Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Blog Page 13

Work hard, drink harder: Alcohol dependence and the Oxford experience

Anonymous
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Work hard, drink harder: Alcohol dependence and the Oxford experience

CW: Discussion of alcohol abuse

Since I arrived at Oxford, alcohol has been woven into the fabric of my university experience. Drinking isn’t just expected – it’s encouraged, celebrated, and deeply embedded in student culture. Nights out, pub trips, drinking societies, formals: Oxford demands drinking, and I’ve obliged, over and over again.

Drinking seems essential to having a good time. It’s there after a long day, a social glue that binds people together. It’s a rite of passage, a measure of belonging. At university, you’re supposed to drink, and you’re supposed to drink a lot.

You’re praised for it. Being a ‘heavyweight’ is a badge of honour. If you drink heavily, you’re a legend. If you say no, you’re no fun. The pressure is relentless when you’re already overworked and overwhelmed and looking for an easy fix, and the embarrassment of being the only one without a drink in hand is enough to push you back into the cycle, again and again.

Oxford is a place where pressure is constant and relentless. The eight-week terms condense what should be months of study into an exhausting sprint, where essays seem to be due at an impossible pace, and the expectation is always that you will have read more, thought harder, and argued better than your peers. The workload is overwhelming, but the culture is such that admitting you’re struggling feels like admitting failure. So, instead of slowing down, you speed up.

Alcohol offers an escape from the suffocating perfectionism. After a day of tutorials where every sentence feels scrutinised and every idea must be defended, the prospect of shutting off your brain for a few hours is irresistible. A trip to the Four Candles with your friends turns the imposter syndrome down to a whisper and makes the academic intensity feel like background noise rather than a crushing weight. It’s the pressure valve that allows students to keep going.

But in a place where overworking is normalised, so is over-drinking. Post-essay drinks turn into post-tutorial drinks, which turn into “just one to take the edge off.” The college bar is always there, the pub is always full, and the idea of saying no feels like opting out of the student experience.

The toll of drinking isn’t just social – it’s financial, physical, and mental. I’ve spent money I don’t have on overpriced bottles of wine because I was too hungover to get to the cheaper shops earlier in the day. I’ve justified drinking over food because I ‘needed’ the bottle more than I needed my dinner.

Academically, it wrecks you. I can have a 10am I’m terrified of, not because of the work, but because I don’t know if I’ll be able to wake up. I’ve set four alarms just to drag myself out of bed. Once, I took cider in a water bottle to a tute because my accent had been mocked in the last session, and I needed the confidence to get through it. I’m never caught.

I can deal with anything, I tell myself – so long as I get to drown my brain again.

Despite everything, I can’t imagine myself stopping. The idea of sobriety frightens me. If I stop drinking, will I still be fun? Will I still belong? The scariest part is not knowing who I am without alcohol. I’ve rationalised it in every way possible. I don’t wake up in shop doorways, I don’t drink in the mornings, I don’t get into fights. I know my wines, I’m ‘sophisticated’ and I’m fine. But I’ve also taught myself that an £8 Mendoza Malbec is somehow essential. I’ve justified my drinking with knowledge, with culture, with class. I can do that at Oxford.

I read self-help books. I was once proud of myself for reading two books on the topic; only to realise I’d read it before and forgotten about it in the morning. I bought smaller wine glasses to drink less. They’re still in the box. I won’t go to a meeting. I’m too afraid they’ll tell me abstinence is the only way forward. If I can’t imagine a life without alcohol, how can I possibly stop?

How do we fix a culture that thrives on excess? Universities claim to care about student wellbeing, yet there are no meaningful conversations about alcohol unless someone reaches crisis point, and by then, it’s often already too late. What would it take to change things? Would students drink less if social events didn’t revolve around alcohol? Would we think differently if heavy drinking wasn’t normalised as ‘part of the experience’? And what happens to those of us who don’t know how to function without it? I don’t know the answers. I just know I’d like to.

If you have been affected by the issues discussed in this article, support is available. Please consider reaching out to the following resources for help:

Oxford dancers reclaim the spotlight with Varsity win

Jack Danson
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Oxford dancers reclaim the spotlight with Varsity win

In the dead of night, five figures emerge from the darkness. Blazers over their shoulders and hands on their hips, they start to sashay down a cobbled street. It looks like they mean business. Over the span of two minutes, we see a swathe of other performers, clad in a variety of colourful outfits, join them in strutting their stuff around Radcliffe Square to the tune of P!NK’s anthemic ‘Get the Party Started’. Despite what you might have heard in Saltburn, it appears that the groove is alive and well in Oxford.

There aren’t many other sports that can boast a polished, professional trailer for an upcoming competition (imagine a 2s football team trying to generate hype by doing keepy-uppies down Cornmarket…), but competitive dance isn’t like other sports. Though the video is actually a teaser for their upcoming showcase, it served equally well as a preview for Oxford University Competition Dance’s clash against Cambridge on Sunday, 16th February.

This year’s iteration of the Varsity Dance competition was fiercely contested to say the least, with both OUCD and their Tab counterparts bringing their A game. After tickets for the event sold out in under an hour, spectators crowded into St John’s College auditorium to watch the dancers go toe to toe. Among those in attendance were Raymond Chai, Lois Samphier-Read, and Amy Ireland, the three guest judges for the competition.

The two sides competed in a total of seven different disciplines, ranging from the more classical Ballet to more modern styles, like Hip-Hop and Contemporary.

After the action had concluded, a hush descended over the auditorium as the guest judges assembled in the middle of the stage to announce the results. Cambridge came out on top in the Hip-Hop, Wildcard and Solo/Duo/Trio categories, but standout displays in the Ballet, Tap, Jazz, and Contemporary rounds secured a 4-3 victory for Oxford. The narrow scoreline is a testament to the skill brought to the table by both teams, and marks only the second time that Oxford has emerged victorious in the competition since its inception.

Victory in Varsity was made possible by months of hard work, dedication, and rehearsing. In the words of OUCD president Josh Redfern and VP Niamh Tooher, “it was incredibly inspiring to see such a high level of dance performed by university students across a diverse range of styles. Beyond the competition itself, Varsity is about celebrating our shared passion for dance, and illuminating an often under-appreciated discipline which bridges the sports and arts. We are incredibly proud of both teams, and can’t wait for next year’s competition!” Anyone who witnessed the spectacle on Sunday can certainly agree with that last sentence.

New cinema proposed for Magdalen Street

Joshua McGillivray
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New cinema proposed for Magdalen Street

The plans for a new cinema on Magdalen Street has been proposed through a licensing application that has been submitted to the Oxford City Council. The proposed cinema will, if approved, replace the Odeon on the street that closed in 2023.

The original cinema first opened in 1924 and was built by the theatre conductor business Frank Matcham & Company. It was later bought by Odeon in 2000, before closing in 2023.

Alejandro Whyatt, who runs a cinema in Burnham-on-Crouch, has proposed to transform the vacant site of the original, into a new cinema multiplex with two screens capable of hosting over 700 people and a café. He registered a new company named Roxy Movies (The Oxford Cinema) Limited in January and has applied for the proposed venue to be open every day each week from 8:30am to 11:30pm.

This new cinema proposal follows the closure of the Odeon on George Street last month, which had been operating as a cinema since 1936. The council plans to replace it with a £37 million “aparthotel” containing 145 rooms, a bar and a café, which a spokesperson said would likely take three years to complete.

The council stated that Odeon did not wish to renew its lease of the location and argued that the building’s demolition and replacement with a hotel area would increase tourism, although the plan faced 97 formal objections from local residents.

As a result of its removal, the only remaining cinemas in Oxford currently are the Curzon in Westgate, Phoenix Picturehouse in Jericho, Ultimate Picture Palace on Cowley Road and Vue on Grenoble Road.

There are fears, moreover, that a proposed redevelopment project, ‘Ozone Leisure Park Reimagined’, will cause the Vue to be reduced to contain only three or four screens. The proposal for the Park contains new labs, offices and community facilities.

The planned new cinema on Magdalen Street may therefore compensate for the increasingly reduced opportunities for public film-viewing in the city. Oxford City Council has yet to either approve or reject the proposal.

Oxford study recommends methods to ‘future proof’ cocoa production

Charlie Bailey
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Oxford study recommends methods to ‘future proof’ cocoa production

Research from the University of Oxford and other global universities has provided recommendations on how to make chocolate production more sustainable and environmentally friendly. It highlights the detrimental impact of climate change on cacao plantations and local ecosystems and the rapid expansion of plantations in the face of increased demand for cocoa products. 

Published by Nature in their Communications Earth & Environment journal, the study acknowledges the economic incentives behind the extension of cacao plantations and the desire to “intensify cacao cultivation methods”. Cacao refers to the earlier stage of cocoa production, before the beans have been roasted or fermented. The study says that the trees are not producing their maximum possible yield due to insufficient levels of pollination because of the significant expansion of such agriculture. The authors claim this has contributed to enhanced deforestation in areas already vulnerable to climate change and also threatened local ecosystems. 

The study looks at ways to reduce the yield gap, which is the difference between achieve and potential cacao crop yield. Specifically, it looks at how different levels of pollination can impact yield and concludes that higher levels of pollination could increase the overall total level of production from plantations without them having to expand. 

Findings from the study show that using hand pollination is an effective means of increasing the amount of cacao that each tree can produce. However, it notes that this method is not always an economically viable option for large-scale cacao production, and is often done by children and low-paid workers under poor conditions. As an alternative, the study recommends “land management interventions that may increase natural pollination”. These include practices such as applying more leaf litter and soil to the area, providing moderate shade, and reducing the use of agricultural chemicals. 

Scientists also noted a correlation between high temperatures and low cacao pod yields in all three areas, demonstrating the ongoing negative impacts of climate change. Cocoa yields were seen to decrease by between 20-31% in locations where temperatures were up to seven degrees warmer. 

The research was conducted in collaboration with Westlake University, China, Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Brazil, and University of Göttingen, Germany. It is based upon data collected in Brazil, Ghana, and Indonesia between 2017-2020, which are some of the largest cocoa producers in the world. 

Data collected between 2017 and 2020 in Brazil, Ghana and Indonesia was used to suggest ideal conditions to maximise cacao yield with minimal environmental harm. 

Lead author of the study from Oxford Dr Tonya Lander commented: “By adopting biodiversity-centred, climate resilient farming techniques, the cacao sector can both increase production and safeguard farmers’ livelihoods.”

Oxford study investigates at-home diabetes tests

Ekam Hothi
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Oxford study investigates at-home diabetes tests

A new study at Oxford University Hospitals is investigating at-home diabetes tests which could play a key role in screening type-1 diabetes. The new tests have been labelled as “revolutionary” and offer a more efficient and less intrusive than previous tests for children. 

The ‘GTT@home’ test was developed by Digostics, a British company focusing on digital clinics diagnostics and diabetes home testing. The test has already been implemented successfully at NHS trusts in Southeast England, where over 2,500 women were screened for gestational diabetes in pregnancy. However, this will be the first study looking at children.

This study is being led by researchers at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and is based at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. It aims to fund and deliver health and social care research. The study will assess 90 children and young people to try to determine whether at home type-1 diabetes testing could become commonplace across the NHS.

The new at home test is a much more child-friendly way of testing for type-1 diabetes. Traditional tests involve undergoing blood draws and having to fast the night before. The new test consists of a blood sample collected with a finger prick. A glucose drink is then consumer, followed by a second finger prick two hours later. 

Diabetes is caused by the destruction of cells in the pancreas which produce insulin, which results in elevated blood glucose levels. It leads to an increased risk of major health problems such as heart disease, blindness, and kidney failure.

Approximately 1 in 350 children are affected by type 1 diabetes, making it the most common autoimmune disease in children. Overall, it is estimated that type one diabetes costs the UK economy over £1.8 billion every year.

Rabbi Swaby, the study lead and Clinical Research Fellow in the Nuffield Department of Medicine, told Cherwell: ‘If successful, our study could pave the way for a more accessible way to perform the oral glucose tolerance test in children and young people of all ages, both in NHS care, and large research trials that rely on this test. We are recruiting until August 2025 and hope to have results by the end of 2025.’

Who is Oxford’s Coffee Shop Artist? In conversation with Julia Whatley

Florence Wolter
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Who is Oxford’s Coffee Shop Artist? In conversation with Julia Whatley

It is a Wednesday morning in Blackwell’s bookshop and the café is full. The table in front of me is flooded: pencils, scattered scrap papers, flowers folded into greeting cards, thick reading glasses parted from their case (and its decorative penis sticker), a magnifying glass, an eye patch. I try to clear an alcove from the pencil ocean for my cappuccino. In the artist’s absence – she’s bustled off to send an email – I seem to have inherited her studio.

I’m here to interview Julia Whatley, the white-haired, eye patch-wearing, (table-hogging?) artist I sometimes glimpse, hunched over her notebooks, in Blackwell’s Nero. Apparently I am a less captivating figure to her; when she returns, she’s forgotten my name: “I have a mind like Swiss cheese – full of holes.” She assures me, though, that she is far more lucid in her art: “it comes to me effortlessly… I’m just the flesh lump that gets in the way of the vision”. As she talks, it becomes evident she means this quite literally. Julia sees herself as the conduit through which an artistic vision is realised. Where does this vision come from? “Somewhere else.” In fact, she confesses: “I feel very much not of this world.”

A critic once wrote that Julia’s art comes from a gentler age. It is easy to see what they meant: Julia’s pieces are buoyed by the fantastical and carnivalesque, relics from a world of childhood imagination. Is this the somewhere else Julia never left? Reflecting on her own childhood, she remembers looking out at the reality from a realm of fantasy; to Julia and her siblings: “Alice in Wonderland was our world”, and she remembers being captivated by John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel. Having attended Winchester School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, Julia pursued a career as a professional illustrator herself, in the course of which she has illustrated the Royal Ballet Sinfonia orchestra and rehearsals of prestigious ballerinas at the Royal Opera House, including Sylvie Guillem. Watching them dance was mesmerising, she recalls. Traces of them still dance across her sketchbooks today – feathery tutus and ribboned calves, the effortless dynamism that seems to animate all her subjects. I cannot help but think of Degas’ ballerinas, though the fluidity of her line and penchant for collage owe more to Matisse.

At 70, Julia says, she is no longer interested in commercial illustration. What drives her now is not financial, or even reputational, interest. It is something far more altruistic: humanitarian and vaguely spiritual. To understand Julia’s art – to understand Julia – is to step into her fantastical somewhere else, and to look back at our imperfect world from there. I try to do this as she tells me her plan. When Julia’s project (which she calls Gadfly) is up and running, she intends the sales of her drawings to fund art supplies for children across the world, especially for those most in need. She tells me: “Children aren’t respected. We need to respect the mysticism of children.” This will change everything. It is hard to tell how literally Julia believes this. She talks to me earnestly about a future where unnamed billionaires download digital scans of her art, while she sends paper to far flung, war-torn nations. She invites me to believe with her. That we can raise a generation that channels pain through creative mediums, who speak and are understood. In the rock, paper, scissors of the world, Julia is betting on paper. But in the collage of our conversation, I sense we have veered from the rugged edge of reality into one of her dreamlike compositions.

Real world aside, her generosity of worldview is uncontestably genuine. When I ask where her intricate designs and whimsical enchantment come from, she does not seem to understand what I mean: “the artworks come from my mind; my mind is like that.” It is simply how she sees the world. Julia sits above the bookshop making a beautiful world, one drawing at a time. If we peer through her page-shaped windows perhaps we can also catch a glimpse.

Adam Leslie: ‘It felt like an ongoing adventure with characters I knew. That’s when writing became a language of its own’

Dylan Brennan
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Adam Leslie: ‘It felt like an ongoing adventure with characters I knew. That’s when writing became a language of its own’

Adam Leslie has always wandered among stories – daydreaming them, curating them, and now crafting his own. The Lincolnshire-born author, screenwriter, and Blackwell’s employee has stepped into the spotlight with Lost in the Garden, his debut novel that has won the 2024 Nero Book Award for Fiction. The novel is a haunting folk horror tale where three women confront the eerie, unspoken dread of Almanby, an idyllic yet perilous countryside village. Now, as he balances the quiet magic of Blackwell’s shelves with the clamour of literary acclaim, Leslie sat down with Cherwell to unravel the roots of his eerie inspiration, the allure of folk horror, and the collaborative storytelling spark that began in childhood with a Tolkienesque exercise book saga.

Leslie’s characters exist in a world where reality itself has “gone a bit dreamlike and a bit feverish” – a liminal England where “geography and directions are fluid” and “corporeal ghosts” wander. At the heart of Lost in the Garden is Heather, a “free spirit, bordering on manic pixie dream girl, but also possibly a little unhinged”. Leslie described her as having “a Peter Pan complex – she’s decided to stay seven years old forever, even though she’s now in her early to mid-20s”. Her “over-enthusiastic, wild demeanour” was amplified by the novel’s dissolved society: “There’s no real structure to rein them in. They’ve all got a bit of arrested development.”

Heather’s quest to rescue her missing boyfriend Stephen – who vanished after defying warnings to avoid Almanby – pulls in two companions. Rachel, a “much darker character”, joins the trip under cryptic pretences: “She’s got a little box to deliver to a friend there but won’t say what’s inside. Heather hears something rattling… that’s the B-plot mystery.” The third, Antonia, is a study in contrasts: a “socially anxious” aspiring comedian and the group’s sole driver, coerced into the journey. “She’s secretly in love with Heather,” Leslie revealed. “She agrees to go just to spend time with her, even though she knows nothing can happen.”

Long before Lost in the Garden unearthed the uncanny in rural England, Leslie’s storytelling instincts were sparked by two formative obsessions: the Beatles and Middle Earth. At seven, he drafted his first unsanctioned tale – a psychedelic ‘Yellow Submarine’ riff where Ringo Starr drummed away subterranean monsters. But it was a clandestine childhood collaboration that truly lit the fuse. After his Tolkien-obsessed friend Peter penned The Adventures of Drinil – a Lord of the Rings homage starring their peer group with Elvish aliases – Leslie took it upon himself to finish the third instalment. 

“I didn’t ask permission,” Leslie told Cherwell. “I killed a lot of them off in a big battle because I couldn’t be bothered learning who all the characters were.” What began as a schoolboy lark, scribbling in purloined exercise books, soon bloomed into a ten-volume saga, co-written over years. “It felt like an ongoing adventure with characters I knew. I was one of them. That’s when writing stopped being homework to me and became a language of its own.”

If childhood taught Leslie that storytelling is a language, his years at Blackwell’s taught him to eavesdrop on its dialects – the whispers between reader and shelf. “Working at Blackwell’s has given me that frontline idea of what people are buying,” Leslie said. “You can read trade magazines or hear Richard Osman dissect trends, but actually seeing piles shrink, meeting readers as they gravitate to certain covers… that’s visceral.” For Leslie, the shop floor is both compass and muse: where the “daunting” sea of titles could paralyse, it instead sharpened his resolve. When it comes to literature, Leslie’s eye snags on the present: modern covers, vibrant as stained glass. “You absorb that texture all day, these glimpses into other worlds. It doesn’t make you think what the market gap is. It makes you want to add your voice to the chorus.”

Leslie’s reverence for covers as “tonal selling points” extended to how he framed his own work. But when Lost in the Garden clinched the Nero Award, his abstract ideas about marketing met the undeniable reality of mainstream recognition. “I found out a month before it was public. I had to absorb this news while pretending I hadn’t,” Leslie recalled, describing the morning he learned of the win. “It was certainly a morning of contrasts. My first customer that day was quite difficult, but I think their complaints helped ground me. Even now, seeing my name attached to the award feels strange. It doesn’t feel like my name. It feels like watching someone else with my name have a great time.”

For Leslie, the accolade is less about confetti cannons than creative freedom. “It lowered hurdles. When you’re not an established name, every project is a double burden. You’re not just creating, but you’re also constantly justifying why it deserves to exist,” he told Cherwell. The prize, he admitted, was a “weight off”, freeing him to mine his backlog of ideas. “It’s given me scope to explore weirder ideas without those same hurdles. If readers will follow me to Almanby, maybe they’ll follow me somewhere even stranger.”

That fictional village, with its whispered warnings and “unspoken dread”, is rooted in Leslie’s Lincolnshire childhood, a landscape both sparse and dense with mystery. “I grew up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by villages you knew only by name: Navenby, Seiston, Sudbrook. You build myths about them. Navenby sounds navy blue, right? But when you finally visit, it’s just… a village.” This dissonance between the imagined and the mundane fuels the novel’s hauntological tension. “Almanby is every place you’ve never entered. The one your parents warned you about, not because it’s dangerous, but because it’s unknown.” The novel’s 1980s setting becomes its own character: a “perpetual summer” where society has begun to fray. “In a sense it’s nostalgia horror,” said Leslie. “Not for a time, but for the way a child’s imagination colonises emptiness. When there’s nothing to see or hear, their minds fill the gaps with monsters.”

Influences for the novel, however, stretched far beyond Lincolnshire’s horizons into the speculative realms of films he read about long before he saw them. “When I borrowed Fantastic Cinema by Peter Nichols from the library, I wasn’t really into films,” he admitted. “I liked Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters… but this book described things like Céline and Julie Go Boating, where two women uncover a haunted house stuck in a murder-mystery loop. They’d suck magical sweets to remember fragments of the story. I couldn’t conceive of it as a real film – it lived in my head as this texture.” In pre-streaming 1990s Britain, accessing such works meant “shelling out for expensive FBI tapes or waiting years for a Channel 4 broadcast”. By the time Leslie finally saw Jacques Rivette’s surrealist classic, it was nothing like he’d imagined. “The atmosphere was totally different. Lost in the Garden is my collage of those gaps – the leftover ideas from films I’d mythologised.”

Among Leslie’s spectrum of projects that the award has made him feel more confident to pursue is a collaboration with Peter, his childhood co-author of Adventures of Drinil. “We’ve been writing together for 37 years,” he clarified, laughing. “There are a couple pet projects we’ve kept on the back burner. You think, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to get these off the ground’? Now it’s less ‘pipe dream’, more possible. It’s on us to make them good enough that people want to read them.” 

Leslie’s counsel to aspiring writers distils lessons from his own zigzag path: “Write the book you want to read – the one that’d be your favourite if someone else wrote it. Don’t martyr yourself to ‘should’. Joyless struggles make joyless books. Finish things. It doesn’t matter how bad the first draft is. Writing’s not real-time – you can fix anything, but only if you reach the end.”

England are learning to win again – can Wales do the same?

Jack Danson
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England are learning to win again – can Wales do the same?

Despite contrasting results, England and Wales’ most recent performances show that both sides have started to turn a corner and are ready to compete again

One of the most-touted maxims in the world of professional sport is that results come down to fine margins. There’s no better proof of this than Wales’ loss to Ireland on Saturday… is what I would have said had England not won by a single point for a second game in a row just a few hours later.

Following a record-extending fourteenth defeat in a row and the departure of Warren Gatland a couple of weeks ago, it’s fair to say that few expected anything other than an Irish victory – and a dominant one at that. Pundits’ forecasts were grim and Welsh fans took to social media to publicly tone down what were already-low expectations. All signs seemed to point towards a mauling at the hands of a rampant Ireland side.

Wales were resurgent and even went into the break with a slender lead courtesy of a score from Evergreen captain Jac Morgan. When Tom Rogers flung himself across the try line early on in the second half to make it 18-10, it looked like Wales might be able to pull off a truly miraculous victory after over a year of tumult.

However, Ireland showed their class to get back on level terms with 20 minutes left of play. Sam Prendergast notched a succession of quickfire penalties to put the visitors ahead. With time and optimism trickling away, Wales looked to be running out of ideas. All of a sudden, they found themselves on the front foot again. The impressive Ellis Mee jinked his way through the Irish defence and, at full stretch, slammed the ball down.

Wales had done it. Cue jubilant scenes – you could probably hear the roar of the crowd in Swansea. A sea of scarlet rippling with joy after snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. As quickly as the balance had swung one way, however, it swung back again. After a lengthy TMO review, it was adjudged that Mee had come up agonizingly short, the ball a whisker away from the try line. Wales were unable to recapture their momentum, as Prendergast drilled in another penalty to seal relief for the visitors and heartbreak for the home fans.

160 miles east of Cardiff, England enjoyed a different outcome after a much less inspiring performance in a game that also went down to the wire. Steve Borthwick’s side looked assured defensively, but faced all too familiar problems at the other end of the pitch, their attack spluttering and struggling to kick into gear despite the dynamism of Marcus Smith and co. on paper. Nevertheless, they emerged victorious at Twicken… I mean, the Allianz Stadium, even with the trademark Calcutta Cup try from Duhan van der Merwe that has so often spelled disaster for England in the past.

It was a game that England certainly would have lost just a few months ago. Cast your mind back to the achingly close encounters with New Zealand and South Africa last autumn. Even in their opening fixture of this year’s Six Nations, Borthwick’s men were edged out by Ireland after a lacklustre second-half display.

But now England look like they know how to win again. Their past two matches have been just as close, if not closer than those losses. The difference is that, against France and Scotland, they did just enough to come out on top. 

Just as Mee was inches away from putting Wales back in front and setting them on course for victory, England were millimetres away from losing to the old enemy. The usually-reliable Finn Russell missed three conversions on Saturday, squandering a total of six points that could have seen his side come away from rugby’s oldest competition with a win, an unprecedented fifth in a row against England in the Calcutta Cup. These kicks were, admittedly, difficult but Russell has converted over 75% of kicks in his last five Six Nations campaigns. If any one of them were just a few centimetres to the left or right, it could have been a completely different story.

At face value, nothing has changed. England have won another game, while Wales’ number of losses continues to grow. But take a closer look at the performances themselves – how both games went down to the wire and were decided by the barest of margins – and similar stories start to emerge.

Steve Borthwick will be fully aware that he cannot rest on his laurels just yet. England look to be moving in the right direction again after a torrid autumn, but there are still issues that need to be addressed. Matt Sherratt also knows that there’s a lot on his plate. Despite losing again, though, the Welsh players looked revitalised, fighting tooth and nail for every metre, fully committing at every breakdown and flying into tackles. All signs point towards a blockbuster clash on the final weekend of the tournament when England travel to Cardiff, where they might be vying for the title, with Wales aiming to avoid a second successive wooden spoon.

Before the tournament, there was much speculation about this year’s edition of the Six Nations being the closest yet in terms of quality, especially in light of Antoine Dupont’s return and a genuinely competitive Italy side. All of the different nations seemed to be in with a shout except one – Wales. On Saturday, they showed that any reports of their demise have been over-exaggerated. With a new man at the helm and a renewed sense of pride, Wales are not far away from stopping the rot.

Oxford Researchers achieve breakthrough in quantum teleportation

Mair Andrews
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Oxford Researchers achieve breakthrough in quantum teleportation

Researchers at the University of Oxford have built a scalable quantum supercomputer capable of quantum teleportation – a huge milestone in quantum computing. They claim that it will allow the creation of “next-generation technology” distributed at an industry level. 

The researchers hope that this technique of quantum teleportation could facilitate a future ‘quantum internet’ which would create an ultra-secure network for communications and computation. It has the possibility of massively improving Artificial Intelligence capabilities, optimise logistical and financial models, and improve drug discovery techniques. 

The breakthrough comes from addressing the ‘scalability problem’ in quantum physics, which is the difficulty of constructing a large, reliable quantum computers without excessive errors. A qubit is a unit of information, similar to a binary ‘0’ or ‘1’ in a regular computer, but it can be both simultaneously, known as ‘superposition’. As more qubits are added, maintaining their stability and preventing interference becomes increasingly difficult, limiting practical applications.

The new method developed links small quantum devices together which enables computations to be distributed across the network so there is no limit to the amount of processors that could be in the network and they take up less space. 

Dougal Main, study lead from the Department of Physics, said that “previous demonstrations of quantum teleportation have focussed on transferring quantum states between physically separated systems.” This study, he continues, uses quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems. “By carefully tailoring these interactions, we can perform logical quantum gates – the fundamental operations of quantum computing – between qubits housed in separate quantum computers.”

The formation is based on molecules which only contain a small number of trapped-ion qubits each. These are linked though optical fibres and light (photons) rather than electrical signals to transmit data between them. The photonic links enable qubits in separate modules to be enabled and quantum logic to be performed across the models. This is, briefly, quantum teleportation. 

“Our experiment demonstrates that network-distributed quantum information processing is feasible with current technology,” said Professor David Lucas, lead scientist at the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub and principal investigator of the project’s research team.

“Scaling up quantum computers remains a formidable technical challenge that will likely require new physics insights as well as intensive engineering effort over the coming years.”

The researchers used Grover’s search algorithm to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. The technique searches for a certain item in a large and unstructured database much faster than a regular computer can. This is achieved using quantum phenomena of superposition and entanglement to explore many possibilities in parallel. Its successful demonstration shows how a distributed approach can extend quantum capabilities beyond the limits of a singular device, facilitating the development for scalable, high-performance quantum computers. The new quantum computers will be powerful enough to run calculations in hours that today’s supercomputers would take many years to solve.

The findings were published in the journal Nature, in a study titled ‘Distributed quantum computing across an optical network link’.

Mini-crossword: HT25 Week 5

Zoë McGuire
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Constructed by Cherwell Editors using PuzzleMe"s free cross word creator

Previous mini-crosswords:

For more crosswords and other puzzles, pick up a Cherwell print issue from your JCR/Plodge!

Editorial from our mini-crossword setter, Zoë, also in Week 5 print edition:

If you can tell exactly which word should come next in the following set: DRIBBLE, ADDITION, FREEDOM, ELLIPSE, BOOKSHELF, ???; you might have a mind for puzzles. I’ve always thought that the best, most pure form of a puzzle, is one in which you’re not given any instructions. Just a set of data, and working out what to do with it is left to you. This was the idea I tried to put forward with my first puzzle for Cherwell, ‘Guillotines’, at the start of this term, and in general I find the variety slot particularly exciting for the ability to try wacky things that solvers hopefully haven’t seen before.

Finding inspiration for puzzles can be tricky. The ones I’ve been most proud of are the ones that have hinged on a gimmick or concept that is truly original, but I also don’t mind trying my own take on an established format (such as the Printer’s Devilry in this issue), or even blending two existing genres together. But even then, you don’t necessarily need an original format to be able to show creative expression. I’ve a friend who makes regular Sudoku puzzles – no funny rules or gimmicks – and yet somehow he sets them up in a way that makes them feel unique and satisfying.

The most important part for a puzzle setter is making sure the ‘aha’ moments are there – that brief strike of inspiration when you break through a hard cryptic clue, or realise why these answers are too long for that crossword grid, or spot a pattern in the seemingly unrelated set of words – that’s an intoxicating feeling, and one that a constructor will seek to manufacture. But it’s a hard process – you don’t know how solvable a clue is if you’re the one that came up with it; of course it seems obvious!

To be a good writer, you’ve also got to enjoy solving puzzles. I’d really recommend taking part in ‘puzzle hunts’ if you like this sort of thing; they’re big online competitions that are full of well-made puzzles by some fantastic people. If any of what I’ve said sounds interesting and you’d like to know more, get in touch with me!

Oh and by the way, it’s CONTINUUM.

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