Hello,

I’m back from Madrid! When I have some spare time and have put my photos on my laptop I’ll write my city review, but for now I can sum it up by saying 44 degree heat, meat and so many chispas. All will become clear, little ones. The title today simply stems from the fact I have a super long hospital appointment on Wednesday to measure my eyes and assess the damage so they can make me some new lenses. I’m really nervous about the whole shebang but it’s better than the alternative.

Not much to update on the writing front I guess except that my hard work is starting to pay off financially from my various endeavours and although it’s very very difficult, I’m doing my utmost to carry on working as normally as I can. Vision in my left eye is nearly non-existent. If anyone knows of a good online photo editor where I can add blur to an image, I would love to use it to show you what I can see because it is hard to explain. I can see colours and I can see where those colours are but I can’t see distinct shapes anymore. It’s deteriorating really fast and it’s frustrating because I know I just have to wait because the NHS are exceedingly busy and doing all they can but it just means I have to live in this funny little cloud for a while. If I close my good eye right now, I can’t see that this is a laptop 30cm from my face, let alone that there are (very magnified) letters on it. It’s quite scary.

I have been thinking I would really love to write some posts relating to some charities soon. Of course I could do Diabetes UK, for whom I raised some money last year soon after diagnosis, but what I would really love to do is to write a post in conjunction with a mental health charity. The mental health season that has been going on on TV recently has been outstanding, but it’s not just that. When I decided to train as a journalist, the other option I was seriously considering was to train as a mental health worker, and it is something I might still do when I am older and have more life experience. I don’t know anyone who isn’t affected by mental health directly or indirectly, whether they know it or not, and I’m going to do something with that.

Once my eye is better I want to start writing properly again. When I say ‘properly’ I mean ‘creatively’. It sounds lame, but all my earliest memories involve creative writing and I miss it so much. I can’t really read at the moment so I have to do a lot of imagining and thinking and it’s been good for ideas but bad because I find it hard to get them down.

Apologies if I’m going a bit AWOL in real life but obviously I’m not finding it too easy to be out at the moment. I can barely recognise faces so bear with me and I’ll be back causing trouble before you know it.

Oh, and before I go, check out the blog post of Sophie who is starting the same NCTJ course I did in September. Should be an interesting read for those of you who have been following Soup du Journalism from the very start or anyone considering taking an NCTJ now they’ve graduated!

Kayleigh