Yknow,

When you’re a theatre kid, it feels like your next show will be the rest of your life. And so on, and so on. You’re emotionally encumbered with the friends you’ve made, the tears you’ve shed, and the rush of endorphins you receive every time a crowd of your friends’ parents give you that sweet, sweet validation you’ve been craving.   

And would you ever listen to anything else? Certainly not. Musical theatre is enough. You’re satiated to the point where nothing else sounds as good. You meet up and cluster together, assigning roles, working out your ranges, belting One Day More at the top of your lungs while the altos sing the boring part, it’s the good stuff, the high life. Surely this is forever.

But, it isn’t. Now you’re sixteen and you’ve swapped your librettos for library books, your tap shoes for Air Maxes, your grease paint for The Body Shop’s two-in-one tea tree acne cleanser and exfoliator. In a few years you’ll be off to university,  and you want to sing along to Wicked’s A Sentimental Man while you’re on the train to your open day, but you bite your tongue because the girl sitting opposite you is kind of cute. And a few months after that, Wicked, JCS, Les Mis, all evidence of that glamorous, foot-stomping, jazz-hand-waving world has been erased from your music library for the foreseeable future. Music is still vitally important, but now it’s music you can relate to, music you can nod along to, and listen to in front of people. Songs you can pick apart with your friends or dance along to at parties. It’s the music of the real world; real people facing real issues, bold and experimental and outrageous and tear-jerking. And you can’t imagine listening to anything else.

And then you discover Stephen Sondheim.

You wanted to find art that resonated with your gloomy, adolescent, self-loathing, soul-searching crusade, and you ended up going back to the place where you started. 

Something Sondheim understood better than most was the human condition. He wrote characters that didn’t know what they wanted, characters who weren’t honest with themselves, characters who were fickle and unpredictable and irrational, which in the Greater Extended Musical Theatre universe was uncommon, especially in the mid-seventies. He understood what it meant to forgive, but he also understood exactly what it meant to lose one’s shit. He understood the anxious pang of feeling directionless, but he also understood the glorious harmony of everything coming together, beautiful resolution, spectacular closure, the little tummy butterflies that tell you everything’s going to be fine despite your odds. Very importantly, whether sour or sweet, he understood what it meant to fall in love. 

You listen- it’s eerie at first. Basslines that teeter on a knife’s edge, vocal harmonies that make no sense. Discordant, chromatic crescendos with chromatic, discordant resolutions. But you pick out scraps of pure brilliance amongst the chaos. The second verse of Marry Me A Little. The last verse of Johanna. The soaring conclusion to Move On, a fiery duet that encourages artistic integrity above all else. And then, suddenly, like all great things, the jigsaw falls into place, the curtain is lifted, and a masterpiece constructs itself before your eyes. You watch old VHS tapes of Sondheim training young theatre grads, peering from the top of a Steinway with one eyebrow raised. His beard is dishevelled, his hand gestures are wild, his direction is acute, and when it all comes together, you can catch the faint crooked smile of a genuinely proud genius who is watching his work come to life in real-time. Over the years, there are celebrities that have tried to catch this brilliance with limited success. Johnny Depp, poreless and vacant, like a reanimated corpse, breaking three vocal chords at the end of Epiphany. James Cordon, autotuned voice wavering and falling flat as he rolls down a hill with Emily Blunt, almost suffocating her. I don’t want to sound elitist, because recreating some of his best moments is a monumental, almost impossible task. Treading the line between harmony and disharmony, beauty and obstruction, life and death.

Goodnight Stephen- you were the best of all time, and probably will remain so.

Don’t lie. You’ve been there. I know I have. You right-swiped with a ten-cent smoke-show on Bumble, and she’s the perfect match. She loves dogs, food, the US Office, and holy shit, she just might be the one. You can’t remember the last time you were this head over heels for anybody other than your pilates instructor. So you take her to the fanciest restaurant in town, Donacelli’s. The ambience is swell, the pepper grinders are unnecessarily large, the waiters are dismissive enough of you to be authentically Italian. It’s perfect, and she looks radiant as the day you met her, which was just a few hours ago, but still, she looks cooler than a penguin’s fridge, baby.

Normally you would order a plain old margherita with the largest garlic bread they have, avoiding ashamed eye contact with the waiter, but this girl said she ‘loves travel’ on her bio, and you’re out to impress her.

‘Two minestrone soups, grazi signor’, you say with a big vacant smile on your face, in a pathetic accent that would make DaVinci weep. You take a big bite of complimentary focaccia and wink at your date knowingly. You got this, you’re thinking to yourself. It’s going great. But when the steaming bowls of soup arrive and are dumped in front of you ( and theatrically seasoned with the giant pepper mill), upon closer inspection you notice a 200kg man in a fly costume has stumbled his way into your soup. We’ve all had to deal with flies in our soup before, but this?! Come on! Worry not. Here’s a simple solution to save you the embarrassment of a first date bug-tastrophe.

1. ask him how he is

A lot of people don’t bother with this first step. They are mostly shocked because they’ve found a 500 pound fly man dripping with chunks of celery and slippery wet macaroni on their table for two. It is likely the table has collapsed under the weight of this novelty-costumed behemoth. But don’t worry! If you follow these steps incredibly quickly, there’s still a chance you’ll handle the mess before your date suspects a thing. Ask the little critter how he’s doing. As you stare down at the well-seasoned rubble, give the wheezing fly-shaped body below you a reassuring thumbs up, as if to say, don’t worry, this happens all the time, you’re fine. If he gives you a thumbs up back, he’ll probably only need another 5 minutes on the ground max, to wipe the scolding hot soup off his feelers. If he yells buzz off! to you, GET THE HELL OUT OF DONACELLI’S. It’s not worth it, man. Even if she’s perfect. Please, just trust me with this one.

2. assess the threat

Just as flies come in several varieties (fruitfly, dragonfly etc) so do giant fly-men. It’s important to know your flies, because some can be incredibly dangerous.

The old timey-fly man from the 1800s is relatively harmless. He’s a bit of an enigma. Nobody knows how he got here or what his intentions are. But that mischievous posture and cheeky expression assures me that he’s undoubtedly up to no good. Remember that this man has come from the 1800s, where fly-people were still respected and considered elegant in some cultures, so get out of your seat and discreetly bow before your date turns around and registers the chaos. As with most Victorians, he loves opium, so make sure you always have some on-hand. And hey, fuck it, you can try some every now and then. But if you run out, buy some more at a discounted price, and sell it for a profit. Hey, this is easy! This could be my livelihood! You are now a drug dealer.

I am so sorry dude. You’re not going to win this one. This guy is the coolest. You know he rides a motorbike? And he smokes just for kicks? And he drinks to forget the pain? And look at the way he’s sitting on that barstool. How the hell are you supposed to compete with that? If he’s already started talking to your date, it’s all over for you. I lost my wife of 23 years to this bastard, as he crawled out of my carrot and coriander soup, wiped the stains off his chin, cracked open a beer and whispered: ‘Hey, what’s the buzz, honey?’ Even though that’s obviously a bee joke and made zero sense at the time, my wife was in fits of giggles, and before I could say curse you, cool fly guy! they were moving into a 4 bedroom colonial townhouse in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Don’t let his cheery demeanour fool you. This kid is probably jacked on mountain dew and hasn’t seen his parents in days. I have seen bad men come and go throughout my lifetime: presidents, dictators, CEOs, corrupt lawyers, etc. But I have never encountered another human with the brazen arrogance of kid fly. This guy will swing off chandeliers, tie your shoelaces together, stick a fork up his ass, and he’ll be enjoying himself the entire time. Just look at that posture. He’s saying what you gonna do? What you gonna do, huh? I’m just a kid fly, baby! I’ll tell you what I’ll do you little runt. I’ll dress up as a giant fly-swatter and chase you across the restaurant. (you have to be really quiet while you do this though so as not to alert your date).

3. DO NOT USE INSECTICIDE

In your flustered state, you’ve probably forgotten that this is not a fly, but a 200kg man in a fly costume. Insecticide is going to do you no favours, and will most likely ruin that lovely bowl of complimentary bread. Also it could drown out the scent of that Tommy by Tommy Hilfiger for Men eu de cologne which you desperately rubbed into your neck at the sample counter of Superdrug two hours before your date. Do you want the place reeking of bug-killer? Not very classy at all, friend. Even a fly-man wouldn’t stoop so low.

4. remember to still give compliments to the chef

In Italy it’s incredibly rude to finish your din dins without giving the chef a little smile and a nod. If there’s any possible way you could eat around this hulking abomination, try to do so, out of respect to the culture of cuisine. Scoop up some remaining macaroni from the wreckage and make direct eye contact with the chef as you eat, rubbing your tummy and saying ‘mmm… so delicious! you can really taste the commitment to the craft. Yummers!’ Not to mention, you’ll look like a real gentleman in front of your date.

5. politely asking the waiter

It’s simple. Little accidents like this happen all the time in the workplace. How can we expect a kitchen to be a constant pinnacle of cleanliness? Don’t make a big fuss, don’t make a big deal, just usher the waiter and show him the bowl, he will nod and scoop up this 6ft fly-man, cradling him in his arms and throwing him back out into the street. You’ll probably get some complimentary bruschetta. Your date, horrified, will probably say ‘I can’t believe they just let fly-men into their restaurant like that! Really unprofessional’. And you can reply with ‘I can’t believe they just let you into the restaurant because you’re too pretty for this world 🙂 ‘

Well look at you, you sly dog, you made it all about her. You’re a true gent.

(recently, the film ‘About Time‘ was recommended to me, and although it was a nice romantic watch, I really had some issues with the premise. Forging this fake relationship by amending every mistake you’ve made in the past made the relationship, to me, seem less genuine. Like the great Robin Williams said, it’s the little idiosyncrasies that make romance spectacular. If you drove out all the ugly, what would you have left? I wrote this blog with silliness in mind, but maybe there’s something to be said for appreciating the hilarious, calamitous moments in your life: the terrible dates, the awkward encounters, the nitty gritty, the metaphorical fly-men that crash into our steaming bowls of soup. The best stories, and certainly the best comedies, are tales in which everything goes wrong. We depend on chaos, as it makes the journey so much more memorable. These are desperate times. But try to stay positive and accentuate the silly when you can. Stay safe, I love you,

Felix.)

In Moby’s most recent memoir, Then It Fell Apart, he tells the story of a romantic encounter with a 21-year-old, platinum blonde, ‘beautiful elf’ named Lizzy Grant. They’d ‘kissed at 4am, just as the bar was closing’, and although Moby asked her if she’d stay the night, she refused his advances unless he took her on a proper date. A week later they ate at a vegan macrobiotic restaurant, then journeyed back to his luxury penthouse to share music. Moby had just released his seventh album, and was one of the most successful artists in New York City. Lizzy was accustomed to open mic nights and club gigs, and was recording a demo after impressing a judge in a songwriting competition earlier that year. Moby recalls a conversation they had in the restaurant that night:

During dinner she told me she was a musician so I asked, “Will you play me some of your music?”

“Sure, do you have a piano?”

“Yes, back on the second floor,” I said.

“Floors in an apartment.” She shook her head. “Moby you know you’re the man.”

“Ha, thanks,” I said.

“No, not like that. You’re a rich WASP from Connecticut and you live in a five-level penthouse. You’re ‘The Man.’ As in, ‘stick it to The Man.’ As in the person they guillotine in the revolution.”

The date ended amicably. Moby made a move, but Lizzy refused to go any further. She said: “I like you. But I hear you do this with a lot of people”. She wasn’t wrong. Lizzy took the elevator from the 29th floor and kissed him goodnight. Four years later, she changed her name and released a self titled debut album. Two years after that, she broke the internet with Video Games. 

I have my reservations about Born to Die. On the one hand, a wonderful nostalgia ties me to the album. My mum would play it in France or on long drives to the beach, with Lana’s gentle voice syncing up perfectly with the afternoon sunshine and blinding fields of rapeseed. Her favourite was Million Dollar Man, which she would play relentlessly- she loved the bridge, where Lana sighs: ‘you’re un-believable’.

But the album makes me feel a bit strange, too. Because with the exception of Summertime Sadness and This Is What Makes Us Girls, we don’t really hear any Lizzy Grant. Not once. Instead, it’s an ensemble of characters. The husky, crooning girlfriend in Born to Die and Video Games, the bright eyed naive debutant in Carmen and Off to the Races, the glowing stereotype of patriotism in National Anthem. The same things are referenced constantly. So constantly, it almost feels uninspired: California, red dresses, heavy drinking, perfume, bad boys who are bad for her, Coney Island, California again, etc. She rhymes crazy with baby about 60 times, and it drives me crazy, baby. Influences are problematic too. Any song which glamorises the twisted, sickening world of Nabokov’s Lolita is cringeworthy to me, and there is one very problematic example on this record (two, if you include the equally creepy bonus track Lolita). It wouldn’t be a stretch to say Lana is subservient and submissive to a fault on this album, oftentimes to a man exhibiting some form of patriarchal dominance over her (look up the lyrics to Yayo on the paradise edition if you don’t believe me). This actually continues throughout the moody sequel Ultraviolence; I will never not cringe at the titular track’s refrain: ‘He hit me and it felt like a kiss’. 

Admittedly, that song is about an underground cult, and it contains (what I believe are) several references to Jim Jones. It’s an intentionally harrowing story. And I don’t really have too many issues with these dominant men either, it’s just the added infantilisation, especially on Born To Die, which occasionally makes my skin crawl. Now, you may be thinking – Felix, what’s wrong with doing characters? You do them all the time! So much that people can’t distinguish whether you’re being serious or doing a bit! Is he doing a bit now? Who knows? You never can tell! Ahahahaha – it’s true. I love characters. I love storylines and metaphors and symbolism. But I also love Lizzy Grant telling Moby he’s the type of guy to get publicly executed in 18th-century France. Enter Brooklyn Baby, the realest and fakest and funniest song Lana has ever recorded. 

I suppose I should start by describing the song itself. As with most LDR, the instrumentation is spectacular. Film-score-esque. A stupidly catchy hook which is just Lana humming over a simple guitar riff. Intense, breathy moments of gorgeous unaccompanied singing. A song which starts with echoey vocals and an electric guitar, and ends with a lazy drumbeat and a backing singer and a string section. It dances between categorisations, both vintage-sounding and dreamlike, with a strange ethereal quality to it. None of it feels like it’s really happening, if that makes sense. It’s very good that this song doesn’t have a music video, as it’s almost too colourful to visualise outside of your head. In fact, I defy you not to form an image of a video in your mind while you’re listening to this song. Everything about it engages with nostalgia and spurs the imagination. As you can imagine, the song has been slowed down and reverb-ed and tinkered with by a plethora of lo-fi YouTubers. But as far as I’m aware, not many people have explored just how critical this track is.

A critique of New York culture:

I’ll admit I only discovered this banger last year. But after listening to hundreds of Lana songs about California sunshine, I was gasping for a tune that hailed closer to her hometown. Interestingly, my favourite Lana song, How to disappear, is about her time spent in New York. It laments on her past relationships and adopts a tone of melancholic longing. Brooklyn Baby does exactly the opposite. 

Lana’s protagonist is a walking cliché. She’s cynical and precious, her boyfriend’s in a band, she casually dips her toes in New York’s literary heritage and drug-fuelled history with the phrase ‘Beat poetry on amphetamines’. In fact, this album is steeped in drug culture, from ‘white lines’ and ‘keys’ in Florida Kilos to dancing while smoking Parliament cigarettes in West Coast. A motivation behind Brooklyn Baby was Lou Reed, who is mentioned several times across the song. Reed was a notable figure in New York’s drug scene, a heavy user of methamphetamine; interestingly his 1975 track Coney Island Baby shares some similar themes with Lana’s. Reed was supposed to feature in this song, but he died on the day of recording. 

Lana has admitted to wanting to feel at home in a New York crowd, searching for an “artistic community like Dylan’s, Joan Baez’s, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s”, but she also demanded respect as a writer. “Truthfully”, she said, “I found neither”. It’s why I’ve always found the lyric, ‘I get down to Beat poetry’ to be kind of playful and sarcastic. It gives New York less glamour and more pretense. Even the title is condescending and childish. But this song also indulges in a key theme throughout Lana’s discography: being young. Its petulance is kind of admirable; when she tells you to ‘Beat it’ (play on words) because you’ll never understand her generation, it sounds sincere and passionate. She’s confrontational, she’s sharp and disgruntled: ‘If you don’t get it then forget it’, she moans, ‘I don’t have to fucking explain it’. It’s the voice of a young artist who wants to start a revolution but doesn’t really know where to start. It’s the voice of somebody who wants to stick it to the Man.

A critique of her critics:

Born to Die was an overnight chart topper, but it came under some heavy criticism for a lack of authenticity. Pitchfork called it ‘awkward and out of date… a fantasy world which makes you long for reality’. James Reed from Boston Globe called it a ‘staggering disappointment’, lacking the ‘self possessive’ allure of singles like Video Games. The Guardian’s qualms were similar to mine, with Alexis Petridis lashing out at the repetitiveness of subject matter:

‘After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she’ll love him ’til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.‘

Isn’t that delightful? I love scathing reviews. But even more so, I love artists who can respond to criticism. There’s a slyness to Brooklyn Baby that makes me think this is definitely not dedicated to a man. It’s dedicated to the music scene in general. When Lana sings ‘I’m too young to love you’, she’s talking about the culture she immerses herself in: ‘They think I don’t understand the freedom land of the seventies’. Lana attacks judgemental people relentlessly across the course of this track, reducing her critics to idiots unable to read between the lines, judging her ‘like a picture book’, ‘like they forgot to read’. And in immersing her song in New York culture, Lana passes the baton of pretentiousness to her critics; suddenly they’re the ones with a ‘rare jazz collection’ and a fondness for beat poetry. It’s the musical equivalent of a ‘Me? No, you.’ I love it.

A critique of herself:

I will give Lana credit and say her aesthetic has excelled as she’s progressed, from the romantic escapism of Honeymoon to the Woodstocky good vibes of Lust for Life. I don’t think it’s mere coincidence, though, that her best record by far, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, is the only one that doesn’t immerse itself in American history. But this song gets stranger as it progresses, because it’s high art, ‘feathers in my hair’ protagonist begins to sound more and more like an East coast replica of, well, Lana Del Rey. Her aesthetic is precise, methodical, planned out. She smokes ‘hydroponic weed’ and is ‘too cool for you’ (a sentiment repeated on Diet Mountain Dew). She seems defensive, yet aware of her own forced identity. And she kind of lets her guard down and embraces the silliness of it all. How do we know this? Lana openly starts singing about herself as the song peters out, with the lines:

‘Yeah my boyfriend’s pretty cool

But he’s not as cool as me!

‘Cause I’m a Brooklyn baby’

Lana co-wrote this song with her ex-boyfriend Barrie James O’Neill. He’s the boyfriend in the band, the man with the jazz collection. And Lana seems to become Lizzy again for a second, as she blends her cinematic stage persona with some down to earth self-awareness. And as the song trails off into some luscious, improvised, fluttery wailing, we realise it’s incredibly tongue-in-cheek.

***

I think Lana Del Rey is one of the most unique and important songwriters in recent history, but I also think it’s taken until her most recent record to explore important themes like independence, companionship, happiness and hope. But this song stands out for me. It’s dripping with stubbornness, it’s contradictory and pretentious and hilarious and genuine all at once. It never loses its glamour or its romance. The narrative is hard-done-by and despicably superior, but so endearing in a way only Lana can pull off.

It’s kind of Lana Del Rey taking the piss out of Lana Del Rey. For me, it’s a flawless track. 

And if you don’t like it, you can beeeeeeeeat it! Beat it, babyyyyy!

A lot of people have terrifying moments of self realisation. For some, it is coming to terms with the fact that sexuality is confusing and fluid and interchangeable. For others, it is the realisation that oppression exists in all four corners of the earth, and we are simply helpless to resist it. For me, it was finally coming to terms with the fact that my Year 9 DT project was just a penis on a box.

I was a bit of a ruffian in Year 9. Nobody cared where I came or went. I walked around as I pleased and if there were rules, I wouldn’t have known, because I simply REFUSED to play by them. It was a dangerous way to live. Like riding a Harley with no helmet on the interstate at 98mph, shit will hit the fan eventually. I was living too fast. But boy, did I look good. I think the turning point, and the reason I’ve since abandoned this lifestyle of recklessness, was probably me realising that my Year 9 DT project was just a penis on a box.

I was good with my hands. The best, even. Felix ‘the artisan’ Revell they called me. My hands were calloused and sore and dextrous and gentle all at once. I could knit you a scarf in my left and skin you a caribou with my right. After just five minutes in the DT workshop in Year 9, my hands knew they’d found a perfect home. I mastered the bow saw within days. The vice grip and sandpaper sheets became toys in the hands of a god. I welded without goggles. Acrylic, steel, iron, elm, pine, plywood, varnish: it was all one big joke to me. But the real joke was on me. The real joke was me realising just now that my Year 9 DT project was just a penis on a box.

And boy, did I work hard on that box. It had to be a reflection of who I was, where I was going. And what better symbol than the humble chameleon? Because a chameleon doesn’t play by the rules. It blends subtly, like a camouflaged NutriBullet. I wrote a slogan on the lid: ‘Chamillion. Everything Changes.’ I felt like Zuckerberg. I imagined selling these boxes by the thousands, having them featured in design magazines, in Instagram advertisements; telling Fallon that we’re launching a new set of interactive Chamillion boxes in the spring, eventually getting sued for $100 million after they find out we’ve embedded microphones and webcams into every box. I stencilled out the perfect chameleon silhouette, sanded the edges until they were smooth as jazz on warm summer’s eve, and stamped my logo over the lid in yellow paint. Unbeknownst to me, it was my undoing. A penis was permanently embossed on my Year 9 DT project.

My DT teacher approached my workbench with a big grin on his face. He knew that a good box was guaranteed in the artisan’s corner. I removed my safety gloves, slung them over my shoulder and slid the box over to him. ‘What do you think?’ I asked with a smirk. His expression was ambiguous.I couldn’t read the pout, the slight frown, the wriggle of the eyebrow and the grimace of the mouth. At the time I thought, ah, I was probably a bit too hasty with my sanding. Now, I’m thinking, that man definitely reacted appropriately, given his student had just adorned his wooden box with a yellow semi erect penis. 

I got a good kick out of Chamillion for the first few weeks. I used it to store marbles, then DS cartridges, then pens, then notes I wanted to hide (because they were about girls 🙂 ), then at last it housed coins I’d picked up on holiday and had zero intention of using. Because Everything CHANGES. Like change? Like, loose change? 🙂 I would sit there for hours playing with Chamillion, idly throwing nickels into this passion project with a big smug smile on my face. My mum would enter my room occasionally saying something along the lines of ‘Wow, so you’re still using that box? Maybe we can get you a new one if you like boxes so much’.

At the time I thought, wow my mum must really have a thing against plywood huh? Now, I’m thinking she was tasked with having a box with a yellow penis on it just sitting there in her tastefully decorated house for 7 years. God bless. 

And in all seriousness, when cleaning out my room, I get this beautiful calmness that washes over me when I’m reunited with something like Chamillion. Because miscellaneous objects, however phallic, are wonderful gateways into little memories you didn’t even know you had. I can remember leaving the box on the windowsill to dry and going to Food Tech straight after DT; we were making carrot cakes. I can remember the purse I made for my mum in Textiles two months later (it was absolutely awful, stamped together with staples because I couldn’t sew, we both agreed to bin it almost immediately). I can remember being so excited in Year 8 to share the Gummy Bear ringtone I’d downloaded off Zedge that I practically ran to school, my hair a perfect blonde bowl in the wind, my rucksack straps tight against my polo shirt, an unassuming victim just waiting to get seat-belted into oblivion. 

I saw the Theatre Society’s production of Blue Remembered Hills two weeks ago, and there was one particular exchange which really resonated with me. When raising the stakes for a bet, one of the kids looks out at the audience, adopts a gangster-like posture, and whispers ‘I’ll give you my ball of string’. Everybody onstage gasps.

How wonderful that everyday objects can have such a sincere place in our hearts. Because when we’re younger, we exhibit so much purity. We don’t attach other people’s value to things, the hierarchy of our possessions is entirely motivated by sentimentality: my pinecone, my pen, my ball of string. 

And when we’ve created it ourselves, when a child has built something and taken time to measure and plan and research and think creatively, that’s when an object becomes really special. We don’t do it so much as adults, because we know other people can do it better. So we idolise the achievements of others. But that’s just consumerist culture, and there’s definitely a place for that in society. But it’s funny to think none of it existed in the same way 200 years ago. And it doesn’t (or didn’t) really exist in the imaginative world of a child. So, while we’re in quarantine for the foreseeable future, I think we should all make our own stuff. Whether it’s music, or paintings, or phallic boxes. And you might say ‘ummmmm why should I do that?’

‘I have a box. I have a great box. I have lots of boxes. Why should I bother making my own?’

And the reason is difficult to express. I think simply because it’s truly yours. Isn’t that wonderful in itself?

I don’t remember much about my first bedroom. We had a small, terraced house on a very hilly street. Parking was a nightmare. My bed was a bunk bed without the bottom bunk, steel framed and sturdy. There was a big box of K’Nex and another plastic tub of rubber snakes. I really liked snakes, for some reason. I was going through my snake-phase. When we moved, I shared a room with my 2-year-old brother. I would lure him out of his cot and get him to follow me to landing. Then I would scurry downstairs and tell mum he’d broken out, and needed to be put to bed again. She would let out an exasperated sigh and head upstairs, and I would get five minutes in front of the TV with my Dad and my brothers while she tucked him in. Diabolical, I know.

I enjoyed sleeping in my mum’s bed. I would tiptoe to my parent’s room and whisper ‘please may I go in your bed?’ about once a week, happily tucking myself in between my increasingly frustrated parents. I always had an excuse, usually a bad dream, but really I just enjoyed being in the same bed as somebody else. This lasted until I was around eight years old, then it needed to stop.

I had a room of my own eventually, with all the hallmarks of a loud theatre kid’s quarters. Bright yellow walls with a small slatted bed that kept breaking. A built in bookshelf with a mountain of young adult fiction, from Skulduggery Pleasant to Alex Rider. A chest where I hid the numerous stuffed toys I was probably too old to play with, but couldn’t let go. A cross-stitch from my grandmother of some teddy bears waiting for a steam engine to arrive, on the central bear’s briefcase it reads: F J REVELL. The centrepiece- a poster from the musical Wicked, on which I’d plastered the tickets of every single musical I’d been to, from Les Mis at Queen’s Theatre to Hairspray at the Hewitt School. My room barely changed throughout my adolescence; I liked it the way it was, I wasn’t embarrassed by anything. As I began eating more, I would stash crisp packets and chocolate bars underneath my bed for a midnight snack. I became famous throughout the house as the gannet, the reason behind all the missing food. It was like this until I moved out in September 2017 and was forced to live alone for the first time.

I’m going to go ahead and skip Leazes. Nobody wants to hear about that place. I will say that the shelving unit directly above my bed meant sexual activity  was basically confined to a night of underwhelming missionary and nothing more, and the washbasin, after some time, became a more desirable place to urinate than our communal toilets. But it never felt like a bedroom. More like a strange, purgatorial cell. I missed my bright yellow walls so much that year.

My second-year bedroom was the smallest in the house, I think. There were three standard-issue, bulky pieces of pinewood furniture which the student residential company had provided us with: A large wardrobe with three sets of drawers, a metre long desk with a hole punched in for cables and chargers, and a slightly oversized bookshelf with five wobbly top shelves, and three shelves missing at the bottom (I used this space for shoes and blankets). The wardrobe was at the foot of the bed, meaning I needed to hunch forward and slam the drawers against the bed to get dressed in the morning. The desk was a sprawling mess of metro tickets, unanswered postcards and blobs of blu tack, with a dust-caked keyboard binding all my loose papers together. The bookcase was a leaning tower of unread literature, accompanied by a signed Wes Hoolahan headshot and a hole punch which I have never used, and never intended to use.

My bed was nestled alongside a radiator which was unadjustable and always slightly too hot, and a large window which overlooked a small courtyard. If I’d have made the effort, the courtyard could have been pretty: fairy lights, a barbeque grill, maybe some outdoor furniture or something. 

There’s no shortage of sunny motivational content on YouTube. A constant shared philosophy is that your room is a reflection of who you are. I spent a lot of time in that room lying on my stomach and binging self improvement videos with an arsenal of processed sugars and saturated fats on my mattress. I would eat, and while I would eat, I would take any semblance of positive change as gospel, idly swearing to myself that my room would become a headquarters of wholesomeness; polaroids on a corkboard, a vase of tasteful flowers, a jungle of well-nourished houseplants, fairy lights, more fairy lights, an endless network of fairy lights tangled into a blinking constellation of positivity, as if to say, look, I’m put-together! Look how together I’m put! I imagined myself welcoming guests into my humble abode, candles on the go, a turmeric-booster-tea in my hand as I took them on a tour of my happy little den. But it was a hopeless fantasy, because your room is a reflection of who you are.

After 30 minutes of monetised self improvement videos, I would shove wrappers under the bed, swat crumbs off the duvet, smoke a cigarette with my back to the window, and promise I’d go on a long, gruelling run later that evening. This was usually around 10:30pm. 

I rarely had visitors. It was probably for the best. My housemates kept themselves to themselves for the most part, which I’m really thankful for. I didn’t need an intervention, I thought. This is just being a student. This is just living independently. By the time I moved out, my ratty un-hoovered carpet was suffocated under a wasteland of unwashed clothes. The wardrobe doors had broken, creaking incessantly throughout the night. My mattress cover was a canvas of smudged cigarette ash and crisp grease.  The courtyard was full of weeds and smelled like bins.

I was extremely apprehensive about my transition to Manor House Road. These were some of my closest friends, but they hadn’t lived with me. I genuinely wondered whether I would repeat my old patterns and ignore them for 9 months, ensnared in another vegetated cycle of indifference. I knew this wouldn’t be the case as soon as I saw my room. Top floor, big bed, a skylight window, a wide, complimentary mirror, an obscenely long desk, and a wardrobe which stayed shut. I wanted to do so many things in this bedroom. I wanted to dance, I wanted to have sex, I wanted to lie down on my bed and knowingly smile at somebody while I listened to Radiohead through my fuzzy speakers.

I kept it clean. It wasn’t an obsessive thing, I loved cleaning my room. I loved organising my desk and lumping together my plastic bags. I loved the smell of clean laundry and scented candles. I even liked having the clotheshorse out, like some constant reminder of good health. On the walls I pinned up posters of my favourite bands, which I’d hungrily purchased from Ebay and Etsy. On the angular beam in the corner of the room I’d taped some letters and some lyrics and some (only vaguely stalker-ish) polaroids of Lana Del Rey that my mum had bought me for Christmas. I found a way to get my microphone working, and would use it to deliver ‘fake tours’ to people who would visit (our house was always full of guests) whether I knew them or not. I stuck a reminder to the ceiling for when I woke up. Initially it read ‘Be Good to Yourself’, then I changed it to ‘Be Kind to Yourself’, and then I removed it entirely. I didn’t need reminding anymore. I never brought junk food or takeaways into my bedroom and I always took my shoes off. I spent three hours rug shopping. I succumbed to the Pinterest clichés and hung bright blue Primark fairy lights from every angle. During parties I would invite people to my bedroom, yell at Alexa to play the sound of rain on a tin roof, and just have a chat. In my mind it was a hub for deep meaningful chats about existentialism and insecurity. But really, I think I just wanted to show it off. One of my proudest moments was when a friend came in for the first time and gasped: 

‘Your bedroom is exactly how I imagined it would look!’ 

It was the ultimate compliment- if my room was that wonderful, then so was I, and I didn’t even realise it. And of course, I adored my housemates. They always had time for me, each in their own unique way. I learned to love the smell of communal cooking and the sound of television from our living room; I thrived off companionship, I wanted to share my personal space with anybody who would oblige. I loved living on the top floor, climbing up three flights of stairs and smiling up at people after a long day of work, before collapsing on my obscenely comfortable bed. I developed a routine of waking up early, going for a morning run and lounging in the kitchen with a hot cup of tea. With seven of us under one roof, it usually wasn’t long until someone equally chirpy bursted through the kitchen door and told you all about their day. I liked hosting afters. A few months ago I cooked for five people after an uneventful night out, and we ate and smoked around my kitchen table at 3am. I’ve never felt such an immense pride in my living space, and people began to notice this. One of my best friends told me recently ‘I can tell you’re living happy now. Everything’s really coming together’.

Things changed a bit during second term. I was knocked down a bit and lost my focus. I couldn’t concentrate on myself as much, and my room was reflective of this. Oddly enough, it didn’t matter too much. Because at this point, our house was one big room in itself; a thriving little Jesmond community which kept me smiling despite the weather. One thing that held me back was how dangerously consuming my room was; when you’re in a comfortable place you never want to leave, especially if the outside world is losing its appeal. When coronavirus struck, I called my Dad and decided it was appropriate to leave. I was a little heartbroken to say goodbye to what I can comfortably say was the most important bedroom of my life. But it’s not goodbye. Some point soon, I’m determined to make a grand return.

My bedroom in Norwich is bare. It has that odd emptiness of a room which has been stripped of its essentials. I feel half-at-home here. I’m eating less, working harder, and spending long periods of time raking through old drawers for a delicious bite of nostalgia (100% worth it as I am now reunited with my Nintendo DS). I’m beginning to think those YouTubers were right, and maybe that’s why my room feels so plain. Because your room is a reflection of who you are, and I don’t really know who I am at the moment. 

It’s time for a reboot. 

I’m excited to self-decorate.