Perfection is over rated ...

Many Mothers and daughters bond over doing each other's hair or having a facial, but with me and my Mum it tends to be a bottle of wine, a curry and rubbish TV. However, last week,  she trusted me with her nails in preparation for her year 11 class's prom. Not just painting or filing them, no ... these were acrylic nails with instructions, an applicator and a tiny tube of glue: easy, right? After actually managing to physically glue her fingers together, it's safe to say we're abandoning that whole girly pampering thing. 

This isn't our first mishap when it comes to beauty however... 

The night before we flew to Florida three years ago, I got my Mum to do my eyebrows with an epilator. She did do a great job; not a single hair remained ... but neither did my skin. Equally, there is photographic evidence of various hair mishaps over the years. There were never any cute French plaits or bows, just a lot of pony tails (practicality was key). I most vividly remember my Grandad attempting to do my hair for school one morning when my parents were working early, and it was so bad that my teachers redid it for me when I got there. I didn't do myself any favours either. I have absolutely no nails and the ones that I do have are pretty mutilated as I've bitten them since I could chew, I once got a hairbrush stuck in my hair which consequently had to be cut out, and I spent a significant amount of my childhood looking like Ronald McDonald, with incredibly sensitive lips. 

I'd like to say I've progressed since then but that would be a complete lie; I'm still a disaster. However, a low key image hasn't been easy to uphold when you go to school with girls plastered with makeup, hair extensions, and a tan that resembles Doritos and the 'perfect' image portrayed in the media. You only need to look at the front cover of a glossy magazine to feel inadequate; perfectly curled hair, blemish free skin tone, and a skinny size 8 waist.

We hear about the 'miracle' diets and the torturous 5 hour work outs every single day and look on with awe, but what I'm coming to realise is that 'beauty' comes from within and these celebrities often have the ugliest personalities. 

My current photo journalism assignment  has seen me finding my way around Photoshop, and I've been quite shocked at the endless ways in which to manipulate a photo. I've always heard about 'air brushing' but never really quite grasped the sheer impact it can have. 

Here's just a few of the most shocking: 

What kind of image is this giving out? These magazines target innocent, naive and insecure teenage girls who dream of looking like these stars, but it's truly damaging women's   confidence everywhere. 

We're lucky that Britain currently has beautiful and inspirational women in the spot light for all the right reasons...

Even Lady Gaga is inspiring girls to embrace their bodies with her Body Revolution Campaign, launched late last year after critics noticed she'd gained 25lbs. Gaga highlights that even the skinniest of women look in the mirror and see flaws, but she is asking women to 'be brave and celebrate with us your 'perceived flaws,' as society tells us. May we make our flaws famous, and thus redefine the heinous.'

Confidence and happiness shine through any amount of makeup, spots or cellulite and I for one hope Gaga's message is contagious. 

We all have our insecurities and things we would like to change. I personally would like to look like Mila Kunis...

But if this futile dream ever depresses me, I take great pleasure in looking at pictures like this...

My hair's never perfect. 

The potential possibility of blinding myself means I avoid eyeliner at all costs.

If deprived of due care and attention, my eyebrows move towards looking like Chewbacca. 

But I'd never exchange my extra hour in bed every day, to rectify any of the above. 

If ever in doubt, look at an ugly picture of a celebrity for reassurance that we are all the same. 

A very special affair ...

If you happened to be in Aylesbury on Friday evening, you may have wondered why the majority of men were strolling around in pork pie hats ... or why every other person was wearing Fred Perry, Harrington jackets or loafers ... or why The White Hart was overrun with a more mature clientele than usual ... weird, no?

Well, if you don't know why, you missed out, because The Specials, came back to town for the third time, since they played as a mere support act for The Clash in 1978. 

That's right, they came to Aylesbury. You know the one; that little, grey town with a prison, where nothing interesting ever really happens ... However, it hasn't always been that way, and Friday night saw what is hopefully the first of many Friars gigs to come. 

In 1969, local men and music fans, Robin Pike and David Stopps, launched a rock club called Friars in Aylesbury. I know ... a rock club ... in Aylesbury ... the best you have nowadays is Friday night karaoke at Stars. However, Aylesbury was once quite the music scene with names such as Black Sabbath, Genesis, David Bowie and The Jam to name just a few, taking to the Friars stage. The club enjoyed success for sixteen years and it was a great loss to the town when it closed in 1985. 

Since then, the club celebrated it's 40th anniversary in 2009 and a year later, Paul Weller and The Buzzcocks took to the stage again, in sell out shows. 

Without the Civic Centre, the later stage of Friars, there seemed little hope for any form of comeback, but the new Waterside theatre has seemingly breathed a sense of culture back into Aylesbury, offering a new chance for Friars, and I for one could not be more in support. 

To many my age, the big names I just mentioned tragically won't mean anything. When I told friends how excited I was to be going to see The Specials with my Mum, it was met with sympathetic laughter and blank faces. To be fair, I do sometimes think I was born in the wrong decade, but then I have to question which decade I would have been born in, for my music collection consists of anything from the past fifty years. 

I was probably one of the youngest members of the audience and friends of my Mum were sceptical as to why I was interested in a band that were active before I was even born. However, I have been privileged to have a diverse musical education from my parents over the years, and although The Specials were the soundtrack to their childhoods, they were indeed a part of mine also. 

The Specials themselves played an amazing set. They were as good live as what I've seen and heard on TV over the years and their hour and a half set included all of the classics and a couple of new tracks as well as their encore. 

One of the reasons I'm drawn to them is that their music is still so relevant to this day. They don't sing about love and breakups like every single song in the pop charts today; they sing about reality. Many of their songs take a political stance such as Do Nothing, or a social stance such as Ghost Town, but many explore youth, lifestyle and culture. 

There is not one youth that doesn't go out on Friday night, and come home on Saturday morning. 

There is not one person who doesn't stop and think they're wasting their time working for the rat race. 

It's not just Rudy who's got a message that he needs to stop messing around and start thinking of his future. 

Everyone can relate to at least one of their songs and that for me, is the ultimate signifier of a great band.

Their 2 Tone Ska sound just makes me want to dance (and that is saying something because I'm a pretty bad dancer) and it's refreshing to hear real instruments as opposed to synths and artificial backing tracks. 

Music has always had a huge influence on fashion but the Specials 'Rude Boy' style is so distinct and so exclusive; you just don't find anything like that today. Everyone wants to be unique, but this style just added to the sense of unity. Forty-year-olds dressing as they did twenty years ago should have looked so wrong, but it never looked so right. 

What struck me most about Friday night however was the sense of community. Community is something that is rare in Aylesbury. Sure there are the odd few areas which are closer than others but disappointingly, on the whole, everyone keeps themselves to themselves. I don't know whether it was the people I was with, but despite the age gap, I couldn't have felt more at home. Age became irrelevant as the venue was full of people who were united purely by a love of music and memories. 

It was amazing just watching people. They bumped into people they hadn't seen for over twenty years and it was like something from that opening scene in Love Actually: embracing, handshaking, squeals of shock. It was truly amazing how people can lose touch, but reconnect so quickly. This made me happy, but also sad; sad that I can't imagine doing the same with people I've met in the last twenty years and sad that I can't imagine one single band of the 21st century that could bring together a community in such a way.

I love the advances in technology that have allowed music to be at our finger tips. The way I can type a few letters and I can see my favourite singers; the way that I can own my favourite songs without actually going into a shop; I love the sheer diversity and accessibility. 

However, at what cost have we achieved all of this? We seem to have sacrificed something that sat at the heart of the music industry: the ability to bring people together. 

If you wanted to go to a Friars gig, you queued up outside with hundreds of other people and you shared the experience. You didn't buy a ticket from the Internet, whilst in bed. 

If you wanted to own the number one single that week, you waited until you'd saved enough pocket money to go to a record store and physically hold the record. You didn't buy it for £0.99 from iTunes or worse still, illegally download it at poor quality and with poor morals. 

Music was a shared experience. 

There's a kind of a warm, fuzzy, feeling, seeing such a big name in your hometown and this is what Aylesbury needs. It needs a music scene. It needs something for the youth. It needs something to unite the community again. 

So thank you to Friars and the Waterside Theatre for putting on such a great show on Friday. I hope this can be the first of many to come. 

The Dark Path to Enlightenment.

Electricity.

We all take it for granted. TVs, computers, even light; electricity controls everything. 

Like everything however, we don't realise just how much we depend on it, until it is taken away from us. 

Last night I came home from work to utter darkness. Not just that all the lights were off and everyone was in bed, I mean pitch black; no street lamps, no traffic lights, nothing. A power cut had plunged the whole area into darkness. 

Now this wasn't completely unexpected, it had been scheduled during the day, but despite the pre-warning, I don't think any of us comprehended just how much it would affect us. Of course there'd be no TV, no cooker etc. but with mobile phone technology enabling you to have everything at your finger tips, 24/7, wherever you are in the world, we thought we'd be ok. However, what do you need to keep a mobile going? That's right: electricity to charge it. Therefore whilst we had 3G, Facebook, Twitter, music, iPlayer, and no end of apps, phone batteries needed to be rationed if we wanted our only form of alarm to go off in the morning. 

Whilst this experience practically crippled my brothers, I revelled in it. 

There was a level of quietness that I'd never experienced before. I couldn't hear that gentle hum of electrical vibes which are so constant, they have become the norm to us. 

There was an intensity of darkness that my eyes just didn't adjust to, not a single red standby laser in sight. 

Despite it being my home, it became a completely alien environment. 

The sensible thing to do would have been to go to bed, but after working all evening, although tired physically, my mind is always still wide awake. Generally, I have a cup of tea, a snack, and catch up on some TV that I've missed, but what was I going to do with no TV and practically no phone? 

I'll tell you what I did: I lit a candle, made myself a cup of tea on the gas hob and crept upstairs, careful not not to disrupt the quiet. 

For a while I just sat. I'm not going to lie, I was at a loss with no electricity for a few minutes, but I found myself mesmerised by the candle. I watched the flame dance and flicker, felt the warmth of it's amber glow, watched the wax slowly fall and freeze. It cast shadows that I'd never seen before, and gave the whole room a warmth and an atmosphere, that would be impossible with an artificial white light bulb. 

I eventually moved to the window and looked out over what is sadly becoming, an incredibly urban estate. Generally, it is lit up like a football stadium, but it was completely black other than the stars. I've never really taken much notice of them before on account they're dull, thanks to the glare of harsh lights that we humans permeate them with. Last night however, they truly sparkled. They glistened, they twinkled and almost winked at me in turn. There wasn't a thing in the sky that detracted from their beauty. 

Eventually, I realised just what I could do with no electricity. It was something so simple, something that's been around forever, something which should have come so naturally to me. However, it was something that shamefully, has joined the line of abandoned past times, in favour of technology. 

Writing. Not the typed word but the written word. You know, writing by hand, with a pen, a piece of paper? 

And thus I was inspired to write the basis of this blog. I couldn't post it online, but even without the buzz of people reading it, I was inspired to write anyway, just for the flow from the pen, the markings on the paper; I could feel what I was saying. All of the greatest writers in history have written in a dim room, just the gentle glow of a candle for company, and I found myself asking: why did this tradition die out? 

Why did any old past-times die out? 

Every past-time you can think of, has been scarred by technology: cooking, family time, music, even sport is being tarnished by robotics and machines these days. 

Don't get me wrong, I love technology as much as the next person. I am a self-confessed Apple girl and I love that the possibilities are endless; it's simply mind blowing. However, what happens when it all goes wrong? When the grid collapses? When we run out of resources? When someone simply cuts the wrong wire? 

Electricity doesn't just simply collapse, society collapses as well. 

We don't know what to do, how to communicate, how to survive. 

So maybe, from time to time, I will write by candle-light. I'll turn off my mobile, unplug the electrical devices, and just write. 

Maybe we should all take some time out from technology; go back to basics, spend some time together and sit around the table as opposed to the TV. 

You may find that the darkness is actually quite enlightening.