I am sitting down with a pizza at Fire & Stone accompanied by Police Dog Hogan, half an hour before they go on stage at The Cel­lar. Peter Robinson, lead guitar­ist, turns to the assembled band and family members: “Sorry, I couldn’t find my glasses to read the menu. So we’ve just got the House Red. Is that okay?” Clearly the band are preparing for a wild gig.

Interviewing bands can – I’ve heard – be rowdy, chaotic, and every now and then a l ittle offensive. I n­terviewing Police Dog Hogan was like having a drink with your par­ents’ friends (admittedly the slightly more fun ones); the ones who take time out to tour the country with their ‘urban bluegrass’ band.

While you might not recognise the name of the band itself, you’re more likely to know its members. Featured regularly in Tim Dowling’s Guardian column in the Weekend magazine, this is the famous “middle-aged-man-band”, in which Dowling plays the banjo.

The band’s front man, James Stud­holme, founded Blink advertising, the company behind John Lewis’ hearty-meltingly tender intrepid-snowman Christmas advert. Other members include top journalists, a publishing consultant, and a barris­ter. The seven men are all highly suc­cessful professionals during the day – and foot-stamping, bar-hopping folk-artists by night.

“It’s kind of a funny dream”, Eddie Bishop, fiddle-player and QC tells me. “I get a thrill out of coming home, throwing off my wig, and rushing to a gig – there’s a sense of frisson. It’s naughty.”

I go along to the interview with firm preconceptions of the band’s motivations. They are there to have fun, I assume – to do something young and lively that’s completely removed from their day jobs. But it quickly becomes clear that the band really care about music; there’s a lot of focus on acoustics, on the dif­ficulties of song-writing. And I don’t know why I’m surprised. They’re bloody good.

James Studholme is credited as the main song-writer. “Whereas other people sweat, each pore of [Studhol­me’s] has a bead of song coming from it at any time,” says Robinson, who is a consultant with public relations company BeyondDesign.

Studholme seems to be the driv­ing force behind the band; as he himself tells me, “Half of us just want to make people dance” – yet at the same time, clearly, real commitment is required to pursue a life of touring English folk festivals, playing dingy pubs and dive-bars. Why do they do it, if they’re not rabidly seeking fame and fortune?

There is general uproar at the question. “Why do you assume we’re not?” They seem both amused and offended. “We were asked the other day who we want to be like. We said Beyoncé.” Apparently the questioner then asked, “You want to sell as many records as Beyoncé?” To which Dowl­ing replied, “No. Beyoncé’s rubbish at selling our records.”

They joke about it, but there clear­ly is some kind of desire to ‘make it’. I can’t help but feel that, for many of them, this is where their true inter­ests lie. Success in their professional spheres is one thing; but do they re­ally want to be musicians?

“We all have different aspirations for what we want when we hit the big time,” Robinson says. “I want sparkling water and a secret knock for our dressing room.”

The division in the band between those who take it seriously and those who “just want to make peo­ple dance” has the potential to be a strain. When talking about their favourite gigs, Studholme says, “I personally prefer a concert set-up – from a song-writer’s point of view, for the story-songs, you really need people to be sitting down.” He ad­mits that there’s “a good tension” between those who want to enter­tain a rowdy atmosphere, and those who are more dedicated to the musi­cal aesthetic: “You can go too far one way or the other.”

Studholme himself, once known in the advertising world as the ‘Gin­ger Supremo’ (so says LondonLoves­Business.com), provides a lot of the band’s momentum. It’s hardly sur­prising, considering the long list of his professional plaudits. I ask whether he finds himself using busi­ness techniques in band operations. He looks at me: “What, management shizzle?”

Ed Bishop, from across the table at Fire & Stone, chips in: “Let me put it this way. I now know, at first hand, why James is such a brilliant pro­ducer. His job, as I understand it, is to just get things done. To deal with lots of people who have different aims and views, and get them to pro­duce something coherent.” There is a pause. “It must be a bit of a busman’s holiday for him.”

James says he doesn’t feel any de­sire to push the band in publicity circles. Not for the sake of keeping a kind of moral division between the two, but because, “I live in a profes­sional world where what we [the band] do is so appallingly unfashion­able.” He mentions the “bile” of his advertising “dudes” towards Mum­ford & Sons. Police Dog Hogan might just not be cool enough.

“We basically have the delusion that what we’re doing is completely normal – we’re in a bubble, not wor­rying what anybody thinks about it.” Robinson says.

Dowling nods, anxiously. “You nev­er know who’s going to think you’re a total idiot. So I try not to mention it. If you found out that someone you worked with thought you were really lame…” he trails off.

I don’t think they should worry about it. The band’s got the whole ec­centric hipster thing down pat; what with the Guardianista, boutique-ad Executive, and “aging hippy” vibe (their words, not mine). Plus it’s, like, totally out of the mainstream. “I think it’s better not to draw down their fire,” Studholme says.

The band do seem to exist in a state of general unconcern for their im­age, despite professedly harbouring aspirations of fame. Perhaps it comes from not being financially reliant on this endeavour. They mention gig­ging with 20-year-olds whose whole lives are their bands; who are des­perate for the big time, because they don’t have anything to fall back on. “We’re lucky”, Dowling admits.

Touring with 20-year-olds – how rock’n’roll is their band life, I ask? “Do you mean, do we stay up really late at festivals?” Dowling asks. “Yes. Yes, we do.”

“Tim had a fight with Larry Love,” Pete tells me. This isn’t the first time in the interview that the band throw in names of musicians I have never heard of, and I find myself uncon­vincingly nodding along, as though fully knowledgeable. Every time this happens I find myself trying not to defend my ignorance by pointing out the generation gap.

Larry Love, it turns out, is the stage name of one of the founding mem­bers of Alabama 3, an English band mixing rock, dance, blues, country, gospel, and the spoken word. Very alternative.

“It wasn’t a fight.” Dowling says. “We had words.”

Studholme chips in: “Tim had an intellectual fight. An intellectual fight that ended with swearing.”

Bishop laughs, and recounts how Larry Love critiqued Dowling on his use of commas in his column. “I think having fights about punctua­tion at three in the morning is about as rock’n’roll as we get.” I assure him that it’s pretty rock’n’roll for Oxford.

Often featured in Dowling’s col­umn, perception of the band tends to be coloured by his characteristic self-effacing attitude. It’s got them into trouble in the past. “When we were playing in Cornwall, some women came up to Tim. It was like one of those episodes when old wom­en batter people with handbags,” James recalls.

“They said: ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself – you’re not nearly as bad as you make out in your columns.’” It’s true: the band is far better than Tim’s tone might suggest. Though, as they recognise, the publicity has also brought in au­diences. Even if they do sometimes take time to complain about it at the end.

How do the band feel about the way they’re portrayed in the col­umn? There is awkward lip-biting all round. “I’m a firm believer that all publicity is good publicity,” Bishop says. There is a pause. “So even when he coined the phrase, ‘middle-aged man-band’…I think that’s fine.” An­other pause. “I think that’s complete­ly fine.” They all nod. “That’s what we are.”

Later that night, I watch them play to a room full of middle-aged Guard­ian-readers, who buy pints of ale, laugh and tap their feet. Some of the audience dance; many of them sway, like festival-goers in their mid-30s, who have had a long week at work. The band often grin at each other on stage.

They look just like a middle-aged-man-band, and it’s no bad thing. Af­ter all, as Pete says, “The bits where we’re doing the friendship – they’re as important as the bits where we’re doing the playing.”

Last Saturday, three mad third-years eager for one last adven­ture before Finals embarked on Oxford’s charity hitchhike, Jail­break. Team goHaRDgohome, comprising Hannah, Rachael and Dan (note the appropriate capitals), had set our hearts on securing an international flight to make the most of our sponsorship money. We had spent the weeks running up to the event phoning and emailing every airfield in the UK, in the hope that a pri­vate jet or helicopter would have spare seats to offer us. When it came to our destination, we were less picky than Harry Styles in a retire­ment home. Sadly, by the time Jailbreak began, we had nothing to show for all our efforts ex­cept a lot of newly acquired knowledge of the aviation industry.

The night before Jailbreak began we dis­covered that everything in Poundland costs a pound, and proceeded to buy half the shop. Just in case. Dan also learnt, to his detriment, that if you don’t come on the clothes shopping trip you will end up dressed like a pornstar for gay fishermen. Women’s tight mustard-col­oured skinny jeans with a faux snakeskin belt, along with Primark’s finest yellow rain mac, re­ally brought out the camp in him.

On Saturday morning we set off with un­bounded optimism, in the hope that we could do our 50 or so generous sponsors proud. With only Dan’s local knowledge and a rucksack full of cereal bars, we blagged our way onto the Park and Ride bus heading for a busy garage on the M40. Our dubious traffic light costumes soon attracted the attention of a lovely cou­ple, Bronwen and Jim, and their son Noah. Al­though Dan insulted their “nondescript” car, they happily drove us into London. We particu­larly enjoyed overtaking our Univ rivals who were on the Oxford Tube.

Despite knowing that it was a longer shot than Paul from S Club 7’s solo career in heavy rock, we were determined to get on a flight or die trying. The lovely Pradeep took us to Heath­row Airport where, on the shuttle bus between the terminals, we surreally found ourselves sitting next to former Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles.

Being avid fans of Moyles’ bombastic break­fast banter, we left Dan to go in for the kill with the classic opening chat-up line, “Excuse me, do I know you from somewhere?” Chris Moyles seemed ashamed of the fact that he was Chris Moyles and de­cided to assume a pseudonym that even he didn’t seem convinced by. We explained our mission and Dan plucked up the courage to ask him to give us a shout-out on Twit­ter. How­ever, the only tweeting Moyles had the time for that morning was to complain that he “used to be somebody” but BA had bumped him down from ‘silver’ to ‘blue’ membership. Feeling sympa­thetic, we briefly considered redi­recting our charitable efforts towards helping him regain his clearly fading celebrity status, but decided that Ox­fam was a more worthy cause.

We explained our mission to staff at BA but, failing to secure flights, we de­cided to lurk around the BA first class lounge, in the hope that someone would offer us assis­tance. This strategy paid off. We met a myste­rious Canadian man who resembled Sherlock Holmes, and explained our cause to him. “I’m not sure about you,” he told Hannah. “You’ve got an honest face,” he told Rachael. “And I’ve shared a cell with you!” he told Dan. To our disbelief, he turned out to be a generous phi­lanthropist, carrying a bagful of cash. Keen to help us generate lots of money for charity, he gave us £80 and wished us luck. At this point however, the BA management requested that we move away from the first class lounge to the ‘poor end’ of the Terminal, where we managed to raise a couple of quid, before we were ejected from Heathrow altogether.

Here, Fortune intervened again. As we were retreating, Rachael ran into our mysterious benefactor once more. Although he insisted he could not tell us his name or profession, he reached into his Mary Poppins bag of seem­ingly infinite assorted currencies, and gave us yet another wodge of cash, which was all he seemed to be travelling with. His only stipula­tion was that we “give back” in later life, and he disappeared with the fond words, “Tell your friend Yellow-legs that he’s ugly, and his mum dresses him weird.”

Aware that we now had enough cash for all three of us to depart the country, the whistle-stop tour of London’s major airports contin­ued. We hitchhiked to Gatwick, in search of low prices, and finally booked flights to Buda­pest from Luton. It was a great relief, upon ar­rival there, to discover that the elusive ‘W!zz’ airline, with whom we had booked tickets, was indeed real. We boarded the flight in euphoria. Having gone HaRD by the end of the first day, we decided we would go for the RAG prize for the team that could get the furthest distance from Oxford and back in 36 hours.

As we skipped through customs in Budapest we realised we had arrived on the last flight of the day and if we wanted to get out of the air­port, it was now or never. While most of our fellow travellers marched past our pathetic “heading West” signs, one glorious woman turned back and asked us what we were do­ing. She offered us a ride in her taxi to the city centre but begged us not to travel through the night in a country where most people didn’t understand the words “hitchhike” or “charity” – even in their own language. After we turned down a bed in her spare room, she gave us the name of a big petrol station just out of town, and dropped us “crazy English” off with a wor­ried cry of “be careful!”

We then had one of many “if-my-Dad-could-see-me-now” moments as we stood at one in the morning, in the snow, on the side of the road in downtown Pest, waving our Univ Library whiteboards as cars hurtled by and drunken strangers heckled us in broken English. As desperation set in, Dan used his Brit-abroad pi­geon-English to explain our cause to an un­suspecting local woman waiting for a tram. We went with her on a tram over the Danube, and copied street names off her iPhone to get a sense of where on earth we were.

A couple of caffeine pills later, we were loving life in Western Buda. We walked for an hour or so through the deserted streets, noting that in Buda, much like in space, no one can hear you scream. We can only hope that the neigh­bourhood was also deaf to the show tunes we shrieked as we trekked through the night. We finally made it to the petrol station. By this stage, the sad hilarity of our predicament had hit us. It was now 4th week of Hilary of our final year, and we were stranded on a snowy night just outside of Budapest, with no coats, money, or grasp of the Hungarian language.

After calming our nerves with a pot of semi-raw noodles, we spent the duration of the night harassing every unfortunate soul who stopped at the petrol station. When daylight broke we were asked to move on, and spent an increas­ingly desperate hour waving on the hard shoul­der. Things got rather hair-raising at one point when a Hungarian man in his rust-bucket per­formed an emergency stop, screamed “girls!” and flung open all his doors, gesturing for us to get in despite refusing to tell us where he was going. After this narrow escape, we finally col­lapsed at the feet of a German-speaking couple back at the petrol station, who agreed to take us to Vienna.

Determined to squeeze some authentic cul­tural experience out of our whistle-stop tour once there, we did what every self-respecting British tourist does in a UNESCO World Herit­age Site: we headed to McDonalds. Some blag­ging more outrageous than last term’s shock relocation of the HFL to the Rad Cam then saw us following the Danube for the rest of the day, through Austria, to Germany. We owe thanks to the many interesting and generous people who helped us on our way. (Big shout out to our homies on the E60 heading West.)

For the final hitch of the journey, our ul­timate guardian angel emerged from the snowy night and agreed to drive us towards Frankfurt. Rudi, a raging socialist who assured us repeatedly that “Angela Merkel is a CREE-minal,” dropped us at a train station near Frankfurt, with three bananas, a load of useless travel ad­vice, and the coat off his back.

Exhausted but exhilarated, we had hitch­hiked nearly 650 miles in under 14 hours, from Budapest to Bensheim-Auerbach. And in total we had travelled 1623 miles, raising over £1100 for our fantastic charities. Throughout the trip, we had been entirely reliant on the kindness and generosity of strangers, and though de­prived of sleep for 48 hours, we honestly came home with a renewed sense of faith in human­ity.

Whilst we didn’t get to see much of the coun­tries we passed through, we met countless open and warm-hearted individuals, all will­ing to go the extra mile.

All money raised is going to Oxfam and RAG’s four local charities: Crisis Skylight, the Against Malaria foundation, Jacari and Helen and Douglas House. If anyone is interested in donating please go to www.raise2give.com/oxford-jailbreak-2013/dannytee

As any old historian would tell you, the history of Britain and France is one which has been inexorably linked for hundreds of years. Naturally, this has led to both countries taking a particular interest in the affairs of the other, and as is always the case with two nations who share a long and tumultuous history, a number of stereotypes have arisen over the years as a means of mocking one country’s cultural peculiarities whilst simultaneously boasting the superiority of their own norms. And so the French became known as the ‘froggies’, a label intended to poke fun at what was seen by the British as a grotesque culinary tradition, while the French scoffed at the rosbifs with their unrefined, neanderthalic tastes.

These labels continue to be used to this day and serve as proof that latent xenophobia is still widespread in both British and French culture. Yet it must be added that stereotypes are often based on at least some kind of truth. Yes, the French are famed for their cheeses and fine wines, not to mention frogs’ legs and snails. And yes, the British do enjoy the occasional WKD or Findus “beef” lasagne.

There is, however, one stereotype that I’ve never really understood about the French – that they are a nation which is constantly on strike, full of perennial picketers and protestors. Indeed, a brief look at some graphs and stats on the internet is all that is needed to show that this particular stereotype is somewhat erroneous and has most likely grown in popularity due to a few high profile protests which have happened in France over the years (May 1968, anyone?). My first few months of living in France as part of my year abroad only served to strengthen my belief that this stereotype was, if not completely false, then at least grossly exaggerated, as not once did I come across a group of angry placard-bearers.

All of which meant that I was slightly surprised as I walked into work on an early February morning to find that the majority of the school’s teachers would be going on strike on February 12^th in protest at the government’s proposal to increase the working week from 4 days to 4 ½ days, which would see the teachers going to work on Wednesday mornings. As such, all but one of my classes were cancelled which meant that on the day of the strike I found myself walking through the empty corridors of the old school building to my class, one of only two classes in the entire school whose teachers had decided against manning the picket lines. I half expected the forgotten, deserted children to revolt against their masters – whose insistence on coming into work had prevented them from enjoying a day off like the rest of the school – and attempt a Lord of the Flies-style self-governance within the school walls, if only for one day.   

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I understood why the strike was taking place – since its introduction in February 2000, the 35-hour working week has been a cornerstone of French working life, a sacred jewel which must be worshipped, revered and never, ever touched (unless it leads to fewer hours, of course). The message has always remained constant: dabble with our 35 hours, and we strike.

“Cry me a river”, I hear the average Brit retort. “4 ½ days a week? A slight increase on 35 hours? Oh what a hard life you’ll have to endure!” The fact that half term lasts two weeks and that two hours of the school day is taken up by the lunch break will do nothing to calm this sense of outrage, this stubborn insistence that the French are nothing but a bunch of lazy slackers. Yet the simple truth is that the French, when faced with the prospect of a change in their quality of life (be it the hours they work per week, their salary, their benefits and so on), are more vocal in their opposition than the British, and are more prepared to do something about it. And therein lies the solution to the problem of this confused stereotype – the French don’t necessarily strike more frequently than anywhere else, it’s just that we hear about their strikes because they decide to act. 

Besides, as an unashamedly lazy student, if I hear that teachers are out on the streets championing the cause of the Wednesday morning lie-in, then strike on I say. Strike on.