Saturday 11th April 2026
Blog Page 1096

Protests greet future King

Sophie Jordan
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Protests greet future King

Prince William was not only greeted by excited students and fans of the royal family at the Blavatnik School of Government. After the prince’s official opening of Magdalen’s Longwall library this Wednesday, former Oxford student and Glasgow lecturer on Russian culture Martin Dewhirst held a picket outside the School building.

The protest was aimed at the University accepting Leonard Blavatnik’s donations, which helped build the School, as the origin of the Russian businessman’s fortune is controversial.

Dewhirst carried a sign which read “due diligence or undue negligence?” and was accompanied by a few other protestors in the inconstant weather.

On top of William’s visit, a conference on world-wide corruption held by David Cameron on the next day motivated Dewhirst to protest. “I wanted to do my bit in Oxford today to in-
crease the chances that Russia will get more public attention,” he said.

“Mr. Blavatnik has been accused of being corrupt, but not much of the evidence is available in English. I don’t understand why the University didn’t invite Transparency International and Global Witness to do some research on Mr. Blavatnik’s activities. I was able to express my concern on this point to quite a number of people in Oxford today – this made the trip worth while.”

Talking to Cherwell after staff from the Blavatnik School of Government refused to accept his photo being taken in front of the new glass building, he said, “Maybe the attempt to control us was a sign of worry, if not fear?”

Oxford graduate and founder of the Moscow alumni society Ilya Zaslavskiy, who has been protesting against donations from Blavatnik and Saïd at Oxford, held a picket in front of the Oxford North America Society Office in New York at the same time as Dewhirst was outside the Blavatnik School. Zaslavskiy had been asked to leave the premises of the Society after raising a sensitive question on April 11, and has launched a petition for the University to “review cooperation with Putin’s oligarchs”.

Its description states, “We believe it is high time to demand transparency and procedural reforms at Oxford with regards to foreign donations and awards that will be benefi cial to the University in the longer term and thus will open a cleaner chapter in broader UK-Russia relations.”

Mr Dewhirst is a signatory of Zaslavskiy’s petition, and told Cherwell, “I spoke several times today about the scandal at the LSE five years ago when its Director, an honourable man, felt he had to resign because he had accepted money for the School from the Libyan Gaddafi Foundation.

“I was not, of course, comparing Mr. Blavatnik to any member of the Gaddafi family, but providing an example of how dangerous it can be to have any dealings with people who are regarded by some experts as morally suspect.”

Commenting on Mr Dewhirst’s remarks about University due diligence processes, the University told Cherwell, “Oxford University has a thorough and robust scrutiny process in place with regard to philanthropic giving. The University is confident in this and in its outcomes.”

Prince William visits Oxford

Sophie Jordan
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Prince William visits Oxford

Returning to Oxford after his last visit in 2014 for the official opening of the Dickson Poon China Centre at Hugh’s, HRH Prince William came to open Magdalen’s newly-refurbished Longwall library today.

The Duke of Cambridge also stopped at the Weston Library on Broad Street, finishing his tour in the recently constructed Blavatnik School of Government where he was met by a group of fans as well as some protestors led by Martin Dewhirst.

Longwall library had originally been opened by prince William’s great uncle Edward VIII, and cost the college £10.5 million to renovate, a price which became the source of one of the prince’s many jokes on his way across Oxford.

Prince William greeted a small group of students who had helped raise funds for the library at his various stops, and told one of them he was “allergic to Chemistry” as he commented on student life and recalled his own.

Mostly described as a pleasant, cheerful person by those who met him in Oxford, the Duke of Cambridge’s visit also triggered more hostile reactions, in particular on his arrival at the Blavatnik School of Government behind Somerville college.

While some students had criticised the British Royal family earlier this week, Martin Dewhirst, an Oxford and LSE alumnus who gave lectures on Russian culture at Glasgow, led a group of protestors outside the modern glass building at 11am, holding a sign

Martin Dewhirst. Photo: Sophie Jordan
Martin Dewhirst. Photo: Sophie Jordan

which read, “due diligence or undue negligence?”

This protest was aimed at the main donor for the funding of the School of Government, Blavatnik, whose fortune and integrity have been questioned in the past. A picket was simultaneously being held by Ilya Zaslavsky in New York, and Dewhirst warned the staff of the School that “less civilised protests” were on their way.

Recipe: Homemade Pizza

Mabel Whitchurch
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Recipe: Homemade Pizza

Making your own pizza dough can seem daunting, but it’s actually so simple and quick – a perfect weekend dinner.

Ingredients:

300g strong white bread flour 1tsp salt
1tsp instant yeast
1tsp olive oil

200ml water
Jar of passata (classic tomato or tomato with mixed herbs)
Mozzarella
Prosciutto
Fresh basil

Method:

1. Mix the salt, yeast and flour in a bowl. Heat the water over the hob until it’s warm, not steaming.

2. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the water in, adding the olive oil. Move around the bowl with a spoon (or your hands) until you have a dough.

3. At this point, you can either cover the dough with a tea towel to let it rise and then make a pizza shape, or skip the rising stage – if do you let it rise, it’ll be a thicker pizza in the end.

4. Cover the dough in passata with a spoon, leaving a little space around the edge.

5. Cut up the mozzarella into slices (this is easiest to do with scissors) and place on top of the passata.

6. Cut the prosciutto into strips and add to the pizza.

7. Cook in an oven at 240C/Gas 8 for around 10 minutes.

8. Take the pizza out, add some fresh basil and enjoy!

Of course the best thing about making your own pizza is the flexibility it offers! Switch out the prosciutto with some sweet peppers, red onion and spinach for a delicious vegetarian pizza.

What’s going on in Abu Dhabi?

Richard Birch
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What’s going on in Abu Dhabi?

Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, is under construction. Not the sort of construction that looks like it has any sort of concern for the future, or any normal planning permission processes; but the kind of frontier mentality that dictates that as there’s a vast open desert, nice beaches and fuck loads of money to finance it, growth must be endless. In short, it is receiving a makeover not too dissimilar to those visited upon the faces of much of Abu Dhabi’s clientele. No long term plan, no sustainability: just plain mindlessness.

Instead of trying to create a long term basis for tourism and development, or indeed any genuine cultural apparatus with which to do so, Abu Dhabi developers have quite literally paid for the names of foreign art galleries to give the illusion of cultural involvement. In a few years (once the cranes and imported and undocumented work forces have left), you too can visit The Saadiyat Louvre; or indeed the Saadiyat Guggenheim! How on earth these places were persuaded to give their names away is beyond me (oil money, you say? No, surely these fine art institutions have more dignity than to be bought off).

Departing Saadiyat Island to head to the main city of Abu Dhabi, one must cross the Sheikh Khalifa Bridge, a six-lane highway with nobody on it. In its desire to imitate the ethos of American excess to the extreme, half of this unusual landscape is covered in tarmac. Indeed, the extent to which the locals appear to admire ‘The American Way’ is evident in the rather bizarre apparition of men in the local, timeless apparel driving Ford Mustangs and enormous 4x4s while blaring out a strange blend of Arabic music with American pop and hip hop. No originality, no culture: just plain mindlessness.

I headed first to the Marina. Symbolically the clouds came over such that when I arrived, the place was disturbingly akin to a seaside town in the North of England. A muddy orange mall, a concreted promenade, a ferris wheel which already looked sad in its rusting emptiness – yes, I could have been in the North (although the North at least has the advantage of not being so oppressively humid).

I then walked down another six-lane highway towards the main centre of the city, via the Emirates Palace, the impressive luxury hotel. The lagoon on which Abu Dhabi sits is undeniably beautiful; turquoise waters lined by golden beaches. Looming in the distance are the great towers of Abu Dhabi, including the three slightly curved glass masterpieces that are the Etihad Towers. The Emirates Palace itself is a testament to the state’s grandeur and wealth; acres and acres of verdant greenery and tropical flowers stretching all around the centerpiece of the huge palatial hotel.

Something about it, however, is amiss. It doesn’t take long to realise what that is: this is a palace which imitates the older styles of other Arab states. Yet this is not an old country. Indeed, in 1950, the region was incredibly poor and barely even irrigated. So it seems strange – disingenuous – to see an old-style palace here. It’s almost like a model city, really, rather than one with an individual style of its own. No history, no future.

As you pass the corner from the palace into the centre of Abu Dhabi, a giant poster looms overhead. A waving sheikh is the image, and the message says, “OUR FATHER ZAYED. UAE.” I subsequently noticed that this poster was just one of many. In Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed constantly looms overhead, like Il-fucking-Duce. Even granted the status of Sheikh Zayed in the country’s history (pushing for the formation of the UAE, leading Abu Dhabi into prosperity, etc.) it seems more than a little presumptuous for him to proclaim the status of a deity. Who art in heaven, indeed. After all, the successes of his reign come down to his luck of digging a hole in his back garden and happening upon a tenth of the world’s oil supply. That doesn’t make him a deity or even a Duce, just one hell of a lucky guy.

I then wandered around the city centre and found absolutely nothing. It was just a continuation – all glass frontispieces with nothing behind them. The Etihad Towers which stood magnificent and curved, visible all the way from Saadiyat Island, were just offices with a viewing deck at the top. I walked away from here to see the new Presidential Palace. The old one, apparently, was insufficient (it only looked twice the size of the Winter Palace, after all) and so a new one, white with gold tips at the domes, was being built round the corner. The whole area was deserted for miles around. If we Brits feel morally wronged by the tax evasion of Cameron, we can at least be thankful that we’re not being run by a self-indulgent President and a dictatorial god-like King.

With sweat pouring off my face, fed up of seeing nothing of any value – of seeing mindless expenditure; mindless construction; mindless dearth of culture; mindless governance; mindless cars, highways and towers – I felt myself a little mindless, head pounding with dehydration. Time to head back to the hotel and give up Abu Dhabi as a bad mistake.

Review: the End of the Affair

Benn Sheridan
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Review: the End of the Affair

Greene, concerning the nature of his belief, once remarked, “I fear I am a Protestant in the bosom of the Church.” His statement outlines the kind of crises which make this book, which he wrote in the midst of the climax of an episode of infidelity, truly one of the most compelling love stories he has produced: a fable haunted by his unease, his confused understanding of belief, and his desire for the security of a loving God.

Of course, these are all quite substantial themes for just a casual read, but this is where The End of the Affair comes into its own: it is not a difficult piece of fiction. The manner in which he crafts his sentences is unadorned, nothing is overwritten. The driving force behind the piece is really the emotional complexities of the protagonist, into whose inner monologue we are immediately thrust. I’d like to think Greene’s concise writing style was crafted during his time working at Cherwell, but who knows.

His character-cum-fulcrum, the aging, increasingly misanthropic ‘popular novelist’, Maurice Bendrix, is an obvious mirror of Greene himself. Self-obsessed, lonely, with deeply distressing opinions on other people’s intelligence, Oxford students should easily relate. He is also, like so many, rampantly non-believing. I doubt that even the Christian Union would be able to get him to listen. However, this novel, which fits into Greene’s tetralogy of overtly ‘Catholic’ novels, is all about conversions (I’m not going to ruin it for you, but everything doesn’t go according to Bendrix’s scheme). Part of me found this ob- session with bringing ‘the divine’ into almost every page, subtly or otherwise, just a little suffocating.

Indeed, the most compelling part of the work is not the presence of God – because, frankly, it’s a little boring – but the very worldly interaction between Bendrix and his lover, the wife of an insipid civil servant. Because we know how far this book is autobiographical – the dedication is ‘For C’ (Lady Catherine Walston, the wife of, you guessed it, a prominent civil servant) – the book is lent a kind of real-world poignancy that is both arresting and deeply disturbing.

Unlike his other works, like The Power and the Glory, or Brighton Rock, in The End of the Affair, we both understand and sympathise with the humanising, normal portrayal of a man torn between love and morality. However, precisely because he is so normal, this protagonist does not grip in the way that, say, Pinkie or Scobie does. There was no point in the novel where I felt the kind of dual loathing and appreciation which I expect in my understanding of Greene’s protagonists. This is, as I said at the start, a simple book. It is a very good love story, and demands little of the reader – but that, sadly, is all.

The utter pointlessness of being alive

Matt Roberts
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The utter pointlessness of being alive

I am, like many of you, currently going through the hot flushes of my youth – a period that I can only presume I will spend the rest of my life reminiscing about and lionising. For me, this experience is perfectly distilled by the effervescent flare of light when, in the course of some debauched evening, I have misplaced my glasses or knocked my contact lenses out of my head – there’s something about the way that light takes on this strange quality which reassures me that I’m not only where I want to be, but where I’m meant to be.

I have always possessed a certain tendency to gilt my present and burn my past, and there’s a seductive propulsion to this world view. I am perpetually rejecting the mistakes of the past, and pushing through to the future, via the present, where I can be a Better Person, and make Better Choices – this is a Good Thing.

This concept is of enormous importance politically to our generation. Progressive politics, particularly surrounding issues of race, or gender, has become nuanced enough to accept fact that many injustices are not perpetrated consciously, but un-, or sub-consciously. This is, in my opinion, a really good thing for our society – those subliminal, linguistically enshrined, and genuinely ‘mindless’ aspects of injustice – have an enormous amount of weight in making peoples’ lives really really rubbish on a day to day basis. Thus we are offered a political experience where we can ‘wake up’ to truth, by learning about critical theories of gender or race, and undertaking a path of radical and perpetual self knowledge – analysing the choices we make every second of being, and examining how in control of our lives we actually are.

This is where the burning of my past comes into play. The revelatory, epiphanic act of ‘waking up’ to my subconscious biases, the social constructions which impinge on my conscious decision making is a deeply euphoric one. We suddenly realise what was going wrong, we diagnose this freshly crystallised symptom of our hypocrisy and imperfection, and consequently consciously act to counter balance or compensate for What We Did. I am then keen, in light of the loss of the burden of mindlessness from my mind, to immolate the decisions I made before I became the Better Person that I am today.

I think love can work a bit like this as well. Being in love is an experience of constant, repetitive, anguished, discovery of why its worth being alive. But, I don’t believe that love is any less vulnerable to revelation than subconscious misogyny. I have seen and experienced love that goes stale, love that isn’t expressed in the perpetual revelation of truth, but that calcifies with boredom and falsehoods and imperfections and dogmatic, unengaged people who go through the motions but don’t feel the truth that woke them up to the mindlessness of not being in love – they revert to the mindlessness.

The problems start to come thick and fast when we consider what the end game of the death of mindlessness is: there isn’t one. I have already woken up to God, and not to God, to Love and not being in Love, to Racism and Sexism and Beauty and blah blah blah more times than I have the inclination to count – we have all probably ‘woken up’ about as many times as we’ve woken up. The funny thing comes when you realise that by the very nature of the waking up, i.e. waking up to things you aren’t conscious of, of which there are an infinite number of things, it is not a finite process. If, hypothetically, I were to be forever, then merely through the act of being I would wake up an infinite number of times to an infinite number of shades of mindlessness. When you try to add a foot onto infinity, it literally doesn’t do anything. The radically active nature of the process of waking up means that we must both stand radically in the moment and set that which has come before on fire. If our minds are merely infinitely small dots on an infinitely long line, with no objective sense of progress or purpose in the face of infinity, then it’s easy to ask, why should I bother? No matter how many times I wake up, I will never get any closer to finishing this great puzzle, which is not only endless, but profoundly direction-less.

Here’s the great problem then, we are (I’m sorry to remind you), all going to die. This is probably not as sad a fact as it might seem, but given we’ll never know whether its fun to live forever, we’ll just have to accept the fact that It Is The Way It Is. So we find ourselves at a point on an infinite continuum of being through waking up to mindlessness, which it is impossible to hop off without shooting ourselves in the head, and which is devoid of any meaning anyway. Even by writing this article, I’m desperately attempting to trigger the process of waking up to waking up, and ending the mindlessness of mindlessness in one fell swoop, but even that won’t get us any closer to working out what the fuck it’s all about.

Of Dogs, Doughnuts and Depression – 3

Nathan Chan
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Of Dogs, Doughnuts and Depression – 3

It has just occurred to me, at the time of writing, that no less than two weeks ago, leading charity Depression Alliance launched what was to date their “biggest ever” Depression Awareness Week (18 – 24 April 2016) in the United Kingdom. As one can obviously deduce from its name, the nature of the campaign is rather obvious. It seeks to destigmatize and to raise general public awareness of depression, or more broadly, mental health illnesses.

This is a cause I feel strongly about, and the reasons why, I guess, are fairly obvious.

I do not know why I have allowed myself to be oblivious the entire time such a meaningful event was getting under way. This piece, therefore, I hope, will serve as an atonement of sorts.

In order to make up for my absent-mindedness, and to perhaps play my part, however little it may be, in such a worthy movement, I have decided that this week I will write about nothing but Tom only. No dogs, no doughnuts – just Tom. He is a mischievous little weasel and ought to be dragged out into the light and open, where everyone can see him for who he truly is.

I am aware that I have not written in weeks, not least because my return to Oxford was anything but a smooth one. But I am in a better place now. I am able to make it out of my room without panicking that often and without stumbling down the stairs. I am able to eat at least one meal a day and drink 5 cups of water. And now, I can write again.

What I am about to write about Tom is a very candid and uncensored account of the past 16 months of my life. It is a very rocky story of how two very different individuals have, quite literally, been forced to spend each and every second together, like a pair of conjoined twins. And alas, in the context of Tom and I, and contrary to what a Taylor Swift pop song might suggest, two is far from better than one. I would also like to suggest to my readers that If you are looking for something dainty and light to read to round off your night, perhaps you should look somewhere else.

This is, undoubtedly, the most taxing and emotionally consuming piece of work I have ever penned down. This will also be a very disjointed narrative too as my thoughts roam far too wild, so please bear with me.

Depression is a peculiar condition. The sensation is difficult to explain, to say the least. If you have experienced it, and made it through, I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. I truly am happy for you. But, if you have not, then I wish that you never will have to. For the pain of depression is something that I would not wish even on my worst enemy. It is a mental prison without parole, and a never-ending dark tunnel with a sealed exit.

I do not intend to deploy a hyperbole when I tell you that there are simply no words adequate to describe very aptly the excruciating pain of depression. It extends far beyond than a malady of the mind. It is a very real, very morbid, and very physical sense of pain. It does not just happen in your head, as so many would ignorantly claim. You feel it ripping your insides apart, you feel it trying to yank off all four of your limbs, and the raging hellfire inside, no matter how hard you try, is inextinguishable. It burns on and on, and on, and on.

It would also, in my humble opinion, be wrong and far too simplistic to classify depression as being “sad”. Sadness, no doubt, is indeed a present element, but it is far from being the sole emotional constituent. The more dominant sensation that I have felt throughout these months, is the sense of absolute loneliness. I felt and do still feel that I am the only person on Earth. Even if my family, and whatever friends I have, were to surround me this very moment, and tell me how much I meant to them, it would not make a difference at the very slightest. I would still, very willingly, place myself in self-isolation, perhaps in the safe dark corner of my bathroom where I have spent many a night weeping silently, and sometimes not so silently, voicelessly asking God “why?” and begging Him, on all fours, for Him to pluck me away from the living inferno I am in.

Depression means seeing visions of your loved ones being crashed into pieces and pieces by an endless succession of cars every single night, while you stand there, screaming, powerless to reverse their fates. Depression means tearing vigorously at your skin and hair, and clawing at your table with your fingernails in utter desperation to distract yourself from what is burning inside. Depression means punching the wall over and over and over until your knuckles bleed, with a faint naïve idea that maybe the negativity inside you will trickle out your body along with your blood. Depression means taking pill after pill after pill every night before you go to bed and hoping, praying even, that you do not wake up in the next morning.

In the days of old, I never could bring myself to comprehend the idea of suicide. Why would someone, with a sane mind, want to end his life when his whole future is ahead of him, when there is so much yet to be done, yet to be explored and experienced? Why die when you know it’s going to be all better eventually?

Upon hearing this, Tom, at this stage, comes in, pats me on the shoulder and with a sly smile tells me: “Tough luck mate, it’s all going to be the same for as long as you live. You hear me? The. Same.”

Step by step, I found myself becoming that certain “someone”. The idea of death was no longer alien to me. It was, in fact, a very, very welcoming prospect. It would mean no more pain, no more suffering, and no more Tom. What could possibly beat that? Death no longer was irrational. In fact, it was the only thing that made sense and appealed to me at that stage. Why bother living, when living is worse than death itself?

I recall having a conversation with a friend last May. I had back then, and still have a daily ritual of removing the medicinal tablets I need every day from their respective packages and putting them into a small plastic box, where I carry around with me wherever I go. I was prescribed pills of all sorts, sizes and colors. The blues ones were for anxiety, the pink ones were antidepressants, the white ones were sleeping pills and some I did not know what they were but still took them just for the sake of it anyways. It did not really concern me as to whether I knew what I was taking in, when I should take them and whether I should be taking them in the first place. But I was too apathetic to care.

The pills were like candy, in that they supposedly made things more bearable. They numbed my senses, rather than stimulate them. They, at times, made me less sad and on lucky days, perhaps gave me an occasional dose of vitality, but inevitably the post-medicinal slumps would always set in. I distinctly remember taking a mouthful of pills, more than I was supposed to, one particular morning and immediately starting to count down, for I knew this farce of normalcy would soon break. Perhaps there was no point in taking them in the first place.  But oddly, amongst this chaos, I did find some temporary moments of peace. Arranging my pills into the small plastic box was strangely a very therapeutic task. It was something, for once, that I had complete control of. I was clapping and giggling, fist-pumping the air whenever I got the job done. That, really, was how delirious I was.

One particular morning in late May 2015, I remember, a very fresh idea suddenly crossed my mind. It was a fleeting one at first, but then it slowly settled. As I looked at my small plastic box freshly stocked with pills of all sorts, I realized that I could actually put an end to all this. All I needed was a generous gulp of water, followed by a big swallow, and that would be it. No more panic attacks, no more fear, no more darkness and no more pain. Nothing.

It was at this very moment, literally so, that a close friend of mine, from all the way in Boston in the States, called me. “Don’t you f*cking do it, Nathan, don’t you f*cking dare.” I was surprised. This certain friend, one of my best mates, has always been quite an interestingly aloof character, albeit nevertheless always in good spirits, yet this was the first ever time I heard his voice trembling and raging with unbridled emotion. “You’ll f*cking break us,” he screamed, “Gear the f*ck up and be the man you’ve always supposed to be!”.

What this friend had said to me was harsh, very harsh in fact. But it was exactly what I needed to hear. And I am truly indebted to him for my life.

After a few minutes, he called me again. I assured him that I was safely in my room, sprawled on my bed, with my small plastic box safely out of reach from me. He gave out a sigh of relief, and asked, moaning even, “Why did you have to do all that? Why? Why are you not afraid of dying?”

I chuckled, and replied, “I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of living”

He told me he did not understand. But, I guess the one thing that he could not see nor understand, was that neither did I.

Now that it’s been a while, I’d like to think I’ve coped with things better. The future is still rife with very unsettling scenarios that I have yet to face and I struggle to return to become the person I once was before Tom came into my life. The days ahead are indeed uncertain, scarily so, and I have never been so afraid. But I do not need a telescope to see, however faint it may be, that there is hope. And that makes me feel brave, and that makes me feel big like a damn mountain.

But even now, I have not finished triumphing over my inner demons. Sometimes I forgive myself for slipping into old habits and caving into my depression, other times I do not. In the ordinary hours of the day, I try not to dwell on it, but every now and then, when I’m reading a case judgment or just folding my shirts, I’ll look up and see Tom coming out of the cupboard next to my bed. I’ll watch him walk slowly towards me, draped in his usual blue polo and khakis, holding a very familiar-looking small plastic box filled with white and blue and red pills. He’ll pass in front of me and stop, putting down the small plastic box filled with white and blue and red pills onto the table. He’ll open it and put a mug of water next to the small plastic box. He then flashes me his sly smile, like the one I’ve seen so many times, and before he heads back into the cupboard, he asks: “You hungry?”

 

Oliver’s Twist: Ru Paul’s Drag Race

Oli Williams
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Oliver’s Twist: Ru Paul’s Drag Race

I’m back and ready again to bring you all my opinions on entertainment! Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best WOMAN win! Yes, I’m revving up my bitch critic 9 billion horsepower engine by kicking off the summer with a review of Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

I hadn’t come across Ru Paul until relatively recently, when a friend tweeted in ecstasy that she had discovered his show on Netflix. Intrigued, I decided to investigate. The ‘Drag Race’ part, contrary to popular ignorant opinion, actually refers to ‘drag’ in the sense of drag queens. The ‘Race’ is to become ‘America’s next drag superstar’ by being the last (wo)man standing after an X-Factor style elimination process throughout the series. I’ve recently finished watching season 2 of the most hilarious, bitchy, fabulous show on Earth.

Each episode of the show follows the style of ‘America’s Next Top Model’, in which the queens have several challenges to overcome: designing outfits, dancing, filming and photo shooting – in essence, everything it takes to be as queenly as Ru Paul him/herself. If you are in the bottom two after being judged by Queen Ru and his fierce companions, you must ‘lip sync…. for you LIFE.’ All the contestants are eccentric and full of attitude, making the series exciting and funny, and even, at times, moving. Their backgrounds are very interesting – the winner of season 2, for example, had a 3 year old son, and until he won the show was sleeping on the sofa of his ‘drag mother’ (a sort of mentor character in the drag world).

Ru Paul’s Drag Race is easily the most quotable thing since Mean Girls. The quips, comments and retorts that Ru Paul and the queens come out with are insurmountable. Ru’s catchphrase is “good luck, and don’t fuck it up.” Another favourite quote from the series is “when my mommy sent me to a military school she told me I’d grow up to be her little soldier. But of course, she got a drag queen.” If you enjoy laughing, you really have to watch this show.

Backstage: Doctor Faustus

Alex Barasch
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Backstage: Doctor Faustus

“We’re building the set at the moment, at the producer’s house, and it’s currently 150 metres of black pipe that we’re spray painting and then cutting and putting together. It’s bizarre, it’s weird – I hope it can look okay!” Director Cai Jauncey is describing their vision for Doctor Faustus and the work that has gone into its set so far. “The O’Reilly is kind of a big, blocky, concrete-y space, and we’re keeping it that way, which I’m quite excited to do, because a lot of the shows that I’ve worked on before are very elaborately staged,” they explain.

The concept for Faustus, by contrast, is grungy, industrial and relatively minimalistic. “You’re actually gonna see it as the O’Reilly Theatre without anything on it; we’re not hiding any of the lights or anything. I’m quite interested in playing with the space that we have.”

There aren’t many set designers left in Oxford – only a handful of people do it consistently – and their approaches vary. “What was really cool getting involved with Phantom last term was seeing all the TAFF guys who are going out now taking this huge elaborate thing and somehow making it work. At the same time I’ve seen people do very minimal but also very interesting things with set: I was assistant stage manager for His Dark Materials Part II last year, which was basically a lot of wood frames with some canvas over them, and that was so versatile.” That freedom is appealing, though the pressure is great. “I think it’s something people are a little bit scared to go into as well because everybody depends on the set – the lighting, the actors, and with Faustus the dancing is very much dependent on where the set goes.”

Still, everything comes together in the end. “The drama scene is kind of weird in that it’s really big – we’re probably one of the biggest drama scenes in British unis – but everybody knows each other, so you always have something like, ‘Oh, what about that person, they’re on that show,’ and you can always pull people in, and everyone’s willing to help out, which is really, really nice.” The Faustus team also started set construction early, which Cai cites as an advantage. “However, it also does mean that it’s taken over your life,” they admit wryly. “Because we started so early it’s an ever-present thing.”

Although translating a strong directorial vision into something that both works in practice and is compatible with the ideas of other members of the team is not without its challenges, they find the process rewarding. “It’s quite fun to work with what other people want to do, and how other people see things can inspire you to want to do something different.”

Why we should say #YesToNUS

Aliya Yule
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Why we should say #YesToNUS

At this year’s NUS Conference, Malia Bouattia was elected as NUS President. She was elected to lead a strong, united student movement; one that stands up to austerity and the Tory government’s attacks on Higher and Further Education; one that is – at its core – anti-racist, pro-welfare, and pro-democracy. NUS’s first black Muslim woman President won her election in the first round of voting by over 50 votes, unseating a sitting President (a rare occurrence in NUS), in the largest democratic union of students in the world, representing some seven million students.

But her election has sparked an array of attacks against her in the media based on racist lies: she was cast as an ISIS sympathiser for calling out Islamophobia, and a radical Islamist for vocally opposing the racist PREVENT agenda; a supporter of terrorism and violence when the opposite is true, as laid out in her speech, and she was subjected to death and rape threats on social media.

Calls to disaffiliate from NUS have largely been mobilised on the back of these attacks, alongside attempts to belittle and deride the work that NUS does. Articles in leading national newspapers trivialised motions passed at conference: the much reported motion ‘banning YikYak’ was actually a mandate to work with social media outlets to stop online harassment during elections. Simultaneously, these articles failed to mention so much of the good work that was highlighted during NUS Conference – a deliberate attempt to undermine the student movement, and stoke calls for disaffiliation.

Some students have argued that we should disaffiliate from NUS because of accusations of anti-Semitism levelled at Malia, many of which were derived from comments taken out of context. Articles reporting these accusations have taken recourse to Islamophobic stereotypes, suggesting they go hand in hand with her being Muslim. I agree with the Union of Jewish Students, who have called upon Jewish students to remain in NUS – this is vital to fight anti-Semitism in all its forms. The upcoming NUS institutional racism review – that will address all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – is most likely to yield constructive results for how we can move forward as a student movement and stamp out all forms of racism.

Given, then, that calls to disaffiliate have been mobilised on smears of the NUS and its new leadership, and that anti-Semitism within our student movement can best be addressed by remaining within it, it seems clear that people driving the ‘NO to NUS’ campaign simply disagree with NUS policy and election results.

        But, as Tom Rutland (OUSU President 2013-4) said in an email to all Oxford students during the 2014 referendum, “we won’t agree with every decision made at NUS – but that’s democracy”. There have been many students who have felt unrepresented by NUS Presidents in the past – myself included -, but we haven’t called for disaffiliation, for two reasons.

First, NUS is much more than its leadership.

Second, to demand an exit from an institution because you don’t like the outcome of a vote is profoundly undemocratic. So what is different about this election? Many students calling for disaffiliation have said that Malia’s election indicates how out of touch the NUS leadership is with “ordinary” or “normal” students: but who gets to be counted as an ordinary student? Are black students unordinary? Are Muslim students abnormal? Are we to dismiss those who care about liberation as “out of step” with the “real world”? As Shelly Asquith – NUS’s Vice-President for Welfare – wrote last year: “This bizarre trope is used to dismiss and undermine issues which those employing it politically oppose”. Saying that NUS no longer represents “ordinary students” is a smokescreen for saying “I disagree with the way they voted”. It is not a reason to disaffiliate.

There are so many reasons why we should stay in NUS that will be set out by the #YEStoNUS campaign in the coming few weeks. The NUS Women’s Campaign has set up a government task force to overturn the 1994 Zellick Report, which has resulted in a failure of universities to support survivors of sexual violence. This year, NUS voted for the first fully paid full-time Trans Officer in the country. The NUS campaign against PREVENT had an instrumental role in forcing a review of the legislation. NUS Conference voted this year to form a national student mental health task force, particularly looking at suicide prevention.  NUS provides solidarity networks for international students who face deportation, and provided evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, which persuaded them to launch an inquiry into the illegal deportation of 50,000 students. Over 2,000 Oxford students have NUS Extra Cards, giving us discounts we can’t get with our BodCards. If we disaffiliate, we lose these, costing individual students money.

Moreover, NUS is the only national organisation conducting nationwide research on student issues – from mental health, to sexual violence, student poverty or the impact of maintenance grant cuts on working-class students. Without NUS, this vital research would not be provided. NUS provides training for our Sabs, multiple trainings such as Women in Leadership, Black Leaders, Disabled Activists, and 26 democratic conferences which include training and workshops for delegates on a number of issues. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

        Saying #YEStoNUS is more important now than ever. Next month, the government will publish its White Paper on Higher Education, alongside the HE Bill later this year, which will introduce radical changes to how universities work, including introducing higher fees for elite institutions like Oxford. This has dire consequences for access, which will be further undermined if Oxford votes to leave the national campaign against the bill.

        The democratic election of the first black Muslim woman NUS President – the most progressive President to date –  is something we should celebrate. More than this, we should be celebrating our National Union of Students, which time and time again has supported us – from campaigning against PREVENT, to providing legal guidance to support rights we have won for Suspended Students, to selling condoms to OUSU at a next-to-nothing price. If Oxford disaffiliates from NUS, it will send a clear message that it is us who are out of touch with students. Come the referendum, say #YEStoNUS.

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