Cherwell 0th Week Vol.272 No.1

Friday 25 April 2014

www.cherwell.org

Inside: Cherwell’s Trinity Ball Guide

Joey Barton on Twitter and homophobia

Hamish Bowles on life as US Vogue’s European Editor-at-Large

Cherwell Independent since 1920

0th Week Vol. 272, No. 1

Bishop of Oxford shunned by David Cameron Jack Doyle Deputy Editor

OUCA campaigns with pro-life Tory Conservative Association criticised for canvassing alongside anti-abortion campaigner Alex Stronell News Editor STUDENTS HAVE EXPRESSED OUTRAGE at the Oxford University Conservative Association’s connection with a senior figure in a controversial anti-abortion group running in the upcoming elections to Oxford City Council.

Mark Bhagwandin, who is running as the Conservative candidate for Headington Hill and Northway this May, is a senior officer in the Thames Valley branch of the controversial pro-life campaign group LIFE. LIFE has been accused by some groups of providing misleading advice to pregnant women. Sexual health charity Brook condemned LIFE after counsellors allegedly told an undercover reporter that abortions increased the risk of breast cancer. Last term, LIFE made Oxford news when Andrew Smith, MP for Oxford East, reported their adverts on Oxford busses to the Advertising Standards Agency for “giving the unrealistic impression that LIFE is offering impartial counselling”.

OUCA members have campaigned

alongside Bhagwandin on several occasions over the past year. Most recently, OUCA tweeted a photo of students, including four committee members, canvassing with Bhagwandin in Headington this March, along with the caption, “We were out spreading the Conservative message in Oxford this morning.”

Alice Nutting, a contributor to the Oxford feminist magazine Cuntry Living, told Cherwell, “It is unfortunate, although hardly surprising, that OUCA is openly endorsing an outspoken anti-choice campaigner.

LIFE has a track record of providing dangerously misleading information, such as leaflets claiming that 85 per cent of abortions are carried out using vacuum aspiration and that the woman has to dispose of the foetus herself.”

Oxford University Labour Club have strongly condemned OUCA’s association with Bhagwandin. OULC Women’s Officer Rebecca Grant told Cherwell, “It is deeply worrying that someone so involved in fighting against women’s basic reproductive rights is even permitted to stand for election on behalf of the Conservative Party. I am shocked that OUCA is

campaigning for a candidate who is associated with LIFE, especially given the very serious allegations about the organisation’s deceitful imposition of their agenda on the most vulnerable women.”

Helena Dollimore, former CoChair of OULC, observed, “It’s worrying that OUCA are choosing to spend their time campaigning for a pro-life candidate who works for a highly controversial pro-life charity. Women who find themselves pregnant unexpectedly need impartial help and support, not politicians who oppose their right to choose. When the majority of students are pro-choice but OUCA are heavily supporting a pro-life candidate, it’s no wonder the Tories have a problem with women.”

Responding on behalf of LIFE, Bhagwandin, who is also chairman of the Oxford East Conservative Association, told Cherwell, “My role in LIFE and in the Conservative Party, are separate and distinct. It is absolutely presumptuous for Labour students to try to dictate to political candidates what groups they should or shouldn’t be associated with. LIFE has already responded extensively to the criticisms by Education for

Choice, of its service. It has a proud history of providing professional counselling and practical support and housing to pregnant homeless women.”

He continued, “Maybe while the Labour activists are it, they can criticise their own Labour MP Andrew Smith who visited the LIFE house in Oxford only a few weeks ago and was very positive about it, even promising to help. They can also point a finger at Labour MP Jim Dobbin who spoke at a LIFE conference about the wonderful work being done by LIFE.” OUCA President James Heywood commented, “OUCA is a branch of the Conservative Party. As such we campaign for the Party, not individual candidates. We don’t have our own separate policy agenda, and frankly any society which is part of a political party but has such a separate platform cannot view itself as a serious branch of that party. OUCA is not in the business of pointless grandstanding; our focus is always winning votes for the Party, wherever we can. I would also point out that the Party does not take a specific stance on abortion anyway. It is a ‘free vote’ issue.”

DAVID CAMERON HAS drawn criticism after his Witney constituency office refused to open its doors for the Bishop of Oxford, who was delivering an open letter about food poverty.

Three police officers prevented the Right Reverend John Pritchard, whose diocese seat is Christ Church Cathedral, and poverty activist Reverend Keith Hebden from entering the constituency building. Hebden expressed surprise, saying that the pair had phoned ahead to arrange a visit at the Witney office.

“The office did eventually acknowledge receipt of the letter over the intercom but said they would not open the door and speak to the Bishop of Oxford,” Hebden told Cherwell. “The police said they were there to ‘facilitate the protest’, however, there was no protest: we literally left the Methodist Church, walked up the road to the constituency office, delivered the letter and were about to leave when the police arrived.”

Continued, page 5

Bitcoin: a financial revolution?

Comment, page 6

The ‘reboot’ will save the world Culture, page 24

Copenhagen: An unorthodox tour Life&Style, page 13

Cherwell | 25.04.14

2 | News

Duck drama at Teddy Hall

TEDDY HALL STUDENTS were needed to escort a duck and her ducklings back to the river after they appeared in a college pond.

Margery Infield, who led the rescue operation, said, “Catching the ducklings was pretty tricky (they are surprisingly agile),

but the worst part was trying to entice the very angry mother to follow us down to the river. She went berserk — unsurprising given we’d caught 13 of her children and put them in a shoebox - and chased us confusedly down the High Street, nearly getting run

over! Fortunately, disaster was averted (no duck on the dinner menu that evening) and all the ducklings were reunited with their mum in Christ Church Meadows. It was an eggsellent result!”

This is the second year of duck drama at

OUSU to hold referendum on NUS affiliation ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns will pick their leaders at briefing meetings on Sunday of 1st week Ellen Brewster News Reporter AN ALL-STUDENT REFERENDUM will be held in 4th week of Trinity regarding OUSU’s affiliation with the National Union of Students (NUS). The referendum will ask voters the following question: “OUSU is currently affiliated to the National Union of Students (NUS). Should it continue to be affiliated: yes or no?”

Nominations to lead the campaign for either side will open on Sunday 27th April at 12pm (first week) with elections for these campaign meetings to be held the following day.

OUSU’s Returning Officer, Alexander Walker, issued a directive on the OUSU website earlier this month concerning the referendum. While all student members of OUSU can go to the briefing meetings to vote, only those who wish to support the ‘Yes’ campaign may go to the ‘Yes’ briefing, and only those who wish to support the ‘No’ campaign may go to the ‘No’ briefing.

Only the Returning Officer and his deputies may attend both meetings. Both will take place at the OUSU building, with the ‘Yes’ meeting happening at 10am and the ‘No’ meeting at midday.

Tom Rutland, the current OUSU President, plans to run to lead the ‘Yes’ campaign. It is not yet known who intends to run to lead the ‘No’ campaign.

“Oxford students benefit greatly by being part of NUS,” Rutland commented. “Affiliation allows us to influence NUS policy, ensure that we have a national union fighting for students’ interests and take advantage of the incredible array of discounts the NUS Extra Card provides.

“Disaffiliating from NUS would cost Oxford

students money, it would isolate us from the national student movement, and it would weaken both unions”.

The NUS are currently producing a tailormade report on the private letting industry and the state of student housing in Oxford in an attempt to help OUSU target accommodation

“

It would be foolish and irresponsible to give up our place in the national student movement problems experienced by Oxford students.

Student campaigner Nathan Akehurst told Cherwell, “NUS has a range of problems with democracy and careerism. It is not a visible

presence in OUSU students’ lives beyond the Extra card. However, NUS does do a huge amount of important work, lobbying and campaigning on a national level in a way OUSU couldn’t. It would be foolish and irresponsible to give up our place in the national student movement.”

Not all universities are affiliated with NUS, however, as Jack J. Matthews points out. He thinks it does no harm to the perceptions of potential students, commenting, “Southampton and Imperial continue to be top destinations for students despite being independent from NUS.” Akehurst disagreed. “Given the amount of bad press Oxford gets, and with the disaffiliation charge led by the political right, NUS disaffiliation would create potentially inaccurate stories about perceived Oxbridge arrogance.”

All students registered within the university will be able to vote, regardless of their college’s own affiliation with OUSU.

Teddy Hall - last year, a duck led her ducklings into the college basement, and once again had to be restored to the river by a team of students.

The ducks were unavailable for comment.

Tom Hall

The week in figures

731

Days during which Magdalen students will have to study in a pre-fab library

1/3 Proportion of male Oxford students get firsts, compared to only a quarter of female students

8

Number of pictures on the Cherwell Instagram: CherwellOnline

25.04.14 | Cherwell

News | 3

Temporary library sparks student concern

Magdalen’s library redevelopment has left some students without a workplace as Trinity Term begins Esther Hodges News Reporter

MAGDALEN’S TEMPORARY LIBRARY, which will serve the library needs of Magdalen students while the permanent library undergoes renovation, is proving disruptive as the new term begins.

The temporary library is set to serve as the college library until the permanent new library re-opens in 2016. As it is not yet ready for use, however, students have been struggling to secure library space.

An email sent to Magdalen students by Christine Ferdinand, a Fellow Librarian at the college, said, “You may want to find somewhere else to work Thursday, Friday, and Saturday morning and possibly until next week when the St Swithun’s Library opens.

“If you are working in the New Library on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday please be prepared to remove your things from your oak desk, while the Maintenance team remove it and replace it with a trestle table. They will work as quickly as they can. Our goal is to get the St Swithun’s Library open as soon as possible and the Maintenance team are helping us do that.”

However, she also stressed that Magdalen was working as hard as possible to ensure the problems with the library would be resolved as quickly as possible.

A further document sent to all Magdalen undergraduates advised students to, “1. Plan to move into the temporary library. 2. Plan to work in the current New Library building until the last minute. 3. Plan to work elsewhere, such as in another library or in your room. 4. A combination of the first options.”

Students have expressed disappointment at the college’s handling of the situation.

“Normally it’s hard to find and share books on the reading list of a module that the whole university do, and without access to the Magdalen Library, this will make it even harder this weekend,” said one Historian.

Magdalen second year, Victoria Lampard, said, “ I appreciate them giving us a substitute, but I feel they could have done better than the undersized and understocked plaster-cast wedding marquee.”

A second year medical student, with exams early this term that count towards her final qualification, said, “All the reference books are gone, many of which we don’t have borrowable copies of.

“The St. Swithun’s library looks like someone tried (and failed) to get the Great British Bake Off going in Oxford - not quite fitting with the beautiful 15th century architecture, I’d say.

And surely that marquee isn’t going to be big enough? Think of the damage it’s doing to the grass...

“Overall though, if the new library is built ac-

cording to plan and isn’t delayed again, the end result should be quite spectacular — probably one of the best designed and most aesthetically pleasing college libraries in Oxford.”

When contacted by Cherwell, Ms Ferdinand

“

It looks like someone tried (and failed) to get the Great British Bake Off going in Oxford detailed the flaws of the existing building and explained the renovations, commenting, “The current library’s roof leaks every time it rains; the builders of the St Swithuns library guarantee that will not happen. We cannot control the heat in the current library — the boiler is either

off or on, and when it’s on it can be stifling hot; we actually have thermostat controlled heating in the temporary library. Lighting is very poor in the current library; it is up to standard in the St Swithun’s Library. Additionally, there are few ethernet points in the current library; there are plenty in the St Swithuns Library.”

Another student told Cherwell, “They’ve been very open about how the temporary arrangements will work, and have welcomed suggestions at every turn for how to make it all work better.

“Sure, it’d be nice not to have to put up with the two or more years of inconvenience that these arrangements will necessarily cause, but the College desperately needs more space for people to work and for books, and it’s not immediately clear to me how to guarantee that with less disruption than what we’re going through now, failing the sudden appearance of a massive multi-million-pound donation to fund the parallel construction of an entirely new library.”

Magdalen’s library renovations are set to enlarge the current library, providing more work spaces for the college’s expanding student population. The plans include a “library outside the library”, an outdoor seating space with wi-fi in the college’s Longwall Quad, and twice as many reading spaces as in the current library.

For the next two years, students will use the temporary library, which has only 45 reading spaces and 3000 books. The majority of the college’s books will be kept in the university’s main Book Storage Facility in Swindon.

The librarian stressed that the college were doing their best to minimise disruption, telling Cherwell, “I have liaised with other college librarians in our vicinity about allowing our students easier access to their collections during this transitional time.”

Study hopes Candy Crushed Cowley Passion Play pulled Survey finds that 80% of students procrastinate for over three hours per day

Councillors mistake sees ‘Cowley Passion Play’ cancelled

Georgia Latham News Reporter

Georgia Latham News Reporter

A RECENT SURVEY by Student Beans has found that 80% of students spend over 3 hours a day procrastinating, with Candy Crush revealed as the top app for time-wasting. Sitcom The Big Bang Theory also headed the leader board as the most-watched TV programme whilst procrastinating.

With finals, end-of-year exams, and dissertation deadlines looming, browsing the Internet was named the main distraction by 39% of students. Facebook was, unsurprisingly, the most popular website but Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat were close behind in the top 5 most distracting apps. 94% of those surveyed said they would even resort to cleaning their room instead of working.

Cherwell found that Oxford students are getting inventive with their procrastination.

From Harry Potter marathons to developing a “sudden and irrational passion for baking”, every timewasting avenue has

been explored. Charlotte Smyth, a computer scientist from Oriel has been to greater lengths to procrastinate than most. She said, “I ran so far from work this holiday that I ended up entering a 5km charity run.”

One history undergraduate from Wadham remarked, “When you’ve done every single quiz on Buzzfeed and know exactly what potato, cookie and Disney character you are, then you’ve spent too much time procrastinating.”

According to the study, boys are bigger culprits than girls with 21% spending over 7 hours a day procrastinating compared to 16% of girls.

The survey found that 39% of students do procrastinate more during the final term of university when there are exams, final coursework due or thesis deadlines. Michael Tefula, author of Student Procrastination: Seize the Day and Get More Work Done said, “Deadlines determine what procrastination is and what it isn’t. When the workload increases, we turn to ordinary activities to avoid doing the work that is required of us. This is why cleaning your room is more bearable (and perhaps even enjoyable) in the final term than in the first.”

The survey was carried out online; Student Beans questioned 923 university students in March 2014.

James Read, editor of Student Beans advised students, “Split huge tasks into small goals that can be rewarded with breaks If all else fails, block yourself from websites and turn off your phone!”

THE COWLEY ROAD PASSION PLAY, a religious event re-enacting the trial and crucifixion of Jesus, was cancelled last week after a council mix-up.

An officer of the city council refused to sanction the event because he thought it was a live sex show.

Damian Feeney, director of the play, commented in his blog post, Chinese Whispers, “It’s an object lesson to everyone in the way in which the media plays chinese whispers with facts, choosing the most salacious half-truth and magnifying it until the original story is unrecognisable.”

In its report of the story the Daily Mail used the headline, “Gormless Labour council bans Good Friday Passion of the Christ play because they thought it was a live SEX show”.

The play was cancelled because a council officer told the organisers that some parts of the play may need a license to be performed and at that time it was too late to procure one.

He did not realize that it was a religious event and as such did not need a license.

The play was cancelled before the misunderstanding could be resolved.

The organisers of the Cowley Road Passion Play told Cherwell, “An unfortunate mistake from a council officer doing his best to help us meant that the Passion Play was cancelled this year. We are naturally disappointed, but look forward to working with the council to bring the play back to the streets of East Oxford in 2016.”

Oxford City Councillor and United Reform Church pastor Dick Wolff said, “Unfortunately, one of the city council’s licensing officers didn’t recognise that a Passion play on Good Friday

was a religious event. I think he thought it was a sex show, so he said it may be committing an offence. This is a case of the system tripping over its own shoe laces.”

A spokeswoman from the Oxford City Council added that the application to the council arrived, “Too late, with limited information to enable the event to take place.”

Passion Plays, performed on Good Friday around the world, re-enact of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ as a way of celebrating the holiday. The Cowley Road Passion Play was first performed in 2012 without a license.

Councillor Tony Brett, chair of the licensing committee, said, “It pains me greatly to see this activity cancelled.

“The Jesus I know and live by is one whose ministry was radical and disruptive and the Cowley Road Passion play is / was a fantastic example of that.”

The council official responsible, Julian Alison, has since apologised, admitting that he didn’t know a passion play was a religious event.

4 | News

Cherwell | 25.04.14

Oxford Economist Hertford cycles from Bridge to Bridge to raise money Hertford students, fellows and alumni to cycle 1,100km to Venice to raise money for access says capitalism it benefits the college as a whole. Hertford’s in the first phase, with isn’t working merit over means ethos is what makes is such THIS SUM32 completing the

MER

Ellen Brewster News Reporter THE PRINCIPAL OF Hertford, Will Hutton, has used a recent piece in the Guardian to express support for the economist Thomas Piketty, whose recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that capitalism is a failure.

In the book, Piketty argues that the gap between the rich and the poor in countries all over the world threatens to destroy capitalism, and that capitalism and inequality need not go hand in hand.

According to Hutton, who is the Principal at Hertford College, it is getting to the point where the amount of wealth accumulated by the very rich is “almost inconceivable”, but this should not be seen as a natural consequence of capitalism as an economic system.

He said, “The Conservatives are trying to convince us that [economic inequality] is the price you have to pay for capitalism to work, and that there will be a trickle down effect for those lower down the system.”

He further argues that, while currently in Britain the top 1% of earners pays a third of all income tax, income tax constitutes only 25% of all tax revenue.

Hutton points out that 45% comes from VAT, excise duties and national insurance, which is paid for by the mass of the population.

In his article, Hutton argues that in England people tend to be more implicitly accepting of this unequal distribution of wealth.

“We do tend to indulge economic inequality in England,” Hutton said, “the resistance in Scotland is stronger.”

When questioned further, the Principal said that our outrage against economic inequality, “Does not get vented in the same way in England, where any such views get crushed by the media reaction. Your chances

“

We do tend to indulge economic inequality in England of getting your argument off the ground are very slim and the media is dominated by that kind of thinking. The movement of opinion [towards paying less tax] has been manufactured by the media.”

This does not suggest, however, that there is no room for change. Hutton suggests an alternative system of indexed tax, where the marginal tax rate for people with the highest incomes will rise if the gap between the rich and the poor widens.

Hutton also suggests that tax evasion in the UK should be dealt with more harshly, and that income tax should be raised from 40 to 50 pence in every pound for people who earn more than £50,000 a year.

An Econonomics and Management student, who wished to remain anonymous, disagreed with Hutton’s claims.

They commented, “Given the living costs of living in an expensive area, £50,000 just isn’t a very high income at all. I agree that we have a big problem, but the answer is not to tax the rich lots more money – but a global push would work well.”

Hutton, speaking to Cherwell, concluded that it will take a while to come to a solution; he said, “I don’t want to be pessimistic, or take away the idealism of students at Oxford. While it may be inconceivable now and may not happen in my lifetime, things can change.”

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Alex Stronell News Editor Hertfordians will take part in a cycle ride from the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ in Oxford to the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ in Venice to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the iconic bridge.

The team, which will be headed by Principal Will Hutton, will consist of fellows, students and alumni. Notable alumni taking part in the journey include television news presenter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, and UK ambassador to Lebanon, Tom Fletcher. The team aim to raise £250,000 for bursaries, scholarships and outreach.

The journey is expected to take eleven days.

Approximately 100 Hertfordians will take part

jou rney t o Venice.

Will Hutton said, “As Principal of Hertford, I have accepted the daunting challenge of cycling 1,100km in 11 days – and as I can already tell from the training, it will be no easy task!

It’s an incredible adventure, and for a great cause. Hertford has a long tradition of promoting access and helping disadvantaged young people to thrive at university - and it is increasingly critical that we have the money to continue this support”.

Miriam Chapman, a first year Hertfordian who will be cycling the first phase of the journey told Cherwell: “I am taking part in the bridge to bridge bike ride, aside from being a keen fresher, because Hertford’s Access scheme is generally awesome. Not only does it really benefit individuals – myself included – but

a down to earth and friendly college.

“Plan of attack for 1st year cyclists is to stick to the training plan better than we do our revision timetables and just cycle everywhere!”

She added, “It’s great that so many Hertford alumni are great involved. Famous or not, their stories about their time are Hertford and how it helped them in later life is pretty inspirational. It’s also really excellent that they can pull in a variety of sponsors, not just students friends and family!”

Anna Baskerville, Senior Development Officer at Hertford College, told Cherwell, “At Hertford, we believe that money should not be a barrier to an Oxford education – so we have organised this bike ride to coincide with our celebrations of the iconic Hertford bridge be-

“

For a great cause that will benefit future generations ing 100 years old in order to raise much-needed funds”.

She continued, “All funds raised will be going towards student support: bursaries, scholarships and outreach. The bike ride from Oxford to Venice is an amazing opportunity to bring together alumni, fellows, students, staff and friends for an event that is not only challenging but for a great cause that will benefit future generations of Hertford students”.

Oxonians raise hundreds by running Marathon Oxford students have raised money for various charities by running the London Marathon Megan Gibbons News Editor

Nikita Makarchev News Reporter

AMONGST THE 37,500 people taking part in this year’s London Marathon were a number of Oxford University students and graduates.

Twenty-four year old Judith Robinson, who graduated from Balliol College, chose to run the Marathon to raise money for the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust, whose support website helped her to overcome depression.

Judith suffered from depression throughout her time at Oxford University, and after being formally diagnosed with clinical depression, she began to search for ways to help her deal with it. She credits the Students Against Depression website, for helping her.

She revealed, “I only found out about it a year ago when I was 23 – ten years after the first time I tried to kill myself, and three years after I was first diagnosed.

“And it’s brilliant. It contains the most cohesive and coherent explanations and discussions about depression that I’ve seen anywhere.”

The site, launched nine years ago, offers practical, clinically-proven strategies for overcoming depression and includes a number blogs written by student sufferers.

Robinson said, “The most useful thing was the site making me feel like I wasn’t the only one. I felt like no one would ever understand how I felt – and I didn’t want anyone to know anyway, because they’d think I was crazy.”

She has so far raised £985 of her £1,000 target.

Current Oxford students also took on the challenge. Two students from Lady Margaret Hall, Victoria Rees and Demetris Ioannides, both raised money by running the marathon.

Rees, a PPE student, donned a rhino costume to raise awareness and funds for her chosen charity, Save the Rhino. She has run the marathon twice before and has so far managed to raise £520 of her £1,400 target for the charity.

Ioannides, who studies Preclinical Medicine, ran to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. Muscular dystrophy is a group of muscle diseases that weaken the muscles of the body, leading to problems with mobility, and sometimes difficulty breathing. Every year, 100 boys are born with a specific and severely debilitating type called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in the UK, and there is currently no cure. He has so far raised £968 of his £1,600 target.

First year student at Keble College, Jack Lennard, chose to run the marathon for a cause very close to his heart. He ex-

plained, “I think I first wanted to run it after watching Run, Fat Boy, Run!, as, after always being the least sporty person at school, it seemed like the ultimate sporting challenge.

“I was due to run in 2013, but had to pull out due to impending A Levels restricting the time I had to prepare. I was determined to run this year, and got a place with the charity Scope, which supports disabled people and their families – a cause very close to my heart, as my sister was born with hydrocephalus (water on the brain).”

He noted, “I found it pretty tough, especially since it was such a hot day, but the massive support from the crowds really helped, they pulled me through when I was utterly exhausted.

“My training was pretty sparse to be honest I trained with a few shorter distance runs, but felt I could handle a half marathon distance pretty easily, so moved on to a 20 mile run a few weeks before the event. Once I knew I could handle that, I knew I could do the extra 6 miles and finish the course - getting a fast time wasn’t important at all to me, but I was pretty pleased with my 5 hour 46 minute time.”

He further stated, “The focus was definitely raising money for charity, helped by doing stunts like dying my hair purple for donations (it unfortunately came out more candy floss pink), and at the moment I’ve raised £6716 for Scope, with several hundred pounds worth of donations yet to come.”

He is already planning more, “I’ve caught the running bug from the experience, and have already signed up for the Oxford Half Marathon this October, and hope to get a ballot place in next year’s London Marathon – the experience was just too amazing not to have again!”

To donate to any of the charities mentioned above, visit the Just Giving pages of each runner at www.justgiving.com.

25.04.14 | Cherwell

News | 5

Bishop snubbed by PM’s constituency Brand new Baby Love in the womb Bishop of Oxford barred from delivering food poverty letter Jack Doyle Deputy Editor continued from page 1 PRITCHARD AND HEBDEN’S LETTER, which was co-signed by 42 Anglican bishops and 600 clerics, expressed concern for the rising national demand for food banks as part of the End Hunger Fast campaign.

The message referenced a recent study by the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food charity, which revealed a 163 percent increase in British people receiving emergency food since last year.

Founding director of the Oxford Food Bank, David Cairns, acknowledged rising food need, but warned that such statistics may overexaggerate the seriousness of the crisis.

The increasing sophistication of food banks over the past decade, Cairns explained, has led to charities reaching more people in need than ever before. For example, the Oxford Food Bank

served £5,000 worth of food a week at its inception five years ago, but is now able to provide up to £20,000 a week due to a rapidly expanding volunteer and donor base.

Cairns expressed hope that a recent parliamentary enquiry on the government’s role in food provision “will actually come up with true facts” about food charities’ contributions.

“We try to keep politics out of food banks,” he told Cherwell.

Keith Hebden, however, believed his and the Bishop of Oxford’s experience at the Prime Minister’s constituency proves differently.

“Everything is political, so we can’t keep politics out of food banks. What we can do is try to rise above the political point scoring that stops progress,” he said, adding that End Hunger Fast’s letter was addressed to the leaders of the three major parties, not just Cameron.

“Only one published an article that day saying he was a good Anglican, while his office called the police rather than welcome his bishop,” Hebden said, referencing Cameron’s recent editorial in the Church Times.

“It’s disappointingly cynical of David Cameron to twice public declare an emotional commitment to the Church of England but refuse to acknowledge a letter signed by 47 Anglican Bishops and over 600 church leaders.”

“We hope he will get around to replying sooner rather than later,” Hebden continued, adding that End Hunger Fast would continue to mobilise until the government addressed their concerns.

“This is an urgent national crisis and we have the wit and resources to do something about it: we need to have a welfare state that cares for the most vulnerable, work that pays, and an answer to the problem of rising food prices.”

New site of popular club revealed at Castle Tavern Tom Hall News Editor THE OWNERS OF Baby Love Bar have revealed that it will move to the Castle Tavern in Oxford, described by Oxford Daily Info as “one of the friendliest hubs of Oxford’s gay pubbing scene.”

The new club will retain the basement dancefloor, pole and late opening hours that have been its most distinctive features. The owners are considering whether to keep its distinctive, unisex toilets in the new incarnation.

Baby Love will have its final, closing party next week after Oriel College announced that it would be taking back the site of the club.

When its closure was first announced, the college said in a statement, “Oriel College has a long term strategy for the gradual redevelopment and improvement of King Edward Street.

“As a result the College will be taking back the premises occupied by the Baby Love Bar shortly. We understand that the Baby Love Bar intends to relocate to new premises as soon as it can and wish it well for the future.”

The owners of Baby Love are optimistic about their new plans. Owner Martin Forde told Cherwell, “The size is practically the same once our redecoration will be completed. It is the same layout, with an upstairs and a basement dance floor. The hours of opening will be till 2am (3am for our more popular student nights like Poptarts and Supermarket).

“We have not decided about unisex toilets, but at present they are separate. What do you think, do students want or do NOT want unisex toilets?

“We WILL retain a pole… that’s a MUST! The

idea is to re-create Baby Love eventually, in its look and service. The one advantage is we will be having draught beer etc. together with cocktails, and I can assure there will be deals for students on those! There is an upstairs and downstairs just like Baby Love, with the advantage of it NOT being near any Colleges, as Oriel objected to the late night noise.”

An English student at Magdalen said, “One third of the reason Baby Love is my spiritual home in Oxford is its grimy, sweaty basement feeling, which the new building doesn’t really look equipped to provide. Second and third is the crowd and music, which hopefully they should be able to bring with them. Finally, Baby Love is or used to be the closest place to Magdalen — now it will take ages to walk to and from.”

An Exeter second year was similarly concerned, “Cellar has proven to be a great venue for Supermarket-esque events. This new Baby Love will need to fight for its place in the social calendar.”

Grade inflation at Oxford RIP to the printed dictionary 21 Top Universities awarded more top degrees than expected Megan Gibbons News Editor A STUDY BY England’s Higher Education Funding Council has suggested that Oxford University are awarding significantly more ‘top degrees’ than expected.

The study found that of the 123 institutions listed, 21 universities awarded a higher number of top degrees than could be expected based on a variety of factors. Oxford University was included amongst the 21, awarding 90.9 percent of students a ‘good’ degree in 2010/11.

Some of the factors taken into account were students’ social background, their previous schooling, prior qualifications and the university’s entry requirements.

Notably, those supposedly awarding a higher number of top degrees included many members of the Russell Group universities. However, other non-Russell group universities were also identified.

Experts have claimed that the figures do not necessarily prove low exam standards but could be attributed to better teaching or iden-

tification of student potential for high achievement, regardless of their prior academic achievement.

More than two-thirds of students left university with a 2:1 degree last year, around one in five with a first.

An Oxford spokesman said, “Education is all about encouraging people to perform at their very best. At Oxford, we offer a high level of individual teaching to all students through the university’s tutorial system. We are confident that this approach, combined with rigorous examination processes, ensures that final degree classifications accurately reflect the very high abilities of our students.”

Oxford English Dictionary’s next edition will not be printed Tom Hall News Editor THE NEXT EDITION of the Oxford English Dictionary, initially intended for publication this year, is unlikely ever to appear in paper form again, and is not expected until 2034.

Estimated to fill 40 volumes, this edition, named OED3, has so far been worked on for 20 years. If the current estimated completion date is correct, it will still be more on target than the first edition; estimated to take 10 years, OED1 was commissioned in 1857 and not published until 1958.

The Editor-in-Chief, Michael Proffitt, told Country Life magazine that the huge volume of words arising on the internet significantly increases the challenge involved in creating a comprehensive dictionary. “Although the internet has made access easier,” he said, “it’s also created the dilemma of information overload.

“In 1989, we looked for five years’ recorded usage before a word entered the dictionary.

Now, it’s 10 years because there is so much more material to sift through.

“We look not only for frequency and longevity, but also breadth of use because, once a word enters the OED, it doesn’t come out. It’s a permanent record of language. I don’t think of it as a purely linguistic document, but as a part of social history.”

The growing number of uses for individual words has presented similar problems; the dictionary’s associate editor, Peter Gilliver, once spent nine months revising definitions for the word “run”, the longest entry in the dictionary.

OED3 already contains 800,000 definitions, over twice that in the most recent edition.

Cherwell EDITORS Max Long (Magdalen), Joe Iles (St Anne's), editor@cherwell.org DEPUTY EDITORS Robert Walmsley, Delia Lockey, Jack Doyle, Samuele Volpe, Ella Richards NEWS EDITORS Alex Stronell, Megan Gibbons, Tom Hall, Charlie Atkins (Broadcasting) NEWS REPORTERS Rohan Arora, Nick Hilton, Rowan Borchers, Leandra Bias, Ellen Brewster, Will Carter, Rebecca Grant, James Rhodes, Nikita Makarchev, Joe Hill, Stanislas Lalanne, Esther Hodges, Jennie Han, Joel Mann, Georgia Latham COMMENT EDITORS Alice King, Nick Mutch, Sybil Devlin (Blogs) INVESTIGATIONS EDITORS India Miller, Jessica Hao LIFE AND STYLE EDITORS Chloe Ingersent, Erin Goldfinch, Tess Colley (Broadcasting) CULTURE EDITORS Emma Simpson, Luke Barratt, Joel Casey (Broadcasting) FASHION EDITORS Leah Hendre, Niluka Kavanagh (Broadcasting) SPORT EDITOR Jonathon Turnbull PUZZLES EDITOR Aneesh Naik BROADCASTING EDITOR Lily Taylor FOOD AND DRINK EDITOR Elizabeth English ART AND BOOKS EDITORS Isaac Goodwin, Joel Nelson FILM AND TV EDITORS Marcus Balmer, Oliver Johnson STAGE EDITORS Jordan Reed, Naomi Polonsky MUSIC EDITORS Rushabh Haria, Helen Thomas DEPUTY COMMENT EDITORS Niamh McIntyre, Tom Carter, Samuel Rutishauser-Mills, Cameron Joshi, Rachel Dobbs, Evy Cavalla DEPUTY LIFESTYLE EDITORS Emily Brown, Natalie Stumpf, Sara Semic, Emma Cookson, Rhiannon Gibbs-Harris DEPUTY BROADCASTING EDITORS Tess Colley, Lakmini Wijesinghe DEPUTY FASHION EDITORS Rebecca Borthwick, Nam Phuong Dinh, Sara Sayma, Jack Davies, Antonia Whitton DEPUTY SPORT EDITOR Jamie Farmer, Jacob Rabinowitz PHOTO EDITOR Kathryn Hodkinson PHOTOGRAPHER Alexander Benn ILLUSTRATOR Sage Goodwin NIGHT LAWYER Jo Lyall BUSINESS TEAM Holly Jackson, Rohan Arora, Stephanie Austera, Emma Lipczynski, Elizabeth Rutherford, Anju Jacob OSPL CHAIRMAN Jonathan Adams (chairman@ospl.org) MANAGING DIRECTOR Kalila Bolton FINANCE DIRECTOR Minyoung Seo COMPANY SECRETARY April Peake DIRECTORS Rowan Borchers, Hugh Lindsey, Christina Maddock

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COMMENT Could Bitcoin be the basis for a financial revolution?

Niamh McIntyre Deputy Comment Editor

W

hile many UK economists recently focused on Osborne’s unprecedented reform of beer and bingo duty, something even more radical has been happening on the global stage: Bitcoin is back.

After the recent collapse of MtGox, the world’s biggest exchange of the virtual currency, apocalyptic prophecies of the end of Bitcoin abounded. And yet, to the dismay of detractors who

“

Bitcoin is revolutionary only in the hands of revolutionaries saw these events as a validation of their view of a wildly idealistic and untenable means of exchange, as of late there has been a kind of resurgence. MtGox, which formerly handled 70% of global Bitcoin exchanges, has rediscovered 200,000 Bitcoins in a wallet presumed lost. The International Business Times published evidence to suggest that ‘the crypto currency market [is] as stable as it has been in a long time’, and valued the current investment in Bitcoin at $117m. In one interesting development, the Aite Group produced a comprehensive 18-page report: ‘Bitcoin: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, which demonstrates how seriously its model is being considered, either as threat or opportunity, by global financial institutions.

It would perhaps be helpful at this point to recap the basic economic premises of Bitcoin.

It is a peer-to-peer payment system whose most fundamental innovation is its circumvention of centralized, third-party regulation and transaction fees. Bitcoins are created by ‘mining’, in which computing power is used to discover the coins by a series of complex algorithms. However, there is a finite amount of the virtual currency, meaning that Bitcoins become increasingly difficult to mine. This move intends to keep inflation at a steady rate, because supply cannot be increased beyond certain amount. Its dollar value, of course, is allowed to float and is highly variable.

There are currently 11 million Bitcoins in existence, and the number of those able to be discovered has been capped at 21 million by 2040.

As Bitcoin has erupted from a highly niche experiment into the mainstream economy, its political implications have become increasingly contentious. Its potential to undermine the monopoly of global banks and governmental regulation means that, depending on your point of view, it is simply aggressively libertarian venture capitalism or a revolutionary affront to the hegemony of traditional economic models. Those who hold the former view would point out that Bitcoin’s deregulation is a highly dangerous way of shoring up power for a minority, akin to the deregulation of our banking systems now widely held to be the most important factor in the 2008 global crash. Does Bitcoin therefore merely transfer financial power from the hands of

one economically empowered elite to another, technocratic elite? It is telling that, while some in the banking sector are determined to eradicate the threat of the crypto-currency, many of their more forward-thinking colleagues have invested heavily. Bitcoin’s process of ‘mining’ is demonstrably undemocratic, in that increasingly complex systems involving multiple computers are now needed to operate it. However, the critiques which condemn Bitcoin’s attempt to circumvent regulation assume that governmental financial regulation is objective, and distinct from the banks themselves; an assertion which would be extremely difficult to prove in any of our large Western economies.

Bitcoin was released in 2009, developed in order to address the void of trust in governments and financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 crash. In a statement accompanying the release, the elusive ‘Sashi Nakamoto’ asserts that “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” While the users of Bitcoin are notoriously anonymous, every transaction in the currency’s history is verifiable and accessible, recorded in its public ledger, ‘the blockchain’.

There is evidence that Bitcoin is being used to bypass traditional economic middlemen and help emancipate the worlds poorest. A good example is a BitPesa, a digital currency platform based in Kenya which will re-

duce by two-thirds the transaction fees taken from overseas transfers to Africa – such fees provide companies like Western Union with an income of around 110 million dollars a year.

Liu, a hacker and blogger at Simulacrum describes the ideological appeal that Bitcoin holds for these communities, “To understand the sometimes slippery ethics of Bitcoin…

We have to account for its perceived dialectical opponent, an entrenched and indifferent economic elite. [It is] a transnational community with no intentional barriers to entry, built on collaboration, relative transparency, and a surprisingly resilient idealism.” For a people that saw first-hand the results of strict control over the economy, Bitcoin and its associated Cryptography seem to offer a permanent respite from the censorship and control that has plagued so much of recent German history. Bitcoin is primarily an ideological move, a thought experiment which has spawned over 100 other crypto currencies, described by enthusiasts in evangelical terms. As Paul Singer said “When kids wake up to the fact that they don’t need their parents’ help to create a Bitcoin wallet...when they can use Bitcoins for free international transactions, at any hour, in every major city on the planet, then you’ll know that something has changed.”

But many remain unconvinced that Bitcoin is any more than a particularly alluring bubble. The former President of the Dutch central bank called the hype around Bitcoin worse than the Netherlands’ infamous tulip mania of the 17th century. Bitcoin is still in an embryonic stage; no-one could confidently predict its future. However, in spite of all its uncertainty, Bitcoin provides the potential for an economic battle-ground by interrogating the idea of the fiat currency itself, and that is what makes it endlessly exciting and corruptible in equal measure. Bitcoin is revolutionary, but only in the hands of revolutionaries.

Yes Can UKIP now be viewed

Cherwell on the go

Nick Mutch and Alice King ask whether UKIP

App available for iPhone and Android Nick Mutch Comment Editor

I

t is still considered slightly unacceptable to admit any sympathy for UKIP among polite company.

However much we may wish to dismiss them as a fringe right wing party, it is time to give up childish gestures such as the NUS’s vacuous “opposition to UKIP” and treat them as a serious and respectable political force, however much you may disagree with their views.

The recent debates between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg were a watershed in UKIP’s history. The public could see that its leader was someone capable of eloquence, intellectual rigor and who could hold his own with the most experienced of Westminster career politicians. At the very least, it showed him as unafriad of publicly defending his views.

The party is also making a concerted effort to clear itself of its peripheries.

Fringe parties are often forced to recruit from the fringes, and

it is to their credit that they have attempted to cleanse the party of its ugliest elements.

The embarrassment of Godfrey Bloom was gotten rid of and the UKIP councillor who blamed Britain’s floods on gay marriage was expelled.

We must admit that UKIP’s consistent and principled opposition to the EU has struck a nerve in a section of the UK public concerned not just with immigration, but also with the European Union’s jeapordization of British autonomy.

UKIP’s point is not a simplistic platform of “anti-immigration”, although it must be admitted they do pander to the belief that immigration is a job stealing racket. It is that Britain should determine its immigration policy rather than merely accept European dictates.

Farage has frequently been accused of xenophobic motivation for his opposition to unlimited immigration from the EU. But we should remember if a country is a member of the EU, their immigration rules must explicitly prejudice people based on their nationality. As Farage

has said, why should the UK give automatic residency to those from Europe (an overwhelmingly white continent), but not to potentially far more skilled people from India, China, New Zealand or the rest of the world, which is much more culturally diverse? Illustrating this is the fact that Farage was the first major party leader to advocate allowing refugees fleeing the violence in Syria, making the sensible distinction between economic migrants and genuine refugees.

There is so much in UKIP to find issue with. Its record on support for Equal Marriage is very poor. Its economic policy is pure Thatcherite neoliberalism, much to the dismay of anyone who would vote UKIP as a “protest vote” against the “mainstream status quo.” Little discussed but also ominous is the prevalence of climate deniers in its ranks. But the only way to defeat UKIP is to acknowledge their strength, rather than dismiss them outright, less we find ourselves on the same side-lines they once inhabited. The Left forgets this lesson at its peril.

Comment | 7

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Cherwell

editor@cherwell.org 7, St Aldates OX1 3BS @Cherwell_Online

Letters to the editors

Since 1920

The fate of David Moyes

The naturalist Roger Deakin once wrote that “a writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to report things as they are”.

This is a basic principle which should to all writing, however detached from politics, and surely it is most needed when applied to journalism. Even in the hackneyed context of student media, a desire to change things has to be at the heart of our work.

Oxford could do with some change. The much-debated – and always embarrassing – admissions statistics call for urgent action. The issues that people of colour face in the university have recently been highlighted, and these also need to be addressed urgently. Whilst students flock to network-based political societies, there is a general apathy towards the institution which is meant to represent their interests.

Much of Oxford’s political life is dominated by a debating institution which is revered across the world for its democratic spirit; but time and again it has shown itself to be morally corrupt and undemocratic.

Oxford is, at heart, a place in decline – a university maintained by ages-old prestige, relying mainly on past achievements and alumni, which do not necessarily have much relevance to the actual experience of students.

Most students are aware that their experience at Oxford is dependent more on their own zeal and motivation rather than on the university’s academic excellence.

Whether it’s the result of national policy, individual initiative, or university-led renewal, Oxford desperately needs a breath of fresh air.

After 10 months of ungracious defeats, match after match of painful facial expressions, and a constant backdrop of murmuring dissent from disgruntled fans, the ‘chosen’ David Moyes was finally ousted as manager of Manchester United. He joins the considerable list of managers of Premier League clubs to have been jettisoned after less than a year, his reign lasting approximately one thirtieth of his predecessor’s.

There is much to be gleaned about the world we live in from the fate of David Moyes.

Disgruntled fans are as old as sport itself and calls for the manager to be sacked are always to be found, but the advent of the internet means that these conversations no longer only constitute private griping.

Everyone who had an opinion on Moyes was not only in a position to bore their friends, but also took the opportunity to vent their anger anonymously and viscerally to the world at large — on Facebook, on Twitter, on their blog.

This certainly has a considerable knock-on effect for journalists. Gone are the days when newspapers had a monopoly on public thought, when the only response to a comment piece would be in the letters to the editor the following week.

We are in a constant global dialogue, with each afforded the chance to contribute.

Where does that leave the traditional media?

Is its role in society being slowly eroded?

Ultimately, no. The media continues to frame the discussions we have, and as the nature of that debate changes, so too should the nature of the media.

Goat Race I found your coverage of sporting events over the vacaction to be shamelessly skewed. The prominence afforded to both the Boat Race and the Varsity Football match was much greater than that dedicated to the much more important Goat Race.

Esmeralda Dame Via email Intimate

A

Link me Cherwell, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Rosalind Brody Editor-in-chief at the Oxford Student Sinkhole

Modieva Dugan Via email Kensal Rise

A sinkhole has emerged outside of Worcester.

Sent from my iPhone.

Re the photograph of Kensal Rise Library

can still be considered as a fringe movement

recent poll has indicated that UKIP may receive as much as 20% of the UK’s votes in the European elections, and has, in turn, been sensationalised by gleeful right wing tabloids. The alleged step up in support comes in the wake of Maria Miller’s expenses scandal and the “week of sleaze” in Westminster, entailing multiple allegations of sexual assault in parliament. Both of these saw the Lib Dems and the Conservatives take a hit in the poll, with UKIP gaining considerable support.

Some publications have decreed that British citizens are coming round to the party’s far right views, as if it is some kind of revelation, as opposed to simply a reaction to losing a little faith in their government in the wake of two big scandals. In fact, the truth of the matter is that any scandal immediately damages the popularity of the government in power, and that some of their votes

Allen Samuels

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d as respectable party?

Alice King Comment Editor

in the snow used for the the Library article on 25th March recently it is mine.

By the way, I think your coverage of this story, by various hands, has been excellent throughout.

must go elsewhere. Both Miller’s expenses and the Westminster scandal can only reflect badly upon the Tories and Lib Dems, meaning that Labour and Ukip are unlikely to suffer. With one third of Conservative voters in 2010 claiming they will now vote UKIP, it’s easy to predict where disgruntled Tory votes will defect to – so while this poll may have shown an increase in support for Ukip, it doesn’t mean that the party has gained said support on its own merit.

I would go as far as to say that Ukip has given us no reason to take it seriously. Godfrey Bloom last year referred to countries receiving aid from the UK as “Bongo Bongo Land”, slating the “Ray Bans” and “luxury apartments” that he was so sure the money was being spent on. The new year harboured little improvement for the reputation of the party when councillor David Silvester claimed the onslaught of floods was caused by the legalisation of gay marriage.

While the majority of the country welcomed in the equal marriage bill in March, yet another UKIP councillor, Donna Edmunds, denounced the

Nick Hilton Pembroke College

Tweet of the Week

In Decline

No “iron fist” equality laws that were being put into place. With all the issues that the country faces, surely Ukip can find something more important to worry about than “iron fist” equality.

As one Daily Mail commenter said “I don’t care if they’re nutters – at least they’re our nutters...” If this is the best reasoning to vote UKIP, as it is the most comprehensive argument amongst the other comments, then there’s no reason to consider them a veritable force in British politics. I personally would be more inclined to vote for them on the grounds that the backlash to Silvester’s weather blunders brought the ever-catchy “It’s Raining Men” back into UK charts after a 30 year absence. However, other recent polls have given no indication of similar support and show UKIP remaining firmly behind the Tories and Labour. Considering UKIP have some of the worst attendance rates for their current MEPs, it’s almost as if they’re not even taking themselves seriously. So ultimately, it’s hard to consider Nigel Farage’s party a respectable force within UK politics.

RIGHT OF

REPLY If you would like to respond to any of the features in this week's edition, contact the Comment section at comment@ cherwell.org

Cherwell | 25.04.14

8 | Comment

Alastair Campbell talks about press, OXSTEW Iraq and Oxbridge with Nick Mutch THE

NUS votes to campaign against political and economic reality for foreseeable future

A

t the annual conference of the National Union of Students, held over the Easter holidays, delegates voted in favour of a controversial motion which proposed to “fight and demonstrate against political and economic reality” for the time period extending to “as long as we can continue to live an existence which comfortably ignores it.”

Its proponents are hailing the motion’s passing by a narrow margin as a great victory for all the students who propose motions to NUS Conference.

“We’ve been concerned for quite some time that the NUS has been slowly sliding into relevance,” one delegate declared at the conference. “That 15% discount for all students at a major UK supermarket last year could have had a disastrous effect on people’s perceptions of organised student campaigning,” agreed another. “Thank God that the NUS can now focus on the battle for cloud cuckoo land.”

However, the motion was not without its detractors. “By adopting a position that anybody with a moderate understanding of what is conceivable in the context of current British politics would instantly dismiss as absurd,” Wallace Neilson, the Labour Students National Chair for Electoral T-Shirt Design, said, “we run the risk of greatly endangering my burgeoning political career.”

Responding to suggestions that the Union was unlikely to achieve much success in its campaign against political and economic reality, its Vice-President for Basket Weaving, Tabitha Messinger, said, “if being in favour of plausibility and achievable change means working within existing power structures that cause bad things to happen, then the NUS is proud to have cast off the oppressive shackles of reality.”

“What will really help the vulnerable sections of society that the NUS represents — students, minorities, disenfranchised young people — is for them to know that when we, the representatives who elect each other, speak on their behalf, they know that we’re operating outside of the corrupt, rotten, entirely democratic system of modern British politics.”

Other landmark decisions made at the NUS Conference were a condemnation of UKIP, just in case anybody wasn’t clear where the NUS stood on an organisation espousing a diametrically opposing rejection of conventional wisdom on the real world; a vote in favour of bringing back ‘the Nineties’; and a vote to denounce “in the strongest possible terms” those milk cartons that have the really fiddly opening bits.

The NUS’s annual elections went relatively smoothly, marred only by the notable absence of almost every single student in the UK from the voting process.

One NUS officer commented that “unfortunately, our dedicated opposition to reality also extends to the use of the sort of technology that might allow real students to vote for the people who represent them at a national level.”

At the time of going to press, the real world has responded to the NUS’s decision by steadfastly ignoring it, a policy which has been in place for some time now.

Sandrino Belier

Nick Mutch Comment Editor

W

hen I spoke to Alistair Campbell in November, he confessed that, “I hated Cambridge. I was too young, too chippy and I hated all the posh kids. I’ve always hated private schools and I still do.” As an undergraduate then, Alastair Campbell admits he was certainly never expecting to come back as a Visiting Professor, where he gave the lecture at which I met him. In fact, for a man who has been

“

I’ve always hated private schools and I still do brutally honest in describing his struggles with depression, and has a public perception of being angry, dour, and combative, he can become extremely jovial and disarming.

“I don’t give a damn what people think or say about me,” he tells me. Following this, he addresses the claim that Peter Capaldi’s foul mouthed spin doctor from The Thick of It is based on him.

“I’m actually often asked whether Malcolm Tucker is based on me and I think, what? A sweary Scottish spin doctor trying to maintain strategic cohesion among ministers, and set the government agenda across the media? Fuck yeah!”

He has previously grudgingly accepting the label of “alpha male”, which colleagues in the media labelled him and at one point during our interview, this side comes out. A member of the

audience suddenly interrupts us: “It’s a bit of a pitch. I’m not buying your book but…”

“Well fuck off then!” Campbell replies, “You’ve just lost your pitch!” to the laughter of the onlookers, as the man sheepishly slinks away, before Campbell tells me, “Can’t he see I’m training the next generation of journalists here!”

The conversation turns to slightly more serious matters. Asked to elaborate further on his views on Oxbridge, he explains. “Clearly it is good for Britain that Oxbridge is a byword for educational excellence around the world. But I have long felt that, although in some ways it is the best of Britain, in other ways it is the worst — elitist and part of the reason Britain has never really been a proper meritocracy. Access is still a huge problem and it has barely changed since I was here. I think schools try harder than the Universities do.”

Other than meritocracy, he is also a passionate advocate for mental health causes, recently speaking at the Oxford Union in association with Mind Your Head. He tells me that, in order for the stigma against those with mental health to end, “more public figures need to be open about these things. The benefits of doing this are huge. Attitudes won’t change if we don’t talk about them. Budgets get cut, nobody complains; people suffer in silence. If you had cancer, you’d tell your boss. Why wouldn’t you tell him if you suffered depression or schizophrenia?”

Our discussion moves into journalism, which was once his trade as former political editor of The Daily Mirror. I ask him what advice he has for a young person thinking of pursuing journalism. “DO IT, and do it well. There are several things to remember. You must never overestimate the intelligence of people above you. Best thing about being a journalist is that everyone you meet has got a story to tell. Just don’t expect to be making any money out of it.” Encouragingly for Cherwell hacks, he praises student

journalism. “I think anyone thinking of getting involved in journalism should start at University. Not just at University — I think sometimes student journalism can make a real difference in national politics!”

On the slightly more high-profile debates on the role of journalism, namely the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations, which were one of the subjects of his lecture series, he has cautious praise for The Guardian. “I actually have a lot of respect for The Guardian and how they handled Snowden.” However, he makes the point of disagreeing with Assange’s political philosophy. “He just thinks all secrets should be open, an indiscriminate dumping; I just think that’s wrong.”

He is still also a passionate defender of the controversial period of New Labour that he was a part of. Iraq, he says, “will be remembered as one of New Labour’s successes. The debate

“

Iraq will be remembered as one of New Labour’s successes about it now is totally one sided. ‘We went to war in Iraq ten years ago and everything that’s gone wrong in the Middle East now is because of that!’ It’s totally untrue.” Other things they will be remembered for, he tells us are “Bank of England’s Independence, devolution, as long as Scotland doesn’t go independent, Kosovo, African intervention, and crucially increasing public spending in schools and hospitals. I still like Tony Blair a lot… I chatted to him this morning in fact!”

He ends on an upbeat note. “I’ve no regrets about anything. I’ve always claimed to never care what people say about me and I never will.”

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Comment | 9

The changing nature of war correspondence Rachel Dobbs Deputy Comment Editor

O

n the 5th of April, Anja Niedringhaus, a German photographer and Associated Press journalist was shot dead by an Afghan police officer, leaving her colleague, Kathy Gannon, seriously injured. The attack was the third of its kind on journalists in Afghanistan in less than a month, following the shooting of Swedish journalist Nils Horner and Afghan journalist Ahmed Sadar in March, whose wife and children were shot alongside him.

In the last few days the death of Niedringhaus has been closely reported and commented on by the international media, which has emphasised its sadness at the loss of a truly exceptional journalist, who was the recipient of both a Pulitzer Prize for her photography of the war in Iraq and a Courage in Journalism Award. Former colleagues have described Niedringhaus as immensely kind and courageous and amongst the best and most dedicated photojournalists of her generation — her death is rightly mourned and her bravery rightly celebrated.

There have been similar responses to the deaths of Horner and Sadar, as well as the 2012 deaths of the internationally acclaimed Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik and many in between. These men and women all risked their lives to give unheard people a voice and bear witness to atrocities. They did this so that the people their work reaches cannot claim they did not know, cannot forfeit responsibility through ignorance. The media and public’s reaction to their work and deaths has been entirely deserved. It also highlights a significant double standard.

In 2008, Amanda Lindhout moved to Mogadishu, Somalia to work as a freelance journalist.

Along with photographer and fellow freelancer Nigel Brennan, Lindhout was kidnapped by Somali extremists and held for ransom for fifteen

months, enduring starvation, torture and (in Lindhout’s case) extended sexual assault.

However, the media’s reaction to the situation was remarkably different to the one that is being expressed this week or, indeed, to the detainment of a team of veteran New York Times reporters in 2011 and the abuse they suffered at the hands of the Libyan military. Much of the response to Lindhout’s kidnapping focused on her and Brennan’s status as freelancers, and the lack of support and expertise that would have this provided them with. This has been extrapolated into the opinion that they were naive and reckless; sensationalists seeking to make their names by capitalising on the devastation in Somalia with little or no regard for their own safety or the costs to the governments trying

to negotiate their release. An article published by the Globe and Mail in September declared Lindhout as “narcissistic” and stated that her situation has “little to do with journalism”, claiming that her ultimate aim was “fame and fortune”. The same article also draws a correlation between the media attention following Lindhout’s release and the fact that she is “highly photogenic”.

If it is true that Lindhout’s actions were fuelled solely by a sensationalist desire to make a name for herself, then such harsh comments may seem somewhat justified. But there is evidence that her decision to enter notoriously dangerous Mogadishu as a freelancer and without the backing of a media outlet was not merely the action of a fame-seeking amateur, nor

that it was unusual. 80% of the journalists covering Syria in 2012-2013 were freelancers and, as such, frequently operated without insurance, translators or suitable safety equipment. Information is a commodity and, as with all commodities, the market in which it is exchanged is dictated by supply and demand. Since the Bosnia war in the 1990s, the traditional assumption that journalists are off-limits as targets of conflict has faded, increasing the danger and cost associated with reporting from war-zones.

This, combined with the ease with which readers can get international news online, has led to a dramatic decrease in the full-time war correspondents, such as Anja Niedringhaus and Marie Colvin, that media outlets are prepared to fund.

Despite this, demand for insight into conflict zones from a personal, front-line perspective remains high and editors remain willing to pay for it. Because of the unsanctioned and open-ended nature of freelance work, competition for stories is fierce and editors can pay reporters lower and lower wages, excluding the possibility of said reporters affording security or insurance. This means that, regardless of whether their motives are for personal reward or a genuine desire to alleviate suffering by raising awareness, reporters are pushed into increasingly dangerous situations, to go where others won’t, to repeat the risks taken by Amanda Lindhout in Mogadishu or hundreds of freelancers in Syria.

The media this week mourns the loss of longstanding journalists such as Niedringhaus and remembers the achievements of their work. For years, the ability of dedicated journalists to give personal insight into far-removed events and places has shaped our perspectives on upheaval and conflict and reiterated the importance of widespread suffering. All reporting from areas of conflict will involve some risk. The same media culture that celebrates the achievements these risks can bring and the sacrifices made should be less quick to condemn the new generation of reporters that they are now creating for the same ends.

The Campaign Esther Hodges, Keble College

Why Cherwell is Living Below The Line

E

very Thursday evening, the Cherwell senior editorial team and news editors traipse en masse to a generic nation of noodles. There, they purchase everything from yo min noodles with king prawns to char-siu pork noodle soup. They then traipse back to the Cherwell offices to set about consuming said Eastern grub. Lovely tale.

The thing is, fewer people than you might think could afford to do this. Even though the noodles purchased by the Cherwell team work out to a thoroughly reasonable and student friendly around-six-quid, this would break a large number of Britons’ banks. Because the ugly truth is that people living in the UK today, a country with one of the world’s largest economies and most advanced state welfare systems, are not immune from the debilitating effects of hunger, due to the fact that they simply cannot afford to eat.

Food poverty in Britain is a problem that is becoming more and more recognised as such, by the media, by politicians, by charities. The media reacts to the news of Britain’s hungry with front page splashes, augmented by pictures of miserable children (see last Wednesday’s edition of the Mirror, whose exposé on the use of food banks in the UK was marred

slightly by the fact that the miserable child on their front page was in fact American). Politicians respond with denials that food poverty in Britain is anything to do with them and promise to do better (but only once they’ve rectified all the other problems left by the last government). Charities, on the other hand, actually do something about it.

Live Below the Line is a charitable campaigning initiative that aims to raise money and awareness about the growing problem of food poverty in developed countries. It was set up in 2010 by a pair of Australians, and involves participants living on £1/day for five days. This year’s UK Live Below the Line takes place between Monday 28th April and Friday 2nd of May, and it is expected that a record number of people will participate.

In pursuit of that record number, and in stoic disregard of the fact that participating in Live Below the Line will prevent that Thursday night trip to Noodle Nation, a group of Cherwellians have decided to take part. Life at Oxford can encourage disproportionate spending on food and drink; there’s always that tasty-looking meal in hall (well, there’s at least occasionally a tasty-looking meal in hall), that bottle of Morgan’s Spiced, that Mission

Burrito. For the Cherwell team, taking part in the Live Below the Line challenge is an opportunity to show that it isn’t necessary to spend so much money on food.

Max Long, Cherwell editor, expressed his excitement for the project, saying “This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time, as I think it’s a great way to raise awareness about a really important issue. Rather than campaigns which call for participants to wear no make up, or not drink

“

At the heart of the matter is an issue of empathy alcohol, I feel Living Below the Line provides a challenge which is directly linked to the cause it seeks to address.”

He added that, “At the heart of the matter is an issue of empathy, and I hope that both by doing this ourselves, and encouraging others to donate as a result, we will provide our grain

of rice towards a wider cause” “I, incidentally, will be subsisting almost entirely on a diet of rice and pulses.”

Yet we’re lucky enough that, once the week is up and we’ve had a lifetime’s share of Tesco value couscous and lentils between us, we can go straight back to spending our money on nutritious and delicious food. Others are not so lucky. For others, there can be no way out of the vicious cycle of debt, unemployment, and consequent food poverty.

Living Below the Line will allow us an insight into the hardships faced by the millions of people both in the UK and around the world living in poverty. But what will really help those for whom food poverty is a constant struggle is the money we raise. This will go towards community projects, food banks, and the continued raising of awareness. So let us ask you to please, please, donate some money.

Perhaps forego a trip to Bridge, buy one less drink during those May Day celebrations, eat one less Taylor’s baguette, and donate that money to Live Below the Line instead.

Cherwell will be living below the line between 5 and 9 May. To donate, visit: https:// www.livebelowtheline.com/team/cherwell

PROFILE Ben Szreter talks football, twitter and homophobia with Joey Barton J

oey Barton’s reputation invariably precedes him, a reputation Barton himself summarised as a “violent Neanderthal thug who roamed city centres looking to beat people up” given his portrayal in the media.

Barton was jailed for six months for common assault and affray in May 2008 as well as receiving a four-month suspended jail sentence for assaulting a Manchester City team-mate in May 2007.

However the Joey Barton I met was calm, collected, intelligent and extremely friendly. At points I could see elements of the illusory Joey Barton the media had created, yet overall my meeting with Barton was characterised by his insightful self-analysis and reflection.

Barton was born September 1982 in Huyton, Merseyside in an extremely deprived community. He referred to himself as a “working class boy from the streets of Liverpool”. Reflecting on his upbringing, however, Barton pointed out some of the advantages which might not otherwise have been apparent. “I look back now and actually think it [my background] was an advantage. It made me hungry, it made me determined to make something of myself, determined to be someone in the world and gave me that drive to succeed and be successful…I would consider it a great blessing”.

It was this sort of drive that led Barton to dismiss coaches who told him he was too small and he eventually earned a professional

“

Giving me Twitter was like giving an arsonist a box of matches contract with Manchester City after his boyhood team – Everton – had released him. Barton would go on to play over 150 times for Manchester City before being bought by Newcastle for £5.8 million for whom he played 84 games. He moved to Queen’s Park Rangers in 2011 where he remains after a year on loan in Marseille. He also earned a single England cap in 2007 in a friendly against Spain.

The first contract that Barton signed when aged 19 saw him receive a salary of around £6,000 a week, not including bonuses for appearances and performance. This suddenly entered Barton into a different world from the one he had grown up in, a world full of its own challenges.

“It’s scary, you have nothing and then all of a sudden you have quite a bit. It’s difficult and no one is teaching you how to adjust to it…

I struggled with it, I struggled with being famous, I struggled with having money and became a shadow of the person I am now… it eventually hit the wall and it accumulated in me going to jail. I didn’t realise until I went inside how fortunate I was and how negative a person upon society I had become. It’s not easy living your life in the public eye and there’s a side of me that envies people who don’t”.

The pressures of fame, money and professional football were clearly a difficult environment to grow up in and indeed this may have been exaggerated by Barton’s persistent belief that, “by the time I was nineteen I had achieved my goal [of becoming a professional footballer]”.

Perhaps this confidence in his achievements prevented him from keeping grounded. But it’s difficult to pass judgment when his background is taken into consideration. According to Barton prospects were severely limited. “I probably had three career choices; sportsman of some sort, manual labour or drug dealer”.

Joey Barton is well known for his use of social media. He has his own website where he writes pieces on all manner of subjects from football to social commentary and has nearly 2.5 million twitter followers (around four times the number that David Cameron has). The development of social media and in particular platforms such as twitter that allow celebrities and media personalities immediate contact with people is something that Barton feels is a significant development.

“They [the media] have to adapt accordingly because I have so many people who follow me [on twitter] who have a better opinion of me than what the media portrayed before. They now have to adjust accordingly because it’s now not a true reflection of society to say I’m just a bad boy Neanderthal. In the social media space, why I’ve been successful is because I’m honest, I’m me, I’m genuine and people have seen that. People have seen a side of my character that they’ve never seen because the media controlled information before whereas now information is everywhere; people consume a lot of their news and a lot of their information from the internet or from social media and don’t do it from newspapers.”

Barton makes a thought-provoking point about the use of platforms such as twitter to “negate the media”, in his own words. Although Barton did jokingly acknowledge that initially he thought that giving him twitter was like “giving an arsonist a box of matches”.

Social media helps create accountability for the mainstream media because of the instant connection that people have with other sources of information. This of course was not the case prior to the advent of the internet and is even more so since the dawn of the ‘twitter age’.

Indeed Barton emphasised the positive role that social media can play and cited his use of his twitter presence in helping the campaign for justice for the victims of the 1989 Hillsbor-

ough disaster gain the 100,000 signatures for the issue to be heard in the Houses of Parliament. When the victim’s names were read out in the Houses of Parliament Barton said “along with the birth of my child it is the proudest moment of my life”.

Barton has also been outspoken about the issue of homophobia in football partially because of a personal connection – Barton had a gay uncle who he grew up “idolising and adoring”. On the issue of homophobia in football Barton spoke about the issues that still remain. “In the dressing room I don’t think it [homophobia] would be a problem, most of the lads who play football are quite liberal – it wouldn’t even be an issue. I think that the greatest fear [for gay footballers] would be what goes on inside football stadiums because we all know football fans can be quite cruel… something has to give, it will be the same way

“

I love causing chaos, not physical anymore, but intellectual as racism within the stadium – it will be other fans policing other fans. In an ideal world we’d answer all of those questions [on homophobia in football] positively but I’m also a realist and know that there’s still a bit of work to be done.

I don’t think it’s the work of gay people to do; I

think it’s the work of everyone to do, society to do. Our sport, as the biggest sport in the UK, should be the most progressive.”

Barton’s progressive (and particularly outspoken) attitude on homophobia in football is refreshing if only because so few other players are willing to talk about the subject. Justin Fashanu committed suicide in 1998 eight years after becoming the first (and to this day only) professional footballer in England to come out as gay. When his niece, Amal Fashanu made a documentary for the BBC on homophobia in football in 2012 Barton was the only footballer who agreed to be interviewed.

Joey is certainly someone who is looking to further himself. He has enrolled in a philosophy degree at Roehampton University; he undoubtedly seems to be taking it seriously because one of the two people accompanying him was one of his lecturers in philosophy from Roehampton. Indeed Barton remarked “I love causing chaos, not physical anymore, but intellectual.” He was philosophical at times and he related his chosen academic discipline to his own life, telling me “We’re doing Plato’s Republic now and really studying it in detail.

A just man appearing unjust or an unjust man appearing just – what is it better to be?” This statement is particularly apt for Barton’s use of twitter to overturn the image created of him by the mainstream media.

Barton described himself as “a good man who made bad decisions” and after meeting him I would say that this rings true. Barton has done some terrible things in the past, but many would argue that they are not unforgiveable.

Barton himself summed it up when he told me that, “I would dare any of us to judge anyone until we’re faced with their same situation.”

PUZZLES

DEFINE: ‘sambuke’

TRIVIUM In the city of Sycamore, NY, there is a set of upsidedown traffic lights that has lived there since almost a century ago, when the local Irish-American population took exception to English red being placed above Irish green!

Which of these is the correct definition of this word?

1. An ancient stringed instrument 2. Variant of anise used to create a popular liqueur 3. An expression of disapproval

CRYPTIC CROSSWORD Across 1. In European capital, small bird eats kitten. Avenged finally! (6) 4. One thousand and one evenings’ ventures initially take place in European capital (4) 8. Omsk cloth ordered to European capital (9) 9. Messy loos in European capital (4) 11. Unable to see my love’s diminished photograph (6) 14. Manage to hang out with leaders of European nation in European capital (10) 17. Kipling poem? Depends. (2) 18. Reduced aircraft carries kitchen fitting to European capital (8) 21. Trams made to order in European capital (9) Down 1. Big cat eats small bird (for starters) in European capital (6) 2. A modern designation is some fine ordeal (3) 3. Unpleasant characters on ends of pitchforks (4) 5. Is ‘mass’ an ideology? (3) 6. One hides between two containers above the metropolis (a European capital) (7,4) 7. Thatcher (perhaps) reveals tale unbegun (4) 10. See some buffalo, OK? (4) 12. Heathen pointing a gun at non-heathen initially (5) 13. “Let Dee out” means eliminate (6) 15. Owns home (a semi, initially) (3) 16. Equip a European capital (4) 19. Israeli rabbis are harbouring terrorists! (3) 20. We, the people? (2)

Email Aneesh Naik at puzzles@cherwell.org for clues or solutions

LOGIC If A=1 and B=2, then AB=12. Similarly, find (different) values for L, O, G, I, and C that satisfy: (L+O+G+I+C) 3 =LOGIC

SUDOKU Difficulty: Hard

LIFE&STYLE John Evelyn

Cherwell says:

Cringe Clubber

I

t’s been a Long time coming, but change has come to Cherwell. The Ancien Régime has fallen, the old guard are gone, the revolution got revolting and 7 St Aldates is wreathed in smIles.

After the mountainous Peakes of journalistic deBorchery scaled last term, with its Murdochian simmering of Benton Sans size 11 bad behaviour, we can only wonder what is in store for us all. Will there be headlines? Will there be hacking?

Or will everything be cool, alcoholic, and topped up with coke – like the Long Ilesand Ice Tea the Oxford journo scene is thirsty for.

Yet like Janus I must look behind as well as before, and bewail glories past even as I anticipate titillations ahead. For it is with desperately sad news that I must begin this term’s diary. They say there is no tragedy more terrible than the loss of a child, and it is a truism Oxford has come to feel most keenly this vacation. The Baby that we so Loved is no more. Cut down like a flower in the fullness of its bloom, the destruction of such youthful innocence has pierced the heart of many an undergrad.

The cruelty of the attack on a defenceless infant marks the beginning of an Oriellian dystopia for swathes of the university’s crop-top’d and hoopearring’d population, a Room 101 in which Tarts do not Pop and Markets are not Super. But like Winston Smith himself (only sweatier and edgier and with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Destiny’s Child lyrics) the hipsters of Oxford have taken up their Action Stations, ready to start Burning Down the House of the perpetrator.

In other Matt-ers, it was heartening to witness one Cowley dweller’s expression of Incontinent adoration for his lady-love earlier in the vac. In an warm gush worthy of the Isis itself, a pale yellow baptism that spread slowly across the matteress and towards the body of his sleeping mistress, the relief of release soured as swiftly as the smell of his piss. The object of his amour was forced to rise Ing-surgent and go to sleep on the sofa. One questions her Life Style choices.

Hit me with gossip.

John Evelyn

Got gossip? Email gossipevelyn@gmail.com with the juicy details!

Here’s a howler dredged up from the recesses of last term... The last Wahoo is always a big one - and these two are clearly making the most of it. Unlike most of us, who were ready to curl up weeping in the foetal position after 8 weeks of term, these two couldn’t be happier to have struggled through.

That being said. to judge by the gurn on this gentleman’s face, the end couldn’t have come soon enough. His lady-friend is certainly happy to have been swept off her feet though! Cherwell can only hope that the vacation has rested and refreshed Oxford’s valiant clubbers .

Creaming Spires

Amelia Anderson Exeter, 2nd Year Music

Matthew Pybus Hertford, 3rd Year Engineering

Gorgeous Gargoyle hopes to hit the right note After spending two terms pestering my friends to go on a Cherwell blind date, I was persuaded that it was finally my turn, and somewhat reluctantly, I surrendered myself to losing my blind date virginity.

Meeting Matt outside Byron, I was a little apprehensive, mostly thanks to a series of blind date horror stories relayed to me by my mother an hour prior to the big moment — even after fervently explaining that I was NOT about to meet a 50 year old creep picked up in an internet chat room! Luckily Matt was very nice and the SOS text I’d prepared just in case I came face-to-face with an axe murderer was not needed.

We engaged in what I presume is typical blind date chat (covering hobbies, likes and dislikes, mutual friends) as we munched on our burgers. A certain something was lacking though, and I don’t think Matt and I will see each other again. I wish him all the best for the future and hope that he achieves his novel writing ambition — as long as this date doesn’t appear in print (anywhere other than Cherwell at least) someday!

Nice Interesting Probably not

Single engineer and budding writer searches for a muse I was a little concerned at first that, having booked a table at Byron, it would turn out that Amelia was vegetarian. Once that worry was assuaged, I was as relaxed as I was going to get on my first blind-date.

Initially, all I knew about Amelia was that she had a concert engagement beforehand. It turned out that she was performing herself, as a part of the Oxford Gargoyles. This news came along with learning that she was to be going on an enviable international tour to both Hong Kong and the US. Despite this encouraging start, I must sadly report that the conversation seemed to only ever skim the surface. Hall boycotts, shared acquaintances, college accommodation, bits of courses, and northern accents were all touched on but, whatever the reason, we never found anything to discuss in much detail.

Regardless, the date wasn’t disastrous, terrific, or in fact any particularly strong adjective. It was just a date. It felt a little rushed, but that’s what happens when you start eating at half-nine.

Decidedly pretty Broken Largely ambivalent

Are you tired of being single and alone? Volunteer for a Blind Date at editor@cherwell.org

I love sleeping with hacks. Shagging someone who everyone has vaguely heard of feels glamourous, naughty even – every time you go the Union you can point at a shifty highflown character and whisper ‘I’ve had him’ under your breath. The news in student papers like this one is that little bit more poignant, after all, when you’ve done the nasty with the guy headlining page six.

There is a problem with hack-shagging though: for the most part, the hacks themselves are god-awful human beings. They’re just not very nice. Or even very fun, which is more important. Years of hanging around Port and Policy with other boys who weren’t cool during adolescence has merely increased the awkwardness gained from years of same-sex education. Crucially too, one mediocre shag will follow you around forever – partly because they’re fucking everywhere and partly because their inferiority complex requires bigging themselves up to their supposed ‘friends’ all the time.

The first time I realised the true nature of the hack was the morning after sharing a bed with an ex-Union-something. When pillow talk turned to election strategies and gossip, the crush that I’d had on him from (very) afar for two terms disappeared, leaving me in a cold college with no clothes, a cramp in one arm that I felt too embarrassed to stretch out, and a lecture at 9AM. I made up an excuse, and scarpered at six.

He’s haunted me ever since – turning up in the Union (obviously), Parkend, and, on one particularly unenjoyable occasion, in a pub where we did a solid show of ignoring each other for roughly an hour. An hour’s torture was not a fair reward for a couple of halfhearted drunken thrusts.

They will undoubtedly only call you when they really, really need votes at some madeup election for another thing that you were blissfully unaware of. They’re great if you fancy acquiring a cracking sconce or are just a bit of a conquest-collector (I see them as Pokemon cards. A president is a shiny) – but if it’s a good seeing to you’re after, best to have to look elsewhere.

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Life&Style | 13

Copenhagen: an unorthodox tour Emma Cookson is impressed by the lessser known attractions of the Danish capital

M

y sojourn in Copenhagen was, you might say, ‘off the beaten track’. Not purposefully, but simply because I had no idea what the ‘track’ was. Booking the flights on a whim in the middle of a particularly harrowing essay crisis, I didn’t really put any thought into it until I was on the plane and realised I had no idea where the friend I was supposed to be staying with lived. Or what her phone number was. Or, essentially, anything that is usually a prerequisite when you go away. As it turned out, I’d also brought the wrong currency since I had convinced myself that Denmark used Euros. They don’t. Funnily enough, they use the Danish Kroner. Despite all this, my somewhat naive optimism in completely giving myself up into the hands of a local, combined with the failure to even open the cover of a guide book, did, surprisingly, pay dividends.

Firstly: turns out, the stereotype that all Scandanavians are blonde, blue –eyed and built like models is actually true. I, at least, fitted the first two categories but was sadly dwarfed in the sea of beanpoles that surrounded me. Even the bike that I borrowed needed me to wear heels whilst riding as, unpracticle though it may seem to bike in serious 70s vogue platforms, it did at least have the added advantage of letting me touch the floor. Which came in handy. Aside from my height, my dress sense was also decidedly non-Danish. By this, read: it did not consist solely of black and white with a pair of black nike trainers. In fact, it was so non-Danish people automatically talked to me in English without me opening my mouth.

Blending in well.

The fact that the Nørrebro district I was staying in is considered the most ‘ghetto’ place in Copnhagen definitely reflected the fact that

Denmark’s overall immigrant community only makes up around 10% of the population. The focal point of this district is the ‘Red Square’— a skate park built in 2012 to celebrate diversity, hence its slightly random assortment of objects ranging from a classic London postbox (seriously, what is the big deal with these) to a brightly painted elephant (sadly not real).

Generally, Copenhagen has many of the ingredients of Amsterdam just with no red light district, far fewer tourists and generally more interesting (although, after getting back, I did have one friend say it was the most boring place in Europe. After further inquiry it turned out: he’d never actually been there, his Dad went on a business trip, spent a day there and only went to see one of the castles and the statue of the mermaid.

Enough said).

One of the areas which you should defi-

nitely check out is Christiania, touted in all the guidebooks as the ‘must-see attraction’.

Having never opened a guidebook, I had no idea what this place was and was therefore treated to a slightly unorthodox tour. For those of you who, similarly, have never heard of Christiania, it was described to me as ‘the free town’ and is essentially a tiny anarchic community which functions under different rules from those of the rest of Copenhagen – for example, they are exempt from tax. It encompasses around 1000 people and to live there, you must know someone from the community already.

Founded in 1971, when a group of people cut a hole in the fence to the military barracks in Bådmandsgade, it slowly grew and is now known for its interesting architectire – most of the occupants build their own houses; eco workshops, galleries and cafes – free living outlook and, of course, its relaxed take on soft drugs.

The bit

Country Diary

Bang!

The Science Column

Dreaming

O

Charlie Coughlan

ur remarkable fascination with dreaming runs deep. The Mesopotamians were the first to document dreams nearly 5,000 years ago, while the Ancient Greeks and Romans thought dreams were messages from their gods and ancestors, holding telling premonitions for the future. Dreaming has formed the centre-point and inspiration for great works of literature including Alice in Wonderland and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Despite this fascination, our efforts to understand the nature and purpose of dreaming remain largely unfulfilled.

However, oneirology — the scientific study of dreams — has undergone a renaissance of late in light of the growing awareness of the abnormal dream states seen in psychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. Scientists hope that the insights gained from dream studies in healthy populations and mentally ill patients could catalyse the development of effective new treatments and dream interpretation techniques, and even answer two fundamental questions which have beguiled philosophers for centuries: what is dreaming and why do we dream?

In the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams were the perceived embodiment of our unconscious desires, feelings and motivations. This theory ac-

counted for the uncontrollable nature (and bizarre, patchwork content) of dreams, and caused “practitioners” to spring up worldwide, offering dream interpretation as a miracle cure for all manner of neuroses and psychoses. This pseudoscience may have fallen out of fashion, but dream interpretation remains a long-term goal for many scientific researchers.

Little progress has been made in man, but experiments on rodents suggest that accurate, real-time dream interpretation techniques are on the horizon. In 2001, a pair of American scientists recorded the activity of nerve cells in the rat hippocampus — an area of the brain which encodes an internal map of the outside world — while the animals ran a simple maze and while they slept.

Intriguingly, they noticed that the ‘place cells’ activated sequentially during the maze task were later activated in the same order, while the animals slept: the rats were dreaming about the maze they had ran earlier the same day!

Even if real-time dream interpretation were to become possible in the future, it wouldn t answer the nagging question of why we dream. Different camps of neuroscientists argue that dreaming represents a form of offline memory consolidation, or simply the reaction of the brain to external sensory stimuli during sleep. The short answer is that we just don’t know. Nonetheless, for the first time in a century, it seems that the future’s bright, and the answer may be just around the corner.

that really interested me was how the inhabitants feel about all the tourists wandering around. This is, afterall, their home and to have hordes looking around as if its part of a zoo must surely feel like a violation – especially considering the separation with the rest of Copenhagen – that’s enforced. Although measures such as prohibiting cameras help, the simplified tourist spiel of this being the ‘hippy drugs center’ must be something that the community fight against.

Christiana aside, another one of Copenhagen’s prime attractions is its vintage shopping.

You can choose between thrift shops (similar to our charity shops) which take hours to rifle through and you end up with one thing you like but which costs 5p, or the classic vintage stores in which their wares are all on display with the mantra of more really is more. These gems are nowhere near the overpriced fads that are their English counterparts. These are your traditional price-by-weight, take-a-bagfull-of-clothes-for-the-price-of-a-big-mac style vintage stores. It’s really quite excellent. Lining the streets in the Nørrebro and Vesterbro district (described as the meat-packing district, although I’m not sure why since I didn’t see any meat in the slightest), you can also find them in the hidden back-alleys behind the University in central Copenhagen.

Basically, Copenhagen is an amazing city. Go there. Even without guidebooks, a plan or any Danish Kroner, there’s so much to explore and so many alternative places to check out and enjoy. Even if my friend’s Dad didn’t enjoy his business trip, a weekend or more in Copenhagen is a must.

I’ll definitely be going back. Next time, though, I’ll remember to adapt my wardrobe and grow some legs.

I

Port Meadow

n his recent book of poetry inspired by Port Meadow, David Atwooll allows that “It’s a peopled place / of course: painted landscapes often need , somewhere, a red smudge”.

One would struggle to describe Port Meadow as a “wild” place. Flanked by a busy railway track and surrounded on all sides by the physical presence of city life, Port Meadow is hardly a remote natural spot; it acts rather as an oasis close to Oxford’s centre. But perhaps it’s this human element that adds to its sense of place.

Most students who feel the pull of natural places have soon exhausted the charm and tidiness of their college gardens or Christ Church meadow; often their first destination in search of a slightly more rugged, remote place is this seemingly endless expanse of grass and mud.

Port Meadow is steeped in myth; it’s the unploughed landscape, the land earned from resisting the Danes, a sacred spot where the Freemen graze their cattle.

It is, nevertheless, a changing landscape, an idea which is captured in Atwooll’s poetry, collected in his pamphlet Ground Work. Illustrated

by Andrew Walton, the collection explores the various phases of Port Meadow, from “veiled in mist and frost” to an “archipelago of pools” as the flood which mantles the flat land for months on end begins to recede.

Ash, willow and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars (“All felled, felled, are all felled”) stand scatterred along along the grassy edges.

To the West, the Isis soaks its banks on the meadow, tempting an intrepid swimmer to be

carried gently down the water by a strong current as a sunny day comes to its lengthy close.

Just across the thick grass, to the East, lies Burgess Field, a small forest which has regenerated on a reclaimed landfill site. The young forest stands immutable as a poignant reminder of the visitor’s transcience.

The meadow is alive. Birds rise in throngs or poke about alone — herons picking the puddled grass for small fish, dunlin with their long arched beaks, as well as geese, gulls, godwits, warblers and the occasional glide of a peregrine or a buzzard.

Horses and cattle share the flat, undulating land at alternating times of the year, allowed only when the creeping waters of the flood don’t leave them stranded.

Port meadow: a meadow turned habour by the winter floods; a field made jolly on sunny afternoons by sweet wine. At night, across the water, Wolvercote flickers in the distance like a seaside town.

And yet it remains, in Atwooll’s words, a “peopled place”. For this landscape is not all sunny walks and natural beauty. Open spaces like this have always attracted questionable activities after nightfall. Such sites are as often places of enjoyment and pleasure as they are sites of reflection, sorrow, despair.

Only the other day, a pink princess outfit, with white frills on the shoulders, glinting glitter, hung from a hawthorn on the edge of the railway track. As a train rushed past, the wind lifted the dress and it blew listelessly, light, to and fro on the tree’s side. The remnants of a moment, opaque, unfinished, vanished.

14 | Life&Style

Houmous Girl

Max’s Bargai n o f the Week Brand new books at The Last Book Shop for £2!!!!!!!!!

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The first thing they heard about the Oxford sinkhole was a Facebook status update from Tiresome Social Media Finalist. “So there’s a sinkhole outside Worcester! Hope it swallows me up on my way to the library!”

The whiff of quirky selfdeprecation couldn’t quite mask the stench of his deep, ineffable smugness. “Sixteen likes!” cried Houmous Girl disgustedly, slamming shut her Macbook. “He’s only put that so everyone knows he’s in the library on a Monday morning in the holidays.”

“The holidays? I think you mean ‘the vac’!” cawed Oxford Fetishist.

“We’re not in Cambridge now!”

Everyone snorted appreciatively at this hilarious gag at the expense of England’s other leading university. The only thing funnier than Oxford Fetishist’s jokes about how Oxford was better than Cambridge was when he did his impression of a Brookes student on a night out.

“Do your Brookes impression!” demanded Houmous Girl.

“Yeah, mmm, do,” begged Worryingly Intense Girl, plucking out thick handfuls of her hair in nervous anticipation.

“Oh, alright then,” said Oxford Fetishist. He quickly changed into a shell suit then developed a hunch back and an expression of utter subservience. “I’m a Brookes student, innit” he said, while applying for Jobseeker’s Allowance.

This piece of searing class commentary had the room in fits of laughter.

“Just out of interest, have any of you ever actually met someone from Brookes?” asked Houmous Girl interestedly.

“Do you think it’s possible that we’re all unutterably selfinvolved and that Brookes is a respectable institution of higher education filled with interesting, well-educated and autonomous individuals?” asked Obnoxiously Opinionated Guy, lighting a rollie by striking a match on his ironic leather trousers. An uncomfortable silence settled. The only sound was Worryingly Intense Girl nibbling her toenails and gibbering.

“Actually, you know what…” said Oxford Fetishist slowly. An expression of confusion briefly flitted across his face. Then he shook his head and the moment was gone, or was it? “Bet some bloody tourists fall into that sinkhole, eh?” he cried with relief.

Cherwell | 25.04.14

Mansfield’s matriculating magnificence or Wadham’s wistful gaze? Vote now at www.cherwell.org

Top 3

1

Port Meadow

What better than to meet the eyes of a lover surrounded by the spring blossoms and fine grasses of Port Meadow? Perhaps take a picnic and while away the hours, lovelorn, in pastoral style.

2

Spots to...

HUMANS OF OXFORD

Gaze wistfully at your partner

Across the Hassan’s counter

It’s late, you’re hungry — for love as well as food — and then you spot ‘the one’ in the queue.

Sharing a kebab can be the most tender of acts, and who knows where a mixed meat and chips combo will lead?

Simpkins, Hertford College Cat

3

Think you’ve got what it takes? Email lifestyle@ cherwell.org to enter the famously fierce competition

In a tute

They say that love is often forged in crisis, and what greater crisis exists than a doomed tute? Your essay has just been ripped to shreds, but with a glance they’ve saved you — a holy bond is formed.

30

S e co How long have you lived in Oxford?

Inter nd My whole life and even longer — I’m Simpkins V view Favourite place in Oxford?

Hertford, obviously, on my bed in the lodge.

Favourite thing about Oxford life?

Sub-fusc is pretty awesome! Black and white - just like me!

What’s the most annoying thing about Oxford students?

They’re always in a rush and never have enough time to sit and pet me — I should obviously take priority over any sort of degree.

What have you got planned for this term?

Sunbathing on the Hertford lawn and soothing all those poor students who have exams this term.

Have you ever met the Mansfield cat, Erasmus?

We do not speak his name in these parts...

“Life gave me lemons and now I sell them loose for 80p each”

Ro

��

1 0 1

“You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already.

Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

O’Brien

The bad tute partner They are smarter than you, they arrive earlier than you, and they’ve read more about Henry II than you. This would all be bearable if they had the decency to do the talking. But Perfect Petunia would rather smirk as you break out in a Parkendflavoured sweat. And how dare she rip your runt of an essay to shreds without the perfunctory ‘I‘ve probably just totally misunderstood you but...’ Bad tutorial etiquette really is the worst.

The Cherwell Keble

To mark the advent of Trinity, C+ profiles som taking place in Oxford over the next few wee bizarre, there’s something fo

May 10th, Keble College Keble’s homage to Romanov Russia is likely to see the vodka flowing, but don’t be fooled into thinking this night is all about the booze — there’s a menu including the best stroganoff and goulash, and even some caviar. Historically great value, expect big things. Let’s hope there’s no Rasputin...

Price: Tickets available via waiting list

Christ Church June 27th, Christ Church With an ‘English Eccentrics’ theme, Christ Church’s ball is likely to be an indulgent affair. Set in the regal environment of Christ Church, and concluding with a “quintessentially English breakfast” this is the perfect ball for the party-going patriots amongst you.

Price: Sold Out

The Oxford Guild May 3rd, Ardington Hall, Wantage A masquerade ball taking place in the novel surroundings of Wantage’s Ardington Hall (right), the Oxford Guild’s Summer extravaganza looks the part. The night will see everything from a hog roast to pizza served to its mysteriously costumed attendees. There’s an island temple too.

Price: £75

St. Anne's May 10th, Kingston Bagpuize House This Trinity, St. Anne’s is taking us to France in their La Belle Époque ball. With a few tickets remaining, the chance to visit the picturesque Kingston Bagpuize House after a luxury reception is too good to miss.The entertainment is nothing special, but after a drink, Action Stations DJs will do just fine.

Price: Tickets available via waiting list.

l Ball Guide

me of the biggest and boldest Summer Balls eks. From the traditional to the downright or every taste and budget.

Trinity June 27th, Trinity College With two musical stages and a promise that guests will be able to “tailor their ball to suit their tastes and fancies”, Trinity’s Ball is likely one of the more ambitious this term. The committee have kept entertainment bookings close to their chests this year, but it is a sell-out nonetheless.

Price: Sold Out

Lincoln May 10th, Lincoln College Lincoln’s small but perfectly formed ball will play upon its guests’ literary sensibilities as it takes them on a Miltonian descent into hell. Props for the concept, and with the delightfully named Ha Ha Tonka headlining alongside Oxford-staple Dots Funk Odyssey, you could do worse than pop along to this.

Price: Dining £129, non-dining £90

Worcester June 27th, Worcester College

Exeter June 28th, Exeter College Exeter’s 700th bash will sprawl across Turl Street, Brasenose Lane, and even some of Radcliffe Square. Music from NERO - one half of whom is a surprising Exeter alumnus - and Stornoway promises to delight revellers, whilst the college’s Hall will transform into the Casino Royale at midnight; a high stakes night in prospect then!

Price: £260 Dining, £180 Non-dining

Continuing a friendly rivalry with Exeter, Worcester have also booked Stornoway. In addition to the entertainment, don’t forget the elegant lakeside location, which will be lit by hundreds of lanterns.

Price: Tickets available via waiting list

Tales of balls past...

Ball-related shenanigans abound in the Cherwell archives. From a thrilling tale of forgery which blighted one Christ Church fresher’s dream of a celebrity date, to a 1985 guide on how to survive the Trinity ‘summer scene’ there have been a few classics.

Along with a few bits of pertinent advice, the 1985 guide to an Oxford Summer (headline pictured above) took pains to make some cutting remarks about balls. It seems partygoers have always been annoying.

NAFF PHRASES: “It was expensive but it was worth it.” “We thought we should go at least once while we’re here.”

“WALLYS: Crashers who don’t succeed. Crashers who succeed and then boast about it. Anybody on their own. People who leave with other people’s partners.”

No doubt the temptation to break into an unlimited stream of free booze is nothing new.

One is more likely to end up as a found Wally nowdays than was the case in 1985 though.

Magdalen may have already cancelled its 2015 Commemoration Ball but ‘ball droughts’ are nothing new. Balls at Balliol were once a thorny political issue. Cries of ‘elitism’ and ‘smash the bourgeoise’ abounded from 1966 until the 1990s, when the college went on official ball strike. In one stormy meeting, in 1990, proposers of a ball were even booed and hissed. Scabs.

Of all the balls in recent Oxford history only one can truly be described as ‘tragic’. The Somerville-Jesus ball had promised “one last night of decadence, debauchery and indulgence”, instead it resulted in a bad-tempted queue to do all those things, where guests were caught in a

Charlie’s Angels star Kate Jackson is not to attend the Christ Church Ball as expected.

Investigations carried out by Cherwell have revealed an elaborate scheme to deceive the guests into expecting Miss Jackson’s arrival.

The possibility of the visit arose after a first-year geographer at Christ Church, Ian Crabb, wrote to Kate Jackson’s promoters, Rex Features Inc. of Philadelphia, inviting her to the ball.

The invitation was sent in March and last week Mr Crabb received a letter on Rex “violent scrum” when there was only a single food stall to cater for nearly a thousand guests.

Not to mention, at least two guests were quite literally grilled alive, receiving burns to the leg.

The Somerville-Jesus ball had promised much, including at one point a shark which

Drinking from the bottle?

T

rinity is the term which gives balls their reputation — one night of the ultimate partying experience — rides, food, but most importantly, the drinks.

Whichever ball you attend, you can rest assured that the drinks will be flowing, from champagne receptions to classy cocktails to your bog-standard Vodka Red Bull for the early hours. But how do you know what’s hot and what’s not? The Cocktail Society is here to help.

Depending on the ball, there might be a limited array of ingredients at your disposal.

If you’re one of the lucky patrons of the famous Commemoration Balls, you can expect to be spoilt for choice. Not one for your average champagne reception, perhaps you’ll insist on a Bellini (Champagne with peach liquor) or a Kir Royale (Champagne with Crème de Cassis) to start. Moving on throughout the night, a simple Martini will be easy to make and is most certainly alcoholic enough to keep you going. Gentlemen dressed in formal attire certainly shouldn’t miss the chance to play Bond.

However, some of the other Oxford balls coming up this term might require a more wily ball-goer than usual. In the absence of the array you might expect from a Commemoration Ball, you might want to front-load the alcohol beforehand. In which case, some simpler cocktails are needed. The Moscow Mule, borne of the US vodka renaissance in the ‘50s, is simply vodka, ginger beer and lime juice. The Black Russian, the more down-to-business cousin of the White Russian, is merely Vodka and Kahlua. With the right

ingredients, a discerning cocktail-lover can avoid the Vodka-Cokes and arrive at their ball suitably tipsy for their night of decadence.

Once at the ball, there are few drinks that can fare you better for the night than the Long Island Iced Tea. Comprised of all the spirits any ball’s bar should contain, it is a deadly mix of Triple Sec, Rum, Gin, Vodka and Tequila topped off, of course, with Coke.

Even if you miss out a few ingredients, what does it matter? Ultimately, once you’re halfway through the ball, it makes no difference what you’re drinking — and nobody cares so long after sunset and so far from dawn.

But have a care for the long-suffering bartenders serving you all night. The Cocktail Society has had much experience of balltending of late, and it certainly makes for interesting people-watching. Painstaking preparation of mojitos and Pina Coladas goes to waste the moment someone asks for “a double shot of vodka”, but there’s always a chance to show off when someone asks us to “make something up”. Of course, we try to avoid the cardinal sin — spilling a drink over someone’s ball-gown — at pain of death.

Needless to say, all this preparation goes to waste if you make that most common of errors, and peak too early. Fellow ball-goers will no doubt laugh as they walk by your crouchedover figure kneeling on the lawn at 11pm — so take care to watch yourself and make the most of your night. A Trinity Ball could turn out to be the best night of your life — we’ll see you there!

Cai WIlshaw

Features headed notepaper, accepting it. It was signed by John Matthews, personal assistant to Miss Jackson, and said that due to a heavy filming schedule further details of the star’s arrival could not be sent until later.

A copy of the letter is now in Cherwell’s possession and we are able to reveal that it is a fraud. It was produced by a first-year chemist, Geoffrey Hill. Together with three accomplices, Hill used letraset to make the letterhead and sent the completed forgery to a journalist friend in America. The letter was then posted in Philadelphia to ensure it had the correct postmark.

When Ian Crabb received it he was thrilled and suspected nothing. Within days nearly half the college had heard ... “It was a cruel, joke and many people must be very disappointed.”

Hill is unrepentant: “I think it was a terrific joke. It did no harm at all. We never really expected him to fall for it. Besides, she could be coming yet.”

Lance Price, 1988 was called off due to animal rights concerns.

Instead, the only sharks that were to be found were those calling for the ball committee’s heads. Let us hope that this Trinity what was first tragedy will not be repeated for a second time as farce.

The ball strategy guide

S

urviving until 6 in the morning can seem a daunting challenge, but how else are you going to make the most of the free food, drink, and entertainment?

Here’s how to make it through.

DO pay attention to the dress code. Wearing Black Tie to a White Tie event just makes you look a little daft. There’s an argument that White Tie is past its sell-by date, but protestdressing will only embarrass one person: you.

DON'T drink too much too quickly. All that free booze can be very tempting, but if you want to make it past midnight you’re going to have to pace yourself. Stick a soft drink between every G and T — and you’ll avoid passing out before the good stuff starts.

DO flit between music acts. Of course balls have big headliners, and enjoying a bit of NERO is a must, but if you pop into the next quad you could well be seeing the next big thing. It’s important to remember that there is a reason that the likes of Dots Funk Odyssey keep getting bookings — they’re fabulous fun to dance to.

DON'T take inappropriate selfies in the photobooth. Yes it may look like a London taxi, and yes the inflatable banana is a fun novelty, but that does not mean that the four photos you end up taking won’t embarrass you on Facebook.

DO go on the dodgems. They’re a great chance to recapture childhood, whilst chances to crash a small vehicle into your college archenemy, or even the Principal, don’t come along every day.

DON'T panic about food queues. Trust that the organisers have bought enough, and if not you can write many angry letters of complaint the next day. Being a bit hungry’s just not worth getting third degree burns.

DO enjoy the early hours. As the ball of your choice flies by, observing the balmy Summer morning with friends can be timeless. Not to mention that watching people stagger around getting progressively drunker is fun.

Most importantly, DON'T leave early. They call it a Survivors’ Breakfast for a reason: you’re supposed to survive. Endurance is key.

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Life&Style | 19

Setting the table for Trinity Liz English has thought of three foods for the summer term

1

Asparagus

Despite their infamous sulphurous compounds (the ones that make your pee smell weird), these veggies are in season this term and we should be making the most of them! Personally a huge fan, I believe that these bad boys should be given the prime spot in a meal — don’t go chopping them and hiding them in a strong-flavoured sauce, rather cook them whole and dip them into your sauce as you go. Soy sauce works marvellously, and is becoming something of a student staple, so it’s really not a meal you have to splash out on. They go great as a side dish for any meaty main, on top of a salad or just on their own.

2

Crackers

Ok, so this is a bit of a strange one, but bear with me! The humble cracker has so much going for it that it should definitely be on your Trinity top-ten. For me, summerfood is plentiful but light, which crackers completely fulfil. Whereas sandwiches can be stodgy, thick and sufferers from sogginess, crackers are the opposite. What’s more, they may help avoid the post-lunch slump that a bread-based meal can sometimes bring on.

I don’t mean have a cracker and nothing else; there’s no way I’d survive half the day on

crackers alone. They go beautifully in a DIY combo thrown together with some cheese, veggies, a slice of ham or two and some salsa.

Mix up your basic biscuits with some seeded varieties to keep you on your toes. If you’re cycling into town with your lunch in tow though, I’d recommend you keep your crackers in a separate bag, for fear of, well, cracking.

They also have the value-for-money advantage — on average a packet of crackers will cost half as much as a loaf of bread, plus they will keep for much longer.

3

Recipe of the

Week

Simple Choc-chip Cookies

Lemons

The bright, sunny colour and fresh taste of this zesty fruit always makes me dream of holidays in the sun and long evenings outside.

The great thing about lemons is that they suit all kinds of meal; whether you’re whipping up a light and tangy dessert, adding some flavour to a cold drink or giving your main meal a whole new level of taste, the lemon is your new best friend. Despite my origins as a lemon-hater (lemon meringue pie is a thing of nightmares), they go amazingly well with savoury dishes, perhaps even more so than in their traditional sugary realm. They add a level of freshness to meat and veg that is bizarre and confusing to the taste buds, but which is perfect for making dishes lighter and less stodgy (goodbye, heartburn!). They also make drinks that little bit fancier when plopped in a glass with some ice.

If that’s not enough persuasion, lemons are also known for their liver-cleansing properties; handy for staving off problems incurred from too much Pimm’s.

When life gives you lemons… you may as well eat them I suppose!

Ingredients (Makes 12+) 100g brown sugar 125g butter or margarine 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla extract ½ tsp salt 225g Self-Raising Flour 200g chocolate (anything will do!)

Method 1) Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees or gas mark four.

2) In a large bowl mix the butter and sugar (give the butter 10 seconds in the microwave on the lowest heat to soften if it’s a bit too hard to mix.)

3) Beat in the egg and vanilla extract, then seive in the flour and salt, folding the mixture together.

4) If you’ve got chocolate chips, great. If not, stick the chocolate into a bag and bash it with something hard until in breaks into small pieces. Add to the mixture and mix well.

5) Roll the dough into a long sausage shape, before cutting it into 2 inch sections. Roll these into balls and place on a lined baking tray. Make sure they’re not too close together as they’ll spread out whilst cooking!

6) Bake in the oven for 9-12 minutes (depending on how accurate your oven is!), until they are golden on the outside but still a bit soft — they’ll harden once you take them out of the oven.

Cocktails with Cai Kick-start Trinity Term with a refreshing burst of this week’s cocktail, Mint Julep With the Kentucky Derby coming up (did you know?), it’s only fitting that we kick-start Trinity Term with a refreshing cocktail that originates from those races themselves – the Mint Julep. One of the ‘smash’ family of cocktails, that counts the Mojito amongst its members, as its mint leaves are muddled at the bottom, releasing more of the flavour and giving it a refreshingly summery taste.

Like many cocktails, its origins are shrouded in secrecy — with many bartenders having laid claim to its invention. But it seems that the Mint Julep started off as a type of medicine back in the 19th Century – pretty good stuff, then. By now, the cock-

tail is much more famous for its association with the Kentucky Derby.

Since before the Second World War, the Mint Julep has been the Kentucky Derby’s signature drink, a suitably Southern cocktail for an early Summer afternoon. The Mint Julep even contends with Pimms, its British equivalent, with 120,000 of them served within a few days every year at the races. Indeed, I’m willing to bet that Queen Elizabeth managed to down a few in her time at the Derby back in 2007.

If you’re feeling lavish, the promoters of the Mint Julep at the Derby once created a one-off $1000 drink. Served in a goldplated cup and with ice from the Alps and sugar from Australia, if you can manage to get the ingredients, the Mint Julep could be the most expensive cocktail you ever

Review: The Queen’s College guest formal

drink. For those on a student budget, you can find the Mint Julep in Raouls, just with Golden Syrup instead of sugar.

It’s also historically fitting for Trinity Term in Oxford. New College have a Mint Julep quartermaster or quartermistress to ensure that Mint Julep’s are drunk on the first day of June, as part of an age old tradition, after a motion passed at the end of last year.

Ingredients 3 measures bourbon Few sprigs of mint Sugar to taste Method Put your mint, sugar, and some water (or some of the bourbon) into the bottom of your mixer and muddle. Strain out the leaves into an ice-filled glass, before adding the bourbon. Add some mint leaves and enjoy!

Described as the grandest of Oxford colleges, it was with some expectation that we walked through the gates of Queen’s for a guest night formal. The hall is, of course, magnificent — unusually bright for an Oxford hall, painted white, with low wood panelling, and a balcony for the choir to sing grace on Sundays. I was slightly concerned by the lack of high table, but this was nothing compared to my shock as I sat down to find, already in place, a wine glass filled to the brim with some melon concoction, masquerading as a first course.

The menu informed us that this was ‘Melon in Barsac’. I have nothing against either component — but to put them together?

I took up my spoon and got it over with. It wasn’t, I admit, bad in itself — it was simply a surprise to find oneself eating an alcoholic, monoculture-fruit-salad.

But I soon forgot this curiosity. The extremely efficient kitchen staff whipped away our glasses, to be replaced with tender, rare, peppered steaks, with sides of lyonnaise potatoes, mushrooms and peas which were constantly, lavishly replaced throughout the entire affair. The mushrooms and peas were a little lacklustre — the mushrooms especially being a bit watery, but it could, I suppose, be rebranded as ‘simplicity’.

After everyone had eaten their fill, and the dishes were still overflowing, out came the pudding. Although ‘pudding’ is a word far too reminiscent of stodge — this was properly a dessert. I believe the official title was Raspberry and Passion Fruit Bavarois;

“

It won’t haunt my dreams, but it was excellent, nonetheless what that turned out to be was a light passion fruit mousse, shaped in a dome, topped with raspberries, and surrounded by swirls of red, sweet sauce. Not a dish which will haunt my dreams, perhaps, but it was excellent, nonetheless.

The starter was forgiven — my lasting criticism, though, is that the affair was a little lacking in ceremony; the serving dishes were thin aluminium, the lights were bright, there was no grace, or in fact, any sort of indication of when we should start other than when our table had filled up — an ever so slightly perfunctory feel pervaded the dinner.

Isaac Goodwin and Gayatri Gogoi

PHOTO

T he Colours of Budapest

Kate Hodkinson

FASHION

Being in Vogue with Hamish Bowles Rebecca Borthwick talks to International Editor-at-Large of US Vogue Hamish Bowles

H

aving worked at Vogue for over twenty years, Hamish Bowles is a treasure chest of ideas and information about the protean world of fashion. “My interest in fashion came out of an interest in costume history”, he explains. As a child, he went to ballet, attended exhibitions at the V&A museum, and frequented the theatre, captivated by the costumes. “It was in my tweens that I started reading British Vogue and I became interested in contemporary fashion”.

His first important couture purchase was an early 60s Balenciaga suit, found in a rummage sale, but he tells me that some of his most historically important pieces to date are a 1926 beaded Chanel gown and an iconic 1952 Charles James Lampshade dress.

On 8th May, The Costume Institute’s new Anna Wintour Centre will open with its inaugural exhibition, Charles James: Beyond Fashion. “This is going to be a really fascinating opportunity for people to reassess the work of an extraordinary designer who has become almost forgotten through the years,” Hamish assures me.

“It’s going to be a revelation for people”.

Charles James is often

described as the greatest American couturier, influencing the likes of Christian Dior and Zac Posen. For Hamish, “Vintage fashion holds a mirror up to its time. It is so potent, and then there is the memory of the women who wore it.”

The Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit will be held on 5th May to celebrate the opening of the exhibition three days later. One of the co-chairs is Sarah Jessica Parker, who has recently brought out her own shoe line, collaborating with George Malkemus, the CEO of Manolo Blahnik.

Bowles was pictured with the actress at the 2013 Annual Met Gala, about which he says, “It is always extraordinary because it’s a real confluence of fashion and celebrity, and extraordinar y clothes and entertainment, and really wonderful visuals in terms of the décor. It is an annual high point.”

Meeting all of these celebrities must be quite the experience, but does the International Editorat-Large ever get starstruck? “Oh, constantly, yes! Certainly at the

Costume Institute Gala!”

What about the first time he met Anna Wintour? Was she anything like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada?! “Well, when I met her for the first time, I think I was wearing a Chanel suit, so she might have been more intimidated than I was! But certainly, her reputation preceded her.” As part of his job, Hamish gets to travel the world, which he loves. “I go back to Tangier in Morocco all the time, and Greece. I just got back from Qatar, which I thought was a completely fascinating and compelling place. I am always fascinated to go somewhere that I have never been before”.

Travelling to such diverse places, Hamish has a good idea about the ever-changing fashion world and the up-and-coming cities for fashion. “I’ve been to see the fashion scenes in Copenhagen, and I certainly think Scandinavia is interesting. I’m intrigued to see what happens in China; there are already some very interesting people coming out of there.

What is exciting is that fashion is so global and that people are so engaged with fashion around the world.” This all sounds wonderful, but, are there any downsides I ask? “Jet lag is a downside, and deadlines!”

English born and bred, Bowles moved to New York in the ‘90s, accepting Anna’s job offer at US Vogue. “The street style is livelier in London,” he tells me. “There seems to be a lot of young designer energy there. It’s more like Brooklyn than NYC. But I’m also very excited by the Upper East Side groomed fashion that you see here”. He does explain, however, how over the years the differences between the two cities have somewhat eroded, making them

more similar in terms of fashion style.

I ask his opinion of the Duchess of Cambridge: “Kate Middleton’s style is absolutely appropriate in every way and thoughtfully considered”.

Not only has Bowles made a name for himself in the fashion and interior design industries, he has also found time to act. Appearing in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, an episode of Gossip Girl, and the fashion documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor, Bowles says, “Acting has been a lot of fun, I’d love to do more of that!” But, if he were doing anything other than working at Vogue, he explains how he would like to design costumes for the theatre or the movies, as fashion design is what he began studying at Saint Martins.

Hamish Bowles was also involved in the now infamous Kim Kardashian and Kanye West cover for the April Edition of Vogue. “Well, I wrote the story, so I obviously feel very connected to it. It has provoked more dialogue than any other cover I can think of since I have been here, which is exciting. As a couple, they are a part of the contemporary zeitgeist and it’s important for Vogue to respect that.”

When asked whether he thought it was a good idea to put a reality star on the cover of such a prestigious fashion magazine, he responded, “This particular reality star and her fiancé are part of the fibre of today’s fashionable world. I think they are both very engaged with fashion and style, and that’s something we celebrate.”

Hamish is currently working on a personal memoir, but says, “I hope to continue working at Vogue. I’m having a lot of fun doing it!”

From Catwalk to Closet: Denim Dreams No longer limited to super-cool denim jackets, skinny jeans and flares, Balmain and like-designers are bringing this nineties favourite right up to the 21st Century by proving just what this versatile material can do. We’re loving just a hint with a crop top or sandal, but full kudos to you if you’re brave enough to channel Sarah Jessica Parker in double or even triple denim this Spring/Summer 2014.

MOTO FRAY FLORAL DENIM BANDEAU £22.00, TOPSHOP Whether you wear this with a cute pair of Daisy Dukes, or you layer it up over your favourite summer skirt, this is a great piece to rock this Trinity! Keep cool and you’ll be sure to look on trend.

NAVY MOTTLED DENIM TUBE SKIRT £19.99, NEW LOOK This is one of our more understated picks of the denim trend, but still oh so wearable! The higher waist is really flattering on all shapes and adding a heel will be sure to make your legs look neverending! We’ll be pairing this with a tucked-in white silk shirt for a bit of added glamour.

SUPERDRY MONTANA DENIM RUCKSACK £39.99, SUPERDRY When the sun’s out, you want a bag which is really practical, with all the space for a bottle of Pimm’s, some snacks and maybe a book to revise from!

Superdry’s got the perfect cobination of stylish and usable here. The tan coloured accents stop it from looking so casual and add a high-end feeling.

NINE WEST MEMORY2 WEDGE SANDAL £85.00, SELFRIDGES Not feeling ready to fully embrace the trend? There are loads of shoes and accessories around which add just a hint of denim to any outfit. These are our faves!

DENIM DRESS £19.99, H&M With everyone’s favourite High Street store now finally open in Oxford, you’d be a fool to miss out on this really sweet, lightweight denim dress.

This is definitely a piece for all through the year because it would look equally great with opaque tights and boots in the winter. For the summer, we’re going to wear it with tan strappy sandals and our hair pulled back!

Images (clockwise from top left): Topshop, New Look, Selfridges, RIver Island, H&M, Superdry

Balmain: fashionblender.com

MID WASH OVERSIZED RAW DENIM SHIRT £35.00, RIVER ISLAND This denim trend is coming back for both fashionable guys and girls. You could wear this shirt with anything, though we think a pair of black drainpipes would perfectly hit that ‘off-duty model-borrowingboyfriend’s-clothes’ look that’s so hot right now!

22 | Fashion

Cherwell | 25.04.14 This page: Dress: Phjlosophy di Alberta Ferreti Sandals: Geox. Sunglasses: Noa Noa Opposite: Dress: Vanessa Bruno Athé. Shirt: Gerard Darel, Trousers: Issa London, Sandals: Chloé

Model and Stylist: Katie Pangonis

Location: South of France

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Fashion | 23

Find the sun & your summer pattern...

Th is

CULTURE

theme... k’s e we

Rebirth

The ‘reboot’ will save the world Our fascination with reinvention is nothing new, says Luke Barratt

A

ccording to Christianity, 2014 years ago, Jesus Christ rose from the dead and was reborn. However, the holiday that we now call Easter has for even longer than that been associated with rebirth, marking as it does the start of spring. The egg as a symbol of rebirth predates Christianity and all manner of festivals centred around the Harvest have been commonplace since time immemorial.

We humans have always liked the idea of rebirth. We naturally lean away from the idea that when something is gone, it’s gone for good. The presence of the afterlife and reincarnation in religions throughout human history shows that clearly enough. Jesus was not the first god to rise from the dead. Ancient Greek religion and mythology contains numerous examples of what they call a katabasis – a descent to

the Underworld before rising again. Heroes such as Heracles and Perseus are famous for their adventures beyond the lands of the living, as is Vergil’s (and later Dante’s) Aeneas, while Dionysus, god of wine, was himself born a second time from the thigh of Zeus.

But religion is not the only place where our obsession with rebirth is to be found. The constant need to ‘reboot’ everything is often seen as a modern fi xation. At the moment we’re seeing a new Robocop, a new House of Cards, even a new Godzilla. We had a new Spiderman only five years after the old one had discodanced down the road out of sight and out of mind. People suggest that this phenomenon betrays a fatal lack of creativity in the modern age. Eight of the top ten grossing movies of 2013 were sequels, and adaptations of books, reboots in their own way, dominate the box office. One of the biggest songs of last year, Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ was a straight-up blast from the past; its mind-numbingly catchy funk restarted the festival circuit career of Chic ft.

Nile Rogers. Furthermore, the internet, and specifically YouTube, is painted with the complaints of selfproclaimed musical purists for whom real music is dead and

anything made after 1995 might as well come encased in frozen dog shit. But is it the case that our culture has lost the ability to create new stories, new ideas?

This is emphatically not the case. As MS MR told me at the end of last year, “there’s more good music being made now than ever before”.

As the internet grows and grows, so too does the potential for new and interesting media.

There’s more independent film than there has ever been, there’s more literature than there has ever been; everything grows exponentially.

What’s more, it’s not even the right question to ask. The value of a cultural work is not determined by its originality, but rather by its innate worth. Homer’s Iliad, widely considered one of the greatest poems of all time, told a story which was known well by its audience, as did the vast majority of ancient classical literature. The art was in the telling; ancient Greek poets weaved new meanings and fresh interpretations into events which had long dwelt in the consciousness of their readership.

The density of allusion and adaptation in Ovid forms part of his poetic identity. Similarly, the works of William Shakespeare were largely either based on previous plays (often in different languages) or on historical events.

Of course, this is all because of one simple fact. Everything is a rebirth of something.

There’s a reason that critics go on about an artist’s ‘influences’ in reviews and interviews, saying that the artist draws upon X, or conjures up images of Y. While one might easily be drawn into thinking of rebirth as an opportunity for a clean slate, the truth is more complicated. Jesus, risen from the dead, is still Jesus, but his existence has

taken on a whole new meaning. A man who is reincarnated into a snail may in some mystical way still be the same person, but his is a different existence entirely. Similarly, Shakespeare’s retelling of the story of Othello has a whole other life to Cinthio’s original tale, the new Godzilla starring Bryan Cranston is worthy of being judged on its own merits, and Trinity’s Cherwell, while connected to Hilary’s, has a new lease of artistic life. This is not to say that the new shouldn’t be compared to the original, but merely that it must be recognized as a piece of art in its own right.

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The value of a cultural work is not determined by its originality This is often my response to people who complain when film adaptations of books don’t match up to the original. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that in the book of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, it isn’t Éomer who leads the charge at Helm’s Deep. The film exists separately, and while its proximity to the original allows for a certain amount of interpretational crossover, it certainly doesn’t preclude its changing elements of the original story.

The reboot is a part of human existence; it’s not going away, so stop complaining about it.

Top Pick

Friday

On until 22nd June

Friday & Saturday

Saturday - Tuesday

Black Orpheus Ultimate Picture Palace, 7pm

Cézanne and the Modern Ashmolean

This May Hurt A Bit Oxford Playhouse, evening & matinée

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema The Phoenix Picturehouse

Marcel Camus’ masterpiece comes to Cowley in this thematic fundraising screening in aid of Cowley Road Carnival.

Winner of the Palme d’Or, Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and Golden Globe awards, Black Orpheus is a timeless love story set in Rio de Janeiro.

This unmissable exhibition showcases some of the most famous artists from the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist era, including Cezanne, Gaugin, Degas, Manet, Van Gogh and Modigliani. As with all exhibitions at the Ashmo, this is free with a Bod card and really is a must-see.

Written by Stella Feehilly and starring Stephanie Cole (Doc Martin, Coronation Street), this is a touching family drama about one family’s encounters with their local hospital. Mingling wit, surrealism and tenderness, This May Hurt A Bit is a political comedy from highly-acclaimed Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark. Catch is at the Playhouse on Friday and Saturday.

Opening on Saturday with the beautiful biopic of novelist Violette Leduc Violette on Saturday, The Phoenix Picturehouse in Jericho presents a season of films (all previews) showcasing the best in French cinema coming up in 2014. Also showing are Venus in Fur, Bright Days Ahead and Nine Month Stretch (with Q+A). Film showtimes vary.

Picks of the Week

Culture | 25

25.4.14 | Cherwell

Top 3

Milestones Cherwell picks out a key moment in cultural history. This

... Births

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The birth of Satan from Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Based on the novel of the same name, Rosemary’s Baby is a genuinely terrifying horror film from Roman Polanski, in which a sicklylooking Mia Farrow becomes paranoid that she is the victim of a hellish conspiracy. It is a psychological thriller, toying with the viewer’s sympathy, emotions and sanity. Featuring marital betrayal of epic proportions and an unforgettably chilling final shot, this is a horror film so subtle that at times the viewer is unsure whether or not it is a horror at all.

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The Birth of Venus Sandro Boticelli (1486)

The sea-shell has long been a metaphor for a woman’s vulva. This Renaissance painting depicts the goddess Venus arriving naked at the sea-shore in a giant shell. The iconography of the painting is much debated, with mythological, political and religious readings all equally plausible. Pagan readings suggest that the painting is an attempt to replicate ancient depictions of the Goddess, while Christian ones see Venus as Eve before the Fall, the Madonna, or both.

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This Woman’s Work Kate Bush (1989)

Kate Bush likes writing about women and wombs (see also ‘Room for the Life’ and ‘The Kick Inside’). This song, from 1989’s The Sensual World, was written for the film She’s Having a Baby. It deals with childbirth from the perspective of the father, sat outside the waiting room and also metaphorically “outside / this woman’s work… now his part is over”. Opening with the heartbreaking “pray God you can cope”, ‘This Woman’s Work’ is a moving picture of the anguish of a complicated birth.

week, Emma Simpson examines writing in the ancient world and the birth of the alphabet

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ay back in the misty annals of time that was my first term at Oxford, I went to play ice hockey. I forget why exactly, but I do remember that every time I tried to hit the puck I forgot that I was on skates, attempted to sprint, and landed flat on my face – or at least, my hands.

Somewhere around fall no. 7 I injured my right hand and had to go home, where I had terrible, terrible nightmares about what would become of me in Oxford, trying to do an English degree without the use of my writing hand.

Writing is lifeblood here. For Humanities students, it’s like breathing. We study the written word, pick it apart, analyze every inch of its possible meanings.

Mathematicians and Scientists have their own universal writing system made up of numbers and symbols and equations, and Computer Scientists can write in a code that tells computers what to do.

Among all the creations of man, writing is the supreme intellectual achievement. It was invented as many as six separate times, in places as distinct from one another as Central America, Africa and China.

In historical linguistics, monogenesis refers to the idea that all human languages are descended from a single ancestral language.

Whether we accept this or not, the earliest efforts began with simple pictures, strokes and dots to record objects and numbers. When it came to recording the innermost workings of our brains and hearts, a more complex system was required.

The first known ‘script’ came about in the 4th Millennium BC, with the development of

‘proto-cuneiform’ and later ‘cuneiform’ writing - wedge-shaped marks made on clay tablets with a blunt reed stylus.

The inventors of this form of writing were the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, the area of the Middle East which also gave birth to the earliest cities, farms and technology.

The Cuneiform writing system was in use in various forms for more than three millennia.

Meanwhile, the Egyptians were developing hieroglyphs – the combination of pictures and signs which is still one of the most complex and beautiful writing systems ever devised.

The 2nd Millenium BC saw the climax of writing’s developmental stage, with the emergence of the Phoenician alphabet. This was spread across the Mediterranean by merchants, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures, ‘birthing’ the earliest forms of alphabets that are still used today, such as Arabic and Greek script - and by extension Latin, Cryllic and Coptic.

The oldest form of writing that is still in use is the Chinese script, which dates back to around 1200 BC, and is still in use in a fairly similar form.

Even today, the story of the beginnings of writing is far from complete.

Extensive study led to the eventual decipherment of cuneiform; the Rosetta stone helped us to understand hieroglyphic text -yet there are still ancient writing systems that have been discovered in places such as Crete, Mexico, Iran and Pakistan that remain mysterious.

It is because of writing that we can see inside the mind of people dead millions of years, enabling us to pass down stories upon which whole cultures - and whole degrees - are based.

Poetry Corner For your chance to appear in Poetry Corner, email a poem (no more than 20 lines long) to culture@cherwell.org.

Butterfly You stay so still, you don’t make a sound, not even a flutter or a flinch, your one fleeting day and your only way to spend it is in silence.

You’re so unaware, so oblivious, so intricate in your brilliance.

You move around, you don’t make a sound, whilst we clutter about in our ignorance.

We think we have so much time, so long to live, so often it passes us by.

But perhaps we should slow it down.

Stay still.

Stay quiet.

The fleeting life of a butterfly.

Lidia Fanzo

St John’s College

Cherwell Etc. This term sees the launch of Cherwell Etc., an online home for the creative endeavours of all Oxonians.

Visit our frequently updated content at cherwelletc.tumblr.com.

Contribute your own fiction, art, photography and anything else by emailing culture@cherwell.org.

Tuesday

Wednesday

Wednesday - Saturday

Thursday

Arts of War and Peace: Samurai Culture in Japan Ashmolean Museum, 2-3pm

Pulled Apart by Horses Art Bar, Cowley Road, 7.30pm

The History Boys Oxford Playhouse, evening & matinée

May Day Venues across Oxford

Pulled Apart by Horses announced their return to our collective musical consciousness with a charity show in London late last year. Now, they embark upon an extensive UK tour. This involves a date at the newly invigorated Art Bar on Cowley Road, a venue revitalized under a somewhat dubious name but with an adventurous music policy.

The student production of The History Boys opens on Wednesday and runs until Saturday in six performances at the Oxford Playhouse. The story will certainly be familiar to many: eight students studying for the Oxbridge entrance exam under the supervision of eccentric teachers.

Whether you favour Camera’s Moulin Rouge event, the May Day fete at the Cowley retreat, Itchy Feet at the O2 or as many of the May Day festivities as you can fit in, May Day is a big deal for any Oxford student. Good luck in making it to the 6am singing at Magdalen College!

The Edo period in Japan was a peaceful time ruled by the Tokugawa Shoguns. This lecture at the Ashmolean museum explores the sumptuous art forms of Samurai culture including arms and armour, lacquerware, gold screen paintings and Japanese tea ceremony wares from the 17th and 19th centuries.

Picks of the Week

26 | Arts & Books

Cherwell | 25.04.14

Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art Helen McCombie enjoys a stunning collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings at the Ashmolean

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ézanne has long been hailed as one of the fathers of modern art; he was one of Picasso’s major influences, and is seen as the precursor to Cubism. Fairly well represented in England, with large numbers of work on display in London, he is something of a household name, due in large part to his still-lifes of apples and pears.

What is particularly exciting about this exhibition is that we see a side of his work which is less familiar, with a large number of watercolour and graphite works on display in the first gallery. One lady’s exclamation of “Oh no, I don’t like that at all!” shows that the works are unexpected.

These works have a delicacy and deftness which is absent from his thickly, boldly painted oil on canvas works. Chemin des Lauvres: The Turn in the Road, c.1904-06 is a great example, combining challenging compositional elements with a strong yet subtle use of watercolours.

The first of the rooms focuses on Cézanne, mostly the watercolours, but with notable oil inclusions, such as Route to Le Tholonet c.19001904, an ostensibly unfinished work, which shows his modern handling of paint, combined with traditional method of using underdrawings.

Alongside Les Grandes Baigneuses, Cézanne’s other most familiar motif is Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain near his home in Aix-EnProvence, which he painted almost obsessively.

The version of this here, in water-colour, presents an interesting variation, with large areas of empty canvas interspersed with thin graphite lines and patches of green and blue paint.

The second room is entitled “Impressionism and Beyond”, with the double height ceiling

note as works by the same artist.

The one Modigiliani sculpture, Head, c.191011 shows something of the non-European influence that has come to be associated most with Picasso’s work of this period.

On leaving the exhibition one is of course met with the ubiquitous exhibition gift shop, with Cézanne umbrellas, Cézanne fruit-bowl boiled sweets, and water-colour pencil sets, which says something about the expectation for art museums to function as much as commercial ventures as houses of art.

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seeming to open up the scope of what is being displayed. It must be said that the paintings on display can feel somewhat bewildering, with works by Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Monet, Pisarro, Courbet, Degas, Daumier and Van Gogh, alongside more by Cézanne himself, but it does give one a much broader sense of the context in which Cézanne developed, and the artists he worked with.

Manet’s Young Woman in a Round Hat, c. 187779 is particularly striking, as is the brightness of van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach, 1888, next to the more subdued Cézanne works either side of it. While these works can all seem very different to one another, their display together does go some way to drawing out the similarities between them, working as they were in the same milieu in early twentieth century Paris.

“Figurative Modernism in Paris”, the third and final room of the exhibition, takes us into another milieu, displaying works by Chaim Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, and Amadeo Modigliani. Soutine was one of the first artists Pearlman collected, which tells us something of the breadth of his taste. Soutine’s Hanging Turkey, c.1925 and Steeple of Saint-Pierre at Ceret, c.1922 feel rather a step away from Cézanne’s provincial landscapes in the room next door. Unfortunately the lighting in this room does make some of the artworks hard to see, particularly densely painted oil works by Soutine. The sculptural works in the room do not suffer however, and we are presented with interesting contributions from Jacques Lipchitz, demonstrating the variety of styles he is able to accomplish, with Acrobat on Horse, and Theseus difficult to

One is allowed a great deal of freedom of thought in this exhibition However one is allowed a greater degree of freedom of thought in this exhibition that is usual in large exhibitions. Information on the theme of each room is set at the back, slowing viewing of the works and encouraging individual impressions.

Overall the Ashmolean, continue their winning streak of brilliant exhibitions, worthily following on from the highly praised Bacon and Moore. Entry is free for Oxford University students; the beautiful landscapes suit Trinity term, whilst offering relaxation for the vexed finalist, and are just edgy enough to gain one some cultural clout with the tutor.

Loading The danger of e-books the Canon T

Isaac Goodwin warns of the demise of the professional author

Cherwell calls for new additions to the literary establishment

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here’s nothing better than good, honest crackpots. Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, by John Michell, is a collection of people who, for whatever reasons and in whatever field, have found themselves at odds with the world. The New York Times neatly summed it up as ‘some of the most outrageous and beguiling oddballs who have ever walked through history’. For example, in the 19th Century an ongoing battle raged between science and the ‘flat-earthers’, those who were convinced that the world was in fact a flat disk. The battle was centred upon a mile long stretch of canal in Cambridgeshire, the Old Bedford Level. A number of experiments were carried out, scientifically sound and mediated by an impartial judge. And yet both sides got exactly the results they wanted. A similar group were active in America, only they were not flat-earthers, but hollow-earthers, believing us to be living on the inside of a globe. Likewise, their own experiments proved conclusively that the earth does in fact curve upwards.

Michell never derides or laughs, but is brilliantly funny. And these stories allow him to be so. John Rutter Carden, a dreadfully

persistent lover, who kidnapped his unfortunate beguiler, was known as ‘Woodcock’ Carden, because he seemed impervious to gunshot fired at him by his Irish tenants, who were none too keen on his modern idea that rent should be paid. But after his failed attempt at kidnap he became a local hero; a ballad was even composed for him.

The book, through its wit, offers a deep insight into human nature; we can recognise a little of Henry Lee Warner, of Walsingham Abbey, in all of us; he was so excessively kind that he couldn’t bear to reprimand the local villagers, who therefore freely made use of his estate, stealing timber and horses, using his land, and generally treating his property as their own. All the characters in this book have one thing in common – they were completely obsessed with their various causes and notions, obsessions which took over their lives, in some cases destroying them entirely.

Quite often, as in the case of the Irish priest who opposed loans with interest, they are in fact more sane than the people who derided them. The book is a standing testament to humanity’s obsessive, credulous and courageous nature.

o say the internet has changed everything is to state the obvious. It is also obvious to say that it has changed the book.

But perhaps less obvious is just how. This is no mere superficial change, a transfer of media and a slight adjustment of the financial structure of the publishing world. This is a radical change in content.

To the publisher, e-books are scary, but have to be embraced – publishers have to roll with the times.

They are well aware of the dangers of illegal downloads, and of simply being bypassed by self publishing authors. To the author, e-books are also pretty terrifying, but there seems to be hope. The authors themselves take a much larger cut of the royalties – a self published work selling on Amazon for a reasonable price will win back 70%. It’s also a chance for those yet unpublished simply to get their work in the pubic eye.

But with e-books priced so incredibly cheaply, many buyers purchase books based purely on price. The testimony to this stands in the onslaught of the 99p

book, and the fortunes it has made; Fifty Shades of Grey is just one example of a hit which was rocketed to fame first as an e-book.

This works very well for popular, populist books. But it’s useless unless you can sell a huge number, like 40,000 copies. More serious books take considerably longer to write, and, by their less populist nature, sell fewer copies. This is simply bad economy as Dr Johnson observed, “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”.

The result? The world of authorship will divide: those who write for money will have to churn out populist reads. Anyone else will be forced to rely on day jobs, or more likely private income. Instead of making the world of books more democratic, by allowing anyone to publish, e-books will actually relegate the serious author to the realms of the extremely well-off.

This is of course an overly gloomy picture – hopefully people will always be prepared to spend more on a book they want to read.

Hopefully, enough people will favour the hardcopy ink and paper.

Maybe, the rather dryer authors will be forced to spice it up a bit, perhaps no bad thing in itself. But there is a danger worth noting, that in a world where many buy books based on price, the smaller selling, but professional author, could become a thing of the past.

Film & TV | 27

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Closing time for remakes? Landmarks Ollie Johnson is fed up with the constant remaking of films

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ew words are as damning or worrying for a film’s prospects as ‘redundant’. ‘Terrible’ can be reframed so it seems like critics are just being critics; ‘dull’ can be spun to mean ‘fun for a target audience’. But redundant? That is a cross no film wants to bear. Variety magazine’s review of The Amazing Spiderman 2 began by saying, “Redundancy remains a problem.” And what’s really amazing is that no one has pointed that out sooner.

Do you remember the original Spiderman movies? Of course you do, because Spider-Man 3 only came out five years prior to this reboot.

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By re-using content, something new is inevitably pushed aside or destroyed outright The hysterical rapidity with which this latest cash-cow for Marvel was churned out is doubly deplorable. Firstly, I refuse to believe that anyone grieved for the end of the previous incarnation of the franchise. Secondly, far more importantly, this is only one example of the ‘rebooting’ frenzy that has swept cinema; a relentless cull of original content in favour of established and done-to-death concepts that are easy sells. Redundant to say the least. Hollywood is a devious critter though. Reboots are rarely brazenly advertised as such, instead being masqueraded past audiences otherwise oblivious to the regurgitated content being sluiced into their eyes. Take the last outing for that adventuring rogue from the 80s, Indiana Jones. 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was unremittingly awful, yet cunningly branded as the long-gestated fourth part of the older Indiana Jones trilogy. But Crystal Skull was not a

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sequel. It was an abortive attempt to introduce young viewers, too young to have seen the originals in cinemas or even to have heard of them, to the franchise, and posit Shia LaBoeuf as the successor to Ford’s legacy. Thank goodness George Lucas couldn’t find a plot in a graveyard, as it left the film roundly condemned as the latest peal in the creative death-knell of cinema.

The list of releases from recent years reads like a cinema programme from a time capsule. This year’s revival of Robocop confirms Hollywood’s rabid fetish for 80s memorabilia.

2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a remake of Tim Burton’s version from 2001 that was itself a reboot of the Charlton Heston 60s classics. Versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th from within the last decade are all bootlegged mutilations of their esteemed horror progenitors. And lest we forget, Godzilla is released on May 16th, a remake of the 1998 version, itself an Americanized botch of the Japanese original from 1954.

The problem is self-evident. By re-using content, something new is inevitably pushed aside, delayed or outright destroyed. Pixar’s recent history demonstrates this perfectly.

The Good Dinosaur, an original story about life in the prehistoric, was originally slated for a 2013 release, only to be side-lined for the unwarranted second helping that was Monsters University. It’s scarcely imaginable how many innovative original scripts have been mercilessly crammed into the shredder by thoughtless film and television executives. Yet, the idiocy of canning new ideas for dust-laden relics from by-gone eras is so overwhelming that it is almost self-defeating.

Yes, cinema is a business, not a rescue home for creativity. I know not all reboots are terrible, as Christopher Nolan’s vanquishing of the pantomime drag-queen legacy attached to Batman from its multitude of embarrassing predecessors attests. But most reboots are appalling. And injudicious. And leaden. And dribble-inducing. And creatively cancerous.

And they really need to stop.

On cherwell.org this week...

ur online reviewers have been left disappointed by a number of releases over the vacation, finding Marvel’s latest outing, Captain America: The Winter Soldier to be weary and generic, Darren Aronofsky’s biblical epic Noah surprisingly clunky and the new hammer horror The Quiet Ones drearily predictable. However it’s not all bad news; Richard Ayoade’s

The Double, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin all made for compelling viewing experiences. The outstanding release from recent weeks is the new Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known which was awarded 5 stars in our online review – a fascinating portrait of a contentious political figure in US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

of cinema

The Usual Suspects See where it all started for one of Hollywood’s biggest directors and one of its finest actors

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Review: The Lunchbox

hat is it about densely populated cities? A person, surrounded by crowds of people, can feel lonelier than if they had retired alone to the countryside. In this film, almost every speaking part is given to a character who feels this loneliness keenly, and it is no wonder that when they come together in different ways, they arrive at a tacit, sympathetic understanding of each other’s emotional vulnerability.

Ila is a housewife in modern-day Mumbai.

Every morning she cooks her husband’s lunch, often under the guidance of ‘Auntie’, who lives in the apartment above and shouts down instructions to her. She arranges the food inside in an intricately constructed lunch-box, which is then taken to her husband via the services of a dabbawala.

One morning, the lunch-box arrives at the wrong destination. At the beginning of the film, we are shown how so many lunch-boxes make their way across Mumbai, and are also shown how Rajeev’s lunch-box arrives at someone else’s desk. In such a large city, as in life, lines of communication are often crossed and mixed up, leading to unexpected outcomes. As one character remarks, “Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right station”. In this case, Ila makes the acquaintance of Saajan.

Saajan works in an office shifting through pay slips and navigating accounts. He has been doing so for decades past, and now he is taking early retirement. No explicit reason is given for his decision, but we can see how tired he is in the way he draws impeccable lines with his highlighter, how he sits alone in the canteen and despondently takes the lunch-box out, only to discover something different inside.

His wife has died, and his home is oppressively quiet.

What transpires, given these details, is in no way surprising. Ila and Saajan enter into a correspondence, which is at first timid, but grows into something deeper. They exchange notes in their

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ith Bryan Singer’s X Men: Days of Future Past set to blow up box offices in 2014, it is worth considering the film which launched this director’s career – The Usual Suspects (1995). With a mere budget of $5.5 million and shooting period of 35 days, Singer crafted what remains one of the most intelligent and dazzlingly unpredictable heist thrillers of all time, including a heartstopping final scene, now arguably more famous than the movie itself. Launching the career of Kevin Spacey, this movie has had a lasting legacy on the ‘thriller’ genre in a way which anticipates the intellectually challenging action movies of Christopher Nolan.

lunch-boxes and it is revealing that Saajan notices and appreciates the difference in quality between the lunch-boxes he usually receives and those prepared by Ila - yet her husband, who receives those intended for Saajan, barely notices anything.

The reason that The Lunchbox transcends the formulae of the rom-com genre it belongs to is because of its wisdom. There is much laughter to be found here, but director Ritesh Batra knows how sad his story is - and that is refreshing, particularly when we learn that this is his first feature-length film. I almost wish he had been braver: the film does not need the easy, slightly clichéd laughs that we would expect from this kind of heart-warmer. The fact that he does not shrink from the darker elements in these people’s lives, and leaves the story to a degree unresolved, demonstrates his intelligence and genuine empathy for his characters.

It is therefore a shame when we feel the formula click in, for it is rare in a film of this kind for the audience to feel that there really is something at stake - that if these characters act decisively, the road they take will be a difficult one. As it stands, The Lunchbox is a charming, pleasant film, and for once, it gives the audience food for thought when the credits begin to roll. When was the last time you saw a romcom that did that?

James Martin

Cherwell recommends...

ast Sunday saw the UK debut of the TV series Fargo - a loose re-telling of the Coen brothers’ 1996 crime drama. Despite the screenwriters taking a few liberties with the plot (most infuriatingly, making the police officer not a chief, and not pregnant), this brilliant story of a struggling salesman who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife is as compelling as you’d hope. The director

has done an honourable job of capturing the jet black comedy of the Coens’ original and Martin Freeman is as watchable as ever.

The standout however comes in the form of Billy Bob Thornton who plays a deliciously unhinged hit man. While it doesn’t have the magic of the original film, Fargo’s dark wit and entertaining characters make it a release worth catching this weekend.

28 | Music

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Cherwell | 25.4.14

Your guide to European festivals Helen Thomas and Rushabh Haria reveal this summer’s very best European festivals

Lily Allen, Sheezus

ast weekend brought the rebirth of Jesus.

Now comes the rebirth of Sheezus. Lily Allen’s new LP comes after a five year hiatus, an onslaught of promotion and one of the most entertaining videos of 2013. However, those who giggled at the singer’s reveal of a “baggy pussy” and ironic echo of Kanye West will not get the clever satirical shit storm that was promised. Instead, Allen has made quite possibly the most mind numbingly boring record of the year.

Bubblegum pop, autotune and lyrics so uninspired they’re comical; it’s all there on Sheezus. “Bring some fags and bring some Rizlas, we’re gonna party like it’s nobody’s business,” sings Allen on ‘Our Time’, an anthem to careless partying and being young. The kind of thing a 12 year old would post on Facebook accompanied by the text “lUv u GUUYss <3”.

‘URL Badman’ shows some lyrical merit, and the ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ cover that closes the record is the musical highlight; but of course, she nicked it from Keane. From the country backing on ‘As Long As I Got You’ to the bedroom beats of ‘Close Your Eyes’, this record is so exceedingly unoriginal it’s like she’s trying (and failing) to be meta ironic. She’ll probably go write a “F**K DA H8RS” song because of this review. An honour, I’m sure.

Ben Phillips

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Damon Albarn, Everyday Robots

amon Albarn marks with Everyday Robots his departure from the legendary ventures of Blur and Gorrilaz, and the album hails a long-anticipated solo effort from a figure regarded as one of music’s modern day geniuses.

The album’s eponymous opening ballad is a reflective lament at modern life, and its melancholic strings set the tone of album until the upbeat, soulful croon of Mr Tembo. Some tracks such as Parakeet touch upon the downright experimental, while the influences of jazz and world music can be heard in others.

Albarn himself has mentioned the positive effects of narcotics on his music in the past, and tracks such as Photographs (featuring recordings of late recreational drugs advocate Timothy Leary) might well be an honest homage to that period.

All in all, the debut is lyrically crafted near to perfection and peppered with personal nostalgia, while the passing of time is conveyed through the synthesised, minimalist drum beats that wearily characterises many of the songs. It’s a shame that the former britpop frontman doesn’t revisit his eclectic influences more, and express them overtly throughout the album, essentially leaving them as a collection of unfulfilled loose ends. But if this debut is anything to go by, they will soon be tied up in an unexpected but brilliant manner.

Rushabh Haria

Roskilde, Denmark 29th June- 6th July

Sonar Barcelona, Spain, 12th-14th June

You may know it as the epicentre of bacon, woolly jumpers and cycling, but Denmark also plays host to Northern Europe’s largest annual music festival in Roskilde, just 35km from Copenhagen. The festival prides itself on its huge variety of acts, and this year’s lineup looks sure to please Park End and Babylove fans alike, with everyone from Drake and Bastille to Chance the Rapper and Warpaint. A word of warning though; the English like to joke about festival toilets. Danes like to ignore them. Eight days of beery piss can be pungent.

Confirmed: Arctic Monkeys, The Rolling Stones

The party capital of Europe plays host to many Summer festivals, but Sonar stands out as a particular favourite. It labels itself as the International festival of Advanced Music and National Media Art, and the line-up including Chic feat. Nile Rodgers, Caribou and MØ can easily justify both the hype and the ambitious (if slightly pretentious) title.

Confirmed: Massive Attack, Rudimental

Main Square, Arras, France 3rd-6th July Main Square a dix ans! This is the festival for culture nuts. Now in its tenth year, Main Square festival is located in a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Citadel of Arras, France. With only two stages it’s on the small side, but don’t let that fool you; this is no baby.

Iron Maiden, Foals and The Black Keys are all performing.

And if you so desire, you can watch 2012’s X Factor #fail James Arthur perform ‘Impossible’ and stare into your soul through those big eyelashes. Though let’s be honest, you probably have better things to do with your time.

Confirmed: Bombay Bicycle Club, David Guetta, Black Keys

Sziget Budapest, Hungary, 11th-18th August Pronounced like “cigarette” without the grr in the middle, this festival is certainly no drag, as it takes place over 7 days on The Island of Freedom in Budapest and typically hosts over 1000 musical performances of attended by over 300,000 campers. Confirmed acts for this year include the likes of Placebo, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Lilly Allen and Jagwar Ma. And if those names don’t excite you there’s also a giant blackboard where you write about the things you want to do before you die.

Let this be one of them.

Confirmed: Outkast, Skrillex

Electric Elephant, Tisno, Croatia 10th-14th July What’s better than mates, vodka, and a long weekend of lazing by the beautiful mediterranean coast? All

that and an electronic music festival. Set in The Garden Tisno, Electric Elephant is a non-stop party of sun, sea and dance. With boat parties and outdoor clubbing, it’s the perfect solution for those wanting a boozy holiday, but who can’t quite bring themselves to book Magaluf.

Confirmed: Tom Findlay (Groove Armada) DJ set, Awesome Tapes from Africa

Festival Mundial, The Netherlands, 27th-29th July Now for something completely different: a festival that draws some of the world’s most eclectic acts to northern Europe. If you’re particularly disheartened by the Reading/ Leeds line-up and can’t be bothered to blow your student loan on Glastonbury or Bestival, why not delve into the likes of Belgian electroswinger Tim Arisu, Danish rustic punk-rockers The Sexican, or my personal favourites Korean avant-garde/post-rock band Jambinai. You heard it here first. All for under 60 quid.

Confirmed: The Skints, Asian Dub Foundation

“A soul buffet from space”

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eliciously concocted like a soul buffet from space, Kelis’ otherworldly R&B drawl protrudes over retro beats producing something that simultaneously ticks the ultimate chill-out/party starter boxes, a great feat indeed. “This is the real thing”, she announces on opening track Breakfast - rebuking those who know her for “bringing all the boys to the yard” with her tasty Milkshake in 2003.

She went on to train as a saucier at Le Cordon Bleu academy in 2008, apparently as the result of disputes with her label, and she’s now hit them back with Jerk Ribs, Friday Fish Fry and Biscuits n’ Gravy on this latest offering - an odd culinary combo.

Much more refined than her previous pop-y hits, her husky purr constantly croons over a warm backbeat and vintage riffs that never seem forcibly contrived but evolve naturally out of her voice. The whole album is teeming with warm brass and chunky riffs, with heaping hunks of vintage soul and salty slabs of funk. Jerk Ribs begins with a mouth-watering bass riff which descends into the depths of your stomach where it’s supported by a swung

“

Her husky purr constantly croons over a warm backbeat shuffle that simply suggests that ‘everything’s fine, you’ll be alright’. The cynics should be quick to jump on Kelis’ eternal optimism but this is counteracted by a voice of experience, and disguised amongst the otherworldly character of the groove.

Where are they now?

Kelis, Food

Cherwell delves into the later careers of one-hit-wonders so you don’t have to

Y The influence of the Neptunes, with whom she collaborated on Tasty, is still felt in the rhythm tracks - the cowbell on Jerk Ribs could’ve come straight from Blurred Lines, but it all still seems entirely original. A Space Odyssey, an odd sounding mix but one that nevertheless blends perfectly with Kelis’ voice which is often pushed back in the mix to become instrumental and to reinforce the fact that Food is almost biographical - the story of Kelis, and not what some random big shot producer has told her to do.

The singer’s comeback could have so easily descended into a musical blancmange, over-produced, filled with poptastic hits but ultimately a bit beige. Luckily, the 34 year-old has emerged unscathed and, in the process, offered something with a slightly longer shelf life.

Jack Chown

ou know the names, the moves, and every word to Reach. There’s probably even video evidence of you belting every word of it whilst spilling tropical VK over the poor bugger next to you. It’s fair to say that S Club 7 are a band close to the hearts and minds of many students, which is why they brought it all back to the fans by hitting student unions and clubs for a reunion. Unfortunately not all the original line up was at the S Club Party, but Jo, Bradley and Paul just Don’t Stop Movin under the new more grown up name S Club, or sometimes S Club 3.

On their reunion tour, they went everywhere from the bright lights of Bradford to the Bognor Regis Butlins. When performing at the former, someone threw a bottle at Jo, following accusations of racism during her Celebrity Big Brother performance. Youch.

Unfortunately, the band have no plans to visit Oxford anytime soon, but they did recently play Bournemouth, where Jo debuted some bright pink hair, and Paul his beer belly. Jeez, the boys really have let themselves go.

Helen Thomas

25.4.14 | Cherwell

Ones to Watch TT14 Naomi Polonsky checks out the best offerings on stage this term

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Collaborators - 2nd/3rd Week, 9th-12th May, Oxford Union Debating Chamber

‘BULGAKOV: As I say – VLADIMIR: – it’s based on truth.’

From Labyrinth, the company behind the “magnificent” (Oxford Times) Semi-Monde at the Oxford Playhouse last term, comes this brilliant, often hilarious, and hugely engaging drama.

In Soviet Moscow, writer Mikhail Bulgakov is commissioned to write a play about Joseph Stalin to celebrate his 60th birthday. What follows is a tense cat and mouse chase through art, politics and relationships. John Hodge’s Collaborators is a powerful, comic and deeply moving exploration of what it means to be human, despite the politics that wrestle within.

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Lord of the Flies - 3rd Week, 14th-17th May, Keble O’Reilly Theatre

Stage | 29

Preview: The History Boys Jordan Reed previews an excellent start for the Playhouse’s term

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f you’re not familiar with Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, then you really should rectify that. A brilliant way of doing so would be to go and see what promises to be a magnificent performance of this modern classic at the Oxford Playhouse next week.

I was informed that the director (James Lorenz) was keen to replicate the open discussion of the original run’s rehearsals at which Bennett himself was present, something which was immediately noticeable during the time I spent with the cast. There is an amazing rapport amongst this group of “boys”, who in the breaks during the rehearsal maintain an uncanny likeness to their characters, throwing things, balancing scripts on their heads, and constantly cracking jokes. A combination of the fantastic cast that has been assembled and this open forum for ideas made for a delightful three quarters of an hour in their company. This was demonstrated all the more during the rehearsal, with enormous enthusiasm shared by every member of the cast and the director.

The short run of scenes which I slotted in to watch (it was refreshing to see a rehearsal at work rather than an overly-prepared snippet) moved from a typical lesson with Hector (the superb and Salvador Dali-esque Benedict Morrison) to the boys testing out a fledging Irwin (Harley Viveash). Viveash’s perfect tone of voice was matched by captivating body language as he leapt, slid, and wound his way around the classroom, interacting perhaps most of all with the self-confident Dakin, played by Tommy Siman. Siman’s lingering words created the perfect frisson with Irwin, suggesting just enough of the bubbling closer relationship underneath.

It is hard not to recognise the similarities between the performances in this production and the 2006 film adaptation, but with a play like The History Boys one might ask whether a director can significantly make it their own.

This has not stopped Lorenz and his cast trying, however: in particular by casting a distinct Hector who does not conform to the Richard Griffiths expectation, but who still retains his crucial stage presence and quirky mannerisms. It undeniably appears to be a conventional production, but to criticise it for this would simply be wrong; the work they have done on this play, considering the lengthy holiday break, is astonishing.

Amongst the ensemble cast, all of the actors fit into the characteristic classroom roles with ease, from the gruff and disinterested Rudge (Frazer Hembrow), through the more tender Posner (Luke Rollason) and the thoughtful Scripps (Nathan Ellis), to the attention-seeking pair of Tibbs and Lockwood (Jack Herlihy and Tom Lambert). Being, of course, also a play with musical interludes, which are seized upon with great gusto by the boys, it was somewhat peculiar to watch Scripps tinkling the ivories on a table and humming the tunes, although he does assure me that the budget will stretch to a piano on the night There does not seem to be a single weak link in this cast, and whatever they are doing, it is most definitely working. Now as I say, go and see it you foul, festering, grubby-minded little trollops.

The History Boys will be playing at the Oxford Playhouse from Wednesday 30th April until Saturday 3rd May. Tickets from £11.

A group of schoolchildren are stranded on a desert island. Left to their own devices, the boys discover the human heart’s capacity for darkness and savagery. But the children also encounter glimmers of hope for humanity, even as the world around them is consumed by an unseen war. BAFTA-winning writer Nigel Williams’ adaptation of this classic novel is brought to life in a refreshing and innovative production from Screw the Looking Glass (Another Country, Judgment at Nuremberg, Caucasian Chalk Circle).

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Surprise - 4th Week, 20th-23rd May, Keble O’Reilly Theatre

Surprise is a two-act comedy about seven twenty-somethings brought together by a birthday party. When Philippa organises a surprise party for her friend Paul in an effort to cheer him up, she invites an assortment of his friends. Six of the guests know each other from university, but the seventh, Guy, is a friend of Paul’s from his childhood, and makes no secret of his alienation from the other middle class professionals. As the party gets going, old relationships are re-examined and new conflicts are revealed; a marriage on the verge of breakdown; an engagement suddenly ended; dormant, unrequited love thrust back into the spotlight.

Guy, the outsider, watches all this with bemusement, but as the second act begins it starts to become clear that he has left his mark indelibly on the occasion. As the evening descends into madness, he is transformed from wallflower to orchestrator. The real is overcome by the surreal and the evening reaches a climax of chaos that throws up one final surprise.

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Vico - 4th Week, 20th-24th May, Burton Taylor Studio

Vico is an intriguing, darkly humorous piece of new writing that explores the relationship between a top psychologist and one particular patient; the lonely, volatile Vico. Full use will be made of the BT’s surround sound system with the composition of an original electronic soundscape soundtrack for the play. This will follow the progression of the play, as the psychopathic Vico attempts to slowly drive her own psychologist, Finn, insane. Meanwhile, Finn attempts to deal with problems at home and a remarkably useless work experience boy.

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Blue Stockings - 4th Week, 21st-24th May, Simpkins Lee Theatre

Blue Stockings tells the story of four first-year girls at Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge University. As the girls navigate a path through study, romance, and the end of the century, their Principal Mrs. Welsh prepares for the most decisive campaign in Cambridge’s history – women’s right to graduate. Celebrating the 55th anniversary of Oxford’s women’s colleges officially joining the university, and featuring a contemporary soundtrack and setting that brings a powerful forgotten story to life, Blue Stockings is an exciting and sharp new arrival in the Oxford drama scene.

Phoebe Hames LMH

Know Your Thesp Phoebe ascended the thespy throne (almost literally) with her performance in Marlowe’s Edward II. Since then she has been absolutely swimming in roles from Tom Stoppard’s ‘The Real Inspector Hound’ to ‘Arcadia’.

In fact her dedication to the Oxford drama scene is so strong that rumour has it that last term she spent more time in the BT than in the library, providing some welcome female punctuation in the very male ‘Oxford Revue’ and also flirting with modernism in Devised Play I – Fear.

Let’s hope this dramatic devotion continues in the future because we look forward to seeing Phoebe tread the boards of the Oxford theatre scene for many terms to come.

30 | Sport

Cherwell | 25.04.14

Send the FA to Specsavers: In defence of Andre Marriner

Thomas Calver assesses the state of refereeing in the Premier League: do we need more technology?

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side from the angry outbursts of Arsenal fans, the post-match furore from Arsenal’s trip to Chelsea on centred largely on the sending off of Arsenal’s Kieran Gibbs, fifteen minutes into the game.

Arsenal were two, soon to be three, nil down to their London rivals when Alex OxladeChamberlain made a dive that team-mate and goalkeeper Wojciech Szczesny would have been proud of, had his palming of the oncoming ball by the goal-line not forced referee Andre Marriner to blow for a penalty. Mistaking the identity of the handballing villain, Marriner showed Kieran Gibbs the subsequent red card instead of Oxlade-Chamberlain – despite the latter repeatedly admitting to Marriner that it was him.

In terms of the match itself, the mixup barely mattered. Arsenal were well on their way to an unceremonious stuffing even before being reduced to ten men, and had OxladeChamberlain gone off instead of Gibbs the result would hardly have been different.

More than anything, the false dismissal questioned the referee’s capacity to observe and judge key events of the game, as well as reopening the barely sealed can of worms entitled ‘technology in football’ Andre and his colleagues are prone to messing things up every now and then but it’s easy to sit

in the stands at a football match, or on our sofas at home, and disagree with everything a referee is doing, telling him that he’s an idiot and should have gone to Specsavers, while we watch the game with the sincere opinion that w e would control the game better than the man in the middle.

We frequently assume, as Pat Nevin suggested shortly after the incident, that the ref is bereft of mental capacities expected of any adult, let alone a referee.

H o w -

e ver, Graham Poll, the public’s insightful eye into the mysterious mental processes of football’s officials, was quick to defend Marriner’s actions.

“You can’t reverse a decision based on what a player says to you. If we’re at 1-1 in the semi-final of the World Cup, Wayne R o o n e y

gets involved in a heated debate or violent an confrontation with opponent, and the referee says ‘I’m sending you off ’ – the left back might come over and s a y b e ‘No it was me ref’, to keep cause he wants Wayne on, as he might score the winning goal in the World Cup final.” An official cannot simply take another player’s word for it, and so must rely on what he believes he’s seen.

It is easy to forget that, thanks to Sky and Co., that we have an unobstructed view of the action beamed into our living room, and are thus able to replay it as many times as we like – when you’ve got what happened replayed and zoomed in on in your front room, it isn’t hard to think referees don’t know what they’re doing.

Some fans, players and managers believe (to borrow the words of Everton boss Roberto Martinez) that “errors, misjudgements and mistakes” are merely “part of football, and you need to accept it because that is what makes football what it is”.

Yet in the modern game, a referee’s decision makes the difference between gaining or losing millions of pounds, as well as between ecstasy or deep sorrow. Sky has not only given us the technology to rewind and pause live action – they have also contributed to the vast wealth available to Premier League clubs; prize money has sky-rocketed over the last 20 years. As a result, the demands on the limited visual capabilities of the human referee are greater than ever. The FA maintained its commitment to empirical-based evidence by allowing Marriner to referee a Premier League game the following

weekend. But until they extend this commitment to the introduction of video-technology to assist with decisions, officials will continue to be seen as idiots lacking in common sense, as the 21st century, Sky+-ready eyes of the spectator remain vastly superior to the eyes by which the game is actually officiated.

Other sports have integrated technology

“

Marriner and his colleagues are prone to messing things up every now and then well, look at the use of Hawk-Eye in tennis, but as has been shown in the cricket world in recent times, advanced bits of kit can only minimise human errors, rather than wholly eradicating them. Despite this, mistakes like Marriner’s are embarrassing for the game as a whole, and it would be counter-productive for the FIFA to remain a ludicrous haven for luddites.

If the game is to see an invasion of technology, it will be interesting to see where said invasion stops. The disadvantages of installing technology are well known, particularly the disrupting effects it could have in a flowing game like football.

While we can’t forget that the onslaught of technology is difficult to sustain at the grassroots level. A real beauty of the game — the people’s game, that it would be a shame to ruin is that its officiation is the same at all levels.

25.04.14 | Cherwell

Sporting The Sporting Bio Rock Stars

This week Jonny Turnbull profiles a MMA fighter with a propensity for marijuana, swearing, and brawling.

Nick Diaz Former MMA World Champion

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ick Diaz is a particularly entertaining figure within the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Diaz holds a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under Cesar Gracie, a member of the Gracie family, the founding fathers of the UFC He is a former Strikeforce Welterweight Champion, former WEC Welterweight Champion, and a former IFC Welterweight Champion. Although a renowned trash talker, with controversy and attention seeming to follow his every move, Diaz has the skills to back it up.

Born in Stockton, California, his first professional fight was in 2001, he then became IFC Welterweight Champion in 2002 after just his second professional fight.

Nick’s way with words has attracted attention throughout his career, and his most infamous quotes demonstrate why he is such a controversial figure.

First up, Diaz never hides his passion for marijuana. The fighter can be found smoking weed on YouTube during an outing on his bike, and has even tested positive for the drug after a visit to the octagon during a professional fight!

“For the record, right now, I think someone needed to come out and say it: I think smoking pot is good for mixed martial artists. It’s a new day and age, this it, uh, the year… the fuck year is it?”

When asked by a reporter whether his use of marijuana had affected his fighting, Diaz replied, “Actually, on the contrary, my fight career has gotten in the way of my marijuana smoking.”

When pushed by a reporter to comment on potential future fights, Nick replied, “I feel that you instigate fights quite a bit…

I mean that’s your job but, where I come from, people like that get slapped”.

His disregard for what people think of him is well known too. His ‘do what I want’ attitude, however, has gained him as many fans as it has lost him.

Nick can be respectful to some though, but mainly towards those that he admires and his fellow Stockton ‘homies’, Perhaps the most famous words to leave the lips of Diaz were spoken following a defeat to KJ Noons in 2007. Noons asked the crowd whether Diaz deserved a rematch, to which his hometown posse of Hawaiians booed. This prompted Diaz to utter the now immortal words,“Don’t be scared homie!”

(YouTube it.)

The ring immediately broke into a brawl, and Diaz, with his brother Nate, left displaying a trademark middle finger to the crowd.

The brothers were also involved in the infamous ‘Nashville Brawl’ with Mayhem Miller, both receiving fines.

Nick’s antics outside the octagon only distract from what was an amazing martial arts career. He retired in February 2012, but then returned to fight Georges St-Pierre at UFC 158 in 2013. After losing this battle, he hung up his gloves for real and has not since returned to the octagon, even after many attempts at persuading him to engage in one last brutal encounter.

He has now launched his own promotions company called WAR MMA. The first event took in Stockton, California, of all places.

Sport | 31

Pat Jennings: A British goalkeeping legend Ben Szreter talks World Cups, George Best and football culture with Pat Jennings

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at Jennings is widely recognised as one of the best British goalkeepers ever to have played. Born in Northern Ireland in 1945 Jennings went on to play nearly 600 games for Tottenham, over 300 games for Arsenal and earned a then world record 119 caps whilst playing for Northern Ireland.

Football wasn’t Jennings’ principal sport whilst he was growing up. Raised as a Catholic in Northern Ireland his school played only Gaelic football and other Gaelic sports. Jennings told me that he, “never dreamt about professional football as a career…I left school on my fifteenth birthday…I went to work in one of the local linen factories from eight in the morning until six”.

Jennings’ unlikely career in professional football developed from his love of goalkeeping when he played football with his school mates, “We went to a field close to where we lived and took a couple of stones out of the ditch or put down a couple of coats [for posts]… the goalkeeper always had the most to do.” Jennings was clearly a very good goalkeeper as a young boy and he played for his local under 19s

team – Shamrock Rovers – when aged 11. This is an absolutely phenomenal feat for a goalkeeper, where height is often very important and Jennings told me he “couldn’t reach the crossbar” whilst playing in this team with people close to twice his age.

Despite his clearly noticeable ability from a young age, Jennings continued working in the linen factory and then a timber yard. He had essentially stopped playing football when aged 17 the team his brother played for – Newry United – lost their goalkeeper when he went to England to look for work. Jennings said he “wasn’t all that keen” on playing for Newry United but he went along to a few training sessions anyway.

Three months later he and the team won the Irish Junior Cup and in the next year he was put forward for the Irish National Youth Team by the chairman of his club. Jennings was subsequently picked for the Northern Irish National Youth Team. The Northern Irish team qualified for the UEFA European Under-18 Championship in 1963 to be hosted in England.

Jennings and Northern Ireland went on a run to the final. “At 17 I’d never been any further south than Dublin or any further north than Belfast…to finish up playing in the final at Wembley… I couldn’t believe it. England beat us on the night at Wembley 4-0. The England team we were playing against were all playing in the first division.”

Things moved quickly for Jennings after this as Watford bought him from Newry and took him over to England. A year later, in 1964 Tottenham then purchased him and it was in this thirteen year stint at Tottenham that Jennings made his name as one of the best British goalkeepers ever.

He won the 1973 Football Writers’ Association footballer of the year award and then in 1976 he was the first goalkeeper ever to win the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) player of the year.

Jennings played 1098 first class games in his career and made

his Northern Ireland debut on the same day as George Best, a player he told me was the best player he had ever seen because, as Jennings said, “He did everything a yard quicker than everyone else.”

Unlike George Best, Pat Jennings did represent Northern Ireland in a World Cup; in fact he managed to qualify for two. After four previous attempts at qualification with Northern Ireland Jennings made it to the 1982 tournament and then later the 1986 tournament as well.

This is something that Jennings had wanted to achieve his whole playing career; “I had been trying [to qualify for a World Cup] from 1964… around 1982 you’re thinking you’re not going to make it... you always live in hope”.

Jennings’ last ever match was in the 1986 World Cup on his 41st birthday against Brazil.

Jennings told me that “playing against them was just a dream for my last match.”

Tottenham still employ Jennings as a coach where he works with their academy two days a week. Jennings has been involved with professional football for over fifty years now and when I asked him what the biggest change had been he simply said “money”. He told me “I would’ve played football for nothing had someone paid my keep.”

Jennings also believes there has been a significant change in the culture in football clubs. “After matches and that we had get togethers, players would have a drink and then maybe go to a local pub. That was just the done thing in those days.” Not only does Jennings see a change in the players’ culture but he also thinks that clubs are putting more and more pressure on the young players as well as managers.

Jennings told me about the boys he works with at Tottenham. “Some of the young keepers think they shouldn’t make mistakes. The man who doesn’t make mistakes, he hasn’t been born yet. It’s the ones that makes the fewest mistakes that are the best goalkeepers.” Moreover with managers Jennings commented that “The old managers got four or five years at a club when they came in. They had an opportunity to come in and set up a youth policy at a club. Whereas now they work from three to four games.”

Clearly football has changed significantly since Pat Jennings played but he believes the players aren’t that different, he told me, “I could’ve played [in the modern game] no bother.” With such an impressive career behind him, it’s hard to disagree.

Sick of the Premier League’s excess, Samuele Volpe turned to the Polish league

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ootball for me this season has been a grim affair. The team I support have vacillated between mediocre and terrible, so I thought that when I was in the beautiful Polish city of Krakow, I’d try and catch a different sort of game, and visit the local club, Wisla Krakow.

I had been frequently warned about the intimidating atmosphere known to exist around Eastern European football stadia. I was told, “Keep your head down” and “Avoid being too obviously English”; horror stories of English fans in places like Istanbul and Belgrade had clearly made an impression upon my friends and family. It turns out though, that Wisla Krakow’s Stadion Miejski is more Ashton Gate than the Attaturk. Disappointingly, only around five thousand fans turned up, and the closest we came to running into any of the ‘feared Ultras’ was when a drunk middle-aged bloke almost fell into the row in front of him.

Perhaps the atmosphere was muted because Wisla have had a terrible season, but I’ve honestly felt more endangered in Park End than I did sat in the stands.

Wisla were playing Podbeskidzie, a provincial side who are battling relegation and as such had far more to play for than the mid-table home side.

The game began in farcial circumstances as Podbeskidzie scored within 15 seconds of the kick-off with a long-range chip which rebounded off the bar, and then the goalkeeper’s arse,

into the goal. Behind me, four thousand Wisla fans groaned, settling in for a testing 90 minutes.

The football itself was a mixed bag. There was a sense that both teams knew what they should be doing with the ball, and both were capable of some aesthetically pleasing stuff in short bursts, but neither side was able to cut out the mistakes. Both instead seemed intent on kicking the living daylights out of each other, and the tally of 10 yellow cards reflected this. In reality though, that both teams made it to half time without a sending off was remarkable, especially as the Krakow goalkeeper continued

his nightmare game by headbutting the opposition striker right on half-time.

After a missed Wisla penalty, and then a procession of injuries, the match drew to a close and thoughts turned to whether defeat would see a hitherto friendly crowd transform into something scarier. To an extent the people around me got grumpier and drunker, but that was about it.

It had been a fun way to spend a few hours, all told, but I left with a compelling feeling that both teams were very limited and the Polish league has a long way to go before we see an European challenge orignating from Poland.

Sport

INSIDE: Ben Szreter speaks to Pat Jennings Thomas Calver on refereeing mistakes

Same old story in Table Tennis Varsity match Polly Streather reflects on this year’s table tennis Varsity matches from Iffley

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n Table Tennis’ Town vs. Gown event, which acts as a warm-up for Varsity, the Men’s Firsts, Women’s Firsts and Men’s Seconds all had teams competing. The Men’s firsts won impressively, posting 7-3 scoreline in their first victory in the event for in six years. This meant that OUTTC now has a beautiful wooden trophy

to put in its metaphorical cabinet.

The Men’s Seconds also put in a sterling performance with a 5-5 draw against an experienced Town team. Unfortunately the Town club’s women proved too strong for the Women’s Firsts and won a convincing victory by 9 rubbers to 1.

Even off the back of a relatively successful Town vs. Gown, Varsity posed a daunting challenge. Cambridge has convincingly held the Men’s Firsts title since 2004, and the last four years have all seen brutal 10-0 scorelines. In light of that, this year’s team was determined to set the record straight with a win on home

turf.

On the women’s side however, Varsity tradition suggests that contest is more evenly matched, with Oxford having won three consecutive titles from 2010 to 2012. Sadly a defeat occurred last year after one of the strongest Oxford players turned traitor and moved to Cambridge.

As the Varsity series began, Cambridge showed they still have tremendous strength at the top, again thrashing the Men’s firsts 10-0.

It must be said though, that the Oxford players fought well and managed to win many sets against them, forcing the Tabs to play far better than in the past. Progress is as such beginning to be noticeable, and with rumour suggesting that a lot of the key Cambridge players are leaving this year, next year’s match is set to be a more competitive fi xture.

The real stars of the show were the Men’s second team, with Michael Peterer, Haijie Tan, Ben Nilsson and Maciej Jarocki winning 6-4 against their Cantabrian opponents. Especially noteworthy was Nilsson’s incredible performance; after a poor start he was 2-0 down, but the Lincoln man battled through and secured his win in the final set, coming back from 9-5 down to assure Oxford’s victory.

The Women’s 1st team fought valiantly too, and were able to secure strong victories in two matches against their more experienced Cambridge opponents, even if the tie as a whole was eventually lost 8-2.

All in all, OUTTC have had a character-building year; results have not reflected the training gains the Oxford players have made, and with an extra year’s experience, we should be able to look forward to the club making more of a contest out of next season’s program.

Oxford cricket scene poised and ready for big Trinity Ben Horton previews the upcoming College Cricket League and Cuppers tournament

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ith Trinity term about to begin, Cherwell Sport turns its attention to the upcoming cricket season. Last season’s dominance for the Blues in Varsity matches, spectacularly capped by Sam Agarwal’s triple century in the four-day fixture, should provide grounds for optimism in the University arena. The real lifeblood of cricket in Oxford however is the College Cricket League and the Cuppers competition, which we will focus on here.

The College Cricket League is set to begin in 1st Week and looks to be as hard to predict as ever.

Last season’s league was slightly affected by rain, but with a warm summer in the offing the teams will hope that consistency and quality will be more fairly rewarded.

The 1st Division last year was a two-horse race between Balliol and Keble which finished in a dead heat, some 44 points ahead of the chasing pack. These two teams will be looking ahead to more dominance, although newly promoted St. John’s and Somerville will provide stiff competition and the likes of St. Catz, Univ, and New will always offer a challenge to any opponent.

The lower divisions were fiercely contested last season, with a much smaller gap separating the teams in the top half of both leagues. The 2nd Division thrived, with St. John’s, Somerville and Exeter contributing to a nail-biting finish which would have been all the more thrilling had Pembroke not run out of time to play their ninth and final fixture. As it is the teams dropping down from the 1st Division, Brasenose and Merton, will face a tough fight for promotion as Exeter, Pem-

broke and Jesus will all be looking to finish in the top two. That is not to mention Trinity College, who as last year’s beaten Cuppers finalists are my pick to finish first as they bid to follow St. John’s up to the 1st Division. No doubt the match of the season in this league will be the Jesus/Exeter fixture as an age-old College rivalry coincides with both sides’ realistic chance of promotion.

The 3rd tier of College cricket was more interrupted last year than the other two divisions, as a mixture of weather and the inability to consistently get full sides to turnout for regular matches lessened the competitive edge of many contests.

Nevertheless Lady Margaret Hall look to be the team to beat this time around, having gone unbeaten in their four games last year and missed out on promotion only because Oriel and Magdalen got through more games. Linacre should also challenge for the title along with former 2nd Division sides Teddy Hall and Wadham, who failed to win a game in last year’s competition.

The Cuppers competition begins in 2nd Week, with the 1st Division teams looking to redeem themselves after two 2nd Division colleges, St. John’s and Trinity, competed in the final last year.

Victory for St. John’s capped a successful season for the team, who also gained promotion and look well placed to mount a serious defence of their Cuppers title. The competition should see some all-round quality cricket played, as the colleges will have the freedom to select their full complement of Blues and ‘Tics players, something not allowed in League fixtures. This could potentially alter the prospects of some of the

lower ranked teams, not least in the case of Lady Margaret Hall, whose star batsman Matt Winter is a mainstay of the Blues middle order and over the winter gained a place in the MCCU squad.

Elsewhere last year’s 2nd Division whipping boys Wadham will be hoping that the availability of Jack Kelleher will boost their chances in Cuppers if not the league. The competition will be stiff however as 1st Division stalwarts Worcester and Balliol can also call on University players for their

cup fixtures.

With an action-packed season in store for all the teams involved, cricket at Oxford seems to be in rude health. Although the ultimate victors in all levels of competition remain a mystery, what is incontestable is the tension, excitement, and passion that will accompany quality cricket across the university.

Keep up with all the twists and turns with Cherwell Sport.