The Christ Church
based Christopher Tower Poetry competition has launched this year’s competition
with a major increase in prize money. The competition, for budding poets aged
16-18, is now offering a £3,000 first prize, with £1000 and £750 for those in
second and third position. The winner’s school will also receive £500. The
increase from last years £1500 top prize is “taking it up a gear” according to
Dr Peter McDonald, competition judge and Christ Church
tutor. The competition was launched at last week’s Cheltenham Literary
Festival. In previous years, the themes have included “Gravity” and “Early
Morning”, and Philip Pullman and Gillian
Clarke have been among the judges.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

Oxford University is establishing a new
scholarship scheme for Chinese students. The project will run initially for two
years from 2006 and is aimed at doctoral candidates. Ten scholarships will be
awarded each year. The memorandum states that students will come from specific
universities in China,
and will work in agreed subject areas. Na Li, President of the University’s
Asia-Pacific Society, stated, “There is a lot of academic talent in China that
cannot find its way to Oxford because of the substantial fees involved, which
are usually above £20,000 a year. A move like this can only be good for the
University and cross country relations."ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

Oxford-led palaeontology
researchers have discovered some of the oldest, and smallest, remains of our
human relatives in Egypt.
The mini teeth, jaw and facial bones of the two fossilised anthropoids are 37
million years old, two million years older than most previous discoveries. The
smallest weighs an estimated 160-270 grams. Dr Eric Seiffert, university
lecturer and project co-leader, said it “filled a major gap in our
understanding” and was interesting because the large eye socket of the Biretia
megalopsis suggests it was nocturnal.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

A recent study led by Dr Ajit
Lalvani, of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, has revealed that the
BCG vaccine may not just prevent the progression from tuberculosis infection to
an active disease, but may also prevent the contraction of infection. Dr
Lalvanic and his team conducted the ELISpot skin test to assess infection on
979 children in Istanbul
living with someone infected with TB, The results showed that 24% of the
children with a BCG scar, who had been vaccinated already, were not infected.
These results mean a great leap in progress for approaching the vaccination
against, and treatment of, TB.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

The Bodleian library and University College have acquired a new group of
letters written by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who was a undergraduate at the
college. The letters were written by Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson
Hogg over two terms whilst at Oxford,
and were addressed to the inventor Ralph Wedgwood. The letters were found in
the contents of a house, and bought by University College
and the Bodleian with aid by a donation from the AG Leventis foundation. Lord
Butler of Brockwell, master of Univ, said “I feel very excited indeed about
these letters.” Ronald Milne, Acting Director of University Library Services
stated, “These new Shelley letters not only add considerably to our
understanding of a significant point in the history of the University and one
of its most famous students, but they provide new raw materials for scholarly
research for our postgraduate and higher-level researchers in Oxford.”ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

Kenneth Peach, Visiting Professor
of Physics at Oxford University and Director of the John Adams Institute
for Accelerator Science, has been awarded the prestigious Rutherford Medal and
Prize by the Institute
of Physics. The prize
recognises Professor Peach’s “contributions to high-energy physics” and his “key
role in reviving accelerator science for particle physics applications in the UK”. Upon
receiving the award, Professor Peach stated “I am very pleased that, through
this award, the skill, dedication and enthusiasm of many people who contributed
to this work have been acknowledged.”ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

We carried on as best as we could. My boyfriend became my full-time carer. I continued working but I was having seizures in front of clients, and I was eventually told they had to let me go. I still had six months to wait for a CT scan at the hospital. I had no income, and I had no contact with my parents at all.Things started to get difficult, and eventually we were evicted from our house. This is when it all fell apart; we were homeless. We went to Oxford City Council for advice many times, but we weren’t given any information to help us understand what we needed to do, and we felt ignored and alone.The worst incident was waking up in the shower room of the shelter, having hit my head during an epileptic fit. I had been lying there alone for an hour, which could have been the last hour of my life.We couldn’t stay there; the shelter had no medical provision or any knowledge of an illness like epilepsy. I was told by the helpers that now that I had a routine and a roof over my head I should be more stable and my fits should stop. They didn’t; they just got worse. Having medical needs didn’t seem to make my appeal for housing any more urgent.We found ourselves moving into a squat, then we moved on to a garage. Again we went to the council so I could register for incapacity benefits. We were told we couldn’t register as officially homeless until we had been living on the streets for six months. Only a voluntary organisation called Street Services eventually helped us. They met with us, advised us on housing, counselling and medical help.One night I had a very serious seizure and fell and broke my nose and a rib and burst a blood vessel in my eye, which left me bedridden for weeks. Our Street Services advisor had left Oxford and we were referred to the Elmore Team, who said they couldn’t help us. Once again we felt like we had gone back to the beginning. We ended up sleeping on the doorstep of a church. This left us open to the elements and feeling almost ready to give up.Through the summer, we bought a tent and ended up staying by the river. It’s frightening; you spend all night awake worrying someone will walk by and disturb you. The fear and stress triggered seizures throughout the night.We eventually received a message from Street Services. The advisor who has been working with us had returned; he met with us, marched us into the council and demanded we be housed immediately due to our situation.That evening we were handed the keys to our new house. This was eight months after we were initially evicted.When I was working, I used to be blind about the issue of homelessness.I was wrapped up in my work, never thinking that one day it would be me. What happened to me has made me more aware of the homeless situation, especially for young people with medical needs, and I hope the problem of homelessness in Oxford is more acknowledged, despite its reputation.Up until two years ago, my life was completely normal. My boyfriend and I both had good jobs and were living in shared accommodation, like many young people in Oxford. One evening I was mugged, beaten and almost sexually assaulted, and that’s where my epilepsy started. Epileptic seizures are almost like being knocked out, you feel disorientated, and can wake up hours later having not known what’s happened to you.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

Where to go… for a curry without the crew-date
Where: Chutney’s
Why: The kind of cosy setting you would describe as ‘intimate’, with a colourful modern interior. None of the usual paraphernalia of a curry house, ie BYOB sign, loud Indian music, darkened interior induced by deep red walls and minimal lighting. Chutney’s is seemingly lacking in crew date attendance, perhaps due to its slightly more expensive menu.
What to eat: Of course, start off your meal with popadoms, which are piled high in a basket and cooked in quite large pieces – so you don’t look greedy with an entire popadom on your plate but you get enough to warm the tummy up for some curry action. The usual chutneys and sauces are served in a big sharing dish which wouldn’t look out of place in Bar Med, but this is a good thing. Slather your popadom in sweet, smooth mango chutney, or lime pickle, or do as my sauce-loving fellow diner did and try the tamarind sauce with the yogurt together, a delicious combination.With such a huge array of vegetarian food, you’d be silly to order meat. Whether a carnivore or not, the pages of mouthwatering dishes will be enough to read through without even giving the meat a second thought. With such a vast array of ingredients, there is no standard vegetable curry with yesterday’s remains here; instead, delicious-sounding pumpkin, aubergine, chickpea and tomato dishes leap off the page. Go for the Mortar Baigan, and if, like my companion, you cannot bear the thought of a meat-less meal, go for the chicken tikka, which is a really different and tasty version of the British favourite. No sooner had the last popadom been munched down and plates cleared away than our aromatic meal arrived. The food was all well presented, the curries in little cast-iron dishes and naan nicely cut into quarters – although there would have been no space on the table for the usual slug shaped naan. The rice was really fragrant, with cardamon and cinnamon, and complemented both dishes well. The naan had ample coconuty filling, and was refreshingly light and crispy at the edges, not damp and heavy like so many.The tikka was creamy and lightly spiced with a delicate taste and reassuringly orange colour. Surprisingly filling, the Mortar Baigan had a warm heat, with good textures – crunchy onions, perfectly cooked chickpeas and aubergine which had soaked up a lot of the intensely flavoured sauces to make a perfect combination.
Where to sit: At the back by the bay windows, well lit and far enough away from the door and toilets so you aren’t constantly walked past. Upstairs is available for group bookings.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

The life of the Gap Year, though short (but such an amazing experience) was a blessing to all of us – temping agencies in particular, as swarms of students with good A-Levels pleaded for any work going for at least three months. The Gap Year was a close relative of the disapprovingly-named ‘year out’, but gained a few Oxbridge admissions officers as supporters and evolved into quite the social phenomenon – it had a proper name, gave middle-class kids a sense of purpose and even created a new form of rebellion for eighteen-year-olds to row about with their parents. Like vegetarianism and Doc Martens before it, the Gap Year was initially the proud preserve of that slightly left-of-centre girl in sixth form who wore coloured tights with her uniform and developed a social conscience when everyone else just wanted fake ID. She went to Ghana to dig wells, it went in the school magazine, she got into Oxford and now single-handedly saves rainforests. However, the break-through moment for the Gap Year’s relationship with the public came in 2000, when Prince William was pictured constructing a walkway in Chile, thus proving that even the richest boys from the nicest schools with the pinkest Pringle shirts can build things in foreign countries. Since this demonstration of the Gap Year’s disregard for class and therefore great unifying quality (see photos on walls of student rooms around Oxford of rahs with Oakley sunglasses cradling tiny underprivileged South American children), it has blossomed in popularity and now is the preferred form of self-discovery for around 200,000 students every year. Cruelly, this globe-straddling traveller has been hewn down in its prime by the introduction of Top-Up Fees. While it claims to rival the Gap Year’s universality with promises of hardship payments, the introduction of Top-Up Fees has so far failed to acknowledge that it will sadly force many would-be ‘gappers’ to get stuck into paying for their education while they still can, rather than hoping that the remainder of what they earned at Office Angels will get them through after they’ve taken out the budget for their TEFL course. In addition to the loss of an outlet for late-teenage philanthropy with an exotic backdrop, with the Gap Year dies a plethora of phraseology which otherwise lacks significance – "Full Moon Party", "finding oneself", "garp yar rah" and "STA Travel" to name but a few. We must also wave goodbye to several important modern social skills – namely the ability to discover someone in Fresher’s Week who was staying in the same youth hostel as you, having an unnatural sub-Saharan tan in October, and being able to write long essay-esque emails informing your friends quite how imperative it is they go to wherever you’ve been. Here’s to the Gap Year – its henna-tattooed, worry-beaded, Jesus-sandalled soul will live on in our hearts as an unprecedented example of mass UCAS-approved and often vaguely altruistic procrastination.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005

The college football season got off to a scorching start last Wednesday with twenty-five goals scored in the first four Premier League matches. The opening games in the First Division proved to be equally entertaining, with relegated Keble and promoted Lincoln proving that they have adjusted well to life in their new division. Newly promoted Jesus immediately made a name for themselves in the Premier devision. They treated the visiting Brasenose side to such a lesson in top flight football by a well-drilled Jesus team, that the 4-2 scoreline did the newly promoted side’s performance justice. Having flirted with relegation at the tail-end of last season, they now find themselves at the giddy heights of second in the league.It was a high spirited game in which both teams did well to overcome the challenges of wind, rain and a slopping pitch. The talents of Brasenose’s John Ditchburn and Jesus’s Graham Parrott shone through in particular on a dank Wednesday afternoon.Jesus set their stall early on, the aforementioned Parrott sending an unstoppable free kick past the Brasenose goalkeeper with just five minutes gone. The two-man Brasenose fanbase soon suffered further misery when Dave Knocker deftly slipped the ball into the right of the net.To their credit, Brasenose’s heads did not drop. Two minutes after Jesus’s second, Ditchburn punished the keeper’s indecision with a beautifully weighted lob. It was more of the same after the break. Gareth Bebb skipped past two defenders to finish neatly. Again, Brasenose struck back, the outstanding Ditchburn hitting a powerful shot which took a deflection on its way past the beleaguered keeper.Far from a tense finish, however, Jesus dominating the remaining period and only some last-ditch defending off two successive corners kept a tired Brasenose in the game. Shortly afterwards, however, Jesus’s Jack Wellby capitalised on a mix-up between goalkeeper and defender to score from the edge of the area, securing for Jesus three points and the right to hold their heads high in the Premier League. The exceptional performance of the first round, however, undoubtedly came from Worcester. A year ago Magdalen were the rulers of college football, and it was presumed that the new season would see the continued supremacy of the black and white stripes. However, rather than looking at another title challenge  Magdalen will face a lengthy struggle for survival. They have lost seven players over the summer and while Catz proved last year that it is possible to overcome a shaky start and still challenge, they never witnessed such a catastrophic result as this. In every aspect of the game Magdalen were outclassed, outfought and outthought. To describe it as one-sided would be to flatter the home side as it suggests two teams turned up. Worcester pressed Magdaeln ruthlessly, launching lightning attacks and appearing to cut them apart at will in a cavalier performance that should leave their title rivals cringing. But Worcester will not play a side as poor as Magdalen every week. The midfield was hungerless and the defence negligent. Magdalen established their fearsome reputation upon a powerfully built side capable of producing results, if not attractive football. However, that can no longer disguise an inherent lack of quality, or even a basic ability to read the game. Worcester were allowed to spray the ball with ease just 18 yards from Magdalen’s keeper while striker Alex Toogood wandered freely between the two central defenders. Goals looked likely during every attack as the home side cowered before Worcester’s rapier blades.The rout began with three minutes gone. Michael Hobbiss embarrassed right back Doug Kelly to win a corner from which Matt Roberts scored.Three minutes later Toogood launched himself on the hesitant back-line, blazed towards goal and lifted it over the keeper. A quarter of an hour gone and Toogood claimed his second. The inevitable fourth went to Worcester’s emperor. A corner from the right was missed by two defenders, as well as Hobbiss, and Beanland thumped it into the net. And in the best move of the match the visitors almost added a fifth before half time. Beautiful one-touch football between Lucian Weston and Toogood spread the defence. Weston had the chance to convert his own good work but he was unable to sidefoot in from six yards.If you’d had the urge to eavesdrop on Magdalen’s half-time team talk you would have heard the captain tell his side to ‘win the second half.’ Well, they only conceded three in the next 45 minutes which was a victory of sorts. Toogood secured his hat-trick with a splendid curled shot from the edge of the box and minutes later, with Magdalen failing to clear a harmless bouncing ball, Hobbiss’ volley sealed a fine captain’s performance.Magdalen’s humiliating performance was ended in the most fittingly humiliating fashion. Toogood’s miscued free-kick skipped round the wall, under the keeper and with a resounding ring like a death knell, squirmed off the post and into the back of the net. In a single game seven goals had passed what had been the most feared side of the top division: the balance of power has undergone a seismic shift and the fight for the crown is on.ARCHIVE: 2nd week MT 2005