Summer? Where are you?

"But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Five Awesome Places in Europe

Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Five places that you should stay at/eat at/get drunk at in Europe, before you get too old to do so:

BERLIN, Germany

Café Zapata

A very unique venue showcasing the alternative scene of the Berlin nightlife.The ground floor part of a big squat complex, Cafe Zapata’s cheap beer, trash art and huge outside area for the summer months, make it definitely worth a visit. Expect to get beer spilt over you at some point and a very relaxed, hippy style clientele.

ANTIPAROS ISLAND, Greece

Antiparos Campsite

The campsite of dreams on a beautiful, small island in the Cyclades. Furniture just lying around outside on the sand, trees and hammocks aplenty, and a wonderful restaurant with cheap food and lots of backgammon playing. Wake up and take two steps from your sleeping mat onto a beautiful bay with still, clear waters. Swim across to the other side or sweetly ask the campsite owner to take you on his boat and go exploring. It's so dark at night that you can hardly make out any sky in between all the stars. It’s a nudist beach though, so British prudes, be warned.

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia

Metelkova

Totally mental, and the most unique place I've been to in Europe. An autonomous squat-turned- social-hub/art-space located on the site of former military barracks, with an old prison and infantry as two of its seven unused buildings. The small, wonderfully dingey inside dance areas make you feel like you’re in someone’s living room, whilst the DIY-atmosphere of the outside area resembles a surrealist painting, complete with odd sculptures, brilliant graffiti and lots of wire. Anything goes here, so turn up expecting the unexpected. Incredible.

VIENNA, Austria

Centimeter

A restaurant where things are served, as the title suggests, by the centimetre. Order the meal in a trough, lots of spoons to share it and you’re sorted. Or if you love your meat, try the two metre sausage. Simple, cheap, satisfying food.

BARCELONA, Spain

Razzmatazz

A club to suit all musical tastes, but not for those who like their clubbing experience to be classy. A huge industrial warehouse with metal stairs and five rooms playing anything from pop, rock, techno, electro and old-school disco. Don’t bother going before 2, and prepare your nostrils for the permanent smell of sweat, pee, smoke and booze. Very dirty, very European, very drunken but ALWAYS fun.

Facing fear: 'Money' at Shunt, Bermondsey Street

Let's get one thing straight. I don't enjoy fear. Horror films are not my thing, I hate all forms of gore, suspense really gets to me and I'm not a fan of the dark either. Oh and I'm slightly claustrophobic. You may call it boring, I call it being sane. So when a friend called me very last minute to go see a play called 'Money' by a theatre company called Shunt, had I done my research, I would have outright refused. Luckily for them, unluckily for me, I hadn't, so I agreed to go without any idea of what I was about to partake in. Sometimes in theatre this 'blind' viewing works as there is no danger of expectations not being reached and thus less chance of disappointment. For this play, however, expectation would have been a God-send. It would have provided me with a much needed suit of armour against the theatrical attack I was about to endure. Unfortunately, due to the joys of being spontaneous, I went totally unprotected.

Surprise number one arrived even before the play had started. The performance was in an old abandoned tobacco warehouse near London Bridge. So, goodbye conventional audience/stage set up. The set? A huge three-storey construct resembling an old rusting machine, equipped with dim lights, dripping fluids and the permanent sound of a train going under a tunnel. And then the action began. A Banksy-esque image of a man in riot police clothes handing out balloons commenced the show. Ten minutes of weird noises, lights flicking on and off and glimpses of people moving around in the machine structure. More dripping fluids. I guessed that we were on some kind of ship but soon realised that any attempt to fix a location or create a narrative was going to be a challenge. This is 'experiential theatre' after all. With the audience sufficiently confused, we were then led up the stairs and into the structure. Freak-out time. A dark long, thin room with billowing black sheets on either side to increase claustrophobia and two screens on either end counting down numbers. Then total darkness. For about fifteen minutes. The kind of darkness in which you can't even see your own hand right in front of your face. For someone not great with enclosed spaces, its safe to say that my paranoia mounted in direct proportion to the increasing oppressive noise blasted into this small room. And just when the tears (I kid you not) began to fill my eyes, lights up and silence. The space had been transformed into what looked like the inside of a ship with wooden walls and benches lining the room. This is what I got from the action and dialogue that ensued: We were all waiting to see a man for approval of some kind of business idea. Dragon's Den, then, but with a twist. The twist being the strange bald, semi-naked man that would intermittently descend from the glass ceiling and play catch with one of the actors. Narrative? I think not. It was at that point that I realised that I can add bald men to my list of phobias - perhaps its the uncanny childlike hairlessness, or the reminder of the creepy John Malkovich but either way, Mr Baldy sealed my state of paranoia. And just as I was getting mildly comfortable with my paranoia in that space, off we went again, this time upstairs into another room, where we seemed to be celebrating some sort of monetary success. This is where the nonsensicality and absurdity of the action, and the absence of a narrative became unimportant. The staging was incredible. Three storeys, with glass floors and ceilings meant that the action took place on three levels in three separate areas, a Victorian drawing room, a sauna and the 'dinner party' celebration upstairs. This voyeuristic viewing experience added to the secret, illicit and underground atmosphere of the whole show. And with permanent reminders of how much money this 'business', this 'machine' in which were located had made, it all began to make a little bit of sense. The dialogue obsessively began to highlight the power of money and of 'the machine', perhaps a symbol of the constantly churning banks, and of the inescapability of this power. With the actors all holding door knobs in their hands, so that leaving was impossible, this atmosphere of entrapment gradually became overwhelming and the bizarre fragments of the play, started coming together. (I later found out that the play was in fact loosely based on Zola's novel "L'argent" about the corrupt world of financial speculation, proving that Money did succeed in creating some form of atmospheric narrative). So when one of the actors told us that there had been technical difficulties, that the show had to stop, and that we could get our money back, most of the audience fixated on the word 'money'. Was this how the play would end, cleverly turning this overwhelming fixation on money back onto the audience themselves, in a Brechtian twist very much in keeping with the rest of the play? Well, no. There had been a technical fault and we were thus unable to view the last thirty minutes of the play, and we did, ironically get our money back. Whilst this was indubitably an anti-climax to the hour of suspense, our willingness to believe that this was all part of the act speaks volumes for the 'experiential' element of the performance. We were so immersed in the play and so willing to forgo any expectations that even the most mundane, realistic event was initially interpreted as theatre. And this is where the brilliance of Money lies. It was not in the dialogue, or in its characters or in the story, which, in fact, remained hard to grasp throughout. It was in its ability to totally brainwash you, to take you into another world and make you feel like the star of it, to place problems and decisions in your hands and wait for you to respond, to feel, and to experience. So despite the permanent state of paranoia, I would hugely recommend it. Go and see it, and please, let me know what happens at the end. I got my money back so I could go see it again, but I don't think my nerves could handle it.

Beautiful Londoners

Military jackets and the 'hobo' chic of jumpsuit, long coat and slouchy bag. The sun shines and all these stylish people come out to play. I heart London in the springtime.

Dry The River

Encouraged by a slightly biased friend, whose boyfriend is a band member, I went to see Dry The River, headlining the Luminaire in Kilburn on Thursday 1st April. After 2 hours of dry, uninspiring music from the support acts Whole Schebang, and the bizarre Robyn Hitchcock, my expectations weren't high. And with signs on the wall strictly telling you that if you're chatting whilst a band are playing, you can just f*** off, the enjoyment of a cheeky pint and gossipy catch up could not even lessen the blow of another hour of same-y, depressing, dull noise. To my pleasant surprise, however, the desire to get another drink and go for a smoke totally disappeared as soon as Dry The River started playing. And by the first two songs, I was utterly hooked. With their folky harmonies and haunting vocals from the lead singer, Dry The River create true shivers-down-the-spine music. The gig commenced with the fragile, stripped down Demons, moving on to the more lively The Chambers and the Valves whose catchy mandolin-infused chorus refused to leave my head for two days after the gig. With lyrics that interlace biblical references with childhood imagery and painful honesty, I had permanent goosebumps for most of the set. History Book almost made me cry. In a very good way. As did the wonderful cover of Sarah Siskind's Lovin's for Fools which closed the hour long set, with an audience momentarily stunned to silence.

A band that definitely screams watch-this-space. Go and see them. Any demands not to talk during the gig will definitely be heeded, I guarantee.

Check their website for upcoming gigs and music.

Iceland's Feminism

Iceland's recent ban on all lapdancing clubs has highlighted how far behind the UK is in terms of totally breaking past gender inequality and the everpresent glass ceiling. Half the Parliamentarians of Iceland are female, a startlingly great difference to the one fifth of female MP's in the UK. Why this stark difference? Is it the UK's huge size, in contrast to the tiny 320,000 population of Iceland. Is it the fact that Iceland has a lesbian prime minister? Or is it simply because the UK just got bored of the feminist struggle and decided to settle for the appearance of gender equality whilst the reality remained comfortably out of sight, out of mind. The gender pay gap is still as high as 50% in some parts of the country and the objectification of women is still an everyday phenomenon. Yet it is one which most people will happily turn a blind eye to.

Admittedly, I have not been an exception to this. I have never really thought twice about the implications of some of the magazines I see in newsagents or of the women standing on street corners in Soho in the early hours of the morning. It took a university event to shock me into the realisation that the objectifcation of women is still very much a part of our lives and that no matter how far we feel we have progressed in the feminist struggle, gender inequality is an everpresent, albeit unspoken, problem.

I was invited to a facebook event for a "Miss Warwick University" beauty pageant. The description of the event claimed that "this was not a beauty pageant" but rather a "chance for the brightest and boldest females" at Warwick to showcase their ambition and drive. By competing in an exclusive fashion show. And by sending in three photos of themselves, one of which had to be "revealing". Having thus far very easily turned a blind eye to the seemingly insignificant indications of women's objectification today, this event took me truly by surprise. How could students at a renowned, highly academic university suggest that the empowerment of women could be achieved through a public display of their appearance, through being judged on the typical, narrow and male standards of what beauty in women entails? Whilst the organisers may have hoped to quell any feminist criticism with the buzzwords of "ambition" and "drive", there was no way that this disguised beauty pageant could be seen as empowering for women in any way, shape or form. And yet, many female students seemed totally unaware of this. With posts from female students as well as male claiming that beauty pageants were just a bit of fun, and that the critics of the event were just "hairy lesbians" it became clear to me that we have moved so far into a state of acceptance, that women themselves are satisfied with their own objectification. In a seminar about "The Cult of True Womanhood",a movement in mid-19th century America which sought to establish womanliness as rooted in the qualities of piety, domesticity and submisiveness, the seminar tutor facetiously asked who in the class agreed with its sentiments. Most students laughed, shrugging off his question as ridiculous and clearly sarcastic. But one female student proudly and defiantly raised her hand and claimed to agree with this archaic notion of womanliness. "Everyone would be happier if women just accepted their subservience".

If women of academic institutions such as Warwick, in the 21st century hold this view, then where does feminism go from here? Have we moved so comfortably into our 'liberated' and 'empowered' state that we are merely going full circle back into a state of subservience? Perhaps the Miss Warwick Beauty Pageant is a telling indication of where women are headed in today's society. Satisfaction with a relative liberation in comparison to years of submission, inequality and repression is surely not enough though. With the pay gap still so huge, with rape conviction rates at less than 6.5%, with only 10% of directors of FTSE 100 companies being female, it seems that Beauty Pageants are only further cementing gender inequality in this country. The UK would do well to stop, take a look at women's position in today's society, and reevaluate the notion that women are 'empowered' and 'liberated'. And Iceland's recent successful clamp down on their sex industry, serves to make this need all the more pressing, putting the UK to shame.