Mental Health and the Young Person's Pressure Cooker.

At twenty-five years old, I, like the majority of my peers, find my i-phone to be a natural extension of my limbs. My whole life is channelled through this one portal, my alarm clock, my banking, Facebook and Twitter, my camera and hundreds of pictures, Amazon, my music collection, news source, calorie counter. An identity has been gathered and constructed and I hold it constantly in the palm of my hand to reaffirm the person I am, the cold sweat of dread when the damn thing goes missing a feeling we are all familiar with. The constant noise that we surround ourselves with becomes necessary and normal; I find myself suspicious of people that don't have Facebook (what are they hiding?) and people that don't have i-phones are just plain inconvenient (what do you mean you don't have i message or whatsapp? I have to pay to text you?)

Youngminds charity published the findings of their mental health survey recently, with the pressures of our  relentless and 'toxic culture' on young people hitting the headlines. Fear of failure, worrying about job prospects and negative self image were some of the many topics confronted in the poll of 2,000 young people between the age of 11-25. YoungMinds campaigns director Lucie Russell, said: "Every day we hear about the unprecedented toxic climate children and young people face in a 24/7 online culture where they can never switch off."

Technology and social media is an intrinsic part of our lives, the identity created on these platforms all adding to the addictive pressure cooker that we find ourselves in. What Youngminds is doing in their Youngminds VS campaign is bringing to our attention the critical picture; more and more young people are suffering from anxiety, depression and other issues than ever before, manipulated by media and influenced by culture, so it becomes important to better equip ourselves when it comes to talking about mental health and our lifestyles.

There are enormous pressures faced as a young person beginning to gather their lives into their  own hands; pressure to succeed, to get good marks, to 'go travelling' (a vague and unspecific destination that everyone seems to have visited.) There is a need to be accepted, be the right shape, to get a good job relating to your good degree, squeeze the value out of your education, save for a house deposit, to be in a relationship. The path is well-tread before us, the message clear; work out who you are, but make sure who you are looks good, earns good, and can get on the property ladder.

It is no surprise then that anxiety and depression is rising in this constant and 'toxic' environment. Stress and anxiety has you believing that you are holding the world up and one wrong move will have everything crashing down, depression knocking any light left out of you. Panic attacks and the fear of them can lock you tight in a never ending cycle of obsessive compulsive behaviour that then makes each minute of a normal day like a full-scale battleground. Facebook and Instagram meanwhile, is telling you that everyone else is having a good time, looking good, loving their graduate jobs, travelling to cool and trendy places, often alienating users when it's ethos is to connect people. Social media despite it's constant presence can often hold a lonely and hollow portrait of a person.

It is education that liberates a young person from the pressure cooker, giving an individual the tools to craft a life and a living from what they love to do, and a good education should inspire someone to do just that. A school should not be an exam factory, but a fertile land where we breed confidence in young minds; confidence to develop individual strengths and value them, measuring success by something other than the wage packet it returns to you. But that is not how the song sings, and an honest look at how we are teaching young people before we send them out into the world would answer a lot of questions when it comes the state of the mental health of 11-25 year olds.

It's not failure to suffer in this way- it's inevitable;  it's a difficult task, trying to find out who you are and what you want, at the same time as trying to fit in to what the society and your peers and your family expect you to be.

"The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life."      

Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life  (1903)

We enter into a world already created, and in our attempts to try and craft an identity, find ourselves against a backdrop that already exists. The world is already moving when we enter into it, it has rhythm and timings, society has seats ready for you to sit at, and the discomfort felt is this friction; you're trying to be yourself, but need the world and society to tell you who that is.

If you were born on to a blank canvas, that's what you would be, a creature with no language, a creature who didn't know whether you liked Chinese takeaway or not, whether 'How I met your Mother' was funny or not. You know what you like and what you dislike because it is pressed against you constantly. Your language, your mannerisms, your tastes and preferences, your ideas about right and wrong, about what you think you want, what you know- all this comes from somewhere external to you.

So if you take away the i-phone, who, actually, are you?

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London Baby

London Baby

That unease you feel when you’re becoming ‘at one’ with that gentleman’s armpit on the 8.05 is not in fact a moment of microcosmic clarity where life, you realise, is pointless- no, that ripple is the recognition that you’re being pulled in a current that is not necessarily your own and semi-jogging through Bank it’s no more than a flutter, it’s no more than an itch at King Cross or a trapped nerve at Clapham junction but it will pervade and get you in your sleep until you voice it; if I'm not hurrying somewhere too then my god I must be useless.

Run baby run, because if they jostle and jam, you must pant and puff to fit in with the chorus, for if you voice such blasphemies as “After you, I’m not in a rush,” then there must be less value in the footsteps you are pressing into the pavement. All those shiny shoes have no time to slow for on-coming shoulders, bumping bones and silent sorry’s. Can you imagine how great their purpose must be that they have no eyes for those begging for a burger at Fenchurch street, no eyes for the light on the river, for the birds that still sing at St Pauls. They are not alone because they are in a hurry, but you are if you stop. So run baby run.

New look New Space.

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None of us Ever Graduates

"None of us ever graduates"

This, I’ll admit, feels slightly ominous as I make my way from the train station up to campus, but am un-deterred reasoning that the ‘us’ the graffiti is referring to, is the ‘us’ that was down in this piss-smelling subway with a spray can rather that studying for that degree, so really, its not much of a surprise that none of this ‘us’ has ever graduated.

"Id like to thank google, wikipedia and copy and paste"

This one is sprayed on the opposite wall next to a fake Banksy of someone juggling bananas but still, I am refusing to judge my place of post graduate study on the local graffiti. The artists are quite simply, misinformed; they've obviously never heard of ‘TURNITIN’- the computer program the large majority of universities now use as part of their essay submission process that goes through your essay with a fine electronic tooth-comb  highlighting your percentage of possible plagiarism. I would have thought generally, professors and teachers would be up for this sort of thing, but one evening later that week down the pub with staff and Phd students from my department, I discover that perhaps this is not the case.

“I don’t mind if my students plagerise.”

          “You don’t?”

          “No, if they get that piece of paper saying they’ve got a degree, how much does it matter how they got it?”

Err, ALOT, I want to answer categorically, but interestingly it was a professor I was having this exchange with, and since everyone was drinking ale in large quantities I paused momentarily, wondering if it was a trick question. I like this professor, in fact it just so happens that this is the exact same fellow who pronounced at the beginning of class that day;

                “Due to circumstances that are utterly out of my control, last night I had to get completely, resolutely and decisively drunk. So, if I get a little shaky, sweating, or even pass out- don’t worry.”

                I did worry. Specifically since I had made the error of sitting in the front row of the lecture theater  if such an instance of shaking or passing out occurred, it was going to be down to me to do something about it, and though there is a card in my purse saying I am a qualified first aider, I’m not all that confident when it comes to hungover philosophy professors.  Also, it’s worth noting that this particular lecture was an undergraduate module I was sitting in on, therefore I was the oldest in the room (apart from the hungover professor), a fact I imagined would count for something in an emergency situation.

Thankfully it was an ironic comment that evening in the pub so I did well to pause, but it led to the question of how you do interpret a piece of paper that says you have a degree? In an economically driven culture, where things are measured in terms of the monetary gain you can squeeze out of things, education, at whatever level, is consequently measured by the pay check you earn post-school/college/university. The lower the paycheck and the bigger the debt, the less value that education had for you. And this is a prevailing path of questioning as university fees rise; What is that degree worth- we ask with our calculators in our hands. What desk does a liberal arts degree belong at? Does a law degree have any value if you don’t actually become a lawyer?

If we are teaching each generation that passes through our current schooling system that learning is only as useful as the wage you earn out of it, it paints a pretty grim picture of the culture being shaped with each passing year group. Is this the aim- young minds trained to pass exam papers, to only be good at things that can pay their monthly gym membership, car finance and the mother of all achievements; a house deposit?

Is it conceivable that it’s the term ‘education’ that is being misunderstood? Education I want to argue, is not a piece of paper with numbers and letters on, government monitored, job center approved- because no one can monitor your true education; the act of opening your mind past what’s going on in front of your nose and letting other substances in. Learning should have no agenda, no feeling of being owed something back for the time spent with a book or an interesting documentary, a trip to an amazing new place. Education is waking yourself up for no other reason but that you want to be awake. Why would you not want to fulfill your capacity? Your capacity to be a well rounded and fulfilled individual, a compassionate person capable of understanding the world from more than just one solitary point of view? But with the tools our culture gives us to measure success and happiness, we often have no idea how to take on such a task.

Is it not odd to ask a 15 year old choosing GCSEs “What do you want to be?”  Most adults have no answer to such a question, in fact I would go as far as to argue it’s the dumbest question you can ever ask a person. Don’t we mind that we are teaching young people that they are only as worthy as the credit rating they have- that Experian are the ones that can tell you how well your doing in life? In trying to think back to GCSE’s, A levels or even university applications, is the standard line of questioning “What do you love doing? What would you love to do more of?” Or is it “what job will this help you get?” “What job do you want to do?” Since the latter is a question that the majority of us struggle to have a clear cut, box-fit answer to, we set ourselves up for anxiety in 6^th form classrooms, in university lecture theaters  at the desks of that first job we’ve taken ‘while we work out what we really want to do.”

There was a girl at my secondary school- fantastic at sports and simply astounding when it came to drama and acting. Everybody knew, teachers and pupils alike that this kid was something special but she felt that as her talents were not counted as traditionally academic, they were not as valuable because everybody knows that few actually ‘make it’ as an actor/ sportsman, it’s not an acceptable answer when the careers officer comes round the classroom. 

            Because this girl was dedicated and hardworking by nature, she pushed herself very hard and achieved fantastic grades in other subjects, went on to do an incredibly academic subject at university, is a very successful individual and as far as I know, perfectly happy. But it wasn’t without sacrifice, and I have never forgotten that girl from those school days because I always felt that somewhere along the way, our culture’s way of measuring achievement, talents and happiness robbed her of something, told her that what she loved doing was not good enough to go out into the world with.

Connor, my house mate, is interesting example of our flawed education system. He is young and very bright, but didn't fit into suitable government targets or desks for long hours as many young boys don’t. With a system that doesn't cater for learning unless it can be regurgitated in an exam paper, he very easily slipped through the net at school and now works at a local supermarket in between having philosophical debates with me and smoking weed.

                “If you could do anything,” I ask him, “anything, what would you do?”

                “Have sex.”

                “Right, well I’m not sure that’s an option here.”

                “Well you didn’t specify. That’s a dumb question because obviously if I could do anything I’d have sex and eat food.”

                I try a different angle. “What did you like back at school?”

                “Maths, I was good at maths- was a bit of an accident though.”

                “You were accidentally good at maths?”

                “Yeah. I heard there was free food at the maths revision classes on Saturday, three hours long they were those sessions, but all the chicken wings you could eat. Never turn down free food.” He says to me seriously before turning back to the play station. “Got an A for maths I did. Liked DT too; once I tried to pierce my mate Warren’s ear with a nail we were supposed to be using to build bird boxes. Wouldn’t go through, got a well thick ear Warren has, had to jam it til it went POP.

                I picture the school workshop splattered with blood and a student with a large hole in his ear lobe.

                “Why didn’t he get it done properly in a shop??”

                “Because Warren’s a tramp and eight pounds was a lot of money back then.”

                “What about English?”

                “Well Shakespeare is shit, obviously.”

                I say nothing, remembering my friend’s interesting take on why he liked the English language the week before-

                “I like saying the word country.”

                “Any particular reason, or you just feeling patriotic today?”

                “No, it’s because you can say the word CUNT really loudly and then add the word tree on the end and you won’t get into trouble. CUNT-tree. Country. See?

               

Ironically he and his buddy Shakespeare have more in common that he thinks when it comes to puns, but I don’t push my luck pointing it out;

                Hamlet: Lady, shall I lye in your lap?

                Ophelia: No my Lord.

                Hamlet: I meane my head upon your lap?

                Ophelia: Ay, my lord.

                Hamlet: Do you thinke I meant country matters?

                Ophelia: I think nothing my Lord.

                Hamlet: That’s a faire thought to lie between maid’s legs.

These examples aren’t to suggest that all our current schooling system is lacking is copious amounts of free fried food and dirty word puns, but if education, fails to inspire, chokes individuality and growth- is more red tape what such a system needs? Does learning have to be linear? Who said it even has to take place in a classroom??

A Day in the Life of a Philosopher

A Day in the Life of a Philosopher.

                “Sorry I’m late!” I drop my bag and bum into a seat, my cup of tea sploshing everywhere.

                “Uh, you’re not late Melody.” the lecturer says helpfully.

                “Oh, I’m not?”

                “No.”

                “Did we start early?”

                “No.”

                There is a pause.             

                “Melody, look around.”

                I do look around, and see, quite suddenly, I don’t recognise any of the faces staring back at me. I’m in the wrong class.

So here I am, philosophy MA student- where I am required to read a lot, have a lot of interesting conversations with some of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the good fortune to come across, whilst living in a house 40 seconds from the beach with very interesting housemates (Interesting in a different way…) I am a very happy philosopher and writer indeed.

I arrived in this new town the way I seemed to arrive in most places- haphazardly. Not a lot of dollar or organisation or any official pieces of paper, but a lot of optimism to make up for it. I had one email from a professor admitting me onto the course and telling me sort out everything when I got here. “Just ask Jaqui” his email had signed off with.

                The night before I am due to leave the vajazzled land of Essex, sleeping next to two suitcases with all my worldly possessions, a thought crosses my mind. Who the fuck is Jaqui?

This is the picture that my friend Sophia and I stared one evening in a Pizza Express of off Regent Street, drinking Pinot Grigio and swapping war stories. Something about this poster did it. This is the picture that gave us our first real-life, smack-you-in-the-face, kick-you-up-the-backside, full blown ephiphany and no, I don’t mean three wise men showed up. I mean we had to quit our city jobs.

We both had good jobs. Job that paid good, looked good on our C.V, jobs that made our Alumni year figures look good, with good tax-paying people in very good London post codes. But in that epiphany, staring at that piece of card on a rainy cold Thursday night, staring at that card in a room full of other harassed-looking people laughing too loud and drinking wine too fast, we learnt something very important. That your life belongs to no one but you. You don’t owe your CV, or your parents, or your boss- you owe yourself. You owe yourself to try and find out what it is that truly makes you tick, what you’re passionate about, what makes your life worth getting up for, what your talents and interests are and then to exercise them, to stretch them out like a rubber band and realise the potential you are more than capable of fulfilling. Nobody else can do this for you.

                It is not selfish to be happy, it is your right. I don’t mean happy as in buy a load of chocolate, gorge on shoes, credit cards or a trip to Vegas to see a scantily clad lady called Candy- that is a brand of happiness that will never quench your thirst. I mean happy, being completely true, where there is no room for pretending or moaning in any aspect of your day. Such a life exists and I refute all those who try to convince me otherwise. If you are not happy, it is no one’s fault, but it is your responsibility to do something about it. 

                 Do the unthinkable; if you skip down a nettled-infested forest path rather than that smooth pavement ready-laid and waiting for you, a few cuts and bruises won’t hurt. In fact, the forest of the unknown is much more fun….

This, as you can imagine, is a short version of the decisions that led my friend Sophia to trek around South-east Asia and me to a philosophy department in Kent, (mine also involved a monk in orange robes in Oxford circus if you would believe it,) but I was tired of being well-acquainted with other people’s arm pitts on the central line, I was uninspired by a city that seem to regurgitate me rather than let me in. Who says you have to live your life in a straight line anyway?

So in looking for happiness (and for Jaqui) and in living the philosophy of doing things that make you happy, this particular forest path has currently led me to a town where Charles Dickens once lived, a place crawling with famous writers (which bodes well methinks) has ice cream parlours that don’t bat an eyelid if you want to eat banana splits everyday of the godamn week, and new housemates in Victorian seaside houses that keep me entertained and kept my pen very busy...

             Connor is full of what could be called straight-up accidental wisdom. Everything is said in a deadpan voice accompanied by a shrug, and his face is so poker straight it’s extremely difficult to read whether or not he’s actually joking when he says things like-

“If I had 24 hours left to live I’d just kill everybody that annoyed me.”

                He tells me that I annoy him, frequently, (something about me talking too much) so I guess I should be grateful that so far, he's free of incurable deadly viruses. It’s thanks to Connor I must mention, that our house is kept running on a constant supply of tea bags and sausage rolls, courtesy of the supermarket giant he work for. All I need to do is lend him my flask he tells me, and milk will be forever free-flowing too. (“It’s not stealing, it’s all from the staff room. I’m staff, ergo- not stealing.”)

Things Connor likes; Call of Duty, Malibu(??!) and spaghetti meatballs. Things Connor doesn’t like; the seaside, crap TV, (“I’m a Celeb is a pile of wank; they barely get out of anywhere. It’s just a shit two week holiday.”) and Simba the elderly albino cat which came with the house and the furniture and is about as old as the house and the furniture. Simba molts white fur, is completely deaf and dribbles; a combination which makes this particular cat Connor’s least favourite bedroom companion, a fact Simba ignores every single night when he sleeps on Connors chest.

The other residents Connor can’t seem to shift from his room are myself and Antony. Anthony lives in a room with a double bed he shares with pizza boxes and cans of ‘Monster’; a more repugnant version of Rebull. A creative music student at university he tells me, though I have to say, I’m not sure I’m convinced considering I haven’t seen him leave the house apart from to go to the conveniently situated off-licence at the top of our road. Since Connor’s room has a sofa and flat screen T.V this is where we are to be found, regardless of whether Connor is actually even in the house. I think Connor likes us warming up his sofa- myself, Simba and Anthony, and I reckon really, Connor enjoys being the host of such gatherings, though he pretends to be annoyed that we’re always in his room, the way he pretended to be annoyed the day I automatically wandered into his room to watch ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and didn’t notice immediately that the poor boy was in his boxers trying to get changed.

Things Ant likes; take away food, lie-ins, making weird music on his Mac. The take away food thing is very handy when looking to save money on your weekly food shop. Ant orders in pizza roughly on average about once a day, but never finishes a whole one, so between Connor and myself, we have fed ourselves on second-hand pepperoni pizza for about two weeks. I like cold pizza, a lot. Therefore I like this unspoken arrangement. There was of course the incident where I came home and automatically ate the remaining two slices of pizza only to discover two new facts; 1. The pizza wasn’t Ants; it was Connor’s. 2. Connor doesn’t share food. But you’ll be pleased to hear I have since learnt from this error of etiquette and am slightly more carefully when it comes to un identified food.

Things Ant doesn’t like: Getting up early, getting up at all, getting out of bed. I, on the other hand don’t mind an early start, and enjoy the odd breakfast on the beach in the old hotel staring at the sea and the curved bay holding little fishing boats. It never get old; no matter how many times I look at it, I’ll never get enough of the ocean. Connor however, is inclined to disagree.

                “I’m sick of the sea to be honest,” he tells me. “Everyone’s always like ‘aahh the sea, the sea is so great.’ The sea is shit mate.”

                This is declared whilst sprawled across my freshly made bed. I had just moved into the best bedroom of the house, my new room having a four poster double bed and an en-suite bathroom that the boys had come to check out.

                “Shotgun having a bath.” Ant says eyeing up my Jacuzzi-shaped tub.

                “You can’t shotgun a bath.”

                “Yes you can.”

                “Ok, let me re-phrase, you can’t shotgun my bath. It’s an en-suite bathroom attached to my bedroom.” I give them my best serious face. “There are going to be no smelly boys in my bedroom.”

In all fairness, they don’t smell. Well, apart from the smell of marijuana that seems to emanate from one of the kitchen cupboards though which cupboard exactly I’m not quite sure. First I thought it was the dishwasher, but having stuck my head in it as well as the surrounding draws, I've concluded it’s definitely the cupboard with all the drinking glasses, and though no source is to be found, I've given the whole thing a scrub with bleach in case the land-lady visits and mistakes me for a pot head.

The other interesting fact about this house is the mystery housemate. Every shared residence always has a mystery housemate; back in halls as an undergraduate it was a bloke called ‘Dave’ who lived in the bedroom nearest the kitchen, and though I often saw the door swing open and shut, I never quite caught a glimpse of this so called ‘Dave’ character. Rumour had it he was a photographer, a good-looking photographer, but no one was ever able to confirm such hearsay. In this house, my invisible housemate is called Oaty. It might be O. T actually, possibly Ottie- but I had been living here a good few weeks with no sign of the man apparently living in our basement and was starting to think that the boys had made him up, an enigma on their Fifa Score board, but low and behold last Friday I heard someone scuttling about looking for the reset button on the wireless router (it crashes about 35 times a day) and so I jumped at the chance to introduce myself.

                “Hi! Are you O.T (Oatie??) I’m Melody, I haven’t met you yet.”

                He shakes my hand whilst at the same time backing away.

                “So, what do you do?” I ask him undeterred by his body language.

                “Business management.” (He speaks!)

                “Great, so how long have you lived here?

                “Uh, a couple of months.” He’s still backing away despite the fact I haven’t let go of his hand. I have a firm and convincing handshake. (You will be friends with me godamnit…)

                “Cool. I've heard you’re a bit of a night owl, that’s probably why I haven’t seen you or bumped into you, that’s funny isn’t it.”

                Oatie it seems, does not think this is funny. There is a pause which I decide is not at all awkward before he adds in a slightly strained tone; “So, do you come round here often?”

                I presume this isn’t a pick up line considering the guy looks pretty desperate to get back to his basement dwelling but all the same, I feel the need to correct him.

                “What? no, I live here. I’m you’re new housemate!” I beam, letting go of his hand, which signals his opportunity to escape and he scuttles back down the stairs into the darkness.

I’m definitely adding him to the list of my new friends.

Having settled in to my home as well as my classes I call my old buddy; the infamous Bulgarian Luka Boy to update him on my new status as an official big thinker and day dreamer. Luka has a CV even more colourful than mine aswell as a background that’s far more lucrative so I’m not immediately alarmed when he calls me back twenty seconds later in whispered and hushed tones.

                “Why are you whispering?

                “I’m in the toilet.”

                “Ok.” I ask the inevitable. “Why are you calling me from a toilet?”

                “I’m on an internship for a management consultancy firm in London, if I get the job I’ll be on big bucks yah!”

                Luka, it has to be said, seems to always be on an internship. He turns thirty this month.

                “What do you know about management consultancy?”

                “Nothing. Listen, when are you coming to London?”

                “I don’t know yet, where are you living?”

                “In the Bulgarian Embassy.”

                “What do you mean?”

                “I mean I am living in the Bulgarian Embassy Mel.”

                “You’re living in it?”

                “Yah! Listen, I have to go, I been in this toilet cubicle too long but Mel-“

                “Yes Luka?”

                “Please send my regards to your Mother.”

I never quite know what to say when he says that.

Perhaps THIS is what we should be teaching the youth...

New YouTube Channel- Good Sized Good News...

The News- whether you get yours from The Sun, the Mail Online, The Telegraph or O.K magazine, everybody’s getting some- but what is it exactly that you’re getting?

We’re good at questioning where our food comes from; is it organically farmed? Were people nice to the pigs in my hamburger, did my tomatoes have a happy life? Should the same line of questioning be applied to your daily news source?

‘Truth’ is a flexible concept in the hands of those with a motive and a profit margin, so learning to challenge what you read rather than take it in 20p portions is a skill worthy of learning.

Ask questions every day. Then ask some more.

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Stick It Where The Sun Don't Shine..

Bitesize Philosophy Lesson Five:

 Everybody has a motive.

Stick it where The Sun don’t shine…

So today’s ever-insightful edition of The Sun has the nation’s favourite bad-boy prince butt-naked, clutching his bollocks under the enticing caption of ‘Pics of naked Harry you’ve already seen on the internet.’

Uh, great exclusive there then guys, plus the story is a few days old. So what is the deal with print VS the internet? And why is everyone getting their knickers in a twist?

The Sun say it’s a matter of public interest to have those images printed, because it highlights issues to do with Harry's security and his royal and military image. That, and of course the bigger debate of freedom of press, a term that’s getting thrown around a lot with the Leveson enquiry, which is looking into media ethics. (Or rather whether anybody has any.)

The Sun’s argument is that though a picture can be freely floating around the internet quite happily, regulations and laws means the same image can’t be printed and this, as they put it, is “ludicrous.” (Big word, well done.)

That to me sounds like our Harry is a bit of a scapegoat here, not the type of goat anyone wants to be especially when you’ve got no clothes on in a Las Vegas hotel.

On The Sun’s website there a nice little video speech where the managing editor opens by stating “The Sun is a responsible paper.” An interesting choice of words for a tabloid whose primary concerns are generally whose on page three, and which footballer’s had a piece of it.

“We’re not against him letting his hair down once in a while.” He says of Harry. Wow, that’s kind of you Mr managing editor, and good to know, because I’m sure Harry would think twice about a vacation if The Sun in its wealth and wisdom were unhappy about him getting a tan.

“This is about our readers getting involved in the discussion about the man who is third in line to throne.” Is it? Is it really? I think there’s alot of things wrong about that sentence, but it does pose the interesting line of discussion about what is public interest. Yes he’s a member of the royal family, but does knowing or not knowing what he did this summer really affect my life as a member of the public? Did we not know he had butt cheeks or something? What is public interest and what is the public enjoying gossip and scandal has become a rather blurry line in this celebrity-obsessed culture, and it’s probably a good idea to remember that this is a boy whose mother died while being chased by a hungry herd of paparazzi looking for their next juicy story. 

The Huffington Post reported how “UK readers were treated to the odd sight of Sun employees posing naked on the front page in place of the real pictures on Thursday. (Editors were criticized for using a 21-year-old female intern in the picture.)”

Bloody hell, and this bald-headed editor is trying to convince us that this responsible paper is fighting a battle that’s to do with press integrity and matters of public interest?? (It also made me realise that actually, maybe I had it easy in my time as a newspaper intern, my clothes as a rule, stayed on...)

Newspapers love throwing around the term ‘it’s in the public interest’ -a loose and lucrative expression that acts as a ‘get out of jail free’ card, or Charlie Sheens ninth life. Wake up- it’s not about your interest, or what best for you, a good and upstanding member of the public. It’s not in the public’s interest- it’s in their interest. They’re a business and they’re in the industry of selling newspapers.

Maybe that’s the difference between print and internet; I can look at Harry’s lovely buttocks for free online, but I’d have to pay 20p to take them home with me from the newsagents. A nice bit of controversy means The Sun gets #hashtagged a few more times, blogs are written, comments are made, hell, here I am talking about the company right now; so the country becomes a walking talking advert for the nations shoddiest tabloid. (A part of, lets not forget, the disgraced Murdoch media empire.)

 Always, always be aware of motive, because in business, everybody has one, and in journalism there’s a fine line.

The internet has changed the world of newspapers and journalism not only because of its immediacy but because of its lack of editing. (And I’m not just talking about the Daily Mail Online’s atrocious typing errors.) Twitter is an un-edited mouthpiece for politicians, celebrities and world leaders, (even Ghandi’s got a twitter account.) There are millions of blogs, social networking sites and online news sites; the internet just doesn’t have a filter in the way a printing office does. The more interesting question to ask is does this make it more or less valuable as a medium for news and truth? Uncensored, un-edited, a wealth of opinions and angles, maybe there’s more opportunity to form your own opinion here rather than in a newspaper; reading a story worded for a certain market.

There are different stigmas and stereotypes attached to different newspapers- a tabloid reader compared to a reader of The Guardian for example, but the notable argument is not who but why: because it’s a market. It’s an industry making money, so different papers are produced in different styles; certain stories are highlighted compared to others, different political angles taken, all to reach these different demographics and produce a profit.

I’m not quite sure what it says about us as a nation if The Sun really is, as they claim, ‘the nation’s favourite newspaper. Yes its easy to read, lots of pictures, not too many words, it’s cheap and has the valuable opinions of topless young ladies in there, but why do we need news to be dumbed down for us? Put it this way, if someone labelled me as a Sun reader, I’d be offended.

 With the internet, more and more people can have it straight from the horse’s mouth, not a day later with a cheesy headline in a bold font. So are we going to grow out of The Sun? Maybe they’re just grasping at straws printing Royal rear-ends?

Of course the best line on the subject came from Good old Boris, who never fails to deliver:

"The real scandal would be if you went all the way to Las Vegas and you didn't misbehave in some trivial way," he told the BBC.

Yes Boris. Yes indeed.

Recess- France: Nurses, Nights and Nibbles intermittent

Recess-
France: Nurses, Nights and Nibbles intermittent.

So I was in rural France, a land large and green where people still take wicker baskets to market and you get your eggs from chickens in the garden not from a shelf in Tesco. Where my family have created a small corner of happiness in a beautiful French farm house with sheep and chickens and the odd cat (although Keith the donkey has sadly moved on.)

I quickly decide this suits me well, where the most pressing concern is what book to read next and where no one has heard of graduate options or an overdraft. Such foreign concepts are substituted with good food, conversation and a hammock under the pear trees that I intent to retire to.

I do however, manage to sustain an injury which leads to two interesting discoveries; firstly, French health care makes the NHS look like a half-arsed attempt at first aid, and secondly, iodine bloody hurts when poured into an open wound.
The second of these discoveries is played out suspiciously like that scene from ‘Fight Club’ where Brad Pitt pours some corrosive ingredient onto Edward Norton’s arm, teaching him some valuable lesson about the nature of his true self as he writhes about in agony. I have no such epiphany, or Brad Pitt. Instead I have the notorious Nurse Rachett, a burly and solid-looking French women with a large mole on her face, who doesn’t so much as flinch as my whole body trembles as iodine is poured into the hole in my side and I nearly bite my tongue off.

Now the NHS aren’t exactly famous for being forthcoming with their medical care, but the word I would perhaps use for the French system would be overzealous. They’re at me with a scalpel and local anaesthetic before I can say petit poi, performing a minor surgery in the middle of the doctor’s office; I’m used to my GP using his computer to treat me rather than any of the tools in his office. So I don’t quite have time to decide whether I’m impressed or alarmed.

Nurse Rachett is then sent forth, trotting on down to the farm house armed with bandages and disinfectant happily holding me me down muttering at me in French.
          “Every day? You have to change the dressing every day??”  
Dressing as a verb implies material on top of the skin, layered careful for an aesthetic finish. No such luck. I experience the ‘packing of a wound’ which involves ‘mesh’ being stuffed into the whole in my side soaked in iodine, after it has been irrigated with the stuff (not the word you want to hear considering iodine feels like vinegar on open flesh.) I fob her off a bit and manage to get her to come every other day, which she thinks is quite amusing, but I don’t know how to say ‘don’t laugh at me’ in French, so I then convince my aunt to take over packing duties, ushering the she-devil back down the lane into her Renault Clio.

                                                         *** 
The thing about the noise here is that there is none. I step out in to my Grandma’s garden that first afternoon looking down at her mini sheep grazing in the grass at the bottom and there is this odd moment when I think I might have gone deaf. I can’t hear anything. Nothing. There’s no soft roar of cars on tarmac somewhere, the familiar constant hum of an aeroplane above, sirens screeching or neighbours yakking. The silence is so absolute it’s as if the mute button has been hit and its almost unsettling until the wind glides through the trees and the sheep spot me and ‘baah’ indignantly.
If its noise you need then a little car trip in order. In the gorgeous French port of La Rochelle we rent bikes and beach walk about, stopping intermittently for coffee and croissants, discovering that Fort Boyard (who doesn’t remember Melinda Messenger on that British Sunday TV pastime) is just off the coast here. The other thing I learn is that the French eat all the time.
           “I just want a sandwich,” I sigh exasperatedly, and the woman in the restaurant looks at me with an equal sigh, asking why can’t we just have a full three-course meal like everybody else in the city.
          You could always opt for ice-cream, which is a meal in itself around here; insane portions of brightly coloured and vividly rich flavours, none of this one-scoop nonsense, but layer upon layer of creamy icecream that melts as soon as the cone is in your hand, so the whole experience is a kind of insane desperate happiness where you don’t even care anymore that you have dessert all around your face, slowly dripping from your hands up to almost your elbows.
One scoop would be enough for even the most optimistic child but my grandmother has a secret talent whereby despite her tiny frame, there is no amount of ice-cream in the world that can leave her full.


She has rather a sweet tooth, in the supermarket a few days previously I saw her with her hands full coming out of the cake isle and I mistakenly said “Well let’s not go mad shall we?”
          “No lets do go mad, because these are important.” she corrects me, putting five packets of biscuits into the trolly.

The other thing my grandmother believes in passionately is the piano. Back at her house we play for a solid afternoon together, her ever patient mind excusing my inability to read music (despite all the lessons she paid for me) and it seems so funny to me that this extraordinary women who will swear blind she is useless at everyday tasks, can sit at the piano and play Chopin, Bach and Mozart with the ease and grace of the men themselves.
It’s not always merely modestly that blinds us to our own greatness, maybe it’s the human condition that sees us naturally focus on the things we can’t do, the things we don’t have. Either way it never fails to amazes me how she’s almost surprised to remember she speaks French, plays piano, got herself through medical school, loved, lost and travelled round India at the age of sixty-five. Perhaps that’s what grandchildren are for. I am in awe of her.

The neighbours, although not on par with my grandmother, are definitely also an interesting bunch. There’s the abandoned ranch next door where you can learn to ride like a cowboy whatever that means, and stories of Jon Jon and the local woman that everyone seems to happily share. (I still haven’t quite worked out whos wife she is.) Some of these people have never left the French borders, and when I come across Jon Batiste’s fishing lake with one solitary mouldy chair on the end of a jetty, I just wander on through, forgetting the French attitude to trespassing. I wonder if I will be shot, but return the next day to see a large chain obstructing the gate instead.

It’s not until you leave the clutches of the city that you can look up and see lights of a different kind; the stars. My god the stars. There aren’t even street lights here so when the night takes hold the sky is impossibly full of streams of lights, the mist of the milky way as clear as if you painted it on yourself.

Watching the end of something never looks quite as beautiful as when you’re looking at a shooting star. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever stood still enough to see one, and out on the terrace sitting in a flimsy plastic chair I see my first one, and marvel at something so beautiful and so dead.

Stars tend to have one of two effects.
Either its along the lines of “Dude they’re so beautiful, anything is possible because the universe is infinite man.”
Or, “Bloody hell, im rather insignificant.”

You can either feel very big, or very small staring up in the dark and as I tilt my head back I remember a quote: