Karl Marx’s idea that if history repeats itself, it does so the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, has become something of a cliché – a phrase which can be glibly slithered from an original intended meaning to be applied hither and thither at face value.

Marx was talking about the way in which the successors of terrible leaders become caricatures of their predecessors – like the way Nikita Khrushchev’s break from Josef Stalin’s shadow, as outlined in his famous Destalinisation speech at the 20th annual congress of the CPSU in1956, lead to uneven projects that seem, in some ways, to miniaturise and parody Stalin’s utter disregard for the welfare of his comrades. Specifically, the post-Stalin housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s oversaw the construction of massive, dejected out-of-town mega-estates, with red, orange and yellow blocks of cramped, cut-off flats in which the proletariat were interred. These buildings have been affectionately and derisively dubbed the Khrushchevki, and remain a clown-coloured thorn in Moscow’s side.

Stalin’s apartment projects, by contrast, are examples in muted urban proportion; grey, iron balconied, sweeping stairwelled. It has been said that the architecture of Moscow is configured like an onion, and that a plumb-line dropped North/South would reveal concentric districts of housing built under the auspices of successive leaders, pushing out chronologically from a jumbled centre.

Marx’s phraseology proved too cute to be taken in its proper context. In historical practice, many such ideas (even those defined with crystalline precision) become repeated, naturalised, digested, and become a cliché –or a discipline. Successive ideas are overlaid in any interpretation of history, be it academia or memory. The historian’s task could be said to be sifting the clichés of the past for their meanings in the present, or tracing paths from a point or points of origin – an endless, largely thankless, and certainly frequently pointless task.

As Marx would have it, by the way, the failings of the tragic leader are exaggerated to a point of satire in the successor. The tragic example becomes a meaningless farce – a type – and a cliché is made anew.

I don’t want to perpetuate the stereotype of all Essex girls being filthy sluts, but one time I raped a girl from Romford, and afterwards she gave me her phone number.

“Where are you from?” A posh boy in a club asks.
“She’s from Essex,” says my friend. “She’s an Essex girl.”
“Oh, never mind,” he grins back, a sloping, lazy grin, arrogant but not vindictive.
“Where are your white stilettos, then?” His friend asks.
“Oh, I left them at home,” I say, airily. I’m bored, not offended. Well, I’m not too offended. How can you be offended about something you hear every day?

Thing is, I grew up half-Indian in Essex. I was too white, kind of, to really hang out with the Indian kids. They lived in a different world to me – a world where you had to go to special schools on Fridays, help your mum with the cooking and the cleaning, a world where some people could be deemed “library sluts.” I just didn’t fit in. My friends were the white kids – and they were, basically, racist. We were, basically, racist. That’s what we were. We went to paki-shops, not corner shops, we were scared of black people, we thought they would mug us, or worse, rape us, we thought Mrs Saki shouldn’t wear a sari to school, and we couldn’t understand what Mr. Haque was saying. Ever.

But when I left Essex I left racism behind me. More or less. What racism became was not just immoral, but seriously uncool.
“Where are you from?” A posh boy, with floppy, trendy hair would ask. “I mean, where are you from, originally?” He’d grimace a bit at the clumsiness of the question – you’re not really meant to care nowadays, but I’m still beige enough that people do. “I mean, where do your parents come from?”
“My mum’s from England and my dad’s from India,” I’d reply.
His face would light up. “Oh, India!” He’d say, fascinated. “I went there on my gap year. Do you visit your dad’s family, much?”
If he asked me where my red dot was, or why I wasn’t wearing a sari, that would be racist. Not incredibly racist, I mean, he’d not lose friends or anything, but racist enough to be disapproved of. To be placed in a certain category. An “uncool” category. It isn’t cool, being racist. It’s a bit common. It’s not done.

“Since I moved away from home, I’ve experienced more discrimination for being an Essex girl than I have for being half-Indian,” I say to my friend. She’s a girl, just like me, born in Britain, a girl who grew up only two streets way from me, only both her parents are Indian.
“Come on, Jacinta, you can’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. I’ve been discriminated against more for being an Essex girl than for being non-white, more for being working-class, talking in an Estuary accent, than for being a member of an ethnic minority.”
“Yeah, but racism is wrong. All that “Essex Girl” stuff is just a joke, it’s funny, it’s normal. Of course we don’t like people who are different to us, who come from another part of the country, who seem strange. And of course we make light, playful, banter. It’s funny! When I meet people from Newcastle, I take the piss out of their accents. That’s what human nature is – humans will always be like that. You’ll never get rid of that, people will always take the piss out of each other. But when it’s just about what place you come from, and not what country, then it’s just a joke. It’s okay.”

But this argument – “Oh, human beings are all different, and we are just noticing the differences, and we will always notice the differences, that is part of human nature…” – this is a racist argument. When Jim Davison says this about black people’s dicks, we despise him for it. Why then are Essex girls fair game?

Back in 2004, the MP for Colchester, Bob Russell, got so incensed with The People for publishing “derogatory remarks” about Essex girls that he urged readers to stop buying it.

“Had the offensive comments been directed at people because of their colour or religion it would have caused outrage amongst all decent citizens and would be considered by some to break the law,” he said in his motion.

He didn’t get anywhere, of course. You’re not just allowed to laugh at Essex girls – you’re supposed to. The hatred we feel as a society towards girls from Essex is so strong that we don’t even recognize it as hatred. It just a natural reaction towards something so disgusting. But what, exactly, do we hate? What, exactly, is the cliché?

Well, Essex girls are blonde, Essex girls are stupid, Essex girls are sluts. Essex girls like sex, they enjoy being raped. Essex girls can’t change light-bulbs, and they don’t know who the Prime Minister is. They have six different kids to six different men, some of whom are black. They smoke as they push along the pram. They might not be poor, but they are always vulgar. They wear ankle chains. They put their ankles behind their ears, just to make themselves more attractive.

But what’s it actually like, being a cliché?

“I don’t mind,” says Natalie, 24. “You know, wherever you go in the world, when you tell people you are an Essex girl you get more attention. It seems to make you less boring.”

“Well, I don’t consider myself an Essex girl,” says Jamie, 29, “ even though sometimes people make jokes when they meet me. I never get offended – I find it funny. I haven’t heard that for ages, though, I think it’s dying out. But I must admit, I hate Essex girls – the typical blonde hair and annoying cockney accents….. they really do put me off.”

“I don’t consider myself to be a ‘typical’ Essex girl either,” says Jamie’s friend, Terri. “Although I do have your typical blonde hair and annoying cockney accent! So I guess a lot of people would view me as an Essex girl. To be honest I feel far too old and boring to put myself in that category; after all, I’m just a mum of two, getting on with making a happy life for me and my kids. It’s nowhere near as glam as it must be dancing round your handbag looking glam and having fun!”

But not all Essex girls think the cliché is a fair one. Lisa, for example, says:
“I do feel it is unfair to stereotype all girls that are born in Essex as Essex girls…. Although the stereotype fits many living here, it does not fit all. I know many girls who go out binge drinking, dressed like something from a ‘Pimps and Whores’ party and sleeping around like cheap tarts. However I am not one of them and have found myself in situations where people assume I am going to behave in the same way.”

“Actually, the girls nowadays are much worse than we used to be,” says Vicky, 31. “I mean, we were sleeping around and that – I lost my virginity at 14, and it was in a park, which is about as bad as a car, isn’t it? But the teenagers in Essex today, they’re real nightmares. They walk around, dressed up like prostitutes. We might’ve dressed tartily but we never looked like actual prostitutes. And the amount they drink is unbelievable!”

Lisa agrees with her: “They might not wear white stilettos anymore, but I would say they’ve got worse due to the things they do wear….. and the amount they drink.”

Lisa is the only Essex girl I talked to who seemed to resent the cliché for its misogyny:
“Men do get off lightly because I believe more of them whore themselves around, drinking too much and dressed like chavs, but they don’t get labelled at all.”

And of course, when you come down to it, that’s all the Essex girl label is. It’s misogyny.

Class hatred is a factor, too, of course – there is nothing so despicable, nothing so disgusting, as social change – and Essex is the county of “working-class-done-good,” a sanctuary for window-cleaners who’ve won the lottery, for taxi-drivers who’ve saved enough to get out of the East End. This disgusts people, because they want, desperately, to keep the poor poor, to keep the working-class in their slums. People who speak like Victoria Beckham shouldn’t own Bentleys. People who talk like plumbers shouldn’t send their kids to private school. You should know your place – and, if you think that ‘towel’ and ‘tale’ are homophones, your place is in a council estate.

But the class hatred, although wrong – as wrong and disgusting as racism, even if it’s a bit cooler – that isn’t the crux of the Essex girl hatred. We hate girls from Essex because we hate women. We say we hate them because they like sex – and enjoying sex is a grotesque, immoral thing for a woman to do, really she should grin and bear it – but deep down we just hate them for being women. All women like fucking, more or less. It feels nice. God, if he created us, designed us to enjoy sex. Women’s pussies get wet when they get aroused, their clits get erect. This is normal. It is a normal anatomical reaction. Women are designed to enjoy sex.

But Essex girls enjoy it a bit too much. We flaunt our bodies, in tight skirts, pink T-shirts, high heels, ankle chains. We wear too much make-up, we fall out of taxis like sluts. Society condemns us, and we condemn each other, but we don’t stop drinking, we don’t stop fucking. We fuck in cars, in car-parks, in parks and forests. We suck people off down alleyways. We get raped and enjoy it.

“I raped an Essex girl the other day,” says a boy in an “Are Essex girls all filthy sluts?” forum. “She enjoyed it more than I did.”

“I don’t hate all girls from Essex,” says Jamie. “But I do hate all Essex girls. They play on it, and I hate that.”

What we hate is women. What we hate is women with power. What we hate is ourselves.

Every year a new American High School TV series  hits our screens, I mean think of how many there have been:Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, The OC, Dawson’s Creek (this contributor’s personal favourite), The Young Americans, Popular etc etc. It’s even arguable that shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Smallville fit into this genre (but they have wacky crossover appeal that means nerdy sci-fi geeks will be into them, but will that affect ratings by alienating the general populace – I imagine this is a fine line that many TV execs often tread). Hell, it’s even come full circle this year with the emergence of the updated version of Beverley Hills 90210 – arguably the show that first started this trend – this time simply called 90210 (you know that shit is hip).  But yeah how many people noticed when this genre slowly slinked its way into homemade British TV? I’m including the full genre title i.e. American High School TV Show. Not just High School TV Show, I mean we’ve had shows like Grange Hill and Byker Grove. Nope, I’m talking about prime time baby. I’m talking about Skins.

Now, everyone knows Skins and I do mean everybody. When I was recently in Russia it was even huge over there, so huge that when I was at a party somebody put the theme music on over the decks and everyone started going mental on the dance floor. I didn’t get that at all – I mean the theme music isn’t even that good, but I guess it was testament to the show’s popularity. Even in the UK it’s everywhere – advertised on billboards, at the cinema, in weekend newspaper supplements, the week its second season premiered Nicholas Hoult was one of the top guests on Jonathan Ross, Dev Patel has gone on to receive international notoriety as the Slumdog Millionaire etc etc – and it can pretty much be described as the great white hope for British TV, and everyone tunes in every week. Now granted, a lot of people I know complain about it being crap constantly, but they still tuned in, and granted, I was one of those people. There was something slightly off about it that I just couldn’t put my finger on,  I guess it just became so ingrained in the collective consciousness of the nation that it actually did become unmissable.

Now, why exactly was this? Upon its arrival a lot of people heralded it as groundbreaking as, with its scriptwriting team with an average age of 21, it claimed to present an accurate portrayal of the youth of today by featuring heavy swearing, drug use, promiscuity and homosexuality. Now, I don’t watch a lot of British TV shows but I’m pretty sure prime time shows such as This Life, Queer as Folk and Shameless had already tackled these issues and featured them in their respective content, so  I don’t really think it was that groundbreaking. Neither is it that realisitic: I used to describe the unrealistic bits in Skins as the wacky side, when it would come up in discussion, and I felt that that was where it fell down.  It was attempting to be hyper realistic but then would have all these dumb moments where someone would get hit by a bus or have a rope ladder conveniently packed in their luggage by their mother, or would get involved with local gangsters who were built up as badasses but would be easily thwarted by our heroes etc etc.   I couldn’t understand why it was included, or why the show was such a success.

Then in the finale of season three it finally clicked and I finally figured it out (that kinda makes me seem like I didn’t think about anything else for three years, this isn’t the case but I probably should have seen it earlier). In this episode, Cook and Effy leave Bristol in a stolen car and go to some unnamed hick town to find Cook’s father and hang out with him for a bit, only to be pursued and found by JJ and Freddy, who then have to compete in a race against some crazy locals for some reason (I forget why, it was on a while ago yeah?) and then have a fight with them and escape on a boat. I mean what? I know its fiction but this kind of stuff doesn’t happen in England, it sounds more like something that would happen in an American High School TV Show….waitaminute…that was it! The hip young screenwriters from Skins, who had undoubtedly been brought up on a wholesome diet of the best imports of the genre, were merely recycling clichéd old ideas from the American High School TV Show and applying them to the hip young promiscuous drug culture that was now prevalent in the UK. That was why the show hadn’t really worked for me, why I had felt like something had been off about it since the start. Like I don’t know if it was simply because those other shows were set in America, or because I was younger then or those shows had better scripts or actors or what, but every time Luke Perry would steal a car in 90210 I’d believe it because he was a badass, but whenever Nicholas Hoult would steal a car in Skins I’d just think it was stupid and that there was no way this posh twat would know anything about how to hotwire a car. The same can be said of many other occasions in both shows like when Pacey Witter spat in his high school teacher’s face I found it powerful and believable (”No Sir, THIS is spitting in the face of the education system”) whereas when some idiots in Skins stood up to their teachers and started trashing the school I just thought it was  ridiculous and lowered the whole tone of the show. And those are only two examples of these incidents, I’m sure if I had the ass I could go back through each series and pick out countless more. So yeah, I guess it comes back to my original point – clichés sell in television. I guess you just need to know how to adapt them and repackage them so that nobody notices, as Skins has rather cleverly (inadvertently?) done.

Every now and then bad stories filter through to the German newspapers. In May this year, a 66-year-old pensioner in the northern town of Hildesheim clubbed three people to death over an allotment dispute. The flashpoint was a shared path, but the feud had reportedly been building for a long time, with tense threats being exchanged and rubbish being dumped over fences for years. In another incident in April, a 78-year-old man accidentally nearly blinded a 14-year-old boy with a homemade explosive booby-trap he had used to secure his shed.

These terrible stories reinforce the popular clichés about allotments in Germany – they are insular, paranoid mini-societies full of old people with old attitudes. The apples that hang over the fence are guarded with booby-traps, and there are dark mutterings if someone doesn’t clip their hedge to the regulation height.

It is exactly these prejudices that Peter Standfuß, chairman of the allotment club Am Buschkrug, is sensitive to. The Am Buschkrug colony is a cluster of 421 allotments in the genteel part of Neukölln called Britz. Speaking for one of Berlin’s larger colonies near one of its poorer districts, Standfuß is a reformer, despite remembering growing up on an allotment colony in the 50s. He regularly organises children’s festivals, complete with bungee jumping, at which 2,000 guests are expected every year.

His plans for a multicultural festival have had to be shelved, however. Some of the older Laubenpieper – the cosy German name for allotment keepers – are apparently not quite ready for it. “Things are changing. Nearly every other applicant for a new allotment is of immigrant background nowadays. We have more and more Turks, Poles, Greeks and Arabs getting allotments. It is a new challenge for some of our older members. But it’s important, because it’s the future. I think it might be time we got a Turkish member on the board.”

But Berlin’s allotment scene is a wide umbrella. Many inner-city colonies are apparently attracting new generations for various reasons. Modern parents see allotments as an antidote to the anonymity and artifice of modern society. They want to teach their kids where food comes from, and defying the clichés of paranoia, almost all allotment-owners talk about the communal atmosphere of the colony, about colonists helping each other and lending each other equipment. Peter Ehrenberg, chairman of the Berlin German Garden Friends (BDG), an allotment community umbrella organisation, was recently quoted as saying, “A garden demands and promotes restraint and cooperation, because you have to show consideration for others. I see that as an enhancement in our anonymous society.”

But Standfuß suspects that young people are put off by the rules. Getting an allotment in Germany means submitting to the formidable Bundeskleingartengesetz, a law which defines not only the size but the purpose of allotments. To lease a plot of land from the German state, you have to use it productively.

For instance, the Bundeskleingartengesetz contains a ‘30 – 30 – 30′ rule: at least 30 percent of the garden be used to grow fruit or vegetables, 30 percent may be built on, and a maximum of 30 percent may be used for ‘recreation’. It is also illegal to live on your allotment, or to install facilities that make it permanently habitable, which is why some German states do not allow electricity or running water on allotments. Sewage, though, is a grey area. “The toilet question is heavily debated,” Standfuß observes sagely.

If the Bundeskleingartengesetz doesn’t get you, then the board might. Colonies have their own idiosyncratic rules. At the Am Buschkrug colony, for example, everyone must have at least two fruit trees, while the obligatory frontal hedges must be kept at a height of between 50cm and 1.25 metres. The Schutzverband colony in Steglitz has the same rule, and also stipulates there must be no noise between 1pm and 3pm, or after 4pm.

But the ruling committees are more flexible than they seem, and are willing to be moderate. Standfuß is eager to point out that the ‘30 – 30 – 30′ rule can apply to the whole colony. If someone shirks their vegetable-growing duties, someone else can compensate – it all depends on the averages. And Helmut Sonnenberg, chairman of the Schutzverband colony likes to assure people that “if someone’s hedge is 1.30 or 1.35 metres, we don’t say anything.”

The relatively liberal standards in Berlin allotments are due to the city’s history. Having been created in the late nineteenth century as a way to curb the development of industrial slums, allotments caught on and were formalised by the German authorities in the 1920’s. Their hour of fulfilment arrived during and after World War II, when they fed and sheltered the decimated population. Allotments took on a special significance in West Berlin, where they represented precious patches of greenery in the walled city.

These secret gardens, then, with their clay figurines, curious owners and complex rules have protected Berliners from the damage of a whole century, and are now preparing for a new generation.

A slightly different version of this article originally appeared in EXBERLINER magazine July/August 2009.

Photography: Emile Holba www.emileholba.co.uk

Sport’s love affair with cliché is the stuff of legend. So rich has football’s battery of stock phrases become that it’s possible for especially gifted commentators to weave together minutes-long tissues of dead metaphors and banalities, never letting an original construction pass their lips (this post’s title, by the way, is Jonathan Pearce – who used to do the commentary for BBC’s Robot Wars - getting poetical at an FA cup game). As we metioned in the podcast, David Foster Wallace once suggested that maybe great players are great because they can take clichés seriously. Having studied A Level Lit. with a relative of gangling England striker Peter Crouch, I’m inclined to think this ability may even be genetic; he’d discuss pathetic fallacy in Lear or Milton’s verse style in exactly the same vacantly platitudinous register Pete favours post-match.

Clichés aren’t just retrospectively applied to sport though; they also inform how we watch and consume it. I’d argue sport is increasingly being disseminated in ways that literalise and perpetuate certain clichés. It’s a process which technology is accelerating, and one with potentially pernicious consequences. Let’s take a simple example: you might talk about how someone attempting to head a crossed ball or make a slam-dunk seems to hang in the air  – which, of course, if you freeze the replay, they do. This sort of manipulation of footage is so common it goes completely unnoticed. It makes total sense, too – of course by slowing or freezing movements we can get a clearer idea of what’s just happened. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t reinforce certain habits of thought and speech though. Paul Stretford’s said of Wayne Rooney  ‘I imagine if we had the technology to look into his head we’d see that he sees everything at a slowed-down pace.’* We don’t have that sort of tech, obviously, but we can slow down on-pitch action to examine a player’s physicality or a ball’s flight as if we were Rooneyesque sporting savants, substantiating the conviction that’s how sportspeople see.

And what about when we hear a star player can ‘beat a team single handed?’ The way sport’s shot and circulated has undeniably changed to support the idea that single actions on the part of individual virtuoso players (Kobe, Kaka, Wilkinson) can shape games. It’s a sexier notion – one more in line with capitalist individualism and sleb culture – than the truth of concerted and sustained team effort. David Beckham’s far from the greatest player to have graced a pitch but his bone structure and the nature of his game means he has a massive appeal for football-illiterate audiences (who, understandably, aren’t that interested in Wes Brown and Gary Neville cannily and tandemically capitalising on the offside rule but can understand and enjoy the sight of a ball scooped mercurially past the keeper from 30 yards). Ronaldo’s skills likewise translate beautifully into the medium of ten-second youtube clip viewed on a mobile phone screen.

Video games and interactive red button-type viewing technologies are making new modes of cliché-concretisation possible – the phrase of ‘turning on the skill,’ for example, takes on a new meaning in games like FIFA or ISS, which allocate a button on the controller to doing just that. Sports games and sports broadcasts have been incestuously trying to mimic each other’s aesthetics for years now, institutionalising all sorts of immediately recognisable visual, verbal and stylistic conventions and clichés in the process. And as sport – and European football in particular – has become more enmeshed with the entertainment industry, a whole bunch of new, capitalist realist clichés (which is to say ways of throwing one’s hands up and albeit reluctantly acknowledging the inexorability of market forces, thereby painting anyone who’d wanna question their inexorability as hopelessly deluded) have also sprung up.

Which is part of the reason Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric was so fascinating (N.B: fascinating but not necessarilygood). Eric Cantona – who I’m going to mostly refrain from waxing devoted about here – never had much truck with merchandising and image rights and extracurricular monetisation in general, and Loach makes him stand for a bunch of leftist-amenable qualities (humility, generosity, courage, fraternity etc.) which, though clichéd, are actually pretty worthwhile. Loach also engages with a another vein of cinematic cliché; the film’s structure is basically cribbed from ‘kid meets creature which teaches kid key life lessons then heart-wrenchingly leaves/dies’ films like E.T. and Free Willy and My Neighbour Totoro.** Throw a few staples of blue collar masculinities films into the mix – strained father/son relationships, reflections on the post Thatcher job market etc. – and you’ve got a cocktail of tropes that shouldn’t work but does. I’m willing to accept that, given my age and sympathies and familial sporting fealties, I’m maybe subject to a perfect storm-style conjunction of susceptibilities here, but for me the movie was both moving and thought-provoking, showing sport doesn’t have to go proving itself right all the time.

*Which – so stop sniggering at the back – he meant as testament to Rooney’s preternatural genius with regard to positional play rather than as an insinuation Wayne’s a bit slow, though the idea that to be blessed with sporting genius you’ve got to be cursed with a subpar IQ is part of the myth, like the artist/madman, comic/depressive thing.

** Coincidentally enough, I think my first experience of the thrill of cliché-detection came when, as a precociously media-savvy kid, I came to the confusing realisation that all these movies had the same plot.

Dorothy Feaver

Oliver Smith

Dorothy Feaver

Oliver Smith

Oliver Smith

Dorothy Feaver

Jack mounts a sort of defence of cliché, arguing – via a raft of ‘dance’ music more likely to inspire chin stroking than rug cutting – that clichéphobia begets overcomplication, elitism and self-consciousness. Not for him friday nights spent sulkily skanking to belatedly trendy London bass musics rather than – y’know – having fun. Maybe sport – an arena where self-consciousness can be fatally counterintuitive, where communality is central and where cliché is king – can offer an alternative, teaching us (pace Luomo) to feel our bodies speaking?

Our list of tracks which either embrace cliché or go to great lengths to avoid it is on the right. Sleater Kinney tie themselves in knots arguing their 70s-y rock transcends pastiche, Zomby’s Tears in Rain incorporates every rave trope from air horns to portentous sci-fi samples and Francoise Hardy appeals – in becomingly faltering English – to be taught what clichés really mean.

Subscribe on iTunes

Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Ivor Cutler – I Love You, Solo on Mbira (Bikembe) in 5:3 Time
• Francoise Hardy – Find Me a Boy
• Luomo – Body Speaking
• Sleater Kinney – Entertain
• Girl Talk – Don’t Stop
• Squarepusher – Do You Know Squarepusher?
• Lil’ Wayne -Kobe Bryant

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/cassettes/fuck-embodied-self-reflexivity-lets-dance-2/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/when-in-rome http://www.murdofleur.org/notice-board/when-in-rome#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:19:03 +0000 header http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=2905 by Hannah Clarke

Perhaps the most well known travelling cliche tells us to behave as those around us do. So if you’ve got some free time to travel the world prepare to subvert from the mainstream and embrace a counter culture.

Save up for your big adventure by working your fingers to the bone stacking the shelves in Tesco or punching numbers in an underpaid office job. Find yourself a travel buddy who´s on the same page as you and head down to STA travel to cross the I´s and dot the T´s on your 9 month, 3 continent, 12 country, minute by minute travel schedule. One week before the off pack everything but the kitchen sink into your shiny new Eastpack and wait for your ship/plane to come in.

On arrival; hit the ground running, straight into the busy streets of Bangkok. Feeling like a couple of fish out of water, panic and get led to a crappy hotel that costs you an arm and a leg. Before long convince yourselves you´re going against the grain by volunteering in an orphanage and send numerous emails home tooting your own horn about the great work you´re doing and how fulfilled you feel. Abandon the orphans in 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail upon discovering cheap drugs to put in your pipe and smoke.

Within time start fighting like cats and dogs with your like minded travel buddy after one of you falls head over heels for the guy from your hostel born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Drunkenly air each others dirty laundry in the hostel bar, but when all is said and done, wipe the slate clean and move onto your next destination.

As the trip continues, realise that money doesn’t grow on trees and lay your cards on the table in an email to your parents requesting a loan.

Money worries aside, by now, home is where you lay your hat and you laugh in the face of touts and tickets sellers who offer you prices as if you were born yesterday. Fry your brain at a full moon party, (b)eat a dead horse in a restaurant filled with locals and find yourself somewhere along the way.

Before you know it the end is nigh, fill your bag with souveniers as useful as a lead balloon, cash in your ticket home and the rest, as they say, is history.

(One tip – Before you land make sure to give away the shirt off your back – a kaftan won’t fly in the U.K.)

In the three years that I spent amongst the future cognoscenti of the UK, it was considered gauche to not know and love Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy. His refusal to break character thrilled a post-ironic generation so knowing that knowingness had become passe. For a truly post-modern comedian like Cohen, genius – and success – lay in the exploitation of a political incorrectness that mocks – nay, transcends – good taste. The pretensions of Cohen’s characters – or lack thereof, in the case of his mega-hit Borat – were open wounds daring the audience to look away first. And after years of being smothered by propriety, the world gaped like a pubescent boy at a porn site.