Tuesday 17th March 2026
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All roads lead to bagels: Green Routes review

Nancy Robson
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All roads lead to bagels: Green Routes review

Don’t get me wrong, I love my college. I’d proudly defend it against most criticisms. But it does have one major flaw: the absence of Sunday Brunch. So, to overcome this tragedy, and in the hope of appeasing my hangover with some much needed sugar, I headed out last week to the Green Routes Café in Cowley.

Walking down Magdalen Road, we pass two well-cared-for gastropubs, three Scandi-style cafés and one Tibetan restaurant. Green Routes, with its wooden benches, whitewashed walls, and enough plants for a small greenhouse doesn’t look in the least bit out of place.  

The other patrons seem, and I don’t know how else to put this, like they have their lives together. Joggers, dog walkers, well-dressed hipsters and mums with strollers. They probably look after their microbiome, have an active Strava presence, and earn a stable income.

Green Routes is the kind of place that cares a lot about coffee. Their speciality roasts come with a backstory longer than most Hollywood characters. Their latte art could be framed. I’m probably not qualified to talk about it (my point of comparison here is freeze-dried instant coffee), but I’ve got to admit they know their stuff.

Their sustainable ethos carries over to the menu, which is mostly plant based and, given the sheer volume of adjectives in it, is halfway to a food review itself. My dining companion (confusingly also called Nancy) orders the ‘Bagel Baby’. I’m slightly sceptical about it, as it has seven fillings, including a hash brown and smoked chilli jam. My suspicions, however, are entirely misplaced: once you’ve actually managed to fit it into your mouth, the flavours complement each other surprisingly well. It’s a little on the oily side, but it comes pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a hangover cure. Especially because the plate is also heaped with a generous helping of Tater Tots, which the other Nancy describes as hash browns with extra surface area. She’s pretty bang on – steaming hot and glistening with oil, these are a far cry from the humble jacket potato. I don’t see any possible room for improvement. Except that the table next us has ordered the Marmite Tots. We catch a whiff as the waiter carries them past, and the scent alone is enough to make me genuinely start salivating.

If good old oily food is one answer to a hangover, then I’ve gone for the other – sugar. But even I am not prepared for the miracle that is the spiced apple pancakes. Draped in maple syrup and a heavenly apple compote, the pancakes themselves are pillowy without being too dry. Dolloped on top is a ‘whipped brown sugar cream cheese’, which  I’m hoping they will start selling by the kilo. And then, as if it couldn’t get any better, there is the almond brittle, salty and sugary and crunchy and utterly addictive.

At times Green Routes might feel a little like a parody of itself and its concept isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but, with the end of Hilary on the horizon, it might just be the perfect place for a sunny Sunday morning.

In Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth

David James Binns
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In Conversation with Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth is an English writer and perhaps the most astute critic of technology’s impact on society writing today. I met him over Zoom, calling from his smallholding in the west of Ireland to discuss his latest book, Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. He edited Cherwell himself back in the early ’90s while studying History at St Anne’s College – “back in the Ice Age,” he jokes – and remembers late nights “desperately trying to lay out pages” on a desktop computer. “I would’ve been very excited if you told me when I was the editor that I’d be being interviewed by the paper one day”, he says with a smile. 

In a former life – which included an arrest for chaining himself to bridges at Twyford Down – he was an environmental activist, deputy editor of The Ecologist, and even named one of Britain’s “top ten troublemakers” by the New Statesman. In January 2021, after a lifelong spiritual journey involving both Buddhism and an “ill-fated foray into Wicca”, he was baptised into the Romanian Orthodox Church at a monastery in Shannonbridge. Now farming in rural Galway using traditional methods, Kingsnorth writes about Christianity, technology, and how what he calls “the Machine” is busy unmaking humanity while we’re too distracted by our screens to notice. 

His latest book, which he has described elsewhere as his magnum opus, lays out his main thesis on the impact of technology in greater detail than ever before. It is an attempt to pin down something he believes has been growing for centuries – what he calls “the Machine”. Even now, he admits, something he finds difficult to define in a sentence, “which is why I ended up writing a 300-page book about it”. Having said this, he does an admirable job for my sake:

“What we’re looking at, I think, is a kind of technological, cultural, political matrix, which has been building up for at least 300 years, at least since the Industrial Revolution, which is encroaching on us now and enclosing us, and we are increasingly enslaved to it.”

This system, he suggests, is warping both the planet and the people living on it: “We have a technological, digital superstructure, which we can’t live without, which everything is dependent upon, which is eating away at the natural world, destroying the oceans and the climate and the metals under the ground in order to feed itself. And it is creating a particular way of seeing, a very rationalist, very left-brained way of seeing.”

The implied endpoint of this, Kingsnorth suggests, is that “we all get to live forever, we have conscious machines to serve us, we have robot servants, we can replace our bodies. It’s technological utopianism, and it is infecting everything now to such a degree that we almost can’t see it. We’re like a fish in water”. 

Central to his analysis is what he calls the “progress trap”, a concept he borrows from historian Ronald Wright. “You create something that makes things more convenient and simple, but then that creates a load of other problems, which you then have to solve using more progress, usually more technology. And the further you go into that system, the more trapped you are within the technological matrix.” 

He gives the example of post-war industrial farming: nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides produced abundant food and population growth, but then came soil depletion, insect collapse, and ecological crisis. The population boom meant there was no turning back: “You’ve got millions more mouths to feed… so you can’t go back to farming as you were before at a lower intensity.” As a result, “most of those problems can only then be addressed by new forms of intensive technology, because you can’t go back to living simply… You go further and further and further into the trap”. 

AI, he argues, exemplifies the “progress trap” perfectly. “What’s AI an answer to? What’s the problem it’s trying to solve? Nobody seems to know. It’s gonna create mass unemployment. It’s gonna cause a reality collapse where we don’t know what’s real.” 

In an age where political discussion can increasingly feel like a kind of team sport, Kingsnorth’s work is striking for evading easy political categorisation. He’s written for The Guardian, The Spectator, and The New Statesman. His influences range from Marx to Roger Scruton, from anarchist revolutionaries to conservative traditionalists. “I genuinely don’t fit into any obvious political category that is around. I can look at the conservative right, and I can agree with them on a lot of stuff, and I can look at elements of the left and agree with them on a lot of stuff… I don’t think that that’s contradictory, because the politics I’m talking about is the politics of scale and place and roots, and that crosses the boundaries.” 

Accordingly, the book draws from a wide array of thinkers from disparate movements, weaving a variegated yet surprisingly coherent tapestry of thought. “It is eclectic”, Paul agrees, but “it does all fit together. If you’re a tribal thinker, you look at a book like this, and you think, ‘this guy’s all over the place. It doesn’t make sense. Is he left-wing or right-wing? I can’t work it out.’ But if you’re thinking in terms of the politics of the Machine, or the politics of refusal of the Machine, then it all fits together perfectly”.

The problem, he argues, is that “particularly in the age of social media, everybody is extremely tribal about their politics. So we have to be progressive, or we have to be conservative, or we have to be reactionary. We have to love Trump or hate Trump. There’s no room for nuance”. 

His response is to try to “keep above it” and look at the bigger picture: “The Machine rolls on, and it absorbs the left, and it absorbs the right… You can all continue to have your tribal fights, but in the end, we’re still all rolling towards technocracy. We’re still all rolling towards the AI god. The world is still being run by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and I don’t really care whether they’re conservative or liberal. It doesn’t matter.”

This leads him to one of the book’s most memorable formulations: “We have a culture war because we don’t have a culture.” Without genuine local culture or shared spiritual foundations, he argues, “we’re just slaughtering each other over transgenderism or immigration or whatever, in a way that doesn’t even solve those problems, but just allows us to have these huge identity battles so we can feel like we’re in the right tribe and we’re fighting off the wrong tribe”. 

Social media, he insists, is the accelerant. “We wouldn’t have a culture war if we didn’t have social media. It’s not to say that the issues wouldn’t be there… But you wouldn’t get this relentless tribal hatred of everybody else without social media.” The algorithm feeds you increasingly extreme content, be it from the right or the left, “and you end up coming out of that very angry, and hating whoever you’ve just been told to hate on the other side. And meanwhile, all the money’s going to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel… and you’re not closer to solving any of society’s problems”. 

There’s an obvious irony to Kingsnorth’s position: he writes about the dangers of the Machine while using Substack, featuring on podcasts and maintaining a website. It’s a contradiction he’s fully aware of.

“There’s no escape from the Machine because we’re all entwined in it now”, he says. “I think it would be almost virtually impossible to live without an internet connection now… In quite a short time, in 20 or 30 years, we’ve seen the construction of this society where we’re all supposed to do everything online. Everything’s online, from your banking to your pension, to getting on a flight, getting on a bus, buying a ticket, going to a concert.”

His own response has been to draw clear boundaries. He doesn’t have a smartphone. He doesn’t use social media. “I have to write online because otherwise I wouldn’t have a career… So you just have to do your best to draw up a set of principles that you’re gonna stick by.” 

Thirteen years ago, he and his wife moved to Ireland with their young children, settling on two and a half acres in the rural west of the country. They home-schooled, grew their own food, cut grass with scythes. “We wanted to be as self-sufficient as we could. So we’ve done that. We have some polytunnels and veg gardens and chickens and ducks, and have a little orchard, and grow as much firewood as we can. It’s a good place to hide. I can kind of make forays out into the world and then come back home to my little retreat.” 

For students, his advice is blunt: “If there’s one thing people can do to resist the Machine, it’s to get rid of their social media accounts, and that is easy, and it’s possible, and you don’t actually need them. Especially when you’re a student.” After taking the leap, he says, “you’re gonna feel much better, and you’re gonna suddenly realise that you’ve been heavily manipulated into these tribal groupings”. 

Despite the increased presence of technology and social media since his own student days, he’s encouraged by what he sees in the younger generation. “I meet a lot of young people doing my book tours…loads of whom have just refused to have smartphones, because they’ve grown up in this whole technological matrix – can see it quite clearly in a way that sometimes older generations can’t.”  

His advice extends to practical career choices too. “If you’re gonna get jobs in the future, if you’re gonna work, you want to do something that can’t be replaced by an AI. Do something actually practical.” His daughter who, he says proudly, “is more of a Luddite than I am”, is about to study bookbinding. It’s a fitting profession: conserving physical objects that will last, a tangible craft that – at least for now – big tech cannot replace. 

For some, Kingsnorth’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity might seem like a radical departure from his environmental activism. He sees it differently. “Everything I’ve ever done really has been, I suppose… a spiritual search, if you want to use that word, and I wouldn’t have used that word when I was younger… I wasn’t an activist because I wanted to reduce carbon emissions… That’s a good idea, but for me it was always something unnameable that was being destroyed. You know, if you are destroying the natural world, you are destroying a place that you shouldn’t be destroying because it’s full of biodiversity and the rest of it, but you shouldn’t be destroying it because of how good it is for your soul.” 

He had “profoundly spiritual” experiences in nature as a young person and came to see “something inherently sacrilegious about destroying a rainforest or ripping up an old hillside or destroying an ancient monument, quite apart from all the utilitarian arguments”. “You come back to that question that we came to earlier, which is: what does it mean to be human? And how should you be living on the Earth? And is there a God?” 

His move to Ireland created the space for this spiritual journey. “I don’t think I’d have become an Orthodox Christian if I hadn’t moved to Ireland… even though these days Ireland is very modern and progressive and all that, it’s still, under the surface, very Christian in its landscape. It’s covered in holy wells and ancient monastery ruins.” 

Kingsnorth’s next project is The Book of Wild Saints, a collection of stories about Christian saints who lived as wilderness ascetics, illustrated with woodcuts by Ewan Craig. “I’m trying to write about the wilderness tradition in Christian spirituality… trying to lay out the stories that so few people know about, about these kind of wild ascetics of Christianity.” 

After that, possibly a return to fiction. “After doing something like Against the Machine, which is this great big intellectual exercise, I need to go and do something more creative again.”  

Recipient of the Gordon Burn Prize in 2014 for his novel The Wake, Kingsnorth came to Oxford as the first in his family to attend university. “I assumed everyone was gonna be much cleverer than me, and I’d immediately get found out”, he recalls. “And there definitely were a lot of people much cleverer than me, but actually, not as many as I thought, so it was fine.” He met his wife on his first night at St Anne’s, in the college bar, though he adds with a laugh that “there was a lot of on and off over the years”. 

It was at Oxford that he first realised he wanted to be a writer. “Coming from the kind of background I came from, I didn’t know any writers. Writers were this kind of glamorous species of people that I’d never met.” Working on Cherwell gave him confidence. “I just realised I liked it. I was able to do it, and I did it a lot, so I got fairly good at it.” Oxford was also where he discovered activism. “I wanted to combine my writing with my politics and kind of write to save the planet. That’s what I wanted to do when I was sort of 19, 20.” 

But writing, he says, “is just the way that I understand the world. I can’t really imagine not doing it”. 

For a writer who tackles such an all-encompassing topic with great eloquence and erudition, Kingsnorth is refreshingly humble regarding his work. The aim of Against the Machine, he says, is not to provide a manifesto or a global plan. “It’s an attempt to analyse what’s going on around us… I want people to read the book, come away from that understanding my analysis, and then they don’t have to agree with it”, he says cheerfully, “you can argue with all of it if you want to”.

“It’s profoundly anti-human, the direction of things. And so I’m just trying to kind of raise a flag for humanity again, I suppose.” 

How 2025’s biggest films made their mark through music

Ruaridh McEwen
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How 2025’s biggest films made their mark through music

The recent Oscar nominations for Best Original Score and Best Original Song in films of 2025 have sparked much debate and some controversy, particularly from those who believed Wicked: For Good was snubbed a nomination. Beyond that, the nominations have allowed us to reflect on how fundamental musical scores are to film, and the highlights of last year’s film soundtracks.

The nominees for best original score include One Battle After Another, Sinners, Hamnet, Frankenstein, and Bugonia, transcending a variety of genres and invoking various emotions within the listeners. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is perfectly encapsulated by the tense and foreboding score from Johnny Greenwood, which takes the stage at certain points of the film, leaving the viewer on the edge of their seat. In contrast, Max Richter’s score for Hamnet sits quietly in the background, breaking through at the most emotional scenes to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings. 

Alexandre Desplat’s Frankenstein and Jerskin Fendrix’s Bugonia share similarities in their grand orchestral scope, yet they diverge in purpose. Desplat’s score leans heavily into the gothic tradition, with grandiose baroque elements echoing the tragic romanticism at the heart of Mary Shelley’s original novel, while Fendrix’s work for Bugonia feels more playful and unpredictable, mirroring the film’s surreal and satirical tone. Together, the nominees demonstrate the remarkable versatility of film music in shaping atmosphere, emotion, and narrative across wildly different cinematic worlds.

Beyond original score, the category of best original song has continued to highlight how music can transcend a film’s runtime and embed itself within popular culture. The original song category includes: ‘Dear Me’ from Diane Warren: Relentless, ‘Golden’ from KPop Demon Hunters, ‘I Lied to You’ from Sinners, ‘Sweet Dreams of Joy’ from Viva Verdi! and ‘Train Dreams’ from the eponymous film. This category is much broader than that of original score, including a variety of genres from K-pop to Mississippi Delta blues. This is where much of the controversy surrounding Wicked: For Good has emerged. For many viewers, its musical impact felt inseparable from the film’s success, reigniting debates over how originality is defined in an era of adaptations and reimaginings. The backlash arguably reflects a broader tension within contemporary cinema: audiences are increasingly drawn to musical familiarity, while awards bodies remain hesitant to recognise it.

What is perhaps most striking about the soundtracks of 2025 is how deliberately they are deployed. Gone are the days where scores simply fill silence; instead, composers now carefully choose when to recede and when to overwhelm. Silence itself has become a musical tool, making the moments when sound does break through feel all the more powerful. This restraint is especially evident in films like Hamnet, where the absence of music can be just as emotionally resonant as its presence.

This careful approach to scoring also reflects a broader shift in how audiences engage with film music. In an age of streaming and fragmented attention due to viewers often being stuck between two screens, soundtracks increasingly serve a dual purpose: enhancing narrative immersion while also existing independently beyond the cinema. Scores like Greenwood’s or Richter’s are not only experienced in the dark of a screening room, but through headphones, playlists, and concert stages, allowing films’ impacts to linger long after the credits roll. The Oscar nominations are not merely about recognising technical achievement, but acknowledging how deeply music now shapes the afterlife of cinema.

Having watched all nominees for the best score category, I have to say that for me personally, Johnny Greenwood’s score for One Battle After Another is the standout soundtrack in its category. The sheer tension created by the staccato of piano notes and piercing string orchestra of its title track reflect the unpredictable nature of the film, drawing the viewer in on screen and allowing the retrospective listener to relive the emotion of the film at home. The rest of the soundtrack, too, has similar elements of tension with nervous piano notes and dramatic synth surges making the 162 minute epic fly by. 

Ultimately, the soundtracks of 2025 demonstrate that music acts as one of cinema’s most powerful storytelling tools. Whether swelling grandly or whispering in the background, film scores help to shape our emotional responses often without us even realising. The Oscar nominations may spark controversy each year, but they also offer a valuable opportunity to reflect on how music continues to define the films we remember, not just through spectacle, but through silence, subtlety, and emotional precision.

Translating Oxford into Urdu

Manya Singh
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Translating Oxford into Urdu

It’s a different emotion whenever I read the Urdu language. I’m not a native speaker, nor have I actively pursued learning the language, but as someone who finds solace in reading shayari (Urdu poetry), I wanted to follow it even in Oxford. I have friends who can speak and read the script brilliantly, and I have always envied them. Not because knowing another language adds feather to their cap, but because it allows one to feel differently, or rather multilingually. It’s like being multilingual in emotions. 

Urdu has a certain gravitas to it – gherai, or depth. I had started reading Urdu poetry during my undergraduate years, and that is when I came across a few poets who wrote on love (mohabbat, ishq) and separation (firaq). In that sense, coming to a new city and joining my dream university was ishq for me, but leaving behind my country and loved ones was firaq. 

When reading Urdu poetry, one often encounters poets residing in a no-win situation: there is neither love nor forgetting; neither acceptance nor forgiveness; neither destruction nor sanctity. Instead, it leaves the reader suspended in a state of emotional encumbrance. Feeling too deeply, and yet nowhere to settle, and that is the crevice where most admirers of Urdu poetry wish to stay.  

On some days as I amble around Oxford, I’m struck by a reality that I rarely focus on– I am in Oxford. I had longed for it, desired it, and adored it (but maybe just never enough). 

Firaq Gorakhpuri, an Urdu poet, writes: “Ek muddat se teri yaad bhi na aayi aur bhul gaye ho tujhe aesa bhi nhi” (“It’s been a long time since I even remembered you, but it’s not as if I’ve forgotten you either”). That is exactly how I feel for Oxford on some days. I haven’t still figured out which part of Oxford these lines speak to: the city itself, or the experience of being a member of this institution? Yet, on walks to Tesco on Magdalen Street, I rarely pause consciously on this feeling. It is only when I see something as magnificent as the Christ Church dining hall, Duke Humphrey’s library, or the Radcam that I’m nudged in the arm by this reality. 

Urdu is often called the language of love, and rarely does it speak without invoking a beloved. The beloved is omnipresent in its poetic universe: sometimes distant, sometimes cruel, sometimes divine, but always there, shaping longing and language alike. As a reader of Urdu, I have always filled the beloved’s space with my own meanings. The beloved, in that sense, becomes less a human and more a vessel for desire, devotion, and imagination.

But this makes me wonder: must the beloved always be human? Can objects ascend to that almost sacred rank? I have always found a similarity between Urdu and Sufi poetry – a form of mystical Islamic devotional literature – in the ways in which the interpretation of the beloved is neither fixed nor singular. Either the divine is the human, or the human is the divine. Perhaps, in both forms the beloved has always been a metaphor expansive enough to hold whatever the heart chooses to sanctify. For me, the beloved is the experience that this city and institution offers to me. 

In his ghazal, Jaun Eliya writes: “Tum haqiqat nhi hasrat ho…” (“You are not the reality, you are a longing…”) And then you would ask me to what extent does a person love something? Maybe it is always in the longing. All desires wane once the longing is fulfilled, once the dream materialises. I’d say keep chasing, keep longing, because that is how you preserve its kadar (value). 

Writing about the prospect of seeing his beloved, Ahmad Faraz begins his ghazal with: “Sunā hai log use aañkh bhar ke dekhte haiñ so us ke shahr meñ kuchh din thahar ke dekhte haiñ” (“I’ve heard that people gaze at them to their heart’s content, so let us stay a few days in their city and see”). Faraz has only heard of his beloved’s beauty and presence. There’s curiosity, admiration, and desire to witness her directly. Though convention often renders the beloved as ‘her’ in translation, I prefer ‘them’. It preserves the ambiguity and expansiveness that make the ghazal form so enduring. Whenever I read this ghazal, I’m always reminded of this city as my beloved and I, as a traveller, visit it for tales of its splendor echoing far beyond borders and seas. 

Sometimes I’m astonished by how much a language, through literature, can offer; I came with it to Oxford, and now I’m living Oxford through its lens. In between journal entries, I find myself using these poems more for this city than for my beloved. Perhaps at this stage, my love for both Urdu poetry and Oxford is interdependent; one cannot grow without the other. 

Stitching the world together: GFC’s London Fashion Week show

Cherwell Fashion
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Stitching the world together: GFC’s London Fashion Week show

A few weeks ago we, the Cherwell fashion editors, were lucky enough to be extended an invite by the Global Fashion Collective to their London Fashion Week show. After a flurry of excitement and calling our parents to announce that we had finally ‘made it’ as fashion journalists, we assembled the closest thing to an avant-garde look we could muster with our uni wardrobes and hopped on the Oxford Tube to Shoreditch. The stated aim of the Global Fashion Collective is to “amplify global voices in fashion” with an emphasis on elevating “independent designers on an international stage”, an agenda that was abundantly evident in the show. It consisted of the collections of four independent designers, hailing from all over the world, to create a loud and rich celebration of multiculturalism in fashion, proudly weaving national identities into their work. It was a breath of fresh air, a rejection of the notion that appearances or customs divide us, instead showcasing the beauty and artistry that comes from collaboration and community.

First onto the runway was Alex S. Yu, presenting his collection ‘A Flicker of Winter’. Yu’s eponymous label, based out of his studio in Vancouver, presents itself as “contemporary womenswear for the everyday dreamer”, and this emphasis on bringing the whimsy of a fantasy world was certainly present in the rose-tinted lens through which his pieces seem to be filtered. Sharp tailored silhouettes, emphasised through contrast seams that foregrounded structure and craftsmanship, were veiled in tulle, giving such formal attire an ethereal air of magic. The streetwear elements, hoodies or t-shirts, meant that while his items had all the glamour of an editorial shoot, they still felt firmly grounded in urban life, pieces of art one might actually pull from one’s wardrobe on a dreary Monday morning. Yu’s work is built off of the dynamic friction of unlikely pairings; the mix of the high-low dressing, layering a sweatshirt over a tailored blouse, or the tulle accents and textured fabrics used to reinvent what we deem conventional workwear, is at the heart of what Yu is doing. It’s classic silhouettes with innovative details, with chunky silver jewellery and hair pieces reinforcing this expression of brand identity. Yu’s use of layering was equally noteworthy, adding graphic floral appliqués, or layering unorthodox materials like faux leather, latex, and mesh, which speaks to his interest in the unexpected. There was something about Yu’s collection that made the little girl inside me jump with joy. In an ocean of Pinterest outfits and micro-trends, Alex S. Yu is all about finding the excitement and beauty in the unexpected.

The second collection displayed was from the French label SAYF. Titled ‘Excellence’, the show focused on a wonderful combination of traditional clothing from Arab, African, and Asian cultures with contemporary street wear style. Hoodies, coats, and jackets were extended to the length of tunics and modernised through variation in material: denim, silk, and leather hoodies all made an appearance. In a time where men’s fashion is limited and often dull in comparison to women’s shows, Sinan, the designer, shot life back into it. These items were injected with elements of rich cultural and religious history through the models’ head coverings and even rosaries dangling from some of the models’ hands. It was here, in the accessories, that this collection truly shone. The most striking of these, for me, was the closing look where the model was adorned with an entirely white headscarf underneath a matching baseball cap. The combination of the traditional with the contemporary in a chic yet inventive way was at the very soul of Sinan’s collection. 

Dunne Cliff was the penultimate display of the show. Its designer, Allison Dunne, perfumed her runway with the concept of “clothing as essay” as she questioned technology and the climate crisis through the fashion show. Before the models arrived, Dunne Cliff was introduced to us with a visual piece. On the screen behind the runway we saw videos of beaches contrasted with images of pollution and a once beautiful environment damaged. The first model then walked out, carrying a bucket which she placed halfway down the runway. Each model that arrived after her placed something into the bucket. It started with bottles of water being poured in, then mock ceramic phones with earphones attached. This performance exploring a wasteful society consumed by technology was somewhat reflected in the clothes. The pieces held strong senses of originality and modernity as well as being deeply rooted in tradition. Contemporary style could be seen in the cuts and tailoring of the clothes, with baggy jeans and fitted tops dominating the show. However, in every outfit there were souvenirs of the past. One of the most obvious ways I saw this was through the hair accessories. By that I don’t mean accessories worn in the hair, but accessories made out of hair. This alluded to the Victorian trend of keeping the hair of loved ones in lockets or other jewellery pieces as a memory of them. Additionally, the past is acknowledged through the distressed nature of some of the clothes. The torn fabric and the holes in felted jackets fed the argument of the “essay” Dunne was writing for us. These pieces emphasised the importance of sustainable fashion and getting longevity out of the clothes we wear – that wearing a jumper to the point of damage is, in fact, a triumph and deserves a spot on the London Fashion Week stage. 

If the show made one thing clear, it was that nobody knows how to make a woman feel like a goddess quite like Olena Adam does. The Ukrainian designer, who was kind enough to speak to us about the inspiration behind her collection after the show, highlighted her desire to bring out the beauty in our world, especially during such a bleak time both in her home country and beyond. The collection, entirely created and produced in Adam’s studio in Ukraine, took my breath away. Amongst the bold colours and prints Adam sent out onto the runway the star of the show had to be her ‘Festan’, which she describes as ‘a versatile wardrobe piece that seamlessly fits into any setting’. These flowy robes shimmered under the lights, the air catching beneath them, creating dancing trains that followed the models. Garments that would not look out of place in a Disney Princess’ wardrobe, bedecked with statement jewels and envy-infusing bedazzled headpieces. Another interesting aspect of Adam’s collection was the contrast of these flowy, almost sleepwear-inspired pieces being styled with intricate updos, full glam makeup, complete with a red lip, and statement jewels. She fully leans into the notion of intimates as outerwear, transforming corseted details, and slip inspired dresses into works of art, elevated through her incorporation of rich colours, ostrich feathers, and embroidery. She finds the beauty in the ordinary, transforming her models into ethereal beings with her focus on the elegant woman who deserves to be seen.

‘Our Feminism Knows No Borders’ protest on International Women’s Day 

Cherwell News
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‘Our Feminism Knows No Borders’ protest on International Women’s Day 

Around a hundred protesters gathered at the Clarendon building this afternoon in an International Women’s Day protest entitled “Our Feminism Knows No Borders”. The protest was organised by Oxford Student Action for Refugees (STAR) and the Coalition to Close Campsfield (CCC), a local activist group.

Protesters held banners with the slogans: “Our feminism knows no borders” and “close Campsfield and every IRC [Immigration Removal Centre]”. Placards and posters in different languages were placed on the steps of the building. 

Two students sat on the steps held a sign reading “fuck the far right”. They told Cherwell that they believed in “intersectional feminism, anti-TERF [Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism], anti-Farage, anti all of that.”

A young girl standing in the crowd held a sign reading: “Our society is built on the labour and skills of underpaid migrant women. They deserve respect, equality and human rights.”

One of the protest’s organisers told Cherwell: “It feels that women’s rights are genuinely under attack everywhere in the world… I see that communities are hungry for solidarity… we have people across different coalitions who are here.

“Women’s rights is not an issue which is added on to other issues, it is an issue which galvanises, and in which people find common ground. It’s really beautiful to stand here in solidarity with migrants, with the trans community, with workers, and with women across the world.”

Speaking to the crowd, Jabu Nala-Hartley, an activist from a local group Mothers 4 Justice Ubuntu (M4JU) called on attendees to: “Rise, resist, and stand in global sisterhood.” M4JU describe themselves as “a collective of family members and activists directly supporting people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system.”

She said: “We refuse to be silent in a world that benefits from our silence.” Commenting on the scale of the protest, Nala-Hartley told Cherwell: “The issue is so big that this is just a small crowd.” 

Today’s protest follows feminist demonstrations against right-wing anti-immigrant politics earlier this week in Oxford. Around ten activists from Oxford Women Against the Far Right (WAFR), a campaigning group within the larger anti-racist organisation Stand Up to Racism (SUTR), held a counter-protest against the British nationalist group Oxfordshire Patriots on Friday. The latter group were staging a protest outside Oxford Crown Court on St Aldate’s, as a foreign national appeared for a plea hearing charged with sexual offences.

An Instagram post by Oxford SUTR accused Oxfordshire Patriots of “hijacking the suffering of a victim of a terrible crime to further their campaign of racialising sexual violence against women”.
Responding to claims that their protest was racist, an Oxfordshire Patriots spokesperson told Cherwell: “Oxfordshire Patriots does not organise protests to target any race, religion or background. Our focus is on justice, community safety and supporting victims.”

Reporting by Oskar Doepke, Mercedes Haas, Archie Johnston, Lucy Pollock, Ned Remington, and Hattie Simpson.

Student loan reforms promised following opposition from MPs

Beatrix Arnold
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Student loan reforms promised following opposition from MPs

Concerns have been voiced among MPs over the state of the student loans system following the announcement last year of increased tuition fees for English universities and a freeze to the graduate repayment threshold. Speaking in Parliament on the 25th February, Keir Starmer claimed to be looking at ways to make the current student loans system “fairer”. 

Last October, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced annual increases to tuition fees at English universities in line with inflation, alongside a proportional increase of maintenance loans available to students. University tuition fees were raised this academic year, after being frozen since 2017. At the time of the announcement, the University of Oxford indicated its support for the increases. 

In the November budget last year, Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that the salary threshold at which graduates start repaying their Plan 2 student loans would be frozen at its April 2026 level of £29,385 until 2030, rather than increasing in line with inflation. Plan 2 student loans were in effect for those who started university between September 2012 and July 2023; whereas the interest rate for those who started university later is 4.3%, for these earlier loans it is the RPI rate (currently 3.8%) plus up to an additional 3%. 

Furthermore, a 6% levy on international student tuition fees in English universities is set to be introduced from 2028, in order to fund new maintenance grants of £1000 for those from low-income households taking certain courses. 

The government is facing pressure to change the current system after other political parties announced their opposition to it when the issue was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Over 20 Labour MPs spoke out against the student loans system last week. Luke Charters, MP for York Outer, called current graduates’ predicament “a dog’s dinner”, while some politicians called for tuition fees to be scrapped completely. The Green Party and the Conservative Party both pledged to cut interest rates on student loans. 

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, told Cherwell: “Freezing the student loan repayment threshold is a stealth tax on graduates. At a time when young people are battling sky-high rents and a brutal job market, the last thing they need is the Government quietly taking more from their pay packets. The whole system needs fixing.”

Annaliese Dodds, current Labour MP for Oxford East, was contacted for comment. A graduate of St Hilda’s College, she led protests during her time at university against the tuition fees introduced by New Labour in 1998.

Seeped in nostalgia: ‘Things I Know To Be True’ reviewed

Charlie Bailey
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Seeped in nostalgia: ‘Things I Know To Be True’ reviewed

Lighthouse Productions’ Things I Know To Be True achieved the rare feat of combining stellar acting with artful set design. Things I Know To Be True addresses the cracks that exist below the surface of any family, and the conflict between maternal obligation and independence. It’s set in a suburb of Adelaide, Australia and writer Andrew Bovell’s vision was to draw attention to “the dreams we’re sold”, romantically and economically. Its few Australianisms do not detract from its ability to address universal family tensions. The action revolves around elderly married couple Bob (Sam Gosmore) and Fran (Lucía Mayorga)’s attempts, with humorously opposite parenting styles, to prevent their children – now embarking on their adult lives – from losing the ideals they’d been brought up with. As in any family (although this one seems a crazily intense parental challenge) each child presents a different set of concerns: Rosie (Hope Healy) the youngest, gets her heart broken on a gap year; Pip (Gabriella Ofo) leaves her husband; Mark (Alexis Wood) comes out as transgender and to top it all off, Ben (Ediz Ozer) steals £250,000.

This production had lots to live up to. Lighthouse’s marketing (by Magdalena Lacey-Hughes, George Robson and Ben Adams) covered all bases: tickets hidden around Oxford, a partnership with the Magdalen College Instagram, and a preview at a Lincoln College cabaret. Adding to this, physical theatre company Frantic Assembly’s Things I Know To Be True was pushed down my throat near-daily by a school drama teacher, making me even more hopeful that this show would live up to the hype. Luckily, they nailed it, and managed to exceed expectations.  

Lighthouse’s interpretation was seeped in nostalgia and did a fantastic job of showing the unsteadiness of ‘family love’. In Cherwell’s preview, the directors mentioned their intent to make the audience recall a “state of growing up”, and to make theatre which “makes you feel something”. Both were certainly achieved. 

The script itself presents challenges, as dramatic turning points follow quickly after another. Moments of high tension are so frequent that it would be possible for the acting to come across as overly melodramatic. Lighthouse was sensitive to the extreme anger that the production carried, describing Fran on their Instagram as someone who “picks favourites and traumatises her children”. Since the text of the play is so dramatic, opting to portray it in a stripped back naturalistic style would have been exhausting for the audience. Lighthouse Productions do a fantastic job of reminding the audience that while the script touches on real emotions, it is not quite real, and the characters are comedic archetypes of real life phenomena which the audience will recognise.

Monologues were accompanied by musical underscores, and changes of location represented by different coloured lights. One example of the show’s ability to make the audience feel emotion without aiming for total naturalism was the scene in which Mark is driven to the airport to start her new life as Mia in Sydney. A car was created out of wooden chairs, and soft blue lighting created a sense of serene nostalgia as Mark leaves home for the final time. This enabled what could have been a monotonous chunk of speech to carry emotional weight.

Another effective set device was the gauze screens at the back of the stage, used to highlight the person each character is thinking of as they speak to the audience. This accompanied with a stereotypical wooden door frame structure to connote the home allowed the set to deliver both literal and metaphorical representations of family love. The doorway was a well-chosen focal point: when each family member rushed through it, it indicated that something was about to go awry. 

The productions’ success at carrying both humour and tension can be largely credited to Sam Gosmore’s portrayal of Bob. He was ridiculously believable as a tired father who loves his kids, but can’t bring himself to understand their generation’s ‘woke’ attitudes. Highlights were the opening scene where he is defeated by the new-fangled coffee machine, and his later extremely high tension confrontation with Ben: his utter rage that Ben would use his working-class background as a justification for stealing (“how dare you”, he screams) reveals a wounded pride. The actors’ focus in this particular scene was commendable: the audience could not help but fixate on the clenched fists of Ben and his father as they raced through a series of emotions. Ozer as Ben convincingly revealed the fragility of his ‘cool guy’ facáde as his fury turns to desperation and he tries to hug his father, who shakes with rage. 

Also fantastically acted was the relationship between Fran and eldest daughter Pip. Ofo as Pip was captivating as a woman desperate to change the mundanity of her life. In a monologue reflecting on childhood – “this garden is the world” – she conveyed a real sense of childish joy, contrasting with her later monologue embracing a more romantically liberated version of herself. She exuded a level of maturity unusual in student theatre.

Lucía Mayorga’s Fran’s physicality gave a convincing sense of a tired mother in a relentless cycle of stress that is largely self-imposed. The harshness of the way she speaks to her eldest daughter compared to the kindness with which she addresses Ben makes the audience reflect on the fact that parents are themselves people, with flaws. A sheer opposite to her stress is Rosie’s total innocence. I found their relationship the most touching – the idea that Rosie had stubborn dreams of independence, but needs her mother’s guidance to execute them really resonated. 

The only thing I questioned was the choice to die half of Fran and Bob’s hair grey given that the fact they are quite elderly is heavily implied. Otherwise, the acting and set combined to deliver a fantastic show. As the characters collapsed in grief at the play’s end, I had literal tears in my eyes, something student drama can rarely boast.

All (college) creatures great and small

Abigail Christie
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All (college) creatures great and small

Growing up, the loving companionship of animals had been a constant for me – a living, breathing reminder that life is worth treasuring and slowing down for. Yet, now separated by hundreds of miles, at university the happiness I had felt amongst my animals began to dissipate. That is, until I saw the cat tree in my college lodge and heard the tip-tapping of four paws across the wooden floor. Amidst the relentlessness of term, the joy of college pets becomes unparalleled. Unexpectedly, in the last weeks of Hilary, this is how I stumbled into the highlight of my term: the opportunity to discover what college pets mean to their community. 

Professor Biscuit and Admiral Flapjack (St Hugh’s College)

Image credit: @hughsiecats on Instagram, with permission

Biscuit (ginger boy) and Flapjack (tabby girl) are the two resident cats of St Hugh’s College. Both cats live with the Junior Dean, Bethan, who takes care of them. Flapjack is described as the more independent of the two; she enjoys wandering around college, believing everything belongs to her, granting her rights to go anywhere. Biscuit, quite differently, prefers to lounge and snooze at home. However, his nighttime patrols often end up with him in people’s kitchens. Bethan told Cherwell: “Biscuit and Flapjack have been a constant throughout my time here. I met them on my very first day at St Hugh’s, and they helped me settle into a completely new place. Even when my DPhil feels stressful, I know I can pick Biscuit up for a little dance or have Flapjack block my laptop and demand attention. They’ve been an absolute highlight of my time here”. 

Walter de Staplecat (Exeter College)

Image credit: Exeter College, with permission

Walter arrived in Exeter College in 2020 during lockdown when a Junior Dean brought him in to accompany her. Walter is described as a relatively grumpy cat, and in typical cat fashion, his affection depends on the person and the day – but is strictly limited to scritches under the chin. In fairer weather, Walter can often be sited in Exeter’s Rector’s Garden or near the Library in the Fellows’ Garden; if it’s cold, Walter (very sensibly) goes inside Palmer’s Tower to keep warm. Helena at Exeter College said: “I love Walter! He’s always outside the library, so whenever I step outside to take a break, he’s there to be cute and friendly and remind me why I love this college. He’s especially friendly in the mornings, so my top tip is to look in the Fellows’ Garden first thing, to find him”. 

Isambard Kitten Brunel and Benedictus Benedicat (Lady Margaret Hall)

Image credit: @lmh.cats on Instagram, with permission

LMH has two cats: Isambard Kitten Brunel (Issy, the fluffy Siberian Forest Cat) and Benedictus Benedicat (Benny D, the tuxedo). Since Michaelmas 2019, Issy has been commuting into college on the bus several times a week, riding on the Librarian’s shoulders. Like most cats, Issy loves to be worshipped, and is very happy receiving lots of fuss. The LMH Librarian told Cherwell: “He loves climbing, as a Forest Cat should, but unfortunately isn’t always great at climbing down. This is particularly a problem in the summer, when he will sometimes escape out of the window into the wisteria – but then gets stuck half way!”. Unlike Issy, Benny D lives on site, but is reportedly less people-focused, so students and staff alike see far less of him.

Truffle (Regent’s Park)

Image credit: Regent’s Park College, with permission

Truffle the tortoise became Regent’s Park College’s pet in 2023, after Emannuelle the tortoise had sadly passed away in 2022, having brought the college much love (and glory in tortoise races) throughout her 120 years. Most of the year, Truffle can be seen (often after much searching) free-roaming in Regent’s Main Quad, with her hutch near the Principal’s Garden. Truffle is well-pampered, having her very own JCR-appointed ‘Tortoise Keeper’, and her diet provided for with fresh fruit and vegetables by Regent’s Catering Team. Fun fact: Truffle loves watermelon and having the lower back of her shell scratched. Members of Regent’s have said about Truffle: “In the Oxford world where everyone is rushing, Truffle reminds us to slow down, be present, and breathe”. 

Basil and Beatrice (Mansfield College)

Image credit: Mansfield College, with permission

Mansfield College is home to Basil and Beatrice, an uncle and niece cat duo. Their family’s grey tabby gene runs strong, so although they look similar, Basil is differentiated by the nick in his left ear. Their favourite treat is Dreamies, frequently provided by students – the vet reportedly believes them to be overweight (surely no correlation!). Ella, a student at Mansfield, said about the cats: “At Mansfield, our college cats are well-loved and a surefire way to bring people together. They can be found snuggled up together on their armchairs, clamouring for Dreamies, ‘helping’ in the academic office (heavy quotes there) or just generally brightening up everyone’s mood. I don’t think Oxford would be Oxford without the animals that call our homes home.”

Teabag (St Hilda’s College)

Image credit: St Hilda’s College, with permission

Teabag the cat made St Hilda’s College her home in 2014, and promptly became guardian of the lodge, overseeing internal affairs. Teabag can often be found going for walks with one of St Hilda’s tutors, Irina Boeru, who said about Teabag: “She was named Teabag as there was a grey cat named Earl Grey wandering about at the time, who was the father of her kittens, which she had in the Lodge (it all happened rather quickly, and she is now spayed!). Carrying herself like an Egyptian God with emerald-green eyes, Teabag likes going out for walks in the gardens, and is particularly keen on exploring the river pathway in college, from where she enjoys watching punters and ducks, chasing butterflies, feathers on sticks and getting into (gentle) fights with the other feline residents!”. 

Reglisse and Ulysse (New College)

Image credit: New College, with permission

Reglisse (all black) and Ulysse (brown and white) are the two resident dogs of New College, both of whom live with the Warden. Both dogs are French (and even have their own passports!), and in France all registered dogs born in a certain year must have names beginning with the letter assigned to that year. So, Reglisse’s official name is Liquorice-Reglisse, being born in the year ‘L’. Their favourite spot in college is the Mound in the gardens. Members of New College have said about the dogs: “Both Reglisse and Ulie are very valued by students – they’ll often be seen bounding around college events, looking for food and attention, which they get in abundance!”. 

Alice and Meadow (Christ Church)

Image credit: Abigail Christie, with permission

Image credit: Isabelli Ferrari, with permission

Christ Church is home to two cats: Alice (calico) and Meadow (tuxedo). The cats came to Christ Church as kittens in Michaelmas of 2023 and have since been equipped with a ‘bod card’ each, though they currently prefer to spend the majority of their time sleeping in the office. Izzy at Christ Church told Cherwell: “In the spring and summer they like to tear up the carefully maintained Tom Quad grass. They also occasionally enjoy ‘pet-baiting’ students by walking in their direction and then running away. Having a college cat means a lot to me. In such a stressful environment, it is so nice to have a lovely little cat crawling about that can take my mind off the stresses of life for a few seconds or minutes”. 

Well-educated, fairly bred, but without money: Gissing’s ‘Collected Short Stories’

Hassan Akram
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Well-educated, fairly bred, but without money: Gissing’s ‘Collected Short Stories’

George Gissing won a scholarship to Oxford in the 1870s, but was unable to take up his place, having landed in jail for stealing money to help a prostitute whom he later married. He was released after a month and exiled for several years to the United States. The rest of his life, and his entire career, grew out of the crater of that first disaster. 

The 23 novels which Gissing published between 1880 and 1904 provide a rich panorama of the slum-dwellers, labourers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, businessmen, clergymen, housewives, scholars, journalists, suffragettes, Grand Tourists, politicians, and aristocrats of 19th-century England. His short stories have largely been neglected, but this three-volume edition from Grayswood Press – the first exhaustive collection of the stories – is intended to correct that. It succeeds brilliantly. These three handsomely bound, luxuriantly printed volumes contain a total of 103 stories – over 1,000 pages of George Gissing content – and show him to have been a master of the short story. Volume One contains stories which Gissing wrote for newspapers while in exile in the United States after his time in jail. Volume Two mostly contains stories and sketches which were commissioned to give a picture of London and English social life. Volume Three, which finds him at the peak of his powers, contains the very best short stories and the ones which have previously gained much wider recognition. 

Both Gissing’s finances and his love life were extraordinarily messy. His first marriage to an abusive prostitute ended with her early death; his second wife, with whom he had two sons, went mad and they separated; and as soon as he met the love of his life – Gabrielle Fleury, who had translated his novels into French – he died of tuberculosis aged forty-six. When, in a letter to a friend, he described the focus of his work as being “with a class of young men distinctive of our time – well‐educated, fairly bred but without money”, he was clearly describing himself. The sense of dislocation, of belonging neither to one class nor the other, and its impact on his personal life, is strongest in his novel Born in Exile – a study of ambition, hypocrisy, and class hatred – in which an arrogant, upwardly mobile atheist intellectual, ashamed of his humble origins, masquerades as a clergyman in order to marry the daughter of a wealthy religious scholar; eventually he is exposed and dies alone in exile in Europe. Tellingly, Gissing was also obsessed with the ancient world, and his lifelong ambition was to become a classical scholar. 

If this all sounds like it would have made him slightly insufferable, it also charges his fiction with a rich psychological complexity. The isolated, ill-fated young man of his novels appears repeatedly in the short stories. ‘Christopherson’ is about a bibliomaniac who once owned 24,718 books, lost everything in business, and continues to squander his tiny remaining income on obsessively hoarding books. ‘The House of Cobwebs’ concerns a young novelist and the friendship he strikes up with his eccentric new landlord. ‘Topham’s Chance’ is about the crafty escape of a disgraced university graduate from his employer, a semi-fraudulent correspondence tutor.  

In The Odd Women Gissing had written harrowingly about the plight of women in Victorian Britain, and his female characters, more than those of most male writers of his generation, possess real agency, as can be seen in stories such as ‘Fleet-Footed Hester’, about a teenage girl in Hackney who wants to be a runner, and ‘Miss Rodney’s Leisure’, about a young university graduate who emblematises the intelligent, determined New Woman of the 1890s. 

Also in evidence is his rare sense of humour, as in ‘A Freak of Nature’, about a bored middle-aged man who goes to the country and plays several practical jokes by impersonating his employer. More in character is his bleak masterpiece, ‘The Day of Silence’, the story of a wharf worker and his wife and their seven-year-old son who try to enjoy a summer weekend; the father and the son go boating and drown in an accident; the mother collapses and dies due to heat-induced illness. Gissing was not a cheerful writer. 

As well as characters and incidents, he was extremely adept at descriptive writing, especially at evoking the squalid, decaying atmosphere of the London slums in which most of his early novels are set, and which gives his books such value as social documents.

Many of these stories are just sketches of a character or a group or a single incident and, rather than building momentum towards something, they trail off quite inconclusively. Largely absent are the laidback style, colourful observations, and deft construction of his more famous contemporary Kipling. (As it happens, Gissing loathed everything Kipling represented, and his late novel The Crown of Life is notable not only for its scalding attack on imperialism but for its uncharacteristically happy ending). Gissing’s occasionally bland prose, too, becomes more of an obstacle in stories of three or four pages than in novels of three or four hundred pages, where the structural mastery of the whole and the sustained delineation of character amply compensate for the dry surface.  

Gissing as a writer is more than the sum of his parts, and his short stories, with exceptions such as ‘The Day of Silence’ and ‘Christopherson’, are more rewarding as a whole than they are individually. Together they provide a bustling mosaic of Victorian England which is as valuable as any one of his best novels. This three-volume set is indispensable for the library of anyone who cares for 19th-century fiction or for harrowingly realistic accounts of poverty, loneliness, and failure. 

George Gissing’s Collected Short Stories, Vols. 1-3, edited and introduced by Pierre Coustillas, are available now from Grayswood Press. 

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