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Hello again everyone, and welcome to today’s post. Throughout this month, I’ve been talking about my goals for 2018. This week I want to focus on what I hope to achieve with this blog over the coming year, starting today with the number of views I would love to get. I have split this into three separate goals. BREAK MY MONTHLY VIEWS RECORD For a long time my best month in terms of views was October 2015 with 772. Last October, that record was broken when I hit 802 in that month. Now, I want to break that record again at some point this year. In fact, due to the large number of posts I have put up this year already, that record may be about to fall by the end of this month which would be UNBELIEVABLE! BREAK MY YEARLY VIEWS RECORD Another of my personal records that I want to break in 2018 is my overall yearly views. At this stage, 2016 has been my best year with 4,246. So, I guess my aim would be to have over 5,000 views on this page in 2018 to break t...

Hello again everyone, and welcome to Music Monday. It’s the start of a brand-new week, and it’s a long way til Friday so I’m here to lighten up your Monday with 10 songs I’m listening to right now. EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED – Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran I know everybody’s talking about their new song End Game released this week, but I love their first collab from back in 2014. WILD ONES – Flo Rida ft Sia This song reminds me of the summer when I finished Sixth Form. It was playing everywhere that year. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY – Katy Perry PLAY HARD – David Guetta ft Ne-Yo and Akon STOLE – Kelly Rowland MORNING AFTER DARK – Timbaland ft Nelly Furtado and SoShy LOVE LOCKDOWN – Kanye West A THOUSAND MILES – Vanessa Carlton This is such a fantastic track and definitely one I would put under the category of “feel-good”. I always feel better after listening to this. MERIDIANS – Greyson Chance Remember the kid on Ellen who performed Lady Gaga’s Pap...

Hello again everyone. It’s Friday again which means it’s time to recap the last seven days. Welcome to This Week. 12,000 views Even after nearly three years of this blog, the number of views I get and the milestones I reach still surprise me. Thank you again for supporting me and my content, whether you have been here from the beginning or are reading this for the first time. End of the F***ing World This is a new show I watched this week on Netflix and it is GOLD! I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll just say it is about a young guy called James who thinks he might be a psychopath. He meets a girl and they end up going on this wild journey together to get away from their dead-end town. It is so good and I urge you to watch it if you can. A post I put up this week Wednesday’s post this week was all about my quest to be confident enough in my body that at some point this year, I would be topless in public. I wanted to mention this in my review...

Hello again everyone. Today I wanted to talk about another of my biggest goals for 2018. I WANT TO GO TO CANADA Two years ago today (January 11 th ) I went to live in France for a couple of months. Ever since then, I have been desperate to go and live abroad again. And I have had one destination in mind for a long time – Canada. Here are just a few of my reasons for wanting to move to Canada. I WANT TO LIVE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY AGAIN Having done this once, I realise there is so much of the world to see and I don’t want to live in the UK forever. Why would I want to spend my whole life on this tiny island when there are so many other places to go and spend my time? MY BILINGUALISM I can now speak both English and French with a degree of confidence and skill. I want to be able to use these skills day to day if possible and what better place to do it than in a country where both languages are widely spoken? NATURAL WONDERS I love nature. Canada has some o...

Hello again everyone. Following on from yesterday’s post about learning to swim, I wanted to talk about one of my other goals for this year, which links to it in a lot of ways. I WANT TO GO SHIRTLESS IN PUBLIC Yes, this may seem like a strange goal, but let me explain a bit more about why this is so important for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever gone into detail about this before on this page, but I have a serious lack of body confidence. It has held me back on so many levels, to the point where there are certain things I haven’t done for a long time because my issues with my body have been so severe. One of those is taking my shirt off in public. On hot days, I have simply sweated it out because I was unable to bring myself to show my body to the world. It just gave me such bad anxiety to even think of not wearing my shirt in any public place. What’s worse is that for years I didn’t even realise how bad it was. It’s only the last few years that it’s become ap...

Hello again everyone. Today I wanted to talk about what is perhaps one of my biggest and longest-lasting goals. I WANT TO LEARN TO SWIM I have thought about this a lot and have come up with a list of reasons why I don’t think it’s happened before now and why I have decided that I want to learn now. WHY NOT BEFORE NOW? I wasn’t comfortable in water I think this is perhaps the biggest thing that has held me back over the years, and I’m sure this is the case for a lot of people who can’t swim, both children and adults. For me, water has always been something to fear and I could never quite feel safe enough to stop panicking and focus on learning how to swim instead of how scared I was. Not confident enough in my body I’m not sure if I’ve ever really posted about my body issues online but for a long time they have been so severe that I haven’t wanted to be seen in public without my shirt on or even in a pair of shorts. I’m going to talk about this more in an...

Hello again everyone, and welcome to a brand-new week. It’s time for the first of my new music series, Music Mondays, which is replacing the old Trent’s Tracks. Below I’ve listed the songs I’m listening to right now. TROYE SIVAN AND BETTY WHO – Heaven It seems somehow appropriate to start this new series with the same two artists who kicked off Trent’s Tracks two years ago. Here is their collaboration about the conflict between sexual identity and religion. These two are seriously so talented and keep an eye out for them both as they release new music in 2018. SAM SMITH – Palace I mentioned this song in my 2017 Poem as being my favourite from Sam’s new album The Thrill of it All. He is one of the finest artists of our time and this entire album is fantastic, but I love this track more than any other. ED SHEERAN – Nancy Mulligan What a year 2017 was for Ed Sheeran with his album Divide breaking so many records. This is one of the tracks from that...

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s post. We’ve reached the first Friday of the year which means it’s time for the launch of my new weekly life updates series – This Week. If you want to know what to expect in this series you can check out yesterday’s post where I talked about it in detail . Here’s what I’ve been up to over the last seven days. NEW YEAR New Year is always such a celebratory time for me and I love the idea that no matter what you’ve been through in one year, you have the chance to start again in the new year. You have a chance to do better, feel better, be better. I spent this New Year with friends of mine, only the second time ever that I haven’t celebrated at home with family. At this time of reflecting and being grateful for what I have, I realise how thankful I am to have these friends in my life. They are so kind, supportive, and generally fun to be around. Being with these guys to see in the new year really was a great way to start 2...

Hello again everyone and welcome to today’s post. Today I’m going to introduce you to my new post series which is starting tomorrow. With the music posts moving from Friday to Monday (and changing name) this leaves a space for a new series to take its place on Fridays. So guys, I give you “This Week”. This will be a kind of a mixture of a diary and a life updates series, uploaded (hopefully) each week on Friday talking about the week that’s just passed. I hope that, in conjunction with the day by day My 2018 project this will become an almost complete record of what I’ve done/achieved over the course of this year, as well as allowing me to write about my thoughts and emotions at the end of each week. That is the last of the major changes I am going to be making to this blog in 2018. Of course, there will be other smaller changes along the way which you may notice, like cover art and other new post series which I’ll talk more about in time. That’s it for today....

Hello again everyone and welcome to my 3 rd post of the year. To continue the My 2018 post series, I want to talk about another huge change I am making to this page this year. Since 2016, I have done a music recommendation series called Trent’s Tracks which has been incredible to do. I have added many tracks to this list over the past two years including the fantastic marathon months where I’ve posted a new song every day. However, this year I have decided to change things around a bit. Let me just say to start off with that I am NOT getting rid of my music series, it is merely changing to become something new. Here is a rundown of what’s changing. THE DAY – Instead of being on a Friday, these posts will now be up on a Monday. The only times when it will go up on any other day will be during my marathon months (which I’ll be posting more info about in due course.) THE NUMBER OF SONGS – Rather than the one or two I was recommending before, I will this time be...

Hello again everyone. Today I wanted to talk about something that I have spoken about plenty of times on this page over the last few years – the My Year project. Quick bit of context for those who don’t know – for the past three years I have kept a box on a shelf called My 2015. Over the course of the year I write down all of the positive things that I do or that I experience throughout the year that are positive. I then fold up these pieces of paper and place them into the box, only to be revealed once the year is over. For the first time ever, this project tailed off at the end of 2017 and I didn’t fill it in for the last few months of the year. So, I am now more determined than ever to make the My 2018 project a success. After some careful thought, I have decided to turn the box into a book. It will be sort of like a diary where I can record what happens day by day, and also add any souvenirs/memories of what happened. Already after just one day and one page I have...

Hello again everyone. Happy New Year and welcome to 2018! First off, I want to say thank you for all of your support throughout 2017. At times it was an incredibly difficult year for me personally. A lot went on that I don’t want to go into right now but let’s just say it wasn’t the greatest year of my life. But, at other times it was an absolutely incredible year. I did so much and experienced so much that I will be forever grateful for so a huge thankyou for that. The new year, as ever on this blog, brings with it big changes. There are some new things to look forward to and some old things which are going to be slightly different. I am going to be posting about these changes throughout this week so look out for the posts coming up in the next few days. On top of that I, like a lot of you I’m sure, have come up with a set of resolutions and things I want to achieve by the end of 2018. I have thought long and hard about what my goals, targets, and aspirations are f...