I work in Mehdi’s kebab van which is on the High Street between Oriel College and Turl Street. I’ve worked in the same van on the same spot since I came to England in 1994. Before I took over the business my father did the same for 12 years.We’re very famous in Oxford and my van has even been voted the best. When the students are in Oxford I work seven days – well, seven nights – a week. You can’t take a single day off because customers start asking about you!I finish at around three o’clock every morning and get three or four hours of sleep. When I wake up I usually visit my brother-in-law at his café on Broad Street, go shopping and watch some TV. Then I try to get about four more hours of sleep before starting work again each evening at five o’clock.My van has to be on the High Street ready to serve by half past six. It might seem like a lot but I don’t think the work is too hard and I’m used to it. But it does mean I don’t get much chance to spend time with my family during term time. That’s why I take long holidays, for two or three weeks, whenever the students go back home.In the summer I go away for four or five weeks, usually to Morocco where I was born. This year I went to Marrakech where my sister lives. I’m 35 now, but I moved to England from Tangier at the age of 24 to be with my wife – I met her in Morocco but she herself was already living in England. When I go back to Morocco now I don’t know how I cope with the heat, I’m so used to living in England.In Marrakech it’s 45°C in August at least, and I can’t breathe! I’m a Muslim so obviously I can’t drink but dealing with drunk students every night doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If other people want to drink that’s fine with me. Everyone has their own ideas and their own feelings and beliefs. At the moment working nights actually suits my religious beliefs as I’m currently fasting for Ramadan and can’t even accept an offer of coffee during the day! Since I work at night sometimes I do get trouble from drunken customers. Last night for instance one man was determined to argue about his order. I just stayed calm and gave him his money back. But it’s not a massive problem because I’m used to dealing with drunk customers.I know the mentality and I know how to deal with it. If they want to argue with you, you don’t argue back. If they start swearing at you, you don’t start swearing back. You just have to get on with your job and make them happy. I actually think my work has made me quite diplomatic. One of the best parts about my job is that you meet people from all over the world.Every night you meet different people from different countries and different cultures. In the summer especially there are tourists in Oxford from Europe, America – in fact, everywhere. But at the same time you get to know a lot of regular customers very well; some people have been coming to my van for 15 to 20 years.What’s my opinion of Oxford students? Well, they’re normal. And generally very nice. Sometimes in the morning when I’m not working I come across regular customers on the street and they’re very happy to see me. Like lots of other businesses in Oxford, my business depends on students. I need them to survive. Without students, Oxford is nothing.ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005

TRY ASKING for an Archer’s Aqua at a college bar. At worst, you’ll be jeered right out of the
quad; at best, pointed derisively to the Carlsberg tap. Beer is in, ladies and gentleman,
and alcopops are out. Ladette culture has finally reached us in the seclusion of the Oxford
college, and a girl just can’t hold her head up like a man until she’s swigging Guinness
from a plastic cup.It all began so promisingly. The introduction of the RTd (Ready To drink, in marketing
terms) to Britain began with Hooch in 1995, and caused a consumption revolution.
Alcoholic lemonade – such a simple idea – appealed to young and old with its quaint
American style, bright colours and sweet taste. Since then, the alcopop has undergone a
transformation.The updated version, Smirnoff Ice, and teenybopper substitute, Bacardi
Breezer, hit the bars and became a late-nineties landmark. But now all that sweetness and
light has darkened and gone sour. Over 150 labels have muscled in on the market and the
novice drinker doesn’t know which way to turn. Spirits are desperately trying to claw back up
the market with such revolting inventions as the ‘Vodka Mudshake’ (isn’t it a long-
established fact that chocolate and vodka don’t mix?).Smirnoff Ice is sullied by the creation
of the Turboshandy
– a half-and-half mix with lager. Who killed the alcopop? It’s fair to say that teenage girls
and their harmless Saturday night excesses have done nothing but put money in the
pockets of the delighted vodka guys and, admittedly, litter suburban streets with their vomit.With bars and clubs responding to government pressure concerning underage entrance,
the poor teens and pre-teens haven’t got a chance.But the downward spiral began, of course, with some desperate journalist and the
controversy he mixed up.An American website, alcoholfreechildren. org, screams “Alcohol
is the #1 drug of choice among our Nation’s youth!” The FCUK attempt to branch out into
alcopops came to a sweet and sticky end when the Portman group deemed them to be
targeting underage drinkers. Hysterical mothers have conspired with the media to bring
about the slow but sure demise of this well-loved rite of passage.Let’s take a moment to
give them their due: alcopops have been more than just a way to get pissed. What you
order at the bar sends an important message – particularly for women: while a Jd on the
rocks shows admirable independence of spirit, a girl with a Reef is dependably fun and
approachable.But a middle way dawns with the revival of the cocktail. After a distressing
brush with the law, happy hour is still going strong, God be praised, and man and woman
alike are enjoying cheap cocktails by the bucket. Incidentally, according to Cocktail:UK, Hard
Sex on the Babysitter’s Bathroom Floor is in Britain’s top ten this year. I think we’re justified
in questioning their sources. At least we’ve found something to drink at the funeral of the
alcopop. A more sophisticated option by far than the Breezer, and yet kind to the delicate
tastebud, cocktails are the way of the future.ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005

Curtailing bop banter is not exactly a new trick among the old dogs of Oxford officialdom – while defacation is hardly the most original of pranks – yet this week these two titans found themselves up for debate in that most intellectual of hot-houses, St John’s College.Whoever did the deed just isn’t very funny, or very clever, but the hilarity of the college’s response can hardly be lost on many. Surely this is the kind of incident which should be swept quietly under the carpet, yet instead the richest college in the university has decided to penalise the entire student body for the actions of one idiot.To impose a levy to pay for the cleaning up of some poo is silly, but to do it as the institution which makes the wealth of colleges such as Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh’s pale into insignificance is hardly a mature response. The undergraduates of St John’s can hardly be eager to pay just to clear this smear on their illustrious name.ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005

The staff of Oxford’s two student newspapers occasionally forget that the majority of the University’s population have little interest in the inner workings of either publication. Indeed, those who read the papers rarely have reason to concern themselves with what goes into their creation. Yet even those with the most peripheral interest in these matters will have noticed that The Oxford Student was not delivered to JCRs last week. The rivalry between The Oxford Student and Cherwell since the former’s creation in 1992 has, we believe, been one of healthy competition and respect. The immediate reaction of Cherwell to this news was, as in similar situations in the past, a combination of sympathy and interest.Yet while Cherwell condones its competitor for their continued desire to print probing and challenging news, it would seem in this case that mistakes were made.When a university interferes with a student paper it is always the former which has the most to lose. The freedom of the press is rightly a treasured principle, and one of the cornerstones of modern democracy. So when the University uses the threat of a legal injunction to suppress information it is unlikely to endear itself to the student body, and it would be safe to conclude that the stakes have been raised more than a notch.Confidentiality agreements and the general culture of caution surrounding the increasingly litigious sphere of student media mean that the full details of the shredding of The Oxford Student will never be fully revealed. But there is more to this story than the precise details of the case.It is a question of responsibility. In such a case, a newspaper has an obligation to report the truth, a university to protect its students.The extent to which both sides fight so fervently is encouraging, and leads Cherwell to note that both parties, regardless of personal cost or loss, have done exactly what, in the circumstances, they were supposed to do.ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005

People often describe Hollywood as a strange beast, by which they tend to mean it has a closed, glazed expression, piercing eyes, and a vast, sore-infested underbelly.In fact an elderly Marlon Brando would be a perfect cast, and, if still alive, he was an extra of choice for director David Lynch, an auteur exiled and virtually alienated by the studios for trying to bring art back into the business – and almost bankrupting a fair portion of it – who in 2001’s Mulholland Drive produced some thinly veiled allusions towards the “execs” who spin the web of intrigue in those dusty corners of Hollywood that the cameras never reach.The result was that the industry cut him loose to the point that even the French shunned their beloved muse. Now, if you want the best in web TV, Lynch is your man.So, anomalies like this aside, and no doubt thanks to the wilful self-distortions it drip-feeds its consumers on personal rose-tinted voyages through its past, Hollywood is normally only seen from the neck up. But currently blowing is a landmark legal case that threatens to expose the whole hideous bodyshot.This is courtesy of Anthony Pellicano, self-professed “private investigator to the stars”, who has dug up dirt for clients as diverse as Hilary Clinton, Steven Seagal and Michael Jackson. The detective’s sordid exploits are too numerous to recount here – imagine a particularly lurid Raymond Chandler novel and you get the picture.But now, despite a spate of prison spells to deter him, Pellicano has gone a bridge too far. A botched blackmail by Pellicano of a journalist getting too close to all his secrets culminated in the FBI raiding his office and uncovering almost two billion pages of phone tap transcripts.The resultant grand jury investigation is now about to indict the industry figures they believe knowingly instigated wiretapping and witness tampering. And we’re not talking Joey extras. Managers, actors, businessmen and lawyers are being questioned, and in some cases subpoenaed, by the federal government in a widening grand jury investigation of suspected illegal wiretapping that has moved beyond Los Angeles and as far as New York.Those being investigated and hoping not to receive the call include former Disney President Michael Ovitz, Paramount Chairman Brad Grey, Universal President Ron Meyer and legendary entertainment attorney Bert Fields. All your basic dream merchants bathing in the same swamp of corruption, blackmail and corporate greed. It turns out that if you sell people a dream, you are probably the stuff of nightmares.Lavish and fantastical as his imaginings were, David Lynch never came close to rivalling this. So it seems that life – and a good sprinkling of investigative journalism – triumphs over art any day. But as we will probably now suffer a thousand preachy Michael Moor-esque documentaries, maybe gazing down at all the corpulent rot was a bad idea. It will only be reflected in the films we see.ARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005

When scientists look back on this period in our history, one has to wonder what they’re going to think of recent years.In the last twelve months alone, we’ve had a tsunami that has wiped out an entire generation, a hurricane that brought a superpower to its knees, an earthquake that has devastated one of the poorest parts of the world and now Europe itself is faced with the prospect of a flu pandemic (avian or otherwise) that our Chief Medical officer believes to be “inevitable”.Such a confluence of events does seem to suggest that something is going awry. I can’t claim any in-depth knowledge of climatology, but I think I speak for most people when I say that it’s beginning to get more than just a bit scary. The world is turning against us, and we seem to be looking the other way.There may be no direct link between the natural disasters of the last twelve months and the climate crisis currently gripping our planet, but it goes far enough to show us the true, devastating, terrifying force of nature when it is unleashed.What we seem to be doing to ourselves at the moment, with our continued disregard for the environment, is bringing on a huge catastrophe one degree at a time.The global warming threat is an epidemic in the same way that bird flu may end up in the comingmonths. It is an epidemic that is induced by individuals. The potentially catastrophic effects of bird flu, however, will come and go – the steady, gradual creep of climate change will not be so rapid.So, what is the solution? It seems pretty straightforward to say that international consensus is required before we move any further.The Kyoto Protocol was an attempt to reach that consensus, but has since failed spectacularly; failing to sign up the US, India and China, who between them create 50% of the world’s harmful emissions. Back at home in the UK, we not only ratified Kyoto but also set a 20% reduction target for CO2 emissions.It’s easy to set the targets and reaffirm them time and time again, but they have to be met with delivery and, as Dieter Helm and may other environmental economists have been pointing out, the UK is failing to deliver.Further worrying signs came from the Prime Minister at the end of September when he said both at the launch of Bill Clinton’s ‘Global Initiative’ and in at the Labour Party Conference that “no country is going to cut its growth” to achieve the Kyoto targets.True, perhaps, but this kind of defeatist attitude will get us nowhere. The sad thing about Kyoto is that it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’re going to get for the foreseeable future. It does not help the cause however, if the UK begins to backtrack on its commitment to pushing Kyoto worldwide.Supporting it at home is one thing, but our long term interests are only going to be met by a sustained global effort. To hear Blair suggest on the one hand that Kyoto is bound for failure on the world stage and, on the other, that Britain remains committed to the Kyoto pledges sends out mixed messages to say the least.If we are to address this problem with the seriousness it deserves, we shouldn’t be backing down, despite our reservations over the commitment of nations such as the US or China, we should be pushing the climate change agenda not for our own interests, but for the global interest.For those among you lucky enough to be lectured by Dieter Helm in environmental economics,you’ll have heard him talk about “future people”, namely, our sons, daughters, grandchildrenand beyond.In essence, it is their interests that we’re trying to protect. It’s unlikely that we’re going to feel the worst effects of global warming, but they will. Climate change is not a temporaryissue: it shouldn’t be allowed to simply slip off the agenda.‘Alarmism’ is a criticism often levelled at environmentalists who attempt to bring these issues into the public eye. I’m sure that some will criticise this article as alarmist. Climate change, however, is something we should be alarmed about. Unlike the natural disasters we have witnessed recently, we have plenty of warnings about this latest threat and we do have the power to avert it.Our leaders cannot stick their fingers in their ears for much longer – either we act now or the next generation will face a worse and even more dangerous natural disaster.Martin McCluskey is Co-Chair of Oxford University Labour ClubARCHIVE: 3rd week MT 2005