Sitting in the Dorchester at a table full of professional journalists with palpable cut-throat ambition while trying to ask a simple question was mildly terrifying. But the nicest guy in the room was Mark Strong himself, an actor who is most known in recent years for his delicious portrayals of gut-wrenchingly evil villains. His latest film, the epic Robin Hood, is no different-he stars as the sinister Godfrey, a treacherous schemer who betrays England to side with the French.

Though Strong’s favourite Robin Hood is the 1973 Disney cartoon, he admits that the newer side of the legend is much more captivating: ‘I think he’s always been quite light on his feet, and I like that this one was more visceral.’ The visceral nature of the new Robin Hood extended especially to the making of this version, creating an atmosphere of historical accuracy that, perhaps, did not involve (as much) singing. All props and costumes for the film were created with Mad Men-type hysteria regarding authenticity, which clearly impressed Strong: ‘The authenticity is vital I think because it means as an actor, you don’t have to compensate for anything. It’s interesting shooting with John Carter of Mars at the moment, which is basically in a big green warehouse, where spaceships crashing to earth are a man with a ping-pong ball on a stick.’

However, by this point, Strong works well compensating, especially with characters that might fall to easily into the category of cackling, maniacal miscreants. As he points out, ‘two-dimensional villains aren’t interesting, and so that’s what you’re always trying to avoid . It’s a necessity to have a villain in any kind of morality tale, which is what a film usually is, because you need something to juxtapose with the good guy’. However much work he puts into his portrayals, Strong is quick to stress that things could have very easily gone the other way with his career. Prior to becoming an actor, he studied law: ‘Bizarrely I chose the thing that was diametrically opposite, for vanity more than anything else. I thought that being an actor sounded good and it would be a great thing to say I did at parties. I realized actually that I was pretending to be a lawyer.’

Acting as a medieval warrior in an epic beachside battle scene in Robin Hood required much less pretending. Strong talked about the intensity of being there as 120 horsemen galloped towards him and his co-star, Russell Crowe: ‘we were going at each other, hammer and tongs, and there was a moment when he meant to hit me, and he got it wrong, and he looked at me as if to say, ‘that’s your fault’ . And I looked round at the 1500 people and thought, I’ll just take the blame.’

However, Strong looks fondly on his time with Crowe and director Ridley Scott: ‘They’re like an old couple, they bicker. It’s all to the good, because they’re both after the same end. They adore each other, but that allows them to be honest with each other, which is quite rare. Me? I’m Ridley’s squeeze, I suppose.’

Dr Thomas Stuttaford – a graduate of Brasenose College, former sex columnist on The Times and also an ex-Conservative MP – told me, “in my day considerable skill was needed to pick up a girl in the library. However, by the time my sons were there 30 years later they told me that this was no longer a problem.  By then someone only had to catch the eye and exchange a meaningful smile before it became a matter of sliding a note across the desk. Conversely in the early 50s the would-be suitor had to hope for an opportunity to bump into his target at the coffee machine or on the stairs when they were both leaving the library.

“Libraries are an excellent environment in which to embark on such adventures. When Spring is in the air and the sun is shining undergraduates are even more easily bored than usual. It can then become difficult to concentrate on the biochemistry syllabus and the role of the tricarboxcilic cycle in maintaining efficiency in the tiring breast muscles of a flying pigeon when a gorgeous red-head is sitting at a nearby desk.”

Oxford libraries, then, have long been a hotbed for romantic and sexual activites. The rise of the FitFinder website seems only to have encouraged this trend with many of its posts pertaining to sightings over stacks of books. I took a closer look at the phenomenon of love in the libraries – both sexual and romantic – to see what had really changed since Stuttaford’s day.

Some I spoke to planned their experiences in advance, while others claim to seize the coital opportunity as it arises.

One Christ Church fresher and his “lady friend” decided to go at it in a college library only upon having returned from Park End. He recalled, “While our college library has limited opening hours, our Law Library is open all hours, so it was obvious which destination to choose. The one problem is that only lawyers are allowed access to the Law Library.

“But one drunken phone call later, we had secured a lawyer’s fob and were ‘bumping uglies’ in the back room of the law library. My memory is a little hazy, and sadly my inebriated state meant I was unable to ‘finish the deed’, but I believe a chair might have been broken during the act, which took place leaning against a lectern, on a table and sitting on a chair.”

Likewise, one English student, an enthusiastic member of JSoc, was taken by the moment – and her boyfriend – while visiting his Ivy League university. She said, “We were just looking around and hanging in the library. We were in the Theology section and it was quite deserted so I reached out and cupped him gently.

“Normally I’m all about the gradual ‘hand up the thigh’, but in the circumstances subtlety was hardly a priority. Next thing I knew we were ripping each others’ clothes off! It was only when he had me pinned up against the books on Patristics did I notice that my knickers were draped over a reading lamp!”

Of those attempts at library loving that have been planned in advance, some can only be considered abortive. In particular, one undergraduate at LMH had planned a spot of midnight copulation with her then boyfriend in his college library, Mansfield.

Together they had set the alarm for a time when the library would be quieter; but, upon its sounding, they were “too tired” and thought it “too much of a pain to get up and go somewhere.”

One salient feature of all the responses I received is the risk taken by couples who fornicate in libraries. Many have mentioned their fear of being caught by the porters while others were reluctant to talk to me even with the guarantee of anonymity, perhaps dreading the judgement of their peers.

At some colleges, however, kudos is dished out to those who engage in this sort of behaviour. For members of the New College, the library is a firm fixture in the otherwise negotiable ‘New College Seven’. The precise composition of the seven locations in which to have sex is, according to one New College undergraduate, the subject of “some debate”. Some of the mooted venues are the Mound, Cloisters, Bell Tower, Dining Room, Fellows’ Garden, the ‘Harry Potter Tree’ (which is featured in the Warner Brothers films) and the laundry room. The ‘Atkins Challenge’  meanwhile is one for lawyers at Magdalen College – all of whom are members of the Atkins Society. The Atkins Book, held in the college’s law library, is maintained by the society and updated so as to include all gossip pertaining to Magdalen lawyers. The challenge – somewhat predictably – is to have sex on top of the book. Once these duties are discharged, of course, they are noted down in the book for all posterity.

Some I spoke to claim they got intimate in the library just so as they would be able to say that they had. One Oriel undergraduate – who identifies himself as homosexual – reportedly performed cunnilingus on a girl in his college library for precisely this reason. In analysing his achievement, it is claimed, he described the labium as being akin to “a seal slapping its flippers together”. I assume that he derived no sexual pleasure from the experience.

It has been difficult to form a view as to which demographic groups are most likely to indulge in this sort of activity. However, one gay Keble finalist – who is presently spending all too significant portions of his time in the Keble library – described this sort of behaviour as “for the ‘Hets’ (heterosexuals)”.

I did receive a tip-off regarding a tutor and his boyfriend – a student – and two other students. It is alleged that all are now banned from the St Hugh’s library even though the tutor still takes some students at the college. The academic in question, a medic, was contacted for comment but no reply has been received.

While those described above have all engaged in full-on sex acts, many have adopted a more demure, modest or courtly approach to their library-based personal dealings. Indeed, in this past year, the Merton College Upper Library played host to a marriage proposal, which the (soon to be) happy couple commemorated in the Visitor Book.
The Rad Cam has of course long enjoyed a reputation as a good venue for ‘talent’. One undergraduate at a college in North Oxford first encountered her then future boyfriend – a finalist at the time – in the Upper Cam.

She said, “I had been working in the Cam all morning and he had certainly caught my eye. Having returned from lunch, he ran past me on the stairs. When I returned to my desk, there was a note asking – if it wasn’t too strange – if I might have a drink with him. I knew immediately who it was from.

“The note didn’t contain a phone number, but it did have his name at the bottom. When I was back there the next week, he was there again. I felt awkward having ignored him so I decided to contact him via Facebook.”

Having met up, she embarked on a six month relationship with the note-dropper. Asked whether she thought a relationship predicated on shared library habits was a good thing, she replied, “it was just a way of meeting, really”.

“At other universities you might pull in a club. Only in Oxford do you meet a long-term boyfriend in a library.”

A history fresher had a similar experience. He told me, “I always work in the Rad Cam, and often see the same people there every day. There was one girl – a visiting student from America- whose eyes I always caught when I looked up from my laptop. One time, I had got up to find a book, and when I returned I found a note on my laptop with a phone number written on it.

“I knew it was from the American girl, after all, no English girl would be that forward! She was good looking, so I thought to myself, why not? I rang her up, and we went on a date. It did feel slightly odd that we had not met in the conventional way – at a club or a bar or something. The fact that we had met in a library made the whole affair seem particularly charming and very ‘Oxford’.”

The theme of returning to find notes at one’s workstation has proved recurrent in responses received. A former Co-Chair of OULC was also so lucky as to receive a missive declaring him “fit”. Unfortunately, nobody who admits to having left such a note participated in this survey of love in the libraries. Love in the libraries is a growing phenomenon, but even sixty years on from Dr Stuttaford, some are still to get in with the craze.

And so Lana leant over to me and said, ‘Darling, kiss with passion, not pressure!’ Such was the punch-line being delivered as I tardily entered the Union’s debating chamber to watch Sir Roger Moore talk. This particular quote was apparently in reference to a love scene between Moore and Lana Turner (who?) in the 1956 ‘classic’ Diane (a film that I obviously missed between the Boxing Day repeats of Only Fools and Horses and a re-run of Lawrence of Arabia). The laughter that met this line, and many such similar ones, was the same as the laughter at a 21st speech; most of the audience don’t really get the anecdote not having been there or, in this particular instance, alive, but everyone laughs out of politeness and drunkenness anyway. Perhaps on this night it is more from politeness than drunkenness, but it is difficult not to be endeared to Moore, whose decision to perch on the desk rather than sit behind it gave the talk an air of a rambling conversation with one’s great uncle at Easter.

Like many a mediocre journalist, I had already scoured his Wikipedia page, and rather oddly found his talk to be an almost word for word repetition of it, interspersed with the odd quip of some description. If it weren’t the case that he professed himself to not be very good with gadgets (a cover, perhaps?), I would be inclined to say that he wrote it himself.

Leaving the Union chamber, I met him in an upstairs room where a bar was, predictably, laid out with Martini glasses (clearly election to the Union is not dependent on a bitingly original sense of humour). Opting for a plain cranberry juice (disappointed faces all around), I was relieved to realise that he had had enough of recounting his acting career because, despite being a big fan of the name drop, it is hard to get too excited about someone whose death preceded one’s birth by a good two decades, even if they were a socialite.

While from the debating chamber’s balcony he had appeared only slightly older than the image one recognises, up close, although he lacked a single grey hair, no number of cosmetic procedures can hide the marks of a youth spent in the south of France with a bottle of tanning oil. Yet, despite this, he has aged remarkably well, and one would never have guessed that he was ripe eighty two. Perhaps his age was more apparent when he talked; the quietness of his speech rendering its slow pace a blessing for my strained ear.

Our ‘chat’ – more conversation less interview – began with some banal questions on my part about his work for UNICEF, for which he has been knighted (incidentally, I failed to address him by any name all night, as ‘Sir Roger’ sounded, in my head, both sycophantic and yet overly familiar, and I was terrified he’d pick me up on calling him ‘Mr. Moore’). His work as a Goodwill Ambassador sees him being lovable and charismatic in order to raise awareness and funds for UNICEF, something in which I’m sure he has more success than fellow Ambassador Craig David (whose reworking of 7 Days – ‘Met this girl on Monday, took her to a charity auction on Tuesday…’ – failed to break much ground in the UK charts).

He is clearly dedicated to the cause, and one of his particular interests is the effect of sport (UNICEF is branded on the front of Barcelona’s football strip). ‘It’s very important, the welfare of children. When there was a big thing about child soldiers, the head of UNICEF told me how important football was because boys who were killing one another a month before were now kicking a ball around’. The soft concern of his voice made me rather ashamed of my prepared list of inane questions (now most certainly was not the time to break out the old classic ‘So, boxers or briefs?’)
Despite the worthiness of the conversation, however, there were some great lines that ended up coming out: ‘I remember the first thing I did with UNICEF was to go to FIFA, and it was the first time I experienced a [Mexican] wave. I was with the German Minister for Culture at the time, and it was sort of funny, the two of us going up and down’ – some quotes are just begging to be taken out of context.

Moving on to lighter topics, I asked him about the string of cameo roles that he has committed himself to, these past few years. Always playing variations on the same character, he appeared as the ‘The Chief’ in Spiceworld: The Movie (Bond, but a music manager), an aging homosexual in Boat Trip (Bond, but gay) and is soon to appear as a voice in Cats and Dogs 2 (Bond, but feline, one assumes). I asked him what he honestly thought about Boat Trip, ‘Crap. But it did have a great script’. Ah, that old chestnut. However, he did reward me with replay of his line, raising his right eyebrow, ‘I wonder whether you’d like a bite of my sausage?’

I would like to pretend that it was not deliberate, but I hope that the reader is impressed that I made it all the way to the previous paragraph before mentioning Moore’s most famous screen incarnation. I realised during his talk that I would do best not to launch straight in with Bond questions; a member of the audience’s ‘Which was your favourite Bond girl’ was met with a cutting ‘That’s an original question!’ (which saw me hastily scrubbing off the first of the few questions I had prepared.) However, we was not so deluded as not to realise that for every person in the audience who came to see a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, ten came to see 007.

I don’t want to sound catty, because Moore was so terribly sweet and jibes about his acting abilities have been doing the rounds long enough (the whole three expressions joke; ‘right eyebrow raised, left eyebrow raised and eyebrows crossed when grabbed by Jaws’), but meeting him I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the critics are right, for the man I met was an octogenarian incarnation of Moore’s Bond. He was cool, suave and immaculately dressed, the only thing missing was the sardonic quip, that seems in the mellowness of age to have been replaced by luvvie references.

Brighton was the jewel of the South coast and chosen holiday destination for Mad King George’s son, George, whose glorified curry house (otherwise known as Brighton pavilion) still stands proud in the centre of Brighton.

Brighton operates under the illusion that it is a metropolitan hub of urban creativity, kindred spirit to Barcelona or some other city where pavement cafes are filled with the urban elite sipping black coffee and talking about Voltaire while the sound of someone playing light jazz on their saxophone drifts through the air. Fatboy Slim lives here and he throws a massive party so that we can all dance to the same rhythm. It’s like a mecca of British cool. Hell, we like, totally voted for the Green party. We do things differently… we take our time. Chill out, look at the sea, isn’t it beautiful? I might sketch it in my dream journal.

And this, in part, is true – although everything operates at slightly lower temperatures and everyone is much paler than in our idolized metropolises. But it’s not all peace signs and wheat/dairy/gluten free scones. The hemp-wearing hippies are being edged out by the 4×4-driving trendy mums – escaping the stress of London, and moving to what is now London-on-sea.

It’s because it’s just so different, there’s a different pace of life here, dahling. It’s got a really edgy independent cinema, you know, but actually let’s just go to the Odeon because the parking is better. And Tesco is much cheaper than those over-priced independent book shops.

On the other side of the spectrum, conscientious, tie dye-loving cyclists are thrown from their bikes as the other set of residents, the ‘chavs’, drive their crunked-up novas (as low riding as their Nappa trackies) across cycle lanes, a rainbow of colours streaming from between their alloys as louder and louder RnB streams from their open windows, and their exhausts drown out the Pink Panther theme tune (the only saxophone music I can think of) with a sound that resembles someone blending empty bottles of Lambrini. They’re probably going to the amusement arcade which also has tanning booths in it.

Occasionally, all out war between these groups breaks out on the neon stretch that is West Street (Walkabout, Oceana, Wetherspoons- they don’t tell the tourists about it when they advertise the beautiful town by the sea). Dead-eyed men wearing cheap gold, accompanied by pink veloured, love bitten women, pushing prams, go out in search of the pseudo-creatives with their ironic slogan t-shirts, while the great vegan unwashed make weapons out of recycled tin cans, and very, very middle class children shield themselves with tomato and olive foccacia.

I am, however, being cruel. I love Brighton. It can be a bit too trendy sometimes. There are awful chavs, and awful students and awful women who call their children Matilda and Georgiana – but it is a lovely place to be. And anyway, I live in Hove, actually.

Homelessness – it is one of the great liberal guilt trips of our age: the dark centre of our supposedly prosperous western world, and one that we see every day on the streets of Britain. What then, if anything, can be done about such a stain on our consciousness? The answer that we seem to have settled on is to defer the problem, to house our hopes for the help of these unfortunates in The Big Issue, a magazine that faces us every time we buy it with a simple statement: this is a big issue, and one that needs to be dealt with.

Is this, though, actually the answer to the problem? Spending time around those who sell The Big Issue, the whole problem suddenly seems rather less simple than it does from the outside. The Big Issue is an important lifeline for a great many of those who sell it. Those I spoke to often said how important it was to get the income from the magazine in order to eat, find shelter, and also – crucially – gain some kind of self-respect. Yet it is also something else, something both more and less than this.

It was Darren, a Big Issue seller whom I met outside the Sainsbury’s in Westgate, who first pointed out this additional dimension. Smartly dressed in a shirt, he was one of the few sellers who was willing to take half an hour out of his day to have a discussion with me. (More often, I was told that I could stand nearby for a short time and watch, but very few wished to talk for more than five minutes once I had made a purchase.) What Darren wished to highlight was not how hard life is for The Big Issue sellers, but the way society uses it to deal with its own problems. He agreed that it was a lifeline for many who sold it, but the reality for him was that many sellers have deeper underlying problems – drugs and drink primarily – and that without The Big Issue the only way to deal with these problems would be to commit crimes. For Darren, The Big Issue was therefore a way of dealing with the potential of some of these people to commit minor crimes. How much easier it is to give these potential prisoners a Big Issue to sell at no cost to the state than to deal with them in the justice system.

Darren’s perspective may well have sprung from his background. He had come to Oxford only recently and had held jobs in the past. (Interestingly, not many used the word ‘job’ to describe what they were doing by selling The Big Issue.) In contrast, another seller said that he had been on the street since the age of nineteen, and was now in his thirties. For him selling The Big Issue had become a way of life, and being homeless was part of his existence that would be hard to shake. I was told another story of a man who slept outside his council house when he was given one because he was so used to being on the street. While this story may be more myth than truth – sometimes it was hard to tell – the very fact it was told reveals something of the attitude of many of those who live and work on the streets.

What struck me most, however, about those who sold The Big Issue was the loss of dignity that followed. As already mentioned, Darren viewed it as just another job, and indeed said that his tent by a lake outside of Oxford was rather nicer than many of those he knew with houses. The physical discomfort of life on the street is of course also awful, but standing for just half an hour with one seller on Queen Street made me also see the mental horrors of the position. Seeing people stream by with disdain; one person actually told him to ‘fuck off and get a job’. All this wore me down – and I wasn’t the one taking the abuse – and made me understand why he had been so reluctant to let me stand with him, why he wouldn’t even give me his name, preferring instead to try and get me to buy more issues.

All of this, of course, needs to be taken with caution. These people are not saints, and like many figures in the canon of the disadvantaged, the individuals are often some way from the archetype. There were those for example who used Big Issue selling as a way of begging, asking for extra change after selling an issue or when someone turned them down. It was also clear that many would deliberately make themselves look more pathetic than necessary. On the other hand, is this any different from ‘dressing-up’ for any job? Doesn’t everyone look for that little bit extra where possible?

What my brief encounter with the homeless made me see was more and less than I anticipated. I saw how degrading it could be, how the long hours of standing in all weather – I was fortunate enough to have bright sunshine on the day I spent out – could be physically uncomfortable, that many of the people I met had serious problems talking with people on a personal level and had clearly had tough backgrounds.

What I also saw, however, was that the moral guilt of the middle class is too simple an answer to such a complex problem. The slogan of The Big Issue is ‘A Hand Up Not A Handout’, and the aim of making people work to earn money is a noble one. The reality is nonetheless that those living on the street are those left behind by our society, and buying a single Big Issue each week is not the answer to this problem. In fact, we should all do more, not because homelessness is a wrong for which we all bear responsibility, but because these people are individuals – both good and bad.

Atomic Burger, 96 Cowley Road

Nestled between a dubious-looking fish and chip shop and a hairdresser that frankly could have Britney Spears (post-breakdown) among its clientele, at first sight, Atomic Burger seems like nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the interior of this humble burger gaff is out of this world. Niche action figures hang from the ceiling, the walls are laden with the kind of futuristic images that you’d find in a low rate nineties sci-fi film, and a projector pumps what can only be described as ‘retro’ film clips and adverts onto the back wall. On a first visit, it’s quite difficult to concentrate on the food. In fact, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything at all. Luckily, though, the burgers in this place are some of the best I have ever eaten, so I’ve been unable to resist going back for more.

The menu, claiming that ‘great burgers ain’t rocket science’, is truly expansive. The general gimmick is to pick a chicken, beef or veggie burger, then a topping, and finally a side. I go for the ‘Sergio Leone’ – my choice of meat plus chorizo, sour cream and lettuce – but there are fourteen other options to choose from, ranging from the bog standard burger to one with meatballs (yes, as a topping.) As the sides go, I find the onion rings a little large and greasy, but would recommend the garlic and chilli ‘Ski-fries’ which are fantastic. If you’re really intrepid you can GO ATOMIC. For an extra fiver you get twice the meat and three sides. I couldn’t handle it. Instead, I prefer the amazing margaritas (raspberry being the best.) Three down, and I feel significantly perkier than those who have been sent into a carbohydrate-fuelled orbit. The only downside of Atomic Burger is that eventually we all must come back down to earth.