Oxford pubs are under threat, with as many as one pub closing every eight weeks as a result of the smoking a ban.Since September, both the White House pub in Botley Road and the Marlborough House, at the corner of Western Road, have both closed and with the winter months setting in, it is predicted that the problem will worsen, with smokers reluctant to stand outside to smoke.Tony Goulding, chairman of the Oxford branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) said: "Pubs are closing at an alarming rate and the situation is getting critical. In the old days, people went to the pub and the cinema – those were their main distractions – but people lead such busy lives nowadays and it's hard to get them to come out to community pubs."In Oxford, estimates suggest that trade in pubs has dropped by around 25%. According to the Oxford Mail, there are currently 28 pubs for sale in Oxfordshire, including four within Oxford. John Madden, of the Guild of Master Victuallers, said the problem is worse when considered on a national scale, with as many as two to three pubs closing daily.

I have spent hours telling potential applicants that Oxford is not that odd. Reassuring them that although we do have to work harder than at other universities, student life here is not that different to anywhere else.  Forget ‘Brideshead Revisited’: we are a perfectly normal set of people.  

But, let’s be honest, there are quite a few things that you get at Oxford which you just won’t find anywhere else. And although the thought of such things unnerved me a bit before coming up, I have to admit that now I’m here, I quite like some of the quirky traditions we have.  Public School-like it may be, but ‘sconcing’ is one of them. 

Sconcing, as it is understood by the students who practice it today, does not follow exactly the same procedures as it used to.  It can be traced back to at least as early as 1617 when the word ‘sconce’ meant a fine or penalty.  A person would be ‘sconced’ at a formal dinner if they broke table etiquette – for example by talking about women, religion, politics or work; by referring to the portraits hung in the hall; or by pronouncing the Latin grace wrong.  All very serious stuff.  The tradition then evolved from being a monetary fine to the penalty of having to drink a tankard of ale which the sconced student could share with his fellows, thus making amends to those who suffered his breach of etiquette. Only the master or senior scholar at the table was able to impose a ‘sconce’: if other people at the table felt that a sconce was necessary, they had to make their request to their senior in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Nowadays sconcing is practiced in different ways by different colleges, and the variations are quite revealing.  The standard format goes something like this: At a formal dinner someone will stand up and say “I sconce anyone who… (insert amusing/offensive/salacious comment here)”. A particular favourite of mine was the person sconced for falling over while thinking about prime numbers.  The people or person who fits that description then has to stand up, and has to down his or her drink 

In most colleges sconcing is mainly practiced by rowers, which perhaps tells you about the love of tradition in boat clubs.  However, subject societies and other sports societies do it too. In Hertford the Tanner Society (for physicists) and the Music Society are known to be keen sconcers, although I’m told by a Hertford physicist that sconcing only happens after dinner, not during it, because the two don’t go well concurrently.  Civilised sconcers indeed. The fact that we’re still eating dinner has never stopped anyone I know.  

In Balliol ‘revenge sconcing’ is frowned upon – for example sconcing people who row on bow side cannot be countered with a sconce against those who row on stroke side.  Balliolites demand ingenuity in their sconces.  An ‘incorrect sconce’, i.e. a sconce description which doesn’t fit anyone present, is met with the cry of SHOE! This then results in the abashed would-be-sconcer having to remove their footwear, pour their drink into it, and down it from there.  Pretty gross.  This doesn’t happen in all colleges that sconce though.  A St Hughs student told me that they’d seen it on a crew date but had wisely avoided adopting it.  Not so in Oriel.  Apparently it has to be the president of the boat club’s shoe which is used and because of its popularity he has particular shoes for the purpose, so that the others don’t get ruined.  Presumably this is a remnant of the old tradition when only the master or senior scholar could impose a sconce.  Clearly Oriel is more traditional than most. 

At St John’s sconcing seems to be less popular now, but until recently it was traditional for rowers to ask for permission from the president of the boat club to sconce people, and to do this in Latin.  They have giant solid silver flagons which are worth about £16,000 each that they put out at some formal dinners. It is suspected that these might be old “sconce pots” which are mentioned in early accounts of sconcing. 

  Sconcing isn’t something done in all colleges though and its not done anywhere in Cambridge.  Wadhamites for example, are clearly too cool for any of this sconcing lark. As one Wadham third year put it “it sounds like a slightly uprated, posher, boatier version of ‘I have never’”. He perhaps has a point.  Sconcing is daft, posh and ultimately very Oxford.  It can get offensive if done by certain people, but I think generally it is quite good fun and pretty harmless. 

by Jack Farchy

Why would anyone want to be in a 24-hour play? Land a part in a play that is conceived, scripted and rehearsed all in the space of 24 hours and you’re likely to find yourself rushed on stage, lines half-learnt, to fudge your way through a play that feels like it was written at four in the morning, because it was. And then the lights go out.

There were plenty of painful moments in the five short plays on show: in one, the actors delivered their bedroom conversation with such intimacy that no one else in the theatre could hear it; in another, an actor was spotted surreptitiously reading his lines off his hand. But there were, in the course of the evening, little moments of quality that glimmered fleetingly, and made the whole exercise worthwhile.

Much of the acting was below par – it is a shame that few of Oxford’s starlets could be coaxed out of their more glamorous spotlights. But there were some striking performances: Iante Roache gave an unusual and powerful monologue as a girl waiting in an airport, reflecting on the child she aborted. Her strong Italian accent, her deadpan delivery, and her unflinching eye contact with the audience gave her performance a mesmeric quality. Kabir Soorya showed an uncanny natural ability for playing a schizophrenic, lonely man who lives on take-away pizzas. My favourite moment of the whole evening came when he choked on the piece of pizza he was eating, while delivering the line, ‘I love eating pizza’ – followed by a characteristically twitchy, coy smile to the audience.

Perhaps the most fully realised play on offer was Tom Crawshaw’s Most Suspect. A classic farce, it employed some well-crafted exaggerated physical comedy, featuring a foolish detective, a drunken vicar, a cross-dressing wing commander, a fainting hostess, and – my favourite – a saucy west country cook, played by Melissa Julian Jones.

The most interesting writing came from Tom Campion and Cathy Thomas. Their two characters engaged in a fast-paced free-association dialogue in which sometimes lovely descriptions of imagined worlds and situations were bounced between them. Unfortunately, though, the play went on too long, and much of its sharpness and mystery was lost.

  Why would anyone go to see a 24-hour play? You shuffle into a half-empty theatre to watch a series of plays that begin falteringly, struggle about the stage for a quarter hour, and then end abruptly and often inexplicably. But there were enough moments of freshness and quality in this show to make me hope the event will become a regular fixture.

by Paul Hallows

Pagan Wanderer Lu – Perfection R.I.P.

****

Firstly, I feel as though I should apologise to Andy Regan, A.K.A. Cardiff’s very own Pagan Wanderer Lu. I have certainly given records more auspicious first plays than as accidental soundtracks to my sleepy washing up. Unbeknownst to me, his new E.P. ‘Perfection R.I.P.’ filtered through to my bathroom, leading me to think that iTunes had rather pleasingly found me a new Belle & Sebastian album. Wait, how long has Stuart Murdoch been sticking glitchy bits in his songs for? And did I just hear the line “spray the foam on the boy’s pectoral”? Upon closer inspection, what turned out to be Pagan Wanderer Lu’s latest effort combines the three features that underpin those questions beautifully. Melodies that scream pop while staying on the right side of cloying are offset by some extremely dark, witty lyrics delivered in an endearing Bolton accent. The opener ‘The Gentleman’s Game’ is possibly the best representation of this, with shimmering electronics underpinning wonky bass and Casio beats with plaintive reflections on how “we are loath to live vicariously, through the sporting achievements of our country”. The quality doesn’t let up from hereon in, and I defy anyone not to start happily singing along to “Perfection of a Simple Life” before suddenly stopping with the slow, cold realisation that you’ve been merrily mouthing lines like “and if they find those bodies buried under your immaculate lawn…”. As a whole, it’s an E.P. that’s a world away from its self-deprecating title. Indeed, as new single and highlight ‘Tree of Knowledge suggests”, if you don’t like it, you can “fuck his apples”. Charming.

Want to get involved in Cherwell24?We are recruiting for HT2008, so if you want to get involved in the fastest growing online publication in Oxford, get in contact with us now.We're looking for a new editorial team, contributors, broadcasters and photographers.For editorial positions, contact [email protected] by Sunday 18th November.For all other positions, e-mail us by November 23rd.Or alternatively, come along to our meetings every Sunday at 11:30am in our offices on St Aldates.

New research from Oxford’s epidemiology unit has confirmed that birth-control pills increase the risk of cervical cancer.

The study, published in the Lancet, involved over 50,000 subjects and research from 24 countries. Lead researcher Dr. Jane Green stressed that the increase in risk was “small and outweighed by reduced risks for ovarian and womb cancer.”

The study also found that risk levels returned to normal in subjects who had not used the drug for ten years or more.

by James Stafford

Oxford is the second best university in the world, according to this year’s THES rankings.

The table, ased on a survey of academics and graduate employers, awarded equal positions to Oxford, Cambridge and Yale, with Harvard topping the poll by a small margin. In spite of a vast funding gap with the US, British universities occupied four of the top ten positions.

The Vice-Chancellor, Dr. John Hood, paid tribute to the “dedication and commitment” of students and staff in maintaining Oxford’s global standing.

by James Stafford

by Henry Clarke PriceI had a slightly strange fixation when I was younger. In the mind of mini-Henry, it was all about tunnels. The London Underground, the Channel tunnel, deep-level air-raid shelters: if it was a hole, I loved it. Freud would have had a field day. This obsession was, er, channelled during my adolescent years. But it wasn’t to last. Along came Oxford and the Bodleian Library and myths of its labyrinthine tunnels stretching out to all four corners of Oxford. Tales of a nuclear shelter made me salivate like a rabid dog. My dreams were filled with elaborate conveyor systems stretching through miles of tunnel, while the unsuspecting world above continued unawares. So when the invitation to delve into the Bodleian’s subterranean book stacks arrived at the office, I basically assaulted my editors until they let me go.

One editorial assault later and I was met in the Old Bodleian by Sarah Thomas, the library’s charming American director. She arrived in Oxford only eight months ago, one assumes as part of the larger sort of Amazon order. Almost immediately she launched into an ardent spiel about the new depository at Osney ‘flood plain’ Meads: this, clearly, is the purpose of today’s visit. Get a little positive PR from the student press by satisfying their unconscious desires. To be fair, she really did sell the depository well. After all, it involves robots – but we can save that for later. One boyish fantasy at a time. With the ‘convince student press it’s sensible to build on a flood plain’ box ticked, we entered the Radcliffe Camera, slyly descending a staircase hidden behind the staff desk in the northern end of the lower reading room. “Ha,” I mocked the mere readers, “while you idly pore over your books, I’m going to the source of the knowledge.” I may also have entertained images of killing a minotaur. Oh, hubris. I’d always imagined the book stacks to be luxuriously-decorated thirty-foot affairs in chamber-like caverns. The kind of place where you’ll trip over the Magna Carta and fall into Shakespeare’s first folio. Perhaps I had set myself up for a fall. Still, the unpainted door wouldn’t have looked out of place in a druggie squat. And once you go through it, the ceiling is only six feet high. It’s more palatial in the back of Argos. You know what really takes the biscuit? The grumpy worker midgets I’d been promised were nowhere to be seen.

With hindsight, my Aeneid-cum-Harry-Potter fantasy was prejudicing my judgement somewhat. After all, it says something for the efficacy of storage that it doesn’t feel like these stacks under the Camera hold over 600,000 volumes. Radcliffe Square was still above us, full of students on fag breaks and tourists taking pictures of each other ‘in front of Oxford University’. I had full faith that David Perrow, our new guide, would re-inject the sense of magic that surrounds the bookstacks. “Between us and the square is a membrane that keeps the water out. When they cobbled the square, they breached it and it had to be replaced… here [pointing to a nasty stain on the ceiling] is where water actually came in, and we had to dry a few damp books.” Magical. Not only was my fantasy lying in tatters, but we were one DIY fuck-up away from being drowned. Well, perhaps that’s a little melodramatic: the water table in this room falls at about waist height. But all it would take is for the pumps that keep this room dry to fail, and we – along with several hundred thousand volumes – would be drenched.

Despite its appearances and imminent risk of soaking, this is nonetheless the site of a great innovation. Here, underneath Radcliffe Square, is the first example of mobile shelving suspended from the ceiling, reputedly designed by Prime Minister Gladstone (although it was not implemented in his lifetime). While it might seem obvious now to make maximum use of the space between shelves, Gladstone Shelving is one of those masterstrokes born of a dire situation. Sadly, no similarly pioneering solution to diminishing space has since been devised, which is one reason why the Bodleian’s least-used volumes are sitting in a salt mine in Cheshire. Through the next door, we reach the first of those much-craved tunnels. This is the passage way which leads to the Old Bodleian. One line of track embedded in the concrete floor marks the path that a railway used to run to transport books between the Radcliffe Camera and the main Bodleian. The conveyor system that serves the New and Old Bodleian libraries doesn’t extend here, much to the annoyance of the stack workers.

“The Camera, although it’s a very popular space, is quite difficult to serve books into, especially with Health and Safety legislation,” explains Perrow. Books and stairs are not the friends of Mister Inspector. Or one’s back. The Radcliffe Camera’s charming good looks do not help the Bodleian staff one bit. It’s under the Old Bodleian that we meet up with the conveyor system. The little cars that run in the cage are mind-boggling. Our guide tries (in vain) to explain the intricate system of knobs that tell a car where to stop. Letters from A to L are marked on the side of the car, and the slider can be set to any of these. It just seems amazing that this eccentric machine is relied on to deliver thousands of books every day. But despite being over six decades old, it still works (just) – although there is no practical way for it to be extended to the Radcliffe Camera. As part of the New Bodleian’s refurbishment (another project on top of the Osney Mead depository), it would be torn out and a new system installed. If you want an idea of how much that would cost, the Radcliffe Camera extension alone of a new conveyor would be £2m. Still, probably cheaper than the health insurance of the bookstack workers. The tunnel winds round and down at this point, as we move under Broad Street. The cage containing the conveyor system (and, alarmingly, what appear to be several water pipes) is to our right. The unpainted concrete walls and ceiling, along with the institutional strip lighting running the length of the tunnel, give the passageway the feel of some Cold War bunker. The notices stuck to the door of the New Bodleian certainly give that paranoid feel. “Have you told a colleague where you are going?” asks one notice. “Emergency evacuation or lost in the stack? Follow the yellow lines on the floor and they will take you to an exit.” That’s right – as if the imminent threat of flooding weren’t bad enough (and the bitumen tanking under the water table is frequently breached here too), these books also risk going up in smoke.

In the New Bodleian, Perrow points out where the sealant around girders has deteriorated. If there were a fire, the holes between the ceilings and these girders would act as a chimney, feeding the flames. National Archives, the authority that decides whether the Bodleian can be trusted with materials of great cultural relevance, is so concerned that it has only temporarily renewed the University’s license to house collections for the nation. Until the New Bodleian incorporates proper measures for fire protection and suppression, it will never satisfy the catchily-named BS 5454:2000, the standard for storage of library material. And if the University loses its license, not only would it be banned from holding manuscript material deposited in lieu of Death Duty, but its chances of attracting any more materials of significance would be nil. Researchers, so integral to the workings of Oxford, would be discouraged from working here. And let’s face it, who wants to study at a University whose collections are either sitting underwater or are one step away from feeding the most excruciating bonfire known to man?

The New Bodleian desperately needs deep refurbishment if Oxford is to maintain its National Archives Approved Status. For this to happen, its 3.5 million volumes need to be ‘decanted’ (a technical term, perhaps deriving from the fact that running this place is enough to drive you to drink). Loath as I am to promote the party PR line, the Osney Meads depository is the only realistic place that this could happen. And while Congregation mulls over it, more and more books are arriving. Far from tolling the knell for printed works, the onset of the digital age has heralded an explosion in publication. Which is great for academia, not so fantastic for librarians. When the New Bodleian was built between 1937-39, the intention was that the library’s intake for the next century would be catered for. But with three decades still to go before we reach that hundredth year, it is already 130% full (based on its original envisioned capacity). With this unexpected surge in incoming volumes, the University’s libraries have had to make rushed, piecemeal expansions. In 1974, Nuneham Courtenay, 8 miles from the Central Bodleian, was converted for use as book storage. Planning permission to expand the Nuneham site was comprehensively refused in December 2003, and books literally started piling up in the New Bodleian, so much so that access to certain stacks was completely blocked off. Subsequently, the University placed its least-used items (dubbed “Bod X” material, but disappointingly unpornographic) in commercial storage in Wiltshire and Cheshire. Dumping books in a cave might sound like a cheap operation, but in 2005-6 it cost the University £110,000, and this cost has been increasing by around £10,000 each month. “We told the University ten years ago that we were out of space,” says Perrow. “We should be opening the depository today instead of talking to you about it.”

So, about those robots I promised earlier. The new depository would sport a system called ASRS which, apart from looking like “arse”, stands for Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems. Within seconds of a stack request being made, the system swings into action to find and deliver the volumes. Because it’s a robot rather than a person at work, bookstacks can be higher and more densely packed than usual. ASRS is six times more efficient with space than Gladstone rolling shelving, and ten times more efficient than conventional shelves. My experience with photocopiers – one which involves tugging and tearing paper out of the depths of a machine while getting covered in toner – made me wary of this system at first. But ASRS (nope, still looks like “arse”) is a proven technology, and when delegates from Oxford University Library Services went on a jolly to America they saw it work and not chew up priceless books. When I ask Sarah Thomas what the Bodleian staff feel about being replaced by robotic claws, her response seems sensible enough: “One of the things that we’ve planned here is a natural wastage, or normal attrition… These jobs have relatively high turnover, so no-one is going to lose a job because of the depository.”

And what about this floodplain business and the dreaming spires? On the first count, I fail to believe that David Perrow and Sarah Thomas, who work with such zeal to care for Oxford’s collections, would happily send millions of volumes to their doom. Far from it, they’re keen to save the Bodleian’s collections from the fiery or watery demise that seems increasingly likely in the New Bodleian. The 22-metre thick defences of the Osney Meads depository are designed to withstand a 1 in 5000 year flood. That’s with climate change factored in. As for the dreaming spires, the depository (as far as I can see) has a negligible effect on the landscape. At the risk of sounding direfully emotional, we should remember that the Bodleian is one of the primary reasons that Oxford has grown to be the great city it is today. If we neglect its collections in favour of a postcard picture, we neglect the very reason tourists come here – and the very reason why Oxford remains one of the greatest academic institutions on earth.

by Robin WhelanI know what you’re thinking: “Snob slates manufactured pop. In other news, Pope Catholic”. But easy prejudices shouldn’t come in to considerations of merit. Elvis? Manufactured. Motown? A veritable production line. Some of the best and most interesting music of our time is being made by superstar producers and songwriting teams. We snobs don’t enjoy admitting it, but the commercial, manufactured genius of the likes of Timbaland and Xenomania is infinitely preferable to the sincere and heartfelt (yet second-rate) offerings of various rent-a-band clones.

So where does this leave The Spice Girls? Britain in the mid ‘90s, stranded forever in a certain time and a certain place. Manufactured pop is about the bottom line. It has to be catchy, with a face for radio. By these standards, The Spice Girls are the best manufactured act in history: they sold by the bucket load, largely through ruthless exploitation of the Tweenie market.

However, going for the earworm isn’t a route to timelessness, not without something more concrete. Lyrics that tug on the heartstrings, or other body parts for that matter. Production values. Songcraft. ‘Wannabe’, ‘Spice up your Life’, ‘Headlines’: these songs are instantly hummable, yet ultimately ephemeral. They, rather unsurprisingly, have the emotional depth and sexual development of a pre-teen. You can almost hear the ‘E’ numbers. Frankly, it’s all rather creepy, the musical equivalent of those Kids TV presenters who pretend to be 13 years old.

So, buy this album for a nostalgia trip if you wish. Party like it’s 1995. Party like a gullible pre-teen. But remember, be it a haircut that you could’ve sworn looked cool, Union Jack t-shirts, or that unrequited crush from primary school, some things are better left as a rose-tinted memory.