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Dani wonders whether anyone will remember Generation Y

I’ve heard on the news quite a lot of talk about my generation.
And it always makes me feel a bit strange.

Firstly because the idea that I am part of a generation is a bit strange. Every generation have done or had something to make them the blah – Di – Blah generation. We have had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. In many years to come people are going to presume that our idols were the two Princes. We don’t really have any real music to play as a theme tune. The Spice Girls were huge but not anything as groundbreaking as David Bowie and all the boy bands are embarrassing to compare with the likes of Marc Bolan and T- Rex, Johnny Rotten or The Beatles. There is obviously a handful of artists that will become the ones our children listen too. But they are rarely mentioned.

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Andrew Kay looks on with envy at a kids’ karaoke party at Gars

Get your hankies out. I only ever had one birthday party as a kid. My baby brother got overexcited and threw a fit, literally, and I was never allowed another. Awwww. So when I got invited along to see a karaoke party at Gars, I had my coat on before you could say “Cake and candles”.

Now normally at this point I would start to tell you how it went, but then I had two budding journos, twins, who were happy to report back. So here they are, Nat and Becky with their review.

Our birthday party at Gars

It was the best party we have ever had. Gars is cool. We had done karaoke before but we had never been to a karaoke party. The karaoke was brilliant! We all picked some songs each and got to hold the microphone for our own songs, but everyone joined in with all the songs. The most fun were the songs everyone knew all the words to, like ‘Barbie Girl’, ‘YMCA’ and everything from Grease.

“Gars have got this pitched just right. The food was beautifully presented and there was so much of it”

There was a proper bar, just for us, with a waiter who you could order a drink from whenever you wanted! We also had our own private bathroom!

We thought we would have to eat the Chinese food standing up but the waiters made a massive long table with a tablecloth and loads of food and we all sat round it. Gar made our parents go and eat somewhere else so we could be treated like VIPs. The food was lovely, especially the spring rolls and the chicken on sticks (chicken satay). There were noodles and sesame prawn toasts, spare ribs and even chips. The chips tasted like normal chips. The waiters told us which food was vegetarian. Gar, the owner, was really funny and he taught us how to count up to ten in Chinese! We can’t remember any of it except that five sounded like “Mmmmm!”

After the Chinese food we had our birthday cakes. Two cakes because we are twins! We had more karaoke but we didn’t get all the songs we wanted because we had asked for so many. We really want to go again!

All our friends thought it was a great party too. It was AMAZING!
Natalie and Rebecca Clark

But what did mum think?

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Victoria Nangle says that when it comes to romance, laughter is the key

When I first started hanging out with aspiring comics we used to go and see as many stand-up nights as we possibly could. It’s hardly a secret that there are a lot more blokes going around being funny into a microphone than there are women, and so it also follows that there are generally more aspiring male comics than female ones. Thus, gender-wise I was usually in the minority. However, this also meant that there were less lady comics on stage, and when they got up they certainly caused a furore with the lads I was with.

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Perhaps one of the most reviled yet misunderstood of all the youth subcultures, the skinhead look and lifestyle has now rightly returned to the very forefront of contemporary youth culture. While celebrities and sportsmen shave their heads for the red carpet, the underbelly of British youth culture has rediscovered the look via acclaimed films such as Shane Meadows’ 2007’s award-winning This Is England.

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