digressica.com

Apologies for the extended radio silence. I haven’t completely disappeared from the airwaves; I just went home to the southern hemisphere for a couple of weeks and was obviously far too busy and important to post, opting instead to carelessly shunt aside my lovingly created blog and indulge in a two-week maelstrom of unseasonal winter sunshine (interspersed with thunderstorms), blurry nights out at beachside clubs (featuring sticky floors and unfriendly bouncers) and vegemite on toast without a trace of irony or patriotism.

If I had actually planned this trip to Oz in advance, I might have been organised enough to drop a post before I left. But alas it was all very last-minute, which to the untrained eye might look like a mildly exotic streak of spontaneity, but actually was more due to a minor nuclear meltdown in some part of my brain that I guess came temporarily unhinged. Danger, Will Robinson!

So my thought process, apparently, was that when life gets you down, when you have a complete mental spazfest and you don’t know how to fix everything up all neat like, the OBVIOUS solution is to flyyyy! Fly, my pretty! Fly away!

Because – derrr – when you come back from your little sojourn, everything will have miraculously fixed itself in your absence. Suffering writer’s block every time you sit down to work on the novel you keep telling yourself you’re writing? Feeling too completely inept to achieve anything at work? Worried that all the social retards at your magical life-changing seminar series are somehow “getting it” while your under-developed brain is just too simple and childlike? Suddenly horribly aware that in the face of overwhelming evidence, you might now consider the existence of God (or Whatever) to be equally as probable as leprechauns, garden fairies and anybody ever solving the world food crisis? Shocked and appalled that for once you’re just not getting every single bratty little thing you want? And any number of other fairly insignificant problems that your inner drama queen has blown up to ten times their original size, like horrible paralysing sea monkeys?

Well, have I got a solution for YOU!

Yes, the logic astounds. So needless to say I came back to London (quite happily) to find that not only was my life and everything in it exactly the same as when I left two weeks earlier, but there was actually nothing particularly wrong with it in the first place.

Huh. How ‘bout that.

I have no theories behind this minor life event. It remains a mystery, like the Bermuda Triangle or Pete Doherty’s enduring fame.

So because I have been away from this thing for so long, I am burning up – BURNING UP! – with things to talk about, and I shall begin with

The Paralympics
Does this festival of differently-abled athletics seem a little… patronising? I’m genuinely asking, because I can’t decide how I feel about it all. What is the point of the Paralympics? And because the Paralympics exist, does that mean disabled people aren’t allowed to compete in what I probably shouldn’t call the “fo’ real Olympics”?

A friend of mine was telling me about a girl with only half an arm (well, she had one full arm, and one that was kind of a stump or something. I’m sorry, I have no idea what the PC term for this is, so if anyone can enlighten me, please do) who won gold in some bike riding marathon thing (probably not the official name). Apparently people were saying that if she’d been in the Fo’ Rizzles, she’d have won bronze.

If she’d known this, would she have wanted to bypass the Paralympics and go straight for third place in the Olympics? Would the fact that she was competing against… oh gosh, whatever you call non-disabled people… make it somehow a more significant win?

And knowing that this girl could have kicked most of their arses, how does that make the Fo’ Riz Olympians feel? Perhaps this is why they have to separate the Olympics from the Paralympics. Just in case some stud in a wheelchair decides to get his awesome on and sail into a victory, making all the rest of them feel like utter knobjockeys. Imagine if that girl really had competed in the Olympics and come in third. What a kick in the guts for the winner… she gets the gold medal and STILL has her thunder stolen by Stumpy and her bronze. Tough gig.

Agyness Deyn
In my favourite part of the London Lite – the text column – someone raised a most excellent point this evening. Why is everybody obsessed with Agyness Deyn? It’s not that I don’t think she’s pretty. She’s pretty stunning. I like her eyebrows especially. (I’m not being sarcastic; I really think they are cool.)

But… there just seems to be something of an imbalance between the level of interest in her and the number of interesting things about her. I can only count one – her eyebrows. Well, I guess that’s two.

I’m so confused.

You know who actually IS interesting? Maureen Johnson is interesting. That’s who.

Maureen Johnson
Oh I love her! Love to the power of love. I don’t remember how I came to find her blog one day a few weeks ago, but I am now obsessed with it.

Maureen is a young adult fiction author from New York, and I have not read a single one of her books. I hadn’t even heard of her before accidentally stumbling upon her blog, but I guess now I will have to read some of her work, because she is like awesome made solid. Funny, insightful, genuine and fabulous.

She is so seriously cool, that I’m left pondering why people like Pete Doherty and Agyness Deyn and Amy Winehouse and whoever else is the Train Wreck Du Jour keep getting our attention and print space, when clever and cool people with lots of interesting things to say like Maureen are left to languish in comparative obscurity.

I would like to make it my mission to let people know the radness they are missing out on if they do not read Maureen’s blog and buy her books. I am going to have Maureen Johnson t-shirts made.

Large Hadron Collider
I am super excited about this. I know it’s old news by now, but aren’t you excited still? The day they kicked this baby off, I was refreshing Radio4’s dedicated Big Bang Day website every five minutes. The updates were mostly just things like, “Oh lovely, now we’re all bathing in champagne and our own cleverness, which we’ve managed to turn into liquid because we’re clever scientists, what a marvellous day this has been”, but it was all just so exciting!

In case you have been living under a rock, the Large Hadron Collider is a big ol’ sciencey kinda machine built at CERN, the world’s biggest particle physics lab in Geneva. Its Big Sciencey Destiny is to fire protons around a huge tunnel the length of the Circle Line (a line on the London Underground, for those of you reading this from outside the centre of the universe) at the speed of light, and smash them together to see what sciencey things happen!

And oh, the things that will happen! Not only could they recreate the conditions surrounding the Big Bang, but apparently this machine could do lots of other fun stuff as well. The people in charge have said it could lead to a cure for cancer or bird flu, and maybe even solve the problem of radioactive waste.

I am sure it is far more complicated than the image in my head, but what I imagine (and please don’t ruin this for me with the real sciencey truth, if you happen to know it) is that the protons speeding around the Circle Line, when they smash into each other, will spontaneously burst into things the likes of which we’ve only dreamed of.

Boom! Look, a little tiny universe, with little tiny humans! There’s me! Look how tiny I am!

Boom! Look, a cure for cancer! It says it right there on the label!

Boom! Look, a unicorn! A garden fairy! GOD! There you are! You’re shorter than we expected, but welcome!

It’s a whole new world of possibilities, people, and I for one am going to start planning a new wardrobe.

Today I’ve been working on my little book (I am writing a children’s fantasy novel) and obsessing over villains and how to make them really, really scary. Well, I’ve been obsessing over this question for awhile now actually, as anyone who’s been a victim of my line of villain-related questioning will know.

So here’s what I needs ta know, aiight.

• Who is the scariest villain of all time?
• Why is he or she so damn scary?
• What makes a good villain?
• Is it more important that a villain has a story behind their villainy, or that they are unpredictable?
• Do men make scarier villains than women?
• What’s scarier in a book: the unseen/unknown, or something that’s physically confronting?

These are my scariest keep-me-up-at-night villains:

The Wheelers

Fucking terrifying mofos from Return to Oz, the 1980s sequel to The Wizard of Oz. This film starred a young Fairuza Balk (the scary chick from The Craft) as Dorothy, and presented a MUCH less cheerful vision of Oz than its 1939 musical counterpart. As well as electro-shock therapy performed on children, Return to Oz featured these terrifying creatures with high-pitched giggles who rode around Oz on four wheels attached to their elongated arms and legs, and wore scary long-haired masks on the top of their heads. You knew they were coming when you heard the squeaky-squeaky of their wheels.

My best friend from high school and I used to walk around the empty streets of his neighbourhood late at night freaking each other out with sudden declarations of, “You know what would be super scary right now? If the WHEELERS just came around that corner. OMG. Totally.”

Mombi

Another treat from Return to Oz (obviously this movie has scarred me for life). Mombi was a seriously sinister princess who had a gallery of women’s heads that she had chopped off real women, and she would wear a different head each day.

At one point, just to crank up the creepiness, Dorothy is wandering through the gallery of disembodied heads, all of which are watching her, and comes across Mombi’s real head in a cupboard. She accidentally wakes it up, the head screams “DOROTHY GAAAAAAAALE!” and then the headless body comes lumbering out of the bedroom to fuck Dorothy up. For fucking reals.

The Gentlemen

Can’t even shout, can’t even cry
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors,
They need to take seven and they might take yours.
Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word,
You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.

Okay. Now… imagine that said in a sing-song nursery rhyme kind of way by a little girl. Then imagine silent, gliding skull-faced men in immaculate black suits who have stolen the voices of an entire town and are slowly making their way through it overnight, taking seven hearts out of seven chests.

SO brilliantly creepy, you’d never realise it was a plot from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hey! It won an Emmy, okay?

There are obviously loads of others that I’ve missed, but these are the three that always stand out in my head (and my nightmares).

So who keeps you up at night?

On a sidenote, I came to a cafe in Camden tonight called InSpiral Lounge. I came here for a couple of reasons: a) they have wifi, which I needed since my housemate kicked me out of the apartment for the night and I had an essay to write that needed some research (I know you’re reading this V! I’m only kidding!) and b) they have a nice little quiet downstairs area, perfect for geeking out on your laptop without looking like too much of a tool.

InSpiral is this little place on Camden Lock, opposite the stables. The place is great for internet, guarana truffles, hippies and rockin’ the ganj. (Sorry, I tried to sound cool just then when I’m quite obviously not. It won’t happen again.)

It’s 10:34 pm, and while two hours ago I was peacefully tapping away and devouring my favourite blog of the week, I have suddenly looked up and found myself surrounded by a large, impromptu group of percussionists.

I guess they must assemble here regularly and it is in fact I who have disrupted their chi and not the other way around. This merry band of minstrels consists of one very bad female guitarist-slash-singer, three guys with very loud bongo drums, someone with something that sounds like a kazoo and a surplus of people who seem to be competing as to who can bring the most haphazardly assembled instrument that makes the least musical sound. Plus one guy who can’t seem to decide what he wants to play, and starts singing loudly at random intervals, apparently when he recognises a song he’s heard before or thinks he may know the lyrics to (he doesn’t).

The prerequisite for membership of this band seems to be having dredlocks and either an item of clothing made from hemp or a funny hat. I wonder if they held auditions.

Oh good lord. I just looked around, and I’m actually surrounded. They’ve blocked my exit. What’s a coffee-chugging, capitalism-loving super-consumer to do?

WTF? (That was a rhetorical question.)

Apparently it’s not just London that’s gone loopy. Things are c-c-c-crazy in Kent as well.

This is the third or fourth time that I’ve heard of someone being knocked from a platform onto train tracks (deliberately, accidentally or otherwise) in the last month.

Standing on the underground platform listening to music or writing a text message I used to idly wonder what would happen if I were to drop my phone, iPod or other precious and essential item onto the tracks. The silly thought in my quaint little brain was that if there was no train due for two minutes or so, I could probably just jump down and grab it.

That was until I learned the track is ELECTRIFIED! Oh yes. Like greased lightning. Oh no, that’s electrifying.

Like there weren’t enough things in London to induce mild panic attacks on a daily basis (I’ll make a list some time). Now I have to worry about people pushing me onto electrified train tracks.

When did we decide steam engines were a bad idea? I would be okay with going back to those.

I feel bad about that marathon previous post, so here’s something bite-sized.

In a strange turn of events, the piece of really, really good news I got turned into really, really sad news. And the really, really bad piece of news turned on its head and is dandy once again. I think.

Has anyone been watching Summer Heights High? Chris Lilley is a genius.

WARNING: This is a frickin’ long post. Seriously. Get some popcorn and a couple shots of vodka before you start reading.

I promised a Landmark Forum wrap-up, and here it is. Can’t say I don’t deliver.

To be honest it’s not really what I wanted to write about tonight, and I don’t think it’s going to be wildly entertaining for many peeps. But on the other hand, when I was leading up to my forum weekend I was soaking up every blog post about Landmark I possibly could, whether positive or negative. So I feel like now that I’ve done the forum myself, I should contribute to this dialogue in some way.

Annoyingly, most of the reviews I stumbled upon while I was researching the Landmark Forum had one thing in common – EXTREMISM. (Yes, I used all capitals for that. What of it?) It was either the cheerleaders with their verbal arse-lickings of “OMG! The forum has changed my life! I will never be the same again! The last 45 years of my worthless existence have been completely overwritten! In the immortal words of Yazz and the Plastic Population, the only way is up baby!” or the conspiracy theorists whining “Run! Run away children! It’s a cult! They make you give all your money away and they don’t even let you nick out for a loo break!”

They used a lot of exclamation marks, those damn bloggers.

So anyway, hopefully this will be a more balanced review. I’m going to be completely honest about my experience, but it’s just one girl’s opinion really, so make of it what you will.

For those unfamiliar with the Landmark Forum, the basic facts are that it’s a personal development course that runs over three days in London, around the Mornington Crescent area (and also in many other countries around the world). You’re in a room with around 150 others and one forum leader. My leader was David Ure, who was Australian.

Let’s shoot out some highlights and lowlights.

Highlights

• Watching one annoying woman’s face fall in the first ten minutes of the weekend when the leader called her a jerk and she realised it wasn’t going to be three days of rainbows and group hugging after all. Cop that, bitch.
• Putting together the weird little puzzle of events in my life that have led me to where I am with certain people, and then actually being able to wipe that slate clean for good.
• Realising that one of the most important things to me is having the integrity to keep your promises – no matter how big or small - and finding practical ways to implement that possibility in my life.
• Being told that life is indeed meaningless, and feeling excited about that fact instead of depressed.
• Getting real with myself about the insane interpretations I’ve had of things that have happened, and realising that they’re just that – things that happen – and nothing else.

Lowlights

• This one was pretty key for me. Because I had read so much about the forum and knew what to expect, I got everything David was saying straight away. That was slightly problematic, because I felt that the entire weekend I was “getting” everything on an intellectual level, but not having these amazing “Ah-ha!” emotional moments that it seemed every other person in the room was having. I therefore spent a lot of the weekend worrying that I was missing out on some deeply personal revelation. Don’t do this.
• There was a lot of yelling. (On the other hand, there was a lot of laughing too.)
• There were a lot of annoying new-agey types who just wanted to hug everyone and talk about their feelings a lot during the breaks. I tried to discourage this behaviour by pointedly putting in my earphones whenever anyone wearing wooden beads or a multicoloured headscarf started to sidle my way.
• The hard sell – YIKES. To be honest I don’t know if I’d bother showing up on the last night unless you’re particularly keen to do so. They make a big deal about how you really, really, really, really, REALLY have to come on the last night, and then it turns out they just wanted to recruit your friends and sign you up to the next course. I didn’t get anything else out of the last night, personally.

Just to answer any lingering questions you may have after reading some of the craziness lurking online about the forum, its purpose and its effects, here are some quick FAQ.

Is it a cult?
No. The people who call it a cult are stupid and sensationalist. Calling it a cult makes it sound much more glamorous than it actually is. If I join a cult I expect to be mentally seduced by a charismatic bald guy wearing leather sandals, not called a jerk and told to stop acting like a brat by a middle-aged Australian in glasses and a brown cardigan.

But don’t they take all your money and make you dump your boyfriend and stuff?
I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty damn expensive. Especially when you move into the Advanced Course, the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, etc. But on the other hand, who cares? Obviously the people who do this thing can afford to. They’re not paying for it with three years’ wages from sewing Primark handbags in a sweatshop. If you have the money and inclination, more power to you. You’d only have spent it on cocktails anyway.

There was at least one guy from my forum who dumped his girlfriend during the weekend. He did it over the phone too, while she was still at home somewhere in Eastern Europe – which, just quietly, I thought was a bit shit. But frankly, I think anyone who gets dumped as a result of their partner going to the Landmark Forum was probably going to get dumped anyway. The process just got fast-tracked a little, which is likely for the best. If you’re reading this, Eastern European Dumpee, don’t worry about it. The guy DUMPED YOU OVER THE PHONE. And then he hit on me the next day. And he wasn’t very pretty or interesting. You can definitely do better.

But don’t they use brainwashing techniques like the Koreans used on the Americans after the war or whatever?
Um… no.

Well, they do this thing where they make up really arbitrary rules for the weekend, and you’re expected to make a commitment to follow them. For example, one of the rules is no alcohol or painkillers during the full course of the forum. I definitely took some aspirin on the second day and no form of retribution befell me, so relax.

I’ve seen a lot of blogs where people try to justify this rule as, “Oh, they just want you to keep a clear head, it helps you take in the information better” etc, but actually our forum leader gave no such reasoning, and I don’t believe there was any such reasoning.

My guess is that if you can make someone follow a seemingly pointless rule, and follow it to the letter, unquestioningly… then they’re basically giving themselves over to the whole process and will probably shut off that cynical part of their brain that has to question everything all the time. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing.

Well, actually, it’s probably good. I mean, the thing is, you’ve paid a lot of money to be there, right? You might as well embrace the concept wholeheartedly, even if it’s just for those few days. I wonder if anything I’ve just said makes sense anywhere outside of my own brain.

Don’t they make you recruit all your friends to do it as well? Isn’t it just a big ol’ pyramid scheme?
Yup. That’s marketing, baby. Hey, they’ve gotta make money, they’re not just in this business to make you feel good about your whiny little problems, jackass.

If you’re going to do this thing, you should know that there is a massive push – especially on the final evening – for you to a) bring everyone you know and have them sign up to the next forum, and b) sign up to do the Advanced Course yourself. I didn’t do either of these things. I do actually plan to do the Advanced Course at some point later this year, and I think it will be really fantastic. But I didn’t want to fork out the cash to do it immediately, and I really want to do it when I know I’ve got time for it in my life and I’m excited about it. Not just because someone is in my face saying, “Oh, you’re not signing up for the Advanced Course? Well, that’s okay. It just means that you don’t ‘get it’. You’ve still got some work to do. Yeah, see those people at the back of the room getting out their wallets? They got it. You didn’t. Sucks to be you.”

Honey, I work in marketing and I have a manipulative mother. I’ve heard it all before.

Do they really not let you go to the bathroom?
Don’t be ridiculous. Why does everyone keep saying this? They do encourage you not to be late and not to miss a minute (“That could be just the minute you need to hear the most!” Whatever…), but there’s no burly woman with a crew cut standing at the door waiting to crash-tackle you if you try to leave.

In closing…
Did I enjoy it? Not the whole thing. That weekend was actually one of the most intense experiences of my life. It was – forgive me for this hackneyed cliché (close your eyes children!) – a rollercoaster ride of emotions (cringe. I’ll be back in a minute; I just have to go scrub myself clean).

There were moments at the end of the night when I was at home in the foetal position on my living room floor crying my over-dramatic little eyes out. There were moments when I felt completely empty and pointless as a human being. But there were also moments of elation, and moments when I actually felt a significant shift in my perception of myself, the people in my life, and life in general. A good shift, I mean.

Am I glad I did it? Yep. Will I do the Advanced Course? You betcha. Would I recommend it? Word.

Okay, I’m bored of this now. I’d like to hear from anyone else who’s done the forum though. Are you a cheerleader, a conspiracy theorist, a little of both, disgruntled, excited, elated?

Thoughts? Feelings? Impressions?

An odd thing happened as I left Swiss Cottage tube station this evening. I was walking very slowly up the stairs of the Eton Avenue exit while reading the London Lite (on a side note – gosh I love that text message column. I always want to send one in but usually by the time I’m out of the tube and have reception on my mobile, I’ve forgotten all about it. If anybody reading this wants to make me deliriously, girl-squealingly happy, please say hello to me via the London Lite text column. I. Would. Die.), and a man was walking down on the other side.

“Hello baby, you look very beautiful.”

Pffft, I thought, and kept walking.

“I love that sexy dress you are wearing.”

Since the only other person around was the homeless man sitting at the top of the stairs, I figured I could safely assume the guy was talking to me. However, as said dress features a very unsexy print of white baby deer, comes almost up to my neck and goes down to below my knees, and was paired with a buttoned-up black cardigan and opaque black tights, I felt his comment was at best misplaced, and at worst a damn dirty lie.

“Oh yes, very nice darling. And now you say thank you.”

Please allow me to repeat that last bit, just in case you didn’t receive the full impact.

“And now you say thank you.”

I’m sorry… what?

Now I say thank you? Okay, good. I’m glad you told me, actually. Because this isn’t the first time a complete stranger with an unidentifiable European accent has called me baby and made an unsolicited comment about my appearance, and I’ve never known quite how to respond before. To be honest, I would normally go for a stock standard “Fuck off”, but really that’s just out of convenience. I use the phrase so often that it’s never very far out of reach and I don’t have to scramble for it.

Now that I know what the proper response is in situations such as this, I look forward to a much smoother relationship with many of my fellow Londoners.

You know, I guess there have been other times when I’ve leapt recklessly to reactions such as irritation, indignation or disgust, when I could just as easily – and perhaps more suitably – have felt gratitude instead.

So, in the spirit of setting things right…

To the rather large black man who, as I walked past the doorway of a sex shop in Soho one evening a couple of weeks ago, invited me to come in with him “for some fun” – thanks. I know I told you to go fuck yourself, but what I actually meant was that while I already had plans for that particular night, your invitation was certainly appreciated.

To the young men who wake me up every second night yelling at each other across Primrose Hill Road, apparently trying to organise the best time and place for a gentlemanly bout of fisticuffs, or possibly a knife fight (it’s hard to tell through the thick haze surrounding my brain at 2:30am) – merci beaucoup monsieurs. If you ever do manage to coordinate your busy social calendars, give me a shout and I’ll be ringside in a jiffy.

To the anonymous man who called my landline a few weeks ago at 3am to call me darling and enquire about a particularly intimate part of my anatomy when I was home alone, insomnia-stricken and watching Silence of the Lambs on television – muchos gracias, amigo. The ensuing ten minutes of irrational fear that because the phone had rung as I was walking right past it meant you were actually looking inside my apartment made me feel so alive.

To the local fast food joints who incessantly stuff delivery menus into our mail slot… I’m going to ignore for a moment the disturbing question of how you got into our building in the first place, and focus instead on some well-deserved gratitude for your perseverance. It’s true… one can never have too many Sizzling China pamphlets. Thank you for your contribution – not just to the rape and devastation of old growth forests the world over, but also to my own personal Heathrow injection.

Wow. Oprah was right. Gratitude feels good.

Got someone you need to thank? Go ahead, share.

Just a quick one. Tomorrow I start the Landmark Forum. If my next post kicks off with OMG this is soooooo amazing the forum has changed my life it’s a whole new world of possibilities and rainbows I have so many feelings it feels like a million little butterflies have exploded in my stomach and are gushing up my throat and spewing out of my mouth in a geyser of happiness and life… well, aside from the brainwashery, I’ll obviously be sorely disappointed that I’ve somehow lost the ability to punctuate.

In other news, today I got one piece of very, very good news followed by one piece of very, very bad news. You would think the two would balance each other out and the result would be a fairly level mood of non-emotion, but no. Instead I’ve spent the afternoon lunging wildly from giddy delight to pitiful gloom, interspersed with moments of quiet contentment and sharp, swift pangs of despair.

Dear London,

I can’t help but notice how many of us have been stabbing each other lately.

Perhaps, as a friend suggested, it is not so much that there is an increase in knife crime, but that the media is increasingly inclined to report on it. I don’t know. Either way, the London stabbings have not been merely brought to my attention; they have been force-fed down my oesophagus like a goose being fattened for foie gras.

Everywhere I go, macabre tallies shriek at me from newspaper headlines.

17 London Teens Stabbed To Death This Year!
No Wait – Make That 18
Oh No, There Goes Another, and Another…

This is getting ridiculous. And, frankly, embarrassing – someone in France called London the ‘City of Blades’ after last week’s tragic fiasco with the two French students who were murdered in their home. “London is a jungle,” people commented on French news sites. “Gangs kill each other with knives, but the English media doesn’t talk about it because these outbreaks of violence are occurring daily so it is no longer shocking.” It’s not that I blame them for having a go, but it’s a bit humiliating to have our civility called into question by the French, of all people.

However, I beg to differ on the English media comment. It seems to me they can’t stop talking about it.

Of course, we can’t prevent the London Lite from dedicating page after page each evening to the most recent stabbing and its fallout (taking up precious print space that could otherwise be occupied by photos of Amy Winehouse falling over), so I feel that we should instead go to the root of the problem – namely, the fact that people keep carrying knives around and stabbing each other with them.

I know it’s not all Londoners who are to blame, but there is a very small minority of us who are ruining it for everyone else. So if you’re reading this, you stab-happy few, I would like to ask you to please stop it. Keep your knives in the kitchen where they belong, and when you leave the house consider replacing your usual weaponry with some nice, useful accessories such as a man bag, a hacky sack, or this cute umbrella.

Naturally I wouldn’t expect you to throw your blades away just because an anonymous blog author asked you to. So allow me to bring your attention to just some of the many mutual benefits of this proposal, for knife-carriers and non-knife-carriers alike.

Knife-Carriers: You will avoid the inconvenience of carrying a heavy, sharp object that you could accidentally hurt yourself or damage your clothing with.

Non-Knife-Carriers: We will avoid death by knife wound.

Knife-Carriers: You will avoid a hefty jail sentence and possible anal rape while imprisoned if (when?) you get caught and charged with murder.

Non-Knife-Carriers: It’s probably worth mentioning the first Non-Knife-Carrier benefit again actually, as I feel it’s an especially good one.

Knife-Carriers: You will avoid ruining your entire life, losing all your friends, having everyone in London hate you and being the subject of a sneering press campaign, not to mention the guilt of knowing you seriously injured another human or ended their life.

Non-Knife-Carriers: We will stop being terrified of London teenagers and return to feeling merely suspicious, disapproving and superior towards them.

I think you’ll agree that this will be a win-win situation for everyone in London. I look forward to your enthusiastic cooperation. If any of the above points need clarification or if you have anything you’d like to add to the proposal, please contact me using the link below.

Yours Optimistically,

Digressica

Saw Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, G. Love and Mason Jennings at Hyde Park with V on Wednesday. It ruled – FACT. Jack is so especially swoon-worthy.

Highlights included a conversation between two girls overheard while standing in the three hundred metre-long queue for the portaloo:

“Are you drunk?”

“No, I’m not like gahhhhhlalala, I’m just a bit like yeah Jack Johnson alright woo.”

“Oh. I’m like yeah woo alright woo.”

One thing that always makes me smile at live gigs is the encore fake-out. You know what I’m talking about. The process goes thusly:

1. Lead singer finishes song and makes announcement something like this: “Right, thanks for coming, we’re outta here, goodnight!”

2. Entire band makes an obviously over-hasty exit

3. The audience clap and cheer a lot, while some people (amateurs) standing around you make nervous comments such as, “Is that it? They’re coming back out aren’t they? I don’t know, maybe they’re not…”

4. A few audience members exit; these are the people who are more excited about an unobstructed departure from the car park or an empty tube carriage than about seeing the act’s best and most built-up-to performance of the night

5. But wait – what’s this? The band! They’re coming back on! Oh, miracle of miracles, it’s as though we’re the best audience they’ve ever had and they simply can’t bear to be parted from us! What ho!

Historically, surely this must be the most enduring public mutual deception in the world. We know it’s a charade. The band knows it’s a charade. But it’s a reciprocal lie that we all actively participate in and enjoy. The band feels like we’ve really, really proved our love for them by screaming ourselves hoarse and clapping our hands raw, and we feel like the band really love us and are giving us our money’s worth by coming back out even after what’s supposed to be their last song.

Just once I would like an act to perform the encore fake-out, but on their return to the stage admit they weren’t really finished anyway, and they’d actually saved their very best material to play only once they felt we, the audience, had properly earned it. Because paying the exorbitant ticket price to see us perform just isn’t enough, damn it. We need you to beg for it.