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Since when has been trashing your own community and throwing missiles at your community’s police force been an acceptable expression of dissatisfication with the lack of opportunities in society? It has not and will not be an effective impetus for social change.

Anyone who thinks looting, burning cars and setting fire to wheelie bins is going to improve their lot in life then they are sorely mistaken. Let’s be frank – if you’re in need of a job and resentful for your inability to afford flatscreen TVs and a new pair of Nikes, the worst thing you can do is contribute to the degeneration of your community by causing thousands of pounds of damage and wrecking the livelihoods of local business owners.

I know that times are bleak for young people today, (even with qualifications you’re not guaranteed a job at all, let alone a poorly paid one), but surely there are more effective ways to improve your lot? I’m hearing so many people blaming the riots on a lack of optimism for young peoples’ futures, but surely adding to the bleakness is the worst thing you can do?

I don’t dispute that the riots have pushed the challenges of deprived areas in London to the top of the news agenda, but, when the smoke evaporates and the windows get replaced, it won’t have succeeded in bringing more investment into these areas.

In times of crisis and stagnancy, innovation is what’s needed to create new jobs and opportunities. This isn’t exactly helped along by the cuts made to local councils and charities best placed to help improve the lot of young people, but that is still not reason enough for trashing your own community.

Residential areas, double decker buses are up in flames while I’m writing this, and it disgusts me to think that these are the images being sent around the world with ‘London’ as the tagline. Wouldn’t it be so inspiring if these youths (as the media love to label them!) vented their anger through creativity, through pioneering their own community schemes or burying their head into a book to enable them to put words to their fury? With rationality and the patience to foresee the long-term consequences of your impulsive actions, these disenchanted members of society might have realised that setting your community ablaze is the most nonsensical cry of help for a better world imaginable!

The Notting Hill Carnival is now in jeopardy, my friends are now updating their Twitter/Facebook feeds about riots happening in their area, and flames are still blazing in areas around the city.

Perhaps the last word should go to this woman who was filmed angrily trying to appeal to the senses of the looters:

Amy Winehouse singing live at Cardiff Student Union

I clearly remember the first time I listened to Amy Winehouse’s album Frank. More than any other album in my life, the songs and the clarity of her lyrics had a massive impact on me. That’s what her legacy should be – the ability to move millions with clever wordplay, biting lyricism and, of course, the way her expressive vocals make themselves home in your head and are almost impossible to shake away.

My friend text me about her death, which I received as I was making my way up the escalator of the tube, and I just wanted to break down and cry. Not just for the desperately awful waste of young life and talent, but for the world generally. I sincerely believe the world is worse off without her music and its effect on so many people. I know so many people who have found solace in her music during shit times, who felt her pain as if it was her own, and knowing that no more music of this calibre will ever get made again upset me hugely.

I even remember playing the music to my grandad, a life-long fan of jazz in all its forms, hoping to convince him that not ALL modern music is a waste of time. Thankfully, he agreed! What has really angered me about the reaction to her death is the sense that people cannot publicly comment on their grief without various people seeing fit to dictate that she does not deserve our sorrow because a terrorist attack happened on the same day, or because she was a “low-life drug addict”, as one person on my Facebook feed commented.

How can we as people place deaths on a scale of what’s more deserving of grief? It’s completely nonsensical to me. Yes, she was a drug addict, and yes, her hedonistic behaviour was almost certainly the cause of her untimely death, but funnily enough I doubt she deliberately experimented with drugs with a view to becoming dependent on them… no-one does, isn’t that the whole point of addiction, that it’s an illness?!

Music is such a powerful form of expression, and Amy gave the world a gift with her beautiful music, as trite as it may sound. I for one will always be grateful that I got a chance to see raw talent in the flesh twice, and I pity those who cannot look beyond the headlines to appreciate it too.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Vladimir Nabokov fascinates me. He had synesthesia, and literary synesthesia is defined as “a writer’s use of a metaphor of the senses”. It gave him a unique perspective to weigh up the world around him, which I think manifests itself beautifully in the prose of Lolita.



Despite the taboo subject matter, I found myself forgetting that this was told from a narrator in love with an underage child, and instead got so seduced by the prose all I could perceive was the beauty of it. There are countless examples of stunning descriptions, effortless yet biting remarks on the world as Humbert saw it, and not to mention the rich use of words to add meaning. I must have had to look up 50+ words on my Dictionary app just to be able to keep my grasp on what exactly the narrator was trying to convey!



Yes, the choice of subject matter is shocking, but I find it all the more shocking that some readers have failed to perceive the irony and sarcasm throbbing through the pages of this book. Take, for instance, Humbert’s assertion that he is “now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals”, or Miss Pratt’s blind assumption that “Dolly is obsessed by sexual thoughts for which she finds no outlet”.



I find it dangerous that so many have read this novel and seen it merely as a depiction of paedophilia, when it is so much more than this. In the novel’s afterword, Nabokov declares that Lolita has “no moral in tow”, and I’m inclined to agree with this. He was not writing this to raise questions about whether or not Humbert’s behaviour was abhorrent – that’s already perfectly clear in Humbert’s fate and his realisation that “What I heard was but the melody of children at play [...] the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord”.



It’s useless getting too bogged down with WHY and HOW an author write the novels they do. I think the key is just to appreciate the fact that they put pen to paper at all and could then subsequently inspire and influence thousands of others. What’s especially poignant is Nabokov’s almost inane assertion that his inspiration for writing the book was reading about an ape that was given drawing materials and then simply drew the bars of his cage. But the more I think about it, the more I am inclined to beleive that Lolita was Nabokov’s attempt to write a novel outside of the confines of his literary cage – to write in a unfettered style, ignoring the traditional limits and restrictions of the literary tradition.



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There’s so many apps/websites utilising Google Maps in inventive ways. One example is Red Bull Street Art View, which describes itself as a “collaborative collection of Google’s Street View locations showcasing Street Art all over the globe.” I love the fact that technology makes it so easy for us to zoom in on a pavement thousands of miles away! Here’s a selection of some of the street art I’ve seen around my own area and recent places I’ve visited:

Other uses of Google Maps

• The Museum of London‘s iPhone app Street Museum is such a great idea, bringing to life historical London using geotagging and images of the city in days gone by. Watch the video below for a demonstration of how the app recognises your location and overlays a historical image of that exact spot!

• MapDango is an amazing map mashup for U.S. National Parks that allows users to learn more about some of North America’s natural treasures. I wish there was something similar for the UK!

• My personal favourite is the Art Project, powered by Google. It allows users from all over the globe to explore museums and zoom in on hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels.

     

For much of the year I view London as a chaotic, jumbling hive of activity; cold, impersonal and anonymous. But there are times when the the rain ceases, the clouds evaporate and it reveals itself to be a pretty damn beautiful place. I’m always thinking about where I want to move to next, but on weekends like this I feel like I never want to be anywhere else! This weekend (in no particular order) I walked along Brick Lane, visited a student showcase of graduate photography, drank cider near Lancaster Gate, had a picnic consisting of cava, strawberries and jaffa cakes with Hard Rock Calling in the background, sunbathed by the Peter Pan Statue in Kensington Gardens, saw the sunset from Putney Bridge, hired Boris bikes and then still found time for three episodes of Mad Men!

I found a link via Gala Darling to a great blog post featuring Literary Love Letters to NYC, so I thought I’d hunt for some quotes where London was the muse.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson

“I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air — or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study In Scarlet)

“Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
— Thomas Moore

I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

Some more London-related blog posts:
• Thirty Essential London Novels
• London Literary Locations–Mrs Dalloway