Western tragedies remind us that we could be next

The world watched in horror yesterday as two bombs were detonated close to the Boston Marathon’s finishing line, killing at least two and injuring over a hundred. Twitter sprang into overdrive, graphic photos of the atrocity flooded the internet, and frenzied speculation about who might be responsible soon began.

But amidst the shock and sorrow, a number of people were quick to point out that over 30 people died in bombings in Iraq on the same day. And while the manner in which this fact was relayed might have been somewhat insensitive – proffered as some kind of body count one-upmanship – it does raise questions about how we apportion sympathy to lost innocent lives on account of their geographical location.

It strikes me that the real reason we found ourselves so affected by the attack in Boston is not just sympathy, but rather that it was an incident you or I could have easily been the victims of. The sweltering, burnt out streets of war torn areas in the Middle East might seem like the usual backdrop for terrorist incidents, but a sunny city in the USA? Almost unheard of, and all the more shocking for it.

The quote that was bandied around the most amidst the online chaos yesterday was one from Fred Rogers, who said: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” And in Boston yesterday, as the rolling photos, videos and reportage showed, that rang true.

But where are the helpers in Syria, or Iraq, or Afghanistan? Where are the helpers in countries that see 10 times this level of terror and destruction every day? A 50 word nib in the back pages of a newspaper reporting mass deaths in the Middle East does not compare to the front page of almost every Western news outlet demanding answers for yesterday’s horror in Boston.  Why don’t we ask for answers unless it happens close to home?

What took place in the USA yesterday is an utterly tragic and shocking state of affairs, worsened by the fact an innocent child was one of the victims. But innocent children and innocent lives are taken every single day around the world by people planting explosives, and to value the death of one over the other simply because they come from somewhere similar to ourselves is just wrong. Every human life is sacred, and we should feel equally moved by the loss of one, no matter from where in the world it is taken.

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Events like yesterday’s often seek to make people temporary media heroes, but Carlos Arredondo (pictured above)’s story is a truly astonishing account of the horrors some people are subjected to, and their unwavering resilience in the face of extreme adversity. 

The strongest female voice in politics is gone. Will there ever be another?

As someone who was born after Margaret Thatcher stepped down from office, the Iron Lady has been a remarkably present figure throughout my life. Perhaps it was because she was the local MP for my area before taking up residence at Downing Street, or the fact she was admired by one parent whilst despised by the other. But more than that, more than any policy she ever triumphed or failed with, the inimitable Mrs T did something that had never happened before or since: she proved that politics could be a woman’s game.

Thatcher’s politics might leave me cold, but her conviction does anything but. As I sat in the newsroom at lunchtime today, watching interview after interview with Tory peers, and the ex-PM’s former colleagues, that achievement was yet again hammered home. I watched as a conveyor belt of wrinkled old Etonians were asked to comment on Thatcher, on her policies, and her life, and her input, and couldn’t help but wonder where her female contemporaries might be. Surely it was for them, and not her male counterparts, that a woman at the forefront of British politics truly meant something.

I talk about the lack of women in male dominated areas of life somewhat frequently – in fact, I often think I should write about something else. But then I notice an all-male panel show, or a political conference entirely devoid of female journalists, and can’t help but put pen back to paper. In a government with woefully few female politicians, most of whom are forgettable faces drawn in to keep up the appearance of addressing the gender gap, Thatcher’s rise to the top of her game and ability to stay there for over a decade is all the more meaningful.

While I found many of her policies to be rather deplorable, Thatcher’s belief in politics, and belief in herself, do offer a glimmer of retribution.  A politician who can be respected is something I’m yet to see. I have never heard the current state of politics more accurately summed up than by comedian Zoe Lyons, who two years ago proffered: “We now have the blandest politicians in Europe. Cameron, Clegg, Miliband – if there was a General Election tomorrow, I wouldn’t know which middle class, middle aged, bland suited, wet lipped, big foreheaded Oxford graduate to punch in the face first.”

British politics has become an increasingly sorry state of affairs, where so-called ‘leaders’ are little more than media monkeys spouting watered down policies that have no real meaning. It is bitterly ironic that in their desperation to show themselves as characters, as men of the people, that Camereggiband has become little more than political white noise. Thatcher didn’t need to tweet, or draft in house pets in a desperate bid for attention. She cared about her country, and though the way she showed this was wildly divisive, no one can doubt her genuine desire to make a difference.

When Roger Ebert passed away last week, tributes poured out in memory of the great writer who spent much of his career destroying that of others with an acerbic flick of his pen. But praise and adulation were heaped upon him because, whether what he said was good or bad, he had an innate understanding of his craft. You may have disagreed with a review or two, but nobody could say the man couldn’t write.

And similarly, while Thatcher’s policies directly impacted some in a most terrible fashion, she understood the game she was playing. It is easy to look back retrospectively and insist that there were better ways to bring coal mining to an end, but the reality was that there was a job that needed doing, and she was the only one with the guts to pull the plug. A politician can never make everyone happy – that goes against the very nature of democracy, where there will always be a majority and minority – but one whose legacy remains as prominent as Thatcher’s has and will speaks volumes for what she achieved. The vast majority of politics revolves around papering over the cracks left by the last government, and while she had inherited an economically damaged country in a perpetual state of rule by an overpaid boys club, adversity seemed to propel her forward.

What worries me most about Thatcher’s death is not the Bieber generation tweeting their desperate confusion about why someone’s name they don’t recognise is trending. What is far more concerning than that is how Britain’s only ever female leader being gone will impact the future of women in politics. I struggle to believe that the likes of Baroness Warsi or Nadine Dorries will positively influence young girls contemplating a career in politics – there are simply no role models, no female tour-de-force frontbenchers who show girls that they can be a party minority and win.

I find it almost impossible to get my head around the fact that out of 75 Prime Ministers, in a country where 51 per cent of the population is female, we have been outnumbered by male leaders in 98.7 per cent of British history. And now, in a society that is supposedly gender equal, we cannot produce one female politician prepared to run for the top spot – which makes Thatcher’s victory at a time where women’s place was in the kitchen all the more significant.

The Time I Contemplated a Major PR Stunt

So here’s the thing: it turns out getting a job you actually want can be quite hard. Who knew? Well, all of us, I suppose. But there’s something quite different about pondering the world of unemployment from the security of your shared shithole at university, and actually living out the uncertainty in glorious technicolour.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen to me after I graduated, so I decided that my best option would be fleeing the country. This ended up as a sort of four-month-double-fleeing-spectacular, starting off with me working on a magazine in Edinburgh for a month and then tootling off to New York for three more to work at a newspaper. Both were totally brilliant in a number of ways, but were finite jobs that had an all too quick expiry date.

So a couple of days before Christmas, I came back to London. Over the festive period, I was still jet-lagged and high enough on mulled wine fumes to temporarily forget the overwhelming and crushing reality that I was sort of unemployed, or a ‘freelancer,’ as us wacky lot in the biz call it. Aren’t journalists a card.

And then some quite good things started happening, like me getting interviews for jobs that I wanted, and getting to the final rounds of grad schemes for major newspapers that I didn’t want, and then I got paid to do actual journalism for an actual company that was actually really good. That job may have only lasted a week, but getting paid for doing almost nothing and reading endless magazines was like a bloody holiday. Stella English, you don’t know what side your bread’s buttered, love.

Right so anyway, then that thing happened where the shit hits the fan and you end up getting a faecal facemask, and life was becoming annoying because I was mostly wearing velour (sometimes in PUBLIC) and just bumbling along not really achieving anything. I coped for about two weeks with the whole desperately-sending-emails-out-to-everyone-in-the-world shebang and then caved, because I am a human who is weak and needs money for overpriced sushi. So I took a job in a car parking appeals office and spent four days hating the world and everyone in it who was employed by people that weren’t thieving bastards making those whose elderly relatives had just died cough up £80 for parking a millimetre outside the allotted bay.

Within my four days of torture at the ticket place, where I know for a fact dreams go to die, I was thankfully offered a sort of mini-job at a newspaper. I think it’s a job because I do get actual money for it (although it’s pretty much pennies), but the gig only lasts for five weeks, which makes me unsure.

Anyway, there is a point to all this, or maybe several points, and they are coming very soon. In my new job type thingy, where I am sort of redoing a lot of work formerly done by other people, I decided to google what my predecessors were doing now. I did this because this is maybe what a journalist would do (I’m not entirely sure if I am one yet, although I’ve been paid enough times to make me think it hasn’t all been a weird banking accident). It is also maybe what a stalker would do, but sometimes I’m really not sure there’s a difference.

So I googled the guy and found a piece written by him on The Guardian’s website. This chappy had taken a load of business cards and doorstepped every national paper and big magazine company around over the space of a couple of weeks, handing them out to anyone who would take them. In the article, he said he had been offered two jobs that could ‘make him.’

This instantly reminded me of the grad who put his big old mug on a billboard and asked people to hire him. And then he got hired. So I started to wonder, were big PR stunts the only way to actually get recognised in the field? I thought writing for publications since the age of 13, being deputy editor of a magazine at 20, moving to New York at 21 and freelancing all the while for national newspapers et al might be worth something, but apparently I was very wrong. Billboards, my friends. They are the mark of a true genius.

In spite of my bitterness, I do sort of understand why employers would see the attraction of someone who job hunts batshit crazy style like the aforementioned two. I’m not exactly risk averse – in the last few months I’ve lived abroad illegally, moved in with random flatmates I found on Craigslist and narrowly avoided a lawsuit – but there’s something about these big LOOK AT ME statements that I’m not sure are quite my style.

I realised the other day that I sit right next to the editor of the paper’s office, and that if I were to do some kind of big weird gesture, he should probably be the recipient (for proximity reasons, mainly). I’m not really sure about this stunt malarkey, though. For some reason, the only thing I could think of was filling his office with peanuts, but that is quite a shit idea (although if he really loved peanuts he might be like ‘OMG peanuts? How did you know?!’, and then gobble them up excitedly. Or, die of an anaphylactic shock. It’s really hard to know what is fucking stupid and what is totally genius in relation to industrial sized quantities of salted nuts).

When I stopped thinking about the peanuts idea (how many bags of KPs would I need to fill the entire place? Etc etc), I did briefly muse upon the fact that both of the stunters, as I shall term them, were male. This may sound a bit trite, but given the news this week that female graduates earn far less than their male contemporaries, it sort of seemed to tie in. The main reason for the pay gap was that women would ask for far lower starting salaries, while men would value themselves higher. In short: they’re bolder, and it’s paying off for them. So maybe it’s time for women to start doing extroverted crap and being cocksure (sans the cock, heheheurgghh), because we deserve equal pay, and we shouldn’t be afraid to ask for it.

If only I could come to some kind of decision about the peanuts.

The Free Press is Costing Interns Dearly

Rarely a day goes by on Twitter without some kind of large scale spat taking place, and amidst dodging the heavily manufactured uproar about Jack Whitehall being an aberration to society, or whatever it is the tabloids are claiming, something of actual importance was brought to light yesterday.

The escalating row about unpaid internships was highlighted by Guido Fawkes, who criticised left wing organisations Political Scrapbook and Left Foot Forward for preaching about fairness and justice – but refusing to pay their own workies. The Commentator also came under fire for the same crime – although they were quick to defend themselves on Twitter by saying they had never let an intern go unpaid – but these blogs just seem to be tiny drops in the ocean of intern exploitation.

Exploitation might seem like a strong word, but that’s what it is. When it comes to the media, or journalism specifically, there seem to be few rules or regulations about what you can be made to do for free. While outsiders might question why young journos fresh out of university sign up for this in the first place, the truth of the matter is that there really is no other option. In this industry, the choices are either forking out for an extra journalism degree (because the £30k you spent on getting an undergraduate one isn’t enough), or start working somewhere for free on the off chance that maybe, one day, they’ll offer you a few pennies for your trouble.

There are two major problems with this culture of working for free, the most pressing of which is, to my mind, the way it makes journalism an elitist industry. The average person comes out of university saddled with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt, and can’t afford to keep working for nothing until they finally land a job they actually want. The only people who can afford to this – and these are largely the people who could also afford to go to university – are those who can rely on the bank of mum and dad to bail them out. Journalism is increasingly becoming a luxury career, one only available to the middle and upper classes, and this simply is not right. Privilege alone does not make a good writer, and newspapers and websites alike would do well to remember this. By refusing to pay interns, they are denying would be journalists no less talented than their richer peers the opportunity to succeed in their field. They are denying themselves the opportunity to publish some of the best up and coming writers in the country. And they are denying people the ability to dream big, because they are unabashedly promoting the mantra that money makes the world go round, and that anybody without it may as well not bother.

The second issue with the incessant debate, and then re-debate, about unpaid internships is that they never actually come from the mouths of babes. I cannot begin to express how disappointing I find it that the mainstream press occasionally opts to berate those who do not pay their interns – yet it is never the interns who get the chance to speak up on a national platform. It is the staffers at these publications who get to boost their own profile as apparent do-gooders and do what they’re paid to do, rather than those actually in the thick of the unethical process. If you want a real story, go to the heart of the source – not to unaffected observers. I studied philosophy as part of my degree (bear with me here), and an issue we often discussed was whether knowledge could ever really be complete without first-hand experience. For example, can Prince Charles ever really know how black slaves felt in colonial America? He might have read every history book on the planet, but surely no amount of literature can ever compensate for  what it feels like to be the target of injustice. Similarly, although of course on a far lesser scale, nothing written by full time paid journalists can ever truly encapsulate what it feels like to slog your guts out for free and spend every penny you have pursuing a career dream that may ultimately come to nothing.

Since graduating with a 2:1 in an academic degree from a Redbrick university in summer 2012, I have had a few writing gigs that have cumulatively earned me around £1500. That’s £1500 in around seven months. I spent the last three of those in New York, again interning on a newspaper where I didn’t even have the luxury of reimbursed travel (this has also happened to me at nationals in England), let alone payment for the dozens of articles they happily churned out with my name on them. The way I see it, if I’m decent enough to be published, I should be getting paid for it. And yet, like so many others in my shoes, we continue desperately fighting each other for unpaid positions because, quite frankly, the only other option is giving up. I’m lucky to have parents who recognise how hard I have worked for eight years (yes, I had my first article published aged 13) and thus are just about holding off on forcing me into the job centre, but not everyone has this privilege, and publications hiring interns are intelligent enough to know this. The only way of restoring justice to this system is for newspapers and the like to fix up and start doing the right thing. People shouldn’t be punished for wanting to be journalists, they should be encouraged, and the current climate of unpaid labour is doing the exact opposite.

 

A Londoner in New York part 9: Dates and Departures

I really can’t believe that this is the last blog I’ll be writing from New York – it feels like only yesterday I was being driven around the  seedy depths of Brooklyn in an unlicensed cab at 2am. Sweet, sweet memories. But three months on, I’m packing my life back up and heading home to London and funemployment. Twenties, you confuse my brain.

I figured that I would have to mark my leaving NYC in as many ridiculous ways as possible, so from sitting on the subway dressed as a reindeer next to Jake Gyllenhaal to venturing into the online dating scene, I’d like to think I lived up to the challenge.

To give a little bit of context to the latter situation, in New York, everybody who’s single is on the same free dating website, which sounds like an exaggeration but is actually true. So anyway, during our very drunken Thanksgiving, my roommate was regaling me with tales of how she found some kind of sexy acrobat on the site and they had some sexy acrobat sex before he ran off to join the circus. Or something like that (I was in a ham and vodka induced coma so the details are hazy). Having been in New York a couple of months by this point and only encountered gay men, I figured that at worst, I’d get murdered, and at best, I’d get an STD, and to be honest, those weren’t the worst odds I’d ever had. So the next day, I signed up.

Initially, I was really worried about spotting someone I knew on the site, so I put little to no information on my profile and only put up photos taken from a distance in case anyone tried to steal the identity of a broke English girl living semi illegally in New York (we are the prime object of identity theft so I am told). Early on in the online dating game, I had your run of the mill messages from people who only had photos of their torsos, or who wore really lame glasses, and I was getting pretty disillusioned with the whole thing. When I discussed the lack of success with my American friends, they assured me that they had met people and everyone had fun and nobody died, so I should just stick with it. I reluctantly listened, but continued to ignore all of the messages people sent me for the aforementioned reasons and because, quite frankly, the spelling and grammar in those messages was appalling. I’m not saying I want to date Einstein, but someone with a higher IQ than a grape surely isn’t a lot to ask.

My friends insisted that I send messages to people as it was the only way of not ending up with total reprobates, so I decided to have a drunken 3am perusal of who the site had listed as my ‘top matches.’ And as I was scrolling through the list, I stumbled across none other than a fellow intern from work, at which point I laughed hysterically, briefly pondered the ridiculousness/awkwardness of the situation and then passed out. The fact that someone I had pretty much zero in common with was an alleged ‘86% match’ reinforced how completely and utterly useless the site was, and reminded me exactly why English people/I am scared of online dating. Because it is weird.

I’d forgotten I was even on the site until the other day, when I had a (correctly punctuated) message from a guy who seemed relatively normal. Well, as normal as someone searching for sex/love on the internet can seem. I ended up agreeing to go on a date, although after a few days of very overly forward text messages from the guy in question, I was beginning to change my mind. But, being the true stoic I am, I soldiered on and went to meet him. He wasn’t a killer, which was nice, and somehow we managed to pass a few hours with reasonable-ish conversation (read: me talking all the time to avoid awkward silences). But the whole affair was rather dull, and after a 13 hour drinking session the day before, all I wanted was to go home and watch Elf in my pyjamas. Eventually I decided that enough was enough, and said I had to go – there was clearly no spark between us, and he was wearing a jumper I didn’t like, so I figured we’d go our separate ways and be done with it. But as we said our goodbyes, he lunged in for a horrendously awkward kiss whereby I was sort of craning my face away and he was still trying to kiss it. It was bad. Very bad. I then made the situation far worse by half running away, and in doing so dropped the candy cane ‘Christmas present’ (seriously) he had brought me onto the floor. Again, very bad.

Some mild boy drama ensued over the next couple of days mostly involving him wanting to meet up again and sending me more dirty texts (this guy was a pre-school teacher), but it ended in typical fashion with us going our separate ways. Probably a good idea given I’d only met him a few days before I left the country for good. But I’m sort of glad I tested the waters, as it taught me that 1) online dating is mostly like real dating, just with a higher chance of murder, and 2) that I’m going to die alone. Necessary life lessons, I suspect.

On a less depressing note (sort of), leaving has given me the chance to think about how many incredible things I’ve seen and done here, and how many wonderful people I’ve met.  Of course, there have been trying times too (a hurricane and near lawsuit spring to mind), but I even found myself getting a little choked up as I left work for the last time on Friday afternoon. Thankfully I’m dead inside so there were no actual tears, but the momentary voice raspy-ness felt symbolic – to me at least. Anyway, I should probably get on a flight now, so bye bye NY – it has been bloody amazing.

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A Londoner in New York part 6: Hurricanes and Hipsters

Hipsters. Fucking hipsters. Only they could make a hurricane more bloody irritating than it is already, and with the whole no power/not being able to leave the apartment for days on end, it is bloody irritating enough. Mid-hurricane, we decided to have a little wander up to the roof because seeing Manhattan without power is just something you have to do when the opportunity presents itself. I’d been reluctant to leave the safety of indoors during the first day, much to the dismay of my far more adventurous housemates, who had gone for a wander to “check out the flooding.” There are times in life when you have to just say no to being hit in the face by a flying bin, and I felt as though that was one of them.

But after the power outage struck that evening, I thought the roof was a safe enough place to feel adventurous when really not being that adventurous at all, so up we went for some high wind related funsies. What made the experience less funsies, however, were the hipsters using this meteorological fuck up as an excuse to be really bloody hipster-ish. Up they trotted with their alternative hats and non-prescription glasses, practically shitting themselves with excitement thinking of all the fun they could have uploading their photos onto their Macs and playing around with the colour settings. I was then sadly dragged in on the act, and made to take a photo of them IN THE HURRICANE so that they could “quickly put it on Instagram.” Really? Really, hipsters? Is Instagram honestly your biggest priority right now? Everyone else on the roof was doing that thing you do when you watch fireworks (the occasional ooh and aah, interspersed with silent appreciation), but they had been there for all of five seconds before the Kodak moment had ensued and they were planning how many social media sites they could shit all over with their hipster hashtags.

It seemed sort of fun and exciting when the power first went out, but it was only by the next day that I realised what a mess the city was in. Given we had no internet at home, and I had no phone reception whatsoever (still don’t on both counts), I was kind of oblivious to what was really happening outside. But yesterday, I decided to make the hour and a quarter long walk uptown to my friend’s place (who, incidentally I couldn’t tell that I was coming given the lack of phone signal), as doing that was a far greater alternative to sitting around all day. What I accidentally forgot, however, was that as around 99% of Lower Manhattan is still without power, walking home at night time would be a rather terrifying experience. It’s honestly hard to imagine a city like New York completely black on every corner to the point where you can’t even see the hands in front of your face, but that walk back was pretty bloody scary. How on earth I even navigated myself back in the darkness from so far across town given my geographical ineptitude is nothing short of a miracle.

We’re likely to be without power and subways for at least a week, which may not sound like a big deal, but when you’re washing yourself with several day old water by candlelight, it feels like a reasonably big one to be honest. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the devastation that has hit so many parts of the city, but the hurricane has been quite isolating in some ways, and the lack of working traffic lights anywhere near where we live makes the roads of New York even more ridiculous than usual. We’ve been having a lot of vodka related fun in our apartment block, though, so every cloud.

When I’ve not been hiding from the storm, I’ve been trying to do some babysitting on the side to reel in some extra funds, although this has been largely unsuccessful. I was offered a full day of work in the Bronx, which was “one block from the ghetto” to quote its owner, and I did contemplate this for a while, thinking that I could just man up and be the strong independent woman Beyoncé has been telling me to be for all of these years. But then I remembered that I’m about as ghetto as a crayon, so I quickly declined. Lots of people genuinely do get shot in the Bronx on a daily basis, and I had tickets to see Alanis Morissette the next day, so it just seemed like it would have been bad timing.

It has been a pretty awesome week for live music, actually, and watching Joan Jett perform live from about 10ft away was the highlight of my life in NYC so far for sure. Less good was the Alanis Morissette gig, though, where I was enjoying bopping along to Ironic (the only song of hers I actually know) when AN ACTUAL MAN WIPED ACTUAL PHLEGM ON MY ACTUAL SHOULDER. This is not a joke. I mean, who the fuck does that? It was an Alanis Morissette gig for one, so the number of bodily fluids flying around was at the bare minimum (just the way I like it). But my elation soon turned to trauma as I saw an palmful of the yellow stuff on the shoulder of my cardigan. The fact that I am an avid cardigan wearer should, in my mind, alert people to the fact that I would not appreciate having their mucus rubbed all over it, but lo and behold, some people are obscenely selfish and disgusting.

So life has been pretty weird on all counts lately, but life in New York is still awesome, and although the Halloween Parade has been cancelled tonight (for the first time in 39 years!), we’re off to Bette Midler’s Halloween Party to see Blondie perform. Let’s hope Sandy doesn’t manage to fuck that up too! Until next time…

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A Londoner in New York Part 4: The Racist Freak Show

It’s been a funny old week. On Monday, myself and trusty fellow skiver Alice bunked off work to watch a live taping of The Jerry Springer Show, travelling across the States to Connecticut in order to join the jobless of America for an afternoon of harmless fun. Or so I thought. After we’d queued up in the cold for several hours, we were allowed into the lobby of NBC’s studios, and told to wait in one room. The time spent in line had given rise to some serious hunger pangs, so we asked if we were allowed to cross over into the forbidden other room which had the much in demand vending machine. The staff okayed this, but said we had to return to our designated area afterwards because of potential ‘fire hazards.’ So far, so normal enough.

After we returned to our room, Alice pointed out that everyone where we were sat was white, whereas those in the room with the vending machine were all black. I shrugged this off at first, thinking it could be coincidental, as surely a major television network wouldn’t exhibit such a blatant act of racism. But there was clearly no coincidence about it, as when we were finally let into the studio, all of the white people were told to sit in the front rows and middle block of the tiered seating, while the black people stood queuing at the door before being directed to the lesser seating on the sides. I sat there in shock for a while, wondering how on earth such explicit racial segregation was allowed to happen. My malaise quickly intensified as the recording began, as the producers ordered us to shout “WE LOVE LESBIANS!” at random intervals, applaud wildly every time Jerry made some vile comment about his vast earnings and offer a standing ovation whenever the show’s guests, who were clearly actors, started fighting each other.

The whole experience was atrocious, and as I sat there vehemently willing it to end, I did ponder how this kind of televised freak show was allowed to occur in 2012. I have never actually watched a full episode of the show, only five minutes here or there, so perhaps it was naïve of me to think that it would be a silly and light hearted affair. But one that provided an affront to race, gender and sexuality was not something I had accounted for.

Still perturbed by what I had seen, I emailed the show the next day, asking why they had done what they did. Needless to say, I didn’t get a response, but I honestly am still shocked by what went down that day. No one deserves to be treated like a second class citizen, least of all by supercilious cunts with clipboards, and I can only hope that now they know they’ve been found out, they’ll keep their foul racial prejudices under wraps.

In less depressing news, work has been rather more interesting this week, the highlight of which was probably a charity benefit at The Plaza. In between befriending Manhattan socialites with ridiculous names, I met Bow Wow, Nick Cannon and Swizz Beats, all of whom were supporting the Children’s Rights Foundation, celebrating its seventh year. As you can imagine, an event in the Grand Ballroom of The Plaza was pretty fancypants, so I turned up looking my usual dishevelled self with frizzy rain hair and holey flat shoes. I just like keeping it classy, okay?

The evening was small talk a-go-go as these events always are, but I did get invites to a few more things, one of which is a charity event with Demi Moore this week  and a pro-Obama vegan cupcake party. The latter of these things particularly tickled me, as I was trying to think of the British equivalent. A Sunday roast party for Ed Miliband?! Somehow, I don’t think it would take off in quite the same way. I’m also going to some kind of Cointreau party hosted by burlesque lady Dita von Teese and interviewing her in the next few days, so there are definitely some good things in store for the coming week. Until next time…