Saturday 14th June 2025
Blog Page 461

Watching, Seeing

Trudy Ross
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Watching, Seeing

I wonder why it matters so much to me that they’re watching. When I picture you, pulling up at the side of a cobbled street after all those years apart, I picture them too. Watching from the windows, noticing how your eyes linger over my face, how long we hold each other, how the silence between us seems weighted with emotion. I imagine their comments to one another, about how we’re really, truly in love, their eyes fixed on a scene of epic proportions. And what’s worse, much worse, is that I imagine their inner monologues, the wistful twinge within them when they see something they wish they had, something they can never share in. Something that is ours, yours and mine, mostly mine, something that they desperately ache for in their all-too-human souls, just as I have ached, just as I have screamed and writhed and sobbed with frustration, just as I have slouched hopelessly and let my fire die, die and resurge, always with a desire to eat something – 

It’s not that I take pleasure in their pain. I don’t think. So what is it? It’s the sense of peace that comes with the close of a door which was slightly cracked open. It’s knowing that they understand the thing you always wanted them to understand. That you are not worthless; you are a real, valuable human being, you deserve to be seen, and what’s more, some people do see you. Proving that you exist and that you can love and be loved. Because when you don’t know whether they know that, when you suspect them of glazing over you like they do every other inconsequential acquaintance they happen upon, scattered patternlessly throughout their daily lives – well, it leaves you screaming. Writhing and questioning. What am I? A face within a teeming mass of faces? God, God, no. 

But when you did drive up shakily in some old blue car, taking a little too long to park, on a day that came with an uncomfortable mix of strong wind and feeble rain, they weren’t watching from the window. And you didn’t hold me like I wanted you to. You were thinking about other things: the weather, the luggage, the practicalities. It wasn’t just me. 

Of course, it was me. It’s just that it was also you. And it was a thousand other people and their thoughts, their swarms of love and worry and passion that don’t live to justify my existence, or any existence, not in full at least. Nobody watched us as I helped with the bags, as you told me about the trivialities, the way the roads had been, the way you’d had to carefully manoeuvre it all to ensure you weren’t more than half an hour late. And yet I was glad they weren’t watching, because all of a sudden I felt unsure. I couldn’t let that uncertainty be cemented in the minds of others.

You can’t make an identity out of imagined things. 

Nobody was watching us later, in the warm darkness, when the light of a candle brushed against your strawberry blond hair. Nobody was watching when your hands on my shoulders burned me up with deep bodily pain and light, other-worldly pleasure. Nobody heard the things you whispered in my ear, the things I had to write down later and keep forever because they were so damn beautiful. I wonder what I whispered back. I wonder how you remember it, how you remember it all. 

Yet I don’t worry that you’ve forgotten. No, you can’t see through other people’s eyes, can’t understand the significance they place on certain things, can’t see exactly what you mean to them. But there are times when you know. You aren’t completely alone. There’s a reciprocity somewhere down the line, there’s the closest you can get to what they call understanding, seeing. It’s not something you need to build an identity. But it can help, on the days when you feel a little shaky, when you’re screaming somewhere. Pacifies the hunger. 

Nobody was watching as you were leaving. Maybe they were, but by that point I no longer cared where anyone was looking, except for you. I wished I hadn’t been so critical at the start, that I hadn’t wasted energy longing for a sky without rain and a version of you that could read my body without effort. Because every stupid, oblivious thing you did that morning we knew was the last, like talking about your plans for later rather than telling me what I meant to you, like playing a song I’d never heard rather than the ones we’d listened to together on the cusp of a gentle sleep; they were all the most perfect things you could have done. And only I was watching. Not them, not even you.

For a better future, activism must thrive online

Amber Haslam
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For a better future, activism must thrive online

“Is there hope for the next decade?” a debate at the Oxford Union asked in January, just weeks before panic began to spread over the escalating coronavirus crisis. By March we were under lockdown, yet in this debate visions of the future remained untainted by the prospect of a pandemic.

Now, it looms over our everyday lives, our thoughts, plans and hopes for the future; it dictates the present, but our angst also lies in worrying how it will dictate the future. The next decade suddenly takes on a very different form in our imaginations. Uncertainty, fear and dread: these feeling don’t leave much room for hope and optimism.

But the hope we do have, to quell our fears of the unknown, is that things will soon ‘return to normal’. That we will watch the news and not be confronted with a mounting death toll, that we will see our families again, that our worlds will open up once more.

While we of course long for this harrowing reality to be replaced by our old, ‘normal’ one, questions are starting to be asked about if this ‘normal’ is really what we should be aspiring to. A Google search of ‘new normal’ flooded me with articles about how the world will adapt to a post-pandemic age and what our new reality will look like in terms of transport, work, and socialising. But what about a more drastic, fundamental change to our ‘normal’? Could this pandemic be a turning point, a moment to reject the abhorrent, shocking traits of our pre-COVID-19 world?

Into the measures we take to ease this crisis and ‘return to normal’, can we incorporate our visions of a more equal society? Can we close the wealth gap, topple the patriarchy, embed compassion into government policy, banish greed and invest in the NHS rather than just clapping for it? And on a personal level, can we take what we have learnt about the value of community into the future?

These questions join the countless others swirling round our collective conscious. And like all the others, our answers and speculations are shrouded in doubt, undermined by unpredictability.

But what is certain is that this presents an opportunity for drastic reform. Disasters and upheaval pave the way for change, good or bad. Our modern welfare state took shape after the crises of the Great Depression and Second World War. But as we pick up the pieces in the aftermath of this crisis, and face the oncoming recession, activism and social change may not stand in the foreground of our focus.

Activism in the time of lockdown and social distancing is more challenging than ever. With street protests – one of the most powerful and tried ways of creating change and raising awareness – banned, and activists reliant on the online realm of social media to continue their work, the question of hope for the future does seem uncertain.

A brief look at the history of social movements shows that fighting for justice involved leaving the house and gathering en masse. The French Revolution, the Suffrage movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Occupy Movement, Extinction Rebellion: all have involved taking to the streets. Now, not only are we limited to our homes, but ‘taking to the streets’ has completely new associations, of rebelling in the wrong sense, putting the lives of others at risk by ignoring collective responsibility.

That said, powerful displays of defiance and protest have taken place within the parameters of social distancing and lockdown. In Belgium, doctors and nurses at the Saint-Pierre hospital turned their backs as Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès walked past in an effort to bring recognition to their efforts on the front line.

Likewise, activism online has grown and taken on new significance. The Friday For Futures movement, which saw school strikes in 7,500 cities to protest the lack of action against climate change, is now gaining momentum online with the #DigitalStrike. Its effectiveness, compared to physical protests, is perhaps questionable – it has 50 to 100 participants each Friday, and gains less attention from governments distracted by the pandemic – but in times like these all we can do is adapt, and they have done so with determination and hope.

We are now more embedded in the online realm than ever, and activism is clearly no exception. If there is hope for the rest of this decade depends, however, on if movements for change can thrive online, during a pandemic and its aftermath, and if they can achieve a better, more equal ‘normal’. Perhaps it will be a combination of activism online and in the community – which we have seen already through peoples’ acts of kindness and solidarity in the past months – that will propel us towards a better future.

Perhaps out of this time of pain, loss and fear, will come the opportunity to create a better world. But it may be years before we know. Fundamental change may be hard to see, but with hope and adaptive activism, it is possible.

Slightly Stained

Anonymous
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Slightly Stained
My breath is since-soured coffee and yours is sweet cigarette smoke. Stale and sleepy and sweating sticky heat, we curl        – in that vast walloping, enveloping duvet, you know the one, that smells like Polish washing powder –                                             bodies wound together, entwined, intertwined, like great gangly grown up fetuses twisted and coated in the folds of that too big, yellowing duvet. We are wrapped in soft green Polish hills, asleep in fluffy clean Polish clouds. Anatomical specimens, suspended, glistening green and gold in the contents of their jar, still – silent, glazed like sugared doughnuts, alive and yet deader-than-dead, Fine membrane separating our slimy, conjoined bodies from outside air. Let in, and we are spoilt. We are stained somewhat yellow; moulding, souring, curling at the edges, a fog of yesterday’s breath. We fell asleep to early rumblings of the dual carriageway chorus, no toothpaste kisses for us. Air of sweat and last night’s fucking, the remaining smog of lust and living. We are inside a kaleidoscope, Trapped within a jewellery box, Viewing a world from behind a stained glass window. Prostration at the altar of the Saint-Chapelle. Worshipping those glowing wet reds, and purples, and blues As we stew, inside this orange, and brown, and beige. My breath in your mouth, your breath in mine. You gave up coffee a long time ago, and I never smoked.

The two

Anna Ticehurst
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The two

They trot and wade back from their night, woozy eyes blinking slowly in the dark. This invisible pool that surrounds them is tension, it is magic and for some reason they cannot stop laughing.

They pry the door closed and settle briefly in the warmth. The glowing bedside lamp is their only light. Its embers surround them, licking their skin and feeding their kisses.

They sleep entangled in each other, and it is a beautiful vulnerable mosaic. The rises and falls of breath are long and sweet and low.

Their bodies grow pale and cold in the daylight now, like they have been drained. The mosaic is a stark jumble of limbs and substance.

They part in the crisp with sleep and crusted eyes, heads and bellies dully aching and clothes sticky
And it doesn’t matter now who they are, or were, or will be
It doesn’t matter.

The grey itself

Anna Ticehurst
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The grey itself

I think about it a lot.
Not him, but the event.
Even calling it an ‘event’ makes my body writhe with cringe, makes my teeth feel like they might clatter together and crumble, pooling in my throat.
Picturing him disgusts me and so I would rather not try to do so. It makes me feel dirty in myself, which I know is not fair, but I cannot help how I feel.

Mutuality was not present that night. Eurgh. Calling it ‘that night’ makes it sound worse than it was, like I was raped or murdered. I wasn’t. It is not that simple and often isn’t. But the ‘event’ and ‘that night’ are necessary descriptors, for what else am I meant to call it? Why do I feel guilty adding weight to it through description?

Linguistic details aside, mutuality was not present. It was notably lacking.

I am lying. It was there at the start, at the very start. It was not notably lacking until-
Until the wash phased into grey, never reaching black but certainly grey and definitely not white.

Once it has happened that’s it. It cannot be undone. Confusion clouded my head and hazed my thoughts the following day. I explained the grey to my friends and to my delight they understood exactly what I meant. They could relay back to me my own experience and I did not feel crazy or like I was overreacting.

I do not wholly blame him, but I blame myself. I blame him for not stopping and for the nature of the event but not for the event itself. I blame myself for seducing him in the first place.

It’s funny because it wasn’t a moment that defined anything, myself included.
It was just a moment, clouded with grey but awash with other brighter tones.
But the grey remains, dull and clingy.

And whilst I cannot say exactly what dynamic was at play, I knew I was the weaker one out of us two.

You were old, and I felt like I’d succeeded in seducing you. But that was enough for me.
I didn’t need the rest.
I didn’t ask for the rest, the rest just happened to me.

With a sigh I acknowledge it was ‘just one of those things’.

Control

Anna Ticehurst
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Control

Your fingers chipped unsuccessfully at the nightstand by his bed
You were familiar with its shape

There was something you wanted to say.
You see he is much more perceptive than you think but has no issues with that.
In fact, he rather likes it-
You had not suspected he had noticed.

A thick air of the unsaid seemed to land in your eyes, or maybe it was the August heat causing them to haze, mouth ajar, lips glassy and glossed. It was as if the hinge to your jaw was broken, jammed like a printer out of ink

Your chest expanded and contracted at a steady pace- the control in your voice seemed more of an effort than you tried to let on.

Had this been any other day, he would have brushed off the hair that was hung off your jaw and teased you for not noticing it yourself, but it somehow didn’t quite feel appropriate today.

Your bare feet broke out of the crease in his duvet nestled at the end of the bed, launching a plume of specks into the space between you, and again as they landed back on top.

The paleness of your legs made them vulnerable in the light that shone in from his bedroom window.

The specks soon settled back down onto the linen. He wanted to dust them off so he didn’t have to breath them in. Instead he accepted his fate and returned his attention to you.

You don’t know this, but after you left, he cried.

Decadence, eroticism and indecent beauty: Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain

Megan Stevenson
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Decadence, eroticism and indecent beauty: Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain

Aubrey Beardsley was an intensely talented, risqué artist who stunned his late-Victorian audience. Loved by many for his depiction of the underside of London life, Beardsley was not afraid to draw what went unspoken with unparalleled detail and humour. He died of tuberculosis at just 25, but despite his short career, his work created such a powerful impact that the 1890s became known as the ‘Beardsley Period’.

The Tate Britain’s current exhibition of Beardsley’s work spans his 7-year career with over 200 pieces. It is currently available to explore on the Tate’s website, although it is more of a taster of what the exhibition has to offer than a substitute for a real visit. It left my appetite whetted for a possible visit in the future, in the hopes that the exhibition length will be extended in light of its current closure.

Starting with the ‘Beginnings’ section, the exhibition outlines Beardsley’s meeting with Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the encouragement he received from the famed artist. We are also told about Beardsley’s interest in sexual freedom and gender fluidity, themes which recur throughout his career, repeatedly shocking viewers.

As the exhibition progresses, we trace Beardsley’s rise, fall, and rise again, in and out of public favour. The images Beardsley produced are refreshing in their stark black and white lines, which have a simplicity of form that also allows him to create complex compositions; many have hidden features and humorous repeating motifs (the angry foetus being my personal favourite, see Enter Herodias and Incipit Vita Nova). The popularity of his style gave Beardsley the opportunity to illustrate famous works such as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, and the controversial The Yellow Book, an avant-garde magazine first released in 1894. The association with Wilde, however, would prove to drag Beardsley down following his propulsion skyward. In 1895 when Wilde was prosecuted for “gross indecency”, Beardsley’s close association with the writer in the public’s mind’s eye was near fatal for his career. The exhibition goes on to document Beardsley’s attempt to rise again. The drawings he produces in this time are beautiful, perhaps out of a desire to prove oneself and redeem the fame that seemed lost.

But what is Beardsley most famous for today? Surely it is his eroticism. As I said earlier, this exhibition is clear to highlight his attitudes towards sex and gender for viewers right at the beginning, before Beardsley’s work has even been encountered.

Some of Beardsley’s pieces reference sexuality in subtle ways. Black Coffee, which shows two women sitting beside each other in a café. One woman’s hand reaches under the table towards the lap of her companion, who has brought both of her own hands beneath the table too. The surreptitious sideways glances and the hair pins denoting devil-horns suggest there might be more beneath the surface of this relationship (and beneath the table) than meets the eye.

Other pieces are more explicit. The Impatient Adulterer, for example, shows a man naked from the waist down, holding his penis and peeking between curtains at something we cannot see. A lot of Beardsley’s starkly explicit pieces were not advertised, instead being made available only to a small group of collectors. The “indecency” made the images unpublishable. The Impatient Adulterer did not even make it into Beardsley’s first retrospective show, held at the V&A in 1966. It was deemed too explicit. The world was still not ready for the drawing 70 years after it was created.

Interestingly, this exhibition in 2020 has separated the illustrations deemed most explicit, showcasing them in a separate room. Although on display, their erotic nature makes them distinct from Beardsley’s other works, this perception being emphasised by their physical separation within the exhibition space. Perhaps the world is still not quite ready for Beardsley in all his inky glory.

Percy Jackson and The Failed Adaptation

Abigail Howe
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Percy Jackson and The Failed Adaptation

If you think you received scathing feedback in your tutorials, you should check out Rick Riordan’s emails to Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief’s producers: “the script as a whole is terrible… fans of the books will be angry and disappointed. They will leave the theatre in droves and generate horrible word of mouth.” He’s certainly not the Oracle of Delphi but this prophecy came true. Two films were released, both directed by Chris Columbus (who notably also directed the first two films of the Harry Potter franchise), and both panned by fans. Ten years after the first film’s release, fans were still clamouring for a faithful adaptation. On 14 May, their prayers (and burnt offerings to the gods) were answered.

“Hey Percy Jackson fans, for the past decade you’ve worked hard to champion a faithful on-screen adaption of Percy Jackson’s world,” Riordan said on Twitter. “Some of you have even suggested it would be a great series for Disney+. We couldn’t agree more! We can’t say much more at this stage but we are very excited about the idea of a live-action series of the highest quality, following the storyline of the original ‘Percy Jackson’ five-book series, starting with ‘The Lightning Thief’ in Season 1. Rest assured that Becky and I will be involved in-person in every aspect of the show. There will be much more news in the future, but for now, we have a lot of work to do! Buckle up, demigods. It’s going to be a fantastic, exciting ride!”

It’s a big leap from an author disowning an adaptation, damning the script as “terrible”, writing to schools to ask them not to show the film alongside their studies of the series, to proudly announcing a new adaptation in the works. So, what’s changed?

The gap between film and television adaptations may contribute to this development. The chapters seem episodic, each with their own Freytag’s Pyramid. This bizarre series of mini-plots (including fighting a chimera at the top of the St Louis Arch, meeting Procrustes in a waterbed store and getting bought burgers by the god of war) adds to the humour and personality of the series, as well as highlighting Riordan’s skill at adapting Greek mythology (and later Roman, Egyptian and Norse) to the modern world. For a two hour film, covering all that content is impossible. For one season of television per book, it’s an option. A Series of Unfortunate Events has had a rebirth in this manner – originally a bestselling series of thirteen books, then reduced to a film with three butchered books crammed in and eventually adapted by Netflix into 25 episodes, each running from half an hour to an hour. A similar structure could be employed for Percy Jackson.

Previously, a television series has been a death knoll for adaptations (after Allegiant’s box office failure, the final instalment of The Divergent Series’ adaptation was initially predicted to be a television project – nothing has ever come of it). Now, the rise of streaming services has changed this (especially with Disney+’s budget), international rights and marketing are easier to negotiate than ever. The record-breaking success, strangely enough, of Trolls World Tour (yes, I never thought I’d be writing that either) as a digital release has also set a new precedent for the potential success of streamed media.

Not knowing your target audience is always dangerous for films. The Lightning Thief’s producers aged its characters, made a romance far more explicit and included a sexualised drug-taking sequence. Riordan’s passion (the books were originally written for his dyslexic son) for the project means that he has interacted a lot with fans; in one email, he wrote that “there is nothing radical, fresh or interesting about biyotch, ass, or shit”, attacking the corniness of  dialogue as well as its content. While this may contribute to a ‘better’ adaptation, it’s also helpful for profit – if you already have a fanbase, you need to exploit it for all it’s worth. That typically means sticking to the original arc and characters as much as possible. For The Lightning Thief this means keeping Percy’s age faithful to the books (his age was changed from 9-12 in the original novel to 16 in the finished film). Riordan recognised the strangeness of this change, writing that “the core readership for Percy Jackson is age 9-12…there are roughly a million kids that age, plus their families, who are dying to see this film because they want to see the pictures in their imagination brought to life… you’ve lost those kids as soon as they see the first movie trailer.”

Whether Disney+ will create a faithful (or even just successful) adaptation or another flop has fans nervously waiting – placing trust in their own minor god who has blessed this new journey for Percy Jackson.

Image via Wiki Images

All Greek to Me: Why we can’t get enough of modern takes on ancient literature

Emma Hewlett
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All Greek to Me: Why we can’t get enough of modern takes on ancient literature

Greek and Latin works have inspired literature throughout the ages – authors were, and still are, constantly riffing off one another, with even Virgil, writing his Aeneid during the infancy of the Roman Empire, following in the footsteps of his epic predecessor Homer. In turn, Dante employs Virgil as his own inspiration, and guide through Hell, in the Inferno, and as we move through the centuries we see the classical chain of inspiration continue to this day, with authors such as Madeline Miller, Donna Tartt and Rick Riordan using mythology and classical literature as the Muse to their own writing.

As a classicist, my choice of degree can be entirely traced back to my twelve year old self reading Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series for the first time. The books work as a perfect first dive into mythology, bringing in gods, goddesses, and monsters in a fun and engaging way, while also keeping close to the classical source material. The narrative includes many stories and details which are close to those associated with ancient heroes such as Odysseus, Heracles, and of course Perseus. As I then started to learn about the classical world in school, there were multiple occasions upon which we would learn about a particular hero and his deeds in class, and I would remember that Percy Jackson himself had completed much the same task. Attention to detail, then, is key, and I would even go so far as to say that they would still hold up at degree level. Furthermore, Riordan’s dedication to diversity and representation also shines through as a great virtue of his books – the characters represent a wide range of ethnicities and social backgrounds, specifically in a series based on ancient myth and tradition, a diversity which has often been markedly absent from the classical texts themselves, as well as their scholarly community. 

Traditionally, classics has been seen as a subject reserved for the “pale, male, and stale”, but it seems that this exclusive reputation might have provided motivation for authors to write their own takes on the classical myths and epic, bringing to the forefront those characters who have often been pushed to the side. Inevitably, amongst this number are inevitably a great number of female characters. Their ‘untold story’ is now given the spotlight, as in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Emily Hauser’s For The Most Beautiful, and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, where the writer gives their reader more insight into the ‘backstory’ of the women who have little or no voice in epic. It is precisely this reclaiming of the female voice through which these authors shine – both Hauser and Barker focus on the Iliadic slave-women, Chryseis and Briseis, who serve the Greek leaders in their camp. Chryseis is the catalyst of much of the conflict of the Iliad, and sparks the famously blazing anger of Achilles, yet she does not speak a single word in the whole epic, functioning merely as an object for trade among men. Hauser, however, gives her voice in describing her plight as King Agamemnon’s slave, showing the brutal reality of female servitude and experience in war, a theme present only on the periphery of the epic poems themselves.

Similarly, Ursula le Guin’s Lavinia centres on the eponymous daughter of King Latinus in the Aeneid, another silent figure whose highest personal prominence in the epic comes from her blushing upon seeing her prospective husband. The women’s stories are finally told in their own voice, a refreshing take in comparison to even the most progressive of Lit. Hum. modules, in which women often only figure as the focus of one tutorial. Atwood’s Penelope is recast from an already shadowy character in the Odyssey. While Homer gives us Penelope’s wily nature and calculating intelligence, Atwood amplifies this, showing us the more cynical side of a woman traditionally seen as the paradigm of the faithful wife (to an incredibly wayward husband). Interestingly, both Atwood and Le Guin give their protagonists a metaliterary awareness of their existence within a narrative, an active decision in framing their narrators as finally speaking their truths. Circe, a bewitching goddess from Odysseus’ travels, also shines in Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel. Once again, we get a backstory which goes further, describing Circe’s past before we come to the more familiar waters of her appearance in the Odyssey, with her expanded story made all the more striking through her liminal identity between the mortal and immortal planes of existence.

Miller’s The Song of Achilles has to take the cake, however, as my favourite novel of them all. A fresh take on the relationship between Achilles and his cousin Patroklos, as told from Patroklos’ perspective, Miller’s prose is stunningly lyrical and flows with the astuteness of Homer himself. I have read The Song of Achilles three times thus far, and the final chapters never fail to make me misty-eyed. 

For me, having read these books enhances the original Greek and Latin texts, as I come across them in my studies – to think that that twelve year old Percy Jackson fan can now read the texts which served as the inspiration for her favourite books in the original Ancient Greek is still mind-blowing to me. I have loved studying the Iliad at university in the original language, and seeing where the authors I have admired for so long got their inspiration from. I must still confess that on occasion the details from these books have gotten confused with text I am supposed to be studying in tutorials, but still these occasional slip-ups only serve to enrich the subject to me, and as a whole these books allow us to see the ancient literature from a crucially alternate perspective. I have certainly been grateful for their introduction to an often traditional and exclusive subject, as they break down ancient barriers and widen horizons for stories which have long gone unspoken, and voices which have long gone unheard.

Unelected, Unrepentant, Untouchable

Shariz Aslam
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Unelected, Unrepentant, Untouchable

Seeing the Daily Mail and The Guardian seemingly in agreement on a political scandal can only be described as a strange phenomenon. Yet this is exactly what Dominic Cummings’ actions – and the government’s response – appear to have achieved.

In case you somehow missed the news around Boris Johnson’s senior adviser and the subsequent fiasco (read: I envy you), the internet is full of detailed accounts. To briefly summarise, stories broke on Friday evening that Cummings had – at the end of March – driven over 250 miles from his home in London to his parents’ property in County Durham. Later that weekend reports arose that on the 12th April, his wife’s birthday, Cummings was spotted at Barnard Castle, some 30 miles from where he was staying.

As the reports came in, I couldn’t help but feel annoyed. Quickly, though, members of Johnson’s cabinet leapt to Twitter to defend the senior adviser’s actions. All echoed Number 10’s comments that Cummings had made the trip out of fear that, should both he and his then-ill wife become incapacitated by COVID-19, there would be no one to care for their child.

Whilst I’m sympathetic to a father wanting to care for his child, this raised more questions than it answered. Was there really no reasonable childcare in London? Why drive across the country when you suspect both you and your wife may have the virus, when government policy was to immediately self-isolate? Crucially, it made me think: did Cummings believe these guidelines didn’t apply to him?

Lockdown has been hard for us all. Missing the communal components of Ramadan, forgoing all the incredibly fun experiences older years said Trinity term had waiting for us, and the subduing of Eid celebrations was all tough. But, for the most part, these sacrifices were relatively easy. They were luxuries that I knew many were missing, ones I’d hopefully go back to experiencing next year.

The hardships that we didn’t expect were the real adversities. The families missing funerals, the patients dying alone in hospital, the fathers who missed births; all these people sacrificed some of the most important moments of their lives for the wider benefit of this country. For all these sacrifices, there is no ‘next year’.

One of my closest friends went through enormous hardship when he lost a parent around the same time Cummings made his trip up north. The one thing I yearned for more than anything was the option to visit him, to be there for support. But I couldn’t, the lockdown made it clear that was off the table. I cannot begin to imagine how difficult it must have been for him or the thousands of families across the country who faced similar circumstances.

What I could imagine, however, is their outrage.

Why did they have to sacrifice so much for these restrictions? Cummings’ hypocrisy, given he helped draft these rules, is not just offensive to the principles and standards we always hope to hold those in power to. In these extraordinary times, this hypocrisy is a middle-finger to the millions of Britons who kept to the regulations, despite moments of hardship, under the notion that ‘we are all in this together’. Yet, it appears, we are not. Behind the smokescreen of unity lies a dichotomy; one set of rules for them, another for us.

In a press conference on Sunday, Cummings gave his answers to many of our questions. Remember the trip where he – on his wife’s birthday – drove 30 miles, wife and child in tow, to a picturesque castle and riverside? He claimed this drive was exclusively to test his eyesight and roadworthiness before driving back to London. I could discuss how this strikes me as questionable at best, but that would miss the bigger picture.

The bigger picture pivots around the global crisis we find ourselves in. Lockdown measures have been difficult to police efficiently, and Britons have been trusted to abide by them. This trust works both ways; there’s a reason why so many cabinet ministers stood before the podium chanting the same mantra of ‘we are all in this together’. Trust in our executive is paramount.

This trust was built, in a ‘rally-round-the-flag’ type fashion, when Boris Johnson delivered clear instruction to all of us in late March. This image of a decisive, steadfast leader was one the PM had been trying to build for years.

Thus, the perception of Cummings’ trip matters, not its legality, and the majority of Britons did not see it as responsible. Musician Tim Burgess tweeted a poll asking if people agreed with Johnson saying that ‘most people would accept and agree’ with Cummings’ actions. The result? 92% ‘No’, with over 360,000 votes cast.

This blow to public perception came as the ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect had already been fading, as perception of the government’s handling of the crisis waned, and that trust slowly faltered.

By May, the UK was revealed to be the second-worst hit country for COVID-19 deaths, topped only by a nation of five times the population and led by a man who implied his citizens could ingest bleach to kill the virus. Johnson’s new ‘Stay Alert’ slogan had been shunned by the other home nations, leading some to title him as the ‘Prime Minister of England’ and not a supposedly United Kingdom. The PM’s approval ratings were already dwindling before he announced Cummings was to stay.

The net effect of keeping Cummings is a dangerous one. If the British see their government as treating them with contempt, the public will start giving lockdown similar treatment. Stephen Reicher of the government’s advisory group on behavioural science (SPI-B) commented that, by backing Cummings, Johnson had ‘trashed all advice… on how to build trust and secure adherence to’ the lockdown.

It’s not hard to see why the PM is frightened to let go of his senior adviser, even if he should. Dominic Cummings is arguably responsible for paving Boris Johnson’s path to premiership, with 2016’s Vote Leave campaign bringing Johnson back to front-line politics, and his help ever since leaving the PM indebted.

I disagree with Cummings’ actions, but it’s hard to refute the man’s competence. As the same cannot be said for the Cabinet, the Prime Minister is unlikely to let go of him without a fight. Make no mistake, if Johnson wishes to salvage a vestige of trust with the British public then Cummings must go. Yet with Johnson held firmly by the balls, Cummings may well be untouchable.

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