The myth of mental illness, an invention of the bourgeois class
The U.K like many of its western counterparts has a Mental Health Act. This act is used to detain and treat a certain class of people involuntarily. The mentally ill are the only people of adult age in this country who do not have the right to refuse medical treatment, even when they do have...
Is City Living Nothing More than Stroppy Misanthropy?
Misanthropy – the hatred and general disgust of humankind and all that it stands for. Misanthropists are those who just can’t stomach other people; human behaviour tends to really grate on them. Many would describe them as grumpy, stroppy and generally miserable souls who need to cheer up. However, doesn’t living in a big city...
Boating for the Lazy
As the American cartoonist Berk Breathed said, “I like boats. They’re healthier than Valium. Cost more, though.” Boats and the idle lifestyle though, don’t, at first sight, seem to go together. Think of Ellen Macarthur, weeks on end with less than an hours sleep a night, bashing around the southern ocean with never so much...
Bizarre and Beautiful: a real alternative party
Die Freche Muse is a London-based alternative events company who organise themed vintage parties every six weeks or so. Starting off from humble beginnings in Dalston, over the past three years they have grown in fame and popularity but remain true to their routes and have not sold out to the commercial sphere which is...
Charity begins…on Oxford Street?
The thing that annoys me most about Oxford Street is this: not the tourists, who wander at snails pace along London’s busiest shopping stretch and then stop, abruptly, in great swarming packs to take a picture of each and every tube station sign from the middle of the pavement. Its not the ‘model scouts’ who...
On Skateboarding in Video Games
Nintendo Entertainment has been the hub of casual video game entertainment since the point in time at which video games began to emerge as being a casual thing at all. However it is not my intent to make an address to casual games as a whole or even Nintendo’s in specific, but rather a facet that is...
