Sunday 8th June 2025
Blog Page 1236

Oxstew: Oxford death toll of 500 in battle for free speech

Ravenna Webster
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Oxstew: Oxford death toll of 500 in battle for free speech

Fighting broke out yesterday in Oxford between two groups of students over a disagreement as to the nature of free speech. Oxford residents have been advised to stay indoors until further notice as heavily armed bands of students continue to roam the streets, killing or capturing anyone who does not practice free speech in the right way. Official estimates put the death toll at 503, but some sources have challenged this and have put the figure at the far higher 613 mark, with over 200 injured.

Reports suggest that it all started on Turl Street, when two groups of BNOCs exchanged insults as they passed each other on the pavement. This descended into a passionate argument about Marine Le Pen, which swelled in numbers as interested students walking by decided to joined in. After around half an hour, Turl Street was blocked with the crowd, and reports have since surfaced claiming that the noise could be heard from as far away as St. Hugh’s. What sparked the subsequent events is not entirely clear, but the argument soon turned into a physical fight, which then spread around the crowd.

Several eyewitness accounts of the beginnings of the conflict have emerged, all corroborating this story. Peter Frisk, a passerby, happened to witness how the violence began, described it as, “an absolute bloodbath”.

“It was really odd,” Frisk continued. “Although they were shouting at each other, everyone seemed to be broadly agreeing with everyone else – saying that free speech was jolly important and an essential part of our society, and so on. Then someone bellowed something along the lines of ‘I don’t like what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it’ and everything kicked off. The French students started screaming about misquoting, politics students about the difference between saying something and saying something on a platform, and then a guy in the centre of the crowd whipped out a sword and started beheading people.”

When asked whether he was traumatised by the incident, Frisk paused for a minute before replying, “No, not really. I wasn’t really that interested to be honest. I just wanted to get a panini from Heroes and they were all in the way.”

The OxStew also spoke to Carmina Wild, a student who managed to evade capture by two different groups on her way home later in the evening.

“The first group that got me,” she said, “asked me straight away to demonstrate my commitment to free speech. I didn’t really know what they meant, and was starting to panic, but then I noticed in the crowd a prominent Union member and guessed that they’d like something strong. I felt bad, but I had to survive, so I denounced the entirety of Islam as inherently violent and threatened to deport or sell into slavery anyone without three good A-levels. They let me go, but then five minutes later the other side grabbed me. This time I simply said ‘smash the patriarchy’, and they all cheered, gave me a free badge and wished me well on my way.”

The Proctors are attempting to get the battle under control, by confiscating weapons and giving extra essays to those known to have participated in order to keep them off the streets. In a statement today, they have promised the residents of Oxford that their city will soon be safe once more, even if it means using some of the Vice-Chancellor’s hard-earned cash to achieve this. They also pledged to launch an inquiry into the incident, but, when asked, refused to comment whether students would ever see the results of it. 

The Campaign: Giving What We Can

Henry Phipps
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The Campaign: Giving What We Can

We often think of giving to charity as an act of self-sacrifice, something we ought to do given the huge amount of suffering in the world, but something that involves sacrificing our own wellbeing to increase the wellbeing of those less fortunate. However, recent research has challenged this assumption. It indicates that giving to charity tends to significantly increase a person’s wellbeing.

Imagine you are given some money. Do you think you would increase your happiness more by spending it on yourself or giving it to others? Research suggests that while most participants believed they would experience more happiness by spending the money on themselves, those who gave the money to charity or spent it on others experienced significantly more happiness.

A related study examined the spending decisions of employees in Boston, Massachusetts, who had received a bonus from their company. Those who chose to spend the money on others reported significant gains in happiness from doing so, whereas this was not the case for those who spent the money on themselves. It has been found that in most countries, charitable giving correlated with an increase in happiness equivalent to a doubling of household income.

Donating money to charity is not something that will only grant you increased happiness if you are already affluent. Research suggests that even when controlling for income, those who spent money on others rather than themselves reported greater levels of wellbeing.

RAG and Giving What We Can Oxford are currently running a ‘Big Match’ campaign to raise money for two of the world’s most effective charities: Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). SCI helps run national prevention programmes against Schistosomiasis (a disease caused by parasitic worms). AMF hands out insecticide-treated bed nets to people in areas at risk from malaria. Student societies from across Oxford have collaborated to put together a matching pot of £10,000. For every £10 you donate, a further £10 will be released from the matching pot. If £20,000 is raised, this will be enough to treat over 20,000 people for parasitic diseases and to provide almost 5,000 mosquito nets.

Find out more by searching for the Big Match campaign online. 

Interview: Richard Evans

Tom Robinson
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Interview: Richard Evans

Sat waiting in the Gladstone Room at the Oxford Union, I felt quite intimidated by the prospect of meeting Richard Evans. Having spent six years at Oxford as both an undergraduate and doctoral student, Evans later served as an expert witness in a high-profile libel case. More recently, Evans has written several noteworthy books including seminal works on the Nazi period, the Third Reich Trilogy, its last part described in The New York Times as “not only the finest but also the most riveting account of that period”.

Richard Evans, now President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, is by any measure an intellectual heavyweight. Yet Evans turns out to be a very likeable, unassuming and open person. Remarking on his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, he describes himself as “a terrible swot” and that his admission to Jesus College in particular was no mere accident. He tells me, “It was full of Welshmen, which is why I was sent there.”

Evans also speaks fondly about studying for his doctorate at the more “cosmopolitan” St Anthony’s College, as he described it. From undergraduate life at a single-sex college, suddenly “there were women. Intelligent and beautiful women. Of course I fell in love with them all and made a fool of myself several times over but I also had some wonderful supervisors and some incredible intellectual experiences.

“The best things were the Latin American parties,” Evans recalls with a smile, “because they all after a certain stage brought guitars and started singing songs about Che Guevara – it was the sixties, you see!” It is evident from speaking with Evans that he finds cultural differences incredibly stimulating. 

I press him on a remark he made for History Today, in which Evans described a sense of “otherness” he felt and that derived from his Welsh heritage. “I never learnt Welsh, I grew up in London,” he admits. “But we went back to North Wales a lot. Everyone was speaking Welsh around me and I didn’t understand, and I had to sit through interminable Welsh language sermons… and it got me fascinated. And it was completely different, I mean, as different as you could get: the Welsh mountains, slate quarrying, castles, all of those sorts of things, again, I found hugely exciting.”

It was this intrigue surrounding other cultures, as well as his experience growing up around post-war London that inspired Evans to study German history, he tells me. “You’d go into the East End, into Stratford or Leyton and see all these rows of terraced houses with huge gaps in them. I was very struck by that. Who were these strange people who’d done that, why did the Germans want to bomb London and so on? And of course, my parents and friends had all lived through the war and talked about it a lot.”

In a foolish attempt to appear insightful, I ask Evans if he sees any parallels between Hitler’s foreign policy and that of Putin in Eastern Europe today. He bats me down immediately. “No, not at all. History doesn’t repeat itself. And the reason is that we know what happened before so that makes it very difficult for it to repeat. Putin, I think, essentially wants to recreate the Soviet Union so there’s this great limit. He’d like to annex the Baltic States to reconstitute that larger idea of Russia that he grew up in, the Russian empire. 

“Hitler was completely different. He wanted to conquer the world. He had no limits in time or space to what he thought of the Third Reich as doing, what he aimed for it to do. Whereas Putin’s use of violence is covert and relatively limited, Hitler, of course, was overt and without boundaries.” 

With my tail firmly between my legs, I move onto Evans’ time as an expert witness in the highly publicised Irving v. Lipstadt case, after Lipstadt had alleged in her book that Irving was a Holocaust-denier. As an expert witness, Evans was instructed to analyse Irving’s work, concluding in his report that, “Not one of his books can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.” Lipstadt was, the court found, justified in saying some of Irving’s work amounted to Holocaust denial. 

On how he found working in such an environment, Evans tells me, “You have to be absolutely on your toes the whole time. It was very draining and the adrenaline sort of keeps you going, I would collapse in the evening and think ‘I’m going to have an early night’.”

On a more sombre note, Evans also tells me of those he could see in the public gallery. “There were a lot of Auschwitz survivors who turned up with their arm sleeves rolled up and you could see their numbers tattooed, hanging on my every word when I was in the witness box.” He says it became “very important to do them justice, as it were, even though I don’t think the trial in the end could deliver the kind of catharsis that some of them, maybe, were looking for.” As the interview nears its end, Evans leans in towards the microphone and tells me, “History is not a court; we are not judges.” To Evans, studying history is about rising above moral standards of the time and not seeking to paint people “as perpetrators, bystanders, or victims.” While his analysis may seem coldly logical, it is clear that Evans, as a person, is not. Richard Evans is a phenomenal historian, but one with an overwhelming sense of humility, humour and insatiable intrigue.

Review: The Boss of It All

Anna Zanetti
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Review: The Boss of It All

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

Who is the boss of it all? The one who appears to be so? The one who plays the part of the boss? The one who controls the boss? Or, the one who actually gets what’s going on and is in control of the situation?  This production, adapted from a comedy by Danish screenwriter Lars von Trier, seems to be interested in asking precisely on this question. It partly succeeds, although not  with the best outcome.

The play revolves around the boss of an IT company (Jack Chisnall), who hires an actor (Cameron Cook) to play the part of the boss, so that he can still enjoy popularity among his staff but at the same time carry out his interests, which are in fact to sell the company. Of course, this trick works up to the point where it becomes clear that blaming someone else is not always possible, and one has to be responsible for one’s own actions. The theme of ‘boss-ness’ is nicely developed in all its possible combinations, and pretty much everyone sooner or later in the play gets to be the boss at some point.

Another interesting motif is that of pretending and dissimulating. We see this in the actor playing the part of the boss, but finding himself without a script and thereby forced to improvise. Eventually, we witness a gradual shift from the puppet controlled by the boss (the real one), to the real boss being turned into a puppet. All this makes the staff (and the audience) question who the boss of it all actually is.

All characters, especially ‘the colourful bunch’ of the staff members, are quite amusing and give a humorous insight into stereotypes: the algid emotionless beauty, the moody and delirious rustic, the chronically depressed widow – there’s room for everyone. However, the deliberate anxiety and social awkwardness, supposed to be performed to excess for comic purposes, is sometimes taken too far, departing from the ‘excessive = funny’ model, and leading to the ‘excessive = fake, rigid, awkward’ one. Kristoffer/Svend (Cameron Cook) himself, although he seems really into the part and over-the-top, sometimes comes across as too stiff, repetitive, and contrived, which effects the large potential for humour the play has.

Nevertheless, there is still laughter among the audience – which creates the most bizarre contrast with the utter depression being staged at all levels – and in some cases rightly so. There are moments of very good humour, such as the scene in slow motion and the exchange between the actor and his own part. However, other bits are not up to such standards. For example, less hilarious is the use of the puppet. It is a brilliant addition in concept, which does not feature in the original script, and it works really well with what the play is all about. But, yet, I feel that it could have been used better. Equally dubious is the decision of having a random Danish voice off stage between the change scenes; it is funny the first time, but a bit pointless after a while.

So an entertaining play overall with an engaging plot, some hilarious types, and a few funny tricks. Although, I sense there could definitely have been even more fireworks.

The Boss of It All runs at The BT Studio until Saturday.

The first Street Style blog

Elif Acar
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The first Street Style blog

The street style blog exploded onto the nascent blogging scene as the new craze-du-jour in 2007. Seven years later, every major fashion city is saturated with ‘photographers’ roaming its streets, approaching well-dressed strangers with the flattering request of “Could I take your photo for my blog?”

‘Street-stylists’ may be patting themselves on the back for inaugu- rating this new phenomenon, but in reality, credit is owed to famed Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne. Considering that he was shooting the fashionistas of South Kensington in the early 1900s, it’s surprising it took a century to catch on.

The work of this amateur photographer is unique as a rare glimpse into the casual dress of the Edwardian woman. With its depiction of the constrained but immaculately coiffed woman grimacing in her discomfort, it offers a stark contrast to the stereotypical image of contemporary dress.

Though they might seem rather prim to us Oxonians in our crop tops and tight jeans, Rebecca Richardson insists that an Edwardian context these shots are “laced with erotic undertones”.

It didn’t take long for the blossoming fashion indus- try to seize the opportunity to monetize this ripple of social change, sexing up silhouettes and creating the ‘ideal’ hourglass figure. Indeed, the maxim of ‘sex sells’, prominent in today’s fashion media, was active, albeit passively, in a time governed by moral and social judgment.

Amongst all this praise of his uncredited revolution, Linley Sambourne’s work
is somewhat tainted by his dubious methods. ‘Candid’ is the operative
word here. With the use of a concealed camera, his subjects were entirely oblivious they were being photographed.

Before the days of CCTV, this clan- destine operation may feel like an intentional and active violation, perhaps altering the impact of his project.

However, I can excuse Edward his surreptitious ways – his work, limited by a lack of resources, was unique for the time and every Katie, Tom and Emily has him to thank for their current corner of the internet.

Jeremy Scott’s Superbowl

Elif Acar
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Jeremy Scott’s Superbowl

For her big 12 minutes in front of 110 million viewers, Katy Perry spared absolutely no fireworks. The half time slot at the Super- bowl is a once in a lifetime opportunity for many entertainers – although perhaps not for Katy Perry – and has previously been filled by Madonna and Beyoncé.

Her performance included Lenny Kravitz, Missy Elliot, dancing sharks, and an absolutely amazing anima-
tronic lion, but to make the most of her
time on stage, Perry also called upon her long term friend Jeremy Scott, the creative director of Moschino, to design her four outfits.

Despite a clothing change practi- cally every three minutes, Perry never left the stage during the slot and Scott stated that dressing her was a “math and science lesson about layering, how to hide, and to have her have
big reveals”. The classic Ameri-can designer, known for his ‘fast-fashion’ designs inspired
by McDonalds and other American corporates, was
the natural choice to design
the clothes for the most quintessentially American
‘California Gurl’ performing at the most quintessential of all American sporting events.

The humour may have been taken
a bit too far by some, with a massive number of memes exploding all
over the internet, likening her flame encrusted dress to Cheetos packaging and Will Ferrell in the ice skating film Blades of Glory. However, despite being incessantly mocked online, Perry can have the last laugh as her half time show now holds the record as the most watched in all of Super Bowl history. All-in-all, a very successful 12 minutes for both her and Scott indeed.

One Art Work, Five Canvases and Makeup

Tallulah Le Merle
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One Art Work, Five Canvases and Makeup

Makeup is extremely versatile. For some reason, this versatility pales in comparison to social stigmas that situate makeup, and the act of applying it, as superficial and narcissistic. This assumption is very one-sided. The purpose of makeup is not singularly, and certainly not always, to at- tract a man or woman, and a love of cosmetics does not signal self-obsession or shallowness.

Instead, I proffer that makeup is a form of creative expression, an art. Some might find this suggestion an overstatement, but what about applying a brush, carrying colour (whether in powder form, gel, liquid, cream, or otherwise), is not artistic? Like painting, makeup articulates and reframes a canvas, highlighting key features, malleable to different moods, bold and brazen or soft and subdued. The purpose of this week’s shoot was to underscore the very inherently artistic nature of makeup. We also specifically chose to recreate styles that have a history or are somehow socially constructed, emphasising that cosmetic trends are cultural artifacts just like art of certain eras and ages. Our models, Georgia Galton-Ayling, Persis Bhalla, Brenda Nijiru, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Fan all pose, therefore, using makeup designs from different eras to demonstrate this.

60s graphic liner (Georgia): When you think of thick eyeliner, Egyptian-style winged liner first comes to mind. We chose to emulate the look popularised by Twiggy in the 60s, which is a very stark, graphic design. The contrast of a pale lid with a dark, dramatic line is interesting and bold. It changes the shape of the eye, and can be very flattering. Recently, the makeup industry has gone very natural, as assistants at makeup counters often en- courage clients to go for brown and grey liner shades, rather than black, which they suggest is too ‘harsh’. But we embrace and appreciate the black, graphic trend.

Dark lips (Persis): Dark lips have a long and diverse history: from the Maori of New Zealand, and the Hindu tradition, to Queen Elizabeth I and the 1920s film industry. But the trend really took off in, and is still associated with, the 1970s and 80s punk/goth movement, when dark lips were not limited to women, but also seen frequently on musicians such as Robert Smith (The Cure) and Marilyn Manson.

Brights (Brenda): Bright colours in makeup often immediately recall the 80s, when lids were swept with a pop of colour, or lips were glossy and cherry-red. Modern makeup seems to tend instead towards neutral shadows, and there is an aversion to colour at times. I, however, am a big fan of colour, and going all out. A thick line of eyeliner in teal or purple perks up my eyes in less time than a full lid of shadow, and bright fuschia lips make me feel alive when I’m hungover.

Strong brows (Charlotte): Eyebrows are the most frequently forgotten facial feature. Not only do eyebrows frame the face, but they can also change the facial expression; heavily arched brows create a more surprised look, while straight brows are bold and no- nonsense. These days, bold brows are back – think model of the moment Cara Delevingne. Perhaps surprisingly, the tweezer has taken a hiatus. We experimented with this look on someone who has naturally thin, light brows – the end result is different, but wearable.

Heavy contouring and highlighting (Sarah): By choosing to contour, changing how light hits the face and where shadows fall, you can seemingly change your bone structure in just a few steps. I have loved experimenting with this, and watching the lines and angles of my face shift and change. The trick with contouring for everyday purposes is to blend, blend, blend (which we actually didn’t do in this shoot). Finding a contour shade that mimics the actual shadows on your face is important so that the skin doesn’t look muddy.

 

The original Calendar Girls: more WOAH than WI

Rosie Gaunt
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The original Calendar Girls: more WOAH than WI

As certain as a bad hangover on New Year’s Day are the resolutions and self-made promises of January detoxes, cleanses and health kicks. Amongst all the talk (and let’s face it, it’s almost always just talk), there is hope, because with the new calendar year comes new calendars; and if you want inspiration that’s going to last all year round I suggest you buy one, a naked one. I’m not talking about one with 12 months’ worth of scantily clad, heavily photoshopped Justin Bieber photos, or Page Three girls on a beach, I’m talking about true art in celebration of the human form.

‘Form and Desire’ is the aptly named exhibition of 40 years of photography from the best of the best of these calendars: the Pirelli.

The location of the exhibition is as fitting as its name: the fashion Mecca that is Milan. While clothes are few and far between in the shoots, the models, stylists and photographers are some of fashion’s finest. The 2015 Calendar is shot by Steven Meisel, styled by Carine Roitfeld and features Adriana Lima, Joan Smalls and Natalia Vodianova to name just a few.

Previous photographers include Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier, Mario Testino and Karl Lagerfeld, whilst the likes of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Heidi Klum and Eva Herzigova appear as models.

Pirelli is fashion, and not just because, as Vivienne Westwood famously announced, “Fashion is about eventually being naked”. The exhibition in its own words is about photography as a “testimony of particular changes, of new styles, of new ideas, of many creative and technical innovations”, just as fashion is.

The 200 photos in the exhibition are displayed accordingly – not chronologically, ironic given that is an exhibition of prints from calendars. They are grouped in five rooms, each room’s collection highlighting a different aspect of the calendar that has run through 40 years of different concepts and photographers. Finally, Meisel’s photos for this year are presented, and they have saved the most overtly sexual for last.

However, there is another surprise too, amongst all the latex and fetish gear: Candice Huffman. She is the calendar’s first plus-size (read: normal size) model. “My presence on this set,” she said, “the most glamorous in the world, is a sign that things are really changing.” She’s right, of course.

Having visited the exhibition during a vacation spent scoffing pizza and pasta in Italy, I hoped to find inspiration for a cleaner, leaner 2015. Instead, I found true inspiration for a happier, but no less glamorous, one.

Some might say that in this age of Facebook event pages and smartphone reminders there is no longer a need for the traditional calendar, but I believe they still have a place, marking the passing of time with regularly changing art.

Unfortunately this is inspiration that I cannot hang on my wall all year round, as the calendars cannot be bought but are merely sent to a select and secret lucky few. So, while I’m working on looking ‘sexy’, not ‘scary’, in the hope of one day getting sent one, I suppose I’ll have to content myself for the moment with the RAG Blues Naked Calendar.

 

 

Fashion Matters

Archive
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Fashion Matters

The fashion world has long lived by that well-known adage ‘beauty before age’, but flick or click through the pages of any fashion mag or site today and you’ll find that times are changing.

Almost every big brand’s spring/summer ‘15 ad campaign’s lens favours the older woman. The oft-featured Italian nonnas at Dolce and Gabbana move to centre stage with the young’uns. Octogenarian American writer Joan Didion (much to the internet’s delight) shares the spotlight with 14 year old Freya Lawrence at Céline, as do three veteran models with their daughters at Lanvin. Burberry’s line-up sees Naomi Campbell star with Jourdan Dunn, in a shoot similar in style to the brand’s fragrance ad last year, starring Kate Moss with Cara Delevigne. Some brands have even gone as far as throwing the baby faced models out with the bathwater: see Madonna’s return to Versace and Joni Mitchell for Saint Laurent.

It’s true that this shift has not simply come overnight. The fashion-set have long been obsessed with the likes of 90 year old icon Iris Apfel and Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Style blog (and now book and documentary), which features street style photos of New York’s “most stylish and creative older folks”. Cohen describes his work as “proof… that personal style advances with age”, but this is proof for which fashion designers and editors need only look, behind those big sunglasses, to themselves.

For a long time, they have been reluctant to do so all the same. In 2013, the then 64 years old Miuccia Prada explained in an interview with T magazine that she wouldn’t put an older lady on the runway saying, “Mine is not an artistic world, it is a commercial world. I cannot change the rules… I’m not brave enough. I don’t have the courage.” Just one year later, Rick Owens and Jean Paul Gaultier plucked up the courage to do just that, sending older models down their runways in Paris wearing their AW14 collections. What a difference a year makes: that brave leap of faith in AW14 now seems like little more than a toe-dip in the fountain of old age, amongst the silver-haired spreads of SS15.

This change of tides, with its influx of older models, is ultimately positive for an industry that, while being creative, needs to be tethered to reality, as it is so often accused of not being. Brands have clearly been starting to realize this in recent years as 2014 saw the arrival of transgender models and a greater number of ‘plus-size’ models on the runway and in print, and so older models were the necessary and natural next step. There is clearly some skepticism as to whether this is the industry recognizing the potential of appealing to wider audiences, or more cynically understanding the power of shock and spectacle as a talking point. Either way, the result of the change is for the better as women see that, just like their quality designer handbags, they get better with age.

 

Interview: Alexandra Heminsley

Claire James
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Interview: Alexandra Heminsley

Alexandra Heminsley, 38, is a freelance journalist, author and broadcaster, who described her experience of sport at university as “eating bags of Walkers crisps while watching Cindy Crawford work out videos from the sofa – trying to smoke off my hangover!” She took up running in 2007 in order to run the London Marathon. Five marathons later, in 2013, she penned a book on her running journey, entitled Running Like A Girl. In 2015, she has set herself the challenge of running 1,000 miles and learning how to swim in the ocean. 

In what sometimes seems like a moment of madness, I signed up to run my first ever race, the Oxford 10k, on May 10th. However, like many a student I can find it a challenge to drag myself away from the procrastinator’s favourite, the Facebook News Feed, and get myself round University Parks. I asked Heminsley about her thoughts on running motivation and procrastination, especially during the cold and wet winter months.

“In terms of busyness, 5k is a really decent run and if you get up to a decent fitness that’s about half an hour. I refuse to believe there are people who want to run, but believe they’re too busy, who aren’t spending maybe 90 minutes a week messing around on their phone. Those half hours do exist. It’s a matter of choosing them. And then when you have done it you feel like you’ve reclaimed a bit of your life back. I don’t remember what I possibly got when I was sitting in a chair scrolling through Facebook, but when I’ve been for a run and then I kind of think ‘Ah, I haven’t got time to look at that now, I’ve got to get in the shower, I’m freezing,’ you feel like ‘Oh I got that bit of my finite time on Earth, I got that back and did something decent with it.’ It’s a matter of how you sell it to yourself.

“The thing about when it’s cold and wet and miserable and you go for a run, it’s like you reclaim the weather! I was thinking that today when I was running back from swimming – I hadn’t checked the forecast, I didn’t have the right kit on and I got absolutely drenched! And actually I felt like, ‘Screw you! I won’t be told when it’s appropriate to be in and be out.’ It’s not forever, it’s probably half an hour of running. When you’re outside in the rain for shorter than the washing cycle that is going to be cleaning the clothes anyway, it can’t be that bad!”

Last month, SportEngland published new research showing that 2 million fewer 14-40 year old women play sport regularly than men in the same age bracket. Despite this, 75 per cent of women surveyed said they wanted to be more active. In response, SportEngland has launched the ‘This Girl Can’ campaign, which is “a celebration of active women up and down the country who are doing their thing no matter how well they do it, how they look or even how red their face gets”. The campaign’s advert has reached over 5.6 million YouTube views in just two weeks. Heminsley shared her thoughts on the reasons behind this gender gap.

“Partly, it is that women tend, not always, to be less competitive. They sort of seem to bracket fitness as an indulgence, almost as if it’s an unnecessary whim, rather than something really fundamental that will lengthen your life; stop you using the NHS so much; make you happier; your hormones more balanced; make you use the food that you eat more efficiently and make you eat better anyway. Whereas a way that a lot of men approach sport is that’s it’s integrated, you know, five-a-side football or whatever, it’s part of the fabric of their lives.

“Exercise is largely sold to women through weight and looks. But the minute you start exercising regularly you realise that you just don’t really care what you look like when you’re doing it. You feel a kind of untethering from, ‘Oh no this will make me have thin legs’ and a tethering towards, ‘this will make me have strong legs that I’m proud of.’ Yet sport is still consistently marketed to us as a kind of luxury to give you the perfect, bikini-ready image.

“I think the ‘This Girl Can’ campaign has been magnificent at counteracting that. I absolutely love it. There’s a massive moving screen at Brighton station and I see it every time I go to London and it just makes me smile at these women just having an incredible time sweating and loving life.”
Heminsley’s personal sporting goals for 2015 are to run 1,000 miles and swim in open ocean. “For three and a half years I was constantly in this loop of the training plan for a thing, and now my only goal is to get the – however many – miles done per week to keep up with myself. So I’m running back from swimming, and I thought that would be the most horrendous exhausting thing in the world! But actually you’re so lovely and warmed up and loose it feels like nothing. If I’m half an hour out, I’ll put on my running backpack and I’ll run to Waitrose and pack it all in my bag. So sometimes I’m running really slowly because I’ve got like a chicken and a bag of potatoes in my backpack and some of the time I’m literally just running up and down my road because I’ve worked out the miles a bit wrong and I just want to get the right amount done today.

“It’s made me realise that running also has a purpose beyond fitness, like I can get to places by running! And I’m really enjoying that. I feel completely unshackled from the training plans and if I can do this time for this event. I don’t care, as long as I am running along the seafront in Brighton with a glass of champagne at midnight doing my final mile, I don’t care how I get there now!

“I took an open water swimming intensive day course last summer. I thought I would be fine; I thought I’m pretty fit and healthy and I was fairly sure I could do front crawl quite well as a kid and I’d done breaststroke on holiday and stuff since then. And it was horrific. I completely and utterly couldn’t do front crawl, my breathing was all screwed, and my legs were much heavier than my top half so I had a terrible position. I basically cried for most of the afternoon!

“So I’m taking a year long course in open water swimming and I’m absolutely loving it! It’s so much scarier than teaching myself to run because if you get tired when you’re running you can just pop your bum down on a park bench or just stand on the side of the road. But if you get tired and overwhelmed swimming, especially if you’re in the sea, you can die. So you have to sort your head out as well and make yourself strong enough to get done what has to be done physically. It’s turned out to be a bigger challenge than I realised. It seems like an unbelievable freedom to be able to swim in an ocean.”
Finally, Heminsley shared her top tips for starting running.
“The most important thing you can ever tell yourself with any run, from your first to your last, is that no part of your run will be as bad as the bit just before you head out of the door. Because you just dread it so much and the sense of doom so many people feel is so intense. But it isn’t all like that and you will have carved back a bit of your day for yourself and done something excellent with it.

“The mistake I made was to dart out of the door at what I thought ‘a runner should look like’ pace, and then completely put myself into stress and exhaustion in under five minutes! I think loads of people go for their first run, do that and then think that running is always like that, but it just isn’t!”

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