By Jessie McLaughlin

Number One: The back of the queue at One Stop, squashed in between the sparse soft drink selection and that freezer containing frozen mince. If you’re at the back of the queue, and the looks-like-dog-food-and-also-looks-like-that-shite-on-the-Iceland-advert mince is staring you in the face, chances are it’s been a long day and you’re queuing up to get pissed.  Except that if you’re stood here you’ve probably left it a little too late, and One Stop being One Stop, they’ve sold out of what you wanted. Instead of the cheap gin and calorie-free tonic combo you usually settle for, you’re now stuck with Gordon’s full price gin and Ribena/some other dire substitute for yourself. Add this to the unusually high number of crackheads who will try to speak to you in the queue, and that weird buzzing sound which resonates in the shop at all times, and you’ll probably be put off going out altogether.

Number Two: Leeds Coach Station. Ok, so this a bit of an obvious one because, lets face it, any coach station is awful. In fact, any public place, where locals, drunks, and students alike can wander in willy nilly is a breeding ground for self destruction. Avoid at all costs the manic woman behind the ‘Information’ desk, anything with a ‘TOILET’ sign hanging above it, and the swarm of pigeons they force you to stand amongst as you wait for a coach that probably will never arrive.

Number Three: Any of the lower levels of the Brotherton Library. I don’t like the Brotherton anyway, it’s too exposed, too academic, and it echoes like crazy. It may boast a grand entrance, but as soon as you shuffle the wrong way into someone’s chair it might as well be all over. Everyone has heard you and all the PhD students are looking up from their monster journals and peering at you through eyes so intelligent they don’t even fully detect life as low as ‘the undergraduate’. However, the lower levels are beyond anything I had ever expected. Having only discovered them late last semester I am still in shock. Whether it is the slowly poisonous stench of books that have not been moved since they were first deposited down there a century ago, or the sickening, and never-ending circle formation you endure to try and find the exit, there is something about deep down below in there that chills me to the very bones.

Number Four: Standing at the Bar of The Hyde Park Pub. If you can call it that. I personally wouldn’t try and name an establishment that blares mainstream ‘indie anthems’ that were released roughly half a decade ago into a room of fake wood furniture and students guzzling pints of Carling and plates of re-heating frozen mass-produced meat pie a ‘pub’. 

Number Five: The bathroom of someone’s house party you don’t know in a bath which quite possibly has (prior to your arrival) been urinated in. Pretty self-explanatory really.

By Liz Williams, Leeds University

Celebrities are annoying. Fact. Especially those who are praised for their apparently admirable ability to look naturally stylish in an unkempt and bedraggled way that the fashionistas of this world are falling over themselves to fawn over.

First, we have Alexa Chung. Well slap me with a shapeless sack and call me Alexa! Perhaps it is not so much her style itself- although her 'scruffy chic' minus the chic does at times make me want to give those awkward hunched shoulders a good shake – as the fact that she is so relentlessly praised for her so-called ‘effortless’ style (which somehow still manages to score the hat trick of being bland, dull and inaccessible all at once).

 It’s likely we’ve reached bad times when our idea of creativity and intrigue is packaged in the form of a dead-behind-the-eyes model glaze and a half-arsed dragged-through-a-hedge hair cut. I’m all for the tousled, just-got-out-of-bed style, but if you’re going to go for it, then go for it. For someone so supposedly innovative and effortless, Alexa does everything by halves: half smile, half stooped, half bothered. Gorgeous? More like gormless.

And then there’s Kate Moss. While Alexa followed, Kate pioneered.  I single handedly blame her for all unwearable trends and unattainable looks ever created. Come on, the woman has given us skinny jeans (both a blessing and a curse ,admittedly) and impossibly short shorts! Ok, I exaggerate (slightly), but Mossy is continuously hailed as some kind of universal style creator and leader. I admit that the woman does look well put together, but the idea of the faux “I haven’t really tried but I’ve actually been up since 6am messing up my hair and finding the perfect outfit” casual but cool is a definite frustration – and a look that people persistently try to copy and recreate.

 And indeed, how inspiring can a slouchy t-shirt and leggings designed to strangle your legs actually be? (Apart from inspiring me to get down the gym that is.) Unashamedly slobby is actually pretty appealing to most of us mere mortals, but the artful contriving of distressed denim micro minis and a dressy, quirky item like a trilby presents to us a lie. 'Style' is perhaps a contradictory idea; the illusion that it is innate, yet in reality being extremely artificial.

It is this somewhat impossible style of being artfully distressed that makes and has made Kate Moss one of the most enigmatic supermodels of the last 15 years. And one of the most annoying.

By Rebecca Inman

Unless you’re one of those uber-annoying people who sit a 9 o’clock exam on January 12^th after skim-reading half a text book five minutes to midnight on January 11^th, and still manage to get a First, chances are as exams approach you’ll be replacing those by-gone, lazy afternoons watching Jeremy Kyle re-runs with your revision notes cloistered up in the library. Eddy B or the Bruv? Your choice. But make no mistake, whichever one of these havens for the written word you choose, you’re guaranteed to be sharing it with the library twats. You know the type. Before you’re even past the barriers you’ll have to contend with Miss Freshling, who can’t find her fugitive library card in the chasms of her Primani bag. And rather then undergo this excavation in the fresh outdoors, of course she has to be standing centre stage, the swipe machines as her mechanical audience. But she’s the least of your worries. Eventually she’ll locate her target, and she, you, and the accumulation of the other fifteen impatient students will reach their destinations. Now to find a desirable study location. Behind door number one there’s the group study area, recognizable, not by a desirable mix of well-studied intellectuals, conversing over their heavily annotated editions of The Riverside Chaucer, but instead by hoards of post-pubescent females, fanciful that they resemble some Sex-and-the-City-esque socialites, sitting hunchbacked, leaning in around circular tables, feeding off the fact that someone called Bunny is screwing someone called Hugo. Rather than stay and listen to the cause of their latest voracious eruption of giggling, door number two seems like the better option. The silent area. The area that is actually silent. This surely means an ideal studying environment. Wrong! It means the fidgets incessant toe-tapping, neck-cracking, pencil-snapping and paper shuffling is amplified ten fold, and if you’ve ever tried to concentrate under such conditions, you’ll agree that Carrie and Charlotte’s salacious gossip appears so much more appealing. So now you’re left with door numero three, the quiet area, and the only place in the English speaking world where ‘quiet’ can be defined as ‘loud, raspy whispers’. Basically, I don’t care if you’re making a piss-poor attempt to whisper, if they can hear you at the other end of the phone that you shouldn’t be using, over the hub-bub in their background, then it’s not whispering. All you’ve succeeded in doing is an impression of a gruff old man with a sore-throat, who, regardless of his ailments, still talks loudly! Bravo! So what now? There’s never more then three doors but the library twats multiply like rabbits in heat. My vote? Go home. It was just a delusion that you were going to do work anyway!