The vac ends, and as you finish cramming your toothbrush into your last bag, you notice the to-do list you optimistically penned within the first few days of the Easter Vac. First bullet-point: Revise. You don’t need a pen to tick that one off. Because just like me, you’ve failed, and now you’ve got a problem.

If I were good at my job as a how-to-instructor, I would probably tell you to put down these venerable and noble pages, and get revising. But I’m not going to do that. Because then what would be the point of me writing this in the first place? So. Once you’ve finished reading this paper, get up. You’re going to need a lot of caffeine. 

At this point, leisurely drinking a cup of coffee is just not going to be enough. Neither is leisurely reading. In order to get yourself sorted, you’re going to need to do a bit of role play. Nothing dodgy, but roll up your thesp sleeves. Here goes. 

Imagine you are in Roppongi. Lay out 20 shot glasses down your desk. Fill each one with coffee (preferably Gold Blend). I repeat: you are in Roppongi. Now, seeing as you’re stuck in Roppongi, there is only one thing a sane person would do. Numb the pain. So now you’re going to have to shot those glasses. Well done. 

Next. In order to escape from Roppongi, you are going to have to write a practice paper for the bouncer. Admittedly this is a test of faith, but you can always ask your friend to step in as faux bouncer. Anyway, before you can complete the paper, you’re going to need to prepare. With the excess coffee in your system, your heartbeat should be going. Start reading. You must finish the page before you hear the sound of your next heartbeat. 

Repeat this for as many hours as you have before your collection(s). If you pause, Roppongi will get you. 

If you get to five minutes before your collection, and you’ve failed to follow my instructions, there is only one thing left to do. It’s dangerous, but it will work. Trace back the email which notified you of your collection all those weeks ago. Print it out surreptitiously. Go into a dark room, and then, within five seconds (you can use a timer on your phone), eat it.

Once consumed, return to your bedroom. Make sure you walk slowly in order not to attract attention. When you are contacted to find out why you were not at your collection, deny all knowledge. Assure them that you never received any emails, and have certainly not consumed any evidence. 

If this conversation occurs in person make sure to hold eye contact at ALL TIME. DO NOT BLINK. Your tutor will realise you are correct, and you can begin the term, unscathed. This will only work once. Revise next time, you idiot.

TW: Sexual Assault

I cannot address this letter to you, because I do not know your name. I only know that you have just been charged with serious sexual assault and prolonged attack of a violent nature. And I have one question.

When you were caught on CCTV following me through my own neighbourhood from the Tube, when you waited until I was on my own street to approach me, when you clapped your hand around my face until I could not breathe, when you pushed me to my knees until my face bled, when I wrestled with your hand just enough so that I could scream. When you dragged me by my hair, and when you smashed my head against the pavement and told me to stop screaming for help, when my neighbour saw you from her window and shouted at you and you looked her in the eye and carried on kicking me in the back and neck. When you tore my bra in half from the sheer force you grabbed my breast, when you didn’t reach once for my belongings because you wanted my body, when you failed to have my body because all my neighbours and family came out, and you saw them face-to-face. When CCTV caught you running from your attempted assault on me… and then following another woman twenty minutes later from the same tube station before you were arrested on suspicion. When I was in the police station until 5am while you were four floors below me in custody, when I had to hand over my clothes and photographs of the marks and cuts on my naked body to forensic teams – did you ever think of the people in your life? 

I don’t know who the people in your life are. I don’t know anything about you. But I do know this: you did not just attack me that night. I am a daughter, I am a friend, I am a girlfriend, I am a pupil, I am a cousin, I am a niece, I am a neighbour, I am the employee who served everyone down the road coffee in the café under the railway. All the people who form those relations to me make up my community, and you assaulted every single one of them. You violated the truth that I will never cease to fight for, and which all of those people represent – that there are infinitely more good people in the world than bad. 

This letter is not really for you at all, but for all the victims of attempted or perpetrated serious sexual assault and every member of their communities. I’m sure you remember the 7/7 bombings. I’m also sure you’ll remember how the terrorists did not win, because the whole community of London got back on the Tube the next day. You’ve carried out your attack, but now I’m getting back on my tube.

My community will not feel we are unsafe walking back home after dark. We will get on the last tube home, and we will walk up our streets alone, because we will not ingrain or submit to the idea that we are putting ourselves in danger in doing so. We will continue to come together, like an army, when any member of our community is threatened, and this is a fight you will not win. 

Community is a force we all underestimate. We get our papers every day from the same newsagents, we wave to the same woman walking her dog in the park, we sit next to the same commuters each day on the tube. Each individual we know and care about may take up no more than a few seconds of each day, but they make up a huge proportion of our lives. Somebody even once told me that, however unfamiliar they appear, the faces of our dreams are always faces we have seen before. Our community is embedded in our psyche. You, my attacker, have not proved any weakness in me, or my actions, but only demonstrated the solidarity of humanity. 

Tomorrow, you find out whether you’re to be held in prison until your trial, because you pleaded ‘not guilty’ and pose a threat to the community. Tomorrow, I have my life back. As you sit awaiting trial, I hope that you do not just think about what you have done. I hope you think about community. Your community – even if you can’t see it around you every day. It is there. It is everywhere. You underestimated mine. Or should I say ours? I could say something along the lines of, ‘Imagine if it had been a member of your community,’ but instead let me say this. There are no boundaries to community; there are only exceptions, and you are one of them.

Cherwell Life is starting a campaign with Ione this term. We are asking for articles under the theme of ‘NOT GUILTY’. We encourage responses considering assault, victim-blaming and community. Whether you have experienced assault, or wish to supply some positive thinking, please do respond, just as Ione has done. We are hoping to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and our website, in order to establish a strong force of community overriding misdirected victim characterisation. Submissions to [email protected]

 It’s worth saying there’s something disingenuous in choosing the title of ‘comedian’. I’m not a comedian in a basic sense – I don’t get money to make people laugh. Though perhaps I’m being disingenuous when I say that, so we really have this bizarre Russian-doll situation of the increasingly disingenuous already, only three sentences in. 

I spend most of my time in Oxford trying to make people laugh with friends, doing sketches and songs, taking them around the country, and it’s certainly what I want to do in life. But I’d eschew the label “comedian” for an altogether more pretentious reason.

To embrace any sense of the professional, even momentarily, and say, “I’m a comedian,” would instantly negate the claim. It’s like how you can’t consciously try to be ‘cool’ – if you’re trying, you’re not doing it right. You have to resist, perhaps even violently hate, the traditional forms of ‘comedy’ in order to do it right. Sketches are a perverse idea; a ridiculous art form that no one should be prevailed upon to sit and watch and enjoy, and it’s important to accept that. You certainly can’t say, “These are great, people love bizarre little microplays feebly acting as vehicles for contrived wordplay – people love me!”. We’re attention-addicts. There’s nothing noble or professional about it. The best you can do is be aware that wanting to make strangers laugh is so utterly strange. 

My week has involved a gig in Cambridge – an exchange show featuring me and three contemporaries as the Oxford Revue, alongside the Durham Revue and Cambridge Footlights. For those unfamiliar with university troupes, Footlights is essentially the brand worth knowing. It’s been a club since the 1800s, and churns out famous comics like a Ford production line. The reputation is enough to get them sell-out international tours annually, regardless of specific personnel. There’s something irritatingly efficient about them – almost German. They don’t get the biggest laughs on the night, but I’m yet to see a Footlight fail. 

Oxford, despite equally distinguished funny alumni (Alan Bennett, Stewart Lee, Laura Solon, Rebecca Front, Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and two Pythons, to name a few) has never witnessed organization. ‘The Oxford Revue’, technically, isn’t a club – there are no equivalences here. A ‘revue’ is a name for a type of show containing light-entertainment cabaret, not a committee. Oxford comedy operates far more casually, and has been represented at the Fringe over the last 60 years by self-elected student teams who just ‘fancy it’. Despite efforts to formalise things, I think Oxford will always work this way. It means we’re far less consistent than Cambridge, but, arguably, things are more ‘free’. 

I met Al Murray (ex-Revue) at the Fringe in 2014, who confirmed this long-standing hippyish disdain for Cambridge professionalism; a raised-eyebrow toward their fierce power struggles and machine-perfect comedy. In Murray’s words, an Oxford comic is “just trying to do something different, man”. 

Durham are old-school, and there’s possibly something testing about their matching uniforms and puns (too unironic for me) – but I would be a comedy snob indeed to say they don’t do well. 

I’m pleased to say, we more than hold our own on the night, everything goes down with gusto, and there’s a great sense of a sea-change when the troupes mingle afterwards, feeling a healthy rivalry, rather than the previous unworthiness that accompanies sitting near Footlights. We all share Edinburgh plans. Enjoying it while it lasts – there’s a statistical spectre abroad, as odds are not even one of us will end up doing it professionally.

Jennifer Murray was born and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to parents for whom she “had to be both the highly successful boy and the traditional girl”. No small feat. She proudly states that she is “a Yorkshire woman”, which, along with her eloquence and humour, certainly draws me to her character, being a relatively genuine Yorkshire lass myself. 

Having attended Barnsley Girls High School, she openly declares that she has “this deep feeling that if you’re not being distracted by the opposite sex, you’re better able to stock your mind.” Although I don’t necessarily agree with this view, I feel that Dame Jenni’s emphasis on the need to stock your mind is a valuable ideal. As if we have a choice to do anything but stock our minds here at Oxford. 

Family is clearly very important to Dame Jenni. She can’t help but display her pride and adoration for her two sons as she happily shares that they’re now a vet and a photographer. She speaks of her great love for horse riding and how her grandfather first taught her to ride (and also to fall off) a pit pony when she was two years old, admitting, “I don’t fall quite so well these days.” 

She recounts how, at the age of 15, she couldn’t comprehend why her father would sit reading the papers whilst her mother cooked family meals and cleared them away afterwards. Once, she confronted her father and asked why he wasn’t helping; he responded with an apology and actively participated in the washing up after that mealtime. 

Woman’s Hour first became a part of her life when she was a toddler; she used to listen whilst perched next to her mother. After deciding on a career in journalism, she applied to the BBC against stiff competition from Oxbridge-educated men, being promoted at a pleasing rate because she was “such a bad typist”. Jenni eventually realised her dream when she became the presenter of Woman’s Hour. The day that she heard her name announced as the host of the radio programme was pleasantly surreal. “There was this history that was suddenly landing on my shoulders.” 

Woman’s Hour is a programme on Radio 4 that is devoted to discussing topics that were “once unspeakable”, such as childbirth, the menopause and the inequality of pay between the sexes. There have been suggestions that the show’s name is now redundant and should perhaps be changed but, despite this, 40% of its listeners are men. As far as its host is concerned, “It has to continue to be called Woman’s Hour to keep the men intrigued.” 

Dame Jenni is clearly proud of the variety in the show as she describes its inclusion of topics ranging from Caesarean section births to advice on how to de-slime your flannel. There’s s o m e t h i n g for eve r y one. Unsurprisingly, her time as host for the last 28 years has seen her interview just about anyone worth hearing from. “The most frightening was Thatcher, she had eyes that bored into you.” Her most interesting guest was Monica Lewinsky because “it was only on Woman’s Hour t hat she r eally g ot a f air h earing.” It’s true that international media were not exactly neutral towards the then 21 year old intern. 

A mother of two sons and the host of a prominent UK radio show, Dame Jenni is a feminist who believes that sex education in schools is not doing what it should. 

According to Jenni, this education is not only the responsibility of the teachers but also of parents. She smiles as she describes how, as young teenagers, her sons had asked if they could put up posters of semi-nude women in their rooms. Her response was, of course, that they could, on the condition that they agreed to their mother giving them a lecture on the objectification of women each time she went into their rooms. They accepted. 

“We should ban sex education in schools and introduce gender education.” Dame Jenni believes that encouraging children to discuss the whole idea of consent and domination would be extremely useful. 

It would certainly be more effective than teaching how to put a condom on a banana, which is what I was subjected to at school as part of our sex education sessions. The teacher couldn’t bear it, there was no hope of an open discussion in that class. 

After meeting Dame Jenni Murray, one thing is blindingly clear: whatever the issue, no matter how taboo or uncomfortable, Jenni is never afraid to challenge it.

She was on the pill, I wasn’t. The best way to get a guy to put a condom on is to say straight out – do you want to have a child right now? 

I’m the jealous type. I never thought I’d be okay having to share a guy (in a two girls, one guy three-way situation), but because it was with my friend, I was genuinely happy to see her pleasured by our new sexual acquaintance. We’d had the sex chats over and over and we knew each other’s sexual history as well as our own. Being there, in the moment with her, it was an unexpected way to cement our otherwise wholly platonic friendship. And so, the ‘morning after the night before’ chat was undertaken at a whole new level. There was literally no detail to be missed – we’d both been right there, in the action. Our friends gathered around as good all good listeners do, vociferous with awe and jealousy. 

If you had been wondering, it’s a massive turn on watching other people having sex. It probably helps if you know your turn’s coming next, and it’s definitely no equivalent to walking in on your friends/siblings/parents ‘in the act’. Having a threesome is also a completely different experience from sex with just one other person. It was surprisingly not awkward (socially or sexually), I didn’t feel shy or embarrassed, even though there was arguably more potential for that. “No, you go down on him. You need the practice” – didn’t I say we knew each other’s sex lives pretty well? It was fun, it was communal, and it was the least seedy casual experience I’ve ever had. 

After a brief, post-coitus doze (the multiple rounds of drinks had taken their toll on my energy levels), I woke up to more murmurs of satisfaction and a gentle bumping against my back. My playmates were at it again. I was faced with a predicament. If I didn’t get at it again with them now, was I just an odd girl lying next to some people having sex?! I decided I had to join in again. 

Threesomes can be pretty awkward, what with the bodily squelches, the recurrent questions “whose is that?” and “whose turn is it not?”. However, I think that there’s only one golden rule for having a threesome – you’ve got to be doing something. So, off we went again. Sex definitely lasts longer when there’s 50% extra sex drive in the room. 

His sense of achievement the next morning was, if I’m honest, something of a downer on the w hole e xperience. He w as clearly straight, whereas my friend and I take a more relaxed approach to the spectrum that is sexuality. For him, it had been a case of getting two girls to say ‘yes’ – a sexual exploit to tell his friends and boost his masculinity. Had it been one girl and two guys, the girl would not be feeling the same satisfaction – she’d allowed two guys to fuck her brains out, but she hadn’t ‘earned’ them. Ironically, in our situation, it was our idea. I’m not sure what he’s going to tell his mates, but he was the one saying yes to our suggestions. And, hell, did we show him a good time.

This is the kind of recipe you can definitely play around with to make your own perfect version, or to avoid having to go buy ingredients specifically.  Here I’ve put my method to make them, and I hope you like it as much as I do.

What You Need:
4 flour tortillas
200ml crème fraîche
250g mixed cheeses, grated (I’d suggest cheddar, mozzarella, or Wensleydale)
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 medium green chilli (very optional)
1 red onion, peeled and chopped
2 handfuls fresh coriander, chopped
1 lime
Salt and pepper

Method:

1) Preheat your oven to 180°C and start your salsa by sieving your tomatoes over a bowl to separate the excess liquid.  Remove the stalk and seeds from the chilli, mince, and place in a bowl with half of the chopped onion, the drained tomatoes, and the coriander leaves.  Juice your lime and add this, along with salt and pepper for seasoning, and mix well.

2) Put a clean, dry frying pan on a high heat and fry your tortillas one at a time for six seconds on each side.  Then spread about a quarter of the salsa, a generous tablespoon of cheese, and a tablespoon of crème fraîche onto each one, making sure not to use up all of any of these.  Roll them up and stick them all on a baking tray, making sure that the visible edge is facing up.

3) Cover the enchiladas with the leftover salsa, crème fraîche, and cheese, along with the rest of the red onion, and bake for half an hour.  Garnish with coriander if you’re feeling fancy and eat quick – they don’t keep long and they’re better hot.