There are a number of elements which comprise women’s tennis at it’s best, with short skirts, grunting and a gloriously sunny day all up there on the list.

All these, and more, were present in the LMH vs Hilda’s women’s Cuppers tennis final and they combined to make an exhilirating match.

St Hilda’s, captained by Emily Johnson, took an early lead when she and her parter Nicola Ullathorne defeated LMH’s captain Louise Pugh and Holly Bower in straight sets 6-3 6-4.

The match was every bit as close as the scoreline suggested, but eventually the superior net skills of the Hilda’s pair proved decisive. In the alternate tie the LMH second pairing of Nicole Carlson and Jusleen Karve manstruck back against opponents Sarah Trueman and Nadia Goldbach 7-5 6-0.

A tense first set went with serve and was only just secured 7-5. LMH dominated the second set however, with Carlson and Karve finding the length on their strokes to show their superior class.

The power of the LMH pairing from the back of the court simply overwhelmed their opponents, allowing them to take the set 6-0.

With the scores now even, both teams knew they would need to up their game if they were to break the deadlock and secure victory.

The next match proved to be a nail-biting affair with both teams determined not be outdone.

The outstanding standard of tennis played by Carlson and Karve was obvious to anyone watching, but it was not enough to overcome the Hilda’s girls who eventually proved stronger, Trueman and Goldbach taking the win 6-3, 7-6.

Advantage now lay with Hilda’s and LMH went into their last tie bearing the hope of the College on their shoulders; they had to win to tie the game and give them any hope of victory.

Despite the pressure, Pugh and Bower rose to the challenge, going for every opportunity in a tenacious performance which saw them win the first set 6-4.

However, they could not maintain the consistency in their strokes in their second set which fell 6-4 after a single break of serve.

Hilda’s carried the confidence of this into the decisive set, Johnson and Ulathorne’s aggressive net play allowing them to take the set 6-3.

Now left with an unassailable 5-4 set advantage Hilda’s Cuppers triumph was complete, though it had come right down to the wire.

On Saturday the hacks from St Aldates and Frewin Court laid down their notebooks and put on their football kits for the traditional end of year OxStu vs Cherwell football match.

Both papers lined up a motley crew of current staff and old guard to settle questions of tracking rules and the best way to do a cut-out.

However, Cherwell were to run out deserved winners, proving their superiority on the pitch as well as in print.

The first few minutes of the game were scrappy as the teams struggled to find their feet in the blazing sunshine. There were a number of flying objects all identifiable as a football for the OxStu players to get to grips with but Cherwell defender and Sports Editor John Citron was a giant in the air to aid his paper’s defence.

As the game began to settle, OxStu ex-Editor Rob Cookson made a number of charges up the centre, although in the two Michaels, Coombes and Crowhurst, he more than met his match.

However Cookson was not to be denied and after slipping past OSPL MD Ran Wei, he found himself one on one with the keeper and kept his cool to slot the ball low past his former opposite number Alex Stewart.

Cookson continued to threaten throughout the opening half but Wei recovered from his earlier mistake to dominate the Stu striker and his brutal defensive style managed to keep Cookson at bay.

As the first half wore on Cherwell managed to gain dominance. Dan Rolle displayed some deft footwork on the wing, taking off on a series of mazy runs straight through a bemused OxStu midfield.

Moving into midfield, Sports Editor Crowhurst began to assert his authority in the middle of the park, controlling the tempo of the game in combination with editor James Rogers.

As the OxStu defence found themselves pushed back, they became increasingly reliant on the uncontrolled aggression of ex-Editor Simon Akam to save them.

However even the blond giant could not shake off Rogers, and the midfield dynamo, who hails from Shropshire, eased past the towering centre-back and launched a blistering strike from 25 yards.

The shot deflected off a hapless OxStu defender providing Cherwell with their equaliser.

Inspired by their captain’s goal, Cherwell started to play with more fluidity and chances came thick and fast. Although a couple of good opportunites were spurned, the pressure eventually told when shortly before the break Ed Kemp struck, pouncing on a loose ball to rifle home from close range.

The OxStu came out fighting in the second half piling pressure on their opponents. Kristian Walsh worked hard up front, though lacked stamina towards the end, and along with Sports Editor, Chloe Mattison, he worked closely with Cookson but a goal was not forthcoming.

Led by Rogers, Cherwell managed to regain the dominance displayed at the end of the first half and Isis staffer William Cowell De Gruchy and Rolle had opportunities on goal but was left to rue some nervy finishing.

With the end fast approaching, an OxStu counterattack appeared to have been seen off, but from nowhere a long range effort went straight through the hands of smoking goalkeeper, and DPhil relic, Stewart, to level the scores as the final whistle blew.

Eschewing extra-time, it came straight down to penalties. The first two OxStu efforts found the back of the net and were answered by confident strikes from Cherwell.

With the shoot-out finely balanced, Crowhurst inexplicably scuffed a tame effort straight at the keeper and suddenly the game appeared to be swinging towards the OxStu.

But Stewart, who missed his penalty and lost the match for Cherwell last year, suddenly found form in goal, stopping the next two OxStu attempts with some great reflex saves.

A quick question for you: what links Edinburgh, Nottingham and UWIC? Answer: according to the BUSA league table, they’re all better than Oxford at sport. Of course, Loughborough is in first place on the BUSA table, closely followed by Bath and Birmingham, both universities renowned for sporting success; perhaps it would be unfair to expect Oxford to beat any of these three. But when did Edinburgh and Nottingham become excellent universities for sport?

And do you even know what the letters UWIC stand for? (University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, for those of you who, like me, didn’t know). Why is Oxford University worse at sport than six other universities? Should we be happy at being seventh out of 149 – and, what’s more, five places above Cambridge – or should we have a right to expect Oxford to be better?

First things first, though: how is the table compiled? Well, the British Universities Sports Association takes all the results from the biggest competitions in BUSA-accredited sports, allots points accordingly and the universities with the most points come top.

All fine and dandy, you might think. But, of course, not all sports are included: among the forty-nine sports included are Tenpin Bowling and Ultimate Frisbee, but Dancesport, a sport in which Oxford excels, is not recognized by BUSA.

According to Mark Brian, Head of Sports Programmes at BUSA, this isn’t BUSA’s fault: "When new sports want to be considered for accreditation, they have to put forward a paper to us and then there are criteria they have to reach – they will then be considered on a case-by-case basis. A group from Dancesport hasn’t yet come forward."

But then there’s the problem of how the sports are weighted. 66154.5 points are awarded overall, but sports aren’t given an equal allocation of those points: Football is given the most points, with 5886 overall, while the most minor sport, with only 60 points, is considered to be Fives.

Out of those 5886 points given for Football, how many do you think Oxford got? I’ll tell you – six, for coming fifth equal in the Men’s Shield competition. In fact, in the 2006-07 season Oxford got far fewer points for Football than it did for Women’s Boxing (twenty out of a possible forty).

Rowing, meanwhile, although it is arguably the highest calibre and most important sport in Oxford, ranks quite lowly on the national stage: it is allocated just 1900 points, fewer than fifteen other sports, including Golf (2336 points) and even Table Tennis (2265 points). Mind you, BUSA has given it far more points this year than it had last year, when it had fewer points than Cycling, Sailing, Water Polo, Canoeing and Rugby League, all of which it has now overtaken.

Mark Brian told me why BUSA now puts more weight on Rowing: "At the top end of the team programme there’s a very good standard but in the Individuals Competitions, competitors who may be of world status were only getting three points. We’re trying to recognize the standard of individual competitors, and so sports like Rowing have benefited fairly significantly from this year’s restructuring of the league table. The points allocated to the Regatta are now 1090 points, whereas football’s Knockout points are only 925 points [the other points are all won from how well teams do in the leagues]."

So, is Oxford happy with its ranking? According to Kate Filochowski, Sports Federation President, the answer is yes: "This was another very, very strong year for us. We came fourth last year, but we always knew we weren’t going to do as well this year after the restructuring [of the way in which sports are allocated points by BUSA]. We always aim to punch above our weight, but it’s not realistic to hope to beat Loughborough, for example, or other sport-specific institutions – they’ve got specific sports departments, sports scholarships and that sort of thing. At Oxford we don’t have sportspeople first and foremost, but scholars and academics, and still we manage to come seventh – it’s pretty awesome, really."

The Sports Federation President is happy with seventh place, then – are Oxford sportspeople happy too? Well, in any case, a lot of them are being acknowledged by BUSA: out of the 49 BUSA-accredited sports, Oxford gained points in 34, including Windsurfing, Pool and Korfball – it certainly seems as if Oxford has breadth and depth.

Even so, there were fifteen sports in which Oxford failed to win any points. Mainly this is because more minor sports have fewer points to give away and therefore often only the best four universities get any points, whereas in football more than twenty-four universities can get points for the same competition, never mind the same sport; sometimes, though, this is for more prosaic reasons – as Rob Dixon, Vice-President of the OU Trampolining Club, told me, one member of the Trampolining team made it through to the BUSA National Finals but didn’t go because nobody else from Oxford was going.

So, apart from turning up to competitions, is there anything else Oxford can do to improve its student ranking? According to Richard Howell, Sabbatical Officer at Bath University Students’ Sports Federation, not very much: "Well, Bath’s success is very much a long-term thing – it didn’t happen overnight. Bath’s a young university – only forty years old – but it’s always focused on sport as an aim, and the Sports Department and the Federation work together to achieve the best results we can."

But he did have one piece of advice for us: "At Bath we’ve got reresentation in almost every sport, and we encourage participation in diverse sports, even trying to send individual competitors in sports where we haven’t got a university team." Considering Oxford doesn’t field competitors in all of BUSA’s 49 sports, perhaps this is something we should be looking to: anyone fancy competing in Tenpin Bowling?

We shouldn’t place too much importance on the BUSA league table, though – as Kate Filochowski told me, "BUSA isn’t everything for us; other competitions and national leagues are just as important."

"Government Ministers have a duty to be entirely impartial when it comes to spending taxpayers’ money, and it is completely unacceptable to put your political friends onto the payroll. It’s obvious that the culture of cronyism that existed under Tony Blair is going to carry on under Gordon Brown. But the Chancellor seems to be taking things to new depths."

Professor McLean denied all of Grayling’s accusations and said they did not constitute political support as he was acting in a professional capacity. "I didn’t provide direct political support to Ed Balls. I was a consultant to Wakefield City Council, as Mr Grayling would have found out if he had consulted them, or me. My financial terms for acting as an expert witness were my standard terms, as agreed with other local authorities in the Fourth and Fifth General Reviews of the Parliamentary Boundary Commission for England.

"All my work for HM Treasury has been unpaid. The only paid contract involving the Treasury was for a report on which I was principal instigator on ‘Investigating the flow of domestic and European public expenditure into the English regions’, which reported in 2003. It was not commissioned by the Treasury but by John Prescott’s department, then called the ODPM. I tendered successfully for it in an open competition," he added.

"Gregor Jotzu is one of the finest men I have ever met," says Tom Corcoran of the athlete, aesthete and all-round ‘culture king’. Gregor curates a termly arts event known as The Empty Space. "It’s very open," he explains. He’s not wrong. The Empty Space has featured just about every form of artistic endeavour imaginable, from the relatively conventional – such as photography and poetry – to the more unorthodox. One evening witnessed a young troubadour who had adapted Psalms to blues music; he was followed by an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to Mark Russell, the god-awful American satirist. "It’s for people to present something they wouldn’t want to present in a formal context, or something that’s not in a finalised form."

"The best thing about it is that there’s a lot of time when nothing happens and people talk about the performances. We have all sorts of stuff: a girl playing a banjo, violin and dancing, absurdist comedy." The occasions have a spontaneous feel – one play didn’t have enough actors for the parts, so the director recruited more from the audience. A regular performer at the event is Tom Corcoran. "How do I describe Tom? He’s impossible to sum up," muses Gregor, who once managed to convince Tom that he existed only as a figment of Tom’s imagination.

Animal rights group Speak has threatened to take legal action against Thames Valley Police after a judge ruled last week that they had been unlawfully prevented from demonstrating by officers.

Mel Broughton, co-founder of Speak, attacked police for keeping officers who had been criticised during the trial on duty, and accused the University of attempting to silence anyone who who spoke out against animal testing.

Broughton complained that police officers, who had been condemned by the judge for acting in an unprofessional manner last year towards Speak, had been present at a demonstration last Saturday.

He explained that he had no confidence in the Independent Police Complains Commission (IPCC) and did not believe that the police would take action against their own officers. "I don’t think they’re [Thames Valley Police] going to do anything. We’re going to take our own action through the courts. I don’t think we’ll get anywhere through the IPCC, they’re clearly not interested."

Broughton also claims that the University is attempting to use the courts to limit Speak protests after a 2006 injunction to prevent Speak protesters using megaphones at demonstrations.

The Speak website stated, "It was noted that at least one of the police officers, whose evidence was described as ‘inconceivable’ and who was considered by the judge to be an ‘unreliable witness,’ was on duty, showing that TVP obviously want to continue policing these demonstrations in the way they have always done, with officers who want to wage a dirty war against protesters and who are prepared to lie about it in court. So much for balanced policing."

A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police confirmed that officers who had been involved in the trial were still on duty and that an internal review of the judgment was taking place.

Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Dr Richard Turnbull, has reacted against recent accusations of reactionary evangelicalism at his College in an article published in the Guardian.

"I know of no homophobia or misogyny at Wycliffe," he wrote.

Turnbull also argued that his assertion that 95 per cent of Britons are going to Hell had been taken out of context.

Want to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel? Rebecca Fry on the surprising similarities between human and animal behaviour. 

My very first lessons in love came courtesy of eighties rock star Pat Benatar. Educated at an all-girls school from the age of four, I grew up barely aware that there were two genders. Opportunities for experience-based learning were seriously limited. Still, listening to the car radio on my way home from school, one thing was clear: love is a battlefield.

Later on I became a teenager, met boys at Bacardi breezer infused house parties and probably even held their hands. Once or twice. I was growing up, trying new things, experimenting with my sexuality. Or was I? I began to realise that I was heavily influenced by my surroundings. Why was I so sure that sexual relationships involved the opposite sex? What was wrong with experimenting with other girls? Or even with myself? Our society teaches us that some sexual practices are natural, whilst others are considered perverse or even perverted. It was time to look to nature itself for some answers.

Brought up in relatively liberal, post-feminist Britain, which sees women succeeding in almost every walk of life, I still can’t even imagine making the first move. "Don’t act too interested, don’t text him until he texts you, and definitely don’t sleep with him on the first date," is typical of the relationship advice that most girls receive from male and female friends alike. Human dating etiquette dictates that female promiscuity is unnatural while men are genetically programmed to thrive on the so-called thrill of the chase.

In the animal world things are very different. Recent genetic research has revealed that females who mate with several different partners produce healthier offspring, giving them an evolutionary impetus to play the field. Female chimpanzees take this to the extreme, with some on record as having copulated with eight different partners in 15 minutes. Others have racked up an impressive total of 84 sexual assignations in just eight days. Lionesses are also voracious lovers, demanding sex at least once every half hour during their five-day heat. But the sauciest species has to be the female dunnock. These otherwise rather uninspiring birds are known to sneak away from their partners for a quickie in the undergrowth with different, genetically superior specimens. The minxes.

Yet in spite of widespread evidence of animal promiscuity, we humans still subscribe to the view that monogamy isn’t just natural, it’s everything we’ve always wanted. Right? Weaned on a diet of Disney classics, relationships always seemed simple to me. All you had to do was grow up, marry the local prince and live happily ever after. Wrong. With divorce rates at an all time high, forever seems to have become a relative concept. And it’s no different in Oxford. Though the majority of my close friends are in long-term relationships, I’d be hard pushed to name one that hasn’t "slipped up" one drunken night at the Bridge. But though fairy-tale romance eludes most of us, it hasn’t stopped me subscribing to the improbable idea that my soul mate is out there somewhere.

A quick glance around a card shop on Valentine’s Day might easily give the impression that it’s the same for animals. Cuddling bears and cooing love birds abound. But while the love bird itself really is monogamous, it’s one of the very few species that is. Genetic testing tells us that most birds live in pairs but are unfaithful to their partners, flying off to copulate with other birds at the earliest opportunity. Birds aren’t alone in this: studies show that less than 3% of mammals practice true monogamy, probably because it has very few evolutionary benefits.

Excluding black vultures, termites and prairie voles, it’s fair to say that most species sleep around. But it’s not just for fun. New research conducted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver concludes that monogamy is in fact a risk factor for extinction. Apparently species that live in pairs or small harems are more likely to die out than those that live in large harems. In the Ghanaian nature reserves, studied colobus monkey species, which have few mates, died out an average of 18 years after the reserves were established. Green monkeys and baboons, which tend to live in large harems, are both thriving in the reserves. Similarly, monogamous duiker antelopes were eradicated after just 10 years in reserves where the more promiscuous buffalo continues to prosper. In the natural world, monogamy isn’t just difficult; it’s bad for your health.

While monogamy is rare, more contentious sexual practices such as homosexuality, masturbation, and even paedophilia are common to animal interactions. Once again, the animal world turns human stereotypes upside down. Though we’ve come a long, long way since Victorian times, the fact remains that most forms of sexual expression that don’t fit into the boy-meets-girl box are still regarded with some suspicion. In spite of the efforts of Oxford’s LGBT Soc, not one of my gay friends feels comfortable enough to kiss their partner in public. And though Friday night TV shows like Sex and the City may give the impression that we’re all happy to discuss vibrators, anal sex and X-rated fantasies over brunch, the reality is very different. Most of us tend to giggle and look the other way, retreating behind our menus before the discussion even gets off the ground. It’s a far cry from the criminal charges faced by practising homosexuals as recently as 1967, or the mandatory hospitalisation of those suffering from the "social plague" of masturbation in the 1700s. Still, with influential leaders like Archbishop of York John Sentamu supporting the 1998 Lambeth Resolution which rejects homosexuality as "incompatible with scripture", sexual freedom remains an aspiration rather than an actuality.

Animals seem much more comfortable with sexual experimentation. Dolphins in particular have discovered the secrets (and the pleasures) of free love. The mammals have been recorded trying to mate with seals, sharks, turtles, eels and even humans. They also engage in homosexual activity, rather amusingly involving blow hole penetration, and, if all else fails, will masturbate. Masturbation is in fact very common in the natural world. As Peter Boeckman of the Norwegian Natural History Museum points out, "masturbation is the simplest method of self pleasure. We have a Darwinist mentality that all animals only have sex to procreate. But masturbation has been observed among primates, deer, killer whales and penguins, and we’re talking about both males and females."