Summer On Film, Me On Perfection

I only posted on this blog 8 times last year. Did you notice? Probably not. That's okay. The thing is, I got distracted. I could tell you now about how eventful 2018 was for me. Probably most of the blogs you read have done a similar retrospective this month, looking back at the last year, but I don't want to. Parts of it were great, parts of it were terrible. I want to focus on what comes next.

There are hundreds of unedited photographs on my desktop, stretching back as far as April 2017. I just stopped editing them. I could go into why but again, I don't want to dwell. I want to edit them. I want to post them. So I will. Starting with these.

I took these photos last summer, at Mount Edgcumbe, Buckfast Abbey, and Dartmoor, with my dad's old Olympus OM-10 and a roll of film that's been in my desk drawer for nearly 10 years. I've only tweaked them a little bit, just a minor adjustment to the shadows and highlights in photoshop, and as you can see, most of them are still overexposed and blurry, but there's something about some of them that I really love.

I think what I love so much about film photos is that they don't have to be perfect. (Of course, it would be nice if some of them could be a little more in focus, but I'm sure I'll get there eventually.) With film, the imperfections are part of the charm. Light leaks and weird colours just remind you that these are physical things, even when they've been scanned into a computer and edited in photoshop. They were made using hands and chemical processes that I still don't totally understand, even after spending hours in the darkroom at school.

I get caught up on perfection sometimes. Okay, a lot. I abandon photos because I can't get the colours how I want them, I stare at a blinking cursor for days because I can't get the words to sound right, I get frustrated because I can't get a cake to come together the way the recipe says it should. I stop doing those things altogether. I know it's impossible to be good at everything right away without putting in any work but I still sort of expect to be anyway. It's a confusing character trait, I'll admit.

I've been making a lot of banana cakes. I've made them so many times over the years that my Mary Berry's Baking Bible falls open at that page but I got bored of them for a while and refused to make any more. Recently, I've gone back to them. They're easy, they're meant to look plain and unfussy, and even if I forgot to adjust the timing for our oven and burn one, it still gets eaten in a few days. Sometimes I put cherries in them too. I cut them up, wash them, dry them, cover them in flour. Sometimes it works and they don't all just sink to the bottom. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere but I didn't get much sleep last night and I think I lost it with the cherries.

Anyway, my point is that I'm trying to let go of the idea of perfection. I'm not the best photographer in the world, I'm certainly not the best writer in the world, but there's always something to like, even in imperfect things, and the point of creating isn't to create perfect things anyway. It's just to make something you enjoyed making, and the more you enjoy it, the more you do it, the more you do it wrong, the more you learn the tricks that make you better. Like how to correctly set the exposure on your camera (I hope). Or that you should wash the cherries and coat them in flour before you put them in the batter.

There it is. There's the metaphor.

Follow

Small Changes

Pin from Literary Emporium

Things are looking a little bit different around here. Just a little. New domain, new header, new photo of my pasty face. I've even updated my 'about' page, although I'm sure I'm the only person who has ever read it. If I've done everything properly these changes shouldn't have been too disruptive. Old links should still work. If you were following me on Bloglovin' before, you should be still.

I'm a little sad to see stasialikescakes go but it feels like time (and it's sticking around on my Instagram because, well, I just don't want to change it there, brand consistency be damned). I have a short story coming out in an anthology this year (more about this soon!) and it feels like time to make things a little more professional around here. Just a little bit. I'm easily freaked out by formality to be honest, so we'll try to keep that at a minimum.

Last year I said I wanted to be fearless in 2017. I don't know if I quite managed that all the time but I did submit a lot of stories last year, some of them good, some of them less so, and I am going to be published because of that. Every time I thought about giving up, chickening out, closing the Pages document and forgetting a deadline ever existed because the story wasn't perfect, I remembered that I had vowed to be fearless and I sent it anyway. So I'm not going to pick a new word of the year for 2018. I'm going to stick with 'fearless'. It's not just some big change I made in 2017 and don't need to worry about anymore, it's a small change I make every time I agree to something I might have been too frightened to before, every time I send an email that terrifies me. And small changes are sometimes the ones that make the biggest differences.

Follow

New Year

Every year I host New Year's Eve at my house. Or, I should say, at my parents' house. Every year since I was eighteen my friends come over, we listen to music in the living room, we play Jools Holland's Hootenanny muted on the TV until just before midnight when we turn the sound on to hear the countdown, we eat pizza, we drink, at midnight I go outside and pop open a bottle of sparkling wine provided every year by Alice. We all drink a glass and toast the new year.

We tell each other our resolutions, which are almost always the same. I want to finish my novel, Alice wants to finish her novel, Rose doesn't make resolutions on New Year because she is an actual, genuine scientist and doesn't entertain superstition like the rest of us do.

This year I really do want to finish my novel. I want to start driving lessons and pass my test. The same things I wanted to do a week ago and a month before that and seven years ago when we first started these traditions.

But this year I've also decided to do something different, something I saw on Rhianne's and Ria's blogs. Something I've seen before but never really thought about doing myself until now. Until I saw Rhianne's and Ria's posts and something clicked in my brain.

I'm picking a word, just one word, for 2017. Something I will try my best to live by and to remember and to be all of this year. It's a word I didn't actually pick, so much as it picked me. It jumped into my head after I read those two posts and immediately it felt right.

In 2016, with so many heroes dying and so many terrifying ideas rising, I have felt more hopeless and fearful than I can remember. Watching half of my country vote against what I believe in, watching America do it too, hearing about the far right rising in Europe and wars all over the world. 'Hope' might have been a good word too but I don't think that's what I need. I think I've always had that. Fearlessness, that's something else. That's something I've never had.

If I want to complete my resolutions this year then I need to get rid of my fear of driving and of letting people read my writing. I especially, and this will be the trickiest of all, need to get rid of my fear of what other people will think of me.

This post is a start. This post feels more personal than most of what I write here but I need to lose that fear too. 

This year I will be fearless. Starting now.

Follow

London.

My Instagram posts from the trip.

My friend Kate has been trying to convince me to go and visit her in London since she moved there over a year ago. Before she lived in London she lived in Texas for a while and before that she spent three years trying to convince me to go and visit her at her uni house in Kent. So basically she's just been trying to convince me to go and visit her for a while. Much to her amusement I finally agreed to go up on Monday the 29th February ('an imaginary day' I think were her words) and stay with her until the Friday.

This is Kate. I've known her since she moved to England from Ecuador when we were five and she is still one of my very best friends, even though she used to eat bugs in the playground. (She definitely won't mind me telling the Internet that, I'm sure.)

We didn't end up doing too much on the Tuesday because we were up stupidly late talking on Monday night, because we basically just don't shut up whenever we're together. We did head over to Spitalfields Market for something to eat (I had a very nice veggie burger and lemonade and we shared those delicious fries you can just about see in the above picture) but unfortunately, thanks to our inability to shut up, most of the market stalls were already closed and gone by the time we got there. Still, it's an area of London I've never been to before so it was nice to see somewhere different, even if I did feel supremely uncool walking around in my strawberry hat and trainers among all the cool hipster types!

Wednesday was our proper 'in London' day. In the morning we headed over to Limehouse and grabbed some lunch in Sir Ian McKellen's pub, The Grapes. I'm not sure if you can really tell from the picture above (I didn't take many pictures during my trip, I'm afraid, and I was plagued by bad light for the ones I did take) but it's a really lovely, cosy kind of place, totally my idea of a perfect pub, and the food was delicious. I would highly recommend it! We spent ages in there.

Then we spent quite a long time in the Lush flagship store on Oxford Street... Somehow I managed not to spend too much money but I have no idea how.

In the evening we went to see Guys and Dolls, which is basically how Kate finally convinced me to visit her in the first place. You see, I love The History Boys and around my 21st birthday Kate went to see Samuel Barnett (Posner in The History Boys) in a production at The Globe and she waited at the stage door afterwards to meet him and got him to sign a copy of the play for me for my birthday. So with Jamie Parker (Scripps in The History Boys) being in Guys and Dolls, Kate had the idea that we would go to the show and then afterwards hopefully get him to sign my book too. Which we did!

Guys and Dolls was brilliant. I've seen it once before but a long time ago and I was really impressed with all of the cast at this production, especially Sophie Thompson, who was amazing as Miss Adelaide. Jamie Parker was great too, of course, and very nice after the show when we literally ran after him and stopped him half way up the stairs as he was clearly just trying to get home. He stopped and chatted to us for quite a while and didn't even seem to mind when we left and then immediately ran back because Kate had forgotten to ask for a picture with him. Also he wrote 'happy 21' in my book, which I'm pretty pleased with to be honest.

Now Kate says we need to go to America and get James Corden to sign the book next.

On the Thursday morning we went for a little wander around Covent Garden but in the afternoon we actually got the train away from London and up to Norwich to visit our friend (and Kate's cousin) Holly for the day! I didn't know a thing about this plan until I got to London and it was the loveliest surprise. I've known Holly even longer than I've known Kate and the three of us have always been really good friends but with her living in Norwich now and me still in Cornwall, it's been about two years since I last saw her. Also I've never been to Norwich before, so this was a doubly nice surprise.

I'm afraid I don't know the name of the cathedral in the above picture but Holly tells me there are a lot of them in Norwich. Holly gave us a quick little tour of Norwich but, again, we managed to get there just as most things were closing. We had some delicious macarons and visited The Book Hive, which is a lovely little bookshop that Holly works in. Then we went for a drink and got some dinner (that delicious fish taco in the instagram collage at the top of this post) and then went for another drink, and then Kate and I headed back to London and the next day I headed back home.

It was so nice to spend some time with Kate and Holly again and to be reminded that actually I do really like London. Sometimes it's easy to forget that. Hopefully I'll be going again soon and hopefully I'll remember to take some more pictures next time!

And here's a picture of me standing very awkwardly outside The Grapes. Kate insisted.

Follow

Gingerbread house.

I bought some gingerbread house biscuit cutters a few years ago and every year since then Jess and I have said that we're going to make a gingerbread house and we never have. Until today!

To be honest we still haven't made a gingerbread house.

We tried. We made the walls. We got one half of the roof on. And then this happened. We think the main problem is that the walls and roof were too long so the middle of those sections weren't as solid as the edges and it just sagged. Here's the recipe if you would like to try making your own gingerbread house anyway. My tip is so make your house more square than ours...

Jess did make some lovely gingerbread biscuits though! Including an accidental gingerbread Donald Trump.

#political

Oh well, the gingerbread tastes good anyway!

But next year we're going to buy a kit.

Follow

A little road trip.

A few weeks ago I went on a little road trip with a few of my friends. We had lunch in and explored Falmouth, then we drove to Pendennis Point (where I feared we might all be blown away by the extreme winds!) and on our way back home we stopped at a roadside Starbucks, where I had my first frappuccino of the season. It was a pretty great day.

All of these photographs were taken at Pendennis Point. I had my Instax with me so my friend Chuck used my DSLR for most of the day but I managed to snap these few photographs that I'm pretty pleased with.

And for good measure, here's a bonus picture that Chuck took of me in Falmouth.

My hair was like a bird's nest by the end of the day.

Follow me on bloglovin'!

Christmas and New Year's Eve.

A few of my favourite Christmas gifts from my parents, taken using my favourite gift of all - a new 25mm lens for my DSLR.

I had a cold on New Year's Eve so spent the evening sipping a hot toddy but even a sore throat couldn't stop me from popping the cork on the sparkling wine in our front garden as I do every year.

I know this post is a little late but that cold really stuck around! I hope you're all having a great new year so far.

Follow me on bloglovin'!

My name is Stasia and I can't make scones.

It was my mum's birthday on Tuesday and we spent the day at the zoo. On Sunday I had asked if she wanted a birthday cake but she decided that she wanted scones instead, so we could take them with us to the zoo and have a birthday picnic. This was fine, I thought, I'd made scones once before when I was at uni and I remembered it being a pretty quick and easy thing to make.

So on Monday morning I put on my dotty apron and pulled Mary Berry's Baking Bible off the shelf, ready to go. This wasn't actually the recipe I had used the last time but I thought surely this will be even better than the scones I made last time. This is Mary Berry!

Cut to two hours later. I have cut out all of the scones twice because they kept shrinking on the baking tray, the kitchen is literally covered in flour, my hands are so stuck together with dough that I can't remember what it felt like to be able to move them freely, and I have already had a little cry. I finally get the scones in the oven and ten minutes later pull out these.

These are not scones. I don't know what they are but I think we can all agree that they are not scones. A friend of mine saw this picture and said they looked like 'scones cunningly disguised as eggs' and I have to agree with her. Apparently they taste okay but I personally am not in any hurry to try them.

Okay, so Mary Berry has let me down. It's alright, I can find the recipe I used last time. I'm at the end of my rope already but it's mum's birthday and she wants scones so scones there will be.

Except we don't have enough flour left for another batch of scones because I used it all on the aforementioned definitely-not-scones. I have another cry. Dad drives me to the supermarket to buy more flour.

The process for the next lot of scones is a lot more like I remember it from last time. It's quick, easy, not too messy, and at no point do I feel the need to have a cry.

Until, of course, I open the oven door to find these.

They look more like scones than they do eggs, yes, and are therefore a step up from the last batch. But as you can see they are also almost completely flat. However, I do not cry. I am already numb to the disappointment.

I throw away the second half of that batter. By this time it is almost four o'clock. I haven't finished making mum's actual birthday present, I haven't showered, and at seven I am going to see a film at our local cinema club with dad. But I'm in too far now.

I grab the hella old cookery book that mum insists contains the best recipes in the world. Just that morning in fact, after the egg-scones came out of the oven, she told me that this book, that she has had since she was in school, has the best scone recipe in it.

Okay, I think, I'll try it. At this point I have spent an entire day making scones with no actual scones to show for it. I have nothing to lose.

I finally give up. I am surrounded by not-scones. Three batches of three different recipes and all that's left are me in my dotty apron and around 30 things that are definitely not scones.

I leave the not-scones strewn across the kitchen and have a long bath.

Mum comes home from her meeting. She tries to assess what exactly I did wrong with all the scones. I do not want to talk about it.

Mum makes her own scones.

I vow never to make scones ever again.

Follow me on bloglovin'!

Where did I go?

You might have noticed that I dropped off the radar for a little while there. Well, those of you who have been paying attention will already know that this was because I spent three weeks waking up at 7am and suffering delayed trains, rainy days with very non-waterproof sound equipment, and lots and lots of walking around with cameras, as part of a film making course run by the Prince's Trust.

It was Jess who found out about it but I decided to tag along and I'm really glad I did. We had a really great time (despite all the train delays!) and we learnt a lot about film making. There were twelve of us on the course with four instructors helping out and together we've made a series of short films about Plymouth, exploring the new branding of it as Britain's Ocean City. Some of these short films have been put together to make a longer short film, which we already know will be shown at at least one film festival in the South West, and the shorter individual films are currently being shown on the big screen in Plymouth city centre, in between the regular programming, for the rest of the summer. It's all very exciting.

As well as learning a lot about film making, I also met some lovely people on the course, and got to talk to some incredibly interesting people as part of our interviews for the film. My mum is from Plymouth and I went to uni there and lived there for those three years so I sort of thought I knew it, but I've actually learnt a lot more about the city from doing this project. Maybe the people of Plymouth will learn a little more about their own city too when they see our films on the big screen.

I would probably be okay with never going to the fish market again though if I'm honest.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's the full film (It's only 22 minutes.)

Truth About Youth - Plymouth Britain's Ocean City? from Energetic Films on Vimeo.

And here are a couple of the shorter films that Jess and I made together (these are less than 2 minutes each.) I just want the record to show that Jess was responsible for naming these two films.

Aquarium Extravaganza by Jessi & Anastasia from Energetic Films on Vimeo.

History Extravaganza by Jessi & Anastasia from Energetic Films on Vimeo.

So this is what I spent those three weeks doing with all those lovely people and this is the city I studied in. Let me know what you think!

Follow me on bloglovin'!

Stithians show.

Yesterday I got up at seven in the morning (!!), put on my dungarees, made the decision to just let my hair be a mess, and went to the Stithians Show with Jess. The Stithians Show is an agriculture show similar to the Royal Cornwall Show (which I realise is probably not as well known outside of Cornwall as it is inside Cornwall but basically just think animals and fairground rides) only much smaller. Also there weren't any cows at Stithians. There are usually a lot of cows at Royal Cornwall.

On the coach I happened to sit next to two lovely people I went on holiday with about six years ago and haven't seen since. I didn't even recognise them until they asked if I had gone to France with them once but obviously as soon as they said that I knew exactly who they were and it was so nice to see them again. Cornwall is such a small place these things are always happening, although usually to my parents not to me. Does this mean I am officially an adult now?

Once we got to the show the first priority was food because food is usually the first, second, and last priority for me and Jess. We ate our cheese and onion pasties on the grass and I took the picture at the top of this post of the happiest, fluffiest dog ever, then we spent the rest of the day wandering around the show in the sunshine. We looked through the used books for sale (and both resisted buying any for once) and we saw lots of weird birds and adorable goats. 

Jess went on a couple of the fairground rides and I stood at the side and took pictures and films for her youtube channel because I am a a total bore and do not do fairground rides.

And we finished the day off with delicious, cold, Cornish beer and a trip around the food tent, picking up any free samples we could find, and listening to the brass band outside cover Dolly Parton's 9 to 5.

Follow me on bloglovin'!