My Mum has told me off twice this week.

I just turned 29. Can you even still get told off by your Mum at 29? Apparently so.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I got told off, it’s why. She told me off because I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been sharing photos. And she told me she misses not just the contact, and the knowledge of what I’m doing all the way over here on the other side of the world. She actually just misses my writing.

This makes me sad. And frustrated. And all the other things you feel when you just can’t get out of your own way.

This year has, I think we can all agree, been an absolute cluster fuck of epic proportions. Prince died. Snape died. David Bowie died. People killed each other in the midst of a global consciousness that seems to be veering increasingly towards ignorance and hate. And then the British and US populations collectively lost their fucking minds and we now have Theresa May in charge of Great Britain, Donald Trump in charge of the free world, and a UK that is Brexiting, messily.

It is sometimes hard to feel like you have anything of value to say in a world that looks like this. Personally, this has been a year of huge change and challenge and general future-forming decision making, most of which hasn’t made me motivated to sit down and write the way that I write. And on top of that, does anyone really want to hear about the self-induced hardships of being robbed twice this year and having some tough travel months and the huge changes in outlook that are going on in my little life when there’s such big scary stuff going on in the wider world?

Well apparently some people do, my Mum amongst them. And actually, it was them I started writing this blog for in the first place, so write I shall. And hopefully some of the rest of you few thousand lovely people that are still visiting my overly wordy, slightly navel-gazing corner of the internet each month will enjoy a moment of escapism, or just a nice 10 minutes of drinking a cup of coffee and reading about far-away lands rather than Trump’s bloody wall.

So, changes are afoot. There’s going to be more long-form travel stories, the kind that I really love to write. They won’t be chronological, probably, because I’ve learned that I’m not a very chronological person. There’s going to be more photo diaries, more food, and more city guides. There’ll be some new stuff, about digital-nomading (can we use that as a verb yet?) and freelancing from the road as I continue to grow my graphic design business whilst living in a camper van in New Zealand (I know. All the best with that, right?)

And there’s going to be a makeover. I’ve outgrown the current format I think, and having spent the second half of this year developing brands for all kinds of exciting creative businesses, my blog is inevitably starting to look a little less fresh than I’d like it to. So I’m going to be working on a redesign over Christmas and the beginning of 2017, and will be relaunching for a fresh start in January.

A fresh start, a renewed passion, and a shift in focus. Seems fairly apt doesn’t it, after the year we’ve had? And perhaps the important thing is to find in a bad situation the motivation for change, rather than the fatalistic outlook that leads to doing nothing. The world is hard and scary sometimes, so do the things that are important.

Protest. Speak up. Write. And make your Mum happy.