Short stories are funny things. I had never read any Byatt before and was, I confess, dubious about reviewing her new collection for the worthy readers of Cherwell.My suspicions were unfounded. The first story tells of two middleaged women retracing childhood steps to confront their demons, as fact and memory merge. Prosthetics are used in her next tale, an examination of artistic morality, as well as a perfectly judged investigation into human relationships. The third story follows a woman’s metamorphosis from grief-stricken mourner to creature of stonesand gems. The fourth presents itself as a meditation on the act of writing, throughout which Byatt’s ideas are sustained by an effortless style. The final tale, aptly, looks at human decline into senility, and includes the unprecedented appearance of the Teletubbies and the Aeneid on the same page. The ongoing theme in all five stories is what is left behind, a concept that Byatt uses to draw in questions of memory and to examine the artistic process. Byatt uses words expertly, with sharp images and lyrical turns of phrase – take, for example, “One morning pain struck her like a sudden beak.”The only flaw I can suggest is a minor one of vocabulary. Does anyone really say “bust” any more? Likewise, “sex” (as in “her hands on his sex,”) sounds rather too DH Lawrence for my liking. But these are churlish comments. Byatt’s writing is marvellous. Her tone is graceful (think Angela Carter without the excess) and strikes a perfect balance between narrative and description. Each story stands out as original and refreshing, fitting together just enough to generate atmosphere while avoiding co-dependence. As the title suggests, each one is deliciously dark. The writing is masterful. It really is that simple. Chatto and Windus,
6th November 2003
Archive: 0th week HT 2004

Blues Rugby captain John Allen surveyed the past term and declared “This was the year to become more expansive”. The MMC Trophy may have narrowly eluded Allen’s squad, but the Australian pronounced Michaelmas a resounding success and sees an exciting future for Oxford rugby at a time when the sport needs to capitalise on its increasing profile.

Allen believes that the draw at Twickenham, in which the Blues outshone Cambridge with their handling but ran up against a dogged defence, may have pointed the way towards an era of open, entertaining Varsity rugby. “This season we implemented a new attacking style, which broke with trend. All of the players bought into that, and it’s a style which suits the players and resources which we have. There is a real belief in the club that to be successful you need to be expansive”.

The aftermath of the Twickenham encounter saw the Light Blues criticised in some quarters for their early-kicking, defensive approach. Allen was quick to point out that Oxford’s opponents had not enjoyed the ideal preparation: “They were disrupted early in the season with injuries and had to make the best of what they had, and that’s what they did. Hopefully the Varsity match will evolve so that both teams throw the ball around, but with desire to win. It’s vital that the public see an entertaining spectacle”.

The Blues’ flowing, technical brand of rugby was not confined merely to the Varsity match. Victories over London Irish and Bath served as evidence of the team’s ability. Allen was delighted with the side’s build-up and saw the pre-season tour of Argentina as a time at which many things began to fall together. “We learned a lot. Our set-pieces and lineouts were strong and dominant and this carried on into the term. Our scrum was outstanding and took that form all the way into the Varsity”. 

Allen’s optimism for the future was especially evident when he cast his eye over the Under 21 side, who defeated their Cambridge counterparts by adhering to exactly the style that is rapidly becoming the culture within the club as a whole. “There are many who can make the step up. They have been playing an open brand of rugby for some time and there is a lot of great potential there”.

Some of the younger players should get the chance to stake their claim this term, in a fixture list which includes matches scheduled against the Army, RAF and Navy as well as sides from Ireland, Japan and South Africa.

As the Blues look to build upon the rapid strides which proved evident at Twickenham, their progress should be well worth following as rugby continues to make an unprecedented impact in the national headlines following England’s World Cup victory.

Archive: 0th week HT 2004

Labour MPs, members of the Opposition, and opponents of topup fees all come in for withering criticism in an ex-Pembroke Master’s recently published treatise on higher education, ‘University to Uni’.Estelle Morris, Former Education Secretary, is seen as “a sweet but ineffective former comprehensive school teacher, with little understanding of, or interest in, universities”. Author Robert Stevens also
suggests that Gordon Brown lacks sufficient charisma to replace Tony Blair, while he calls Margaret Hodge “a former member of the loony left”. Speaking to Cherwell, Stevens stood by his comments, adding that Hodge “used to fly the red flag over Islington town hall”.Nor do the Tories escape the onslaught. Stevens argues that Michael Howard’s opposition to topup fees is a cynical ploy to gain votes, “bribing the affluent members of society and the middle-classes” and is inconsistent with Conservative policies. He also accuses the Tories of crippling universities by having failed to provide sufficient funds.Stevens argues that defeat for Blair over top-up fees would be disastrous for Oxford in particular, “If you want serious universities, you have to put in the money,” he told Cherwell. Without funds from students themselves, he warns, Oxford risks “dumbing down”, losing its best academics to the United States, cutting courses, and being forced to recruit foreign students in place of Britons. He argued that if student opponents of top-up fees get its way, Oxford “will become an even bigger joke than German and French universities”.
Archive: 0th week HT 2004

 Blues footballers enjoyed a tour of Prague as they looked to limber up for the second half of the BUSA season. Arran Yentob’s side put a total of ten goals without reply past their two Czech opponents, who could have suffered much further had impressive build-up play not been marred by wasteful finishing.

The first game saw a youthful FC Umbro, who were dispatched 6–0. Nat Armstrong notched his first Blues hat-trick and Paul Hackwell, Sam Aylott and Craig Adams were also on the mark against opponents who were dwarved in size as well as technique. The next day saw a 4–0 victory over a physically stronger FC Ave.

In the BUSA league, the Blues lie in the relegation zone, although their work last term was hardly aided by a spate of injuries. With the defence performing creditably, Yentob will be most concerned by the fact that his forwards have only notched seven goals to date, and will hope that the scoring spree on tour will have boosted confidence.

Hilary opens with a fixture against Nottingham Trent which is followed by a home match with De Montfort.

Archive: 0th Week HT 2004

Oxford 11

Cambridge 11In the 72nd minute, Cambridge winger and fresher, Charlie Desmond, lived up to his billing as the “speedster” and “bolter” of the side with the try that retained the MMC Trophy in the 14th draw in Varsity Match history. However, though Cambridge settled early on, Oxford were utterly dominant for the majority of the second half
and will rue their failure to put the game beyond the Light Blues when they had the chance. As Director of Rugby Steve Hill said afterwards, “One team came to play today, but fair play to the other, they certainly defended
well.”After a nervy first minute in which Oxford nearly scored, Cambridge found their rhythm and, holding a solid line upfield, began to punish Oxford’s forwards who were too slow to the breakdown. Two rucks, in the 6th and 18th minutes, both led to penalties which Daffyd Lewis duly converted. Perhaps even more worryingly for Oxford, Graham Barr, a scrum half by trade, was forced to fill in for the unfortunate John Fennell at fly-half after the latter tore a hip flexor muscle. However, by the end of the half, Oxford had gained an 8–6 lead, and appeared to be shading the game overall. Until the 34th minute, Cambridge’s defence held firm and infuriated Oxford in a physical, attritional battle. Then,
however, the pressure finally told, as John Bradshaw made a minibreak on the left and laid inside to
captain John Allen. Allen passed back to Ryan O’Mahoney who in turn fed prop Henry Nwume a few
yards from the left touchline.Nwume still had plenty of work to o but shrugged off a challenge and burst, bloody-minded, for the line, touching down through one final desperate Cambridge body. The Dark Blues’ lead arrived through an injury-time penalty
from O’Mahoney, after left-winger Adam Slade had superbly outpaced 3 defenders and broken into a desperate Cambridge’s twentytwo. However, at half-time Cambridge had a right to feel aggrieved, as moments earlier the
touch judge had failed to spot the fact that a Lewis drop-goal attempt had clearly passed between the posts. For the first 30 minutes of the second half, Oxford were completely dominant in terms of territory and possession. “The fact that they didn’t get out of their half was testament to our game plan,” said Allen. However, Cambridge refused to give an inch, particularly in the tackle. The Dark Blue forwards kept hold of the ball, with
Canadian international Kevin Tkachuk notably outstanding, while the backs were patient; at times they were enterprising, with Barr working hard to fill Fennell’s boots. Allen and Bradshaw both came agonisingly close to the line before a magnificent break by tough-tackling Man of the Match Adam Magro through the centre
nearly laid in Matt Street for a try.Though there was a suspicion of a forward pass, Cambridge gave away a penalty in the ensuing desperate
scramble under the posts, and O’Mahoney extended Oxford’s lead from the kick.  After Allen, nearing the line,
knocked on in the 67th minute, Cambridge gained some respite, and after a well-run loose ball was fed to Desmond, he dodged a tackle with brutal speed to finish in the corner. In the last minutes Oxford were generally on the back foot, but a wayward drop-goal attempt was the closest the Light Blues came to winning outright.Archive: 0th Week HT 2004

Another New Year, another new term, and with them comes another new trend. Well, you’d think this is the case, but some how, this time round it hasn’t quite worked like that. Something is up. Inevitably at this time of the year, every newspaper is filled with endless predictions of what to wear, how to dress and why to detox. The problem is for the first time I can remember, the wonderful, pure and good world of trend-setting in the popular press has been beset by contradiction. We’re not talking about cool here either. We are talking about good, old-fashioned trends – the concrete, visible signs that people are all living in the same time frame.There are some agreements: gold. Apparently the more chic and modest silver is no longer in and gold is taking over, however, “bling” (the most grotesque fashion blip since shoulder pads) is also on the ebb. Comfort is also a very popular buzz-word flying around at the moment, and the days of multi-changes are waning. This is rather a relaxing prospect and suggests a hectic world becoming more gentle but please note, it does not mean a
laxness regarding looks.The area of most contention however is colour. Now some say none, some say more. On the cover of January’s Vogue is a dress by Jonathan Saunders, king of the London fashion scene. Print and colour seems to be in, but then it was last year too. So it seems this year is less “new year” than “same year in a different light”.Furthermore some counsel oyster/ taupe/camel – where then to look? The answer must be that this year the one thing that speaks louder than any look is confidence; divine confidence that what you do is right.Archive: 0th week HT 2004

They tried to dissuade him. Forty-four days without food, and his body would turn to itself for sustenance. Heart palpitations, hallucinations and loss of sight would be par for the course; even if he survived, the reintroduction to food could cause sudden death. “It’s a pretty daft thing to do, really,” advised nutritionist Mike Stroud. But to little avail; soon after, David Blaine announced his fourth and most challenging endurance feat at a press conference where he whetted the public’s appetite by appearing to hack off his left ear with a casually pocketed knife.Self-imposed starvation was hardly new to Blaine. Aged 11, he decided he “wanted to go for a week with nothing but water,” and promptly did. Deprived of both father and television, the young Blaine turned to recreating images from the past; his idols were Chaplin, Houdini and Buster Keaton. “I looked up to the great showmen,” he admits. “As a kid, that was always an obsession I had, creating an ambience that will tell its own story.” From simple card tricks to ripping the head off a chicken; from secretly fasting for a week to starving in a box over the Thames for six; Blaine has undoubtedly realised his childhood ambitions. But is he a consummate performer, the Houdini of the 21st century, or should he have sought help early on for the obsessions he openly admits to having? “I haven’t sorted these things out,” he tells me. “I just think [my childhood] was a bit of a throw-off from reality.”It would be impossible to describe David Blaine as anything other than an enigma. His obsession with death, coupled with his almost clichéd love of life. His penchant for apparent selfharm – traditionally a private act – in public. The man who can survive live burial, but has an irrational fear of insects. In conversation, it’s surprising how open he appears to be; until you realise that you’ve spent an evening with a Jekyll and Hyde character, and you’re no closer to understanding what makes him tick. How does the holy innocent who found spiritual peace in starvation fit in with the former member of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “pussy posse”, who confides that he has “obsessions with women”? The beatific smile on leaving his box, with what seem to be calculated attempts to emulate, if not better, perhaps the greatest showman of all time, Jesus? Little wonder the textbook Christians are out to get him. “Satan will prepare the way for himself and his wonders,” writes one in an internet forum. “I am not claiming that David Blaine has gained his abilities from Satan, but I don’t rule it out.”Extremism, to Blaine, is an art form. And, like a modern day Oscar Wilde, he lives his life as a work of art. “I’m a performer,” he says, “who does illusions, performance pieces, and stunts.” In Blaine’s world, even the mundane becomes art – including the toe-curling face-off with Eamonn Holmes on GMTV, where Blaine resolutely refused to say a word, despite his interviewer’s best efforts. “The thing I did with Eamonn Holmes and the eye, I considered magic, in the sense that it was a performance piece,” he says. Notoriously difficult with journalists, he recently reappeared on GMTV to confuse Holmes yet more, declaring that he’d had a body double for his latest stunt, who lay in the box while he went out to gorge on fast food. Friend Uri Geller puts this antagonistic behaviour down to his character. “David is an utterly sincere man,” he wrote in the Telegraph. “I think this explains his habit of clamming up in interviews. He desperately wants to tell the truth, and only the truth.”And if so, what a truth it is. He doesn’t know why he does what he does; just that he needs to do it, and has needed to from an early age. Was he bullied at school? He pauses. “No, I wasn’t. In a weird way I can’t even understand why, but if there was a swimming pool here right now, I would say I’m going to do seven laps underwater without coming up. And if I knew everybody in this room could do two, I would always say I’m going to do seven, and then I would just do it.” So it’s a need to prove himself to others? “No, because even if I was alone, I would do that. Maybe it has to do with coming up with something and achieving it, but not doing what other people are doing, so I build my own mountain and then try to climb it.” It’s this mentality that leads him to set himself ever harder, more draining goals. “I actually didn’t think anybody could survive the box until I’d done it,” he says. “I just didn’t care if I made it or not. I figured, as long as I try, that’s a win, so if I come out on Day 32, I still tried. The fact that I went the whole way was fine.” Master of understatement, he later tells me that he looked “almost too good” on exiting the box. Why does he feel he has to prove himself continually? “It’s not even proving. It’s about creating images that last.”Yet for one content to form mere images, Blaine wrestles with his fair share of issues. He talks about Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, one man’s journey to self-realisation. Forbidden by his father to become a monk, Siddhartha stands motionless all night, “his arms folded, not moving from his spot,” to persuade him; a feat repeated by Blaine while standing on a 100ft high pole. As a monk, he “fasted for twenty-eight days. The flesh waned from his thighs and cheeks; a shaggy beard grew.” Mere images to be replicated, or is Blaine hunting for something more profound? “All those things are what they try to do to enter manhood, by leaving their earthly temptations behind,” he says about the book. Perhaps the unfaltering love lavished upon him by his mother, who died when he was 19, has given Blaine a Peter Pan complex, from which he tries to break free through his stunts.It has certainly led to problems with women. “She gave me so much attention and so much love that I have obsessions with women, and I have a problem with that,” he tells me. “I have this real need for approval and attention because of that; my mother giving me that amount of attention at all times and making me the priority of her life probably was a little bit of a throw-off from reality.” He has nothing but awe for his mother; is his behaviour his way of trying to be worthy of her? “I don’t even think I’m in the range of what she was doing,” he replies swiftly. The day before he entered the box, he visited Great Ormond Street Hospital, though he is at pains to point out that “I don’t consider it charity work; I just go and do magic with kids in hospitals.”The other shadow left by his mother, a Russian Jew, is his spirituality. He carries a poem by Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in his wallet, pulling it out to show me over dinner. Later, he gives me a reading list on Holocaust writing, stressing his respect for Levi as an author, because “he writes the truth as it is, he’s writing for no-one but himself. He’s everything a great artist should be; I wish I could have that in me.” How can he square Levi’s controlled, self-effacing prose with his publicity-hungry stunts? “I love to pull people out of their mundane thought patterns and make them think differently. I love making people watch suffering.” He quotes the last lines of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. Since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.”Friend Christopher Reeve has said that Blaine proves that “the body can do more than we think.” Is his permanent desire to push through boundaries showing us the way to a higher sphere of existence? Over dinner, he describes his time in the box as a spiritual awakening, which lapsed the moment he returned to eating and the habits that control our lives. Wouldn’t that experience make him want to retreat from the spotlight? “Not yet.” Can he see himself as a hermit in the future? “I imagine so.” Where will he be in twenty years time? “I don’t think I’ll be alive then, at least not visibly.” Will he die spectacularly, or disappear to live in solitude? “We’ll see.” Could he cope leaving the adulation behind? “For sure.” He talks about his “continual journey,” although what the end point is he doesn’t yet know; “I probably never will.”So David Blaine remains an enigma. A magician who has eschewed magic. A spiritualist with an obsession with women. An American who laughs that his next stunt – after jumping from a helicopter into the Hudson river – will be to sit in a box in Times Square, gorging on burgers and seeing how much weight he can put on in 44 days. It will be called Gluttony. An anti-American project? “It’s not that I’m ‘anti’ anything or ‘pro’ anything. I just think humanity is. I don’t want to be part of something that says I’m different from you or different from him, because I don’t think that way.” Is Blaine a deeply troubled man, exploited by those who spy his money generating potential, or a consummate showman, cashing in on our obsession with reality TV? Is our watching him leap out of a helicopter, or Derren Brown playing Russian roulette, nothing but our fascination for the public executions of old, played out in our newly sanitised society? Not only do we vicariously enjoy the danger watching these stunts, we cannot help but imbue their performers with superhuman strengths, putting them onto pedestals for their abilities to read minds, starve, or pull off the illusion that they are risking their lives, even if they are as safe as us in front of our television screens. Watching Blaine preaching as he exited his box, black scarf and beard billowing in the wind, and listening to the lone voices crying out his name outside the Union, where he speaks tonight, it’s hard not to wonder: David Blaine – our new graven image?Archive: 0th week HT 2004