The Class

The session starts with a warm up that resembles old style aerobics – a few grapevines and leg curls etc etc. So far so good. Then comes some core work – sit ups, pilates style balances and a few press ups to finish.
Then onto the moves. The teacher demonstrates the fireman (a circular swing around the pole), some floor work and then a peek a boo (squat down open your legs then look coyly away as if it’s not happening – god that sounds slutty when written down!) The class finishes with a freestyle routine that the teacher makes up and you try to copy.

The People

The class really was all ages and types of people (there was even a guy which I hadn’t expected). There were the inevitable blonde, size 6, perfect dancery types but they were in the minority.

Sexy or ermmmm…?

The atmosphere in the class was really supportive. You share a pole between 3 and practice together and give each other tips. By the end of the session our group were egging each other on with ridiculous comments and pushing the person on the pole to spin higher, bend further and generally make a bit of a fool of themselves. Letting go seems to be key here; if you look around most people look anything but sexy. But there is something quite liberating about just letting go of everything and not worrying if you crash to the floor on your bum. I guess that kind of liberation will be sexy.

Should you try it?

At £145 for 12 lessons it’s not cheap and it’s difficult to practice if you don’t have your own pole. Still I think it’s a great confidence booster and a great way to meet people so if you’ve got the cash then it’s a great hobby to take up.

And if you need more inspiration…

Check out this comedy video from the polestars youtube channel. Can you imagine what the Grannies on the tube were thinking?

And not my even my grandma. It was my boyfriends grandma who shares her birthday with valentines weekend. Despite taking the place of the dinner on a night which me and my man traditionallly see as an excuse to go somewhere ridiculously expensive for dinner, it was great fun. We ate, drank champagne, reviewed the new super sausage game and talked about whether or not the natwest app was rubbish.

Yes as you may have guessed all my friends and relatives are heavy iPhone users. In the days when iPhones were rare people used to joke at our dining table which always had at least 4 iPhones nestling between the usual clutter. A lot of my friends work in digital media (hence the glut of iphones) and so we spend all day staring at computer screens, googling technology and trying to persuade the boy (who is not in digital) that twitter is not a waste of time but a great learning tool.

Sometimes though for this girl who loves books and who often has to stop herself from touching art at galleries (for me the sense of touch is so much stronger that just looking) all this virtual stuff gets too much. So when I heard about the parlour, a pop up venue in shoreditch I knew I had to go.

The brainchild of Mien, a new etiquette magazine, the parlour is a pop up venue free of mobiles, technology and stress. Running a series of quaint events such as letter writing and parlour games, the aim of the venue is to make us Londoners slow down and ‘enjoy a unique old world experience’. This is the perfect idea for people in a city where we barely have time to see our friends, let alone make time for people you don’t know. (As a comparison to this, I recently spent 15 minutes talking to the chemist who I had met just moments before when I handed in my prescription- when would this ever happen in London?)

Tickets are either pay what you can or pre-purchase. Check out their facebook page or the Parlour website for more information.

I’m particularly interested in doing this at the moment because two of my close family members have received help from charities and it seemed like I needed to give something back to the people who helped them.

I choose mental illness and leukemia charities as my focus and then started to research. Despite my initial optimism, I found that it is surprisingly hard to become a person who does charity work; instead of following my misinformed dreams that I would just walk into an intensely rewarding and interesting position, charity work seemed to involve more filling in of application forms than actual volunteering. During this month I have filled in over 20 applications for placements on do-it.org and timebank.com (I had to widen my choice of charities as it appears that the conditions that effect the widest strata of the population are also the ones supported in the most bureaucratic manner), most of which got sent to the same volunteering office anyway. Following this I got an email to come to a volunteer evening a few weeks away to discuss what was available. Which made me wonder, what’s the point in having an online application process if what you put into it makes no difference to your application at all?

I also just started sourcing charities off the internet and writing to them directly but have mainly been ignored. In one case I got an email back saying thanks for the kind thoughts but they “simply have more volunteers than we need”. I am not, it seems, the only person who has decided that they must do some good.

So instead of fulfilled I feel frustrated. How can I help? Can I even help anyone? Is it possible to be a volunteer and hold down a demanding full-time job? Or is my idea of helping ease some of the problems of London’s fast living just a utopian dream?

If anyone knows anything about this and could guide me a bit your help would be gratefully appreciated!

But whilst people have good intentions, it makes me quite scared how little people know about food and how easy it is to lead them to decisions. Take Channel 4s ‘Big Fat Diet Show’, which apparently aims to educate people about food. They showed dieters two cereal bars, one Special K bar and one made out of Coco Pops and asked which had the least calories.

Which do you think the women chose?

Suprise, surprise all the women went for the diet bar.But infact it was the chocololatey cocopops bar which had the least calories.

Cue shock from all dieters. However what the program ‘forgets’ to mention is that the Special K bar has grains and dried fruit in it, whereas cocopops are just puffed rice with a bit of cocoa powder on them. Obviously dried fruit has more calories than rice so it’s not a surprise the special K bar has more calories. And yet, that doesn’t mean that it’s less healthy – surely the nutritional value of dried fruit is much higher than that of puffed rice.

Little wonder then that people are getting fatter – even media that is apparently aimed at helping weightloss has it’s own sensationalist agenda.  This all got me thinking; where is the line between fact and embellishment if you are a health journalist? Do you sensationalise (or even make up) a diet or health facts in order to get your scoop?

TV is for entertainment and for some reason we are just as obsessed with fat people as we are with food itself. Do journalists have a moral obligation to provide us with bare, balanced facts if it means loosing the interesting bits of their programme? And why are we educating ourselves on nutrition using the TV anyway? Surely relying on entertainment shows to educate ourselves on something so basic is setting us up for a much fatter future?

In no particular order these are:

1. Climb snowdon
2. Save some money every month
3. Attend a pole dancing class
4. Learn Spanish
5. Take part in a flash mob
6. Go to a gig of a band I’ve never heard of
7. Do some volunteer work
8. Go for a weekend away in England
9. Attend a cooking class
10. Sing in a choir
11. Attend as many probition bars as I can
12. Read a list of educational and inspiring books
13. Get a Thai massage
14. Go up monument
15. Do more yoga
16. Attend a school of life class
17. Try climbing
18. Go for a night out in a superclub
19. Cook one new recipie every month
20. Try some of londons many tea bars
21. Blog more regularly
22. Go to a festival
23. Attend a secret film screening
24. Learn to stop when kitesurfing
25. Organise interesting trips/nights out with friends
26. Be receptive to meeting new people
27. Pay back student debt (thanks dad!)
28. Go camping
29. Try an art or craft
30. Explore

Well that’s what I got – now to see if I can do them all!

I think I’m going to start with looking at volunteering – how easy is it to do good?

1. Get fit/healthy/loose weight
2. Earn more/Work less/Get a promotion/Change jobs
3. Not make any resolutions I can’t keep

Pretty generic but a good indicator of what we all think about most of the time.

So in an attempt to be different I thought I’d try and crowdsource my new years resolution by asking other people to  suggest things that I should try out in 2010. I’d like to get say 50 experiences/things I should try or skills I should learn and put them in a big to-do list. My resolution would be to try do all of them before the end of 2010. Once I’ve done each thing on the list I’ll try blog about it.

If you’ve got an idea of something I should try in 2010 then just post it as a comment. Suggestions can be as generic or as specific as you like. (Although as I live and work in London, moving to New York is unlikely to make it onto my final 2010 to do list) But other than the no moving house or extensive travel then be as creative as you can. If no one suggests anything then I end up with a really easy resolution to keep!  And if it does work then it should make for a far more interesting resolution than normal.

As tis the season to coop yourselves up with family, I travelled back to the welsh outback to see my nearest and sometimes dearest. Then promptly decamped to the pub for a meet up with some old school friends.  A lot of us have moved up to London over the past few years and after a few glasses of wine we started discussing the pros and cons of the place. Most people started by saying London was ‘amazing’. But when you probed a bit what also came out is how lonely it is. How living in London makes you rude and impatient (how many of you have huffed when someone has stood on the right hand side of the escalator and therefore really annoyed you, despite the fact that really YOU ARE NOT IN A HURRY!) I find it impossible to make people commit to anything – people you consider friends will never 100% commit to things incase another pressing (ie. more exciting) engagement comes along. I think this is because Londoners have so much to do that they can never commit for fear of loosing out on something else.

Sites like fridaynightsucks and meetup suggest that people do want to meet people and that they are interested in finding like-minded people. But can these sites actually cure the sang-froid us Londoners? (yes I now count myself amongst them)

It’s kind of odd that internet meetings (previously the area of the desperate) are now the accepted way to meet friends. It’s as if reading someone’s personal profile and rating them according to your friends tick list will stop you ‘wasting’ any time getting to know the quirks of someone new who may not be around in a few months. It seems to me we’ve missed the point somewhat – surely getting to know people is not a waste of time before friendship, it IS the friendship. So I suppose the question is: how do we get everyone to slow down and realise this?

The idea of adding a bit of character to otherwise sedate pastimes is quite a good one. What could you make? An underground yoga society perhaps? (Although alcohol and downward dogs are never going to end well) Or perhaps a crazy cross-stitch group fuelled entirely by their consumption of gin martinis.

I’ve decided I’m going to seek out some underground pastimes. If anyone has any tip offs then let me know!

So imagine my surprise when a friend of mine told me about the rave held by large advertising firm better known for corporate branding than their maveric culture. Apparently it was carnage; the receptionist got slapped for not picking up one individuals coat fast enough, 2 creative directors indulged in a fist fight whilst their staff were working on bridging the gap between their agencies in the most basic ways possible.

Not sure this is really the way to prove that people should keep spending on advertising when all their budgets are being cut. But it does liven up the day talking about it and should make the pitch room even more tense than it normally is for a number of agencies in 2010. Who said the medja was dead?

What I know so far:

T-shirt website targets students

Website needs boost in traffic to get sales

Students are well known for indulging in sex

I need to boost sales and have lots of condoms that could become incentives

And so the’get out of the rut’ (working title only) campaign was born – offer competition where  the winner gets a t-shirt and 1 year supply of condoms. It’s got to work surely? Now all I need is a better name…