Reply from The Lassies

Every year I attend a Burns Night with my Dad put on by a friend of his in Codicote, Hertfordshire. We've gone for the last 3 years now and last year I was asked if I would do 'The reply from the Lassies'. 

For those who aren't familiar with Burns Night, its a celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns birthday on 25th January each year. Traditionally its an evening filled with his poetry, a meal of 'haggis, neaps and tatties' washed down with whisky. Its increased in popularity in the last couple of years and is now something of a thing, even in small south English towns. I for one am quite glad, because its a different and enjoyable evening. Anything that perks up January gets my vote. 

Part of the evening includes 'A Toast to the Lassies' which is a thank you to the ladies from the men of the evening and 'The Reply' is the ladies response. 

I wasn't sure about doing the Lassie's reply as I've never been much of a public speaker (get me 1:1 with a cup of coffee and you won't shut me up however). Its only really being a Run Director at parkrun that has got me used to and *almost* alright with speaking to a large crowd. 

I thought I would post my reply here as a little reminder to myself that I did something last year that I have actively spent my entire life avoiding and for future reference for anyone else. 

With a good slosh of prosecco and wine down me, here was my reply:

My name is Holly Finnigan and I am a millennial. 

*Pause*, now I have purposely left a note to myself saying ‘pause’ to leave a moment for a reaction as I wasn’t sure what reaction I would get this evening to that statement.

I am actually a terrible millennial. I can’t stand avocados and and when I checked this morning, my one and only cactus was definitely dead.  True story. 

I was born in 1986 so I am a millennial, but it has not escaped my notice that this is something of a dirty word in the press and in groups of people that are, I shall politely say ‘predecessors’ of millennials. But I hope in my short reply this evening, that you may see that actually we are no different to any other generation.

Imagine the world today without women’s sufferage, the women who kept the country going and didn’t want to just get back in the kitchen after WW2 ended, the invention of the pill, the Beatles, changes to marriage laws to make the right to marry the person you love equal for all, the people who said this happened to me so we could say metoo! Imagine if we all just listened to those who don’t want change, where would we be? Probably stuck in Robert Burns time, in fact we probably wouldn’t as the average age in Rabbie Burns’ time was 35. So we’d all be ‘deid’ as the Scots would say.

Both as a millennial and a woman, I’m told that ‘we don’t know hardship’, that we’re ‘snowflakes’ who are too easily offended and can’t cope in the real world. Like the generations before us, we’re not always going to get it right. But we want to try. We want to learn from the past and celebrate what is good and improve what isn’t.

My generation has shown me that it is ok to challenge someone who is treating me unfairly due to my gender, to challenge men at work who address me differently because they are being lead by woman. In 2019, this is still a challenge that I face personally and I know theres plenty of others that would say #metoo

My generation has shown me that we still have a long way to go in terms of equality and educates me on how I can use my white privilege to challenge inequality and stand with those that face oppression.

I also see equality in action in my generation, with no better example than my beloved parkrun. Whether I’m running or volunteering the challenges are the same, the expectations are the same and I’m not treated differently because of my gender or anything else for that matter. It is one of the most positive parts of my week, largely for these reasons. I believe that one day the rest of my week will catch up.

The desire to grow, make positive change and our world a better place doesn’t belong to millennials, it belongs to us all.

I hope that my reply has give you a little smashed avocado on toast for thought. They say the future is female, but I like to think the future is us all. Men, we need you. We need you to cheer us on from the sidelines, love us and support us and we need to do the same for you. A toast to the wonderful laddies in our lives, may we know them, raise them and love them.  

Happy Burns Night

Best wishes

Holly

x

#hollyruns10002k18

(Almost) a new year and time for a new running challenge!

I tend to do some kind of running challenge every other year, 2014 was running the London Marathon, 2016 was running every day and 2018 will be running a total of 1000 miles for the year (yikes).

I've been thinking about where I can take my running next and I had a few ideas. However when a couple of #ukrunchat friends said that they were thinking of doing 1000 miles and asked if I fancied joining them, it lit a small but wild fire in my running soul and I knew quite quickly that it was the right challenge for me. 

I'm also going to be raising a few pennies for Stevenage Haven along the way so my challenge benefits not only myself but others too. Haven is a homeless hostel in Stevenage that I had the pleasure of visiting a couple of weeks a go through work. It was a particular moment I had there that confirmed that I needed to take on this challenge and do some fundraising. I won't be sharing my experience here but I'm happy to discuss it individually with you if you're interested. 

If you're interested in following my progress, the best place to find me is on Instagram and Twitter, I'm @ohhollygosh on both. 

If you can spare any pennies and would like to see 2017 out with a good deed my fundraising page is: 

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/hollyruns10002k18

Thank you and best wishes for 2018...here goes!

Holly

xx

Westminster one week on

This time last week I was in Westminster, this isn't an unusual place for me to be as the organisation I work for's head office is based there. But last week, on the 22nd March I was there when the attacks took place outside the Houses of Parliament.

I want to start by saying that I was fortunate enough not to be involved in or witness the attacks, but being in the vicinity affected me in a way that I still can't describe but more deeply than I thought it would. I wanted to write this blog post to remind myself of how I felt that day. 

However, one week on the shock has subsided and I have made my way through what I can only describe as the 'fog' that I was floating in in the days following the attack. I've been sitting here, fingers poised at the keyboard ready for the words to come out as freely as they did last week. But they won't. In the days following I found it difficult to simply just 'carry on as normal', but my Britishness has caught up with me and whilst this has helped me look forward it isn't helping me with what I set out to do.

After sitting here for a while I remembered an email that I'd sent to BBC Radio London the day after. I don't normally listen to Radio London but my Mum does and she told me that they were speaking about the attacks all day the following day. You may think its strange to want to keep going back to an event that was so unpleasant, but hearing others talk about it felt comforting and made me realise that it was ok to feel as deeply as I did. It compelled me to write in to Jo Goode's show with my experience to remind others that it was ok to feel however they felt, even if they weren't directly involved. It felt odd at first and I spent an hour or so deliberating over whether I should, but I did and I'm glad. My email got read out on the show, which you can can listen to BBC iPlayer for the next 24 days (my email is read out about 1 hour and 25 minutes into the show).

So I hand over to my last week's self, she can articulate what I wished to say much better than I can:

Hi Joanne,

I live and work in Hertfordshire but was working in Westminster yesterday in my organisation's head office which is round the corner from where the attacks took place.

I was fortunate enough not to witness or be involved in the attacks but to be so close to it and see such horrific events take place somewhere where you visit frequently has shaken me considerably. I walked past Westminster Bridge and The Houses of Parliament on my way to work and was in the area on my lunch break an hour prior to the attacks

I can't stop thinking about PC Keith Palmer and the fact that I probably walked past him a couple of times that day, both of us with no idea of what was to come. Thinking of PC Palmer, Aysha Frade and the others that lost their lives, are critically injured and their families has moved me to tears many times over the last 24 hours and I'm finding it difficult to carry on as normal.

I have felt silly at times feeling so affected by something I wasn't directly involved in, but to those who are also feeling like me. There is no shame in feeling compassion and loss for your fellow human beings. Compassion, kindness and love are what makes us good human beings.

My heart goes out to the people that have lost their lives, their families and those who are still fighting for their lives and my gratitude goes out to the emergency services who looked after us all yesterday and every day. It reinforces my opinion that first aid should be taught as standard in schools and is a skill that we should all have. Inspired by MP Tobias Ellwood I will be renewing my first aid certificate.

Many thanks and have a great day

Holly Finnigan 

As I said in my email to the show I did feel silly and even not 'entitled' to feel how I did. But I know that I'm right and that compassion, kindness and love are what makes us good human beings and we should all strive to live these values in our day to lives, even if others do return it.

I know that the 22nd March 2017 will stick with me for the rest of my life and my heart goes out to all those whos lives have changed forever as a result of that day.

Holly

x

March Goals

I was inspired to write this post by Essbeevee's Sarah's Instagram post this morning about making some March goals.

I have quite a few goals this year, some I've started and are ongoing and some I'm yet to start. Looking at them on paper, its quite an overwhelming overview of things I want to achieve this year. So inspired by Sarah I have decided to break them down month by month starting today (how is it already 1st March?!)

I've broken them down into personal and work and have limited them to 3 each to keep them SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound, those who work in care will know what I'm on about here ;) I'm only going to list my personal ones here though, because lets face it they're more interesting and no one wants to hear about my paperwork woes.

Personal

• Listen to one new band - I used to be so in to music in my early twenties and LOVED going to see live music. Its not that I've lost my love for it, but the older I've got and the more 'adulting' I've had to do and some of my interests changing and growing the more its taken a back seat. Plus also, now I've hit 30 its time to admit that I now purchase seated tickets over standing (comfort all the way folks). However, last weekend I went to see Me First and the Gimme Gimmes which is a band my boyfriend likes. I was feeling a bit non plussed by the whole thing at first, however since they are a covers band and I fancied a bit of a dance I switched my seated ticket to standing ticket and ended up being right at the front with my boyfriend's friend. As much as I didn't enjoy being dragged into circle pits and being squashed I forgot how much fun gigs can be. I'm making it my mission this monthly to properly listen to one new band I've never heard of before.
• Stick to my triathlon training plan - at the end of January I joined a new gym. I'm a runner and love to be outdoors, however I need to get to grips with cycling and swimming more as I'm doing my first sprint triathlon in July (eek) so I joined a gym. The first 3 weeks were great and I was kicking my training plans ass, the last couple of weeks...I've had to be a bit flexible with my working hours so my ass has been getting kicked rather than the other way round. I've also not been getting enough sleep so getting up to go in the morning has, well, sometimes not happened. This month, that will change. 
• Sort out the spare room - I know, *yawn*. We're planning on (fingers crossed) buying a house next year so I'm prepping way in advance by slowly but surely having a good sort out and getting rid of stuff. I know that we will be exchanging our 2 bedroom cottage in town for a tiny 1 bed flat on the outskirts so things need to go to avoid sharing a bed with a shelving units. I'm also trying to make the upstairs spaces a lot nicer, staring with the spare room.

So there we go, a little bit of accountability. I'm hoping that breaking down my goals into bite size chunks will help, I'll let you know how I get on. 

Happy March everyone, do you have any goals for this month? 

Love from

Holly

x

Writing

Back to the start…

(Nearly) 365 days later…

Fast forward a few months...

These are just a few title ideas for this blog post that I had before I settled on one. At what point do you pick up a blog that you haven’t posted on for nearly a year? The last post was when I had just started #hollyruns3652k16 and I’m now only 33 days away from completing it.

I didn’t really plan on blogging about my challenge and I didn’t really have any goals with the blog as a whole as such, but I didn’t plan on it being this long before I posted again.

This year I’ve started reading a lot more than I had done previously. I have always loved to read but as I’m sure anyone with a full time job and other responsibilities can relate, its one of those things that tends to fall by the way side of this thing called life. I’ve been doing my best to make sure I make time for this though. Some months have been harder than others to make sure that I’m making time to pick up a book but I have knocked through some of my reading list.

As I have been reading, my thoughts have also turned to writing. Until right now when I am writing this post, these have just been thoughts. As a child and teenager I always used to write. My friend and I used to write a magazine when we were young and had plenty of time to play and create, then when I got older this turned to writing a journal and eventually an online diary. I’m actually trying to regain access to my online diary from all those years a go, I’m not holding out much hope as we’re talking 10-12 years since I last logged in but I’ve contacted the administrator as it would be great to read it again.

Very boldly for my 16 year old self, I shared my online diary with my friends and a number of them read it and followed suit by starting their own. On the one hand its seems strange that as a 16 year old I was happy to share some of my innermost thoughts and what was going on with my life with my friends and strangers, something I don’t always feel comfortable doing now so publically as a 30 year old. But the internet and social media (which wasn’t even a thing then) has changed so much that it seems quite a scary and alien concept to share the sort of information that I used to.

I never fell out of love with writing but my feelings for it definitely changed. I did a degree in English and was very much made to feel like I needed to write in a certain way, and of course about certain things to meet the criteria of my course. I guess it just became a bit of a chore and once my degree came to an end and I didn’t need to write anymore, I just stopped. It wasn’t intentional but it happened. For me, university wasn’t the most positive experience of my life and I got used to hiding how I felt about a lot of things. I’d stopped sharing in real life so I stopped sharing online, I also didn’t want to acknowledge that a lot of the time I wasn’t having as much fun as everyone else or feeling about university experiences how everyone else felt and wanted me to feel. I felt that ‘if I didn’t write it down, it wasn’t true’ so my online diary stopped when I was about 20.

I regret that I stopped using the written word to document my life but I compensated with photographs, another medium I want to include more in my life next year.  

Whilst I don’t think I would share to the level that I used to before, I would like to start writing again and its definitely on my list of goals for 2017. I’m not entirely sure what it will look like at the moment, but I read a lot of blogs and I have some ideas about what I want to mine to look like. Last night I read some of my past blog posts and I enjoyed it, so if I enjoyed it I can only hope that maybe others will to (though its not my main reason for writing a blog).

I’ve written this post over the last 20 minutes and the words have flowed easily. I have felt how I want to feel when I write so I’m hoping that this is a positive start. Fingers crossed for 2017.

Holly

x

Holly Runs 365 2k16

So, 2015 wasn't my greatest year of running. I completed the London Marathon in 2014 and it was one of the biggest achievements in my life. However since London I felt I'd achieved my goal that I'd worked for 3 years to get to and I struggled to stay focused as I didn't know what was next.

I spent a lot of 2015 wondering what my next challenge could be and it came to me a few days before the new year. 

I know I can train for a marathon but I don't know if I can run every day for a year. I needed a new challenge and now I have one, run a minimum of a mile every day for a year.

Can I do it? Well if there's 366 vlogs at the end of 2016 then I'll know I've got there. Its Day 13, I'm  25.4 miles in and doing pretty good so far.

I'll be doing 1-2 minute vlogs every day to document my year, come along with me? Follow along here.

Happy 2016 and Happy Running! 

Holly

x

Its December the First

Happy First of December!

Yes I am one of those people! December is officially here so my family, friends, colleagues and especially my boyfriend can no longer tell me off for being festive. I've been window shopping all the Christmas decorations and drinking all the coffee shop's festive drinks since the end of October but now it is well and truly an acceptable time to crack out the Christmas jumpers and turn up Michael Buble. 

I absolutely love December 1st and always try to make sure I have something fun and festive to look forward to on the day. As you read this I will be on my way to a conference for work in London. As snoozy and unfestive as that sounds, I've actually really been looking forward to it as its a day of showcasing all the wonderful work that people in the organisation do and seeing people being recognised for what they have achieved (and of course, free lunch). I also get to see some lovely colleagues from other parts of the business that I haven't seen for a while and we're all going to go out for drinks after the conference. So all in all a happy happy day.

And just incase you need to kick start your festive cheer, here a picture of my Mum's Christmas tree that I helped her to decorate yesterday...

And a super cute little tipple of sherry (mandatory when decorating Christmas trees) with the glittery Christmas lights...

Whether today is a normal day, you give it a nod by opening the first door on your advent calendar or you go full on Slade and Christmas jumpers, I hope it is a great one for you!

Holly

x