ordinary, everyday tasks. So roll on next week!

I've been thinking a lot lately about how Social Media seems to put pressures on people from all walks of life and all ages to 'look' a certain way. I'm not just talking about physical looks like hair, make-up and clothes etc, but things like the life others perceive we live which is given out by carefully staged photographs shared on Social Media platforms. So in the spirit of 'getting real', I'm sharing a very unstaged, make-up free, hair-needs-a-wash photo of me working on something yesterday.

I'm seriously considering just chucking IG because although I absolutely love aesthetically pleasing photographs and find them inspirational to a degree, I can't help feeling that these days there seems to be a lack of authenticity with it all. I mean really, we don't all go about our daily lives stage-managing every part of our lives and we should be able to have a meal without posting a picture of it for all to see 😂. Then there are all those 'bots' that seem to find and follow you. Daily I am deleting various military fellows that follow my account. They are 'bots' for sure but it gets tiresome to have to constantly be weeding out these irritations, I'm not sure it's worth it. But then again, there are some lovely 'real' accounts and it is a great tool when you run your own small home business.

What are your thoughts? Are you happy to just keep deleting fake accounts that follow you or ignoring those who are playing the 'follow for follow' game? Somehow I'm thinking that it's just not worth the aggro.

Now, there are two things, big things that I tackled this year. I have not mentioned them here at all because they are things that required a bit of time to work out and see what the outcome was. But after 10 months the outcome is now clear and I thought I would share them with you.

The first thing is this... in February I decided to apply for the voluntary position of a Magistrate. For those that don't know the English legal system, a Magistrate or Justice of the Peace is a judge. All criminal cases in the UK start off in the Magistrates court. Less serious crimes are decided and sentenced here and more serious ones where the sentencing powers are beyond those of a magistrate are sent to the Crown Court. Anyone can apply for this position, cases are heard before a panel of three magistrates and there is a legal adviser in each courtroom to advise the magistrates on points of law. Sentencing Guidelines are used by the magistrates just as the same sentencing guidelines are used by judges at all levels of our legal system by judges from the Magistrate Court right up to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court.

It's a gruelling process. The application form itself is rigorous. If you are successful you then have to attend two interviews before a panel of magistrates judges and one lay person for impartiality. The first interview really looks at you and your motives. If you make it through that you attend a 2nd interview which tests your judicial intelligence through a serious of case scenarios. You need to rank them in order of seriousness and then defend your decisions.

Anyway...yesterday I received a letter from the Lord Chancellors Advisory Committee to say that I have been successful through the interview process and that my name was being put forward for appointment as a Magistrate! This is a huge achievement for me and one that will treasure always. However, I have had to turn it down as we no longer live in Devon. Each county has it's own Advisory committee and Magisterial needs so it's not quite as simple as just transferring to another district. But still, to know that I made it is good enough for me right now.

The second thing that is now all official and that will be going ahead is that I am officially a law student!

You see, this whole law thing all came about when I decided to upgrade my skills in preparation for re-entering the workforce once our homeschooling is done by taking a Legal Secretarial course. I found the subject matter fascinating, discovered that I LOVE studying and qualified my legal secretarial course with a distinction which got me to thinking... why not just go for it? 

I've never been to university but have always wanted to study a degree so why not? I've spent months agonising over whether I should or shouldn't and finally decided to grab life by the horns and just do it. So I signed up to do an LLB with the Open University in August. My course officially starts on October 6th but being distance learning, I already have access to my modules so have started already.

I'm not sure what it means career wise but that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I find law interesting and I want to fulfil an ambition of getting a degree.

So exciting times. Life is what you make of it. So often we talk ourselves out of doing something we really want to do telling ourselves that we are not good enough. I have thought that way my whole life. Thinking I'm not good enough/clever enough/worthy enough. But my husband has always been my cheerleader. He always tells me that I am good enough/capable enough/ valuable enough and that companies/businesses/whatever would be lucky to have me. It's because of his support that I have stepped out this year and taken on things and put myself forward for things that I never thought I would be able to and achieve things I thought were beyond me.

Is there something that you really want to do and you are talking your way out of just going for it? Have faith in your worth and just do it!

Blessings to you all today...