“Nobody knows all the wounds of our national tragedy... This trouble will drive us mad” These words of Gomidas in his final moments of lucidity are chillingly prophetic. Perhaps the original tortured artist, his pithy and disarmingly titled songs, such as I Cannot Dance and Oh, What a Delight echo the wry melancholy of The Smiths more than a peasant folk tradition of almost a century earlier. Yet both irony and incongruity were so poignant in the life and works of this Armenian priest and musician - or, to give him his lofty official title, ‘doctor of musicology’.He wrenched the remnants of Armenian peasant culture into the 20th century, painstakingly putting rural folk songs he came across to manuscript paper. His aim was to resurrect the cultural heritage of his homeland. Yet this was not a self-promoting scheme reminiscent of patronising narodniks attempting to incite passion in indifferent Russian serfs. It was an entirely selfless, and ultimately masochistic, task, ...

“Toniiight, I’m gonna have myseeelf, a real..” ..terrible time. The first smug two bars of this worldwide anthem of ubiquity care of Queen make my heart sink, send shivers of nausea through my weary body, and then the adrenaline kicks in. My brain, hitherto knackered with a cocktail of cheap spirits and a vague sense of oblivion, wakes up and screams FIGHT OR FLIGHT, FIGHT OR FLIGHT! If you don’t get out before “having a good time/having a good time..” then you’re inevitably trapped in that sweaty room until the bitter, over-climactic end, by the euphoric flailing limbs of the revelling masses, unaware that what to them constitutes a fun, emotive power ballad is the private living hell of others, such as myself. I was forced to stop repressing my deep, complex aversion to this party-time phenomenon when I read Dorian Lynskey’s interesting, and thankfully non-fawning, analysis in The Guardian of the renaissance of one power ballad in particular that I find too horre ...

London is a bit like the sun; hostile, overwhelming, sprawling and definitely the centre of everything. With impossible parking. Double yellow rays all over the place. Ironic really, as it is a city greyer than if one were to colour in the skin of an elephant with a graphite pencil and sew it into a stormy sky. With Gandalf’s beard woven in. In the shade. But it is still our capital, and how absolutely capital it really is. In the lead up to May 6th (remember election fever? Far more exciting than the result), Michael Hann of The Guardian suggested that journalists have a “sneering attitude” towards places outside the Big Smoke. His reason for identifying this “metropolitan sneer” was due to the mockery by the media of the UK Space Agency setting up shop in Swindon and at the certain unremarkable buildings winning Civic Society awards in Macclesfield. He’s got a point. It is true that any journo sent around the country to interview residents of those obscure lands outside ...

I am definitely speaking for every single person in the world when admitting that the first thing I think of upon hearing the term ‘literary heroine’ is a very BBC image of Elizabeth Bennett sticking it to the man (the gender and the system), speaking when she’s not spoken to, and generally walking around fields being empowered. Like Gloria Gaynor, but in a muddy petticoat and charmingly bedraggled bonnet. I think of Wuthering Heights’ Cathy running free on the moors, enchained only by an all-consuming crippling love for a man she cannot have; a beautifully tragic image, if not inextricably linked with a late ‘70s Kate Bush. I then ponder Scarlett O’Hara, who marries all the wrong people and gets bit too hung up on a particularly symbolic plantation; Anna Karenina, who was a bit too hung up and symbolic in general; Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley, who as far as I could tell were just pretty nasty to their poor long-suffering husbands, Jane Eyre, Moll Flanders... There’s ...

It needed to be written. A predictable wistful-turn-of-the-decade-piece hailing the end of the Noughties and the inevitable onset of the Tens (not quite as catchy. Tennies? Sounds a bit like over-the-counter diarrhoea medication. Give me time on this one) and a bit of token drivelling about the internet now being a vital yet terrible extension of our personalities and the carbon footprint that is ominously stamped all over our middle class fun... Well I refuse to give in. I like the 21st century and all of the soullessness it delivers. I like the convenience of expressing the very depth of my soul through one sentence in a neat little box beneath my Facebook profile picture. Now finally the emotionally awkward have a chance to communicate love/sadness/confusion through handy specific combinations of punctuation, :-) indeed. I enjoy the enigmatic nature of “Maybe Attending” events, shamelessly Wiki-ing my way through higher education, and being able to Google all those annoying th ...

"Should it happen we do not endure this uneven fight and drained of strength and agonized we fall on death’s ground, not to rise and the great crime ends with the last Armenian eyes closing without seeing a victorious day, let us swear that when we find God in his paradise offering comfort to make amends for our pain, let us swear that we will refuse saying No, send us to hell again. We choose hell. You made us know it well. Keep your paradise for the Turk." (“We Shall Say to God”, 1917)Vahan Tekeyan wrote these bitter words in 1917, three years after the purges of Armenian intellectuals by the Ottomans on April 24th 1915. He was the only major poet to survive. This massacre of a generation of poets, writers and intellectuals became known as Red Sunday. This date is commemorative for the Armenians today; a symbol of the first stage of genocide, Ottoman cruelty and a lost renaissance. In morbid anticipation of these “summons to misery”, Armenian li ...