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The Menopause Café Wants More Young Women at the Table

Image Credit: Chevanon Photography Everyone loves a café. Whether you go there to drink tea, eat cake or socialise, there’s nothing quite like the allure of fresh coffee and an almond croissant. But have you ever had your macchiato with a side of menopause? The Menopause Café offers just that – a space where people gather to talk openly about menopause. Founded by Rachel Weiss in 2017, this…

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One man’s decade-long battle for Camden’s iconic queer venue

Image Source: Oxyman In 1981, 19-year-old Alex Green arrived in Camden, “young, naïve, stick thin and gorgeous”. He was soon immersed in a thriving queer scene, awash with colour, androgyny and fluidity. Central to this world was The Black Cap, a historic pub and queer performance venue which was popular from the mid-sixties until its closure in 2015. Green recalls walking into The Black Cap…

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Police Intervene as Pro-Palestine Protest Escalates at Camden Council Meeting

Police were forced to intervene after pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a Camden council meeting on Monday night. Activists from Camden Friends of Palestine, silently held up pieces of paper reading ‘Stop Genocide’ as the deputations were being read, 45 minutes into the proceedings. Borough solicitor, Andrew Maughan, asked the protesters to remove the “offensive” message but one campaigner,…

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New O2 Redevelopment Plans Cast Long Shadow Over Local Community

Landsec, a property developer, is facing backlash over proposals to construct even taller buildings where the O2 centre stands, a beloved retail destination on Finchley Road. New fire safety regulations mean that one building must be removed from the original redevelopment plan. To compensate, Landsec want to add 1-2 storeys to the remaining buildings, increasing their height by 5.6 metres and…

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Adaptation and Visual Grammar in Call Me by Your Name

Sensual, idyllic, tender; these are all words which apply to Guadagnino’s 2017 film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Set in Northern Italy, the mise en scène evokes a luxurious Italian estate, surrounded by the pastel skies, sepia-tinged streets and quaint landscapes which you might expect to find on the front of a vintage postcard. There is no denying the visual allure of the…

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Activism and Academia: How the University of York is Failing its Advocates

I speak to scientist and climate activist, Abi Perrin, about the University of York’s response to the climate crisis. Image: Jeffrey Czum Picture a scientist, educated at Cambridge University with a PhD in molecular biology. Now picture an Extinction Rebellion climate activist, who has spent 24 hours in a police cell for glueing herself to a government building. They don’t look the same, do…

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Redefining Beauty: The Pursuit of Inclusivity in Women's Fashion

Imagine getting ready for a night out, shimmying into your new dress, curling your hair, then spending 45 minutes trying to incorporate a medical device into your outfit; it’s not easy. I have spent the past fifteen years trying to navigate a world of women’s fashion which is wholly unsuitable for someone with a health condition, a sentiment shared by many. I spoke to someone with achondroplasia,…

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Bridging the gap

My girlfriend is ten years older than me. Or nine years, four months, and six days if we’re being precise – which I certainly wasn’t being when we met. Instead, I was consumed by the typical ‘beginning-of-relationship’ feelings: excitement, attraction, uncertainty, vulnerability. We were in Barcelona at the time, training to be teachers, escaping from our respective lives. We swam in the sea at…

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Eye contact

Your eyes across the room, more intimate, more like a whisper on the skin than if you'd put your mouth to my ear, they are

a faded blue like the flotsam of some aborted dream, or the colour of my blue curtains after someone accidentally washed them with bleach (I suppose the bottles were side by side on my windowsill).

They meet mine, a searchlight searching for something in the depths of my iris. They are

blue or green, blue or green. I'm not sure what colour, the underbelly of a wave, that part between the foam and the sea. They are

My dad's eyes, everyone says. An inhereted token of his disinterest, eyes I barely saw as they flickered away, not towards my mother who only ever had eyes for her own reflection, but towards a stream of other women.

The male gaze. A stale gaze. And they are

A reminder of my friend, blinking like a moon eclipsing the sun, dark and tranquil until she was not and she was locked behind the walls of a hospital and her own mind. They are

A window to the soul. Love at first sight. So many cliches, as your eyes meet mine across the room and everything fractures into mosaics. How do I know if I'm staring at the same person who will meet me at the end of the aisle?

Or if you're just another two spools of eggshell blue, waiting to unwind, to leave me with a memory of some fleeing eye contact and a stilted smile.

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Train to Sitges

I am sitting cross legged, my feet open

Like the butterfly that is unfolding it’s wings

Against the window pane.

She shut it, because the breeze had flown

In from the sea and blown goosebumps across your collarbone.

A magnum is slowly melting in my hand -

White chocolate for me and something rose-coloured for her,

Which we bought, late at night, from the neon supermercat

Next door to the gelato store that charged

€3,50 - ‘inflation’ I said

Shaking my head at the grid of circles and squares on the floor,

At the walls and windows and

balconies with small forests that lean into the street; conspirators.

In the centre of the bed I am surrounded by

Socks and books, their pages upturned as if

They’re dictating to the ceiling

And love.

But only me and her can see that, so don’t try

Squinting in the twilight.

The walls are painted orange, like the

Mandarin whose segments are spread on her palm

And the scent of citrus perfumes the space, our space.

The space between our bodies which I’m always trying to close.

When the window is open we lean over the railings and watch

the woman in the opposite window straightening her dining table and

The man smoking with a book propped on his knee.

Now, we are on a train to Sitges

Segmented and crawling along the track.

‘Oh shit, I didn’t mean to fall in love’ says

The audio book we are listening to -

Or pretending to listen to -

For she is asleep against the window and I am writing a poem.

We’re sharing her headphones, one each.

I have the right ear.

Español surrounds me in conversations;

This audiobook is talking in English about

Over-exercising, under-eating - it’s the cycle of womanhood is it not?

‘Love yourself’ they say, trying to swallow back their disgust when you tell them 2,500 calories - but I see it.

Periods are overrated

anyway.

Anyway,

I was writing about the train to Sitges, and love, and icecream and her.

Almost two years ago we were on a train like this one

To Tarragona, to drink Baileys and have difficult conversations on the beach.

So, what are we going to do?

Time hasn’t given us an answer to that

yet.

Yet, - life feels like a series of connectives sometimes - where is my full stop?

I think full stops are something men invented

because they were scared what would happen

If women were allowed to continue, and they wanted to contain us to a sentence.

A full

Stop.

We are getting off at the next stop.

Miles and miles of coastline and ocean and beige houses roll by and

All everyone sits here watching, or stumbling down the aisle because they misjudged how much time before the train

Stops.

[celestial1]

Before Sunrise

I am poet fifteen

my scattered pages stuck in the flotsam of a dream.

That night we wandered the streets of Vienna and nothing but

poetry dripped from our mouths, even as I tripped on the curb

and fell into your arms.

The houses sway and bend their faces together to

whisper secrets that drip down the walls like unfinished

paint.

In the dark, the angular windows and corners soften like

smoke trails from your cigar - 'I hate when you smoke'.

Careening around corners blackened by lamposts

we are just two souls and nothing matters.

We talk and we talk and drop breadcrumbs as we walk

into the Danube.

'What does water symbolise?' poets muse

for centuries: why does it matter? It's licking my ankles

and you're laughing like

the black hamstring of the sky wants to feel your breath on her

underside. A concave of the world is Vienna where

mockery crystalises and through the window the shadow

of a form

longs to excel at something.

I wonder why nobody ever said they were 'good' at love, that

always elusive negative space, trimmed by the light of cobblestones

which bounce the moonlight back at us.

Perhaps, that's not the point and love is an ever-striving, ever-

tightening piece of string, holding together

the pages of music so that bent corners are all we ever see

when the wind blows.

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Salman Rushdie: Is he a Revolutionary or a Spectacle?

Emily Warner discusses the issues that have arisen in the shockwaves of Salman Rushdie’s attack. Image by Alexander Baxevanis On 12th August 2022, Salmon Rushdie was attacked. The 75-year-old author was preparing to give a lecture in New York when he was stabbed on stage multiple times, in response to his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. At the time of its publication in 1988, the book…

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A Camera in a Moving World: What I Learned as a Marketing Coordinator in Peru

Reflecting on my experience as a volunteer for the NGO, Intiwawa “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder” ― Susan Sontag, On…

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Writing Resistance: The Legacy of Taras Shevchenko

Image by Adam Jones Imagine this; you are walking through the beautiful gardens in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, being awed into silence by the green spaces, exquisite landscaping, and carefully manicured hedgerows. Suddenly, you come across a monument which towers sixteen metres high, upon which is positioned a statue of Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian artist, writer and poet.…

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Is the Mona Lisa Worth the Hype?

Image by Wikipedia Commons When I tell people I went to the Louvre this holiday, one inevitable question rears its head; “What did you think of the Mona Lisa ?”. I must have had this conversation with every member of my extended family during the Christmas period and by New Year’s Day, I was tired of recounting the experience. My unenthusiastic response, “it was a bit disappointing actually”,…

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Empire of Light: Beautifully Crafted with a Jigsaw Plot

Image by IMDb A somnolent seaside town, ocean-soaked paving stones and a faded cinema; this is the setting for Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. Masterful shots and scenery, paired with the breathtaking performance of Olivia Colman, manage to polish this film to a dull shine; the effect of the artistry is a quiet appreciation for cinema. Unfortunately, the plot can’t quite match this artistry. An…