British Christmas dinners tend to be quite meat heavy, and can cause a lot of tension for vegetarian family members as the festive season rolls around. The discovery of the Macsween Veggie Haggis (which is in fact vegan) has entirely revolutionised my experience of roast dinners. A source of consistent deliciousness, a veggie haggis leaves nut roasts in its wake. Made primarily of oats, seeds, kidney beans, carrots, onions and lentils, a veggie haggis is free from any unmentionable cuts of meat which understandably put people off traditional haggis.
Waitrose seems to be the only shop that consistently stocks veggie haggis, but don’t be put off by a reputation for bougie prices; a Macsween Haggis usually costs less than £4 and can feed three to four people. As a vegetarian roast it seems almost insulting to refer to the veggie haggis as merely an ‘alternative’ to traditional meats. The veggie haggis should indeed gain a position as a roasted staple around the British dinner table; cheap, healthy, easy to cook and universally delectable.
Paired with a caramelised onion gravy, roasted potatoes and veg I find myself free of a yearning for tender turkey or pigs in blankets at Christmas time. Haggises (haggi?…) can be cooked easily in the oven and even microwaved, making it a cheap and easy option for plant-based roasts.
Gravy at the Christmas dinner table is, of course, absolutely vital. Since becoming a vegetarian I have made it my mission to perfect a vegetarian gravy. Though I firmly believe that no two gravies should be the same, below I’ve laid out how I usually throw together a gravy in what can loosely be described as a recipe.
Emily’s Idiosyncrasy Gravy
Ingredients – don’t worry if you don’t have some of these things, gravies can be somewhat made up as you go along!
Onions (1 or 2, finely chopped)
Mushrooms (a large handful, finely chopped)
Sugar
Butter
Veggie gravy granules
Marmite
Garlic
Salt
Ketchup
Wine
Method
Soften the onions and mushrooms in the pan with some butter and a little sugar.
Mix a couple of teaspoons of gravy granules with some boiling water (I find a big mug is good to do this in) and add in a teaspoon of marmite, pour this in with the caramelised mushrooms and onions.
Add in crushed garlic/garlic powder/garlic paste and season with salt and pepper.
Add in a little ketchup and some wine (red, white or even pink works!) and leave to boil for a while.
You can use a hand blender to make the gravy smooth and add in more granules/water mixture if the gravy needs to be thicker.
Other tasty things that can go into gravy include mustard seeds, fruit jam, vegetable water – basically whatever yummy bits are laying around the kitchen!
I’d always recommend making large amounts of gravy, not only because it’s completely scrumptious, but also because it is the perfect condiment to Boxing Day haggis potato cakes. Mash up any leftover potato and mix with any veggie haggis you didn’t scoff on Christmas day, add an egg if needed to bind the mixture together and shape into little potato cakes. While you fry the haggis cakes some of the seeds and lentils can pop and jump in the pan like tiny pieces of popcorn.
In September, it was announced that in the journal Nature that phosphine had been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus, sparking a debate about the possibility of life on the planet. Dr Colin Wilson of the Oxford department of Physics cautions that the question of life on Venus is not necessarily a simple one.
“Its interpretation needs to be somewhat nuanced. And it’s never as simple as the presence of phosphine means life.”
Phosphine is a biomarker, which means that it is considered a sign of possible life. This is because, on Earth, much of the phosphine in the atmosphere is made via biological processes. “Most of the phosphine, almost all the phosphine found in the atmosphere comes from biological sources. So because it’s from anoxic environments, you get it formed in the gut. You get it formed in swamps, away from the air.”
Still, “there are lots of other ways you can get phosphine. So other sources of phosphine in the Earth’s atmosphere include the breakdown of phosphorus containing dust and minerals, possibly some kinds of volcanism. You can also have lightning breaking down atmospheric phosphine containing molecules and having phosphine as a by-product.”
“It’s only by eliminating all other abiotic forms of production of phosphine that we would be able to conclude that phosphine [on Venus] is produced by life.”
“Even eliminating all the abiotic forms of producing phosphine wouldn’t be enough because life as we know it cannot exist on Venus either. So before saying it must be life, you’d have to find the kind of life which could be producing it.”
Even the presence of phosphine on Venus is contested. “One of the first things we have to do as a science community is follow up on that detection to try to see whether it’s repeatable as a detection. Lots and lots of corroborating observations are going on as we speak from various telescopes on Earth.” So far, the researchers have already found a processing error in their original data. They say that while the phosphine signal is still present, it’s fainter than before.
Dr Wilson’s work focuses on the three primary candidates for life in our solar system: Venus, Mars, and Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons. Atmospheric physics, his field of science, is one filled with both potential risks and challenges.
“I did my PhD here in Oxford working on the wind sensor for Beagle to Mars Lander, UK Mars Lander, which went to Mars in 2003. Unfortunately, that Mars Lander crashed and I managed to get that same wind sensor on the next European Mars lander, which went in 2016. And unfortunately, that crashed as well. So this illustrates certainly some of the high risk nature of planetary exploration.”
“There’s a limit. Fundamentally, it’s a spatial resolution limit. It’s what you can tell. So we can tell sort of large scale weather patterns. But a lot of the details of what’s going on on the planet can’t be sensed from ground.”
The next step for many planetary scientists is to send an orbiter to the atmosphere of the planet, but often chemistry and composition still can’t be fully understood from that vantage point. The ultimate aim for scientists, then, is to get landers, rovers, and balloons onto the planets that they are studying.
The Titan Dragonfly mission, which Dr. Wilson is developing a wind sensor for, is aiming to do just that. The Dragonfly is a nuclear powered rotorcraft which is capable of flying to a new site on the moon every few weeks, and is currently set to launch in 2027.
“Titan is a world like no other. It has. It’s the only moon we know of in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere and the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. So the only nitrogen rich atmosphere, which we know is the earth, really. And so Titan is another body like that.”
“It’s also [got] lots of organic chemistry. It’s got huge amounts of methane and ethane. You may raise your eyebrows thinking, you know, where do hydrocarbons come from on earth? It’s sort of fossil fuels, decaying ancient forests. So we don’t think that’s where Titan’s hydrocarbons have come from.”
An area for investigation, then, is the origin of these hydrocarbons. “In some ways, this is an ideal laboratory for understanding sort of prebiotic chemistry, the organic chemistry stages you go through before you get to life.”
Other bodies in our solar system are often gateways to furthering our knowledge of things here on Earth. Dr. Wilson has also been involved in a proposal known as EnVision Venus, which sets out to explore the geological character of the planet. In the past, he worked on the Venus Express, an orbiter focused on the atmosphere of the planet. “But actually, some of the most intriguing and tantalising results it sent back were about current geological activity on the surface”
“It’s covered in volcanoes. There may be a million volcanoes or more on Venus and lots of rifts and signs of tectonic activity. We have a global map of the surface showing all this, but it was effectively a static picture obtained in the early 90s by one of the first planetary radar missions. And we don’t know whether any of these volcanoes are active today.”
“Why do we care about this? Well, it’s like a parallel earth. It’s the same size as Earth, made of the same sort of materials formed around […] the same amount of time ago. But it’s evolved really differently with this huge greenhouse effect.”
“The science is split […] between whether Venus used to be Earth-like and inhabitable with liquid water oceans in the past, or whether its evolution bypassed that stage of being nice and clement and inhabitable. And so our investigations of its geological state should tell us that difference, whether it was once an earth-like planet.”
Coming back to the question of life on Venus, it is some of these very conditions that make life on the planet a complex issue. “The surface of Venus is up at four hundred fifty degrees centigrade or so. So nothing, nothing is going to survive there.”
“Even life adapted for other environments is going to have difficulties because really most life as we know it, or as we can conceive of it, needs liquid to mediate the interactions between different parts of the cell and so on.”
Life on Venus, then, would not necessarily be life as we’re used to seeing it. “People have been talking about life surviving in the clouds, because as you go up in altitude, as on earth, the temperatures drop. And by the time you’re 50 to 60 kilometres above the earth, above the planet’s surface, you have environments which are rather pleasant, rather comfortable even.”
“I don’t think anyone [is] suggesting that you’d have birds or condors soaring around because it takes great big evolutionary processes to get to that stage. So we’re probably looking at bacteria.”
“Some of the very, very earliest rocks we can find on Earth already bear the signs of life having evolved very soon after the Earth became habitable as an environment for billions of years. […] So that tends to suggest that it’s maybe it’s quite easy to create single celled, single cellular life, relatively easy.”
Still, Dr. Wilson seems to think that the most likely version of Venus with life is one that no longer exists. “I think that the places most likely to form some sort of life would be possibly ancient Mars and ancient Venus, because there are strong suggestions that both of them were once more habitable in their climates.” With no orbiters currently able to confirm phosphorus directly from the planet, it might be a while before we hear more on the subject.
Emily Ratajkowski’s essay published in September, entitled ‘Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her image’ is a beautifully written piece tracing her increasing awareness of and struggles with the stark insistence of others in holding a claim to her image. A claim to their own version of Emily, as she calls it, asserted by photographers, artists, and ex-boyfriends alike. In the essay, she details her sexual assault by photographer Jonathan Leder, at her first and only shoot with him in 2012, when Ratajkowski was 20 and Leder was 40 years old. Leder later published several books of her nude Polaroids without her consent, and without informing her.
There was one detail that stuck with me long after reading Ratajkowski’s words: her innate feeling of being visible. She writes that, when Leder picked her up from the bus station to go to his house for the shoot, she remembers “feeling watched, aware of our proximity and my body and how I might appear from his driver’s seat.” The exhausting feeling of being watched is one that I believe is familiar to most women. In 1972, sociologist John Berger published ‘Ways of Seeing’, a book based on his BBC television series, where he explored what it means to see, and the relation between the art of gazing and the establishing of our place in the surrounding world. He writes:
“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men…A woman must continually watch herself…Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually…And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman…Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”
Is my shirt rumpling up as I sit down? Do I look sloppy as I eat my sandwich on the tube, eyes to the floor, shameful, for daring to do such a thing in public? A distinct picture of the tiny wrinkle that appears between my eyebrows when I frown, emerges in the back of my mind almost simultaneously to the frown flooding my face. Such images, questions and checks accompany women almost constantly throughout the day, myself included, until I reach home and shut the door – and even then, I am somewhere dimly and instinctively aware of my silhouette as I hunch over, head bowed, to make an evening cup of tea.
The problem with feeling so visible, with a constant running stream of scrutiny in your head, is that it leads you to start doubting your credibility. I am female; I am different; therefore, am I wrong? Ratajkowski in her essay describes wanting to “impress” her disdainful photographer. She describes explaining to him that modelling “was just about making money” for her, an insistence that she wasn’t “dumb”, that she knew “modelling has its expiration date”, and that her true intention was to save money to “go back to school or start making art” – an explanation that she “was used to defining myself with…to men especially.” When Leder dismisses this ambition, stating that she would never be able to save enough money as “you girls always end up spending too much money on shoes and bags”, Ratajkowski doubts herself and starts believing him despite not even in the habit of buying expensive bags. “What if he was right? What if at the end of this I really would have nothing?” This is symptomatic of a society that ridicules women for being women, that insidiously makes women insecure simply for assuming the connotations that come with being a woman. Leder, at another moment in the shoot, also sneers at Ratajkowski for being “’obsessed’” with Instagram when she turned to open her phone. How ironic, then, that he first posts his prized Polaroids of her on that very same medium.
When the feeling of self-consciousness and visibility is synonymous with experiences as a woman, this opens the door not only to doubting your own credibility, but to allow others to also doubt it for you. If a woman commits the crime of being ‘sexy’, her sexuality becomes all-defining, the essence of her very being, and consequently is used to perversely negate her capacity to ever be sexually assaulted. When Leder heard of Ratajkowski’s allegations against him, he dismissed them not by defending himself but by describing the ‘type’ of girl she supposedly is: “You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in Treats! Magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?” And here, I think, is the most devastating aspect of this lived ordeal: existing as a woman in a patriarchy, where the male gaze intrudes on all areas of life, completely delegitimises your experience in favour of any man’s definition of you. This toxic undercurrent to issues of consent is what leads to police confiscating phones of sexual assault victims in order to pass judgement on their private life, and to female and male commentors alike on Instagram claiming that the fact that Leder published a book of nude Polaroids without Ratajkowski’s consent doesn’t matter, because she could have just kept “’her clothes on’”.
What can we do to remove the male gaze from our lives and imagination, and move forward into a world where being attractive, working, or dancing on a roof, whilst simultaneously a woman, are not inherently offensive? I’m not sure. Ratajkowski wonders: “what does true empowerment even feel like? Is it feeling wanted? Is it commanding someone’s attention?”
She describes Leder publishing the book of her revealing Polaroids without her consent as a “violation”, the “using and abusing” of her image for profit. In a tweet at the time, she decried the act as a perfect example against what she stands for: “women choosing when and how they want to share their sexuality and bodies”. What is striking is her emphasis on the amount of attention she naturally paid to her violation as it happened. She staged a “very public protest” at the book’s publication, and shares how she looked him up occasionally thereafter, checking in on a part of herself, the part “he now owned”: “it was intoxicating to see what he’d done with this part of me he’d stolen”.
With time and distance, Ratajkowski recalls feeling a “deep twinge of shame” at her “posturing” and her desire to impress the photographer with highbrow talk of art-making and culture, as he subtly and disdainfully dismissed her. By promising herself that she “wouldn’t look him up anymore”, she begins the work of reclaiming her image. Despite the multiple reprints of his book, posing as high art so long as it bears his name as the creator, and despite contemplating the possibility of draining herself to entangle him in a legal lawsuit, she concedes that expending her resources on Leder would not be “money well spent”. Perhaps this is what real empowerment is: a focus, however taxing to maintain, on one’s image as whole, and not on the fragment that was stolen long ago. Whilst Leder will run out of his “crusty Polaroids”, Ratajkowski will forever remain as the “real Emily”.
As you consider these questions for yourself, read Ratajkowski’s essay. Here is an example of a woman who has sought to reclaim her image, deafen her quiet inner second-guessing by speaking out loud, and as she puts it, “carve out control where she can find it.”
St Edmund Hall JCR held an emergency meeting on 23rd November after it became apparent that “at least 15” students, “primarily freshers”, had been unable to vote in the election to choose key JCR roles due to technical issues.
The initial vote was conducted through the Oxford University Student Union website between 04:26 on Wednesday 18 November until 14:00 on Thursday 19 November. During that time, two students contacted the JCR IT Officer reporting their being unable to vote. One JCR member who reported technical issues described in the emergency general meeting that it had taken “seven hours” to resolve and included sending screenshots.
The results were released on 19 November at 18:59. An email sent on 21 November at 13:09 by the IT Officer to ask if there were others who were unable to vote due to technical issues revealed that “at least 15” students had encountered similar problems.
Two of the contested positions, JCR President and JCR Female Welfare Officer, were won by victory margins which fell within the amount of people who had been blocked from voting due to technical issues. The position of President was won by 13 votes while the position of Female Welfare Officer was won by 12.
On 22 November, the JCR President announced an emergency general meeting scheduled 24 hours after its announcement, as per the minimum constitutional requirement. In the email, the President admitted that “15 students came forward and reported this issue to us, and with this number being roughly 10% of those who did vote, there is belief that this is significantly large enough for a re-run of the elections to occur.” However, he stated that a call for a new election was not an opinion “held unanimously” by the JCR Committee, and therefore it was decided that an Emergency Meeting to vote on whether to hold a new election was “the fairest and most democratic action to take.”
Cherwell was able to view the election minutes, in which JCR members on both sides of the argument made opening statements. The statement opposing the calling of a new election stated: “To open the election again is basically saying that we want to open the election because certain students weren’t happy with the results.
“There will be no material change to the way the JCR conducts the election. Getting in contact with [the IT officer] to say that you’ve struggled to vote, couldn’t figure out the system or couldn’t find the button literally takes less than a minute.”
The statement continued: “To say that there were unreasonable factors preventing JCR members from voting is ludicrous since they had plenty of warning and it takes no time at all to get in contact with [the IT officer] or literally anyone on the JCR committee and ask them to help you.”
They also cited the welfare of candidates and that a new election would potentially become a “popularity competition where the person who can get the most people to speak vocally in their favour has a large advantage.”
The statement arguing for a new election read: “This was obviously not [the students’] fault and meant that they were unable to voice their opinion. This is almost equal to about 10% of people who voted for the JCR President (160 votes counted) and is therefore by no means an insignificant proportion of people and could have made the difference to a number of results.”
It continued: “Some are arguing that they should have contacted the IT Officer or the JCR President. This is an unreasonable and dangerous argument. As a democratic principle, all those who are eligible to vote should be able to vote with the same ease as others and to expect these people to have to jump through a series of hoops to record their vote is unfair. It is known that one person did contact the IT officer and it took several hours for them to record their vote, furthermore it seems an individual contacted the SU who were not able to resolve the issue in time for the end of the polls [sic].
“These experiences might have put other students off and go to show that it was not an easy process to get their vote counted. Furthermore, the confidence required for a fresher who may have never spoken to or met either the IT officer or the JCR president is underestimated, particularly as they might have believed it was a problem of their own doing.”
The statement emphasised that the motion was not “a retrospective attempt to change the outcome of the election” and “is merely an attempt to ensure that we have a fair election.”
One member was recorded as having said: “The point made saying that it is unfair to expect freshers to get in contact with the committee about voting problems does not make sense. Everyone here is an adult and that’s not unreasonable to expect someone who wanted to vote to do that.”
A JCR member then responded: “I think it is a base level principle. Individuals may not have wanted to hassle people or message people who they have never met. They tried to log in and as a basic principle it is unreasonable to get people to go through all of those hoops. For some people the barrier of vote should not be higher than for others.”
Members expressed concern about a re-election being unfair as the results of the first election had already been published: “I think it is completely unfair to say you can void the first election because everyone has seen the votes now. You can’t change that by voiding the first one, there’s no way that they will be treated separately. It will create completely different incentives for people which will make it completely unfair.”
In response, another student claimed: “I’ve heard people saying that they would vote for someone they didn’t vote for before because they wouldn’t want that person to lose now. Also I have heard the other way round. I think it would be viewed as another election and if we do another one that last election would be void.”
The vote at the emergency meeting saw 50 votes against the motion to have another election, and 47 in favour. As such, the motion failed.
The JCR Committee had earlier this term agreed to extend the period of voting in regards to a referendum about the role of the social secretary, as people had reported issues with voting. When asked why the same protocol was not being followed in the JCR Committee elections, a member responded: “The reason we extended the referendum voting at the time was because we knew there were a few issues at the time. The reason it wasn’t the case this time was because we were unaware that there were all of these issues as only two people got in touch with [the IT Officer].”
Cherwell can report that the St Edmund Hall JCR Committee did not follow the guidelines of the constitution when organising voting times for the election. The Constitution states that the dates and times of the election must be announced seven days in advance, which did not take place. Teddy Hall’s Constitution does not provide for a specific Returning Officer and instead this is a role undertaken by the IT Officer, who is appointed by the JCR President in consultation with the Committee.
The St Edmund Hall JCR President has been contacted for comment.
When an Instagram video of Taylor Swift sitting at the end of her bed in jeans asked me to “check out” Folklore, I waited until it got dark. Only after another day of remote work, filled with homecooked dinner, did I build a campfire and allow myself to press play. We listened through in silence, gazing up at the gap in the trees.
I can remember exactly when I first heard each album drop this seasick summer: I listened to Little Simz’s Drop 6 watching the rain outside my window at 4am; Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now was on a three hour drive to the ocean; during Lady Gaga’s Chromatica I stared at fish through the slits of a dock; and of course, I squealed to my current flatmate the moment Ariana Grande’s Positions flashed up on Spotify.
Online hysteria surrounding Folklore was nothing short of extreme. It was streamed 80.6 million times in the first day, making Swift the fasting selling artist in 2020 and the fastest selling female artist of all time. Twittersphere even compared Folklore to King Lear, which Shakespeare wrote during an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.
Lockdown has heightened our collective experience of album drops. In a time of physical separation, bonding over a shared auditory experience is a privilege we haven’t taken for granted. The buffet style of Spotify and its competitors have given individuals the ability to build up larger music libraries than traditional pay-as-you go records or CDs would ever allow – I’m sure we’ve all heard parents or grandparents talking about saving up to buy that hot record. If you can only acquire a limited amount of music, you’re going to choose what everyone else is listening to.
The growing trend of anti-mainstream music snobbery has been met with a renewed gratefulness for anyone who is creating right now. Obscurify is a plug-in that strips data from Spotify to calculate the percentage of how basic or obscure your music taste is in comparison to the general population. This summer my score was the lowest it had ever been, but somehow I didn’t mind. All it meant was that I had listened to the music my real-life, and social media, friends were listening to at the moment, allowing me to participate in a global movement.
We’ve had to put in an unusual amount of work to find what to listen to this summer. Gone are moments of random exposure such as Top 40 pop radio blasted at you in high street stores, Drum and Bass Father on a night out, or whatever is oozing out of the person’s earphones next to you on the bus. However, more work does not necessarily mean we have had more choice. Scrolling through TikTok is probably the place where we have been the most exposed to the greatest variety of music, but we are at the mercy of an algorithm.
The result is the Spotify playlist Viral Hits, a franken-mesh of high grossing big names and alt-bedroom-pop one-hit wonders shot to the top thanks to a certain 15 second section of their song. Perhaps the extreme popularity of this summer’s big album drops along with Tiktok hits indicates decision fatigue more than anything else. In a pandemic, maybe we can be excused for liking what everyone else likes.
It is sometimes said that the historical narrative of Queer Cinema has been applied retrospectively. Many of the arguments which dispute positive views of films of the past are quick to point to undue focus on characters or storylines with hints of LGBTQ+ themes which might not have been recognised at the time. Despite this, there are some films whose contribution to the overall history of LGBTQ+ rights in this country is undoubtable. ‘Victim’ is one such film.
It tells the story of Melville Farr, on the surface a successful London lawyer in a happy marriage, yet who conceals the secret of his sexuality from all. When his former lover, ‘Boy’ Barrett contacts him asking for help to pay off blackmailers, he ignores his requests. Barrett has stolen money from his employers and is caught by the police. Aware that his sexuality would soon become clear, he commits suicide in his cell. Farr, racked with guilt, resolves to take on the ring of blackmailers, yet each of their victims that he talks to refuses to help, prefering to pay the money in order to keep their private lives secret. Finally, he resolves to help the police catch them, knowing that it will most likely destroy his promising career.
There is little fanfare in the 25th minute of the film when Detective Inspector Harris, investigating Barrett’s suicide, admits that he suspects he was “homosexual”, the first known use of the word in an English-language film and a landmark moment in the history of Queer Cinema. He explains to his naive deputy that 90% of blackmail cases had a homosexual element, and this led the laws criminalising homosexuality to become known as the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’. For the viewers of the day, this would have been intimately linked to reality, after a clutch of high-profile cases in the 1950s brought the issue back to the forefront of public conscience. Most notably, the Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s imprisonment in 1954, which partly triggered the foundation of the Wolfenden Committee, delivering the recommendation that homosexuality should be decriminalised in 1957. Eventually, after a long period of struggle in both Houses, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 achieved this in England and Wales. One of the major sponsors of the Act was The Earl of Arran, a Tory Peer whose elder gay brother had committed suicide in 1957, who once reportedly told director Basil Dearden that ‘Victim’ had been the film which finally secured a majority for his Private Members Bill in the Lords.
The film, of course, does not live up to modern standards in its progressive attitudes. Almost all of the primary characters are either blackmailers or gay men, and there was some criticism at the time that this diluted its message. There is little suggestion of the potential for bisexuality, with the audience left sympathetic to Farr’s wife, who resolves to stay with him through the prosecution of the blackmailers even when a homophobic slur is painted outside their house. Nor is there any discussion of gay women, and it is only the working-class Barrett that pays the blackmailers with his life. Nonetheless, ‘Victim’ illuminates an important moment in the history of LGBTQ+ rights, primarily in normalising the existence of homosexuality and encouraging empathy. Much of the language of Inspector Harris, one of the few heterosexual characters in the film, is of “poor devils” with “abnormalities” in search of a “magic cure”. This is indicative of the mentalities of audiences at this time, with a 1965 poll run by the Daily Mail finding that 63% of its readers were in favour of decriminalisation, but 95% still believing in the need for treatment or help for gay men.
‘Victim’ is made all the more poignant from a retrospective point of view with the knowledge that Dirk Bogarde himself lived his life as a closeted gay man. His struggles in the film were real, and it was often said by those who knew the industry at the time that his refusal to enter into a ‘marriage of convenience’ limited his chances of a Hollywood career. You cannot fail to view this film with this in mind, as well as the knowledge that the blackmail element would partly cease, although not end entirely, just seven years later. It is also important not to underestimate the positive effects of this film for gay men, many of whom had lived their lives in denial, and for the first time saw genuine and credible representations of their often unassuming lives on screen, endorsed by Bogarde, a matinee idol of 1950s British cinema. Relph later wrote of his film that his primary aim was to “show that homosexuality may be found in otherwise completely responsible citizens in every strata of society”. In this he is successful. These are not activists living in the fantasy of the metropolitan ideal of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ but, simply, victims. They are profoundly normal lawyers, actors, barmen and hairdressers, found in all walks of life, that do not demand attention, only sympathy. There was no more powerful message required at this moment in history, and the power of this is as profound to a modern viewer as it was in 1961.
British school parodies are some of my favourite TikToks. From rating the top ten school hymns (Cauliflowers Fluffy got the top spot, if you’re wondering), to pretending to be the popular girl at school, it’s funny – and a little unnerving – to realise that my childhood was the exact same as everyone else’s. But amongst these generally harmless sketches, TikTok users are contributing to the classist ‘chav’ stereotype that has a long history of working class oppression.
I thought we’d had this conversation. In fact, when I first saw one of these videos, I was confused; I checked the likes, not expecting many, and saw they numbered in the millions. The chav hashtag on the app has almost a billion views at the time of writing this. It’s full of teenagers slapping foundation on, streaking bronzer across their cheekbones, and artfully letting a false eyelash hang off in their impersonation of a ‘chav.’ Hooped earrings, chewing gum, and Victoria’s Secret spray complete the look. In many of these videos, the creator acts out a scene as the ‘chav’: a dumb, loudmouthed girl with a rough accent and poor grammar.
A sketch with 2.6 million likes shows a ‘nerd’ transformed into a ‘chav.’ In it, the girl asks for a shower, and is told “Chavs don’t shower.” Another, imitating a character select game screen, describes the ‘chav’ character as “late every day to school”, “bottom set”, and as having “anger issues.” In an uncomfortable display of profiling, one TikTok simply zooms in on a group of pre-teens in tracksuits with the viral sound ‘chav check’ playing in the background.
One user describes Khloe Kardashian, among other celebrities, as “looking chav-ish”, ironically hitting on a key feature of the discriminatory use of the word. ‘Chav’ trends have long been part of the mainstream, but gold hoops, scrunchies, and jogging bottoms on celebrities aren’t considered trashy or cheap. This double standard is the hallmark of appropriation; trendy on the rich and tacky on the poor.
TikTok’s chav character is also undeniably gendered. The vast majority of the videos on the ‘chav’ hashtag involve users impersonating ‘chavvy’ women – coarse, gobby, and aggressive. It seems that talking back at the teacher and getting angry isn’t fitting behaviour for the educated, middle class woman. This feeds into the idea, learnt even in our schools, that a girl is quiet, patient, and polite; God forbid she play class clown or act cocky. Our society thinks aggression is reserved for the lower classes; we know this from Jeremy Kyle’s circus of a TV show in which he would bring in low-income families in order to exploit and aggravate serious issues they faced. This is a serious misrepresentation of the poorest and most vulnerable communities.
It seems the ‘chav’ caricature, which depicts the working class as trashy, aggressive and antisocial, is making a sinister comeback among a generation who appear ignorant of its role in demonising the lower classes.
The etymology of the word chav is unclear, but its harmful associations are obvious from the popular misconception that it is an acronym for ‘council house and violence.’ The media played a large role in legitimising use of the word; ‘chav’ was used in 946 British newspaper articles in 2005. In the same year, Boris Johnson added his unwanted two cents in a column for the Telegraph in which he described the UK’s poorest communities as made up of “chavs”, “losers”, “burglars”, “drug addicts” and “criminals.”
The 2003 TV show Little Britain saw Matt Lucas and David Walliams – two middle-class and privately educated comedians – in velour tracksuits and hoop earrings in an imitation of working-class women. Vicky Pollard, played by Lucas, is a vulgar, ineloquent woman who shoplifts, has a teenage pregnancy and swaps the baby for a Westlife CD, and spends a year in prison. Pollard is often seen shouting in a broad accent littered with poor pronunciation and grammatical errors. The TikTok chav sketches are no more than a modern day reincarnation of this kind of tasteless satire.
The chav stereotype has always been political; to pretend otherwise is to ignore an entrenched class system that permeates every level of British society. Politicians have long taken advantage of the unsympathetic portrayal of those of low social status to justify benefit cuts. The myth of the lazy jobless masses “scrounging off the state” was employed time and time again during the post-2008 era of recession. It’s no coincidence that in Little Britain, one of Vicky Pollard’s story arcs involves her trying to get pregnant in order to be eligible for council housing. The cultural representation of the working classes as dirty, stupid, and lazy creates the ideal political climate for slashing public service funding.
It is for this reason that the resurgence of chav-bashing is so dangerous. A society that is compassionate and understanding of the many factors that contribute to poverty is necessary in order to bridge the vast wealth gap between the rich and poor in this country. It might seem amusing to older generations to think of TikTok as a political space, but a new generation who will soon be of voting age are growing up believing that working class steretypes are acceptable forms of humour. Even accounting for the generational gap is giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Teenagers on TikTok are not necessarily to blame for this; a significant proportion of the users making these videos are from the US and elsewhere, and are likely unaware of the history of working class demonisation in the UK. The creator of a ‘chav check’ Instagram filter – disturbing proof that the trend is expanding out of its original platform – is Filipino, and defended the filter by saying: “Since chav culture has become embedded in our meme and pop culture landscape, social media has helped fuel people’s interest in hopping onto trend.” The history of the word has been erased, and now, harnessing the new power of viral internet culture, ‘chav’ is going global. But the phenomenon had to have started in the UK, and there are plenty of British TikTok stars also participating in this new cycle of mocking the working classes.
Just a few weeks ago, over 300 Conservative MPs voted against extending provision of free school meals to children over the school holidays. In a now deleted tweet, one of these politicians, Ben Bradley, linked the provision of free school meals with “crack dens” and “brothels.” The demonisation of the working class lives on, and TikTok is only making it worse – its never been more important to educate yourself on the shameful history of ‘chav-bashing’ in British culture.
Oxford’s academics are the most cited researchers in the UK and the second most cited in all of Europe, a report by Clarivate suggests. Oxford boasts 52 individuals on the 2020 Highly Cite Researchers List, out of a total of 6167 worldwide.
Professor Patrick Grant, the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at Oxford, said: “We are fortunate to have so many eminent researchers who are addressing many of the world’s most pressing problems and exciting opportunities. Their work and the impact it produces inspires us all.
“This global recognition of individuals also speaks to the excellence of the research students, early career researchers and staff who support and contribute to our research.”
According to the list, Harvard University in the US remains the most cited institution (188 researchers) in the world and the Max Planck Society in Germany remains the most cited institution in Europe (70 researchers).
China has experienced a major surge in influential research over the past decade, going from 636 researchers making up 10.2% of the list in 2019 to 770 researchers making up 12.1% of the list in 2020. In particular, Tsinghua University in Beijing has moved from 19th place to 9th place in just one year. This places China in second place for research influence, below the USA and above the UK.
The list is assembled by analysing the top 1% most cited papers across 21 fields from 2009-2019. To be featured, an academic must have published a large number of highly cited papers and have a large number of total citations. The threshold value for a paper to be classified as ‘highly cited’ differs across fields, with Clinical Medicine requiring the highest threshold and Economics and Business requiring the lowest.
David Pendlebury, a Senior Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, said: “In the race for knowledge, it is human capital that is fundamental and this list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at Oxford University who are having a great impact on the research community as measured by the rate at which their work is being cited by others.”
Laura Herz, Associate Head of the MPLS Division (Research), added: “I am really delighted to be included in the 2020 Highly Cited Researchers List. It’s fantastic to see so many researchers from a number of different MPLS (Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences) Departments represented which demonstrates the strong research base we have within the Division and across the University as a whole.”
The Dean of Christ Church has stepped back from college duties, the college anounced last week. New allegations that Percy behaved inappropriately towards a woman have recently emerged, This has sparked a dispute between Church of England authorities and the Dean’s supporters.
Church authorities received a complaint against the Very Rev Professor Martyn Percy, who is also head of the Christ Church Cathedral. Percy subsequently stepped back from his role in the college.
The details of the complaint have not been confirmed publicly, however The Mail on Sunday reports that Percy acted irresponsibly towards a woman during Sunday service last month. The woman claims the Dean told her: “I couldn’t take my eyes off you this morning.”
She also claims that Percy stroked her hair. According to The Mail on Sunday, Percy has denied both claims. The Diocese of Oxford, the administrative body of the Church of England in Oxfordshire, is investigating the issue.
Allies of Percy have come to his support. The Mail on Sunday quotes one ally saying: “Martyn is in an impossible position of being unable to defend himself while detailed allegations against him are being leaked all round the place.”
Others have said the claims are a “weapon” to remove him from his job. After these comments were published, the Diocese of Oxford released a statement condemning attempts to support the Dean.
It said: “We are disappointed that those seeking to support the Dean are reportedly trying to downplay the severity of the complaint.
“Such actions belittle the complainant and only add to the distress of anyone else considering a complaint against someone in a senior position. The complaint, which has been brought to the Church under the Clergy Discipline Measure, will be properly and thoroughly investigated.”
Allies have now criticised the Diocese’s statement. David Lamming, a friend of the Dean, told The Church Times it was a “wholly inappropriate public comment while the current allegation is under investigation”. Others have claimed that the comment was one-sided, not taking into account the behaviour of the Dean’s critics, including one member of Christ Church’s Governing Body allegedly anonymously briefing journalists
In response to reports in the media, Christ Church has stressed that Percy has not resigned, but “voluntarily withdrawn” from his duties.
Christ Church shared the following statement with college members: “The Dean of Christ Church, the Very Revd Martyn Percy, has voluntarily withdrawn with immediate effect from all duties and pastoral responsibilities in his role as Dean of the College and Cathedral. Christ Church will not be commenting further whilst necessary inquiries are under way. The Charity Commission and relevant Church of England authorities are being kept fully informed.”
These developments come after a long-running dispute between the Dean and the college Governing Body.
Disagreements emerged in 2017 when Percy complained that his salary of just under £95,000 was insufficient and below the median for Oxford heads of colleges. He was suspended in 2018 after being accused of “immoral, scandalous, or disgraceful conduct”. However, the charges against Percy were dismissed and he was reinstated in August 2019..
The row was reignited in February this year, when academics called Percy a “manipulative little turd” and a “little Hitler” in leaked emails.
As the Dean was appointed by a Letters Patent, only the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury can request his resignation, making it difficult for his critics to replace him. In May, 41 members of the Christ Church Governing Body signed a letter asking for the Charity Commission to remove him. This prompted the Commission to order a mediation process between the two sides.
Christ Church welcomed the Commission’s intervention, saying that the dispute “has undoubtedly gone on for far too long”.
Percy claims he has faced religious and disability discrimination and has launched an employment tribunal against the college. The case is due to be heard next year.
Percy has also been accused of mishandling sexual assault allegations at the college. However, he was exonerated of these charges after a Church of England investigation found he “acted entirely appropriately in each case”.
Martyn Percy has been contacted for comment.
Correction, 09/01/21 – David Yamming was corrected to David Lamming.
I’m writing this sitting on the floor of my student room at university in France. I thought I would be spending lockdown alone but all my flatmates decided to invade Lyon; there isn’t too much space, but we get on alright. We watch films together, do yoga every evening and, most importantly, inspect our basket of fruit and vegetables that we collect each week. We signed up to a scheme called AMAP (the French love their acronyms) which roughly stands for the Association for Supporting Small-Scale Farming, a nation-wide distribution system that ensures a fair price for both parties and fresh, in-season vegetables for us. Now every Tuesday we wait to see what mud-covered, gnarly, sometimes-past-their-prime veggies have been harvested from fields nearby.
When our basket first arrives, there are moans and groans. “Why have we got 30 radishes? What on earth is that?”. Then comes a little meal plan; chard risotto Friday evening, fennel gratin Saturday lunch, squash soup and bread Saturday evening… Those knobbly, dirty seasonal vegetables are transformed into something delicious.
We normally think of winter as a barren season, however it is anything but. Go on the hunt for seasonal vegetables and you’ll be amazed at the variety. Okay, potatoes are a-plenty, but keep an eye out post-halloween for sweet-fleshed pumpkins, all kinds of leafy green veg, beautiful purple beetroots and the unassuming fennel, cabbage and cauliflower.
As the clocks turn back, the culinary holy trinity – onion, carrot and celery – should all be easy to find. Why are they sacred? Because with them you can form a base, a soffritto, for a myriad of soups, stews, and sauces. The basic ratio is 2 onions : 1 carrot : 1 stick of celery. Chop into a fine dice and sauté on a low heat in olive oil for around ten minutes. Then go from there. Take inspiration from my October article and make a minestrone. Or how about a chilli con or sin carne for a weekend dinner with your flatmates? And if you’re feeling lazy, add to scrambled eggs for an outrageously tasty breakfast.
Pumpkins often have a rather sad fate after halloween. The UK bins about 8 million pumpkins after halloween each year. However these winter squashes are perfect for pieces, warming bowls of soup and festive veggie loaves. Check out the first wonderful winter recipe:
Squash, Mushroom, Spinach and Onion Pie
This recipe is quite involved but no stage is difficult. To cut down on time, make sure you start to defrost your spinach earlier in the day, and consider roasting the butternut squash at the same time as you cook your rice and fry your onion and mushroom.
Roll your pastry into a rectangle a bit bigger than an A3 sheet of paper. Transfer to a baking sheet lined with a piece of baking parchment and place in the fridge for at least two hours.
For the butternut layer
1 butternut squash, peeled and cubed
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Roast the butternut squash cubes in the oven drizzled with oil and seasoned at 180C until soft, around half an hour, turning as necessary after twenty minutes. Leave to cool.
For the rice layer
100g rice (I used Camargue red rice for its nuttiness and chewiness but basmati, brown, long-grain would all work equally well)
Cumin seeds
Bay leaf
Olive oil
Cloves
2 onions
250g mushrooms
Cook the rice according to packet instructions, adding a sprinkle of cumin seeds, five cloves, a bay leaf and a drizzle of olive oil to the cooking water. I strongly recommend to follow the instructions for a light, dry rice – we don’t want stodgy student rice here. I know it’s good, but it just won’t work! When cooked, remove the bay leaf and cloves.
Chop your onions into thin slices. Add to a pan with a drizzle of olive oil on a low heat and cook for around eight minutes. Meanwhile chop your mushrooms into thin slices. Add the mushrooms to the onion and cook until soft.
Mix everything together and leave to cool.
For the spinach layer
300g frozen spinach
50g pine nuts
Leave to thaw in a sieve. When thawed, wring out in your hands. Wring out again. You want to get out as much water as possible. Toast your pine nuts in a pan.
Assembly
Start with the rice layer – spread an even layer of the mixture on the middle of the pastry in a rectangle about 45cm x 12cm. Then on goes a layer of spinach, pine nuts scattered over. After that pile your butternut squash chunks on top. Don’t overdo it! Wrap one side of the pastry rectangle over the filling, then the other. Make sure they overlap with an inch of pastry – use a knife to cut any excess. Carefully turn over so that the ‘seam’ is underneath. Tuck the top and the bottom underneath, pinching to seal. Use the extra pastry for decorations; mushrooms, leaves, holly branches, whatever takes your fancy. Score the pastry with diagonal lines and place your decorations on top. Crack egg into a bowl and whisk. Cover the entire pie with this egg glaze. Then into a preheated oven at 170C for 20 minutes or until the pastry is gloriously golden and crispy. Present on a wooden chopping board and listen to the crackle as you cut through the pastry casing to reveal three gorgeously colourful layers.
And now for something a little more lowkey! The winter vegetable with the worst reputation has to be the Brussel sprout. When I was little, I hated them. Each Christmas I would beg that no more than two be put on my plate. Now I’m older, know better, and am less sensitive to the bitter compounds that make them so widely hated. And all the better, since Brussel sprouts are high fibre, contain more potassium than a banana, and (so long as there aren’t shortages…) should be great on a student budget. Still not convinced? Next time you make a stir fry, shred a few and chuck them in. At worse, you won’t even notice them. At best, you’ll be able to navigate the Christmas table much better.
Then come the winter vegetables that leave you perplexed; fennel, cabbage and cauliflower. Fennel tastes too strong, cauliflower, too weak, and cabbage is just a bit, well, gassy. You could make a cauliflower cheese, a coleslaw, or a cheesy fennel gratin, but adding cheese feels like cheating and anyway, isn’t the aim to be able to taste these winter veggies rather than drowning them in dairy in the hope that no-one will notice what they’re actually eating? So, to put these baffling oddballs in the spotlight, I really recommend a good roasting. It’s shockingly simple. For fennel, chop in half, then cut inch-thick wedges and put carefully into a roasting tray. Likewise for cabbage. For cauliflower, separate the head into florets. Then cover in olive oil. A couple of cloves of garlic or some sliced onion would make a nice addition. A drizzle of balsamic vinegar for extra sweetness. Thinly sliced lemon works a treat too. If you’re feeling like it, add some spices, such as cumin, ginger, or turmeric. Use your hands to make sure your veggies are evenly covered with mixture. Then pop into the oven at 180C for around three quarters of an hour, turning every ten minutes, adding more oil if needed, until melty, oily, and slightly blackened at the edges. These can then be stored in the fridge in Tupperware for up to five days, and make a brilliantly quick and simple lunch paired with pitta, hummus, falafel.
For a winter spin on hummus, look no further than the beet greens family, to which Swiss chard and beetroot both belong. If you don’t make your own hummus and you have a blender, start now! It is infinitely better than the shop-bought stuff which is bulked up with a disgraceful volume of water. Take a jar of cooked chickpeas (save the chickpea water), three tablespoons of tahini, a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed, and the juice of a lemon and blitz together. To make a brilliantly fluffy, silky hummus, add a good amount of the chickpea water back in. Taste as you go and add more garlic or lemon as necessary. (Sometimes I get up to five cloves, depending on the strength of the garlic and whether I’m in a particularly garlicky mood!) In winter, add a couple of medium-sized cooked beetroots to your hummus for a stunning colour.
However, what about Swiss chard? Last but by no means least, is my recipe for purple pasta with sautéed chard.
Purple pasta with sautéed chard
Makes 2 servings.
Ingredients:
200g 00 flour (normal flour does work too, but 00 flour shouldn’t be too difficult to seek out and is more authentic) plus extra for rolling
2 eggs
1 bunch of Swiss chard
2 small cooked beetroot
Method:
Mush the cooked beetroot with the back of a fork or blitz, until you have a fine purée. Then make the pasta dough. This is not as complicated as you might think, though if you are a beginner you might want to make a batch or two without the beetroot and then move on to this recipe when you’ve got the hang of how a pasta dough works. To make it easier to clear up, put your flour into a large mixing bowl and add the eggs and beetroot purée to a well in the middle. Use a fork to draw the flour in and start kneading as soon as you can. Knead for around eight minutes, adding a little flour when necessary, until you have a smooth dough. Cover in plastic wrap and put in the fridge to rest for half an hour.
At this point, get a large saucepan of water up to the boil and add a big pinch of salt. Cut your chard into inch long pieces and sauté in a large frying pan (larger than you think you need, you’re going to add the pasta to this pan), adding the tougher stems first, then the leaves at the end of cooking. While this is cooking, make your pasta ribbons. Take a quarter of the dough at a time, keeping the rest underneath the plastic wrap, use a rolling pin to roll out your dough on a lightly floured surface as thinly and evenly as possible. Cut into ribbons and leave on a floured baking tray while you roll and cut the rest. Add to the boiling pasta water, making sure that it doesn’t stick at the beginning. Fresh homemade pasta cooks in no time at all. Sometimes just a minute does it, depending on how thin your noodles are, so keep tasting every 20 seconds or so if you don’t feel confident. Add a good glug of oil to the Swiss chard pan and when your pasta is cooked, transfer directly into this pan, not worrying too much if you don’t manage to drain all the water. Toss and serve as it is, or with a big dollop of pesto on top (head over to @greens_and_grains for two scrumptious pesto recipes).
And that brings this whirlwind tour of winter veg to a close. Surprising, delicious and certainly not boring.
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