Saturday 12th July 2025
Blog Page 2220

Genre Confused

0

Mia Matsumiya builds robots. They do cool things for 30, 40 seconds; they twitch, malfunction; then they die. She calls them ‘tragibots’.

She also makes music. The creation is a similarly painstaking process, interweaving neoclassical form with structural rigidity and melodic freedom, then casting it all in terms of the guitars and vocals more familiar to doom or sludgemetal connoisseurs. We call it ‘postmetal’.

This is a genre which, though rooted amongst hardcore and metal musicians looking to express themselves beyond the verse-chorus-verse straitjacket, is now just as much home to jazz, psychedelic and even classically-trained artists. They simply want to turn up the amps and scream a bit. For each band tagged with the name, a distinct musical heritage is apparent.

There are raw, fire-and-brimstone blues behind Oxbow’s The Narcotic Story, while Isis… well, Isis seem to have rather a penchant for bears. Enraged ones, specifically. All of which might sound horribly pretentious, an accusation sometimes difficult to dismiss.

Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn, an instrumental concept album about the Maoist Great Leap Forward featuring 208 words of track title, probably deserves to be so branded. But to focus on the self-indulgence is to get caught up on the ‘post-‘; and forget that the music is still very much metal.

Oxbow’s ‘Eugene Robinson’ can turn a room of lethargic, undernourished indie geeks into a convincing reinterpretation of a Hieronymous Bosch image with nothing more than his tortuous howling, while thrusting his bemuscled form at the audience.

He often adds to the aura by involving the mic stand in illicit, aggressive and possibly quite painful relations. There are more accessible styles; 15-minute orchestral-rock compositions are never going to make good football chants. This is music that demands, seizes and finally rewards, your complete attention.

The juxtaposition of power chords and piccolos might seem a perplexing one, but if you can stomach that thought and open up your mind a little bit, you will find that the music is immensely rewarding. Who, after all, doesn’t want to live the dream, and one day relish the prospect of having a tormented soul thrust his grief, and his groin, in your face, to an accompaniment of violins?

 

Violence hits freshers’ week

0

Fresher’s Week has been marred by a series of violent incidents involving students from several colleges, with JCRs warning students about the dangers of alcohol.

One student from Jesus college was attacked on Wednesday of 0th week and was taken to hospital by ambulance.
Henry Freeland, a second year at St Anne’s, witnessed the incident.

He said, “I was walking away from Park End at about 2.30am when I saw a student lying on the floor. I assumed that he was drunk, but on closer inspection it became clear that this was not the case.”

“The attacker and a friend were still there, they seemed to find the whole thing very funny and explained that the student had kicked one of them whilst urinating, so he was punched by one of the guys, a professional boxer.”

“The punch knocked him to the floor and probably broke his nose. It was at this point that they left and we called an ambulance.”

A St Hilda’s student, who wished to remain anonymous, was also chased and assaulted while returning to her house in Cowley after a night out.

“My friend and I were chased by a white male in a hoody until we got to our house where we stopped and he hit me. We really did not expect it to end that way,” she said.

“It was unprovoked – all we did was ignore whatever they were shouting at us from the car they pulled up in,” she continued.

“It’s true that people just don’t think it will ever happen to them, until it does. I admit that now I am worried about the rest of the year living in the area.”

In the same week, a group of St John’s students were reportedly chased into the college by an Oxford resident, which is now under investigation by the college authorities.

The JCR Entz Officer, William Deller, circulated an email to St John’s students telling them that, “whilst the matter is currently being investigated by the porters, and we are not looking to apportion blame, this sort of behaviour is unacceptable.

“We have been warned that should such an incident happen again there could be severe repercussions.

“Please think carefully about your actions this week,” Deller continued, “and indeed on any night out. We all want to have a good time but your safety is of course of paramount importance.”

St Hilda’s JCR Committee has also sent out safety advice to members of the JCR. It includes suggestions to limit “alcohol intake and not getting involved in any fights” and warning that “any incidents where students initiate or incite violence will be treated as student disciplinary offences by the college.”

 

Album Review: Oasis

0

Every few years another Oasis album comes out and people
fall over. Some hit the ground in disgust: ‘Oasis? Oafs in parkas fixated on an imaginary Sixties with a frontman whose first love is fighting German gangsters! Rubbish!’. Others crumple to their knees in tribal admiration, worshipping any sweatsozzled stage worthy of the Gallagher
loafers.

The core question for both these camps is: ‘what is Oasis for?’ Flatterers know that, at a gig in one of the enormo-domes the band are wont to play in these days, they can lunge a beer-spattered, check-patterned forearm round their best mate’s neck, probably known as Craig or Darren, and go ‘mad fer it’ over ‘Champagne Supernova’ and ‘Wonderwall’.

Slightly more reserved fans see in them the replication of a great tradition in popular music: appropriation. The Beatles have always been Oasis’ target of choice. Noel rarely manages not to mention them in interviews, and Liam went around for some years actually thinking he was the resurrected spirit of John Lennon.

He’s not. But what Oasis have always managed to do is create a product that people want. They release an album and it sells, and there is no doubt that what they do is much more in the spirit of the tradition of guitar-based popular music than timid noodling by dance-fixated nerds on Moog synthesizers having to stop every five seconds to scrape their floppy fringe away from their eyes without disturbing their manscara.

To blast away these waifs with real rock and roll, Oasis storm back with their seventh studio album Dig Out Your Soul, a warm embrace of the tradition of appropriation. Here The Beatles become more than an affectionate albatross around the necks of Noel and Liam – they become a kind of daemon, supporting, bolstering, encouraging, but always leaving important decisions to the demands of 2008.

In earlier albums it seemed as if Noel in particular was afraid of innovation in the envelope-cauterising manner of his heroes. The attempts on 2001’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants ended in critical contempt, although moments on that album, like the paranoid swirl of ‘Gas Panic!’, were worthy of minor Lennon/McCartney achievements. Noel got around the charge of backwardness by merely aping the Fab Four’s developments and assuming that would suffice for critics who wanted progression.

Let’s be clear; there is little real innovation as such on this album, unless you count quirky-ish beats and using a vocoder. Oasis would have no point if they tried to innovate in a spectacular manner.

Would we really want from this band a Radioheadstyle self-consciousness that spirals quickly into humourless defensiveness? A Kid A trajectory that shows a band so disconnected from their fans that they refuse to play ‘Creep’? Oasis continue to respect the taste of their fans, however banal that taste may seem to some high-brow critics.

As usual, most of the album is penned by Noel, with three offerings from Liam and one each from Gem Archer and Andy Bell respectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter two are the most forgettable. Liam builds on his earlier promise with an elegant (for Oasis) turn on ‘I’m Outta Time’ and the psych-rock rave-up ‘Ain’t Got Nothin’. Noel remains the furthest from the Beatlesburden. This may seem contradictory, but what he’s managed to do is to make his songs sound just like… his other songs, and not like his musical idols.

The pulse of ‘Waiting for the Rapture’ and rocket-blast of lead single ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ anchor the first half of the album firmly in Noel’s classicist Oasis vein. There’s still the wide-eyed, embracing melody, the rather silly lyrics (‘I got my heebie-jeebies in a little bag’) but it all bubbles underneath what is actually very murky music for Oasis.

The album’s dense and multilayered arrangements mean that the aural world that the album creates is perhaps the most consistent, atmospheric and enticing since 1994’s breakthrough Definitely Maybe. So, what is the point? Well, Oasis are a fallback, a steady hand on the throttle, a cup of tea, a shag pile carpet.

They present no real difficulty, no need for anxious concentration for the listener, although on this work such attention would be rewarded. Their real purpose lies in the recreation of origins from the vantage point of retrospective appropriation. On this new album they’re exciting, energetic.

Liam is still probably the best rock and roll singer of the last twenty years and these songs point to a future that gestures to journalistic questions of musical purpose with a two-fingered salute.

Four stars

 

Racist slogans worn by Peter’s freshers

0

Undergraduates at St Peter’s College are to be collectively warned about their behaviour after a group wore t-shirts bearing homophobic and racist comments while on a pub crawl.

When challenged by offended onlookers, they claimed to be from Teddy Hall.

The pub crawl, which took place on Thursday of Freshers’ Week, involved the first years being given t-shirts on which they could write, and then being split into three groups.

As the evening progressed, the writing on some of the t-shirts of one group became increasingly offensive, with accompanying second years advising them to turn their t-shirts inside out, or scribble over the writing.

When challenged, some of the students claimed to be from Teddy Hall, a college with whom St Peter’s College has a longstanding rivalry.

Charlie Southern, the St Edmund Hall JCR President, has called their behaviour, “totally unacceptable.”

He continued, “the fact that when challenged the students claimed to be from Teddy Hall is pretty pathetic to be honest, and it will only come back to harm them to an even greater extent in the end.”

St Peter’s JCR President, Sanjay Nanwani, called the incident “regrettable”, and said that it was “unfortunate that it happened”, conceding that some of the material was offensive.

He stressed that in organising the event, the Freshers’ Committee had abided by all decanal rules and regulations, that the incident was down to a minority of freshers, and put their claims to be from Teddy Hall down to “a moment of frivolity, not malice.”

“The JCR obviously does not condone racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism. We are very tolerant,” Nanwani said. “I want to stress that we have every respect for St Edmund Hall.”
He added that he was confident there would be no disciplinary action taken against students involved and that the Dean was to send an email to all St Peter’s freshers warning them about their conduct.

The Dean of the college, Dr. Roger Allen, who was unaware of the incident until it was brought to his attention by Cherwell, said that, “St Peter’s takes a very serious view of any offensive behaviour on the part of its students”, and that the President “has the College’s full confidence and support in the way he and the JCR committee are dealing with this incident.”

He said that he has since discussed the incident with the Junior Deans and the JCR President.

 

Burglars raid three colleges

0

Three colleges have fallen victim to thieves in a spate of burglaries this week, including the loss of a widescreen television from St Anne’s JCR.

Students were astonished as they entered the common room to discover that the enormous TV had vanished.

JCR President George Kynaston informed the college by email and offered a day of amnesty on Monday to anyone returning the TV.

He said, “I’m hoping this was someone in the JCR just being stupid and that we can get the TV back without any trouble.”

No information has been forthcoming, but he dismissed the idea that it may have been an outside theft, saying, “it would be pretty tricky to smuggle that TV past the
porters lodge.”

College authorities are currently studying CCTV footage and police may get involved.

An intruder, believed to be from outside of college, also broke into a student’s room in St Peter’s college.

The incident took place on the 8th of October between 6.00 pm and 2.30 am, while the student was out. The burglar was caught on CCTV scaling a wall. Investigations are ongoing.

St. Peter’s JCR president Sanjay Nanwani maintains that the college has “acted promptly” and that members of the JCR have been kept “regularly informed of developments”.

He confirmed that he is certain that “the necessary steps will be taken to ensure the integrity and security of [their] premises.”

Jessica Davies, a second year who lived last year on the staircase where the theft took place, said, “I never had any concerns about security at St. Peter’s and I’m confident it was only a one-off.”

Theft also hit LHM, with the loss of a laptop at around 8pm on the 7th of October. This follows a series of burglaries in the Jericho area over the previous few days.

Five of the incidents resulted from students not locking their doors properly or in some cases leaving them open.
Thames Valley Police are currently investigating whether this incident is linked with several other thefts of jewellery, iPods, laptops, digital cameras, cash and even champagne.

Deputy Sergeant Marc Tarbit, who leads the Oxford Burglary team, issued the following statement, “we seem to have at least one person targeting properties in the Jericho area and some Jericho residents have made the burglar’s job far easier for them.”

The police have urged all students to make sure that their doors and windows are secure before they leave the house.

 

The Live Wire: Enter Shikari

0

Since their last appearance in Oxford two years ago, Enter Shikari have burst onto the music scene with the release last March of debut album Take to the Skies. Now the St. Albans-based quartet’s chaotic blend of trance and hardcore has become more than just an underground fad.

Enter Shikari take this opportunity to showcase material from their newly recorded album, with five previously unreleased songs, even at the expense of first single ‘Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour’, and fan favourite ‘Jonny Sniper’.

The new songs reveal some interesting additions to the mix; ‘The Jester’ opens with a flute melody over a swinging jazz beat, before descending into a screaming, guitar heavy midsection, which seamlessly segues into a happy hardcore crescendo.

The band are slow to get into their stride – the frequency of new material early on in the set-list seems to slow down the night. Enter Shikari are at their best when they have the whole room singing, screaming or shouting the words back at them.

When they get going though, they really get going – ‘Labyrinth’ sees frontman Rou Reynolds careering across the stage, whipping the crowd into vicious circle pits. There are more melodic moments too: ‘Return to Energiser’ ends with a slow sing-a-long, the audience waving glow-sticks.

Their fusion of hardcore screams, trance sections and singable choruses may sound like a bad idea on paper, and like a bit of a mess to the untrained ear, but playing live is where Enter Shikari really shine – their live show is an exhilarating experience.

 

A grand old man and his dog

‘This is probably the worst fucking work I’ve done in my whole life – although there has been some real bullshit’. The scene doesn’t seem to be going well. Despite the precision of the actors, despite their sheer willingness to listen and be directed, Walcott isn’t happy.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, Walcott has been feted since his emergence onto the poetry scene more than fifty years ago. Hailing from St. Lucia, Walcott is at the forefront of the Caribbean’s cultural identity, and is a world-respected artist in his own right.

Wandering back and forth from his chair to the acting space, his large frame seems weighed down with age. His white trainers squeak across the parquet flooring.

Far from revelling in his fame and extraordinary success he shrinks from talking to us. While his actors chat and joke with us, he remains silent. Until, unprompted, he says ‘You’re from Oxford? There’s a university there as well?’ A wide grin stretches across his wrinkled face, before he recedes to his chair.

The room is grand, but battered. This is not the sandy beaches of Walcott’s epic Omeros, nor the Thebes of Sophocles’ Antigone. It is Woolwich Town Hall, and we are at a rehearsal of Derek Walcott and Peter Manning’s current operatic production of Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes.

Several hours after arriving, we are finally given the chance to talk to Walcott. He’s less than pleased. In fact he’s thoroughly annoyed. It is safe to say that all of our fantasies of inspirational, generous poetic genius are shattered.

A few minutes later, Walcott returns. Grumpy, certainly, but calmer, he asks whether he can eat his lunch during the interview. We, overly enthusiastic, offer to ‘wait until later, if it’s more convenient?’.

It isn’t. And so we begin. First he wants to know whether we are going ‘to ask a load of dumb questions’. We are, after all, from Oxford.

But the play, the play, we protest, what about the play? ‘Tyranny is an eternal thing’, he muses. Well. Fine then. It is the humanity of the Antigone, the terrible relevance of the play, which has captured him.

Originally written by Sophocles, it recounts the tale of the martyr Antigone, whose brother Polyneices is denied burial by the dictatorial Creon. Adapted by Seamus Heaney into an epic poem in 2004, Antigone has been transmuted into operatic form, by the highly acclaimed Dominique le Gendre, the first woman to compose for the Royal Opera House.

Combining the work of two Nobel Prize winners, the rising talent of le Gendre and the skill of conductor Peter Manning, this is a project of stunning proportions. Premièring at the Globe last weekend to awful reviews, it is clearly also a contentious project.

Walcott has decided to relocate the play from Grecian Thebes to a failing Latin American republic, avoiding what he terms the ‘cliché’ of the Middle East. He is painfully aware of the violence which has disfigured Latin America. This project, hailed as a triumph of cultural diversity by the national press, is not about difference but about universality and unity.

Latin America, he tells us, is ‘my choice, my interpretation’, but ‘if you put it in China, Africa, it’ll all work’. ‘The reality of it is that it is nothing to do with being Greek, or being Colombian. The ultimate thing is the horror which comes upon a family. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what context it is in.’

But the play, the poem, and now the opera, are not to do with aesthetics, or an enjoyable experience for the audience. ‘It’s a context of violence set against a background of considerable beauty’ he adds. The portrayal of violence is something which concerns him; because ‘the horrible thing is, sometimes, violence can become a cliché’.

His ideas for direction struggle against this truism, and he focuses upon the image of ‘a dead dog at the side of the street, or in the middle of the road. You don’t see dead dogs in the street in Europe, in England, in London’.

It is a picture intimately connected with the Latin American setting, and has a powerful and defamiliarising potency. ‘If you substitute a dead dog for Polyneices, that’s what he wanted Polyneices to be’. It’s about the visceral, the brutal and the putrescent.

‘That putrescence is central to the play, and that putrescence doesn’t really have anything to do with Greek columns, or Greek architecture…’ ‘The greatest literature happens when there is a crisis of faith in that society’, Walcott adds.

It is the faith of the audience which interests him. They cannot believe in Greek gods, in passionless acting and old bits of marble. So we must access ‘the reality not of the gods, but of a dead dog in the street, rotting; there’s been too much horror not to start there.’

Modern drama fails to confront that sense of tragedy, he feels. ‘Instead of poetry, you get neurosis… it’s not poetry, it’s a clinical, psychological thing.’ But ‘the classic is instant, the classic is now.’

We move on to questions about the operatic nature of the production. What, we ask, does the music bring to the play? Walcott shakes his head fiercely. ‘It’s not what it brings to it, you have to think of it simultaneously’. The music, he says, ‘should be simultaneous, it should be synonymous, with the text’. Peter Manning, conductor and musical director, emphasises this point further, and talks at length about the intimacy of the relationship between verse and music.

But, he stresses, it is the task of any sincere musician to fight against the cliché of ‘the poetry of music, rather than the poetic in music’. One of the major musicians and conductors of his age, Manning he is trying to ‘create a new structure’, through his company, Manning Camerata, and to act ‘to engage at a different level’. ‘That you have to create the poetic is the challenge for any performing artist’, he says.

A refreshed looking chorus have returned from their lunch break. The cast are winding up for an arduous afternoon, but they are laughing, and smiling. We gather our things, and go to leave.

‘How are we getting back to Oxford?’ Walcott enquires. ‘By coach’, we reply. ‘Coach? You have to drop such an archaic word…A coach, several horses…’ he laughs. And a smile finally slashes across his wrinkled face.

 

Greenbox: Desperate for Development?

0

Over recent years Development in Oxford has galloped towards its precarious financial situation today. All along the canalside increasingly tall expensive blocks of flats tower over local Victorian terraced housing. Jericho Boatyard, operating for over 100 years, was evicted and sealed off by British Waterways, intent on selling it for £4,000,000.

The recent wave of unbridled economic growth has swept aside important landmarks such as a grade II* central Oxford railway building, and a much loved Dickensian ironworks foundry near Port Meadow. The Green Party views these land and buildings as assets to be held in the public domain rather than sold to the private sector.

For example, when Lib Dem, Labour and Tory members supported the proposal to expand the Westgate centre into a giant car-dependent shopping mall, the Greens actively opposed it and by placing one legal challenge after another in its way, delayed it until the credit crunch has it lying wounded, unable to raise the funding to begin work on the site.

Greens argue that pieces of land like this could be developed on a local, human scale like the Lanes in Brighton, with small business units and flats above them, a community centre and some public space. This would regenerate the area, but would not make Oxford so competitive economically in the SE region, which is what successive government policies would have us do. Oxford University gets involved too as a major landowner.

The University’s proposals are usually eventually passed, but the City Council has also rejected plans such as the University’s proposal to build a book depository on a flood plain that has recently flooded, and was thus opposed by local residents and Councillors. This was eventually defeated at Public Inquiry, and a new site will now have to be found for University books.

One of the biggest hurdles to democracy in Oxford is the way public consultations on large planning proposals are carried out. First, the plans are made and nearly set in stone by an ‘in principle’ agreement to accept them. Then, the public are presented with a proposal which is put to them as what ‘will’ happen.

Everyone acts as though at some point a decision had been made, so that when the decision comes to be formally made, it is a foregone conclusion that few local politicians would dare oppose. Suddenly large developments are going to be stalled for an indefinite period, and we are all going to have to think differently about economic growth and competitiveness, because the ‘credit crunch’ heralds a new way of thinking about the purpose of developments and how we use our land.

 

The return of the LBD…

0

Models: Georgie Bloomfield, Emma Radford
Photographer: Tom Wild
Stylists: Rebecca Johnson, Sam Losey

Bangles, velvet and satin mini-dress and
caped mini-dress: all from Reign, 136 Cowley
Road (01865 250004)

Lace dress: Zara, Clarendon Centre
All make-up by MAC

Shoes and sunglasses: stylist’s own

Advice

0

I have a lump in my scrotum. I don’t have a regular partner, but I do have quite a lot of sex, and no-one has said anything. I don’t think that this is an STI but I am worried.
Graduate Student, St John’s.

The Delphic Oracle’s wisdom, Know thyself, is imperative advice. It’s impossible to offer medical advice by letter, but if you notice something for heaven’s sake, swallow your embarrassment and – to put it bluntly – have the balls to see a doctor immediately.

It could be many things, but let’s cut to the source of your fear and face the very worst possibility – the risk (rather obviously!) of testicular cancer in a man’s lifetime is about 0.4%, but it is most common in men in the student age range (well, 15 – 35 actually); but it has the highest cure rates of all cancers, virtually 100% if there are no secondaries. But early diagnosis is imperative. However nervous or embarrassed you feel, there really is no alternative to acting now…

I am a law undergraduate doing well and looking forward to a career – I have found that I’m in the very early stages of pregnancy, my boyfriend doesn’t know, and I think he will not see the issue as a problem, but as something to be dealt with. I’m not entirely sure.

I think that a lot of stuff about a foetus being a little person is sentimental, but I am a conscientious vegetarian and a pacifist and I have real qualms about what I suspect will be the inevitable end in a termination of the pregnancy.

I don’t want to waste the support and encouragement of my family who always went the extra mile, but I don’t want to worry them, I am supposed to be an adult after all. I don’t even want advice, but I do want to make a choice which I can live with.
ANON

Thank you for entrusting your story – we are not revealing college and have changed some detail to protect you. First, you are already an informed, thoughtful and reflective person with the rights and responsibility to make a decision that is so important, because you have to live with it.

I am sure that your friends and family will support you, and seek to advise you, but the decision has to be yours. I think that you are trying to make an informed and realistic choice about your life, and you’re right that you have to make the decisions. But that doesn’t mean that you have to face them alone.

You say that you haven’t yet told your boyfriend: he may well have certain expectations, but I hope that together you can face some of the things that face you over the next few weeks. Whatever the outcome, facing the issues together is a really important part of your relationship. I’d guess he will be well-aware of your approaches to life and I hope that he will be utterly supportive.

You write about wanting to protect your family – no doubt they would want to do exactly the same for you – obviously I don’t know your family details, but I suspect that if they have been supportive of you thus far, that’s not going to evaporate at a time when you need them very acutely.

There are also people you can talk to at different levels of anonymity – from student help lines, College nurses, doctors, and welfare provision in your College. People generally are trustworthy, unshocked and proactively supportive.

These structures can help you now, and sustain you whatever your choices. Most of all, treat yourself as tenderly and generously as you do your own friends, there is no easy answer, but with the support of those who love you, you do not have to face the decisions you have to make quickly without support.

I’m a cheat. I copy stuff for term essays, smuggle things into collections and am struggling hard to keep everything together – I haven’t been caught, but I am terrified of finals that are like a dark cloud on the horizon.

I get pissed a lot, and have been in trouble with my College because of that – but they haven’t a clue about how stupid and inadequately prepared I am, and I’m depressed that no one has caught me – or even seems to care.

My family want me to succeed and have invested a lot of time and money in my education. I don’t have a long-term meaningful relationship, and I don’t really want one – I get around, but I feel everything is going to crumble.

ANON

This is a very honest letter. Wherever you are there isn’t a place where you can’t make a choice. You clearly feel hemmed in, and it might be worthwhile pretty soon to talk to a doctor about how you are feeling.

But let’s move to the substance of your letter. Cheating – plagiarism if you like – is a sign, above all, of a lack of self-confidence. You didn’t say whether you cheated for your A-levels, but you must have got AAA (or thereabouts).

At any rate, smuggling stuff into Collections is crazy and unnecessary, and sounds almost like a deliberate attempt to be caught. Taking a paper and not doing well may get you a robust response at Academic Review or from your Tutor – but it sounds from your letter as if that’s really what you want – to be caught out, or at least ‘known’ well enough so that you can be taken seriously.

Seriously, your College would care very much indeed, so dare not to cheat, and go to talk with your tutor if she or he is close enough to you, or someone else in your College’s welfare structure who is committed to being confidential and they will support and challenge you.

This is something your Chaplain, for example, will be skilled, and no-doubt experienced, in dealing with. I don’t know any Chaplain who’d tell you to be good and sing a hymn, by the way… If you’ve been in trouble with your College for alcohol related offenses, they are probably aware that there is some problem, and your raising it would be counted very much in your favour.

However generous it was of your parents to spend time and money in getting you here, you’re not their FTSE investment – and they’d be pretty wounded, I suspect, if they thought you reckoned that they only spent the money to get you to Oxford to succeed ‘for them’. Of course they want you to have the chance to make the best decisions for your life, but don’t let a misplaced sense of debt oppress you.