I’ve always been someone who documents everything — flight tickets, receipts, scribbled notes, cards — all stuck into scrapbooks alongside photos. I love being able to look back and feel exactly how I felt in those moments.


One of those first scrapbooks made it all the way home from New Zealand — a 5kg chunk of paper and memories that I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind. As a broke backpacker, paying to ship it home felt ridiculous… but also completely necessary.


That scrapbook became more than just photos. It was a diary. A record of the people I met, the things we did, and the way those days felt at the time. Before I had left, my best friend and I had written a list of things we wanted to do before we turned 30 — and that list lived in those pages, slowly being ticked off. One of them was a skydive which I did in the incredible Bay of Islands, I actually still have a few more things to tick off from that list!


Coming home after that trip was hard. But I promised myself I wouldn’t stop chasing those moments — that I’d keep travelling, keep documenting, keep collecting pieces of life.


A year later, I met my husband. One of our early trips together was to Morocco, where — thanks to an Instagram hashtag — a travelling photographer reached out and offered us a free photoshoot. I was a bit dubious, but I’ve always been more of a ‘let’s just see what happens’ person (which, incidentally, is also how we ended up with our second dog).


We went for it, and it turned out to be one of those unexpectedly perfect experiences, we had so much fun as you can probably tell from the photo of my very excited face! We still have those photos up in our home now, and every time I look at them I remember exactly how that trip felt — the laughter, the light, the novelty of it all.

Around that time, I’d been given a DSLR. I didn’t really know what I was doing with it, but I tried — photographing bits of everything, without much direction.


I’ve made scrapbooks for other people too — putting together one for a friend’s wedding, carefully piecing together moments that mattered to them in the same way mine mattered to me.


And in our home, we’ve slowly built a gallery wall filled with photos and prints from different points in our lives. Not perfect ones — just ones that mean something.


It’s always been there, this instinct to keep, to document, to hold onto moments. Looking back, it’s strange how often this has shown up in my life without me fully noticing it.


Life happened. Nine years passed in what feels like a blur — buying a house, getting married, adopting two dogs, and working in the NHS through job changes, burnout, COVID, and everything in between. I picked up my camera here and there, mostly to capture moments like my husband’s mountain bike races or my dogs, but it was never consistent.


Until this year.


Something shifted. It felt like a quiet but persistent question I couldn’t ignore anymore: Why am I not doing what I actually want to be doing?


I’ve asked myself often what I’d be doing if I wasn’t a nurse — but this time it felt different. Less hypothetical, more urgent. I needed to be doing something creative.


So this is me, picking up my camera again. Not as a professional (yet), not as someone who has it all figured out — but as someone who’s always loved documenting life, and wants to take that a little further.


Maybe this blog is just another scrapbook.


Just a digital one this time.