Wednesday 9th July 2025
Blog Page 1015

One thing I’d change about Oxford… Greggs

Alex Oscroft
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One thing I’d change about Oxford… Greggs

Shall I compare thee to a steak slice? The pastry is an orange the shade of Donald Trump’s wigless, racist scalp while the filling on its own wouldn’t look out of place in an abattoir, but there is nothing more perfect in this life. So why, in this centuries-old city where perfection is the minimum requirement, are we denied such joy?

The smell of freshly-microwaved pastry, the queue of tired workers fumbling for their loose change, the rows and rows of identical little parcels of fat and grease and unidentifiable meat – these are alien sights to Oxford. I miss the aggressively blue signs and the worryingly high concentration of pigeons loitering outside. Even for a soft Londoner there are few more comforting sights than a Greggs.

A beacon of hope in the night, a warm orange glow of happiness. The vacancies on our streets are being filled by more and more Taylors or sushi bars, but the people do not want more sushi! What is rice and seaweed to a foot’s worth of sausage and pastry, toasted and bagged in seconds? We want meat and bread and gravy and we want it now.

Without a Greggs in Oxford soon I’m going to start to lose hope. There are only so many trips to Hassan’s in my pyjamas I can handle. And what about when Hassan isn’t there? What do I do between 4am and 7pm? Nowhere in this city is there a substitute for it. Wherefore art thou, Greggs?

Disclaimer: this article has not been sponsored by Greggs in any way, I’m just desperate.

Georgi Pirinski: an MEP’s Brexit perspective

Toby Williams
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Georgi Pirinski: an MEP’s Brexit perspective

“There is a real storm, a real tempest. The European Union is in an existential crisis.” Georgi Pirinski, former Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister and current MEP, as we spoke over coffee in London after he gave a speech in Parliament which strongly made the case for Britain to remain, a case which he wasted little time in explaining to me.

This began with the reflection that “maternity leave and many of the other labour and social rights which are currently regulated at EU level, if left to the tender care of personalities like the former Mayor of London, would not be so well defended. Plus, the European Investment Bank, which spends over €80 Billion, gives over 60 per cent of that sum to the five largest economies, which includes Britain. I do believe that the European Union, even with all of its shortcomings and deficiencies, still represents a community of nations with a very strong commitment to social equality and solidarity.”

I then ask Georgi why, given all of these positives, there is such pervasive anti-EU sentiment in Britain and throughout the continent? “It has to do with the idea Boris Johnson is expressing that the EU is a place where money is not spent for any good reason and that it is hamstringing local governments. However, sitting on the budgetary control committee as I do, whose principal exercise is to regulate how the European Commission is actually spending the EU budget, I know there is a scrupulous review of all spending. I don’t think the British public is aware of the degree to which EU institutions justify every euro of money they spend. I also think the pressures of everyday life, of economic insecurity, of anti-establishment sentiment, provide a base for Brexit to build on without any rational underpinning. I am not though willing to be critical of British people – I don’t blame them. I understand why they are in this mood given the widening economic and social disparities.”

This mood has helped populists such as Nigel Farage, whose conduct in the European Parliament has left Georgi less than impressed. “He basically enjoys himself. He likes to debate informally with Juncker. He is there to make an impression back home, he is not there to contribute. I think it is a question of proportion and he and his colleagues go way beyond proportion. The fact is though that they were elected – the genuine voice of a part of society. Certainly, being in the European Parliament is a way of finding expression for their concerns. But the questions start appearing when you ask why they are actually there? Are they there to do away with the EU? Once you enter an institution there are basic principles and norms and you can’t just say they’re rubbish.”

I ask what the general sentiment is in Brussels towards the possibility of a Brexit. Georgi explains that of the majority who want Britain to stay, many “are just keeping quiet, waiting to see what’s going to happen. They don’t want to do anything that would raise tensions. After all, Britain is an important member of the European Union and there is a very real risk of a domino effect if it leaves.”

Yet, at the end of our discussion, Georgi concedes that “the rational arguments so far are not working.” They are failing to set out the benefits of the EU or how it is not solely to blame for the current economic and social climate. Instead he insists there must be an appeal “to the emotional side of the argument” to prevent Britain from leaving and the existential threat this poses to the EU.

Nikolay Koshikov takes Hilary 2017 presidency in Union elections

Tony Diver
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Nikolay Koshikov takes Hilary 2017 presidency in Union elections

Nikolay Koshikov is the new Union President-elect of the Oxford Union, following the results of elections held on Friday 10th June.

In a clean sweep for their slate of other officer positions, Mia Smith was chosen by members as Librarian-elect and Dom Hopkins-Powell as Treasurer-elect. Mark Fischel, who ran as an independent candidate, was chosen as Secretary. All officers ran uncontested.

Elizabeth Webb, Kriti Joshi, Laali Vadlamani, Owen Rapaport and Chris Zabilowicz were elected to the Union Standing Committee.

It was a particularly successful election for Koshikov’s slate, with four of the five Standing Committee and eight of the eleven Secretary’s Committee running alongside him.

The turnout was 917.

See the full results below:

OFFICERS

President-elect: Nikolay Koshikov – 610 (RON – 155)

Librarian-elect: Mia Smith – 646 (RON – 107)

Treasurer-elect: Dom Hopkins-Powell – 589 (RON – 138)

Secretary: Mark Fischel – 575 (RON – 141)

STANDING COMMITTEE (in order of number of first-preference votes)

Chris Zabilowicz – 220

Owen Rapaport – 180

Laali Vadlamani – 131

Kris Joshi – 127

Elizabeth Webb – 103

SECRETARY’S COMMITTEE (in order of number of first-preference votes)

Edward Evans – 109

Juliette Aliker – 73

Simon Jagoe – 70

Julian Kirk – 62

Gui Cavalcanti – 62

Aidan Lea – 59

Edward Piggott – 58

Melissa Hinkley – 56

Alex Urwin – 56

Alan Petri – 50

Rufus Morgan – 44

Uni gender gap visible in schools

Stephen Hawes
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Uni gender gap visible in schools

Women are more likely to have a positive attitude toward higher education from the age of 13, a new report suggests.

The paper, called ‘Believing in Better’, was published by the Sutton Trust last Friday. It revealed 65 per cent of girls in Year 9 believed higher education was “very important” compared with just 58 per cent of boys. On top of this, 15 per cent of boys surveyed said they did not see the point in higher education.

This seems to be feeding into the gender gap in the UK education system, in which female pupils regularly outperform their male counterparts at school, while being 35 per cent more likely to go to university in the first place. White males from poorer backgrounds are now the least likely demographic group to go to university, with just 8.9 per cent attending.

Professor Pam Sammons, lead author of the report and Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, commented, “Our research shows that the students’ belief in themselves and their aspirations are shaped by their background. However, positive beliefs and high aspirations play an additional and significant role in predicting better A-level outcomes.”

However, male students are still more likely to study university subjects which have been linked to higher earnings, typically science, technology, engineering and maths. Honorary research fellow and Oxford professor of educational psychology Kathy Sylva said, “Earlier reports published by the Sutton Trust show that girls regularly get higher grades at A level. This does not fit easily with the higher earnings of men, compared to women. We have learned that the higher grades of girls has not led ‘automatically’ into higher earnings across the board.”

While the University Press Office declined to comment on the report, Oxford admitted 1,709 boys and 1,507 girls last year, an inverse disparity to that of many other universities.

The Sutton Trust’s report can be found at http://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/EPPSE-final-Believing-in-Better.pdf

I, Daniel Blake: a working class triumph

Jem Bartholomew
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I, Daniel Blake: a working triumph

Cinema commands a powerful ability to influence how we perceive the world around us. It offers lessons in empathy and tolerance, as we glimpse experiences separate from our own. This can revolutionise our perspective on the struggles of others. A social realist approach to film-making strives for such an impact, focusing awareness and debate to the country’s failures. In a society still reeling from the trauma of austerity, cinema is fundamental to refuting stereotypes about those who receive state welfare – demonised as ‘scroungers’ by the media, and abandoned by a faceless bureaucracy.

This is what makes Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or win for I, Daniel Blake so important. A grandee of social realism, Loach’s new feature explores the struggle between the elderly, unemployed Daniel and what he calls the ‘conscious cruelty’ of austerity Britain’s bureaucracy. As part of a small but growing European trend of the screen, the likes of Peaky Blinders or Measure of a Man, we are witnessing the slow re-emergence of working-class stories.

And quite frankly it’s long overdue. In recent years, public representations of our state welfare have become politically charged. The Murdoch empire vanguards our ugly national discourse, which attacks ‘scroungers’ and ‘slackers’. These mythical categories act as pantomime villains, only serving to divide the working-class. But this sentiment contradicts concrete facts. Just 0.8 per cent of welfare is claimed fraudulently in the UK – a figure people perceive is as high as 30 per cent. But in our era of media saturation, perception is more important than reality.

I, Daniel Blake must take credit for rising above political digs. Rather than fall victim to the polemical, it listens and engages with those in poverty. The narrative is structured around honest, human stories of hardship. It casts real people, non-actors from Newcastle who imbue the film with realism. Into the abstract rhetorical categories of ‘shirkers’ versus ‘strivers’, Ken injects humanity. He emphasises complex human emotion, with humour being just important as frustration and despair to social realism’s impact.

Can Loach’s new film make a difference? I must admit I’m pessimistic about art’s ability to change government policy directly. But this doesn’t mean there’s no hope for modern social realism. If I, Daniel Blake can help change hearts and minds – about how we think about poverty, how we empathise with those who need food banks, how we perceive those who receive welfare – then we’re one step closer to a more just and harmonious society.

Oxford Gobblefunk Dictionary honours Dahl’s memory

Nathan Chan
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Oxford Gobblefunk Dictionary honours Dahl’s memory

ROALD DAHL FANS might have a new reason to be “whoopsy whiffling”, as Oxford University Press has published a new dictionary compiling Dahl’s words to celebrate the centenary of the illustrious storyteller’s birth.

The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary features almost 8000 real, and invented, “extra-usual” words known as “gobblefunk”, that Dahl used in his work for children. The dictionary is also illustrated by Sir Quentin Blake, and its release is an opportune precursor to the upcoming Steven Spielberg film adaptation of The BFG.

The dictionary was researched and compiled by a team led by lexicographer Dr Susan Rennie over a period of five years. It showcases Dahl’s literary artistry, such as his adoption of spoonerisms and malapropisms, and his play with puns, sound and much more.

Examples of such literary creativity include “delumptious”, which means delicious, “whoopsy whiffling”, which means exciting, and “rotsome” which means unpleasant. “Dahl’s literary creations also were reflective of his personal life”, Head of OUP Children’s Dictionaries Vineeta Gupta told Cherwell.

An example of such would be that in Matilda, a parrot called Chopper actually alluded to Dahl’s real-life Jack Russell terrier. “Matilda” also means “mighty in battle” and was a frequent name given to tanks used in North Africa during WWII, where Roald Dahl served as a RAF pilot.

Gupta said the dictionary was meant to be an insight into Dahl’s creativity, and in particular to encourage children aged eight and above to “write more”. It also has the “rigour” of a “real and fully-functioning dictionary”.

“Roald Dahl’s work is timeless and he is the number one children storyteller in the world. How can we not have made such a compilation? We hope that this dictionary will be enjoyed by children, parents and grandparents alike from all over the world”, she said.

“I think it’s absolutely great that one of the wittiest, most creative, and most jubilant authors of all time has been featured in his own dictionary.” said Jonathan Yeung, a second-year PPEist at Oriel.

“Language leaves such a big impact on all of us, and every good language needs to have people who are willing to stretch it, give it dynamism and life. Roald Dahl is one of these people”, he continued.

Michelle Sum, a second-year lawyer also at Oriel, thought the same and told Cherwell, “Oxford is proving itself not to be archaic and boring by giving its seal of approval to Roald Dahl’s creations.”

“Children around the world can now rejoice in knowing that they can call their teacher who give them too much homework a cracfficult oompa loompa. What will be next? Perhaps a sign for a Harry Potter dictionary to come?”

Live review: Father John Misty

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
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Live review: Father John Misty

“I never liked the name Joshua / I got tired of J”, croons Father John Misty, opening the last of his three Roundhouse shows with the ingeniously twee ‘Everyman Needs a Companion’, the final track from his Father John Misty debut, Fear Fun.

It is no wonder that he was restless as Josh Tillman, drummer in Fleet Foxes, or, in fact, as J. Tillman, under which he released eight critically unsuccessful folk/Americana albums. It is only now, as Father John Misty, a name under which he could be anything from a wayward preacher to a hallucinating shaman, that Tillman has put his genius lyrics and arching melodies into play, receiving critical renown with last year’s I Love You Honeybear.

Far more important is the silhouette of his tall frame in a slim-fitting black suit, thrusting out moves half-way through ‘Holy Shit’ as though he were on a dancemat. He, a pulsating body on the floor amongst this cosmic breakdown, singing “Love is just an institution based on human frailty” with an unrivalled sincerity.

And this is the thing about Tillman: one moment he is standing upright, howling about “ancient gender roles / infotainment, capital”, and the next he falls to his knees, crying “People are boring / but you’re something else I can’t explain”, overcome with the romanticism of his own lyrics. The whole show is a roller-coaster canonisation exposing his wit.

And this wit of his embodies so many levels of human existence. One such level is that of Tillman’s marked sexuality. “I wanna take you in the kitchen”, he sings on ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)’, one of the finest songs of last year. The furious sexuality of his lyricism oozes with promiscuity, the kind rarely handed to a sweaty room full of strangers with such a straight face. The man is an outrageous performer, but that doesn’t mean his show is inauthentic. He may well cavort his body daringly to the rhythms of his band, but no matter how many guises of ridiculousness under which he slathers his music, nothing will detract from the intelligible crispness of his song-writing.

George Foreman: getting up after getting knocked down

Daniel Sutton
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George Foreman: getting up after getting knocked down

“When I was a kid”, booms a deep Texan voice, “I used to bunk off school. I’d set off, like any other kid, then go to the woods, stay there a little while, then climb back in through my window and go back to bed. One day, as I was climbing through the window, I saw my cousin Rita, and she said ‘Hey Monkey’ – she always used to call me Monkey – and I said ‘I just forgot something, I’ll be off to school’. She looked at me, and smiled. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t go to school. Nobody in this family ever comes to anything.’ I got my stuff, stormed off and almost went to school.”

After two world heavyweight boxing championships, 40 years as an evangelist and around $200 million in earnings from his eponymous grill, George Foreman tells his tale with a smile at the Oxford Union. His epic weaves from childhood truancy to spiritual rebirth, Olympic gold to multi-million dollar commercials, but at its centre was the world championship fight against Muhammed Ali, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the defeat for which he is still best remembered among boxing fans today. As I sit opposite Foreman, 42 years on, he describes how it felt to lose the world championship fight.

“Before then, it was like winning, winning, winning, and that was the only time I really lost; I lost plenty of other decisions, but I figured they could have gone either way. To leave defeated, where one day everyone is looking up at you, thinking ‘whoa’, and the next day they’re patting you on the back with sorrow, it’s the most devastating thing that could happen to you. It’s terrible. It’s like a darkness come over you, and you must get back and you’ve got to fight. That was the worst I’ve ever felt in boxing.”

Foreman continues, describing the challenges of entering a fight as champion. “The hardest thing, you know, about being world champion is you start believing things you hear about yourself. It’s hard to resist that, and I said I wouldn’t, but I became part of it, believing I was as tough as people said I was. That was a hard thing to resist.” Asked whether he had a role model himself when he was growing up, Foreman grins and sits back in his chair. “There was a great football player by the name of Jimmy Brown, who later became a great actor. I wanted to be him. He could run real fast and he was the first guy I’d seen without the football helmet, and I saw his face and I thought: ‘that’s the face I want’.”

At that time, was Foreman already set on being a boxer? “I really hated boxing – when I was street fighting as a kid, I thought I could easily fight without being a boxer, but it came to the point in my life where I realised there were things I needed for my family, and I could only get them by boxing. There was a time when I was in the Job Corps and a load of us were listening to a fight on the radio, and some of them looked at me and said ‘If you’re so tough, why don’t you go and do boxing?’ So I did.”

To start with, though, boxing didn’t go as planned. “The first time I went into a ring, I was up against this real weedy guy, and I thought, ‘This is gonna be too easy’. Then he hit me – bam – and it hurt! I tried to hit him, but I kept missing and he kept punching and the crowd started laughing, and I got real angry. I picked the guy up, and the referee said ‘put him down’, and the crowd laughed harder. When I lost, I ran out, and told myself, ‘I’m done with boxing’. None of my friends would look at me, and when I asked if they saw the fight, they just shook their heads.

“As I was walking down the street, my coach ran up to me, and he asked ‘Where are you going?’, and I told him I was done with boxing. He looked up at me and asked why, so, looking for an excuse, I said I had no boxing shoes. He then said ‘Wait here’, and ran off. I waited for about an hour, and then he returned with a pair of boxing shoes. That left me with no choice!’”

After a defeat at the hands of Jimmy Young in 1977 and what he has described as a near-death experience, Foreman converted to Christianity. Following this, he retired from boxing for a time to be an evangelist, initially on street corners, and set up a youth centre in Houston, Texas. Asked how his faith impacted his work, he paused. “I’ve been a preacher,” he said, “but faith is what I have, and it’s hard for me to describe its effect because I just know what I know. I suppose it builds you, it shapes you, and for more or less 40 years I’ve been telling people the same story of how Jesus Christ has worked in me. He’s been the only consistent thing for me, for so long now.”

Though he last fought professionally in 1997, Foreman still remembers the pressure of the ring and how he grew to relish it. “You know, the first time I got knocked down, I was an amateur, the guy hit me so hard, and I didn’t know what winning would get me, or losing, but I remember being on that floor thinking ‘I’ve gotta get up. I’ve gotta get up’. And in that moment, I didn’t have to win, but I had to get up. In boxing, when you hear that bell ring, you feel real confident because you know you have to get up. Sometimes you just get hit real hard, but you still have to get up.”

And the greatest moment of his career? “Winning an Olympic gold medal, in Mexico City. Even once I turned professional and won world titles, nothing came close. I’d represented my country, and I was so proud. I wore my medal so much that the gold began to wear off the back, and I said to my friend ‘Isn’t this a gold medal?’, and he went, ‘It’s gold-plated, George, but I’ll fix it for you’. And I remember my cousin Rita saw me soon after – the one who told me nobody in our family ever came to anything – and she said, ‘I always knew you’d do well, Monkey.’”

Google asks Oxford to find the ‘off’ button

Colin Donnelly
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Google asks Oxford to find the ‘off’ button

Google has partnered with Oxford academic Stuart Armstrong to ensure their new artificial intelligence program, ‘DeepMind’ can be turned off by humans.

Google had been concerned the program, which relies upon a neural network style of computing that mimics human intelligence, might have been able to refuse to obey instructions, and use its intelligence to circumvent human authority.

Students held a variety of views on this collaboration and the possibility that technology may become so advanced that we cannot completely control it.

“It doesn’t seem at all likely to me that software would attempt to harm humans in order to keep its execution running”, said Magdalen JCR computer rep Winston Wright, who is interning with Google this summer.

On another level, the possibilities with artificial intelligence could greatly increase quality of life. “AI and machine learning have the potential to greatly help people do a variety of tasks. Areas that particularly excite me are automated medical diagnosis, driverless vehicles, and natural language processing,” Wright said.

Oxford’s burning destruction

Daniel Curtis
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Oxford’s burning destruction

A friend once made the point that the central quote from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, is the ultimate descriptor of Oxford: to chart our experiences with how much caffeine is needed to get through to the next panic-inducing deadline or scenario is quaint. But in this quote lies a contradiction: the considered nature of “measured” cannot coexist with the explosion of energy and pace conveyed by the caffeine of “coffee”. It is a striking, yet jarring, juxtaposition, one which comes closer to describing Oxford than my friend ever realised. Indeed, it is this which makes our collective temperatures rise – the dual necessities of calmness and freneticism.

Needless to say, Oxford leans towards the latter. Yet this is not only in an academic sense, as overwhelming as the demands are here. Instead, other spheres all vie for the same space in our minds, with politics, relationships and our own individual challenges coming to the fore to render any mental space a luxury – a psychological reflection of the Oxford property crisis.

The other day I walked to seek refuge in the tranquillity of Port Meadow. I bumped into some friends along the way, but their conversation was already firmly parked in the arena of economic debate and political allegiance. As much as I love them, I left them, and headed back to college, ironically to resume working. This is indicative of our mental state: the need to de-stress is scuppered by the pressing concerns which harass us into action. It is as if we cannot give ourselves the space we need to cool down when there is always something below the surface vying for our attention.

Referenda are the prime offender in this regard. While much of the campaigning the NUS referendum reflected that of the upcoming EU one, the former is over while the latter rages on. How should we respond to political foot-dragging when not directly involved? Railing against the world in its entirety is an appealing proposition, channelling the immortal cry of “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” from 1976’s cutting, Oscar-winning satire Network. This anger can be cerebral, too: The Smiths’ defiant creed in ‘Still Ill’ of, “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving / England is mine; it owes me a living” assumes a prominent edge in our battle not only to be heard, but to drown out the voices of those that we resent.

Yet sadly, in my experience, the likelier outcome is one of resignation. Jay McInerney, in the stunning post-modernist novel Bright Lights, Big City (1984), writes, “You suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you.” It is perhaps the most brilliantly simple summation of the plight of the outsider – and indeed, the plight of the Oxford student.

This is an environment that fosters comparison – toxic, non-constructive comparison – and the baseless assertion that the whole world has their life together except for you. That you are the exception. That you are a failure. Thus, the natural evolution of our presence here leads to a yearning for a simpler time – a nostalgia for home, for school, for reckless abandon.

Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is obsessed with this notion: that the only true way to deal with failure is to scrabble around in search of a time long gone. The settings, books and characters of his narrator’s past are all identified, analysed and unfurled in much the same way as our own – a revision class with A2-sized paper and black marker pens brought back pleasing memories of my own faded school days of innocence and levity. “We can cap the old times, make playing only logical harm”, cries singer Paul Banks on post-punk band Interpol’s ‘Obstacle 1’. “We can top the old times, clay-making that nothing else will change”. All of this is the logical result of the natural need to grip a constant when everything else seems amiss.

Surely, then, the answer lies somewhere in the middle – to have enough of a sense of justice to get stuck in where necessary, but to always maintain enough of a sense of perspective to stay grounded. Indeed, in Brideshead Revisited (1945), Evelyn Waugh presents a recollection of an idyllic Trinity term and Oxford in the summer. His protagonist writes on reflection that “it is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence.” So leave yourself no need to do any such thing.

Yes, Oxford and life are both catalysts for burning frustration. But what goes less noticed are the opportunities they give to cool down. Waugh’s breath-taking description of the ‘dreaming spires’ puts it best, writing of the city that “her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days… when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth”. Look around you. Take it in. Cool your temperature. Measuring out your life with coffee spoons may well be necessary. But just make sure that you leave plenty of room between them.

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