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Although travelling halfway across the globe to be literally in Burma has the novelty, ‘cultural exchange’ factor and the appeal of the sheer uncertainty that considerable distance, decent weather and perhaps a language barrier offers, it is difficult, costly and not necessarily, in my view, more valuable than venturing a little closer to home. Think of the carbon footprint! And it is especially wasteful when your view of life in the UK is narrowly limited to only a few cities: London, Birmingham and Oxford, like mine is. While stuck on rainy home turf having just escaped the Oxford bubble I took the opportunity to visit the city of Manchester for the weekend under the hospitality and guidance of a charming local.
What attracted me to Manchester in particular is how the city is prominent and even mythologised within wider British culture. It is the city of Manchester United and Manchester City, two world leading football clubs that are responsible for huge amounts of UK tourism; it’s definitely a city that attracts considerable glamour, WAGs, and the young and the reckless. It is also a city of learning, featuring outstanding museums and universities, and is home to one of the largest student populations in Europe. Manchester has spawned an incredible music scene and bands of the calibre of The Smiths, Joy Division, The Hollies, Buzzcocks and the Bee Gees… the list goes on. Readers should be aware at this point that I am a big fan of The Smiths, as is my charming local guide, so this trip was inevitably going to serve as a form of musical pilgrimage. Yet Manchester also played a part in a less glamorous narrative of British history as a key site of the Industrial Revolution: its shocking 19th century conditions inspired the likes of Marx and Engels to act as revolutionaries. It continues to encompass some of the most deprived boroughs in England. Of course all cities including my own, London, are not without their tensions, particularly in recent history during the terrifying frenzy of consumerism and anger that was the riots, so I wondered how ‘gritty’ Manchester would really feel. My family are from India but I have always lived in West London, enjoying the freedom offered by such a diverse and multifaceted place and its lively cultural beat; all aspects which form my criteria for a top city and which I hoped the weekend might offer. So on Friday I arrived in the stunning city, drinking in the visual impact of big statement architecture in glass and cool metals that could not have been more than ten years old, juxtaposed with warm, lightly tarnished Victorian red-bricked facades.
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Manchester by Night
We began the night at the Temple: Not a place of worship as such but a tiny bar in a converted public toilet, filled with various types including an androgynous man sporting a wig, all conducting themselves very politely. It offered a quirky selection of beers and many an alternative anthem from the jukebox. Then on to a few other bars in the Oxford Road area, all of which were atmospheric, cheap and within easy walking distance, so you can experience an enviable range of bars and clubs in one night compared to what you can achieve in London. But this was all to warm us up for the main event at the Star and Garter: Morrissey Disco. Founded in 1994, this night consists of nothing but Morrissey and The Smiths tunes, all night long. Unsurprisingly, everyone was oscillating wildly like sweet and tender hooligans who never ever want to go home because they haven’t got one, anymore.
By day, we drove round town to get a taste of life on the outskirts of Manchester city centre. Admittedly much of it was a bit sleepy, and Tesco has clearly asserted itself as aggressively as it has where I live, but there are many interesting places, beautiful parks and a thriving community spirit. There was no shortage of great places to eat or drink: Rusholme has got Wilmslow Road, a curry mile with many Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants and the Blue Cat and Town bars in Heaton Chapel are sophisticated and offer great service, with the added bonus that Town is a regular haunt of Primal Scream’s Mani. In Burnage, the quiet childhood home of Noel and Liam Gallagher, we popped into an amazing bargain record store called Sifters. The area of the four Heatons held a packed community event in Heaton Park, with live music, fairground style games, and even a somewhat fierce bake-off – genuine, clean fun for kids big and small.
The city felt busy but never over-crowded, and it has numerous green spaces and squares where people stop to congregate. One of these areas is outside the new Football Museum at the Urbis building, another of Manchester’s buildings situated by a polar architectural opposite, Manchester Cathedral. Urbis was part of the spurt of regeneration after the 1996 IRA bombing of Manchester, which explains the big shiny glamour. By contrast roaming the city’s Northern Quarter feels much like being in a calmer version of London’s Hoxton where you can find laidback restaurants, thrift and record stores as well as places like the interesting art space and social community hub Nexus. It was here on Sunday that we saw The Condition of the Working Class In England, a community devised play inspired by Engels’ 1844 book of the same name. Using devised drama, dance, film, music, poetry and a fair bit of satire it explored the lives of the working class today and discontent with capitalism through the ideas and perspective of the actors’ own lives, a reminder that despite an improvement in conditions since 1844 there remains an unsettling gap regionally between rich and poor, and indeed nationally between North and South in England. Their impressions of Cameron and Clegg would have anyone of any political affiliation in fits of laughter. More seriously, if a sense of the working class in Manchester city centre is obscured by posh retail outlets, swanky bars and tourist attractions, the actors at this local event spoke out about issues of classism, prostitution, racial and sexual abuse. It was the captivating and fascinating voice of opposition to politically correct analysts seen on the news devising graphs and explaining recent downward economic trends, thereby abstracting from and neglecting the reality of the ordinary person’s day-to-day existence in poverty. We ended Sunday night at Big Hands, the sister bar to Temple, listening to music from Bowie, Dr. John and Tom Waits. It was a relaxing conclusion to an incredible weekend… That was until I chundered everywhere! (Just kidding.)
Amid the thorny peaks of the Alps, a British sportsman is on the cusp of making history. Serious history too – if Bradley Wiggins continues as he’s been going over the past two and a half weeks, he will be the first British rider to ever win the Tour de France.
This majestic race has never quite made it into the British sporting consciousness however, and this achievement is likely to go, if not ignored, then certainly devoid of the full panoply of celebration it surely deserves. Part of this lack of interest bears a direct relationship with the lack of British success.
Track racing, come Olympic time, is seen as one of the marquee events – due no doubt to the dominance of Chris Hoy and Wiggins himself over the last two Games. Indeed, Mark Cavendish’s exploits last year (winning the sprint competition in the Tour, as well as capturing the World Championship) landed him the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award.
Well, it largely drifted by me as well until this year. I had heard of Wiggins and Cavendish of course, and before that was vaguely aware of the Tour, mainly through the vast presence of Lance Armstrong and the frequent doping scandals – the only two avenues through which it seemed cycling seemed to make the papers.
But this year I decided, what with Wiggins now in the ascendency, now was the time to give one of world sport’s mega-events a go.
I’ve haven’t looked back: it’s taken less than two weeks for me to turn into a cycling bore, and I’m here recruiting. Full immersion is the best strategy to get to grips with an alarming array of terms of art and names from all over the globe.
Once you’re initiated it’s captivating viewing. There’s no comparison with the torpor of track racing – the Tour is alive in a way that other forms of racing like the keirin or madison somehow fail to be.
First and foremost it’s a forbiddingly tough test of physical and mental endurance. Two thousand miles and twenty-one days are the key figures to bear in mind here. Spurious comparisons to marathon-series are often made but the feat is phenomenal enough to stand alone, and the attrition rate of the Tour speaks to this as finishers are always a fair number fewer than starters – and this from those at the very peak of endurance cycling.
There’s a great deal of variety too. Stages, and riders, are not identikit: there are the long flat rides; cruel, thigh-pummelling mountain stages (although the mountains aren’t unique in punishing the thighs – the whole event could’ve been designed as a cosmic joke on quadriceps) scattered across the Alps and Pyrenees; and shorter individual time-trial stages that provide the fast men like Wiggins a chance to rack up a lead.
Diversity in riders comes from excelling at different styles of stage – Cavendish is a sprint man, for instance, his weakness at the climbs meaning he can’t challenge for the overall prize, the famed maillot jaune or yellow jersey, instead gunning for the sprinters’ green (the king of the mountains wears a tasteful red polka dot number).
France has rarely looked better than filmed in HD from helicopter as the race traverses it, and then back again. The course changes each year, providing ample amounts of landscape shots to keep the tourism board of each department happy.
The French, on the other hand, don’t come out of the race altogether positively. Full points for enthusiasm: the sidelines of the race are thronged at almost every point, providing what must be an inimitable atmosphere as normally there are no barriers between riders and crowd.
The lack of barrier leads to the issue though, because encroachment is common. Vast swathes of the French youth population seems to have no higher ambition for the month of July than to run alongside Vincenzo Nibali and knock him off his bike.
So what are Bradley Wiggins’ chances? He has enormous obstacles ahead of him and there’s no shortage of high calibre opposition either. But the man from Kilburn is currently in the overall lead, and with a crack team behind him (or more accurately for most of the race ahead of him) he seems odds-on to march down the Champs-Élysées, claim his umpteenth kisses from the good ladies of Carrefour, and win the whole thing.
So tune in now or risk missing the opportunity to miss genuine sporting history being made. Look out for the acerbic Brit in yellow with the ludicrous sideburns. He could well be the country’s next sporting hero.
On a lazy Monday last week I watched Shooting Dogs – one of those films I’d always wanted to watch but never gotten around to. For those who don’t know it, the film documents one of the worst atrocities of the Rwandan Genocide at the Ecole Technique Officielle, near Kigali. Following a lengthy siege of the school by extremist Hutu militia, the film ends with the meagre UN contingent evacuating to the airport, conscious that in doing so they were condemning the 2000 Tutsi to a machete massacre at the hands of the militia – which duly occurred.
The poignant aspect of the film is that officially, there was no dereliction of duty on the part of the UN soldiers – their mission was based on observation; they had undergone no commitment to protect anyone. But when Tutsi families sought refuge in the school grounds, the soldiers became their de facto guardians.
The story, I think, is morally analogous to the West’s relationship with the Syrian freedom-fighters.
The struggle of the Free Syrian Army is an embarrassment. Not to Bashar Al-Assad, to whom the revolutionary movement has now become a mortal threat, pushing the Red Cross to officially designate the conflict as a civil war. The Syrian people’s struggle is an embarrassment to the Western and UN leaders, who stand by limply as the Assad regime orchestrates indiscriminate slaughter.
‘If we can act, we should’ is not the only consideration that should apply before launching into conflicts abroad, but it should be the main one. Inaction can be as morally reprehensible as ill-fated action. I get riled up when anti-Iraq war advocates take the moral high-ground because, as the late Christopher Hitchens put it excellently, to oppose the war on strict moralistic terms requires one to defend the preservation of a tyrannical, murderous, brutalising dictatorship.
Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the only reasons that the doctrine of interventionism became discredited under Blair/Bush. The political requirement for Bush to do something, and Blair’s acquiescence, were used to justify the principle, rather than the principle being used to justify the action. Consequently the doctrine was applied inconsistently. If a principle is applied in a haphazard manner it breeds cynicism – in this case characterised by a retreat to national concerns, less fraught with moral dilemma.
The losers in this are the Syrians. Whilst a Cameron-led coalition intervened to provide air and artillery support to Libyan rebels, more would be required to topple Assad – possibly even ground troops.
The lazy opinionator will chastise me for my naivety: ‘how can you justify blundering into Syria after the catastrophes of our other Middle Eastern misadventures!?’ The truth is that the mistakes we make after a period of national distress are often characterised by caution rather than belligerence. We would not have been as patient with 1930s Appeasement were it not for the terrors of WW1. Food for thought.
On July 10th, the coalition suffered its biggest rebellion so far when 91 Tory MPs voted against Lords reform at its second reading. The government won the vote, but the bill’s future is in doubt after plans were dropped to timetable it before the summer recess. To the majority of the country, July 10th will have been as insignificant as any other day in Westminster, but it could have important long term effects on the health of the coalition and the country.
After the vote, Sir Menzies Campbell strongly implied what many had already predicted; that the Liberal Democrats will refuse to back the boundary reforms, a major Conservative policy, if the Tories don’t support them on Lords reform. The proposed boundary changes are expected to reduce our current electoral system’s bias towards the Labour party, and the Conservatives could gain up to 20 seats. However, Nick Clegg’s party, despite being treated much more unfairly by our system in terms of votes per seat, is actually predicted to lose several MPs. There is a feeling among the Liberal Democrat backbenchers that they have made political sacrifice after political sacrifice for the sake of the coalition, tuition fees being the famous example, yet they have achieved little more than a failed AV referendum. At the same time, Tory backbenchers have hardly had to forgo any of their political principles, and the Conservative party has in fact implemented a large part of their manifesto. It is almost unthinkable that Liberal Democrat MPs will march down the division lobby corridors for Tory boundary changes, some of them literally walking to the end of their careers, without a positive legacy to leave behind.
It now seems unlikely that Cameron, a man with ever diminishing political capital who has no appetite for a long battle with his backbenchers, will be able to whip his party into line on Lords reform. This will be immensely damaging for relations inside the coalition, but for its own sake it must remain united in government. The coalition was formed in the name of economic and political stability, and to split over Lords and boundary reforms, issues that are close to insignificant to the electorate, would be political suicide. With a July 18th MORI poll giving the Labour party a 13 point lead, it seems an early election would hand power to a resurgent Ed Miliband.
It is clear that neither the Tories nor the Liberal Democrats can afford to let the coalition fall until it is politically acceptable to do so, which is likely to be the General Election in 2015. However, the infighting and tit for tat nature that we are seeing at the moment and will only see more of as time goes on could turn the electorate against coalitions for a long time to come. There is obviously no appetite for a Con-Lib agreement; a Yougov poll on the 14th July showed that only 5% of Tory voters and just 11% of Liberal Democrats want the coalition to continue beyond the next election. However, the anti-coalition mood of both Westminster and the country make it significantly more likely that Ed Miliband, should he win the most seats but not an outright majority, will attempt to rule as a minority Labour government, although a Labour majority is of course more likely now the boundary reforms look doomed to fail.
A good film leaves us with an impossible itch long after we have left the cinema screen. We may have a desire to inhabit the film’s inhabitable world, or perhaps to inherit the protagonist’s eccentricities. The futility of this leads us to cling on to the tangible, imitable aspects, such as a character’s wardrobe. Indeed, cinema is the vehicle that brings fashion to life for most of us as we experience costume as a vital part of the narrative.
The iconic imagery of certain films has left a deep impact on our collective fashion consciousness. This is your guide to the most sartorially influential cinema.
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A Bout de Souffle (1960) – Probably the most iconic of the Godard’s Nouvelle Vague period films, A Bout de Souffle’s gamine Patricia (Jean Seberg) inspired a generation of women who adopted her pixie haircut and filled their wardrobes with Breton tops, chinos and ballet flats, synonymous with classic and chic French style. There was, in fact, no costume designer for A Bout de Souffle, and Godard encouraged the wearing of the actor’s own clothes. This film signals the abandonment of the prim, ladylike attire of the 1950’s and marks the transition into the tomboy look that represents free-spiritedness and liberty present in Patricia’s character.
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Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo? (1966) – Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? is Vogue photographer William Klein’s hilarious, if not eye opening satire of the fashion world. The opening scene is a shocking portrayal of the industry’s glamorous façade, as models take to the catwalk, having been fastened into sheets of aluminum. On the catwalk the models are serene and poised as they parade in these architectural masterpieces and the fictional head of the fashion world (based on Klein’s editor, Diana Vreeland) proclaims them ‘magnifique’, but backstage its grotesque reality is depicted, as a model screams having been badly cut by a sharp edge of her impractical, metal dress. The film is a flawless evocation of the Modernist pre-hippy sixties, influenced by La Nouvelle Vague, Mary Quant and Bridget Riley and seems to foreshadow many of Gareth Pugh’s latest designs.
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The Great Gatsby (1974) – With another remake of the movie coming out later this year, this season has seen many fashion houses taking inspiration from the Jazz Age, symbolic of freedom and hedonism. Gucci’s Frida Giannini has cited the inspiration for the 90th anniversary collection as being “the architectural shapes, especially the New York skyscrapers of the period”. It was after styling all the male characters in the 1974 version of the film that Ralph Lauren became a household name, and garnered him an Academy Award.
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Annie Hall (1977) – Annie Hall’s (Diane Keaton) style embodies a range of dichotomies that should not logistically work, but which she manages to pull off with ease. Her outfits are at the same time masculine and feminine, irrational and organized, frumpy and tailored. On their first encounter, Woody Allen’s character compliments what Annie Hall is wearing, to which she replies: “Well, uh, this tie was a present from Grammy Hall”. Everything that she wears has a symbolic value, and only works due to the enigmatic and quirky nature of her character. Allen loved Keaton’s style so much that he refused to hire a stylist, and indeed, Annie Hall’s style seems to reflect Diane Keaton’s own neuroses, signaled by the covered up nature of the garments.
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The Virgin Suicides (1999)– The dark, sinister nature of the film is contrasted with the sisters’ innocent appearances, clothed in outfits of long, pastel coloured silk and chiffon. The outfits were intricately and painstakingly detailed in order to imitate 70s style, from the billowing sleeves of the white maxi dresses to the velvet bell-bottoms of the boys’ suits. Coppola allows the dresses to portray the sisters’ fluctuation between girl and woman and between innocence and impurity.
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The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)– What makes the costume design in The Royal Tenebaums so unique is the fact that each character has their own idiosyncratic uniform that stays with them for the duration of the film, from their infancy at the beginning, right until the end. The Director, Wes Anderson, explained that this was supposed to show how the characters all peak in their adolescence and never evolve in the same way again, becoming static characters. Margot’s (Gwenyth Paltrow) wardrobe is a mélange of sporty and glamorous, her daily outfit being a piqué collar Lacoste tennis dress, a Hermes ‘Birkin’ bag, and a caramel coloured mink coat designed especially by Fendi. Margot’s look has inspired many designers, most recently Cynthia Rowley’s Autumn/Winter 2011 collection.
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Marie Antoinette (2006) – What the critics found lacking in substance and historical accuracy are certainly made up for by the visual elements of the film, with the Italian costume designer Milena Canonero winning an Academy Award for her efforts. Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) wore 60 different dresses during the film; all designed in Rome’s Cinecitta studios, considered to be the core of Italian cinema. Coppola, who directed the film, is said to have handed Canonero a box of pastel coloured macaroons from Ladurée, and said, “These are the colours I love”. This pastel colour palette translates perfectly onto Marie Antoinette’s outfits and the set design in general, and illuminates the aim of the film: to show Marie Antoinette less as the commonly portrayed detached hedonist but more as a naïve, playful girl thrown into the role of Queen at a far too early age.
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A Single Man (2009) – Tom Ford’s direction delivers a perfectly rose tinted portrait of 1960’s American style and aesthetic, which masks the desperately crumbling reality of the film’s characters. Arianne Phillips was asked to design the costumes, with Charley’s (Julianne Moore) black and white dress as the centerpiece but the men’s fashion does not fail to disappoint either. Even in the scene where George (Colin Firth) is sitting on the toilet reading a book, his shirt, tie and dark, thick-rimmed glasses combo exudes sophistication. Phillips started her research for the male characters by looking into 1960’s sack suits but transformed the silhouette into one that was more relevant to the contemporary eye, so that they appear tailored yet loose at the same time, all produced in Ford’s Italian factory. One of Ford’s reasons for creating the film (out of his own pocket), was the longevity of film as a medium, something which is essentially a time capsule from the moment of creation but which lives on, as opposed to fashion which needs to be new and ever evolving in order to be consumed and appreciated.
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Io Sono l’Amore(2009) – Tilda Swinton stars as Emma Recchi in Io Sono l’Amore, a visual masterpiece about the oppressive nature of the Milanese haute-bourgeoisie. Raf Simons of Jil Sander and his team were asked to create the pieces so that the colour palette changes from muted colours and pastels at the beginning of the film, to the red dress in the second half of the film which signals her succumbing to socially forbidden passions. The director stated that the choice of Jil Sander’s team came from their understanding of “an extremely subtle dialogue within the film between narrative and fashion”.
A study by a team of Oxford scientists has solved a decade-long medical puzzle explaining why drugs prescribed for people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis (MS) often made their symptoms worse.
Researchers were unsure why the drugs used successfully on other autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease did not work for patients with MS.
For the past three years the Oxford University team, in collaboration with German, Danish and US scientists, has focused on one particular variant gene called TNFRSD1A, which was previously associated with the risk of developing MS.
The normal gene is responsible for the production of a protein which sits on the surface of cells and binds TNF, an important signalling molecule involved in a number of biological pathways in the body.
The Oxford-led research team discovered that the variant caused the production of an altered, shortened version of the protein which mops up TNF, preventing it from signalling.
According to the joint authors of the paper, Mr Adam Gregory and Dr Calliope Dendrou, from the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, “the drugs given to MS patients [TNF blockers] mirror the action of the variant gene, thereby promoting or exacerbating their symptoms.”
On its own, the genetic variant TNFRSD1A is linked only to a modest risk of developing MS. However, in conjunction with the drugs its effect is greatly amplified.
According to the authors of the study, it is “the first of its kind” and demonstrates the clinical relevance of studying genetics.
“A prior knowledge of the functional effects of the gene variant could have helped predict the poor outcome of the drugs,” explained Mr Gregory and Dr Dendrou. The study shows how an understanding of the overall mechanisms that lead to disease through genetics can ensure better drug administration.
Mr Gregory and Dr Dendrou told Cherwell, “we’re delighted to have been part of what we believe is a very important study, and that this has been reflected in the media interest that we’ve had since its publication.”
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurological condition which affects around 100,000 people in the UK. In MS, the coating around nerve fibres called myelin is damaged by the immune system which mistakes it for a foreign body and attacks it. This damage disrupts messages travelling along the nerve fibres between the brain and the body; they can slow down, become distorted, or not get through at all.
Nick Rijke, Director of Policy and Research at the MS Society, commented, “There are many genes associated with MS, but we know little about the role they play or the influence they have on the condition. This important study has shown that some of your genes can play a part in deciding whether or not you respond to a treatment. In the future this could help ensure that people with MS are offered drug treatments that are most likely to work for them.”
85% of students applying to Oxford this autumn will face an admissions test before interview, according to the University’s director of admissions.
In an interview with The Guardian, Mike Nicholson said that 70% of the subjects offered for 2013 entry at Oxford would require candidates to sit “some form of aptitude test”.
Materials Science, a course which has seen 40% growth in entries in the last half decade, will use an aptitude test for the first time this autumn.
The proportion of applicants to be assessed represents a steady increase from 60-65% of entries three years ago. This growing figure is “predominantly driven by the significant increase in applications over the last five years”, with “clumping” around the most competitive courses, such as Economics and Management.
This figure could rise further if more courses receive in excess of four applicants per place.
“More about diversity”
Oxford abolished entrance exams in 1995, but has slowly re-introduced ways of sifting out true ability in certain subjects as applicant numbers have skyrocketed.
While Nicholson acknowledges that the tests are designed to offer insights about candidates beyond the limitations of A-level results, he insists that increased testing is “more [about] the diversity of our applicant pool”.
“About 70% of our candidates take A-level. 30% don’t, and it’s the 30% that don’t that’s been an increasing figure. So in part, the tests benchmark the candidates against each other within a discipline so that we don’t have to try and make up complicated algorithms to offset what the German Abitur is against US SAT against the International Baccalaureate.”
Oxford University emphasised that there is “no set weighting or percentage” assigned to tests in relation to factors such as predicted grades, references, and interview performance.
The trend comes as the coalition government continues to review the adequacy of 14-19 qualifications.
Cherwell contacted Ofqual, the exam watchdog, who stated, “Our research shows that A-levels are well thought of by universities and are considered broadly fit for purpose. Certain areas can be improved, and we are looking into higher education having more involvement in developing and designing A-levels.
“It is right that universities can use additional selection measures to help them identify the right students for their courses.”
“Not an extra barrier”
OUSU’s Vice President for Access and Academic Affairs, David Messling, told Cherwell, “It shows steps in the right direction towards an ever more discerning and individual admissions process. As Oxford seeks much more information on a candidate, it’s in an even better position to admit students on their academic potential.
“There’s still more work to do – there’s a challenge to ensure that candidates and schools know that these tests are about giving more opportunities to show potential, and not an extra barrier.”
Cherwell spoke to Ssuuna Ggolooba-Mutebi, a student starting A-levels at a comprehensive in northwest London. He was initially daunted, “considering A-Levels are hard enough without one having to think about reading far ahead”.
However, upon explanation, he welcomed the opportunity to “think outside the box”, commenting that, “such questions shouldn’t be undoable for someone who really knows what they have learnt at school and is actually interested in the subject.”
Oriel historian David Mason, a former attendee of Oxford’s access summer school, voiced his reassurances. “While some applicants, particularly from disadvantaged schools, could be deterred from applying by the perception that there is another hurdle in their path, there is no need to see it that way.
“The tests are essentially meritocratic. I am informed that, in some subjects at least, final aptitude scores combine your test score with a contextualised GCSE score, and so actually benefits people from disadvantaged schools.”
You didn’t know the first thing about jobs when you were five. Jobs were what grownups did. Why they bothered was anyone’s guess. Quite frankly, it was masochistic – why spend eight hours in a boring room when you could watch the Cbeebies channel all the time? I mean, how could you not want to? The Cbeebies channel is right there, all day. Intriguingly however, you would sometimes find that Johnny’s mummy or Katie’s daddy did something that was super super cool, and sometimes they had special assemblies for super super cool mummies and daddies who came in to tell us what they did. And they often looked like they had stepped right out of one of those Dorling Kindersley picture books with ‘My First’ in the title. Wow, you thought, I want to be just like that. One day I really want to be a…
Policeman/Policewoman
Once upon a time you could let someone take a hit to the jugular and run off with their pouch of groats without even getting an ASBO. The classic ‘bobby on the beat’, nicknamed after Tory reformer Robert Peel who created London’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829, has always been a staple figure in quaint children’s programmes based in small-to-economically-unviable-sized settlements. In Grown-up Land, things are less pedestrian in the big bad boroughs. The constable’s helmet is, these days, heavily oversubscribed. An alternative popular route is through becoming a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO), or you can volunteer a few hours a week as a ‘special constable’. To wield the truncheon, however, requires passing the Police Initial Recruitment Test, which only around 8% of candidates succeed in doing. And with frequent new reports of cuts to policing, that’s a high sense of duty on a thin blue line indeed.
Pilot
If you regret being born too late for the Battle of Britain, or hanker after the Mad Men school of sex appeal, Tom Cruise and Leonardo Di Caprio will have likely struck a chord with your aspirations. Many of us do find ourselves charmed by the idea of flight, frustratingly enticed by Frank Sinatra or flagrantly misled by the promises of Red Bull. When we were wee ones no one thought to remind us that stretching out both arms and wheeling them about in errant mid-sprint was unlikely to achieve lift, nor one of BA’s requisite competencies. Traditionally many civil aviation pilots are ex-air force, not least because private training to get aloft is pretty damn expensive. BA does actually have a ‘Future Pilot Programme’, training people up from scratch, but naturally such a rarity is keenly seized upon. Its inaugural year in 2011 received around 3,500 hopefuls for just 80 places – a success rate of about 0.02%.
Princess
Work experience is slightly tricky for this one. Needless to say the straight answer is that going to St Andrews probably helps. Otherwise, hedge your bets on being an American divorcée, a real fun gal, or just hanging about like a canny old bird for a few decades. Many prepubescent girls seem worryingly party to the belief that this is actually a viable career option. Are you still looking for that movie-miracle morganatic marriage? I hate to say it, but you might want to put it on the back burner when you get to final year. The odds of having a Notting Hill moment at 1am in Camera aren’t great. (Not even in VIP.) Besides, what’s going for it? You don’t even get to meet Ricky Tomlinson. In the half-imagined words of Bob Diamond, there are probably better perks at Barclays.
Firefighter
For an animated Welsh public sector worker, Fireman Sam deals with an unsettling level of negligence in the valleys. I don’t know if you missed it, but some major shit went down since the last time you saw him. To our recollection, the only fun part was the bit where you go down the pole, although it must be said that ‘fireman slides down pole’ is not a recommended search on Google Images, so perhaps better simply to recall the joy of it. If the likes of Ladder 49 does inspire you to pass babies out of burning buildings, there’s some way to go yet. In the UK there are also six National Firefighter Physical Tests: a 13.5-metre ladder climb in PPE (as Oxford students we of course know that’s Personal Protective Equipment), evacuating a 55kg casualty, lifting the mass of a ladder, crawling under simulated smoky conditions, and carrying and assembling equipment like hoses and pumps. The armed forces have their own fire services, as do airports, which are looked after by the BAA Fire Service. Full-time firefighting jobs are here and there but many places look favourably upon you if you’ve offered your services as a retained firefighter – a firefighter on-demand. In superhero-like vision it entitles you to sprint out of work to attend upon those half-baked babies.
Ballet dancer
Did Black Swan put you off? No? Great, we’ll continue. Think happy thoughts of County Durham mining families instead. After-school ballet or dance practice will have been a familiar segment in the earlier lives of many female readers, but as Natalie Portman manages to convey – though maybe a smidgen harshly – becoming prima ballerina assoluta is an un-dainty, if not gruelling ask, and can indeed carry physical risks. Unpalatable as you may imagine sober gyration in clubs to be, it pales alongside the thought of starting out at the age of three, which is by no means unusual, and becoming professional before you’re big enough to upgrade from the log flume at Alton Towers. As with any other artistic or sporting profession, fierce competition lays every step of the way, so getting in there as soon as you can walk, as well as being talented, diligent, and unwaveringly committed, helps. The best of the bunch might end up at one of the professional ballet schools, such as the English National Ballet School or the Royal Ballet School, or if you’ve got something special, the prestigious Bolshoi Academy in Russia. On making it through, you’ll have to join a company – often the one the ballet school is affiliated with. Even then you might find you’re good enough for the corps (the background dancers) – but not good enough to be a soloist. In the eponymous film, Billy Elliot’s answer to what inspires him about ballet is simply, “The dancin’.” And when he says, “I don’t want a childhood. I want to be a ballet dancer”, we figure he probably had the right attitude after all.
Astronaut
Growing up with the dregs of the Cold War freshly behind us, the glory days of going beyond the ionosphere could not fail to inspire the intrepid. Like Buzz Lightyear, we may fall back from our aspirations, but the sky’s never the limit for the young at heart and the obsessively dedicated. We have a problem though, Houston. It is exceptionally tough. The UK Space Agency is famously based in that most otherworldly of places, Swindon, but doesn’t actually fund any manned space research. NASA’s program is tops, but NASA only recruit every few years, with only a handful of international selectees. Short of forking out yourself, your best bet is to follow the lead of five of the six British people who have been into space, and actually become American. Also a plus is being an unashamed geek for science, like Michael Foale (a contemporary of Stephen Fry at Cambridge, who once made fun of him for saying he wanted to go into space), and perhaps have flown very big dangerous things before, like Major Timothy Peake, the newest British astronaut to have been selected via the European Space Agency. And talking about requirements doesn’t even broach the black-hole-pressure of selection and training. One of the things you have to be able to do to get on NASA’s two-year course is to swim three lengths of a swimming pool non-stop in full flight suit and tennis shoes. You need more than a doughty dash of determination to ruin a good pair of those.
Dinosaur hunter
We used to be nuts about dinos – a credit to Mr Spielberg, who made the idea of going into densely forested areas looking for old things that could possibly kill you seem like a right lark. The BBC caught on and did their thing, and Disney even released a film about an orphaned specimen making a long and arduous journey, although sadly before long we all started getting interested in another orphan and another long and arduous journey. You may not have heard of the Cambrian, the Devonian, or the Palaeogene, but you probably have heard of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous; and everyone knows of the ‘terrible lizard’, tyrannosaurus rex. (Although, interestingly, not the biggest lad around.) When is an unhealthy obsession with wanting Indiana Jones’ whip not merely risqué? When you think you could be one assembling the bones in the Natural History Museum, that’s when. For that honour, you’ll need to be an earth scientist, biologist, or geologist, with a masters and a doctorate under your belt soon enough as well. Having dug your way all through education, it’s then a case of getting that research funding and digging some more. People can pay to go on short digs, but it’s some way better to be in a position where you can have some bitch of a carnivore named after you, or have the pleasure of naming it yourself.
Spy
Ian Fleming’s most famous creation feels implausibly distant to our humdrum lives, though funnily enough both the Security Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, have graduate recruitment pages and profiles. (You need a 2.1.) The official use of the term ‘agent’ is actually better described as an informant, although in wonderfully classic bureau-speak they are technically known as ‘covert human intelligence sources’. James Bond would be what is called an MI6 ‘operational officer’; the MI5 equivalent is an ‘intelligence officer’. Bond is an old-school prodigy, having studied at Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, but some things don’t change: Bond read Oriental Studies, and MI6 are still keen in this day and age on hearing from any Mandarin speakers. MI6’s website provides a ‘virtual tour’ of the organisation, which seems pretty surprising, though helpfully: ‘There are no pictures of actual SIS employees or interiors on this virtual tour.’ Understandably you aren’t allowed to tell anyone about your application, so don’t be too quick to judge that otherwise genius finalist who appears to be ambivalently faffing around. If you’re clean, stable, and have the balls, you can apply here, but suffice to say yours truly clicked through two pages and totally wussed out.
Doris Day would have a rubbish time in the twenty-tens. No longer can you rattle off a woolly “que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be” as legit careers advice to your precocious, socially aspirational nine-year-old. The very thought might make you yearn for the halcyon days of ‘jobs for life’. Back when you could pat them reassuringly, then proceed to seize them by the scruff of the neck and throw them back outside to accumulate hopscotch bruises on the cobbles while your local MP trundled past in one of them Morris Minors.
Thankfully, modern parenting needn’t be awkward. Pack them off to the nearest careers fair – it’s fantastic they’re thinking about work experience this early. Given that we are now all guaranteed to graduate with albatross-shaped millstones that will leave our naïve hopes in grim tatters, they may as well be trying to get an edge ahead of their starry-eyed peers. Plus, ‘chimney sweep’ is a great addition to any CV.
The entire cabinet surface area of the kitchen now lies beneath your unwashed dishes. The walls of your room and surrounding corridor are covered in a choking, amber tobacco-smoke residue. The floor of the living room is impenetrable under the mass of loose paper, empty cans and Gwen Stefani CDs strewn across it. It is your fourth day of living out in Oxford. Sadly your ignorant, philistine housemates fail to grasp that you are merely subverting oppressive and archaic social norms and you fear the rising tide of anger against you may lead to your imminent decapitation. What you need is a master-class in conflict resolution.
Perhaps you could take a lesson from the Prime Minister, who this week penned an article in the Sunday Times calling on Lib Dems and Tories to work together to mend the ailing coalition. “I have always called myself a liberal Conservative” effuses Mr Cameron, presumably in the hope that Nick Clegg will respond by stating that he considers himself a Tory democrat. He lists a number of coalition achievements: that they have reduced the long-term public sector pensions bill by half (i.e. public sector workers will receive much lower pensions); they have created a “tax system that rewards effort” (that is, they have given tax breaks to millionaires) and they have overseen an expensive railway investment plan (except they haven’t, not yet at least, but Mr Cameron feels the need to mention it anyway). There was no reference to the government’s deeply controversial health reforms and the tuition fee rise received an honourable, if very brief and indirect, mention.
The document is, in essence, a list of reforms the Lib Dems would certainly not have passed were they the sole force within the executive, tied together with a vague message about how both Tory and Lib Dem are both into “progressive goals” and against “uniform state control”, whatever that means. The article unintentionally highlights the increasing uselessness of the coalition to the Liberal Democrats. It is very clear given the failure of the AV referendum and increasing likelihood of Lord’s reform derailment, that the Lib Dems will come out of this coalition with nothing to show for it. If their two flagship policies are sunk, then they too cannot possibly hope to remain afloat as anything like a serious political force in the future.
Clegg’s recent threat of “consequences” (surely all actions have consequences?) following a failure to reform the upper house are hence perfectly understandable. Matthew Paris and other may have decried the Liberal leader’s comments as blackmail, but they must be using a very atypical definition of blackmail. Threatening to withdraw support for your partner’s policies if they do not support yours is simply how a coalition works. If Clegg had threatened to release photographs of Cameron masturbating a sheep whilst dressed as a Nazi (Cherwell disclosure: to our knowledge no such photograph exists) then that would have been blackmail.
Cameron’s plea, and of course the very need to publish it, show how rickety the coalition is getting. With Labour consistently polling a good ten points above the Tories and a Labour majority at the next election (whenever that may be) looking very likely, the only remaining utility of the coalition to either Lib Dem or Tory is that it is a means of staving off an inevitable political wipe-out for a little bit longer. Perhaps this is the shared value Cameron should really have mentioned.
Oh and for christsakes go wash those dishes. I mean seriously.
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