Saturday 29th November 2025
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An affectionate, homely play with hidden ambition: ‘Under Milk Wood’ reviewed

Mair Andrews
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An affectionate, homely play with hidden ambition: ‘Under Milk Wood’ reviewed

The lights dimmed, a small plaque was illuminating the stage with the red letters, “ON AIR”. I know I am in for a treat: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, or A Play of Voices, as a radio play, and this set choice indicates the production will be a thoughtful application of Thomas’ voice. The sound designers are actually onstage, at the edge of the traverse, so the audience is conscious that every sound is indeed an act of theatrical illusion. During one moment, a metronome pulses while characters begin to exchange lines in perfect meter – the way that Thomas’ poetic and sensitive rhythm was lifted from the page and to the stage was charming. 

Playful deception is the starting point for this play, as the first narrator (Bea Smalley) opens, inviting the audience to listen to the innermost thoughts and dreams of the townspeople of a small Welsh fishing town called Llareggub (which you only notice is “buggerall” backwards when you look at the programme). One by one, the characters enter, and we see snippets of their dreams: Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard relentlessly nags her two dead husbands; Captain Cat relives his precarious seafaring times; and Polly Garter pines for her dead lover. After these introductory snippets to the unconscious of our characters, the town awakens and we watch them go about their daily business, now with the knowledge of what hidden feelings motivate their actions. 

It’s all rather chaotic. Not only are there twelve actors onstage but there are 28 characters in the whole play – it’s incredibly difficult to follow. Actors had to double up and identities were initially easily confused given that our introductions to the characters were through their fantasies (or nightmares) rather than reality. Yet when Mr Pugh has dreams of poisoning Mrs Pugh, and then in real life announces to his wife at dinner that the book he is reading is a guide on poisons, the moment of connection between the unconscious and conscious is such a sudden shock that it provokes a rich feeling of collaborative comedy – the audience is delighted to be in on the joke.

The entire ensemble rises to the challenge of Thomas’ convoluted script. As the stage is a strip on, with the audience on either side, you can only hone in on the interactions that are happening directly in front of you – it creates a unique and intimate viewing experience, as though the audience member, like Captain Cat, is peering through a window and watching the townspeople go about their lives. 

Despite the largely mundane activities enacted, each character is entrancing. It is no easy feat to portray different characters within a few short moments, but each character has such a developed series of mannerisms, gait, and vocal inflection that you are gradually able to intuit when an actor has switched between characters. 

Some notable moments were Lily Smalls, a young girl who bemoans her existence immediately upon waking, complaining with childish vanity into her mirror during an aside, before returning onstage with elegance and poise, truly presenting as a different person. This was an  introduction to the theme of dual identities which continued throughout the production, and was mimicked by the dual roles actors inhabited. Magdalena Lacey-Hughes, for example, played both a 17year-old girl who has never been kissed but spends her afternoons drawing lipstick circles around her nipples, and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, who ceaselessly pesters the ghosts of her two dead husbands.

One moment, however, stole the show. Captain Cat, the blind sea captain who is tormented in his dreams by his drowned shipmates, dances with the ghost (or rather, a puppet) of his lost lover Rosie Probert. Until this scene, he has been an observer in the town, narrating what he sees through his window, but this change of emotional tempo is so gentle and calming that it is heartbreaking. 

The production occasionally struggled to keep up with their ambitious sound and lighting concepts. Technical issues at the start of the show meant that lights came on rather than off, sometimes there was a clear delay in the sounds or lights, and we were sat suspended in the silent darkness waiting for something to happen. This only really hindered the performance at its opening, however, and first-night jitters can always be excused, especially when demanding effects are necessitated by the text itself. 

Overall, the production’s risks tended to pay off: the most engaging set innovation was a small light projector, used to create a backdrop, but also tell shorter narratives of the play without adding in new cast members through clever shadowplay. The technicians were working constantly. At the end of the performance, when the townspeople were falling asleep onstage, I glimpsed the sound directors also slumped over the switch board – they had earned their rest.

In the final moments of the show, the overwhelming emotional response was tenderness. As all the characters danced around in circles at a celebratory town hall event, switching dance partners and involving the narrator, it was heartwarming to see these characters finally meet each other outside of their dream worlds. There was something homely in the dancing, with fiddles and even harps brought onstage, which left me half expecting the audience to get up and join. 

Cartesian Production’s Under Milk Wood was a delicate and heartwarming showcase of ambitious creative talent in all departments; the chaos and lyricism of Dylan Thomas’s writing was brought to life with tangible affection for the stories of the residents of a quaint fishing town. 

It’s time we woke up to the failures of the NUS

Archie Johnston
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It’s time we woke up to the failures of the NUS

After the Cambridge Student Union (SU) voted to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS) last month, Oxford University students should be left with questions about whether the NUS is equipped to live up to the political moment, especially after years of watering down their radicalism.

The official case for the motion to disaffiliate claimed that the NUS has “ignored calls from students nationwide, and a motion passed at their own highest democratic decision making body, to campaign for Palestine”. This is not the first time that the NUS has been challenged in recent years, especially over what Amnesty International has described as the apartheid and genocide in Palestine. In the last three years, SUs at the Universities of Warwick and York have tabled disaffiliation motions, citing Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism in the organisation. Cardiff SU voted against renewing their NUS affiliation just last week. However, there is a much longer history here that Oxford students should consider: that of a once-vital student organisation slowly fading from relevance, of one we desperately need back. If Oxford disaffiliating could serve as a step towards an effective and principled NUS, it is one we should seriously consider.

The disaffiliation vote at Cambridge came after more than 200 student leaders and societies signed an open letter to the NUS criticising the organisation for “failing to defend” pro-Palestinian student protesters facing a “wave of repression” on university campuses. This should ring true for Oxford students more than anyone; the demonstration at Wellington Square on 23rd May 2024 saw heavy police repression of peaceful demonstrators. The University accused student protesters of violence and failed to back these claims up. The NUS, however, was silent. 

The issues raised in the open letter were serious, and merited appropriate engagement. Unfortunately, NUS leadership did not see it that way. According to Not My NUS, the group that organised the open letter, the NUS issued a letter to the CEOs of all student unions that signed, pressuring them to unsign or be banned from NUS events. 

Though in recent months the NUS has made concessions to student pressure, supporting the campaign to evacuate Gazan students with places at UK universities, it has not done enough. Delegates walked out of the NUS conference last week after NUS president Amira Campbell refused to state, when asked, that the NUS was willing to be anti-Zionist. The invitation of Palestinian ambassador Husam Zomlot to the conference rang a little hollow, given Campbell’s refusal to stand against the ethno-nationalist ideology which guided the settlers who expelled Zomlot’s parents from their home in 1948.

This equivocation over Palestine draws a sharp contrast with the key role the NUS has played in fighting apartheid in the past. The NUS’ “Boycott Barclays” campaign was critical in forcing the bank to pull out of apartheid South Africa in 1986, putting its institutional power behind a campaign which had originated in the student movement and university occupations of the 1960s.

Yet some argue that the case for disaffiliation ignores the important work that the NUS does on issues that affect UK students more directly. The Cambridge Labour Club highlighted the work of the NUS in “campaigning to save the graduate route visa or defending trans rights”. This argument sets up a false opposition, however, between taking a principled stand on global politics and effectively defending student interests. It was in 1971, just as the NUS embraced its ability to campaign against apartheid, that it mobilised British students against government proposals to reorganise the finances of student unions. An institution which can fight for the just treatment of its own members is one which can stand up for justice everywhere. It is here that the NUS is now failing. 

In 2000, journalist Gary Younge said that over the previous fifteen years the NUS had been transformed “from a mass campaigning organisation to little more than a provider of cheap booze and a crèche for would-be parliamentarians”; a dramatic change that occurred under the dominance of the Labour faction in the NUS. The detrimental effect of the monopolisation of NUS leadership by its Labour supporters reached its most depressingly illustrative moment in 2007, when the NUS dropped their opposition to tuition fees under then-President, now-Health Secretary Wes Streeting. In 2010, while demonstrators filled the streets of central London in protest against the trebling of fees, NUS leaders were telling Liberal Democrat MPs that if fees were doubled, the organisation would only “go through the motions” of opposition.

The NUS has changed, and for the worse. Over the last three decades – especially during the tenure of New Labour – it has become a springboard for ambitious would-be Westminster apparatchiks rather than a purposeful organ to represent students and uphold progressive values. It no longer fights power. It is a path to power.

This is such a waste. Having a nationwide organising structure for students to use is vital. Whether challenging universities on complicity in genocide or fighting for the freedom of international students to study in the UK, there are so many things that the institution can do, and has done. As student debts continue to climb, and student movements against apartheid and genocide face consistent repression, the NUS needs to change if it has a chance of fighting on both fronts. Dramatic actions like disaffiliation cannot be off the table, if they can force the NUS into becoming the institution students so desperately need.

Spokesperson at NUS UK said: “The student movement is at its strongest when we stand together. Through NUS, students at Oxford are represented across the country, in Parliament and wider afield. We have been, and are committed to continuing, working alongside your Sabbatical officer team to work on your priorities based on the issues your SU has raised with us. NUS staunchly defends the right to protest on campus. Additionally, we are committed to ensuring that Palestinian students can access higher education here in the UK. We have been working with the Universities Minister on that, and Oxford students should be integral to these important conversations. We hope to continue working with Oxford SU, and remain open to constructive conversations.”

Peach Juice and Other Inappropriate Attachments

Ava Doherty
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Peach Juice and Other Inappropriate Attachments

My hostel sheets smell like regret and Chanel No. 5 sprayed like insecticide. I suspect it was me. The scent now mingles with the peach juice that trickled down my thigh this morning, as if my body itself was tired of holding form.

It’s hard to write in Paris when you’re sticky, humiliated, and vaguely possessed by the ghost of a man who’s still very much alive.

He was my mentor, sort of: old enough he should be irrelevant, but attractive enough to disrupt that fact. He looked like he belonged in the margin of a medieval manuscript, elbowing cherubs and taking long, meaningful pauses before disagreeing with you. He wore unseasonal scarves. He recited Rilke aloud, unprompted, as if life were an audition for a radio play no one was casting. Once, he called me “too clever for my own good,” and then proceeded to ignore every idea I ever offered him.

Naturally, I wanted him to ruin my life.

I misread everything: his tone, his glances, the way he once touched my shoulder as if I were a particularly delicate antique. It’s possible he just liked the sound of his own voice and I was a conveniently placed audience with oversized eyes.

Someone told him I was obsessed. He told me this as if reading aloud a fortune cookie: “Apparently, you’re obsessed with me.”

I laughed. A sound like crushed insects.

He looked pleased. Or maybe his face just does that.

By the canal, I sweat through linen and contemplate leaping in. Not from sadness—more for theatrical effect. A sort of baptism into bitterness.

A man sits beside me. He smells like shampoo marketed to tired mothers. He reads slowly, lips moving. I think, “This is the kind of man who wouldn’t complicate my life,” and immediately hate him for it.

I try to write, but the page is smug. All I manage is:

“The peach juice is inside my notebook now.”

This feels like a metaphor. Let it be one.

He never asked me out. Never kissed me. Never even stood too close. Still, I rearranged my thoughts to accommodate his absence. He lived inside every unwritten sentence. A squatter in my syntax.

He once said, “I worry about you,” and I carried that line like a relic, as if concern were some higher form of love. Looking back, I think he just didn’t want me to make a scene.

The truth is: I liked the idea of falling in love with someone who couldn’t possibly love me back. It felt safer. Like throwing yourself at a locked door and blaming the hinges.

What I felt wasn’t even romantic. It was logistical. Like: “If I give him exactly 13.5% of my brilliance and 100% of my trauma, surely something will open up.”

It didn’t.

Instead, I got a headache and an itchy sun rash.

There are pigeons here that strut like minor aristocrats. One of them made eye contact with me today, and I swear it looked concerned. I took it as a sign that I’m not writing enough.

I try to revise this scene in my mind: He tells me he’s been in love with me all along. I pretend to be surprised. We kiss. The pigeons applaud.

But that version doesn’t end with me Googling “how to get peach juice out of Moleskine paper.”

Eventually, I’ll leave Paris with nothing but a tan line shaped like a shoulder bag and a vague understanding of boundaries.

Here’s what I know:

  • He didn’t love me. Not even a little.
  • I made a performance out of pretending he almost could.
  • There are worse things than unrequited feelings.
  • Like hostel roommates who snore in iambic pentameter.
  • Like sticky thighs and no working fan.
  • Like seeing him again and saying, with complete composure, “Ah, yes. I wrote about you.”

That he will not get the pleasure of asking what I wrote.

Can movie violence ever be fun?

Ottilie Bostridge
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Can movie violence ever be fun?

“Because it’s so much fun, Jan!” This was Quentin Tarantino’s answer when an interviewer asked him to justify on-screen violence. Few would disagree. From the thousands who flocked to see the on-stage strangling of the Duchess of Malfi in the early 1600s, to the 16.5 million moviegoers who paid to watch the slaughter of four teenagers in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), violence has always been a staple of popular entertainment. Even the supposedly buttoned-up Victorians had the sensational novel and the ‘penny dreadful’; The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde sold 40,000 copies in only six months. 

But is violent entertainment really just a bit of fun? Aristotle thought it might lead to spiritual renewal through catharsis. Psychologist Dolf Zillman thought violence was entertaining because it is perversely arousing. Others have likened it to a ‘forbidden fruit’ or as a contained rebellion against everyday morality. Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, whose films The Piano Teacher (2001), Funny Games (1997), and Caché (2005) were re-released this summer, shows that violence in media isn’t harmless; it desensitises us to the act itself. 

Haneke has made it his project to remove the fun from violence on screen. He wants to remind his viewer of what it means in real life. In a 2009 interview, he articulated the dangers of desensitisation: “I don’t notice it anymore” when violence is shown on the news. He told another interviewer that physical violence “makes me sick. It’s wrong to make it consumable as something fun”. 

So his most violent films are anti-violence. They intend to be anti-entertainment, too. Funny Games (1997), for example, tells the story of a bourgeois family’s country holiday. Two young men take them hostage in their home, torturing and killing them in sadistic ‘games’. It’s a pretty standard sounding slasher plot, except that Haneke frustrates the viewer at every turn. When one of the young men is shot, the other one breaks the fourth wall, ‘winding back’ the plot with a TV remote: he frustrates the viewer in their desire for revenge. Even the violence avoids gory catharsis: the murder of the last remaining family member is an anticlimax, as the mother is quietly pushed off a boat to drown. Breaking the fourth wall, the villains mock the viewer’s appetite for entertainment. After beating a dog to death with a golf-club, one of them turns towards the camera and winks. Thus Haneke seeks to show our complicity (also the title of a recent retrospective) in the characters’ suffering. 

Caché does the same. It begins as a surveillance thriller. A French TV host anonymously receives videotapes of his house: he is being watched. But the ‘whodunit’ setup never pays off. The film shifts its focus into an exposé of French colonial violence. We never discover for sure who sent the tapes. As in Funny Games, Haneke frustrates the viewer’s wish for a tense, violent thriller. A tale of bourgeois paranoia is trivial next to  the mass, unthinking violence of colonial brutality. 

However, I doubt cinema can ever truly offer a deconstruction of its own violence. Take, for example, the opening of Funny Games. A family drives down an idyllic country road, playing ‘guess the opera’. Suddenly the words FUNNY GAMES appear in huge blood-red letters, accompanied by the discordant screams of the avant-garde metal band Naked City. The noise verges on painful, but it’s so audaciously satirical that it’s also incredibly compelling. Haneke’s postmodern tricks do the same thing. The torturers break the fourth wall; they comment on their own violence; they compare themselves to ‘Tom and Jerry’ and ‘Beavis and Butthead’. All these make for bold, playful storytelling so strangely fascinating that it ends up aestheticising the violence Haneke wants to deplore. He cannot escape his own talent: by making a film so engaging, he fails to avoid the ‘fun’. 

Caché also struggles to escape the conventional role of violence on film. The graphic suicide is there to shock viewers into recognising their own role in the erasure of colonial suffering. But it’s hard to separate the moral of the story from the form it takes. By shocking the viewer, the violence also keeps them watching. It feeds their hunger for suspense. A massive splash of blood across a white wall is so memorable, so artistic, so brutal, that it serves to satisfy the morbid desires of the desensitised movie-goer. 

Haneke’s aims are didactic, but he carries them out with such bold style and biting satire that, for viewers already used to violence on film, it’s hard not to get something  pleasurable from his bleak cinematic imaginarium. He may want to teach us about the dangerous power that violent entertainment offers. But he can never avoid an uncomfortable truth: that cinema, however upsetting, is always entertainment. 

What Britain needs is meritocratic elitism

Alexandre Guilloteau
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What Britain needs is meritocratic elitism

Elites have a bad name. Conjuring up images of toffs in top-hats and Eton collars, they are almost invariably paired with the adjective ‘out-of-touch’. But that need not be so. We must be careful to distinguish elitism of social background and elitism of the intellect. Any society requires its share of talented people, driven and nurtured to produce the best work that they can, and we all benefit from this. In the world of competitive sport this is uncontroversial, yet the educational institutions which nurture our intellectual elite are under constant attack for their exclusivity. While I have not seen many Eton collars at Oxbridge, places like Oxford certainly accept a disproportionate share of people from a privileged background. This produces not only an unpleasantly stratified society, but waters down the intellectual elite by missing out on potential from large swathes of society. The way to open up this talent pool, however, cannot be for Oxford and its peers to reduce their standards. Instead, we must turn our focus to improving primary and secondary education. 

Those who like to scorn elitism would presumably rather elite scientists develop their vaccines, elite surgeons operate on them, and elite engineers design the bridges they drive over. These people have reached the heights of their ability by the rigorous process of selective and intensive education. We are all better off if these functions are performed by the most qualified people. It is simply the case that there are tasks requiring technical skill, which should be carried out by those whose education has qualified them to do so. 

At the same time as acknowledging the need for an educated elite, we must admit that there is a problem with who gets the opportunity to develop these skills. Though Oxford is ostensibly open to anyone, there can be no doubt that attending certain schools puts applicants at a significant advantage. It also happens that many of those schools charge large sums of money. And so it is likely that applicants of a similar innate ability are being disadvantaged by their social background. This is not only unfair, but, by reducing the pool from which our intellectual elite is selected, diminishes the quality of that elite. 

So what can Oxford do to solve this problem? One option is to lower the standard of entry (for certain groups, at least). This is the worst option. In theory, people might overcome their disadvantages and reach the same level as their more fortunate peers. But they are fighting against all the odds. The resulting downward pressure on the degree not only would reduce the capacity of that vital elite (and make it lose out to foreign competition), but would remove a significant lifeline for those from lower social backgrounds who do get in. If the academic qualification is less meaningful, inevitably connections and social capital more readily accessible to the wealthy will become more influential in their future careers.   

In reality, there is only so much that Oxford can do: most of the disadvantage of bad schooling has been baked in by the time of university admissions. But I have two suggestions. Oxford could involve itself in schools by focusing outreach work not simply on persuading pupils to apply, but helping teachers prepare children for academic rigour. Secondly, we could look at France. Upon leaving school, children set on the academic path move to an école préparatoire for a year or more, before taking the entrance exams of the grandes écoles. Rather than rejecting those with genuine potential who have been failed by poor education – or letting them in with a lower standard – could we not run something similar aimed at those who, with the right education, have a good shot at getting in? These might be run at Oxford, a sort of transitional year, or instead as a form of extended secondary education provided by the state. Programmes such as UNIQ, though no doubt valuable, does not come close to this in length or scope. There does exist a foundation year, but it only has 68 places – indeed, I hadn’t heard of it before researching this article  

Nevertheless, the impetus must lie with improving primary and secondary education. There is precedent for this: the rise of academically selective state education after the 1944 Education Act led to significantly increased Oxford admissions from state schools. As Adrian Wooldridge notes, the percentage of the privately educated at Oxford fell from 55% in 1959 to 39% in 1969. Over a similar period the proportion of the eldest sons of peers who got a place fell from 50% to 20%. One Eton headmaster is cited as believing that 60% of private schools would have gone under if most grammar schools had remained (obviously there are still a few). Of course, there were flaws in the 1944 settlement, and we need not copy the model exactly (for example, there could be more opportunities to move to a selective school than the all-or-nothing 11-plus), but the key point is that selective state education can be tremendously beneficial. Why should academic selection be the preserve of private schools?

Oxford cannot alone make up for the failure of schooling without compromising its own academic standards. To do so would disadvantage everyone who relies on the research that it produces, and would work against the disadvantaged who do make it here. We are right to decry the fact that access to the intellectual elite is so much easier for the social elite. Unfortunately, Oxford can only play so much of a role in changing that. 

Fashion around Oxford – Joe Osei

Antonia Rogers
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Fashion around Oxford – Joe Osei

Joe Osei, budding stylist and general fashion icon, shares his style secrets and where he’s shopping right now.

Cherwell’s current fashion inspiration is Joe Osei, a third-year PPE student at St Regent’s College. With experience working behind the scenes at Paris Fashion Week, and generally serving looks around Oxford, he shared his fashion secrets with me over coffee at the Weston Library Café.

Cherwell: What are you wearing right now?

Joe: On top, I have this military style jacket from Brick Lane and a Bella Freud jumper. My corduroy trousers are from Jaded London, but you’re not allowed to hate it because I’ve been looking for a pair of really baggy corduroy trousers for three years. I’m also wearing my New Rock’s which I’ve had for ages. The laces are actually from my Jordan’s, because I really love patching shit up and making it work. My socks and underwear… you don’t need to know about.

Cherwell: So, how would you describe your personal style?

Joe: I was at the library the other day, and someone asked me what prop closet I got my clothes out of. I think that’s a pretty decent description of my style! It’s like a costume, like playing dress up. I’ll go through my wardrobe and look for an outfit that’s either funny, looks good, or interests me in some way. I get dressed about fifteen times a day, so I can’t really limit my personal style to one thing.

Cherwell: Has Oxford affected your personal style?

Joe: Unpopular opinion, but a lot of people in this city know how to dress really well. One of my favourite things to do is to walk down the street and observe what people are wearing, and pick things out. My housemates also affect my personal style because I’ve got access to so many more things; I can look at something that one of my friends is wearing and go “oh, I know exactly how I’d wear this.”

Cherwell: What is your go-to library outfit?

Joe: Generally something that’s quite dark, usually black or navy. Even though I’m wearing massive shoes and my shirt is probably too tight, I’m in clothes that I know I can move about in.

Cherwell: What is your favourite item in your wardrobe?

Joe: My full-length mink fur coat from the 1960s that I got in an auction when I was meant to be in a politics lecture. It’s so iconic, and I got it for such a steal. I will be buried in it! I also have this bright pink opera coat, which my friends call my Marie Antionette coat. I worked in PR over the summer, and my favourite part of the job was playing around in the wardrobe department and being given these really stupid pieces of clothing. The opera coat is one of those things that is just so unwearable, but so fun to throw over a shirt and jeans.

Cherwell: What is your best vintage find?

Joe: My Burberry coat. I went for a job interview at 16 (which I didn’t get) and I wanted to treat myself, so I visited this Burberry reseller on Brick Lane. Even though I couldn’t afford the coat, the guy gave it to me for a fraction of the price. That’s why it’s my best find, because it was just a person deciding to be nice to me, and that’s so lovely.

Cherwell: What’s your biggest fashion faux pas?

Joe: I have never made a fashion faux pas, and I stand by that. When I look bad, I look bad on purpose. I think it’s funny to dress out of type and see what you can get away with.

Cherwell: What is one item of clothing you would never wear, and why?

Joe: Skinny jeans. I did ballet when I was younger, and so my tight school suit trousers just looked a little bit wacky with my proportions. I do feel like the skinny jean hate is overdone – the bandwagon is crazy because some of you look good in a pair of skinny jeans, but you’re unwilling to accept it because you’ve fallen for the propaganda.

Cherwell: What are the clothing items you think everyone should have in their wardrobe?

Joe: Dress shoes. Wearing trainers everywhere just looks bad, and it can really take away from an outfit because it looks like you haven’t thought about what you’re wearing from top to bottom. So, you’ve got to have a pair of shoes that aren’t trainers.

Image Credits: Will Schwabach with permission

Cherwell: Where are you shopping right now?

Joe: I’m going to gatekeep because I hate you guys and don’t want you to have good things (“I want this to be quoted directly”). The one thing I won’t gatekeep is this app called Ganddee, which lets you know where all the second-hand stores are in any city that you’re in. I really need everyone to get on it, so they keep expanding, because I need to know where all the shops are.

Cherwell: What is your favourite place to shop in Oxford?

What Alice Wore. Once a month, she hosts a vintage pop-up where you can get lots of really cool curated vintage clothing. All of you should shop there more because she’s lovely, and if you’re nice and social, she might give you a discount. It’s also really nice to support local businesses.

Cherwell: You’ve accompanied fellow Oxford student and model Bebe Parnell to Paris Fashion Week. What was that like?

Joe: I’ve been three times. The first two times I was jobless – I was just there to shop and party! During the most recent one, I got a job doing the guest list for a fashion show. What I quickly realised was that it’s just kind of a job that’s really underpaid and overworked. It’s a lot of emails, taking pictures of stock, and getting the bus to deliver things to people. Once in a while, you get to feel like the most special person in the world because some famous stylist will come in and chat to you. But, right afterwards, you’ll remember that it’s basically like being a shop assistant convincing people to wear and buy things.

Cherwell: How is styling someone else different to dressing yourself? Do you take a different approach?

Joe: I look at them, at their bodies – certain silhouettes will look really great, where others will look kind of wacky. I also look at the way they express gender. Bebe recently told me that she wants to look like Patti Smith in the 1970s, so I created a mood board and selected certain items which I thought were interesting and that I could easily source. More important than money is the time – if you want to look good, you’ve got to be willing to dedicate an unnecessary amount of your time to just observing clothes. Additionally, apps like TagWalk, which enable you to search for specific items on the runway, are useful. I’m really just doing what I do with myself, but on a different body.

Cherwell: Do you have a fashion icon or designer that inspires you?

Joe: No, but I have an era that inspires me massively. I believe the early 2000s defined modern menswear. Within the space of about five years, we defined what masculinity looks like today. You can see the ultra-baggy silhouettes from the ‘40s and the ultra-tight, really skinny, coming into its own during that time.

Cherwell: Who in Oxford do you see as a fashion icon?

Joe: All female tutors are fashion icons in their own way. It’s interesting to see how they deal with a patriarchal institution (Oxford) in the way that they dress. Some of them will take themselves hyper seriously and dress in the mixed stereotype of what it means to look like an academic. Then, once in a while, you’ll have a really cold tutor who pulls up wearing a full leather pants suit. I think female tutors are the real fashion icons.

Cherwell: Any final fashion advice?

Joe: Unfollow every fashion influencer, because they are casting spells on you and forcing you into microtrend hell, where no one wants to experiment or admit that they like something that’s a little bit outdated. Even though something isn’t on trend anymore doesn’t mean it’s not cold. Don’t listen to them. Do what you want. Unfollow them now (unless it’s me).

Oxford students queue outside for 48 hours to secure accomodation

Archie Johnston
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Oxford students queue outside for 48 hours to secure accomodation

Students from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University queued for over 48 hours this week to secure housing for the next academic year. The agency, Finders Keepers, released 40 properties for three or four occupants at 9am on Tuesday morning, to a waiting queue of more than one hundred students.

At 5.40am on Monday morning, there were already ten students queuing down the side of the letting office. Three groups of students had pitched tents, two of which were set up in front of the office windows. Due to the cold temperatures, most people in the queue were dressed in hats, scarves, and winter coats.

The queue for Finders Keepers has become notorious in recent years. Last year, the BBC covered the experiences of a first-year Brookes student who queued for 24 hours to secure a lease. The situation has worsened this year. Speaking to Cherwell on Monday morning, students at the front of the line said that they had been there since 8am on Sunday, expecting a 48 hour wait to secure the house that they wanted.

The properties offered by Finders Keepers are primarily in Headington, Marston, and Cowley, and the demand from students at both of Oxford’s universities is intense. An Oxford student who joined the queue at 9am on Monday told Cherwell that she and her prospective housemates had looked at ten houses the previous week through another letting agency, Chancellor’s. All ten of the available properties were leased before the students could attend the viewing. 

A spokesperson for Brookes University told Cherwell: “Many students choose to live in the private rented sector after their first year, which is common across the sector. In Oxford the market is competitive due to high overall demand for housing in the city. Returning students can also apply for University accommodation and many do so each year. To support students navigating this, the University provides clear guidance throughout the year on how and when to book with the University.”

Of those Oxford University students waiting in line, around half were medical students seeking housing in Headington due to the neighbourhood’s close proximity to the John Radcliffe Hospital. A third-year Oxford medical student told Cherwell that though she could have another year of college accommodation, “the accommodation we do get is in north Oxford whereas the hospital is in southeast Oxford, so very inconvenient location wise. This means that what generally most people have to do in fourth year is find a house somewhere else.”

The student lamented that the scramble to find housing came alongside the transition to clinical studies: “This is routinely the year that people find the most challenging, just because of how big of an adjustment it is to be in the hospital. So, having this looming over my head plus this whole organisational crisis with trying to find a house is not great, and I know that there’s a lot of people in the same boat as well.”

Explaining the process of securing a house through Finders Keepers, she said that the agency does not give property viewings before leases are signed, at which point tenants must make a holding deposit of a week’s rent. What this means, according to the student, is that “effectively a viewing costs £700”. She said that this makes it difficult to assess the quality of a property before one has signed the lease, a process that she said “feels really shady”. She told Cherwell: “Just because we need houses as students and the letting agencies know that, doesn’t mean the letting agencies can just take advantage of us.”

Victoria Lyall, head of marketing for Finders Keepers, told Cherwell: “Launching our properties on a nominated date is the fairest way to give all students a chance to find a property they want. This enables us to communicate this date to students so that they can see all available options in one go.

“During the pandemic, we launched the properties remotely (via the telephone) but this was not effective as the systems were overwhelmed; rather than one person calling on behalf of a group of five they were each calling and getting their parents to call in an attempt to get through first. We have always stated that we are open to suggestions on how to manage this situation in the fairest way, and this remains the case.”

Lyall said that students queuing was not necessary, and that other properties become available later in the year. She claimed that “if students start to queue, we advise them (face to face) that it is not necessary.” Students waiting outside the office on Monday, however, encountered no staff from the agency.

What I discovered when I started reading French books

Ben O'Brien
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What I discovered when I started reading French books

My most hated subject at school was French. I mean, I hated every subject – the only thing I remember liking in all my years at school was the hour-long geography lesson we spent watching videos of erupting volcanos (lava spouting!) – but French had a special place in my list of hated things. This was partly because learning it seemed so boring. Did we really need to know how to buy an umbrella, or how to help Simon find the bus stop, and couldn’t we do something more interesting, like watch a French film and drink red wine? But there were also the usual Anglocentric reasons. I didn’t see why I, an English-speaking person, should have to learn a foreign language, when out in the big wide world everyone else would have to speak English just like me. On the morning of my French GCSE, I slipped out of the school gates and went to the park to smoke weed. Needless to say, my results weren’t good.

Little did I know at the time, I had many things in common with Annie Ernaux, the French author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022 (the first French woman to do so: fifteen French men had been nobelised before her). Not that I’ve won the Nobel Prize (I’ve never even been nominated). Nor am I French, a woman, or born in the 1940s. And for that matter, Ernaux didn’t even hate school. But one of the major themes of her writing is the tension between the world she was born into – that of provincial, rural France, where most people spent their lives working on the family farm and where living room floors were made of bare soil – and the one she climbed her way into, that of the university-educated intellectual elite whose books were published by Gallimard. One of Ernaux’s obsessions is the way that ‘provincials’ felt disdained by what we would now call the metropolitan liberal elite, and how they disdained those elites in return. Town versus county, intellectuals versus the ‘uncultivated’, those who quote Shakespeare versus those who don’t – all these oppositions are present in much of Ernaux’s writing. There’s a lot that I, the weed-smoking hater of anything intellectual, including learning other languages, could have identified with, had I been willing and able to read French.

Funnily enough, today I both read and love Ernaux’s books, due to the fact that I now do something that fifteen-year-old me never in a million years imagined possible: living in France. Though I come back to Oxford for term times, for the last five years my official home has been a small medieval town in southern Brittany, where I live with my French partner. But it took me a long time to really feel at home in France. Between going back to Oxford for an undergraduate degree, a masters, and now a PhD, it’s been hard to find the time to properly learn the language, let alone build up a circle of French friends. But eventually I got sick of not understanding a word anyone said to me on nights out and decided to take learning French seriously. And one of the major steps in that has been reading Ernaux’s books.

For those starting out reading French, Ernaux is a good place to begin, because her writing is so straightforward – pick up any review of her work and you’ll see her writing described as “sparse”, “clinical”, or “like cut glass”. When confronted with the scary thing called French Literature, it’s easy to feel you have to start with the intimidating classics, Proust’s three thousand pages about Madeleines, page-long run-on sentences and all. At least I did, and it’s the quickest way to confirm the feeling that your French is useless. Giving up Proust and finding Ernaux’s cut glass is a good way to realise that your level probably isn’t as bad as you think. I read La Place (1983), the short book about the death of her father that made Ernaux’s name, in a weekend. I followed this with Une Femme (1988) an equally short book about her mother’s gradual descent into dementia and then death. A lot of death to deal with at once, but Ernaux’s writing is so gripping, its impossible to put the books down once you’ve started. And I hardly had to use a dictionary. 

But there’s also a political point to Ernaux’s writing. As she has spoken about at length, she never escaped the feelings of guilt that came with joining France’s intellectual elite – she describes herself as a “class defector” (“transfuge de classe”) – and both her subject matter and her style reflect this. Time and time again her writing returns to the experiences of those, including her own parents, who felt looked down upon by French social elites, and the point of her pared back style is that her parents and those like them could feel both that her books spoke to them and spoke like them. And therein lies the value of Ernaux to me. She shows that intellectualism, if that is what writing books – or, dare I say, going to Oxford – has to be called, it can be done without pretension. Maybe if I’d read her sooner, I’d have done better in my GCSEs. Or at least I’d have thought that trying to do well didn’t necessarily have to involve quoting Shakespeare.

‘Designed to be deleted’: The unHinged world of online dating

Beatrix Arnold
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‘Designed to be deleted’: The unHinged world of online dating

I’d been warned about the dating scene at Oxford. There’s something about self-entitlement that sharpens the sting of hook-up culture. One too many walks of shame through the city centre as students flocked to their 9ams taught me all too clearly that academic and emotional intelligence do not always develop in equal measures. And so, earlier this year, I made a pact with a friend that we would both download Hinge. Given my track record of Kanye-defenders, love-bombers, and emotionally under-developed mummy’s boys, I figured that I had nothing to lose. 

The notion of romance, naively supported throughout childhood through the Hallmark staples of love letters, roses, and the meet-cute, has, inevitably, evolved in the digital age. The whole process of dating has become ‘gamified’, and romantic decisions are compressed into the tap of a button – a bleak arcade machine where the prize is usually disappointment. If you’re looking for the reasons behind the dwindling marriage rates, I have an entire album of screenshots that make a strong case. Somewhere between the third “I’ll fall for you if… you trip me” prompt, and the eighth awkward group photo (it’s always the one you hope for the least), I came to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to find the one on Hinge. 

The entire concept of online dating has long been regarded as dubious. Flattening yourself into the confines of a perfectly curated profile can all too easily verge into the risky territory of commodification, a marketing campaign from which a unique image of yourself can supposedly be extracted, bolstered by artificial insights into your personality to muster a mumble of self-expression. Within this hall of mirrors, you must display uniqueness filtered through the limits of the socially digestible. This performance art eschews intimacy and reduces romance to a highlight reel of superficial ranking, a digital pageant show which incurs the same, age-old objectification, the same Faustian bargain with a built-in obsolescence clause. We are made to represent ourselves in some sort of perverse panopticon of romantic and sexual fantasy. 

Everything about this is a humiliation ritual. The act of sending a like is enough to make you feel like Carrie Bradshaw showing up at Big’s door. You have to cultivate a show of insouciance, an ironic detachment: desperation is detrimental to the brand image. Even Vogue decreed that having a boyfriend is cringe now, actually. One wrong romantic step is figured as a catastrophic brand collapse, where partners are evaluated not as people, but as threats to your image. This focus on optics turns out to be just another symptom of the timeless idea of women as a product, something to be marketed and sold – capitalism loves to disguise itself as feminist analysis. 

But it never felt that serious. Once I had abandoned the hope of actually making a meaningful connection, scrolling the app became a kind of entertainment, an opportunity to laugh with my friends over some of the more egregious profile choices. The bleak landscape of online dating, when viewed through this lens, was transformed into a carnivalesque display of what Oxford has to offer. That is, of course, until I began to more frequently experience that uncanny feeling of recognition as I pass people on Broad Street. Oxford is ultimately too small a place for the world of Hinge to be safely abstracted. The profiles of friends, exes, and BNOCs appearing on my feed has caused me to throw my phone across the room in shock more times than I can count. One more photo of someone in an academic gown is going to make me scream, not to mention the sheer number of people willing to label themselves ‘conservative’. But the real low point came when I received a pick-up line that was patently AI-generated. Clearly, communicating with girls their own age is beyond the skillset of the average Oxford student. 

This is not to say that such a disheartening range of options is an Oxford-specific problem. When I went home over the vac, the only profiles that came up on my feed were the bartender at my village pub, and a boy I went to primary school with. Needless to say, this didn’t fill me with optimism. At some point, the curiosity wore off. Opening the app became admin and tapping through the profiles became a chore. The ethos of “it’s just around the corner” is an exhausting one, and lack of fulfilment breeds defeatism. The half-baked prompts and confusing red flags that had, at first, provided such ripe comedic material, now became a source of frustration. Increasingly, I found myself lost in analysis paralysis, weighing up which of my standards I could compromise on in the interests of the least bad option. I buried my instincts for self-preservation and followed the rules for dating proscribed by the universe (or rather, the Hinge CEO).  

Hinge fails because it turns dating into a diagnostic test. Romance is too stubbornly particular to be generated by an algorithm, particularly one that, as a business model, benefits from relational failure. Dating apps impose an artificial structure, an illusion of control over something inherently mysterious, as if all romantic experience can be concentrated into the conveyor belt of homogenous profiles. 
Hinge is marketed as the app “designed to be deleted”, but what it didn’t specify is that it would be out of frustration, rather than any kind of romantic fulfilment. All this is to say, there’s no way Zohran Mamdani met his wife on Hinge.

Oxford Art Society: Discovering local talent on St Giles’

Natalie Conboy
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Oxford Art Society: Discovering local talent on St Giles’

On a grey, rain-soaked afternoon in September, St John’s Kendrew Barn Gallery offers a quiet beacon away from busy St Giles’. The mix of warm light and colour provides a welcome retreat from the weather, and an inspiring insight into the local artistic talent of Oxford.

It is the perfect setting for the Oxford Art Society’s latest Open Exhibition. With four light, airy rooms inviting you to explore, the space is still “small enough to take in”, according to Caroline Moore, an oil painter and member of the society. They hold two exhibitions a year: one Open Exhibition in September, and a Members Exhibition in March. Kay Gibbons, a committee member and glass artist who helped curate this exhibition, told Cherwell that members must live within 30 miles of Oxford, and have their art accepted into two open exhibitions, before receiving an invite from the committee.

The focus on local artists was the founding principle of the society, established by watercolour painter Walter Tyrwhitt in 1891. The Society’s 134 years of commitment to promoting local artists has revealed the wealth of artistic talent in and around Oxford. Previous members include Henry Lamb, Paul Nash, and Nancy and Richard Carline. The prestige of this society is evident in its committee members: in July none other than Kathleen Soriano was announced President Emerita, and Oxford-based artist Francis Hammel opened the private viewing of the current exhibition. 

This year’s Open Exhibition was arranged such that the eye was drawn around the rooms by changing colours and themes, with each piece complimenting and contrasting its peers in complete harmony. There was something in every single one of the approximately 250 pieces which captured my attention. The range of styles and media meant each brought something unique, and although there was no theme, there was a sense of coherence running through: a boldness, and a striking novelty, no matter the subject.

OAS also focuses on promoting young artists in Oxford: their OAS Young Artists Exhibition is open to anyone between the ages of 18 and 30, and students are encouraged to apply. There are further links between the University and the city in the Oxford Art Society Associates, led by President and Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp. The OASA was founded in 1962 with the aim of making art regularly accessible to the people of Oxford. They provide six lectures a year on the visual arts, delivered by specialists in their fields.

From the mix of media, to the Society’s mission to promote local artists: collaboration and integration is at the heart of what I took away from my visit.

Kay told Cherwell about how she integrates different surroundings in art – sometimes drawing inspiration from the poetry she reads – and finding new meaning in different forms. Another member of OAS who draws inspiration from the local area is Mark Clays, whose first volume of his long term project A Never-Ending Way, a four-volume concertina sketchbook of the Hinksey Heights Nature Trail, is featured in the exhibition. Mark uses his experience as a volunteer on the trail, as well as the words of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, an extract of which he takes as the epigraph for his work. His project is still ongoing, and will take 18 months to complete. This piece, placed in the centre of one of the rooms, contributed to the extremely ‘Oxford’ feel of the exhibition, and shows that the Society’s focus on locality is still strong. 

In a city so deeply rooted in artistic and intellectual tradition, the Oxford Art Society’s Open Exhibition stands as a testament to the enduring vibrancy of local creativity. This exhibition is both a celebration of Oxford’s past and a glimpse into its artistic future, and I will definitely be going back to see their Members Exhibition in the spring.

You can view the exhibition artworks in the online gallery on the OAS website, and visit the Members Exhibition in March 2026.

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