Next episode: All-Souls’ Library.
Oxford votes Yes
Voters in Oxford, “the home of liberal intellectualism”, demonstrated their overwhelming
support for electoral reform by voting Yes in last week’s AV referendum, in contrast to the majority of the rest of the country.
The majority of voters in Cambridge also voted in support of AV. Nearly four thousand more votes were cast for Yes than for No.
North London constituencies including Islington, Haringey and Camden equally followed this trend.
However, only 10 out of 440 national constituencies had a majority vote favouring AV.
Andrew Mell, Oxfordshire Press Officer for the YES campaign and an Economics student at Nuffield, said more people in Oxford voted in favour of AV because of an effective campaign which “engaged with all parts of the community”.
Oxford City’s result did not match the national consensus. 6.1 million people voted in favour of electoral reform across the country, as opposed to the 13 million who rejected it.
Mell said that it was time for those behind the Yes campaign to hold a “post-mortem” to “work out what went wrong”.
Sam Robberts, an OUCA member from Christ Church, said that both campaigns had centred on “demonisation” of the opposition.
“I was concerned that the increased consensual politics the Yes campaign required would in fact lead to greater voter apathy”, he said.
Robberts admitted that Oxford’s liberal stance hardly came as a shock.
“I am not surprised that Oxford and Cambridge, and North London voted yes”, he said.
“They are traditionally seen as the home of liberal intellectualism in this country, and it is good to see that those people at least stuck to their principles and delivered the result they wanted.”
Taking Wadstock
In 2006, my first experience of Wadstock was cut tragically short by an errant frisbee hitting me in the face. Watching Dot’s Funk Odyssey’s headline set through my friend’s window, I was disappointed to be missing the night’s climax in order to ice my swollen eye. At the time a musically-unattached Wadham fresher, I was unaware of how many more Wadstock experiences I had left to go.
Now a third-year DPhil student and trumpeter for Dot’s Funk Odyssey (DFO), I hold the fairly dubious title of serial Wadstock attendee. On Saturday I played onstage in the DFO headlining set for the fifth year running, and surprisingly, it was still every bit as exciting and energising as each year before. This year we had a torrential downpour and a bar that ran prematurely dry to contend with, but it’s the little challenges that make performing at Wadstock really memorable.
Like in 2008 when a fellow trumpeter’s drunken moshing adventure ended in paramedic attention and a malfunctioning left leg. Or the following year when another trumpeter was so intoxicated by 10 pm that we resorted to pouring three successive espressos from the MCR coffee machine down his neck. This proved not to sober him up in the slightest, but did however seem to imbue him with transcendental musical powers, as he proceeded to improvise a mind-expanding jazz descant over our entire set, while sporting a glazed expression and struggling to stay upright .
This year’s Wadstock took place in the Wadham College gardens and was the first to be open to everyone, not just Wadhamites and their guests. The 19 band line-up included garage rock (Muse covers, anyone?), a ukulele ensemble, singer songwriters and a violinist armed with a digital looper. However, the annual 12-hour festival wasn’t always the large, all-inclusive variety-fest it is today and Dot’s Funk Odyssey (DFO) was formed in 2004 as an antidote to the endless line-up of grunge wannabes that the Wadstock bill used to comprise.
Originally a loose collective of 19 tambourinists and backing singers, by the time I joined DFO in Michaelmas 2006, the momentum of two Wadstocks and a handful of balls had transformed the band into a tight and disciplined group of soul-enthusiasts with intent to funk. In order to survive in Oxford’s slick jazz, swing and a cappella scene we’ve had to get more focussed – we recruit across the university at Freshers Fair and audition new members – but we still push the same aim: funk and soul music to dance and sing along to. It’s a mission that’s certainly worked for us so far. However, neither the cheeky delight in actually being paid to attend five balls a term nor the thrill of filling your favourite Oxford venue (The Cellar, not Wahoo) with dancing fans can compare to our annual highlight – heading the bill at Wadstock.
Six and a half years on, Wadstock still forms the musical pinnacle of DFO’s year. 0th week of Trinity sees us convening emergency rehearsals and engaging in heated setlist debates, whilst our resident arranger Alex Kaiserman throws together our Wadstock special number. Previously, these funked-up versions of recent chart hits have seen us take on Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’, mash-up Estelle’s ‘American Boy’ with Dizzee’s ‘Dance Wiv Me’, and underpin a Beyoncé song with a Rage Against The Machine riff in a number christened ‘Killing In The Name Of All The Single Ladies’. This year it just had to be Cee Lo Green’s ‘F**k You!’ which we delivered to a rain-soaked crowd of dedicated ravers.
The Wadstock day, for performers, is an exciting mix of relaxed open-air picnicking and a slight underlying panic about everything that could go wrong. The list here is pretty extensive and during my five years in the band we’ve seen all sorts including singers being too hung-over by 11pm to sing, drunken saxophonists going missing, broken equipment, lost music and, last year, rioting. As we commenced our final number, Wadham anthem ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, a look of distinct alarm spread across the security guards’ faces as the entire female population of the audience climbed onto the shoulders of their male counterparts. Ignoring instructions to stop playing, we were soon unplugged and engulfed by an audience stage invasion. Add to this the thrill of hearing 800 people chant your name and the sight of your logo being worn on Wadstock T-shirts for the next year and you’ll see why, as Oxford students, we appreciate that this is the closest to rock and roll we’ll ever get. And for that, Wadstock, we thank you from the bottom of our funky souls.
Hindu festival celebrated with flying colours
Hundreds of students gathered in the Mansfield-Merton sports grounds on Sunday afternoon to celebrate Holi, the Hindu festival of colour.
Students, dressed in white, threw water and coloured powders on each other to celebrate the Indian agricultural festival which initiates the spring season.
Organised annually by Oxford University’s Hindu Society, the event reached new heights of popularity this year, welcoming somewhere between 700-900 students.
The event made a profit of £834, which will be invested into the Diwali Ball, another annual event hosted by HUMsoc to raise money for Manav Sadhna, an NGO inspired by the teachings of Gandhi which offers aid to underprivileged children in India.
Over 1300 clicked ‘attending’ on the Facebook page. Event organizer Jamie Patel commented, “Every year for the past 10 years HumSoc has run a Holi event, but this year just happened to be a lot bigger.
“It was a fantastic success, the only problem was that we didn’t realise how successful it was going to be and we sold out of colour within an hour and 20 minutes!
“Considering we had around 66kg of coloured powder, that was unexpected to say the least.’
Another member of HUMsoc told Cherwell “Everyone seemed to look like they were having a great time so we were very happy with the event, especially with the weather.”
Emily Clarke, a second-year historian at St Peter’s College who attended, commented, “It was a really fun, almost carnival atmosphere and everyone was involved.
‘One of the nicest things was that all different groups of friends were mixing and covering each other in paint!’
Another attendee commented: “I’ve got a lot of bruises from the paint but it was so worth it!’
HUMsoc was “amazed by the popularity of the day” and is planning to host the event again next year.
Clarke added “I would definitely go again but next time go prepared – take a big water gun!”
HUMsoc explained the origins of the Holi as “a time when man and nature alike throw off the gloom of winter and rejoice in the colors and liveliness of spring.
“Holi also commemorates various events in Hindu mythology, but for most Hindus it provides a temporary opportunity for Hindus to disregard social norms, indulge in merrymaking and generally ‘let loose.’”
Street Style #2
This girl has a really self-assured sense of style which is always great to see. The layering of the t-shirt with the denim shirt and cardigan is ideal for early spring and she gets the colours spot on. Her shoes and wristband really compliment the shirt. 7/8 length is THE trouser length to be seen in this season, making her chinos an inspired choice! And finishing an outfit like this off with a gorgeous Mulberry bag?! You just can’t go wrong!
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Street Style #1
This girl has a really bold and individual sense of style, and that’s what fashion is all about! She’s working the tricky block colour trend really well with the pink skinnies, purple fingerless gloves and yellow/orange bag. The layering of the coat over the leather jacket is inspired.
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How To… The Smoky Eye
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2. Eyeliner: Use either a gel liner or a sharpened kohl – see MAC or Bobbi Brown – and to avoid smudging, apply with a fine, synthetic brush. Starting on the inside of the lower lid, follow the contour of the eye from the inside corner of the eye outwards. When applying liner to the upper lid stay as close to the lashes as possible – the liner is only meant to define the shape of the eye, not add anything to it.
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3. Start blending: Next, choose your colours for blending. It’s recommended that you use varying shades of brown, or grey, rather than black, to avoid looking over the top. Begin with a shimmering pink. Using a soft-bristle brush once again, apply the pink lightly to the eye, going all the way up to the brow bone.
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Then, add a more neutral colour such as taupe, but this time only take it up to the mid-way point between eyelid and brow bone (the crease of the upper lid).
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Change to a smaller brush and apply a dark brown to the outer corner of the eye, but only apply the shadow in the triangle between the lid and the boundary of the iris. Start off very gently, building up the colour gradually – remember, you can always add, but you can’t take away. If, however, you do find that you’ve overdone it with the dark brown, overlap it with the taupe eyeshadow and blend. Then, apply a lighter, pink-based crème shadow to the inner corner of the eye and work outwards, to create a contrast.
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4. Finishing touches: Using your little finger, apply a small amount of cream highlighter to the brow bone, which will attract the light and emphasise the smokiness of the eye. With a fine synthetic brush/cotton wool bud apply a fine line of cream highlighter under the lower lid – working from the inner corner out. Then apply a thin line of the dark brown eyeshadow from the outer corner to the middle of the eye, then blend with the highlighter.
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5. Eyelashes: Use an eyelash curler on the lashes of each eye for three seconds, then apply either black or brown mascara (brown is recommended for blonds). For the best results, use the mascara brush to sweep the lashes to the outer edges of the eye. To avoid getting mascara marks on the area above the eye, try not to over-blink. If you do get mascara blotches on the upper eye area, these can be quickly blended in using the large, soft blending brush from steps 1 and 2.
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Sharing a cup and sharing a story
As we tear down Highway 1 to Ben-Gurion International, the plastic cup that Jalal hands me is both flimsy and scorching. Somehow, his brother is brewing coffee in the backseat for everyone in the car. I struggle not to spill as the cup wilts in my hand. Barbed wire flies by my window as we drive alongside Israel’s ‘Security Fence’ or ‘Apartheid Wall’ depending on your politics. Taking advantage of the scenery, I ignite a brief fraternal argument over the appropriate name for the barrier. A few hours ago I didn’t know either of these men, but after spending the past six weeks at a news agency in the West Bank I’ve learned that in this place one can make fast friends so long as coffee or tea is provided.
One of the first people I shared a cup with was a protester in Bethlehem. I arrived in Palestine just as it joined the ‘Arab Spring’—the wave of youth-driven, democratic uprisings that began in Tunisia and is now blistering Syria. It is now referred to as the March 15 movement, to commemorate the first day of demonstrations. Rather than calling for the abdication of a dictator as in Egypt or Libya, the youth of Palestine demanded reconciliation between the secular Fatah party, which controls the West Bank and the recognized government, and the rogue Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.
The young protester who treated me to a mug of Turkish syrup voiced his desperation in between sips: “This split between Hamas and Fatah has held back our struggle for a Palestinian state more than any Israeli policy could hope to do.” Having arrived at the movement’s beginning, I suppose it was only fitting that I left as its demands were finally reached. A few hours after I touched down at Heathrow, the two parties signed a unity deal in Cairo. Netanyahu is fuming, and my friends in Manara Square are celebrating.
Shopping for ceramics with a friend in Hebron, we ended up having tea with the shop’s owner, a man named Munir. Hebron is a city in the southern West Bank that provides the most extreme example of the volatile Israeli-Arab dynamic. The city has been partitioned into H1, governed by the Palestinian Authority, and H2, inhabited by a small group of settlers and fully occupied by Israeli forces.
Shuffling around the streets of H2 I’m sure that my friend and I underwent the same bewilderment as any visitors to Hebron. It is known as the ‘sterile zone’, a euphemism that fails, since it fully conveys the numbness of H2. The barricaded shops, the abandoned schools, and the glares of the settlers—some all too happy to finger the triggers on their chunky firearms—briefly placed us somewhere other than planet Earth. Eight hundred illegal residents have turned this section of town—population 30,000—into an urban husk.
In the middle of our tea break, a fight breaks out in front of Munir’s shop, between some young settlers and a Palestinian boy. Within seconds an IDF jeep rattles into view and the tussle is over. “That one, with the pink hat,” croaked Munir as he pointed, “he is around here often. He causes trouble.” With that he lowered his hand and went back to stirring his tea in silence.
Halfway through my stay, actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered outside of his home in Jenin. I had hoped to have a coffee with Juliano before I left. Having seen his film Arna’s Children a few days after arriving in Palestine, I made a plan to visit the destitute refugee camp in Jenin where he ran a theatre and drama school for Palestinian kids. Instead I ended up writing up a report of his assassination. On the evening of April 4 a masked gunman stepped in front of Juliano’s car, a few feet away from his home, and opened fire. While the wave of reports on his murder subsequently referred to him as ‘Arab-Israeli’ – his mother was Jewish and his father Palestinian – Juliano once stressed that he was “one hundred percent Israeli, one hundred percent Arab.” Far be it from me to ignore his specification.
Juliano was much loved in Jenin, where he erected a professional-grade theatre with all the trimmings for youths that knew only the poverty, violence and boredom of the refugee camp. But at the same time, among the godly and the literal-minded he was deeply hated for his productions at the Freedom Theatre, many of which empowered Palestinians children to reject religious and societal subjugation as well as Israeli occupation. In a recent interview, he candidly and humorously predicted his own assassination. He announced that he would die from a bullet fired by someone “very angry that we are here in Jenin,” then with a theatrical scowl and a forbidding voice, “to corrupt the youth of the Islam!” Though the investigation of his murder is not yet closed, that is most likely exactly what happened.
Not content with the demise of only one innocent activist, a little more than a week later a Salafist group in Gaza kidnapped and hanged Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni in an abandoned house in Gaza City. The group in question was considerably to the right of Hamas and among other things demanded that the government release its co-religionists from prison. By the time the police in Gaza reached Vittorio’s body, however, it had been lifeless.
A few days after Arrigoni’s death I attended a vigil at Bethlehem’s unity tent. There were calls for perseverance and there were calls for blood. There were tears for both Vittorio and for Juliano, from those that knew them and those who did not. A colleague of mine delivered a eulogy in short bursts, as another speaker translated her words across the circle of mourners. I scribbled them on the back of a magazine for a story on the event due later that night.
Soon a doctor in the crowd, a native of Palestine who spoke to us all in English, ended his own tribute to Vittorio with a crackling voice as he began to talk about the recent murder of his friend Juliano. He suddenly spoke very slowly, and the candle in his hands started to quiver: “We will continue to do our best, to end all the violence here…to win ourselves a normal life,” until his features withered and he began to sob, “so we can finally stop things like this, from happening anymore.” With the doctor in tears, most everyone around me began to weep. He had touched the nerve not only of Vittorio’s death, or Juliano’s, but the entire tragedy of Palestine in all of its confusion and violence.
At that moment I nudged my friend and fellow intern Carlos, who raised his eyebrows and shook his head, before nodding in the direction of a coffee stand nearby. I nodded in turn and we started toward the cart. We had a lot to discuss.
The doctor will see you now
Dr. Christian Jessen, made famous by Supersize vs Superskinny and the not-for-the-squeamish Embarrassing Bodies seems absolutely unshockable. If you’ve got three testes, a purple boob or a claw for a hand, he’ll have seen it before. What’s more, he’ll be surprised you haven’t volunteered to show it to the nation on prime time channel four. But does he really never squirm at the sight of such shocking maladies? “I suppose what shocks me is going to be different to what shocks you, or what shocks the public, you’re going to be shocked by yucky, yucky things while I’m going to be shocked by the implications behind them, rather than the actual thing itself. I’ve probably seen it before so that’s not going to have much effect anymore.”
“While I was working on Embarrassing Bodies, a little girl called Charlotte was brought to see us with a case of bad verrucas, she had been to see her GP who seemed to ignore it, and firstly, it was the most shocking case of verrucas I’ve ever seen, and secondly, I was shocked by the whole management behind her. She ended up having a bone marrow transplant.” He seems just as unsettled by the patient’s treatment as he is by her condition. “It was how bad this was and the fact that nobody had thought to ask, ‘maybe there’s an immune problem going on, and perhaps we ought to check it’. The thing that shocked me is, how the hell did that happen?”
‘It was the most shocking case of verrucas I had ever seen. She ended up having a bone marrow transplant’
Talking to a man who seems unfazed by everybody else’s body problems, I couldn’t help but ask, had Jessen has any embarrassing bodily malfunctions of his own? I half expected, or guiltily hoped for, a brazen confession of a mortifying, repugnant condition. Instead, “I got appendicitis, which I decided to ignore. So that was fairly embarrassing, but that was for other reasons because I knew exactly what it was, I just didn’t want to have appendicitis at that particular time”. While he jokes about trying to hide from his own diagnosis, he admits to what troubles him most. “I suppose my biggest issue is my body dysmorphia; my issues with weight. I obsess with the gym and my body weight and how I look. Not in a completely superficial way, but what I see in the mirror is not really how I look.” Now, I’ve seen his show where he swans around the beach of Marbella telling tourists to slather on the sun cream, and his body should not even be humanly achievable for a 44-year-old man. But he maintains, “I’ve had issues with that for a long time and I’m fully aware of it; I need to not weigh myself obsessively when I’ve been to the gym. Being on the telly obviously doesn’t help when people are commenting on how you look and your build and all the rest of it.”
So how did he wind up working on one of the most bizarrely compelling shows on the television? “It was like so many people in television, it’s a lucky break. You kind of say yes to things that sound like a bit of fun and it escalates from there.” Not only that, but he didn’t even plan to be a doctor. “I actually wanted to be a film director, but because I was academic my school sort of pushed me towards something more worthy, in their eyes. But to be honest at that age, you don’t have a clue do you?”
He went on to study medicine at UCL, about which he says, “I enjoyed parts, hated other parts and ended up as a doctor. But in fact, what I do, I love. I love what I do – it ticks all the boxes for me.” While so far it seems like he stumbled into the job he now loves, he is quick to admit this and laughs, “a lot of my life has been lucky accidents I suppose, I’ve found myself doing things that I never actually intended to do but then found that I quite enjoyed them.”
‘Here’s a picture of my boobs, doctor, I thought you might like them’
But what does Jessen think of us? Young people are always in the media for our obesity rates, eating disorders, STIs, teenage pregnancies, and binge drinking, for example. But refreshingly, Jessen doesn’t blame young people. “I think the majority of students know exactly what they’re doing. It’s partly to do with the age that students are at, it’s all about taking risks and finding out who you are, so to me that’s fine to an extent, as long as you’ve evaluated those risks accurately. If you know that you’re going to have a wild summer and drink a bit too much, then, fine. I suppose taking sexual risks is a different matter because that’s not so simple. As long as you have evaluated things carefully in your head then obviously it’s your decision and I’m never ever going to tell anyone not to do something. I don’t believe in that. I think it’s a small minority of young people that generate bad press. Being a student is about having fun, if you drink an awful lot and have fun then actually I think that’s a good thing, because you get it out the way and then you move on. And you can cope with it when you’re young.”
I ask Dr. Jessen whether he had received any strange fan-mail, he laughs and says, “Oh God yes, lots, masses. Particularly being a doctor people think they can be a little bit more open with you than they are with other people. But it’s things like ‘here’s a picture of my boobs, doctor, I thought you might like them’. I get things like ‘here’s my knickers with discharge in, I thought you’d like to look at them’ but not just in a pervy way, in a really serious way, they’ll say ‘I really need to know is this normal? Should I be worried?’ and I just think, what? You sent me your knickers!”
Dr. Jessen is now busy preparing for his next show due to air on Channel 4 at the end of May. He says, “it’s going to be a completely live, interactive health show in HD. People will skype in for consultations and there’ll be specialists there. It’s sort of interactive medicine via your TV set, the first time it’s ever been done. It’s going to involve a lot of the web, and we’re linking up with the NHS Choices and the NHS website. It’s going to be high tech, the future of medicine, with diagnosis from the comfort of your own home I think. But it’s very scary indeed, we’re doing six one hour shows initially and I guess we’ll see how it goes.”
Dr. Jessen’s new show ‘Live From the Clinic’ will be airing 8pm on Channel 4 later in May.

