Epigram Issue 342

Greek craving Inside...

High climb

Ghost stories

Our Food Agony Aunt tackles your Taka Taka addiction

Recent UBMC alumni discuss their most exciting trips

A poem and a short story of ghoulish inspiration sends spines tingling

The Croft page 13

page 31

pages 23-24

epigram

Fortnightly October 28 2019

est. 1988

Issue 342

The University of Bristol’s Independent Student Newspaper

‘SU back People’s Vote in London’: a coach of officers, staff, and students took their pickets to the capital again to protest for a second referendum, page 6

Grades see record high

New FOI results show 31.5 per cent of 2019 degrees were first class, compared to 18.7 per cent in 2010 Isaac Haigh

Investigations Correspondent

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n Epigram investigation can reveal that the proportion of degrees awarded First Class Honours has increased 68.8 per cent over the past nine years.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Epigram has revealed that in the 2018/19 academic year, 31.5 per cent of graduates received first class degrees whilst in 2009/10 it was only 18.7 per cent. The reasons for this increase are unknown. There has been an upward trend of the number

www.epigram.org.uk

of First Class degrees awarded.

If continued at the current rate, that would mean that, potentially, everyone graduating in the year 2094/95 would receive a first. The number of 2:1s has seen a steady decrease over the same period of time with 62 per cent of graduates

EpigramPaper

receiving a 2:1 in 2009/10 and 58 per cent in 2018/19.

The Faculty of Engineering, which awards the highest proportion of top degrees, has also seen the largest increase of students receiving Firsts.

Only 22.5 per cent of engineering students graduated with a first in

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2009/10 compared to 42.7 per cent in 2018/19. The Faculty of Science has the second highest number of first class degrees being awarded at 41.2 per cent in 2018/19 with an almost equal number of students graduating with a 2:1 at 42.9 per cent.

@epigrampaper_

Continued on page 3...

Editorial

epigram 28.10.2019

Co-Editor-in-Chief Co-Editor-in-Chief Deputy Editor

Imogen Horton Patrick Sullivan Will Charley

Digital Editor Tom Taylor Deputy Digital Editor Bethany Marris epionlineeditor@gmail.com

Halloween burnout

I

t ’ s nearing the middle of term and everything seems to be up in the air. As I write this it’s still unclear whether we’ll leave the EU on Halloween, though I’m not sure this is something we’ll even know until the day looking at the current state of Parliament.

Closer to home, third year is now full of deadlines and grad scheme applications. Next year is still a mystery.

I have no idea where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing but I’m going to follow Donald Tusk’s advice (I never thought I’d say that sentence, oh my) and put a delay on stressing about it for a few months.

Halloween has always been the beginning of winter festivities for me.

As a child I had a friend whose American mum pulled out all the stops for Halloween, putting on the level of parties you only see in cliché films.

To ‘reward’ ourselves for getting to reading week this is exactly the level of extra my flat is going to. Instead of writing essays or catching up on revision notes, we’ve been scrolling through Pinterest to find those insta-worthy, spooky themed alcohol and sweet treats. The plans are firmly in place to make our kitchen an industrial sized Halloween bakery this week.

We’re still looking for group costume ideas though, the current thinking is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. If any of the very few people that actually read this editorial has any groundbreaking ideas on what my group should go as, hit me up at editor@epigram.org.uk.

This edition of The Croft has Halloween suggestions to rival Instagram: from last minute makeup ideas,

so you don’t have to resort to cat ears and eyeliner whiskers, to cocktails and the best treats from supermarkets - we’ve got you covered. Not going out? I really don’t blame you, but browse our entertainment sections for the best horror films and theatre for a more ‘relaxed’ Hallows’ Eve. These nights of chats, planning and delirious laughter in itself is the blessing of third year; if we’re drowning in work, then we’re all on the same sinking ship. Friendships, which are going into their third year, definitely feel like they’ve been there as long as any ‘home’ friends. Dinner parties and face masks have replaced jaegerbombs at Gravity Monday, though with a sister in first year I am still able to vicariously live my fresher life again through her.

There’s so much pressure to be ‘living your best life’ and FOMO, particularly in first year where you think that missing one night out will mean that you’ll lose friends. I can tell you that any pictures of our extra Halloween are 100% not representative of our flat most of the time. Instead find us in dressing gowns with hot water bottles, moaning about how much work we have, while simultaneously not doing that work.

Make sure you take time for yourself and miss that night out if you don’t feel up to it. Reading week and Halloween can be a point of burnout so don’t beat yourself up if by Week Five you don’t have the same stamina that you did in Freshers’ Week. Check up on yourself, and your friends. The pressure is rising and so are stress levels. Acts of kindness really don’t go amiss.

The last few weeks have seen a myriad of protests. From environmental marches, to fights against events on campus and Brexit, students have been voicing their opinions loud and clear. Being opinionated and political myself I have so much respect for the students putting themselves out there and standing up for what they believe in. On the same note though, we do have to be mindful not to let our opinions become hate. It takes nothing to be kind. In fact, it takes more muscles in your face to frown than smile.

Epigram is the independent student newspaper of the University of Bristol. The views expressed in this publication are not those of the University or the Students’ Union. The design, text and photographs are copyright of Epigram and its individual contributors and may not be reproduced without permission.

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Upward trend for first class degrees

Continued from the front page...

A fourth year Engineering student told Epigram that he found ‘grade inflation frustrating on two levels’.

Saying: ‘Not only does it devalue grades for hardworking students - especially past students - but it creates an expectation that students should be getting firsts, which I think puts undue pressure on the bulk of students who are looking for a 2:1.

‘Firsts should be reserved for those willing to go above and beyond the expected level of work.’

The Faculty of Social Sciences and Law has seen the smallest increase of first class awards over the last 9 years. 14.2 per cent of graduates received a first class degree in 2009/2010, compared to 23.4 per cent in 2018/2019.

Professor Tansy Jessop, Pro ViceChancellor for Education at the University of Bristol, said in response to the data: ‘Bristol, like the rest of the higher education sector, has seen an upwards trend in the proportion of students getting top degrees.

‘A number of factors can help to explain this, such as changing student

‘However, even accounting for prior attainment and student demographics we still find significant unexplained grade inflation.’

Trends at Bristol reflect common patterns within higher education.

Statistics for the sector as a whole show the ratio of first-class honours degrees in 2009/10 was 14 per cent, in 2013/14 was 20 per cent and in 2017/18 was 28 per cent according to HESA data.

For Bristol, the same figures show the ratio of first-class honours degrees in 2009/10 was 16 per cent, in 2013/14 it was 20 per cent, and in 2017/18 it was 29 per cent.

35% 33% 31% 29% 27% 25% 23% 21% 19% 17% 15% 09/10

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motivations, ability and diligence towards their degree attainment, enhancements in teaching and learning practices and facilities and improvements in academic support

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It creates an expectation that students should be getting firsts, which puts pressure on the bulk of students

for students.

‘Degree attainment at Bristol is an important issue and one we closely monitor to assure the value of our

12/13 13/14 14/15 15/16 Academic year of graduation

degrees. We have robust measures in place to assure the quality of marks and the degrees awarded.

‘This includes oversight from external examiners, who are members of academic staff from other universities, appointed to each course to ensure that quality and standards of the awards we make are appropriate.’

In December 2018 the Office for Students (OfS) published a report investigating into ‘spiralling grade inflation’. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, said: ‘We absolutely recognise how hard students work for their degrees, and accept that improved teaching

16/17

17/18

18/19

and student support, and increases in the qualifications students gain before university, could explain some of the increase in grades.

It is important to note that the HESA data is different as it includes data from all degrees awarded, including those degrees that cannot be awarded a First Class Honours, for example Medicine and Veterinary Science.

Faculty of engineering graduates 100% 90%

Percentage of graduates

Investigations Correspondent

Percentage of graduates with First Class Honours

Isaac Haigh

Graduates with First Class Honours

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• Bristol University is awarding more firsts than ever before • The Faculty of Engineering has seen the largest increase of 90 per cent

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 09/10

10/11

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12/13 13/14 14/15 15/16 Academic year of graduation

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with First Class Honours

with Second Class Honours (First Division)

with Second Class Honours (Second Division)

with Third Class Honours

18/19

Maggie Sawant SU Correspondent

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akota have announced they will be banning the use of phones at their ‘Eats Everything’ Halloween event on the 31st. Their phones will be placed in a lockable case that they will keep with them during the event, which the owner can unlock upon leaving the venue by tapping the sleeve on an ‘unlocking base’. The phone cases are produced by Yondr, a small tech

company based in San Francisco.

Their website states that the cases ‘provide a haven to engage with what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. In physical space and real time.’

Nicky Tarran, a second year Languages student, told Epigram: ‘I think the event is good because it means that people will enjoy the evening with each other and not be distracted by outside events – they’ll just live in the moment: something which not enough of us do these

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You’re free to be who you want to be whilst dancing the night away

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• Lakota will ban phones to bring clubbers closer to the music • The club plan to use lockable cases where owners can keep their phones during the event

days. ‘They’ll just live in the moment: something which not enough of us

do these days.’

Lakota hopes that the phone ban will make clubbers more immersed in the experience, recreating the ‘no holding back attitude’ of ravers in the early 1990s, when Lakota was founded. The event page states: ‘With no phones to hold you back and no fear of being recorded, you’re free to be who you want to be whilst dancing the night away.’

A spokesperson for Lakota said: ‘We strongly believe phone-free nights are a chance to revive the scene and introduce a new generation of ravers to an atmosphere they may never have experienced before.’

On the night, Lakota will provide an area where the cases can be unlocked, ensuring clubbers are still able to make emergency calls.

Flickr / Alex

Lakota to ban phones at Halloween event

epigram 28.10.2019

4 News

Will Charley Deputy Editor

R

ent in Bristol has risen the second fastest in the UK, according to a study by property-agent, Zoopla.

Whilst the average national rent rose by two per cent, rent in Bristol rose by four-point-five per cent.

The cost of renting in Leeds has also risen the second most in the UK, joining Bristol with a four-point-five per cent rise. However, rent increased the most this year in Nottingham, where it rose by five-point-four per cent.

The study looked at rental prices for private one to four-bed accommodation around the country,

between October 2018 and September 2019. Zoopla also looked at how much people spent paying rent, as a proportion of their earnings.

Bristol tenants spend the fifth highest proportion of their earnings on rent.

Private accommodation in London City was proportionally the most expensive, costing 46 per cent on a renter’s average earnings. This was followed by Oxford (43.8 per cent), Brighton (42 per cent), and Cambridge (41.3 per cent).

The average property in Bristol costs tenants 38.7 per cent of their earnings in rent.

However, Zoopla’s study concluded that renting is becoming more affordable nationally, after the average percentage of earnings people spent on rent fell from 33.6 per cent in 2016 to 31.8 per cent in 2019. The study also found that the cheapest city to rent in was Hull, where the average tenants pay just

18.9 per cent of their earnings for rent each month.

Zoopla concluded that rent has increased the most in cities where demand has risen or where the rental supply is inadequate, whilst in places like Hull, rent is lower due to a lack of demand. The study also noted that

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Rent has increased in cities where the rental supply is inadequate

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• Rent in Bristol has risen second most nationally • Bristol is the fifth most expensive place to rent in UK

rent has increased in cities with a significant student population.

Zoopla’s Rental Market Report looked at rents and earnings in 40 cities and 376 local authorities, for the period from October 2018 to September 2019.

More information can be found on their website.

Mayor delivers State of the City address in Wills • The Mayor of Bristol gave his annual address from Wills Memorial Building • Plans for the city include an underground line from Temple Meads

Ellie Brown News Subeditor

T

he Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, delivered his annual State of the City Address on Wednesday 16 October in the building’s Great Hall.

The speech focused on Rees and his team’s achievements since 2016, such as funding redevelopment projects in Temple Quarter, and achieving UNESCO City of Film Status in collaboration with the University and others.

He also highlighted the council’s work providing ‘housing for young homeless, care leavers and students’ as part of a scheme in which the University is also a partner, and shed light on the development of Bristol Arena – a ‘state of the art,

17,000-seater’ building ‘ready to come to planning in a few months.’

Other plans include building an underground line from Temple Meads Station to Bristol Airport, pedestrianizing the City Centre, and working with ‘unions and businesses’ to make Bristol ‘a Living wage city.’

Additional speakers at the event

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The speach highlighted the councils work providing accmodation for students

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Bristol experienced second largest increase in rent in the UK

included both of Bristol’s Youth Mayors, City Poet Vanessa Kisuule, the University’s Deputy Vice Chancellor Guy Orpen, who opened the night.

A video, ‘We Are Bristol,’ was shown before the Mayor’s speech, and the event was rounded off with a panel discussion on future cities.

Students protest Free Speech event due to controversial guest speaker Maddy Russsell News Editor

S

tudent campaigners gathered outside the Centre for Applied Autonomy on Wednesday 16 October to protest an event held by the Bristol Free Speech Society.

The event entitled Extremism on Campus: Take 2 included a talk from Emma Fox, a Research Fellow at the foreign policy thinktank Henry Jackson Society (HJS).

Another planned Free Speech Society event earlier this year, at which Fox was supposed to be speaking, was cancelled by the University due to ‘security concerns’.

This came after Bristol Islamic Society released a open letter, signed by nearly 500 people, and several hundred expressed their interest in protesting.

Both events presented the findings of Fox’s recent report entitled Extreme Speakers and Events: In the 2017/18 Academic Year.

The report claims to catalogue ‘204 events promoted by students in the academic year 2017/18 featuring speakers with a history of extreme or intolerant views or representing extremist-linked organisations.’

Five of these events were believed to have been hosted by student societies at the University of Bristol.

Protesters from the campaign group Stand Up To Racism accused the Free Speech Society event of allowing ‘hate speech’ on campus.

Fox later described the allegations made by protesters as ‘simply not true’.

Khadija Meghrawi, on behalf of Bristol Islamic Society, said the following: ‘Our objection to Emma Fox and the HJS is based on their specific prejudice towards Muslims that is veiled as an objective counteraction to extremism in general. Her report Extremist Speakers from 2017/2018 is supposedly a neutral catalogue,

listing events to students in the academic year 2017/18 featuring speakers with a history of extreme or intolerant views, or representatives of extremist-linked organisations.

‘Claiming to be an exhaustive list, every event listed is either by an Islamic society or a handful by Palestinian societies. This leaves us with two possibilities: either every extremist event that happened last year was related to Muslim students or the report left out other forms of extremist events to imply that to be the case.

‘For example, the Henry Jackson Society did not report on speakers such as Steve Bannon, Marine Le Pen, and Sargon of Akkad.

‘Not only is it propagating the implication that all extremist events during that year have been associated with Muslim activity likely to incite prejudice, the fact that this inaccurate conclusion has been marketed as based on objective evidence is even more dangerous, misleading people to a conclusion that they believe to be fact rather than opinion.

What is also particularly abhorrent

Epigram / Sabrina Miller

• Emma Fox from the Henry Jackson Society spoke last week • Fox is accused of hate speech, an accusation she denies

is their demonisation of Islamophobia Awareness Month campaigns based on similarly weak, misleading evidence, attempting to undermine a campaign helping to make Muslims feel safer and more included in this country by perpetuating the very stereotypes that lead to these feelings of division in the first place.’

A spokesperson from Bristol Free Speech Society said: ‘We were very pleased to welcome Emma Fox from the Henry Jackson Society to give a talk on her report Extreme Speakers and Events: 2017/18 alongside Dr Steven Greer, the event’s chair.

‘Our diverse audience found her talk to be highly engaging and afterwards many told us they were confused by how such a talk could ever be viewed as controversial.

‘We would like to reiterate our thanks to the excellent security team who we had protecting our attendees and speakers, allowing the event to go ahead without fear of disruption.

Those who came to protest did so in a respectful manner, and we are grateful for this.

28.10.2019 epigram

News 5

• New designs have been criticised by heritage campaign groups • The University and architecture groups have defended the plans

Benjamin Salmon Deputy News Editor

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train.

Campaign group Historic England said of the plans: ‘This is a very prominent site, and its location adjacent to the London-bound platforms at Temple Meads will be the first impression of Bristol to visitors arriving in the city.

‘There is a danger that the proposed buildings may appear as sheer

University of Bristol

ocal and national campaign groups say student developments near Temple Meads are unkind to the local heritage architecture.

Plans for new student housing near Temple Meads station have been criticised by campaign groups and residents’ associations.

The designs for the 953 student flats, which come as part the University’s landmark Temple Quarter construction project, came under fire after campaigners said they ruin the view of Bristol for visitors arriving by

unrelieved monoliths with little sense of refinement in their detail.’

Local residents’ associations Totterdown Residents Environmental and Social Action and Windmill Hill and Malago Planning Group also oppose the plans.

However, the Bristol Urban Design Forum, a local architecture and city planning collective,

support the proposals: ‘The height of the development, when seen from surrounding areas, does not appear intrusive.

‘We support the design approach.’

A Bristol University spokesperson also defended the plans, saying they would ‘regenerate a long-neglected central area of the city by creating a welcoming campus in Temple Quarter.

‘The colour and materials used for the facade were chosen to reflect and complement the station and the industrial heritage of the site.’

Bristol City Council is due to vote on 16 October on whether to give the development the go-ahead.

The Temple Quarter campus, which the University hopes to turn into a science and technology hub for the city, is billed for construction on what currently is a brownfield area of the city – land which is either unused or derelict. The plans are now approved.

Deliveroo riders boycotted Wagamama last week - and they could again in future • Riders took no orders from Wagamama over wait times • Move follows a previous strike last month over pay • Deliveroo claims it does its best to maintain efficiency and safety

Benjamin Salmon Deputy News Editor

Epigram / Benjamin Salmon

H

ungry students may have been waiting longer for their katsu curry last week after Deliveroo riders in Bristol staged a boycott on Wagamama orders from restaurants in the city.

More than 80 riders participated in the protest – which took place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – over the length of time drivers have to wait for orders at the popular Japanese chain.

The organisers, led by Brazilian rider Joseph Nunes, argue that the 25-minute wait time is too long, during which they are simply not paid.

Speaking to the Bristol Post, Nunes said: ‘We all dread the waiting time at Wagamama. It is not fair on the riders.’

With longer waiting times, there

are fewer deliveries the riders can make each day.

Recent pay cuts at Deliveroo, have seen riders like Joseph make only £6 an hour after taking into account moped maintenance, insurance and petrol.

Nunes described working 12-hour days to make ends meet, going as far as calling the situation a form of ‘slavery’.

He justified the protests, saying that considering most riders in the city took part in the boycott, Wagamama lost orders and business.

Owing to the perceived success of the protest, Nunes made clear that the riders would be willing to stage industrial action again in the future.

The pay cuts Deliveroo made over the summer, as well as concerns over rider safety in areas of Bristol

following attacks by bike gangs on rideres, prompted a similar strike last month in which over 100 riders protested through the city.

A spokesman for Deliveroo said: ‘Deliveroo has recently made changes to rider fees so riders are paid more for longer distance deliveries and wait times at restaurants are taken in to consideration when calculating how much riders are paid.’

• English students have been left frustrated after assement deadlines were received two weeks later than they were supposed to • The Department of English has appologised for the confusion but defended the postponement

Benjamin Salmon Deputy News Editor

E

nglish students were left frustrated after assessment deadlines were received two weeks later than they were supposed to.

Deadlines should have been released by the end of Week 1 of TB1, but they were officially set nearly two weeks later.

One third year English student told Epigram: ‘The assessment deadline schedules were released much later than promised this year - last year they were released in week one.

‘To have deadline clashes in such a crucial final year is raising stress exponentially.’

The Department of English apologised but defended themselves, saying: ‘There was a delay this term announcing assessment deadlines for students studying English and we are

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We are very sorry for any concern this may have caused

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New student housing causes concern among campaigners

English Department ‘very sorry’ after essay deadlines delayed by fortnight

very sorry for any concern this may have caused.

‘This was due to some necessary amendments and improvements to the assessment schedule which took some time to implement.

‘Further, the administration team was operating on low numbers due to illness.

‘Students were informed of all TB1 assessment deadlines via Blackboard on October 17 (Thursday of Week Three). The first summative deadlines in English are during Week Five of term.’

epigram 28.10.2019

6 News: In Pictures

SU joins calls for second referendum

• Bristol SU Officers and students took part in rally for a second referndum on Brexit • The Bristol group joined over one million other protesters

Maddy Russsell News Editor

O

University of BristolFergk

Epigram / Fergus Ustianowski

n Satuday the 19th the membes of the SU attended the People’s Vote rally in London, as part of national calls for a second referndum on Brexit.

In a statement to Epigram, Undergraduate Education Officer Hillary Gyebi-Ababio said: ‘We are taking part in the march because the voice of Bristol students should be heard.

‘Both current and future students will be impacted by Brexit, and we want to ensure that our EU and international students feel part our diverse community, that students from liberation backgrounds are protected from the rise in hate crimes and that our universities continue to be world leading institutions.

‘Over the past 3 years we’ve seen instability, chaos and a loss of trust in our political establishment. The march is a way for us to have a final say - especially for those young people that didn’t get to vote, and those that come from aborad but reside on the UK. ‘

Students protest Newport accomodation

Benjamin Salmon Deputy News Editor

Epigram / Kofo Ajala

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tudents marched through the centre of Bristol last week, protesting the University’s policy to house surplus students in Newport, Wales.

The protest was organised by Bristol Cut The Rent and also saw representatives from Bristol Labour Students and Bristol SU in attendance.

Student Living Officer at Bristol SU, George Bemrose, spoke at the march.

He said: ‘Newport shouldn’t be an option, its too far away from the University, there’s no support there for the students.’

Ruth Day from Bristol Cut The Rent, also spoke, lamenting the missed social opportunities for those placed in Newport.

28.10.2019 epigram

News 7

Temple Meads campus University launches development receives new sexual £20m funding boost misconduct and relationships policy T • New tech innovation centre strenghtened by £2 million investment • Plans for the campus include two new academic buildings

Maggie Sawant

located at the new campus, as well as one new halls of residence.

Professor Guy Orpen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for New Campus Development, said: ‘The new QTIC+ facility will further enable the region to become the go-to-place for development, commercialisation and growth of businesses.’West of England Mayor Tim Bowles, also said: ‘The West of England’s innovation, ingenuity and creativity, alongside a highly-skilled workforce, fed by our universities, ensures we are a major force in the global marketplace.’

University hosts People’s Assembly on Climate Emergency • On the 23rd of October the University hosted a people’s assembally on the Climate Emegency • The event was attended by staff and students

Isaac Haigh

Investigations Editor

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he University Sustainability Department, with the help of students, hosted a People’s Assembly on 23 October about the University’s declaration of a climate emergency.

The University declared a climate emergency earlier this year, on 17 April, acknowledging ‘deep concerns from students’. The University of Bristol was the first UK university to

declare a climate emergency and has also proposed being carbon neutral by 2030.

Sarah Sharp, one of the students organising the event described the event as ‘positive’ and ‘transcendent of politics and ideology, inclusive of all University members, bringing everyone together. Not one voice is more important than the others. This is everyone’s fight, not just those in power.’

The two and a half hour event on Wednesday had a capacity of 270 tickets, with 135 being open for all and the other 135 given to various staff departments and student groups representative of the University population.

The event was seen to mark an introduction to what a climate

emergency may mean for the University and how it plans to reduce its emissions. The event also spoke about what a People’s Assembly involves and the science behind the declaration.

Attendees were split into groups of eight led by a facilitator to come up with ideas from one of seven or eight topics involving the University’s environmental impact.

Topics discussed included food, waste management, transport and buildings, among others.

Martin Wiles, Head of Sustainability said the aim of the event was to ‘generate ideas to help to reduce our carbon emissions. I am particularly interested in what we can do collectively working together looking at everything we do.’

Maddy Russell News Editor

T

he University has launched a new policy aimed at regulating potential sexual misconduct and relationships between students and staff.

The initiative, spearheaded by a task force of ten, is based on a similar policy developed at the University of Sussex and is aimed to tackle potential grey areas of sexual harassment which, it is believed, are not currently covered in the University’s existing policy framework.

Its developers hope that the new measures will provide a more explicit basis though which to address any potential complaints, which may not be covered in the existing Prevention of Sexual Harassment Policy, launched in 2018.

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The new framework is designed to tackle potential grey areas of the existing sexual harrasment policy

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month, with the city’s tech businesses turning over £7.9bn and employing almost 25,000 people as of 2018.

The Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus aims to capitalise on the city’s growing tech industry, by bringing together researchers, businesses and communities with students, entrepreneurs and users of technology.

The campus will be open to students and the public alike and will join the city centre to the east of Bristol with new walking and cycling paths.

Two academic buildings will be

• The new policy will be aimed at regulating potential relationships between students and members of staff • The new policy is based on a simlar initative developed by the University of Sussex • It is hoped that this new regulatory framework will cover potential gaps in the University’s existing Sexual Harrasment Policy

The new policy was developed in alignment with the 1752 Group, a UK-based research and lobby organisation aimed at ending staffto-student misconduct in higher

education.

Its release comes following a survey by the NUS in 2018, which found that more than four in ten students reported experiencing at least one incident of sexualised behaviour by university staff.

The policy states that it is designed to maintain professional boundaries and protect both students and staff from inappropriate behaviour, including the exploitation of inherent power dynamics.

This particularly includes those which may result in a conflict of interest or the use of threats or

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According to a survey by the NUS more than four in ten students reported experiencing at least one incident of sexualised behaviour by a member of staff

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he University’s plans to create a technology innovation centre at the Temple Meads campus have been strengthened by a £20m investment.

The investment will extend the campus’s Quantum Technology Innovation Centre (QTIC+), the world’s first dedicated open access innovation centre facility for developing a broad spectrum of quantum technologies.

The money will aid the QTIC+ in its development of new businesses, products and services, as well as in its exploration of emerging applications for quantum and other disruptive technologies, taking them from the lab into the real world.

It is hoped that the investment will help to position the West of England as a global leader in deep tech innovation and will enhance the University’s reputation.

Bristol was also recently named the UK’s leading ‘tech hub’ last

University of Bristol

Students’ Union Correspondant

rewards in return for sexual favours.

Included in the policy is the University framework to deal with potential intimate relationships between staff and students.

Developers of the policy told Epigram that they had decided not to place an outright ban on staffstudent relationships so as not to dissuade potential complainants from coming forward if they feared getting into trouble.

Whilst, such relationships are not explicitly banned, according to the new measures both partners are required to disclose their relationship to their respective academic school.

The framework for the policy is believed to have been shared with a number of other universities across the world.

8 News in Brief

epigram 28.10.2019

EngMaths department taking over old Maths Building

Axe-throwing bar to open in Bristol this November

Vet students can now practice anywhere in the world

FoodBank Society increases number of volunteers tenfold

Rogue squirrel breaks into Education Library

Patrick Sullivan n an email to all Engineering Mathematics, it was confirmed that the department would be moving into their own building later in the academic year. After the Maths department moved into the new Fry Building in September, their old building on University Walk became vacant. The University of Bristol has now allocated the space to the EngMaths department.The assignment means that the Faculty of Engineering now has three buildings on the Clifton campus: Queen’s Building, Merchant Venturers Building, and now the Maths Building. The faculty consists of 3,548 students, compared to 4,772 in the Faculty of Arts and 7,768 in the Faculty of Social Sciences & Law.

Olivia Beatson histle Punks, the first brand to bring axe-throwing to the high street, is opening its fourth and largest UK venue in Bristol on 13 November.

The new venue will be the company’s largest, featuring 6 lanes where groups of up to 10 people can book a session and throw axes at targets. It will also feature a bar stocking various alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and pizza

by Pizzarova. Axe throwing sessions will last for 70 minute. During a slot participants awill first be taught how to throw an axe, and then engage in a tournament against one another. It is recommended guests book in advance in order to secure a lane before they sell out.

Maddy Russell et students graduation from July 2019 onwards will now be able to practice anywhere in the world, following the news that Bristol Vetinary School has been awarded the full acreditation of the American Vetinary Medical Association. The new accreditation means that all Vet graduates will now be able to work in Canada and the USA. Bristol Vetinary School is beleived to be only one of seven vetinary schools in Europe to have received the accrediation.

Patrick Sullivan he University of Bristol FoodBank Society was refounded as a society earlier in 2019 and since their first Freshers’ Fair on 27 September, the number of student volunteers signed up has increased from less than ten to over 100 as of 12 October.Volunteers help move food from the designated donation boxes in Beacon House, Wills Memorial Building, Senate House SU Living Room and the ASS and deliver them as grouped ‘parcels’ to food banks around the city. The food then gets distributed to people in the city who hold emergency food vouchers and are in need of the supplies.from their Cabbot Circus outlet for their first delivery at the start of October.

Isaac Haigh n 19 September, hard working students studying in the Education Library were joined by an unexpected guest. Sat alongside students, a squirrel could be seen perching on one of the plastic chairs.

Described as small, furry with a bushy tail, the squirrel is a suspected resident of the Brandon Hill parkland area. Located in 35 Berkeley Square, the library is a short distance away from the entrance to the School of Education, a distance a particularly brave squirrel could easily make in a hurry. Although the squirrel’s motives are unclear and not malicious, the commotion has driven students nuts. Epigram was unable to locate the squirrel for comment.

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Twenty thousand students have Google accounts disabled Patrick Sullivan fter a long transition period moving from Google to Microsoft IT services, the University disabled all of their Google accounts. The department implementing the system changes, sent out multiple emails advising students

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to protect their work, however many students have still lost access to work when accounts were disabled on the 14th of October. In a statement to Epigram, IT services said: ‘Google accounts for over 20,000 students were closed last Monday as advertised for the past year. Only about 100, about 0.5 per cent of the students, have requested that their accounts be temporarily reactivated. This was offered in case students had missed the deadline to save their work before their Google accounts were closed.’

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Sustainability team revive 46 water fountains around campus Patrick Sullivan s part of the Refill campaign and the University’s Plastic Action Plan, the Sustainability and Facilities Management teams have revamped facilities for drinking water.The University of Bristol have repaired and updated 46 out of the 48 faulty drinking water facilities on campus between 7 and 11 October as part of its Plastic Action Plan for greater sustainability.

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Unsplash / Shan Young

Maddy Russell lue Mountain has been saved from demolition after plans to replace it with student flats were rejected. Councillors raised concerns about flood risks after a disused coal mine was discovered under the club.

The origional plans would have seen 240 student bed, shops and offices being build over the clubs premisis.

It was also agreed that a new eightstory block would have ‘harmed the character’ of Stokes Croft.

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Blue Mountain saved from being turned into flats

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Features

Editor: Robin Connolly @robinnlcc Deputy Editor: Jack Charters Digital Editor: Oliver Cohen Investigations Editor: Georgiana Scott @GeorgianaScott7

Twitter: @EpigramFeatures

Epigram / Robin Connolly

Windrush uncovered one of the greatest mistakes of recent history

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It is clear that at the moment nothing is guaranteed and that everything is up in flux

inevitably affected by the Windrush Scandal. Last year was meant to be the great anniversary year – with the 70th anniversary. And what we had instead was people feeling the shock and the pain of the Windrush Scandal.’

He spoke to me about how one of the effects of the Windrush scandal has been the creation of a history which is, understandably, raw and painful for many of those connected to it. ‘I’m spending this Black History Month being very aware that the message that I’m delivering about the history behind the Windrush Scandal is very difficult for an awful lot of people, for very good reasons,’ he explained.

Despite there being ‘other, better, less disastrous ways’ of these his-

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Britain has an institutionalised problem with structural racism, which will take a long time to shift

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t the end of our conversation, a polite, although (self-confessed) angry David Olusoga stated that, to him, ‘the function of Black History Month is for everyone to celebrate it, and for it to be seen as a shared history. To be recognised, celebrated but also lamented – because some of it is wonderful, but some of it is absolutely tragic.’

This was a theme that recurred throughout not only our interview, but his talk itself – the importance of understanding, discovering and sharing black histories of Britain. His clear expertise, but also care, around the subject of the Windrush scandal came across as he spoke about the relocation of hundreds of thousands of people from the Caribbean after World War Two and the mistreatment that they and their descendants faced from the British government.

The Windrush scandal saw the discovery of one of the greatest mistakes of recent history. The Conservative Government’s 2014 policy of ‘Hostile Environment’ removed the exemption made for Commonwealth Members in the 1971 Immigration Act. In

tories becoming known, he seemed somewhat optimistic that the Windrush Scandal has uncovered ‘who that generation were’ and ‘what they went through.’ He stressed the importance of the fact that this has caused people to ‘know this history now better than they used to.’

His sense of positivity grew as he went on to praise ‘the fact that we’re having these discussions, that millions of people feel the way they do about these issues, that university campuses are full of people who are fighting for critically important issues, that the attitudinal studies suggest your generation doesn’t see things the way my parent’s generation or my generation did.’ He even furthered this with ‘I think there’s loads of reasons for optimism’.

However, as our conversation moved on, he also made it clear that at the moment ‘nothing is guaranteed’ and that ‘everything is up in

flux.’ He expressed a disappointment in politics, that ‘we have a British Prime Minister who used the word ‘Pickaninny’ – the same word Enoch Powell used in his Rivers of Blood Speech in 1968’. That there is

an American President in power who ‘will call members of the Ku Klux Klan very fine people’.

He highlighted how he believes Britain has an institutionalised problem with structural racism, which will take a long time to shift. ‘We have to challenge those ideas at their root, and that’s a very, very difficult process. It took centuries to build these ideas, it’s going to take us a long time to identify them, challenge them and

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The socioeconomic and racial zoning of Bristol is worthy of the Deep South

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Features Editor

2018 it was found that on failure to provide extensive documentation of residence in the UK, at least 83 people had been wrongly deported, while others were detained or faced other injustices.

I asked how Olusoga had found Black History Month this year. ‘I think Black History Month has been

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As part of Black History Month, David Olusoga talks about Windrush, politics, and segregation in Bristol Robin Connolly

mitigate their effects.’

Knowing that Olusoga is a Bristol resident, I was intrigued to find out more about an article he wrote, where he stated that ‘the socioeconomic and racial zoning of Bristol is worthy of the Deep South.’ When I read this, I confess I felt immediately defensive and perhaps even affronted. Yet, when I asked him to elaborate on what he meant, I began to realise that he might just be right.

‘I think Bristol, in my opinion, is more divided, more zoned than anywhere. It’s partly geography, because the city exists on this huge topographical range. I think it’s getting better, but when I moved to Easton

I lived in a multicultural area. When I moved to Southville, suddenly I didn’t.’

It turns out that he’s not wrong. If you look at the census from 2011, the data agrees with what he’s saying.

There is a considerably higher proportion of people of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity living in Lawrence Hill than in any other area of the city; on the DataShine interactive census map, it is obvious that the city contains pockets of what Olusoga defined as ‘racial zoning’.

‘It was stark, absolutely. When I lived in Easton and worked at the BBC on Whiteladies road, I would see no black people all day when I was at work and when I drove to Easton, every second person looked like me.’

He went on to explain that ‘one of the problems is – we’re used to it, so we don’t see it. People get defensive.

Again, it’s that defensiveness. I’ve said this out of a belief that Bristol is a wonderful city. I wouldn’t live here; I don’t have to live here – my business is in London. It would be easier if I didn’t live here – much more convenient in many ways. But I think it needs to address these issues.’

We agreed that hopefully, my generation has the capacity to take these issues on, through shared conversation and the reclamation of English identities. Although – as Olusoga aptly noted, ‘but then you’ve also got to save the world, so you’re pretty busy.’ Busy indeed.

10 Features

epigram 28.10.2019

Indecision leading up to Brexit leaves students in the dark Sarah Dalton First Year, English Literature

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he question of how Brexit will impact the Erasmus+ Scheme has repeatedly been brought up by MPs, and many facts and figures

have been passed around in an attempt to avoid the simple response of ‘I don’t know’. It remains to be asked just how this issue will affect students at Bristol in particular. With the UK potentially leaving the European Union on October 31, what could that mean for students on the Erasmus programme?

Erasmus is a programme co-founded by the European Union which aims to increase student and staff movement within European countries. Run by the European Commission and managed by the British Council, the scheme promises financial support to all students completing an Erasmus+ study placement and staff completing teaching or training abroad. It also provides the opportunity to receive language support in their chosen country.

According to the University, approximately 350 students from across Europe study here each year through the scheme, with 450 University of Bristol students travelling to one of Bristol’s 100 partner universities. On a nationwide scale, currently 53 per cent of UK students who learn abroad do so through the Erasmus scheme.

Unfortunately, the answer to what will happen if Britain leaves the EU on October 31st is very complicated and has a long history behind it. When the news

of Brexit first broke after the general election in June 2016 and the exit date was set to 29 March 2019, the primary concern was that funding wouldn’t be available for the 2019/20 academic year.

However, the delay of this date to 31 October under May’s government meant that the Erasmus programme was able to assure funding for UK students travelling to EU countries under the 2019/20 programme, regardless of a no-deal Brexit, the proposed deal, or further delay. In the case of a no-deal Brexit, Erasmus confirmed that students whose programmes have already begun would continue to be funded by the EU, and the UK government had undertaken to fund those whose had not.

There are further complications beyond the funding of the scholarships which are often not considered by mainstream press. University of Bristol third year student, Clémence, who is currently studying on the Erasmus programme from France noted that ‘even though I will get the Erasmus scholarship, it is already difficult to control my budget between pounds and euros because the British pound rate keeps increasing.’

She continues, ‘It is tough to know when I should transfer money because it (the exchange rate) gets even higher every day and I lose money over it.’

Whilst Erasmus has worked to cover the current academic year regardless of the Brexit outcome, debates continue to take place over its future and those looking to undertake the Erasmus 2020/21 programme.

In August of this year, the debate reached such a height that Richard Lochhead, Scottish Further and Higher Education Minister, and Kirsty Williams, Welsh Education Minister, wrote to the UK Education Secretary to raise their concerns. If the UK leaves the EU on the current proposed date, they highlighted, this will be before all funding for the next academic year has been approved.

Whilst it is possible for the UK to continue participating in Erasmus outside of the EU (as many countries including Iceland and Norway currently do), this relies entirely on the UK government including this in Brexit negotiations.

As it stands, the UK government has released a statement promising that if these negotiations don’t take place, they will attempt to speak with individual countries about creating exchange programmes. However, whether they intend to keep this promise, or how high this issue sits on Boris Johnson’s priority list is perhaps questionable. The Lords EU Committee have warned how difficult the programme would be to replicate.

Flickr/RRP

Unsplash / Christian Wiediger

Brexit uncertainty putting Erasmus+ Programme in limbo

Whilst the future of the Erasmus programme after 31 October 2019 is still, for the most part, unsure, current advice from the University of Bristol reassures students that if the UK leaves the EU as intended, there will be no change to the UK-EU immigration rules until 1 January 2021. They encourage concerned students to contact the Global Opportunities team for more information.

Epigram / Georgiana Scott

Former UoB student and Bristol West MP candidate fights to prevent student suicides

James Cox discusses his experiences as a student battling mental health issues and his plans to prevent student suicide Georgiana Scott Investigations Correspondent

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n International Mental Health Awareness day, James Cox, Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Bristol West and founder of ‘Zero Suicide Bristol’ sat down with University of Bristol students for a transparent talk and informal discussion about student suicide.

Post-graduate University of Bristol alumni, James, began by candidly sharing the issues that personally affected

his mental health while studying at the University of Bristol.

These included his recreational use of cannabis, lack of contact hours with lecturers/tutors and a seemingly perpetual feeling of isolation, something several students said resonated with their current University experience.

His honest account of his five-year battle with depression shadowing his time at university and his inside knowledge of the mental wellbeing and counselling services demonstrated a refreshing understanding of the deep-rooted issues that continue to lie within them.

He disclosed his plan, if elected, to set up an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) committed to combatting student suicide and mental health. It would involve the convening of members of the House of Commons, the NHS, var-

ious university representatives, and the world’s experts in finding mental health solutions. Alongside the ongoing mission to get student mental health on the parliamentary agenda, the end goal would be to create a framework that would ‘ensure there are minimum standards, in terms of maximum waiting times for counselling, the number of professors trained in mental health and ensuring some parameters of harmonisation across all UK Universities.’ He said that, currently, ‘universities like Bristol are spending an enormous amount of money on a system that doesn’t address the issue.’ James explained his conviction that tackling student mental health needs to come from an ‘evidence-based approach’ where research is conducted, and solutions are found in congruence with a continuous reassessment of what is working and what is not. Acknowledging the scale of his mission, James said that committing to a ‘Zero Student-Suicide pledge’ would require a recognition of the ‘student suicide epidemic’ from all major political parties - ‘It’s not just going to be the Lib Dems that find a solution, it is going to take everyone to come together, engage in a cross-party effort and the institutions need to be willing to do the work’.

While universities do not need to be providing an NHS level of suicide prevention, James spoke of small steps that would be a starting point to achieving the ‘Zero-suicide pledge’ set out by Norman Lamb, Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, earlier this year. James ended the discussion by sharing his frustration that Brexit has become a major distraction for parliament and the public. He said: ‘I think student suicides at places like the University of Bristol would have been on our parliamentary agenda, but Brexit has just become such a black hole for everything whether it be climate change, school funding, homelessness, mental health – so many issues have just been lost in that void’.

However, it should be remembered that

if a student suicide focused APPG made it to parliament, they would not have any legitimate power in policy-making but would be influential and this is also not to be underestimated.

For now, James is continuing to keep a dialogue, specifically about the mental health of University students, open, gradually diminishing the stigma surrounding it and urging for immediate changes in flawed systems that are potentially costing lives.

If you are concerned about someone, or need help yourself, please contact Samaritans on 116 123. Other student support services include Young Minds, Nightline, Papyrus, Student Minds, and Off the Record. The University Wellbeing Services are signposted on their website.

Features 11

28.10.2019 epigram

What it’s like to live in Newport, as told by student housed there

border into Bristol. Same applies via the train, where the cheapest tickets I’ve found are £8.40 for off-peak return tickets, otherwise you’re looking at £10+ per day unless you’re willing to miss your 9ams.

After having my car broken into

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Epigram / Kofo Ajala

ollowing the limited space for students to live in and around Bristol, the University decided to buy some space up in the Newport Student Village as a means of temporary student accommodation for those with nowhere to stay for the start of the academic year.

This year, I’ve had experience of living across the border, so I’ll break down everything from the lively spaces to the treacherous commute to help you understand the realities of being a Bristol student living in Wales.

The Newport Student Village is a lovely place to live. With warm, cosy rooms, a well fitted, spacious kitchen and a central location, there’s much to love - especially with the partially subsidised costs. I was lucky enough to secure one of their ‘Gold’ standard ensuite rooms, with a double bed and enough space for an extended corner

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Newport Student Village is one of the best fitted-out places to live

halls in Bristol, but it has a homely feel with a very well fitted common room. Boasting a dedicated cinema room, gaming and karaoke areas and comfortable single seat sofas, there are a lot of facilities for personal downtime or group hangouts around

Epigram / Jordan Ebert

Third Year, Engineering Maths

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Jordan Ebert

desk and a two-seat sofa, all for the comprehensive price of £92 per week.

The room itself is very big for the price and with high speed Wi-Fi and electric heating, it doesn’t take long to settle in. As someone who has had stints in both Orchard Heights and Unite House, and who has seen a fair share of other halls during my time in University owned accommodation, I can confirm that the Newport Student Village is easily one of the better fitted-out places to live. The kitchen is on par with that of the Bristol city centre residences, but definitely feels wider with the brightly coloured décor playing to its advantage.

The residence is relatively small compared to some of the city centre

the halls, including a comparatively large smoking area if you’re into that.

While the residence has a car park within the grounds, most of the stu-

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It’s difficult to get into Bristol each day without sufficient means of transit

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An inside look at the trials and tribulations of being a Bristol student living outside the city

dents park just opposite the halls in a semi accessible outdoor parking lot. Having free parking is definitely a positive for those who have a car, but the limited parking times of 10am to 11pm causes quite an issue when you’re explaining that you missed your 9am due to a locked gate.

Newport itself is very nice and clean, especially for someone coming from London. The people here are lively and the city centre is generally a nice place to be around, albeit it’s quite small. The city itself spans just over 70 square meters, which you can cover in about 20 minutes, but as a Bristol student, you’ll probably find yourself around the University campus for most of the day anyway given the commute.

The only real negative is the 35 mile commute into campus each morning. As I’ve already touched on my love/hate relationship with the car park, it’s worth noting that as compensation for having to live so far out, we’re given a free parking permit to be used in Stoke Bishop’s Wills Hall, where we are also given a free bus pass to go from Wills to campus.

The drive takes 40 minutes on a good day and up to 70 minutes if there’s any traffic or road closures, which is more of an accurate meas-

ure considering the times of the day you’re likely to be on the road. The train takes about an hour and a half as an alternative, or anywhere up to two and a half hours by bus if you’re not careful, making a car the only feasible option to get in for most mornings.

As the free bus pass given by the University only covers the standard uni buses in the city centre (U1, 3, 4, 9 and 72) you’ll have to pay yourself to get out of Newport and across the

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Epigram / Jordan Ebert

The area is inviting but the city seems to shut down at 6pm

and damaged, it’s proven rather difficult to get into Bristol each day without sufficient means of transit.

Naturally, there’s no easy way to find other Bristol students around here without asking everyone I see individually, which has made for some interesting conversations here and there but little more.

Overall, the residence is good, especially for the price. The area is inviting but lacking in the nightlife aspect as the city seems to shut down at 6pm. The only overarching issue is the commute and apparent radio-silence from the mainland regarding transfers and additional help with transport to University and other related issues.

Newport in Numbers 13 5

the total number of students who have lived in Newport

0 £92 £171 30 45 85 £8.40

students, three postgraduate and two undergraduate, currently living in Newport as of 23 October with UoB working with two to facilitate a move first year students currently living in Newport - they have all been moved to Bristol weekly cost of double ensuite room in Newport weekly cost of double ensuite room in New Bridewell accommodation, Bristol miles between Newport and Bristol minute typical commute by car from Newport to Wills Memorial Building minute typical commute by public transport to Wills Memorial Building price of peak time return for NewportBristol trains

epigram 28.10.2019

12 Features

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efurbishment has been completed and doors have opened to students at the University’s Fry Building nearly two years on from the major fire that broke out on 6 January 2018.

The fire was first spotted at around 5:20pm when smoke and flames could be seen coming from the maths building, covering Park Street and the Triangle. The smoke came from behind the Wills Memorial Building, one of the University’s most wellknown landmarks and could be seen billowing across Bristol.

Helicopters and firefighters arrived on the scene shortly after the fire started, with at least nine fire engines involved. Nearby buildings were evacuated, including the Wills Memorial library which remained closed as a precaution. Students who were evacuated were advised by the University to use the extenuating circumstances process to inform their school of any disruption in preparation for their exams.

Later that night, firefighters released more details in a statement confirming that there were no casualties or combustion of ‘hazardous materials.’

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The fire was caused by refurbishment works which had been taking place that day.

versity’s £525 million capital investment programme.

The refurbishment was funded by the Wolfson Foundation, an independent charity that awards grants to support and promote excellence. The foundation has been supporting the

University of Bristol’s research for more than 40 years, giving over £13.1 million to buy and build vital equipment and infrastructure. Its funds are generated through endowment and it supports over 10,000 projects across the UK, based on expert peer review

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The architects had the challenge of preserving the character of the 1880 Grade II building.

and advice Work originally began on the new maths building in March 2016 with plans to transform it into an ‘outstanding’ new home for the School of Mathematics through a major £33 million refurbishment. In December 2017 the building reached a milestone with the installation of its Voronoi brise soleil screen, which is both an art installation and sunshade that borrows heavily from the Voronoi mathematical diagram. The work was due to be completed by Spring 2018; the fire delayed the project by over a year.

The work to get renovation ‘back on track’ began again in February 2018, with the University releasing a statement on the continuation of refurbishment: ‘work to refurbish the Fry building, which was damaged by fire at the start of January is continu-

ing and our priority now is to ensure the refurbishment project progresses as quickly as possible.’ The damage largely destroyed the roof and the top floor of the South block, with water damage to the lower floors.

The damaged section of the building was made safe and work restarted in the areas unaffected by the fire. The contractor selected by the University to partner on the project was Balfour Beatty, one of the UK’s leading contractors with a significant amount of experience in the construction of University buildings.

The School of Mathematics moved

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It is an advantage that the whole Mathematics School is housed in the same building.

‘it doesn’t seem a welcoming place.’

Students have seemed positive about the refurbishment, with it described as ‘so cool’, ‘like a modern Hogwarts’ and ‘one of the nicest spaces at the university’.

Give the building a visit if you are curious or looking for study space.

Epigram / Isaac Haigh

Third Year, History

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Layla Link

Two days after the fire, it was confirmed by the Avon Fire and Rescue investigation that the fire was accidental, caused by refurbishment works which had been taking place earlier that day.

A document from November 2013 reveals the initial proposals for the refurbishment of the Fry building.

The proposal outlined integrating the building further into the heart of the campus, by remodelling the surrounding external spaces.

The architects had the challenge of preserving the intrinsic character of the 1880 Grade II building whilst at the same time overhauling it by planting trees along the boundary, building an atrium linking to a 140 seat lecture theatre, adding a roof garden above, moving in over 1000 office chairs, and including countless new seminar rooms and offices. The development was a part of the Uni-

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Two years on from its startling fire, the Fry Building is now open for business.

back into the restored building on 4 September this year. The new building has lecture theatres, teaching rooms and a wide variety of spaces for students to study. There are areas for group working, silent study and socialising.

Epigram spoke to some of the lecturers and tutors about what they thought of their new office spaces.

Dr Rachel Bennett, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, told us that the building ‘provides an excellent space for the School of Mathematics.’ She highlighted that it is an advantage that the whole School is now housed in the same building, making ‘discussion of ideas and collaboration across different branches of mathematics much easier’. Maria Banks, Honorary Teaching Associate, was a little more pragmatic in her comments, stating that ‘the Fry Building is very sympathetically refurbished retaining original features although the offices are very modern in style. However, as one of my colleagues remarked, it is a bit kafkaesque in layout - a floor plan might help!’ She also mentioned that

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Epigram / Isaac Haigh

Rising from the ashes: the rebirth of the Fry Building

Opinion

Editor Digital Editor Deputy Editor

Sabrina Miller Kofo Ajala Elisha Mans

EpiCartoon: The scariest thing about Halloween Our third cartoon of the year shows some of the terrifying costumes students decided to dress up in this year!

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Fancy yourself as a budding cartoonist?

Send in your submissions or ideas via email to opinion.epigram@ gmail.com

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think that we could widely agree, as forward-thinking human beings, that what income a child is born into should not determine their life chances.

So, it should surely be of national outrage that top-performing universities such as Bristol University can be complicit in the knowledge that they disproportionately favour privately educated students.

According to The Sunday Times' Good University Guide 2020, 34.1 per cent of students at Bristol University come from an independent school.

When this is compared with the fact that only 7 per cent of students in the UK are educated privately, we can see huge discrepancies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same is to be said of the majority of Russell Group Universities.

By creating a student body which is so unreflective of the educational realities of the UK’s population, the

University is accepting a culture whereby those born rich stay rich.

Obviously, the University accepts students predominantly on a grade basis; I am not making outlandish claims about direct discrimination.

However, the reality is that students from private schools get better grades.

In 2018, for example, 48 per cent of private-school students achieved A*s and As at A-level, compared with a national average of 26 per cent.

This can be put down to schooling factors such as small class sizes and the school’s ability to spend more money on resources; and, also, the backgrounds of the students, who tend to come from supportive households with parents who have experience in succeeding in higher education.

So, to speak of a meritocracy in which the University selects students on a best-grade basis, creates a bias which favours the progress of economically advantaged students.

Taking students just based on grades does not work unless we are to assume that students from comprehensive schools are inherently less academic – which is clearly not the case.

Whilst I do acknowledge and respect that the University has recognised this as an issue and put in place schemes to aid social inclusivity, most notably their contextual offers scheme, more must be done to make the University an institution which can truly claim to be open to everyone.

With regards to this issue, Alice Bassett, the 93% Club’s Outreach Officer, a society which is dedicated to representing non-privately educated students at the University of Bristol, said: ‘Widening participation measures are crucial in raising aspirations and attainment and improving social mobility. This is vital in ensuring a diverse community in which students can excel.’

This could not be truer of Bristol University, who seem content in the fact that they can show they have made some efforts toward social outreach.

There is, unfortunately - and this is reflective of higher education generally - a tendency towards a lack

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What income a child is born in to should not determine their life chances

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Bristol needs to do more to balance the scales and make the university more socially inclusive Elisha Mans

Epigram / The 93% Club

Bristol must become more socially inclusive

of social mobility because students from less privileged backgrounds do not even know, or are not encouraged to pursue, the opportunities that are out there.

Social mobility will only improve

if state school representation in well-regarded universities improves dramatically.

Corbyn and the Labour party recently proposed that there should be a 7 per cent cap on University places allocated to privately educated students, thus keeping higher education in exact proportion with the UK nationally.

At first, I thought this was crazy; a proposal that was actually discriminating against children who were educated privately. To be honest, I still think that this might be ignoring the principle of meritocracy a bit too much.

However, there is much to be taken from a proposal such as this.

To implement a similar scheme, if perhaps less militantly, would truly revolutionise the toxic traditions of social inequality that have existed for so long in our higher education system.

Even if there is no quick-fix to the problem, something more must be done to get students from comprehensive schools into the same Universities as those who have been privately educated.

Social inclusivity at the University of Bristol is still appalling.

14 Opinion

epigram 28.10.2019

‘The atmosphere of a carehome’: Hall bars need help

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A brief glance at the bar is is enough to leave anyone gasping for a Guinness

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touching distance of your front door, and much else besides, with all your closest friends at your beck and call.

With this in mind, you gather a number of new acquaintances and bound down the corridor, the sound of roaring laughter and merriment ringing in your ears.

You hurriedly turn the corner, fling open the door and…

It is at this point, my dear friends, that our journey into the imagination is brought rather jarringly to a halt, and I must now elucidate the far darker reality. The fact you were able to even open the door was a God-given miracle.

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The bars of our University have been ruthlessly stripped of their most loved qualities

mill behind the counter, unable to demonstrate any skill apart from the finesse with which one reaches for a tin of Carlsberg from the fridge.

Perhaps, for many of you in higher years, our delve into what for me is merely imaginative, holds some semblance of truth.

Well I ask one simple favour hear our plight. When you next sip that perfectly poured pale ale, remember that we won’t be doing the same.

The bars of our University have been ruthlessly stripped of their most loved qualities and left a husk, a shadow of their former selves, barely able to even function, unable to fulfil their purpose. A sad reminder of what once was, and yet, what could be again.

I may reside at a certain hall that shall remain nameless - with a somewhat of pompous reputation for displays of pageantry, but I can’t believe this is an issue felt by us alone.

Such a crisis easily transcends petty divisions; it binds us together in blood and beer, it crosses the heart of every student from Badock to Hiatt Baker.

Students of Stoke Bishop unite.

The time is upon us to man the barricades, assemble our forces, and relight the fires of freedom and overly intoxicated revelry.

Take to the streets and make your voices heard. We cannot allow such acts of treachery to go unopposed. They may take our lives, they may take our ability to receive the recommended hours of sleep, but they will never take our bar.

Epigram / Fergus Ustianowski

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nd so it begins.

A new crop of students eager to embark on their university journeys descend upon the streets of Bristol. You were there at some point in the not so distant past.

For just a moment, please rewind the clock.

Do you smell it too. The faint whiff of freshly pressed flared trousers, and Lidl’s own Dark Rum waft through the city. You arrive at halls filled with anticipation, with an ounce of anxiety to sweeten the pot. After such a long and arduous journey, you find yourself somewhat parched and hear tell of a local drinking establishment located conveniently within the walls of your accommodation.

I speak with no small amount of admiration, of the hall bar.

Immediately, your mind is beside itself, filled with images of tankards overflowing with beer, spirits adorning each wall in copious varieties, and vast quantities of wine that would make even Jesus blush.

Until now, you’d have to have trekked to the ends of the Earth to find even the most hellish of watering holes, just to sip rather begrudgingly at the local pisswater. Well my friends, no more. That pisswater is within

If we want to effect change, we need to move away from the Glamour Politics of the People's Vote march towards local protests.

Molly Pipe First Year, Social Policy and Politics

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little while ago, a friend of mine told me an encouraging story. He works as a musician, and for the past 20 years has always used a postal vote. One year, however, in the run-up to a General Election, the expected postal ballot paper did not appear. My friend rang around and discovered that there had been an administrative error at the Local Council. His request for a postal vote had not been registered - and he was due to be on tour on election day itself.

At that point, many people would not have bothered to head to the polls. They would have said that their single vote was hardly likely to make a difference, and that the effort was not worth it. But my friend didn’t think that. When the day came around, he jumped in his car, drove three hours up to Birmingham, voted, and drove three hours back. A few hours later, he was mid-gig.

I’ll admit it: despite being a Politics student with a deep-rooted interest in elections, I’m not sure I would have done the same. It’s easy to feel disillusioned when you think of the tiny impact an individual has on the world stage, whether it’s at election time or on the protest line.

Even a figure like Greta Thunberg, celebrated for ‘single-handedly’ starting the school climate strikes, only had the influence she did because of the hordes of journalists,

social media users and supporters who raised awareness of what she was doing. So if even Greta Thunberg wouldn’t have much power on her own, what hope is there for the rest of us? I can see why people do not protest.

There are times, however, when a big effort is made to have one’s say. I took part in the latest People’s Vote march, an extraordinary affair not just for its size (early estimates say a million protesters), and not just for its proximity to the dreaded Brexit crunch day - but for the fact that politicians were debating our demands at the very same time as we marched.

Had the amendments been in a different order, there would have been a chance of us being granted our demand of a People’s Vote halfway through the protest. I don’t know of any other march where the demonstrators have achieved their

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It's easy to feel disillusioned when you think of the tiny impact that an individual has

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First Year, Law

For only one day a week is the bar accessible and I’m afraid, once inside, the news is equally grim.

A brief glance at the bar is enough to leave anyone gasping for a Guinness. Tap-less; the wooden countertop lies completely exposed, naked, and vulnerable.

The walls are much the same.

The atmosphere is reminiscent of a care home, and in many ways, the nature of the bar is much the same: empty, lifeless, waiting for death. The bar staff lazily

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Stoke Bishop bars are nothing but disappointing Tom Rattner

A toast to the local protest

aims during the actual event.

The reason I say all this is to acknowledge the significance of today’s protest. Buses rolled in from Newcastle down to Truro, helicopters filmed from overhead, and a range of prominent figures lined up to address the crowd. The feeling was all around us: something big was happening here.

Yet these events, glamorous as they are, are far from the only protests we should be heeding. A recent article from The Independent suggested

that the political will for a People’s Vote was won not by the large-scale protests in the capital, but by the smaller, regional protests in places like Sunderland. These were the ones that challenged the notion that it was mainly ‘loony lefty Londoners’ who wanted a second vote – and they also kept awareness of Europhilic feeling present in politician’s minds.

These regional protests may not have the excitement of joining a group of a million people. There may not be pop-up fast food stalls and DJs blasting music out of speakers.

And yes, in a local protest you may be stood in the cold in Hillsborough, with five other people, trying to engage with apathetic shoppers – but these are often the encounters that matter. These are the ones where you can actually talk to the person on the other side, find out if there are any views you share, and see whether you can reconcile them to your ideas.

Whether you're pro-Brexit, antiBrexit, or backing a completely different cause, the message is the same. This low-level, persistent activism may be unexciting, but it is the stuff that matters if you really want to change a community’s views.

Don’t just stick to the capital – take it to the regions. Don’t just join the big marches – make yourself heard at the small ones.

And like my friend, don’t just partake in politics if it is glamorous.

Spending six hours in a car in between gigs may not be James Bond material, but it is this localised, community action that is necessary to change the big stuff.

And remember kids, if you join in the small protests, you’ll be part of that coolest group of all: the ones that were a fan of the thing before it went mainstream.

Opinion 15

28.10.2019 epigram

The downfall of the Bearpit: how much are students to blame?

Epigram / Joe Maspo

Second Year, Politics and Social Policy

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significant increases in the price of housing and lack of affordable places to stay are making it harder for those who are less well off to be able to afford to rent or buy. In addition, family homes and large buildings have been transformed into university housing instead of homeless shelters

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Students have snatched up the majority of affordable housing

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he steady removal of pieces of the iconic Bearpit located at the St James Barton Roundabout has been a hot topic among students throughout the past few months, but are students to blame for the Bearpit’s demise? In part, yes, but the Council’s lack of attention to the growing homelessness problem and gentrification in Bristol are the main culprits.

The removal of the Bearpit is due to the larger issue of homelessness in Bristol which, in a way, is indirectly affected by students. According to Bristol City Council, there is an everincreasing number of university students living in the city, and in turn, an increasing number of homeless people have started living on the streets of Bristol. This is in part due to the housing crisis that is massively affecting the people of Bristol.

Students have snatched up the majority of affordable housing in Bristol. According to the Bristol Post, approximately 250 houses are being turned into student lets per year. The

or council housing. While this isn’t necessarily the fault of students themselves, the outcomes of this growth in the student population are causing widespread gentrification.

Students are bringing over 250 million pounds into the city per year, which is helping the economy

to grow and businesses to flourish.

However, when big businesses flourish, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This divide is thus causing the increased homelessness seen in the city in recent years.

Bristol City Council have decided that one way to decrease this homeless population is to get rid of the Bearpit, an area in which a large number of homeless people have found shelter and community, rather than create more affordable housing or homeless shelters. The council decided to evict all squatters in the Bearpit on 19 June after an attack on 18 June according to the Bristol Post.

The Bristol City Council have blamed the population of homeless people living there for increased crime and drug use, but the squatters there have claimed that they have been getting clean and have a group

of support within each other. The idea that crime is caused by homeless people is supporting the idea that just because these people have no income, they are immediately criminals and drug addicts, which is not always the case. Crime may be rampant in the area, but the idea that this one group is causing all of it is not the case.

Even if the Bristol City Council seeks to lower homelessness as a means

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Removal of the Bearpit does not equal the removal of homelessness

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Bristol City Council need to do more to address homelessness Olivia Morris

to reduce crime, removal of the Bearpit does not equal the removal of the homeless in Bristol, it merely relocates them somewhere else.

Too much focus has been given to trying to improve the look of the Bearpit instead of trying to make a genuine change to the housing and homelessness crisis. In 2014, the Bearpit underwent massive changes to try to make it more visually appealing. However, adding restaurants and cafes to the Bearpit was never going to reduce crime and homelessness. Instead, it created a short-term visual distraction that

was then quickly covered up by the fact that nothing was being done to stop the homelessness problem at its roots. The gentrification of the Bearpit placed upper class people into the centre of the lower class, giving them a first-hand look into the negative side of poverty.

The gentrification and subsequent removal of the Bearpit does not only do nothing to solve the wider issue of homelessness, but it also takes away what could be considered a staple piece of Bristol culture. Supported by the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, the Bearpit was supposed to be an experimental common area where people could 'experiment different, incremental and gentle approaches to public space'. Slowly but surely, this unique area of Bristol has been demolished. The homeless population was not the only aspect of the Bearpit that has been removed.

Popular icons of the area such as the Bearritos Bus have been shut down and the iconic Ursa Bear was recently removed, leaving a bare landscape with little history left. What used to be a bustling area of Bristol culture is now nothing more than a walkway through a roundabout… and the homelessness problem has yet to be solved.

Five reasons why you should become a student leader “ Only students know what life is like for students

Provide a face on campus

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There is nothing worse than trying to convince someone else of a problem that you’re having and having that person either not believe you or ask for more evidence; with a student leader they are more likely to understand our points of view.

Students representing students

Become more engaged with University life and be proactive!

Who better to represent the voices of students than students themselves? While our professors and administrators have an idea as

It can often feel quite isolating on campus, perhaps University hasn’t been all that you’d hoped for and you’re looking for something new to

Student leaders are essential in providing the link between the wider study body and the University.

Their presence on campus will provide those with grievances an outlet to express themselves in an unintimidating way and with the knowledge that their emails aren’t just going to be ‘lost’. They are important in ensuring that the voices of the masses are heard.

rewarding. If you're tired of seeing issues but feeling like nothing is getting done about it, be a part of the movement to enact change.

Looks great on your CV

Being a student leader will be incredibly rewarding

While many of us would like to delay the inevitable, and stay in our little bubble forever, at some point we’re going to have to face reality and the daunting task of finding a graduate job.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find ways to stand out.

Becoming a student leader will give you a lot of relevant hands-on experience and give you a lot to talk about in interviews.

Student leaders are voted for by students in a democratic process.

It’s rewarding Let’s not lie – being a student leader will require a lot of commitment and at times may be stressful. But at the end of the day it will be incredibly

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ith student elections right around the corner, the opportunity to cultivate your political appetite and have the chance to identify a problem; to consider ways in which university life could be made simpler; and then be a part of the organisation to see the changes come about is incredibly gratifying.

Becoming a student leader will give those who are interested in politics or representing the voices of students the chance to gain some real handson experience. Reasons why you should consider it:

get involved with, perhaps feeling like a small fish in a big pond.

Becoming a student leader will allow those who are seeking for new ways to get involved with University life to do so in a way outside of going to lectures or being a member of a society. It offers a chance to meet new people.

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Fourth Year, Politics and IR

to what life is like for students, only students know what it’s like currently.

We are the ones that experience first-hand the repercussions of any decisions made higher-up. Student leaders can effectively ensure that the voices of students are heard.

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Being a student leader is rewarding and it's important to get involved Abigail Gledhill

I did it in the library…

If you’re not registered, you can’t vote.

Registering is quick and easy.

Do it now gov.uk/registertovote

Editor Deputy Editor Digital Editor

IIIIIIdylka

SciTech

Want to write for SciTech? Join our writers’ group!

Vilhelmiina Haavisto Isobel O’Loughlin Topaz Maitland

A guide to UoB’s science and tech societies

Bristol Space Exploration Society (SEDS) ‘Bristol SEDS is the society for all Students who are interested in all forms of Space Exploration, are interested in a career in the Space Industry, or would simply enjoy working with fellow space enthusiasts on some incredibly rewarding technical projects. As the Bristol branch of UKSEDS, we represent all students who have an interest and enthusiasm for Space. The society is open to everyone from the Uni, with a diverse range of courses represented. All are welcome to join, from undergrads to seasoned PhDs. Bristol SEDS has a long history of

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Highlights include the design and fabrication of a Lunar Rover design for a competition run by UKSEDS

Memberships are available to purchase on the SU website; a year’s membership for SEDS costs £5. You can find SEDS on Facebook and Instagram under bristolseds.

The Bristol University Research Society (BURS) ‘The Bristol University Research Society (BURS) was initially set up for STEM undergraduates with an interest in research to meet with PhD students

Women in STEM ‘Women in STEM is a society founded by students in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and

Mathematic departments of the University. Motivated by their own experiences, Women in STEM society are passionate and enthusiastic to promote more diversity and equality in the STEM disciplines.

Women only make up 14.4% of professionals in STEM industries and that figure is mirrored in the composition of many STEM courses at the University. It can be very isolating for female and non-binary students who arrive at University to commence on a course in which they are highly underrepresented.

Women in STEM aim to support and encourage all intersections of women and non-binary people in STEM to continue their career in academia.

We do this through a diverse range of events and programs including socials, networking events, outreach in schools, mentoring programs,

Flickr / AJC1

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he University of Bristol is renowned for its scientific and technological research, with recent successes in fields from creating vaccines to marine ecosystem recovery. With that in mind, it is definitely worth mentioning some of the science and technology societies available here at the University!

and discuss recent publications. We have since developed into a society for all students with two goals in mind: bridging the gap between UoB’s research, staff, and students, and developing UoB’s community of researchers. We predominantly focus on organising lectures and panel discussions which promote interdisciplinary research.

For example, our main event in 2018/19 was a panel discussion titled ‘AI & Society’ featuring Professor James Ladyman, Dr Carl Ek and Dr Miranda Mowbray - whose backgrounds range from philosophy of science to big data ethics to probabilistic machine learning. Like any other society, BURS is a place for likeminded students to meet and pursue something together; in our case, for students who are interested in research or thinking of pursuing a career in academia’.

- Bristol University Research Society President, Kheeran Naidu.

You can gain access to valuable seminars and reading groups for free with BURS via a year’s membership on the Student Union website. You can find BURS on Facebook and Instagram under bristolresearchsoc.

Epigram / Bristol SEDS

First year, Zoology

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Hollie Tuffnell

successful and technically impressive projects. Highlights include the design and fabrication of a Lunar Rover design for a competition run by UKSEDS, and a pair of model rockets including scientific payloads. For 2019, the committee has a fantastic year planned, kicking off with Water Rocket construction and the latest edition of our long-running CanSat design competition. We also have hosted talks on space related topics, as well as collective viewings of launches such as the Falcon Heavy in 2018.’ - Bristol SEDS Vice President, Luke McClure.

Unsplash / George Pagan III

Still looking for a society?

Here are just a few science and tech options, and what their committee members had to say about them!

talks, panels, and skills workshops.

All genders are welcome to join this society.

Raising awareness amongst male peers is paramount to achieving a welcoming environment for females and non-binary students in the immediate future and in working towards equality within STEM disciplines long term. Most importantly membership is free! With events happening, you’d be crazy not to get involved’ - Women in STEM President, Flora Jobson.

How to get involved: As Flora mentioned, membership for Women in STEM is free. Therefore, there is no excuse not to head over to the Student Union website and grab yourself a membership.

Find Women in STEM on Facebook (UOBWomeninSTEM) and Instagram (uob_wistem)

Hilary McCarthy PhD, Biology

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Farming of animals for food is now responsible for 73% of all antimicrobials’ use worldwide

the Global AMR Innovation fund and UK aid in order to systematically obtain and compile data on the use of antimicrobials and consequent incidence of AMR in Argentinian farming. The scientists will collaborate with Argentinian veterinary researchers, farmers, industry professionals and government policy makers and the work will provide an

essential platform for putting the required regulations in place.

Farming of animals for food is now responsible for 73 per cent of all antimicrobials’ use worldwide. This number has risen sharply in recent years and is growing alongside unsustainable levels of meat consumption. Unsurprisingly, this is associated with growing AMR. Not only could this present catastrophic implications for animal health and the global livestock industry, but it also potentially poses significant threats to human health, as shown by a growing body of evidence.

A review of published research articles found that only 5 per cent of reviewed journals claimed that there were no serious implications of farm animal antimicrobial resistance for human health. However, 72 per cent documented evidence of a clear link between the two.

Though the problem is global and must be faced as such, it is particularly prevalent in low to middle income countries (LMICs), with Asia, Africa and South America

Flickr / AJC1

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ntimicrobial resistance (AMR) constitutes one of the greatest global challenges of our time; however, if the words ‘antimicrobial resistance’ make you think of over-prescribed antimicrobials for human medication, you are likely only seeing one side of the problem. Figures published

by Public Health England (PHE) last year suggest that even now, at least 20% of antibiotics prescribed were unnecessary.

However, while this percentage is worryingly high, the overuse of antibiotics in human medicine is responsible for only a relatively small proportion of overall observed

resistance. As well as transforming medicinal science, antimicrobials play a huge role in animal agriculture, where they are used not only for preventing and curing disease, but also to promote livestock growth.

A research team led by the Bristol Veterinary School has been awarded a £1.25 million research grant from

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An interdisciplinary group of researchers have been awarded a £1.25 million grant to establish the levels of antimicrobial resistance in Argentinian livestock

Flicikr / Alex Proimos

Antimicrobial resistance research awarded £1.25m grant

being highlighted as continents with a significant number of resistance hotspots. This is because in LMICs, meat production is increasing most rapidly while access to both veterinary and human antibiotics remains generally unregulated. Aside from the lack of regulations on the use of antibiotics in farm animals in LMICs, there is also a lack of documentation of trends in antimicrobial resistance.

Surveillance of antimicrobial use and resistance is essential in

establishing the best course of required coordinated action to prevent a further rise in AMR. The new research project FARMS-SAFE (Futureproofing Antibacterial resistance Risk Management Surveillance and Stewardship in the Argentinian Farming Environment) will add to the University’s extensive scientific accomplishment surrounding AMR and hopefully provide a barrier to the serious threat of the AMR from unsustainable farming.

18 SciTech

epigram 28.10.2019

Second Year, Mathematics

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Companies are starting to see the benefits of writing personally to clients

to present the idea at The Pitch Final in London in October of last year.

Van Den Bergh and Robinson then secured £400,000 from investors by writing to them with the company’s own software. Scribeless is currently expanding beyond its Bristolian birthplace and now has offices in the US, Canada, and Europe, with more opening soon.

More recently, Van Den Bergh

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Scribeless is currently expanding beyond its Bristolian birthplace and now has offices in the US, Canada, and Europe

referrals increasing by 1000% for similar companies. On their website,

Scribeless quotes a 32-fold increase in return on investment from alumni of the University of Bath.

Talking with the University of Bristol, Van Den Bergh said that they are ‘incredibly proud’ to have won the Santander prize, and ‘can’t wait to help more companies utilise [their] handwritten solution. The University of Bristol and, specifically, their enterprise hub Basecamp have been hugely helpful since the start of Scribeless and supported us through the entire Santander Universities competition. The Basecamp team

have helped us every step of the way’, Van Den Bergh said.

What sets Scribeless apart from rival companies is its software: of similar services, Van Den Bergh states that ‘even if they’re written by a pen, fonts look like fonts,’ in contrast to Scribeless’s AI creating a more authentic-looking script by learning the inconsistencies of real handwriting. Speaking in The Pitch final, Van Den Bergh told the audience that their ‘research-driven AI can learn any handwriting style.

Even yours.’

In the lab at UoB International work led by the University of Bristol provided insight into marine ecosystem recovery after the mass extinction 66 million years ago. Fossils of a photosynthetic plankton spanning the following 13 million years showed that the communities were initially highly volatile. Stabilisation coincides with carbon-cycle restoration. However, it took another 8 million years for the species richness to recover. The study demonstrates how the loss of biodiversity can impact the ecosystem stability.

Researchers from the University of Bristol and University of Edinburgh traced scar-producing cells in mice livers through their development to fibrosis, by using their expression of a morphology-controlling protein called WT1. This allowed them to identify the origin of these cells and characterise their subtypes. By stopping the production of WT1, they proved that the protein is produced after injuries to halt fibrosis.

Therefore, this could be helpful in finding treatments for diseases such as liver cirrhosis and cancer.

Anastasia Gurskaya

Anastasia Gurskaya

Working out the physics of liquid interaction University of Bristol physicists applied a range of theoretical and simulation techniques to fluid models.

They uncovered that the transition between wetting and drying depends on the temperature and the range of interactions between fluids and substrates. The work offers a novel framework for the physics of water repelling and absorption, discovering new behaviours including ‘critical drying’. This framework can be used to develop new materials and to understand the interactions of biomolecules with water.

Anastasia Gurskaya

Unsplash / Nithya Ramanujam

Tracking cell lineages for insight into liver disease

Flickr / Joseph Elsberndl

Fossils used to understand ocean ecosystem recovery

Flickr / Kate In Paris

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o-founders and University of Bristol alumni Robert Van Den Bergh and Alex Robinson officially began their company Scribeless in 2018 after its conception in 2016, with the help of University of Bristol’s Basecamp Enterprise team and UWE’s Launch Space facilities. Earlier in October, Scribeless topped 2,000 other businesses to win the £25,000 joint 1st prize from Santander’s Universities Entrepreneurship Awards, along with Cosi Care.

Scribeless aims to provide clients with convincing-looking handwritten notes efficiently and affordably on a large scale. The venture of an Accounting & Finance and a Computer Sciences student, it uses AI, machine vision, style transfer technology and colourphysics mimicking algorithms to ‘learn’ a style of writing and add imperfections to give an authentic look. After the written content of the

entered and was crowned joint winner of Santander’s Universities Entrepreneurship Awards 2019, winning another £25,000 of seed funding as well as future support from the bank’s services. Of the event, Van Den Bergh said that it was ‘fantastic to win the Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Awards’, and that the ‘support [they have] had throughout has been instrumental in driving forward the growth of the business.’ He credits the experience with ‘[enabling them] to continue growing [their] team and provide handwritten marketing to more companies around the world.’

Scribeless has quickly grown to catering for large companies such as Marriot International, Panasonic and NatWest. In an increasingly electronic world, companies are starting to see the benefits of writing personally to clients. It is estimated to increase engagement with customers massively, with word-of-mouth

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Isabel Bromfield

letter is uploaded, advanced robotics armed with fountain pens reproduce the letters at five times the speed of a human. They can then be sent to as many as 10,000 recipients at once, all in a script indiscernible from real handwriting.

Scribeless began in Bristol – rated in the top five cities for startups in 2019 – after Van Den Bergh spent weeks at an internship writing handwritten letters to clients and seeing the positive effect it had.

After Van Den Bergh and Robinson officially launched the company, they secured Scribeless a place as one of 15 finalists out of 500 businesses

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Two Bristol Graduates have secured a top prize for their business that uses AI to create handwritten-looking letters on a commercial scale

Unsplash / Aaron Burden

Bristol graduates’ AI handwriting business wins £25,000 prize

28.10.2019 epigram

SciTech 19

Does the cosmos need further exploration?

Second year, Medicine

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n 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. In the eyes of many this was the peak of the space race - or at least that’s the American point of view. Since then, public interest in space appears to have declined. In an age of climate crisis and political strain, many question the need to explore the galaxy further when there is so much to be done on Earth.

However, speaking to Maggie Aderin-Pocock, presenter of the BBC’s ‘The Sky at Night’ and acclaimed space scientist, has left

then there’s for understanding our universe’. Maggie told me that she believes ‘our destiny lies out there’ - that it seems reckless to contain human life to one area where it might become extinct, and ‘it makes sense to seed human life elsewhere’. However, she was keen to make it clear that ‘the key is to do it as ethically as possible; we need to learn the lessons from all the mistakes we’ve made here and make sure that we don’t just repeat them elsewhere’.

Space projects are notoriously expensive, and with the loss of interest in the field it has become much harder to acquire funding. I asked whether anything can be done to reduce the costs of projects or help obtain the funding. With a sigh,

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Reflecting on the experiences of astronauts can be an inspiration in itself

Epigram / Vilhelmiina Haavisto

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she said that ‘unfortunately, getting things into space fundamentally costs quite a bit of money’, but ‘I think the more people that do it, the better the technology will get, because of market forces’. She became

particularly excited when telling me about the idea of ‘using the moon as a base to travel t o

in

Genevieve Clapp

me feeling as though now more than ever we need to look to the galaxy for answers. I interviewed Maggie after her talk at New Scientist Live, entitled ‘The Moon: Past, Present and Future’, where she spoke about how the moon has played a part in our lives since the dawn of time, creating the tides that were potentially vital for the formation of the molecules we are made of. She went on to tell us what scientists predict will happen to the moon in the future and how that will affect us here on Earth.

I began by asking what I have been eager to know from the beginning – why do we need to continue to explore space? ‘I think there are a number of reasons why we need space exploration’, she began. ‘When people think of space, they think of people going out into space, and that’s very much a part of it, but also, we use space for so many different things – for Earth observation, for understanding our planet and

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Epigram interviews Maggie Aderin-Pocock, presenter of ‘The Sky at Night’ and acclaimed space scientist, at New Scientist Live 2019

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t h e rest of the s o l a r system. The moon has a sixth of the Earth’s gravity’, she said, ‘therefore it’s much easier to get things off the lunar surface than the Earth’s surface. If we establish a base there, we could actually use lunar soil to build things and then launch from there into space’ In the long term this could be significantly cheaper; however, there would be large set-up costs.

During her talk she mentioned that the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth, at a rate of 3.5cm per year and that eventually our planet will begin to gyrate, leading to an entirely new and extreme weather system. When I inquired what other effects the distancing of the moon will have, she told me that ‘in the

distant future the moon will move so far away that the gravitational pull of the Earth won’t be enough to keep it captive, so we will lose the moon’.

Luckily, this will not happen for ‘a few billion years’. In the meantime, she notes that ‘it is quite interesting to see how the moon influences us, for instance the twenty-four-hour day that we take for standard will get longer and already is beginning to’. In relation to the moons of other planets, our moon is very large and protects us from debris and solar storms; Maggie says ‘we will miss it if it goes’.

My final question was how we can inspire the next generation of space scientists. The response was something I’d never considered.

She of course began by saying that with it being 50 years since the lunar landings, reflecting on the experiences of astronauts can be ‘an inspiration in itself’.

However, she went on to say that from learning about space and our past we can ‘learn how to change our future’ and that with the school strikes for climate action it is clear that ‘kids are worried about the future’, suggesting a collaboration between space science and environmentalism would be beneficial. ‘I think space helps us to understand the environment’, she stated. ‘The things that space can teach us are not just limited to environmentalism; by looking at how the earth and human life were first formed, we can help advance both medicine and technology’.

Vilhelmiina Haavisto SciTech Editor

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hough cheap wines are the bread-and-butter of many pres, not all are harmless fun. Fraud is a real problem in the wine industry, and cheap wines can contain unsafe levels of pesticides, sulphites and arsenic. Lewis identifies trust as an essential ingredient that is lacking in consumers, and she wants to bring it back by providing wine aficionados with data – heaps of it. Her solution may seem futuristic at first, but it is rooted in existing technologies; machine learning (ML) and blockchain.

Though many are familiar with

blockchain in a cryptocurrency context, this is not its only application.

Blockchain is fundamentally a way to record transactions, and Lewis wants to use this to create a clear path from the vineyard to the bottle in consumers’ hands. Data will come from every part of the winemaking process – from the grapes to fermentation to transport, and with this data she hopes to show consumers the journey that the wine

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She hopes to show consumers the journey that the wine in their shopping basket has taken

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Data-driven solutions are beginning to revolutionise agriculture; Judith Lewis is starting with vineyards, as she tells the crowd at New Scientist Live

in their shopping basket has taken, including exposure to pesticides, transport temperature, and even where in the vineyard the grapes

came from. Lewis’ current work has been feeding ML algorithms 20 years’ worth of weather and growth data from the Weinbauzentrum Wädenswil on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Lewis emphasises that these ‘cheap, affordable, and implementable’ techniques will benefit winemakers in the long run. Water use can be minimised by reacting to prevailing weather conditions, and fertilisers and pesticides can be spared by spottreating affected areas. ML algorithms could also make suggestions about which varieties to grow, and Lewis says that her collaborators believe they will even be able to predict yield – though winemakers are sceptical.

Her team published a working paper detailing their efforts and approaches in 2018.

The technologies that Lewis is proposing are already in use elsewhere. For example, a California winery is using satellite data along with IBM’s Watson AI to optimise

Epigram / Vilhelmiina Haavisto

A better wine for everyone

irrigation in their vineyards, where water is precious. Similarly, lettuce growers in California are using tech that can discriminate between crop and weeds, spraying fertilizer on the former and herbicide on the latter.

Lewis has big dreams – not only does she want ‘a better wine for everyone’, but she also believes that the same solutions can be implemented for any and all crops.

These solutions would make farming more sustainable and transparent.

If it is possible in stepped, sloped, rugged vineyard terrain, she says, it is possible anywhere.

Read more about this year’s New Scientist Live talks online at epigram.org.uk/tag/ science

Film & TV

Editor Deputy Editor Digital Editor Deputy Digital Editor

Leah Martindale Louie Bell Laura Aish Tom Goulde

Halloween films: trick or treat?

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t’s a futile question really. Surely nobody would willingly enter into the contract of a trick? And yet, as the leaves develop their rustic orange colour and pumpkins begin to line our porches, as a society we gravitate towards choosing ‘tricks’ as we settle down to watch all things abominable.

Masked killers? The living dead?

Souls being ensnared by the devil?

Bring it on. The more heart-attackinducing jump scares the better.

It is the one time of year that we can indulge that strange, inherent fascination humanity has with the macabre. There is something playful about Halloween, contrasting to other holidays.

It is a holiday for naughty children, for the devil on your shoulder and for throwing away savoury snacks in favour of candied apples that rot your teeth. It is a time when dark magic obscures the safety of the fairy-tales we’re so used to into twisted fables with adult contexts and a surprising amount of metaphorical verisimilitude.

Film and television takes blissful advantage of this and provides us with that seductive allusion of danger we crave, but safely from the other side of the screen as we cower back into our sofas or cinema seats.

In case you’re now hankering for a fright, here are my top three watch recommendations for the mysterious month ahead…

Scream (1996)

Based on Washington Irving’s tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), Tim Burton’s fantastical strangeness is epitomised in this truly spooky Halloween favourite which in my opinion encompasses all the elements that formulate the holiday. Its eerie, terrorising, romantic steampunk style brings you forth into a dream-like reality plagued with mystery and a gripping story that is literally to die for.

Homicide detective Ichobod Crane (Johnny Depp) – who is afraid of blood, I might add – has his sceptical b e l i e f s challenged when he is sent to the uncanny village of Sleepy Hollow, where the spirit of a headless horseman has risen to claim the heads of the community one by one. With an expansive budget for Georgian costume and set design, the grey and the gruesome is materialised before your eyes and let’s just say this feature is not short on graphic gore.

The special effects are impressive and certainly make you thankful for your neck’s attachment. However, it owns more than a visually grand reputation; it has a well thought out plot with a momentum that keeps you hooked without going over the top. Imagine Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (19691970), aired way past the watershed: this is my top pick this Halloween.

It is such a classic that certain moments in it have become clichés that we could all recite in our sleep.

But what is a cliché if not something successful that is copied so vigorously that it leads to extinction?

This cult classic for the ‘90s fanatic gave birth to three sequels and a Netflix TV reboot. In a tale as old as time they never quite lived up to the stylistically ironic and self-aware originality of the first, which manages to both mock horror films and be a great one at the same time.

Adam Smith, writing for Empire, encapsulated its charm by describing its ability to ‘leap with balletic deftness from exuberant in-jokery […] to ballretracting moments of terror’.

Wes Craven tactically balances an intelligent ‘whodunnit’ plot – giving us an egotistical compulsion to solve the mystery – while interrupting us with terrifying stalk-and-hunt sequences, dramatic irony shots and jump scares.

It’s jam packed with stars who give superb performances, all seeming a little deranged in their own way, as characters who have grown up in a horror-movie permeated society where everybody is a suspect.

The only regret I have regarding this feature is watching it for the first time alone and in the dark.

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1st Year, Film and English

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

It is the one time of year that we can freely indulge that strange, inherent fascination humanity has with the macabre

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Here’s a round-up of some of the spooky season’s best Halloween watches Ella Wignell

Read more about each of these spooky films featured in this article in full on the Epigram website!

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018-) A prime feature of this show which makes it an ideal binge for Halloween is the gorgeous aesthetics and cinematography.

From lofty country houses adorned with candles and jars of miscellaneous preserved beings to botanical life thriving around tall trunked forests in the dead of night.

A far cry from Sabrina The Teenage Witch (1996 - 2003), this Netflix return from the makers of Riverdale (2017) sees a dark-humoured, sexy drama with a twist of whimsical nature.

The show discards the withered ‘hag’ Witch you see in storybooks and gives us vivacious females of all ages, sexualities and race presented on the same par as the men surrounding them and effortlessly taking control of both the heroic and villainous storylines.

It depicts Sabrina (Keirnan Shipka) struggling as a half-witch to own both her mortal and immortal life after signing her soul over to the Dark Lord of their religion (aka, the devil). We align ourselves with the perceivably moral Sabrina as she simultaneously wields and fights against evil through her adventures and trials.

The show has a feminist alignment which is refreshing and empowering to see within such a male dominated genre where for decades females were reduced to the damsel in distress.

In fact, a central theme throughout the show is the depiction of Sabrina challenging of the patriarchal hierarchy within her Church.

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Film & TV 21

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Horror and the Oscars

Laurence Boag-Matthews Third Year, Liberal Arts

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orror has a fraught history in Hollywood, particularly with the Academy: only six films from the genre have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar - The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is the sole winner. Some now considered to be among the greatest films of all time, regardless of genre, e.g. Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980) weren’t even nominated for Best Picture.

There is a cultural feeling - shared by the Academy - that horror is a trivial genre less worthy of acclaim.

Classically many truly great horror films have been independently made, which puts them at a disadvantage in comparison to large-scale studio productions when it comes to awards.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was made with a budget of less than $140,000 yet is one of the most effective horror movies of all time and paved the way for the slasher sub-genre that followed, originating many elements common to later films. Large studios still seem unwilling to fund more ambitious horror projects, which risk losing money, therefore the most visible horror films are the less innovative

sequels, remakes, and imitations that are likely to be less impressive than new projects that break conventions.

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There is a cultural feeling - shared by the Academy - that horror is a trivial genre less worthy of acclaim

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A genre overlooked by the Oscars, why doesn’t the Academy value its contribution to cinema?

Horror thrives when boundaries are broken to establish new rules. Recently the most critically acclaimed, groundbreaking horror such as It Follows (2014), The VVitch (2015), and Hereditary (2018) were independently produced and received no Oscar nominations, following historical trends in the genre. Classics

that shape trends in horror are often made with little formal support and very little money.

A further reason that horror films may receive fewer awards is that it occupies a place in culture where it allows us to explore base-level fears such as the dark and death, albeit in a controlled manner. The dependence upon viscerality and an audience’s physical reaction seems to hold the genre back from acclaim. To view a horror film as ‘good’ we require it to make us feel scared, the most effective horror gets under our skin and stays with us beyond the screen.

Some may argue that horror doesn’t make us think deeply, or operate on the same level aesthetically as the Oscars’ usual suspects. However,

I would argue that it is perhaps the most cinematic genre, as to be effective horror relies on our buying into the reality of the action, at least for a short time. Horror films are probably the films we talk about the most often as truly affecting us; even people who are not that interested in films or don’t watch films regularly have stories of seeing a scary movie as a child which they remember particularly vividly. I believe that this qualifies the genre as worthy of higher acclaim than it currently receives.

Read more on horror, the Oscars and our halloween special on the Epigram website!

Editors’ Picks IMDb / Universal Pictures

IMDb/ A24

IMDb / MGM

IMDb / New Line

IMDb/ Significant Productions

To celebrate Halloween, our editors provide their selection of spooky cinema

Leah Martindale Editor

Louie Bell Deputy Editor

Laura Aish Digital Editor

Tom Goulde Deputy Digital Editor

Siavash Minoukadeh Entertainment Sub-Editor

The Addams Family (1964-1966)

Se7en (1995)

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Midsommar (2019)

Death Becomes Her (1992)

I’m a baby. It’s true. I shook like a leaf through Hereditary (2018), I had nightmares about the naked grandma in It: Chapter 2 (2019) - I am the wrong person to write about Halloween.

However, I have always loved the satirised American nuclear family who are the Addams. With an original cartoon, TV shows and movies, a reboot coming soon and even a stage musical, this wonderfully macabre family has been a staple of culture for over half a century, teaching us that happiness is what you make it, and light can be found in the darkest shadows.

Yikes. Whilst it overlaps heavily with the fascinating realms of a psychological thriller, David Fincher’s terrifying crime story Se7en still gives me the shivers.

With a killer on the loose butchering people according to their breach of the seven deadly sins, detectives Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Mills (Brad Pitt) must track the madman across one very gory week. The atmospheric setting of a stormy Philadelphia and a slow reveal of horrifically symbolic murders builds the tension to unbearable levels and culminates in one of the most iconic finales in cinematic history.

The Cabin in the Woods is a comedyhorror film directed by the legendary Joss Whedon, known for the successful Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (1997– 2003) as well as The Avengers (2012) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). It twists and remixes familiar horror genre tropes into an amusing and surreal plot that will keep you gripped throughout.

If you want a mixture of Whedon’s unique dialogue-style, a thoroughly bizarre story and some genuinely quite frightening moments then you might want to book a trip to The Cabin in the Woods this Halloween…

If you want a film that you will be thinking about for weeks, then this is the pick for you. Ari Aster’s second feature film is just as creepy as his critically-acclaimed breakout hit Hereditary (2018). With the whole film taking place in the daytime it is not the eerie shadows or the terrifying jump scares that make it a great horror movie, instead the seemingly-normal climactic build up to a horrifying last sequence is why this movie makes such a mark on your mind forever. A story about a relationship spiralling out of control has never been so scary.

I’ve always shied away from horror - yes, I scare easy - but even I can get into the spooky spirit with Death Becomes Her. There’s blood, body parts and potions but there is also make up and bucketloads of high camp. Oh yes, and Meryl Streep, who, as always, is spectacular. If you want to stay on the sofa this halloween but don’t want to have nightmares into November, Death Becomes Her will have you screaming with laughter, not fear. The scariest thing about it is the fact that it won the best VFX Oscar. And, I cannot stress this enough, Meryl Streep.

Film & TV

One to watch

A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, featuring Tom Hanks, showed at London Film Festival Siavash Minoukadeh Entertainment Subeditor

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Jordan Peele has captured the imagination of modern cinemagoers - what is it that sets him apart?

Louie Bell Deputy Film & TV Editor

F

ollowing my selection of Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) as my Editor’s Pick for Issue 341, I did some reading on the impact of his breakout film Get Out (2017). What almost all of the critical responses touched on was the social aspect of the horror that Peele had tapped into. Dubbed a ‘social thriller’, Peele defined his innovative genre as hoping to ‘deal with this human monster, this societal monster. And the villain is us’.

This represents an important move in modern cinema, where debates have recently raged over whether the role of cinema is to challenge conceptions and provoke discussion or whether it should simply entertain.

Peele, in his genre-defying debut, proved it’s possible to do both, and to do so within the setting of the US’s racial strife.

In a cinematic world not afraid to delve into some of the most moving and emotionally shocking studies - the depiction of slavery in 12 Years a Slave (2013), and racism in If Beale Street Could Talk (2019), for example - why did Get Out punch a such a determined hole in the social consciousness? The answer, I would argue, is in its subtlety.

The garden party scene is a masterclass not only in suspense, but in the reworking of horror tropes into a terrifying matrix of creepiness and unease. Peele’s dialogue serves to isolate Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the African-American boyfriend of Rose (Allison Williams), a wealthy white

woman.

With such knuckle-clenching, cringeworthy and ultimately infuriating comments from the white attendees at the party as: ‘fair skin has been in favour for years, but now the pendulum has swung back – black is in fashion!’, the film highlights a liberal racism barely explored in cinema until now.

Get Out captured a disenfranchisement with liberal America that not only rang true for African-Americans, but also the wealthy elite, many of whom masquerade as proponents of social justice - only to react with unease when actually confronted with it.

Perhaps this is captured best by an anonymous Oscar voter’s response to the film as ‘an entertaining little horror movie that made quite a bit of money’ and lambasted it for ‘trying to suggest it had deeper meaning than it does, and, as far as I’m concerned, they played the race card, and that really turned me off.’

We can scoff at such incompetence in a supposed member of the Academy, but we might also pick apart this response to try and get at why it eerily mirrors the very motifs of the film it criticises. The notion that a film about black America has no right to a ‘deeper meaning’ is clearly misguided and frankly racist in its ignorance.

If Get Out was a genre-subverting warning shot to the horror fans of the world, then I would argue that Us (2019) took Peele’s social thriller to the next level. Following an AfricanAmerican family as they are stalked by doppelgangers of themselves, for me it broadened the reach of its social commentary without a fall in poignancy or intensity.

Us was Peele’s response to a deeply divided America, the title itself perhaps reading as ‘U.S.’ - a country

in dire need of self-reflection. The themes of division, jealousy and the shadows hiding behind us all shine through via Peele’s consistently scary and disarmingly funny script.

If there ever was a time that the world needed a wake-up call to stare ourselves in the face and finally point out the flaws in the hegemonic power structures that have long dominated cinema, then Jordan Peele has been the one to light the torch for change.

Reflecting on his work this month is important, but I for one will always be looking forward to what he’s going to hit us with next.

om Hanks takes on the role he was born to play in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019).

Playing Mr. Rogers, the American childrens’ TV show host, this is Hanks at his warmest, friendliest and most huggable.

Based on a magazine article, the plot follows Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynical, world-weary journalist who no longer has hope in the world.

On an assignment to interview Rogers, he is slowly won round by his childlike innocence and wholesomeness.

It’s a simple, but well-executed plot and stands in contrast to the gritty, dark tone so popular in cinema recently.

Yet it doesn’t avoid handling serious subject matter but the power of kindness and love are shown to win out. In an age where hope can be hard to

come by, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood makes a strong case to keep trying to be kind.

Shots are mixed in with beautiful montages of the set of Rogers’ TV show and classic children’s TV music and puppetry which gives the whole film a poignantly nostalgic tone. Watching it, it was hard not to well up in some of the scenes.

In an age when everyone seems to have a secret and things have taken a dark turn, in film and in reality, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood stands as something of an oddity, making an unflinching call for compassion and respect. It’s much-needed at a time like this.

Whether you’re a Tom Hanks fan or not, this is not one to miss.

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Spotlight on...

Jordan Peele

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A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood will be in cinemas from 9 December

Arts

epigram 28.10.2019

@epigramarts

Editor Deputy Editor Digital Editor Deputy Digital Editor

Livi Player Imogen Howse Will Maddrell Serafina Lee

Horror on stage: theatre’s most underrated genre?

Formless

A creative ghost poem

Epigram/ Patrick Sullivan

Sanjana Idnani, First Year English

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What is it that we find most frightening?

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related to the frightening, real-life events happening before their very eyes.

The Woman in Black, a play which uses many Brechtian techniques, is perhaps the best example of enduring contemporary horror theatre: it is the second longest running play in the West End and has received much critical acclaim. It is devilishly creative, but also simple and sincere in its nature.

Adapted by Stephen Mallatratt, the play often breaks the ‘fourth wall’ - the divide between a c t o r s and the audience and employs the technique of multi-roling am igr – where an actor Ep plays more than one character onstage.

Such techniques were pioneered

by Brecht. He developed methods that allowed for a highly critical and objective approach to storytelling and aimed to give more agency to audience members. For him, horror /P atr ick

O

ften when we think of the genre of horror, we think of the senseless gore of popular franchises like Saw (2004) and Final Destination (2000), where characters meet violent deaths purely for the sake of spectacle.

In theatre however, there is often something more: something more unsettling, something frightening in a deeper, more innate sense. It is for these reasons that arguably, the true essence of horror can be found in theatre.

Bertolt Brecht is a good starting point. To understand the inspiration for his works, it is important to offer s o m e context.

It was during Brecht’s lifetime that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis increased in popularity: for him, this was what true horror meant. He had no appreciation for plays that were essentially uncritical rollercoasters of emotional manipulation and forced identification with a main character;

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Is it empty spectacle, or is it the deepest most unnerving aspects of human nature?

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Third Year History

theatre wasn’t about jump scares and mindless escapism, but rather about looking within to find a connection with and appreciation for a contemporary or political issue.

Another example would be The Threepenny Opera: there is some debate in regard to who contributed to the play, but most consider Brecht to be the main author. The play concerns Mack The Knife, a dangerous killer, and follows him in his criminal and amoral misadventures. Beneath this story however, there are many motifs regarding class distinctions, and it ultimately reads as a socialist critique of capitalist society.

We might also look to Antonin Artaud for an example of the real essence of horror: he is best known for having a significant influence on Theatre of the Absurd and conceptualising Theatre of Cruelty. A French dramatist and theatre director, and quite frankly an evidently disturbed but brilliant man, Artaud was profoundly influential in the development of avant-garde theatre. Absurdists like himself held the belief that life was, well, absurd. Their theatre reflected this and also strived to exhibit a deep, brooding existentialism. Pieces were structured as though circular, beginning and ending in the same place and always moving towards silence.

Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is both

a philosophy and a discipline. He began to develop a theatrical space in which the senses of the audience are assaulted in a myriad of different ways in an effort to find artistic truth, courtesy of the unconscious mind.

His short play Jet of Blood was written in 1925 but was never performed in his lifetime. It has been termed by some theatre directors as ‘unstageable.’ Stage directions include an earthquake, a giant hand, and a jet of blood. Critic Alison Croggon offers that ‘a series of oneiric scenes sweep through the theatre to the accompaniment of a bruising soundtrack - a catalyst and a provocation, rather than a model.’

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For him, horror theatre wasn’t just about jump scares and mindless escapism

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Annie Tyagi

to him, these were the very techniques used by fascist populist movements and this kind of manipulation was the antithesis of human decency.

He prioritised works which struck a chord with his audiences: both in a moral sense and in a way that

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Forget horror films for a truly terrifying Halloween experience, try horror theatre and prepare to be unsettled

Artaud held the belief that these kinds of arresting and disturbing pieces of immersive art had the ability to purge people of destructive forces, allowing them to enjoy feelings otherwise repressed by society. He claimed that: ‘the theatre has been created to drain abscesses collectively.’

These styles of theatre lead us to the question of what it is that we find most frightening - is it empty spectacle, or is it the deepest most unnerving aspects of human nature?

We only need to look back on these great theatrical pioneers for inspiration: add a more modern twist to their styles, and horror theatre will be rediscovered and reaffirmed in popular culture in no time.

The rain pushed sullenly against the leaves And a sliver of moonlight could be seen through the crack Of darkness.

Shivering slightly as she stepped outside, She felt her stomach suddenly jolt and tumble.

Bent double. Her eyes widened as if she was suffocating.

The wind hissed as if slowly squeezing out breath A puff of cold smoke. Whisper after whisper spilled around her, the fog of lights, the crowd, the din of traffic but she seemed frozen in time. Trapped.

Her bloodless face illumined in the darkness A shadow edging all round her.

The pin drop silence of something threatening to be, to move, to pounce.

The Earth begins a tense melody of clatter and chatter.

Tap tapping of shoes on the ground.

They all ignore the suffering sound she makes (Over mastered by all the world’s fear- after all Did she utter a single a beat? ) The wind picked up. The clouds seemed to move with terrible pace.

She trembled, fear creeping up her face.

A blood curdling scream.

Silence.

The rain pushed sullenly against the leaves And a sliver of moonlight could be seen through the crack of darkness Casting a shadow on a splayed body.

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epigram 28.10.2019

Second Year English

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alloween is, in many ways, about stories. It’s a festival intrinsically tied to notions of narrative, theatricality and pretence, with each of us placing ourselves at the centre of our own costumed play. However, our current vision of Halloween lacks any awareness of ancient, archetypal legends; it’s fair to say that for most of us, the festival is presently more bound to Hocus Pocus than any sense of historical tradition.

This is arguably because Halloween’s debt to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain is relatively unknown.

Samhain (pronounced ‘sawn’) was observed on 31st October by the people of pre-Christian Ireland to mark the end of summer and to honour the dead. It was considered a liminal time when the veil between the mortal world and the Tír nAill (‘the otherworld’) was at its thinnest, and aos sí (‘spirits’ or ‘fairies’) could cross over to involve themselves in the lives of humans. As with modern Halloween – which emerged out of this Celtic tradition as a sort of Christian hybrid – dressing up, feasting, and playing games were all part of the festivities.

Samhain was central to Irish culture and it forms the basis for many mythological narratives; the eerie, off-kilter atmosphere of the occasion allowed for heroes to grapple with the uncanny and inhuman, and exploring this literature as a modern reader provides an insight into the conventions and concerns that persist in our presentday Halloween lore.

The Echtra Neraí (‘The Adventure of Nera’) is the quintessential Samhain tale.

Part of the Ulster Cycle of mythology, it relays the story of the nobleman Nera, who, at a special Samhain feast, volunteers to compete in a morbid

competition that involves tying a willow branch around a dead man’s ankle. This catalyses a bizarre series of events; a reanimated corpse is given a piggy-back ride, an army of spirits decapitates an entire household, and Nera takes a time-warping trip to the Otherworld. The story is at times absurd and at others unnerving, but at the heart of Nera’s surreal journey is Samhain, which is taken literally in Kuno Meyer’s translation to mean Halloween. As the narrator ominously declares, ‘great was the darkness of that night and its horror, and demons would appear on that night always.’ The cliché of ‘setting as character’ can be applied here; Samhain provides more than atmosphere – it causes cataclysmic events. Nera is told that the invading army of aos sí ‘will come on Halloween next: for the fairymounds of Erinn are always opened about [Samhain]’.

The Adventure of Nera depicted protozombies and hallucinatory visions long before Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) were made, and is worth reading for

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If Halloween is about stories, then exploring its literary past seems a worthwhile endeavour

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Nowadays it’s all trick or treating and cheap costumes - but where did it all begin?

Aline Downey

its mind-bending imagery and twisting plot. Moreover, the Fenian Cycle’s Macgnímartha Finn (‘The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn’) is equally striking. It is the origin story of the famous hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, and as described in the Laud 610 manuscript, he proves himself a warrior by tackling a very Samhain-specific issue: every year on the night of the festival, men come from far and wide to woo a beautiful maiden who lives in a fairy-mound. However, any man that attempts this challenge inevitably finds one of his own men slaughtered. The writing echoes Nera

Epigram/ Unsplash

Hocus Pocus: the forgotten origins of Halloween

when the narrator remarks that ‘the fairy-mounds of Ireland were always open about Samhain; for on Samhain nothing could ever be hidden in the fairy-mounds.’

The Fenian Cycle of mythology includes another Samhain adventure in the Acallam na Senórach (‘Tales of the Elders of Ireland’), wherein a vengeful fairy woman, and later three female werewolves, appear every Samhain to terrorise the local flocks. It’s a grisly tale; after returning to human form and being lulled into a stupor by dulcimer music, the three wolf-women are ‘strung together on [a] spear’ at the same time. The writing is particularly vivid, with the moment when the werewolves takeoff their ‘dark, long cloaks’ and transform into humans being especially evocative.

If Halloween is about stories, then exploring its literary past and giving shape to our own understanding of it seems a worthwhile endeavour. These medieval myths, with their jarringly strange images yet oddly familiar tropes, are some of the most satisfying ‘Halloween’ stories you’ll come across.

The Jilted Bride

A Creative Ghost Story Ella Rose Wignell, Second Year Film & English I was hiking the coast path in a stretch between St. Ives and Zennor when I stumbled upon a young woman; Delilah.

She wore a muddied white dress and white leather boots. Quite the contrast to any hiker I had met before. Her eyes were a…strange...complexion of milky violet and her hair was pitch black. She was singing an old Cornish folksong as we walked, when I felt rain heavy like bullets against my skin. Scared for our safety, we diverted inland towards another route. We found ourselves lost in a wooded interval - that is when we came across it. Amongst the trees, like a hallucination, was an ornate imposing chapel.

Before I had time to question its presence, Delilah was dragging me eagerly through its doors, letting them slam shut behind us. Inside the sanctuary, I was awestruck; torrents of majestic silks were draped from end to end of the large, gold adorned room, tapestries hung abundantly along the isle up to the altar and lit candles in tall, silver holders stood at the end of each pew.

It was stunning, and yet…

When I turned to Delilah she was watching me with curious desperation, her lips parted as if about to let out a most terrible wail. The rims of her eyes were laden with tears stuck on the precipice of a fall.

“Will you marry me?” her lips trembled. I was taken aback, but an instinctive dread rose in my chest. She moved to block the door. “Will you marry me?”

Before any form of response had come to my mind, she began to murmur under her breath, her head dropping down in a defeated, angry manner.

Oh!–her eyes when she lifted them were no longer milky but decayed, and unseeing! Her skin… like a porcelain doll cracked and through the cracks came a molten red that pulsated with heat, the remaining face began to sizzle and pop into black ash that stuck to raw, exposed, burning flesh.

The material of her dress flaked into her crackling body. She continued to ramble in obsessive phrases that plucked my heart out of its chest! The most profound being, “he left me to burn.”

I ran from the living corpse as the ground shook beneath me, knocking down the candles and tapestries which set alight in a ferocious howl! I heard Delilah screech in agony as the flames engulfed her… In a fit of adrenaline, I threw myself through a window, branding myself with scars. When I turned again…there was no window, though there was glass shattered at my feet.

Indeed, there was a church standing precisely where the one I had escaped from had been. But this one was…dilapidated…empty…made of three walls and some rubble that swarmed with botanical life, thriving around the rotting, half-burned remnants of ornaments over a century old. The rain had ceased. The place was cold and silent.

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28.10.2019 epigram

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t’s that time of year again: the changing of the seasons and the preparation for winter. Oh, and the time for witches, vampires and ghosts to reign again.

Halloween can be a pretty big celebration for some, but for others, the bats and broomsticks aren’t welcomed with such open, bloody arms.

The traditions, in particular, are often scoffed at and thought worthless in their modern day attempts to empty our pockets in return for some cheap orange plastic or fake cobwebs. In spite of this, they

dressing up - ever the child!

Whilst we deck ourselves out in full witch attire and head off to every house in the vicinity, armed with some sort of pumpkin-shaped bucket, the Celts were far more cunning in their ghostly creations, dressing up so as to confuse any evil spirits of their true form, and thus protecting themselves from harm.

They even left offerings of food and drink outside their houses to placate them. A far cry from our greedy sweet teeth it would seem…

Many years later, influenced by a tradition of reciting verses or short plays in exchange for food, the tradition of trick-or-

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For others, the bats and broomsticks aren’t welcomed with such open, bloody arms

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Second Year English

are cheerfully honoured by many, even if the initial intentions have perhaps evolved.

Halloween, or Samhain as it was originally known to the Celts, traditionally marks the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. The traditions of the festival were vast, including rituals, games, and plays - many of which are still carried out today.

My personal favourite, however, has to be

am igr Ep

treating is born! An interesting tradition in its complete lack of task for the receiving party, but a beloved one nevertheless, no doubt due to the free chocolate from slightly terrified, usually obliging, absolute strangers. I have also yet to see a ‘trick’ as a consequence of refusing a ‘treat,’ and somehow doubt that I ever will.

Our traditions will, of course,

differ from person to person, but the general consensus seems to be that dressing up as a terrifying creature to roam the streets collecting sweets is the best way to celebrate Halloween.

However, it would appear that over the years, the likes of witches and demons have almost been ousted by popular characters such as Spider-Man, Elle Woods, or even unicorns! This, I’m afraid, I do not understand - since when

“

Over the years, the likes of witches and demons have almost been ousted by popular characters such as Spider-Man, Elle Woods, or even unicorns!

“

From pumpkin spiced lattes to sexy cat costumes, it’s safe to say traditions have changed over the centuries!

Phoebe Rose

/L ivi Pla yer

Wiccans meet unicorns: the strange evolution of Halloween traditions

did the recognition of all things evil become cute?! Fascinating.

Still, I’m sure that had earlier cultures been in possession of pink, glittery unicorn costumes, they too would have indulged.

They must have been out of stock.

Book Corner

News Sub-Editor

A

lthough it has its fair share of spine-chilling moments, Frankenstein is much more than a horror story. Shelley’s story follows the revenge the ‘creature’ exacts upon Dr Frankenstein - the scientist who created and abandoned him. Told from multiple points of view, Frankenstein covers the once intelligent and kind-hearted creature’s descent into violence and brutality - a sharp contrast to the ‘monster’ which appears in various film adaptations. Come for the thrilling and gruesome tale; stay for Shelley’s insightful and relevant critique of society.

Sara Espinosa Rastoll

First Year English & Philosophy

I

f you’re looking for an unconventional horror tale, Angela Carter’s short story collection is the perfect read for a sleepless Halloween night. As she twists and distorts familiar fairy tales into stories of pure terror, she not only depicts a world of spooky and ghoulish creatures but also shines a light on our own societies, alluding to issues ranging from sexism, to capitalism, to the inner conflicts that haunt us all as human beings.

Whether you’re searching for a simple horror story or something a little deeper, these haunting tales will suck you straight in.

Leah Martindale Film & TV Editor

A

lthough she is predominantly famous for her amazing Noughts and Crosses series, Malorie Blackman’s lesser-known novel The Stuff of Nightmares is my Halloween pick for this issue’s Book Corner. I have only read the book once, over a decade ago, but the story holds such a tight and permanent grip on my psyche that the haunting tale will forever be poised to be dragged from the back of my memory. With a tone befitting her Young Adult audience combined with the ageless severity imbued in her writing, The Stuff of Nightmares will always put the fear of God in me.

Nina Freedman Second Year English

O

ne spooky book to read this Halloween is Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It’s short enough for a weekend read, but still manages to hold its own as a modern classic.

You will be repulsed and drawn to the novel’s protagonist, Merricat, who functions as the haunting narrator.

She uses a rhetoric reminiscent of that found in children’s literature, adding an extra eeriness to the novel, but also invokes more mature themes of feminism and abuse: it’s like a dark mirror image of your favourite childhood fairy-tale. Look out for the film adaptation later this year!

Photo courtesy of Waterstones

Photo courtesy of Waterstones

Photo courtesy of Waterstones

Photo courtesy of Waterstones

Ellie Brown

Photo courtesy of Waterstones

Epigram Arts’ regular feature: your go-to for our top book recommendations this Halloween

Gruff Kennedy Third Year English

I

f you’re looking for a lighthearted supernatural romp this Halloween, Iain Banks’ debut novel, infamously condemned as a ‘work of unparalleled depravity’

by The Irish Times, is decidedly not for you. However, it’s no pulpy, exploitative shocker. Aided by Banks’ masterfully paced and snappy prose, its phenomenally bleak violence conceals a compelling narrative of mystery and isolation. Even its most harrowing imagery feels purposeful and never gratuitous. Stick with it, if you can, and you’ll be rewarded; this is a novel that, for better or worse, leaves a lasting impression.

epigram 28.10.2019

Music

@EpigramMusic epigram_music

Editor Deputy Editor Digital Editor Deputy Digital Editor

Francesca Frankis Guy Marcham Joe Boyd Will Snelling

‘Expect some pretty good dad dancing’: Epigram Music interview APRE Editor’s Pick: The Hall ween Special

The Specials - Ghost Town

Chuff Media

Dusty Springfield - Spooky

[A] unique brand of alternative pop, drawing influences from the 2000’s indie scene

“

It perfectly showcases their consistency and versatility

Charlie about buying some expensive yet disappointing sushi, what the Midlands are soon to be renowned for after this interview goes to press.

All jokes aside, the hard working and charismatic band are a pleasure to interview, and really put on a great performance later that night. If you like alternative-indie pop music be sure to give these guys a listen and you won’t be disappointed. You never know, they might just be the soundtrack to your Christmas this year.

Bauhaus - Bella Lugosi’s dead

The Horrors - Ghost

Jamie T - Zombie

Chuff Media

“

fluences, especially when listening to songs like ‘All yours’, which wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Foals album. Jules tells me that they will soon be releasing new song ‘Dream World’, a ‘vibey, dark track’ that is his favourite song of theirs.

There is also talk of a new EP being released by the end of this year and, unexpectedly, a potential Christmas song. According to Charlie, it was written as a joke around 2 years ago, but ‘they [record label] really liked it’.

Hopefully it will get released as there is a definite deficit of alternative Christmas songs out there, and as Jules reminds me, Christmas songs are ‘the gift that keeps on giving’. Aside from new EPs and potential Christmas number ones, the band have more definitive plans in the form of a UK headline tour taking place next February- they’ll be visiting The Louisiana in Bristol on the 22nd.

The band tell me that Leeds (also a destination on the headline tour) is one of their favourite places to play, which is met with an excited response by my friend and former Leeds resident Liv, who has accompanied me to the gig. I question the band on their thoughts of The Cookie in Leicester (my local home venue) and am met with an anecdote from

Image:

‘I

t’s the longest tour we’ve ever done’ – Charlie Brown, singer and guitarist of alternative pop duo Apre tells me just before they perform at Exchange in Bristol (supporting Inhaler on their epic headline tour.) Charlie is joined by other half of the band, Jules Konieczny: ‘It’s been really good, really fun’, he reveals.

Despite having just travelled down to Bristol all the way from Glasgow earlier today they are in good spirits.

The London-based band have toured a remarkable amount, considering their recent 2018 formation.

Their unique brand of alternative pop, drawing influences from ‘the 2000s indie scene, Bombay Bicycle Club, Two Door Cinema Club and Foals’, is well suited to live performance and has been gladly received by crowds on the Inhaler tour (Jules tells me that ‘Europe was wicked’). It’s a good thing the pair enjoy touring as they have just been announced as support for Half Alive on their massive European tour, starting in Zu-

“

Second Year, Geography

rich in late October. Mentions of Half Alive leads into a discussion about dancing; Half Alive arguably have some of the most impressive dance moves in the music industry. When asked if they were planning on rolling out a similar style of synchronised dance on the tour, I’m told to expect ‘pretty good dad dancing’. Jules explains that he thinks their dancing has improved a lot recently. ‘Speak for yourself mate’, retorts Charlie, highlighting the charisma and close relationship between the bandmates.

The band’s latest release, 2.45, a collection of all their previous EPs, was a special curation for Record Store Day and was on sale at the merch stand after the gig. Containing some of their most popular songs to date (such as ‘Gap Year 2008’ and ‘Come Down’), it perfectly showcases their consistency and versatility as a band.

The synth-heavy alternative pop clearly highlights the band’s in

“

Epigram Music catch upcoming indie pop band APRE - just before they blow up Katie Hubbard

The Cure - A Forest

28.10.2019 epigram

Music 27

The vibrant history of Bristol’s music venues: The Lousiana B

ristol is renowned both nationally and globally for its music venues.

From clubs such as Motion to pubs and bars like the Crofters Rights, many of the city’s iconic venues have an interesting and varied past.

The Louisiana stands at the end of Wapping Road near the Bathurst Basin. The New Orleans style balcony stands out amongst the terrace it stands on, but even then it remains fairly unassuming. Within the Grade II listed building however, is an intimate music venue that has hosted some of the biggest music talent in the past thirty years.

Owned by the Schillace family for the past 32 years, the iconic venue has previously functioned as a Hotel, Pub, and a restaurant in its varied past.

It might have stayed that way if not for a fateful night in 1996 when another of Bristol’s venues caught fire.

In the aftermath of the blaze at The Fleece, The Louisiana flung open its doors and opened up its upper floor with a hastily erected stage to accommodate the artists scheduled for The Fleece.

“

Every genre and every size of artist has been catered to

“

A venue that has come to define the Bristol music scene

capacity of only 140 provides a delightful environment for artists and seemingly has even national touring acts that can sell out stadiums coming back.

Posters adorn the walls of both the pub downp stairs and the ra tog o h music stage P 7 Flat upstairs testifying to the vast number of artists who have played here. Divine Comedy, Black Keys, Scissor Sisters. Every genre and every size of artist has been catered to.

S p e a k ing to Laure Noverraz, who handles the booking of acts/shows, she puts this down to the fact that the venue is ‘grassroots, a safe space and has no grief.’

This is especially true in their attitude to the student music scene. Many student bands have played hy

Third Year, History

“

Aaron Wilkinson

Thus started a venue that has come to define both the Bristol music scene and musician’s careers. In the first week of opening as a music venue, London rock band Placebo played the venue, paving the way for a roster of illustrious artists who would play here.

Notable acts that have played the venue include Kasabian, The White Stripes, C o l d p l a y, Two Door Cinema Club, and Stereophonics. In true Bristol style, it’s said around the venue that the owner of the Louisiana ended up on a late night bender with the Welsh rockers.

Keane signed their label deal at the Louie while the global sensation that is Muse once had a 6 month residency as the house band.

Idles released their debut EP Welcome here in 2012. Amy Winehouse played here just after the release of Back to Black. The intimate venue which has a max

“

Exploring the eclectic history of Bristol’s most celebrated venues, Epigram Music lifts the curtain on the famed Louisiana

their first gigs at the Louisiana.

I spoke to Zac Richardson, lead guitarist of The New America, a Bristol based punkrock band. When asked about what he thought of the Louisiana he replied: ‘The Louisiana’s very cool because it feels a bit like a big living room, but the sound is routinely very good. Not too boomy or loud for the space. It’s cool because it’s a good enough size that well known bands will play there, but it’s still an intimate v e n u e ’.

There’s live music on pretty much most nights of the week at the Louisiana and you can find additional information on shows and upcoming dates at their website or by popping in for a drink. The staff are friendly, the drinks are good and the r vibe is incredible he latc B h so I’d whole-heartTas edly recommend heading on down to catch one of the brilliant acts lined up to play.

Most tickets start at around £5 and rarely go over £10, so it can be a pretty affordable night out too, especially for the student crowd. Why not support the local music scene?

You never know, the band you see tomorrow might be the next big thing, and who doesn’t love bragging rights?

November’s hottest tickets Injury Reserve The Fleece 9/11/19

Sampa The Great - Rough Trade 18/11/19

Art School Girlfriend - Rough Trade 25/11/19

Ezra Colletive Trinity 29/11/19

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What I’ve enjoyed most on the programme is being able to build relationships with the people I work with.

Matthew, Think Ahead participant

Apply your mind to mental health n

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Paid two-year fast-track route into mental health social work.

Fully funded master’s degree.

Make a real difference to adults with mental health problems.

Puzzles

Editor Subeditor

Kezi James Fergus Ustianowski

epigram.puzzles@gmail.com If you need any help, contact the editor by email or through social media

Sudoku

Halloween Fill-in Crossword

Fill the empty squraes with the numbers 1-9 so that each number appears once in each row, column and box.

Credit: Laura Stock-Caldwell, Fourth Year Engineering Mathematics Fill the empty squares with the words around the edge. Each letter should only fit into one square.

1 7 6

Bat Blood Broomstick Cackle Cloak Corpse Crypt Disguise Eyeballs Frankenstein

5

3 5 4 6 2 8 9 4 1 2 37 9 9 8 96 7 4 8

2 69 1 9 5 17 6

8 6 4

Continuing puzzle This will be a running puzzle where every week the previous weeks answer will help you solve this puzzle. Every weeks puzzle shall be put up online if a week is missed.

Credit: Fergus Ustianowski, Puzzles Subeditor

Using last edition’s answer, what four letter word best describes the music at the event?

Haunted Mask Nightmare Petrified Phantom Poltergeist Scary Scream Spider Supernatural Tombstone Vampire Voldemort Warlock Werewolf

1.

2.

Cryptic Crossword

3.

4.

5.

Credit: Conor Cullen, Fourth year Engineering Mathematics 5. King likes green vegetable eaten in his name (7).

6. Splitting the atom can be a nuisance. Made clear if you look in the right places (7).

12. Mike pulls a revolver on Oscar. It’s his greatest work (6,4).

13. Outlaw stringed instrument (5).

15. A rope is twisted to make a rather shrill sound (5).

16. Fits as tightly as a flower? (8).

17. Flightless bird has a fruity flavour (4).

18. Boast about special garb put on backwards (4).

Down 1. Manufacturer taken to court over tainted batch of anti-git oil (10).

2. High flier is hard to ingest (7).

3. Mirroring edit tool is on the rise (4).

4. Spooky presence at the Lough (5).

7. Manuscript containing alternative grains (5).

8. Swimming with lone whale can be a trick or treat situation (9).

17.

9. Strong current from Hampshire (3).

10. Plumber has to renovate. He has a new tap due (6).

11. Pop band using barium backwards and forwards (4).

14. Take a seat to reassess your direction (4).

18.

16. Use to store a fresh red fig (6).

7.

6.

Across

8.

11.

9.

10.

12.

14.

13.

15.

16.

Solutions will be posted online at: epigram.org.uk/tag/puzzles facebook.com/epigrampaper If you would like to submit ideas for Puzzles, email epigram.puzzles@gmail.com

Sport

Team of the week: Mens Lacrosse 2s

epigram 28.10.2019

Futsal: football’s forgotten sibling

UoB Mens Lacrosse 2s

UoB Futsal

IMDb / Blue Zoo

The 2s celebrated their 2nd win of the season thus far, with a 16-3 win over Plymouth. It was a great team effort, both defensively and offensively, with many players scoring 3 or more goals - notably Louis Smith who bagged a double hat-trick. Also, a special mention to man of the match James Dean, for a superb performance and great leadership on the pitch.

Futsal is often pushed aside by its bigger sibling, football, however, it is time it got some recognition of it’s own Alex Lamberti History, Third Year

O

riginating in South America in 1930, Futsal has become one of the fastest growing sports in the world, yet many people remain unaware of the game. Futsal is played on an indoor, hard floored court, similar to basketball. Each side has five players, including a goalkeeper, on the pitch at any one time, with around five substitutes,

who rotate on and off at anytime.

A common myth about the game is that the ball is allowed to be played off the walls or boards as is common in street football, but this is not the case. The pitch is marked out similarly to how a basketball pitch it, and play stops every time the ball goes off the court, as is the same in Association Football. The ball itself is smaller, harder and bounces less, which encourages players to favour ball control and short, quick passing

“

With over 50 members, futsal at the University of Bristol is one of the institution’s fastest growing sport

“

30

above long range balls downfield.

With over 50 members, futsal at the University of Bristol is one of the institution’s fastest growing sports clubs, with two men’s teams competing in BUCS competitions weekly. Founded in 2012, the club rapidly gained a following, with trialists in the early years easily reaching into the hundreds. This year, over 400 people trialled for only 15 available spaces in the club, which showcases the huge demand for the sport, consistent with its growth across the world over the last 10 years.

Bristol has grown into one of the biggest names in the BUCS Futsal leagues over the past few years. Both the 1st and 2nd team compete weekly

in the BUCS Western league, in the Western 1A and 2B respectively.

The 1s league includes high calibre opposition such as Exeter, Cardiff, Bath, Swansea and Bournemouth.

Additionally, the 1st team will compete for the national trophy this season, with a first-round fixture away to Wolverhampton to begin. Both sides this year are looking to win their leagues and cup competitions, looking to follow up good performances last season. The 1st team have already began strongly, beating Bournemouth 11-5 in the opening game of the season, whilst the 2s demolished the University of South Wales 21-3 in their own curtain raiser.

Grounded in an identity combining high quality performance with a strong club morale, the Futsal club is one of the most inclusive and tightly knit communities in the University.

The club’s focus on the needs and wants of club members ensures that all who join have the best experience possible. This is proven by the club having one of the highest player retention rates of any of the sports clubs at the University, with over 95 per cent of players who join the club playing for the full three years.

For anyone interested in playing Futsal at a more social level, we have, this year set up a futsal intramural league, which is set to begin later this month. If the sport is something that appeals to you, be sure to check out our Facebook page, University of Bristol Futsal Club, and our Instagram, @uobfutsal, for details on how to get involved.

Sport 31

28.10.2019 epigram

Paige Taylor UBMC Alumni

I

t’s midnight in the quaint French village of Orpierre - we’ve been travelling since 9am and we’ve been promised pizza. We arrive to the camp site with suitcases full of ropes and quickdraws and grumbly bellies to find that everything is shut; it IS midnight on a Sunday night. Luckily, some biscuits are shared around and everyone goes to sleep excited for the promise of French baguettes, brie and of course, some climbing in the morning.

For a lot of us on the trip it was our first experience leading outdoors.

Leading is different to your usual indoor climbing centres, as the rope is attached to your harness rather than an anchor at the top of the route, so you attach yourself to the rock along the way. It was the perfect setting to learn outdoors.

“

Orpierre is extremely picturesque snowy alps in the background, large valleys and the sounds of waterfalls around you

Orpierre is extremely picturesque snowy alps in the background, large valleys and the sounds of waterfalls around you. It fully immerses you in the climbing mindset.

There are six crags with routes ranging from 3–8b. It’s amazing to

watch people sending those higher grades, working their way up the rock gracefully with the utmost precision.

Then, you attempt a four for the first time and nothing feels more terrifying than when you free solo up to the first bolt. You end up on the rock swearing to yourself, asking why you’re doing this and why everyone arounds you enjoys it so much. But when you reach the top, the utmost feeling of accomplishment waves over you as you’re being lowered to the ground.

Us newbies suddenly went from wanting to talk about anything other than climbing over dinner, to wanting to share our own stories of risky moves, tight spots and routes we wanted to

“

The most helpful piece of advice anyone gave me was ‘fall until falling is boring’

attempt. Luckily, you’re surrounded by lots of people who know what they’re doing, who are willing to share chalk and beta to improve your climbing. The most helpful piece of advice anyone gave me was ‘fall until falling is boring’.

What I’ll take away from the trip is the strong sense of community climbing instils in a group of people.

We’re a club that spans across courses and year groups, ranging from theatre to aerospace, 1st year to pHd. But when you’re playing ultimate Uno, screaming at someone across the table about different climbing routes, you feel like one big family. We’re engaging in a sport that relies on trust between a climber and a belayer, and while there is a lot of controlled risk you never know what could go wrong. Orpierre was the first of many people’s outdoor climbing experiences and it’s kickstarted a strong sense of commitment to the sense of adventure climbing gives you. Here’s to Croatia this year!

Epigram / UBMC

Epigram / Aleksandra Wierzbowska

ska

W

hat would you do if a guy you had spoken to only a couple of times, sent you some photos of a faraway country you knew little about, and said: ‘let’s go climbing there’. Val had me hooked from the beginning! This is how I ended up bolting first ascents in Armenia.

For those who don’t know Val, he completed the first thru-hike of the 1500km Transcaucasian Trail through Armenia and Georgia in 2017 and came back full of stories of adventure and enthusiasm for the region. I think the main reason I latched onto the improbable idea of developing new rock

ow

UBMC Alumni

zb

Peter Rosso

climbing routes was due to the sheer passion Val has for the country.

Armenia is a landlocked country in the southern Caucasus which is not famous for high mountains. Yet, it offers one of the largest amounts of limestone I have seen in such a concentrated area. Located at 2000m within Dilijan National Park, the limestone cliffs extend for over 15 kilometres ranging from 50-400m high. As beautiful as the rock is, and as good as the climbing is, what struck me as the most unique aspect of our experience was the incredibly hospitable nature of Armenians.

When I first came to Bristol at the start of my degree, I would have never imagined myself doing something like this. I was all about safe bets and the certainty of what was coming up the next day. I knew I had to go to lectures, and I knew I would have to eventually get a job. Life felt more like putting one foot after another, marching in a direction that I was told to. During my studies, the certainty of what I wanted to do with my time faded and all that was left was what I knew made me happy; climbing.

I found myself in an eight-person team covering three continents and five countries. The Project Armenia team was composed of UBMC former President Florrie Wallace, Bristol Uni Alumni Val Ismaili, Kim and Graham McGrenere, Tadeh Karapetian, Aleksandra Wierzbowska, Jasiek Kędzia, and myself. I was desperately trying to learn all I could about bolting new climbing routes. I messaged all the developers I knew from local climbing walls until one of them agreed to mentor me.

Meanwhile, as a team, we were applying for sponsors and getting funding so that we would be able to afford the trip. Here’s a tip: don’t be

UBMC ventured to Orpierre in France for its sunny, dry rock and range of crags and climbs for any kind of climber - there was something new for everyone to try every day

“

UBMC alumni bolt first ascents giving start to Project Armenia

shy about asking. If you have an idea in mind and a story to tell, you might find someone willing to support you through your adventure.

When you are preparing to set off for an adventure of this scale, time flies.

Before I knew it, it was time to fly to Armenia. Luggage was lost, flights were delayed, and from day one things started deviating from the plan!

The overwhelming potential for climbing required Val and I to set off on a scouting mission, walking along the full extent of the cliff line in order to understand where to focus our works.

We quickly realised that the scale of these cliffs was larger than we thought.

The subsequent weeks came to be what I think was one of the best experiences of my life. I abseiled down walls which likely no one has before.

Slowly, this made me realise the true scale of what we had in front of us.

We slept through terrible thunderstorms only to be woken up by beautiful cloud inversions. Blessed by the warm sun in the morning, we were forced to hide in the shade at lunchtime.

But regardless of how things were going, it was beautiful to share this experience with such a ier W ra d motivated team. an s k e / Al Epigram I sweat and bled on those walls, but I did it with people who are now close friends and hopefully I will see again soon in Armenia.

It is mad to think back to a few years ago, when I was learning to tie a knot for the first time. If you haven’t yet at university, consider joining a society and be curious above all else.

Ask questions, and learn as much as you can so that when adventure comes calling, you’ll be ready for it!

This expedition has now finished, but #projectarmenia has just begun.

This enormous area of rock is no longer hidden away unknown to climbers.

We’ve equipped 23 routes which are ready to climb, but there are another 15 kilometres of cliff line ready for others willing to take a risk and develop new lines. As Val said, ‘[This is] an open invite to any experienced or wannabe route developers - there’s lots of rock waiting for you in Armenia!’

If you want to hear more stories from the expedition, check out www. projectarmenia.co.uk. In the meantime, lots of talks have been set up by, so UBMC Climbing, so give them a follow on social media and keep an eye on the UBES expedition news for more details.

“

Epigram / Aleksandra Wierzbowska

Alumni of Mountaineering and Climbing Club on how it rocks!

Sport

Editor Digital Editor Student Sport Correspondent

India Gay Tymoteusz Suszczyński Edward McAteer

Smifsports Photography

Bristol men’s brush aside Bath in clinical second half performance

Eddie McAteer

Student Sport Correspondent

A

crisp Wednesday night under the lights at Coombe Dingle saw UBAFC take on Bath in their second BUCS league fixture of the season. The game started with a composed Bath side passing the ball well without really threatening the Bristol goal, yet, as their confidence grew, Bath looked more and more dangerous.

The breakthrough came in the 21st

minute, when some fine defensive work by one of the Bath midfielders saw them break Bristol. They managed to turn the defence and curl a brilliant strike into the top right corner. Following this setback, Bristol rallied and put together some nice moves. However the striker, Femiola, had little to work with and so the game remained at 0-1, with some heavy challenges starting to come in from either side.

The game was completely turned on its head at the end of the half, when the ball was won back by some industrious defensive work from the Bristol midfield. The ball was worked out wide to right winger, Pagano, who promptly fizzed a cross past the face of goal for Femiola to bring the score to 1-1. This goal, and the half-time talk, proved influential as

Bristol came out for the second half a different team.

Immediately, the midfield continued to defend dilligently, winning the ball back in the middle of the park. Taking the ball in his stride, Haire powered off a brilliant shot to the bottom left hand corner to make the score 2-1 in the 46th minute.

With the tone set early by Bristol, Bath tried to get a response and looked good for a period; it took some solid defending from the men in red to keep Bath at bay. Bristol struck again, however, when a throw in from the left saw Bath at sixes and sevens in defence. Then. Hinks gleefully put the ball past the keeper, giving Bristol some breathing space at 3-1.

Shortly after the third goal Bristol

regathered possession and some lovely interplay allowed man of the match, Hinks, to extend Bristol’s lead to 4-1 with 30 minutes still to play.

The loyal Bristol supporters then found their voice and the chants

“

The half time talk proved influential as Bristol came out a different team

“

Bristol’s first team put on an impressive show during the second half of their recent fixture against Bath’s second team

got increasingly confident. The home players seemed to adopt this confidence as the Bath players’ heads went down, as Bristol proceeded to lay down a marker for the rest of the season.

The introduction of substitutes

did Bristol no harm either, with all the new men looking to impress.

The last 30 minutes was all one way traffic; Bristol threatened on multiple occasions before a fantastic team move down the left-hand side picked out (replacement forward) Jasper, who took a simple touch and nonchalantly beat the keeper with a stunning curling effort for Bristol’s fifth goal.

Bristol continued to move from their own half into the Bath box with ease, and a mix-up from the Bath defender and his goalkeeper allowed Gabe to snatch his teams sixth and final goal, easily slotting the ball into an empty net. With the fans in full voice Bristol saw out the remainder of the game without any issues and celebrated a well-deserved victory at the final whistle.