OK, first of all, I’m female. Maybe I should have made that clear back when I started writing this but, thing is, I didn’t think I needed to. It has recently come to my attention, however, that I come across as a gay man in print.
Is this embarrassing? I suppose I’ve mentioned anal, referred (somewhat camply) to a ‘boyf‘, suggested the purchase of a spanking paddle… Oh, wait. Yeah. I am totally a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. Suddenly my obsessions with Liza Minnelli, body glitter and the word ‘fabulous’ take on a sinister significance. Chris Grayling probably wouldn’t support my right to stay in the B&B of my choice. But apart from my raving homosexuality, why would you assume that I’m a man writing this? Because no matter how much the public tries to accept and even encourage female sexuality, it still makes all of us a little bit uncomfortable.

What else could explain the public bitch hunt of Belle de Jour and Girl With a One Track Mind, et al? Yes, it makes a great story to expose high profile anonymity, but the impetus behind it seems to be the public shaming of a woman who enjoys, nay, speaks of enjoying sex.

It runs deeper. The press furore around the murder of Meredith Kercher was in large part aimed at the sexual monster that was Amanda Knox, not her boyfriend, who was – incidentally – equally implicated. But you all know this, I‘m not claiming to have uncovered some insidious patriarchal conspiracy. As female Oxford students we’re not ignorant of feminism, we can invoke Irigaray, perhaps a cheeky bit of Butler, but are we more down with the literature than with getting down and dirty?

I can theoretically argue a woman’s right to do the latter with anyone or thing she chooses, but in practice I’ll call someone a slag as quick as the next misogynist. There was a girl at my secondary school who used to sit in the basement of house parties and give blozzers to any male who cared to go down (so to speak). I didn’t respect her empowerment, I laughed at it, and saved it up as a juicy story to use in a sex column years later. Perhaps I should embrace my new found identity as a female identified gay man. I could go to Poptarts, give out as many blozzers as the aforementioned friend and escape judgement from everyone. But B&Bs might be an issue. And I do like a good mini-break.

Jop van Bennekom is super low-key. (He also likes the word ‘super’.) He lives in the Netherlands, where he co-edits Fantastic Man magazine, and about once every month he travels to London to confer with Penny Martin, editor-in-chief of The Gentlewoman. (Jop is also creative director at The Gentlewoman.) Together with Gert Jonkers, Jop’s business partner and co-editor of Fantastic Man, Jop and Penny are responsible for two of the most popular fashion magazines currently going.

Fantastic Man was launched in 2005 and in just five years has achieved an international circulation of around 70,000. Its success has been so great that when Jop and Gert teamed-up with Penny to launch The Gentlewoman, which debuted earlier this spring, expectations were so high that the first issue sold out almost immediately. (I had to go to six newsagents in London before finding a copy.)

‘I was surprised,’ says Jop, ‘because it’s never easy to make a first issue of a magazine. I’ve started up, I think, five magazines now, and it’s always difficult.’

‘My surprise was actually the kind of response,’ says Penny, ‘not so much that we got so many people but the slightly emotional quality of how people responded to the magazine. The slightly frantic kind of excitement over specific things, and how people want to tell you what they liked about it, their favourite bits.’

I met with Jop and Penny at the London office of The Gentlewoman, which occupies the first floor of a nondescript building in Shoreditch. There is no sign, no advertising, no magazine covers plastered to the plate glass front to celebrate the enormous success of the first issue. Inside the floors are plain wood, the walls exposed brick, and simple white work tables support a small but impressive collection iMac computers.

Are you getting that one quality of ‘a gentlewoman’ is her taste for understatement?

Jop and Penny make an interesting pair. Jop is clearly at home in the role of independent magazine publisher. He is low-key but confident, and speaks with the clarity of purpose that comes from starting five magazines from scratch and intermittently spending years living on savings and freelance design work to finance his ideas.

‘I’ve always been into super independent media, the idea of independence when I was a teenager was exciting, and I still think it’s exciting.’
Penny, at least initially, is incredibly demure. Talking about her previous role as editor of Showstudio, a hugely successful fashion website, she declines even to mention the name of its famous founder, photographer Nick Knight. (‘I worked for a key fashion photographer’) She considers each question thoughtfully and answers earnestly, a nod to her role as Professor of Fashion Photography at the London College of Fashion. As the interview progresses, she becomes increasingly animated by all this talk of her new editorial role. Before I leave she will mime Stanislovsky techniques to help me prepare for my turn in the college play.

The magazines that Jop and Penny produce, along with Gert, are clear reflections of their editors’ personalities. Both Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman cultivate a polite, modernist sensibility. (The captions in Fantastic Man, for instance, refer to subjects as ‘Mr. [name]’.) They are beautifully designed and extremely well-curated, a necessity for publications that issue just twice per year. (Necessary, but not always easy: says Jop, ‘We have so many ideas!’) Most of the features are about people who are exceptional in a comparatively small universe: people like Wolfgang Tillmans, the Turner-prize winning photographer (on the cover of Fantastic Man) and Phoebe Philo, the creative director of fashion house Céline (on the cover of The Gentlewoman).
‘We exert much more opinion and control during the commissioning process,’ says Penny. ‘People understand that it won’t be just a case of turning something in and it will get run as is. Other magazines are like a container that you chuck stuff into.’

Says Jop, ‘We’re working from a much more critical point of view, saying we’re interested in showing breasts in a new way, let’s talk about really small tits or something, you know, just to give an example.’

This kind of creative control is essential to making Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman different from other magazines. ‘It’s really independent because it’s self-sustainable’, says Jop. ‘If you give in to all this kind of commercial pressure [especially advertisers], you are starting to make exactly the same magazine as all the other magazines because they are all doing that.’
Of course, this kind of independence comes with a price: Jop and Gert lived on savings and freelance work for two years before Fantastic Man finally sold enough to pay its editors any salary. Even now, with both Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman garnering great success, the mastheads remain thin and the expenditure priority is clearly on the product. (Hence all those iMac’s in an otherwise sparsely furnished office.)

‘It’s professionally run but it’s not lavish,’ says Penny.
‘Exactly,’ says Jop. ‘It’s a different thing to go to fashion shows in Paris and stay in the Ritz, then you spend a computer every night on just sleeping.’ Jop laughs, ‘We’re too Dutch for that!’

Interestingly, low pay and high risk are not the only reasons why Jop and Penny think so few people are doing what they are doing. ‘If you are good,’ says Jop, ‘and you have something to say, there is this whole professional field that you might want to first explore before you maybe want to start your own business.’

In other words, people get stuck in the system?
‘I would have been eaten up by the system if I was British, because I was super eager to work on magazines, interested, and also I’m not a bad designer, so I’m sure I would be in a different place now if I wasn’t in Amsterdam.’

The value of independence comes through again when I ask for advice to budding Oxford journalists. ‘Find your own project,’ says Penny. ‘The best projects come from peers from your own age group, that’s much more viable as an editorial system than trying to look at the generation above you and trying to somehow interest them. It’s about looking sideways instead of looking in front of you.’

If that’s the sort of strategy that produced Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman, independence may be the new black so far as magazine publishing is concerned.

Race you to the nearest print shop?

When Abel Ferrara, director of the original Bad Lieutenant, heard that Werner Herzog was directing a remake, his reaction wasn’t exactly positive: ‘I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.’ In fact, Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant bears little resemblance to the original and is one of the best films of the year (see it from May 21st), yet it is nonetheless symptomatic of Hollywood’s incurable obsession with remakes.
Whether it’s due to a shortage of original ideas or to cash in on brand recognition, remakes keep coming. They may adopt the deceptive guises of ‘reimagining’ or , most recently, ‘reboot’, but remakes they remain. Yet while most are vacuous, moronic, unnecessary and thunderously dull, some have been shown to work if they follow a few simple rules:

1. Remake a bad film

Directors have a worrying tendency to see a film they love and then rush to do their own version. Gus Van Sant remade Psycho shot-for-shot in 1998 to universally derisive reviews, and similar critical reactions have met remakes of The Ladykillers, Get Carter, Alfie and The Wicker Man, to name just a few. Matt Reeves is currently filming an American remake of Let the Right One In, a damn-near perfect Swedish vampire film. Reeves himself said ‘It’s a terrific movie’ So why touch it? It’s no defense to claim to be making the film more accessible to a wider audience – if Reeves really loved it, he would promote the original rather than deposit a pungent cinematic turd on the face of an ungrateful public. Not that I’m prejudging his remake or anything. 

2.Don’t remake your own film  

Michael Haneke made Funny Games in Austria in 1997, a film that depicted horrifically violent acts before shouting at its audience for not walking out in disgust. Clearly Haneke didn’t think enough people had been told off, so remade his own film shot-for-shot eleven years later, only in English. Similarly, when directing The Ring Two and The Grudge 2, the original directors also failed to improve on their original work. Worryingly, David Cronenberg is currently preparing a remake to his 1986 classic The Fly, and although he could conceivably follow in the footsteps of Hitchcock, who remade (and improved upon) his 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956, Hitchcock could be the exception that proves the rule.

3.Ignore the original  

If you must remake a film, it’s best not to watch the original at all. It’s what Herzog has done with Bad Lieutenant, and he’s produced something completely original. Stephen Soderbergh also did this with Ocean’s Eleven, a remake that obeys all three cardinal rules and was very good. Coincidence? I think not.

These rules are by no means comprehensive, but if adhered to, they can be cinematic Rennie’s, slightly easing the pain of the fat, overpaid Hollywood snake eating its own artistically bankrupt tail.

Yesterday afternoon, The Union was graced by a man who certainly knows his fashion: Hubert de Givenchy. The eponymous founder of fashion powerhouse Givenchy is just one of many designers who began their careers by designing, creating and self-promoting. While Givenchy as a French aristocrat certainly had a leg-up into the fashion world, the design, flair and excitement associated with his creations and styling of numerous icons such as Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy were all his own. The House of Givenchy has also nurtured various designers, including John Galliano the late Alexander McQueen, Julian Macdonald and more recently Ricardo Tisci.Yet The fashion industry is undergoing a distinct change that many will argue is not for the better.

Fashion has always formed a close relationship with celebrities, whether they are the muse for a collection, model, or be spokesperson for a campaign. The uniting of an actress or singer to a designer or brand can often become the most influential part of an advertising campaign. From Marilyn Monroe’s iconic perfume ad with Chanel, to recent endorsements by fashionistas such as Alexa Cheung and Taylor Momsen, the fashion industry has closely followed the rise of celebrity and society’s obsession of ‘what are they wearing’. Yet a new fetishism has emerged within fashion: celebrities are no longer satisfied with simply wearing the clothes, there is now a burgeoning desire to design them.
It almost began with a sniff of cocaine. Kate Moss, one of Britain’s most successful supermodels, was caught in a drug scandal in 2005, resulting in being dropped from various labels such as H&M, Burberry and Chanel. However, picked up by Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia Group, the commodification of Kate Moss’ name was a commercial success. The following years have seen ranges from Lily Allen for New Look and Beth Ditto for Evans – yet it is not only the High Street that has witnessed a ‘celebrity revolution’. Although Victoria Beckham’s first designer work was a denim collection for Rock & Republic, she launched her own label during New York’s 2008 fashion week: with various pieces of her recent collections worn by supermodel Elle Macpherson and Leighton Meester.

Yet the transition of celebrities to fashion designer is not always smooth. In September 2009, it was announced that Lindsay Lohan was to become the artistic adviser for French Fashion house Ungaro, but a collection presented with designer Estrella Archs in October received poor reviews, and Lohan left the company in March 2010. Furthermore, many are questioning the propriety of celebrities becoming designers when they have often received no or little training. In February 2010 it was publicized that Olivia Palermo, of The City fame, was to become a spokesmodel for Matches’ Freda label, and recently she has launched a range of jewellery in collaboration with Roberta Freymann. Celebrities or socialites are seen to be using their own status to perpetuate themselves and their designs in the fashion industry, regardless of their competence, originality of creativity. In Kate Moss’ debut collection for Topshop a simple t-shirt vest sold for £12, double the price of Topshop’s own designs.
However, it is not in the realm of celebrities moving into fashion design that this aesthetic incest is taking place. While designers themselves have always had some status of celebrity (it helps by selling something that has your name on it), in recent years programmes such as Project Catwalk have raised the profile of many designers in the non-fashionista world. T4’s recent offering, Frock Me With TK Maxx has seen Henry Holland’s transition from the sewing machine to the camera lens. Not only is he dressing people, but he interviews the very celebrities he is dressing.

The question is, why should we care? For one, the application of a name or profile to a designer or brand can often not only increase profitability but also raise awareness: Emma Watson’s collection for People Tree has certainly raised valid points about ethical fashion. Yet it is the budding designers that this current fad is affecting. The power of the brand-name obsession, created and sustained by celebrities themselves, runs the risk of not only undermining years of study but also overshadows true creativity and flair. For celebrities, designing seems a leisure activity, an additional stream of income and a further commodification of their own name, but for designers themselves it is a passion and a career. In an industry where competition is still fierce, it utters a solemn request to celebrities: perhaps they should stick to their day jobs?

Wem. Where do I start? It is a very small market town in the north of Shropshire. You haven’t heard of Shropshire? It’s close to Wales.
Wem boasts both a primary and a secondary school, the latter of which was afforded its fifteen minutes of fame about eight years ago when the headmaster poached several thousand from the school’s budget and was duly ousted and tried for theft.

Another exciting feature of the Wem landscape is the surprising religious presence. We have our standard Anglican and Catholic Churches, along with a friendly Methodist, and then a nutty Baptist thrown in for good measure. Fortunately the various representatives of organised religion are only given limited air-time in the secular paradise that is Wem; only at weekly assemblies, youth groups and annual Bible activity weeks for the town’s children are the faith groups let loose.

A few years ago, the council tried to close down the town’s swimming pool. Aged fourteen, I couldn’t resist a good cause – my stubborn vegetarianism is a rusty relic of those heady days – and so joined the righteous campaign of the swimmers and invested in a ‘save Wem pool’ t-shirt. I say invested, but really there is no other occasion on which such an item is wearable. I am still waiting for someone to come up with a suitable fancy dress theme.

I have worked at the local supermarket for several years, and every return home brings with it the predictable ‘so, when are you back?’ enquiries. Good to know I always have shelf stacking if the degree doesn’t come through for me. The people of Wem are surprisingly impolite to the staff of the Co-operative supermarket: highlights of my experience there include ducking a loaf of bread-turned-projectile-missile when a customer angrily declared that it was ‘too expensive’, and the time I unwittingly incurring the wrath of the woman who could not understand why we only stocked two sizes of tinned peas.
I would be lying if I said we went to Wem to ‘go out’. There is one good restaurant, the waiter knows ‘my usual’, and the staff have seen me embarrassingly drunk too many times for me to look them in the eye these days. The various pubs have few redeeming features, and besides, all the cool kids have other places to be – as far as I know the place to hang out in the evening is outside the public toilets on the playground. To my (not so) great disappointment, my invitation to this nightly get-togethers has as yet failed to materialise.

These days my family actually lives in Aston, which is in fact half a mile outside of Wem, and therefore enjoys various amenities which reflect its separate status, including, and limited to, a post box and a broken phone box. Aston is in fact a road with fewer than fifteen houses. The demographic is heavily pensioner biased, but with the arrival of my very large family the average age dropped by a good twenty years. The corresponding levels of rowdiness have, I feel, been to everyone’s liking. I like to think the farmer has developed a fondness for our ‘hilarious’ tradition of drunkenly throwing the same traffic cone in the river every vacation. Fortunately for me Aston is a very friendly place, from the sheep which wander into the garden, the quiet man down the road who leaves his home-grown sprouts atop cars every Christmas Eve, and the neighbours who pitched in to lift out the car my visiting friend inexplicably managed to drive into someone’s front garden. Sometimes I feel like we live in an episode of The Archers.

The short film is easily dismissed as a small and inconsequential form of cinema. Often seen as nothing more than a staple of struggling film students or as a dry run for bigger and naturally better projects, they are rarely embraced or even seen by mainstream audiences. But the sheer quality of some short films is changing these preconceptions.  

One of those films is the latest winner of the Animated Short category at the Oscars. Written and directed by a French team composed of Francois Alaux, Ludovic Houplain and Hervé de Crécy, Logorama is set in a world composed entirely of – you guessed it – logos. For sixteen perfectly formed minutes, we follow a renowned criminal in the shape of Ronald McDonald, evading ‘the law’ before a freak Earthquake rips apart the trademark-covered landscape and floods the city with crude oil.  

Hervé de Crécy says that the concept behind Logorama grew out of working on pieces for the likes of Massive Attack and Röyksopp using what he calls ‘the technique of the diversion.’ This is a method in which an existing visual language, in this case that of logotypes, is used to create something entirely different. And the directors have certainly succeeded in doing that.

In the Los Angeles-style city which is the setting for Logorama, Michelin men are cops, Snow Mountains brandish the Evian name and the Aston Martin and Bentley emblems fly side by side. By using over two thousand logos to create the scenery, the directors have created a film in which each frame is visually complex and startlingly familiar. De Crécy believes that the film will be different for each viewer based on the images they are able to recognize and relate to. He calls logotypes ‘a universal cultural inheritance’ and says that making the film was ‘a way…to regain a common patrimony.’ 

But a film in which skyscrapers in the shape of corporate logos are engulfed by oil is obviously mocking this ‘cultural inheritance.’ And questions about the message behind the piece are bound to be raised. De Crécy is keen to explain that the directors ‘didn’t want to denounce, or point out a message about our society’ and that the film was simultaneously a satire of the modern world and a tribute to the iconic logotypes it has produced.

Despite the somewhat satirical (and unauthorized) use of the symbols of huge companies, de Crécy asserts that the filmmakers have not been on the receiving end of any backlash. In fact, they even received a message of thanks from Cash Converters.

The makers of Logorama may have managed to avoid any negative responses from companies but the brave use of corporate logotypes is one which could only have worked in a short film. It’s easy to predict the reactions which would be elicited from a feature film that used the same techniques. When asked about his opinions on the short film format, De Crécy calls the medium ‘a wonderful place for…powerful ideas.’ With the creation of such impressive examples, one thing is clear; the short is on is the rise.

What is it about children going to university that sees parents running to the divorce lawyers? While statistical proof is difficult to come by, I’m sure many, if not most, of you have come into contact with a situation of a couple separating while their children are at university.

It’s no scoop that divorce rates have been on the rise for the last forty years; and the Tories’ marriage tax break, even if it comes in, seems unlikely to stem this. From what little information that the Office of National Statistics provide on the issue, one can see that divorce rates for those aged over forty-five have, since the 1950s, increased at twice the average rate. Far more tellingly, I suppose, is that not only myself, but three friends in college have also seen their parents separate in the last two years (and given the dearth of friends in college, that is an impressive fifty percent hit rate).

At school the careers and counselling services shared a corridor, and while waiting for some career profiling results I read an article on the wall entitled ‘Oxbridge Blues’, about the phenomenon of parental separation whilst children are at university. Far from being a particularly memorable piece, I never thought of it again until the day that my parents, seemingly out of the blue, told me that they were splitting up. Back when I read it, I was already at the age where I believed that the time for my parents to divorce had been and passed. Potentially my view on relationships was a tad simplistic, but I reasoned that one didn’t wake up, twenty five years into a marriage, and suddenly decide that you are no longer in love with your spouse.

Of course, looking at it rationally, it makes perfect sense; with the children out of the way, the forty or so more years until death seem too bleak to stick it out. Still, it seems a wonder that having stuck it out for so long, one can give up that easily. But then, starting one’s life again the other side of middle age is no mean feat and perhaps my own issue is that nothing seems to have been gained. I asked my mother the other day whether her net happiness had increased, and she said that quite the reverse is the case. Surely quietly being stuck in a rut of non communication and mutual apathy, as desolate as I’m sure that is, is a far better situation to be in than finding yourself, the other side of fifty, alone and miserable?

Having done extraordinarily badly in a recent set of collections, I pulled out the divorce card in an attempt to forestall the inevitable announcement of my academic probation. While my college senior tutor is an exceptionally kind soul who suggested all manner of potential help, unfortunately, it does not seem that the university quite understands the problem. One chaplain’s counsel was, in a typically caring and sharing, head-tilting sort of way, that ‘the result for the child is often a blaming of themselves for leaving [to go to University]… the important thing is to relieve them of their automatic feeling of guilt’. Neither myself, nor a single person I have spoken to who has been through a similar situation, has in any way suggested that they believed it to be their fault. Surely the whole point is that because we have left home it is explicitly no longer about us? Children at home are just a flimsy plaster over the real fact of the matter; love just doesn’t last forever and often it takes a significant change in a couple’s life for them to realise that.

The real issue, which people such as aforementioned chaplain don’t understand, is that the problem is far more practical than emotional. I failed all my collections, not because I spent the holidays in a darkened room, lying in a foetal position, bemoaning the end of my innocent youth, but because I had to spend it having organised fun with two suddenly desperately needy parents. Talking about it, particularly with some bearded woman with a night-course diploma in psychotherapy, will only eat up more time.

I happen to be fortunate enough that, with my parents living far enough away from Oxford, the excuse of distance is reasonable grounds for never having to see them in term time, but a friend of mine’s parental geography is not so ideal. With his father disappearing overseas, his mother installed herself, post-separation, in a flat in central London. His siblings having left university and moved out, he is the only one who moved with her. ‘The hardest thing is that I feel guilty unless I go home and see her at the weekends, but that makes her feel guilty because she knows what I’m missing out on back at Oxford’. As selfish as it sounds, attempting to have fun while maintaining a passable academic scorecard is hard enough without the incessant reminder of what’s in store at home once term ends. Indeed, the last thing one wants to have before heading out at night is a parent, with a desperate air of forced jollity, calling to discuss Waitrose’s delicious new range of meals for one, or John Sergeant’s performance on Strictly Come Dancing.

Along with the time consuming reversal in emotional reliance, there are the practical issues that also cause considerable hassle. In Oxford, where a large number of students remain living in college provided accommodation, rather than their own houses, the termly clearout of one’s room reinforces the fact that Oxford is not home. Yet university is part of a process in which we are weaned off the reliance on parents for a home; we graduate into the ‘real world’, where we are expected (and most of us do) find a job and, more relevantly, somewhere to live which should be the beginning of a series of new homes.

With those that I spoke to, all agreed that one of the most wearisome aspects of the whole was the balancing of time spent between the two parents (one almost wishes for a judge to decree ‘weekdays with one, weekends with the other, and alternating Christmas and birthdays’). At a time where, with little over a year left at university, it seems pointless to establish an extra home, now, one sees the holidays being eaten up, oscillating between the parent who remained in situ (and wandering around the bleak morgue of a childhood, filled with newly empty spaces of carpet and wall) and the parent who moved out (desperately trying not to refer to the other house as ‘home’). Where home should be a place to have a happy catch up with the’ rents, eat some proper food, and get some washing done (incidentally, like in some badly written novel, our washing machine, a wedding present, irrevocably died at the same time as my parents’ marriage) instead it becomes an unimaginable chore.

Perhaps the worst part is that it brings out a selfishness that one usually tries to suppress (I’m very conscious of this character trait running throughout this article), but one does fairly quickly realise that it isn’t all that bad. Though parents separating while you’re at university does not allow you that safe territory to escape to; but by being away from home we, conversely, can have university as a place to which we can escape. By being older one is able to think a bit more rationally about it all and if for many of us such announcements came out of the blue, does that not show just how lucky we are? Having an easy and stable childhood is one of the greatest things that a parent can give a child, and, if we’ve only just found out our parents’ relationship is coming to an end, then we’ve already had one. More to the point, here and now each of us whom this has affected still has two parents, a luxury not afforded to everyone. Perhaps, if it is going to happen, there may not be a better time.

5th: The Bullingdon Club

The cabinet may now be full of ex-members, but its glory days are over, and is now synonymous with washed up Etonians who were never cool at school, attempting to redefine themselves as wildly exciting men about town with a vastly overblown sense of self-worth. Rumours about more invitations rejected than accepted abound…

4th: Essay statuses

The prevalence of work-related facebook statuses is worrying. Every essay is apparently a crisis, but guess what – everyone has work to do. NO ONE cares whether you’ve got 2000 words to go or 20, or how precisely you’re procrastinating. Smug gloating about having finished is also unacceptable, FYI.

3rd: Kukui/Park End/Bridge/Wahoo/Clems

If this sounds like the order of your typical week then you need to take a step back and reconsider. We’re not saying that these nights are objectionable individually. Hell, you can get away with going to three in a week at a push, but the capacity for this much cheese within seven days, though perhaps rare, is a truly terrible thing.

2nd: Stash

Just about permissible when actually participating in sporting events, but the sporting of stash as mufti (college hoodies count by the way) is a big style no-no: actually quite offensive, and just plain ugly. Watch out for law soc committee members – the worst offenders. Don’t you have any other clothes?

1st: Pretension

Ok, we have all probably been guilty of this, and the most pretentious among us probably aren’t even aware of it. Talking about the significance of spatial elements in Jane Austen self- consciously over coffee or outside the Rad Cam (doing this in public spaces is key of course), air-conducting a mental Beethoven symphony as you tuck into hall, or discussing anything as ‘meta’, are examples of this social crime. It’s a bit like sex: do it in private, and not too loudly.

I pray you all, give your audience, and attend to this matter with reverence.’ Back in the day, if you wanted theatre your options were pretty limited. You could go and watch the mummers fumble their mixture of satire and pantomime, or you could go to a mystery play to be terrorised with hell and damnation and Bible stories. The Church certainly used to lay it on thick: the morality plays bring the Good News home with Avatar-like stage directions – the Virgin Mary ascending on a blazing aureole of light, and so forth – and ringing rhyming couplets full of sin and retribution.

But even Catholicism tends to use more carrot than stick these days, and the mystery plays begin to look decidedly dated. Most of us are nonplussed at the prospect of fiery torment, so what value do these pieces have now except as antiquarian curiosities? Well, that depends on how they are played.

New College have made a very credible job of The Somonyng of Everyman. Written around 1500, its couplets are full of Tudor vigour, and resound in the beautiful ante-chapel with clarity. The characters in this allegory are boldly drawn: George Hilton’s blind Death is straight out of Paradise Lost, and there is life enough in the supporting cast of faithless friends and fleeting virtues. On the whole the acting is off-the-peg rather than bespoke – Rory Smith’s Everyman could do with a bit more imagination – but it is tailored to a good pattern.
The aim is more to instruct than to entertain, but there are moments of real humour and poetic power. The satire on the Catholic priesthood may not be as sharp as some would like, but Everyman’s discovery of the weight of sin that cripples his Good Deeds is genuinely moving. Perhaps you even catch yourself looking into your own soul for an instant. Everyman’s message for a secular age is that integrity and goodness are the only things we can truly call our own, and this production delivers the moral well. This noblest of Punch-and-Judy shows is ably delivered in one of the stateliest settings in Oxford, and deserves your attention.

The evening before my 12.30-3.30am shift chez Ahmed, the responses elicited by my planned kebab van stint were varied. Some friends were thrilled because ‘obviously’ they would get more chips than normal and would get to push in front of the queue. Others emphasized my probable body odour issues; in fact Ahmed himself said to me quite early on – ‘You know you will smell quite badly of barbecue right?’ All of these comments, both the well meaning and the precautionary, served to build up the occasion. My initial curiosity at the finding out about the workings of a kebab van was beginning to be pushed aside by feelings of nerves.

But I needn’t have been nervous. I had so much fun in a van that serves essentially the entirety of a restaurant menu – kebabs, chips, jacket potatoes, curried meats – and the contents of a corner shop – chocolate bars, gum and soft drinks – through a small window in its side. The evening of my shift, I worked alongside Ahmed and his colleague Hemin. It quickly became evident that these guys genuinely enjoy their jobs a lot and my nerves quickly dissipated as their tireless energy for their work infected me.

Ahmed, originally from Morocco, has been based in Oxford almost all his life. His kebab van has been parked in its location on High Street, outside University College, for 23 years. Indeed, Ahmed was serving good, hearty grub to the Oxford masses – the kebab van’s clientele extends far beyond the student population, with a number of regular taxi drivers calling up in advance to place their orders – long before many undergraduates were even born. Something must have kept him working the same job for all these years.
I asked him if he had any interest in working in a different occupation within the catering business, but Ahmed replied that he has worked in restaurants in the past but they simply don’t offer the same kind of job satisfaction that he clearly gets from working in his kebab van. Even from the rather disparate comings and goings of customers that evening, it became clear to me very early on that Ahmed loves the fast pace and the high pressure of working in a confined space to deliver quick, hot, and quality food. I use the word ‘quality’, because though the food that the kebab van serves may not exactly be low in calories, Ahmed and his men strive for fresh food. Salads are prepared just before the van opens up shop. Leftovers at the end of the evening are thrown out. As far as possible, things are prepared from scratch on a daily basis. And though burgers and kebab meat may be precooked before the van opens for service, they are all reheated to order. Chips, too, are served piping hot. These guys care about their food and the service they offer us and this speaks volumes about their dedication to the trade.

Working with 190 degree oil, and a hot plate that is over 200 degrees, in addition to dealing with drunk customers desperate for their late-night fix, is a fine art, which these guys have mastered down to a tee. There isn’t really room for two people to walk side by side along the central galley of the van, but that’s no big deal to Ahmed and Hemin. They have a great partnership, Ahmed explained to me. They can handle a number of orders each at any one time and if one needs to get through, to get a can of coke or a dollop of hummus for the portion of chips they have just deep-fried, the other can ‘sense’ that and can squeeze in towards their side of the counter to make room. It’s quite a marvel to watch. Two pairs of hands juggle with tongs, knives, hot and cold foods to provide for their vast menu.

Last Thursday, there were three pairs of hands, though. Having been politely given a cup of tea (did you know that Ahmed can serve you a veritable selection of hot drinks too?), Ahmed and Hemin set to teach me as much as they could, so I could strive to be more of a help than a hindrance to their kebab van operation that night. The beauty of working is such a small space is that nothing is more than a few steps and an arm’s reach away. But the easiness stops there.

Over the course of my shift, I learnt the technical ins and outs of serving perfect polystyrene boxes of food. Most important is box-holding. The aforementioned temperatures of the various appliances in the kebab van mean that food is really hot, and you don’t want to be spilling hot beans on over your fellow colleagues as a result of a collision in the galley. You need a firm grip of the peach-coloured containers, with your thumb clasped along the centre fold of the box, and the rest of your hand holding the bottom.

The second technical skill I had to master was paper towel ripping. The towel rolls that hang from the fluorescently lit canopy of the van’s window are placed at the perfect height to grasp a sheet or two before handing over food to customers. I was determined not to get flustered with streams of paper towels cascading down into the salad containers directly below them. Ahmed made it look very easy. I had a go. And succeeded a fair few times. Indeed, the only times I messed up were in the presence of drunken friends returning home. And in those cases, I should like to blame my paper-towel ripping shortcomings on a nervous desire to impress them.

The hardest thing of all was shaving doner kebab meat. A lot of multi-tasking is involved in this activity. The (surprisingly heavy) electric shaver needs to be held at the right angle to produce the perfect strip of shaved meat. All the while, you need to use one of your feet to control the power pedal for the shaver with one foot, and grip the bottom of the rotating doner stick with tongs to stop it from rotating. Using three different limbs and getting them to do different things was difficult, and I’ll admit that doner kebab shaving was not my forte. I much preferred serving up orders of burgers and masala chicken, and adding the cheese, salad and sauces to chips. Lots of comparatively straightforward tong action.

Given the number of kebab vans dotted around Oxford, it’s easy to take them for granted. We shouldn’t though. These guys work flat out. Their job is a daytime one as well as an night time one – shopping and lots of preparation has to be done every day, whilst bed time for Ahmed and Hemin is normally around 6-7am.

It would be easy to see how these guys could be irritable people but they are so far from that. They’re happy and friendly. We shared jokes together. At one point Ahmed was convinced that a drunk Polish tourist ‘liked me’ and so I, not Hemin, should definitely serve him.

Apparently, Babylove was quite fun that night, but last Thursday was certainly a night that I was happy to miss.