Like many other graduates without a meticulously structured career plan post-university, the jarring need to move onto the next big thing came as something as a shock. I moved into a new house, convincing myself that my degree meant any spell of unemployment was likely to be an aberration and nothing more, but as the days turned to weeks, desperation crept in. Never kind to ditherers at the best of times, the post-recessionary job market put a large dent in my jejune optimism. Everything was taking a long time to materialise – all except for the bills, of course. They were always punctual.

It was during this period that I had the name of a well known essay-writing site mentioned to me – the ones that write essays for order for paying students. The deal seemed a good one. Freedom to work from home – or indeed, wherever I wanted, and a salary which could reach £500 per week. The greatest appeal was, however, to my vanity – after countless knockbacks it seems I had finally found an employer who was willing to give creative license to my professional intentions.

When I mentioned my new employment to my flatmate, he was appalled, citing the undermining of academic integrity, and the effects on inequality which such sites engender. Now, I can’t pretend that I took seriously the statement provided by these sites which emphasised the purely guiding role these ‘sample’ essays were meant to perform, but I didn’t see clearly in those early days who I was harming in the course of my late night writing sessions.

As my argument ran, the essays of the length I was writing would be unlikely to be coursework, and that marks for such things could never make up a substantial proportion of the student’s overall grade. Tutors would easily catch out exceptionally advanced work, and furthermore, I reasoned that essay-writing was so conducive to the learning of the subject that the students lazy enough to pay the money would show themselves up badly in exams, thus not disrupting the meritocratic principles of the academic system. This stance was to take a beating in the weeks that followed, as it became clear from the information submitted along with the briefs which I was bidding for, that the pieces were assessed, that some did count towards their overall grade, and finally, that one was a dissertation.

My disillusionment was compounded by the particulars of the site’s policy when bidding for briefs. I was contacted by an employee of the company who wanted me to know in what kind of academic areas I specialised. I realised later that the reason for this was their desire to work out which writers were most abundant, and thus the lowest price they could offer and still have the work written. This seemed the only plausible explanation for how some more esoteric subjects could offer vastly higher fees than more common ones for essays of similar length.

The deadlines offered by the site were also unrealistic. Thousands of words were expected within a one-or two day timeframe. This of course played into the hands of the company, whose terms of service allowed them to confiscate the entire fee if the brief was late by more than 48 hours. Panicked by the impending deadlines I faced, I resorted to a combination of research chemicals and not sleeping in order to complete them. This in turn made me irritable during the day, and resulted in terrible interviews for the few jobs I could still apply for. I became a mess – snapping at my housemates, sleeping in the day, and my eyes ached from all the time I was spending with the computer screen.

The last straw for me was an experience which vividly brought home how little these sites value their writers, and how powerless they are in the face of the contract they sign. I applied for and got a brief which turned out to be a dissertation. Vowing to myself that it was going to be the last piece of work I would do for the company, I set about writing it.

It soon became clear that the deadline was insufficient. Two weeks was always going to be optimistic when my masters dissertation had taken me two months, but I noted that the client’s deadline was not for many months yet. I begged for extensions to be made, only to find that instead of reasoning with the client in what should have been a matter of common sense, the company seemed instead keen to pander to the client’s every whim, vigorously chasing me up and even threatening me with refunding the client and making me legally liable for the value of their payment.

Nor did my problems end once the work was handed in. For weeks afterwards, the company refused to pay my invoice – amounting to £400 – citing a list of their client’s demands which had nothing to do with the original specifications of the project. As anyone who’s struggled on a low wage can attest to, losing £400 from a month’s wages is serious business. It caused me immense inconvenience having to ask for money from friends and family, but I was completely powerless in the face of the contract I had signed.

So I worked my way through the alterations, only to find that there was seemingly no end in sight. Bizarre requests for redrafting continued to hit my inbox. Eventually enough was enough, and I terminated my service agreement with the company, asking for part settlement of my fee for the article at the modest rate of two thirds of its original value. I have yet to receive anything, however. Each email I send is met with a sneering reply which alludes to deductions and potential legal action for my refusal to carry out more work for free.

My advice: consider well the contempt with which they hold their writers, and steer well clear. I am now making a living teaching my subject part-time, and I haven’t looked back since.

Everyone knows the scene towards the end of the sublime Mean Girls, when the fat girl gets up on stage, her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, and reads from a crumpled piece of paper: “I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.”

Reading our feature on the secret lives of Organ Scholars this week, it’s hard not to be reminded of this speech. The article ends with the suggestion that “next time you’re at Evensong, check out the guy/girl in the loft. There might be more to them than you think.” It might not seem like a call-to-arms of a closing sentence, but the message is clear. It’s time to break down the walls which have been erected between the various tribes which form themselves in Oxford, look past the occasionally ghastly exterior and appreciate whatever we might find within.

Freshers’ events and the few weeks after are the only times most of us mix with genuinely different people. After that the cliques are formed, and thesps are rarely to be seen out drinking with Rugby U21s, while the Library Massive are unlikely to be tempted out to Park End.

Like the Mean Girls’ cameo, we think that’s a shame. As this week’s feature shows us, even Organists, the most lofty of social groups (pun fully intended) are just students like everyone else. So Union-haters, e-mail yourself in for President’s drinks and spend a night with the hacks. OCA members, stop and ask the student selling Socialist Workers how the revolution’s going. The lovecake is big, and there are enough slices for all.

By the time you read this, the polls will be closed, and we will probably have an idea of how the next government is going to be made up. One stage of months – years – of debate will have come to an end. What we won’t be any closer to knowing is what this government’s decision on University tuition fees will be.

The Browne review, the body which will advise on the future of University fees, will not release its findings until later in the year. As this newspaper reported last week, the Russell group of Universities, of which of Oxford is a member, will not release the information it sent to the Browne review into the public domain.

While the Liberal Democrats promised to scrap tuition fees altogether in their manifesto, and the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates for both Oxford constituencies have pledged to vote against any rise in fees, the reality is, when we headed to the ballot box, we didn’t have any real confirmation of where the next government would stand on this issue.

We can hazard a guess, though. Chris Patten, our Chancellor, has repeatedly called for fees to be raised, labelling the amount we currently pay as “preposterously low”. And as reported this week, Browne has, unsurprisingly, privately recommended the removal of the current £3,225 cap. Fees would be raised by £1,000 annually from 2013 up to £7,000, while the price of a science course would reach £14,000.

The writing on the wall says that the cost of a University education will go up and up. Deliberately holding the Browne review’s report until after the election has stifled debate on the subject. What will our vote mean for the price of higher education? We don’t know, is the implication; let’s wait to hear from Lord Browne.

It may seem dull and obvious that a student paper has chosen to focus on this issue in a political event which necessarily encompasses so much more than this. But this isn’t simply a ‘student issue’. If Labour were serious when they set the target of fifty percent of young people going on to higher education, then this is an issue for fifty percent of the population. Not just us at University here and now – if anything, we have less of an interest in this, as at least we know exactly what we’ll be paying for our education.

It’s a question for every family with a child in school, for everyone – parents, grandparents, siblings – who will be thinking about where that £7,000 will be coming from. Maybe the state will subsidise tuition fees for the poorest. It is possible, though unlikely, that fees won’t be raised at all. We’re not reactionary enough to say that scrapping fees completely is unequivocally a good thing – this is obviously a complex issue and needs to be debated in depth. The problem is we haven’t been able to do that. However we voted, in this sense we’ve all been shut out of the system.

When and where did humans evolve?

Palaeontology, archaeology and genetics confirm Darwin was right to identify sub-Saharan Africa as humankind’s area of origin. Hominins (the group of animals to which modern humans and our immediate extinct relatives and ancestors belong) split from the lineages leading to our closest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) 6-7 million years ago and are known from several places in South and East Africa. Our own genus, Homo, evolved – perhaps in East Africa – about 2.5 million years ago and was the first hominin to leave Africa. But the lineages that first did so are almost certainly evolutionary dead ends. DNA analyses of people alive today show beyond doubt that all modern humans have a much more recent African origin. Along with fossil finds, they indicate that our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved south of the Sahara about 200,000 years ago.

When did we move out of Africa?

The fossil record is clear that hominins moved out of Africa more than once, the first time about 1.8 million years ago. Those movements brought several species into Europe and Asia, including the ancestors of the Neanderthals and those of the ‘hobbits’ (Homo floresiensis) found a few years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. However, modern humans spread beyond Africa much more recently than this. A first move, indicated by 100,000-year-old fossils from Israel, is often considered a failed colonisation, though new work by Oxford’s Mike Petraglia and others suggests that it could have reached as far as India. A further expansion some 60-70,000 years ago saw people cross the Red Sea into Arabia and move around the Indian Ocean rim from there.

Who were the Neanderthals and why aren’t they here today?

DNA analyses of Neanderthal bones show their ancestors split from ours about 600,000 years ago and that genetic drift and adaptation to the severe cold of repeated Ice Age conditions produced the distinctive skeletal characteristics known from fossils across much of Europe and western Asia. In general, Neanderthals seem to have been heavily carnivorous and they were clearly efficient hunters of medium and large game. However, archaeology suggests that they probably had more limited cognitive capacities than our own ancestors. In particular, there is next to no convincing evidence that Neanderthals made and used art, jewellery or complex tools of the kind associated with Homo sapiens. It seems likely that, socially and technologically, modern humans could cope better with severe fluctuations in climate and food availability, outliving, outbreeding and outcompeting Neanderthals across their range. The last known individuals died out in Spain about 28,000 years ago.

When did we first start producing art?

The cave paintings and decorated objects left by Upper Palaeolithic people in parts of Europe (especially southwest France and northern Spain) were long thought to place the answer to this question no more than 40,000 years ago. Now, shell bead jewellery from sites in Africa and Israel demonstrates that people have been using material culture to make statements about their identity for at least 100,000 years. Equally startling, geometric designs scratched into pieces of ochre go back to around 75,000 years ago at Blombos Cave, South Africa, and can be paralleled only a little later at other sites on ochre and on ostrich eggshell.

Are there any new discoveries?

Absolutely. Just in the past few months three big ones have occurred. First, the ancestors of the Flores ‘hobbits’ turn out to have got there, across the open sea, over one million years ago. Second, mitochondrial DNA analysis of a finger bone from a cave in Russia’s Altai Mountains shows its owner to belong to an evolutionary lineage that split about this same time from those leading to the Neanderthals and us. Not only does this mean there was a third (previously unknown) hominin species in Siberia as recently as 40,000 years ago, it points to a previously unsuspected migration out of Africa about 1.0 million years ago. And third, there are the two beautifully preserved partial skeletons of Australopithecus sediba from caves near Johannesburg, a new species perhaps directly ancestral to our own, from just under 2 million years ago. Human evolution continues to surprise.

Bar few, the eminent figures of the arts world over the past decades have had one thing in common: they’ve all been interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. It really wasn’t much of a surprise then when Bragg’s apology for keeping me waiting at his ITV office was because he’d been busy organising an interview with Victoria Wood.

The Cumbrian culture vulture is host and editor of TV’s longest-running arts programme, The South Bank Show, now in its final comeback series called Revisited. The programme has brought writers, actors, musicians, dancers, directors and artists into often surprisingly sincere close-up. He’s chatted to Laurence Olivier on his deathbed; he chased the French composer Olivier Messiaen for twenty years; and George Michael marked the occasion by lighting up an enormous spliff. In addition to the show’s unparalleled duration, Bragg can also claim credit for his role, as he puts it to me, “in tackling opera and pop music with equal seriousness”.

‘Oxford and the movies were where my whole life really started’

But above all there is his gift for disarming some of the trickiest and most fortified egos on the planet. Finding that parenthesis, getting that foot in the door to the mind of the interviewee must be a real challenge? “Yes. You’ve got to get it right. The point of entry; that’s the really the hard bit”. Most people, he tentatively explains, start out looking like they’re shot through with nerves, jittering apprehensively. “Not about me, or my questions”, he’s quick to add, “but because they’re on screen; it’s very different from the way you talk to your pals, or even the way you talk on radio. You know that your face is going to be in other people’s faces”. Bragg pauses. He seems slightly hesitant. “The way you look counts for a big percentage of the way people see you, and they know that.”

Even so, Bragg always seems to pull it off and lay bare the raw talent of creative minds. In the astonishing Francis Bacon interview, he and Bragg go out for lunch and get absolutely plastered on disgusting red wine. Bacon staggers to his feet, declares “Cheerio”, and fills their glasses again. Bragg asks: “Why do you want to do that, Francis?” The artist replies: “Because I like doing it. I just happen to be a painter, that’s all.” He then goes on to talk eloquently, if a little slurringly, about his work. “Francis drunk was a very important part of Francis”, Bragg said. “And when he was drunk he talked about his life to the highest level.”

Most famous of Bragg’s encounters was his interview with Dennis Potter in 1994 just before his death where he started with the question: “How did you, and when did you, find out that you’d got this cancer?” The interview rocketed round the world and people took to it because of the power of what Dennis said, and because of the way they did it: Bragg vividly describes the shabby, stripped down TV studio where Dennis was sipping liquid morphine, clasping a bottle of Champagne and heavily smoking.

Asking Potter about his cancer was a one off though. Bragg’s main focus has always been on the work of the artist, not on their personal life. It’s the quest to get to the heart of “what is real in the marrow of their work” that he sees as the definitive challenge. “Sometimes I get it and just feel rather quietly pleased with myself”.

He candidly admits that the personal does occasionally seep in, like when Bacon talked about his homosexuality. “But he brought that in”, Bragg assures me; “I didn’t sort of say are you gay or anything”.

I learn that keeping this sense of distance from people’s private goings on is a belief instilled in Bragg by his small town background – it’s something quite necessary in a tight-knit community, he points out. “You really mustn’t pry into the private lives of others”.

Part of this belief might also stem from the great personal tragedy he has had to come to terms with. His first wife, the French writer and artist Lisa Roche, committed suicide in 1971, a pain that he has said “never stops”. In 2008 he published the novel Remember Me… that addressed her death in fictional form. It took him almost five years to complete it, “rewriting and rewriting. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at anything”.

It was Bragg’s 20th offering in a long pedigree of novels and it dug into the last part of the previous novel Crossing the Lines; the two form “the Oxford novel I refused to write”. But although part-fiction, the passages about Oxford had to be written. “They were where my whole life really started.”

So what’s the reality behind Bragg’s Oxonian turning point? “There were some crackingly good Historians to look up to”, he says. But it was the allure of the movies shown at the Phoenix Picture House in Jericho, then named The Scala, which really changed everything. “Something clicked. I saw that there was a different world out there.”

He explains how he became immersed in contemporary European film, enthusiastically reeling off an endless list of directors I’ve barely heard of. By his third year he’d moved a long way away from just wanting to pass exams. He was enjoying writing for Cherwell as film critic, acting, and had even tried his hand at writing short stories, “although I sure didn’t tell anybody”. He also loosely remembers co-directing a film at Oxford called Altogether Boys. I eagerly press him for a copy. “Mercifully none of us know where it is!”, Bragg responds.

He went on to win a traineeship with the BBC, “and that was probably the biggest stroke of luck in my life. In retrospect, I’m rather embarrassed to say, at the time, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do; I genuinely had not a clue”.

But Bragg moved up the ranks quickly. After a 10-year stint on Start the Week, which he turned into a Radio Four flagship, he launched In Our Time, with the county’s top boffins talking it out about anything from Platonic philosophy to the frontiers of contemporary physics. “In academia, a lot of it is taken for granted. My job is to say, hold on, I didn’t understand that Higgs boson”. He thought it would probably only last six months. Instead, it has become a benchmark of quality broadcasting and he tells me he’s just signed another three year contract. “I’m up at five am doing my final cramming session before I go in”, he tells me. “That really keeps you going”.

Now in his 70s, Bragg has more than a lifetime of experience to retell. But could he see himself being interviewed on The South Bank Show as the great populariser of the arts that he now is? “Oh no, wouldn’t dream of it.” As Bragg modestly puts it: “I’m not a very good interviewee actually”.