It appears that I don’t love my family. Try as I might I’m starting to believe that I don’t even know them. As I fumble around packed shopping centres and barge through bag-laden consumers I look down at my empty hands and die a little inside. I can’t find a thing.

Maybe I am just neurotic, but I’ve purchased and returned three gifts so far. One fabulous perfume picked out for my sister reeks of “I didn’t know what you wanted, but I hear people with ovaries like this.” My brother’s stripy woollen jumper had a gift receipt quietly tucked behind the cuff with the indelible message “If, as I suspect, this is in fact the jumper I bought for you last year, you might consider exchanging it.” And, had I stuck with the range of candles I had bought my mother from her favourite store, which each one of my siblings buy her on every special occasion, I’m sure her living room would have looked like a medieval church and smelled like a whore’s boudoir come Christmas day.

Sipping a half-time coffee and gazing guiltily at the rather marvellous dress I’d found for myself along the way, I came to the conclusion that this disaster may not be my fault. Christmas shopping is uniformly awful. Everyone is given less than two weeks to find something “special” for the people they love in stores consciously selling gifts “designed for people you love.”

Don’t get me wrong, the gift selections laid out in department stores are perfect. But only for acquaintances. They are categorised by stereotype in a flow chart structure. First you decide if they are male or female and are sent into the blue room or the pink room accordingly.

Once inside the blue room, you are given an age/maturity range spanning from student, to young professional, to taking his career seriously, to retired. These are then subdivided individually into likes sport and likes sport less. Where sport ceases to be a major factor the students are given something to help them with the daily grind of imbibing alcohol. Need a three pint glass sir? Beer helmet to free up your hands for your scurrilous wench sir? Young professionals are offered chrome accessories and obscure gadgetry to adorn their leather lined inner-city dwellings. Leather becomes a key feature on the career man’s wish list. Cowhide is stitched and shaped to encase everyday appendages from iPods and Blackberrys to business card holders and manicure kits. And once his heady career days are over the retired man relaxes into a life of golfing, angling and whiskey tasting.

The pink room is just that. The only perceivable subdivision seems to be: has given birth and is waiting to give birth. None the less the colour choice in each category does not extend far beyond pink; if it’s pink and shoe related you are on to a winner. Don’t box yourself in, dear shopper, it needn’t be an actual shoe. A garish, boot-shaped money box will help the woman in your life gather pennies to buy yet more footwear in the new year. If you are confused by the array of shoe-related products then bath bubbles, crystals, bombs and salts will cheer every woman and soap away the lasting pain of childbirth.

Creeping away and rubbing the glitter from my eyes I realise it’s time to leave the high street. I need to think laterally. Out of the box, blue sky. Their presents this year may be a little dull, possibly – heaven forfend – functional, but maybe they’ll be a little more personal.

Standing at the gate of my mother’s house I take a moment to survey my kingdom, gazing over every inch of tat that I have accumulated over my few short years. Boxes of books, belts and cuddly toys are piled up to my eyes on the patio and my mother is still fussing over coolers stacked with frozen spaghetti.

Every year, when the leaves are turning and the nights are drawing in, I find myself here on the roadside ready to ship out to whatever student diggs or London house-share is to be my brand new palace for six months of blissful independence.

This time though it’s not just pots and pans, a laptop and a Shakespeare anthology loaded in the back of my sister’s Peugeot 106, it’s everything I own. Every letter I have ever written, every picture I have ever drawn and every shade of lipstick I’ve outgrown. I’m moving out forever – I can never go home again.

The youngest of my brood, I’m just about the last one to go – my older brother is leaving with me – and it’s time for the parents, tired now after 33 years of child rearing to think about retirement. The family home is safe for now, but there’s talk of them running off to Adelaide, Boston and even Mayo. I can just see some young family moving in and ripping apart my mother’s precious paradise.

“You really want these notes?” she calls flailing my university binders at me. I know I will never, ever so much as breathe on the things in any constructive way again but I call back: “Yeah, put them in with the books.” Everything that is me needs to stay with me. I’m not starting a new life, it’s my life in a new place. A permanent place this time, well, at least it will be longer than one academic term.

I have always been teeny tiny. Not so much size wise, I’m a little shorter than average maybe, but it’s my general diminutive demeanour that makes me always seem a foot smaller and a years younger than my peers.

Although I’m 22 I still view myself as being around about 17; still a little awkward looking, socially backward and with a girlish hopelessness that drives my ever patient boyfriend to the edges of despair. Escape from my own fumbling foolishness has always been sought between the shiny, scented covers of Vogue.

Purchasing the lady’s laminated book of dreams makes me shoot up 4 inches in height in a split second. My posture improves, my usually vulgar north London chirp is coated in a Sloney drawl and I feel suddenly lady like.

Gazing at the tall gazelle like togetherness of womanhood that resides in this most sacred of spaces had never made me feel inadequate. I never assumed that I’d have to lose three stone and buy a Balenciaga bag, a weakness too many ascribe to the glossy’s young female readership.

To me the desires and aspirations wrapped up in the fashion and lifestyle pages were akin to reading Celtic myth; the sights and smells of the green green grass of my homeland are as instantly recognisable in these stories as the curve and gentle grace of glamorous womanhood are in my magazine but both have an air of impossibility that makes them seem like a holiday from harsh reality.

This month the usually reassuring weight of my magazine almost floored me. Stepping away from the news stand a million little flyers broke free from their printed prison and the oddly thick spine of a special high street supplement bumped my toe on its splayed journey into a crowded commuter platform. Hopeless.

While gathering my gubbins together and inadvertently squeezing hot coffee onto the crotch of my jeans I realised something had changed. Then, that cherished monthly moment when I first begin flicking through the thick pages was ruined when a slight jolt caused my over burdened wrist to give way to the enormous weight of the October issue.

I felt smaller than I ever had. Buried under a breeze block of advertising and aspiration, with my girlish limbs waggling helplessly. I began to wonder why I read with obsessive devotion, a tract so far removed from my experience in life. Why I, a girl who always fails in the fashion stakes, would continue to coo over a strapless tulip dress, tailored from thick brocade silk when I – if I were ever offered the opportunity to meet it in person – would be swamped by its grandeur.

Then I began to see, not only had the ladies at Vogue overdone it on their tree killing this season, the weighty pressure of maturity had begun to press onto my narrow shoulders. It is time I thought, looking a pictures of strong, independent women, to stop being a girl, look beyond my pigtails at a new world in which I was one of those imposing adult types.

Forget national service, new rave is all our county’s ‘misguided’ youth needs.

According to a BBC survey more than four in five people believe Britain is in a state of moral decline. Hooded youths have established a reign of terror on our streets and no one is safe from their gun totting alcohol consuming antics.

What is to be done? Gordon Brown is calling for a review into sexual and violent images children are exposed to and David Cameron wants to conscribe the lot of them to national service. It all seems a little much, its as though teenagers have never gotten out of hand before. A few high profile cases has sent the rightwing into a frenzy, clutching for a hunting rifle at the mere sight of a McKenzie tracksuit.

The Tory leader claims there is “anarchy in the UK”. It’s the 1970s all over again. He is right in a sense, the cultural landscape certainly fits his diagnosis: strikes, union revolts, unfair wage restraints in the social sector. Its all frighteningly reminiscent of the winter of discontent.

While the more reliable crime figures would suggest that youth culture isn’t out of control, Mr Cameron might be right in suggesting that they might just be a little angry. His reasoning, however is somewhat misguided. He told Radio 4’s Today programme: “I believe it’s because of social breakdown, it’s because of family breakdown, it’s because of a lack of discipline in schools, it’s a lack of proper values being taught in the home. We are not really going to solve the crime problem unless we solve the family problem.”

Mr Cameron must know it’s really a music scene problem, right? He’s probably just too afraid to say so in front of an old school Tory contingent.

Our children may well be festering with a disillusioned rage but what they need is not more constraints and more discipline, they need an outlet: a movement. The restless dissatisfied youth of the 70s had punk. They dyed their hair, pierced their skin and experienced a freedom that only skin tight leather could restrain. Now tamed stockbrokers, these harrions of social unrest are all holding down City jobs and holding up our economy.

The same is happening again, but this time round it’s all a great deal friendlier. New Rave, the self professed creation of the Mercury prize winning band The Klaxons, is the remedy for a new generation of disaffected youth. The title New Rave is a misnomer for a genre bearing only a passing resemblance to the original rave scene, but don’t ruin their fun: this far more socially acceptable. Little do they know it, but right now glow sticks, guitar riffs and an expertly handled synth are all helping to mould them into well adjusted citizens.

It’s a revolution in its infancy. Still the social commentary of urban grime, the pitiful unhappiness of Emo and the verbose self reflection of indie is infecting our youth with anger and ‘thinking’. What they need is a repetitive tune and slogans like Super Super Party magazine’s “global optimism!” Beats the current government slogan: “global terror” hands down, where can you go wrong?

Soon they will be raving their hearts out, too focused on the mind blowing pattern they are creating with an array of glow sticks to worry about increasing unemployment, poor pay and the fact that they may never be able to afford student fees or a home to live in.

As The Kalxons’ singer and bassist told the Guardian: “There doesn’t seem to be much fun in music at the moment. Rave is something that’s bright, attractive to the eye.” Exactly, distract them from the moribund society they are terrorising for 10 minutes. Hand them back the glow sticks, tutus and candy they were denied along with their childhood and we might just get somewhere.

Social responsibility is not what a child needs in their teens, a certain abstraction from the normal workings of society is needed to help children build their self esteem. They need to be reassured that they understand youth culture while everyone else is old and has lost it. How on Earth are they supposed to sustain any kind of edge or self respect if we march them into ‘patriotic’ service of the community? I mean what’s the big idea?

David Cameron reassuringly says: “The big idea is simple,” marvellous, “every 16-year-old in our country should take part in a programme of national citizen service that’s about personal development, about serving the community, about a big challenge for them to take part in as a right of passage from being a young person to being an adult.” Not so marvellous.

The fact is, apart from being far too sensible, national service simply won’t do because its violent connotations are too much for a generation wearied by a futile war. These skinny, bleary eyed lovers can’t fight. They, as their variously toned neon shirts scream, “Drop beats, not bombs.” After a furious session of throwing shapes they are more likely to share a lengthy hug with you than the wrong end of a black-market handgun.

If things go ariy and a handbag is lovingly coaxed from a pensioner in order to buy more e-number laden Skittles, at least it will be easy to track the neon bandits. With acid green pants and tight fitting hoodie that’s just been freshly attacked with the innards of a glow stick, police will be able to accost the hoodlums even in the dead of night.

We mustn’t promote Rave, this will foil the plan. I propose a rather secret government policy of condemnation: ban neon, classify glow sticks as a class B drug and tell the kids that their infectious candy fun pop is unconscionable filth and they will be dancing, singing and whooo hoooing into sensible careers with a clean criminal record before you can say “music is my favourite mistress.”

No need to be afraid, put down the rifle, the kids are alright. It’s just that every now and then a cloud of mediocrity covers the music scene, turning their rebellion into violence. Now they have revolution full of colour. You might even say they were taking the great Tory leader’s advice and “letting sunshine win the day.”

Walking down the high street a single solitary tear rolled down my cheek. “Is that the first sweater dress of the Autumn season?” I was still trying to muster the energy to peel myself off the window of H&M when a large tourist barged me into the crowd waiting to enter Oxford Street station.

My love affair with the high street has come to a bitter end. I have forsaken shopping and fashion for another God. No longer enthralled to the worship of false idols, I have turned to ethical consumerism.

It was all so innocent when it started, I developed a taste for Fairtrade’s Divine chocolate – the milk chocolate orange ones went down so well with my lunchtime tea – then came the bananas and before I knew it I was buying Ecover washing powder and lugging it home in a ‘bag for life’.

Accusations have been flying around for months now and then this news report hit me. Ghandi once said: “There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.” I’m with that, blad is real. So I’ve realised that there is no joy the most accurate catwalk to highstreet fashion item if garment workers in Bangladesh are earning little more than £1.13 a day.

Sequin detailing will not shake me.

I have taken a drastic step and signed myself up to a month – for starters – of sartorial sobriety. Not once will my abused debit card grace the hallowed tills of my favoured fashion retailers. Never will my weary feet beat a path to Primarni’s door.

All month I will live glamorously on:

My old clothes

New clothes made from my old clothes – by a happy coincidence I’m currently listening to Dolly Parton sing A Coat of Many Colours. (I’m a Londoner of Irish descent, we sometimes err into country music. Don’t judge, it’s racist.)

New clothes made from second hand store purchases.

It’s been done before. There is a blog all about the very same promise but I cannot find it for the life of me right now, when I do I will link.

“Burn the slag,” I woke, rubbed three days of encrusted filth from my face and realised that I was still in a damn field. “Burn the slag,” so I wasn’t dreaming. Kicking off my sleeping bag and stumbling from a soggy tent I emerged to a scene of post nuclear devastation.

The primal chant, “burn the slag,” was coming from the next camp. A group of young festival goers were gathered round the sex doll that had marked the location of our temporary home amid swathes of tents and were proceeding to, well, burn the … slag.

The tribal crescendo that was my first trip to the Reading Festival had just peaked with this display of raw savagery. All in all I had had a fabulous time but I couldn’t help noting the Lord of the Flies-esque moments and the almost religious observance of festival tradition. There was the neon coated Klaxons worshipers, the night time travelling cries of “BOLLOCKS” across the camp site, and the morning communion of beer and fags.

I write this while clutching a can of chilled Fosters and lightly sprinkling fag ash into my computer keyboard. Adjusting to civilisation has been a slow process.

Aside from the worthless social commentary I did see some very good bands. Foremost among them being CSS. My life now sparkles, let’s hope they never tire of being sexy.

It seems I have started a blog. A few years behind the rest of the world, I have cleared a space on the web for my self-involved ramblings. You can all die happy now knowing what I had for breakfast. (Special K – with the berries. Oh, and some real sugary tea. I find it makes up for the lack of fat in my cereal.)

Knowing me – possibly the only reader this here blog will ever be blessed with -  this won’t last long. Soon enough I will realise my utter lack of useful opinions and toddle of this virtual coil. Then again, that hasn’t stopped a world of bloggers.

Here goes nothing.