Everyone, I think, is familiar with that cosy, soothing adage, ‘everything happens for a reason’. The subtext is that the world amounts to more than an insignificant interlude between infinite silences. That there is purpose, cohesion and sense to existence – that you are a creature integrated into the designs […]

Did you look in the mirror today? Just once? With longing or loathing? Was it a glance or a gaze? Were you surprised? Mirror mirror on the wall, who is most narcissistic of them all? I believe the answer is everyone, to a lesser or greater extent. The ubiquity of mirrors is […]

In most cases, a tea advert should illicit nothing more than a desire to drink tea.  Tea is a plain, uncomplicated, quotidian pleasure. It stands as an immovable bulwark against class and cultural divides. After water, it is the most egalitarian beverage known to man. But most tea adverts, in […]

I’m sitting in a dark room, gluttony sapped by litres of fizzy drink and enormous chunks of chocolate, eyes strained by the white glare of a laptop screen, buttocks gone numb against the (now somewhat sticky) leather of my chair. This, to my great sense of wonderment, is what post-graduation […]

Who, in their sane and proper mental condition, thinks to celebrate the loss of innocent lives? A death is not a celebratory occasion for normal people, especially not the death of the blameless at the hands of crazed fanatics. Yesterday saw the deaths of the US ambassador to Libya, as […]

Perhaps the feeling most keenly awakened in me by Palestine is the feeling of intensity. I think, after almost three weeks of absorbing (or being absorbed into) this enchanting land, the intensity of the experience has left me a little drained. It isn’t the same sort of intensity that is […]