Greetings and Salutations!

The Nicer Life, you say, what's the point of that? Why not...the awesome, amazing life of fabulousness? Then it would just be rude to have a blog shouting about it. Why not The Perfect Life? Well, because, for starters, that would be immensely dull. Why not The Good Life? A bit pious, for me. Plus we don't have enough space in the back garden (okay, we don't have a back garden) for a goat, more's the pity. Why not The Happy Life? Being happy...is nice, but it's actually quite hard work, being happy all the time, and harder still trying to explain/justify it. The Nicer Life, then, what's that? I'm going with "making a few things a bit better wherever possible". That's the plan. Highlighting the good bits, so that the bad bits pale away.

'Nice' strikes me as a much-maligned word. 'Nice is boring', people say. No, no, people are boring. Nice means nice. That's better than boring, and more interesting than a slap in the face. Tea is nice. Given how much of my life is spent drinking all kinds of tea, it would be weird if I didn't embrace the niceness of tea.

So, here, I intend to make notes on the nice things. The good bits. The things that smooth the rough edges of life, the things that make me smile, the things that don't make me angry. It won't be all running across the sand and cupcakes, although I won't lie, these things are shiny.

This isn't my first blog, but it is the first one I've decided to do without a fandom, without any intent, just...for me. For fun. For the nice things in the world.

Now, I'm just going to go and watch the Champions' League Final, with Nice Thing #1 - my David Beckham duvet, a present from one of my old housemates, and Nice Thing #2 - a good glass of wine.

The sky has been so grey today, there's no sunset, which would've counted as Nice Thing #3, so instead, here's a picture of one, from a long time ago, that I love.