This must be the first year I’ve ever known about London Fashion Week before it actually happened. Normally I’m not aware of it until all the party photos come out on websites afterwards and I wonder why I wasn’t invited to the ‘boring’ parties with free booze and tons of models, so I too could complain about how vacuous my Thursday night was and how tired I am of going to parties I don’t want to go to. In actuality, Thursday is my regular night to eat fish finger sandwiches, so they come as quite a highlight of the week.
Anyone who’s ever been to a corporate party with free booze knows how fucking awful they are and how everyone there would gladly sell their own friends just to secure another bottle of Tuborg. In fact, that’s wrong, anyone who’s been to one will have got completely smashed and had the best time of their life. It’s the second time onwards where you see the dull side of weak ‘free parties’. The thought of having to go to a whole week of such soul-destroying parties is probably what pushed Alexander McQueen over the edge. So that you don’t find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few other things that just aren’t worth the hassle of trying:
Going abroad
If ever something was over-rated, it was going abroad. If you spend a year travelling around the world, the one thing you’ll learn is that life is exactly the same the whole world over – no better, no worse. People still reluctantly get up earlier than they’d like to get to a job they hate and struggle through their commute just like people do here in London. They might be going to an office job in Tokyo, or to irrigate a farm in Kenya, but you can guarantee that they’re both as miserable as each other. In fact, you’ll tell yourself that guy in Kenya is ‘really happy with his lot’, and made you reconsider your priorities in life. But in truth, given the choice you know you’d always choose to be smashing back sake with the xxxxmen in Shinjuku before collapsing drunk in front of your spouse (who you’ve secretly come to resent). Yep, the only thing that going abroad teaches you is that as a privileged Westerner you have options. And you’ll always choose the greedy option and fuck your life up.
Getting a job
When you’re at university, you tell yourself that it’ll be great when you have a job and won’t be so oppressively poor the whole time. But what no one tells you is that the reverse is true; you’ll never be so rich again as when you’re a student. For a start the loans company give you a grand every few months, then your parents pay all your bills, then every other family member gives you a few quid because they think you’re destitute, and soon enough you’re in HMV every Monday buying DVD boxsets so that you can feel justified in sitting at home and not going to your lectures. When you have a job, you’ll never have the time to do such decadent things again, and you’ll suddenly start getting hit by things like ‘Council Tax’, rent, and just generally having to pay your own way. Trust me, it’s really shit. Oh, and all that money you thought you had earned?? The government are gonna take loads of it before it even hits your bank account. And what’s more, you won’t end up with the dream job that you thought you’d walk into, like being a trendy photographer, or writing your own sitcom, or being in a semi-successful band who earn just enough to get by but have heaps of street cred on the underground scene, or whatever the hell you do on your blog. No, you’ll end up taking what you can get (which will be a dull office job) and you’ll spend all day e-mailing your friends and feeling happy with yourself when you take an extra five minutes over lunch. Getting a job really is the worst part of your life, and you will never come to terms with how soul destroying it is.
Photography
You know how you like to think you’re original for spending £150 on that Yashica T-4 and ‘only take photos on film these days.. I mean, it’s just so much more authentic that digital..’? Well sorry, but a whole generation has just trod that line, except they only paid £40 for their Yashica’s and just sold them on to you because they knew it was about to break anyway. Speaking as someone who has come through the fad of doing photography in their spare time I can tell you that, of course, you can take out of focus shots of five fat people speeding past you in a Mini Cooper, or a cat peeping out of a toilet, or even your friend with a nasty graze on their arm, but don’t expect to get famous or make a career out of it. The ratio of people who are interested in buying those kind of photos to the number of people who take those photos themselves is about 1:100, so the competition is pretty fierce. The only reason that people who make a living out of taking such photos manage to is because they are friends with the right people and nothing else. There is no innate talent involved, and no one can tell the difference between a ‘good’ photo or a ‘bad’ one. The only difference is a photo taken by someone who expects to get paid for it and someone who’ll give it away for free. So sorry for bursting any dreams you had there, pal. Only you might want to stick that Yashica on eBay before everyone else realises why the whole world stopped using film about ten years ago.
So there you go, three big wastes of time you needn’t ever bother wasting your time trying.
