ABOUT

Blogging life started for me in June 2004 after I went on a bad, but very funny date. I found myself awake at 5am the following morning, unable to settle back to sleep and for some strange reason I remembered an article I’d read about blogging in The Observer a few months before, pulled out the clipping, and ten minutes later I had a blog, Tired of Men (I no longer write this blog) and other things that drive a twenty-something around the twist. I used my dating angst, tales of living in London, and my own journey in personal growth to inadvertently inspire readers and in September 2005, fuelled by support from readers, I started Baggage Reclaim, a dating and relationship blog where I use my own experiences and the lessons I’ve learned to help people offload their own baggage and discover themselves.

I found love in 2006 and life has fast forwarded since then as we have two little girls and have moved to suburbia. In May 2006, I started Bambino Goodies where I curated cool stuff that I’d found to convince me it wasn’t a sea of bland when you have a baby. In January 2008 while on maternity leave, I left my job as a major accounts manager for one of the biggest technology publishers in the world and decided to make the leap to blogging full time.

Roll forward to August 2009, and I have a personal readership of just over 240K unique users a month reading Baggage Reclaim, Bambino Goodies, and Nest Goodies (interiors and homewares inspiration). While I do generate some income from advertising, it’s publishing several ebooks and people hiring me privately to help them that has enabled me to make a very decent living from blogging. As I move into getting my books into hard copy on Amazon, launching speaking events, and of course publishing more ebooks as well as the multitude of things I do on a day-to-day basis, I’ve consolidated my blogging and decided to make this my personal and hopefully inspiring vehicle for my work and life tales.

I live in Caterham Surrey, with ‘the boyf’ who works in IT, our 3 year old ‘the bambino’, Saria, and our 1 year old Nia aka Grace Jones (child has att-i-tude!). I’ve appeared in various newspapers, Red and Marie Claire, have guest posted for Cosmopolitan.co.uk and am a regular guest on Sky News.

Even though I don’t use my original blogging name NML as much, lots of people still refer to me as that!