Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  For some weird reason, for the past year, I've been really getting into watching detective series. It started off with a bit of Vera on the weekends and then it ended with me getting hooked on watching Line of Duty. I now have four detective series that I can confidently say I have been obsessed over and they are: Vera, Sherlock, Wallander, and Line of Duty. Why I've suddenly gotten into this series is beyond me. Maybe I just find the process of solving murder mysteries really cool, or maybe I just find this particular area of the police force really interesting, I really don't know. However, what I do know is, they are very addictive to watch and if you're stuck on what to watch during lockdown, I would definitely recommend watching these detective series.  Wallander is what people like to call, a Nordic Noire and that is because it is quite dark and depressing and it also happens to be a Swedish series. There...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Although I write a lot, there have been many times when I've picked up the pen or the keyboard and have struggled to push out any sort of word. Writer's block can affect even the most experienced of writers and it has the capacity to slow down productivity. Before lockdown had started, I was told to write an essay for English and despite spending the whole weekend attempting to do it, I simply couldn't put pen to paper and any word that I put on the page sounded really rubbish to me. It also really annoyed me because I had a deadline to complete it by and although I tried really hard to complete it, it still wasn't working. Thankfully, on Monday evening after cancelling my French revision to find time, I started to write and I didn't stop. There are usually three key factors that cause writer's block: pressure, fatigue, and fear of failure. If you were to analyse why I got writer's block over that Eng...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  There's a common misconception that in order to become a great dancer, you have to start your training at a very young age. Whilst this definitely makes it easier to ensure that you're an advanced dancer later in your training, like many other things, it's not impossible to be something great starting a little later. Many dancers who do start late, are often self-taught and in my opinion, they can often be more outgoing than the trained dancers you see. This is mostly because self-taught dancers have to work a little harder to get noticed, whilst trained dancers have been introduced to the dance setting ever since they were young. One famous self-taught dancer is Matt Steffanina, who began teaching himself how to dance at 13 years old and now has a successful YouTube channel, where he showcases his dances. To me, dancers like him show that anything is possible, if you've got the right mindset and work ethic. I al...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I think that there's a lot of things that people appreciate more because of quarantine. One of the things that I've noticed more people are doing is going on walks. Behind my house there's a small wooded area and a public footpath, which used to be empty when me and my family went on walks about a few months ago. Now people walk down the path all the time and are trying to avoid each other. I've also noticed that people are in the kitchen more and parents are baking more with their children to desperately keep them occupied. That was probably one of the reasons why my mum couldn't find flour at Tesco or Booker, the wholesaler where you can buy things in bulk. I did find it a bit bizarre that nothing was in Booker because it is only for businesses but maybe flour is just in demand. I think that people appreciate reading as well because it provides escapism from the current situation. I've finished reading...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I would say that I really enjoy travelling, even if it can be quite exhausting at times. When I went on my history trip to Berlin in year 10, I definitely found the 16 hour coach journey there quite strenuous, as did many other people on the coach. However, I'm really glad I went because it was a great and memorable experience and it pushed me out of my comfort zone. That is why I try to encourage as many people as I can to start travelling because it definitely strengthens you as a person. You don't necessarily have to go far; you could even go on a small road trip with your friends. But taking the time to try something new makes you more confident and self-assured in other phases of your life. I think this is why I've really enjoyed watching the second series of Race Across The World because it encompasses all the great things about travelling and seeing the world. If you haven't already heard of Race Across Th...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I know that there are some schools who offer online materials like live follow-along sessions, in order to keep dancers on track and to provide people with routine and structure in their daily lives. My studio are installing purchasable online videos from our instructors, for people to use if they would like to continue practising during quarantine. However, with our amazing advances in technology, it's easy to remain on track in other ways. A quick search on YouTube will provide you with all the resources you need. Popular YouTubers like Claudia Dean and Anna McNulty post many follow-along stretching routines and dance exercises. I'm not ballet trained but I like doing some of Claudia Dean's barre exercises, as she offers them at many different levels (beginners,intermediate,and advanced). It's a good opportunity for me to get better at something that I don't usually do and it's only going to better my d...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Despite all the negative media stories around Covid-19: the collapse of businesses, the increase in death rates, and the number of people who seem to be treating this crisis as a holiday, I can also say that people have been doing really positive things to help the cause and I think it's just as important to reflect upon that.  One example of this effort, particularly around our gratitude towards the NHS, were the millions of people across the nation who got involved in clapping for the 1.5 million workers on the frontline. I didn't realise just how effective this simple act of kindness would be until one nurse was moved to tears. "We heard you loud and clear," said one nurse at Nuneaton hospital.  The Telegraph However, it wasn't just the clapping that showed our increased gratitude for these amazing workers. Many people have individually gone out of their way to raise money for their service. ...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I think that ever since I was little, I've always wanted a pet of some kind. However it was never really possible because at the time I was probably asking my parents, we didn't have our extension done on the house so it was probably too small and my sister had allergies so a pet probably wouldn't have been suitable for her either. Consequently we've always pondered on the idea of getting chickens. This would be great for us since we have a big garden and although they're animals, they don't live in the house like a pet. However, one big drawback that has affected many chicken owners are the foxes. We've never had a fox step into our garden before but since we do live by a field, I'm sure that the lure of potential food won't stop them from coming in. However, my dad has come up with an idea which entailed putting big heavy bricks underneath the main frame and some broken glass, to ensure that...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Firstly, I would like to thank you for watching my recent dance video on Instagram. It was the routine to Riptide by Vance Joy that I talked about earlier and it has got over 200 views and a great amount of support. If you have not yet seen it, I'll link it below so that you can watch it. However on the same day as filming this video, me and Alice (my sister), decided to watch Dianne Buswell's dance video on IGTV. If you don't know who Dianne Buswell is, she's an amazing professional ballroom dancer on Strictly Come Dancing and she came up with an excellent dance. It was a commercial routine to Dua Lipa's song, Physical. I find learning dances off of videos quite difficult because the left and rights are switched around but for this video, I managed to pick up the routine quite quickly. It was quite fast-paced but once you picked up the beat, it was really fun to dance. I like it when you've learned a danc...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  After watching Louis Theroux's documentary on autism, there's one question that kept popping to mind. How much do we actually understand about our brain? In the documentary, Louis visited autistic children at an education centre as well as some families who had autistic children, across many different parts of the spectrum. One teenager called Niki, was acting like a normal child up until 18 months old when he stopped crawling and talking. This was when he was diagnosed with autism. He was non-verbal up until the age of six when he miraculously began talking again and from there, he actually became more sociable. Although he has a twin sister, he was the only one diagnosed with autism. However, his family were very supportive of him and believed that autism was just part of his character. Although the way Niki spoke was different to the way other people spoke, I was truly amazed at how confident he was in speaking to oth...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  It was the beginning of the Easter holidays and regardless of whether or not we were in quarantine, I was ready to relax a little bit. So me and my sister Alice, decided to watch a movie outside. However, we couldn't really see the screen very well so my dad proposed that we build a tent so that we could watch the movie. The last time I built a tent, we were on a camping holiday and I'm pretty sure that I had to ask my dad for help. That camping holiday always seems to bring fond memories because the first campsite we booked was right next to a road and it was really rubbish. However, we managed to find a second campsite by this big farmhouse and a field and it was brilliant. We ate porridge and bacon sandwiches by the fire and although it was simple, it was a holiday to remember. Now it was time for us to build the tent again and we surprisingly succeeded. Aside from the fact that I read step 3 on the instructions first...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Last week, I watched Billy Elliot with my family. This was one of those many dance films that I've wanted to watch for a while but I've never had the chance to. Now that I'm 15, I guess I can handle a bit of the bad language. To be fair, there was quite a lot of swearing in the film but aside from that, the story was still really good and quite funny. It's about a boy called Billy, who sees this group of ballet dancers at the gym, whilst he's practicing boxing, and he becomes inspired to start dance. It's quite funny because his dad was expecting him to continue doing boxing and suddenly on one occasion, he walks into the gym and sees his son doing ballet and is just completely enraged by it. However, what I think I liked the most about the film was the representation of a dancer's sacrifice to become something big. In the film, Billy does not come from a rich family background, in fact his mother die...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I watched Steve Backshall's Blue Planet Live, with my family on Monday evening. I wasn't sure what the documentary would be about but I found it quite interesting because in this episode of the series, Steve was talking a lot about Sharks and why we should respect them. Respect means that we shouldn't fear sharks even if they're a top predator in the ocean and it also means that we should protect their population and the habitat that they live in. Since some of my family are Japanese, I understand some of the traditions there are with eating sharks in countries like Japan and China and it does sadden me a lot. Sharks are a vital part of our coral reefs because without them, there would be no balance of species below them and no diversity of species would be maintained as there would also be nothing to balance out the competition. These apex predators are also vital to us because they are indicators of healthy ree...