serious holiday envy

First there was Seasonal Affective Disorder, semi-amusingly shortened to SAD. Now I’ve discovered its summer sister: Serious Holiday Envy, not-even-nearly-amusingly shortened to SHE.

Since Sunshine is possibly the only doctor I can think of that wouldn’t immediately dismiss my new ‘medical’ discovery, and she’s locked away in the Big Brother house, I’ll just have to go this one alone.

symptoms of serious holiday envy:

Similar to SAD, SHE results in listlessness, audible sighs and a general disinterest in anything 

work related.

Unless they are giving out free ice creams*.

The inability to talk about someone else’s holiday without sulking, refusing to buy them a round or dismissing their plans to go to Marrakesh because ‘everyone goes there, even my parents’.

Wearing excess layers of clothing because ‘it’s not actually that hot; I don’t know why everyone is making such a fuss about it. It’s far hotter in [insert name of last holiday destination visited here]’.

Adopting a permanent tangerine look due to an unfortunate (and dangerous) addiction to tanning beds, because you want to ‘match’ everyone else.

symptoms may become aggravated under the following conditions:

The entire office decamping to Estonia for the weekend, leaving behind the lowly intern and some guy they only hired last month*.

Soaring temperatures during work hours*. Particularly an issue in offices without windows.

Failure in securing tickets to any sort of summer festival that involves getting drunk in a tent, listening to music and not washing for at least 72 hours.

signs of serious distress and practical solutions:

Refusal to leave the house unless it is to an airport, ferry port, or similar. Should this occur, it is always a good idea to set up ‘holiday’ events in the comfort of their own city/town/village/hamlet. A sandpit and paddling pool are a good start. Hire a ‘foreign-looking’ friend to walk by frequently and try and flog them blue leopard print towels and some sort of noisy musical instrument. If you really want to splash out, hire an overweight 80-year-old man to sit next to them wearing only a Speedo.

Last minute booking of a Club 18-30 holiday. This is inexcusable and extremely serious. Should this occur, the only option is to cancel the booking for them and replace it with any type of ‘in-abroad’ alternative. Literally: anything. Even if this does mean going somewhere really awful and bleak, like Russia. They will soon realise, after two weeks of eating nothing but unidentifiable lumps of meat and cabbage, sleeping on the floors of old ladies houses in Communist tower blocks with burnt out cars outside, and getting shouted at by angry drunk Russians, that they would rather be at home eating fruit pastille ice lollies with their feet in the paddling pool**.

*See the Ink office, Shoreditch.

**I’m not being mean to Russia. This did really happen to me.

for the sake of commuters everywhere: don't give up on jamie oliver

So Jamie Oliver’s school dinners’ tactic has failed to cut obesity, our Health Secretary informs us. This is hardly surprising. Trying to separate children from sugar is like trying to separate a Tana Torajan from their buffalo. Not easy.

It’s often easy to blame the parents. Children don’t like the school dinners. Parents become annoyed with constant whinging and sugar withdrawal symptoms. Parents provide packed lunches. Children try to swap packet of raisins for friends’ chocolate chip Tracker bar (parents’ concession to 500+ calorie alternative). Teachers complain that packed lunches aren’t healthy enough. Parents provide money. Children promptly run down to the corner street newsagents and spend the money on sugar-coated salt-laden carb-calorie infested feasts.

On the plus, they’re probably now supporting local businesses that can no longer do trade to the underage after their nicotine fix.

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I was growing up, I was regularly informed of all the nice natural sugars fruit contained. I mean, over in my hippie household, Sesame Snaps were considered a treat. And not even the chocolate-coated ones. Talking of chocolate, don’t even get me started on the carob chocolate cake incident. So really, I think they get it quite easy.

I still believe we should persevere, however, if only to save us from future years of obese people combined with hot summers and London’s rush hour. Today, I managed to wangle a seat on the train, checking of course, that there weren’t any pregnant or elderly people, pregnant and elderly people, or those about to collapse from heat stroke around. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not about to complain about being able to sit down. The problem, however, is that it makes you a prime target for ‘accidental’ swipes to the face with the Metro/Evening Standard. Or absolutely filthy stares from a fourteen-year-old boy whose main activity of the day involved deleting happy slapping evidence off his phone. It’s okay; I’ve only been frying my brain writing about deconstructivist architecture all day. It’s fine.

I should have clocked the man standing over me as soon as he wheezed his way onto the train. I would have offered him my seat, but this would have meant the person next to me would have had to give theirs up too. I’ve got nothing wrong with someone who likes the occasional pie or ten. But not when their excess body fat makes them sweat about fifty times as much as a normal person. And definitely not when it starts dripping on you. A few less Turkey Twizzlers, a few less drops of sweat on me; that’s all I’m saying. I’m sure Jamie Oliver would say exactly the same.

*insert lyrics containing the word 'sunshine' here*

Carl Barât and Pete Doherty once sang: ‘You’re like a journalist/How you can cut and paste and twist/You’re awful.’

Anyone who knows me (possibly even who has met me) is probably aware that I have a huge amount of respect and time for these artists. Because of this, and Doherty’s relationship with the media, it might strike you as a little odd that journalism is the career I’ve chosen, given their reputation for exaggerating and manipulating the truth.

But it was only in the last week that I’ve become truly and personally aware of the power that the media hold; their ability to shape a nation’s point of view and to categorise an individual based on a few very small facts known to them. The fallout, of course, can be huge. But a more shocking headline means a few more papers are sold; the news is fast becoming sullied with things the public are interested in, rather than things of public interest. And if a few people are trampled on as reporters battle to get their so-called news up on the internet first, the attitude of the murkier press seems to be, then so be it.

A friend of mine, Sunshine Martyn, is currently a resident of the Big Brother house. I would say, undoubtedly, that she is probably one of the most intelligent people I know, therefore immediately dismissing the idea that everyone who enters the Big Brother house is actually quite stupid. This is the girl who learnt shorthand not because it was necessary to pass her medical degree or even her medical journalism BA, but because she wanted to. She’s also incredibly funny, whether it’s the stories she tells or the time she walked into the newsroom dressed as a Goth, complete with a chalk white face, black lipstick and some round black stickers stuck to her cheeks.

Until the fame hungry ex-boyfriends and jealous ex-classmates come weaselling their way out, the media have access to very little information about her: she has a pet Chihuahua called Tinkerbell; she likes gluing crystals on things; her car has a sign on the back that says: ‘Powered by fairy dust’. And yet these small facts appear to make up the bulk of their assumptions about her. Recycle the same press release, change the top line a bit, write a wittier picture caption using a songs whose lyrics contain the word ‘sunshine’ and there we have it; her character, summarised in less than two hundred words. It’s the mortifyingly bad kind of journalism panic written five minutes before a deadline. Or when you’re hungover. Or when you’ve already written thirteen other similar articles and you never really cared in the first place. The sort I’m constantly told I should never, ever produce.

As well as spending all of thirty seconds rehashing a press release and a snippet of video footage, a shockingly high proportion of the initial publications misspelt Sunshine’s surname. And these weren’t just blogs and facebook groups; these were newspapers. Rule number one in journalism: fact check, especially names. And really, given the more unusual nature of her name, it’s not actually that difficult to Google it.

I’ve already been approached by both the News of the World and Reveal magazine to dish the dirt on Sunshine (sugar-coat it by saying ‘+ive stuff!’ all you want, I don’t really believe you), but I’m not quite ready to sell my soul yet. Unfortunately I just don’t trust journalists enough not to cut and paste and twist.

So I’ll leave you with this: Sunshine to win. She’s epic.