Saturday 5th July 2025
Blog Page 2011

City unethical, say Oxford undergraduates

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A recently published report by OUSU and the Oxford Careers Service has indicated that many view the City professions as unethical.

Many also perceive that gender discrimination is still rife in business.

The survey of 450 students was prompted by enquiries from banking and management consultancy firms as to why only one third of their Oxford applicants for graduate employment were women.

The perception of discrimination in the financial services sector was particularly negative with only 20% of the women surveyed answering that it “truly does not discriminate”. Only 30% of women felt they would be supported in financial services and management consultancy, and just 40% in the law sector.

Furthermore, a majority of women felt that discrimination would actively affect them in any chosen career path, with 70% citing “promotion prospects and speed” as their primary concern. 50% were of the opinion that pay, benefits and the workplace culture would have a negative impact on their careers.

Based on the survey, which focussed on seven sectors – academic research, education and healthcare, engineering and environment, accounting, financial services, management consultancy and the law – the report concluded that “for every occupation, students perceive they must trade-off individual benefit and contribution to society”.

Jobs in financial services were perceived to have excellent pay, with starting salaries 34% above the Oxford average, and a clear promotion path; however almost none of the respondents felt it was an ethical career, and the majority felt it was not supportive of society and that discrimination was a problem for both genders.

Jonathan Black, Director of Oxford’s Careers Service, said in response to the findings, “in the era of mixed colleges and the Equal Pay Act, not much has changed in the perception of men and women about discrimination. Women may think lots of professions are open to them but, just as in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, they still perceive that there will be a big discrimination gap between them and their male counterparts in Oxford”.

The report also showed that despite 75% of respondents labelling the ABCL (accounting, banking, consulting and law) careers as “not supportive of society in general” with almost no students perceiving them as “demonstrably ethical”, 10% of undergraduate students are nevertheless employed in these sectors just six months after graduating.

A current female undergraduate commented “I think the City has always been presented as a male dominated space…Despite this, I think banks and other professional services are working extremely hard to reverse the appearance of a gender bias and I do think it is working.

“I applied for several internships and I felt that my gender was irrelevant in deciding whether or not I got the placement; instead it was interview technique or my skills set which determined the outcome…I think gender is still an issue at the higher management levels but at the internship and graduate recruitment levels it is unimportant from my experience.”

The assertion that initial entry into financial services suffers from little or no discrimination is supported by the fact that men and women in the sector have the same starting salaries. However, the perception that a ‘glass-ceiling’ still exists for female professionals appears to be reinforced by data from the City, as out of all the FTSE 100 companies, only 5 have a woman in the top job, whilst only 1 in 10 of the board directors are female.

Kat Wall, OUSU’s VP for Women commented: “If you see a lot of men in charge, it perhaps leads you to think you might not get there as a woman”.

Interestingly, the report also found that within the University there is a clear imbalance as “women make up only 10% of Professors, 18% of Readers and 27% of Lecturers”.

Oxford Literary Festival: Simon Singh

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It is testament to Singh’s reputation as a fascinating writer and speaker that such a crowd turned out during a furious thunderstorm in Oxford on Thursday. The Blue Boar Lecture Theatre was packed with dripping spectators, and they were not disappointed.

Singh has clearly given this same talk many times before, but only as of Saturday has he been able to begin it with a picture of a newborn baby; his and his wife’s first child. Such endearing minor changes aside, all the practice has made him an interesting, often hilarious speaker, with a really important message about alternative medicine and, more importantly, about the need for libel reform in Britain.

Singh’s ongoing libel case is over an article he wrote in The Guardian on the claims of chiropractic medicine. He recounted how, after being told he was going to be sued by the British Chiropractic Association, he ran to The Guardian legal team. ‘What are we going to do about this?’ he asked, to which their automatic response was, ‘Hey! What do you mean “we”?’

However, unlike his last speech at the Oxford Union, the Oxford Literary Festival hosts a considerably older audience and, while they laughed appreciatively at this well-delivered anecdote and Singh’s more scientifically accurate re-recording of Katie Melua’s 9 Million Bicycles track, I couldn’t help but feel that many had long ago made up their minds about many of the issues he was discussing.

‘Well, he simply didn’t seem to have a proper grasp of the memory of water involved in homeopathy’, I overheard one older woman mention as we left the event. I found it hard to fight the urge to grab her, shake her and insist, ‘No, you simply don’t seem to have a proper grasp of the extent to which he has scientifically analysed both the claims and the research about homeopathy and come to a highly informed opinion about it as covered in his detailed book Trick or Treatment!’

My frustration with the audience did not stop there. After his speech there were several questions asking whether he could have made clear that his article was his opinion rather than fact in order to escape the libel case. One cannot help but feel such a line of questioning rather misses the point of why he is standing by his article and fighting the case. He thinks what he said was right and attempts to water it down, even if it might have saved him a legal battle, would have prevented important information being available to the public. He is doing what he thinks is right.

Constant self-censorship amongst journalists and scientists for fear of expensive libel cases is one of the unquantifiable damages of having a system which works in favour of the wealthy and the big corporations rather than those with points to make in the public interest. We clearly need better libel legislation in Britain when even winning a libel case can result in un-reclaimable costs in the hundreds of thousands – equivalent to the value of a small house – for the individual or publisher.

Sadly, this particular Christchurch appearance just seemed to lack the buzzing and open-minded atmosphere of the Union event. I think the Literary Festival really should be attracting more student audience members; while opening Oxford up to members of the public is admirable, I cannot help but feel Oxford students could are missing out on a varied, interesting, and well-organised series of events because of a lack of publicity and, possibly more importantly, because of a need for student discounts.

Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial by Professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh is published by Corgi Books and available on Amazon

Oxford Literary Festival: Ben Goldacre

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‘What was I talking about?’ The audience sat entranced, waiting for Ben Goldacre to remember his point after his mind had once again wandered towards more and more surprising facts about the a placebo effect. Then with a great burst of air – ‘Ah!’ – and an appreciative titter from his fans, he launched himself back on topic.

Goldacre is a medical scientist and a journalist with a regular column in The Guardian, ‘Bad Science’ tackling scientific inaccuracy in all its forms, particularly where dangerously misreported in the media. He also happens to have been a Magdalen student. He was back in Oxford promoting the new edition of his complete book, also called Bad Science, after the last one had to exclude a chapter of criticism on selling vitamin pills to AIDs sufferers in South African townships, for which he was facing a libel suit at the time. He won the case, but he and The Guardian still lost thousands of pounds in un-reclaimable damages, one of the many ways in which British libel laws are in desperate need of change, as Simon Singh explained in his talk earlier this week.

But Goldacre was not here to discuss libel; his mission was to describe ‘how quacks, media and big pharmaceutical companies gang together to sell explanations of things which are actually social and political’, and though his talk went all over the place, one left with an important warning about the medicalisation of everyday life. He argued that in the middle of the century, when amazing medical breakthroughs were happening, the realisation of the link between cancer and tobacco for instance, too much was promised to the public. Doctors and their patients thought that all sorts of cancers and other diseases would be able to be linked to a specific dietary cause and that miracle cures would continue to crop up.

Add into the mix big pharmaceutical companies, which, when you run out of treatments for the diseases that already exist, discover that you can start inventing diseases for the treatments that already exist; a media desperate to sell big medical headlines with a lack of thorough science writers; and quacks eager to make a quick buck or genuinely duped by their own products and a poor understanding of the placebo effect. What you get is a society which takes problems like children’s poor behaviour and concentration in school and, instead of dealing with it using a tried and tested method, such as the incredibly test-successful and cost-effective Surestart parenting programme, or admitting that we don’t have a clear and satisfying answer beyond trying to improve children’s diet and making them get more exercise, as a society we turn en masse to the magic fish oil pills. Every socially- and politically-caused problem is explained away as mechanical, as something we can deal with using magic medicine, instead of addressing the real underlying problems, from poverty to a lack of communication with our spouses.

This wasn’t an interview; Goldacre didn’t have notes and there wasn’t a handy power point projector to refer back to; the format was simply a man sitting and spilling his ideas out to an audience, often asking them questions, begging them to challenge him. He had a particularly endearing way of going ‘Oh, did you hear about this?’ as if he were speaking to a couple of friends over a coffee, rather fighting the noise of the rain on a marquee full to bursting with hundreds of adoring fans (and curious critics).

Goldacre is a man with a ferocious intelligence and an incredibly sharp wit and I was blown away by the passion and thoroughness with which he approaches his arguments. I was even more impressed by his likability a speaker, something which apparently flies in the face of what he is like off the podium, according to the unlucky Hector Keate who spoke to him when he visited the Union.

He littered his speech with the phrase ‘and, more interestingly than that’, and every time followed it by throwing out yet another idea, fact or joke; amazingly, every time it would be even more interesting than the last one. Sadly, one hour was simply not enough to cover all the things he wanted to talk about, and I would have happily sat and listened until the small hours of the morning. He was one of the most engaging, funny and persuasive speakers I have seen in my life, let alone at the Oxford Literary Festival.

‘Zero-star’ Jericho restaurant to re-open

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The Lebanese Restaurant Al-Shami has now reopened following the temporary closure imposed on the business last week.

Al-Shami, of Walton Crescent, Jericho, was shut down by Oxford City Council inspectors on 19th March following a routine inspection which found failures in food hygiene management and staff not properly trained in safe food handling practices.

In response to the Council’s actions Mimo Mahfouz, owner of Al-Shami, spent over £25,000 refurbishing the restaurant kitchen and installing new fridges and freezers which will now keep raw and cooked meat separate. An additional area has also now been created specifically for the preparation of raw meat.

The restaurant was issued with a Hygiene Emergency Prohibition Order on Tuesday 16th March after officers found what the council have called ‘widespread evidence of cross contamination between open raw meat and high-risk ready to eat foods including cooked chicken, yoghurt, cheese and salad’.

The order, which was then upheld by Oxford Magistrates on Friday 19th March, dictated that the restaurant be closed indefinitely, until the Council’s Environmental Health Officers were satisfied that any risks to health had been removed.

Richard Kuziara, Environmental Health Officer, commented at the time: ‘When dangerous conditions such as these are found we will always take the necessary action to protect the public.

‘The premises will only be allowed to reopen when we are satisfied that they can produce food that is safe to eat.’

The improvements have been met with praise. Kuziara commented that, having interviewed all Al-Shami kitchen staff, he was satisfied that employees were now well aware of hygiene issues.

The restaurant’s food hygiene rating, which totalled zero stars according to last week’s inspection, cannot officially change until another random routine inspection is performed. However, Mr Kuziara commented that the establishment would have achieved a three star rating had the inspection been carried out this week, after Mahfouz had implemented improvements.

Mahfouz reflected on the recent events: ‘I feel that I have learned a lot from this and I thank environmental health for opening my eyes to a lot of things.’
He added, ‘everybody was shocked that we were closed, but we are concentrating on hygiene now at least 10 times more than before, we owe it to our customers that we are in top condition everywhere’.

Despite its recent bad press, students seemed keen to revisit Al-Shami, which has featured in The Which? Good Food Guide for the past twenty years. Claire Jonstone, a student living near to Walton Crescent, commented, ‘If the Council is happy now that the restaurant is hygienic, then I would definitely go – the food there is good’.

Another undergraduate from the Jericho area agreed ‘I’m sure Al-Shami will still be fairly popular among students.’

Information regarding the cleanliness of Oxford’s various food businesses is available through the City Council’s ‘Scores on the Doors’ scheme, which publishes restaurant information and hygiene ratings.

Oxford Literary Festival: Will Hutton

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The beginning of Will Hutton’s talk was somewhat complicated by a series of microphone adjustments and a wave of audience migration from one end of Christ Church Hall to the other, where, it was promised, the volume was audible. I, fortunately, was located in a more than adequate spot, and therefore was able to enjoy the event in its entirety. Hutton checked with the audience before he launched into his talk, and after an enthusiastic show of hands encouraged him to proceed, he sketched the outline of his forthcoming book Them and Us, which will be published this September.

Hutton’s talk was packed with information and examples, while remaining accessible to the non-economist; the argument he threaded through focused on the importance of fairness – a principle, he says, which underlines our appreciation of the NHS and can explain many of the current problems in society. We need, he explained, to restructure capitalism around the principle of fairness. As a long-term lover of all things left I am always unsurprised when I find myself persuaded by arguments framed in the language of fairness, but Hutton made a concerted effort to outline how his argument could be embraced across the political spectrum – fairness as getting what you deserve.

Hutton argued that fairness is inherently appealing to human nature: we understand that reward and punishment ought to be distributed according to how much effort we have put in. For this reason, Hutton claims, the principle of inheritance tax is misunderstood by George Osbourne and the Conservatives – it is not a ‘death tax’ but rather a ‘we are all sharing in your good luck tax’. People’s place in society is the luck of the draw, and whatever cannot be directly attributed to our own hard work is a consequence of this luck – the inherent appeal of fairness means that we can understand that there is something wrong with the arbitrariness of limitations imposed in this way.

I remain to be convinced that presenting the privileged with the inherent appeal of fairness could convince them to support increased redistribution, lower wages or education reform – fairness after all, may be understood by everyone, but so it seems, are other conflicting values, including special concern for one’s own life and family. However, Hutton certainly illustrated that an argument, at least, is required to show why it is acceptable for one’s life to be determined so completely by the accident of one’s birth. He extended his argument about the inherent value of fairness to argue for the instrumental value of helping people to break from self-perpetuating circles of poverty: a society which makes the best use of all of its citizens will be a more productive society.

Hutton’s passion for his arguments was expressed through the urgency in his voice and the accompanying energetic gesticulation – a rallying cry for the left slightly incongruous in the sumptuous setting of Christ Church Hall, but certainly a relief for those of us often concerned by the lack of vitality amongst the intellectual Left. Moments in the speech would not have been out of place at a protest or demonstration, and I felt a little disappointed that the audience were mostly respectable and middle aged, clapping politely at the end but doubtless went home with every intention of voting for David Cameron.

Hutton’s call for a fairer society is grounded on firm foundations, with examples drawn from historical precedent, and a convincing grasp of the accompanying political and economic considerations. The outline for change, both in theory and in terms of concrete steps, is both coherent and well considered: only when capitalism is underlined by a concern for fairness can it (and society) hope to survive in tact. The brushstrokes with which Hutton painted this society were, understandably, very broad – restructuring society in the space of an hour is a stretch for the best of us. If his book can deliver the quality of content Hutton gave us reason to expect with this talk, then we should be excited indeed for the date of publication.

 

Oxford Literary Festival: Andrew Rawnsley

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Man of the moment Andrew Rawnsley appeared at the literary festival to promote The End of the Party, his book chronicling New Labour’s rollercoaster ride in government over the last nine years. The same book which, incidentally, hit the headlines a few weeks ago because of the claims made about Gordon Brown’s behaviour towards staff. As Cherwell reported at the time, Oxford tutor Stewart Wood was rewarded with the questionable honour of having his face on the front page of the Mail on Sunday after the book revealed that Brown had barged past him on the way to a meeting in No 10.

The book is built out of interviews with a range of figures from the New Labour era from both in and outside of government, and embeds the intense relationships at the party’s heights in the national and party-political context of the last two terms. Rawnsley’s extensive experience in the murky waters of political journalism not only gained him access to the right people in writing this, but more importantly equipped him with the skills to get those people to offer their accounts of the last nine years, gory details included. From these Rawnsley structured a narrative unbiased by personal ties, as we find with the memoirs and diaries from the time, holding the architects of the ‘third way’ aggressively to account for their behaviour, but also dishing out credit where it is due. As Rawnsley says, “I have quite a lot of positive things to say about Gordon Brown and Tony Blair…but character matters in politics.”

Rawnsley was interviewed by Martin Ivens, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, whose thorough reading of the book meant that the questions were perfectly pitched to draw out the most interesting details and encourage the author to reveal his personal analysis of the events he reports. The book emphasises the incredible cracks behind the shiny packaging of New Labour’s spin machine, and the full extent of the Brown-Blair feud – Rawnsley described some of the behind the scenes action as a “soap opera-cum-psychodrama”. Audience members who had not read the book were treated to descriptions of some of the more incredible behind the scenes incidents, including Mandelson’s furious telephone call to Brown: “I love you but I’ll break you! If you do that, I can destroy you!” and John Prescott’s increasingly desperate interventions into the decaying Brown/Blair struggle.

Those who had already ploughed through the 803-page tome were rewarded with Rawnsley’s own views on the key players in New Labour – he believes Blair’s “hatred of personal confrontation” and failure to stand up to Bush and Brown shaped his premiership, and jokingly commented that while Gordon Brown has probably intended to become Prime Minister “since the age of seven”, he “didn’t really have a plan” for when he arrived at number 10.

Rawnsley also admitted that he had more material than could be included in this edition of the book, and explained that certain omissions were justified by the high standard of proof he sets himself. This was clearly a sensible decision; while the backlash from the party following the publication was aggressive – as Rawnsley commented, “No 10 was not very pleased when this book came out” – events in the book have subsequently been backed up by his sources and other witnesses. The book is an excellent read, and as Rawnsley pointed out, some of the incidents are just too funny to make up.

Oxford Literary Festival: Patti Smith

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I should probably start by explaining that I can’t claim to be a massive Patti Smith fan. I know who she is of course, I can hum a couple of songs, but I wouldn’t jump through fire to go and see her, if you get what I mean. Fortunately for me then, there was a complementary Cherwell ticket going spare, and the event was five minutes from my room. No excuse.

Smith was at the Literary Festival to promote her new book, Just Kids, about her relationship with famous photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The pair met in New York in the 70s when Smith was just twenty, and remained firm friends until he died in ’89. The book is, Smith explained, the fulfilment of the last promise she made to him: to put their story into writing.

During her interview with David Freeman, Smith described how she met Mapplethorpe several times before he rescued her from an awkward park bench scenario with a bearded science-fiction writer by pretending to be her boyfriend (I know – we’ve all been there, right?). Smith then proceeded to regale the audience with tales of their time living at the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out with Janice Joplin and avoiding drugs in the late sixties.

Smith revealed that the iconic image on the front of Horses (Smith’s first album) had taken Mapplethorpe only eight shots to perfect. Mapplethorpe needed no assistants and requested only that Smith “didn’t get spaghetti stains on my shirt”, she added that “for Robert, taking pictures was no big deal.”

During the talk Smith had a tendency to slide towards that brand of slightly-bullshitty-artsy-indulgence: her first song was “a young person’s declaration of existence”, while Mapplethorpe “was not rebelling against anything, he was himself, he was his own vision”. I’m not entirely sure what that means.

The heights of silly were not reached, however, until the audience put their frankly bizarre questions to Smith, ranging from: “Who is the coolest person you have ever met?” to “Do you have any advice for a 13 year old?” (To which Smith’s answer was: “Take care of your teeth”). Enlightening indeed.

The high point of the event followed the question everyone was hoping someone would ask: “will you sing for us?” Smith whipped out her guitar and sang two songs for the audience – the second was about William Blake (“whenever I start to feel sorry for myself I think of William Blake”). I emerged from the marquee into the rain with a smile on my face; Smith’s wit, modesty and extraordinary voice (talking and singing) made the event a thoroughly well-spent hour of my life. I even enjoyed the artsy-bull if I’m honest. Patti Smith is almost certainly the coolest person the Sunday Times literary festival has seen for some time. I’m sure the book is a good read.

The Budget: ‘It’s Politics, stupid’

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As Budgets go, Wednesday’s was one of the most unexciting and uneventful of recent times. There were no ‘rabbits out of the hat’ that Brown performed as Chancellor, or nothing like the excitement of Budgets by Healey, Lawson and Ken Clarke. This was a budget thin of economics and big on politics.

The only real significant changes that were announced in the budget was the abolition of stamp duty for houses below £250,000, This change was paid for by the introduction of stamp duty at 5% on homes worth more than £1million. This got the Labour benches cheering and put the Tories in another sticky situation.

During the budget the Chancellor is allowed to have a tipple of his choice – Ken Clarke chose sherry and Lawson, whisky, but Darling and Brown only ever have mineral water. It was good that Darling did not choose cider which will saw its duty increase by 10%.

What the budget did not do was greater than what it did. It did not announce the quantitative measures to restore the budget balances. There were no radical decisions made on spending or on taxation that the markets were calling for in the build up to the budget. The Red Book does include some measures that will reduce spending in some departments. But these measures, such as cutting £555m from the department of Health ‘through reducing staff sickness’, do not represent a credible long term strategy for restoring the government deficit.

This budget, economically at least, may not have happened as it did not actually do anything. All of the decisions that it did not take will be taken either immediately after the General Election or at the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Politically this budget has several ramifications. It was a sensible budget and has done much to shore up Alistair Darling’s status as a sensible, if sober, Chancellor. It put the ball firmly in the court of the Conservatives and their plans, which are, in the words of David Cameron, ‘to get the economy moving’. It is clear that although the Tories must have this plan, they are not yet putting it in the public domain.

The Conservatives have been the main losers of this budget. It was a neutral budget, presenting Cameron with a problem. What to cut, how to do so and, most importantly when to inform the electorate of his party’s intentions. His response to the Budget was a good parliamentary performance, while Clegg’s speech was not; the Chamber got less and less populated during the Lib Dem leader’s speech. However in post-Budget appearences, Cameron has appeared agitated and not comfortable when answering questions on economic issues.

Another thing to notice about this budget, from a Tory viewpoint, is the conspicuous absence of George Osbourne. One would have expected a possible future Chancellor to lead the Conservative response to the announcements. Osbourne has only appeared in front of a few media outlets, and those that he has graced with his presence have only seen him toe the party line that they had before the Budget statement. Is Osbourne now become a political liability? Clarke’s own label of him as inexperienced, his previous membership of the Bullingdon and his trips to Russian magnate’s yachts have seen him grow into a political liability. If the Tories win, will he be the next Chancellor?

This political budget leaves the Tories with all the work to do. It is they who have been most affected by the Budget and the way that they respond will be of crucial importance to their electoral fortunes. Even the Belize tax agreement (remember a certain Lord Ashcroft?) caused yet greater embarrassment for them. Who is the second biggest loser? Those enjoy a nice pint of Cider and are about to buy a one million pound house. 

A funny thing happened on the way to the tattoo parlour

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It takes about ninety minutes to get from Oxford train station to the Brixton tube station in Southwest London. This means that if you want to be first in the queue at Sacred Ink Tattoo Studio, which opens at 11AM and takes walk-ins only on Saturdays, you need to catch the 9AM train at the latest because you never know what’s happening with the tube at the weekend. With the Olympics just around the corner the construction can be horrendous, it turns out the entire Jubilee line is shut but that’s OK because Sacred Ink is nearly a straight shot from Paddington Station, take the Bakerloo line down to Oxford Circus and then boomerang around on the Victoria line to Brixton, the last stop on this train, everyone please exit the train.

Sacred Ink is run by Martin Morrissey, who has been tattooing for over thirteen years on three continents. He’s originally from Brixton, a fact which I learn from Pat, the only other person who has braved the weather and the early hour to arrive before the opening of the studio. Pat has known Martin for years, they both grew up in the neighbourhood, and after trying a number of places around London Pat can honestly say that Martin is the best, to be entrusted on this day to inscribe the name of Pat’s second child on the inside of his right bicep, “Luice” (pronounced “Lucy”). This is Pat’s sixth tattoo so I feel good about his endorsement: even if he has known Martin for ages, surely he wouldn’t let just anyone carve something permanent into his body, at least not twice? Pat is actually the second person who has told me to expect great things from Martin. The other person is my friend Kilian, whom I met on a boat in Turkey two years ago and who has many, many elaborate tattoos. When Google returned 44,800 results for “London Tattoo Parlours” I cut to Facebook and checked with Kilian: “Wow you asked the right guy! I have a really good friend named Martin Morrissey who does great work out in London…”

The walk from Brixton tube station to Sacred Ink is along a busy road called Acre Lane, lined with shops selling affordable consumables, layaway furniture and used tyres, franchised fast food everywhere. I pass an off-license selling espresso, cappuccinos and popcorn out of a newly built window in its store front; why not, everybody is diversifying during the recession. I arrive a few minutes before eleven, standing outside in the rain, counting the white people that walk by on one hand. It’s a good thing I wore my tweed (collar popped!) and skinny jeans so I would look especially ironic huddled under my dandy pink and blue umbrella, eating cous cous that I brought from home because I’m giving up being skinny for Lent to pursue the even greater vanity of bigger muscles; if you don’t eat you can’t grow.

This would be the time to mention what I have come all this way to have inscribed onto the middle of the right half of my back: Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo (“Without fear of infamy I answer thee”), from Dante’s Inferno and also the last line of the epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I have it typed out in just the font and size I want, on a little piece of paper just for Martin, absolutely no room for error.

How many Oxford students does it take to screw-in a light bulb?

Pat has brought his wife and young Luice, still in her pram, except no prams (or bikes, or loud music) are allowed in the studio, so he settles down to wait by himself while I go first. Martin is running late, “stuck in traffic” says his assistant, who busies herself getting me signed-in, cash in advance, sign this waiver, I hand her my design, “Where do you want this?”.

“On my back, under my right shoulder blade.”

“Is this your first tattoo?”

“Yes.”

She smiles, I think impressed, “Well, it’s not the least painful place you could have picked…”

Martin arrives, traffic was terrible, he checks my design and approves, “Let’s tattoo!” The studio is very neat, very clean and very small. The waiting area is a square of gray carpet with no chairs, just a bench along the plate glass storefront on which Pat has perched, declining my offer of a newspaper while he waits. The tattooing happens on the other side of the high counter, a little square of white tile where everything that can be is sterilized. Martin dons latex gloves, unwraps a new needle, pours fresh ink into a disposable plastic thimble, washes my back with alcohol and disinfectant, smears Vaseline over the first letters in the design now stenciled on my back and steps on the foot pedal: dip, buzz, cut, wipe; dip, buzz, cut, wipe. This is the rhythm of the next ninety minutes of my life. The telephone rings periodically, Martin’s assistant issues the same refrain each time: “Hello, Sacred Ink? We’re open 11-6 today. No we don’t take appointments on Saturdays, it’s first-come, first-served. No, we can’t give you a quote over the phone, you’ll have to come down. We’re open 11-6 today. Thanks.” My arms, stretched above my head to keep the skin on my back taught, fall asleep.

In the end I am not nearly so counter-culture as I thought. (Perhaps the pink and blue umbrella should have tipped me off?) There isn’t even any real pain to brag about, although the letters along the spine do make my eyes water. When we’re all finished, Martin covers his work with cling film which I am to keep on for the entire afternoon. He wraps scotch tape around my chest and I feel momentarily vindicated: this is going to hurt like crazy when it comes off, ripping out a huge strip of chest hair. Martin hands me a card with after care instructions. “Twice a day you need to put this cream on your tattoo until it heals, called Bepthanol.”

“Will do. Can I get this at any chemist?”

“Yeah, just go to the baby aisle. It’s nappy rash cream.”

Of course it is. Story of my life.

Moore-ishly good

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Revered as one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century, a wide-ranging collection of sculptures, drawings and sketches by Henry Moore has been brought together at the Tate Britain. Works span his entire career from the 1920s to the early 1960s.

Moore emerged on the art scene with the concerted intention to place himself apart from classical sculptural tradition and its restrictions of academic modelling. Maintaining the integrity of the materials he worked with – stone, plaster, bronze and wood – he engaged in direct carving.

His sculptures are all at once beautifully simple and complex. There is a duality about them. On the one hand, their fluid forms seamlessly punctuate the gallery spaces, but on the other hand, they are evidently the culmination of meticulous anxiety-ridden workings at the hands of Moore, who explores themes of apprehension, claustrophobia and the violated in much of his work. Bryan Robertson, the exhibition’s curator has commented, “His work is grim, and on occasion tragic. There is no easy reassurance in it. It is anything but gentle.”

Whilst I do not wholly agree with this as a generalized statement of all the work on display, it is true that some pieces are imbued with a great sense of the agonizing processes undertaken to nurture the sculptures to completion. His forms are sinewy and very deliberate.

The exhibition’s breadth means that we see how Moore’s artistic processes change and develop. The works in the first two rooms are figurative and cement his principle and enduring interest in the human form. This is revisited at the end of the exhibition with a focus on the reclining female figure. In the interim, Moore’s work departs in a Modernist direction, and two rooms are dedicated to work that reflects a concern for the abstract, the allusive and the suggestive. Sculptures in this phase of his career have sensuously undulating surfaces and subtle protuberances. They are sexy and evocative.

What follows is Moore’s lesser-known work. The outbreak of the war marked a switch in Moore’s medium of choice from sculpture to drawing. Using a combination of pencil, wax crayon, watercolour washes and ink, Moore produced an array of drawings, diversifying his artistic repertoire. His ‘Shelter Drawings’ depict the hostile environment faced by the masses as they huddled in the London Underground, away from the full force of the bomb attacks above ground. Moore also made drawings of coalmine workers and like his official ‘war art’, these reflect the artist’s tremendous sensitivity towards his subject matter.

The exhibition ends on a high with a room of Moore’s sculptures made out of  elmwood. The recumbent female forms are complemented by the use of the warm, smooth wood. Moore once said, “Trunks of trees are very human… To me they have a connection with human life.” These sculptures bear associations with sexuality and fecundity. They have an all-encompassing presence that pervades the whole room and the viewer is drawn into the admiring their every curve.

I’d be hard pressed to say what I liked most about this exhibition. Moore’s early figurative work is executed with such great tenderness particularly those sculptures that reference his ‘Mother and Child’ motif, whilst his wartime drawings are wonderfully nuanced and reveal the artist’s affinity with political and intellectual issues of his time.

His works are profoundly resonant, and though it’s a shame that there is a limited display of his larger scale work (which admittedly are often placed outdoors), I shall be going back to see more of Moore before the exhibitions closes in the summer.

Four stars.

This exhibition runs until 8th August.
Admission is £11 for students. Full price tickets cost £12.50.

Image: Henry Moore – Reclining Figure (1939), Detroit Institute of Arts © Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation