Is religion obsolete in Oxford? Freddie Parton investigates the two poles of apathy and evangelism

Your average student at Oxford probably views Christianity with suspicion. Images of bearded men with side partings and opened toed sandals most likely spring to mind. Perhaps even slightly bizarre memories of finding a bread roll and a gospel in your pigeon hole during freshers’ week. For most students, Christianity may not seem to play much of a role in the university at all. Oxford society seems to be thoroughly secular, and Christianity a sort of ‘club’ that only a few people join.

In many respects they are right. Oxford does seem to be a secular university – a strange thought considering its history has been shaped profoundly by Christian tradition and faith. The university’s motto: Dominus Illuminatio Mea, taken from Psalms 27.1, ‘The Lord is my light,’ once emphasised the importance of the Christian faith within an Oxford education. This principle has changed dramatically now and, since the Enlightenment, many have considered Oxford to be a very rational, sceptical and dry place.

Even the study of Theology is removed from any form of faith perspective. Students are told that the course aims to "promote a critical and dispassionate understanding" of the subject matter, something that tends to put off some Christians. One person I spoke to said, "At my interview my tutor said she was worried that my faith would cloud my vision and get in the way of studying the subject. But that to me is completely backward. My faith is my whole reason for studying theology!"

Despite the fact that Oxford presents itself as a secular institution, it’s clear that the Christian faith still plays a large part in the life of the community. Sure, the role of Christianity at Oxford has changed significantly but the traditions still live on. Chapels do still play a very important role in the life of the colleges. The number of people that attend college chapel may seem relatively few when you go to the odd evensong or Weekday service. But you have to put this into perspective. Oxford is not a large city but on any night of the week during term you can hear at least four really good choirs singing evensong. There is a church for every tradition and denomination all with a student dimension. Every college with a chapel also seems to hold alternative forms of worship such as prayer meetings, Bible readings and discussion groups. It is no wonder that outside London, Oxford fosters the highest number of vocations in both the Anglican and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense Christianity in Oxford is very much alive amongst the students today.

Though most of us might only go to our college chapel to have a really good sing at the carol service, it is clear that they play an important role in the spiritual wellbeing of the students – whatever their faith may be. The college chapel is a place of worship for Christians, but also a sacred space for those of other faiths and a place to discuss any religious issues you might have. It is a place that you can go to, even if you are unsure whether you believe in a god, to escape from the fast pace of Oxford life. Most importantly it is a place where the whole college community can come together. When a student at our college died in a tragic accident last term, the college chapel was the natural place for the whole community to gather together, regardless of faith, and share their grief.

Saying this, Christian worship at Oxford is not so focused around the college chapels as it once was. Worship seems to have moved out to various other Churches in the town itself, the biggest probably being St Aldates, St. Ebbes and OCC (The Oxford Community Church). The head of the Christian Union, Dan Treget, said that he personally knew people from at least twelve different churches. It is difficult to know why worship for some Christians has moved away from the college chapels. Perhaps it is because of their universalistic stance – the fact that the services are geared at people of all faiths and so tend to avoid Christian stances that are difficult to understand.

One Christian I talked to said she preferred going to one of the big evangelical churches outside the University because they address issues that the college chapels are afraid to touch on such as hell, punishment or sin: "Our church is not afraid to tell us things we don’t want to hear. Christ is meant to be offensive, or at least challenging!" She went on to explain that Evangelicalism is (as its name suggests, coming from the Greek euangellion ‘good news’) about proclaiming the good news about the salvation of the kingdom of God. The reverse side of this however has to be shown, she argued, "I mean, salvation wouldn’t mean anything if we didn’t have to be saved from something." And it’s true that if you look at the New Testament that Jesus does emphasise the difficulties of coming to God. He continuously challenges the status quo and presents his followers with goals that aren’t easily achieved. This is not to say that just because some Christians choose to worship outside the colleges they to not value their importance for the community. One Evangelical Christian that I chatted to put it this way: "What is important is not the church you attend, but whether your heart is given over to God or not. Whether you express your love for God through the Anglican liturgy or through jumping up and down and clapping is almost completely irrelevant. I don’t think God cares how we worship him, as long as we are worshipping him. I’ve sat through the most Catholic of Catholic services and I’ve danced with orphans in a field in Mozambique. I found belief in both places." Perhaps the best thing about Christian worship in Oxford is that there is something for every believer.

Evangelicalism is probably the branch of the church which has received the most media attention in recent years. A key example would be Richard Dawkins’ television programs which have painted Evangelical priests and followers in a very unattractive light. The ‘evangelicals’ probably receive such attention because they believe in the importance of sharing one’s faith with other people. As one person I spoke to put it, "We have nothing to hide, we have the most amazing gift in the world and we love sharing it with people". It is members from their churches whom you might have seen preaching and singing on the streets. Because so many people have unfounded prejudices against this branch of the church, I decided to investigate it myself and went along to a session of the Alpha course at St. Aldates’.

The Alpha Course was founded by Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington and is a course designed for people who are not Christians to ask the big questions in life and to help them find Jesus. You may have seen their adverts on television or at the Cinema. Having always thought of it as a sort of Christian cult run by men in sandals that lured unsuspecting non Christians in, I have to say that I was very surprised at how normal everyone was. I have always been a bit sceptical about ‘new’ forms of worship. Call me old fashioned but I like a church with old hymns, a priest in black with a dog’s collar and choir boys in their cassocks. I remember last Christmas being horrified when my family and I went to a more evangelical church and were told to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Jesus, it just seemed so inappropriate.

When I turned up at Alpha, my initial reaction was quite negative. For someone who likes a very traditional sort of church service I was in for a bit of a shock. St Aldates’ church, though a very old building, has been completely revamped inside. There is no longer an altar or organ, and all worship is conducted across the width of the church from a stage where the preacher stands. Around the stage are television screens so that everyone can see what the preacher is doing. Despite my gut reaction however, I had to admit that the church had a real sense of activity and community. Unlike many of the admittedly very beautiful old churches in Oxford which can sometimes feel more like museums than places of worship, St Aldates has a real sense of life. Everyone who is there wants to be there which creates a really positive and welcoming atmosphere.

It is easy to see why people are drawn to the Alpha Course. It is well organised and everyone is incredibly welcoming. The session begins with a meal, which always puts people in a good mood, then follows with a talk and group discussion. Everyone is put on tables made up of around ten people so that you can discuss things while you have dinner and after the talk. The whole session is, I think, designed to be highly emotive. Though I initially recoiled at the idea of there being Jesus-inspired musical entertainment, it was actually very moving. Drums and guitars aren’t exactly ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘I vow to thee my Country,’ but the songs they did perform were done beautifully.

I suppose the most striking impression that I gained from this experience of Evangelical worship was that everyone was really enjoying themselves. Even though I had come to the session with a slightly negative and sceptical attitude, and even though I didn’t accept everything they were arguing for, I had a good time. I suppose the evangelical church is simply trying to bring Christianity into this century and make it applicable to modern life. In this respect it seems to be succeeding; indeed, I have heard that St Aldates’ is moving from two to three services every Sunday because of it popularity.

The role of Christianity at Oxford has been strongly criticised by the press recently, especially concerning the University’s review of the Permanent Private Halls, most of which are theological colleges. The problem was that the press seemed to have combined two completely separate issues: the report on the theological colleges and the allegations that Wycliffe Hall’s new principle was making the college too evangelical. The report on the PPHs made by the university began last July before any trouble at Wycliffe had been made known. It was simply concerned with the academic issues concerning the PPHs, and whether they offered a "suitable educational environment" for undergraduates. The report was to review all the PPHs not just the evangelical colleges.

The really sad thing about the reports in the press was that they began to make the assumption that the subject theology itself is narrow minded and exclusive not worthy of study. But as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the theology course at Oxford is far removed from any faith perspective so that anyone from any religious background can feel comfortable studying it. The articles in the press also implied that the tutors from evangelical churches gave one sided teaching to the students. This is far from true however, and anyone who has ever attended the lectures of Alister McGrath (once a member of Wycliffe Hall) will tell you that he always covers every theological viewpoint of a topic.Though attempts have been made by the press to devalue the role of Christianity at Oxford, it seems that it is very much a part of the community as it ever has been. Its role at Oxford has certainly changed, going to church is no longer compulsory, people can choose whether they want to believe in God and when and where they want to worship. Oxford may seem to be a very secular and rational institution, but it is firmly based in the spiritual too. For many, the University’s motto, Dominus Illuminatio Mea, still lives on.

Questioning the meaning of dreams tends to make us think of colourful ‘dream symbolism’ dictionaries, which list reams of everyday items and detail the secrets they conceal about the inner workings of our psyche. Having looked up "birds" as eager eleven-year-olds, we were told that dreams involving these winged creatures "indicate a desire to escape ties by which your unconscious mind feels restricted". By now, though, cynical Oxford students that we are, we’ve probably dumped our wee dream dictionary next to our astrology books and letters to Santa.

It is through the work of Freud that this notion of dream symbolism has become so rooted in our collective consciousness. Freud theorised that in dreams we attempt to fulfil the wishes of our waking life, but, since many of these wishes are really rather naughty, our mind won’t allow us to view them in their naked truth. Therefore, our mind censors our dreams, with the result that our desires are transformed into innocuous objects which can get past this censor. These innocuous objects are the symbols which, when interpreted, reveal the ‘true’ meaning of our dreams.

Freudian theory has left a legacy in which dreams are expected to hold a revelatory psychological power. Yet, as soon as a curious romantic starts to look into contemporary science’s opinion, they’ll quickly see their hopes scythed down. Freud’s idea that our dreams carry a carefully veiled meaning is largely rejected as fanciful nonsense.

More convincing, but less satisfyingly debauched, is the theory that during sleep our mind is busy processing all the information which we’ve acquired whilst we are awake. This procedure involves erasing the unnecessary information and ‘cataloguing’ the rest. Thus, our experience of dreaming is a kind of ‘read-out’ of this mental process.

Yet the mystery hasn’t been entirely removed from dreaming. This latter theory still accepts the possibility that our dreams contain some fragmentary glimpses of subconscious, unarticulated desire. The theory is a mid-way point, since we do retain some of the intrigue of Freud’s view, but we don’t have to worry about the dark and disturbing symbolic value of our dreams.

Victor Petrov questions the validity of anti-drug attitudes

Hard drugs, by some categorisations, include alcohol and tobacco. So yes, put the absinthe down and stub out the cigarette, because you’re all shuddering junkies to me. These beloved substances are physically addictive and much more likely to lead to severe health problems and ultimately death. Just compare the 8386 fatalities from alcohol related disease in 2005 in the UK alone to the lack of a single one directly traceable to LSD – in the whole world! However, cultural norms attach a stigma to certain drugs, while others become an accepted part of our social interactions.

The Netherlands, that bastion of liberal drug culture, has recently announced that it will ban all magic mushroom sales on its territories. But Dutch teenagers running amok in Amsterdam are not the cause of this; it is tourists who, taking advantage of the local drug laws, do not know how to handle the drugs they take. Here we see uneducated, rampant foreigners failing where the tolerant, relaxed locals succeed: in dealing with drugs. The Dutch are not biologically immune to chemical alterations – they have learned to deal with it through years of experience. Impurities in cocaine and ecstasy could be seeded out through government guidelines. Demonstrably, toleration of substances and regulation of a legalised drugs industry will stop deaths and accidents. Whether we like it or not, even if drugs remain illegal, they will still be around. Drugs, in the right circumstances, can be fun (after all, half the world’s rock stars can’t be wrong). Drugs should be a question of public health, rather than a criminal issue. Puff and blow those critics away!

Raf Nicholson warns against the dangers of experimental drug use

I know it’s not the fashionable side of the argument, and its proponents often sound like teachers. Drugs are dangerous, drugs do you nothing but harm, drugs are evil, malicious substances, responsible for all the ills in modern society. But outside of school, where everything you are told is gospel truth, that’s no longer the message. Now, everyone’s telling you a spliff every now and again can’t do you any more damage than that pint in your hand or that cigarette. But I’ve been there. I know what it feels like, and I know why I turned it down.

Cannabis isn’t just a plant – there are medical consequences to its use. Regular smoking can lead to lung cancer, especially as spliffs are often mixed with tobacco. According to a recent study, the vast majority of medical experts in the UK are convinced that cannabis increases susceptibility to mental illness. It is proven, too, that regular use can make you fatigued and unmotivated – do you really need that during an essay crisis?

And even if some people want cannabis legalised, the fact is it’s still illegal. Well, we all know the police never bother about cannabis offences, don’t we? Actually, plenty of people I know have spent the night in a cell as a result of cannabis use. Neither are you safe as a non-user, if you host parties where people are smoking joints in your room in college. Plenty of people get threatened with prosecution for that, too,

Why risk it? In my own experience, either you get a kick out of cannabis that leads to regular use and psychological dependence which increases each time you smoke it, or nothing happens. If the latter, then what’s the point? And I’ve seen what the result can be in the case of the former. I saw what was happening to my friends who were doing weed regularly, and realised there was nothing I could do. I saw them losing respect for all drug laws, just because they’d broken one. Cannabis became magic mushrooms – bad "trips" and terrifying stories of hallucinations. "Shrooms" became cocaine, and ecstasy – class A substances, highly addictive, resulting in massive cravings. It’s sad, but I don’t feel like I know some of those people any more. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? There are real risks associated with cannabis. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

 Henry Oliver snuggles down in Blackwell's with the Ambit Poets

 Fewer than twenty of us gather on the first floor of Blackwell’s on a chilly Monday evening, all looking slightly awkward. Everyone shuffles around, very politely not speaking to each other. The organiser, Rita Ricketts the Blackwell Archivist, specifies only one rule – help yourself to wine. She is a vivacious woman and keeps spirits bobbing, chatting with the poets and audience alike while we wait for the last few people to arrive. The first poet is a voluptuous Serbian woman called Sonja who wears elliptical turquoise glasses; she is a poet, critic and playwright and describes herself as a voluntary exile. Then there’s Satyandra: an Indian gentleman who taught Indian History at Cambridge for twenty-five years and has won numerous awards around the world. He is short, wears enormous glasses on his bulbous nose and has shoulder length hair, neatly swept back like the quills of a porcupine. The third poet, Lin Hongbin, is absent, his work being read by a woman who works for the poetry magazine Ambit, besides being an Oxford graduate in Chinese. On the shelf above their heads are copies of the newly released letters of Ted Hughes. It feels fitting to be attending such a gathering under the auspices of the grand master.

All of these poets have left their native country, and we were gathered to listen to poetry about the nature of exile. It became apparent that neither Sonja nor Satyandra thought of themselves as exiles, but more as ex-patriots, having voluntarily moved to England to study or work. Liu Hongbin is a different matter: his father was executed in 1970 and his poetry was circulated during the Tiananmen Square protests. China won’t have him back, suprisingly enough. His feelings are understandably mixed. We heard a reading from each poet: the poetry was good, the wine was better. Sonja’s poetry is full of clear purposeful imagery and carves a world out of cultural detail and careful rhythm. Part of her collection is about plants, for which she undertook detailed research of plant mythologies – her work is very precise about the things it discusses. Satyandra read us a poem called Winston Churchill Knew My Mother which is about his homeland, his sense of national pride, and his joy at arriving in England and going to Hyde Park to tell the statue of Winston Churchill that his mother had been one of the supporters of the great empire. The reading of Liu’s poem was difficult. It has lost a lot in translation. Both Sonja and Satyandra write in English as well as Serbian and Hindi, whereas Liu only writes in Chinese, which he then translates into English himself. Although leading English poets help him polish the English, the transfer from a language of symbols and pictures to one of words leaves the poem feeling artistically underdeveloped, full of blunt imagery and stilted rhythm. Whilst the poem is well constructed from an intellectual standpoint, meditating on the idea and ideology of History and its relationship to personal and national identity, clunking lines such as "Confucius without a diploma had to enrol at the Open University" hardly do the poem’s ideas justice.

A late arrival appeared somewhere in the readings, quietly shuffling to the back. Nazand Begikhari is a Kurdish poet with a doctorate who has studied at the Sorbonne. She is a survivor of Anfal, the Iraqi genocide led by Saddam Hussein against Kurdistan in 1987, in which she lost many family members and friends. She too may never return to her native country. Her poetry was the best of the lot, full of meaningful sparsity, which struck me as reminiscent of Frost, and symbolic imagery. She read, as she clearly writes, from her soul, working effectively within a tradition whilst breaking out from conventional forms. The most powerful poem was an anti-patriarchy piece about a guard who, when presented with ten death certificates, "signed them while drinking mint tea." That poem An Ordinary Day is deservedly in the Forward Book of Poetry. She maintains tight control over the poem throughout and creates an effective psychological portrait which resonates long afterwards with harrowing thoughts of how the reality compares to the art.

Discussion and questions ensued and the poets were happy to chat to us about their passionate love of England as well as about their home countries. There was a clear divide between those who left voluntarily and those who cannot return. What united them was a belief in poetry and poets as representatives bearing witness to life, especially Nazand, who is publishing work in Kurdistan as part of her anti-patriarchy movement; Kurdish Women Against Honour Killings. The evening was well orchestrated and even the cosy audience was a positive advantage; this was the sort of small, unpretentious event which typifies the best part of Oxford. The readings were set up because the founders of the store were all aspirational writers who invited poets to speak, and published early work of poets such as Auden, and Rita Ricketts fervently believes in the promotion of poetry, and in a community of known and unknown poets. The triumph of the evening lies in the truth that poetry has always been aural, and works best as aural art.

The next reading is on January 15th at Blackwell’s bookshop, Broad Street

On the surface, it is very easy to dislike Michael Winner. He is a man whose career in film revolves around violence and smut, and who is now predominantly known for scathing food reviews and a supremely annoying car advert. Indeed, even the Oxford Union, where we met, did not escape the cutting tones of Winner’s pen. Writing about the experience later, he described the food as "pretty awful", although he admitted that he very much enjoyed the company. Maybe a high tolerance for hacks should be added to the charges against him.

Fittingly, then, our conversation opened with Winner’s own journalistic career at Oxford – which is odd, because he went to Cambridge and edited Varsity. In a move that Winner describes as a "major upheaval", he decided to bring out an Oxford edition of the paper. This not only caused enough scandal to make the national newspapers but, unsurprisingly, caused a bit of a stir in Oxford as well: "I learnt when I was coming here that some of the Cherwell staff were going to throw me in the river. So I took the precaution of bringing with me the Cambridge Water-Skiing team." His final words on his experience with student journalism sum up the legacy he left at Varsity: "When I became editor of the paper, it was extremely rich, had an enormous amount of money – and by the time I’d finished, it was broke!" Chastise him all you want. He was selfish and irresponsible, but he did what every student paper would secretly love to be able to do: publish what you want, spend as much as you want and hang the consquences. This seems to be Winner’s philosophy of sorts; do what you like and leave the clearing up until tomorrow.

However, Varsity was not Winner’s first foray into the abandoned world of journalism. He had, in fact, been writing a column for the Syndicate of Local Newspapers since the age of fourteen. This job came about following a visit to Winner’s school from the publisher Paul Hamlyn, who was persuaded by Winner to give him copies of all his film books. Then, in a characteristically daring act of self-promotion, Winner rang all the film studios, claiming he was writing a book for Hamlyn, allowing him access to the world of movies, which was what he really wanted. He met and interviewed all the big names of the day, including James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich and Louis Armstrong. Winner punctuates these stories of his adolescent japes with a laugh that fills the room, and would probably cause the corners of even the most hardened mouth to twitch upwards. Yet nestled within his nostalgia, there is a sense of something lost. He believes that the film industry has "changed beyond human belief", and there is an implicit admittance in this statement that his tactics would have gotten him nowhere in today’s market.

But Winner is frank in admitting that his career as a columnist was only a means to an end: "I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a film director – but I had to get near people in movies." Although much of his directorial output can be mocked with the clear eye of hindsight, it is hard to disagree with Winner’s statement that "I worked with the biggest stars of all time." His actors included Robert Duvall, Oliver Reed and Burt Lancaster, of whom he speaks with particular affection: "My best friend in the industry was Burt Lancaster. He threatened to kill me three times. But he was a wonderful man – he only threatened to kill his friends." If Lancaster was Winner’s best friend, though, it was not this relationship which was to make him most famous. Winner is, in fact, probably best remembered for his work with Charles Bronson, who starred in the Death Wish films, although Winner admits that, after their first film, "I didn’t think he liked me." However, their professional relationship was secured when Bronson insisted that Winner direct his next picture.

There is a danger that any discussion of Winner’s prolific directorial career simply turns into a dialogue of name-dropping. But Winner’s attitude to the film industry, so different to the distain he applies to other fields, prevents this from happening: "I’m a fan. Everyone in the industry is a fan. To suddenly have Orson Wells and Marlon Brando on the phone…It was a great thrill." Although he frequently refers to these screen icons by their first names, it smacks, not of ‘luviness’, but of a true fondness for his colleagues, especially Brando, with whom he was close friends and who he spoke to only a few days before his death. This attachment appears to have been mutual as Brando once commented, "Michael Winner is the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t talk to me in the way he thinks I wish to be spoken to." Certainly Winner does not seem to be one for unwarrented flattery.

Gradually our discussion moves away from his film carreer, on to his charity work for the Police Memorial Trust. Winner was instrumental in the campaign to get the Police Memorial erected in The Mall. This task took him ten years, and the memorial was eventually unveiled by the Queen in April 2005. For this work Winner was offered an OBE. An honour some would think, but not Michael Winner, who refers to the award as a "bloody insult…I’m perfectly happy to carry on my good work without any recognition." However, when pressed further on the subject, Winner does admit, "I might have accepted a knighthood, to be honest. I wouldn’t have accepted anything less." Such honesty might be refreshing, were it not for the feeling that Winner has said it all before. His anti-establishment, devil-may-care lines seem decidedly rehearsed; Winner is a practised media personality who knows exactly how he comments will go down with those who read them.

Yet Winner’s brash behaviour in the public eye seems only a cover for the difficulties he has recently experienced in his private life. At the beginning of the year Winner was admitted to a private hospital in London, having contracted the bacterial infection Vibrio Vulnificus. Often incurred after eating contaminated oysters, the disease has a 50 per cent mortality rate within the first forty-eight hours. Winner himself "was pronounced dead five times." But despite the seriousness of his illness – which lead to media reports that he may have to have a leg amputated – Winner remains pragmatic about his brush with death: "People asked, ‘what did it make you realise?’. I said, ‘That illness is a fucking nuisance.’" Some might say more than a nuisance; Winner was in hospital for three months and has estimated that his medical bills totalled at least £750,000.

After the near-death experience, things seem to be looking up for Winner. He has become engaged to his girlfriend, Geraldine, whom he first met in 1967. Yet even after forty years, Winner is in no hurry to tie the knot. Almost in a parody of his own insurance adverts, he explains: "Please, please, I’m not getting married, dear. I’m engaged. I said to Geraldine, ‘It’s taken me seventy-one years to get engaged, don’t hold your breath for the wedding.’" Indeed, this is Winner’s first attempt at matrimony, despite – or perhaps because of – claiming to have slept with over one hundred and fifty women. When asked if he regrets never having had a family, Winner replies with characteristic candour: "You can have the life with children and a family, or you can have the life that I’ve had, as a very lusty bachelor. And the life I’ve had has been marvellous." Winner also appears to have conducted his seductions with class; he remains close friends with many of his ex-girlfriends and speaks to some of them "three or four times a day" on the telephone. There are not many people around today like Michael Winner. He is one of the old guard, and there is a sense that he, too, realises this. He speaks of his life in the past tense as if the fast times are over, and a quiet reflection is now due; he is, after all, a pensioner. In frail health himself (he has been limiting public appearances this year), he also makes references to looking after old friends and ex-girlfriends when they become ill, sounding far less like a celebrity than a sheltered housing resident. This feeling of nostalgia, therefore, makes it easier to forgive Winner’s pomposity and his practised responses. It also means that, deep down, it is very difficult to dislike Michael Winner; the most that can be mustered is slight disapproval, couched in grudging admiration.

The Tain is one of 80 tales making up the Ulster Cycle, which tells the story of the Ulaid, the prehistoric inhabitants of Northern Ireland. The Tain begins when wife Medb is forced to concede that her husband Ailill possesses a better prize bull than she. In order to rectify the matter, Medb resolves to steal a better bull, The Brown Bull of Cooley, from the province of Ulster. The Tain documents the mission of Medb and her army, prevented as they are by the great warrior Cu Chulainn, who is eventually the main protagonist of the tale.

By translating The Tain, Carson takes on a daunting task. As with any story that is initially part of the oral tradition, The Tain has been a fluid entity, changing and growing under the hands of many generations, the needs of each different from one another. Carson’s translation is based on multiple texts, themselves fragmentary and influenced by the personality and beliefs of the transcriber. To make matters just a little more difficult, The Tain uses a multitude of linguistic forms, from poetry and prose, to ‘rhetorics’ – unpunctuated blocks of ryhthmic prose. Amazingly, Carson makes it work.

The epic gushes by in heated but steady waves. The action is always imminent but there is never too little time for a diversion into a character’s past or a dwelling’s layout. An emphasis on the landscape of Northern Ireland pervades throughout the book and creates something like the rhythm of a bass guitar; subtle but unyielding.

The melody of the work, the story itself, is a celebration of bloodthirstiness. While today, participation in war is usually, and rightly so, a source of guilt, there is no such guilt in The Tain. Indeed, the characters are happily driven by impulses to war with one another. Warring camps are not portrayed as those of in the conventional sense of the word, acting on real contempt for one another. Rather, they have a reluctant respect, even love, for one another. After all, the initial dispute which leads to great battles occurs between husband and wife. The importance of poetry, written messages and Druid prophecies attenuates the hideousness of war, until the decapitation of troops in Medb’s army is seen as part of some happy banter. To so remove our contempt for death is a difficult undertaking that Carson is, luckily, more than capable of.

by Mona Sakr

While essentially a children’s book, The Ingenious Edgar Jones will delight children and adults alike with its quirky tale of a porter’s son in nineteenth century Oxford. Liz Garner’s style is fluid and unctuous, and the whole book feels pleasantly like a warm breeze blown through your mind. It is even more enjoyable when you are intimately acquainted with the landmarks that form an intrinsic element to the story; one of the most evocative passages is a description of the view from the roof of the partially-completed University Museum of Natural History, with the Oxford we inhabit now taking shape amid the remnants of the medieval city.

Comparisons with Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence are inevitable with such a book, but in reality entirely unnecessary. Liz Garner’s Oxford is firmly grounded in reality – the description of the porter’s walk to work from Jericho to New College is accurate in every detail, as any resident of the city will be able to attest. There is no attempt to encompass a similarly philosophical sphere, and the forays into evolutionary science and architechture are meticulously well-researched whilst remaining brief enough and simple enough to be completely subservient to the plot. The character of Edgar himself, a boy strangely gifted in ways adults are seemingly unable to understand, is just petulant and arrogant enough to be intensely likeable, while his parents are, in their different ways, equally blind to the progress and innovation that their son tries to drag into their lives.

The only disappointing moment in this book comes at the very end, when Edgar has escaped from prison only to discover that his family has disintegrated and his one passion, the Museum, no longer needs him. It isn’t that you wish that everything could turn out well, quite the contrary; it’s just that you wish it didn’t end in such a predictably ambivalent, cliché-ridden way. Other than this final let-down, this is a stunning novel, worthy of the very highest praise, and most definitely worth breaking free of the weekly grind of academic reading to enjoy.

by Caroline Crampton

When I left Oxford for my year out at the end of my second year, I headed for Scotland thinking that I was going to dominate Oxford on my return. My flatmate and I were planning to create a cult of mystery around ourselves, appearing only seldom on college premises to do fascinating and mysterious things, but never looking like we were trying. We were going to set up a sort of fraternity, consisting of ourselves and a collection of malleable fresher girls, attracted to our air of continental sophistication, as expressed through a love of Gauloises and real coffee. Although no berets were included in this vision of fourth-year bliss, we were certainly going to be living a Left Bank lifestyle dripping with Sartre and easy irony. That’s essentially how I envisaged my fourth year and how I imagined myself in it: too cool for Oxford and sitting at the top of the food chain, enjoying familiar pleasures with a new-found worldliness.

Unfortunately, it almost worked. Sitting on the Oxford Tube at the start of October, I realised I was left with a horrible dilemma: on the one hand, I didn’t want to be that guy who thinks he’s too cool for school and only talks about how much better things are elsewhere but, on the other, I did feel too cool for Oxford and couldn’t help thinking I’d rather be back in Berlin. I’d moved on. I think we all had. I don’t know about those who decided to study abroad, but those of use who worked and even those who spent a year asking French schoolchildren, "And what did you do on your ‘grandes vacances’, petit Pierre?" tasted the sweet air of freedom. It was particularly the financial freedom that brought me such joy. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to ask my parents for money, I didn’t have to fill in those ridiculous student loan forms, I wasn’t scrounging from anybody. The big difference between money you earn and money you get for free is that people aren’t giving it to you because they like you (your parents) or to with the long term aim of supporting the economy (the government), but because they want something from you. Immediately, you become an equal partner in the power relationship, because you are independent and can work or not work as you choose. If you decide not to work and then lose your job, you lose your money, but not your self-respect because you don’t owe anybody anything. If you decide to take every penny you have and blow it on a four-day rave in a Serbian castle, there is an added satisfaction in not wondering how many hours your parents had to work for it.

But, perhaps more important than this is that last year was not just an interlude with no result but a few anecdotes about bratwurst, it was a year of my real life and a lot happened in it: my first love left me; so did my second; I turned to nicotine; stopped again; started again; I got my first ever job, and my second; I went on holiday to a militarised zone and expanded my mind in a German sex club; I changed my hairstyle; I stopped wearing pink shirts; I grew up and moved on and all that shit and all the while, Oxford stayed exactly the same.

Of course, some things are different now: most of my friends have graduated and college is no longer full of familiar, if boring, faces, but nothing essential has changed. The student newspapers are writing articles I read in the first year: promiscuity, drinking, state versus private, rent rises and so on ad nauseam. My predictions for Trinity: there will be banter in the Rad Cam, some random Union hack will fuck someone and there will be a feature every week about the fascinating link between sunshine and libraries. This year, as every year, everyone will read the Isis and agree it’s pretentious, no-one will read the Owl and come to the same conclusion. Oh Oxford! Even this article has been written many times before. I particularly recommend "The Lot of the Linguist" from the Cherwell archives. Does it matter? Probably not, given that it seems clear that the university experience will remain similar from year to year, but the lot of the linguist is to hang around like an old ghost and watch a new generation rehash the same old tripe that seemed so important to us at the time.

 This is the horror for a returning linguist: that everything is marked by a stale familiarity and, as we know, familiarity breeds contempt. The issues and the conversations are the same as they always were, but they have lost the vitality that comes of being bound up in the fabric of university life. The news that Keith Barber is on a sex-crazed rampage is, I’m sure, fascinating to friends of Keith, but I don’t have the foggiest who the man is and all the information I’m left with is that people go on sex-crazed rampages, something I remember well from long forgotten members of college, the names of whom mean nothing to the first years I bore with their stories. And what is more, three years from now, Keith Barber will be forgotten as others were before him and and only briefly remembered by a sixth-year medic at Harris Manchester. Nothing leaves a mark. The legendary Somerville cuppers victory of 2005 is now nothing more than an entry in the records and it is sheer vanity to suggest that anything we do at Oxford will ever be more than that. You could come top of the year, captain every sports team, edit every paper, preside over the union (heaven forbid!) and still, this insitution, which has chewed over so many generations of ambitious young undergrads, would stay completely untouched for another thousand years. It is as if our time here as stretched on into a lifeless no-man’s-land We live in a limbo between our continetal sophistication and graduation.
However, this is not to say that nothing has changed. Some things seem to be shifting slowly and gradually. Now, it seems that the ladies with the scarves and Ugg boots pout to pendulum instead of hip-hop (but still think they’re street) and the smoking ban has made Filth even more disgusting (I assume). Also, the bureaufascists in charge of most colleges seem to be using the forces of darkness to expand their evil empires and impress upon us all: you are stupid little children and if you disagree, we will tell you to grow up. Perhaps more worringly, the union seems to have become even more vacuous. I notice that in this year’s term card, three officers (bureaufascists in the making) have chosen pictures of themselves drinking. Obviously there’s nothing like the ability to get pissed to get people to vote for you. And it is exactly this that seems most depressing about Oxford: the arrogance and the vapidity of so many people here, who don’t realise that, to the outside world, studying here doesn’t make you special, it doesn’t even make you clever, it just makes you a twat. Similarly disgusting is the snobbery and the belief that wealth is a virtue, to be paraded and envied. And what is worse: it makes me realise how completely I fell into all these traps and how foolish I must have seemed.
But we are clever, and it is the persistent anti-intellectualism of Oxford that is most depressing. It is the waste of talent, and of time, that perhaps characterises best the way I see my years at Oxford. For all those weeks I spent sitting about chatting about Vogue and chain-smoking, I could have finished my first novel or actually gone to something I signed up for. In fact, I could have even done my work properly instead of spending years handing in second rate nonsense that I’d cobbled together the night before. But perhaps that is the charm of Oxford life: there is such an abundance of riches that one doesn’t bat an eyelid at throwing it all away. Indeed, it does seem that true luxury necessitates waste and if time is the most valuable commodity we have, I must consider the first two years at Oxford the richest of my life.

And finally, develop an intolerance to the outside world. You’ve been at Oxford for a month and already you’re talking in a gay falsetto about pressie drinks, have rediscovered your teddy bear and become slightly afraid of the checkout assistants in Sainsbury’s Local. However unless you’re a member of OUCA you presumably intend to re-enter the world in three to five years, only slightly pasty and jaded. Dons on the other-hand only ever leave the city limits to go on bitchy conferences or dig manuscripts up and therefore have the permanent air of Prince Charles about them.
You have to love them really. They are much like the professors at Hogwarts, with strange names and costumes, sometimes sexually and ethically ambiguous yet redeemed by their quirkiness and the sneaking suspicion that they may just be figments of the imagination after all. Yet whilst they go off to the arctic wastes in search of the northern lights just think yourself lucky that, unlike them, you will one day escape this mad-house.

 The dictator meets his match in the shape of Thomas Corcoran

As time draws the twilight of his days into the realms of dusk, Fidel Castro occupies first place in the hall of the twentieth century’s great survivors. Since he took power on the island of Cuba, he has seen ten of the forty-three US presidents pass by: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. In those heady days of 1959, Buddy Holly was hogging primetime radio and The Beatles were struggling to get a gig at the Cavern Club. The changes in the geopolitical environment since then have been immense, but rather than being left behind, Castro seems to have moved along with those changes and indeed acted as a symbol of them. From national guerilla leader to South American legend, from enemy of Amereican imperialism to Soviet client, from post-war leftover to grandfather of the anti-Bush New Left "Pink Tide": Castro seems to embody the history of the Radical Left, past and present.

The days of this frail, bed-ridden figure are drawing to a close, and he has finally decided to tell his story, if in a somewhat unconventional manner: Ignacio Ramonet, who is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and on the faculty at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, has interviewed him for over a hundred hours and put down the results in a tome of over seven hundred pages. Yet, rather than moulding these interviews into a coherent, structured whole, Ramonet has simply regurgitated them in the form of an enormous series of question and answers, and we are denied even a dialogue of limited sophistication. Such a format is wholly appropriate for a Communist dictator, but completely unsuited to a biography of any form. For biography seeks to present to us aspects of an individual’s personality with which we have been unacqauinted, yet in this instance even the most intimately personal details of Fidel’s extra-political life are somehow bound up as part of a broad political doctrine. Even his beatings by his father are presented as important steps in the early life of a strong leader.

In fact, Castro comes across not only as a soulless dictator, but as an incredibly boring man. The events he describes – his early life in a Jesuit college, his student radicalism, his guerilla war, his battles with American assassins and relationships with Soviet leaders – should be interesting. But when they are recounted by a man who has descended to such levels of sadness that he prides himself on the fact that his abstinence from shaving saves him about ten working days per year, they induce sleep.

Thus Ramonet has produced an horrendous document here. Not only has he created something gargatuanly tedious, he has done something despicable. He has become an apologist for a dictator; a barely-reluctant instrument of political propaganda in the guise of a biographer. His introduction to the novel reads like it has been written by a bureaeucrat in the Cuban Ministry of Public Information, as he descends from the level of political intellectual to that of idiotic apologist. He calls anybody who opposes Castro (and that includes the entire Cuban pro-democracy movement) an instrument of American imperialism, to be lumped together in the same camp as General Pinochet. The repression of homosexuals and imprisonment of political opponents are swept under the carpet after the briefest of mentions: Fidel’s strange explanations are accepted as gospel truth. We can see why Castro ceremoniously presented this book to Hugo Chavez, the suspiciously dictatorial Socialist "Bolivarian" president of Venezuela who has allied himself with Iran – a nation where to display a Communist symbol is an imprisonable offence. It forms the basis of the propaganda upon which he has thrived since 1959: by appealing to left-of-centre sympathisers across the Western World, Castro has managed to prolong the existence of one of the most idiosyncratic dictatorships the world has ever known. We can only hope that Ramonet does not seek to make similar "biographies" in the future. Though I’m sure Kim Jong-il and Muammar al-Gaddafi would pay good money.