As anyone will tell you, I'm not overly big on music. However, recently I've been listening to a lot more than I used to, which is mostly down to my new phone being able to access the internet and therefore YouTube. It's also thanks to my amazing friend Elisha recommending some pretty smashing artists, for which I am eternally grateful!

I think I'll put a few videos up every now and then, when I'm short on inspiration, but today I wanted to post some songs from Marina and the Diamond (my latest obsession). Because I'm lazy, here's a bit about her from Wikipedia:

Marina Lambrini Diamandis (born 10 October 1985), better known by her stage name Marina and The Diamonds, is a Welsh singer-songwriter and musician. She rose to fame after reaching number two on the BBC Sound of 2010 poll list, coming second to Ellie Goulding. Diamandis' musical style ranges from keyboard-based ballads to more up-tempo new wave-style songs with full band backing. Her stage name consists of Diamandis' first name and the translation of her surname, which means "Diamonds" in Greek.

Here are my three favourite songs of hers:

Despite only starting this blog less than a week ago, I seem to have already neglected it slightly... However I do have a good reason for this - I've been staying with family in the UK, and I've been getting up to all sorts of vaguely interesting things. But the most exciting thing has definitely been getting my typewriter! I'd spent months lusting after a few different models on eBay, but then a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy one - this proved tricky for reasons which I won't go into, but I eventually managed to get my uncle (a seasoned eBay pro) to do the ordering part for me. It was waiting for me when we arrived, and oh, is it beautiful!

As I explained in my last post, this week I found myself trying to regenerate a vintage ice cream van as part of my journalistic duties while working for a magazine. The van was a 50s model, and located in a rather dingy garage in the centre of Brussels.

For these past two weeks, I've been working at an English magazine based in Brussels for work experience, as I'm interested in going into journalism. It was fantastic to see how the company worked, even though I spent a lot of time fiddling about aimlessly on my laptop, trying to find things to do - but I still learnt a lot and had a great time. On Wednesday I saw a very different side of the company, however, as the publisher has recently bought a vintage ice cream van to use in an advertising campaign for the magazine, and he took me and the other intern along to an old, slightly dingy garage where it's parked - our job was basically revamp it ready for an event this coming weekend.

The van is a seriously vintage 1950s model, with all the original gizmos and in full working order. However it was absolutely covered in stickers showing ice cream prices, so we spent two afternoons peeling all those off after blasting them with a hairdryer for about 5 minutes first. Then we scrubbed the paintwork inside and outside with white spirit to get rid of the gluey marks that were left behind. It was quite messy work, but the end result was immensely satisfying!

This is what the van looked like after one day's effort. There were still quite a lot of stickers left on, but originally all the windows were plastered with them.

This is the first post on my new blog! It's all very exciting, as I've been wanting to start a blog for quite some time now, and today I finally decided to take the plunge and get started. This is going to be a personal blog, where I post anything and everything I feel like, which may include book reviews, hauls, my opinions, extracts from my writings and more. I very much doubt I'll get many followers, but I'm not doing this with that in mind - I just love the idea of having my own space on the internet where I can post whatever I want.

You might be wondering why I chose the name 'Raindrops in the Ashes' for my blog - well, I haven't really got a valid reason, just that I thought up a few different ones and most of the rest were taken.

I'm not new to blogging by any means - I've been contributing to my friend's Stardoll blog, The Brunettes of Stardoll, for about eight months now, and before that we had another blog together. I follow tons of blogs on Blogger, mostly fashion-related but a few others.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to blogging in the near future!