I wanna be like Osama/ I wanna bomb a path to fame across the earth!” Not a quote from Al-Qaida’s latest video release, but a song featured in Jihad! The Musical, one of the many shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival that sought to shock. And one of many which had, on the whole, failed to raise even a gasp by the time the curtain went down. ‘Stirring things up’ has long been one of theatre’s self-appointed roles but when the show’s title appears to have been dreamt up before its plot, the action itself is likely to be about as controversial as an episode of Richard and Judy.
Sex, Politics and Religion were the hot buttons of choice for companies on the ragged edge of this year’s Fringe, issues guaranteed to generate exposure in the mainstream press. The Tony Blair Musical, Tony! The Blair Musical, Songs About Vaginas and a show apparently exposing the truth about Scientology all vied to court controversy. But for audiences inured to cheap shots at George W Bush and evangelical Christianity there seemed to be little, even on the Fringe, which could raise an eyebrow. As it happens the most offensive thing I saw this year was a swing version of Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ but the only controversy there, sadly, was in whether or not the offense was intended.
Jihad! was the kind of Edinburgh show that announces itself in a blaze of un-PC glory, and promptly garners broadsheet comment. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that as a piece of theatre it was woefully defunct. As a musical parody, it ticked certain boxes, ‘The Jihad Jive’ being a musical highlight. But as a commentary on the modern world it was a non-starter, with politics so basic and unoriginal it hurt. (It’s overriding lesson: “The Americans can be corrupt too!”). Indeed, its most offensive element was that its white American writer, who looked – and sang – like a refugee from the cast of Fame, played the central young Afghan character, and seemed capable of far less expression than the play’s seductive, burqa-wearing femme fatale.
Attempt 3.4, a show devised in part by an Oxford graduate, at least had some structure, and a real tension – none of the actors knew what was going to happen each night, though full-frontal male nudity does seem to have cropped up rather a lot. Because of the contained nature of the action, set in a post-apocalyptic city, despite its spontaneity the show had a natural growth. Meanwhile, in Raz-Mataz, the Ruskin School-supported performance piece, the audience could sit secure in the knowledge that truly spontaneous madness was unlikely to erupt, if only because Health and Safety would have had a fit and fake-blood-spattered audiences would likely sue.
The main problem that beset so many Edinburgh shows that aimed at the radical market this year was that image was conceived before substance. Raz-Mataz was at times fascinating to watch, but a lack of any true passion or direction meant that its interminable shouting, counting, drumming, gallons of fake blood and use of a pantomime horse were generally greeted with mixed amusement and bewilderment from its supposedly-participatory audience.
As another Cherwell critic put it, “I’d hate to deny the Raz gang the primal joy they’re obviously having. The show is, admittedly, fun to watch, much like watching a gang of nihilistic three-year-olds wreaking havoc in kindergarten art class. But it’s missing the charming innocence which makes playground anarchy redeemable. Instead the mood prevailing is that the Razzers think the “show” is in anyway shocking, controversial or original, while in reality their performance was an affront to the words ‘provocative”, ‘controversial’, ‘experimental’, and ‘theatre’.” At least the show could never be accused of eliciting a complacent reaction.
Xenu is Loose!… The Musical was another Oxford production whose concept and posters were at least as much fun as the show- not least because it’s title was almost as long as the first act. Watching it one couldn’t help but feel -however charitably- that the production must have been cramped by the threat of the legal might of the Church of Scientology which it supposedly lambasted. The play’s only coherent comment upon the scriptural science-fiction lunacy it portrayed was to set it alongside an equally mawkish and ridiculous high school love story.
Offensive material on the Fringe comedy circuit abounded as usual, but offense in the guise of comedy seems to have gone mainstream and is worth big money. Why else would Jimmy Carr be so ubiquitous on Channel 4? No theatre show could gain the celebrated notoriety of comics like Stephen Amos or the I.F. Award-Winner Brendon Burns. What seemed to be lacking among this year’s theatre offerings was a true passion for controversy that meant anything. Laughter can be a powerful enough weapon at the best of times, but not when the targets being satirised are patently absurd on their own. There was little that seemed likely to affect the audience’s perceptions once they’d walked out the door and into a flurry of ads for the hundreds of other Festival shows. Certainly few of the shows that attracted big audiences and the attentions of the press on the pretence of sheer daring could be said to fulfill the promise of a snappy or downright bizzarre title.

 Whats love got to do with it? Gareth Peters on the gurus who would guide you to the perfect pickup. 

This summer, students approaching the second year have been getting broody as they experience firsthand the miracle of life. Luckily for them, they get to skip the sleepless nights, the breast feeding and the baby sick which usually make life hard for new parents. Instead, they get a young adult who can generally take care of themselves, although freshers’ week may result in the same level of vomiting.

Being a college parent isn’t the most complicated job in the world, but there are certainly some things to keep in mind. Whether your new child has just arrived or if you’re a new first-year with a kid due in twelve months, there are a few pointers to remember, just to ensure that your little bundle of joy manages to stay on the right road.

Some doctors suggest that talking to the unborn child in the womb can be helpful to the baby’s growth and development (it also works for pumpkins). Similarly, before you meet your own child, communication is advisable simply to establish a good rapport, whether it’s a lengthy letter or a quick e-mail. Be wary of humorous opening sentences though; "Luke, I am your father" references might be a good way to break the ice, but are perhaps not to be recommended when there’s a chance, albeit a slim one, that your kid has recently been searching for their birth parents. Everyone wants to feel wanted, so when meeting your college child for the first time, make sure that you give them more than a two minute chat. Buy them a drink and get to know them a bit, and offer advice without patronising them, especially since there’s a good chance that they’re older than you.

A child’s first years are the most important for their progress, so it’s not surprising that their first days in Oxford, freshers’ week, is crucial. Advise them on the best places to go and be the familiar face in the crowd without being too much of a crutch, and don’t be offended if they don’t jump for joy every time they see you, all birds will fly the nest eventually. If it goes the other way though, and your child wants to spend as much time as possible with you, it’s probably best not to take advantage. Committing college incest in First Week is sleazy and is more likely to have a negative effect on their reputation than yours, so if you actually manage to find your soul mate in the delivery room then at least refrain from acting for a while.

The concept of college parenting goes hand in hand with the Oxford tradition of college marriage, so if you have a spouse, then you have the opportunity to introduce the extra parent over dinner. You might want to stop there with your explanation of the family tree though, as the Oxford custom gets a little old by the time you’ve met your mother’s sister’s aunt. Also, if you never managed to find the husband-wife for you, avoid the bastard-spinster-orphan jokes; it’s just a tad pathetic, and if you’re given more than one child, then avoid blatant favouritism as no one likes playing second fiddle.Research shows that ten to fifteen percent of new mothers are depressed after birth, and some develop negative feelings towards their newborns, which raises an issue with your sprog; what happens if you hate your child? What if they’re just a bit of a loser, or a complete creep? Luckily for you, you don’t have to be best friends, but if they need some advice, it is only fair that you help out, or at least send them to someone who can. College parenting doesn’t take too much effort, and shouldn’t cost you more than a pint or a carnation come exam time. It’s all about giving someone security for a potentially scary couple of weeks, reassuring them that all will be fine. Basically, then, it’s fostering without the tax benefits.

I enter the O3 gallery in the Castle Complex and my heels click intrusively on the stone floor. The gallery is a small grey grotto, with Claire Wiltsher’s paintings hanging from the ceiling and shining, jewel-like, from the dark walls. Wiltsher left her job and home several years ago and took off on a journey around the globe recording sights and experiences in sketches and photos. These paintings are the result of this highly personal journey.
The overriding impression of these paintings is of colour and texture. The texture is rough, thick and thoroughly satisfying. Colours are vibrant, if a little stereotypical. England is typified by muddy, grey green colours whilst Cuba and hotter climates are reds, oranges and yellows. She uses collage with exquisite accomplishment, blending magazine clippings and photographs with acrylic paint.
There is, however, a trace of A-level Art about Wiltsher. The texture reminds me of Anselm Kiefer’s work whilst the information handed out about the artist cites Maria-Helena Viera de Silva as an inspiration. Both artists are favourites of art teachers across the country. Even the technique of collage, though utilised well by Wiltsher, is one favoured by art departments to the point of cliché. The personal element of this exhibition is something which poignantly reminds me of Sixth Form. You were always encouraged to explore yourself and draw on personal experiences which is exactly what Wiltsher does in these paintings, almost too much. Whilst most art is clearly a result of a personal experience, I would suggest that these paintings are too personal, so personal that they exclude the viewer from fully understanding them because they were not there with her.
There is however one exception. Isolation, a small painting to the left as you walk in, is easily overlooked. It depicts a tumultuous scene so vigorous that it is almost abstract. A man and his dog traverse this lonely scene calmly as if oblivious to the roaring wind around them. It is much freer in technique than the linear and rigid depictions in other pieces and feels more like an experience for the viewer rather than the artist.
Other pieces, whilst not as emotionally evocative as Isolation, do display the artist’s talent very well. Alluring Light, in particular, makes beautiful use of colour whilst Hypnotic explores form and space very well. On the whole this exhibition is visually exciting but not necessarily mentally stimulating. I was thrilled by the colours and the painterly skill of Wiltsher but I certainly did not experience the “energy and spiritual presence of a place” I was promised.

As the last all-girls college in Oxford, St. Hilda’s is often sterotyped, but in reality it is a community of great openness and broadmindedness. Where there may be a cliquey atmosphere at other colleges, there is little sense of that at Hilda’s, although of course friendship circles have naturally formed. The fact that St Hilda’s is all-female gives us the incentive to make many friends outside of college circles and to socialise as much as possible with as many people as possible. As a wise woman once said to me: "You don’t have to live with boys to sleep with them."

Yes we do watch a lot of Sex and the City, wander round in pyjamas, and laugh when a guy visits for the first time and tentatively asks: "Can I go to the toilet here?!", and our all-female status has always set us apart from other colleges. Yet St Hilda’s is on the cusp of change; a change that this college has never experienced before. Next year, boys will be admitted and the last all-girls college in Oxford will become mixed. Most love being in an all-female college, but I believe most will also love being in a mixed college. Perhaps then, a fantastic college could now become even better.The greatest conundrum must be… where will they put all the urinals?

In 1964, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters arrived in New York City. Travelling with them was Neal Cassady, Denver-born street kid, petty criminal and Jack Kerouac’s chief muse, immortalised as Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Cassady was desperate for Kesey to meet Kerouac, to show Jack how he was still living the Beatnik life, still on the quest of an inverse version of the American Dream. Cassady persuaded him to come to the apartment where the Merry Pranksters were based. In Kerouac’s honour, they had spread an American flag across the sofa. Kerouac took one look at it, alcohol-sapped eyes narrowing, forehead furrowing, carefully picked it up and lectured the group on how to correctly fold it, before placing it to one side and sitting down. The others carried on with consuming their pot and acid, while Kerouac was content with gulping from his own bottle. No doubt Neal Cassady was amazed by his friend’s behaviour. The wild Jack of the fifties had given way to the cantankerous, hectoring old drunk. Jack had grown up.
On the Road, first published in 1957, is often cited as the foremost text of the Beat Generation, the literary father of the sixties counterculture, the work that opened up new channels of experience to youth everywhere, chronicling the exploits of Sal and Dean in their road trips across America. Its exploration of living free, of removing the individual from the so-called conformity of the bourgeois constriction, inspired musicians such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and is held up as a work that pours scorn on the strait-laced world of fifties America.
Now, the release of the original manuscript on the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road’s publication allows many of the characters’ real names and some of the previously censored passages to be reinstated, in an effort to produce the work that Kerouac originally envisioned: the perfect expression of his later-developed theory of ‘spontaneous bop prosody’. The result is a text infused with even more of the wild, acclamatory language that gives the original such a breathless, headily tangential quality.
Jack Kerouac began work on the version most recognisable as the final On the Road in April 1951, working almost non-stop, fuelled by Benzedrine, sweating through his T-shirts until his room was filled with old ones drying. By 27th April, the first draft was finished. This manuscript was then retyped, reformatted and rejected by publishers until finally on 11th January 1957 it was accepted by Viking Press.
The novel catapulted Kerouac to fame. Everyone clamoured to review both the book and the man. Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times called the novel ‘the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat’’.
Kerouac couldn’t cope. Everyone assumed he was Dean, the wild leader of the escapades across America recounted in the novel. He was, in fact, Sal, the observer and follower. He followed Christopher Isherwood’s maxim from Goodbye to Berlin: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording.’
The crux of the journalistic inquest was the Beat Generation. Commentators wanted to know what the Beats’ stance was on everything from organised religion to juvenile delinquency. Kerouac styled himself ‘a crazy solitary Catholic mystic’ and later insisted that ‘beat’ was far removed from its original vernacular use to describe a ‘state of exalted exhaustion’, but instead should be spelt ‘béat’, reminiscent of the Catholic state of being beatified. Beat was not simply a cosy name for vagrancy, but became a term of religious significance.
Kerouac had originally envisioned On the Road as a quest novel, in the vein of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Its praise of the car is linked to the concept of the open road, and Kerouac, by birth a French-Canadian Catholic, was possessed with a sense of the mystical aspects of Catholicism, and claimed that his ‘kind of monastic life’ at home with his mother was both his route to the heavens, and the context behind his writing skills.
Being in a state of On the Road is to be on a never-ending quest for something not defined, but suggested by belief. Writing itself for Kerouac was a way of recapturing actual fact and event, but the exercise was also a methodology of making sense of a world in which spirituality was becoming increasingly marginalised in society by the progression of rationalist thinking. Kerouac’s philosophy was that society corrupts the true heroes and terms them undesirable, when in fact they are ‘beat’, but in an irreversibly positive way. Like Jesus walking amongst the lepers and those society wishes to hide, Sal and Dean see beauty in poverty. And for Kerouac, who knew his Keats, beauty is Truth, and Catholic Truth in the actual world can only be God revealed.
The Jack who grew up was misrepresented by his followers. Those who disparaged America and religion and looked to him for leadership missed the point. Kerouac was a lot more concerned with praising America than is readily apparent. His portrayal of poor American communities as the ideal is linked with his quest for God, and like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress the journey is both a physical and sacred quest. On the Road is a spiritual allegory, undeniably simplistic in according worth to members of society who are, after all, car thieves and burglars, but in using such individuals, Kerouac reminds us that the spiritual unknown, whilst not necessarily the Christian God of organised religion, is found everywhere, even in places we least expect it.

The new, uncensored version of On the Road was published by Penguin on the 6th September.

Term off to a bad start, as whilst diving into the porter’s lodge, bod card in teeth and skirting parents clutching fresher offspring to their chests, Pert’n’Perky (my tute partner and nemesis) leapt out from behind the pidges to flash her gleaming mega-watt smile in my face.

Still sensitive after an alcohol-fuelled party the previous night, I reeled a little.

"Darling," she cooed, her cavernous cleavage serving as a magnet to the eyes of all fresher boys in the vicinity, "How was your holiday? Oh, poor thing, you haven’t picked up a tan at all, have you! My holiday reading didn’t take too long. Zipped through the Faerie Queene in a couple of days to be honest…"

Pricked with slight pangs of guilt about the pile of books that had lain stuffed in my wardrobe all summer, I looked for a distraction and immediately found it, in golden and muscled glory.

Bounding through the entrance to the porter’s lodge, accompanied by neither luggage nor parents, a fresher male of such stunning good looks made even Pert’n’Perky lose the thread a bit.

"Um, yes… Spenser… easy really…" she murmured, as we gazed open-mouthed at this demi-god who had unexpectedly been placed among us.

"God bless gap years," I breathed, as the bronzed apparition, who surely could only have attained such a hue in a country far, far away, turned to face us.

"Hi," he grinned a melting smile, "Do either of you know the way to staircase 8?"

As I opened my mouth to answer, calamity struck.

My parents careered round the corner, triumphantly brandishing a bottle of wine and calling my name. The porter yelled, "Who else needs keys?" and the parents rushed forward, cajoling their offspring with "Come on, you’re at Oxford now, show some bloody initiative…" In a sequence that seemed to unfold in tragic, unstoppable motion, one father, with a rather too enthusiastic shove to his daughter’s shoulder, sent her cannoning towards my mother, who drew the eyes of the quad upon her with a shriek of indignation and heavily tripped off one, stiletto-shod foot, staggering into my father. With a loud oath, he let go of the bottle of red wine, sending it tumbling onto Pert’n’Perky’s foot, where it shattered in a smash of shards and crimson.

Amongst my injured tute partner’s screams, my father’s apologies, the porter’s swearing and the nudgings of the freshers, I turned to the boy who I had been certain of securing as my future spouse."Second staircase on your left," I said hoarsely, as the wails of Pert’n’Perky echoed round the quad.

More exercise, weight control, and reduced alcohol intake can significantly reduce a woman's risk of breast cancer, according to leading Oxford researcher Professor Max Parkin.New research taking place at Oxford has discovered that changing certain aspects of a woman's lifestyle can decrease her risk of breast cancer significantly. Prof Parkin believes that the number of cases can be cut by more than 5700 each year if his guidelines are followed. According to him, regular exercise could help to prevent around 1400 cases, obesity prevention would help a further 1800 cases, while avoiding HRT would save another 2100 cases. Alcohol has been a common factor in a number of studies, finding that every alcohol unit drunk daily could increase the risk of breast cancer by as much as 11 per cent.The last decade has seen the number of breast cancer and incident rates increase by more than 12 percent. Prof Parkin acknowledges that an individual's genetics plays a significant part, but warns that women should be more aware of their lifestyle choices.

From December 9th, travel time between Oxford and London will rapidly fall as commuters find themselves with a new, high-speed route.The service will come as a welcome to commuters, seeing journey times cut by 15 minutes on earlier services, and up to 50 minutes later on in the day. The knock-on benefits include increased train services between Didcot Parkway and Paddington being increased at busy times of the day.The first trains will depart at 6:03am and arrive around 7am, seating 282 people, with the number rising to 515 by February.

Oxford University's clearly got its business plan well sorted. Keen Germans have been telling the Süddeutsche Zeitung how much they've being enjoying their pointless, extortionately-priced Oxford holiday camps. At a price of £820, foreigners can spend two weeks 'studying' in a college and soaking in the surroundings. One participant, Heidi Reiss-Wellbery, shares with us that

from the moment I got off the bus in Oxford, my legs went numb

and then claims that

here people think in ways in which we never thought before.

And her beautiful room in Exeter College was apparently

part of the adventure.

And here's the clincher:

Every time I'm here, it's as though I'm on a journey into a fairy tale,

according to Ina de Mets.As long as the Europeans think like this, Oxford will keep raking it in.
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Author and local-resident Philip Pullman expressed his concern over the way Oxford was changing, warning that it threatened the unique nature of the city.Pullman raised his concerns while lending his support to campaigners protesting against plans to redevelop the Castle Mill Boatyard site in Jericho. The former boatyard site is under threat following plans put forward by Spring Residential to build blocks of flats. Speaking of the boatyard, he commented that it was sites such as these which distinguish the city; the new additions would only add to what he described as the "concrete wasteland" spreading over Oxford."The Covered Market is changing, and Cornmarket is now a street like any other High Street in the country, so it is all the more important we protect little spots like this."People need to protest and make their views heard as soon as possible. Oxford is unique and different to any other city in the world."