My FaceTime call rings, my sister answers. I ask the question I will certainly regret: ‘How was your day?’. Oh, the joys of being a primary school teacher. She says how she needs it to be the weekend (baring in mind it was only Tuesday). One day she’s going to flip – they just don’t listen to her. She says she wishes they’d all behave like ‘good little Austin’. She’s on a rant and she isn’t going to stop. The situation is made worse as it is only a few weeks into the first term of the school year, meaning there are thirty new four-year olds trying to get used to a new routine. With a clenched jaw, rolling eyes and a deep… very deep breath, she complains that one of them had gone on a biting rampage, another one had knocked over all the paint and another one or five were tugging on her jumper begging for attention. I attempt to reply but immediately she was back in with ‘and that all happened within the first twenty minutes’!

She props me up on the side of her drawers against the mirror. That’s when I know this is going to be a long conversation, or more like listening session for me. Her face lights up when I ask her about Austin and Hannah. ‘Oh, they’re a god send! They make all this worth it’. This happiness doesn’t last long however, as she requests I don’t even get her started on the germs that the children are swimming in. They cough, sneeze and snort all over everyone and everything. As this is said she pauses and interrupts herself with a sneeze followed by a phlegm filled cough. ‘Great,’ she says in a sarcastic tone ‘I’m ill too!’            ‘Bless you’ I squeal, secretly happy this encounter is happening over technology as otherwise within three to four working days I would be contaminated too. She says how she continuously tells them to cover their mouths but it goes through one ear and out the other and instead they cough everywhere on purpose. She says they wipe their runny noses all over their hands and uniforms, don’t wash their hands and then grab a book, pencil or toy and smother it in their snot. ‘Ewww,’ I reply with a sour expression on my face. I’ve always wanted to be a primary school teacher but there are days, like this one, where she makes this seem less appealing.  

Eventually she stops to ask ‘oh, by the way, how was your day?’      

“So, what’s Facebook then?” My dad says with a confused smile on the edge of a chuckle. He is questioning me due to his lack of knowledge on social media- a term he doesn’t understand either when I tell him that is what Facebook is. I sit next to him in the corner of the family sofa, him in his ‘Dad’s chair’. He feels foolish. He shouldn’t. It’s only social media, I think, it’s not something he should have to care about. But he wants to know.

On my other side, Charlotte (my sister) sits speedily tapping her naturally long nails on her own phone. I sense my Dad curiously look at her screen wanting to be in on the joke as she mutters a laugh. Until recently, my Dad’s idea of a phone was a small plastic brick- something last found in 2000. But now, he has been handed my brother’s old phone as he opts for a newer model. A whole new land of apps and data and settings and font sizes.

Despite the joys of posting aesthetic photos on Instagram and sharing twitter memes of Sonia and Sharon from EastEnders with my friends, a feeling of distrust always comes with it. Not from the memes or of the blog-style fun, but from the dark side of social media that is seeping its way into the good. I find myself not wanting to explain what Snapchat is to my dad in a way to protect him from the dangers he doesn’t understand. Whereas he used to protect me from the big bad world, I was now protecting him from the dangers of the digital age. Snapchat has remained a source of fun with its Snapchat Stories and quirky filters for a healthy amount of years. But during high school me and my friends would spend hours trying out new filters to unhealthily “improve” our features. In contrast, we would also spend many conversations theorising how Snapchat was using our facial recognition to keep our pictures in a data base for a later mysterious use (“probably clones” was our conclusion).

It turns out we weren’t too far off. Not with the clones or with Snapchat’s features but with facial recognition becoming a danger to our society. Deep Fakes. A term that of recent has been slowly crawling its way into the public conscience. It means anyone who knows how to can edit a face onto a video realistically to fool its audience into believing the video is the real deal. This week, two videos arose on the internet of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other’s campaigns for the upcoming election. Only it was not Johnson or Corbyn. It was really people with the said MPs’ faces technically glued onto their bodies saying statements that were very out of character. When I viewed them, I noticed they were realistic but robotically moving beings, eyes glossed over, who stared inhumanely out of the screen past my own confused eyes. Luckily, the makers of these videos were only using Deep Fakes to create awareness of dark technology. The fakes explain the false image that shows us how easy it is to create a fake opinion that changes how people are viewed and how scary that can be. Even more so, the out of sync voices on the edits make it clear the video cannot be trusted- which was most likely intentional. Although to the social media trained eye the edit may seem obvious, for people like my Dad it may not be as noticeable.

You may think “so what?” It’s not going to change your opinion on who to vote for. But you have to think- where else has and will this technology be used? It has been reported on many occasions that Deep Fakes have been used in instances such as revenge porn. Innocent people have been publicly humiliated by being wrongly portrayed with their faces edited onto adult content. And if you didn’t know of Deep Fake technology, why wouldn’t you believe it? The footage is right there. It’s not just a photoshopped image, it’s a moving image. Something widely considered more credible. Videos of supposed celebrities other than Corbyn and Johnson have appeared across the internet, spewing unlikely opinions and lies that can easily be believed. This leads to the ruin of reputations, and therefore, lives. It also meddles with our own understanding of what is real and what isn’t. Fake news could be developed to the extreme with this technology, potentially creating unimaginable horrors. //

Recent BBC TV drama ‘Captured’ even showed how Deep Fakes could wrongly incriminate people through the use of it in CCTV footage. It would be wrong to say this series is realistic in its take on CCTV, however it does explain and draw awareness to how Deep Fakes work and affect people’s lives. As it develops, the victims could include more of the general public, with Deep Fakes maybe even going on to fool the most social media obsessed and even the highest professions, as seen in Captured. This leaves me wondering what we will be able to trust and create an honest opinion upon in the very near future.

Precautions are beginning to be put in place to avoid the up rise of Deep Fakes, nevertheless. Twitter’s new policy includes restricting Deep Fakes which is a step towards the better. But there are so many other outlets online that still need to approach this. What’s more is the fact that once something is out on the internet, it is never truly gone. Things are shared, things are transported from one media outlet to the next. Things are not forgotten. 

As my dad often tells me, “never trust anyone fully,” it is to no surprise that older generations distance themselves from the internet. This doesn’t stop them from falling victim to the Wide Web’s lies, however. Coming from a younger generation, I admit we cannot help feeling attached to social media as it has been present throughout the majority of our lives. This makes us all vulnerable to dangers such as Deep fakes- the former being more oblivious, the latter being more exposed to it. And as the younger generation is more aware, will we trust the internet for much longer? You only have to look around a lecture university hall to see small squares of coloured post- its or circles of blue tac covering the front camera of 2/3 of the laptops in the room to know we don’t trust our beloved tech- albeit subconsciously.

I’m finally trying to explain Snapchat to my Dad when I receive the reply “ah I don’t need none of that. I don’t trust it.”  I don’t trust it, runs through my head and unfortunately, I agree. Something I didn’t realise until this moment that I had thought for a while.

An important aspect of going to school, especially when you are a child, is to make sure that you pay attention in class. You listen to teachers telling you how important your grades are, that your exams at the end of this year will set jet-black precedents, stone tablets that define who you are. Your SATs will give you some numbers, a 1, 2, or 3 – these are bad, scary numbers. You must learn to be afraid of 1s, 2s, and 3s because they are Delphic oracles – revere them, respect them, and abide by them, or you will be unhappy. Be sure to jump with joy when your mother buys you the Year 6 CLC Science Textbook for Struggling Students, because it is a happy moment; winding, unlit avenues of learning are ones any child should walk down.

School will begin to feel intolerable – when this happens, you will recall when you were 6 years old, watching increasingly vague celebrities climbing Kilimanjaro for charity – and you will recall how you stood up and planted your feet on toe-slicing carpet, and how in that moment you were bigger than any Kilimanjaro you could imagine. You will hold that feeling in the ball of your fist when walking through corridors and classrooms, and for so long it feels like it’s burning you. When you’re finally forced to uncurl your fingers and let it go, the world will be put on your shoulders.

When your father asks if you’re really trying for the 17^th time this month, and when he says really he means really really, you should tell him again that you are. This is not untrue. You go to school every day, just like the other children, but when you look down at your desk you don’t see the 4^th handout of today’s Maths lesson. Instead you see a page of blank impossibilities because questions never sit well with you, like a radio just out of tune, or an egg yolk that had been cooked for too long. These pages are for doodling. Returning home with pens run dry will make your father happy, because you ‘wrote so much down that it ran out’ – little will he know of your immense artistic portfolio, created by forbidden ink, with each masterpiece ending up in a bin at the end of each day. He will ask you again if you want to be a plumber when you grow up, because a plumber is what silly little boys who don’t pay attention in lessons end up becoming. His words will sting you, and you will shed tears.

Your teachers will refer to you as an enigma – this is a word you will not truly understand for some years, but while you’re still young you will like its shape, the way it rolls around on your tongue like ice cream that’s about to melt. You’ll enjoy how grand it makes you feel, as now you aren’t just another splinter of driftwood in a sea that’s too big to think about, you are perplexing, and the fact that people can’t quite understand you only makes you even more worth understanding. But they will not appreciate the things that make you enigmatic, like the way that you start your sentences with prepositions, or the way you answer the big questions they pose to you by putting them in boxes so that you can make them small (because things that are too big make you sick to the pit of your stomach). They will not like how you prefer the smell of the poppy and lavender plants they put on the outside of the playground to the smell of a fresh felt tip pen, or how you prefer to make up your own games than play tag with the other kids because when you run too fast your lungs complain.

Nor will you like how your chest feels like it’s about to cave in when your mother finally tells you what ‘enigma’ really means; you will not take pleasure in the knowledge that all it really meant was that your teachers couldn’t understand why you were so useless.

You will get older and eventually stop caring if what you are doing is making your father proud, because old people who make children unhappy are not entitled to define how you should live. You will teach yourself how to ride a bike without any hands, and you will create recipes for pasta sauces that taste better than your mother’s. You will teach yourself how to make a computer, and then how to break it. You will take up the drums, learn how to play them better than the older kids, and then give them up, and you will hug your brother so tight that you feel like you’re 4 again, toes buried in Cornish sand, waiting eagerly for your birthday tomorrow.

The truth is; life’s a mess, and there are no lessons, unless we smash our horrible experiences into something that vaguely represents one in the hopes of better tomorrow.

Every self-respecting Brit has a story of their first binge drinking experience, it’s practically tradition. We usually bury it deep, but I’ve been thinking about mine recently, and how times I’ve changed. If I was half the shit now, then I was when I was 14, I’m sure I would’ve been be “cancelled” by now; perhaps you’d even have a point to do so. But let’s go back to when I was 14 so I can explain.

Everyone took a card. Ed shuffled his deck flamboyantly. We sat in a circle in Henry’s bedroom.

There would be no sexual forfeits. Of the 5 of us, Ting was the only girl, and she was with Henry. And the boys agreed that we didn’t want to kiss each other.

“Ed probably does cus he’s gay.” Henry added, brilliantly. Those were simpler times.

Half an hour later and the wheels had already started to come off.

Henry was wrestling with his brother next door; who accused him of stealing his Dairy Milk chocolate bar. Freddie was much bigger than Henry, but he usually held his own. Dom had thrown up on the bathroom floor which was, bizarrely, carpeted. Dark green no less. Now, Dom was in a heap over the toilet seat and Ed was patting him on the back, singing to him gently. Grenade by Bruno Mars no less. This had all happened in the blink of an eye, so Ting and I found ourselves at a loose end, alone, in Henry’s bedroom. She was sat on the edge of Henry’s single bed, and I was sat opposite, in Henry’s gaming chair.

“So, here we are…” I really hated myself sometimes.

“Yep.” Ting agreed. The “p” really popped.

Miraculously, a conversation came about out of this desolate wasteland. She thought I was funny, even. Huh. So, we talked for an hour or so. She liked Henry but she wasn’t sure if he was the one. She liked my hair, weirdly. I acted like I wasn’t surprised. She liked cats, pizza and Family Guy. Whoa. I also liked cats, pizza, and Family Guy. I couldn’t believe the extraordinary number of things we had in common. This was not good.

More or less out of the blue, but also not really out of the blue at all, Ting leaped across the room and into my treacherous arms. Henry was my best friend.

“Shall we be friends, Will?” She whispered in my ear.

I gulped. I want to be friends. We stayed like that. I confessed I was secretly in love with her. I didn’t realise beforehand, but I wasn’t lying either. We might’ve kissed if Ed hadn’t walked in when he did.

We sprang back to our original places. He eyeballed us before walking further inwards, inspecting us and the room for clues like Sherlock Holmes. Don’t mind me, he said curiously. Sharp as a knife was Ed.

“I need the toilet.” I blurted out, scrambling out of the room and into the bathroom next door. Dom was going the other way, back from the brink of death, it looked like. I locked myself in and thought hard about my next move. I heard mumbling from outside, I pressed my ear against the bathroom door.

“They were what! He said what to her!? STANNARD!” Henry yelled in his Bristonian rage.

This was it. Boiling point. The blood was pumping through my veins. There was nothing else other than to go out there and apologise like a man. I inhaled deeply and opened the door.

I’m gonna kill him. Henry steamed. He was headed straight for me with a 4 ft plank of wood that looked like it had a nail sticking out the end of it. I’ve no idea where he got it from. Dom and Ed seized him like a trapped animal. Let me at him! He barked; more like a Jack Russel if anything.

Him being restrained. I realised I sort of had the floor. A one-man-show called “Sorry I Tried to Get Off with your Girlfriend”.

Gesticulating wildly, I made my case. “Yes.” I nodded furiously, “I’m an idiot.” “No!” Shaking my head. “We didn’t kiss. Did we Ting?” I pointed at Ting like a conductor points at his trumpets. She shrugged mischievously. I went on. “Please don’t hit me with your big bat, what if you punched me instead?”

We punched each other as a matter of daily commerce; I knew it wouldn’t be a good enough offer.

“Ok, you can punch me in the face.”

Henry growled. That wouldn’t do either; but he was still locked in the peacemakers’ grip.

Now, sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if Dom and Ed hadn’t restrained him. I think if he’d had a free run at me, he probably would’ve gotten all embarrassed at the last second, called me a knobhead and stormed off. But luckily for him, the boys did hold him back, so he got to pretend like he was really going to hit me with a big scary bat.

Things settled down eventually, although I don’t remember the rest of the night; apparently, I spent it with my head on the toilet seat regularly throwing up a luminous cocktail of stomach acid and cider (figures; to this day I can’t stand the smell of the rotten stuff).

The next morning, all was right in the world. I woke up on a sofa downstairs with a blanket on top of me and a glass of water beside me. Henry came in around lunch time.

Alright mate. He grinned. Rough night I take it?

Um. Yeah. I scratched my head, confused. I remembered. Listen Henry, I really am so-

“Nuff of that kid. Mums making bacon butties. Get yourself up, you’re an eye sore in my mums lovely living room.”

And that was it.

These days, when I go home to Bristol, I almost always go to the pub with my old mate Henry. We love nothing more than retelling these ridiculous stories from our childhood.

The funny thing is; Henry probably didn’t think twice about it; forgiving me, that is. To him, forgiving me was as easy as a mother to forgive her baby for throwing up all over her new blouse. He just did.

Of course, this is only a thing that happened. And I’ll always shy away from trying to pluck universal truth out of a drunken night of teenage angst. But I will say this; there’s something beautiful about the way Henry dropped his bat and got on with being my friend. The other side of the decade, and the world looks different than it did in 2011. Forgiveness seems like a thing that is harder to come by. Certainly, on the world stage, some things have happened that are hard to forgive.

But I’m glad I have friends like Henry. You need them, if you’re a fallible human being like me.

The first day back at University and as usual, I had forgotten to pack an abundance of essential items I needed for the first week of lectures. My mother and father were not pleased to say the least.

She will say it was all my fault; that I need to start taking responsibility. He will say I was the most unorganised person he’d ever met. She will say I was old enough to know better, despite the fact she had forgotten too. He will say it was the last time he would do me a favour, the last time he would pay for my mistake, the last time he would help me if I had done something wrong.

“Calm down” I will respond, reluctantly.

He will say he was even angrier than earlier. She will say I never listen. He will say I can’t do anything for myself. She will say I need to learn from my mistakes. He will say he was tired of telling me the same thing repeatedly, he will say he’d told me a million times to check I packed everything.

“I’m sorry. I promise, I will remember everything next time” I will whisper.

She will say it was fine and that this was the end of the conversation, that we couldn’t do anything about it now. He will say he knows but that wasn’t the point, that I will do the exact same thing next year. He will say he was sure of it. She will repeat that this was the end of the conversation. He will say well, we’ll see won’t we.

I will sit there looking defeated, my eyes aimed at my mother; they will speak the words “Thank you.”

You sit behind your work desk. You sit upright, so upright that books would balance perfectly upon your head. You cross your legs and pull every strand of hair over your left shoulder. You recognise, this is how a lady should sit. You feel your back start to throb because you are wearing a push up bra, that is two sizes too small. You recognise, in order to keep your job, you must show cleavage. You see your boss arrogantly walk towards you. You flick through alternatives, but you continue to drag your spectacles to the end of your nose. You look at him, enough time for him to recognise you have noticed him. Because god forbid if you don’t notice him. Nevertheless, he continues to walk towards you. He informs you of the amount of photocopying that needs to be done. You recognise that he is capable of doing this. But you are aware of your status.  You rise from your chair, cautious of your five denier tights. You know you have to have your legs on show. You walk away from him, pretending your feet are not patterned with blisters. But you know you have to wear heels as the men in the office prefer it that way. However, you make sure your heels are not high enough for you to be taller than the men in the office. You lean against the photocopier for support. You lick the tip of your finger and begin to flick through the pages. You know you shouldn’t read what you are photocopying as you are breaching his privacy. Whilst you wait for the first batch of pages, of which you assumed was admin, you undo one more button of your pressed shirt and pull up your skirt, so the spilt at the back just reveals your lower bum cheek. Now you are dressed appropriately, you work to your full potential. Careful not to chip a polished nail, you open the photocopier and begin to alphabetically arrange the admin. Once complete you begin copying the next batch. Breaching his privacy, you can’t help but read the fresh copies. How a women should act in a workplace, you read. You hand over the copies to your boss. You smile as though you are clueless. After all, that is the duty of a lady.

My Name

The origin of my name comes from Bangladesh, which my mum said means ‘Earth’. Or as my sister loves to say, means dirt. However, one aspect of my name which always baffles everybody is the fact that it is actually a nickname. My legal name is Fabbiha Kifayat Azad Suhan (Urbi). I know, they have nothing in common. Yet I never use Fabbiha for anything other than official documents and exams. However, in primary school, the other kids loved to merge both my names in order to create Furby. Yes, one of those horrible looking toys from the 90’s. That’s what I apparently represented. If it wasn’t Furby, for the 18-years of mispronunciation that I had succumbed to, Herbie was also a fan favourite. It was during these times that I wanted to simply swap the first two letters of my name to form Rubi instead. I believed it would fit into the area I lived in a lot more and be more socially acceptable. My mum liked the name Urbi from the start because she found it short and sweet, whereas my uncle confirmed it because in our culture, there tends to be an elder who approves each name. She found it in her trusty book of baby names. But before Urbi, there was the possibility of names such as Yamin, Wasif and Nafim as my initial scan declared that I would be a boy. However, the older I get, the more I enjoy having an unusual name because it’s unique, and so far, one of a kind. Another thing I always loved about my name is the fact that babies and children could never pronounce the ‘R’ in my name, because it always sounded cute when they called me Ubi. It was a quality that my name always had, because the kids could pronounce every other name in the family quite easily. My goal for university was to be able to introduce myself and my name properly, which has been a success in some part. Hearing my name said correctly was a shock at first, and sometimes I’d forget to respond because it was something uncommon. But now it fills me with pride to hear my name be pronounced properly, or at least attempted with full intention. Although, even at university, a new version of my name has been born, in the form of Orbi. Now this I can’t blame since there was literally a Pope called Urbi et Orbi, so I suppose it almost makes sense. It is still incorrect, but I let it slide most of the time because it’s exhausting having to correct my name several times to the same person and still see them look spaced out with absolute confusion. One minor thing I can’t stand is when people roll the ‘R’ in an attempt to sound somewhat cultural when saying my name. It makes no sense to me because I can’t physically roll my tongue anyway. Nevertheless, here I am, 19 years later, as Urbi, the one and only.

This is where your articles are going to go…

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

A compilation of profound nonsense by under qualified bunch of young adults trying to express themselves.