On a night when temperatures dropped below zero, I opened my forlorn underbed drawer in search of a disused hot water bottle, promptly brought back to action. An addiction was soon developed.

A new night time ritual now marks the end of my days. The application of face cream, hand cream, and eye contour cream in succession is now followed by a surreptitious trip to the kitchen to boil water. At the beginning, I moved around the kitchen in the dark to avoid being seen with my unfashionable bedfellow, invariably ending up burning my hands. Hearing me sneak into the kitchen night after night, my flatmates suspected I must have developed a drinking problem.

To be fair, hot water bottles have made an appearance in shops across the city in this snowy winter, even peeping out of the windows of fashionable ones. Topshop displayed them in a prominent spot between jewellery and bags, categorising them as an accessory. If shops so decree, then the bottle must be a legitimate belonging for a girl. The derided bottle has even become a cute present this season, with lots of varieties to choose from: velvety, fluffy, or plastic – for the hardcore. A colleague who is always cold got two as a gift for her January birthday.

There is more to a hot water bottle than fighting the cold. Plump and warm, it is there to be hugged, kept close to your body all night long. When I wake up the next morning, I’m still clasping it. Unlike a boyfriend, the hot water bottle will not turn on his side as soon as you fall asleep, and will not steal your blanket during the night. It serves an emotional function, prompting sweet dreams. Reliable and available, it is there for you on those lonely, cold nights. It is indispensable for girls with no boyfriend and no double glazing. Compensating like no other for the lack of a man, the humble water bottle is the ultimate pleasure toy.

 It’s been only a few years since knitting went from grandma’s pastime to hobby of the movie stars. My prediction is that the hot water bottle will enjoy a similar rediscovery. While I wait and see if I am right, I will keep mine in my secret drawer. Like a guilty pleasure, evidence must be removed after use.

You may think you need to know about variable mortgages and HIP documents to conquer the world of real estate, but what you really need to know is oh-so different. Getting on the property ladder starts with a trip to the local stationary. The piles of paperwork you will be accumulating will soon clutter your carpet and take over you desk. Be prepared, and buy a folder before you spill that hot coffee on your mortgage offer.

Being ready for purchasing is not only about having saved up over time: make sure you also save your documents – payslips, council tax payments, bank statements and all. I must not be the only one who has been throwing them away to make space for useful staff like travel memorabilia and photos.

When the moment of the viewings comes, do not just go by description, maps and images of the property: google the name of the house, if it has one. That is how I found out I was about to view the ‘tough estate’ where the criminal career of a South London gun gangster started. I read the article in time to cancel my viewing, and save myself time and the prospect of being mugged. On the positive side, I also found a Facebook group of residents of an estate I was thinking of moving to, getting precious insider’s knowledge on the owner of flat 16, who plays the saxophone late at night, and on the crying babies of flat 21.

By buying I learned that solicitors cannot spell. I have had to throw away four agreements because my 6-letter name and the address were misspelled. We are at attempt number five, and there is still one ‘e’ too many in my name. My purchase is going to have a very high impact on the Amazon Rainforest. Let’s hope the flat with the address they keep on using instead of mine comes with a terrace and a pool.

What’s more, buying a flat taught me more than a whole series of Sex and the City about love. Now I know that it is not only for closeness, intimacy and for trying a spoonful of your partner’s chosen dish at a restaurant that people get together. Now I know that the foundations of relationships lie in a joint mortgage application.

The process taught me that, no matter how undomestic you think you are, you will end up talking about your future house endlessly, like parents with newborns. Talking of baby burping and nappy rash is not very compelling, but you forget that curtains and lamps do not make for better conversation. Decorating will take up your life. Ikea catalogues and furniture brochures now lie on my desk, where the Guardian and the classics used to be. I have replaced nights at the movies and the theatre with after-work trips to hardware stores. I spend sleepless nights thinking of curtain fabric. I can hardly recognise myself anymore. And this is why, when the solicitors spell my name right and all is over, the first thing I will do is replace furniture catalogues with holiday brochures and close the door of my much coveted flat. It will look much more beautiful after a break from it. A bourgeois property owner I may have become, but I am still nomadic at heart.

 Buying a bed is a strange business. The questions you are asked are a lawful violation of privacy: from confessing sleeping habits to the body shape and height of your partner, from the lordosis you developed as a kid to how much time you spend reading in bed. When my dedicated shop assistant – the same Robert I talked to when I called the shop in the morning – invited me to take my shoes off and lie on the bed, I could feel the awkwardness of the situation in all its force. I followed his advice, and prayed I had not put on my old black tights with holes. However, as I moved from a divan set to a wooden bed, from a pocket spring mattress to a latex one, running around a shop barefoot and jumping on beds not my own unleashed my childish side. Customers who have just arrived at the shop smile when they see me stretching my arms and legs and turning in bed. Experience has taught me that if you go bed shopping after a long day at work, and if the mattress is comfy enough, the risk of dozing off is quite real.

 There is a bed for every need: even one with a support for a TV incorporated for those who are really into their reality shows. Recognising what is comfortable for you should be an immediate intuition – yet mattress after mattress my sense of touch goes numb. Only when Robert walks away can I really start to get a sense of comfort: I turn, close my eyes and try to imagine waking up in this new bed. To facilitate the task, this shop has even decorated parts of its ceiling with a starred blue sky – Van Gogh style.

Virtually all bed frames come with exotic female names: Amelia, Natascha, Angelina. Evoking Mrs Jolie to boost the sales of a bed clearly reveals how sexist the marketing of beds is. And it is, of course, a business for two. If you, like me, go bed shopping on your own, a strong, uncomfortable awareness of your being by yourself will be hard to avoid.

Having decided to wake up for the foreseeable future in a bed with my aunt’s name, Amelia – a bizarrely Freudian prospect – I have to fork out more than a month’s wages for frame and orthopaedic mattress. It promises to provide the ultimate sleeping experience, yet the extortionate amount paid for my new bed guarantees to make me sleepless tonight.

In the daily battle for commuting, cyclists feel cleverer: independent, brave, unstoppable. In London you don’t just ride a bike – you are a cyclist. The bike as a means of transport of choice becomes a status symbol of sorts: under that fluorescent yellow jacket lies an individual with an environmental conscience, fit, casual, dynamic, strong enough to brave the 18-meter long monstrosity of bendy buses – red serpents that put venom on London streets.

As colleagues wondered what improvised way home to experiment as public transport failed due to the weather conditions, the London cyclist put his helmet on and waved goodbye in time to be home for the 6 o’clock news.

Having cycled in high heels to night clubs and blocked roads on my bike during environmental demonstrations, I can count myself among the smug lot of hardcore London cyclists. Ignoring all weather reports, on the coldest day of the year I sat on the icy saddle of my bike for my daily commute to work. When I entered a cycle lane off the main road, satisfied with myself at how early I would be for work, cycling suddenly became dangerously close to ice-skating. As the ice on the ground made my bike swerve and me fall, an old woman shook her head in disbelief at the lack of commonsense she was witnessing. With a bruised knee and tears in my eyes, I walked back home dragging along a broken bike. ‘Don’t enter that street!’ – I warned a fellow cyclist about to enter the cycle lane, probably saving his legs with my words.

While I lay on the couch in front of day-time TV with frozen peas on a swollen knee, I cried as desperately as a toddler. Turns out my knee was not broken: part of the pain came from hurt pride. On that icy road I lost the smugness of the London cyclist, aware that there is much more I could have lost.

No rooster had previously been seen roaming on stage at Queen Elisabeth Hall. Artist Robin Rhode chose to follow one with his camera to translate into images the liveliness of one of the movements of Mussorgsky’s piece. A more sober man in a suit, sitting upside down and pushing bubbles in the air with his feet, accompanies most of the piece.

A visit to an art gallery, with its interaction among several mediums, will suffice to get a sense of how hybrid contemporary art tends to be. However, in Pictures Reframed the contamination of different genres is not only a sign of a modern adaptation. This ambitious project aims to trace the genesis of the piano cycle itself: Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition based on ten pictures by Russian artist Viktor Hartmann.

In the modern-day rethinking of the interplay between music and the visual arts, the videos offer a sometimes thoughtful, sometimes ironic commentary on the music. The humour of Rhode’s art is in stark contrast to the nationalistic solemnity of Mussorgsky’s music. A chalk keyboard that crumbles as it is played and a drowning grand piano achieve a desecrating effect, setting this performance apart from the stilted canonical experience of classical music.

The stage presence of Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is not diminished in the least by the videos playing above him. His relationship with the instrument is powerfully physical: he embraces his piano, touches its chords in an almost visceral symbiosis, plays parts of the instrument most listeners will be unable to identify, producing unusually eerie sounds. He dominates the instrument to such an extent that he does not even delegate turning the pages of the score.

The multimedia collaboration in Pictures Reframed is only one aspect of this joining of forces. The show, commissioned by NYC’s Lincoln Centre, brought together a Norwegian pianist and a South African artist performing a Russian classic, each with his own medium. Austrian composer Thomas Larcher, inspired by Andsnes’s performance of Pictures at an Exhibition, wrote What becomes, also performed as part of Pictures Reframed. This project proved to be a fertile ground for an open dialogue between different cultures. Where politics fails, art magnificently succeeds.

For our first date – drinks in a posh bar where I can only ever afford soft drinks – I sported a Guess skirt I borrowed for the night from a colleague, the closest approximation to a designer label I could access in my social circle. He turned up suited and booted, looking glam and successful. I started kissing him on the neck only to inspect his jacket. With the Dolce and Gabbana label looking menacing at me, I went pale at the thought of what to wear had there been a second date. An old-school gentleman, he walked me to the bus stop. Taxis are an eccentricity I do not indulge in: I had to beg him to leave as I stubbornly waited in the cold for a red chariot to spirit me away.

The first time you see your date’s place is a moment of truth. When I got to that stage with him, I was ready to be taken aback by a manor with a pool. As the door opened to reveal a messy flat in desperate need of being aired out, I was strangely relieved. It was full of travel memorabilia – African masks, Indian fabrics, Japanese robes – but desolately devoid of food. We ordered in dinner – to my astonishment he asked me to chip in – and ate on the floor from the carton: so much for dating Mr Big. The next morning, as my stomach rumbled in pain, I discovered there is not even a biscuit in his flat. Turns out millionaires only eat out, and walk in a supermarket less frequently than I go to a designer shop.

Over the past few months, not only have I had to give up on my breakfast cereals: I have also had to accept being seen as a time-slot in-between a business meeting and a conference call. He, on the other hand, has had to visit me in my South London house-share infested with flatmates and mice, to savour my four-quid wine on offer at the local corner shop, to sleep with the feel of Ikea sheets on his skin. Class difference is a healthy reminder of the fact that a relationship, much like international politics, is based on compromise.

 Erotica UK has not failed to draw enthusiastic crowds for its 2009 edition. Thousands faced disruption to public transport and torrential rain to check what is new in the world of adult lifestyle…

Hosted in the sumptuous Olympia exhibition centre, Erotica UK claims to be the biggest adult lifestyle show of its kind in Europe. Posters advertising the event popped up everywhere on the London underground network in the run-up to the expo, and have been giving commuters wild dreams at night.

 There is much more to this sexy shopping experience than leather bras and fishnet tights: holiday specialists, accessories, furniture, art galleries are arranged in a head-spinning succession, while performers hit the stage. I’m now convinced that the brightest minds must be working in this industry.

Many of the visitors are regulars, attending year after year to keep abreast of the latest trends. This is a highlight of their calendar, much like Paris Haute Couture week for fashionistas. Some shop assistants are volunteering for the day. The selling techniques displayed at the expo prove infallible: how can you avoid a purchase if, given a practical demonstration, you find yourself shivering with pleasure? The items on sale tend to be pricey, but visitors are inclined to approach them as an investment with life-changing potential, yielding life-long returns. With a wide product, Erotica does cater for every need. Couples flock to the venue to spice up their lives, singles to add to their seductive prowess. Both equally look forward to unwrapping their purchases.

In the weekend that marks the opening of the Xmas shopping season, the amount of brimful red shopping bags seen at Erotica has one certainty to offer. Forget playstations and ipods: Londoners have pretty good odds of finding everything from tape to corsets, pinwheels and cushions in their stockings this Christmas.

Delectable Love Bites

Leaving the West End to visitors, with their discounted tickets bought from a booth on the day, I headed to explore the budding south east branches of London’s theatreland. The density of actors on The Cut – the side street home to a major cultural institution like the Old Vic theatre, the more experimental Young Vic and a fringe theatre venue – is not unlike the density of bankers in the financial district.

On my way to my Friday night play, I had to walk past the Old Vic theatre. Crowds were gathering by the entrance, radiant in anticipation of their encounter with Kevin Spacey on stage. With my two tickets securely stored in my inner pocket, I dodged the elegantly-dressed audience about to applaud the Oscar winning actor, and headed a few meters away to the Calder Bookshop.

‘Love Bites’ will be running in this unpretentious theatre space until 13 November. The stage is the size of a two-seater, with the actors playing among leather-bound copies of Shakespeare’s plays and critical editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A showcase for new talents, ‘Love Bites’ is a series of five short plays written by young playwrights. They share the setting – a bar – and the theme, love being the common thread.

As if mirroring the one on stage, the bookstore is arranged to provide a bar at the entrance. As you sip your glass of wine, you will recognise the atmosphere framed by the plays all around you. ‘Love Bites’ is a celebration of the short form in writing. By watching the diversity of the results achieved within the constraints set for the exercise, the power of good writing emerges uncompromisingly. It only takes a couple of effective lines for a good playwright to create a well-rounded, perfectly formed and unforgettable character. Like an assignment in a creative writing course, love is declined by the five playwrights in ever new forms, with final twists that will surprise even consummate theatre goers.

The institution of social drinking becomes the point of view for an insight into lives and souls. The stories, although independent, contribute to an overall design. With its pithy portraits of arrogant bankers, inane sales people, struggling businesswomen and other various lost souls, the plays also mirror today’s London.

‘Love Bites’ is a long-standing project. Launched in November 2008, the first group of plays was set at a table in a restaurant, and the second one in a hotel room. If you end up missing your dose of ‘Love Bites’, you can contact producer/writer Ziella Bryars to join the group’s newsletter and wait for the next instalment. Will it be set on a bench? On a street corner? Or maybe in a car?

One thing is for sure. Given the humour, insight and emotional intensity of these plays, I can confidently predict it will not be long until this theatre group makes the transition from the independent bookshop to the institutional theatre across the street.

In other club nights meeting a celeb on the dance floor – and cheekily touching her breasts while she is dancing with you – would be the highlight of the night. Not if the club is Torture Garden.

With themed rooms including an enchanted forest, a horror installation, a zombie tunnel, entering the venue is like falling down the rabbit hole. TG’s Halloween wonderland is made of bars, cabaret, live acts, dance floors, and dungeon. It is much more than a night out clubbing: it is seeing installations, going to the theatre and listening to a gig all in one. As the night unfolds you are never a viewer: you are the protagonist in what could be a Fellini movie.

The no effort-no entry dress code results in hours of preparation. Torture Garden’s queue can be massive, but it is a performance in its own right – a makeshift catwalk displaying the best of debauched creativity. The clubber standing in line next to you in a leather body harness could the accountant who does your tax return. This is an occasion for ordinary people to explore their creativity – in their clothing, in their manners, in their social interaction. By donning flamboyant masks they manage to get rid of the social one.

Stepping into the club equals making a statement on your views of the world. Acceptance and enthusiastic exploration are the key elements to the club atmosphere. Once you are in, you belong to the community. The friendliness of the TG experience will hardly be found anywhere else in the big city.

As my friend finds out what it feels like to get blood to your head on a fetish wheel, I sit on a stone of the enchanted garden and massage away stiletto-induced pain: a little old trick to attract a foot fetishist. Mine is a cute, devout Frenchman, who reactivates my circulation before I hit the dance floor. Such treats and much more reserves the world’s leading fetish club.

No pumpkins were to be seen at London’s most decadent Halloween party. Walking out of the club under the foggy tunnels surrounding London Bridge is like resurfacing from the underworld. You feel dazed, as if jet-lagged. As your make-up starts melting away, you can suddenly see the limiting nature of what society has constructed to be ordinary life. You have absorbed philosophy enveloped in PVC. As if exiting Plato’s cave, you now know that an all-accepting and totally free world is possible, a dimension where the absurd and the strange are part of reality. An upside-down world where it is Halloween all year round, where everybody joins in the chorus: ‘Don’t dream it, be it!’.