Name: Cara Delevingne
Born: August 12, 1992
Roles: Spokesman for a generation of thin rich girls. Model. Actress. Musician. Retweeter. Gurning face of young London.
Notable achievements: Model Of The Year – British Fashion Awards 2012. Face of Burberry. 

Short of tattooing her face inside your eyelids, Cara Delevingne couldn't feel more ubiquitous. Everywhere you turn your head (assuming you only turn your head between clubs in Soho, Vogue covers, The Sun's Bizarre column and Twitter), there she is, being tastefully kooky, being rich and being striking-looking – a classy fashion industry avatar made out of all the things Karl Lagerfeld dreams about while wearing his sunglasses at night.

But for all her omnipresence, there remains a lot we still don't know about the Next Kate Moss. Who exactly is this barely-legal, mainly-regal who haunts our pop culture? Where does she come from (besides Belgravia), and where is she going to (apart from an overpriced nightclub with Jake Bugg and Rita Ora)? Here's a one-stop guide to Cara Delevingne so that you can talk to her without feeling weird the next time you bump into her at Roberto Cavalli's mansion or on a yacht in the south of France.

SHE'S THE NEW KATE MOSS AFTER THE LAST NEW KATE MOSS
But she doesn't have such a good surname. Moss – it's clean, it's crisp, it sits evenly on billboards, it describes a physical object that is velveteen. Delevingne – there is patently at least one too many "n's" in there. It's a squalid, faux-Frenchie mess that makes even seasoned writers feel a little dyslexic. Regardless, the shadowy global syndicate who proclaim people new versions of other things has spoken unanimously: she is the modelling world's Next Big Thing until at least S/S14 (despite the fact she's already won Model of the Year, which kind of makes her more a Big Thing than the NBT, but whatever). Update your Google Alerts. Practice crossing your eyes. Tear down your saliva smeared shrine to Lily Cole.

SHE WAS DISCOVERED BY THE SAME WOMAN WHO FOUND KATE MOSS BEHIND THE EXCESS BAGGAGE AISLE
Famously, Moss was at JFK with her parents when Storm Models founder Sarah Doukas jumped out from whatever they had at American airports before Starbucks and presented her with a contract inked in blood. Twenty years later, Loukhas signed up her daughter's school friend and Cara's older sister, Poppy, to do a couple of shoots. Loukas was then well-placed to notice the younger Cara's ascent towards womanhood, weighing in her head whether her body parts were shifting towards marketable proportions and, if so, precisely what amount she could expect to charge for them – the classic fashion fairytale realised.

SHE LOOKS WEIRD, AND THAT'S KINDA LIKE MOSS, TOO
But that's a thing, right? In fact, that's the thing. Like the gap-mouthed 90s superwaifs, she has swum out of the usual litter of beautiful faces by virtue of her imperfections. In Cara's case, it's the thick eyebrows that suggest Gallagher paternity and the slightly snubby nose that suggests Shih-Tzu maternity. Having a thing is important because it allows you to cross over between the two hemispheres of fashion: the cool and the corporate. Each bolsters the other: you need to have enough of an edge that the highstreet will pay you thousands to donate some of your cool to their latest campaign. Essentially, you need stunning looks and a condiment of oddness, and Cara Delevingne looks amayonaissing.

THE VERB FOR WHAT MODELS DO IS "WALK", AND SHE'S GREAT AT IT
As in: "She walked at 25 shows this season," or, "She's walking at New York, Paris and Milan this year." Anyway, Delevingne is apparently an expert walker. She walked in 39 shows last season, with 13 of those walks all in New York the other week. That's a lot of walking to do in the space of five days, but Cara is a professional and clearly won't let the threat of bunions stop her from doing her job the way it's supposed to be done.

SHE RUNS WITH THE NEW BRAT PACK
If, by "The New Brat Pack", you mean Nick Grimshaw, singer and personality vacuum Rita Ora, loin-spawn Georgia May Jagger, other loin-spawn Coco Sumner, aristo loin-spawn Jazzy de Lister and model whose parents couldn't spell "Jordan", Jourdan Dunn. She was also recently rumoured to be dating cheeky mum-fucker Harry Styles and is now reported to be having a thing with the one man who's seen it all: Jake Bugg.

SHE IS A SOCIAL MEDIA GENIUS: HALF A MILLION FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER CAN'T BE WRONG 
Ask any social media consultant what's wrong with most people's intimate photos on Instagram or Tumblr or whatever, and he'll reply that they contain too many indifferent dinners and don't contain nearly enough hot models larking about with their mates. This is where Delevingne comes into her own. She = hot model. Mates = other hot models. And she's always larking, either in a onesie (vulnerable, childlike) or new rave's knuckle-duster leftovers (assertive, modern), striking a natural balance between canny intimacy and the glamour that is her job when she's not posting photos online. She even posts pictures of herself munching late-night McDonald's, which is a very evil sort of genius indeed.

SHE'S A STRAIGHT-UP COMEDIAN
The fashion world knows – and evidently loves – Delevingne's "irreverent, impish humour". Translation: she crosses her eyes in photos. Crossing her eyes has become a signature move for Delevingne. It is her Mobot, her Usain Bolt lightning bolt, her Boris Johnson gurgling poshly. There are whole corners of the internet that exist solely to catalogue the breadth of her vast funny-face arsenal. She pouts, she sucks in her cheeks, she generally subverts her good looks with zany silliness. Isn't she a good sport? Isn't she just like you and me? So what if I'm carrying a few extra pounds? At least I know gorgeous girls like Cara aren't looking down on me through the straws of their coconut oil and celery smoothies. 

HER GRANDDADDY PUT THE "QUEEN" IN HARPER'S & QUEEN
In the 60s, Sir Jocelyn Stevens took some on-its-arse mag called The Queen, and re-tooled it as the bible of the hipper end of the King's Road set. Then it merged with Harper's and, at some point, they dropped the "Queen" bit from the title and added "Bazaar" instead. He also supplied the money for famed 60s pirate radio station Radio Caroline, the Rinse FM of its day. 

Anyway, the point is this Stevens bloke was a bit of a face back when people used to talk about faces. He was later chairman of English Heritage, his wife was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – they inevitably spent a lot of time doing gin and cigarettes with her in Mustique.

THE WAY PEOPLE WRITE ABOUT HER FATHER WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO PUNCH YOUR GENITALS OFF TO CASH OUT OF THE HUMAN RACE
“Daddy is Charles Delevingne, a former debs’ delight. He is handsome, perma-tanned and often described as a 'man-about-town'.” Really? A debs' delight, eh? A fucking man-about-town? Where I come from, a man-about-town is a bus driver and Deb's delight is what we call 20 Lambert & Butler. 

HER MOTHER HAS HAD A BIT OF A TOUGH ONE
The "delightful Pandora" was also a bit of a rascal in her day. What I'm hinting at here is that, if you search for "Pandora Delevingne", Google helpfully suggests "drug addiction" as the first correlated term. Pandora blamed the strain of living with a severely-disabled brother, Rupert, for her long, sad tale of heroin use. He died, aged 22, and dad Sir Jocelyn spent a lot of the 70s saving his daughter from her smacky life-problems.

He  "dragged her out of druggy squats" and "tracked down her drug dealer, ensuring he was jailed". He was parental Judge Dredd, basically. Pandora later told Tatler, “He once hauled me out of the overdose ward in New York and put me into a loony bin in Switzerland and used to sit there, wherever I was, holding my hand and saying, 'Blood is thicker than water.'" Nowadays, Pandora is also good buddies with royal punchline, Sarah Ferguson.

APPARENTLY WIKIPEDIA IS ALLOWED TO OFFICIALLY LEND CREDENCE TO THE TERM "IT GIRL"
On sister Poppy Delevigne's page it reads: “Poppy Delevingne (born September 15, 1986) is a British model, socialite and It Girl.” I'm sorry, but does anyone know how to edit these things? Can someone please go in there and slash this entry back towards the basic tenets of reality? Poppy is a fellow expert at looking pretty, fair enough, she's clearly good at it, she's done campaigns for Jigsaw and Burberry. Poppy runs with her own slightly older Brat Pack that includes ex-flatmate Sienna Miller, Princess Beatrice and Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich's latest sex partner. Poppy believes that she is called Poppy because her mum was making a sly reference to her own drug habit. Which sounds like nothing but a gift card to lifetime in therapy.

JOAN COLLINS IS HER GODMOTHER
And the MD of Conde Nast is her godfather. Enough said.

JUST IN CASE MODELLING DOESN'T WORK OUT, SHE'S STILL KEEPING MUSIC AS A BACK-UP PLAN
According to her agent, Sarah Doukas, Delevingne has "a lovely singing voice". When she started modelling, she also had a development deal going with mogul-man Simon Fuller. He offered to change her name and turn her into a pop thing. She made two never-released albums for him, but then the modelling went into hyperdrive and it all got shelved, denying the world what could have either been another beautiful but inevitably bland V Festival main stager, or the 21st Century's answer to Sam Fox.  

BUT SHE ALSO WANTS TO ACT
People who like to watch boring films may have seen her small role in Stoppard's adaptation of Anna Karenina last year. People who like unfathomably shit Tim Burton films will have failed to see her in Alice in Wonderland a few years back, though she made it down to the last few for the title role. More recently, she almost starred in critically-reviled West End musical Viva Forever, but eventually turned it down, saying, “My agent said: 'No, you can’t, it will be a career killer.' Of course, I loved the Spice Girls. I loved Geri and Baby, but who liked Posh Spice? They said I looked like her and I said: 'That’s not cool, that’s really mean.' ”

She doesn't seem to have twigged that she's working with Posh's son in the new Burberry campaign, probably her biggest advertising job yet.

Obviously all hats are stupid, but just as you wouldn't want to punish a student halls weed dealer for the crimes of a man who can't stop setting orphanages on fire, it's important to treat specific types of headwear with just the right amount of derision. There are varying degrees of hat wanker and I'm here to help you identify them with this handy spotter's guide.

TRILBIES

Let's start with the big fish. Nothing makes my heart feel more like clearing its desk than the sight of a trilby. For reasons known only to university town perverts, trilby wearers think their brimmed turds lend them an air of Rat Pack mystery, as if they were bought with dirty money from an old, servile milliner who doesn't ask questions. But if the Rat Pack were alive today, they wouldn't be seen dead in trilibies. In fact, they'd probably get their henchmen to beat up anyone who wore a trilby in their presence for making them feel like they were part of a lesbian hen night. (I don't have anything against lesbians, btw, but the Rat Pack were from a different time.)

If you yourself are a trilby wearer, you probably also regard breaking into schoolboy French mid-sentence as nature’s very own Rohypnol. In the world of hats, the only thing worse than a trilby is a white trilby, a trilby with pinstripes, or a trilby worn at a “rakish” angle. If you ever see anyone combining all three of these elements out at the club, by all means give them both barrels, just don't leave your pint unattended when you go for a piss.

Wanker rating: 5/5 - the alpha male of hat wankers.

BOATERS

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a trilby in any other fabric still makes you a prick. The only redeeming quality of the boater is that straw is remarkably flammable. Worn exclusively by Oxbridgers who only got into the drinking society because their gran paid for a new library, and satellite town Jack the Lads who get jacked every time they're not out with the lads. Oh, and Olly Murs, the shit-box messiah of the boater scene – a man whose V Festival main stage slot must have been a spiritual homecoming on par with Malcolm X's visit to Mecca.

Wanker rating: 3.5/5 – the straw that made the camel puke.

BEANIES

Beanies are weird ones, aren't they? They're also fucking everywhere, generally worn in one of two ways – either in the Craig David style, where it's wrapped right down over the ears like a brain condom. Or in the East 17 style, where it's balanced precariously at a weird angle and still looks like a condom, but an ill-fitting one that's been twisted on hastily in a botched car fuck. Why would you wear your hat at an angle that makes your roots sweaty but your ears cold?

I don't know if your mother ever told you this, but when your hair sweats too much, it falls out. Combine the current lust for lactic follicle acid with other youth culture tropes, and it seems like Tumblr's inadvertently raising a generation of girls who'll grow up to have freakishly over-developed cheek muscles and male pattern baldness. It's similar to the Thalidomide thing, but with more Palace shirts.

The real problem with beanies is that they’re the gateway to a myriad of other sins: camo jackets, creepers, veterbrae jewellery, alpine sports, goatees – they're the start of the virus, basically. It's as if they warm people's brains to a temperature at which they're only capable of making bad decisions. Before you know it, you're David Beckham, the most eligible bachelor in the world, walking around waving at people with a cow's vagina hanging off the back of your head.

Wanker rating: 2.5/5 - up for negotiation.

SNAPBACKS

Stop trying to cling onto the last vestiges of your rapidly dwindling youth – nothing screams “post-18 parental allowance” louder than a 20-something "kid" who really, really cares about streetwear brands.

Fall outside that age range and you're either the guy at the house party discussing Squadda Bambino's flow and strains of "haze" in the kitchen, or the cool uncle who slips away at family barbecues to smoke haze because nobody wants to talk about Squadda Bambino's flow.

Wanker rating: 4/5 – "There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an English man in a baseball cap." – Johnny Borrell, circa 2006. I think?

THOSE FLOPPY-EARED HATS I DON'T KNOW THE NAME OF

Just kidding! No one wears these any more; it's 2013. Except in Bristol, where CD-Rs of Kidulthood are being passed excitedly around college campuses and N-Dubz are still the Lickle Rinsers Crew.

Wanker rating: 1/5 – these guys get enough hassle in the street, they don't need to come home in the evening to find me heckling them on the internet, too.

HATS WITH ANIMAL EARS ON

Hey, precious snowflake, know what sort of people you're gonna attract? People who want to fuck animals.

Wanker rating: 4.8/5 - bestiality's not my vibe.

The hat wanker still thrives, regardless of how many people tell them they look like an idiot. So, trilby-wearers, you take the crown for being the most odious and reprehensible of all the hat wankers. Well done, you greasy bunch of pricks. It’s the only accolade you’ll ever get.

James Blake was, probably rightly, heralded as one to watch in 2011. His first album arrived early in that year, but its excessive promptness was perhaps not the only reason for its omission from the retrospective best-of lists. The debut had a kind of insufficiently elaborated feel. The song structures were dark alleys and even dead ends. While the production was rendered with all the authenticity of true talent, the overall effect was of an artist with something on the tip of his tongue, never finding the means to articulate what he was really getting at.

‘The Wilhelm Scream’, for example, is full of meticulous details: tasteful reverb; treated vocals, permutating kit sounds, and a ranging, slightly complicated lead melody. But what do all these nice little ideas add up to? What is their sum? Neither an interesting song, nor an exploratory sound experiment. In other words: It is a failure. And the first album is littered with disappointing near-misses and also-rans akin to it. The first thing to know about his follow up, then, is that does not disappoint.

Blake’s most coherent solo single and first Overgrown discharge, ‘Retrograde’ features Blake’s most indebtedly soul-flavoured vocal cadence yet, and yet this debt is used to redeem one of his boldest performances. The last time his voice was this earnestly exposed was on the insufficiently distinguished cover ‘Limit To Your Love’, where the words were not his own. The lyrics here are almost as declarative as their delivery: “I’ll wait, so show me why you’re strong, Ignore everybody else, We’re alone now.” He’s not pleading with the girl at the centre of the song, he’s demanding something of her. It’s characteristic of the shift in confidence the album represents. The shift is: up a gear.

‘Take A Fall For Me’ finds RZA rather generously contributing a rap most consistent with its surroundings, appropriating such colloquialisms as “Million quid” and “Fish and chips (with vinegar)”. Apparently he’s an admirer. We gathered. Certainly the respect is a two way mirror, and it may not be overstating the case to say a certain Wu-Tang flavour haunts the sour opening chords, and inhabits the weird vocal sample which blindsides the mix frequently. An oddball highpoint.

For a while it wasn’t clear that Blake was going to become an Album Artist. He released a stream of material without any obvious organisational theme in 2011, and the debut album itself seemed remarkably not-mulled-over. But here we find him with a firm handle on the prerequisites of albumness. Standing back to back, ‘Digital Lion’ and ‘Voyeur’ are nice representative examples of  the many very fine album tracks here. By remodulating a few simple themes in consistently progressive and interesting ways, and incorporating a range of textures, the freshness never fades. The palette is expanded, the bud has opened, and the colours are vibrant and varied.

One of the problems with a  majority of Blake’s more vocals-orientated work in the past is that the songs never became anything. The lyrics are without nuance, the melodies do not develop, the production, while diverting, never quite engages with the other elements of the songs. Nothing becomes anything. This fragmented, nothingy quality is not fully escaped on this latest work, either. Sections of music don’t hang together, things don’t gel, there are awkward lulls in quality where Blake doesn’t know quite what to say, or perhaps how to say it. I think this may be a function of the audible (and explicitly stated) ambition which used to be as much his enemy as his ally. He’s managed to much better master his talents on this outing, but still it gets the better (worse) of him at times.

On the album’s curtain call ‘Our Love Comes Back’ a mood of delicate, finely balanced serenity is established with the gentle popping loops and record hiss which hang over the track. After delivering a few scant lyrics the thing develops into a wordless chordy melancholy, before Blake finds the nerve to essentially interrupt himself and fall back into the track’s former smallness, where harmonised, musing “hhmmmmms” carry us to the finish. It’s a superbly confident take.

There’s a blurred line between singer-songwriter and electronic artist which Blake straddles, and it’s still not clear yet whether he’s going to successfully to carve out this niche for himself or not. However, Overgrown is evidence in his favour. He’s fused his more experimental tendencies with his artistic sense in a way which wasn’t necessarily predestined. Whereas previous releases have felt like glimpses into the workshop of a developing talent, this new album feels more like an official presentation; he’s coming to us, rather than making us go to him. It’s accession to the pleasure principle of pop music.

Overgrown: I’d disagree with precisely half of that title.

Nabil Elderkin, the filmmaking mastermind behind videos for everyone from Antony to Kanye, has shot the video for the lead single too. It's a characteristically surreal nighttime trek through forests and hills haunted with spirits (and a very meditative James Blake).

Synonymous with downtown, laidback tailoring, Rag & Bone conceived the project in 2011 with the intention of subverting the traditional photoshoot and giving models full creative control over their images. Featuring Rag & Bone favourites Miranda Kerr, Candice Swanpoel, Carolyn Murphy and now Anais Mali, the project provides each model with a digital camera, a set of clothes and a simple brief: interpret and enjoy.

French born Anais shot her campaign in St Barths “where I was for New Year’s Eve, then in Miami, when I was visiting my boyfriend.” Laid back, full of life and personal style, the shoot, and the project as a whole, is a refreshing take on fashion and ‘ad campaigns’. Power to the people, another great move from Rag & Bone. 

One of the most heavily anticipated albums of the year randomly drops onto the internet one April night at 2am, no warning, no promotion and no track list. Now, had this have happened with 99% of other artists around the world, alarms bell would ring instantly. It would be denounced as an unofficial leak, removed as quickly as possible and that would be the end of that. This is where Jai Paul is markedly different – over the next 24 hours the story would twist and turn, ultimately ending with the release of a tweet from the man himself stating the music was leaked from a stolen laptop, put out by someone else and was not in fact the long awaited eponymous debut. When looking at the details closely it all seems a bit odd, nonetheless that’s his story and he’s sticking to it. So in recapping, here’s who won and lost over the last 48 hours.

The Fans: The fans, me included can be excused for being whipped up into the frenzy upon the 16-track ‘album’ emerging. The tracks now denounced as demos, some unfinished, some never meant for our ears and some we needed to have been patient enough to wait for. Well, firstly, they sounded pretty good to me, fantastic even. There was the genre-defying “BTSU”, a slightly tinged studio version of “Jasmine”, the incredible 2012 single and other standouts included “Track 15” (All Night) and “Crush” a cover of the 1998 Jennifer Paige chart smash. I’d already given away my coveted ‘album of the year so far’ award on Twitter by time rumours of illegality started to creep out. It was almost too good to be true and in some ways it was; coming from a man with only two solitary single releases over the span over his 3 year career to date, I’ll gladly accept it. Before I rest my case, I’ll leave you with this – you know that 'Sound Off' list the BBC put together at the end/start of every year, tipping the next big things that we spent the previous year already getting into? Well Jai Paul landed on the longlist in 2011, alongside guys now on their second and third projects today, so thank the music Gods for Bandcamp-Gate, for it’s finally given us an actual project to attach fandom towards and that can’t be a bad thing.

Verdict: Winners

The Label: The confusion could have been, should have but ultimately wasn’t cleared by XL Recordings, their actions throughout helping to muddy waters further. A label A&R tweeted “Surprise”, hours after the album dropped; this was then retweeted by Head of Marketing at Beggars Group records (of which XL is an offshoot). Pretending to be in the know and having the situation under control in the face of what looked like elusive weirdo music guy going rogue and releasing his album in protest (surely he wouldn’t be that stupid? Yes, I’m looking at you Wiley). That’s just the kind of thing you’d expect in this business.

Verdict: Losers

The Artist: Jai Paul hadn’t even posted a tweet on his verified account, up until two days ago. How he managed to rack up over two thousand followers without a single tweet is anyone’s guess but that number has now swelled to eight after the momentous first140 character occasion. When accessing the situation for the man from Rayners Lane, it’s far from a tragedy. Trending for the day on Twitter, albeit probably alongside whatever the guys from One Direction had for breakfast, is never an easy feat (for regular musicians, with sane fans). It also seems the villainous perpetrator uploaded the tracks and managed to link the payments to Jai Paul’s personal email account. Who knows, now he’s apparently pocketed a couple of quid from his undeniable talents, he might actually get used to this whole concept of releasing and earning and that way everybody wins eventually.

Verdict: Winner

Richard will lead a Chesney Hawkes hair fashion revival, and Millie will be forced to invite him into the Glamour offices where he will sit on a special throne made of Frizz-ease and dispense wisdom, answering only to the name “Dalai Barnet”. Rosie will be the first to seek his counsel, and find spiritual enlightenment at the business end of a Mason Pearson.

Kimberly will come back to train Lucy to speak “pretend posh”, and they will fall madly in love. They will release erotic DVDs of the event, and turn over more money in two weeks than Boulle Enterprises has ever made. The movies will be called “All up in her grill”, “All up in her grill II: The thrill of the grill” and “All up in her grill 3: No willy, just grill on grill-y.”

Sophia will have left Boulle’s bear on a Manhattan hotel pillow. Boulle will mutter “it’s fine”, but weep silently and manly-ly into his fist, whenever he’s alone. Channel Four execs will approach him and ask if he’d like to do a feature length, Citizen Kane style rescue mission. Boulle will politely decline, but hurl a Murano decanter in their wake, screaming “How can you cheapen my grief?!”

Mummy Felstead will leave SW3 for W1 when she is invited to perform a weekly showcase at Raymond’s Revue Bar. She’ll impress audiences with her contortionist act, emerging naked from an Hermes Birkin. There will be lots of hilarious jokes about her “puppies” as she takes her bra off and Scrumble’s litter falls out. Binky will refuse to join her Mum on stage, but Gabriella volunteers without being asked.

Cheska will remember that in episode one, she started a blog, and will do a post entitled “Sorry I haven’t written in a while”.

Following the runaway success of Ollie’s first title, Laid In Chelsea, he’ll sign a three novel deal with Penguin writing a series about a Victorian orphan who sets up a women’s correctional school in Australia. Critics will praise his “authentic voice”.

Spencer will tell Louise that he loves her and he’s sorry for being a giant dickhead and it was all a ploy to get famous enough to go on Celebrity Great British Bakeoff.

Spencer will be asked to leave the Celebrity Great British Bakeoff after he argues with the other contestants about the suitability of premade ingredients and ends up throwing a Vienetta at Mary Berry’s head.

Jamie Biscuits will ask Boulle to help him invent a new, sexy, romantic biscuit to seduce Binky and win her back after breaking her heart. The whole thing will be Shanghai-ed by Mark Francis who insists on making them musk flavoured.

Millie will be modelling her newest hat, a Rastafarian number, before announcing that she and Pro Green are heading to Barbados to record a concept album Halle Sell Asprey. They will be forced to leave when Millie attempts to Kerastase someone’s dreadlocks.

Proudlock will find out about contact lenses.

Mark Francis will acquire an obsession with ostrich meat.  At first, he’ll insist on only having it flambed in Remy Martin and wrapped in a Ferragamo napkin, but eventually he’ll be seen at dawn wandering the outer reaches of London, chomping through raw, bloody ostrich steaks. Eventually he will disgrace himself at an ostrich farm and be forced to attend a treatment facility, where he will give up the ostrich but develop a dangerous dependency on dried papaya.

You don’t come here in your trainers, I made that mistake. No, everybody here is as shiny as a penny. Here is a place where you will still find hats, straight backs and upper lips of significant stiffness, and why would you expect any less when it's a designer shopping bags swing from Harrods in one direction, and Harvey Nichols in the other? On entering the hotel, the sense of history is palpable and the scent of mandarin delicately danced under my nose, a smell which to my delight, went onto fill all nine floors of the hotel.

My bed, fit for a king. The television popped up out of that quilted blue chest. Posh.

I entered my suite for the night, the 'Sloane suite' to find high vaulted ceilings, beds as crisp and perfect as they come, with princely pillows and a floor-to-ceiling sea of marble in the bathroom. One look from the balcony confirms you're right in the heart of where you want to be, overlooking a jaw-dropping stretch of Knightsbridge. Before visiting I was told by friends to expect an intimidatingly busy ambiance, but I have to robustly disagree, this is where I'd suggest you go for some cloistered quiet. The staff glide here and were beaming, as proud of the history of the buildings as they were about the world-renowned spa and Michelin star restaurants.

After spending my evening with a certain Mr. 'Ye West, I retreated to the suite to enjoy a bath in the, what-felt-like, Olympic size pool marble tub. Relaxed, washed and wrapped in my robe and slippers, I escaped to the balcony to enjoy my welcome bottle of red whilst overlooking all the spark of Knightsbridge. The Mandarin Oriental, Hyde Park is in a lane of its own and is a genuine piece of local history. 

Rates start from £325 a night. You can experience the Mandarin for yourself, by booking here.

The campaign for Beyoncé's forthcoming fifth solo album has so far involved a Super Bowl halftime performance, a HBO documentary about Beyoncé's greatness directed by the woman herself, covers for GQ, Vogue and The Gentlewoman and the announcement of a world tour that starts in just over a month. Oh, and that little matter of performing at Barack Obama's inauguration. Which is all well and great, but what's been missing up to yet was any actual music. 

Beyonce is somewhere warm, eating peeled grapes, thinking 'Yeah, that one. Send that one. That'll get their gulible little minds twisted' and you all fell for it.

Faggot.

There, I said it. Well, typed it. Shocking, isn’t it? Except, not really. I doubt anyone’s offended or outraged, just because that word is sitting there on the page. What’s the context? And what made me want to use it in the first place? Until you can answer those questions, it’s simply six letters in a familiar sequence. For all you know, I could be talking about a bundle of kindling, or a mildly anachronistic meatball. And yet, there are those who would argue that the word should be consigned to Room 101, no questions asked.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of ‘faggot’. I could happily spend the rest of my life without ever hearing it used, or seeing it feature in yet another story about some brainless footballer lashing out on Twitter. But it’s still just a word, albeit one with considerable power. Especially when wielded by a careless, unthinking or malevolent speaker.

It might be almost twenty years old, but the point made in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s fascinating documentary The Celluloid Closet, about Hollywood’s portrayal of casual homophobia, still resonates. ‘Faggot’ is the only pejorative that can be used by a film’s lead character, without instantly marking them out as a bad guy in dire need of redemption. Now, ask yourself when you last watched a movie (that wasn’t made by Quentin Tarantino) where the hero got away with calling someone ‘Nigger’.

Despite this, many people argue that to compare ‘faggot’ with the N-word is a matter of false equivalency. In fact, they’re both politically charged and emotionally loaded terms. Remember the fuss that kicked off when Radio 1 tried to ban Fairytale of New York? The broadcasters argued, not incorrectly, that the song’s use of the lyric “You cheap, lousy faggot” could offend listeners.

However, in the context of the song, the word made sense, since Kirsty MacColl was clearly singing in character. Not that such nuance is observed by the people I usually hear singing along in the pub. If you’ve ever been called, or referred to, as a faggot, you’d become a little more sensitive to the extra emphasis that people tend to place on that particular word, as if they’ve been given momentary license to say something rebellious. Equally, a similar controversy came to light recently when the BBC re-aired Fawlty Towers, minus some of the Major’s more socially unacceptable dialogue. Although this was another example of character as context, the fact remains that society has also evolved in the forty years since the show was first broadcast. Watching it now, the Major’s casual racism no longer represents the mildly inappropriate ramblings of an elderly eccentric – it threatens to derail the entire episode.

The same misplaced logic that saw Jade Goody refuting accusations of racism on account of her being “half black.”

The two parallel issues of racism and homophobia are currently rearing their heads again, since R&B star Azealia Banks made a concerted effort to reopen the debate. This all started when the New York-based rapper began a Twitter-feud with Perez Hilton, a man with no shortage of celebrity nemeses. When Banks dismissed him as a “messy faggot" (you have to laugh,) critics were quick to take her to task for her thoughtless use of language. But rather than issue a simple mea culpa, the provocative musician decided to tackle society’s fixation with the word, head-on. Initially, Banks assumed that she could wield her own bisexual identity as some kind of defence against any accusation of homophobia, displaying the same kind of misplaced logic that saw Jade Goody refuting accusations of racism on account of her being “half black.”

In a way, she’s right to question our obsession with language, and a culture of knee-jerk offence taking. But she must also accept that we each have a responsibility for the words that we choose. Initially, she argued that “A faggot is not a homosexual male. A faggot is any male who acts like a female. There’s a BIG difference.” Let’s set aside the issues of a woman who perceives female behaviour to be a negative characteristic, worthy of scorn. Instead, let’s focus on what counts here – individual redefinition. She’s still at it, now elaborating on her original theory and stating that “Faggot means coward, liar, backstabber” then asking her followers how they would define the word. This is problematic, since she’s accusing the rest of the world for choosing to take offence, but shifting the goal-posts by coming up with her own definitions. Try to imagine visiting your grandmother and calling her a Cunt, then arguing that you’ve decided you meant it as a term of female empowerment. Good luck getting yourself back in the will.

I’m sure that many people might rationalise their use of the word differently. But ultimately, it all comes down to intent. For all the talk of communities reclaiming and re-appropriating the words that have hurt them, what matters here is how they are used in the moment. This is where the accusations of false equivalency between faggot and the n-word don’t hold water. If it’s a word that still has the power to belittle, bully or harm, then it’s bad. If it’s a word you wouldn’t want your kids using, it’s bad. And if it’s a word that’s ever been yelled at someone as a pejorative or insult, it’s bad.

But is Azealia right – have we all become hyper-sensitive? Are the forces of political correctness clamping down on our right to free speech? Not at all. No-one’s saying she can’t use it. And we’re not saying there’s no room for debate about the shifting nature of language, and how words become more or less acceptable over time. We’re simply saying that the right to speak freely doesn’t automatically insulate you from the criticism of those you’ve opted to offend. My love for her aside, Azealia needs to recognise that as a black, LGBT woman, she’s faces no small number of battles. And just like the rest of us, she needs all the friends she can get.