The late Anthony Bourdain once observed: “In England man, it’s like 1986 over there. Everyone’s doing Charlie. I really hope I never spoke like they do. Every other word is an endless stream of bullshit. Yammering half drunk… God I get contact paranoia just going over there.” Not an encouraging endorsement from a man who was once an addict himself. But he’s not wrong. The Guardian reported that more than 6.2% of all 15 to 34-year-olds in the UK confess to using cocaine in the past year,

We have the dubious accolade of cocaine capital of Europe, and the problem is only getting worse.

Cressida Dick, head of the Met, lays the blame squarely at the feet of the middle classes, who are operating on double standards of lauding fair trade coffee and veganism, only to blithely pick up a few grams on a weekend, blind to the damage and knife crime this causes down the supply chain.

Whether it is fuelling knife crime to the extent Dick suggests or not, it’s normalisation amongst middle-class millennials is undeniable. Tweets and instagrams from influencer accounts that are instantly ‘relatable’ pump out ‘LOL’ quotes about cocaine use to their burgeoning groups of followers.

two biggest shocks of adult life:
1. everyone does cocaine
2. cheese is fucking expensive

— czm (@totallyclairezo) October 9, 2017

Drug dealers are using niceties such as ‘Regards’ to butter up posho customers over Whatsapp. In the city, cocaine use is ‘rife,’  justified beneath a philosophy of ‘work hard, play hard’.

After all, no one is addicted, right?

Journalist Dolly Alderton cheerfully admits in her memoir,Everything I know about Love, that she built up a familiar rapport with a ‘charming’ middle-class drug dealer named Fergus. In short, cocaine is being referenced in popular culture and normalised as just something everyone ‘does.’ After all, no one is addicted, right? Cocaine is ‘only ever a vehicle to carry on drinking’ and to keep the evening going. It’s the inevitable conduit to making a new friend at a party. It’s the pleasure of the ritual, holed up in a loo or an upstairs bedroom.

But what Cressida Dick failed to highlight, is that it’s not just the middle-class millennials that are at it. Cocaine use spans social and demographic divides. The drug is certainly no stranger to the football stadium- a video of fans on the pitch at Tottenham snorting lines spawned the Daily Mail headline ‘White Hart Line.’. And as Gordon Ramsay’s recent documentary uncovered, everyone in the restaurant trade is supposedly ‘at it’ both in and out of the kitchen.

Scratch beneath the service of any industry, talk to anyone in a pub on a Friday night and you’ll find a culture of recreational cocaine use that is barely concealed.

The hedonism of the weekend gives way to the hell of a Monday morning

So what it is it about the British and cocaine? There’s surely something deeper at play here than a base desire to carry on the party. It is inextricably linked to our relationship with alcohol, and of course, social anxiety. Adrian Chiles summed it up well in his programme exploring his own penchant for booze. He asks the valid question, “If we don’t like ourselves, what do we do to be likable?” Instead of seeing each other soberly on a Tuesday, everyone is staying in more during the week, and relying on cocaine to fuel pub session conversations on a Friday.

Some get hooked on cocaine because they find it relieves their anxiety

It’s no surprise then, that along with cocaine use, anxiety issues are going through the roof. As the Raleigh House charity notes: ‘When it comes to cocaine and anxiety, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Some get hooked on cocaine because they find it relieves their anxiety. Others develop severe anxiety once they start using cocaine.’ The hedonism of the weekend gives way to the hell of a Monday morning. I spoke to one user who described almost having a panic attack over a powerpoint presentation after a particularly heavy weekend: ‘It rendered me incapable.’

The two problems are serving each other in a virtuous circle.

And nowhere are we more extreme than in the capital. If the disgusting, but fascinating fatberg on stage at the Museum of London has told us anything, it’s that London is a city on the hunt for highs, healthy or otherwise. When analysed, it contained a concerning, if contradictory, amount of sports enhancers, cocaine and MDMA.

A significant portion of the country being permanently stuck in a wheel of self-care vs. self-destruction

Irvine Welsh, not adverse to a line of cocaine himself, admitted to approaching exercise with the same verve and enthusiasm as drug taking, praising the ‘buzz’ it gave him. Yet again it highlights the search for ‘wellness’ and a need to sweat out the weekend’s excesses and paranoia combined with unbridled hedonism has lead to a significant portion of the country being permanently stuck in a wheel of self-care vs. self-destruction.

Wellness trends will come and go but until we, as a nation, we stop thinking the answer to a long hard week lies at the bottom of a glass and a rolled up note, little is going to change.

Have you ever had that feeling when someone knows you so well it makes you want to cry? 

When Miranda in “Sex and the City’” is mocked, (or so she thinks) by the woman at her favourite  Chinese who cackles down the line, ‘every night it’s the same!’ she feels judged and embarrassed.  Because when your local takeaway knows your routines and foibles better than some of your closest  friends, it’s surely time to get out more right? Well I’ve got no shame. Every Sunday for nigh-on seven  years, I’ve been ordering from the charmingly shabby Dim Sum restaurant opposite my house in  Peckham and the weekly ritual is as comforting to me as a hug from an old friend. So I may as well  tell you now, this isn’t going to be a typical restaurant review. It’s utterly biased, totally subjective and  based on my deeply personal and idiosyncratic relationship with the aptly named Lovely House. Over  the years there seems to have been a benevolent conspiracy in miscommunication- the woman who  runs it still thinks my name is Christie and I will continue to not know her name (and honestly, after all  we have been through, it’s far too late to ask). No matter. Lovely House and I need not unpick these  irrelevant missteps. We remain the best of friends.  

Everyone knows the best Chinese food is found in slightly dingy outposts, not the swanky West end  joints. AA Gill himself was famously scathing about upmarket chinese. The dumplings at Chai Wu,  Harrods were parcels ‘decorated with shards of gold leaf or caviar or truffle, denying their basic  utilitarian purpose and pleasure.’ There is nothing decorous about Lovely House. The website is  appallingly basic, a mess of Comic Sans and random pictures. You will struggle to find the phone  number. Look on Twitter, and words associated with it don’t exactly scream foodie mecca. It ‘looks  like a dive,’ said one. It’s ‘understated’ said another. Put bluntly, it’s ‘not very cool’ but it’s also  apparently ‘authentic’. And cheap. I’m the place’s biggest fan and even I’ll admit Lovely House isn’t  exactly ‘vibey’. But man, I love their dumplings. 

Despite the abundant options in Peckham’s burgeoning food scene, it was Lovely House that I first fell  in love with back in 2013. Being 26, weekends were heady. My housemates Emily, Lauren and I spent  them swinging the pendulum between drunk or prone on the sofa nursing the kind of hangovers that  become untenable in your thirties. Sunday evenings at that first rented terrace revolved around our  pick up. We were self professed addicts to the prawn and chive dumplings. The crispy spring rolls.  The soupy dumplings we could never remember the name of. Post yet another Saturday session, we  would always have a craving for its comforting saltiness. The lashings of soy sauce with their glorious  prawn toast- so greasy and crunchy- a winning combination that left you wiping your chin in glutinous  satisfaction. So, we decided, whatever debauchery had led us to make bad decisions the night before  at 4am, all it meant was that we deserved more dim sum than usual from Lovely House’s extensive  menu. On one occasion I went too far. Having come back from a long afternoon in the pub, I got my  portions and sizes confused and ordered 50 dumplings. ’Is this for one?’ the woman asked tentatively  when I bowled in to pick up my gargantuan order. It was a fair question. I muttered something about  ‘some friends’ and then had to blearily pay for an almost industrious amount that took me about a  week to eat. 

The smiling woman at our favourite establishment has seen me through these turbulent twenties with  reassuring regularity, quietly observing my behaviour over the years. Commenting to Emily recently,  she asked, ‘How Is Christie? A while back she seem a bit crazy? But she more happy now, now she  much more settled.’ Her brief and sage analyses of my psyche often unnervingly hit the spot. Because  things have changed. I now have a mortgage, a house of my own and a fulfilling job. Brunches with  babies are more frequent than all nighters. But the Sunday night routine remains the same. And if  anyone tries to suggest an alternative culinary option for that evening, Emily and I will dutifully explain  to the interloper that in this house, since the beginning of time we have had dumplings and to veto this  would be, well, sacrilege. 

When you think of the average Londoners’ spending habits, much has been said about the tech  behemoths taking our hard earned cash. Ten quid for Netflix. God knows how much on Uber and  Deliveroo. But for me, Lovely House tops the single most consistent outgoing. We’re talking North of  50 quid a month. For seven years. This is no exaggeration. To this day, Lovely House isn’t on  Deliveroo. Hell, it doesn’t even do delivery. You have to go and pick up your order. Imagine! How  quaint. It is a place where your order isn’t anonymised and your interactions are remembered. Where  you aren’t ever judged for turning up in your pajamas on a Sunday evening and a pair of trainers,  having been nominated by the household for the dim sum dash. And every time it’s one of my  housemates rather than me, she will ask ‘how is Christie? Did she send you?” Amongst my circle, my  relationship with the ‘dumpling place’ has become folklore. At Lovely House my loyalty isn’t just noted,  it’s revered. One friend visited and was told first hand, ‘Christie? She’s our favourite customer! We  want to get her picture on the wall!’ The proprietor recently announced she had a present for me- a  silk scarf from China. It began to dawn on me that I was as much a part of her life as she was mine.  And what of the food over this half decade? Like Emily and I, still the closest of friends, it hasn’t  changed. We dutifully pull out the menu each week but we know it’s for show. Prawn and chive, pork  sui mai, one Shanghai and one Peking (whichever is which), spring rolls and copious amounts of soy  sauce that we mix with extra chilli and sesame oil. Fortune cookies and prawn crackers are always  added without us having to ask (we like to think these flourishes are reserved for regulars). My Lovely  House fix has been more constant than boyfriends, housemates and jobs. Since lockdown, it has  been shut and I feel bereft. So when someone asks me ‘oh you’re so lucky having all those delicious  restaurants on your doorstep. What’s your favourite?’ I will silently be thinking of the gorgeous Lovely  House, with its stark interior, its basic dim sum and charming owner before recommending some other  more well known and ambient choice. Because I know that most people just won’t ‘get’ Lovely House.  They will be too short sighted and too tuned into the zeitgeist to give into its understated allure and  that’s fine by me.

The expression ‘basic’ took hold in 2019 and I think it must have been coined by someone who had spent a significant amount of time on dating apps.  Why is everyone so eerily similar? If you are a single man aged between 25-44, you must be a fan of the following: sport (ideally something ‘impressive’, so you can take a picture of yourself having completed the Iron Man, Tough Mudder, a long cycle ride in the alps), dogs, beers with the lads and the occasional festival. A few variables may change, but dating online has begun to feel like groundhog day.

 

I don’t want to be the purveyor of bad news but it feels like it is slim pickings out there at least if we’re judging on images alone, which let’s face it, we are.

So for all the men out there, here are some of the most repeated offensive items in my feed, accompanied with a plea to desist:

 

• A blurry image, taken some time in 2008, with new rave sunglasses, gelled hair isn’t going to cut it in 2020. These are far too common, followed by another which clearly shows quite how much you have changed. 
• The carefully posed-for wedding photo giving the best man’s speech. The blueprint of any self respecting male. It tells this woman, I’m a bloody good lad, and I was the best man once and organised the ridiculous piss up.   
• Then there is the photo with the baby which says ‘I’ve got a sensitive side’ and you’re marriage material. Or alternatively for the more cynical, it just says I’ve got a nephew and I held him once. 
• The sport photo. I’m not impressed by a picture of you in lycra.
• Everyone likes dogs. And jogs. And ‘lazy sundays’. 
• The selfie with your top off in the mirror. I don’t need to explain why this is not ok.
• The one with your back turned. Or with a mask on. Or in a group with 20 other lads on a stag.
• A video of you playing the guitar and crooning.  
• And please don’t answer the question ‘most spontaneous thing I’ve ever done’ with ‘booked a flight to somewhere at a moment’s notice’. I’ve read this sentence 20 times.
• Anyone who describes themselves as “funny” usually isn’t. 
• And everyone is looking for someone who ‘doesn’t take themselves too seriously.’

 

A writer for the Sunday times recently admitted, I’ve often rejected men for details that may well be irrelevant to the overall tapestry of their personality: because they’d taken a selfie at the gym; because they’d used “your” instead of “you’re”; because their pictures were full of guffawing, champagne-drinking men in suits.’ I disagree. This stuff matters. We take people at face value every day. Your first reactions are probably right. If he wears a tank top,or flip flops in London or plaid shirts, it’s ok to swipe right. 

I don’t want to flatten people and take away their dimensions with too-swift criticism but these things are unforgivable.

 

Just take a look through the raft of Twitter comments about the app and I know I’m not the only one. There’s the endless male declaration ‘I’m competitive about everything’. There’s the downright rude. There’s the depressing algorithmic recommendations that suggest you are ‘most compatible’ with someone that couldn’t be less your type. There’s the continuous ghosting, and this goes both ways- sometimes people just give you the creeps after a few messages. It can be over nothing more than a word. Last week someone sent me a message saying ‘Austria is giggles’. And I couldn’t continue. A man who says ‘giggles’ just isn’t for me. ‘Drinkies’ is similarly not ok. 

 

And yet I’m still here- flicking away just to pass the time and locking in a pint with man #19 on boring Tuesday. Maybe in 2020 I’ll finally give up swiping altogether.

I’m currently conversing in 10 different WhatsApp groups, a couple of email chains and a few (very few) one to one text conversations. My friends and I are in constant communication. It’s a LOL a minute and yet, when we try to find a date for dinner, the earliest everyone can seem to do is September. How is everyone so inexplicably busy? Are we all lying to avoid a dinner out when we could be on the sofa watching Patrick Melrose?

‘No one works a full week anymore’ my friend Calypso ambitiously claimed last week
as we sat down to a Friday afternoon aperitif. I coloured slightly and glanced around.
It’s exactly the kind of glib comment that gets us millennials into trouble when
actually, we work bloody hard, albeit in less traditional jobs than our parents. That
being said, one of the great advantages of our more ‘flexible’ attitude to work and life
is you can drum up an awful lot of enthusiasm for lunch on the last day of the
working week. ‘Freelance Friday’ (also known affectionately amongst our core group
as the day of the ‘shirkers lunch’ or the ‘Friday salon’) is always a delight. There is
something joyous about lunch on this day in the capital, whether you’re working in an
office or not. The weekend is winking at you on the horizon. Around London, teams
assemble. Emails gradually dribble away, and any task bigger than doing your
timesheets ‘can wait until Monday.’ So off we went to Smoking Goat, three of us
freelancers and my brother Hamish, who works in advertising, where a boozy Friday
lunch is hardly frowned upon. We were feeling guilt free after a busy week and ready
to unashamedly treat ourselves.
Smoking Goat is in the heart of Shoreditch surrounded by all the other big hitters-
from Brat to LeRoy to Lyle’s, this area of town is heaving with options. Smoking Goat
though, is unique. Describing itself as ‘influenced by the late night canteens of
Bangkok,’ it is essentially Thai barbecue- two words I hadn’t heard together before.
The aesthetic is fairly minimalist- stark wooden tables, and a large open grill
presiding in the middle of the room where the chefs are working their magic.
Now I know it seems old hat reviewing somewhere Marina O Loughlin reviewed back
in 2015 and is widely considered to be (spoiler alert) damn good but here’s the thing
that she didn’t mention about Smoking Goat. It’s this kind of restaurant that really
appeals to the under 40s. It appeals to our sensibilities and our societal outlooks. It
doesn’t make you conform to a dress code. It doesn’t pigeon hole itself as
traditionally ‘Thai’ but whacks an award winning scotch egg on the menu without a
second thought. It will give you lashings of coriander and garlic and aubergine and
soy and Cornish greens. It will give you the stickiest, sweetest fried chicken. It will
give you meat so tender that pretty soon you really don’t care whether it’s Thai or not.
And that is just what the modern workforce is after. We don’t want to be tied to one
discipline, to one linear route to seniority and success. This different way of living
has coined a trend- the rise of the ‘slashy’- someone who has multiple creative hats
and balances a few different pay streams. It’s no surprise then, that we’ve also
fuelled the ‘slashy’ restaurant. Places that are half bar, half old school diner. Places
that play rock music too loud but serve michelin star food. Places like the
wonderfully inventive Pidgin, with a different menu every week and the sumptuous

Indian tapas of Kricket, or the Albanian, Turkish, Greek and Iranian dishes cooked
perfectly on an open fire at Peckam Bazaar. All over London the best chefs are quite
rightly sticking two fingers to conventional cuisine.
This whole idea hasn’t been met with unanimous delight I might add. The Guardian
reported that ‘recent controversies have highlighted questions about racism in the
industry and who ‘owns’ different cuisines.’ The words ‘cultural appropriation’ are
being bandied around social media. Should two white guys be allowed to run a
restaurant they’ve named ‘Thai BBQ’? As I see it, Smoking Goat treads that
controversial line with aplomb. Taking some of the best bits of Thai cooking, and
giving them a fresh new look that we haven’t seen before. After all hasn’t imitation
always been the highest form of flattery? And we all know the most inventive artists
never stuck to the rules- Picasso famously said: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you
can break them like an artist.”
But make no mistake, there are establishments who are getting it badly wrong. Last
summer, Som Saa even had to fire one of its chefs Shaun Beagley for openly
mocking Thai and Asian culture both in speech, and in his captioning on Youtube,
regularly replacing the letter L with R in his narration and texts. Less outright
offensive, but nonetheless problematic, are restaurants that are brazenly putting
down the origins of the cuisine, either suggesting their version is ‘cleaner’ or quite
simply ‘better’ with no celebration, just downright stealing. Then there’s Gordon
Ramsay’s new National Geographic series ‘Uncharted’ which sees Ramsay “tested
against the locals, pitting his own interpretations of regional dishes against the tried-
and-true classics.” The lines are being drawn in this debate but to me it’s pretty
simple, and the so called ‘line’ isn’t that thin actually. When a restaurant is inspired by
a country, and cooks new food with love and care, it shows. Smoking Goat is the
proud of its sourcing, and boasts a menu full of authentic elements, but is by no
means tied to tradition. It has defiantly and gloriously gone its own way.
So just to be clear. When it’s done right, I love this new wave of cuisine. And contrary
to the baby boomers’ belief, this isn’t the snowflake generation being typically, well,
flaky. Actually our expectations have just risen in every respect, from food to work.
Large corporations just don’t foster the culture we want anymore. And likewise when
it comes to restaurants. The likes of Le Gavroche and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal
et al have given way to Kiln, Temper, Pitt Cue and Hoppers, where today’s young
people actually want to spend their time and money eating interesting food with a
whole host of influences. Let’s face it, the vast majority of us will never be able to
afford a house, so we may as well splash out on a a few damn good lunches at the
Camberwell arms or Black Axe Mangal instead.
It may sound obvious but we want somewhere fun and good value. Ideally with an
intriguing but delectable menu and a good selection of affordable wines, in a relaxed setting. And we really don’t care about labels. We will continue working part time,
indulging in ‘side hustles’ and exploring the creative opportunities big corporates
don’t give us. Meanwhile the London food scene has never been so exciting. As long
as you pilfer those age old ideas with integrity and inventiveness, we’ll come running.

It has been an intrepid first week in Costa Rica. I don’t think Jules quite realised she was going on a mini gap year when we started but that is certainly what is has turned out to be. I now know that if I am in charge of booking, just go expensive, never try to save at the cost of comfort when you are travelling with your sixty year old mother.

 

Having arrived at San Jose airport after what had already been a mammoth journey, we were told our domestic flight had been cancelled- Sansa, Costa Rica’s local airline is a basically a complete gamble: arbitrarily leaving passengers stranded is the norm rather than the exception. So onto plan B. A taxi all the way to the coast and onto the ferry. With a three hour wait until the next departure, we had no other option but to sit it out with the sea of backpackers and locals in the only restaurant we could find. The image of Jules sitting on my backpack, fag in one hand, bottle of water in the other, and a look of resignation on her face after the 18th hour on the road was definitely one I will remember.

 

We did finally make it after a bumpy road trip the other side and set about the business of enjoying our holiday. Santa Teresa is a essentially a surfer/yoga town, built around one long stretch of road along the beach. We arrived pretty clueless about what to do and where to go but it became abundantly clear that wheels were necessary to navigate this place. Given it was peak season, all the cars had been rented months ago, and so we only had one option: quad bikes. These turned out to a lot of fun and actually the best way to get around but wow, the DUST. Burning man hasn’t got anything on Santa Teresa.

 

 

We spent the next few days knocking around Santa teresa, getting our bearings before embarking on our first pretty disastrous trip;

 

Mistake number 1: Going to a waterfall in Montezuma on new year’s eve. We had been told Montezuma was a lovely, laid back town and going to the waterfalls there followed by lunch would be a great day out. Turning up on a national holiday, it looked like half of the Nicoya Peninsula had the same idea. Doggedly sticking to our plans, we started the climb up over the rocks getting overtaken by Americans with kegs. This was not an easy walk and Jules, red faced wearing the wrong shoes, looked increasingly pissed off. I kept thinking, ‘this is it. I’m going to kill my mother. She is going to crack her head on a rock and it will be my fault.’ Still we kept going, with the misplaced optimism that it would be worth it in the end. It wasn’t. Hordes of people surrounded one waterfall. It looked more like a local swimming pool on a rowdy afternoon than a tranquil nature spot. Time to retreat. We hiked, sweaty and disgruntled, back towards the town and beach, which Robbie aptly described as ‘Santa Teresa’s ugly cousin’. More swathes of tourists, blaring Bob Marley’s ‘No woman no cry’ from portable beatboxes and and a sad looking beach front restaurant with the shady promise of a delicious meal. Not our best day out.

 

By this point we had realised we like a different type of travelling and found our Zen. For the next few days we headed to Playa Hermosa which is by far the most beautiful bit of beach. The best hotel in the area, Florblanca, became our favourite spot for margaritas, quesadillas and stunning sunsets:

 

 

Mistake number 2: Boat trip to Tortugero. Again, at the advice of our hotel, we booked a boat trip to Tortugero, which boasts some of the best snorkelling in the area. We piled into a four by four and within a few minutes realised we were headed back to the dreaded Montezuma. This was by no means a private boat trip, we would be taken en masse, 21 people to a boat. The site of the cargo, all wearing orange life jackets, clutching cameras ready to embark did not fill us with enthusiasm. Robbie summed it up pretty well: ‘That looks bum out’. This time we decided to cut our losses and bail. The idea of being stuck on one of the boats, with no means of escape on our penultimate day was not appealing.

 

 

Nearing the end of the week, given Sansa’s form, Robbie was getting increasingly nervous about his return trip to San Jose, repeatedly asking the reception to call the airline and ‘100% confirm’ that the flight was going ahead, to which they had no answer. ‘Just tell it to me straight!’ he kept pleading as his neuroses about work began to kick in. It looked like we had to just head there and assess the situation.

 

Tambor airport isn’t so much an airport as a man with a clipboard, a wooden bench and one tiny plane. No one could confirm whether his flight would be going on time but we heard that there would be a private charter leaving shortly. We turned our attention to the older, South American man wearing a 20 grand watch, a lot of jewellery, an open shirt and slicked back hair, who was travelling with his sons and their beautiful girlfriends. Would he be willing to take one more passenger on his private plane? For sure, if we paid him 200 dollars. I am certain he was not in need of the cash but he saw the desperation on our faces and knew he was onto a winner. Within 15 minutes Robbie was on a plane to San Jose and we were off to the mountains.

 

Going somewhere completely new does mean you have a few trial and error situations and we know what we would do differently next time (NO MONTEZUMA). It’s always easier to write about the ridiculous bits where things went wrong but we have genuinely had an ace time so far. As everyone reminds you constantly here, Costa Ricans have an expression ‘Pura Vida’… which translates to ‘Pure Life’ but seems to just mean everyone is super relaxed and very helpful!

 

We have now arrived at an unbelievably luxurious hotel in La Fortuna called Nayara Springs. So I will be making the most of the spa, the gym, the food and all it has to offer before the travelling finally begins on Monday. We are higher up here with Arenal Volcano looking at us in the distance. Lots of wildlife and forest to see here, so more to come…

 

FELIZ ANO pals!

 

This second week could not have been more different to the first. We have swapped beaches and surf for the ‘cloud forests’, volcanos and lakes of La Fortuna. The hotel has been ridiculously spoiling, with 4 different restaurants and just the 5 swimming pools. All very casual. As many have said before me, ‘another fucking boring day in paradise’… so not much to report on here other than lots of bathrobe wearing and a very intense deep tissue massage in which a large woman sat on my back and kneaded me with a vicious intensity whilst whispering in my ear. I’m pretty sure she did more harm than good. Definitely not my Gap Year:

There were luckily however, some extraordinary fellow guests. The clientele at Nayara Springs were great pool fodder. I particularly enjoyed the elderly American woman with her gay 50 year old son. A caricature of rich America. The son had the voice and mannerisms of David Sedaris. From my brief conversation with them, they warned ‘ we travelled BA upper class the last time we came to London… but the food was lousy. The chicken was so dry.’ I thanked them for the heads up on who not to go with for my next upper class transatlantic flight before giving my own recommendation: I’m flying back from LA for £140 on Norwegian! They were less than impressed, ‘well Honey, you get what you pay for, you get what you pay for.’ London itself got more of a glowing report: ‘We always stay at Claridges when we come to London. Nigel is our concierge. He is spectacular.’ I could have listened to them all day.

Our first and only proper excursion here was the ‘Hanging bridges walk.’ We saw an incredible amount of wildlife: Sloths, howling monkeys, lizards, beautiful birds. The trail is interspersed with these huge suspended bridges and views of the Arenal volcano in the distance. Mum and I clearly went full Attenborough, At one point we spent circa 15 mins watching a trail of ants carrying leaves to their ant hill, which at the time was genuinely fascinating. I think I may be having an epiphany,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well I have survived three days on my own. For someone who has never even eaten at a restaurant alone I’m calling this an achievement. Not just an achievement actually but a success! I headed to Monteverde after leaving the luxury of La Fortuna and the downgrade hasn’t been too severe. I’m happy to admit my dorm days in hostels are over and I am still able to rub enough pennies together for my own room. Even more fortunately, the hotel I picked seemed to be the hotspot for all the monkeys in town and I spent both mornings enjoying them running around outside my window.Adventure awaited. Monte verde offers a zipline tour of the forest: you are essentially clipped onto a wire and you sail through the trees. This started out fairly pedestrian, but ends with the ‘superman’: they clip you on front ways and you essentially ‘fly’ head first, on the longest zip wire in Latin America. Unfortunately they don’t allow photos but you get the idea:

The final hurrah is a mini bungee called the ‘Tarzan.’ You jump off a raised platform, free fall for a couple of seconds, and then just start swinging. ‘No problem’ I thought, ‘I’ve done a bungee.. I’ve done a skydive.. I know what I’m doing.’However, when it got to it, it actually seemed more terrifying than I envisaged. Never one to turn back (who could face the shame of retreating with a queue behind you?) I jumped and inordinately let out a very deep scream that seemed to come from someone else. Seems very odd that my voice becomes deeper in adverse situations but hey the journey of self discovery continues.

The afternoon  was spent horse riding through the fields with two hilarious Austrian girls (I always thought Austrians were boring, these two were not) and our guide Fabio, who who was a delight.

Feeling pretty satisfied with my first foray into traveller life in Monteverde, it was sadly time to move on. Today was spent on the road with my least favourite driver in Costa Rica, Ricardo. There is nothing that grates me more than a driver who insists on stopping at every tourist trap for ‘photos and refreshments’. A journey that should take 4 hours, instead took nearly 6. Clearly he was making a bit of commission along the way. The Italian couple in front of me indulged every pitstop, even posing for photos with Ricardo at these scenic layovers whilst my glare got progressively less subtle.

(Sure the scenic layovers looked nice)

I couldn’t quite believe it when  we pulled into a restaurant for yet another layover to watch our driver eat a two course meal and have a beer whilst we all sat in the parking lot waiting politely for him to finish. When he went up for seconds, it was all I could do not to scream. Seeing the look on my face he smiled… ‘Por favor Senorita… Pura Vida!’ but it just didn’t cut it, what does Pura Vida even mean?! I was desperately trying not to be the unchilled English person but 45 minutes? He went back for seconds! Outrageous. Thank God Jules was no longer with me or there would have been blood.

Anyway. I have made it to Manuel Antonio. This is the most accessible national park and beach in Costa Rica. I’m afraid I have to agree with Tildogg on this one: the animals here are actually too tame. The monkeys will steal your food given half the chance and the place just feels a bit touristy, My hotel/hostel is exactly as I’d imagined: there’s a tightrope across the pool for the lads to show off on, lots of laid back beats and breres. It’s also the kind of place that charges 13 dollars for a below par chicken sandwich and 100 dollars for a room.

Well it is one night only and then onto Uvita tomorrow, where I (hope) to see whales and dolphins. Keep your fingers crossed. Love you all xxx

 

Manuel Antonio is a town that is permanently on Spring break. My hostel Selina was so firmly stuck in the zeitgeist it boasted daily  ‘Instagram workshops for the perfect post’. One night here was definitely enough.

Travel an hour down the coast to Uvita and you arrive in a quieter part of the Osa peninsula. Here I was staying a in a ‘casita’/air Bnb on the river and was slightly taken aback when Steve the owner came to pick me up, and I realised he was from bloody Newcastle. An ex army Geordie, who had settled on the Costa Rican coast with his wife Rachel. It seemed so incongruous after so many American voices and conversation quickly turned to hatred of the northern line, south London generally etc etc. Turns out that he and his wife had been on the channel 4 programme ‘A place in the sun’ and Steve put it down to their episode that any Brits come here at all. Not to knock the program, but I highly doubt that’s the reason for the influx! It was hardly a ratings star. Though he did insist it has now been repeated ‘at least 8 or 9 times’ so who can argue with that?

Rachel and Steve’s below, the best place I’ve stayed, thank you channel 4!!! http://www.costaricariver.com/about-us

They were very friendly but didn’t seem quite sure what to do with me. On day one they suggested I make a trip to the hostel down the road and meet some friends. I did stress that’s not what I’m here for, and I’m perfectly happy listening to the river (as in outside my door not the Bruce Springsteen song) and reading. I don’t need to share a dorm with some random named Miguel to have a good time. The house was right by a waterfall, and unlike in Montezuma, I had it all to myself:

But the main reason I was here was for the whales. There are two seasons for them, one from the North and from the South. As our guide reiterated on multiple occasions, whales were by no means guaranteed at this time of year, but we got lucky:

We found a mother and a baby and circled them for about half an hour coming to the surface. Not wanting to state the obvious but they were absolutely enormous, the baby is almost a ton when it is born. It really was incredible to see them up close. Apparently, (and this can be the same for monkeys as well), males get very aggressive and can even kill their young or attack the mother so you never see families together. The rather large polish man on the boat kept yelling that these were the ‘Harvey Weinsteins’ of the marine world and laughing heartily to himself.

Welcome to the jungle: Drake Bay

One thing I have really noticed on this trip is how prevalent and pivotal ratings and reviews have become. Every single tour, hotel and interaction ends with the plea ‘gives us 5 stars on trip advisor!’… ‘give us a good review… pure vida!’ I, quite frankly, cannot be bothered to dissect each place I stay for the rest of the digital population but have spent endless hours myself reading opinions of places, which help to a certain extent, but are of course all subjective. Basically the rule of thumb is, if enough people say somewhere is good, the chances are it is.

The boat trip down the river to drake bay from Sierpe for example, gets a considerable amount of airtime on all the forums, with worrying summations such as ‘white knuckle scary’ and ‘all part of the adventure’. It was in reality, just a pretty bumpy ride on a small boat through the mangroves and out to sea, though apparently it is genuinely terrifying in the rainy season:

My first and only booking disaster has been in Drake bay. Hotel Margerita was new and so didn’t have the customary reams of reviews to validate it, only a couple of limp endorsements along the lines of ‘it’s clean and good value’. When I arrived however, I realised I had got this horribly wrong. As we drove further out of town, I began to have my misgivings and on arrival it was clear that this was a motel of sorts, and not a good one. Three rooms along a corridor, with no windows facing outwards, and no common area to sit.  The smell in my room was the kind of clean that made you think someone had been murdered there. The chirpy American with his Russian wife I had shared a taxi with, was more upbeat: ‘well it’s not exactly what we were hoping for… but we’ll make the best of it!’ I told the manager Emilio I needed a taxi ASAP and he was happy to cancel the booking, giving me a smile as if to say ‘fair enough.. I wouldn’t stay either.’ You’ve got to love the good natured attitude of the Costa Ricans.

This was the best decision I could have made as I ended up in a bungalow in a cheaper hotel overlooking the beach, Even more fortuitously, the heavens opened as I arrived and a black out ensued, so I hunkered down with my new neighbours, a couple from Streatham with a candle and a bottle of wine. Poor Emilio- I certainly won’t going to take to trip advisor to warn off other travellers. It may not be for me and who knows the hotel Margerita may improve?!

My two days in Drake bay have been relentlessly filled with excursions; snorkelling at Cano island and a trip to Corcovado national park: this part of the country feels a lot more underdeveloped and wild. The nature reserve is the main reason people come so far, it’s one of the most bio diverse places in the world. We spotted amongst others, the collared peckory (a pig of sorts), this owl (whose face might become my new avatar), 4 types of monkey, a deadly spider:

And these huge trees getting slowly being strangled by ficus, the roots alone were a metre high:

It has been a slog to the next destination today: from the basic and rustic Drake up to the tres chic Nosara. One flight, two buses, one taxi and I’m here. After two hours in the capital this morning I already wanted to leave San Jose. The expression ‘pure vida’ clearly isn’t used as frequently in the metropolis. My urban taxi driver was polite as anything until someone cut in front of him on the freeway. He made a serious effort to catch up with the culprit, wound down his window and yelled in spanish ‘eat shit you motherfucker!’ and a tirade of other abuse, before returning to ask me sweetly about my next destination. Serious aggro in the big smoke.

xxxx

Comparing the tourists pretty much sums up the difference between Drake Bay and Nosara- Drake Bay is full of hearty Canadians with walking boots and budget backpackers. In Nosara I was surrounded by Americans and expats (including some surfers all the way from Polzeath). It is essentially a sandy outpost of California replete with juice bars, raw diets and yoga. This is where the money is. Despite opposition from the inhabitants over the past few years, new developments are popping up all over Playa Guilones; there is clearly a unique appetite for upmarket properties and tourism here. Yes it does cater to American tastes, which may not be ‘authentic’ Costa Rica, but it is hard not to love it. I’m all for a freshly squeezed juice and an acai bowl. Who isn’t? The beach here is the best I’ve been to, and the whole town congregates on the playa to watch the sunset as nightly ritual. If someone told me I’d be stuck here for another month, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

I’ve been staying at La Negra surf hotel: bands play, there’s a yoga studio and surf school attached, and the rooms are huge and luxurious.

Wildlife isn’t big on the agenda. There are turtles but you need to wait for the full moon, which I had just missed. I had to give surfing a go. And let me tell you, its bloody hard. I’ve never been great at listening to instructions; ski school was an irritant, and my lessons with Juan Carlos have followed a similar trajectory. I have zero technique on the slopes, and zero technique in the waves. The basic surf move is: lie down on the board, do the ‘cobra’ then, ‘pop up’. Whilst I could stand up from the offset, my method to get there was slightly more unorthodox, more of a scramble from flat, to knees, to feet on the board. Juan began to lose his patience: ‘Get on the board. Do it again. Do it AGAIN…, you’re not LISTENING. You are not focussing Casty.’ Flashbacks of driving lessons came to mind as well, another hellish experience. I felt like telling him to chill, I am supposed to be on holiday. So what if my technique isn’t perfect? It’s not as if I am going to become a pro surfer in three days.

Instead of staying somewhere middle of the road for 5 nights. I decided to go a bit more extreme- stunning hotel for three nights to bunk bed in a dorm for two with a threadbare mattress and a bunch of weed smoking locals. The owner of the hostel, Hector, has a dog called Ganja. They spend their evenings smoking and watching badly dubbed comedies like American pie. At first, given there is no lock in the door I was worried about my valuables, stringently putting everything into my locker, but I’m not sure I should have bothered. There was a complete lack of acknowledgement of my existence past a mutter of ‘Buenos Dias.’ I don’t think they even realised I was staying there. It worked out quite well really: I continued to masquerade as a guest in the cushty hotels before heading home to the reality of my $15 dollar bunk at the last possible moment.

The final morning in San Jose has been a category of errors: having nearly managed to leave Costa Rica with all my belongings intact, my phone has been killed at the final hurdle. I spent last night with a friend of Sophie’s mum’s, and not wanting to wake her up at 6am, I tried to escape the enclosed community alone. Security is clearly pretty tight in the suburbs and I couldn’t seem to open her automatic gate. I had an uber waiting on the other side, so I did what anyone else would do in the same situation and threw my bags over a wall and climbed over. I must have thrown a little over zealously as my phone didn’t survive the impact. I then took an uber to the domestic airport instead of international, and with no way to edit my destination on my now defunct phone, I had to make a frazzled trip to the bank and incurred a massive detour nearly missing my flight. The struggle pony lives on.

….Some final musings on the pros and cons of travelling alone.

Pros:

• You talk to people. A lot. Anyone who engages with you really. Since being in Nosara I’ve had dinner with a yoga instructor named Bill, tequilas with some surfers from Cornwall, and an after party with some Texans in the villa next door.
• You listen to more podcasts, read more books, and of course write more (!).
• You rarely drink too much and go to bed very early. You feel healthy.
• You take in your surroundings. You are forced to out of sheer boredom.
• You partake in more group activities and excursions. You do stuff.
• Autonomy and total freedom to do exactly what you want.

Cons:

• It is very hard to put suncream on your own back. But not impossible if you sacrifice the middle.
• Everything is more expensive.
• The aforementioned boredom.

I have now arrived in LA but will soon be back in the sunless/starless cold of London. Anyway goodbye Costa Rica, it’s been real.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The late Anthony Bourdain once observed: ‘In England man, it’s like 1986 over there. Everyone’s doing charlie. I really hope I never spoke like they do. Every other word is an endless stream of bullshit. Yammering half drunk… God I get contact paranoia just going over there.’ Not an encouraging endorsement from a man who was once an addict himself. But he’s not wrong. The Guardian reported that more than 6.2% of all 15 to 34-year-olds in the UK confess to using cocaine in the past year,

We have the dubious accolade of cocaine capital of Europe, and the problem is only getting worse.

Cressida Dick, head of the Met, lays the blame squarely on the middle classes, who are operating on double standards of lauding fair trade coffee and veganism, only to blithely pick up a few grams on a weekend, blind to the damage this causes down the supply chain, such as fuelling the culture of gangs and associated knife crime.

Whether it is leading to an increase in knife crime to the extent Dick suggests or not, it’s normalisation amongst middle class millenials is undeniable. Tweets and instagrams from influencer accounts that are instantly ‘relatable’ pump out ‘LOL’ quotes about cocaine use to their burgeoning groups of followers. Drug dealers are using niceties such as ‘Regards’ to butter up posho customers over Whatsapp. In the city, cocaine use is ‘rife,’,  building on the long standing philosophy of ‘work hard, play hard’. Journalist Dolly Alderton cheerfully admits in her memoir, Everything I know about Love, that she built up a familiar rapport with a ‘charming’ middle class drug dealer named Fergus. In short cocaine is being referenced in popular culture and normalised as just something everyone ‘does.’ After all, no one is addicted right? Cocaine is ‘only ever a vehicle to carry on drinking’ and to keep the evening going. It’s the inevitable conduit to making a new friend at a party. It’s the pleasure of the ritual, holed up in a loo or an upstairs bedroom.

But what Cressida Dick failed to highlight, is that it’s not just the middle class millenials that are at it. Cocaine use spans social and demographic divides. The drug is certainly no stranger to the football stadium- a video of fans on the pitch at Tottenham snorting lines spawned the Daily Mail headline ‘White Hart Line.’. And as Gordon Ramsay’s recent documentary uncovered, everyone in the restaurant trade is supposedly ‘at it’ both in and out of the kitchen. Scratch beneath the service of any industry, talk to anyone in a pub on a Friday night, these exposés suggest, and you’ll find a culture of recreational cocaine use that is barely concealed.

So what it is it about the British and cocaine? There’s surely something deeper at play here than a simple desire to carry on the party. It is inextricably linked to our relationship with alcohol, and of course, social anxiety. Adrian Chiles summed it up well in his programme exploring his own penchant for booze. He asks the valid question, “If we don’t like ourselves, what do we do to be likable?” Instead of seeing each other soberly on a Tuesday, everyone is staying in more during the week, and relying on cocaine to fuel pub session conversations on a Friday.

It’s no surprise then, that along with cocaine use, anxiety issues are going through the roof. As the Raleigh House charity notes: ‘When it comes to cocaine and anxiety, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Some get hooked on cocaine because they find it relieves their anxiety. Others develop severe anxiety once they start using cocaine.’ The hedonism of the weekend gives way to the hell of a Monday morning. I spoke to one user who described almost having a panic attack over a powerpoint presentation after a particularly heavy weekend: ‘It rendered me incapable.’

The two problems are living off each other in a vicious circle.

And if the disgusting, but fascinating, fatberg on stage at the Museum of London has told us anything, it’s that London is a city on the hunt for highs, healthy or otherwise. When analysed, it contained a concerning amount of sports enhancers, cocaine and MDMA. Irvine Welsh, not adverse to a line of cocaine himself, admitted to approaching exercise with the same verve and enthusiasm as drug-taking, praising the ‘buzz’ it gave him. Yet again it highlights that the search for ‘wellness’, and a need to sweat out the weekend’s excesses of unbridled hedonism, have led to a significant portion of the country  being permanently stuck on a wheel of self care vs. self destruction. Wellness trends will come and go, but until we,as a nation, don’t see the end to a hard week at work being the bottom of a glass of wine or a rolled up note, little is going to change.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s fair to say it’s been a turbulent year for film. The disgrace of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent unfolding of the #metoo movement revealed an industry that seemed rotten at its’ core. There was an Oscars ceremony of ‘optional’ black. There were shiny badges and impassioned speeches. But there was no denying that things needed to change at a more structural level. For starters, only 5 women have been nominated for Best Director since the Oscars began (1929) and just one (Kathryn Bigelow) has ever won. 

Luckily, there’s a new slew of female directors, actors and stand ups entering the fore.

The recent ‘Nanette’ has been a groundbreaking hit for lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby. Greta Gerwig is is on a roll, and a vocal supporter of change: “there’s something coalescing. Every year they come out with the numbers. You know, out of the top 100 films, by gross, 4% are directed by women. I think those numbers are going to shift.’ (https://variety.com/2018/film/features/greta-gerwig-saoirse-ronan-lady-bird-interview-collaboration-1202650197/)

We hope so. Director Georgia Oakley is firmly ensconced in this new wave. As part of the latest cohort of the BFI flare mentor scheme, a programme that sees six emerging LGBT-identified filmmakers mentored by a senior figure from the film industry while developing industry knowledge, she has a specific interest in convention defying narratives and the stories less told. Last month her first feature length film Blue Jean was selected by iFeatures to be developed.

Blue Jean is set in 1988. Thatcher’s government have just passed a law that stereotypes lesbians and gays as paedophiles, recruiting children for their ‘deviant’ lifestyles. Female PE teachers are prime targets for homophobic accusations, and as a result, Jean [37] is forced to lead a double life. During the week she’s a respected member of staff – on the weekend she slips anonymously into Newcastle’s burgeoning gay scene. But when a new student arrives and threatens to expose her, Jean is pushed to extreme lengths to maintain her job and her sanity.’

http://ifeatures.co.uk/blue-jean.html

First of all congratulations on the iFeatures grant for Blue Jean. What gave you the idea for the film?

I got the idea for the film from my neighbour actually, who was a pivotal figure in the feminist movement on Greenham common back in the 80s that propelled gay women into the public eye. (Note: The press coverage of the event at the time was widely homophobic, writing the protesters off as a lot of ‘leftie loony lesbians’).

At that time there were a lot of women only communes and a lot of the inhabitants were gay. Either they’d been thrown out or they’d run away from home. There’s no way they’d be able to live a normal life with a partner like I’m doing now. Back then, you couldn’t come out to your family or friends and not be ostracised. Section 28 stated that it was illegal to promote homosexuality in schools and local governments. Teachers started thinking if they came out, they’d be criminalised.

It was this specific attitude that interested me and why I decided to focus on a teacher. The homophobic idea that being gay was one step away from being a paedophile, the latent fear that ‘gayness’ was something that could be pushed on children. Blue Jean is about a PE teacher who isn’t willing to give up everything and go and live in a commune. It’s about someone not wanting to sacrifice one part of their life for another.

https://youtu.be/uKqJ_xlzDQw

Do you think think it’s important for young LGBTQ people to grow up with role models?

Absolutely. The law wasn’t even repealed until 2003, which meant if you were questioning your sexuality at school, there was no one you could even speak to. In ‘Blue Jean’, the teacher encounters one of her student at a gay club night and instead of looking out for each other, the student eventually outs her.

There was a definite lack of role models when I was growing up. I remember when I was coming out, when I began to realise I was something not ‘box tickable’ that there was no one, either in my life or in the press I could really relate to. I found myself finally finding articles on Kirsten Stewart and thinking, ‘oh cool well she’s doing that.’  Section 28 affected me personally in this way and it’s certainly a story that really hasn’t been told enough.

The explosively honest stand up from Hannah Gadsby has been lauded as a watershed moment for comedy, detailing the struggles of a gay woman expressing her authentic self. And we’ve recently had a spate of critically acclaimed films in the queer genre. Disobedience with Rachel Weisz is coming out later this year, which is sure to be widely reviewed and discussed. Do you think that queer cinema going to remain a niche category?

Well it’s certainly becoming less so. Films like God’s own country and Call me by Your Name have managed to commercialise queer narratives. The issue is that most films with queer narratives end with death and disaster. It’s important for people to see films where it doesn’t all end horribly. God’s Own Country is a great example of a celebratory ending. Unfortunately my film wouldn’t be realistic if it was a happy ending!

Visibility remains an issue for gay women even now. Arguably gay men have had more of an imprint on culture than gay women. Why do you think that is?

I think there’s two things. First of all, to state the obvious, the patriarchy. They are still men after all. Secondly the criminalisation of homosexuality was specific to men. They had to go through a different sort of experience, one that was vastly more publicised. The reality is that gay women were there too. They were still frowned upon, still taboo. If you did come out in the 80s the police would come and take your kid away, even though as a woman you were most likely the primary caregiver. Facts like that are still relatively unknown.

As a female director, you’re fighting a war on two fronts. In the stories you want told and in the male dominated environments you inhabit. Do you find that difficult?

Back when I was younger and mostly working on commercials, I probably didn’t notice, but I was often on sets that were 90% men, and lots were more experienced than me. Now I’m wised up to it all, I just won’t work with dickheads. The last film I worked on we had an 80% female cast, which was a fantastic experience.

Obviously we don’t want to get to a point when you’re doing women only sets but I do feel really passionately that until younger women can look up and see women of every personality in positions of power in the industry, from introverts, to extroverts, to straight to gay, we haven’t reached total equality. You can already see that if that you’re a man. At the moment it’s Sofia Coppola or Kathryn Bigelow and what if you don’t relate to either? We need more diversity in film.

The Guardian recently reported that there is only one female director in Hollywood for every 22 males. What do you think is the best way to combat that disparity?

Women still get lambasted for being outspoken, for being too emotional, whilst men seem to get away with so much. As a female director, you have to prove you have the confidence to execute, AND ensure you’re not a wallflower in the process AND prove that you’re a really ‘nice’ person. You have to be calm and ruthless. It’s a tightrope.

We need to have quotas for a time for gender parity. The Swedish Film Institute did for 3 years, and has now achieved  50-50 Funding Distribution Between Male and Female Directors. I actually came up through the BFI’s queer programme, the Flare, which is a great example of a quota that’s working out. The BFI are generally great at funding women, but higher powers won’t introduce quotas. It frustrates me that lot of older female directors are against this stuff. There seems to be a culture of ‘I haven’t got where I am because I’m a woman, but because I am exceptionally talented.’ It’s a generational thing.

Finally what advice would you give young female directors?

I was at a talk at Berlin Film Festival recently, and one of the speakers said, ‘you know it’s’ the right film to make, if you’d be very uncomfortable showing it to your parents’ which I think is wise advice. My parents know I’ve managed to get on Ifeatures but they don’t know what the film is about!

Applying for schemes like the BFI’s is also really helpful. You’re matched with a mentor (Georgia’s is Desiree Akhavan (writer, director, actor, The Slope, Appropriate Behaviour). Desiree has been really generous with her time.. You do need people around you to encourage you if you’re going to focus on convention defying film. I was certainly swayed by what I thought I should be making when I was younger. Now I know. Don’t make films that you think people want to watch. Do what motivates you. Make stories you care about. Start with your own experiences and what’s individual to you.

We can’t wait to see what she does next.

Read more about Georgia and her feature Blue Jean:

http://www.georgiaoakley.com/about/

Donald Glover has proved he is the ultimate a purveyor of culture

No one enjoys a gushing review. It can be easily skimmed past, with the simple assumption of ‘worth seeing/watching/eating’ whilst a terrible summation can be savoured and enjoyed. I’ll make no apology on this occasion. It isn’t often that one call a music video a work of art. Bob Dylan, Eminem, Kendrick Lemar, most ‘artists’ in fact, would purport to have their fingers quite firmly on the zeitgeist, enabling meanings through their music that can be shared collectively. None however have managed it with the aplomb and nuance that Childish Gambino has done on his latest track ‘This is America’.

The single release could not be more timely. Whilst Kanye West’s has been running riot with a series of troublesome tweets, (he has voiced his support for Trump, moronically labelled slavery as a ‘choice’ and shown himself to be a narcissist on a par with the president himself), here we have Childish Gambino, showing the two faces of America, the difficulty of being a black actor and entertainer in Hollywood, gyrating, then gunning down a choir, then singing: ‘you just a Black man in this world’. This is so much more than the ‘virtue signaling of millionaires,’ parroting the sentiment of ‘black lives matter.’ This is powerful stuff.

With over 120 million hits on Youtube since its’ release ten days ago and hundreds of thousands of comments on Twitter. The videos’ conceptual nature has generated the kind of catatonic enthusiasm and discussion usually reserved for feature length films and novels: alternative political and cultural readings abound. Glover’s Jim Crow mimicry is disturbingly evocative of America’s problematic past, the shootings emblematic of America’s violent present. The critics have been unanimous: ‘the most elegant translator of his generation’s ID’ deftly depicting America as a place where ‘violence and celebration come together.’