Gap Year Experience 2: Swine flu

As a small disclaimer, I haven’t actually had swine flu. But I thought I did and it was awful.

Admittedly, the flu may have been my fault. Having not scheduled in my post-festival wallow (where you lie in bed eating fruit and drinking copious amounts of lemsip in order to heal your aching body from the pain of sleeping on rocks and frequent daytime drinking), and started my late-night bartending job at ubercool venue The Cellar, I had perhaps worn myself out somewhat.

Cue going to bed at the end of the week with a temperature of 40 and waking up ill. It didn’t even occur to me it might be swine flu until I feebly reached out for the TV remote and caught the latest death quotes on the morning news, at which point I panicked, and went on the website.

Now I don’t want to imply that the British health system is ill equipped for the pandemic, but it is really shit. You go through a series of questions that are both frighteningly close to home (do you have a runny nose?) and ridiculous (do you frequent a clinic for renal failure?) and then the server will apparently determine if you have swine flu or not. And apparently I did. The next step is then to receive your automated special sick person number. A word of advice: write this number down. They will not give you another one when you accidentaly close the window with the special number on it, and as far as the rest of the healthcare system is concerned, that is your problem and on to the next paranoid teenager with a sore throat.

So I decided to ring the helpline, which incidentally, is not free, and I paid for 7 minutes of chat with a friendly Scottish man while we tried to decide if I was a risk to public health or not. He read out the exact same list of questions from the website while I sniffed down the line at him, improvising where necessary (in response to my lack of accessible thermometer, he asked if I felt like I had a high temperature. I did.) Eventually he realised that the swine flu system will only issue one person with one special number, which it turns out is just your e-ticket to some Tamiflu, and that essentially I was fucked.

So under Scottish man’s instructions (and let me just say, I’ve been unemployed for three months and I couldn’t get a job at the swine flu helpline? I’ve got call centre experience and everything) I rang my GP. Cue the local witch on reception who knows and dislikes me responding to my pleas for Tamiflu with ‘You’ll have to get it yourself.’

‘How do I do that when you have to prescribe it to me?’

‘Don’t know.’

Wonderful. Eventually I got a doctor to ring me and we decided I did have swine flu, that I should stay in and they would give me the elusive prescription for Tamiflu. Now I don’t mean to be rude, but given that it’s apparently stockpiled in various locations around the country, along with those SARS masks that were all the rage a few years ago, it’s very hard to get hold of if you actually need it. Furthermore, the only place in Oxford that has it is the Woodstock Road Pharmacy, which must be making an absolute fortune.

And that took all morning, and did nothing for my head, and by this point I was feeling properly ill. Then up rocks one of my housemates, who had already had swine flu, declaring that Tamiflu was, in fact, the worst idea and just to stay in bed and watch DVDs. The most sensible advice I’d had all day, so I did just that and felt so much better by the next evening that I went out dancing. Which made it worse, so I retired back to bed on Sunday.

So the moral of the story is what GPs have been telling us for years: stay in bed, stop whining and take some paracetamol.

Gap Year Experience 1: Festivals

This summer, the summer of my emancipation from state education and the birth of the realisation that recession + not wanting to work in a loans company call centre = three month period of unemployment, I embarked on a series of what I can only define as typical gap year experiences. I will continue to document these throughout the gap year, as now I no longer live alone, am losing my foreign edge and have acquired everything I need to keep me basically happy (flat, job, university place), I am going to embrace the typicality. So, festivals.

The first one was the Tomatina in Spain. I was sold on the idea of 14 friends and I having a villa just far enough away from Benidorm with its own pool, but apparently the main attraction was to get on the three hour bus to Valencia, spend the night in the station and rock up in Buniol at 5 the next morning to chuck rotting fruit about. Convinced it was cultural by the fact that it is only started when an idiot climbs a greased pole to touch a ham (I kid you not), 12 of us eagerly and naively boarded the bus, plastic bags of spare clothes in hand, and descended on Valencia.

One overpriced paella dinner later, two new German friends and a lot of furious comments made about the sadistic train station staff in Valencia who would let you lie on the benches but the second you closed your eyes would come over and bark at you in Spanish to wake the bloody hell up and stop looking like a tramp in their very smart station, we boarded the metro to Buniol.

The tradition of the Tomatina is to wear white, so it becomes a very strange sight to see thousands of tourists, mostly Australians, dressed entirely in white, sleeping wherever they fell on the hour long train journey. I distinctly recall being so tired as I crouched in the aisle of the train that I rested my head on a French man’s lap and napped as quietly and inconspicuously as I could manage in such a situation. Needless to say he was either too embarrassed or too tired to take issue with it, and for this I thank him now.

We arrived in Buniol to find the sun coming up and the festivities of the previous night ending. Because the festival has to occur in the morning before it gets too hot, most people apparently descend on Buniol the night before and eat sausages and drink sangria, thus avoiding the early morning rush. We wandered around the crowded streets, noting the tarpaulins thrown over the older, nicer buildings, and the complete absence of any shops or cafes that would let anyone inside, a sightly ominous sign of things to come.

The crowds were congregating around the aforementioned greased up pole, in such a density that observers from the balconies above spent most of their day chucking buckets of cold water onto the crowd, much to their continued delight. Once in the crowd, the water was indeed very welcoming, especially as most members, including myself, had failed to attend to their morning hygene rituals. However, before we had fully immersed ourselves and were simply indulging in an innocent morning vat of sangria, the force of the water being thrown from above knocked my drink out of my hand, and at this point in my tired state, was nearly enough to bring me to tears. Still, I soldiered bravely on, and after five minutes in the crowd it became completely normal to be standing on one leg, pressed against the British stag party to the front and the overexcited Australians in the back, shouting ‘aqua!’ at the top of one’s lungs, while desperately clutching at your friends’ (or in many cases, what you think are your friends’) hands, attempting to stay together in the heaving mess of a crowd. And this was before they had even brought the tomatoes out.

Eventually, someone must have touched the ham, and three lorries crept through the narrow streets, each with shadows of former people on them, grinning and flailing their limbs as they threw tomatoes as if their lives depended on it. I don’t know where you would find anyone who would willingly take this job, because going to the Tomatina is one thing, but to willingly fully submerge yourself in rotting tomatoes for up to three hours and enjoy every moment takes some kind of stamina I hope I will never know. Perhaps they were mental. Or just the organisers preying on the overtired. Either way, I would be intruiged to know the recruitment strategy.

The first tomato to hit me was still relatively intact, and smacked me square on the back of the head. Unfortunately this caused me to have something of a small mental breakdown in my tired and hungover state, and I, most sensibly, decided that I actually wanted no part of all this mess and what I would like is a sandwich and a nice lie down on a quiet pavement somewhere. Armed with two friends who felt similarly, we eased our way out of the crowd towards the metro, only to be pushed back by the police, thus returning us to the tomato doom. The smell was horrifically overpowering, and to this day I still find uncooked tomatoes offensive. Apparently further into the crowd, they were knee deep in muck and simply scooping it up in armloads and chucking it around like monkeys throwing their own feculence. Clearly my bitter feelings about that first tomato are still intact.

So while the others continued to cover each other in a smell so overpowering most of us have had to discard our clothes from that day, I bought a sausage sandwich and curled up on a pavement on what I later realised was the main thoroughfare through the small town of Buniol and waited for the rest our friends to emerge from the crowd and meet at our sensibly pre-planned meeting point.

I don’t really care to remember the rest of the day, but a few haunting images come back to me:

1. The colossal crowds of tourists waiting to get back onto the metro, clutching ripped and soggy metro tickets, and then the transport police packing people so tightly onto trains that there were people lying on the overhead luggage racks.

2. The trains having no air conditioning or windows, or indeed anywhere to sit, and having to endure the smell of eight thousand idiots covered in rotting tomatoes in the heat.

3. Gradually congregating outside Valencia main station, sleeping on the pavement precariously close to the road while eating felafels and shuddering in disgust.

4. Getting to the bus station to find that we had caught the last bus back to Calpe, the town of our villa, with only five minutes to spare, and the relief so intense that I shed a tear.

5. Washing. All. The. Tomato. Off.

My advice regarding the Tomatina now is to not go. I didn’t think it was worth it, but then I’m not into covering myself in shit. If you like that sort of thing, then wear flip flops, something over your hair and get someone to hose you down before you get back on the trains. Or move to Valencia. Don’t stay up all night, and drink a lot of sangria in the morning.

The second festival of my modest gap experiences was Bestival, a quirky ‘aren’t we different’ affair on the Isle of Wight, also known as an area of the UK with one of the highest old-people-and-leisure-facilities-to-anything-else ratios. I’ve been, I’ve seen, it’s weird. Because it’s the last festival of the season and takes place on the second weekend of September, its populated mostly by university students, gap year layabouts and families. Very nice it was, as well, apart from the epic journey down, which requires time to be spent in both Southampton (possibly one of the more depressing coastal towns the UK has on offer) and East Cowes on the Isle itself, which has fully embraced the punnery available around the Isle of Wight, and is full of twee shops selling crap called ‘Wight Elephant’ and such. Most irritating.

The festival, however, is lovely. Set in a nature park of sorts, relatively small at 40,000 people, which cuts down walking time between one’s tent and one’s desired grassy space in the main arena marvelously. It was sunny all weekend, and to add to the festival’s initial quirkiness, it has an annual costume based theme, which this year was classed as ‘outer space.’ While it’s normally exciting at festivals to see the occasional nutter in a banana suit, seeing at least three quarters of people there dressed up like complete tools was relatively entertaining, especially when one considered how much time and effort had gone into some of the costumes and, potentially, how little some people must have in their lives. That or they were bored and unemployed on their gap years.

Music wise, the Bestival was an incredible let-down, but a sign of its quality as a festival meant that this didn’t matter. I only recall seeing about four bands, namely Lily Allen (not my choice), MGMT (amazing but fell victim to the poor sound engineering so very quiet), Bat for Lashes (good enough to convert me to a fan) and Fleet Foxes, who were so good I had a quasi-religious experience and have been listening to the first album on repeat ever since. Which is all you need from a festival really.

However I will take a moment to pick a few bones with the staff. First of all, they put all the best acts on for Friday afternoon, which is ridiculous. We arrived at the festival, tired, worn, and weighed down by cider and tins of beans to the sounds of Florence and the Machine, only mine and festival companion Zoe’s favourite band ever, which was so disappointing we nearly cried. Then I learned both Metronomy and Passion Pit had already played, and all the good dubstep was that evening when you’re too tired to get into it. Foolish, Bestival, foolish. Furthermore, the sound quality was poor. I won’t rant about it, but it was poor.

Making up for the lack of bands available for viewing, however, were the numerous DJs who played all through the night in something like 12 different tents, which was fantastic. We saw Diplo, who was on top form as usual, and Jaguar Skills, who proved surprisingly good in a live environment. I couldn’t tell you the other DJs we saw, but all music genres were covered, particularly well in a tent called DaDa, which was less of a tent and more of a samba club from the 50s, where they played reggaeton and salsa till the small hours. We ended the festival eating vegie-burgers after dancing to an hour of trance in the curiously titled ‘Beatles XBox tent’ and drinking the free Vitamin Water being handed out by the best (and indeed, only) cockney 12 year old salesmen I’ve ever known.

Other exciting activities at the festival included:

1. A circus

2. A hip-hop kareoke event

3. A vegetarian cafe with polka band who, on the last night, descended into the audience to have a chat and then out of nowhere broke into a practised dance routine, with the cafe staff, for a full four minutes, much to everyone’s awe. It was like Bollywood.

4. Yurts, for those who could afford them.

5. A lot of enviro-crap going on, including daubing paint on big bits of paper in order to end poverty, and painting your face blue and taking an aerial photo to send to Gordon Brown to apparently hammer home the message that some members of the student youth are unhappy about the way the planet is going.

6. Multiple hog-roasts.

7. A food stall devoted entirely to mashed potato and condiments.

So Bestival receives my thumbs up, though I don’t know if I’ll be going again due to the extreme measures required to return to Oxford, including getting up at 6, waiting at the ferry terminal, dirty and shivering in the early morning sea breeze, putting up with seemingly every other ferry passenger purchasing and waving in my face a fry up (there is something I find so offensive about a fry up breakfast made on a ferry that I simply cannot describe) and a certain member of staff at Southampton station who will remain nameless, but the witch knows who she is, who refused to let us onto the platform to catch an earlier train and beat the post-festival rush, thus causing us to spend two unnecessary hours in the excuse for a functioning facility that is Southampton main station, on my companion’s birthday no less, tired and dirty. She attempted to use the ‘I don’t make the rules’ excuse, but when dealing with British Rail, I know she doesn’t make the rules, and that is why you rely on the sense of the individual to bend the rules into what most people understand to be a logical way to run a train network. But I’m not bitter about it.

Next up, the fascinating world of unemployment.

Disappointed in Duress

A fruitful visit to the Tirana bus station (identifiable by the high ratio of shouty men to buses) allowed Julia and I to board a coach to Duress, Albania’s flashy beach resort. And by flashy I mean ugly and dirty.

Duress offended us first by not having a beach directly on the seafront, but instead a cholera-tastic rubbish dump of a promenade, with the fresh smell of sewage wafting over. The beaches, hardly less smelly, are a mystery bus ride away, the title destination of which the Bradt guidebook does not deign to disclose. One accidental trip to the scrap metal end of town later, we found the bus that drove a charming route through several motorways to the beaches, with concrete blocks for buildings parked rakishly close to the shore. The smell of sewage was equally fragrant, and as I read my book while Julia swam, I saw a pair of youths openly rummaging in the pockets of other swimmers under my gaze.

Duress lost further points by being the site of King Zog’s apparently extravagant palace, but not caring to signpost of acqunowledge the location of said attraction. Instead we stumbled upon the remains of a Roman forum and amphitheatre, and a cow tied up outside a sidestreet butchers, mooing woerfully, but no palace. We peeped in the Mosque and then decided to attempt a sunbathe on the mysteriously placed giant slabs of marble a few metres out to sea from the central promenade. It was fairly digusting wading through muddy water under the gaze of the fishermen, but we felt very glamarous sunning ourselves on a marble rock. Until the sewage smell kicked in.

By night Duressi was the happening place for all of Albania’s trendiest ladies, dressed up to the nines in their heels and cropped tops, shimmying along to the usic blasting from all cafes and bars. There was a rusty fairground and an air of excitement, though it was lost on me first by the ugly concrete buildings that Hoxha was so keen on for his communist holiday resort, but also the sight of lots of homeless children sleeping in the middle of the promenade, which wasn’t something I’d seen before and seemed worse in a holiday town. Tirana has relatively few beggars, and the most hassle we got was from kids selling Albania pens, which, admittedly, we bought. I like tat.

The only things I can recommend about Duress are its proximity to Tirana, if you want a day on the beach, and one nice cafe we found in a little fortress. It was the only place that was quiet, typically, but it was atop a stone roof in a round building, probably the only non-concrete block in the place, and was therefore calmer and ever so slightly cooler, convenient for me as I had by then developed a surprisingly potent allergy to airconditioning.

So overall Duress is not worth it, especially after visiting the Albanian riviera. While all of Albania is dirty due to lack of rubbish disposal techniques, Duress seems to revel in this, depressing when considering the fact that in a few years Albania will probably be the new Greece.

Return to Albania

So after almost exactly one year, I threw my ‘never go back somewhere because it’s probably disappointing’ motto to the wind and got on a BA flight to Tirana. New travelling companion, new indepth knowledge of the uniqueness of Albanian communism, same backpack.

I will start by saying that approaching Albania by air is a tricky thing. You can go fairly cheaply  on Albanian Air, but I wouldn’t. Look at their website if you don’t believe me. Options also exist via Rome and Budapest, but we decided direct was easiest, and rocked up at Gatwick at a reasonable hour to be drug searched and watch all the Albanian ladies present being taken aside to be questioned for human trafficking. And then had our passports checked by not only the staff at the gate and border control, but a lady with a special badge. Serious stuff.

Rinas airport in Tirana is rather smart, and provides a lovely taxi service to the centre by means of a hassley man who badgers you until you give in, and I say that as someone who is highly resistant to such schemes. However it was handy in the case of finding our apartment in Tirana, which was located in the typical Albanian fashion of ’somewhere between a hairdresser and a coffin shop, behind the row of skips and left of the third uncovered manhole down the sidestreet that isn’t the other sidestreet.’ Luckily the guy who rents the apartment – and I’ll get to that in a minute – was there to provide a key and show us round.

Now, the apartment. Probably one of the best things about Albania is how ridiculously cheap it is, and we managed to find this place (Dream Mirror Apartments, in fact) on a normal hostel website for 12 Euro a night. What we got was a renovated three-person flat with aircon, full kitchen, wifi, and balcony, five minutes from Skanderberg Square, opposite a supermarket. Bargain. It’s also run by a guy who claims his name is Elton, which is an added bonus.

In order to fully revel in the swishyness of our backpacker accomodation, we decided to hit Monday night Tirana by storm, which in my book means strolling down to Taiwan via Skanderberg Square. I don’t know why I like Taiwan, because it’s just an ugly concrete building in a park, but it always feels like the place to be in Tirana, and you can people watch happily. It also (still, after my visit last year) has the options of both ‘fruit pants’ and ‘fresh fruit pants’ on the menu. Incidentally,’fresh fruit pants’ turned out to be a mixture of fresh orange and lemon juice, not a delicious combination, but worth it for the novelty of looking a young Albanian waiter in the eye and asking for pants.

The next day it was culture time, which for us meant the ‘communist nostalgia tour’ as detailed in the Bradt guidebook to Albania. Now I will take many issues with this guidebook, but my first is that either the author is not familiar with what real communist nostalgia is, or she is lazy. I vote both, as the walk described was pretty much a look at Skanderberg Square (which is indeed a cracking good bit of communist nostalgia, but a rather obvious one) and a walk down Boulevard Deshmoret. On Deshmoret the (hideous) Pyramid can be seen, as well as the (horrifying) Mother Tereza Square. Admittedly both are relics of Albania’s communist past, but the most communist thing about the tour is noting the collossal width of Deshmoret as a communist built street. We took our tour to the bbloku area, which I like very much. It is essentially where the poshos of Tirana live, and stroll up and down in their designer gear, drinking coffee in the nice outdoor cafes and apparently pretending that they are not directly outside Hoxha’s old house, which is labelled on the map but not in actuality. We could only be sure it was the right building when an armed guard inside the gate told me off for taking a photo, and the range of Hoxha’s own literature being flogged outside. It’s not even mentioned on the nostalgia tour.

After my frappe and a break from the heat, we hit the market, which was fabulous. Again, cripplingly cheap, and full of figs and tomatoes and other goodies at this time of year. Enroute to the market was a visit to Ethem Bey mosque, one of the only old ones left in Tirana to my knowledge, which was lovely if poorly ventilated for summer prayer, and the Statue of the Unknown Partisan, which is what it says it is.

This was more than enough culture for me, but travel companion Julia proved to be something of a fiend and we proceeded out, post-siesta, to attempt to find the Tanner’s Bridge. We did not find it until some days later, by accident, as we were delayed by what was perhaps the most epic thunderstorm I had ever seen, presumably a result of Tirana being sat in a bowl between mountains. We stopped under an outdoor cafe’s umbrellas, and were still there, having moved inside to attempt to maintain dryness an hour later. Eventually we gave up waiting and, against every old man in the cafe’s advice (old men populate most places in Tirana, cafes are only one) ran out to find Sarajet, a traditional Albanian restaurant as recommended in the Bradt book. Badly. Not only did it fail to warn us that, as a rather posh place, we would not only bewilder but probably offend the staff by showing up wetter than if we had fallen in the sea, but that it was also fairly shit. Despite being in the guidebook it didn’t have a translated menu, or food that anyone wanted to eat. They did, however, kindly provide a large stack of paper napkins for us to attempt to dry ourselves with, between trips to the bathroom to wring out our clothes. However the wine was cheap and our waiter was entertainingly nonchalant about everything we said, from declaring vegetarian status to sniggering when he offered us a dessert ‘with cock.’ Fuelled by wine, we later enquired as to the nature of a dessert with such an addition, and it turns out to mean walnuts. I like to think he was grateful for our explanation of his culinary faux pas, but his persevering nonchalance made it hard to tell. Incidentally, despite being in quite a nice building, Sarajet is not an amazing place, and the food is fairly poor. I will continue to take the Bradt guidebook on point by point throughout this writing.

The next item on the cultural tour agenda was the National Museum, a wonderfully soviet affair, identifiable immediately by the large socialist fresco on the front, taking up a side of Skanderberg Square. It is full of the things that soviet history museums think are both interesting and meaningful, including bits of old pots, money, endless rows of mannequins dressed in traditional costumes of the period, etc. There was relatively little on either Skanderberg or my hero Lekë Dukagjini, who wrote the Canun of Lekë Dukagjini in the 15th century. This book is vital reading before going to Albania, especially if you travel outside of Tirana, as it dictates the Albanian way of life that prioritises hospitality like no others, especially nice after general Balkan apathy.

The museum also stops at 1947, or has taken down anything after that, which is understandable but a shame. The most on Hoxha we could find was his coat and gun in a glass case, and his photo on a poster of members of the National Front. Nothing more, and where his exhibition had presumably once been was blocked off. Still, it’s an interesting museum if you like that sort of thing, though there aren’t many translations of captions yet.

Photos and details of our exploits in Duress, Sarande, Himara and Bajram Curri will follow as I have time

The Great Sperm Race and other TV

Their words not mine.

Always having heard about the benefits of PSHE (personal and social health education), the government initiative to stop British kids being fat and/or pregnant but having arrived too late in Britain to hav experienced it, I was pleased to watch a grown up sexual eduation program on Channel 4 last night. Well, not pleased at as the ripe age of 18 I know the basic facts (my American education has taught me the following things: never, drink, take drugs or smoke, and never, ever, even if you’re not Christian, have sex) but this was still beneficial. Something of a biology connoseur (for this summer’s exam I am required to know no fewer than nine terms containing the word sperm) I settled down, ready to critique the pop science and scoff happily. However it was actually very good. Not only was the science up to scratch but what absolutely made the program was the use of hundreds of extras of all ages and backgrounds, dressed in white, running about in order to simulate sperm. However, not only did they just run about on set but they were also made to run up a spiral staircase to simulate male ejaculation, but also through glorious Telly Tubby-esque green fields which apparently represented the womb. It was incredibly comical yet done with a completely stiff upper lip by the narrator and the scientists involved, including the portrayal of the digestitve lysosomes present in one’s uterus which break down sperm cells as really quite frightening monster men, with scream-type masks on. Despite being disolved in giggles at the poor extras (more facial close ups were done than I felt necessary, the poor actors) it was a very good and educational programme and I’m sure it’s on 4OD somewhere.

At the opposite end of the good TV spectrum lies the modern remake of 90210, a high school drama about beautiful rich kids in LA. Now I never saw the 80s original but this is really terrible. Not only are all the kids suspiciously beautiful and promiscuous despite being 15, but they’re also never bigger than a size 6. The show documents all the usual teenage problems – love triangles, divorcing parents, being the loser and, of course, cocaine addiction and a teacher fired for having a relationship with a student who was actually an undercover cop trying to bust said cocaine addict. We’ve all been there, I know. However, the programme contains none of the following: good acting, good production, good plots, good dialogue and good clothes. You can get all of these things from Gossip Girl, the East Coast equivalent, with fewer size 6 girls (depressing and surely a bad example to the younger audiences) and more convincing bitchy characters at that.

Perhaps I’m just biased because one of the main characters in 90210 is outcasted for having a blog. But I’d rather watch sperm any day.

A round up of the music headlines.

So in the past week my Zodiac (or apparently now the O2 Academy, will they ever just leave it alone?) going habit has been reinvigorated, a happy coincidence with a week of half-term holiday, defined by all my fellow students as the last ever school holiday to sleep, socialise, and lie around in front of daytime TV without feeling guilty. Naturally I have been working hard at this, interspersed with writing 3,000 words on Hoxha’s rule in Albania and discussing the ramifications of the Taliban’s rule of Afghanistan, and, most importantly, following the Masterchef semi-finals.

But inbetween these important tasks, I have been to see drum and bass moguls Chase and Status with Beardyman and local Oxford DJs, Late of the Pier, Florence and the Machine, White Lies and Friendly Fires.

Chase and Status

The evening of Chase and Status proved to be an interesting experience. I was expecting it to be populated with male students of the type that populate dubstep and drum and bass establishments, identifiable by their floppy ‘I’m too cool to commit to wearing it properly’ hats and their floppier dance style, a sort of rhythmic shoulder thrusting to heavy bass. So I was surprised when we arrived to find it mostly full of the awful gaggles of women in their mid-twenties who have been informed of local club nights on commercial radio, and only show up at the O2 academy because it’s now no longer the scary, grungy, dirty Zodiac club. There were, of course, the usual drug-fueled, scantily clad teenagers there too, recogniseable for their oh so uncool habit of taking photos of themselves dancing (I only did this twice because I run my school’s yearbook, so it’s OK), and of course the floppy boys present also. However the presence of the afmorementioned gaggles I find rather to have ruined my evening, as more often than that they have either consumed too much to drink and/or don’t enjoy being in large, densely packed crowds that the O2 academy encourages, and become rather agressive. This led to much of the night being spent timidly stepping aside every few minutes to let a crier followed by eight overprotective blondes in stiletto heels past, each one giving you a shove and a glare for being in their way. I am fully sympathetic to those who dislike being in the middle of a large sweaty crowd, as I don’t either, but that’s why I don’t go in them.

Beardyman

Anyway, the music was very good. I missed Kano, a London rapper who was second on the bill, but Chase and Status were very impressive and better still was Beardyman, apparently the UK champion beatboxer whose skill would have been more impressive if I had been closer. His talent exists in singing and producing music entirely from his mouth, apparently with no help from a DJ or any other of his posse of urban types milling around on stage during his set. This confused me, as there was an extremely overenthusiastic DJ on stage for the entire set, fiddling about with his knobs and buttons and doing lots of heavy breathing and muttering that, if I was a world-famous beatboxer, would find to slightly cramp my style. But I’m not, so I’ll assume that the DJ had a real purpose. Anyway, the Bearded one was very good, ending the set with a cheerful cover of Don’t Worry, Be Happy by Bobby Mcferrin.

After a weekend of recovering from the traumas of the gaggles and the floppies, it was time to return to what turned out to be exactly the same crowd to see Late of the Pier. The fact that I am a long-term fan of Late of the Pier makes me feel extremely old, as I first saw and reviewed them almost two years ago supporting Jack Penate’s tour, and I am quite young. The band are of the extremely hip electro-indie scene; their music has probably been in Skins at some point and it’s the sort of thing that 16 uyear olds (never me) put on fluoroescent pink legwarmers and glow sticks for. I say that in jest but you couldn’t move in the crowd for all the tight fitting checked shirts on the indie boys. I also believe they have just completed a tour of the nation’s warehouses, in what I assume was an attempt to recreate scenes from Skins where (unfortuantely it was rival electro-indie band Foals who got the bill) sixth formers amassed in a hidden forest warehouse with copious drugs and alcohol to dance the night away to what can only have been a 9 song set.

Late of the Pier

I wasn’t expecting them to have changed or even be very good, so I apologise for this with the admission that Late of the Pier were, actually, very very good. Dressed in what is only a degree away from drag; skintight jeans, sparkly, shiny tops and with lovely pixie haircuts, they flounced around on stage, complete, I was pleased to note, with wooden bed slats present in their 2007 set, used as drums. They were so good on stage that I felt terrible for doubting them, and the only thing I could fault with the entire set was that they didn’t play Circular. Bouncing between bongoes, at least four synth keyboards, the bed slats and a stack of amps, the boys put on a very good, energised show, playing all my favourites from their first (and I believe only) album, including Heartbeat Flicker Line, Random Girl, Dose A and my ending with my favourite Bathroom Gurgle.

Thus the music week ends with the NME tour, always a highlight in terms of seeing what the NME declares is the best in new indie and is usually the dregs of the previous year’s electro-indie scene. Last year the line up included this year’s second bill Friendly Fires and 2007’s Crystal Castles, bleepy, jerky electro ‘rave’ at its best, ever present in indie gospel Skins. Due to the excessive referencing, for those who don’t know, Skins is a Channel 4 drama about the lives of Bristol sixth formers and the Guardian’s way of obtaining its ‘down with the youth’ status as well as general British media’s support of the notion that British teenagers are stabby drug-peddling hoodies with nothing to do but get each other pregnant while abusing their parents, which I resent because it’s probably only half true.

Beautiful Florence and her harp

So anyway, this year the full line up was Florence of the Machine, White Lies, Friendly Fires and Glasvegas. Florence and the Machine were first up, and both the best and newest act of the night, without even their first album for sale. I have long been a fan (or at least since Christmas), and initially their presence in the set list was the only reason I had got tickets. Probably the best live act I’ve seen in a long time, Florence, a redhead of goddess-type appearance thrashed, somehow elegantly, around stage, waving her lovely hair and howling (and I mean in a strictly lovely way) out slightly morbid songs about death and domestic violence with a voice so amazing she didn’t seem to need a microphone. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any woman in modern music who was truly admirable, and my gig companion and I truly fell in love with her, so much so that we bought a band T-shirt afterwards, which is something I have only ever done once. The Machine part of the band also deserve a mention, partly for having a harp as part of their set, which is something you don’t see everyday, but mostly for being an excellent band fronted by an even better Florence. I am in love.

Anyway, their set included My Boy Builds Coffins, Kiss with a Fist, Postcards from Italy and ended with my favourite, and their first single Dog Days are Over, which was really good. The early crowd of devoted, long-time NME tour goers, now a little greying and beer bellied, as well as the music-concious men in their late twenties who have the air of those who have recently changed their taste in music and like absolutely everything, seemed very impressed.

Next up were White Lies, who I have very little time for, not just because their music is a more boring version of The Editors’ worst stuff, but also because they ran an extremely oppressive ad campaign through January declaring that they were the best band of 2009, which was irritating and surely inaccurate. I reluctantly stayed in the crowd for their single, which I can only assume they played second in their set to keep people interested, which is rubbish and has a chorus that drones the memorable line ‘let’s grow old together and die at the same time’ over and over until you want to die long, long before White Lies ever do. I sat at the back of the club for the rest of their set.

Friendly Fires

The only reason White Lies were endured was to see Friendly Fires, who I had missed at the previous tour and didn’t particularly want to see, but was convinced by my gig-companion and turned out to be a very good move indeed. Friendly Fires on record seem to be your run of the mill indie band, not bad but not spectacular or feigning uniqueness, a Good Shoes sort of act if you will. However, live they are much more funky and dancey than their singles give away, and if that wasn’t enough they are also very good looking, even if the guitarist hadn’t managed to find a shirt without bulging buttons, which isn’t really a good look for anyone. The frontman appeared very sweet, wiggling away to what were infinitely better songs live, including my favourite Strobe and single Paris, as well as Skeleton Boy, which, rather confusingly, sounds incredibly like ATB’s You’re Not Alone. Glasvegas were the final act in the tour but I have no time for Cribs-impersonating boring Scotting drivel. In fact I have very little time for almost any modern Scottish acts, from The View to Calvin Haris, so there.

It’s been overall a good week of music in Oxford. Ruined slightly by the modern crowds attracted by the O2 academy perhaps, but the music has been on top form, which puts me in high spirits for next month’s gigs including a Hot Chip DJ set, the return of both Jamie T and Goldie Looking Chain and Mr. Hudson and the Library.

When Christmas became Georgian

This year the Spector/Ryding christmas took on a new international affair with the addition of Georgian traditions for our Christmas eve 12 vegetarian dishes event.
As it’s our last Christmas to be spent in England, what with the purchase of the first family home in some 10 years in Vilnius, we went out with a bang and a small party in Oxford to help us eat all the Lithuanian Christmas fare. Though, to be fair, the only Lithuanian addition to the proceedings this year were kuciukai, tiny crunchy bread lumps flavoured with the Eastern European staple of poppy seeds.
Mother grinningly provided churchkhela from Georgia, a delicacy perhaps only enjoyed by Georgians, made of nuts dipped in grape juice and resembling a large dog turd. As they turn surprisingly rubbery when more than three minutes old, our guests regarded them with concern before turning to the Greek additions of baklava and spanakopita, apparently East Oxford staples as I enjoyed them both at new years and summer parties this year. The only thing to do with the churchkelas in the end was hang them with the Christmas decorations in a window and perhaps convince the neighbours of our ever curious taste in decorating.
Other Georgian additions included khatchapuri, unfortunately made without the aid of the Japanese instructional video found on youtube, but popular nonetheless. The Christmas turkey was even named George, a tribute to mother’s well-liked colleague in Georgia.

A cheeky trip to Dublin

My visit to Dublin proved to be an interesting experience. Originally it was a quick trip over on Ryanair with a friend to go to Trinity College open day, but then the idea of 3 days off school in Guinness-land soon attracted many friends and lo and behold, 11 of us descended on Dublin for three days.

Incidentally, the open day was rubbish. We wondered around the college grounds for a while, which were lovely until you went round a corner and found the same awful 70s concrete rubbish as in Oxford, which universities were allowed to build until everyone realised it was horrid. Given that the talks all appeared to be ten minutes long and none were on my subject of choice (Central Eastern and Jewish Studies with Russian), it was quite a waste of the tenner we spent on flights.

Otherwise I very much like Dublin. Our hostel was just off O’Connell Street with both the Post Office looking like either a Greek temple or the Town Hall in Vilnius, with a bit of gun damage left on, though I couldn’t see it. Also impressive was the giant spike. There’s no better way to describe it as the central monument of Dublin is, simply, an incredibly tall metal spike that causes many tourists to lose their hats, such is the amount of neck craning required to see the top. Still, it proved very useful in finding our way home when we got lost.

Much time was spent in the Temple Bar area, sitting in pubs where everyone seemed to be wearing flat caps and live bands sung songs while hearty Irish crowds slapped each other on the back and gulped down pints of Guinness. By day the area had a little less to offer and the cold kept us off the streets, but the city centre was certainly very agreeable. Somewhat impressively, we also visited two modern art museums in Dublin, which I enjoyed very much. The IMMA, located just near the prison-like Guinness factory had some excellent French cartoons from the 30s, which Georgian friend and I agreed looked very much like Socialist cartoons. I don’t know how I know what socialist cartoons look like, having never been anywhere socialist, but it was a recognisable theme. We also visited the Collins Barracks in a fit of being cultural and killing time before the evening flight home. While we didn’t stay long, it was a great museum, with the actual flag of the 1916 Easter Rising encased and only slightly biased accounts of the war.

I was very impressed by the amount of Gaelic visible in Ireland; all the trams, buses and street signs were labelled in both English and Gaelic. It is, incidentally, a language that is completely explanitive of the nature of the Irish accent, though, like Hungarian, completely unfathomable and bizarre considering the neighbouring countries. Always a fan of Irish accents, notable local pronounciations included overhearing someone saying ‘tursday’ and the ever popular, ‘two turds’.

Despite being completely fucked over by Ryanair (you have to pay £8 for the privilege of checking in to your own flight, yet I took all means of explosive shampoos, a full water bottle and the potentially lethal hair straighteners on board) it was a very good trip indeed. Dublin is a very agreeable place to be a student, it seems, if rather expensive. Pubs on every street, the ever necessary H&M and friendly Irish people all round.

If nothing else, it had always been something of a goal of mine to have been to all 43 nations of Europe by the time I was 20 and finally, on Tuesday last week it was confirmed that I have just 10 countries to go. The remaining are Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Russia, Belarus, Norway, Portugal, Moldova, Malta, Cyprus and Iceland. Naturally the most far flung, difficult to get to. Easyjet don’t even fly to Iceland anymore.

A return of the Zodiac?

Regular readers will be aware of my dislike of the Carling Academy venue on Cowley road in Oxford. It used to be the Zodiac club, where bands like Radiohead and Supergrass used to play to local musicians on week nights. It was dingy and dark and smelly and everything a music club should be. There wasn’t a smoke machine or a great light show, but local bands could get on the line up list and it was cheap.

Carling Academy has, until now, proven to be the exact opposite. It is expensive, full of corporate rules and regulations (apparently there are no hard drugs allowed backstage. How un-rock and roll is that?), their security are rubbish and it attracts a certain late-twenties crowd who between them seem to represent the entire demographic of commerical radio in Oxford, i.e. they might have heard of a band playing at the Carling once and decided to go for a night out. The resulting effect is that they do not like being in a crowd or having to pay £5.50 for a drink and are extremely aggressive. Since the change from Zodiac to Carling there have been fewer people thrown out for bad behaviour but three times the reports of it. I myself have had my gig-moxy stripped away when I went to Alphabeat. Those familiar with the musical stylings of Alphabeat will be shocked. Those who are not think Danish nonsensical pop sung by beautiful people who like glitter and balloons as much as your average five year old. Essentially, I was pushed and shoved out of the way while having my hair pulled by a group of swearing angry girls who seemed not to be able to cope in a very crowded and hot atmosphere. When I reported the incident the next day I was told that ‘nothing could really be done, if it’s not at the front it’s not really a problem. Wait, were they smoking?’

So the Carling Academy in Oxford is not my favourite place. I can’t say I particularly care for the Brixton one either; it’s very  very light and the sloping floor as it’s primarity a theatre is a bit awkward to stand on when it’s slippery from beer.

Clearly they have become aware of this recently and have attempted to redeem themselves. Cycling past the venue the other day I couldn’t help but notice that on the line up for Saturday were the Half Rabbits. Not only are the Half Rabbits an extremely local band (big sister went to university with the front man who also lived a few doors down from me) but to have snagged the prestiguous Saturday night slot when the commerical radio listeners are out in force.

Now I can’t endorse the Half Rabbits as a prime example of Oxford music. I’ve seen them a few times and I think they are at best a little bit boring. I get the feeling they don’t like me that much either, given that the front man still seems to think i follow him. It is unfortunate that the few times I’ve seen them play I happened to have ended up at the same noodle bar afterwards and then appeared to follow him home because I lived further up the street than him. It may be worth considering that when I see him in the street he looks worried and sometimes crosses the road, but as the reviewer I feel I have the high ground.

But this is surely a step forward for the Carling Academy. They may charge £15 for the privilege of going to see Airbourne, which I flyered for last week and can confirm are the cause for plummeting sales in floro length leather jackets, but £7 to see a good, local Oxford band on a Saturday night and probably have a chat with them afterwards is a very good deed. Maybe they just couldn’t get anyone else, but a fraction of my trust from the old days of the Zodiac club has been restored to Carling. Having said that, I definitely didn’t go.

The plight of the A-Level student

It’s crunch time. Not just with the global economy (though I have yet to see the negative effects of this; I have three jobs and a brand new home in Lithuania) but with one’s education. All around me my fellow pupils have got The Fear. The Fear only usually occurs around April but this year, our final year of school, we have lovely life-altering exammies 6 months early to ‘take the burden off in June’ which is both ominous and stress-inducing information. Luckily I have finally acquired a coffee habit, which fuels not only this post but new working hours late into the night.

University applications have been sent off (or rather in the case of the non-Oxbridge applicants, sent off with a sigh of releif, sent back to have typos checked, sent back, returned etc) and LSE, SOAS, Edinburgh, Sussex and Trinity Dublin will soon be hearing from me. Meanwhile I pour not only over the rise of the Labour party in early 20th century Britain but also over transcription in cells, the Russian Civil War, Wordsworth and Colerdige and the German present tense.

So naturally, The Fear has set in. Christmas may be round the bend (as Tesco have been trying to shove down our throats since September – this is no joke, they put the Christmas crackers out when I go back to school after the summer, like there are people out there worried they won’t have enough come the big day four months later) but as the A level students of the world slog away it is not Christmas trees we dream of but the genetive case, Lenin versus Trotsky and the works of Owen and Sassoon with an extra helping of lysosomes and geographical speciation. It’s a sad year for us.

With an attempt to deviate from the norm of memorising exam answers every day I have been reading lots. Currently I am enjoying, or at least reading ‘The Women’s Decameron’ which makes for some fairly gritty reading but interesting given that I am now attempting to become a Soviet culture buff. Next on the list is Ali and Nino, a bit of social anthropology and gap year research for my impending trip to Azerbaijan. After that I will attempt to plunge into Albanian history once more in the depths of Oxford’s Bodleian library, which I have been avoiding largely because you have to read a ridiculous pledge not to set fire to the books each time you go in if you’re not a member of the university, or at least I do. Frankly the rasping voice from the asthma should be a dead giveaway that I don’t carry a lighter and the money our family has spent on carting our books round Europe should be another but I don’t like to complain. While I’m on the subject of Albanian history it’s worth mentioning that anyone thinking of buying ‘Albania, Who Cares?’ shouldn’t, because it’s appalling and just the ramblings of some journalist who decided to go and interview a load of people who got stuck at the wrong end of the Cultural Revolution. Incidentally the book comes with a sticker on the front declaring that 50p from the sale (I imagine they’ve made about a pound now that I’ve bought it…) will go to ‘the people of Albania.’ Given that it’s one of the most corrupted European countries that doesn’t really fly with me, but I’ve done my bit my going for my summer holiday. If anyone wants to buy this article, 50p of the sale will go to the author.

Alas I fear most of these reads will be hypothetical. The Fear doesn’t like to share with non-curriculum based reading. Back to the genetive then…