Issue 15

Issue 15, February 2011

www.dur.ac.uk/grove

ENGLISH WRITING • EVENTS COVERAGE AFGHAN SPECIAL • DURHAM DRAMA FESTIVAL, ‘DEAD LANGUAGES’ TRANSLATIONS

XV

THE TEAM’S PAGE Welcome to the third issue of the year! Despite the stressful nagging thoughts of perhaps beginning dissertation research/beginning to write at least a paragraph towards those summatives this issue of The Grove has still somehow managed to materialise…This issue includes exciting coverage of the Durham Drama Festival, featuring interviews with some of the student writers and extracts from their plays. The Durham Drama Festival 2011 runs from 23rd-26th February. For more information on this see: http://www.dramafest.co.uk.

We also have an Afghanistan special making up the Centrefold section of this issue.

The articles are written from various viewpoints by people who are exploring the way in which the West interprets the country and issues connected with it, especially in light of military presence within Afghanistan. The articles are also intended to promote The Afghan Appeal Fund, a charity run on a voluntary basis by family and friends of British soldiers to raise awareness of the plight of people of Afghanistan, and raises money to help them. For more information on this please see the charity’s website: http://afghanappealfund.org.uk/ As ever, if you’re interested in contributing to the magazine please send your work or ideas to: grove@dur.ac.uk We are also currently recruiting for next year’s exec, so if you feel that you would like to have a role on the editorial side of things, now is your perfect opportunity to get involved! Again, just email the above address, and we’ll be in touch about available positions.

Enjoy the issue!

-The Grove Team

THE GROVE IS FUNDED BY

2

CONTENTS ENGLISH WRITING

EVENTS

“The Inheritance of Loss”

by Kiran Desai “Amy Foster” by Joseph Conrad “The Finkler Question”

by Howard Jacobson “The Dead”by James Joyce

“The Secret Policeman”

by Matthew Urwin “Matthew Urwin Interview”

by Rebecca Sheppard “Waiting For Dogfish”

by Ellen Diver “Ellen Diver Interview”

by Lyndsey Fineran “A Daughter”

by Donnchadh O’Conaill “Donnchadh O’Conaill Interview”

by Alex Mason

page 4 6 8 10

STUDENT WRITING “Untitled” by Hugh Smith “Higher Love” by Avishek Parui “Seasons of Mind (extract)”

by Ruby Lawrence “The Nose Garden” by Gwen Kent “Departure” by Lydia Knoop “Cry Baby” by Ralf Webb

12 12 13 14 15 17

26 27 29 30 31

TRANSLATIONS “Old English Riddles”

by Unknown “Metamorphoses” by Ovid “Aeneid” by Virgil “Hymn To Aphrodite” by Sappho “Iliad”by Homer “The Saga of Gunnlaugr Worm Tongue (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu)”

by Unknown

CENTREFOLD “Unseen Knowledge of Afghanistan”

by M K Alam “Afghanistan - Pakistan Border Regions” by Oliver Renwick “Britain In Afghanistan”

by Anonymous “Alexander’s Relevance To Afghanistan” by Chris Wright

25

19 20 22 23

34 35 36 37 38

EVENTS LISTINGS

41

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

42

THE GROVE TEAM ARE Editor-in-Chief: Emily Chester; Deputy Editor: Lyndsey Fineran; Acting Editor: Alex Mason; Deputy Acting Editors: Ettie Holland, Sasha Magill; Section Editors: John Clegg, Rebecca Sheppard, Kate Hutchings, Alexis Grigorieff, Lyndsey Fineran Sub-Editors: Ella Colquhoun-Cole, Will Hanson, Astha Sharma-Pokharel, LeeMey Goh, Louis Campbell-Stievenard, Emma Charles, Jamie Baxter, Laura Mosley Sponsorship Officer: Tom Trennery Development Officer: Maxime Dargaud-Fons

3

33

ENGLISH WRITING Happy New Year! After focussing exclusively on poetry in the last English Section of The Grove it seemed high time we showcased some of our favourite prose. In this issue we’ve given you excerpts from contemporary novels to turn-of-the-century short stories. Enjoy!

KIRAN DESAI

Excerpt from The Inheritance of Loss All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapor, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the light, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.

Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.

Here, at the back, inside the cavernous kitchen, was the cook, trying to light the damp wood. He fingered the kindling gingerly for fear of the community of scorpions living, loving, reproducing in the pile. Once he’d found a mother, plump with poison, fourteen babies on her back.

Eventually the fire caught and he placed his kettle on top, as battered, as encrusted as something dug up by an archeological team, and waited for it to boil. The walls were singed and sodden, garlic hung by muddy stems from the charred beams, thickets of soot clumped batlike upon the ceiling. The flame cast a mosaic of shiny orange across the cook’s face, and his top half grew hot, but a mean gust tortured his arthritic knees. Up through the chimney and out, the smoke mingled with the mist that was gathering speed, sweeping in thicker and thicker, obscuring things in parts—half a hill, then the other half. The trees turned into silhouettes, loomed forth, were submerged again. Gradually the vapor replaced everything with itself, solid objects with shadow, and nothing remained that did not seem molded from or inspired by it. Sai’s breath flew from her nostrils in drifts, and the diagram of a giant squid constructed from scraps of information, scientists’ dreams, sank entirely into the murk.

She shut the magazine and walked out into the garden. The forest was old and thick at the edge of the lawn; the bamboo thickets rose thirty feet into the gloom; the trees were moss-slung giants, bunioned and misshapen, tentacled with the roots of 4

ENGLISH WRITING

Kiran Desai

orchids. The caress of the mist through her hair seemed human, and when she held her fingers out, the vapor took them gently into its mouth. She thought of Gyan, the mathematics tutor, who should have arrived an hour ago with his algebra book. But it was 4:30 already and she excused him with the thickening mist.

When she looked back, the house was gone; when she climbed the steps back to the veranda, the garden vanished. The judge had fallen asleep and gravity acting upon the slack muscles, pulling on the line of his mouth, dragging on his cheeks, showed Sai exactly what he would look like if he were dead.

“Where is the tea?” he woke and demanded of her. “He’s late,” said the judge, meaning the cook with the tea, not Gyan.

“I’ll get it,” she offered.

The gray had permeated inside, as well, settling on the silverware, nosing the corners, turning the mirror in the passageway to cloud. Sai, walking to the kitchen, caught a glimpse of herself being smothered and reached forward to imprint her lips upon the surface, a perfectly formed film star kiss. “Hello,” she said, half to herself and half to someone else.

No human had ever seen an adult giant squid alive, and though they had eyes as big as apples to scope the dark of the ocean, theirs was a solitude so profound they might never encounter another of their tribe. The melancholy of this situation washed over Sai. Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

The water boiled and the cook lifted the kettle and emptied it into the teapot.

“Terrible,” he said. “My bones ache so badly, my joints hurt—I may as well be dead. If not for Biju. . . .” Biju was his son in America. He worked at Don Pollo—or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba’s Fried Chicken? His father could not remember or understand or pronounce the names, and Biju changed jobs so often, like a fugitive on the run—no papers.

“Yes, it’s so foggy,” Sai said. “I don’t think the tutor will come.” She jigsawed the cups, saucers, teapot, milk, sugar, strainer, Marie and Delite biscuits all to fit upon the tray.

“I’ll take it,” she offered.

“Careful, careful,” he said scoldingly, following with an enamel basin of milk for Mutt. Seeing Sai swim forth, spoons making a jittery music upon the warped sheet of tin, Mutt raised her head. “Tea-time?” said her eyes as her tail came alive.

“Why is there nothing to eat?” the judge asked, irritated, lifting his nose from a muddle of pawns in the center of the chessboard. He looked, then, at the sugar in the pot: dirty, micalike glinting granules. The biscuits looked like cardboard and there were dark finger marks on the white of the saucers. Never ever was the tea served the way it should be, but he demanded at least a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws. Something sweet and something salty. This was a travesty and it undid the 5

Kiran Desai

ENGLISH WRITING

very concept of teatime.

“Only biscuits,” said Sai to his expression. “The baker left for his daughter’s wedding.”

“I don’t want biscuits.”

Sai sighed.

“How dare he go for a wedding? Is that the way to run a business? The fool. Why can’t the cook make something?”

“There’s no more gas, no kerosene.”

“Why the hell can’t he make it over wood? All these old cooks can make cakes perfectly fine by building coals around a tin box. You think they used to have gas stoves, kerosene stoves, before? Just too lazy now.”

The cook came hurrying out with the leftover chocolate pudding warmed on the fire in a frying pan, and the judge ate the lovely brown puddle and gradually his face took on an expression of grudging pudding contentment. They sipped and ate, all of existence passed over by nonexistence, the gate leading nowhere, and they watched the tea spill copious ribbony curls of vapor, watched their breath join the mist slowly twisting and turning, twisting and turning.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Excerpt from Amy Foster The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch the distant horizon of the sea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen.

From the edge of a copse a wagon with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge. Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a heroic uncouthness. The end of his carter’s whip quivered high up in the blue.

Kennedy discoursed.

“She’s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, the tenant’s wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don’t know what induced me to notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer attentively at a vague shape which, after all, may be nothing more curious or strange than a signpost. The only peculiarity 6

ENGLISH WRITING

Joseph Conrad

I perceived in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary stammer which passes away with the first word. When sharply spoken to, she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries; and as to Mrs. Smith’s gray parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith’s well-known frivolousness, was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties. If it’s true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

“How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an inscrutable mystery.

She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same - day after day, month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat trimmed with a black feather (I’ve seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along two hundred yards of road - never further. There stood Foster’s cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately - perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse - a possession!

Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky - and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute...”

With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on a gorgeous and somber 7

Joseph Conrad

ENGLISH WRITING

aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.

HOWARD JACOBSON

Excerpt from The Finkler Question He should have seen it coming.

His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.

He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in the daylit world. Lamp posts and trees reared up at him, splintering his shins. Speeding cars lost control and rode on to the footpath leaving him lying in a pile of torn tissue and mangled bones. Sharp objects dropped from scaffolding and pierced his skull.

Women worst of all. When a woman of the sort Julian Treslove found beautiful crossed his path it wasn’t his body that took the force but his mind. She shattered his calm.

True, he had no calm, but she shattered whatever calm there was to look forward to in the future. She was the future.

People who see what’s coming have faulty chronology, that is all. Treslove’s clocks were all wrong. He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her — his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney — only for every wrack of it — its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future — to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past.

She didn’t leave him for another man, or tell him she was sick of him and of their life together, she passed away in a perfected dream of tragic love — consumptive, wet-eyelashed, and as often as not singing her goodbyes to him in phrases borrowed from popular Italian opera.

There was no child. Children spoilt the story.

Between the rearing lamp posts and the falling masonry he would sometimes catch himself rehearsing his last words to her — also as often as not borrowed from the popular Italian operas — as though time had concertinaed, his heart had smashed, and she was dying even before he had met her.

There was something exquisite to Treslove in the presentiment of a woman he loved expiring in his arms. On occasions he died in hers, but her dying in his was better. It was how he knew he was in love: no presentiment of her expiry, no proposal.

8

ENGLISH WRITING

Howard Jacobson

That was the poetry of his life. In reality it had all been women accusing him of stifling their creativity and walking out on him.

In reality there had even been children.

But beyond the reality something beckoned.

On a school holiday in Barcelona he paid a gypsy fortune-teller to read his hand.

‘I see a woman,’ she told him.

Treslove was excited. ‘Is she beautiful?’

‘To me, no,’ the gypsy told him. ‘But to you... maybe. I also see danger.’

Treslove was more excited still. ‘How will I know when I have met her?’

‘You will know.’

‘Does she have a name?’

‘As a rule, names are extra,’ the gypsy said, bending back his thumb. ‘But I will make an exception for you because you are young. I see a Juno — do you know a Juno?’

She pronounced it ‘Huno’. But only when she remembered.

Treslove closed one eye. Juno? Did he know a Juno? Did anyone know a Juno? No, sorry, no, he didn’t. But he knew a June.

‘No, no, bigger than June.’ She seemed annoyed with him for not being able to do bigger than June. ‘Judy . . . Julie . . . Judith. Do you know a Judith?’

Hudith.

Treslove shook his head. But he liked the sound of it — Julian and Judith. Hulian and Hudith Treslove.

‘Well, she’s waiting for you, this Julie or Judith or Juno . . . I do still see a Juno.’

Treslove closed his other eye. Juno, Juno . . .

‘How long will she wait?’ he asked.

‘As long as it takes you to find her.’

Treslove imagined himself looking, searching the seven seas. ‘You said you see danger. How is she dangerous?’

He saw her rearing up at him, with a knife to his throat — Addio, mio bello, addio.

‘I did not say it was she who was dangerous. Only that I saw danger. It might be you who is dangerous to her. Or some other person who is dangerous to both of you.’

‘So should I avoid her?’ Treslove asked.

She shuddered a fortune-teller’s shudder. ‘You cannot avoid her.’

She was beautiful herself. At least in Treslove’s eyes. Emaciated and tragic with gold hooped earrings and a trace, he thought, of a West Midlands accent. But for the accent he would have been in love with her.

She didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. Someone, something, was in store for him. Something of more moment than a mishap.

He was framed for calamity and sadness but was always somewhere else when either struck. Once, a tree fell and crushed a person walking just a half a yard behind him. Treslove heard the cry and wondered whether it was his own. He missed a 9

Howard Jacobson

ENGLISH WRITING

berserk gunman on the London Underground by the length of a single carriage. He wasn’t even interviewed by the police. And a girl he had loved with a schoolboy’s hopeless longing — the daughter of one of his father’s friends, an angel with skin as fine as late-summer rose petals and eyes that seemed forever wet — died of leukaemia in her fourteenth year while Treslove was in Barcelona having his fortune told. His family did not call him back for her final hours or even for the funeral.

They did not want to spoil his holiday, they told him, but the truth was they did not trust his fortitude. People who knew Treslove thought twice about inviting him to a deathbed or a burial.

So life was still all his to lose. He was, at forty-nine, in good physical shape, had not suffered a bruise since falling against his mother’s knee in infancy, and was yet to be made a widower. To his knowledge, not a woman he had loved or known sexually had died, few having stayed long enough with him anyway for their dying to make a moving finale to anything that could be called a grand affair. It gave him a preternaturally youthful look — this unconsummated expectation of tragic event.

The look which people born again into their faith sometimes acquire.

JAMES JOYCE

Excerpt from The Dead She was fast asleep.

Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.

Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded?

From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be 10

ENGLISH WRITING

James Joyce

sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

11

STUDENT WRITING Welcome all to a new term and more importantly, a whole new year. While Christmas hibernation may seem just a distant memory and the only celebrations in sight are those of an essay hand-in nature, hang it there! Leave the library for an hour, grab a cup of coffee and settle down with the new issue of The Grove and see what our lovely student writers have been up to.

Dissertation, what dissertation??

Also, please find a reprint of Gwen Kent’s short story, The Nose Garden with our apologies for the misprint of it in the last issue and many thanks to Gwen for her understanding.

HUGH SMITH

Untitled the sun’s crazy: not unlike a new born baby without any eyes slipping out from the sky’s reddened thighs.

AVISHEK PARUI

Higher Love The waltz of slanting shadows flirted with the furniture I cross each day to be a little further from where the mirrors can see me.

The last man was driving away to his wife and kids as my diaphragm grinned back like the lock of my apartment door that opens with too many keys to let in the hands that enter to buy what I do not own.

My limbs hanged with the loss that eats after being eaten 12

STUDENT WRITING

Avishek Parui

as the sight of the ketchup bottle alone in the table mixed with the ping of my micro-oven announcing its warmed up meat.

The cold floor stung with the fear that comes with the touch of the cruelly complete.

But the window ledge I climbed on saw me fall in love with the knowledge that I could leap till I fingertipped MAYBE across the misty glass.

Stepping back I smelt the rooftops suddenly age beneath my window with the spasms of a flesh that could have become a bird had I let me fly away had I not heard...

RUBY LAWRENCE

Seasons Of Mind (an extract) Today was garden day. We have garden day once a week. I think they have some idea that garden day invigorates us, fills us up with fresh air, revitalises our sorry souls with the great outdoors. In reality it is an escape. A chance, for just a couple of hours, to be out of a four wall prison of white paint and tinkering nurses and the lonely company of our aching minds.

I am so bored with myself. I used to try to talk to myself when I first came here but when I did the answering voices evolved into the chorus of others, painfully infuriating, mocking me with their unbearably joyous song. That’s when I got so angry I’d scream, and when no sound came out I’d bawl even harder till my throat felt like it was ripping and my breath burnt into my shuddering lungs. The only sounds were my knuckles smashing against the doorframe and thud of the bed as I heaved it across the room like a white, skeletal Hercules. The last time it brought them running, the nurses and some of the doctors too. For the days that followed I was strapped down with buckles across my body and a needle sticking out of my forearm, injecting me with something that slowed my blood down to a soup. I never tried it again.

The garden is beautiful. I always sit alone away from the main lawn (they trust me enough to go that far) in a wooded area, tucked away from the house.

The trees are ancient twists of wood rooted so deep in the soil they are like 13

Ruby Lawrence

STUDENT WRITING

limbs from the ground itself, bent, curled, arthritic fingers of the earth. Their age fascinates me. I know trees can live for hundreds of years, even thousands.

All around them so much has changed but their wrinkled bark remains unmoving, stretching up into branches fluttering with green in the sun. I say ‘unmoving’ yet there is something about a tree which is so alive, the way it groans and creaks in the wind, shifting its weight, how it sighs when a breeze flows through its leaves. If you press an ear against the trunk of tree you can sometimes hear the rhythmic gurgle of the sap from deep inside, the blood of the tree slowly pumping through its veins.

GWEN KENT

The Nose Garden Veera had a cold.

She went to the local surgery. The cold had stopped her sleeping and dark phlegm the colour of brewed tea shot painfully through her lungs. Also, she was lonely.

The doctor said: ‘with the latest scientific advancements, the common cold should not need to cause you worry. All you need is a new set of lungs and a new nose. All will be well.’

The operation was quick. When Veera woke up she could breathe perfectly.

She was presented a mirror which showed her a sharp new nose, different, surrounded by stitches. ‘Where are my old nose and lungs, please?’

‘We’ve disposed of them for you. You won’t be needing them again.’

As Veera walked home she mourned for that loss of her own body, her old nose that had been with her, kept her alive, for over twenty years. Those lungs that had grown with her and given her her first laugh, her first words. Now she wondered at the last words they had given her, those words that demanded the partnership end.

That night, driven by sentiment, Veera broke into the surgery and located her lungs and nose, attached to one another still by the long, knobbly trachea, in the bin of the operating theatre. They were still breathing doggedly, hacking and spluttering, the last juices of Veera’s own body leaking from them into her own hands.

‘I’ve come back for you,’ Veera cooed, ‘I’ll keep you safe.’ She took the lungs and nose home. ‘I can’t keep you inside: people would talk. And if you’re outside I can’t let a fox get you.’

Veera thought of the perfect place. Lit by moon puddles and the neighbour’s sensor lights, she went into her garden and dug a pit. She placed the lungs deep inside of it, pushed earth around the trachea to keep it upright and the nose 14

STUDENT WRITING

Gwen Kent

above ground, so that it could breathe. As she finished, watering the soil to ease the lung’s trauma, she heard the pace of the nose’s inhalation slowing. It was calm. It felt safe. Its new body was the earth.

Veera wiped the phlegm that dripped from her old nose, night after night, until the cold passed and her planted lungs could breathe properly again. She mourned that the doctor had given her the power to make a bad decision.

Humans will always make a bad decision when given the opportunity.

And then, as the winter came to an end, she noticed neighbours, friends, all with different noses, all with fresh new breath, phlegm free. She raided the surgery bins at night and found lungs piled on lungs, tracheas twisted and noses blocked, neglected and panting and dripping.

She brought them home by the armful, planted them in her garden. Dug holes and watered them in. Night after night she gathered them, cold and desperate, until her garden was crowded with the breath of fifty sets of lungs, fifty noses sniffing scents she had planted for them: lemon thyme, rose and jasmine, which crept twiggy fingers around rocks to flower in the breeze of eager nostrils. The ground swelled and sunk with satisfaction.

And the lungs felt with her. She saw a burglar trying to climb through her garden, but the ground beneath panicked and panted and he could hardly stand up straight, turned back on himself before even getting halfway to a window.

Veera crept into her garden and sat, held her breath and felt the garden shudder. She breathed deeply and strongly and lay herself down as close to the ground as possible, felt the slow rise and fall in and under her, felt the warm breath tickle her all over.

She decided to start sleeping there, in the garden, among the noses, breathing, and no longer felt alone.

LYDIA KNOOP

Departure 02:07: the keys were too bright, luminous as snow and glow-worms and there would be no more sleep now. A few more heavy hours anchored in a leaf-thrashed dawn, a taxi. The station was empty where light grew, gutting the landscape slowly, leaving raw bones pulsing at the sky. Wind lifted the feathers on a small, clawed carcass and hills began to gather their flesh, as one forgetting romance pulls stale socks on the nudity of sex. This wasn’t as planned. Years ago, in a notebook, there had been a lust for adventure and the flow of hills beside the train’s path, full veins of writing flung from the washing-line horizon.

15

Lydia Knoop

STUDENT WRITING

She had dreamed of fabric. Green ribbon unbound in streaming tongues across the room, winding illustrations out over the ceiling and looping the bed in vowels. And now there was biting silence: morning stitching the sheets overhead. Wet earth or worse. Mice were running between the tracks, tarblack, lumps of mobile coal. What had happened to the ribbon? White and green, but the needles had turned everything upside down. Even dreams could carve havoc now. Six twenty, the man holding up a plastic moon and day began.

All it took was a ticket collector entering the carriage. Entering one, small hell upon another. Where her breath ran out the seats illuminated, pupils filled with black wool. Oh not now, not now. The train staggered and fingers surged to the seat in front: belly up, dead fish. Faceless, flawlessly remembered save for that: replaced it with a box and the ticket crawling out like a badly kept secret. She wished she hadn’t worn her favourite dress. I couldn’t help but notice – I saw you earlier, my co-worker...you switched sides on the carriage.

The view. All this for the view. Moving backwards reminds me of death. If only she’d said it. Your dress – A thrift-store in San Francisco. It was the day after the fur hat, blowing circles of air that turned brown into grey. That’s how you know, he said, that’s how you know. And the day after that she’d bought a summer dress for Christmas and watched a film about finding constellations in freckles. The first Christmas away from home. Fifteen dollar shoes and a t-shirt with the Eiffel Tower and a seam running down the back like it owned its own spine. A bar where they shared Californian Merlot with fake ID and cheesy fries because the beer hurt her insides. Days blurred and time differences became ink-blotted, coffee beans ground alongside spices, sleep and splintered mornings. The armchairs she remembered, soft and calmer than the hot, love-crazed walls and holding warm cushions the colour of spilt sun.

Your dress – I couldn’t help but notice. They could never help it. She focussed on the mice spreading their insides on the tracks like jam. You’re a very pretty young woman he said. Thirteen-year-old mind still unable to get its head around breasts and blood every month. He walked away.

A woman opposite fumbled with a fresh paper, throwing dirtied doves in the aisle, licking her fingers to mend the chaos, then the world was on rails and the train hummed tunelessly. It would always be like this. Moments colliding, boats unchaining in the ports, trains halting in the cities, days threaded together and somewhere a child threads conkers on a string, bludgeons them to pieces. Words morphing in the mind, on the tongue, dipped in the copperpoisoned fountains and festered on the shit-covered heads of gargoyles.

Hands unfolding maps and memories and memories and memories. Let them stop. Let them stop.

16

STUDENT WRITING

Ralf Webb

Ralf Webb

Cry Baby The ill are sat praying in front of silver-screen romance!

And pretty children wash their little hands in the porcelain sink.

Young prophets hang low from the branch of the blossom tree laughing at harlequin puppets, electric saints riding slut-oil-slum propaganda, and all litter the grass with swan feathers.

And the grass harp cry crude and weak beneath the remote controls castrating whole rosy nuclear families.

Death, slow death devours the person!

And cancer is the dogmatic tyrant returning pure and fleshy as trembling lumps hiccupping and engorging the body burning millions in medicine cocktails, dragging naked crying families to the coils of the snake, all their songs and wishes consumed, consumed again.

And the one hand that lights the cigarette is the one hand that seeks the flesh is the one hand of hunger is the hand of the head of the holy soul who turns to the arch of the tree looming low and Bardic across the shimmering water, but consume! Consume! You vile enemy!

Tempted fool!

May all our bodies topped rich with coffee and cream and greasy burger-flesh be tantalised in the stream forever.

We have devoured the raven! We have poisoned the water!

The bough will not bend for us, the loom of the land is nothing more than a chemicalled Tesco’s bag flittering listless and empty thru the midnight street.

We have erected Tesco’s as monuments where meadows and graveyards once stood!

O plastic heaven, O dirty dead heaven of the plastic soul, plastic prayer beads for the ethically unconscious family man, work-a-day wives and diminished suits, where can we find God’s Cathedral nestled in the green forest?

Luminous green! Neon green! Nuclear green! You are green no more!

Blakean green? Echoing green? No more!

All abattoirs! All burgerkings! All fashionable female hatch-backs!

All parasites, all parasites still roam thru these streets and weep, let us drink that blood, drop that penny, 17

Ralf Webb

STUDENT WRITING

and scatter our immortal ashes over the earth.

O I cry, O you cry, O everyone cries, cry, baby! for all the little poor children dying in the dirt; “Oh lover it’s so sad Oh darling if only we could do something Oh darling let us drink soulful alone and dance and sing and vomit angelically in the gutter!”

Yours is not a virgin mind, yours is Moloch! Yours is Cameron!

Yours is every lead-hungry American! Yours is every internet prostitute!

Yours is every millionaires mind!

Go be dead and infamous again, go kiss the root, go query the phallus, go electrify the pigs, go suckle the breast and may the West deify you high and fast.

Ah hell, we all make each other sick.

The newspapers have a fist-fight over each and every murder happening three times daily, sell it as cat food for the masses and we all twist our hip, scream set the table dead alone in our beds for the paedophiles, paternal enemies, popes, serial killers and every drop of oil capped off into mother ocean.

O ill fate, each tear is a triumph in the spider-web.

We are monuments of our own holy inevitable defeat.

Salivate over the skinny blonde in the red dress and if she catches you with a hard-on watch her bare all on Hollywood-circus.

This ecstasy is worthless. It means everything to me.

I’ll arrive tonight, trailing thru your living room wearing rags, the television set will glow warm-electric and together we’ll fall asleep, cosy and disquieted, waiting for the pure, cool orgasm of red dawn.

18

CENTREFOLD The selection of articles comprising this issue’s Centrefold are all based on visions of Afghanistan, and aim to present you with a starting point from which to reconsider and re-evaluate many widely-held stereotypes associated with the country. The section also intends to provide more general information about Afghanistan, and raise awareness of the Afghan Appeal Fund charity. For further information see the charity’s website: http://afghanappealfund.org.uk.

M K ALAM

Unseen Knowledge of Afghanistan At a time when much of the world’s focus is homed in on Afghanistan, and the leaders talk about the threat it poses to the stability of the foundations which we rely on, it is interesting to note the complete lack of understanding in perception from the other side or not taking into account what the other might feel or wish to relay to the party of peace merchants that gather over the mountainous land of intrigue and tales. If counter-insurgency was to succeed according to the political leaders then one must look into the heart of the Afghan people, and if any people could claim to be further away from politics then it is indeed in what the Persian language we now call Afghans.

What do Afghans feel about themselves when so much of the outside world seems so much more worried about their temporal state? The medieval travelers came to discuss the Persian word Hindu Kush, but that was referring to the people of Hind further East who tried to inhabit the mountains but failed; instead meeting their deaths in the mountains which reached skyward in harsh climates and unforgiving landscape. In Persia the province of the Afghans was laden with stories of the unseen powers that use this great clutter of rock as their playground, further Westwards Zeus had deemed to chain Prometheus to the rocks which were closest to where the heavenly eagle could peck at its liver. It was this same province of the great Persian domain that gave birth to its shimmering sons Zoroaster and Rumi. So when the world points a finger at the land that holds no knowledge one must tread carefully at a land that possesses a knowledge of another kind, one that does not seek material reward or which floats on a cloud boarded by sycophants.

Pashto, which is a branch of the Persian language, teaches us to respect above all the teacher that opens your world and brings light into it. A pupil must be judged by his master. For the teacher is the one who brings him to eternal life while the father is the cause only of his temporal life; it is an old theme which is also played out

by Socrates in The Republic. The pupil who masters the art of knowledge becomes a leopard that is set free towards the mountains. In Pashto there is a saying, ‘dale kasa prong, dale kasa kamr,’ which translates as look this way, a leopard, look that way, a 19

M K Alam

CENTREFOLD

cliff. So one can seek either of the two paths.

It is a land that shatters the myth of pastoral poverty, a people that respect the nature they live in without the desire to plunder and build a high castle of treasure.

In an age of cynicism with no absolutes there seems to be a craving for recognition and rage is mistaken, knowledge is hijacked by various ideologies and the profane has become so seductive. So what we see is an assault on this unseen knowledge from both extremes today which wish to bring Afghanistan into its seen knowledge. A saying of the great Persian philosopher Ghazali is no more apt than in Afghanistan; ‘What you really possess is what you cannot lose in a ship wreck.’ In Afghanistan knowledge is like the horizon, it recedes as we approach it, so there is always the need to know more. Many tribal elders lives are devoted to probing the mysteries of existence, most are found far from inhabited areas. Knowledge is to seek rather than gain, as gain implies the seen garment wished to be looked at.

There is always a spiritual purpose and upliftment in one’s course. They seek the foundations of certainty, human nature at its base self is one of emptiness, and the ignorance of the unseen world, and human beings attain this knowledge through organs of perception so they can understand the world of created things. Sense of touch, sense of sight is the most far-seeking of all the senses, hearing allows us to hear sounds, but what of the sense of unseen. For this you need the teachers that grasp abstract things which are possible or not possible, beyond reason lie visions beyond the reach of reason. Theologians, philosophers beat a path to that door; and the end goals are the realities that lie behind the veil of physical existence, and in Afghanistan where the physical existence of man is beaten down by the ever towering peaks and rocks one wishes to tear down that veil. Whether it be the systematic discussion of metaphysics or opening one’s heart to the unseen, the teacher does not yet knoe what he has to offer; it comes after searching and dialogues in caves and peaks. Afghans see it no more than an abode and garment to the unseen. What we see in the West as seen knowledge or sensory knowledge, this knowledge is not infallible but in fact one could be deluded into thinking of it as a fact or dry practice of argumentation. Self-aggrandizement or ego-stimulating experiences come to no avail, and the outsiders would do well to heed the warnings of the Afghan storytellers otherwise like others before them their perceived intellectual knowledge will come to nothing but a well-camouflaged ignorance.

20

CENTREFOLD

Oliver Renwick

OLIVER RENWICK

Afghanistan - Pakistan Border Regions Oliver is studying Politics at Durham, and has worked for Crispin Blunt MP, Secretary for State Prisons, and Oliver helped Crispin in the Council for ArabBritish Understanding in Parliament. Oliver is hoping to follow in the footsteps of his father by going to the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst after his graduation at Durham. He has a passion for Middle Eastern Politics and helps the Afghan Appeal Fund on various fronts.

‘In the mountains, travellers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, ‘a day’s travel’ (French journée), meant the same as the Old Persian word ‘farsang’, ‘the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,’ and the territory was in effect ungovernable.’ - Rory Stewart Afghanistan’s remoteness in time and geography has always been a key factor in its strategic aloofness from the rest of the world. However, there has been a misconception of Afghan isolation amongst many analysts. For outside observers looking into the media trends and consumption of the Afghan population, some historical insight and context would be relevant when assessing the population’s perceptions. The population of Afghanistan in the 19th century and early 20th century was quite isolated; the people were living in valleys where there was some water and there were very few population centres and roads. However they were by no means isolated in terms of culture of civilisation and were not like the people living in jungles of Philippines in the Stone Age. This is the fundamental mistake many scholars and observers of Afghanistan make when assessing its history and the nature of the people that have shaped the country. The Afghans went to pilgrimage in Mecca, they were involved in the intellectual currents of the Islamic World and beyond, they were involved in international trade. Afghanistan has been integrated into the world but at a low speed because of its geographic obstacles in travel which meant that outside influence or culture did not affect the daily lives of its people.

The same applies to the coming of the media age to Afghanistan. It has been slow and steady, and especially over the last nine years with the coming of the NATOled International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) tremendous strides have been made with regard to internet and mobile phone coverage. Again before delving into the more minute details of media consumption into Khost it is most necessary to look at the historical context of what has shaped Khost’s tribes and culture. In more than most conflicts in Afghanistan it is the events of the past that are most often recounted by the elders and youth alike. The perception is shaped by the events that have formed what is now the geographic entity called Afghanistan. It is with great peril and indeed loss of thousands of soldiers that ISAF have learnt the regional and 21

Oliver Renwick

CENTREFOLD

historical context of stability in Afghanistan. Writing in 1919, Lieutenant-General Sir George Macmunn summed up saying that Afghanistan had been forged and influenced through a combination of Arab Islam, Persian Islam and Turkic Islam.

Furthermore, it was the influence of Arabs that was felt most by the British Army in three Anglo-Afghan Wars. It is this historical analysis that remains relevant in Khost today when looking at media consumption and to which direction the province sways. Indeed when one looks at the map of the insurgency and security risks, it is evidently clear the connections are alive today. The tide of insurgency is intimately linked with the videos and media messages that emanate from where the hostile action is most prevalent and Khost features prominently.

ANONYMOUS

Britain In Afghanistan Much of the attention focussing on Afghan charities and the ones linked to the Armed forces is related to the welfare of the soldiers and their families and rightfully so. However one cannot help but despair at the lack of Afghan-centric charities, most officers who come back from serving in Afghanistan have a deep desire to give back to the country which has enchanted them and left a lasting impact in their lives. Indeed the current Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, has said that during his previous time in Afghanistan, the people and the country “entered my bloodstream.� This mentality echoes amongst all those officers and soldiers who grounded connections to the mountains where they have served. It is with this in mind that one must look at the British contribution to Afghanistan. Often critics of the war assume wrongfully that this is a war of brutality and occupation. The British effort towards Afghanistan is first and foremost, understood in context to the connection of stability of Afghanistan having a direct relationship with the security of the United Kingdom. We do not live in a world where one can look the other way and discount the impact of actions in one continent on that of the other. It is a deeply interconnected world. To hold and build is the common thread in the space we share. One cannot discount the welfare of the Afghan people that the Army is there to protect, and those who criticise this war should look deeper into the need for interventions that lead to stable societies. Germany and Japan would not have moved towards their present state, without the military presence of the British and American forces which laid the groundwork for civil society to flourish without hostile environment.

AAF The Afghan Appeal Fund (AAF) is run on a voluntary basis by family and 22

CENTREFOLD

Anonymous

friends of British soldiers and aims to raise awareness of the plight of the people of Afghanistan, particularly the children, and raises money to help them. The charity has gone from strength to strength, and work is continuing on three more school projects in Afghanistan in 2010. Having funded the reconstruction of a school in Helmand province which was damaged during fighting in 2008, the AAF is now financing the construction of an additional five classrooms to help cater for the 600+ children hoping to go to school. The other ongoing projects are village primary schools in Nuristan and Bamyan provinces.

Educating the children of Afghanistan helps to promote peace and stability, particularly in the more remote regions – it is key to the hearts and minds campaign and to the rebuilding of the country. Afghanistan has been destroyed by successive wars, and education is the first step towards a brighter future.

CHRIS WRIGHT

Alexander’s Relevance To Afghanistan Chris Wright studies Classics at Durham, comes from a family steeped in military history and upon his graduation from Durham will be off to the Hindu Kush mountains to assist a former British Army officer who runs a school in Northern Pakistan. He will then enter Royal Military Academy Sandhurst after a year long stint at the school.

Gaugamela, 331 BC: ‘He promptly made for the gap and, with his Companions, and all the heavy infantry in this sector of the line, drove in his wedge and raising the battle cry pressed forward at the double....’ (Arr.3.14) Megas Alexandros, leading almost fifty thousand Hellenic forces1, expanded eastwards remorselessly and, to some extent, callously. Indeed, ‘a considerable proportion of the population never returned’ causing ‘disastrous consequences’ for his soldiers’ native lands2. Certainly, our sources (none of which are contemporary) portray Alexander as a man of contradictory traits: a philosopher king and a tyrant; a civiliser and an oppressor; a liberator and a conqueror3.

Furthermore, Alexander’s causus belli was founded upon two pillars: Vengeance and Deliverance. Vengeance for the Persian destruction of Greek temples had long been achieved4, as had Deliverance, the so-called ‘liberation’ of ‘Greek’ communities 1 See Arr.3.13: 40,000 infantry and 7000 cavalry 2 Bosworth, A.B., 1986, ‘Alexander the Great and the Decline of Macedon’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 106, p. 2 3 Gustav Droysen’s Alexander was a magnificent symbol of ‘nationalism’; Tarn’s Alexander was a visionary with a view to unifying the disparate peoples of antiquity under his leadership of the ‘brotherhood of man’.

4 See Arr. 2.7-12 for the Battle of Issus, BC 333 and, earlier, Battle of Granicus, BC 334.

23

Chris Wright

CENTREFOLD

under Persian influence5. Accordingly, modern scholarship has suggested that Alexander continued to wage war under false pretences6.

Nonetheless, whatever Alexander’s weaknesses, his great strengths are abundantly clear. Curtius Rufus tells us how, before the Battle of Issus, ‘Alexander went on ahead of his foremost standards, repeatedly checking his men’. This giant of antiquity, invoked by as varied figures as Robert Kennedy7, Eastern Block communists, Macedonian nationalists, and German fascists, had the clarity of purpose, sheer bloody-mindedness, and unquenchable thirst to succeed that facilitated his great successes, whether they were for better or for worse.

The world is very different now. Certainly, any endeavours of ‘’Western’’ forces in the Eastern hemisphere-namely Afghanistan and Iraq- are rightly far more multifaceted and scrutinised than they were two-and-a-half thousand years ago.

However, comparisons can be found within the plethora of differences.

Vengeance for 9/11 and deliverance of liberal democratic values in regions beyond our immediate spheres of influence have been cited as rational for remaining engaged abroad8. Notions of wars fought under ‘false pretences’ rings especially true and Arrian’s description of fighting ‘not as before’ (Arr. 3.9) given the unusually rugged Persian terrain invokes the unforgiving environment for ISAF soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.

Given President Obama’s (seemingly) reluctant approval of a 30,000 troop surge9, imminent defence cuts in Britain, and dwindling public support for interventionism on both sides of the Atlantic, we can fairly ask whether, a la Alexander, and for better or for worse, we have the political and diplomatic leadership and desire to achieve our stated objectives in far-flung corners of the globe.

5 Despite the contestation of literary sources (Rufus, Plutarch, and Arrian, inter alia), the archaeological evidence suggests these ‘Greek’ communities fought with the Persians against Alexander and this dispelling and notions of ‘Deliverance’.

6 For example, see Hamilton, J.R., 1974, ‘Alexander the Great’, Hutchinson University Library.

7 Robert Kennedy, ‘Day of Affirmation Address’, 1966, University of Capetown, South Africa. http://www. jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Day-of-Affirmation-Address-news-release-textversion.aspx 8 Clearly, discussion has latterly outlined the need to prvent terrorist extremism from threatening homeland security. See Liam Fox, ‘it is about making British streets safer rather than sending Afghan girls to school’. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7133519.ece 9 See Woodward, B., 2010, ‘Obama’s Wars’, Simon and Schuster, New York and London

24

EVENTS For thirty-five years, the Durham Drama Festival has established itself as one of the highlights of Durham’s theatrical calendar, and this year promises to be no exception. (See programme details: http://dramafest.co.uk/2011/programme.html) From 23rd to 26th February, the festival will showcase a nation-leading host of theatrical talent, and, in celebration of this fact, this issue brings you interviews with a few of those writers whose plays will be staged. We have also included some exclusive excerpts from the plays to whet your dramatic appetite. See you all at the Assembly Rooms!

MATTHEW URWIN

The Secret Policeman

A once comfortable, now rather shabby living room. As the house lights go down, there is the sound of a recording playing. At first it is just static, through which the occasional snatch of cello music can be heard. It gives way, briefly, to shouts, screams, sirens, gunshots.

Finally we hear the distorted recording of an interrogation. The lights slowly come up, to show DAVID, sitting staring into an open briefcase in front of him on a coffee table, a small recording device at his side.

SAMUEL (V/O): What do you think of the Party?

VOICE (V/O): Will it make any difference?

SAMUEL (V/O): Of course not. What do you think of the Party?

VOICE (V/O): (Mechanically.) The Party was elected by the British public fifteen years ago because we wanted to be safe. Since then the Party has saved our nation from religious extremism, political violence, and economic catastrophe.

The Party SAMUEL (V/O): That wasn’t what I asked, D13. You have been accused of protesting in favour of cessation of hostilities in Northern Ireland and openly agitating against the Specialist State Police. I think you need to be very careful about what you say right now. Otherwise, we may have to take you– 25

Matthew Urwin

EVENTS

The recording decays into static. DAVID reaches over and switches the recording device off. He sits in silence for a moment, then looks up and notices the audience. He stares for a moment, before speaking nervously.)

DAVID: My name is David Carver. Tonight, I am going to kill someone.

REBECCA SHEPPARD INTERVIEWS MATTHEW URWIN Your play seems to possess a kind of Orwellian/Hitchcockian feel, which is then juxtaposed with an element of romance. To which genre would you ascribe your play?

I don’t really like the idea of genres, because it tends to pigeonhole things.

Essentially, the play is a dystopia. Although it is influenced a great deal by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, it draws mostly on the Stanley Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments. These involved some tests carried out during the 60s and 70s on the wave of people affected and ordered to carry out things by those in positions of power. The findings were awfully frightening; they demonstrated how huge numbers of people are willing to torture and, if necessary, even kill under the orders of someone who looks like they are in a position of authority. Or, when ordinary, decent people are put in a position of authority themselves, they are prone to abuse that authority if there are not enough checks in place. It’s really chilling stuff, and it accounts for these terrible things that have happened in the twentieth century, such as the KGB in Russia or the Gestapo in wartime Germany.

So would you say that there is a contemporary political agenda to your play?

No. Ultimately, the idea behind the play was how people are fundamentally good at their core, and that anything bad they do is an aberration. I think my play talks about the fact that, actually, there is a capacity for evil in everyone. So even though it is talking about a political system, and evokes the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the play is not really a comment on politics. Rather, it is a comment on human nature and how, basically, we’re all bastards.

In the process of writing, are you conscious of how your play will be received by your audience?

To be honest, I am probably writing more for myself than for my audience. I like to write about the things I find interesting, which is quite selfish I suppose! I mean, this is the first play I’ve written, so I don’t really know how people are going to take it. Hopefully people will like it!

26

EVENTS

Matthew Urwin Interview

Your lead character often addresses the audience. Why did you decide to have that direct relationship?

Well we’ll see if it works, but I guess the intention was to draw in the audience and to get the audience involved in and believe in this person’s life. I wanted to have a dialogue between the audience and the characters. Having said that, though, I think a lot more can be said with a silence than with words. You can learn as much about people from what they don’t speak about as from what they discuss.

Do you think that the best theatre ought to be difficult?

Not necessarily; I think the best theatre needs to elicit a response. For example, Shakespeare’s comedies aren’t going to change your view of the world, but they make you happy and they make you laugh. Whether it is finding something humorous or intellectually challenging, good theatre ought to draw out a reaction of some sort.

What attracts you to writing for the theatre specifically?

It’s nice to write fiction and short stories, but with theatre you see the characters interacting and bringing your creation to life before your eyes, which is a really nice feeling. In addition, it is not such a solitary process. I am especially looking forward to directing the play, auditioning people and meeting the actors. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

ELLEN DIVER

Waiting for Dogfish JOSEPH: What is it?

AVA: I can’t believe you don’t know what it is.

JOSEPH: You don’t know.

AVA: I do.

JOSEPH: What then?

27

Ellen Diver

EVENTS

AVA: Not telling.

JOSEPH: You don’t know.

AVA: (winking) Look at it. It’s obvious.

JOSEPH: How is it obvious? What’s obvious about it? It’s big with fins.

AVA: (ponderingly) And teeth.

JOSEPH: And teeth. What’s obvious about that?

AVA: It makes it a shark. Only shark-fish have teeth.

JOSEPH: What’s a shark fish? There’s no such thing, Ava. You think you know everything. It’s not a shark fish.

AVA: It is. It’s a small shark.

JOSEPH: You don’t get sharks that size. I know. I have them in my picture books. A dogfish is the smallest.

AVA: A dogfish.

JOSEPH: Yes, a dogfish.

AVA: That’s what is anyway. Like I just told you. It’s a dogfish. You can tell by those spots.

JOSEPH: You didn’t say it was a dogfish. I said it was a dogfish.

AVA: You never listen, you know that?

28

EVENTS

Ellen Diver

JOSEPH: I said it was a dogfish.

LYNDSEY FINERAN INTERVIEWS ELLEN DIVER What was the inspiration for the play?

The idea had been in my head for several years…you know when you have one of those cloudy childhood memories where you’re not sure if it actually happened?

I remembered vaguely being a kid and finding a fish in a rock pool and not being able to help it. It haunted me for years afterwards. So I’d had the idea for the script in my head for a little while and I contacted my little brother to ask him whether he remembered it and whether it had actually happened. And he got back to me and said ‘yeh, it did, I remember it too.’ His memory of it is actually quite different to mine; he remembers it happening at sunset and being called away by our mum, which isn’t at all how I remember it. So he sent me some notes about what he remembered. I used the bits we agreed upon, and in essence the play is a sort of an elaborated version of that moment that I can recall from my childhood – looking into a rock pool, wanting to lift this fish but just being paralysed with fear about doing it.

Is the title a play on Waiting for Godot?

Yes. I’m taking a module in Beckett and I’ve always liked him. When the idea was germinating in my head, the parallel of two people just waiting struck me inescapably. So I thought that if that was going to seep into the play anyway, I had best acknowledge that right from the beginning – that way I’m free to do what I want with it after that because I’ve acknowledged my debts right away. I was happy enough to admit to myself that it was coming from my interest in Beckett.

Any other Beckettian ideas that come into the play?

There are Easter Eggs throughout; lines that come from other bits of his work. I suppose the setting, too, which could be almost anywhere, with very little indication of who these kids are, where they’ve come from or what country or where they are, sort of comes from Beckett. It’s something I struggle with whenever I read him.

That stripped-away quality makes it very hard to imagine who the characters are, but also incredibly easy because it allows you so much room. It just seemed perfect for the story of these two kids, especially since the memory is so vague. There are lots of things that I know I don’t know about what actually happened so it felt right to leave it quite nebulous, so that it could take form for people as they watch it.

29

Ellen Diver Interview

EVENTS

What would you say the main themes of the play are?

It’s about the processes that go into making important decisions; the reasons you have for deciding whether to take one course or the other. I wanted to look at the times where you feel like you should do something but you don’t. We tend to think of our conscious decisions as being the ones that are going to make us who we end up to be. But the things we don’t do are just as important, perhaps even more because there are more of them.

Guilt – that’s another major theme; of being able to alleviate your guilt without actually doing anything. The kids at the end try to convince themselves that it’s not the kind of fish they thought he was – that he’s meant to be there – that interference would have been a terrible thing. And at the end of the play they lose the fish but J has found something in the rock pool and Ava refuses to look. It’s this mentality of ‘if we can’t find him, then we can’t help him.’ Are they lying to themselves? Have they found it again? They don’t want to go back to the start of the play and begin all over again and go over these decisions for a second time.

What made you choose Waiting for Dogfish as the play to put on?

It was the only one that was kind of ready! I’ve got a lot of half-finished things floating around on my computer and some things that are pretty much ready but haven’t quite come to life yet. I suppose with Waiting for Dogfish I began with an advantage because it’s a short script and I know who the characters are – it was just a case of changing them for things to play out the way I wanted them to. It is easier when you start with something small and contained like that, because you can allow it to unfold to the required size.

DONNCHADH O’CONAILL

A Daughter

Light up on a dusty, shadowy space. A large stack of cardboard boxes. A stool to one side.

Daughter enters, a woman in her late twenties/early thirties. Soberly dressed – jumper, jeans or skirt. She sits on the stool, and begins looking through the boxes, opening them, looking inside, occasionally taking an item out in the course of her search.

She speaks without looking up.

Did you know they’d call – lost luggage, from Edinburgh?

She looks at the audience, stops her search.

30

EVENTS

Donnchadh O’Conaill

I suppose you left that book there just for that reason. That was the first anyone knew of it, that phone call.

Father drove up to collect it all, that weekend. The book, your phone, the notebook. The spare clothes. The Telegraph. That I didn’t understand. You never left the crossword unfinished. When I saw that, that was actually the first moment I realised that something was wrong.

It was very, sudden, of you. I remember when Louise got married, you called it ‘unexpected’. Which it was. I remember thinking the same thing myself, except I was wondering how odd it was that she attracted any interest at all. She’s lovely, bless her, but she’s frightened of her own shadow. And Mark, as well – I can’t imagine what their first date must have been like. Two Trappist monks in a wine bar. Communicating by offering each other the peanut bowl. And married four months later. Good peanuts.

That was what you were referring to: the speed of it all. That, and her dropping out of uni. You never approved of that, did you? ‘Unexpected’.

ALEX MASON INTERVIEWS DONNCHADH O’CONAILL Donnchadh would like to inform the readers that it’s a pity that they won’t get a chance to read excerpts from the first interview (of which the recording was accidentally erased) because it was some pretty awesome stuff and the following may be a little naff due to him already having shot his intellectual load on the first one.

Can you say something about the play, apart from it’s about a daughter?

It’s a play about a daughter. Just to confirm, the title is not a typo or misleading...the twist is not that it’s a man. It will be played by an actress of the female persuasion who will almost certainly be a daughter. For each play I write I like to set myself a task or two, and for this play the first was to write a critical monologue. In recent years monologues have tended to put everything at the level of what the actor actually says, with the actor telling you what’s been going on. The main reasons for someone to tell a story on the stage is to be able convey information via subtext and without actually stating that information. I’ve written parts for women before, but they’ve not been very big and I’ve not been happy with them and how I’ve handled them. Those are the two background assumptions I had when I sat down to write the play, and I guess the third one was to do with my interest in the idea of people disappearing; of someone with whom you might have close ties to vanishing for whatever reason. I wanted to explore the reactions people might have in that circumstance.

Do all your plays have inherent constraints placed on them?

Not always. I wrote a play years and years ago where I tried to play with the relation 31

Donnchadh O’Conaill Interview

EVENTS

between the actors on stage. The play was a series of interlocking monologues; there was a man and a woman, and when the man was speaking the lights were on the woman doing something else, and then vica versa. It was an attempt to have them relate to each other but without doing so face to face. On the other hand, when I did a romantic comedy I simply wanted to do a romantic comedy, but this one is a little more explicit with the restrictions I wanted to place on it.

To what extent do you think the theme of tragi-comedy influences your writing?

The tragi-comedy theme isn’t something I always do, but I find it fruitful. I’ve done a bit of comedy, and a natural extension of comedy is to write comic pieces that have more emotional engagement. In some ways it’s more interesting if you have a comedy where you take a little bit of a risk with the audience’s engagement and you kind of dare them to care about the characters and then you see if you can make them laugh. The plays that I’m happiest with are those that try to get humour out of quite bleak situations. What is funnier are people’s reactions to the terrible things happening, and that’s when you’ve got to think about character and you’ve got to make the audiences sympathise with characters. It’s useful for me as a writer to do that – although it’s not necessarily a better way of doing things, I find it a good vehicle.

How do you think you’ve grown as a writer?

For the last few years I guess I’ve been mining this dark comedy/tragi-comedy scene. As for growing as a writer, I’ve been enjoying going to plays regularly, and seeing a lot of theatre. Even though the standard of production is not professional, nonetheless you absorb a lot of different texts, and if you are writing for the stage, then seeing texts actually being put on is very important. Facets of the script are harder to identify when you see the words on the page. For example, I read quite a few plays by Pinter back when I was an undergraduate, but I certainly didn’t get as much out of them as I would have if I’d seen them. Another thing that’s helped me is doing a little bit of directing. It made me appreciate the value that a director and a cast can bring to a script, and that when you’re writing you’ve got to be careful not to put everything into the script or put everything into what the characters are saying. A script is more like a skeleton that the actors then bring to life, or put flesh on. As a writer, it’s too easy to become disconnected from the actual reality of what you’re writing for the stage. You’ve got to always have the connection in your mind between what you’re trying to put down on the page and how it’ll come out from the mouths of actors.

What would you like to talk about that you feel was missed out in this abridged second interview?

Quantitative easing.

32

TRANSLATIONS Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Latin, Old English: all dead languages? Not necessarily so, if we follow Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom “all speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.” We have selected for this issue texts translated by Durham students from all of these languages, ranging from the Islandic sagas to the Iliad and the Aeneid, along with some Old English riddles, which we hope you will find very lively and enjoyable.

UNKNOWN (translated by David Wigy)

Old English Riddles Riddle 5 I am alone, wounded by iron, Hurt by sword, sated with war-deeds, Exhausted by swords’ edges. Often I see battle, Bold ones fighting. I do not expect consolation, That relief from battle-strife will come to me Before I perish completely amongst men; Rather that the legacies of hammers batter me, The hard-edged, deadly-sharp handiwork of smiths Bite me in strongholds. I must await A more hostile meeting. I could never Find the kind of physician in a town Who might heal my wounds with herbs, But the wounds of swords become augmented on me Through death-strokes day and night.

Riddle 7 My dress is silent when I tread the ground, Or when I occupy the villages or stir up the waters.

Sometimes my trappings and the lofty air Raise me up over the habitation of men, Then the power of the skies Carries me widely over the people. My ornaments Resound loudly and make melody, They sing brightly when I, a travelling spirit, Am not near to water and earth.

33

Unknown

TRANSLATIONS

OVID (translated by Louise Walker)

Metamorphoses Art is art, human is human Art is like a snowflake; touch it and it dies on your fingertips Oh beauty of mine if only you were real, I’d sing to the stars of my burning love.

Your beauty is divine, immortal, pure, Your snow white arms only inflame my passion.

Accept these charms of the earth, sea and sky Let me garland you with diamonds and pearls, Lay you on silks of tyrian purple, Caress your breasts, your rounded thighs, kiss your Seductive lips and stroke your golden locks, If only you’d kiss back, accept my love.

Oh Venus, grant my prayer, that I wed a Sweet beauty like my ivory maiden.

Can it be true? Your lips warm to my press?

Can truly you feel my gentle caress?

Yet… Why does your skin glow like flame?

Why do your eyes pierce me so?

Why do you writhe and groan?

And your once serene face, it smiles And your once flawless skin, it creases And your once silent mouth, it speaks Where is my ivory maiden?

My dream, my perfect love…

You, you’re just a woman.

34

TRANSLATIONS VIRGIL (Translated by Louise Walker)

Aeneid The Storm A translation from the Book Three of the Aeneid (192-208) then to the deep did cling the rafts, when no further lands were seen, Sky everywhere and everywhere Sea: then above my head, a shadowy cumulus seethes, bearing Night and Storm and in murky shadows did tremble the waves.

ceaselessly the winds churned the sea, fracturing the vast expanse, we exiles were tossed across the abyss. clouds swallowed down Day. Night cloaked Heaven in rain. Fire ravaged the torn clouds again and again. driven off course, atop the swells, we wandered, blind.

Day from Night from Sky, Palinurus himself knew not, nor recalled the mid-way across the sea. for three lost suns, in the eyeless black, we wandered on the open sea and for as many nights without stars. on the fourth, first land was seen rising and at a distance revealing mountains and wisps of smoke. the sails we bring down and upon our oars we rise. without delay, we exhausted sailors churn waves into froth, and sweep the sea away.

35

Virgil

Sappho

TRANSLATIONS

SAPPHO (Translated by Zenobia Homan)

Hymn to Aphrodite Rainbow-throned undying Aphrodite, deceit-weaving daughter of Zeus, I urge you do not, mistress, tame my heart with devastation.

Instead arrive, as once before when you heard my voice from far away, when you left your father’s house of gold and came.

With yoked chariot, you lead around the dark earth fair fleet sparrows turning their wings through mid-air.

And they came at once, and you, blessed one smiling with immortal bearing, ask how I suffer now now that I call.

You ask what was my greatest desire in my raving heart. “Whom do I now persuade to permit you into her love, and who, who wrongs you, Sappho?

If she still flees, she will soon follow, if she refuses gifts, she will yet give them, and if she does not love, she will soon hold you dear, against her will.”

Come to me now, and free me from peril, from cruel caring, and end end this, my heart’s desire.

Be my friend.

36

TRANSLATIONS HOMER (Translated by Hilary Stewart)

Iliad The Encounter Between Hector and Andromache Then Hector, helmet great and gleaming, Addressed her: “This also is in my mind My wife, but I would be ashamed If, like a coward, I crept away from battle, And my heart would not allow me.

I have learned to be heroic always, And fight amid the foremost ranks Of the Trojans, and taking glorious renown For myself and my father. For in my heart And in my mind, I know a day must come When Ilion the great will go to glory, And perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam, Gifted with the spear, shall fall.

But it is not the torment to come for the Trojans Nor for Hekabe, nor Priam that plagues me, Nor my noble brothers numerous, who will fall In the dust at the hands of deadly enemies, But my anguish for you when an Achaian, bronze-clad Leads you, weeping and takes your liberty And in Argos, compels you to weave at another’s loom And, unwillingly from Messis or from Mypereia, bear water, For they will subjugate you. And someone will see you Crying someday and will say to you: ‘Behold the wife of Hector, who of the horse-breakers, The Trojans, was the greatest When once they fought around Ilion.’

This he will say and how raw your sorrow shall be Lacking such a man to liberate you From your day of bondage. But let me be buried Covered with earth before I hear your cries And know you are captured.”

So, speaking, Hector stretched out his arms Towards his son but the child shrank back Against the bosom of the well-belted nurse Sobbing, overwrought at the sight of his father 37

Homer

Homer

TRANSLATIONS

Horrified of the bronze crested with horsehair That dipped dangerously, or so he deemed, From the apex of the bronze armour.

But his cherished father, chuckled, his mother Laughed, and Hector, luminous, removed the helm, To place it glinting brightly on the ground.

He swung around his son in the air And kissed him calling aloud in prayer Out to Zeus, and other gods, “Oh Zeus! and all other gods, Grant that my child may be, as I am, Prominent among Trojans, powerful and courageous, And rule illustriously over Ilion.

And let it be spoken as he comes from battle ‘This boy is better even than his father.’

UNNKNOWN (translated by Garet Mills)

The Saga of Gunnlaugr Worm Tongue (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu) As he had been so disturbed in sleep, the Norwegian asked what he had dreamed.

Thorsteinn said: “Mark not dreams.”

And when they rode home that evening, the Norwegian again asked what he dreamed.

Thorsteinn said “If I speak of the dream, then you must tell me its meaning.”

The Norwegian said this must be attempted.

Thorsteinn then spoke of it: “I dreamed of myself, and I appeared to be outside the front door of my home in Borg. I looked up to the house and saw a swan on the roof, beautiful and fair, apparently mine, which pleased me. Then I saw a great eagle fly down from the high peaks. Hither he flew and sat beside her on the roof, calling to her tenderly; it seemed to me the swan was very pleased. I saw then that the eagle was black with iron claws - clearly of a gallant nature. Then a second bird flew near from the south. I saw he also flew hither to Borg and sat on the roof beside them, wishing to court her. He too was a mighty eagle. Soon it seemed to me the the first eagle was very angry, and when the other came, I saw them fight fiercely and at length - I saw the blood of them both spilled. Thus their contest ended: both fell down, each on their own side off of the roof, both dead. Afterwards the swan was very downhearted and dejected. I saw then that another bird flew from the west - a falcon. It sat next to the swan and spoke to her tenderly, and afterwards they both flew away to the same quarter of the sky – and next I awoke.

This is of no significance”, he said “and shall foretell the first of the new weather, which will begin from that place where the birds flew.”

38

TRANSLATIONS

Unknown

UNNKNOWN (translated by Samuel Sargeant)

The Saga of Gunnlaugr Worm Tongue (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu) Gunnlaugr meets Jarl Eirikr In that time, there ruled over Norway the Jarl Eirikr, son of Hákon, and Sveinn his brother. Jarl Eirikr was staying at his family’s residence in Hlaðir and he was a powerful chieftain. Skuli, son of Þorsteinn, was then with the Jarl and was his retainer and highly esteemed.

Now it is said that they, Gunnlaugr and Auðunn Festargramr, went with twelve men in all, into Hlaðir. Gunnlaugr was thus dressed; he was in a grey tunic and white stocking breeches1. He had a boil down on the instep of his foot. It frothed up with blood and pus, which he walked with.

And with that outfit he went before the Jarl with Auðunn and spoke he well. The Jarl recognised Auðunn and asked him for news of Iceland, and Auðunn said such as there was.

The Jarl asked Gunnlaugr who he was, and he said to him his name and where he came from.

The Jarl spoke: “Skuli, son of Þorsteinn,” said he, “what sort of man is this in Iceland?”

“Lord,” said he, “take to him well, he is the son of the best man in Iceland, Illugi the black of Gilsbakka, and my foster brother.”

The Jarl spoke: “What is wrong with your foot, Icelander?”

“A boil, lord,” said he.

“And go you not lame?”

“Gunnlaugr answered: A man should not go lame, while both legs are the same length.”

Then spoke a retainer of the Jarl, Þorir he was called: “This Icelander behaves very grandly, we should trial him somewhat.”

Gunnlaugr turned to him and spoke:

One of the train’s A particular pain: Be wary of trusting him: He’s evil and black.

Then Þorir went to grip an axe.

The Jarl spoke: “Let it be quiet,” said he, “men should not take heed of such, but how old are you Icelander?”

Gunnlaugr answered: “I am eighteen years old.”

1 Trousers and stockings made in one.

39

Unknown

TRANSLATIONS

“I swear,” said the Jarl, “that you will not live another eighteen.”

Gunnlaugr spoke and rather low: “Pray not for a curse on me,” said he, “but pray rather for yourself.”

The Jarl spoke: “What say you now, Icelander?”

Gunnlaugr answered, “Thus, that you should not call for a curse on me, but say a suitable prayer for yourself.”

“What is that?” said the Jarl.

“That you suffer not such a death as Jarl Hákon, your father.”2

The Jarl went as red as blood and ordered the fool to be taken quickly. Then went Skuli before the Jarl and spoke: “For the sake of my words, lord, give the man quarter and allow passage away as quickly as possible.”

The Jarl spoke: “If he will have quarter, let him leave quickly and never again enter my domain.”

Then went Skuli out with Gunnlaugr and up the quay. There was a ship sailing to England ready to put to sea, and Skuli then got Gunnlaugr passage with Þorkatli, his kinsman. Then Gunnlaugr gave Auðunn his ship and wealth he did not need to bring with him for safe keeping.

Now they sailed, Gunnlaugr in the ship bound for England and in the autumn they came south to London quay and lay the ship up onto its rollers.

2 Jarl Hákon was murdered by his own servant when hiding in a pig sty.

40

EVENTS LISTINGS REGULAR EVENTS Mondays, 7.30-9pm at the Big Jug: Literature Discussion Group. This year, tutor David Crane will be discussing the poetry of Ezra Pound.

2nd Monday of each month: Leonard’s Café Book Group. 6-7.30pm, free. Past reads include How to Paint a Dead Man or The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

See www.northeastbookgroups.com/durham or contact durhambookgroup@newwritingnorth.com Tuesdays, 7.30pm: Creative Writing Society. Whether it’s overcoming writer’s block or getting feedback on your work, CW can help. Contact creative.writing@dur.ac.uk to find out more. Maths building CM107 at the Science Site.

Wednesdays, 7.30pm: Poetry Society. Alternate sessions discussing poems by established poets and poems written by members. Free. Venue: a living room near you. Contact them at poetry.society@durham.ac.uk Thursdays, 7.15pm: World Film Society shows a brilliant foreign film - one of Durham’s best societies. ER141.

UPCOMING EVENTS Wednesday 9th-12th February, 7.45pm: The Peculius Theatre Company presents Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the story of on man’s lust for knowledge and eternal damnation. At the Norman Chapel, Castle. £6/£5 Students/ £4 DST members.

Wednesday 9th February, 4.30pm to 6.00pm. Editing Beckett’s unpublished story Echo’s Bones, by Dr Mark Nixon (University of Reading). Seminar Room, Hallgarth House. Contact ulrika.maude@durham.ac.uk Tuesday 15th February, 7pm: Bizet’s fiery and passionate opera, Carmen. Title role sung by Heather Shipp, in French with English titles. At Newcastle Theatre Royal. £15 - £56 Friday 4th March, 7.30pm: Elkie Brooks performs at the Gala Theatre. £20 More events at www.dur.ac.uk/whatson For regular events and societies, see our website at www.dur.ac.uk/grove

41

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COVER IMAGE

STUDENT WRITING

Cover artwork by Lija Broka

Intellectual copyright of all material in the Student Writing section is held by the authors.

ENGLISH WRITING Desai, Kiran. Excerpt from The Inheritence of Loss.

CONTRIBUTORS Ellen Diver is an mirror-stage MA student in literary exile.

Conrad, Joseph. Excerpt from Amy Foster.

Jacobson, Howard. Excerpt from The Finkler Question.

Zenobia Homan is a second year Archaeology & Ancient History student who prefers playing video games over sitting in ditches and digging up rocks.

Joyce, James. Excerpt from The Dead.

Avishek Parui: Some say I’m a shallow wannabe who takes himself way too seriously...I know they’re right! There’s not much else that’s true about me except that I take great pleasure in creating lovely lies!

TRANSLATIONS Unknown, Old English Riddles Ovid, Metamorphoses

Samuel Sargeant is a MA student who may or may not have invented the colour blue.

Virgin, Aeneid Sappho, Hymn to Aphrodite

Hilary Stewart is a St. Mary’s student with a soft spot for sibilance.

Homer, Iliad

Matthew Urwin is a 3rd year History student, which is another way of saying he is unemployed and likely to be for the forseeable future. Other life achievements include his silver swimming certificate. Once he very nearly had a conversation with Bill Bryson.

Unknown, The Saga of Gunnlaugr Worm Tongue (Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu) EVENTS Matthew Urwin, The Secret Policeman.

Imagine a Classics student called Louise Walker: Odysseus’ disciple and prone to cryptic circumlocution.

Ellen Diver, Waiting For Dogfish.

Donnchadh O’Conaill, A Daughter.

Ralf Webb is a first year at Castle, who lives in Wiltshire. Please don’t feel obliged to read any of his stuff ever again...

Contact: grove@dur.ac.uk without whose express permission no part may be reproduced.

42

ADVERTISEMENT

43

ADVERTISEMENT

44