Helen Lawson

Oh dear, looking through my diary to compile this list makes me realise I didn’t get out enough in 2012.

The gigs I attended were mainly as someone’s +1 (hence seeing Mika twice, ahem) and films were safe options that I thought I’d like, rather than trying something unknown – perhaps because London tickets are so expensive that I don’t want to waste £10 on something I might not enjoy?

Still a bit hard to get my head around the free time thing now I’m no longer a student, am clearly quite institutionalised after 20 years of two schools, college, and two universities.

Highlights?

Music: Nile Rodgers and Chic being amazing at Lovebox, Rihanna and Azealia Banks at the Hackney Weekend and Robyn tugging at my heartstrings by singing my love life at Brixton Academy.

Film: Jean Dujardin as a modern day Gene Kelly (<3 always) in The Artist, Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen being the woman I wish I’d had to look up to in my teens and Michael Fassbender’s face when a woman wasted one of the few questions the audience were allowed by asking him about his favourite pizza toppings.

Anyway, excited about buying myself a Picturehouse membership in the new year – here’s to getting out more!

My friends know me as the Diet Coke girl, rarely seen without a cold can in my hand, and joke about me being addicted to the stuff. I’m fanatical about paying the lowest price possible to sustain my daily habit. You’ll find me concentrating hard in the supermarket as I use my phone’s calculator to work out which of the many special offers works out cheapest – I’m loath to pay more than 35p per can – and I don’t leave the house without at least one can in my bag.

But my habit is getting to the point where even I’m worried. On a recent big work project, I bought a six pack one morning and polished them all off over the course of a day before heading home to bed. It scared me to think that I’d been able to fall straight asleep despite putting 252mg of caffeine in my body that day – equivalent to more than three cans of Red Bull.

So I’m going to take drastic measures: I’m going cold turkey. It has to be all or nothing for me – I’m not the kind of girl who can nibble a bit of chocolate and wrap the rest up for later. For three weeks I won’t touch a soft drink, be it a cola or lemonade or even posh fruity drinks containing carbonated water. I’ve got big deadlines and friends’ birthdays in that time but won’t be able to rely on my faithful fizz to stay perky. It’s going to be painful.

Before I start I can’t help but think about why I’d like to quit my habit. I’ve tried to kid myself that my routine isn’t so bad, but my lack of energy would beg to differ. I feel tired most of the time and turn to fizzy drinks to give me a boost. I worry that I look unprofessional when constantly reaching for the can next to my keyboard and can’t last in meetings without a can to sip from throughout.

I use my weekends for lazy days of catching up on sleep and telly rather than getting out of the flat and doing things that make me happy and refreshed. It’s no wonder I’m sluggish again by Monday lunchtime.

Vanity plays its part, too: I’ve been struggling to fit into some of my clothes and the constant bloating from all that fizz doesn’t help. My skin looks dull and spotty and my face looks puffy. It’s all self-inflicted now I’m no longer a hormonal teenager.

I feel that I’ve now lost control of my fizzy drinks consumption. I’ve always got one with me to fulfil the physical need for one so it’s too easy to just crack it open without a thought and I’m surrounded by friends who share my vice. I’m not looking forward to the next few weeks one bit.

Week 1

It’s the first day and I’ve already cheated: there’s one last can of Diet Coke in my fridge and I decide the best way to avoid giving into temptation midway through my three weeks is to neck it down quickly. I then crack it open at lunchtime and savour it for more than an hour and a half.

I become painfully aware of the hiss of ringpulls opening around me, and glare at my boyfriend when he boasts about his office receiving a delivery of more than 120 glass bottles of the stuff. By 9.10pm I fall asleep on the sofa soon after I’ve eaten before dragging myself off the sofa and crawling under the covers by 11pm – being too tired to remove my make up before bed.

It’s not till I’ve polished off a bag of salt and vinegar crisps with lunch the next day that I remember that I’m not drinking Diet Coke anymore, and washing them down with water just isn’t the same. I get caught gazing longingly at other people’s fizzy drinks twice during the day, and I first think about lying on my bed and having ‘a nap’ at 6.24pm, roughly 27 hours since I finished my last sips.

My next day’s tactic is to not be presentable until I absolutely need to leave the house, thus stopping me from wanting to sneak out to grab a soft drink from the corner shop.

I’ve also devised a new tactic to get rid of my cravings: brushing my teeth every time I fancy a swig.  If the acid erosion isn’t going to wear away my teeth, perhaps my frantic brushing will. By 3pm, I’ve got a headache that stays for the rest of the day when I’d usually knock back a can or two to banish the pain. I’m out for dinner and have a glass of flat cloudy lemonade with my meal and I’m tired and cranky by 9.30pm. It doesn’t help that I’m in the smoky garden area of a pub and need to stay awake late to watch a band. I could really use a dose of caffeine to perk me up.

By the end of the week I feel thirstier than ever; chilled water is the only thing that can see it off. My skin is still spotty and dull from the week before, I’m completely lacking in energy, and don’t even leave the flat or get dressed on one day.

The first weekend

I wake up horrendously bloated on Saturday morning, even though I haven’t had a fizzy drink all week, which feels hugely unfair. I go out on Sunday night for a friend’s birthday but my dancing legs haven’t left the house with me. I also have a minor transgression: I’m slurping on the straw of a delicious gin and tonic before my friend gleefully reminds me that tonic water packs a lot of fizz in it. I make a command decision that tonic is not a fizzy drink – it’s water!  I drink a glass of wine and two gins, and not being able to have a nice fat McDonald’s Coke the next day to perk me up after mixing my drinks means I’m in bed till midday and not the happiest company.

Week 2

On the day of a big evening deadline I’m sluggish by 3pm and have to be prodded along through the task by my co-workers, even though I made sure to eat breakfast, and had fresh fruit and water all day. The rest of the week starts to feel like I’ve accepted my new limits, though I have to keep remembering not to look at the fun fizzy drinks in shop fridges, and I’m still reaching for the toothbrush rather than my purse when I’m at home and feel the urge to nip out. And I’m suddenly noticing soft drinks screaming at me from the side of buses to cinema screens and seemingly at the end of every supermarket aisle. Even my newsagent has a drinks logo on his shop sign outside! I have a quiet low-energy weekend at home catching up on telly and magazines, but still don’t feel bright and raring to go for the week ahead.

Week 3

It’s another stressful week juggling my workload where I need to retain lots of important information, but one particularly bad day feels like I’ve left my concentration under my pillow. This is the day I feel the most like chucking the past fortnight out of the window and giving in, but I talk myself away from the supermarket drinks fridge and back to the water fountain. Later in the week I catch a friend staring at me and she tells me my face looks thinner and my skin looks brighter. Appealing to my vanity is a genius move – whether it’s true or she’s just saying it to keep me going, it’s worked. I realise I haven’t touched a packet of crisps or even craved fast food because the thought of those tastes without a fizzy drink to accompany them is off-putting.

***

By the time the last day of my short experiment arrives, I don’t have touch a fizzy drink till my evening meal and only then because I have a weird sense that I should try it out. It’s not pleasant: I’ve got a headache and stomach ache within half an hour and lie awake for at least 90 minutes before an unsettled night’s sleep. A few days later I try it again at a gig before the unfamiliar taste sends me heading for chips and gravy before catching the bus home, and it’s a similar story in a pub for my friend’s birthday that weekend. On a day where there’s no food in the flat, we head round the corner to McDonald’s for large meals. Each of those returns to fast food has been prompted by only one can, and I’ve felt decidedly crap after each one and haven’t slept well. I don’t fancy self-inflicted headaches much, and find it easier to keep on the water afterwards.

I’m surprised that I’ve not gone rushing back to my fizzy favourites at my old rate when I resented not being able to have them so much. It’s made me realise how good it’s felt to not be bloated and to feel lighter on my feet rather than dragging myself around – something I definitely didn’t appreciate during my short experiment. It’s been nice having a clean-feeling mouth, settled digestion and undisturbed sleep, and I haven’t had a big spot breakout since the spots of week one faded. Best of all, I feel like I’ve regained a bit of control over one of my many bad habits – the shakes and physical cravings are yet to make a return. Perhaps I do have the willpower to ditch the sweets after all.

There’s nothing quite like a good internet rage to shame big firms into action. The latest saga to face the ire of social networks is the story of Tesco and the job with no wage. The nation’s biggest supermarket advertised a role through the Job Centre’s website for permanent night shift workers – the only catch being it isn’t a route into permanent employment at all.

The advert stated wages of jobseeker’s allowance plus expenses for 30 hours work a week– hugely different to the usual hourly rate of time and a half for Tesco employees working through the night. An outcry on Twitter led to a PR nightmare, where the company claimed the advert was an administrative error. They said the notice was for “work experience with a guaranteed interview” instead.

But Tesco isn’t the only firm to be recruiting unpaid staff from the Job Centre queues. As part of the Government’s Mandatory Work Activity programme – ‘Workfare’ – more than 24,000 jobseekers have performed up to four weeks of full-time work with private corporations, public sector offices or charities. Refusing to obey the orders from a Job Centre manager means a jobseeker could face a quarter of the year without their benefits. The time they spend unpaid on a shop floor makes them unavailable for the job searching they are supported to do.

At the end of last year, graduate Cait Reilly was both slammed and praised for speaking out against her two weeks unpaid work at Poundland. She had to interrupt a placement she’d organised which was relevant to the career she longs to pursue in museums, otherwise her benefits would’ve been withdrawn. Critics including the Daily Mail’s Jan Moir accused her of thinking Poundland was beneath her. Reilly’s point was that she would’ve been happy to work for a wage, but she gained nothing from her time in Poundland, while the company enjoyed the benefit of a free employee.

Sadly for the Government, they are even damned by their own statistics, let alone the general public. A 2008 report by the Department of Work and Pensions into similar schemes around the world concluded: “There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances.”

Tesco boss Philip Clarke started out on the supermarket’s aisles as a shelf-stacker before an economics degree from Liverpool University took him along the management track. His predecessor Sir Terry Leahy shared the same career path from the shop floor to head office, and was delighted to accept the garlands of the state with his knighthood.

What a pity that bosses such as they – with seven figure annual salaries – are so willing to conspire in the government’s plot, rather than remembering their own starts in life and offering the lifeline of employment to those who desperately want it.

Perhaps it is unfair to pick on Tesco alone. They certainly aren’t the only ones profiteering from the free labour of the registered unemployed. But they are yet to follow the example of TK Maxx and rivals Sainsburys, in withdrawing from the Job Centre’s work experience scheme, and to make such a move would surely see many big retailers rush not to be the bad guys left behind.

Tesco and their ilk draw upon the taxpayer-funded unemployed to aid their moneymaking. These people are not undertaking work experience: they are performing the role of a worker, aiding store productivity, and must receive a fair wage in return. We must not pay for Tesco to make its money other than through its tills, and even now perhaps it’s time to rethink where the weekly shop is done. Taking away your cash is the only argument they might possibly understand.

By being complicit in such schemes, private firms show their complete disregard for their responsibilities to the society that shops in their stores and fills their pockets. Such schemes could not exist without the collusion of the big bosses. The shameful scheming of those who hold the power in the UK just goes to show there’s nothing remotely fair about Workfare.

If, like me, your regular exercise routine consists of flexing your fingers to unwrap a bar of Dairy Milk, then hula hooping could be just the thing to coax you out of that rut.

We’re not talking playground-style hooping here. Exercise hoops are heavier beasts made from weighted tubing covered with colourful tape to aid your grip, and the bigger the hoop, the better for hapless beginners like yours truly.

Any fears I had about the prospect of being out of my depth in a mirrored walled room of buff gym-goers are instantly allayed on arrival – there’s not a mirror or crop top in sight. Set in the Great Hall of the Old Hampstead Town Hall, there’s plenty of space to form a large circle and, most importantly, plenty of room to let loose without whacking a fellow participant with an erstwhile hoop.

Anna Drury, tonight’s teacher, is a leopard print-clad professional hooper, who competes internationally with her burlesque act. Thankfully it’s ok for us to take baby steps tonight, and she immediately takes me under her wing, proffering her biggest hoop and sending me to join the circle before I’ve got time to talk myself out of it. Surrounded by women giggling at themselves every time a hoop clatters to the ground, it dawns on me that the only way to get through the next 90 minutes is to just go for it.

Starting on the waist, the trick is to flick your knee while rotating as tightly as you can, letting the hoop fall to your hips and controlling it from there. The waist part is easy, but it’s hard not to reach out to grab the falling hoop in a doomed bid to keep it rolling. I’m rescued by Anna, who assures me I’m a natural –a natural what isn’t exactly clear – and swaps my hoop for a smaller, green glittery number.

I acquaint myself with my colourful new friend, while Anna watches and patiently shows me how to scoop my hips and bum under the falling hoop: it’s an inelegant but effective solution. It’s quickly clear that my right hand is acting of its own accord to try and save me from embarrassment, but it’s a hindrance. As a group, we realise the only way to keep it smooth is to look incredibly silly and fling your arms above your head while bouncing and sticking your bum out.

Weirdly enough for this chronic exercisephobe, my stomach muscles are crying out for mercy but I’m hooked. Against a pumping chart music soundtrack, every time my hoop hits the floor I pick it straight back up and keep going. It’s easy to see how Anna, a self-confessed hooping obsessive, has spent the past six years honing her craft (and her impossibly-toned stomach).

She tells us we can replicate a routine she performs for us, including a move where she gets a hoop from the floor,  sends it whizzing around her body, and catches it after it flies over her head with only one flick of the wrist. I scrunch my eyes shut, take a deep breath, and am stunned to find the hoop in my hand. By this point, I’m willing to try anything she suggests – I’ve been able to do everything she’s shown us step-by-step, if a little cack-handedly. The woman’s a genius.

I swiftly return to Earth with the arm work. Holding out a firm arm, you’re meant to apply a fingertip under the arch and steer it around anti-clockwise, before guiding it towards your shoulder to get it spinning.

I come really unstuck when it’s time to throw. The idea is that you balance the hoop between your thumb and your outstretched forefinger, gently rocking it from side to side before bending your knees and launching it into the air. If you’re feeling really flash, you’ll do a spin on the spot before catching it in your other hand but getting that hoop to soar up and down without it falling into a wobble is hard. When Anna throws a hoop, she does it with the grace and power of a ballet dancer. When it’s my turn, it looks like I’m flailing to fend off an attacking bee.

We end the session with free practice, and I’m flinging hoops from the floor and over my head like a woman possessed, feeling pleasantly amazed that I haven’t collapsed to the floor or been laughed out of the room for ineptitude. A central London town hall is a long way from Hawaii, and my muscles complain like crazy the next morning, but I think I’ve caught the hula girl bug.

I hooped at The Fun Fed, based at Interchange Studios, 213 Haverstock Hill, NW3. Cost: £10 drop-in, £8 advance booking. Visit www.thefunfed.com for more information. Anna Drury teaches weekly classes in Hackney and Kennington, and one-off classes around the city. Search for ‘London Hula Hoopers’ on Facebook for a session near you.

Steve McQueen’s second directorial outing after 2008’s acclaimed Hunger, where Michael Fassbender took method acting to extremes to starve himself down to play IRA man Bobby Sands, puts his leading man under the full frontal, unforgiving gaze of the camera. Fassbender’s Brandon is laid bare in all senses. Within the first 10 minutes he’s striding to the bathroom and towards the camera still swollen after a sexual encounter, and throughout his hand is never too far away from his groin as a corporate man whose daily activities are centred wholly around porn and wanking, even in the office.

Abi Morgan, enjoying a wave of credits with recent script duties on The Iron Lady, Birdsong and The Hour, shares the writing here, with a sparse script showing Brandon as a cold-eyed operator, seemingly drawing no pleasure from his dalliances. Brandon’s solo life is interrupted when he arrives home to find his drifter sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) naked in his shower, as the unwanted house guest who shares a troubled chemistry with her older brother.

Mulligan’s accent waivers, taking a tour of the European dialects, but without the back stories for the siblings denied to us by McQueen, we know nothing of where Sissy has lived, travelled, or even if she has family other than Brandon to turn to. He ignores her obvious neediness, and their fights are frequent.

Manhattan itself is as much a character as any of the lightly sketched beings here; it’s a suffocating presence, with Brandon ever contained in the glass of his skyscraper apartment, or the floor to ceiling glass of his skyscraper office, or the subterranean dirt of the subway. The city is an enabler where at any time of day or night Brandon can summon a prostitute, or head to a gay club for a blow job, or partake in an orgy. He tries to form a relationship with Marianne, a co-worker, but for once his penis fails him and he sends her away before hired help saves his frustration.

McQueen doesn’t spare us the sex in its flesh-wobbling glory, though the camera lingers almost too long for comfort and certainly doesn’t steer the scenes towards titillation. Shame is not a popcorn film, but an unromanticised, unyielding portrait of a man so consumed by sex that it leaves little room for anything else.

This sold-out run of Brixton shows should be the pinnacle of a wondrous year where Friendly Fires cemented their reputation as the bringers of the party, with second album Pala more than matching up to its self-titled predecessor and its singles instantly joining the band’s glut of sing-your-heart-out hits.

But the year’s highs have been more than matched by lows, with the band reeling from the shock summer death of their tour trumpet player Richard Turner while having to fulfil festival commitments.

And with their grand outing of the venues of the British Isles disturbed by a bout of laryngitis to lead singer Ed Macfarlane, it looked like 2011 could end in upset. Southampton, Nottingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Newcastle were all struck off the touring list as Macfarlane’s illness took hold, so rather than culminating at Brixton’s sell-out dates in front of 15,000 fans, tonight is a mid-point. No end of tour party this evening, more a palpable sense of relief that their biggest headline gigs to date are here and happening.

The majestic swoop of the Pala cover’s parrot ushers the band onstage to a massive roar from the crowd, the urgent bass line of ‘Lovesick’ backed up with the sheer bombast of blaring brass from the back of the stage and propelled forward by Macfarlane’s incredible dancing. He thrusts, shimmies and shakes his way across stage, his snake hips urging the crowd to imitate his every move.

The band play it smart; they know they’ve got a formidable catalogue from only two records and pay equal attention to both, much to their fans’ delight. Now they can toss ‘Jump in the Pool’ in as the second song, when they’ve got ‘Chimes’ and its ilk from the second record to sustain the momentum.

By the end of the set, after the mass singalong of ‘Paris’ and though they know there’ll be a return, the crowd chant for more. Dancing back to the front of the stage, Macfarlane belts out song-of-the-summer ‘Hawaiian Air’. The paean to the airline makes far more sense live than on record as it takes off to the explosion of glitter cannons and technicolour treats; joined by Hawaiian dancers who drape the crowd in floral garlands.

Drenched in sweat with mile-wide grins, the school friends from St Albans take their bow in front of a crowd fully-roused from any earlier malaise. Once they ruled the grotty, unglamorous but thrilling clubs, but tonight they’ve stepped up as showmen-extraordinaire.

This is a short review I wrote of the first Random Act film from the new Channel 4 series, as part of my arts and culture specialism on my MA course. We had to imagine we were writing a ‘last night’s telly’ piece, and the night before was a bit eventful as Colonel Gaddafi had been killed… Points and adulation to anyone who can work out how to embed the video into this post!

And here is the film itself: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/random/articles/competition-winner-apple-by-dylan-owen

I don’t know about the strength of your  stomach, but last night’s late offering from Channel 4’s new Random Acts series was a welcome diversion from the Gaddafi gore splattered all over my TV screen.  Enough with the dead dictator already; a dose of animated whimsy from this arty short was just what the doctor ordered.

And though a doctor should indeed be kept away by an apple a day, Dylan Owen’s ‘Apple’ finds our poet in some seriously fruity medical trouble.  He chokes, he fantasises about the utter devastation his demise will cause his family, and heads down a disorientating tunnel towards certain death.

Among this beautifully-drawn crisis is the hero of the hour; a seagull who chokes on our poet’s discarded apple core and performs an unconventional Heimlich on our man. But there’s no thought for the poor bird; he says he is “saved by a seagull killed by an apple.” No, my narcissist friend, you killed the seagull. What a shit.

I’ve watched this ‘making of’ video a couple of times now and it made me go all a-quiver. Seeing the team playing around with flatplans, layouts and design, and realising that they really did use a typewriter for text and scan it in rather than using a fancy font…ace.

A regret about my editorship of Forge Press is that I never paid a visit to our wonderful printers (Yorkshire Web, absolute superstars) to see the presses in action, and it always felt a tad like skiving from probably the most crucial point of the whole process. So I loved seeing the printers included in this video, and especially loved the girl sniffing the finished Little White Lies at the end. Like I said in my last post, it’s a vital component!

I never expected to have a ‘just lovely’ encounter courtesy of the Leamington Spa branch of WHSmiths. I had a ten pound note and some coins in my purse and was feeling particularly cavalier. ‘Screw the need to preserve every penny!’ I thought, ‘I’m gonna buy magazines!’ I’d already scooped up Private Eye, Vanity Fair and Artrocker, but was still scouting the shelves when I spotted Oh Comely. It seemed familiar (I think I read about it first on the Stack site) and through the till with the others it went.

Reading Oh Comely was the most enjoyable magazine experience I’ve had in a long time. I feel a little late to the party on this one, as I picked up #6 and #7 is due very shortly, and obviously it’s already stocked nationwide in Smiths so can’t be that much of a secret! But it felt like a hidden delight and I’ll certainly buy it again.

Notionally it’s a women’s magazine, but judging by the amount of times my boyfriend stuck his face in front of mine to scan the pages there’s no need to classify it that way. Of course, he might’ve just been trying to work out what was keeping me so quiet for so long, but I was totally engrossed and read every word.

Oh Comely specialises in the interesting and quirky; I loved the focus on non-celebrity people who do really cool things in their day-to-day lives (an epidemiologist, artists, filmmakers, dog walkers) and really enjoyed the articles where a task had been set – trying out superstitions, attempting fun on a £1 budget, making your own sweets, and illustrating postcards from places you dream of visiting but haven’t yet been to.  I never thought I’d choose to read an article about different types of rubbers, but I’m a sucker for stationery and it was so lovingly written that I ended up feeling faintly nostalgic for the pre-Year 3 days where we wrote in pencil.

The design is lovely. It’s clean and sparse and beautifully decorated with illustrations and photographs alike. I really liked how there aren’t any strokes bordering the photos, making them segue into the page rather than marking them out as obviously imposed (Man, that sounds wanky). There are plenty of pages I’d love to pin up on my wall, if it didn’t mean tearing up the mag! And about halfway through I realised there were no adverts to be seen. The adverts generally bookend the magazine, rather than interrupt the flow of features, and it meant I stayed totally immersed.

I’ve been having difficulty with the women’s magazine market lately because I never feel that they’re really aimed at me. I don’t want to go on some silly crash diet (too much of a sweet tooth), the boy advice can usually be replaced with ‘talk to each other, ffs’, the scrutiny of women’s bodies over their personalities/talents really bugs me, and I’m not yet a career girl with cash to splash on the expensive items they feature. Plus, the cover prices can sometimes feel like a bit of a swizz when you spend ages flicking through adverts to get to the next piece of writing and have finished the whole mag within an hour. So coming across Oh Comely – which I enjoyed over two days – really cheered me up. £4 is an utter bargain in this case.

Plus, it smells *really* nice. This is, of course, very important. It’s not quite up there with Little White Lies on the gorgeous whiffy magazine front, but it’s running close behind.