Vote (X) Only Once

I’ve reached the point where it feels weird not to mention the Referendum.

Actually, I’ll be honest: it’s felt weird for MONTHS now.

The truth is, although this is, for the most part, a light-hearted look at my life through fashion, beauty and all of the frivolous things that fill my head most of the time (I mean, there were GNOMES. In my garden. HOW?), those aren’t the ONLY things that fill my head, and I would hate for you to think that they are.  And while I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly political person, this referendum is hugely important to me, and, of course, to my country. It could change EVERYTHING.

Today, Scotland will decide whether or not it should become an independent country. Tomorrow I could wake up in a different world. All of a sudden, that outfit post I was planning to publish feels almost like a lie by omission. I would press publish on that post, and you’d see me rattling on about shoes and clothes, and what you wouldn’t realise is that I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about little else but today, and what it might mean. That I have literally lost sleep over it. That I’ve written and re-written this post about twenty times now, and that I’m still not even sure I’m going to publish it: never talk about religion or politics, huh?

So today I won’t post about fashion, or makeup, or any of those things. I also won’t post about the referendum itself, as much as I want to. I actually DID write a post about it a few weeks ago, but, having given it a lot of thought, and talked it through with Terry, I came to the conclusion that our business, of which this blog is a part, is not the place for politics, and especially not for arguing about politics, which is what I suspect any post on the subject will descend into.  But at the same time, this is important to me, and I want to acknowledge that.

It bothers me that, by reading my blog, you might be encouraged to think that there isn’t a thought in my head outside of shoes and dresses: there is, and although the focus of this blog has been very fashion-centric over the last couple of years, it is, first and foremost, a diary, and an attempt to tell the story of my life through snippets of words and pictures. I can never give you the FULL story, but I can at least give you a more rounded version of it, and this is it. A lot of my readers have told me they like it when bloggers (and fashion bloggers in particular), step away from the shiny surfaces and staged photoshoots and provide a glimpse of their “real” selves.

So this is me. I’m Amber. I love shoes and dresses, and tonight I’ll sit up until the small hours, waiting for the results to come in on the most important vote I’ll ever participate in.  And more than anything, I hope that after today, how everyone voted will be less important than how we all move forward, and learn to respect  and tolerate each other’s different beliefs. I don’t know about you, but I think that would be the biggest – and best – change of all.

 

Photo by Alex Azabache on Unsplash