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

It’s never a good idea to let the newspapers make your decisions for you. If you were to believe everything you read in the daily of your choice, the country would be divided into some pretty interesting little groups. Telegraph readers wouldbe convinced that the Tories, under Boris Johnson,  were about to win the next election, Daily Mail readers would be sure that their Great Little Island was being overrun by a plague of illegal immigrants, and Sun readers – well, the people who look at its pictures, anyway – would know for sure that the England were going to win Euro 2004 and the next World Cup to boot. And as the public repsonse to Robert Kilroy-Silk’s recent gratuitous anti-Arab rant in the Daily Express has shown, most agree that Muslims are a universally dangerous people hell-bent on destroying the West.While the rabid opinions of the majority of the papers can be more or less ignored, the repercussions
 of September 11th and the subsequent rise in terrorist incidents around the globe directed at "Western” targets are having an effect on independent travellers. Bookings are down, flights are being delayed or cancelled while security checks are carried out, armed police are keeping watch at
UK airports, travellers in America are being finger-printed and photographed for security reasons, and western targets abroad – embassies, expensive hotels and nightclubs popular with westerners are being deliberately targeted by al-Qaeda and its constituent lunatics. You can’t go abroad, it seems, without either being blown up, shot at, or having your plane vapourised by some crackpot with a pound of Semtex stuffed inside his Hush Puppies. You might be safer going on holiday to Greenland for a few years, or even spending the time hiding under your kitchen table with your fingers in your ears. Fewer risks, you see.These risks are probably not as great as people think. The vast majority of the world is almost devoid of any threat whatsoever, and the level of threat in much of the rest of the world is rarely more than low. The terrible bombings in Istanbul last year did change the picture, however. Turkey is on the borders of Europe and soon to become part of the continent, and one of the targets was the HSBC bank; for the first time a British target had been deliberately picked out.But setting aside for a moment all the media hype and the sinister videos of bin Laden encouraging
Muslims across the world to rise up and destroy the West, has the outlook for travellers actually changed much since September 11th? It would seem not. As the recent controversy over BA flight 223 to Washington showed, thes security services are listening to terrorist plans and are usually aware ofvany major plans before they can be carried out. Armed flight marshals are already being used on American airliners and will shortly be employed on British planes as well, so in fact our aeroplanes are probably even safer than they were before September 11th.Only a few countries are genuinely “off the map” for independent travellers. Even countries like Syria  and Iran that continually refuse to bow to American demands for their immediate disarmament aren’t regarded as dangerous to the solo traveller, and reports from people who have been there are almost universally favourable; some people even recall watching public demonstrations against America and Britain and then being warmly welcomed by the people who, minutes before, had been screaming their hatred of the country they had just come from. The impact of terrorism on individual countries is much worse. Third World countries like Kenya and Tanzania which rely so heavily on safari-going tourists to bring in much-needed funds are suffering heavily as terrorist threats and flight cancellations abound. While opportunists would say that the inevitable price-slashing merely gives tourists a better deal, it also means that operators are more likely to cut corners to maximise their profits, which, in countries where countless fragile ecosystems are under threat from exploitative tourism, is never a good thing.With careful planning and sensible precautions, the individual traveller should have few problems, in spite of the impression that the media may give you. Look at it like this: are you really going to let a bearded lunatic with dodgy personal hygiene and a penchant for hiding in Afghan caves ruin your trip of a lifetime? Thought not…
Archive: oth week HT 2004

It seems extremism in all shapes and forms is permeating so many aspects of our lives these days; aside from the everyday worries of horrendous working hours and fanatical dieting, it has also got something of a stranglehold on entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for one minute your pipe-and-slippers type, but forgive me for thinking that watching pranksters throwing themselves down flights of concrete steps on snowboards and people voluntarily hoisting themselves into small glass boxes and starving themselves for weeks is getting just a little bit wearying. The latest addition to the ranks of those who will seemingly do anything to get on television is the cast of yet another reality show, Channel 4’s Shattered. Bereft of the brain-splattering possibilities of Derren Brown’s Russian Roulette set-piece, the producers obviously thought they still had a cunning gimmick to save this one from mediocrity. Not only were the contestants the usual mixed bag of urban innocents and serial killers in-the-making we have come to expect from such shows, they were also prohibited from sleep for eight days and seven nights. But what could have been an intriguing and informative psychological documentary was dumbed-down into a second-rate game show. As if the likes of Big Brother hadn’t sent us into enough of a stupor, we now got to watch a few lacklustre Joe Publics yawning at each other every night. Hardly extreme enough to grab an audience.Then again, what would? Obvious ethical barriers prevent human subjects from participating in the kinds of experiments conducted on animals that would provide the high-risk hit we're assumed to crave. One test by scientists from the University of Chicago deprived rats of sleep by placing them on a wheel above a pool of water; if they tried to rat-nap, the wheel was turned and they would have to walk in order to stay on it. After two weeks, the sleep-famished rats mysteriously died. Although two episodes of Shattered later, I felt like doing the same – surely just a strange coincidence. The issue here, though, is not that the multiplying breed of programmes centred on extreme stamina and crazy feats needs to be made more intense to draw audiences; they need to be completely replaced. The format thrives on its ability to offer something unusual, but there has been such a flock to shock in the media recently that people are simply becoming numb to it. As a novelty, people doing crazy stunts for exorbitant cash wasn’t a bad idea; natural human curiosity (or was it voyeurism?) made sure the first batch of these offerings succeeded. But we’ve already seen how the ratings dropped when Big Brotherdecided to cash-in with yet another series, and how badly Jackass: The Movie flopped – the more we see people trying to reach those elusive “extremes,” the more it becomes run-of-the-mill. And for many of us, Fear Factor’s idea of making people hurl themselves between speedboats at full pelt before force-feeding them maggots is hardly great entertainment. Hopefully, plummeting interest in most other TV-endorsed extreme stunts should persuade the hyperactive commissioning bods to can the tedium and take a valium. Would you be content with watching a blue movie instead of doing the real thing? Thought not. So why watch others having all the fun? Snowboarding, parachuting, bungee-jumping; whatever takes your fancy, get the rush firsthand. But better, if you can’t join them, beat them. My award goes to the punter who, having obviously heard of nothing more ridiculous than starving yourself in a box over the Thames, hovered a remote-controlled helicopter/Big Mac combination outside Blaine’s box. In a truly British welcome, our favourite mad magician was made to endure not only this airborne temptation but also the usual projectile eggs, tomatoes, Paul McCartney insults and the lure of a burger van parked directly beneath him, replete with the smell of freshlycooked hotdogs.His girlfriend complained that the New York public “gave Blaine peace” when he pulled a similar stunt in the
States. What can I say? They also lap up Jackass…Archive: 0th week HT 2004

The problem with extreme sex is that I’m not entirely convinced such a thing exists. If anything, it conjures ludicrous images of overweight women dressed as ponies, pasty businessmen rolling around ecstatically beneath stiletto heels and that old favourite: nails being hammered into penises. I, for one, have never hammered a nail into a penis, although to be fair, I’ve never hammered a nail into anything. I’m not really into DIY.It soon becomes clear that there are no markers by which extremity can actually be determined, whether in sexual terms or any other. You might say pony play, being stood on a leatherbound dominatrix and having someone hang a nice watercolour from your dick is pretty extreme but, if you asked me, I’d say it was pretty silly. But extremity is not necessarily dictated by the weirdness of an act so much as the intensity of the experience.For example, I have a friend who seems to have recently undergone a bit of a Sandra Dee transformation. From a cute, exceptionally devout Christian, she’s now a bi-curious beguiler with a penchant for corsetry – and we say amen to that. Recently she regaled us with the story of the time she went down on a guy while he was driving. Not so very extreme, nevertheless, she was flushed and giggly and obviously thrilled to bits with her own audacity. But this is what it’s all about. Daring to do something that your own hang-ups or boundaries would normally prevent you experiencing, I have a long string of Catholic lovers behind me (what can I say? It’s the guilt thing, makes me horny) and, without fail, their ultimate dirty thrill is always Doing It somewhere in a church, preferably the very church where they sing in the choir on a Sunday. The altar, of course, for those with real courage of conviction. I’ve never been struck by lightning, but then again, I am an atheist. It’s hellish on the knees, though, all those hard surfaces.Of course, deliberately venturing beyond what the Americans would term “your comfort zones” is bound to carry a certain amount of risk. Of course, all the best things do, within reason. I would hope that, as well as the urge to try and copulate interestingly with as many people as possible, preferably simultaneously, some of us were at least granted a modicum of common sense. But herein, I suspect, lies part of the appeal of, for lack of a better term, what you might call kink. BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) offers an opportunity to explore and, perhaps even travel beyond, your boundaries in what should hopefully be a safe environment.Like almost everything else in the world, BDSM represents a spectrum of experience, from owning a fully equipped bondage dungeon to an inclination for making your lover beg for fulfilment. And, again, it can allow you to discover, on an individual level, what, for you, is a sexual extreme. For some this may be no more than lying still beneath a lover’s caresses, for others it may be the dark austerity of pain, for some the heady self- abandonment of complete immobilisation, for some the sexual drama, for others the prickling of uncertainty or the whisper of fear that comes even when, rationally, you know there’s nothing to be afraid of… and all this without the risk of motoring accidents.Archive: 0th week HT 2004

This nefarious exploration of all things savage is a deliberately perverse piece, to such an extent that to grasp either where it’s coming from or what it’s meant to say is analagous to an exercise in enigmatic code-cracking. Ian and Cate enter a minimalist set, and before a word is spoken, we are struck by his brashness and her meekness, a combination which promotes fear from the start. Their sordid relationship is exposed, the play then skirting over bigotry, disabilites, terminal illness, and vicious sex, before a sudden shift to a crude examination of the effects of civil war. Through repeated rape, violence, and sickening imagery, playwright Sarah Kane attempts to expose modern civilisation. The acting of the three cast members is of a very high standard, and the directing by John Walton is strong. The body language of Charlotte Covel (Cate) is particularly effective for revealing the personality of her character. Her exploration of the hotel room and thumb-sucking reveal Cate’s child-like side. Andy King maintains a powerfully versatile portrayal of gun-brandishing Ian’s mood swings. But Ian is always more threatening when he puts the gun down and menacingly undresses in front of the unwilling Cate. The ceremonial undressing and redressing, which Ian uses in an attempt to entice Cate, seems to replace and animalise their colloquial discourse. The violence in the play, both shown and recollected, is unmitigated. We feel the sexual acts Ian forces on Cate are only a prelude to the entrance of the brutal soldier (Devesh Patel). Kane seeks a raw realism through nudity and violence, but the unrelenting surge of emotions is first stomach- turning and then tedious. However, the lack of relief from brutality does give the audience a feeling of what the constant fear of war is like. Whether thegraphic nastiness constantly shown and spoken of in the play is needed is another question. The description of events is even more upsetting than the events themselves. However, all the sex and blood utilised by Blasted does not succeed in highlighting anything new of relevance to an audience. We need not be personally introduced to fictional debauchery and bestiality to understand the horror of real occurrences. Our imagination, like the playwright’s, can create something far more horrifying than anything produced on stage.The play has the germ of a laudable concept, but the script is infected by a lack of substance. The audience is witness to death, rape, necrophilia, and the cannibalisation of a baby , all without clearly expressed meaning. The play does not even merit the dubious dignity of being branded sensationalist; it is not shocking but plainly absurd, rather a curious mixture of Sex And The City meets the Slater sisters.Archive: 0th HT 2004