Blog Page 1130

Vaping on the NHS: should it go up in smoke?

Alec Fullerton
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Vaping on the NHS: should it go up in smoke?

Do you smoke? Don’t quite fancy chipping out for a vape, but oh so aware of the Instagram potential of those Snoop Dogg style smoke clouds? Fret no longer, as in a couple of months you might be able to get one free on the NHS.

Last week, the BBC reported that the UK’s Royal College of Physicians said that smokers should be offered e-cigarettes by GPs to help them stub out the fags for good. Back in January, the first brand of e-cigarettes was medicinally licensed for use in the UK, so it seems that it’ll be only a matter of time before GPs are dispensing them.

However, at a projected £20 cost for the initial kit, followed by roughly £10 per week for the nicotine cartridges, this would amount to an enormous cost for UK taxpayers. So, with so much money at stake and, more importantly, peoples’ health, are we certain e-cigarettes can help people quit smoking?

First of all, e-cigarettes turn smoking into a novelty. The way e-cigs are marketed and advertised turns a harmful and addictive product into the next ‘must-have’ gadget, and inevitably attracts impressionable young people.

What’s more, unlike cigarettes, smoking a vape has no finite length. Since you can smoke it virtually anywhere, it would be very easy to just continue inadvertently puffing away, ending up smoking considerably more than you would have done if you were just going for a single fag.

Using an e-cig completely lacks any of the elements of ritual or social interaction that you get with normal smoking, arguably one of its only positive aspects. Since you can do it anywhere and it doesn’t have a definite length, people don’t go for ‘vape’ breaks in the same way. Having never consistently smoked myself, I’m not going to assume the moral high ground and make the ignorant and overused claim that ‘willpower’ is all you need to stop. However, the whole basis of using an e-cig to stop smoking relies on people periodically turning down the dosage to wean themselves off nicotine. Surely if they have enough willpower to do it this way then they could do the same with normal cigarettes instead of having the NHS pay for a fancy gadget? This process of cutting down by lowering dosage is not as obvious and tangible as simply reducing the number of cigarettes you smoke per day, which offers more motivating, physical evidence of the progress you’ve made.

I would argue that attempts to stop smoking using an e-cigarette are misguided and a poor public investment. Above all, they confuse the process of quitting, which unfortunately does require some application of willpower, with simply deciding to pick up a vape instead of a Marlboro red.

Image credit: vaping360.com. License: CC BY 2.0.

Unheard Oxford: Neal Marjoram, member of the Pembroke maintenance team

Sophie Dowle
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Unheard Oxford: Neal Marjoram, member of the Pembroke maintenance team

Usually two or three of these lights go at the same time, so I’ve got a couple of them to do today. It’s shame it’s today that they’ve gone, because it’s raining.

I like the sort of variety you get working here. You never know what you’re going to get that day. A lot of it is routine. We get a lot of heating problems. On an average day I get in to Pembroke early in the morning and begin my day by checking the system and seeing what’s been reported overnight. I spend my morning responding to them. A problem to do with heating is nearly always among them. They are priority so I make sure to get them done. The boilers normally need the pressure dropped on them, or you need a new part. Sometimes I have to call someone in to look at things like that.

I mostly work at the GAB (Sir Geoffrey Arthur Building; Pembroke’s off site accommodation), and I prefer it down there. I just know it a lot better. When someone describes a fault I know what they mean or I know what it’s going to be, whereas up in college I don’t know the set up so well.

This time of year we start to get some stranger requests. Everyone’s got their exams coming up so little things get more annoying and more highlighted. For instance, last week I had people complaining about banging and squeaking doors. It’s little annoying things. It’s not a big deal, but when your exams are coming up it becomes more of a big deal. You do get more of that at certain times of the year, which is understandable.

It’s the routine, small things that are important. They’re part and parcel of the job. The most important thing is to keep the students happy. If they’re happy then it’s a lot easier, and college runs a lot more smoothly.

Linking Linklater’s Latest

Jake Kennedy
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Linking Linklater’s Latest

Everybody Wants Some!! is the newest effort of film-maker Richard Linklater, a man who understands the complex relationship between time and cinema. With the release of Boyhood almost two years ago he was universally recognised as a true great of the medium. About time. The evidence has been there since Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Linklater is not a flashy filmmaker. His films are modest, their genius understated. Neither manipulative nor sentimental, their interest in people celebrates humanity in a very real and honest way.

Often going unnoticed is Linklater’s mastery of story: Dazed and Confused, with its wandering plot line and high-school setting, feels like an easy, inconsequential movie. But this is only because of Linklater’s brilliant handling of pace, his unconventional narrative and its numerous characters. The film’s 102 minutes make us feel like we’ve lived every second of the 12 or so hours over which the film takes place. This is the subtle genius of the director, who can provide a short but sweeping look at real characters with real lives, while simultaneously expressing the inarticulacies of youth in a way that only cinema could. Boyhood takes this approach to another level: the film spans 12 years and by the end we feel like we know Mason as well as his own mother.

It is easy to miss the artistry in these films because they are not experimental in the conventional sense. Linklater seems to adopt a uniquely passive approach to his craft: the best of his films unfold themselves naturally before us, with no sign of being forced. They have a realism – not the kind of realism that is created by a shaking camera and grainy cinematography, but by the way he just seems to let his films happen. They mimic the experience of living and it’s this kind of passivity which is innovative and new. It is also deceptively hard to achieve.

Yet, Linklater also understands the artistry and artifice of cinema. Linklater’s cinema strives for realism but he doesn’t forget that film-making is about telling stories, and that stories are made up of moments in time. In films like Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, he demonstrates his expertise in knowing exactly which moments best reveal these stories, so that 102 minutes feels like 12 hours, 165 minutes like 12 years. But, due to Linklater’s subtle genius, we don’t even notice that we are being told anything.

Everybody Wants Some!! was released on May 13th.

Review: Melted Butter

Ellie Siora
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Review: Melted Butter

I’m always hesitant to go to any showcase of Modern Greek culture here in Britain. I’ve always tactically avoided all my family visits to the North Manchester greek orthodox eklesia, where the light of the candles flickers against cloudy skies rather than the lilac sunset of my grandmother’s village. I believe it stems from a stubbornness to keep ‘Greekness’ as something that is exclusively my own, to maintain the vibrant allure of my childhood memories rather than settle with bland replicas of my homeland over 3000 km away from their original.

It turns out, however, that amidst Oxford’s dreaming spires, I wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped in keeping my two separate cultures as distant from each other as I’d thought. I’ve missed the hybrid culture that I had at home, where we would in very British fashion over the pettiest detail, all while eating Mediterranean food. Therefore, although still hesitant, I couldn’t help but be enticed by OUGS’ Praxis’ performance of Serefas’ Melted Butter.

Still, as I walking towards the Simpkins Lee Theatre, I cringed at the idea of the tweed-clad classicists who were at liberty to judge the crude clichés that often manifest themselves in such instances. What’s more, I was worried the script would be loaded with the superficial drama and histrionic acting that could be found in the 3pm Greek soap operas I watched on hot, lazy afternoons. Melted Butter was exactly that – but, to my surprise, wonderfully so.

The script stands as a melodrama, with the plot line of the small town girl longing to sing in the big city, the deceptive pseudo gent who plucks at the heartstrings of her dreams, the slow unravelling of murderous details and the voyeuristic Oxford academic. Anastasia Revis’s direction lives up to the cliche, packed with sensational commonplaces: the dancing girl in the red dress, silhouetted against a spotlight on the curtain with roses thrown at her feet as her seducer claps the rhythm, foreshadows tragedy. The performance of the actors was the kind that would cause outrage amongst fans of subtlety. And yet, it all worked, with the writing, direction and acting preventing the common themes of deceit, lust and friendship from seeming trite. Any hellenophile who still harks back to the golden age of ancient Greece would have little to judge, for Serefas’ Melted Butter was a modern classic. As he himself intimated to Cherwell following the performance, Ancient Greek Theatre had inspired his writing and this was evident in the gripping nature of his play.

As entertaining as Melted Butter was, however, the political element of Ancient Greek theatre is lacking from its modern counterpart. But that itself is the lasting impact of modern Greek theatre – the fact that it mirrors the vapid drama of soap operas, and their focus on the ever-present theme of human nature, reveals the contextual relevance of such performances. The eternal culture of this ‘Greekness’ that I have been so adamant in protecting from judging eyes has become more popular than ever to modern Greek playwrights, theatre companies and, of course, audiences – just as it has to television producers and authors.

We, as Greeks, are all struggling to preserve the vibrant allure that our country so effortlessly offers in its beautiful landscape and rich history, in a present where the very same country is crumbling both politically and economically. For me, PRAXIS, the first theatre company to translate Serefas’s work, is both brave in shamelessly exposing ‘Greekness’ to others, and skilful in implying its significance – at least to a Greek person- by doing so.

What new admissions data actually means for access

Charles McGrath
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What new admissions data actually means for access

The release of the 2015 admissions statistics has led to the usual charges against Oxford and how it is letting down those from disadvantaged backgrounds by continuing to accept a large proportion of privately educated students. While this is true, and Oxford still suffers from this systemic problem, it is only half of the story.

Perhaps the most significant aspect to these statistics is that, on a year-by-year basis, there doesn’t seem to be much change. Around 62.5 per cent of applicants were from state schools, while 37.5 per cent came from independent schools. Of these, 55 per cent of acceptances went to state school students, compared with 44 per cent from independent schools. Around 63.8 per cent of those applying were UK domiciled, compared with 24.4 per cent from abroad; 80.8 per cent of offers went to UK domiciled applicants.

All of these statistics are useful in their own ways, in the sense that they show – despite the University’s best efforts to improve its access scheme – things are beginning to look pretty constant. However, perhaps the most useful thing that these statistics tell us is what access should focus on next.

It’s clear that the disparity between independent schools applicants and the number of acceptances they receive compared with state school applicants is here for the long haul. The 2015 statistics are roughly comparable with those from 2007, when around 52 per cent of acceptances were from state schools.

The development of the access scheme in the coming months and years will hopefully address the disparity between applications and acceptances from state schools and those from independent schools. As recognised by the University on its report, ‘state school’ as an indicator of social disadvantage is ineffective; a more sophisticated model is needed in order to truly gauge what Oxford and other Russell Group universities are doing to improve diversity within the student body.

Yet, I would contend that even using Government indicators like Free School Meals and Pupil Premium poses the risk of ignoring students from equally deprived backgrounds as those eligible for such schemes. To venture into anecdote, I was an applicant from a single-parent family whose mother was working for around about £16,000 per year at the time of my application, and who was in receipt of Working Tax Credit and Housing Benefit. This immediately disqualified me from receiving FSM or Pupil Premium. I’m sure there are many others from relatively deprived backgrounds who, because of quirks like this, are not visible on the University’s radar when it comes to measuring the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds being accepted. That is why I believe that an access programme that takes other factors into account, rather than simply those used by the Government, would be more effective in improving the socioeconomic diversity of students at Oxford.

Within the UK, there is a clear North-South divide in applications and acceptances to Oxford. Again, however, this is already on many access workers’ radars, and my own college – Pembroke, where I’m the JCR Access Rep – performs a lot of work in our partner region of the North West (Cheshire and Greater Manchester) to not only encourage applications to Oxford but to develop Sixth Formers’ critical faculties so that they even consider higher education at all.

There is still work to be done on this, including a more co-ordinated response to access work in different parts of the country between colleges. OUSU is taking its first steps in building a database of committed access workers, noting the regions from which they derive, so that each college has a pool of people from their ‘catchment areas’ who can then go to schools and represent the university in those regions. The most effective way in getting the attention of an assembly hall of Sixth Formers is to have someone who you can relate to – from the same area, with the same accent – giving a talk, and so these are definitely steps in the right direction.

The highlight of the 2015 statistics in my view is the disparity between UK domiciled students and international students applying and accepted into Oxford. I suppose this is unsurprising considering that, from my experience of friends who have come from abroad, only a select few schools are given the chance to apply to Oxbridge. Equally interesting with the EU referendum on the horizon is that the number of applications from within the European Union seems to be increasing at a slower rate than applications from outside the EU. Despite this, both figures are dwarfed by the number of UK domiciled students accepted into Oxford, and shows a need – in my view – for programmes such as the Reach Scholarships provided by OUSU to be pushed even further and to a wider range of schools in other countries.

The statistics present relatively little that’s new, but affirm the need for Oxford to continue its commitment to access and perhaps call for new approaches towards access, particularly involving international applications and ways for colleges to keep in touch with their partner regions. While the statistics aren’t a cause for celebration, they do show that – with a bit of effort – the University through its many ccess programmes could improve further the diversity of the student body here and lead the way amongst other top higher education institutions.

If OUSU wants to be taken seriously, it should let us see what its up to

Tony Diver and Hannah Foxton
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If OUSU wants to be taken seriously, it should let us see what its up to

It was Otto von Bismarck who declared that there are only two things in the world you should never see being made: laws and sausages. And if you believe the rumours about our Prime Minister’s time here, there’s more than enough pork flying around at Oxford.

But at a much-awaited OUSU meeting on 28th April, in which delegates from Oxford’s thirty-eight colleges came together to decide whether we should be granted a referendum on our NUS membership, the gristle-grinding of democracy in action happened behind closed doors.

Having been sent by Cherwell to film the debate, we and our cameras were voted out of the room because of the sensitivities of a small minority of audience members. An erstwhile OUSU delegate suggested to the meeting that filming might break a rule of the council – a rule that, as it turns out, doesn’t exist. Having spoken to the Chair and President of OUSU council in the meantime, Cherwell learnt that nothing at all equips the chair to prevent filming, apart from general standing orders which require them to ensure that “council fulfils its functions” and that “everything is carried out in an appropriate manner”.

Yet the unfortunate Matthew Collyer, harangued by audience members sitting behind the camera, told us that if a single person in the room felt uncomfortable with filming, regardless of whether they appeared on tape, then we wouldn’t be allowed to film at all. A handful of audience members – who we had no interest in filming – wanted us to stop, so we left the room. Democracy in action indeed.

Delegates from across Oxford had gathered to discuss whether OUSU should hold a referendum to disaffiliate from NUS. Calls for the vote had been triggered in the wake of the election of controversial new president Malia Bouattia who stands accused of making anti-Semitic remarks. After hours of debate, the motion was eventually passed, and Oxford students will be given the chance to vote in sixth week on their University’s membership.

Although of little importance to anyone outside the Oxford bubble, the move will have profound implications for our students. In any democracy, no matter how small, it’s imperative that we know what our representatives say on our behalf.

You’d think that a student organisation like OUSU, an insular community that attracted a measly 14% turnout at the last university-wide election, would be begging for the coverage. After all, the number of people interested in student politics here could barely fill the table at an elite dining society. When invented council rules are used to keep the lid on proceedings, you can understand why the turnout figure is so low.

In this case, our union chose to prioritise the discomfort of a small number of students over the openness and transparency of an organisation that is meant to represent us. The increasing prevalence of ‘safe spaces’ in areas which ought to be hubs of debate and free speech is typical of the way that student politics has become more concerned with its own moral righteousness and the avoidance of offence than with making itself accessible to the average student.

Oxford students can sleep well at night knowing that the freedom of the press in the real world lives on. Perhaps Bismarck was right to keep laws and sausages secret. But the privacy of pork has been breached – we’ve seen what goes on. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

See Cherwell’s broadcast report on the vote below:

Rewind: Let It Be

Sam Purnell
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Rewind: Let It Be

On May 8 1970, The Beatles released their 12th, and final, studio album Let It Be. It came after the White Album, and its ensuing arguments, taking its toll on the group and their cohesiveness.

Paul McCartney seemed to be the only member keen to continue, spearheading a return to ‘back to basics’ and hoping that the traditional group recording would reinvigorate the other three unenthusiastic members. This idea worked, with a return to their musical roots greatly appealing to John Lennon and George Harrison.

However, this apparent harmony only lasted until rehearsals and recordings as McCartney took on the role of leader. With The Beatles’ fight gone, Lennon became more devoted to making music with his soon-to-be wife Yoko Ono. Lennon’s disengagement and McCartney’s controlling streak caused Harrison to quit, the first crack in the façade, only to be coaxed back several days later. Evidently The Beatles weren’t committed to this album; it was a product of the fragmented and empty shell of the once great band.

Rehearsals took a turn for the worse, with Lennon running out of ideas and showing disinterest in any offering brought by McCartney or Harrison. This caused their minds to shift further away and they became unprofessional due to their lacking enthusiasm.

Despite all of these bumps in the road, the album was eventually released. With many fans still swept up in continued Beatlemania, with the album going on to top the charts around the world and selling over 4 million copies in America, many critics didn’t see the hype.

Instead, they could see the lack of care that seeped out of the album: NME’s Alan Smith wrote at the time “If the new Beatles’ soundtrack is to be their last, then it will stand as a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop.”

Even the seemingly immortal refrain of this album, ‘Let it Be’, evokes this sense of mindlessness in its listeners. It implores them to take up a mantle of passivity and let events wash over them like a wave. In many ways, this title perfectly epitomises the end of the Beatles era – dying embers of a creative fire that had once burned so brightly, now left untended by lacking commitment and enthusiasm.

Representing The Impossible

Jem Bartholomew
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Representing The Impossible

Post-war art seemed to reflect Theodore Adorno’s dictum, that ‘poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. But, perhaps through the passing of time and distance, we became ‘able’ or ‘ready’ to see more accurate artistic depictions of the Holocaust. In terms of cinema, the epic scale Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), then Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) illustrate this trend. Yet Nemes’ Son of Saul differs significantly from these grand-historical-narratives of horror. It powerfully identifies the futility of ever truly representing horrors of the Holocaust through art, while simultaneously providing the fullest and most human realisation of the inner workings of concentration camp life.

Son of Saul forces us to comprehend the internal anti-logic of a death camp through the eyes of a Sonderkommando – prisoners who gained ‘privileges’ if they helped oil the mechanic process of killing. The depiction of camp ‘order’ is both shocking and thought provoking. The Internal hierarchies among prisoners (between Jews, ‘politicals’, and POWs), the inmates’ de-sensitivity to mortality, the repetitive working day, reducing horror to mundane routine – all are complexities of camp life usually overlooked by directors.

By forcing those persecuted to participate as a small cog in a ruthlessly efficient, evil machine of genocide, the fascists tried to erode their humanity. Having studied the period and read many memoirs by Holocaust survivors, I’m all too familiar that they were often successful in this endeavour. The surviving Sonderkommando Paul Steinberg wrote, “We were the beasts they had made of us.” Son of Saul is one man’s attempt to retain his humanity, as he struggles to search for a Rabbi to perform a burial for a young boy. This act of defiance is an attempt to preserve both his humanity and his religious identity in a world stripped of hope. Saul’s resistance is on a personal level, in contrast to the armed resistance his inmates plan for. Over the course of the film these two types of inmate resistance frequently collide and disrupt each other. This moral dilemma has the audience involved until the last.

Son of Saul doesn’t appropriate the Holocaust for grand cinematic imagery. This is a very personal, internal story, focusing on one individual and the moral complexity of his situation. The shallow focus and close camera-work maintain an engaging sense of claustrophobia throughout, making for superb dramatic intensity.

Art will never be able to truly express such horrific human atrocities. The unbridgeable chasm between the screen and the viewer make cinematic representations of the Holocaust inherently inadequate. Once the credits roll, the viewer can leave the hush of the cinema pews and return to the comfort and safety of their normal life. However, what Son of Saul does offer is a sensitive and unflinching exploration of the intricacies of concentration camp life, allowing us a poignant window on a world of trauma we’ll never be able to truly comprehend. We’ll never be able to truly represent the Holocaust, but Nemes’ power comes in expression precisely this inability to represent the Holocaust.

Review: the OBA Easter Projects

Louise Howland
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Review: the OBA Easter Projects

The Oxford Broadcasting Association (OBA)’s Easter Projects debuted five shorts from Oxford’s student filmmakers, made at pace over the vacation. At the UPP, the energy was electric as directors, writers, producers, editors and actors gathered to see their creations come to life.

The first was the charming Monitor. It used conventions of the archetypal rom-com as a template for exploring modern love and its dangers. Behind the laughs, it posed questions about the compatibility between ‘true love’ and social media, and how Facebook stalking encourages unhealthy monomania. Maddy Walker was impressive as our tragic hero’s cynical co-worker.

Next up was Bench. It starred Imogen Allen as a girl with mental health problems who, after chatting to a stranger, is given a reason to leave the safety of her flat. Credit must be given to Bench’s refusal to play into common stereotypes concerning mental illness. The approach to autism was sensitive throughout. This film best exemplifies why the ‘Easter Projects’ were endorsed by the organisation ‘F-Rated’ – which seeks to further women in film. Bench gives us hard intersectionality, while retaining a tenderness that is moving and thought-provoking.

The Tie, about a man mourning his late brother, showed flashes of brilliance early on. Characterised by a dark gallows humour, it provoked the most lively audience laughs of the screening. Its flaws – lingering transitions, or the flippancy between cutthroat comedy and melancholic grief – are not reflections on the writer and directors. Instead, they remind us the Easter Projects are the OBA’s annual endeavour to encourage amateur filmmaking: choosing deliberately inexperienced crews to foster indie cinema. The intelligence and shrewdness of The Tie was powerful enough to look beyond its mistakes.

Moving the tone from bereavement to a complicated LGBTQ love triangle was Ensemble. Script revision turned it from heteronormative to female same-sex heartache, as teacher and student battle their way through the minefield of power-relations and love. The premise was interesting, and the performances strong, particularly from Rebecca Hamilton and Seamus Lavin (who dazzled as a clueless drama student), but the loose plot disappointed.

For me, last certainly wasn’t least with Shannon Britton’s The Arbor standing out. A colourful, violent piece on youth in revolt, this enthralling dystopia took ambition to be realised on the big screen – and boy, did it pay off . The striking visuals and slick style made for an intense experience. Praise is due for Rosa Garland, whose harrowing, energetic performance as the flawed heroine was a promising debut and should not go unnoticed.

These OBA films highlight the power of creative ideas communicated via cinema. On top of this, all five short-films featured female directors, highlighting an active and self-consciously feminist approach to film-making. The film industry should take note.

Review: Pripyat

Alex Barasch
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Review: Pripyat

Veronica is an obituary editor. Her girlfriend, Percy, suffers from Cotard’s delusion, a form of psychosis that makes her believe she’s dead. It’s not a narrative one is likely to encounter just anywhere, but Verity Bell’s new play – a sharp, authentic exploration of mental illness whose only characters are queer women – is a vital one.

While the opening monologue was slightly heavy-handed, and the wilful destruction of the fourth wall doesn’t always work, the characters and their story (told in disjointed snapshots intercut with Percy’s medical history, from the amusing aftermath of a DIY piercing gone awry to weightier accounts of depressive episodes) are undeniably compelling. Given their situation, it’s understandable that the two talk a lot about legacies – both their own and humanity’s, as embodied by the eponymous Pripyat, a nuclear city evacuated following the Chernobyl disaster which the surrounding wilderness has gradually subsumed. In a telling moment, Veronica says that the animals there must be happy, while Percy points out that they’re almost certainly “cancerous as fuck.” And then, the question that looms over the play itself: does that matter in the absence of a diagnosis? How much does a disease, or more specifically our awareness of it, affect our experience and sense of self?

Like its characters, Pripyat is keenly aware of the works that have come before it (complete with meditations on Sarah Kane), the conversations it hopes to start, and the tropes that it comes perilously close to but ultimately, thankfully, subverts – rather than falling into the easy “hysterical woman” narrative, Bell treats Percy’s illness and Veronica’s helplessness in the face of it with respect and compassion. The back-and-forth between the two is witty and quietly devastating by turns; their relationship is understandably fraught but ultimately deeply loving.

The two-woman show asks a great deal of its leads, but they quickly prove themselves up to the task: their chemistry is apparent from the outset, and Anushka Chakravarti shines in the scenes depicting the early days of their relationship, lending Percy a kind of humour and charm that makes the toll of her illness all the more heart-wrenching in contrast. Imo Allen is exceptional as Veronica, with a range and emotional intensity rarely seen in student drama that becomes particularly apparent as the play reaches its tragic end.

Most facets of the play work well. The set design makes the space feel intimate and lived-in; the lighting is more inventive than that of most BT shows, including instances where clinical records are superimposed over the pair as they are read out. The script itself is occasionally overwrought, and its self-awareness doesn’t quite rescue it from a few stilted speeches and moments that seem to be checking off a list of buzzwords, but ultimately these shortcomings can be forgiven. Granting representation to people and issues that go ignored all too often is clearly close to Bell’s heart, and the result of her efforts is well worth a watch.

****

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