This term, Cherwell Broadcasting has been taking a look at the different sports on offer at Oxford. Today, we present what we found out when we visited a training session with the Oxford Lancers American Football team.
If you would like Cherwell Broadcasting to broadcast one of your games or training sessions, please get in touch!
This week, Cherwell Broadcasting went to the Oxford University Archaeological Society event with Professor Chris Gosden, a Professor in European Archaeology and Director of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His latest project, titled ‘English Landscapes and Identities’, has taken five years to complete. We went along to the lecture to hear more from one of the leading figures of the discipline.
If you begin something musical with the letters ‘D’ and ‘F’, you’re onto a winner instantaneously.
Consider the following— DFA, renowned record company which brought us LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip; DFTBA, renowned record company that brought us legendary Doctor Who fan band (a.k.a Time Lord Rock, or Trock) Chameleon Circuit, and of course, DFO.
Okay, you’ve definitely seen them at that night in Cellar, or that college ball, but let’s just take a minute to salute one of Oxford’s finest live ensembles. Dot’s Funk Odyssey are continually a delight to behold live—their effortless assault on your self-consciousness to the point where everyone is up and dancing is remarkable. The 14-piece band deliver hit after hit without ever losing a sense of authenticity as they make the songs their own.
And really, each member of the band is a BNOC of their own – imagine being able to go to every college ball, every garden party—they really are ‘Mr Steal Your Gurl’.
These are the heroes Oxford needs, but doesn’t deserve. DFO, please never stop.
Third Week getting you down? Behind with work that you will never finish? Need some laughter in your life? If so, Cherwell Broadcasting is here to cheer you up with a video on the Oxford Revue Comedy Club. Make sure you check out their special Valentine’s Day performance on the 14th February.
If you’ve ever found yourself writing an entire speech in your head before calling up to book a doctor’s appointment, or had to shoot off a quick text that actually just spent five minutes languishing in the Notes section of your phone, it’s unlikely you’re very good at small talk.
Freshers’ Week may be a struggle. What finally makes all those moments of awkwardness worth is the occasion of your first DMC with that potential best friend. All of a sudden, familiarity replaces the strain of discussing the hall menu. Speaking becomes easier again—particularly for those who might wish they had a minute to preemptively jot down a few thoughts with which to keep a dying conversation going.
Indeed, the realm of the written is often presented as an escape from a world where language feels false or disingenuous: think Matilda, the young Jane Eyre, Lisa Simpson. The concept of ‘normal’ conversation is often used in novels as a way of representing realistic interaction, and blurbs and reviews may tell us that a work manages also to illuminate ‘truths’ about those relationships that might be disguised in everyday life. In literature, the mysteries of small talk can be reimagined in ways that somehow point prophetically to deeper truths about human isolation and distance. In Adam Bede, George Eliot eloquently puts it this way: “examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings.” Victorian realist novels such as this one are often associated with a preoccupation with everyday language, and the idea that all the possible ways in which individuals communicate must be presented in order to fully grasp the human mind.
And yet, as is often the case with lengthy Victorian novels, Adam Bede is peppered with scenes of minute behavioural detail, as well as sections of highly dramatic dialogue. Eliot chucked them in for the sake of ‘truthfulness’, yet they seem to suggest one thing about everyday conversation: it’s dull. Perhaps unintentionally, this impression is made stronger by the sharp contrasts between these scenes and the more dramatic, intentionally ‘emotional’ scenarios.
Perhaps I’m an impatient reader, and missing the point too. This is a method of realism that gradually builds up a complex network of relationships, that do achieve poignant depictions of the perils of daily interaction and conversation. But put as just incidental detail, there’s little sense of being able to really understand a character’s psychology. A wholly different concept of presenting everyday interaction is demonstrated by Alice Kuipers’ Life on the Refrigerator Door. Reading this novel, the strongest impression left is one of honesty. Here you have an entire book in the form of notes stuck to the fridge door, tracing the correspondence between fifteen-year-old Claire and her workaholic mother. It reads like one continuous conversation, constantly punctuated by afterthought : ‘Could you leave an extra 20 dollars with my allowance? Pleeeeeeaaaaaase?’ The kind of small talk that develops not between occasional acquaintances, but within the closest kinds of relationships.
It may not be the most complex or ‘literary’ of novels, yet it captures in written form an instantly recognisable way of speaking. Clearly its modern context makes it more recognisable, but through this simple refashioning of the form of everyday speech Kuipers acutely foregrounds the way in which we use routine language to leave the more important things unsaid.
Maybe the inner romantic in me does still want an element of clear fictionality in the presentation of everyday speech. Sometimes the idea of conflating emotional truth with actual spoken words seems to swing too far towards the extreme: ‘you are the answer to every prayer I’ve offered. You are a song, a dream, a whisper, and I don’t know how I could have lived without you for as long as I have.’ Thanks Nicholas Sparks, I’ll make sure to note that down. What I want, stubbornly and subjectively, is to read a way of speaking that sits halfway between my idea of everyday interaction and total fictionality. Enter Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy’s struggle with his small-talking world makes him a completely relatable, socially awkward character (status as an aristocratic man in the 1700s aside). Sadly though, even Pride and Prejudice contains moments of such perfectly crafted dialogue that I think it would be impossible for me to carry it off . For now, if I want to learn anything about the words around me, there’s always The Fine Art of Small Talk, available on Kindle from £6.99.
The forgotten faces which are the subject of Christ Church Picture Gallery’s current exhibition hang unassumingly in a corridor between rooms filled with the great and grand works of the Italian and Dutch masters. Both the subjects of the portraits and the artists who painted them are unknown, their identity lost somewhere along the course of their long history. Three of the four paintings come from the storerooms of the gallery and are on exhibition for the first time in decades, offering viewers a unique chance to see these fascinating and otherwise inaccessible images.
The first and best preserved painting in the exhibition is the only one of the four to be on permanent exhibition in the gallery, where it perches high and unnoticed above Frans Hals’ famous ‘Portrait of a Woman’. Once believed to be a Holbein, the concentrated and selfabsorbed look of the sitter rather suggests a self-portrait. The intensity and prominence of the dark eyes serve to draw the viewer into participating in the meticulous observation of facial geography and the mysterious process by which a portrait becomes a depiction of inner life.
The second painting is of a wealthy, elegantly attired townsman. It has been heavily damaged and retouched over the years, such that much of its quality and feel has disappeared. Parts are blotchy and clumsily restored and only a couple of details—notably the silver clasp of the book and the shine on the gold necklace—give an impression of the quality the work might once have possessed, a quality indicated by the back of the portrait which bears the cypher of Charles I’s royal collection. One wonders about the level of sheer contingency which determines whether a painting hangs in a gilded frame in a great hall, or lies forgotten in the storeroom. One substandard retouch or unlucky accident in a history spanning centuries can consign to oblivion not only a painting, but its subject and creator too.
The third portrait, by far the most intriguing of the exhibition, is likewise impossible to attribute to a specific artist owing to years of abrasion and patchy restoration. It gives a striking sense of proximity and intimacy—one feels an immediate and personal relation to the subject staring back at the observer with an ambiguous, enigmatic gaze. The young man seems to silently address the viewer, though the nature of the address is uncertain. Dressed modestly in an unornamented black gown and cap, the young man perhaps worries for his future, or stoically accepts some misfortune.
The fourth painting offers something rather different. While the other three are conventional portraits painted on canvas, the fourth is the left panel of an altarpiece triptych for a private chapel. In it a pious father bends his knees in prayer, his two young sons flanking him in a chapel which opens onto a broad, barren landscape. It differs significantly from the other paintings in both style and content; there is an empty, detached look in the eyes of the father and sons as they gaze skyward in contemplation.
These faces are not intended to reveal something about the sitter, to demonstrate personality or status, but to serve as an aid to prayer and contemplation, showing not the sitters themselves but their standing before God. The chipped and warped frame of the painting is exquisite, its delicate interplay of gold and black reminiscent of the lush foliage in Altdorfer’s ‘St George and the Dragon’. The full triptych, including a panel for mother and daughter, as well as a central scene of the Madonna and child, must have been a magnificent sight.
It is ultimately disappointing that so few of the stored paintings are on show and that many others remain forgotten in the storerooms of the gallery. Much of the exhibition’s interest comes from one’s own speculations about the history and identities of the paintings and their subjects. Nevertheless, taken in the context of the gallery as a whole, these forgotten portraits offer a kind of antidote to the heroism and grandeur of many of the works which fill the rest of the gallery. They remind us that in between the series of towering peaks which are the masterpieces of western painting there lies a wide and wonderful array of a thousand mounts, hills and valleys, each of them a unique and valuable reflection of forgotten faces and anonymous hands.
Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Prize winning activist who narrowly avoided death after being shot by the Pakistani Taliban, has received an offer to study PPE at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), according to the Telegraph.
Speaking at an education conference in Birmingham today, Yousafzai told the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL): “I’m studying right now, I’m in year 13 and I have my A Level exams coming and I have received a conditional offer which is three As so I need to get the three As, that is my focus right now.”
She said: “I have applied to study PPE so for the next three years I will be studying that. But other than that I want to stay focussed on my Malala Fund work.”
A Telegraph report today has claimed that Yousafzai, aged 19, is likely to take up a place at LMH to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), so long as she achieves the AAA A-level grades required for entry.
In January, Yousafzai confirmed in an interview that she had sat an interview at LMH, which she described as “the hardest interview of my life.”
Yousafzai had said she had also applied to study at Durham, LSE, and Warwick, which all make A*AA offers for PPE. At Oxford, the standard offer is AAA, in line with Yousafzai’s statements today.
In studying PPE at LMH, Yousafzai will hope to follow the path of her hero Benzanir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in 2007.
Yousafzai has lived in Birmingham since being treated at the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital after surviving an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen in 2012.
While living under Taliban rule, Yousafzai had written a blog under a pseudonym which featured her thoughts on girls’ education.
She later rose to global prominence as a campaigner for girls’ education. In 2013, she addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
Oxford University and Lady Margaret Hall have been contacted for comment.
When I started my degree, the year abroad seemed like a far-off abstraction that would never happen. Although the idea of a prestigious internship in some famous publishing house or in a law office had some glamour and appealed to my parents, I’d heard very sad year abroad stories about those that included boredom, loneliness and general disappointment.
Studying at a university meant that I would meet of people my age, and it gave me the opportunity to learn about things that my course didn’t offer. But really, the main reason I ended up at the University of Salamanca was because I couldn’t be bothered to look up and apply for things that really interested me. I didn’t have the time or the energy, and did rather little, convincing myself that the following year would never come, anyway.
I was still in denial when I arrived. It’s not that I wasn’t happy to have a year of sun and guiltless naps, for a change, but the end of second year had seen me completely destroyed and unable to get out of bed, even to shower. Summer vacation had not been enough to recover my debilitated self. The problem was that I saw Salamanca as just that: a hospital for the Oxford-wounded student. I was there, but in my head it was really only to regain energy for finals. I couldn’t get myself to enjoy this year for its own sake.
It’s nothing new that the highly pressured environment of Oxford can affect students’ mental health. However, after two years there, the fact that mental health issues among students had seemed so common clearly led me to subconsciously accept that they were a normal and necessary part of the human experience. It was only after half a year away from Oxford that I realised how deeply my experience there had thwarted my perspective.
At Oxford I constantly felt like I had to try to keep up with the high-achieving individuals who spent all their free time doing theatre, filming, writing, not to mention participating in sports, politics, and the Union. It didn’t seem enough to try to stay on top of my work, have a social life and stay sane. I was always worried about missing out on the opportunities Oxford offers, which, whilst amazing, can be ridiculously life draining.
This anxiety followed me to Spain, and it was hard to shake off. At first, doing things that I hadn’t done since high school felt amazing. However, soon my anxieties resurfaced. Cooking was a waste of time, and so was going to useless classes or socialising. Oxford habits became me, and soon I let the cycle of work-guilt take over my physical and mental health. I blamed Salamanca and its unstimulating student life for being miserable and I started applying to internships in France and Spain.
However, I then realised that changing places would only make things more stressful and I would have to get used to a new environment again. I had expected to have as much energy as I had at home. I had felt guilty of taking the time to settle in and look after myself. When I returned in January everything suddenly seemed a lot easier. After all, I already knew the city and had friends, and I gradually felt healthier and happier.
Whilst I still feel guilt and anxiety creeping up on me often, I regularly try to focus on the small things, that I used to ignore, that make me feel physically healthier and more productive mentally. Whether this means I clean up my room, take the rubbish out or randomly talk to a classmate, these tasks get the machine going and they’ll carry me through the whole day.
My year abroad has undoubtedly been challenging, but it has definitely had its merits. I have learnt a lot about myself and the ‘real world’ and my own mental health has improved greatly.
A new study looking into banning all petrol and diesel vehicles from the centre of Oxford has been launched today.
The £30,000 study, which aims to investigate options for introducing a Zero Emission Zone in Oxford from 2020, has been jointly commissioned by Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council.
According to Oxford City Council, the study seeks to engage with bus, delivery and taxi companies—and will propose a range of options for how the Zero Emissions Zone can be introduced. It is envisaged that a zone will start small and expand as technology develops in order to facilitate zero emission travel.
While Oxford has been a low emission zone since 2014, the city was included in a World Health Organisation report as one of ten cities with unacceptable levels of pollution. As well as this, European Union targets for air pollution are currently being breached at 32 per cent of 75 locations monitored across Oxford.
It is hoped that a Zero Emission Zone would reduce emissions from transport by restricting access for polluting vehicles and encouraging uptake of zero emission vehicles.
However, this is not the first scheme designed to lower pollution levels in the city, which have a significant impact on health by contributing to a range of illnesses, as well as having an economic effect. The impacts of air pollution in the UK estimated to cost between £9 billion and £19 billion annually.
In January, the introduction of driverless vehicles to the Oxford transport system was proposed by Jeremy Long, the chairman of Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP).
In an interview with the Oxford Times, Long said that connections with the university research departments and local car industry could provide a platform for Oxford to become leader in the field of autonomous vehicles.
Despite the idea of driverless ‘pods’ being omitted from the study, John Tanner, Oxford City Council Executive Board Member for A Clean and Green Oxford, says he is “thrilled” the study is taking place. This is despite Tanner previous branding the idea as “ridiculous”, and claiming in 2015 that the City Council would not support “a blanket ban” because “ordinary” cars were not responsible for pollution.
Tanner added: “Air pollution has a significant impact on the health of residents and visitors to Oxford.
“Our vision is to create a city centre that people can live and work in without worrying about how vehicle emissions will impact on their health.”
“The Zero Emission Zone will achieve this, which is why I am thrilled that this study is now taking place.”
In addition, the Road Haulage Association also called the proposals “unworkable”.
A spokesman for the County Council said the ban would initially only apply on a small number of roads, and the timescales would change if technology was not advanced enough.
Councillor David Nimmo-Smith, Oxfordshire County Council Cabinet member for Environment, said: “There has been an improvement in air quality in the city in recent years and there is clearly a need to carry this trend on.
“The improvements clearly illustrate that measures to improve air quality, such as the introduction of the Low Emission Zone, have worked. However, there is more we all need to do to improve.”
The study is expected to be completed later this spring, and its aim, as set out in the 2015 Oxford Transport Strategy, is to introduce the Zero Emission Zone in phases between 2020 and 2035.
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