The ritual of preparing garlic is as natural to any member of my tribe as brushing our teeth (which, when you're ingesting as much garlic as we do, is also something of an obsession). Cracking the back of a big, fat clove with my favourite knife - the one with the smooth, worn wooden handle and the broken-off tip - peeling the skin and inhaling that first juicy waft, sprinkling the cloves with salt before slowly, joyously chopping them into a mound of oily, savoury wondrousness to be added to a chilli, massaged into the skin of a chicken or shaken into a pan of roasting potatoes is a simple affirmation that all is well with the world or, at least, my little corner of it.

It's also a ritual that opens a window into a bank of memory I often return to for the absolute pleasure of recall. As a family, we love to cook together - gathering in a kitchen as much for the necessity of creating a meal as to run the whole gamut of our senses, whilst talking loudly, taking turns to choose music, divvy up the culinary tasks, lay the table, make cocktails, refill wine glasses and get a head-start on the washing up.

There's the sense of being involved in a kind of impromptu, hastily-choreographed piece of amateur theatre as we move around the kitchen - though each of us know our place in the cast well. My father, for example, never actually 'cooks'. His role something akin to a 'sommelier on holiday'; slowly working his way through our drink orders whilst inspecting the raw ingredients for the meal (holding aloft and admiring a giant beef tomato or peering into pans bubbling away on the stove). 

Strategic partnerships are formed; my sister and mother team up to peel potatoes, my brother and I wash vegetables, slice tomatoes and discuss the merits of a honey and mustard dressing over balsamic vinegar and olive oil. My husband and mother discuss tips for roast spuds, before he departs to the barbecue, corralling my father on the way and the two of them talk all things Steely Dan as the coals begin to glow. 

Holiday cooking is especially memorable and, whilst chopping the garlic for this evening's dinner, my thoughts wound back to last year's trip; deep in the heart of the Loire Valley, in a huge, rambling old stone farmhouse with cows and sheep for neighbours. 

The days were hot and lazy and, as dusk slid towards nighttime, my family and I gathered in the kitchen, damp-haired and fresh from showers that had washed away another day of sun cream and swimming pool chlorine. Rural France has a way of slowing time to the perfect pace; that seemingly infinite gentle tick-tocking of passing hours where rushing anything would be sacrilege. 

With a gin and tonic at my side, I turned my attention to the first item on my part of the culinary 'to do' list of this particular evening's meal. Earlier in the day, we'd been to the local market and bought fist-sized bulbs of smoked garlic, their outer skins burnished, conker-like and potent with the scent of woodsmoke. They made my heart sing to hold them to my nose and inhale their mouth-watering perfume; the promise of a delicious dinner tantalisingly at hand. 

The accoutrements of any holiday home kitchen can often, at best, be described as rudimentary, and our farmhouse was no exception. On arrival, my husband, a past-master on such matters, proclaimed the knives '... blunt as cricket bats...' and promptly collected them up to sharpen on a handy lump of stone sitting just outside the kitchen door, perhaps intended for this very purpose. Thus imbued with a little more bite, I selected an appropriate tool and cracked open a bulb of garlic.

The joy of breaking open a brand new bulb is far greater than that of driving a teaspoon through the foil of a fresh jar of coffee, or smacking a Terry's Chocolate Orange on a solid surface and feeling the satisfying separation of the wedges beneath the foil wrapping. 

The novelty red plastic apple-shaped cutting board, warped by a hundred cycles through the dishwasher, wasn't the most glamorous of surfaces upon which to honour the queenly garlic, but it would have to do (the other, wooden, boards having already been appropriated for their tasks by my brother and sister). It wasn't to matter, however, as the heavenly scent began to diffuse into the warming air inside the kitchen the moment I broke open the clove. 

As second, then a third and fourth clove joined the first, sprinkled with salt to give the knife added purchase, I began to chop. Back and forth, back and forth, sweeping pieces from the knife edge with my finger to join the mound of dense, oily deliciousness taking form on the cutting board.

There exists a rhythm to the process of cooking, brought into sharpest focus by the repetition of chopping (grinding also having as big a part to play in this respect). When a recipe calls for 'finely chopped' - whether decreed in a cookery book or by my own design - I rejoice; for here is a moment to be as humanly mechanical as domestically possible, whiling away a moment to the sensory satisfaction of one's own motions. It is a time to be thankful, truly, for what we are about to receive.

The kitchen around me hummed with the industry of a meal in the making but, for a spell, my garlic and I were alone. I cannot recall the resultant meal nor remember what other tasks I undertook to help it to fruition. Those beautiful, smoky bulbs of garlic will, however, ride along with me all my life, just like the Christmas oranges my Grandfather forever recalled as a highlight of his childhood.

Thus, garlic is rooted in my consciousness as a player in so many of my very happiest memories that I've never minded anyone else having the whiff of it about them. 

Some things are so humble as to be made for exultation; their simplicity becomes a motif stamped upon my heart and I am just a slave to nostalgia, after all. Can I make it official, here and now, that when I'm dead and gone, my mortal remains be mixed in with the soil of a garlic crop? 

Christine and the Queens; Bournemouth International Centre, 17 Nov 18

Sort of knowing what to expect from seeing her perform on Later with Jools Holland, I wombled along to see Christine and the Queens, 30-year old French singer songwriter Héloïse Letissier, deliver her infectious brand of g-funk heavy electro-synth pop. If you think that's a mouthful, it's also something of a misnomer, doing nothing to adequately embrace the depth of her sonic ability or performance.

For the uninitiated, 'Chris', as her self-titled second album released in September invites us to know her, is a woman for whom standing still would be akin to death. She moves, constantly, flicking between all-out homage to Michael Jackson and a fresh-to-death originality all her own. Her choreography, alongside a retinue of eight supremely talented dancers, are an exercise in illustrative fluidity; clearly deliberate and practised, but so effortless as to appear the coolest damn tic on the block.

Talking of the dancing first takes nothing away from the music, but it's so rare to find a contemporary singer songwriter for whom dancing is such an important element of their performance. From the precision of formation routines, to the staggering athleticism and stamina required of the dancers to run in sprinting rings around Chris for the full duration of one particular track, her love of the human body in motion is wholly apparent.

One scene involved the dancers acting out a slow-motion fight, culminating in an undulating tableau of bodies entwined and piled upon one another mimicking the movement of the rising, swelling oceanic tempest painted on the stage backdrop. The ensemble's ability to communicate the mood of every piece was heightened by their facial expressions - fear, love, brutality, loneliness among them - never corny or overwrought.

Chris's voice never sounds forced - the lack of vocal acrobatics allows her songs to breathe on their own merit, the sentiment inherently understood, even when she's singing in her curious trademark mix of mashed-up French/English and chucking in Edward Lear-style nonsensicals in order to maintain her rhythmic narrative without compromise for a missing metaphor that'd never adequately translate to either language. 

Her music is poetic, whilst not necessarily being 'poetry'. The ballads, simpler in their language than the more upbeat tracks, rooted in a very French tradition of love songs. Chris jibed the audience with a couple of chuckling threats of 'singing (us) a very sad song in French' as a sorbet between the pop funk. And we lapped those up too because we were exhausted just watching her and needed a rest before the next astonishing feat of choreographic genius.

There were no costume changes (Chris appearing in her favourite get-up of black cigarette pants, chunky trainers and little black bra, with a scarlet silk shirt casually knotted at the waist), nor astounding displays of pyrotechnics, but there were several touches of stripped-back stagecraft that delivered more in their simplicity than any amount of complex tricks. Dense whirling clouds of dry ice, into which Chris and the dancers dis and re-appeared, a single green flare, held aloft by one of the dancers, looking for all the world like a revolutionary about to revolutionise everything in his path. For the final song on the set list, three slim columns of some kind of feather-light powdery substance fell stagewards, rotating slowly as they caught a breeze, turning into miniature tornados. It was all so very understated, but nonetheless captivating.

The two final un-setlisted numbers were yelled for with the kind of fervour commonly reserved for boybands, although the 4,000-strong audience ran the full gamut of ages from teenagers to at least one group of women of around seventy. I believe all of us fell a little bit in love with Chris.

And Chris seemed genuinely surprised and touched that four thousand people had come to see her on the first night of her first UK tour. She engaged us with a gentle sort of confidence, nothing brash or explicit in her tone. Her ability to front was saved entirely for her performance; attitude for days, swagger the like of which any snake-hipped, shirtless rock star would kill for and yet, by contrast, vulnerability and tenderness that brought tears to my eyes.... twice. 

The scene where she removed her shirt and, back turned to us, reached up in a gesture of absolution to the towering tempest depicted on the backdrop, had me dry-mouthed. Her skin, pale as alabaster, gave her the look of a Caravaggio painting, and, asking to be devoured by nature she mimicked swimming to the crest of the waves, before taking flight above them. Just one little human in the face of everything else. Wordlessly, using just the movement of her body she told us; we all feel like this sometimes.

Earlier this week, two women were robbed in their car near Paris. Not the most shocking of news, until you discover the women (sisters from a wealthy Qatari family whose identities have not been made public), were carrying with them in that car (a Bentley) somewhere between £4-£4.5m-worth of valuables. 

Hot on the heels of Kim Kardashian's Parisian apartment heist and last year's raid on Jensen Button's St. Tropez holiday home, the mega-rich may be forgiven for considering France a somewhat hostile destination; even if the rest of us still flock to the Paris and resorts all over the country following terror attacks in the capital and Nice. 

As any mediaeval peasant living under the iron grip of their feudal lord would attest, public displays of wealth are nothing new. Although many publicity-shy billionaires keep their chattels firmly under wraps, the rise of the super-celebrity coupled with social media tropes such as 'Rich Kids of Instagram' have created a shop window attracting a very sinister breed of viewer, one quite apart from the usual harmless, breathless enviers of shiny baubles and supercars. 

Violent criminal gangs have carried out several attacks on the road between Le Bourget airport, just north of Paris. In addition to the sisters mentioned earlier, in summer 2014 the convoy of a Saudi prince was robbed of €250,000 and, in April last year, an east Asian art collector lost jewels worth €4m. 

How these attacks were planned isn't clear, although Le Bourget is well-known as a business airport serving a large percentage of high net worth individuals among its clientele. By contrast, Kardashian's experience was touted as the result of having 'advertised' her jewels in a series of images posted to her social media accounts. 

The roar of disapproval was instant; headlines in both The Telegraph and The Independent were quick to publish comments made by the Parisian police department suggesting Kardashian had been targeted after posting photographs on twitter and Instagram of a 20 carat diamond ring and her diamond-encrusted mouth grille days four before the attack.

If Kardashian 'flaunts' her wealth as avidly as it would seem the Qatari sisters conceal theirs, are their respective robberies a sign that having great wealth, privilege or fame, and the physical evidence of such, brings with it the consideration of managing who gets to see it, then determining the level of threat they may pose?

Widespread reports of individuals targeted specifically for high-value personal items began circulating almost twenty years ago following a spate of street robberies in west London. Among the most well-known victims was Slavica - then-wife of Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone - robbed of a ring worth up to £700,000 outside her Chelsea home in 1997. 

It may be no co-incidence that 1997 was the year social media was born, with the launch of contact network-based Six Degrees. 

Since then, we've been busy putting our lives online; there are currently estimated to be around two billion active social media accounts. A window into the lives of others is as easy as any other online task - from paying our bills to seeing what our ex is up to in one simple step. 

Those with the most money to burn - typically tendering in pounds, dollars, roubles, RMB's or riyals - likely started off their social media existence in the same way the rest of us did; connecting with close friends, family and near acquaintances. Social media platforms diversified, in line with online content expanding exponentially. There began a trend towards images over written content, as evidenced by the popularity of platforms such as twitter and its mean 140 characters per tweet rule and Instagram where no-one had to know anyone in the real world but could simply 'follow' them. 'This is useless without pictures' became an often-used phrase. Everyone was able to see everyone else's stuff at random - or, more importantly, at will. 

When you own or experience things of significant (and subjective) monetary worth, the temptation to show 'n' tell can be difficult to resist. It's writ, tellingly large, even at the most basic level. How many photos of glasses of champagne, palm tree-fringed beaches, crystalline swimming pools under a far-flung sun or hands bearing recently-presented engagement rings have caused you an internal groan while idly scrolling though your Facebook feed?

At the super-rich end of things, however, the need to 'show' explodes into a Croesus-like obsession with the amassing of valuables. They appear no more than fleeting whims; boiled sweets in a fistful of gems, a Lamborghini for every day of the week when your chauffeur always drives, and a home on every continent when you never leave Beverly Hills.

Thus, you show... and show.... and show, until one or two shady characters among your (in Kardashian's case, 49 million) twitter followers start wondering how easy it would be to relieve you of the undoubted weight of that 20 carat diamond. They know they could never sell it, but they could definitely use it as collateral on a large-scale deal. Or maybe they did it because you showed too much? The latter explanation doesn't seem plausible, as violent criminal gangs rarely execute such robberies in the name of envy alone. 

Whether by accident or design, the very wealthy advertise that wealth every day: by rote of a Mayfair address, a £200,000 supercar on the drive, by carrying a £15,000 Hèrmes Birkin handbag, by a non-executive directorship of a FTSE100 company and by regular appearances in the society pages of any number of glossy publications. They're all showing, so you can bet your last custard cream someone's watching. 

If you're in a chauffeured Bentley on the road to an airport well-known as a hub for the monied elite, the chances are there's also collection of Louis Vuitton luggage (a small suitcase starts at around £1,600) in the boot. You're showing, even if you think you're not. 

If you're out and about in west London wearing the national debt of a small African kingdom on your finger, you're definitely showing. 

And, when 49 million people can see your diamond-encrusted mouth grille and 20 carat diamond ring, you're showing in the most obvious way possible. 

Of course, scorn should be reserved entirely for the perpetrators of robberies and violent crimes involving the theft of valuables from anyone, regardless of their status. An interesting development is the shift towards sentiments of blame upon the victim, even within the wealthy elites' own circle. Karl Lagerfeld (a man otherwise wholly protected from reality in his own unearthly bubble) when questioned on Kardashian's robbery replied; "... Kim cannot display wealth then be surprised when she is robbed". Other murmurings among the rich and famous have been similarly bent. 

The determination to amass wealth, to keep it for yourself and do no good with it stings the watching majority. The hazards of wealth are not restricted only to the worst-case scenario of violent criminals running your car off the road on the way to the airport, or tying you up to fear for your life in a luxurious Parisian apartment.

The far more common and increasingly loudly-voiced hazard of wealth is that, as greater numbers of people all over the world become poorer, the gap between those with and those without is thrown into ever-sharper relief.

When even Karl Lagerfeld can see that it's probably time to consider exactly why you need yet another, well, anything and more so, why you need to show the rest of the world that you have it.

As one season trembles on the cusp of another I, squirrel-like, begin preparations for the deep chill and muted atmosphere of winter; when the snow tamps down all noise in a natural attempt at sound insulation and the world falls a little quieter. 
 
I adore the preparation that comes with the notion of ‘gathering in’; stockpiling ever-stranger chutneys (“That’ll be lovely with some leftover turkey”), madly panic-buying real beeswax candles in fizzing excitement of surrounding them in an entirely unoriginal festive tableaux among collected pine cones (solidly tapped on the doorstep to encourage any resident bugs to move along) and freshly-cut holly from the garden.
 
As the days shorten, I feel my internal rhythms begin to settle into a comfortable, familiar pattern that suits me far better than popular ideals of getting the most out of the few sunny days we’re bestowed by heading for the beach. UK beaches in summer fill me with dread, and not only owing to bikini paranoia. I can’t bear crowds, I’m terrified by the mere thought of swimming in the sea and find it really hard to consider it ‘cute’ when boisterous children kick sand over my picnic.
 
Warmer months also bring mosquitos; my most hated creature in the entire world. Years of experimentation have resulted only in a plethora of rashes from both chemical and natural repellents, alcoholic poisoning from ingesting vast quantities of gin and tonic (any excuse, eh?) and long, hot screaming nights of utter frustration at why the nasty little bastards seem so keen on me.
 
Autumn and the delicious slide into winter brings relief, calm and renewal of the long-held belief that I should move to a far northern land where winter conditions prevail in a near-perpetual state of hushed serenity.
 
My sensibilities towards colour change in winter – with usual predilections for a muted palette of greys and creams, and textural cravings towards bark, smooth silks and crisp linen turning toward a want for deep jewel tones, wools, velvets and chunks of dense, carpet-like moss which, luckily, grows in abundance in my north-facing garden.  
 
Winter means open fires for a truly all-round sensory experience. From getting your hands on the bare components, laying down the kindling and selecting the choicest logs from the woodpile, right through to watching the cat luxuriate contentedly in the warmth and glow, listening to the crackle and hiss, the fragrance of wood smoke (often attempted, though never equalled by perfumers), can also be smelled and tasted as the mellow scent wreathes around the room, lingering as a whisper of itself the morning after. 
 
The chilled white wines of summer are replaced with bottles of red; heavy with aromas of dusty velvet curtains, tobacco and warm leather, and chosen according to a scale of importance ranging from expert tasting notes to the whimsy of the picture on the bottle (with the latter usually winning out).

The woollens come down from the attic to be satisfyingly de-bobbled and folded with reverence bordering on the holy. I buy cashmere year-round and never pay full price for it, seeking out gems on auction sites and in summer sales – with the added bonus that many shops are air-conditioned, providing respite from both the heat and the mozzies as I peruse the offerings and day dream of winter.
 
Thus, in celebration of the approach of my no. 1 season, I give you a few of my favourite things to buy for yourself or to give as gifts. All of these lovely things are guaranteed to turn you into a winter lover just like me. 

Andy Warhol was right, or at least partially, in his assertion that one day everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. It would seem a quarter of an hour stretches into unhindered eternity when it comes to 'reality' TV.

I recall the first series of 'Big Brother' back in 2000 with a certain nostalgia. From setting foot into the house, none of the participants could have anticipated the unprecedented effect their antics would have on the audience. Their astonished reactions upon leaving the house were both endearing and fun to watch, not least because they were entirely unprepared for just how many people had seen the show and were now privvy to their most intimate secrets. 

That was just fifteen years ago. The blink of an eye before social media was quite the all-encompassing beast it is today. Anna, Nick, Craig and Melanie and the others (those four were my favourites and I've never forgotten their names) were thrust into the national consciousness for their oh-so-recognisable traits of human behaviour: Anna and her haphazard way of making the worst situation seem like a hiccup (which, owing to her fondess for getting drunk, it usually was), Nick's two-facedness and smooth conniving, Craig the chirpy builder, the kind of guy we all want on our side when the world ends and we need someone handy to knock us up a shelter and get the lights back on, and Melanie: introverted, guarded, she was definitely the melancholic of the bunch, and the one with whom I most closely identified.

Throughout it all ran a warm current of gentleness, a feeling that were really were viewing the innate banality of human existence. Of course the participants knew the cameras were there, but they seemed genuinely to have forgotten. There was very little posturing, and even less posturing over others, in order to gratify one's own public image, for no-one actually knew they even had a public image to play up to. 

My, how times have changed! In fifteen years, reality TV has become a feeding ground for vanity, spite and the kind of public posturing that would make Motley Crue think they weren't trying hard enough. 

I pause, here, to make an admission: I don't actually watch any reality TV programmes. The last of its kind I viewed was the first series of 'The Only Way Is Essex'. This particular programme served to extinguish any last reserves of fondness I'd once had for a genre that has subsequently pumped out so much effluent since Craig emerged triumphant and donated his winnings to charity, that I'd been left cowering in disgust from the splatters. 

Celebrity. In years gone by, the word would conjure images of tea-time gameshows, the Royal Variety performances and the type of light entertainer who would, but for the BBC and the old guard at ITV, otherwise be relegated to relying on panto season alone in order to feed and clothe themselves.  Not any more. The gathering momentum of a decade and a half's worth of reality TV, coupled with the explosion in social media, has created a very specific kind of 'super celebrity' which, despite the apparent grandness of the moniker, is a snappier way of saying: 'talentless nonentity with monstrous ego and a shelf life of around eighteen months - two years, tops'.

'TOWIE', just one in a long line of monster ego-spawning franchises, thusly spewed forth the most loathsome monster of them all: Mark Wright. 

Mr. Wright is a man too stupid to have become an estate agent: the kind of swaggering, tight-trousered moron who keeps his knuckles off the ground only to protect his manicure. His tweets are legendarily badly spelled, displaying grammar that would shame most nine year olds. His TOWIE appearances presented a person entirely devoid of wit and charm - and in his home town of Brentwood, where steroid use has rendered a portion of the male inhabitants dumbed down to the point of complete intellectual inertia, that's no mean feat. 

I recall him as a man so entirely absorbed by himself, without capacity for sentient thought as to the feelings of anyone else. The mean, controlling and misogynistic treatment of his then-girlfriend/short-lived fiancee on the show was illustrative of someone so completely bereft of empathy for other human beings, that he appeared as some kind of orange-hued, stiffly veneered automaton. 

That said, there wasn't a single member of the TOWIE 'cast' (for 'cast' is what they were, and remain: a group of people so entrenched in their narrow frame of reference as to be immeasurable by any reliable ethnographic standard) whom one could fairly describe as 'nice'. 

Were we to believe Brentwood inhabited only by 'TOWIE types', a label which has now become shorthand, we would never venture within five miles of the place, and install an exclusion zone around this once-pretty north Essex town lest we lose double figures from our own IQs merely by driving through. 

I had to give up TOWIE, and all other forms of programming of its ilk before my blood pressure got the better of me. My barely-adequate capacity for suffering cunts, already reduced to dust by Amanda Holden and her wax-like portrayal of a Stepford wife to Simon Cowell's equally stretched and burnished presence on Britain's Got Talent, atomised entirely at the end of season one, largely thanks to the antics of Wright.

I wonder what Warhol would have made of it all? Though his life and legacy have ensured him icon status in the art world proper, he was never a man to claim celebrity for himself. In the best tradition of Hollywood, where the studios created, controlled and manipulated their stars to best effect, Warhol was no different - although I prefer the term 'personalities' for his glittering cavalcade of factory characters. 

He never wanted celebrity for himself, even if he did thoroughly enjoy basking in the reflected light of his creations. I like to imagine him, a heavenly voyeur on a silver foil cloud, absorbing the sum total of modern reality programming. Would he gently place an index finger to his lips and murmur a quiet, lisping 'Oh, I love it'? Or, like me, would he frisbee a dinner plate at the TV and vow never to watch another second?

Contemporary dance is an area of, dare I say it, ‘entertainment’ that has taken me forty-one years to collide with. I enjoy ballet (or, as one must label it in order to display connoisseurship, ‘The ballet’, with no concession to such frippery as it being mere entertainment), but my tastes had not thus extended to any other forms of dance: classical or otherwise.

Yesterday evening marked my first foray into contemporary dance as both art and entertainment. A collaboration between Spanish flamenco artist, Israel Galván and Akram Khan, a British dancer of Bangladeshi descent, Torobaka had its UK premier at Sadler’s Wells.

I was aware of Khan from his work with Danny Boyle at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, but had not previously heard of Galván. The birth of their collaboration piqued my interest as part of the BBC series What Do Artists Do All Day? that follows the endeavours of artists working in a variety of disciplines.

In the programme, Khan travelled to Galván’s native Seville to lay the groundwork for what was to become one of the most curious and deeply resonant performances I’ve ever seen.

Khan’s discipline, Kathak, is an ancient form of narrative, story-telling dance with origins in northern India being passed down from generation to generation, with literary evidence of its beginnings in existence 400 years before the birth of Christianity. It differs from the more instantly recognisable forms of Indian dance primarily thanks to its more freeform style and delicate, twirling Persian influences, upon which Khan layers his own unique movements.

Galván’s style, while essentially derived from traditional flamenco, exists as something of an anomaly in Spanish dance. The testosterone-heavy jutting and strutting is present, but blended with an almost ego-free version of primitivism: a call of atavistic nature that has nothing to do with the flamboyance of flamenco’s image the world over.

That Khan and Galván do not share a common language is evident in the early opening of the performance, where Khan places his hand over Galván’s mouth, silencing a series of bird-like calls. The scene is set for the two dancers to communicate through the shapes they make with their bodies.

If anyone was expecting flawless, mirror-like mimicry of one another’s movements, they were to be disappointed. However, the minute and subtle differences in the placement of gestures and steps was, for me at least, the very essence of the piece as a whole: Khan and Galván, while seeking to create a new dialogue in movement, remained wholly, and rightly, individual.

Similarly, if the performance in its entirety seemed disjointed to some, the patchwork of scenes, all set within a darkly illuminated pool of stage lighting, served to illustrate both the coming together and setting apart of two very distinct personalities.

In one scene, Khan appears as a prescience of new birth. On his knees, with a pair of flamenco shoes on his hands, he writhes in creative emergence, tapping out a rudimentary signal. He seems as we all once did: human, though not yet sentient.

Large portions of Galván’s solo parts exhibited comedic elements far removed from the traditional character of flamenco. He shrieked and gurned, posing himself in unflatteringly bent positions. In doing so he too explored nascent aspects of an archaic human psyche.

Torobaka is not just Khan and Galván, were more than their talents required. They were joined by a mixed-up gang of drum-beating musicians, a woman singing liturgically-styled folk songs in a completely unexpected tenor, and a man singing way up high who looked as though he’d just rattled along in his gypsy wagon expecting to find his brigands huddled around a campfire, instead of being thrust into a blackened spotlight on a theatre stage in the middle of London.  Best of all among their number is a patriarchal Spaniard, delivering time-honoured flamenco handclapped rhythms and providing a kind of umpiring service, counter-balancing the whirling and snapping of Khan and Galván’s evolution.

The show is an exercise in becoming: it twists itself into entirely new shapes, and throws fresh shadows onto the old ways of both flamenco and kathak. The real joy is in the knowledge that, despite Khan and Galván not sharing a common language, they’ve found an entirely unique way to communicate with one another.

To label Torobaka as contemporary dance alone is to rather miss the point. At heart, it neatly packaged up every difficulty we little humans have in communicating with one another, and handed us a peep at the best path to understanding: first, be curious.

Torobaka pings with natural, fluid curiosity and that oh-so human need to infinitesimally explore our own species. 

I went back to my old home town of Leigh-on-Sea today, which isn’t as big a deal as it might sound. I only moved three miles down the road seven weeks ago, and my studio is still based there.

It’s funny, though, how psychological absence of a place brings its changes into such sharp focus on subsequent returns.

I’ve known about the new apartment block being built near the library for ages. I’d seen the artist’s impression and barely given it a thought. And, despite the fact that the local vernacular quite happily absorbs and assimilates a variety of architectural styles from early to late Victorian, 1930s deco, and even a smattering of mid-century modernism, I hadn’t considered just how badly a seemingly faceless apartment block would fail to fit in.

A few yards from the beautiful red brick library built in 1838, a total turd of a building is coming into being. It looks like a particularly uninspiring, low-rate hotel or the type of hospital where boobs are made larger and noses made smaller. One curved metal-clad elevation already appears to be wilting tiredly towards the Victorian villas now cowering in its shadow on the opposite side of the road.

Admittedly, the wilting wall is the one ‘design feature’ (if, indeed, it can be claimed as such) to actually give the bloody thing any discernable façade whatsoever.

I stood on the pedestrian island staring at this scaffold and plastic-wrapped Jonah for a while – trying to decide whether it was designed by an architect at the beginning or end of his or her career. It could be either. It’s clearly someone who hasn’t spent much time in Leigh, nor cares as to the impact this brick-built, shit-coloured-box-of-nothing has on the town.

I shouldn’t give a toss about it, really. It’s so faceless as to be almost ignorable. But that’s precisely my point. What is it about so many new apartment blocks that causes such apathy in their design?

Before I moved to Leigh, I worked ‘in property’, as the saying goes when one is determinedly trying to be as vague as possible in order to attract the widest possible remit of services for which one may charge exponentially. I saw so many identikit apartment blocks with absolutely nothing to separate them from one another that I became confused and disorientated in lifts and stairwells, feeling as though I were trapped in some kind of computer-generated maze of beige décor.

I know precisely the fit and finish of Leigh’s latest development without having to set foot over the threshold. There’ll be no singular defining feature, aside from square footage, to differentiate the three hundred and twenty five grand apartments from the laughingly speculatively-priced six hundred and seventy five grand ‘penthouse’ – as if Leigh-on-Sea were proclaiming itself as the Essex version of Miami by route of its estate agents’ ability to successfully market every property on their books at least 20% over and above what any mortgage lender not on crack would deem an acceptable loan-to-value.

Six hundred and seventy five grand. You can buy a five bedroomed detached house in Leigh for that money. Or, alternatively, you could keep your cash/three decades worth of debt (delete as applicable) and refuse to buy into the cynicism of developers who aim their product directly at just the type of slack jawed cretins who think paying over the odds for a ‘uniformed concierge’ (I shit thee not), a bit of granite counter top and two sinks in the en-suite is going to give them the cache and style so desperately missing from their tight-jeaned, gelled-hair, BMW-wanking existence.

Yes, my rant is aimed at both the perpetrators turning a once-charming town into just another Brentwood: greedy developers and their lazy architects putting premiums on ‘soft close’ toilet lids and ‘fully tiled’ shower enclosures (is there any other kind?), and the uninspired pricks who blindly buy an apartment ‘off plan’ with no intention of actually being a useful part of the community going on around them. For example, the advent of ‘anti-homeless’ spikes recently exposed in the media goes some way towards disclosing the sinister agenda of both some developers and the type of people who buy their properties.

Maybe I’m being unfair, generalising and naïve. I certainly don’t believe every new apartment block is populated entirely by idiots. Leigh is, regretfully and undeservedly, becoming a big draw for a certain type of upwardly-facile dickhead.

Such wildlife can be viewed fighting and loudly gobbing off like some kind of comedy skit pastiche of themselves on any given weekend. Turning the route from the Rio bar all the way down Oakleigh Park Drive to the shudderingly awful Bellini’s into their personal latrine.

In digressing I am, perhaps, showing my true colours as a sort of social racist. I admit, I loathe the knuckle-headed bluster, uncreative profanity and swaggering ego of the type I saw so often in Leigh. I hate the thought of the place turned over to so many who simply don’t care about anything outside their own narrow frame of reference and are unable to expand their limited vocabulary further than to express shock/surprise/horror/joy/sadness by way of three-letter acronyms.

That architecture has a bearing on the personalities of those it provides for is proven. Developments all over the country, such as those being built in Leigh right now are, in their very blandness, creating a hothouse environment for a whole new breed of community inept morons with a serious superiority complex. If I can get past the uniformed concierge, maybe I’ll try and meet a few in the hope of being proved wrong. 

Having recently been somewhat able to rein in my obsession with reading trashy online celebrity "news" items (and I use the word in its loosest term), I recently found my piss being boiled to steam by quite possibly the rudest spurt yet to issue forth from the fountain of spite and banality that is the Daily Mail. 

I know, I know. I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself for even deigning to give it a thought. But this time it's important that I infect my own blog by having to mention the name of that hideous publication. 

"What's their secret? Gillian Anderson and Minnie Driver are fabulous in their forties at Television Critics Association event" trilled the headline, delighted with itself at having discovered two women over the age of thirty-nine who weren't completely physically decrepit and still able to remember how to use lipstick. 

I'm sure "journalist" (loose term no. 2, aptly enough) Mike Larkin thought he was being terribly complimentary with his appalling cack-handed opener of "Some say women age like wine". Unfortunately, apart from statements like this being on the list of tabloid phrases even the laziest journos left behind in the 1970s along with the word "boobs" (regretfully still a Daily Mail staple), he also omitted the word "fine".

Some women do, indeed, age like wine. Me, for example. Some days I feel I feel like a Blossom Hill rosé that's been stored by a radiator throughout winter, or the dust-covered bottle of Liebfraumilch propping up a bowing shelf in the local corner shop. 

Ah, hang on, Mike had merely been saving the adjective for his second sentence. "And if so Gillian Anderson, 45, and Minnie Driver, 43, are of a particularly fine vintage if their appearance at a Television Critics Association event in Los Angeles on Sunday is any guide".

Quite apart from the assumption that the last sentence appears to have been written by someone who's spent several hours on the booze himself (possibly swilling the aforementioned dusty Liebfraumilch), are we to assume that Gillian and Minnie should feel flattered they're being touted as proof that ladies over forty can still be deemed worthy of praise by a newspaper whose general M.O. is to call out any female not wearing an Hervé Léger bandage dress and eight-inch platform stilettos as frumpy or drab?

Following the Swiss Tony-style opening gambit, things took a decidedly Benny Hill turn for the worse with the assertion that "aesthetically pleasing" Gillian had teamed her brown lace dress with a pair of "high heels". 

Firstly, describing any woman as "aesthetically pleasing" infers she's being inspected like bloodstock and serves only to confirm that Mike Larkin is the sort of bloke who probably considers feminism a bit of a daft idea. Secondly, Gillian was wearing wedges, not "high heels", so not only is Mike vastly unqualified in determining a woman's worth by simply peering at her, he's also entirely unschooled in matters of lady-shodding.

Although descriptive errors concerning footwear pale into insignificance when stacked against the blundering insensitivity of the piece as a whole, they do also serve as low-level indicators to remind us exactly what a useless pile of crap the Daily Mail really is.

Continuing with the tepidly warmed-through theme of insults barely concealed as compliments, Gillian was also described as easily mistaken for her twenty-nine year old co-star's sister. This, as we all know, is tabloid code for "the younger one is wearing enough make-up to look like a forty year-old herself". In this case, Mike had even managed to cock up on that score as the co-star in question, Rachael Taylor, was minimally made-up and looked around fifteen. 

Not that it prevented him from practically foaming at the mouth in lascivious delight with a photo caption reading: "The saucy pair showcased their lovely legs as they discussed their programme". You could almost hear the rustling of a grubby raincoat moving stealthily through the privet. 

Minnie didn't fare much better by Mike's reckoning, either. Although she was spared the indignity of being compared to her much younger co-star (thankfully, it was apparent enough he was an eleven year old boy), she was treated to the baffling assertion that she "…was looking almost as good as ever…".

Almost? What was it that pipped her at the post, to be held aloft in Mike's estimations as a shining example of exactly how "saucy" a forty three year old woman could be if only she really tried? 

Sadly, we can never know as the article ended. Abruptly, and possibly in tandem with Mike Larkin's journalistic career. Had an editor with more than the requisite amount of intelligence usually required for a post at this comic of a newspaper realised the tone was dangerously inappropriate (much less so poorly written as to be laughable even by their own raggedy standards)?

Which brings me to some assertions of my own. I fucking loathe the Daily Mail. I hate the way they perpetuate their nasty little methodology of spite against ALL women - not just those over forty. Their deliberate, insidious, belittling and damaging philosophy of alternate faux-complimentary and snide, pretend concern is, whilst wholly transparent, also that by which many women offer up their own image for comparison. 

Of course, the Daily Mail aren't the only publication guilty of such blatant disregard for the female image. It's a seeping, creeping tide perpetuated by all corners of the media machine. It's just that Daily Mail do it with greater disregard and less pause for consideration than any other mainstream newspaper. 

Neither am I laying the blame for every abomination of journalistic intent solely at the feet of the hapless Mike Larkin whose twenty six strong twitter followers may recognise by his own admission as "… a sub-par journalist who can do a few card tricks..".

Women's age or, more correctly, the advancement of a celebrity woman's age, is a scary thing for a tabloid editor. On one hand they know publishing photographs of her will herald the mouse-clicking, advertisement-flicking cash register, but when she's no longer the great big film or TV star she once was, what's left to say? When she's gone from Dana Scully to some spy thing no-one's ever really heard of, what can we possibly say about her to keep the proles interested?

More often than not, the answer is to use her age as a battering ram by which to hammer home the point that whilst we're unlikely to see her rocking a latex catsuit again, at least she's not run to fat or resorted to wearing things she's knitted herself (and if she has, she's fair game for a real savaging). 

I admit to a modicum of responsibility for perpetuating the insatiable appetite of the masses for such cruelty. I am no better than the snarky tabloid editor or bitchy features writer. After all, every one of my clicks counts towards the constant call for ever-more prying, pointless pieces such as I've described. 

My itchy, naughty fingers, stuck for something to do between the more pressing matters of commerce and domestic responsibility, sneak across the keyboard in idle curiosity as to whatever happened to Kathleen Turner in the years after all those sexy clinches with Michael Douglas.

I am partly to blame, no matter how resoundingly I thump my outrage on the digital lectern of propriety and respect by way of increasingly incredulous emails to the editors of the most loathsome rags.

Like giving up smoking (another disgusting habit I occasionally return to), I need to find a wholesome diversion for my digits. 

Maybe I'll knit myself something nice.

That quiet honesty is the prevailing marker for his character throughout. Despite any treatment metered out to him, through horrors that would surely break the strongest of human resolve, he endures with little vociferous complaint, even when not under his master's watchful eye. 

Ejiofor's performance is based upon the true story of Solomon Northup, a free born African American kidnapped into slavery in 1841. Lured to Washington from his home in Saratoga by a false job offer, Northup was drugged, sold to an illegal slave trader and put on a boat bound for New Orleans. 

Upon arrival in New Orleans Northup is renamed "Platt" and given the identity of a runaway slave from Georgia to conceal the fact that he is a free man. The metamorphosis of the cultured, confident Northup, a talented violinist and family man with two children, to a man in chains is swift. 

After a fellow slave on the boat advises the only way to survive is to "… do and say as little as possible. Tell no-one who you really are, and tell no-one that you can read and write", Northup witnesses the murder of Robert, another slave, by one of the boat's crew. Realising that resistance, or any form of escape attempt while aboard would likely lead to his death, Northup instead resolves to seek freedom once the boat has landed.

If the brutality to that point was hard to watch, it was merely a precursor to the full extent of what Northup would endure throughout his years of bondage. But, horrific as many of the graphic scenes of lashings and beatings were, the true power of 12 Years a Slave does not come from its violent bloodshed. 

It may seem something of a contradiction to assert that the cruelty served only to heighten the impact of scenes free of savagery. Northup appears to grow ever-more gentle with each undeserved punishment, conveying less a sense of being 'worn down', than an air of retreating further inside his own impenetrable mental and emotional shell. 

Far from taking the character away from the audience, however, this withdrawal creates an impression of his seeking to protect us from the barbarism he suffers, taking us safely down into the kernel of his resolute determination for survival. He takes a golden chance for escape in the form trusting a white worker to post a letter on his behalf, to inform friends in the north of what has befallen him. He is betrayed, and only narrowly manages to convince his psychotic master, the terrifyingly unpredictable Edwin Epps (played with malevolent intent by Michael Fassbender) that the betrayer is a liar, out for his own ends. 

Amongst the sweat and tears there are moments of sublime beauty a'plenty: dappled sunlight trickling through the trees, shyly exposing peeps of Titian-esque sky and plump, rosily-lit clouds. Gentle breezes dancing within the Spanish moss-draped branches of ancient oaks, and director Steve McQueen's signature evident in luscious, lingering shots of Northup's pain-soaked countenance. 

Scenes depicting the singing of spiritual songs in the cotton fields are a particularly potent reminder of how slaves would keep their spirits up during hours of exhaustive labour. Their words resonate down the years as a haunting testimony to the physical resilience of people set to heavy work by plantation owners who kept them on the brink of malnutrition, while demanding ever-greater productivity.  

One song-scene should, hereafter, rank among the most carefully-crafted and finely executed cinematic moments in movie history. One of the oldest members of Northup's slave community, overwhelmed by years of physical exertion, dies on the cotton field. That evening, he's buried by his peers, who crowd around the newly-filled grave to sing a final farewell.

"Roll Jordan, roll", they begin, slowly and quietly. We see Northup, lips pressed tightly together, refusing to sing. This is his moment of moments: go on living, or die - whether by his own hand or by that which believes it has just cause to strike the life from him we cannot be sure, but we can see the decision being weighed up. Though he has never seemed a particularly religious man, we're also witnessing the last reserves of faith in any spiritual saviour draining from him.
 
We close in on his glorious, ravaged face as voice after voice joins to swell the song. "Roll Jordan, roll", and we're rolling right there alongside them, determinedly trudging through the mud, blood and ceaseless toil, feeling every shred of hopelessness, each kick in the backside and every crack of the whip. 

Northup's battle rages within and we sense a reckoning about to take place. All the years of quiet dignity and patient reserve, which counted for nothing when he placed his trust in betraying hands, is dissolving, like early morning mist across the cotton fields. 

But… but… there are some things that never die, no matter what you throw at them and Solomon Northup, in a split second, turns despair into new hope. We actually see it happen. Right there in front of our very eyes. His lips relax and he's singing, a voice of such pure and dazzling courage as to be matchless by any yet-invented conceivable standard. We stood on the precipice with him, and he let us experience what it might be like to die beside him. 

If the movie were only those few, brief minutes and nothing else, it would still be better than anything else I've seen on the screen. Ever. It'd take a thousand scientists, a full century and all the money in the world to work out the formulaic equation for what just happened there and even then I bet it would be a pretty weak attempt at a theory.

And the greatest thing about it was that Chiwetel Ejiofor didn't need a stunt double, a car chase, an explosion, a gun-fight, outlandish make-up or even any dialogue to create this magic. 

There are many other things I could say about 12 Years a Slave, but in the heat of my still-processing absorption, I fear they might give too much away, and I don't want to be a spoiler. In any case, nothing I could say will eloquently enough translate the virtuosic performances of all the actors from the screen to the written word.

Do yourself one very big favour and just watch it. I guarantee you, like me, will still be busily processing what you see long after the credits have finished rolling. 

Imagination. My whole life I've been variously accused of having a "vivid" or "overactive" one. I've never thought this to be any sort of curse or affliction, but have, on occasion, wished I were able to tone down myriad thoughts that rush through my mind at a thousand miles an hour. 

Never being able to stick at any one project for its full duration, many of the random happenings of my imagination are disjointed, totally at odds with anything going on in my real world and entirely without a root source of reference. 

There are few people with whom I would ever bother to share some of the more ridiculous ideas that form, unbidden by rational thought, inside my nonsensical head. My sister is one of them. She, too, is given to whims and fancies for which there is no ultimate purpose in her real life. For example, in an email today, she informed me that she'd spent part of Saturday night measuring her bathroom floor and pricing up fancy tiles.

Not so weird, really. I'm sure many people have had cause to use the expansive capability of the internet for such common-or-garden tasks. However, I'm willing to bet that not many people who live in a rented flat and have no intention of actually re-tiling their landlord's bathroom floor have gone to the odd extreme of spending several hours pondering the various merits of a jazzy Spanish geometric pattern versus something reminiscent of a Grecian temple. 

My sister's assertion that she probably needs to, "...get out more..." reminded me of a similar, and somewhat over-imaginative in-depth DiY planning project of my own which I embarked upon in a (largely futile) effort to rid myself of the pervasive threat of a bout of depression some seven years ago. 

I had recently split from the man I am now very happy to call my husband. Our early foray into a relationship did not go completely according to my prescribed plan of a) meet suitable man on dating website, b) marry him. He, being fresh out of a thirteen-year marriage and keen for some of the more robust forms of physical entertainment sans strings was probably not my best bet for instant and everlasting monogamy. Needless to say, our fledgling love affair hit the skids pretty darn rapidly and I was left doing a more than passable impersonation of the archetypal sobbing, broken-hearted maiden (my previous twenty-year career of dating and relationships notwithstanding). 

I had to find a way of getting through the heartache which didn't involve alcohol, drugs, sleeping with someone even less emotionally available or, equally, sleeping with someone just as ready as I for a long-term relationship (because obviously I would only be using them and would subsequently break their heart in precisely the same way my own thudding organ was currently being internally wrenched) or turning to any form of spirituality or religion. 

I should say, at this point, that I did briefly consider going into a church to pray for the revival of my romantic fortunes. In a twist of luck, however, there was a wedding rehearsal going on in my chosen place of worship, and I felt my whining declarations of unrequited love might put the mockers on the hopeful mood of the soon-to-be-betrothed couple. I'm not Catholic either, by the way. It's just that too many years of watching Madonna videos gave me the idea that they were the best bet for glamour when it comes to paying homage to a non-existent deity - all that incense and gold leaf is sure to turn a girl's head eventually. 

So, I sat at home, smoked too many cigarettes (my final nasty habit and one which I've been able to ditch in favour of putting on three stone and moaning constantly about how much I miss smoking) and decided there was only one way to drag myself out of the mire: to plan some DiY. 

Yes! Out with the old, in with the new, that was the ticket! During this time, I was living in the same rented flat in which my sister now resides, she having taking over the fine tradition of McHattie women re-settling in Berkshire for a quieter pace of life once the treadmill of corporate life becomes too much.

Nevertheless, the genial Landlord, the ever-affable Neil who looks like Terry Venables and is himself an absolute stranger to the notion of "if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well", was agreeable to my sprucing up the place as long as it didn't cost him anything, nor compromise any of his own previous professionally-bodged efforts. 

I could paint my bedroom! I thought, excitedly contemplating a vulval blush pink where I could return to the womb and swear off the responsibility of love forever. Or, perhaps the lounge would respond well to a couple of coats of mocha?

Nah, what REALLY got my sap rising was the idea of building a lodge in the garden. Of course! There was no way a feeble tin of paint was going to bring me out of my reverie. What I needed was a log cabin affair, complete with a pitched, tiled roof and a verandah where I could sit in a rocking chair, dressed in florals, crocheting a lampshade and finding ultimate solace from this cruel world that had so blighted my hopes in the ungraspable philosophy of “happy ever after”. 

I got to work at once by creating a spreadsheet simply entitled "Garden Lodge" which was obviously only ever a working title, and the final edifice would have a suitably quaint name to go with its idyllic stature. 

I scoured the internet for hours, gradually building an extensive list of suppliers for everything from the cabin itself to plumbing fittings (my retreat of rustic luxe would have its own bathroom and kitchenette, as well as a comfortable lounge area and a small study), furniture, bed linen, cushions, mirrors and lamps. 

I found the perfect local contractor, with great references, who had built beautiful, cosy lodges in the gardens of everyone from Sarah Brightman to Kirstie Allsopp (my own personal heroine of chintz). His quote made all the blood run from my limbs, but I reasoned that there was no price too high for my own slice of heaven: the lodge encapsulated everything that represented a safe retreat from the harsh reality of my crushing single life. 

I spent sleepless nights, hunched over my laptop, sourcing those most de rigueur of domestic ideals: plantation shutters. These innocuous window coverings have, in recent years, replaced the white plastic conservatory with the big pointy finial on top as the discerning homeowner's most lustful item. I had absolutely no idea that they are, pound for pound, more expensive than diamonds which have been crushed under the feet of every crowned head of Europe, digested by a white rhino, then picked out his subsequent doings by Bill Gates.

“Hmm,” I pondered, late one night, polishing my spectacles in the warm glow of my laptop screen. “Perhaps curtains haven’t quite had their day, after all”.

Within four weeks, I had the full costings in place. The princely sum of (and I have to spell it out in letters rather than numbers because looking at that huge number still makes my head spin) forty-three thousand, five hundred and twelve pounds and sixty pence was the final price of my eternal and fully substantiated happiness.

Thus, I would be the proud owner of an elegantly furnished Caribbean-themed lodge, complete with one of those four-poster fruitwood beds swathed in a snow-white mosquito net and layered with six-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton heaven.

I would drink my morning coffee from antique Limoges china, and take my evening claret from William Yeoward crystal. Surrounding myself with all that luxury would cosset me from the reality of being without a mate with whom to share all the real riches of life: shared hopes, worries and dreams and the ability to nudge the braver half of the partnership awake on a stormy night to check that the back door really was locked and there were no werewolves hiding in the broom cupboard.

Released from the studious machinations of mentally developing a glorified garden shed that would turn Marie Antoinette green with envy, I rested: depleted by the sheer exhaustion of the administrative exercise and reeling from the shocking revelation of exactly how much real American walnut flooring costs.

If, I reasoned, it’s this tiring just doing the sums, imagine how stressful the process of actually getting the thing built is going to be!

But that was not the only folly of my exertions. In seeking to create my ideal retreat, I had neglected to address one tiny consideration. My flat didn’t even have a garden.

My imagination had well and truly run away with me this time.