I am going to have to try harder...

...to make my dreams a reality.

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In ten years time I will be 27 years young. I want to have blonde, pink and turquoise dreadlocks right down my back. I'll either live in a grungy basement / top floor flat in somewhere alternative or in a camper van, on a mattress and I'll tour the country selling artwork and clothing. I want to run a hair salon in Camden Town. I want to wake up everyday in a room that I've spent ages working on, full of fuchsia pink paint, feather boas, photos of black and white movie stars and crystals that twinkle in the sunlight. I want to be free. I want to play my music as loud as I like. I want to camp out on the beach and eat barbecue food. I want to walk around quaint little shops wearing an anklet but no shoes. I want to get a tattoo of whatever I hold dearest. Maybe I'll act in tiny backstreet theatres. Or maybe I'll just wait tables. I will live on wholemeal cheese sandwiches, chicken curry and spaghetti bolognese as these are my favourite things to eat. I'll go on the road and drive until I find somewhere that takes my fancy. I'll watch the sunset over the sea. I'll sit up late burning incense and inhaling the fumes. I'll paint your portrait on the quayside of a seaside port somewhere. I'll be one of those girls who braids coloured threads in children's hair and gets them into trouble with the teachers at school. Maybe I'll work in a piercing parlour, making the holes or designing the jewellery. I probably won't have much money. I'll listen to those free CDs of summertime classics, the ones you get in the newspapers, on a little CD player in my living room. I'll wear vintage clothes from junk shops and jumble sales, hand tailored in front of late night TV on a rickety sewing machine. Somedays I'll lie in until the afternoon, reading my favourite books over and over. Other days I'll get up at dawn, stand on the wet grass and watch the sunrise.

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I wrote this nearly five years ago, in response to a Writer's Block prompt on livejournal. A lot of it still very much still relevant to the life I want to live - some things have changed , my desires to act or run a hair salon, have dissipated, but on the whole, I still want to be that barefoot girl, watching the sunset and dipping her toes in the ocean. I think my seventeen year old self would be slightly disappointed by the progress I have made towards these goals. I have a very strong desire to escape my hometown, to live in the countryside, to breathe sea air and feel free. I would love to live in a camper van and travel wherever the mood took me. I realise this is probably a very idealistic view of such a life, and maybe I wouldn't be so keen on the rainy, lonely days. But I would like to have tried, even so. I don't want to reach my forties and be full of wishes and regret. I have always said I'm going to make my dreams happen. I'm slightly alarmed that I haven't really started yet, where did those five years go anyway?! Apparently sitting around making mood boards and adding things to pinterest doesn't count?!

So if you have a camper van (or a  driving license!) and you fancy this kind of lifestyle and wouldn't mind a travelling companion - I can provide inane chat, out of tune singing, a good bit of story-telling and a general artistic vibe! Haha, kidding. But any tips, send 'em my way! ;) ♥ A