Let’s get the explanation out the way first, Cilla Reviews was destroyed by a spam comment and my lack of understanding of my hosting. Simple as that. Every post was lost because I thought they existed on WordPress in the same way that posts do on Tumblr for example. Turns out I was wrong and years of work went down the pan.

It’s taken me almost a year to get back on here and create something new. There is something quite devastating about seeing something you loved doing, something you considered to be your ‘other job’ completely disappear. I was angry at myself for not saving my posts and writing them directly on the editor and I was angry at the hosting company for trying to extort money from me to get it all back. I did manage to collect together snippets from google cache and when I’m back into the swing of this I’ll probably put together a little archive of what I rescued. Until then, this is a fresh start and a lovely new domain name as a Christmas present to myself.

People always asked me where the ‘Cilla’ bit came from, and it’s a strange mash up of an old school librarian calling me ‘Cilla Black on acid’ after seeing a rather rough photo of me and it was my old myspace name. I realised recently that if I want to blog at 25, I can’t use my myspace name. I just can’t take it seriously anymore. I use my full name for many things, and I love that my wonderful Nanny Helen’s full name is in there so from now on, my online presence will no longer be a ‘brand’, it will be Lauren H H Kirk, as in me. Makes sense eh?

A lot of things in my life have changed while I’ve been absent from blogging and I don’t really know where to start in terms of content, all I know is I’m back, my fingers are flying and I can’t wait to get stuck in.

So please bear with me while I find my feet again…and my knife and fork.