was six months old when my father started working at St John’s. That was in 1946, and he
worked here thirty odd years, into his seventies. He was a scout. Back then it was all male
scouts. He made beds, brought the coal in, cleaned shoes, and was generally
a skivvy; a nursemaid, I suppose you’d say. It was quite different in those days; it was real
hard graft. My eldest sister worked here, in this building, for about thirteen years. She
left just over four years ago. So there’s been me, my dad and my sister, and actually my
daughter worked here for about five years as well. Back then a lot of families worked here.
The husbands, the wives, the children – that’s how it was in those days. It has changed
now, of course: people don’t stay as long as they used to. When I started, women were able
to bring their children along to work with them during holiday time, which is no longer the
case, and I think that’s why a lot of them did this job. It was a way of working when you had a young family; a way of going back to school when
you didn’t have a career. That was what you did: you either worked in a college or worked in
a school, and because my father was involved in college life it was pretty obvious I would be
too, somewhere down the line. Life’s changed a lot since then. Everything’s got faster. All
this health and safety has come in and there are all sorts of different gadgets for various
things. And there’s now only about three or four of us left who’ve been here for a few years.
When I started I just did one staircase in the block and my sister did the other two. now I do
the whole lot. As long as you’re in a routine, you’re alright. I get in at half six in the morning
and do 36 hours a week. I live 11 miles out of Oxford so although my husband drives me to
work, it still means an early start for me.I was born in north Oxfordshire and lived in Central Oxford all my live until about 8 years
ago. My mother still lives in the house I grew up in, in St John’s Street. I started coming in
early so I could clear up after the bops while everyone was still in bed. There’s usually
loads of rubbish afterwards. It’s surprising how much there is to do, really. I try to pace it
out: I do the loos first, then start going round the rooms at half past eight. Some people are
up by then. I do all the bins and what I can in the rooms when I’m going round. I have my
coffee at 10 o’clock, then start the hoovering on the staircase. The showers and the
bathrooms are the last thing for the day. I’m here all year round but I prefer it when the
students are here. We’ve had a few interesting people staying. There was Jonathan
dimbleby’s son, and Tony Blair was in this building too. I don’t think I was working here at
the time. My sister was, but she can’t actually remember him. Typical of my sister. At the
beginning of a new year it’s diffi cult because I’m quite nervous and the students must find
it odd too. Some students will talk and some won’t and you can usually tell from the very
first time you meet them whether they’re going to speak or not. I’ve been here nineteen
years now, and I’m actually going to retire in March. It’s the end of an era from the family’s
point of view, but it’ll be nice not to have to get up so early in the morning. That is one thing
I’m really looking forward to. Susan Gulliford talked to Julian CotteeARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005

In 1992, a european country was destroyed while the rest of the world watched. Its nucleus,
however, resisted, fought back and survived three years of siege and bombardment. By
1995 over 170,000 people had been killed and several times that many injured. It was
Bosnia and Sarajevo, and a war that substituted for my childhood. The Serbs blockaded
Sarajevo that april: their snipers took positions on high buildings in the suburbs, killing
at random. as Sarajevo is in a bowl-like valley, within days their artillery occupied
the hills surrounding us and aimed down. Soon, the Serbs turned off the electricity, the
freezers begun to defrost and everyone was cooking so the food wouldn’t be wasted.
Simultaneously the bombing started and we began spending nights in the basement of our
apartment building with our neighbours eating all this food, like some strange nocturnal
underground picnic. For a child, it seemed we were in some crazy festival, like the circus had come to town, and
at the end there would be a big meal and the children would play while the adults talked
about how bizarre it had all been. But then water and gas pipes were switched off, the food
ran out and the bombing intensified. The maternity hospital was bombed, pictures of
people shot dead in the city filled the newspapers and from the look in my parents’ eyes I
realised it was time to be scared. The men in the building took turns to guard the entrance
at night, armed with semi-automatic rifles. Bosnia had no real army because the
Yugoslavian army was mostly made up of Serbs, so the government released from prison
and armed some powerful gangsters who formed militias to defend the city. They
essentially saved Sarajevo from falling in the first weeks, before an organised army was set
up. as children we sang songs celebrating their bravery. I still regard them as heroes,
despite their crimes. At home, we abandoned all rooms with windows, leaving us with only
the hall to live, and cook and sometimes sleep in. But most nights we slept in the
basement, sometimes staying there for days. Water was brought from a nearby pump.
Food was scarce and monotonous and before long we were down to one daily meal of rice,
beans or pasta. By the time we left Sarajevo I had forgotten what ice cream was, and whether oranges had
to be peeled. It was all the more surreal because I couldn’t understand what was going on
or why. On the radio, I heard ‘ethnic conflicts’ mentioned, but this seemed like an answer to
a different question, one I didn’t ask. My father is Muslim, my mother roman Catholic, my
best friend Orthodox Christian and my nanny was Jewish. But, as a family we celebrated
the Orthodox Christian festivals with our Orthodox Christian friends,the Jewish ones with
Jewish friends and so on, and probably took them as seriously as they did. Religion served
not to preach, but to bring friends and family together, secure theseties and carry on
traditions passed down to us. How ironic it was then that which had helped unite us
was now being used to divide and kill us. Most Muslims in Sarajevo don’t go to the mosque, don’t know arabic or how to pray, smoke
like chimneys and drink alcohol like the best of them, so the idea that they could suddenly
go on a jihad to establish a fundamentalist Muslim state seemed incredulous even to a
child. However, that’s what the Serb politicians claimed, what they convinced many of their
people was happening and what some in the outside world seemed to (want to?) think.
In reality, I later understood, it was a genocidal, nationalist war, initiated by Milosevic,
Karadzic, and some Bosnian Serbs to make a ‘Greater Serbia’. Bosnia was to be annexed
and the Muslims living there killed or removed. My parents decided to stay in Sarajevo,
partly because they are doctors and most doctors had left. Five anaesthetists served a city
of 350,000 during the war, my mother being one of them. But also because it was Sarajevo:
a city where four religions, the east, the West, capitalism and communism, met to
create an energy that so many thought was worth fighting for. The city was all it was
because it was multicultural and multiethnic, and we wanted it that way.
Perhaps I idealise ante bellum life in Sarajevo. The privileged life that I led there, of
nannies, ballet lessons, winters skiing in the mountains and summers on the coast,
wasn’t a life that many had. There were many problems that didn’t affect us but, still,
there was something unique about Sarajevo, something that made everyone proud to
live there and made so many stay to fight for her. Peter Maas, a Washington Post
correspondent who spent 1993 in Bosnia, wrote “Sarajevo was a temptress,
and it was hard to know which was more seductive, the half-mad look in her eyes, or
the scarlet drops of blood on her extended hand. Temptresses have different allures with
which they entice their victims, and the oddest thing about Sarajevo’s allure was that the
more ghastly she appeared to the outside world, the more her buildings were destroyed
and the more starved her residents looked, the more seductive she was. Sarajevo was
violence and passion.” It was the longest siege in modern times, but for the
residents there was never the option of surrender. Just a sense of defiance, a sense that
in Sarajevo we were right and just had to hold out until the world realised that too. I remember the night when the Serbs set the national Library on fire. My parents took us up
to the roof during the bombardment to see what the cowards with their tanks on the hills
were doing. and camera crews filmed this and the aftermath of massacres and broadcast
the unedited footage on TV, to show the world what was happening. and it saw, but when
the Un Secretary General Boutros-Ghali visited, he just said, “I can give you a list of ten
places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.” Meanwhile, my parents went out
to work separately, so that a single grenade couldn’t kill them both. But, on Christmas eve
1992, dad and I were leaving the house and he was shot as we walked down the street.
Fortunately he was only wounded while many others we knew were killed. Lucky, everyone
said, that it wasn’t me. The strange thing was how quickly this stopped upsetting us:
by the time they started burying people in football stadiums, death had lost its novelty value.
In war, you see things you don’t want to see. You live through things you don’t want to. You
lose people you love. as a child, you grow up quickly. There are no ‘boogie monsters’ under
the bed, trying to ‘get you’, because you know of real monsters, with real guns, who wake
up every morning with the aim of killing people like you. There is no school because they
bombed it, but it would have been too dangerous to go there anyway. You stay indoors for
months and, when you can go out, you play ‘street wars’ with kids on your street, throwing
rocks and glass at the other neighbourhood kids because you can’t remember the games
you played before the war. After three years my parents decided they had done enough. With the help of some British
friends mum went to england for a job interview and returned. One night, through a secret
tunnel dug underneath the airport and over a mountain, she took my brother and me out of
Sarajevo and to england. aged ten, I had my first day at school, she worked as an
anaesthetist and a year on dad came to join us – a happy ending. But I don’t know whether I
should be happy I lived to tell the tale or resentful that I have such a tale to tell. Probably it’s
the former. I feel privileged to have experienced man at his best and at his worst, risking life
to commit good or evil. But, there is anger that it was allowed to go on: perhaps because
Muslims were being killed, perhaps because Bosnia had no oil, perhaps because even
when Clinton intervened (after 9,000 Muslims were killed in two days in Srebrenica,
a town declared a ‘safe area’ by naTO) it was principally to salvage his image. Politics-
wise, I’m a cynic. But maybe I just can’t believe that mediaeval sieges of cities would be
tolerated in 20th century europe, that the attempted genocide of a people was tolerated
for years only fifty years after they said ‘never again’. I now realise what they meant was
‘should never happen again.’ not quite the same, but how naively we hoped otherwise.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005

Some go peacefully, some “rage against the dying of the light”, some do it themselves,
some let nature take its course, for some it is a low key event, some do it in style. The
uncomfortable truth is, sooner or later, we’re all going to do it but have you ever wondered
how you’re likely to die? My own, rather rudimentary, research into how people would like to
die yielded a variety of not very constructive answers: “peacefully”, “old age”, “in bed” and
“jumping off something.” Of course most of us aren’t going to get what we want on
this one and statistics suggest that the most likely way will be heart disease or cancer. But
of course, as 83% of people know, statistics can be used to prove anything, so here goes.
The US national Safety Council has over the past few years estimated the chances of dying
from various causes. For example, the chances of dying from falling from a bed or chair are
1 in 4745 but only 1 in 93,125 from contact with hot tap water. Ignition of nightwear is the
fate of 1 in 286,537 people whilst “foreign body entering through skin or natural orifice”
accounts for 1 in 161,956. an average of 73 are struck and killed by lightning each year and,
according to Professor Steve Jones, this is much more likely to happen to men. The
chances of drowning in floods caused by a dam bursting are 1 in 10 million and there is of
course also a 1 in 2.8 million chance that you will die falling down a hole, possibly much
shorter odds if you are a Warner Brothers cartoon character. Vending machines – safe, yes?
no, these deadly pieces of equipment kill an average of twelve UK citizens each year,
shaking it for that last KitKat really isn’t worth it. and any resident ofOxford will not express
surprise that those ‘silent killers’, bikes, are responsible for 824 US deaths every year.
away from our perilous modern existence filled with vending machines and hot-taps the
natural world is of course a dangerous place to be. For example, the chances of dying from
being bitten by a dog are 1 in 206,944. “death where is thy sting?” – well for 6 million
americans each year it is in the end of a bee. But you have only a 1 in 54 million chance of
dying from a spider, lizard or snake bite.Scientists wanting to prove just how innocuous various animals are often cite the odds of
being hit on the head by a falling coconut, George Burgess, director of the Florida Museum
of natural History’s International Shark attack File (somehow I can’t imagine a British
museum appointing a director of ‘shark attack file’) claims that fifteen times as many
people are killed by coconuts than by sharks each year and that coconuts account for 150
deaths per annum. This idea has been heavily influenced by the work of Dr. Peter Barss, an
american academic whose jolly oeuvre includes, ‘Suicide in the Southern Highlands of
Papua new Guinea’, ‘Scald burns in children 0-14 years old’ and ‘Cold Immersion deaths
from drowning and Hypothermia’. He was awarded an Ig-nobel Prize in 2001 for his thesis
‘Injuries due to Falling Coconuts’ and now works in Saudi arabia. Barss further aided
medical science during his period in the tropics in the 1980s with such publications as,
‘Inhalation hazards of tropical “pea shooters”’, ‘Falls from trees and tree associated injuries
in rural Melanesians’ and the scientific classic ‘Grass-skirt burns in Papua new Guinea’.
Perhaps we should not pay too much attention to a man who has made his living
inspecting the buttocks of young Papua new Guinean girls, conclude that the
coconut statistic might just be George Burgess talking out of his Barss and that the much
maligned coconut is less dangerous than has been suggested.But how should you prevent all this? Well clearly you need to stay in your house at all costs,
have no social contact and never turn on the hot tap. Oh, and be naked. Yes because
clothes can kill as well and not just grass-skirts. Recent research has suggested that tight
ties can cause glaucoma and we chaps have long been aware of the health risks of tight Y-
fronts but perhaps the most dangerous article of clothing your trousers. Yes, each year
3695 people are hospitalised in trouser- related accidents. Primarily this is from putting
them on too quickly and falling over but anyone who has seen There’s Something about
Mary will realise the health benefits of button flies as opposed to the zip variety.On the other hand most accidents happen in the home, a fact which would be attested to by
the 35 people which the royal Society for the Prevention of accidents claims were injured in
2000 by tea cosies or the 738 who suffered at the hands of beanbags three years ago.
Over recent years the Darwin awards have shown us some of world’s most peculiar deaths
and accidents, such as the six egyptians who drowned in 1995 trying to rescue a chicken
from a well (the chicken survived) or the Californian who, offended by a rattle snake sticking
its tongue out at him, returned the favour only to have the offended body part bitten off. The
awards are of course designed to confirm darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest, or at
any rate the survival of those who can remember to put the pin back into an unthrown
grenade before returning it to their pocket. Of course one way to insure an eccentric death
seems to be to become famous. Celebrities and especially musicians have a habit of dying
in bizarre circumstances. Jazz musician Chet Baker’s defenestration or Sonny Bono skiing
into a tree serve as reminders to us all. Sadly the story that Keith Moon drove his car into his
swimming pool is fanciful, as he actually died from alcohol poisoning, incidentally in the
same flat in which Mama Cass had died from ‘ham sandwich asphyxiation’ a couple of
years previously. Modern rock deaths are a familiar and predictable catalogue of
overdoses, suicides and traffic accidents and it is surprisingly to classical music that we
must turn to encounter the truly bizarre.Charles Valentin alkan, a French composer, died when a bookshelf collapsed on him as
he was reaching for a copy of the Talmud from the top shelf whilst Henry Purcell died from
chocolate poisoning. Jean-Baptiste Lully died from an infection when the large wooden
staff he used to keep time whilst conducting fell on his foot and the Czech Frantisek
Koczwara meta sticky end to autoerotic asphyxiation in 1791. Such a fate has more recently
befallen Conservative MP (and former Oxford Union president) Steven Milligan and BnP
activist Kristian etchells, which perhaps says all that needs to be said about the British
right. death was no more subtle in the ancient world either. aeschylus the Greek dramatist
died when a vulture dropped a tortoise on his head, and the stoic philosopher Chrysippus
died of laughter after seeing a donkey munching on figs. At the other end
of the Mediterranean, age might not have withered Cleopatra, but an asp to the breast did
the trick. and death is no respecter of position or breeding as many royals would testify.
King Béla I of Hungary died when his throne collapsed due to sabotage and his compatriot
Matthias died after eating poisoned figs, which Chrysippus would presumably have found
quite amusing had he still been around. Modern day Hungarians seem to fare little better, in 1973 Finance Minister Péter Vályi died
when he fell into a blast furnace at a factory he was inspecting. Ben Schott revels in
recounting the deaths of Burmese kings in his Original Miscellany including no less than
three trampled by elephants and one killed by an enraged cucumber farmer whose
cucumbers the king had eaten. Closer to home, Henry I died of a surfeit of lampreys whilst
edward II was unfortunate enough to be the 1 person in 161,956 to die from a foreign body
entering the body through skin or natural orifice although as the foreign body was a red-hot
poker and the orifice was his anus I suspect the odds are somewhat longer. The quest for
knowledge is a noble one but one which has its hazards, just look at the case of Francis
Bacon who died from pneumonia after stuffi ng a chicken with snow to see if cold could
preserve meat; his body was not cryogenically frozen.Or there is Scottish botanist david
douglas who died in 1834 after falling down a pit trap and being crushed by a bull
which fell down the same trap. What are the chances? Well 1 in 2.8 million actually. One
final word of warning, “manners maketh man” but they can finishth the man just as easily,
as danish astronomer Tycho Brahe found out in 1601 when he politely remained at the
dining table rather than get up to go to the toilet during a banquet. He died of the ensuing
bladder infection. So what is the moral of all this? “Some people are so afraid to die that
they never begin to live” said Henry Van dyke, so we can all afford to live a little. Living won’t
kill you, though it will be those bastard vending machines. Is it wrong to laugh at other
people’s misfortune? George Bernard Shaw said, “Life does not cease to be funny when
people die” and he should know – he died falling out of an apple tree at the ripe old age of
94.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005

A
company founded by Oxford University Chemists has doubled in value since last
year and is now estimated to be worth £58 million.The company, VaSTox Plc, was floated on
the London Stock Exchange in October 2004 valued at £30 million. earlier this
month the company published an interim financial report showing a turnover of
£201,000, a fourfold increase from last year. One of the company’s founders
described its success as “remarkable.” The company was founded in 2003 by
Professors Kay Davies of Hertford, Edith Sim of St Peter’s, Graham Richards of
Brasenose and Steve of new College, who invested £100,000 in the company. VASTox is involved in develop­ing
treatments for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and tuberculosis, using a
process known as chemical genomics. Professor Steve explained, “By looking at
the unique features of fruit fly larvae and zebra fish eggs, we are able to
predict the properties of organic chemicals.” This information can then be related to
humans. According to the company’s website this leads to the production of much
safer medicines. As a ‘spin-out’ company, the Univer­sity holds a stake in
VaSTox allowing it to share in the company’s massive success.In January 2005, VaSTox moved out of
University facilities to a new site at Milton Park a few miles south of Oxford but Professor
stressed his priority, “still lay with the University, managing one of the
largest research departments and running a full teaching programme.” A professional
management team handles the day-to-day running of the company, allowing
academics to continue work in the University. described the team as “highly
competent”, and highlighted their role in the company’s achievements. He also
stressed that none of the academics were involved for personal profit, allowing
more money to be reinvested in the company. VASTox is not the first spin-out company
with which had been involved. In 1992 he founded the similarly successful Oxford asym­metry
Limited. That company was also floated on the stock exchange and sold for £316
million in 2000.Professor admitted that he had made
considerable personal gain from Oxford asymmetry’s suc­cess but added that a
large part of the company’s profits were used to fund chemistry studentships in
the University. He believes that success­ful spin-out companies can only be
beneficial for the University. Since 1998, forty companies have been spun
out from University de­partments and their estimated value is over £2 billion.
The companies are overseen by Isis Innovation Ltd, a subsidiary of the
University.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005

Cherwell notes with relief the return to form of those two bastions of political potty-training, OULC and OUCA, just when things seemed to be getting a bit boring.That’s not to say that the OUCA types haven’t been happily ensconced in the Union drinking port and talking about how Europe is a bad thing or “compassionate conservatism” (whatever that may be), or that the OULC haven’t been smartening up after the odd drunken rendition of Things Can Only Get Better. But in recent weeks they seem to have recovered from their respective hangovers to indulge in that most political of pursuits, the art of mud-throwing.No longer so concerned with Cameron vs Davis, or the latest (will he ever stop?!) ignominious departure of David Blunkett, the respective sides have got down to the really serious business at hand.For once, the charade was prompted by a rather over-the-top letter from the Presidents of OULC on the back of the now unlikely-to-actually-take-place visit of the infamous (if only he were in-famous) George Galloway, in which they tactfully implied that OUCA has fascist sympathies.A thinly veiled attempt at points scoring which hardly covers them in roses, however righteously Red they may consider themselves to be.On the other hand, the response from the not-entirely-whiter-than-white OUCA which accused OULC of Communism has added a touch of Blue bathos to the whole incident. While OUCA is right to argue that there was a degree of provocation to the original letter, from the point of view of OULC one might argue that OUCA is an obvious, if cleverly chosen, target.All in all Cherwell rejoices at OUCA’s formal complaint to the University Proctors which must surely, at least at first, be received with a combination of confusion and amusement in Wellington Square. While it is unclear where this particular saga will end, there is clearly no love lost between the two sides. Cherwell sits firmly on the fence in these things, but is sure to outstretch a hand of congratulation to all concerned for creating a nice little disturbance to wake us from a mid-term slumber.We imagine that, to quote The Big Chill, you’re “just trying to keep the conversation lively”, and for that, we thank you.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005