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‘Something Wicked’: The Rise of Modern Witchcraft

Caitlin O'Sullivan
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‘Something Wicked’: The Rise of Modern Witchcraft

In 35BC, the Roman poet Horace depicted witches with ‘false teeth’ and ‘tall wig[s]’ of ‘dishevelled hair’, howling at the moon and ‘tearing a black lamb to bits with their teeth’. Over two thousand years later, however, the art of witchcraft is far from forgotten. Along with banana bread baking, Zoom call outfits, and home workouts, the practice of witchcraft has surged in the past year, with modern paganism trending across TikTok and Instagram.

The witch has long been a figure of curiosity both in the UK and across the world. As well as the famous Salem witch trials in the U.S., instances of witchcraft have been found across the globe. Some African tribes claim to be protected by the witchcraft of their clan, whilst in Japan the fox-witch or ‘kitsune-mochi’ is capable of shape-shifting, possession, and illusion. In England, arguably the most famous witches are found in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, chanting ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, an incantation that very few people can claim to be unfamiliar with.

Even if you don’t spend your free time perusing the works of Shakespeare, the phenomenon of the witch is impossible to avoid in the twenty-first century. From hit shows like ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’ (re-made in 2020 by Netflix as ‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’), to the cultural sensation that is J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, the human obsession with magic and witchcraft has manifested itself throughout art and society.

Within politics, also, the correlation between world events and the interest in witchcraft is telling. During women’s suffrage, in the nineteenth-century, the witch figure was portrayed as both a wisewoman and a devil worshipper. Meanwhile, the publication and sale of occultic books rose during the second-wave of feminism. More recently, the #MeToo movement coincided with an increase in the number of people identifying as witches. It’s fascinating that predominantly women – though studies have shown that minority ethnicities and the LGBTQ+ community also – identify with the world of witchcraft, particularly during moments of political struggle. In the face of patriarchal resistance, witchcraft seems to provide a sense of power and community to those who are so often marginalized and oppressed.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a witchcraft community called ‘Magic Resistance’ formed in the U.S., and has continued to meet throughout his presidency. The group perform ‘binding spells’ and gather together Tarot cards, feathers, and candles, amongst other items, alongside unflattering photos of the President. This ritual is performed each waning crescent moon so that Trump’s ‘malignant works may fail utterly’. As of today the ‘Magic Resistance #BindTrump’ Facebook group has 6.6k members, and performed their final binding on 12 January 2021 at the last waning crescent moon before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

How, then, has the current global pandemic affected the witching community?

Just as, historically, the practice of witchcraft has been shown to increase during moments of social upheaval, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown has resulted in a flourishing of modern witching activity. On TikTok, the ‘WitchTok’ community grew exponentially, with influencers posting tarot card readings, manifestations, and good luck spells that their followers could watch from home. As of today the hashtag #WitchTok has received 8.3 billion views, while hashtags like #witch, #witchcraft and #witchesoftiktok have received 8.9 billion views between them. There is even a teaching element to the community, under the hashtag #babywitch, where anybody new to the world of witchcraft can learn more about the spiritual practice. The WitchTok community also actively participates in the world around them. Last summer, during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, many WitchTok accounts posted tutorials for spells that could be used on people for protection before they went out to protest.

But the online witching community is not limited to TikTok alone. Insta-witches have gained traction during the pandemic, with users like @thetarotlady performing regular tarot card readings on her Instagram live stories, and Wiccans like @harmonybeatrix even creating custom made Tarot sets for her followers to buy. Twitter’s witching community has expanded, whilst experienced witches like Pam Grossman, author of Waking The Witch, have taken to Zoom to hold online classes and conversations about witchcraft.

This isn’t to say that the community of witches is purely a lockdown phenomenon. According to a 2011 national census, 56,620 people identified as Pagan across England and Wales, as well as 11,766 people identifying as Wiccan. It is impossible, however, to deny the surge across social media that witchcraft has experienced in the past year. At a time when the world seems more uncertain than ever, young people in particular are turning to witchcraft in order to find a sense of stability.

It is notable that the most popular witching videos include recipes for ‘Banish Worry’ potions, ‘Anti-Anxiety’ spell tutorials, and positive manifestations. At its core, witchcraft focusses on harnessing inner strength and energy, regardless of external upheaval. With education interrupted, exams cancelled, and careers put on hold, it is no wonder that young people are searching for faith in the abstract where certainty has let them down.

Moreover, as social interaction is increasingly limited, the world of online witchcraft provides a strong sense of community to witches across the globe. Between live streams and the posting of magical content, the Internet has created a virtual home for modern day witches to share their spirituality and connect with like-minded people.

Witchcraft throughout the ages has been used as a means of empowerment, a source of spiritual strength in an increasingly hectic world. In 2021, however, the witch figure spends less time howling at the moon and baring their false teeth. Instead, you are most likely to encounter their inclusive community online using spells, crystals, and Tarot cards, as they harness inner strength and engage with the tumultuous world around them. Now, more than ever, the age of the modern witch is upon us.

Artwork by Emma Hewlett.

Ava Max’s ‘Crazy Ex’: smashing or bolstering hetero-normative stereotypes surrounding women and mental illness?

Kiri Ley
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Ava Max’s ‘Crazy Ex’: smashing or bolstering hetero-normative stereotypes surrounding women and mental illness?

CW: mental illness, mentions of gaslighting, violence.

She’s ‘sweet but psycho’, ‘torn’, ‘pushed […] to the edge’. Ava Max (born Amanda Ava Koci), the Albanian-American pop singer who shot to stardom following the 2018 release of her hit single, ‘Sweet but Psycho’, capitalises on a heavily lip-glossed and lycra-ed image of the crazy ex-girlfriend in this single, as well as in ‘Torn’ and ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ (2020). The persona that Max cultivates in these three videos is so overdone that it could be a cynical deconstruction of the ‘crazy’ stereotype, rather than a reinforcement of it. However, could the effect ultimately just be a reproduction of old misogynist tropes, changing nothing and possibly even fuelling the faithful old fire of patriarchy?

As someone who identifies as a woman and who has at times been disabled by mental illness, this question is personal and political to me, as all feminism should be. Leaving a ream of male critics and journalists to debate the intricacies of Max’s portrayals is short-sighted of the music criticism community; I hope to offer a more invested voice to the conversation.

Max herself claims the prior of ‘Sweet but Psycho’, ‘[At first, people] think I’m actually calling them psycho, but then it’s a deeper meaning’. For ‘people’, read ‘women’, here – or, rather, a White, straight woman. The three videos star Max as a ‘crazy girlfriend/ex’ figure who wreakes stylised, violent revenge on the (exclusively male and White, notably) boyfriends/exes/bosses who have wronged her. Of the three archetypal Romantic madwomen identified by Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980, Max chooses to employ ‘the violent Lucia […] symbolising violence against men’. So a woman reclaims power, exclusively against men, through ownership of the very ‘psycho’ stereotypes which try to hold her down – right?

In ‘Sweet but Psycho’, Max’s revenge seems to be on men generally, perhaps a symbol for the patriarchy. Translating the specific paradigm of her rage to a female or non-binary sexual partner wouldn’t quite work, and I do wonder what different dynamics would emerge if the ethnicities of the male partners were more variable in the videos. The use of the word ‘psycho’ in the title situates this video as an explicit response to the hetero-normative, misogynist ‘psycho girlfriend’ stereotype. The music video sees Max transform from the sexy submissive, serving dinner to her partner, to a Miss Havisham/Bride of Frankenstein-style figure chasing him down the stairs in a wedding dress. She features in a straitjacket before threatening the man with a large knife, possibly an empowering reclamation of the phallus that has (allegedly) wronged her. The other male victims who topple over each other in Max’s wardrobe constitute a clear inversion of the Bluebeard myth, with dead boyfriends in the closet instead of wives. 

The song attracted criticism from UK mental health professionals, such as the Zero Suicide Alliance, on the grounds that it perpetuated negative and false stereotypes associating mental illness with violence. Poorly-judged ‘irreverent humour’ can indeed lead to further stigmatization, as Nicola Spelman, author of Popular Music and the Myths of Madness, indicates. David Metzer, in Alim Kheraj’s article ‘Why is popular music still obsessed with madness?’ offers an alternative viewpoint: that female artists such as Max are ‘protesting the expectations that have been placed upon them by flaunting that protest’.

This dimension is supported more strongly through the imagery in ‘Torn’ and ‘Who’s Laughing Now’, Max’s more recent singles. ‘Torn’ dabbles more in duality than craziness per se, invoking the nineteenth-century motif of the split hero, characteristic of classics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This hero is usually male, whereas Max’s female heroine lives as a downtrodden, nerdy girlfriend and badass superhero, respectively. Halfway through the song, the superhero persona turns ‘nuts’, brandishing a stiletto heel and belt as weapons. Interestingly, the climax is the unfaithful boyfriend pushing Max off the top of a high building: attempted murder. An undefeated Max slaps him across the face in response. The message here is clear: despite the play with ideas of split personality and schizophrenia for the girlfriend figure, it is the lying man who is dangerously violent.

In ‘Who’s Laughing Now’, Max grasps the crazy image by the throat. She is straitjacketed in our first sighting of her in the video. Max channels the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s here, which railed against the institutionalisation of mentally unwell people, and questioned the validity of mental illness as a social and cultural category, conceptualising its diagnosis instead as a means of exercising oppression. 

However, cross-editing images of Max writhing in a straitjacket and attacking her ex’s car with a large weapon somewhat undermines the accompanying lyric ‘Don’t ya know that I’m stronger?’. A glass wall separates her from the male psychiatrist later in the video, the one BIPOC man we see Max target across the three songs, but without the same romantic context and determinedly violent intent as aimed at her White exes/partners. She may smash the wall, perhaps a sister of the glass ceiling: however, he brands her as a ‘Psycho’ nonetheless, and she still ends up in ye olde asylum. The straitjacket remains. 

Ankhi Mukherjee, in Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction, charts the literary and dramatic representations of hysteria from the nineteenth century to the contemporary. She points to ‘a lasting cultural fascination with hysterical performance and play’, certainly applicable to Max’s aesthetic in these three music videos. Mukherjee’s question of whether the ‘female hysteric’ is a ‘madwoman or an actress?’ is demanding in the context of Max’s visuals. If Max aims only to be an actress, as the artist herself claims, deconstructively owning a glitzy aesthetic of madness for her own commercial success and the empowerment of gaslit women, then there is value in her employment of the madness motif.

She certainly succeeds in aligning whatever her persona actually represents, with sexiness. This is subversive in itself to some degree, when framed through Joan Busfield’s explanation of ‘mental illness’ in ‘The Female Malady? Men, Women and Madness in Nineteenth Century Britain’ [sic].

‘Madness, like its twentieth century counterpart mental illness […] is a concept which categorises some aspect of mental functioning – some thought, action, or behaviour – as abnormal, defective or disordered – that is, as undesirable’. 

Max’s figures are definitely desirable. Whether or not she is mad, she taunts her male lovers with the uncomfortable truth that they want her, anyway:

‘You’re tellin’ me that I’m insane

But don’t tell me that you don’t love the pain’. 

If her portrayal is edging closer to that of an actually mentally-ill person, on the other hand, the territory is far dodgier. To step away from preoccupation with the stylised madness images, there is another image in the ‘Sweet but Psycho’ video that is far more telling. Before the role play/murder/whatever festivities commence, Max’s persona sits in a bedroom strewn with her mussed clothes. 

Being marooned hopelessly in a disordered living space is a classic symptom of clinical depression. Max is not exclusively Showalter’s Lucia, then: she is also, perhaps, the ‘sentimental crazy Jane or crazy Kate’, or maybe even ‘suicidal Ophelia’ – or something else, entirely. A contemporary young woman with depression.

Despite this reference to ‘genuine’ mental illness, the mocking of the straitjacket image corresponds to a dominant late twentieth-century idea that mental illnesses are more social than anything else, and might not even exist. I support Busfield’s view of mental illness, that:

‘notwithstanding the sociological claim that madness and mental illness are social constructs, we do not have to accept the view of 1960s ethnomethodologists and of 1980s postmodernists that they [mental illnesses] have no ontological reality’. 

Max shows us who the really violent people are in ‘Torn’, and ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ – according to her, unfaithful men and male psychiatrists – to highlight gaslighting in heterosexual romantic relationships. This is still a necessary topic for contemporary intersectional feminism.

But suggesting that her personas are not ‘really’ unwell is perhaps an opportunity missed. Max seems a bit unsure about whether she is actually ill or not in her videos. Mentally unwell women, and yes, those undergoing psychiatric care, can be victims of abuse and gaslighting, too: in fact, they are possibly more likely to be so than mentally healthy women. 

I’m not sure that suffocating a couple of interesting boundary-blurs about gender, mental illness, stereotyping and institutionalisation beneath the ‘crazy’ aesthetic is the way to go. Mental illnesses, in spite of their confusing mish-mash of cultural, situational and somatogenic factors, are, as Michael G. Kenny notes, ‘real […] though they are also a potent resource for metaphorical elaboration and obsessive/compulsive behavior’ [sic]. And they are disabling. They are not glamorous, and frustratingly cannot be changed like make-up can. Tossing symbols around and playing at being a superhero are fun, maybe empowering if you look at them under the right strobe lighting. We could do with more explicitly and proudly nuanced takes on what it means to be female and gaslit, or female and mentally ill, or both – taking into account further intersections – to sit beside or even top Max on the chart pedestal.

Who are your new Oxford SU officers, trustees and delegates?

Cherwell News and Investigations Section Editors
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Who are your new Oxford SU officers, trustees and delegates?

Rashmi Samant was elected Oxford Student Union President. Samant aims to extend access to resources and events for graduating one-year Master’s students, along with lobbying the University to waive residency requirements, along with implementing a safety net and mitigating circumstances until the World Health Organisation declares that the pandemic has ended. She also wishes to focus on decolonisation and inclusivity by removing all imperialist statues (specifically mentioning Codrington in her manifesto), consulting students regarding the decolonisation of syllabi and tackling institutional homophobia and transphobia. Additionally, she aims to decarbonise the University by lobbying the Conference of Colleges to divest their entire financial portfolio from fossil fuels as soon as possible.

Devika was elected VP for Graduates. She aims to further centralise University and student communication, support the Fair Outcomes for Students campaign, collaborate with colleges and societies regarding their Race and Diversity Initiatives and tailor welfare support to graduates and non-traditional students.

Safa Sadozai was elected VP for Access and Academic Affairs. She aims to review course content to ensure that material is “accessible, accurate and representative of the diversity of students and society alike”, including a review of examinations to make them more manageable. She has also suggested altering the structure of Oxford’s terms by extending into 9th week, reviving the defunct “Free Our Wednesdays” movement or the implementation of a reading week. Sazodai has also highlighted the importance of equalising the college system by addressing different colleges’ bursaries and hardship funds.

Aleena Waseem was elected VP for Charities and Communities. In the past, Waseem has started centralised SU systems for getting vulnerable students accommodation during the vacation, and for combating homelessness and rough sleeping. In her manifesto, she has promoted working towards greater sustainability awareness and working with sustainable local businesses.

Keisha Asare was elected VP for Welfare and Equal Opportunities. She resolves to work with the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and the Counselling Service to provide workshops, lobby for next year’s finalists to be given mitigating circumstances and to reassess the Counselling Service’s pre-appointment form. 

Oluwakemi Agunbiade was elected VP for Women. Her campaign pledges focus on the health and administrative difficulties faced by women, as well as addressing sexual violence and representation. She intends to lobby for counselling service to include a request for a POC counsellor, as well as push for regular sessions of gender, trans and racial bias training throughout colleges. She further wants to revive Oxford Women and NB walk home safe. 

Bethan Adams, Dhitee Goel, and Wesley Ding have been elected as Student Trustees. This role involves considering the long-term success of the SU, and they are usually given a specific role in one of four areas: complaints, finance, media, or vice-chair. Bethan Adams was previously the President of Turl Street Homeless Action and wants to work to break barriers in student involvement by improving access. Dhitee Goel is campaigning against an increase in international fees, and greater investment in student mental-health and well-being. Wesley Ding wants to increase communication between the SU and student members, working directly with JCRs and MCRs.  

7 NUS delegates have been elected: Jade Calder, Rafiah Niha, Mehrin Abedin, Otto Barrow, Gurpreet Bahj, Aaliyah Musa, and Zuhaira Islam. This role involves representing the Oxford SU at the annual NUS delegate conference. The candidates campaigned on a range of policies, including mandatory training for staff and students to prevent sexual assault and harassment, and building closer links between Oxford SU and the SUs at other UK Universities. 

The RAG Charity Ballot saw 6094 votes cast. The local charities selected were Homeless Oxfordshire and Oxford Hospitals Charity, and the National Charities were BEAT Eating Disorders and the Access Project. 

The election saw 36,405 votes cast from a total of 4,881 voters, a 61.1% increase from the previous year. Students in the Humanities Division had the highest turnout at 23.6%, while students from the Mathematical, Physical & Life Sciences Division were least likely to vote at 15.1%. Among colleges, St Catherine’s topped the leaderboard, followed by Wadham and Magdalen.

Oxford’s overlooked inhabitants: Brexit and the East Timorese

Eve Webster
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Oxford’s overlooked inhabitants: Brexit and the East Timorese

In my second year at university I found myself short of cash. I had underestimated the expense of living out of college and so on the first week of Trinity, I printed off ten copies of my CV and went into every restaurant on Walton Street until I’d ran out. I soon got a job at a pizzeria, and it was probably the best waitressing job I’ve ever had mainly since my colleagues were great company and very interesting. There was a girl from Romania who gushed to me about a boy she met at Café Baba in Cowley, the head chef from Umbria who spoke perfect French and then there were the three men who worked as sous-chefs and pot-washers in the kitchen. Unlike the rest of the staff, these men didn’t speak English very well although this communication barrier didn’t prevent them from being extremely friendly, often saving me slices of pizza after a mis-order. I asked our manager, a Polish man, where these guys were from. 

“East Timor. I’ve worked in restaurants across Oxford for over twenty years and in every place I’ve worked, they’ve had someone from East Timor washing the dishes.” 

I’d never heard of the place. After a couple of weeks, one of the East Timorese sous-chefs was absent for a couple of days. I asked where he was and was told that he’d gone to Portugal for a week to sort out his new passport. I wondered why he had to go to Portugal to collect his new passport if he was from this unknown-country, East Timor. But then the phone rang for another delivery or the kitchen bell dinged telling me to take these starters to table four so I never asked. 

In the year since I hung up my waitressing apron, a year in which the UK ‘Got Brexit Done’ and the the COVID 19 pandemic has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, I have found the answers to these questions and learned more about the complex and often hidden struggles of the East Timorese community living in Oxford. 

No-one is sure how many East Timorese people are living in the UK, but estimates range between five and twenty thousand, with most of them living in Oxford. Fifteen thousand people is quite a large margin for error, and you may wonder how this statistic could be so inexact. First, very little English is spoken within the fairly insular community, which means that many are not registered with GPs and rarely find themselves filling in the usual forms which ask for place of birth and nationality. They face many common issues for immigrants from developing countries, and mainly work precarious jobs which are unprotected by contracts and are often paid less than minimum wage. Bocagio do Santos, an East Timorese translator and interpreter, told me that they usually work extremely long hours, often six days a week and socialise very little outside of the Timorese community. In short, these five to twenty thousand people fly under the radar. 

But the most confusing and obscuring factor limiting understanding of the size and needs of the East Timorese is that the vast majority of them living in the UK are EU citizens. East Timor was once a colony of Portugal — until 1975 in fact. According to the country’s Wikipedia page, “for the Portuguese, East Timor remained little more than a neglected trading post until the late nineteenth century, with minimal investment in infrastructure, health, and education”. This neglect carries on today: about 30% of the country is illiterate and about 37.4% of its citizens live on $1.25 a day. Portugal abandoned its colony after an internal revolution in 1974, and in November 1975 East Timor declared its independence after almost three hundred years of occupation. Within a month Indonesia invaded and what followed has been called genocide. After UN intervention, the country finally became independent in 2002. Any Timorese person born before this date, that is to say any Timorese person older than nineteen at the time of writing, is entitled to a Portuguese passport, and all the rights of a citizen on the European Union, including, until last month, the right to live and work in the UK.

When the first Timorese began arriving in the UK in the early 1990s, they were essentially asylum seekers and yet, since they were on paper no different to a French, German, Swedish or Greek person moving to the UK, over the past thirty years they have received far less support than people fleeing violence from other countries. They were presumed to have a comparable education, culture, recent history and financial situation to Brits—as is the nature of the EU. This, evidently, is not the case. 

However, with freedom of movement between the UK and the EU coming to an end this year, even the Timorese people’s status in the UK has become precarious. Like most other EU nationals living in the UK, over the past five years they have had to apply for settled or pre-settled status. However, due to poverty, unsociable working hours, language barriers and IT illiteracy, the process has been especially challenging for this community.

Fazil Kawani, a project coordinator at the charity Asylum Welcome Oxford outlined these difficulties to me. The charity has been offering services to the Timorese community and have made a real effort to communicate the urgency of their situation through their website and through emails to community leaders. However, as the East Timorese have not had any issues regarding their immigration status in the UK until recently, very few have come into contact with the charity. “They have many of the same issues as the other communities we’re helping but they have a different status in the country and that stops them from contacting us.”

Mr dos Santos is helping many Timorese people through the labyrinth of proving that they are entitled to stay in the UK. I first found his Facebook page ‘Tetum Solutions’ which has over eight thousand followers. Tetum is the language spoken by the East-Timorese. I couldn’t understand any of the posts, naturally, but occasionally phrases like ‘National Insurance Number’ or ‘pre-settled status’ or ‘Brexit’ jumped out. I wondered if this, a voluntarily run Facebook page, was actually the only source of information for these people on an issue that massively affects their rights and future in Britain. Mr dos Santos kindly agreed to speak to me. He outlined how the vast majority of his fellow Timorese are in the dark about the fundamentals of British culture, including Brexit and that, indeed, almost all their information on the subject comes from social media. As recently as last December, dos Santos has had people approaching him with only the slightest understanding of what Brexit was and what it means for their future. 

“Most are very worried,” he told me. “Some of them have no idea how to do these applications even four years after [the referendum]. In fact, it is very likely that there are Timorese people in the UK who are totally unaware that Brexit has happened. This could end up with them being in the country illegally and they won’t even know why.” When I pushed him, dos Santos roughly estimated that around 70% have begun the process of applying for pre-settled or settled status, but that many have fallen through the net of bureaucracy. For instance, since many are paid cash-in-hand, possibly somewhat off-the-books, they don’t have a payslip to prove that they are employed in the UK. 

He suggested I got in touch with Rosalia Costa, the community leader of the East Timorese in Oxford who also kindly agreed to discuss her community with me. She is responsible for liaising between the Oxford City Council and the community on issues such as housing and outreach. On the phone, she seemed very frustrated and worried. She assumed the post in September 2019 last year, and thanks to the pandemic, has had many of her plans dashed. I asked her if the city council or any other branches of government had attempted to communicate this increasingly urgent situation to this sizable Oxford community.

“There is not much effort to communicate with us,” she said, “If something is published then either myself or our committee has to translate it but so far there hasn’t been any effort to communicate in our language.

“There are about four thousand Timorese people in Oxford so presumably we should have a service in our language to help the people who don’t want to speak up — leaflets or dropping door to door, but no, we haven’t seen anything like that.” 

She also hinted that there is often a reluctance on the part of the East Timorese to ask for help. 

“Many Timorese people disadvantage themselves by not seeking help when they need it, because of the fear of shame and judgement. You know you need help but you don’t want to ask.” 

The City Council highlighted that there have been efforts to reach out to the community on this issue saying:

“Oxford’s East Timorese community are mostly here as EU citizens with Portuguese nationality. We are encouraging all our EU citizens to apply for EU Settled Status by the deadline of 30 June 2021, so that they can continue to legally live and work in the UK. We have partnered with Asylum Welcome to support their Europa Welcome service, which helps EU citizens who are struggling to make their application, and we have specific communications in the main East Timorese language of Tetum to reach this community. The Europa Welcome team have also been doing their own community outreach.”

Mr Kawani of Asylum Welcome believes a formal support system is necessary, and that with the Council’s support, the charity is trying to provide one. “They’re not exercising their rights. The online application is a big issue. Many of them don’t have access to IT equipment and lack the technical skills to make their application.” 

These impediments to making an application come from years of poverty and isolation within the city, which mean that the Timorese are often unaware of their entitlements as EU citizens, such as Universal Credit, council housing or child benefits. When I searched something along the lines of ‘East Timorese Oxford’ into Google, one of only things which appeared was a 2018 investigation by NHS Oxford on the health needs of the East Timorese and a report of a Commissioning meeting responding to the findings of this paper. The latter report wrote: “Poverty is visible within our East Timorese community…Within Oxfordshire members of our East Timorese population are often living in houses of multiple occupancy, paying extremely high rents, with a lack of contracts, unsafe environments, damp, infestations, and poor safety standards. Exploitation by employers, with no contacts and wages lower than the minimum wage, is common.” 

Mr dos Santos confirmed this, explaining that since even three pounds an hour (less than half minimum wage) is far greater than what most could hope to earn in East Timor, the Timorese in Oxford are reluctant to ask to be paid minimum wage, or don’t even really deem it necessary or do not have the language skills to ask. Asylum Welcome and community leader Mrs Costa began arrangements working with an employment charity and social enterprise called Aspire Oxfordshire to provide English language classes for the East Timorese, at times convenient for them, to alleviate this isolation and the issues caused by language barriers. However, due to the pandemic these have been postponed. 

This is one of many ways in which the community has been particularly badly hit by COVID 19. Despite commendable efforts by the East Timorese government to improve the health infrastructure of the country, most Timorese people living in the UK had essentially zero access to healthcare growing up. As a result they often don’t have a great understanding of ‘Western’ medicine and practices. Mr dos Santos told me that some members of the community have far more faith in traditional healing and believe that illnesses are caused by past misdemeanours. Many pregnant Timorese women turn up at the hospital for the very first time on the day they go into labour having not had any antenatal scans or check-ups. Naturally this spikes serious concern among hospital staff and often leads to social services getting involved in the family. Once this link to the state is established, there are often massive improvements such as the family is registered with a GP and has easy access to housing. However, with about 90% Timorese in the UK being men and 60% of them being unmarried, this link is not often established.   

It should be clear how precarious employment, a lack of access to healthcare, cramped housing and no information on current affairs have combined in a terrible way for the Timorese during the pandemic. Once again, despite efforts made by the Council and other services, for many, Mr. dos Santos’ Facebook page is the only real source of information on COVID 19. Since he is working full-time, Mr. dos Santos is not always able to update the page with a Tetum translations as soon as restrictions are announced by the UK government. This means that when the Tier System was announced last year, many of his followers were totally clueless until over a week later. He did a loose translation for me of some of the comments underneath his post which largely expressed total complete confusion and incredulousness. Imagine your principal source of information about this all-consuming pandemic being a Facebook page which rests on the shoulders of one, albeit very dedicated, single individual. Awareness of the impact of COVID 19 is particularly an issue amongst the Timorese, since tuberculosis is very prevalent in the community and East Timor has one of the highest smoking rates in the entire world. 

The Council informed me that ,“in the pandemic [it has] have provided translated communications for a number of communities. We also work with community partner organisations, who have strong connections with different communities, to provide practical support and advice. The Council offers free translation for its customer services to help ensure everyone in the city is able to get the advice and support they need.” 

However, it did not specify if any translations had been preemptively provided in Tetum. And although this free translation service is no doubt indispensable to many, the East Timorese have been shown to be less likely to engage with Council services.

This contrasts to the situation in Tower Hamlets in London, where the council have put up huge posters and leaflets and sent out a monthly newsletter explaining social distancing and government announcements in Bengali to ensure its large Bangladeshi community is informed. Nothing similar has been put in place in areas of Oxford, for instance Blackbird Leys, which is believed to have the highest concentration of Timorese people in the UK. At the time of the last census (2011) there were 222,127 Bangladeshis living in London, which explains to some degree why this step was an obvious one; Bangladeshis living in East London are a much larger community than the Timorese in Oxford. But equally if you compare that very precise number (albeit ten years old) to the inexact estimation of the Timorese population in the UK, there is another possible explanation. Since, on paper, there is often little difference between other EU immigrants and the East Timorese, city councils, but particularly larger branches of government only have rough estimations of the size and very distinct needs of the community.

This often extends to social and legal issues. For instance, East Timor’s conception of law and order is very different to the UK’s, or indeed any other European country. Dos Santos tactfully explained this to me: “In East-Timor, if someone insults your parents, it is normal for you to go round their house and [physically] fight them. It’s very normal.” The fact that this is not the case in the UK is not always explicitly explained and this has led many Timorese finding themselves in hot water. A lot of Mr dos Santos’ work is interpreting between the police and an East Timorese person who hasn’t realised what they are doing is illegal until it is too late. Filial loyalty in East Timor is rather seen as Grievous Bodily Harm in the UK. This massive culture clash is far from inevitable. Many East Timorese people work aboard to send money back home to their families. Since 2009, East Timor is one of only fifteen countries which has access to the South Korea’s Employment Permit System allowing Timorese workers aged between eighteen and thirty-nine to fill job roles on temporary visas for up to five years. When they relocate to these countries, the Timorese workers have induction programs and lessons on Korean culture, language and way of life. This is not to say the scheme is without issues (findings have suggested that while the vast majority of workers said they were treated well, they received very little time off and were sometimes expected to work when ill) but it did mean that workers had a far greater understanding of their host country— for instance very few got into fights. There is also a very successful seasonal worker program in Australia in which the government ensures that the workers are paid minimum-wage. Mr dos Santos suggested that similar programs ought to be set up in the UK in which, at the very least, British laws and their own rights are explained to them.  

Both Rosalia Costa, the community’s leader, and Mr dos Santos showed a lot of optimism about the next generation of Timorese people living in the UK and believe that they may be the answer to many of the community’s issues. Most of them were born here and have been raised through the British education system. After a sobering discussion, it was really heart-warming to hear dos Santos speaking about his own children. He explained how, if he and his wife happen to be out of the house, his sixteen year old son will answer the queries of any Timorese person who stops by and translate any document for them, in lieu of his father.  

“They are absolutely amazing at adapting to the country. Many of them are at university and work as nurses and doctors,” said dos Santos. “Their English is perfect and many of them help their parents and grandparents. I’m very proud of them.” 

The deadline to apply for settled or pre-settled status is this June. As already discussed, whilst some have already completed or started their applications, some will have not even begun the process. Mrs. Costa told me that she is especially concerned by the fact that people are still arriving from East Timor with not much of an understanding of what awaits them and not knowing that they may not have spent enough time in the UK to be granted even pre-settled status. The East Timorese have been an established Oxford community for almost thirty years. Many improvements have been made to their situation and the new community projects and younger generations offer real hope. However, with challenges as large and complex as Brexit, the pandemic, and the profound and mutual lack of understanding between the community and the UK government, many East Timorese people’s futures are far from certain.

Oxford Union cuts standing committee to five officers

Cherwell News and Investigations Section Editors
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Oxford Union cuts standing committee to five officers

An Oxford Union public business meeting on 11th February passed a motion for the “reduction in the Number of Elected Members of Standing Committee” from its current seven officers down to five.

This motion, proposed by the President James Price, Worcester College, passed 41-34 and is set to be implemented at the end of 8th Week of Hillary term 2021.

This comes as a direct overturn of the decision in Trinity 2017 where it was voted for the Standing Committee to be expanded from 5 members to 7. The policy which was implemented in Michaelmas 2017 caused controversy and led to an investigation as the then-president added two previously un-elected Standing Committee candidates as officers. However, his decision was later cleared and the seven-member Standing Committee has since been instituted. 

The Standing Committee is the Union’s governing body, which makes all major decisions concerning the running of the Society, and oversees the work of all committees. It is also a requirement to be an officer of the Standing Committee prior to running for the office of President.

Today’s meeting was extremely well-attended with 87 people present at its height and many ex-officers coming back to make speeches both for and against the motion. 

Points in favour of the motion largely included the manageability of such a large committee and a desire to stray away from a lot of the bureaucracy currently present. There was also the concern of costs as Union committee members who work over the vacation are compensated with £8 per day, a figure that is set to rise to £12, and members are usually expected to commit to 10 vacation days.

However, those against the motion were concerned that this was an access issue, with a lack of opportunity especially for those who choose to run in the election independently without a slate.

A Union spokesperson told Cherwell: “The decision to reduce the number of members of The Standing Committee was taken at a meeting of all members. It is hoped that this decision will make the Committee more efficient. This is also part of a wider group of reforms intended to improve the accessibility of the Union’s Committee.”

Image Credit: Topper the Wombat. License: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Rituals: A reminder that you’re not alone

Lily Sheldon
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Rituals: A reminder that you’re not alone

It’s 2012 and I’m crying to my mum as she drives me straight from school to yet another bat mitzvah lesson. I try all the usuals: “But Mum I don’t want to read from the Torah, that’s ancient stuff” or “It’s not fair, Miranda Hart’s new episode is literally on TV like right now.” Truth be told, despite my attempts at grinding my mum down, I finally took to the stage, also known as my synagogue, and belted out my Torah portion. It took a year of learning how to sing an ancient alphabet in tune before I performed the ritual which connected me to my ancestors and my hypothetical successors to me.

When people hear the word ‘ritual’, their first thoughts are often prayer, spirits, antiquity, or maybe even bloody animal sacrifice. However, in my case the only figurative blood that was shed was about whether to wear a classic skater dress from Topshop or that sparkly puffy dress from Ruth’s. (My North London Jews will know what I mean). 

Retrospectively, however, I will never forget the feeling of looking up from the yellowish parchment paper of the biblical scroll and seeing everyone I love. It was at this moment that I realised what coming of age rituals are all about: the feeling of being part of something larger than yourself, which just happened, in my case, to manifest itself in a cringey purple and silver themed party.

Fast-forward eight years and I’m in Oxford debating with my tute partner over whether brushing your teeth is a ritual. It could be, he argues, as it’s a sequenced activity which connects many people to our greater societal belief in cosmetics and health, but on the other hand, it’s just a private self-indulgent activity which merely helps us achieve that colgate smile. Despite agreeing to disagree on the toothbrush we came to define ritual through Victor Turner’s words of Communitas: something which acutely connects people to a greater community through a sacred common experience, such as a rite of passage. 

Coming of age rituals manifest themselves in different ways across the world. Instead of a bat mitzvah, 15-year-old Latina girls have a fiesta de quinceañera to mark their transition to maturity, or Amish teenagers experience a period of Rumspringa, where they break away from their community before deciding whether or not to re-enter the Amish church for life. All 20-years-olds in Japan are invited to celebrate Seijin no Hi, or ‘adults day’, on the second Monday in January, and when coming of age in Bali, which is at first period for girls and breaking of voices for boys, teens have a teeth-filing ceremony performed by a priest. All of these cultures have their own way of defining adulthood which additionally emulate their attitudes towards gender, age, and maturity. For many cultures, they may be liberating in their own right; me reading from the Torah would have made my great-grandfather quake in his boots but for my 12-year-old self I had never felt so powerful. 

It goes without saying that ongoing lockdowns have taken a toll on communal coming of age rituals. However, my community has found ways to evolve. For my cousins’ bar mitzvah, Zoom was suddenly in operation; they had to practise singing powerfully enough to beat any sort of lag and we had to tune into our too-small screens. It may not have been the celebration they deserved – there was no uncle who took a bit too much license with the open bar, no throwing of sweets, no drunken screams of “Mazel Tov” to The Black Eyed Peas ‘I Gotta Feeling’ – but it did still mark their coming of age.

With the growth of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, teenagers have never been so connected, yet somehow have never felt so unspecial and alone. No matter how frustrating and nerve-wracking, coming of age rituals make the individual feel special because they are part of something beyond what they can see, our ‘communitas.’ To my own community, we must continue to virtually hold these kids up on a bat mitzvah chair as we, on Zoom, dance the hora, because at the end of the day, it’s a reminder that our community is here to break their fall when the obstacles of adulthood get in their way. 

Image from pixabay.com.

In conversation with Robbie Lyle

Maurício Alencar
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In conversation with Robbie Lyle

CW: racism

“You alright? How you doing mate? Busy morning, man, busy morning.” When I let Don Robbie into my Zoom call the other day, arguably the most famous English football fan there is, he greeted me with that typical smile. Arsenal had lost to Wolves the night before, so this high-spiritedness would normally come as a surprise. But I was quickly assured that, with Robbie’s naturally infectious charisma rubbing off from the outset, the interview ahead would be a rather good chat.

If you don’t know who Robbie Lyle is, you probably should. Robbie defines himself as “a sports guy”, but he is better known as the founder and host of AFTV, an Arsenal fan Youtube channel that boasts over 1.3 million subscribers and a total of over 1 billion views. On the channel, Robbie has interviewed a range of people, from ex-manager Unai Emery, to Piers Morgan, and Mia Khalifa. Robbie Lyle, along with his channel AFTV, has pioneered a new age in football fandom. It is an age in which social media platforms give some substance to fans’ voices, for better or for worse.

At the heart of his love for the game, of course, is Arsenal. I asked Robbie what his first memory is in following Arsenal: “The first thing I remember is walking into Highbury with my cousin, and just thinking- ‘wow!’. I was hooked. I loved this. I loved the atmosphere, I loved the ground, I loved the place. Just everything about it. That was it- Arsenal fan, for life.”

He goes on and tells me that the Invincibles era was the pinnacle of his time following Arsenal. As he reminisces about those glory days, a time of pride for the Arsenal fan, he then sighs: “I just miss seeing that quality of players.” 

Those days came long before the creation of AFTV in 2013. Arsenal went on a trophy-less run that ended in 2014, when they won the FA Cup against Hull. It was a timely moment for a channel like AFTV to surface and grow, just as many fans of one of the biggest clubs in the country were beginning to get fed up with their owner Stan Kroenke’s administration of the club, as well as with Arsène Wenger’s management. I asked Robbie to define AFTV: “AFTV is set up to give ordinary fans of Arsenal a chance to have a say on the club that they love. That was the aim of it. Let them have their say, and let them have their say where they’re actually hurt- that’s what we do.”

It was a time of hurt for many Arsenal fans, who were so used to success, supporting the “third most successful club in this country”, as Robbie boasted. In the period leading up to Wenger’s resignation in 2018, regular fan contributors to AFTV, such as Troopz, DT and Claude, were desperately calling for Wenger to leave. Many of AFTV’s videos went viral on the internet, and so the channel quickly gained traction across the footballing world. Speaking on the success of AFTV, Robbie says: “Because we are such a big platform, a fan can come on and he can have his say about things around the club or have his say around performances, good or bad, and people would hear it.”

Robbie is not sure about how much of an impact the channel itself has, as “it’s really hard to gage”, but Robbie is certain that AFTV has given a powerful platform for Arsenal fans to at least express themselves. “I’d say that normally what you hear reflected on AFTV is what’s been reflected in general around the fanbase,” he evaluates.

“We allow criticism, and as long as it’s balanced and done in the right way, I have no problem with it.” Robbie responds to my question on how AFTV deals with damning disapproval of the channel from other Arsenal supporters. Those AFTV-loathing supporters are often more “traditional”, as Robbie puts it. It is not unusual for fans to publicly voice their criticism of the club, often in derogatory terms. However, many football fans see AFTV to be an echo chamber for opinions that do not generally represent the views of the club’s fanbase. And in being so public, some may believe that AFTV run the risk of creating entertainment out of negativity and glamourising the pessimistic opinions of some of the club’s fans.

When I mentioned the videos of Arsenal fans singing “get out of our club” to AFTV at football games, Robbie answered, “They’re entitled to their opinion. It’s a very small minority. I was at the game, some of it was probably directed at me. It was probably about 20 guys, who then  probably got the chant going to about 30 or 40 people. So, as I said, we just got one billion [cumulative] views on Youtube alone. That doesn’t count all our other platforms. What do I go with? One billion? Or forty to fifty people?” Robbie adds, “I don’t really think that somebody should be coming to a game when they’ve got such an agenda, when they’re not looking at the team playing on the pitch. They’re more focussed about singing a song about me. Sing a song about the club! Get behind the club! Say it after the game when the game is finished.”

The criticism directed at AFTV goes beyond just the fanbase. When making an appearance at the Oxford Union two years ago, Arsenal full-back Héctor Bellerín questioned whether it was right for AFTV’s success to be “fed off a failure”. Simon Jordan, a TalkSport host, as well as ex-footballers and TV pundits Micah Richards and Gary Neville, have been other outspoken critics of AFTV; Gary Neville went the channel himself and offered his personal opinions to Robbie and other Arsenal fans in face-to-face interview.

AFTV has survived the incoming tides of criticism, as Robbie explains to me: “I have no problem with Gary Neville. I’ve spoken to Micah Richards since what he said. You’ve got to be able to take criticism. I really sort of wonder sometimes when people say to me sometimes ‘are you hurt that this journalist said this about you?’. I’m like ‘no’. As long as it’s fair criticism, I’m cool with it.”

The ethos of AFTV is democratic. AFTV is about giving fans a chance to speak and the opportunity to be listened to, which otherwise may not be so easily done in modern football when you take into account the closed nature of club ownership. According to Robbie, if AFTV is able to freely criticise others, they should be able to take on criticism themselves.

AFTV is part of a wider system in our world, according to Robbie. He tells me: “We are in a new era: this is the era of social media. Even if we don’t exist, there will still be people on various social media accounts talking about the same things we’re talking about. We are just a very big account, I guess you could say.”

Robbie breaks out laughing in our interview when I ask him what his opinion on social media is: “I look on social media and think it’s a great thing – obviously, I would! You wouldn’t be talking to me today if there were no social media. It’s given me a chance to build what I have, and it’s given many people a chance to have a say.

“You get a minority of people who use it for the wrong reasons: to racially abuse players, to abuse players personally… it’s not just players. I could show you loads of abuse that I get. You know, probably worse than what a lot of the players get.” 

Instances of online abuse in football have spiked in the last few years. Some of those targeted for vile online abuse include Karen Carney, Reece James and Marcus Rashford, to name but a few. In recent times, it has become a topical point of discussion, with players currently “taking the knee” before every Premier League fixture in order to raise greater awareness and drive racism out the game.

“I want to see real change. Social media companies have to do more,” Robbie tells me. “I don’t think that at the moment they do near enough. I do not understand how you get people- and I see them, even abusing me- just repeat offences. And they just do it over and over and over again. [Twitter] banned Donald Trump! They must be able to ban some of these idiots that are abusing people, you know? Ban their whole IP Address. Those are the sorts of things that need to happen. They need to come down on these things hard. We’ve got to take this thing seriously. I just don’t feel it’s taken seriously.”

Naturally, Robbie spends a lot of his time online, but perhaps now so more than ever under current lockdown restrictions. Just as much as Robbie misses going to the football ground, millions around the country miss actually playing football. His son, he tells me, is one of those people: “He plays grassroots football. He loves football. I take him like three or four times a week to various training and games. Since lockdown, he’s not played a game. They send through things for us to do, little home training. You go out in the back garden and it’s full of mud because of the horrible weather we’ve been having. Basically you’ve got loads of kids and loads of academies, whether it be from my son’s age and lower right up to like 18 year old kids [and] they’re not playing any football at the moment. And I really fear for them. That’s the part of football we sometimes don’t see. It’s going to take time to build back. There will be clubs that will survive but they’re going to trim right back, and that’s going to have a negative effect on the kids and the youngsters.”

Maybe the chances of England winning the World Cup in 2034 have been slightly lowered as a result of this pandemic, but so it has for other countries. With talks of a European Super League and re-formatting of tournaments, the future of football looks to be bleak for the average football fan. “I get very disheartened when I hear all this talk about super leagues.” There was particular emphasis on those last two words. He shook his head twice.

As I began to ask him what will happen when fans are allowed back in the stadiums in a post-pandemic world, Robbie put his hands together, as if praying for that time to come soon. He is hopeful that the pandemic could be a “turning point” in how fans are treated by their respective clubs. He explains to me: “You watch it on TV, and they’re having to get the noise that they use on FIFA games to replicate that of fans, because otherwise you just wouldn’t watch it. Fans are so important to football.  Look at the businesses around football grounds that have suffered- pubs, bars, restaurants- because there’s no football fans around. If that is not a wake up call for all the businesses, the authorities, the football owners to say that ‘you know what, football fans are so important’, then I don’t know what is. I’m hoping that they finally see those fans coming back in, that they treat them not just like a customer or to make money.

“I hope they say: ‘You know what, we love these guys. These guys support clubs through thick and thin, they come in and show their support. Yes, of course we have to make money, but we are not going to have ridiculous football prices. If we’re a TV company, we’re not gonna move the game at the last minute so that the fans afterwards can’t get back home on a train.’ I hope that this is a turning point. I hope!”

He adds: “Everybody who knows things about habits, knows that when habits are broken, you may not always return back to that habit. There might be fans who say: ‘In this last year of the pandemic, I’ve kind of enjoyed spending a bit of time with my family. I’ve taken up another passtime. I’ll still watch my club, but you know what I’m going to do when the game comes back? I’m going to go and watch Arsenal once a month.’ That could happen. So, it might be that when fans start to come back, the clubs have got to earn them back. When they’ve got to earn them back, that’s when they look after them better.”

AFTV’s online growth now means Robbie is a recognisable figure among lovers of the game. His opinion on football has gained value, perhaps greater than that of professional TV pundits. In fact, Robbie hosted three series of Channel 4’s The Real Football Fan Show. AFTV has let the common people talk, and it has made people listen. Robbie might be the first ever football-fan-celebrity.

When reflecting on his new identity, Robbie says “It’s been crazy. Cause you know, before I did this, I was working as a surveyor, and then you start this thing up. You start to see a few people know who you are. Now, it has got to the point where I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go into a shop. It’s mad. I embrace it. I have a laugh with a lot of fans from other clubs, and I enjoy it.

“I think, you know what, we talk so much about the negatives. But the positives far outweigh the negatives.” When thinking about what he enjoys about football exactly, he says “The banter around football, the tribalism- I absolutely love it. I adore it. People who are different races, people who speak differently, talk differently, who are complete opposites sometimes- they come together to watch their team play. There’s no better thing than football for me. I absolutely adore it.” At this point, he pauses for a while. He smiles for the last time: “As well as a massive Arsenal fan, I’m a football fan.”

Image courtesy of AFTV

In conversation with Jonathan Wilson

Maurício Alencar
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In conversation with Jonathan Wilson

CW: mention of violence

Filing through untouched archives in Ghana, committedly searching for the name of a football manager’s wife for over a decade and a eureka-moment after having drunk a couple of beers- these are but some of the ways to sum up football writer and journalist Jonathan Wilson’s career so far. He has written popular books such as ‘Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics’ and ‘The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper’, but perhaps most significantly of all, Jonathan Wilson founded ‘The Blizzard’, a football quarterly magazine which shares more “obscure” football stories. The Blizzard gives a new space for journalists to reveal unfound perspectives and to uncover every aspect of the game, however arcane that article may be. Articles in the magazine often reminisce about the historical moments of the game, or they might explore and contextualise football against various ongoing world affairs- from Thatcherism to climate change. I would personally say that Jonathan Wilson has been key in spearheading a change in how we go about treating football; that is, in his words, “to study it a bit more seriously”. 

One of the things The Blizzard prides itself on is its “long read” articles. The Blizzard’s writers don’t have to face the constraints of strained 300-word limit articles. I asked Wilson what it was exactly that had caused him to create a magazine that treats all matters of football in depth. He told me that he had been interested in doing a piece on Steve Mokone in 2009, who was the first Black South African to play in Europe. Steve Mokone, as Wilson explained to me, later became a professor of psychology in Canada. Mokone was jailed after he was convicted of throwing acid at his ex-wife – he has always maintained his innocence. This led to letters being sent from South African authorities to the CIA trying to get him out of prison. Jonathan Wilson wanted to be able to write a long article on it. “The problem was newspapers didn’t have space. It’s a story that requires a couple of thousand words to tell it properly,” he tells me. The creation of The Blizzard would allow for Jonathan Wilson to break free from the confinements of mainstream media- a freedom to write at any length. 12 years on from 2009, “long read” articles are more common across different newspapers and media companies. He gave a small, nervous laughter when he realised that this USP of his quarterly magazine is not as powerful as it had once been. 

That was not the only thing that urged Wilson to found The Blizzard: the very idea of the Mokone article was rejected ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. “I was pitching that around to magazines and the story I kept getting back was that ‘no, that story is too negative, our advertisers won’t like this’, which just struck me as being preposterous. Our job as journalists should not be to bow before advertisers.” 

Jonathan Wilson had had enough. In 2010, he was back at Fitzgerald’s pub on Green Terrace in Sunderland. Sunderland thrashed Bolton 4-0 with a Darren Bent hattrick that day, he fondly remembers. “I had a couple of pints,” he recalls as he clenches his fists and prepares to theatrically throw punches into the air, “and I was sort of like ‘what we need, what the writers need- we need to take control! We need to bypass all the middle men, all the managers and all the advertisers! We need to have a magazine that is of the writers, for the writers- and we share the profits, and even if there aren’t any profits- at least we’re doing what we want to do!’” His revolutionary beer-talk quickly turned into genuinely making arrangements with his boyhood friend, who was a designer and publisher, for the creation of the magazine. “The idea was essentially to give a forum for writers to write about topics that were either too obscure or too difficult or they needed a piece of too much length to be done in the media that existed in the time.” 

Jonathan Wilson, an alumnus of Balliol College, began his trade doing sports journalism for The Oxford Student, writing alongside comedian and cricket pundit Andy Zaltsman. After he found that “it became a real slog” to follow the top Premier League clubs every weekend while working for The FT, he turned to more hands-on research. The “boring” reporting of “a bloke talking to a room full of other blokes” at press conferences was replaced with “going through old archives, going through graveyards, going through the card index to find where this guy’s buried or where his son’s buried”. 

Speaking on the nature of his job as a researcher, he tells me, “you’re finding 20 people in Budapest with the same name, you’re emailing them all, you’re ringing them all: ‘are you this one?’, ‘was your mother this woman?’, ‘was she married to him?’. 19 of the 20 say ‘no, sorry’, then you find the right one. That’s what research is- sifting for ages until you find the nugget, and that feeling when you find the nugget is just a glorious moment.”

Wilson shared with me an example of the lengths he goes to in search of his discoveries. “Imre Hirschl, who is a bloke I had been chasing for like 15 years,” Wilson reveals to me, “was born in Apostag, which is just 60 miles south of Budapest in 1900- even to find that took 14 years, because he had lied about his background. He is hugely influential in Argentinian football, and in Uruguay’s World Cup win in 1950. But because he bulls***ted about his background, it was very hard to find any information. He appears in Hungarian papers only twice- once when he got married in 1923 and once in 1928 when he showed journalists around his salami factory- that was his job, he was a salami salesman. He wasn’t a football coach, which is why he lied about it to the Argentinians- to get a job. I didn’t know who his first wife was. I knew he had married in 1923, so I had the name Erzebet, but by searching through various records, eventually a mate of mine based in Budapest rang me one night. I had just come back to the hotel, around 10 o’clock, just about to go to bed, phone goes and my mate goes “ah, I think I found her. I think I got her maiden name.” For years I had on my laptop these passenger manifests from ships going from Cherbourg to Genoa to Santos in Sao Paulo. I knew that was the route Hungarians took. I thought, just before I go to bed I’ll have a skim through these [manifests] and see if I can find Erzebet Bayer anywhere. So I looked through the passenger manifest that Hirschl was on going to Santos, and she’s not there. And then literally the next one I opened: passenger 1 – Bayer, Erzebet. For more than a decade, I’d carried this around with me. In 2 minutes, I’d gone from not knowing who she was to having the proof that in 1931 she had taken this boat and gone to Buenos Aires. Those are the moments you live for.” 

Right as we think we are losing touch with the overly-commercialised game, Wilson’s fairytale-like stories in his books or articles are a breath of fresh air; learning about the roots of the game provide us with some structure and reasoning for why football is so universally adored. However, Wilson’s own love affair with football has altered in some small ways in recent times. With every top-flight match being televised due to the pandemic, “something quite strange has happened”. He compares his relationship to what goes on in the Indian Premier League. He explains, “So often, it will come to mid to late afternoon and I’ll be flagging a bit. So, I’ll turn on the telly because it’s nice to have something in the corner of the room even if I’m still doing work. The IPL is perfect for that. I love it, I think it’s brilliant, and I have very little idea of what’s going on in it…  I’m watching it and I don’t really think of league positions. I’m just sort of thinking: ‘oh look, there’s Jofra Archer bowling to David Warner! Oh, he’s got him out again! Brilliant!’” Comparing a day-long game of wooden sticks to relatively short football matches sounded troubling to me at first. What it seemed Wilson was getting at was that he was virtually uninterested in having to know every detail of every action that occurs in cricket. Football must continue to be the sport of ‘unmissable live action’, I told myself, it cannot be that football becomes anything like the day-long game of wooden sticks and balls being chucked around… He continues, “I’ll put on tomorrow’s 6 o’clock football game and I will vaguely pay attention. I don’t really know what a win for either side would mean for [the football] Premier League positions because you don’t need to know that. It’s not like when you had 8 games happening on a Saturday, and at 5:30 you got a league table and that actually meant something- the league table will have changed by tomorrow. And so, I’ve started to view the Premier League in the way I view the IPL, in this sort of dilettante-ish way, which is a very odd thing.” 

Wilson is very likely not to be the only football fan that feels this growing background sense of disillusionment, particularly with no fans inside any stadium. Match-going fans will certainly be missing that 3:00pm match day experience. The pandemic has really hit hard on fans, it goes without saying. On the flip side, while it is true that some Premier League clubs have certainly struggled, they might just have found that real punch which could help bring in greater revenue in the long term, according to Wilson. “My suspicion is that this is probably how we’re going, I don’t really see who in the league benefits by not having all the games on TV… The people who lose out are people in the lower leagues,” predicts the award-winning writer.

Jonathan Wilson’s worries for the future of football go beyond the problems of TV rights in England. He also told me he is worried about FIFA’s ambitious plans to reform club football at continental and international levels. This was a problem that was close to me. At the end of each year, I face some of my Brazilian friends and bicker about how credible or important winning the Club World Cup is from an objective standpoint. So, when I asked Wilson whether he believed any future Club World Cup could work, he regrettably answered “it needed to be introduced in a proper form 50 years ago”. He explains his reasoning in greater detail, “Good football is two evenly matched teams. A Club World Cup will have a huge number of mismatches. There’s no real way round that without artificially enhancing the big African clubs, or the big Asian clubs, or the big Oceania clubs, or the big South American clubs.” 

There is something quite fitting in that people across the world can have a conversation about football. Yet, the fact that conversation veers towards chat over European football is somewhat discomforting. While still remaining on this topic of a utopian world where a Club World Cup could really work, which would probably mean a world in which fans did not have to support a club in Europe in order to watch top-quality football, I asked him what he felt about Twitter’s impact on the footballing world. Twitter is a platform which connects the non-match-going fan to a club in another continent (Europe more often than not), and that fan has the equal right to express their opinion as the match-going fan who follows their club over land and sea. “I find it [a] really difficult [subject],” he contemplates for a while. “As a Sunderland fan, I grew up two miles from Roker Park, and every other Saturday of my adolescence I went to Roker Park. It was a huge part of my relationship with my dad and with the city. The only reason I go back to Sunderland now is to go to matches. At 1:30, I walk into the King’s Arms on a match day and I know [my mates] will be standing in that corner by the bar. Sunderland, the football club, seems integral to my identity in a way, for better or for worse, in a way that I emotionally find it hard to comprehend how a Manchester United fan in Beijing, for instance, can have that same connection. But then I listen to what I say, and I realise that these are really troubling arguments. It’s a very blood and bones argument, and I’m on the wrong side of that argument. The idea that this is some kind of exclusive club that only people born within 5-10 miles of Roker Park or who have a parent who support that club, that only they can be Sunderland fans is manifestly ludicrous and against almost everything else I stand for.” 

Wilson ponders on this matter for a while in our discussion. The question of what is truly wrong with supporting a football club on the other side of the globe remains. He reflects, “And then you extrapolate that and you think, well, say you are a Manchester United fan in Beijing, and for some reason age 5 you’ve decided that you are a Manchester United fan. Every time you’ve bought a shirt, it’s been a Manchester United shirt. You save up a little bit of money every week. Eventually, when you are 20 or 25, you have enough money for the trip of a lifetime to fly from Beijing to Manchester to go to Manchester United against Burnley, and this is going to be one of the great weekends of your life. People don’t have a right to say that he’s not a fan just because they happened to not have been born in Stretford. So, these are the tensions of globalisation. And what I find with football is that emotionally I’m on the other side of it to what I am on everything else. I guess that’s why I find football to be such a useful prism to view the world through.” 

Despite Wilson’s deeply truthful, sage and wisdomatic words, a discussion still remained on whether it is right for FIFA to inject money into certain clubs in order for football to become more international in some way at club level- a world in which the croaked, cockney-voiced man’s rule-of-thumb ‘support your local’ could feasibly be adhered to for all fans across the world. The problem of enhancing clubs within continents worsens some already-existent problems at a domestic scale, as Wilson warns me. After he tells me about the time he studied the rivalry between Asante Kotoko from Ghana and TP Muzembe from DR Congo, having searched through the archives first-hand (which were protected by a “bewildered kid in overalls”) from their African Champions Cup final meetings in the late 60s, Jonathan Wilson momentarily dreams that “the idea we could get something like that again is really appealing”.  And yet, unfortunately, Wilson comes to a painful conclusion: “If you just pump a million of pounds into TP Muzembe, for instance, they already win the league in DR Congo every season, and they’re just going to win it more easily because the gap between them and the rest is just going to grow. So who does that benefit? It doesn’t benefit the people who watch football in DR Congo. One of the things that makes football so appealing is these big rivalries. The economics of football means that the Club World Cup as it stands fulfils no function.” 

We had discussed a lot, but perhaps we still hadn’t found a reason as to why we should “study” football. I gave Jonathan Wilson a hefty task towards the end of our interview. “Define football,” I commanded. I had been keen to hear how someone who had really studied football on a global scale, someone who had gone through tiresome journeys to get the facts right, someone who really knew the ins and outs of the thing I loved most to summarise what that thing actually is. Growing up in a time where football had just begun to be properly thought about in an interesting way, as through Simon Kuper’s book Football Against the Enemy, Pete Davies’s book All Played Out, and Nick Hornby’s autobiographical essay/novel Fever Pitch, Wilson went one step beyond and chose to study football with real intent. He had gone through all those years of experience as a leading football writer to finally face this one gruelling question. So, after a couple of seconds’ silence, Jonathan Wilson answered: “Football is the most universal cultural mode. There’s pretty much nowhere in the world you can go to now where football hasn’t touched. There’s no reason other than snobbism not to study it in the way you would study theatre or music or literature.” 

Image courtesy of Jonathan Wilson.

Coming of age with Beanie Feldstein

Lily Sheldon
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Coming of age with Beanie Feldstein

All teenagers hit that age where they are suddenly on the verge of adulthood whilst still clinging onto what is left of their childhood. When it was my turn to encounter such “minor” identity questions, cinema was undergoing a similar sort of coming of age. Having long graduated from the overplayed boy meets girl narratives of the “Brat Pack” 80s, and tired of the batty, boyfriend-orientated chicks, central to Clueless and Wild Child in the 90s and 2000’s, Hollywood began to hold a more honest mirror up to coming-of-age of women. Beanie Feldstein was in the reflection.

The first time I experienced Feldstein on screen was on Mother’s Day in year 12. My sister was back from uni and we thought we’d be good daughters and treat my mum to a cinema trip to see the new film Ladybird. She would pay of course, in exchange for some quality time with us. However, by the end of the film it was clear that I was the one who had been treated. The quality time had been shared between me, myself and I; ninety-four minutes to reflect on growing up.

Ladybird is that angsty teen who wants to get as far away from her Catholic girl’s school, her neurotic mother and her hometown, Sacramento, as possible. Inevitably, she must leave home in order to realise how much she appreciates it. Of salient importance to me, however, was her organic friendship with Beanie Feldstein’s Julie. 

Beanie’s small-town character is in many ways a foil to Ladybird’s fiery rage, but their friendship is timeless. They lie in the bathroom of their school talking about masturbation, Julie accompanies Ladybird to see her sad-boy love interest Kyle (Timothy Chalemet) and his band, and when Ladybird tries to social climb it is Julie that brings her back down to earth. Julie is very much the observer in this friendship, but her loyalty demonstrates the timeless bond between neighbourhood best friends who have been through it all together. My mother and sister left the cinema with tears in their eyes due to the film’s relatability and attention to the human reminders of home that remain with you when you’ve outgrown all the rest of it. I was yet to truly live out this lesson. 

The next year, I took a break from A-level revision and gap year planning to watch Booksmart. In contrast to the timid character of Julie, Feldstein’s Molly steals centre stage as she embodies the try-hard Gen-Z teenager. She is focused on academic success, her role as class president and her best friend Amy. In a Superbad-esque framework, Amy and Molly realise that they have given up their social lives to get into Ivy Leagues whilst their partying peers have still somehow managed to score places at Yale.

As the film progresses, we are witnesses to what is basically a love affair between Feldstein’s uptight and controlling Molly and her kinder and sweeter friend Amy. The girls try to cram four years of fun into one night. It is as if, in this one night, we experience a lifelong friendship: they dance it out on the street before going to school, they have compliment wars before going to the party (“call the police because there has been a {beauty} emergency”), they fight at their first high school party, but the most poignant and most heart wrenching scene is when Molly says goodbye to Amy at the airport. Set to a backdrop of a breakup song we witness the dramatic parting of two soul mates, childhood best friends who separate in order to independently start the next chapter of their lives.

Having watched all three versions of A Cinderella story growing up, I thought it would be my Prince Charming who I’d be most sad to say goodbye to when I left home for my gap year. It was, in fact, the parting of paths with my own childhood best friend, my own Beanie Feldstein, that resulted in the true separation anxiety. For me, Feldstein represents that unconventional but yet oh so conventional friendship, she reveals how often cinema and society undercuts the true hardship of the end to a female friendship. It may not be romance but that is because it is something so much more. 

When I came back from my 12 months away from home, I watched Caitlin Moran’s almost autobiographical film How to Build a Woman, in which Beanie Feldstein plays 16-year-old working class girl from Wolverhampton, Johanna, who reinvents herself by becoming a journalist at a rock magazine. In this movie, Feldstein is as daring as Johanna’s black top-hat; she brings to life the fresh concept of a sexually empowered female character who has unconventional beauty and no sexual experiences. As teenagers, we are constantly, subconsciously reinventing ourselves until we find an identity that fits and for Johanna this, at times, meant wearing bin-bags and confessing her love to a rock star. Far more reflective of your everyday girl than most young-adult female leads, such as Elle in Clueless or Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink, Feldstein’s character is guided by her ambition and that alone. 

I see myself and my peers stealing bits and pieces from Beanie’s Feldstein’s varying portrayals of women coming of age. Whether it’s the timid, side-lined best friend Julie, or the dominant and ambitious Molly, Feldstein’s characters have expanded the definition of what it means to approach womanhood. They turn the typically sexualised female protagonist on its head and are sexually empowered without the direct involvement of any one man. With all three of Feldstein’s movies passing the Bechdel Test, they place value not on size or beauty or men but rather on character and the great power of human connection.

Feldstein’s women, however, did not come out of nowhere, they were written into existence by fantastic feminist artists such as Greta Gerwig and Caitlin Moran who are now taking back control of defining womanhood. Imagine that, women writing women has actually given birth to realistic portrayals women gasps. Not only did Beanie Feldstein help me come of age, she also helped Hollywood join me in adulthood, and join the 21st century. We live in a time when growing up is particularly hard, but without our soul sisters, the hormonal transition to womanhood would surely be much harder. 

Cumin in from the Cold – Three Winter Warmers to Alleviate January Blues

Shreya Banerjee
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Cumin in from the Cold – Three Winter Warmers to Alleviate January Blues

Winter in the UK demands warm and comforting food – for those of us who are lucky, the holiday season also provides ample time to prepare it. It’s unsurprising that when the temperature drops, we crave piping hot dinners, whether it be Vietnamese pho, Swiss fondue, or throat-tingling curries laden with fragrant spices. Another thing that snow-time specials from cold regions across the world have in common is that they have to be flexible, given that produce from the peak growing season isn’t readily available. As a result, if you’re being mindful of your food’s air miles, winter is the time for canned goods, pickles, and long-lasting root vegetables to shine. Here are three adaptable (and veggie-friendly!) winter dishes that won’t only keep you warm but can also be made with things you might have tucked away in a cupboard. 

Noodle Soup for the Soul (2 hefty portions)

Umami: the 5th basic taste that is still mystifying many of us. Often translated from Japanese as “savouriness”, it is characteristic of broths and meats – perfect for a discussion of winter warmers!

Fermented products are a great source of umami, as well as something that can sit idly in a cupboard until you need it, and that’s where one of the star ingredients of this dish, miso paste, comes into play. This noodle soup uses vegetable stock (500ml) with miso paste (20g with 200ml boiling water) for its broth, but you could make this more traditionally by adding dashi powder – a key component in Japanese stocks.

First, sauté a diced onion with four cloves minced garlic, and a 3cm chunk of ginger, adding a stalk of lemongrass in half-cm slices last of all. Using lemongrass, whether fresh or as a paste, adds an aromatic freshness that will enhance the soup. Cook your broth for about 10 minutes, and then add veggies that need to be cooked through and your favourite noodles (I opted for udon here!), as many Serrano chilis as you can handle, and any vegetables rocking about in your fridge or freezer. Corn (baby or sweet) is a nice colourful addition, as are diced carrots and runner beans. Don’t forget to top with fresh coriander and spring onion. 

Star ingredients: yellow miso paste and fresh lemongrass stalks

A Nostalgic Kofta Curry 

This second dish is heavily inspired by Tejal Rao’s recipe for a vegetarian kofta curry. These koftas are made with a purée of garlic, ginger, and green chilis, added to a mixture of canned black beans, an egg, breadcrumbs, spring onions, and chopped mint and coriander. After you find a tin of beans hiding at the back of a cupboard, using a fork, mash the mixture together until it is almost smooth. To make this step easier, you could incorporate refried beans in the place of some black beans, before shaping the mixture into 1-inch balls.

Baking the koftas, a deviation that Rao makes from her grandfather’s recipe (as detailed in her article “I Think of My Grandfather Every Time I Make Kofta”), cooks them evenly and you can avoid the oiliness that might result from frying. They take 25 minutes in the oven at 200°C – this is your opportunity to prepare the spicy and comforting curry that the koftas will be sitting in, as well as a pot of rice to go alongside it. To craft the curry itself, fry sliced onions in a vegetable oil for a few minutes before adding 4-5 cloves of minced garlic and half an inch of ginger. Once the garlic and ginger are fragrant, add a tsp of turmeric, ground cumin, ground coriander, chilli powder, and garam masala to the pot. Before long, the aroma of these spices will be wafting out of the kitchen, revealing to your whole corridor what’s on the hob. Mix in a can of chopped tomatoes and 2 tablespoons of tomato puree, and season with salt and black pepper. Spoon this onto your plate, before arranging a few koftas in the curry and plating the rice. Finally, top with fresh mint and coriander.

Star ingredients: the spice mix and fresh coriander

Winter Veg Laksa Lemak 

Laksa lemak is a spicy soup popular in Malaysian-Singaporean fusion cuisine. There are two components that underpin this soup – it gets its creaminess from coconut milk (I chose to use light coconut milk, but both work) and its depth of flavour from a paste of spices called rempah. The rempah, a blend of garlic, ginger, lemongrass, red chilis, turmeric, cumin, and a shallot, is beautifully aromatic, and should be cooked at length on a low to medium heat to release maximum intensity of flavour. Rempah is wonderfully flexible. In Malaysia, tamarind or fermented shrimp paste might also be added, but a paste of suitable and available ingredients will make a delicious foundation for a unique bowl of comfort.

This dish comes together with the addition of rice noodles which should be swimming, not drowning, in the broth, winter vegetables such as sweet potatoes, celeriac, swede, or carrots, and other optional toppings – for example, crispy fried tofu or prawns for non-vegetarians. With a squeeze of lime and a garnish of spring onion, and coriander, this dish is a perfectly satisfying veggie meal. To add a bit more texture, you could also top the soup with beansprouts or halved cherry tomatoes.

Star ingredients: rempah paste and the squeeze of lime 
This winter vegetable Laksa leak combines creamy coconut with aromatic rempah – check out @chefshreyasi for more colourful dishes and restaurant reviews

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