"All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow" - Leo Tolstoy

I had the immense pleasure of attending a wedding this weekend. The lead roles? A girl with a heartbreaking past, yet with enough heart left to be one of the most wonderful people I know. Her fiance; a golden retriever character. Or that's as much as I could gather from about 7 hours in his presence.
The setting? It's seen War & Peace, it's listened to Anna Karenina's torturous life story. I's residents have been starved, frozen and hailed as heroes. It has changed it's name three times in the last century. A city that remains one of the greatest love stories of the modern age. Something only Tolstoy could have summed up.

St Petersburg was having a particularly warm February - I only needed two woolen jumpers.

The wedding was pleasantly un-Russian (aka. paid very little tribute to My Big Fat Greek Wedding). Minimal dancing, no one passing out drunk, relatives with only moderately eye-rolling speeches, only a few cheesy gift-boxes. The dress, to my immense relief, was absolutely gorgeous.

The city feels like it's still breathing the glory of it's history. Of course, visiting for exactly 2 days, I had little chance to sample the nightlife and youth scene (how it pains me to use that phrase) but which I am assuredly told is thriving. If Moscow is the daring, glamorous younger sister that goes out and attracts all the attention; St Petersburg is the older sister, the dreamer and the poet.
It's astounding how big the city is, for a relatively small population. The streets were built to plan and encompass a maze of canals and islands. It's often called the Venice of the North; it too is sinking under our feet. A strange and charming fury; the strength of history and the frail, sad beauty of what it's walls have lived through. 

I caught the bouquet that evening. But too late, I think I'm already in love.

"Charity creates a multitude of sins" - Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's plays drew a rainbow of characters, whose opinions were so dramatic and varied that one could not possibly ascribe such thoughts to the man himself. Or at least I hope not, otherwise he would have led a very bleak existence.

Sadly, we know this to be the truth. Coming from the man who was sent to the workhouse at the age of seven, whose mother was taken into a mental institution when he was nine, and who spent years in prison under a multitude of charges - you'd think he'd be a little more sympathetic towards those in dire need, even through the mouthpeices of his characters.

Last week, a good friend of mine and myself took part in a charity event called Jailbreak. The idea is deceptively simple: 36 hours to get as far away from our uni without spending any of our own money.
The key phrase here is 'our own money'.
I'm sure that, back in the good old days when people were more noble/smart/kind/better, they hitchiked and trudged and struggled through the snowy season to emerge somewhere a little more interesting. What do we do now? We beg, barter and annoy people for money.. and use it to buy plane tickets.

Admittedly, this probably works to get people further (one group got to Sydney this year, pretty mind bending stuff), but those thousands of pounds given to airline companies?
Not once over the course of those hours did we bend the truth, exxagerate and weasel our way out of awkward explanations. We never lied, but that speaks not of our moral victory, but more of those kind donations which came from the rushed, the bored and the occupied. Those that would rather throw a few coins in the listen to our frozen, desperate pitches.

In the end, we'll collect more money than we spent (which, admittedly, got us far further than we could have hoped for), but does the end justify the means?

We returned exhausted, dirty and poor, but elated. Shame to think those folks in Sydney have get right on that plane and come back the next day.

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything" - John Steinbeck

I thank GCSE English lessons for introducing me to Steinbeck. I'm pretty sure that I was in the minority, a minority who were secretly enthralled by character profiles, entertained a secret love for writing essays and kept quite whilst our peers sniggered at why anyone would ever willingly put themselves through the torture of reading a book. (God forbid; enjoy it.)

When Steinbeck was asked whether he thought he deserved his 1962 Nobel Prize for literature he answered: "Frankly, no."
The choice was supposedly a controversial one. The New York Times spoke of his 'tenth-rate philosophising'. Ouch.

I can't speak for world literature, but I can speak for the wrenching gut feeling I felt when reading East of Eden; which remains one of my favourite books. I can speak for the that heavy, hot weight in the pit on your stomach that won't go away for long after you've turned the page. My fingers shook for rage and agony.
I can't quite remember one of my favourite lines from the book, so shall have to settle for one that is 99.9% as satisfying: "It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves... The skin tastes the air".
Had Cathy Ames appeared in front of me in those moments, I was sure that I'd tear her skin to shreds with my very nails. Few villians before or since triggered such a deep, physiological reaction from me.


I like taking photos. I fear it is partly a selfish thing; I enjoy posting them to social media sites, and enjoy showing off what enormous fun my friends and I have together. Thankfully, I almost never take photos of myself, so this ugly truth masquerades as a selfless act of documentation and friendliness.
I used to adore creating photo-diaries of trips and holidays - 'Oh, remember this?' and 'This is when we found that funny looking tree/crisp/sign!'. I no longer have the patience for that anymore, and as people grow older they lose patience on the other side of the camera too - they don't like the flash in their face, they don't WANT to remember why they drank that 3rd bottle of wine.

The city in which I have lived for the last 3 years is beautiful. All turrets and gateways, bridges and cobblestones. But sadly, even that begins to lose its charm. I suppose that's what sets me apart from the 'real' photographers - I tire from beauty. What a terrible thing to admit.
The last three years have changed me to the point that I am unrecognisable to the person I was. I've fallen apart, nailed myself back together, bullied myself into obedience, lost myself in the process, fallen apart once again and am slowly - ever so painfully slowly - rebuilding myself, brick by brick.

Had I taken photos of those lows, my self-image would have been very different. But no, we choose to capture the good times. I look over albums of even the worst times with a tinge of bitter nostalgia. We think 'maybe it wasn't so bad at all?'. We use the digital images to sugar-coat daily life. Look at us: all parties and fun and games. No one knows what I was doing several hours earlier behind closed doors because THERE ISN'T A PHOTO OF IT. And the truth will be stored in the imperfect catalogue of our memories, distored and pixelated as need be, so we can plaster our bedroom walls with smiles and caricatures of an alternate reality we believe ourselves to have lived.

I often think that, if I were in The Matrix (a situation I regard as statistically likely to occur within my lifetime), I would have chosen the blue pill. Call it cowardly. I challenge anyone to choose differently.

"The saddest thing I can Imagine is to get used to luxury" - Charlie Chaplin

My father and I rarely see eye to eye when it comes to sense of humour. Yet one of the childhood memories to which I am most attached is the image of both of us rolling around on the floor, tears streaming down our faces which ached from insupressible laughter.
And to what do we owe this treasured moment? To the 'Little Tramp'. To the man who could make the world laugh using two forks and a pair of bread rolls.

Chaplin's life story reads as if the phrase 'rags to riches' was created in his honour. (Maybe 'honour' is a poor choice of word; to his misfortune.)
One of the few comedic actors to whom I will refer, tentatively, to as a genius; was forced into a workhouse at the age of seven, and whose mother was admitted to a mental asylum when he was nine. Hardly the stuff of fairy tales, unless you're a fan of the original works of Hans Christian Andersen.

I take a somewhat guilty pleasure from famous quotations. Having amassed books, websites and magazine articles on the subject under my belt; I continue to collect these soundbites of meaning everywhere I find them. I have shoeboxes filled with post-it notes and sheets of phrases and ideas, like a magpie which likes nothing more than to admire her treasures and applaud herself for having such good taste in theft. I applaud myself in having such a good taste in genius.

Dorothy L. Sayers, an early 20th century English author, joked that she always used quotations because it saved her having to do any original thinking.
(There's me disguising another quote in a sentence. I just can't stop.)

Which brings us to the original philosophy which kicked off today's train of thought: what is luxury and how do we stop ourselves getting used to it?

I was lucky enough to be born into a stable family background. The pinnacle of our poverty was perhaps when I had demanded ice cream as a child, only for us to realise - after my demands had been fulfilled - that we hadn't left enough money for the bus ride home. My parents walked for almost three hours to get home that night, me on my father’s shoulders and my mother telling stories so I wouldn't get restless.

Today, I am fortunate enough to attend a university cloaked in more traditions and prestige than it's terrified students can uphold. The terror of being faced with 4 rows of cutlery at the dinner table has been overcome. The complaint about how they're serving salmon AGAIN loses its absurdity. I do not hesitate at the thought of driving myself further into debt by spending a weeks worth of wages on a black tie event. Because, well.. EVERYONE DOES IT.
I'm painfully aware that this does not win many friends, nor does it ease our traumatic pathway into 'The Real World'.

Are we sad? I suppose that depends on what each of us has given up in the pursuit of such luxuries. Whether you still have the capacity to enjoy something you've grown accustomed to, and perhaps even bored of. How different were we before we knew what wealth tasted like?

All I know is; salmon gets very tiresome.