Tuesday 26th August 2025
Blog Page 497

Oxford By Night

Luke Bateman
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Oxford By Night

As I wandered through midnight Oxford streets
Shimmered gold from lamps and warm dorm room view
Drizzle caught in an auric glow inspired
Beaded crystals on absent cobweb: dew
That should’ve collapsed the whole damn thing there
Yet somehow it clung valiantly on
Lost by an automatic step unplanned
It still quivers in my mind’s morning song.
It haunts me in its fragility that night
Shivering against a Novembered torrent
How many evenings has it weathered in golden light?
To how many has it been forgotten?
I wonder if the weaver will survive longer than its home?
Immortality comes not in cobweb, but in gold tinged stone.

Image Credit: Isabella Lill

Day to live, day to love

Samuel Gledhill
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Day to live, day to love

Today is a Sunday, and today is a beautiful day to be alive
Wake up… sniffle and sneeze, wheeze, as your body wakes to the reality of dust inhalation
A dusting across beds and throws, from heads on pillows
It is a hazy start. The mind clear, but a mucus filled nose endlessly dripping

Yoga is next on your list
Yoga is key, relax the body
But it’s hard to feel free in positions like dog, or cat, or tree…..
If the mucus inside makes it harder to breath

Yoga complete, what a feat, what a way to be starting your day
Slide your hands downs your legs and then grab your big toes
Before crouching in ways that resample a crow; your final, and favourite pose…
And there’s not even any more snot in your nose!

Walk. Float. Past the hammock, down the stairs, and out onto the path.
Perhaps a long route back past the old house
Descend only slightly, and select an inefficient route through the olive trees
Increase your changes of seeing a rabbit, or a mouse
Perhaps that red breasted bird that perches fleetingly on the disused washing line

Enter the house, see who is there, only josh in his bed with his crazy new hair
Its late. Its 9:36, and you normally eat just a little past 8, but wait…
Today is a Sunday
A day of rest! No work on a Sunday!
The day of the Lord you might think to your self
Hardly one’s fault to be raised in the throes of a dogmatic cult
But…
Today is a Sunday, and today is a beautiful day to be alive

Josh isn’t hungry and jack is asleep, so breakfast can wait
Negra (the dog). Is. Hungry
She whimpers and sings, with a gurgling moan, in the hope that you might have some food or a bone
But you have set your sights on a lengthy pre-breakfast meditation…
Negra can wait

It’s a cool morning breeze that brings you back
Lost in thought
This time woken by a peculiar song as a gust strikes the eucalyptus beams on the upstairs balcony
Its now 10:38 and you think to yourself that you feel fucking great!
So you walk to your room and remember that nug of your weed that you left in a mug on the side of your bed
Do you need that weed?

Its less about need, and more about want
An inkling that you should appease your desire to be higher than you currently are
You smoke, a tiny, spliff

The day is young. The sun is warm but low
You wait.
Then you walk…
Looking out onto the beach
Searching for the signs of a mid-morning mother collecting stringy sea weed from the high-water mark
But there is nobody there…
Not a bike or a car or a quad so you talk to the air! And she sings back at you

Eyes dampening, corners fill with the beginnings of a tear drop, and you cry
Cry because you can
Cry with the tears that have waited to arrive
Held back by a block that has been there too long, and a ceaseless prolonging of all that was wrong
Tell it “cease and desist and be gone!” don’t let it persist
The time has arrived to be strong and walk out of the mist, so you walk…

With music in your ears, and a distinctly stoned gate
You climb your favourite rock
Watch your favourite tree sway in the same wind
And bask in the light as you dance with your favourite self

Is this the point that we set out to reach?
And by we I mean me but accounting for each of the moments in time that we, have, been…
I am the sum of the parts, all the me’s from the past have necessarily come together
They stand here with me.
And we cry.
As we look upon beauty…

Image Credit: Charlotte Bunney

Walking Together

Sarah Lewis
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Walking Together

Walking together
I thought how I’d never
Forget you
(As friends do at night)
I wondered if you’d
Forget me
I imagined you might

Earlier I’d waited for you
Inevitably late
Glancing around
I don’t want you to surprise me
But you do
Friendly remark
On the tip of my tongue
Gone

All undone
Because I’ll miss you became
The I love you for friends
But please
Don’t say you’ll miss me again

Image Credit: Georgia Watkins

Anxiety and Me

Joe Drakeley
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Anxiety and Me

I was struggling with where to start this. The start seems a tad too conventional for something that is anything but conventional, so we are Tarantino styling this and going from then jumping back and then forwards again.
For anyone who knows me the previous academic year was a weird one and not exactly the easiest but also probably my best yet and I would personally argue the most informative and important year of my life. Without being cliche I learned more about myself in the past year than I had in any of my time at school.
That’s for one simple fact, I started my year at my version of rock bottom (when on a phone assessment for CBT I said life didn’t seem to have any meaning for me anymore and I was referred to high-intensity one to one CBT). I’ll always be grateful for the position I am in that my rock bottom was still living comfortably with family but mentally I was in a really bad place. In September of 2018, I had been told I was being kicked out of university for failing my first-year exams. First-year of university had not been easy and I can safely say my anxiety had never been worse than before my set of exams and over the summer before the subsequent resits. Yet despite all of this I didn’t speak out, I got up every day, put effort into how I looked and tried to be as smiley and friendly and “lit” as possible all in a vain attempt to make other people think I was coping. I somehow thought that if others thought I was doing well or there appeared to be someone struggling more openly than I was that I would be ok and I had nothing to worry about. This is something I’ve done for most of my life, and not something I’m proud of, to find someone who’s doing “worse” than me and take solace in the fact that, at least at face value, I’m not the biggest fuck up out there. Of course, neither of those things are true, someone else’s problems don’t minimise your own and more importantly, I should be as open as other people about how difficult life is. It does, however, extend to avoiding busy places (something I have thankfully been forceful and stopped myself doing), regularly thinking everyone (including close mates) hate me and that my accent is grating on everyone’s ears.
If you’ve seen me around college or Oxford recently and stopped to ask me how I’m doing there’s a chance I’ve told you I’m not doing well. That’s not to say term is going badly or my mental health is deteriorating I’ve just taken to not putting up a facade anymore. If I am having a bad day I am going to tell you and have no shame about it.
I won’t bore you all with the details of how anxiety affects me in everyday life, partly because I am aware just how trivial most of it is when written down, just like many things in life a bullet point list will never get across the experience of what life is like with it.
I started suffering with anxiety around year 11 and my GCSE exams, I remember shaking with nerves (something I’d never done before) outside my English exam. I didn’t finish that exam but ignored what had happened as I still did ok. I now fully believe I have never had a really good experience with exams since that day, be it thoughts that I’ll fail to never fully achieving what I felt I could there has always been something off about exams since that day. It’s not just academically that anxiety affects me, I felt my mind cloud from anxious thoughts in my black belt karate grading (which I subsequently failed) and if you ask me to approach someone new on my own you’ll be met with a laugh and some choice words if you keep pushing.
Growing up both gay and with undiagnosed dyspraxia I was unfortunately prone to developing mental health problems trying to navigate a world that isn’t always the friendliest place. Not feeling like a proper man because I used to play with my sister’s barbie dolls and couldn’t kick or catch a ball if my life depended on it is still something that quietly affects me to this day. But as you get older you do realize that is a problem with how masculinity is defined and not a problem with one’s self.
It was this desire to be seen as a proper man that stopped me from speaking out earlier not wanting to be seen as weak and “attention-seeking” something I now realize was my own prejudices against mental health which rather ironically caused me a lot of harm. This past year I have realized it’s not bad to complain and vent and open up to lots of people, the more people who know you the more people you have to turn to.
I am by no means at the end of my journey being as I only truly started it 6 months back when I started receiving CBT on the NHS (now discharged which is a strange feeling) and I am certainly not, or probably ever, living anxiety free. But I certainly much happier now than during my first year at uni and that’s all that matters. I still put too much effort into how I look on my bad days and the rule about me not approaching people I don’t know at mixers most definitely still stands. This is by no means a full life recount and anything left out has been done so for a reason (I’m probably not comfortable talking about it here). There is to many people to thank for making the past year so good from what should have been nothing (shoutout to the big sis though who has done more than she probably realizes) and I’ll leave this with the small fact that opening up and standing up for myself got me back to uni and if that’s not reason enough to seek help for your own worries and stresses I don’t know what is.

Wandering Walser

Klara Zhao
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Wandering Walser

Wondering is the wandering of the mind, as Wandering is the wondering of the body. And so it is very fitting that Wandering is simply Wondering with an extra leg given to its second letter.

Walser died in the same style in which he wrote: he went on a lonely walk and never came back. His body was found lying in a field of snow. 

His writing appears aimless – and, in fact, is – for he often goes on a tangent, and keeps straying further away from the point until he eventually ends the story, elegantly, after losing the plot entirely. It is worth noting, however, that he never strays entirely away from his original point – he becomes very close to doing so, yes, but never quite does so. Reading his stories, one feels as though one has somehow, unknowingly, been placed on a swing, swung back and forth until, suddenly again, one finds oneself quite far from Earth. Floating along in the abyss, amongst the moons and stardust, one orbit later we are more or less grounded, and find ourselves at the end of the chapter. We do occasionally find guidance in the novel, something like an usher with a voice resembling that of Walser, but with deliberate differences that blend it into the fiction of the story: this voice tells us not to worry, there is no need to be scared, and oh how he is ever so sorry for the narrator’s bursts of passion that quite carries him away at times. But he always writes with such self-conviction that one is often under the impression that he had not meant, perhaps, to have a reader at all, but had always written for himself — to himself — in a genial one-way conversation. It is rather like peeping into the most minute of pinholes, through which we gain a glimpse of a phantasmagoria of eccentricity, bursting to escape the confines of the pages. 

To read Walser, one must be in just the right mood, and one must, naturally, be patient. The mood to accept the directionless path one follows in his stories, and the patience to wait for a meaning to become clear. It is rather like the process of inserting the thread into the needle before sewing; it is precise, requiring much patience, and a useful skill in life. One must not become anxious when the thread seems not to enter the tiny hole, but instead must find a way to make it thinner, sharpen it, steady one’s hand, and then try again. Eventually, the thread enters, to one’s greatest satisfaction, and the needlework can then recommence. Later on, the thread might be lost again, may unthread itself, but all one needs to do is simply persist, rethread, and carry on; in the end, all will be well. This is the way to read the works of Walser. Patience, that is all, and one will be rewarded with the beauty of the art. 

Image Credit: Isabella Lill

New Year

Sarah Lewis
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New Year

We don’t talk you and me
And it’s striking
Really
How your words no longer
Light up my phone
The lover bubble we burst through
Now we go it alone
While couples walk in worlds I’m not part of
And I feign understanding
As they talk about love

And I look on my life all thin and uneven
With metaphors trying
When no one believes them
Redrafting a life with no object for feeling
Relaying the foundations of my self esteem and

Refusing to act out the same old scenes
Because I left all that in 2019

Image Credit: Francesca Nava

Can I speak to the manager?: what ‘Karen’ tells us about Internet discourse

Z.M.
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Can I speak to the manager?: what ‘Karen’ tells us about Internet discourse

This week, I’ve been thinking about Karen. My interest was piqued when the Financial Times’ weekend supplement featured a piece about ‘Karen the pushy mom’, following a flood of Karen jokes on the popular video app ‘TikTok’. According to the author of the column, ‘what really marks out a Karen… is their capacity to complain and get their own way’. A Vox article from earlier this year takes the definition a little further, characterising Karen as ‘blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer. Karen has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, ‘superior attitude to go along with it’. The joke itself is perhaps best represented by a viral TikTok which depicts a mother at a fast food drive-thru who seemingly throws a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way – this is classic Karen behaviour.

Interestingly, the Karen meme has been floating around for quite a while. In June of 2019, Guardian columnist Grace Dent wrote about the Karen in all of us, ‘fostered by the I-Want-It-Now-Culture’. Back then, the trope was not so overtly racialised. – Karen was certainly a white suburban mom but use of the meme didn’t result in the kind of heated arguments witnessed online recently, with some white women branding the term a ‘slur’. The argument kicked off when journalist Julie Bindel took to Twitter earlier this week to ask ‘Does anyone else think the ‘Karen’ slur is woman hating and based on class prejudice?’. Soon after, the Editor of the conservative ‘Feminist Current’ published a piece in which she concluded ‘Of course “Karen” is a sex-based meme, and of course it exists to mock and dismiss women’. Other media outlets have also picked up on the debate, and as with all online arguments, Karen began trending on Twitter.

Those who deal with Karens generally work at what we are currently terming the ‘frontline’. Working-class service sector workers, particularly those in supermarkets, are often confronted with angry customers who are upset with a product or an in-store experience. On the most basic level, the Karen meme is about person to person interaction, and the racial and class-based structures that manifest in our everyday lives. White and middle-class, Karen is comfortable throwing her weight around in the store because she feels entitled in a space where she exists to be served. Crucially, she is not aware of the way in which she enacts the privileges afforded to her. This is where the joke often lies.

Of course, many of us fail to pause before each social interaction and pick apart the structural layers that form our identity. But Karens wield their privilege in a nasty manner, getting away with yelling at shop-floor workers and drive-thru employees, and then producing crocodile tears if held accountable for their actions. In a country such as America, where African-American women are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white women, it would make sense that the latter group feel more comfortable acting aggressively in public spaces. 

When it comes to using privilege, the history of white womanhood (particularly within feminist movements) is riddled with contradiction. At times, white middle-class women have been powerful allies in anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. Catherine Impey was an English Quaker in the late 19th century who campaigned on an anti-racist platform. She launched the magazine ‘Anti-Caste’ in 1888. Anti-colonial activists include Ellen Wilkinson, a white British MP in the early 20th century who campaigned for self-rule in the Commonwealth.

At other times, however, white feminists have stepped on the backs of members of the working-class, and those in an ethnic minority (particularly Black Americans), in order to secure their own rights. In America, the early campaign for women’s suffrage openly allied itself with white supremacist sentiment, with many prominent suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton arguing that it would be preposterous for Black men to be given the right to vote before white women had it. In Britain, white middle-class women such as Violet Markham strategically supported social imperialism, advocating for eugenics-based policies and lauding social Darwinism, and boosted their own public profiles as a result.

These snippets of history may feel irrelevant to a 21st century meme, but collective memory is a powerful thing, and the social context to Internet discourse should not go ignored. Some of the most hard-hitting Karen tweets are those that reference historical or present-day injustice. One Twitter user responded to Julie Bindel saying ‘“Karen” was a term created *specifically by Black women* to talk about white women’s interpersonal + state violence against us and our communities: calling the police on us for getting coffee, threatening to have us fired, talking down to us at work (where we’re now ‘essential’)’. Another user suggested that the young white women yelling abuse at Black students when public high schools were integrated in Montgomery in 1963 were historical ‘Karens’.

Crucially then, Karen does not represent all white women, and though the meme feels reductive and may present offensively, it is a symbol more than it is anything else. Feminist movements in the West have been splintered along race lines from their inception, and people of colour are right to point to the ways in which white womanhood can be weaponised within the current system. And though it seems that every other thought-piece these days is about the way in which coronavirus has laid structural inequality bare, it is clear that this theme of unfairness is on people’s minds. Perhaps it is only natural that our memes feel more political than usual; the scaffolding our society rests on has been exposed as unbalanced, with the Karens of the world getting their way where others cannot (and often, because others cannot). No joke exists in a vacuum, and the memes and TikToks trending currently are capsules of the societal mood during this crisis – it would be wise to treat them as such.

A Case For Sonder: rejecting putting a price tag on life

Santiago Bedoya-Pardo
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A Case For Sonder: rejecting putting a price tag on life

All throughout the world, health professionals are facing some of the most disheartening scenes of our times. Their efforts are valiant, there’s no denying that. These men and women are on the front line of a conflict that has no precedent. They charge into battle each and every day. Some may be critical of the use of bellicose rhetoric, of this language of war. I will, however, be a contrarian. It is a necessity to adopt such an approach. This is, indeed, a war. We have seen a soul-crushing number of casualties, each and every single one of them a tragedy. However, fortunately, the vast majority of us have merely been passive witnesses to this calamity.

Healthcare providers have not been vested with such good fortunes. They have not only been real, active witnesses to this great human tragedy, but as well, they have found themselves playing the part of the ​Moirai​. The ​Moirai,​ the Sisters of Fate to the Greeks in antiquity, controlled the thread of life from every mortal being from birth to death. When looking at the heart-wrenching stories that have come out from severely hit nations, such as Italy and Spain, where doctors and nurses have been forced into the horrible task of defining which patients get to live or die, such a comparison becomes palpably clear.

One thing needs to be made explicit: the fact that these men and women are being forced into such scenarios is beyond dreadful. As stated previously, they are already being forced to deal with the horrors which we’re fortunate enough to learn from through our televisions and phones. I understand that the dire nature of the circumstances is forcing such draconian pragmatism to become the order the day; I will not abdicate rationality for the sake of blind idealism. However, what I will do is make a case against this becoming a norm, for one cannot assign such value to one life over the other.

To do so would be to negate the potential of every single human life, regardless of caveats and descriptives. Thanks to equality of opportunity, one of the hallmarks of modern life throughout the global north, this has never been more pertinent. Every single individual, regardless of their background, age or identity is nowadays capable of attaining their full potential in life. Opportunities and ambitions are plentiful, and to seize them has never in human history been more possible. To artificially and arbitrarily define that some lives are in any way whatsoever more valuable than others, and then to act on these judgements, is a violation of this principle. Such a violation should never, under any circumstances, become ordinary and mundane.

However, and perhaps of far greater importance, to allow for these measures to become commonplace would be to allow for us all to be led astray from the path towards something we should as a society aim for now more than ever; sonder. To acknowledge that every single stranger we pass by as we make our way through a street has a deep, complex reality much like our own, something we cannot even begin to contemplate. Every single person enjoys a completely unique conscious experience. They have things that provide them with joy, they love and are loved. Every individual alive at this moment in time, or any other moment indeed, is or has been an entire cosmos we are not able to fathom. To pretend then that we can arbitrarily assign disparate values to individuals is folly.

I wholeheartedly understand the case for the measures being adopted by doctors and nurses throughout Europe in these challenging times. We should not be blinded by idealism amidst the crisis our world now faces. Our reality is what it is, and if such actions are necessary for the greater good, that of saving as many lives as it is possible, then we should indeed adopt them. However, let us not allow for them to erode our character. We ought to understand that these awful measures may just so happen to be the medicine needed to fight this plague, or to at least ensure that its toll is not as cruel as it could be. At the same time, though, let us not forget that to assign value to human life in such an arbitrary manner should not become a normalized aspect of life once we have won this war, whenever that may be.

The great cosmos that is every single living individual is invaluable. Let us not be ignorant to that, regardless of the violent and brutal tidings of circumstance. With our character untarnished, accepting that conscious experience is beyond the realm of value, we will see through these times of plague and dread. We will, together, weather out this storm.

Beyond the window

Clea Butcher
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Beyond the window

For Thomas, there was an indescribable fascination with the movement of the pen on paper. The familiar pressure as the nib traced his name, over and over, claiming the blank spaces as his own. He was getting distracted again, digressing from the tedious task at hand. Yet the harsh lines of the pixelated computer screen stung his eyes – tempting abstinence. He liked the irony of his abstinence from work, this active defiance, it made him feel as though, in his procrastination, he had turned off from the highway momentarily, to watch languidly as his colleagues passed him by. 

He sifted absently through his emails. The words blurred into one another on the screen, drifting momentarily, leaving no impression upon his brain. As if in imitation, outside the office, the rain ran in eddying streams down the window. It reminded him of that day, years ago, when he and his sister had been caught in a thunderstorm on the slopes of Skiddaw. He was grateful for the office then, enclosed within the white sterility of the walls, shielded from the elements. Yet… that insistent tentative yet. There was something exhilarating about the thunderstorm; as they crouched, pressing themselves against the rocks, the deluge surged around them, cold water biting naked skin. As the lightening ripped, a jagged glare, across the sky, he felt that rare numb panic – that complete vulnerability. He remembered that moment when he turned towards her, face streaming with water, eyes brimming with tears that weren’t his own. He could see her shouting, but no words reached him. In this moment of lost communication, unable to move for fear of being caught by lightening, there seemed a sudden hilarity in it all. He was laughing then, standing up, reaching up to the sky in reckless abandonment. 

Absorbed now, in the window, he watched as a group of boys jostled against one another on the pavement. Their faces were indistinguishable from distance, yet he could vaguely hear their voices, washing over one another in an attempt to be heard. He revelled for a moment, in their ignorance that he was observing them. He wondered ironically if, when one of the boys glanced at the window, he too was centralising him in an unspoken narrative. Their anonymity inspired his curiosity. The cans of beer that they were swigging gave it away, he thought, they were probably on their way home from a game. He could remember distinctly the warm sensation of the alcohol; the drifting of long hazy summer nights into a contented oblivion. Hands outstretched, hesitantly reaching towards the heat of the fire. He glanced across at his friends faces, candidly caught in the amber glow.  Their laughter ricocheted back to him and he was awash again in the unaffected naivety of youth. When the path stretched as far as the eye could see, dipped in the rosy hue of the sunset. No longer able to distinguish their features, his vision was blurred by the tides of time. As the light faded outside the window, replaced by the encroaching darkness, he avowed to make changes to his life tomorrow. To step outside, to reconnect. Yes, it would happen tomorrow! 

Yet, half-heartedly he recognised the emptiness of a promise that would never be fulfilled. Fated to be caught perpetually behind the window, always waiting for that elusive tomorrow. 

Image Credit: Justin Lim

Life as a rugby blue: from the Varsity Match to a virtual Trinity

Martin Yip
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Life as a rugby blue: from the Varsity Match to a virtual Trinity

Tell us about yourself: where you’re from, what subject you’re doing, and how you got into rugby?

I’m Jasper, a second year physicist at Oriel, and I live in Cambridge. I first played rugby in Sydney where I grew up and continued it in Tokyo, where I spent four years. Since then, I have been playing in and around Cambridge, and now at Oxford!

As a rugby blue, how many hours do you devote to training or competitions each week? Does it get into the way of academic work?

Rugby has the unique quirk of having its Varsity Match in December which means the vast majority of our performance-focussed training happens in Michaelmas with an extensive pre-season before hand. At the peak of the season we are probably training 3-4 times a week with 2-3 gym sessions and a game on a Friday night. This does consume a lot of time which invariably means sacrifices in work or social life but after Varsity training is scaled down appropriately so the work can be made up with a bit of commitment.

How does rugby compare to other blues sports, from your experience?

I have pretty limited experience with other Blues sports but from what I have seen there is an almost universal shared dedication to their respective sports. Relative to the other sports, our season is very short, and so I think we have a reputation for the intensity of our pre-season and Michaelmas training.

What do you think of ‘lad culture’ in Oxford? How should the problems with this be tackled?

Obviously, I can only speak from my experiences with Oxford and Oriel but I would say that the ‘lad culture’ here is pretty minimal. We (at OURFC) have no initiations and socials are, for the most part, events where the team can buy in as much or as little as they like. We try to encourage attendance as we feel that it is an important part of team-building but Oxford is an intense environment with many conflicting time-pressures so we appreciate that players may have other commitments.

At OURFC, the men and women’s teams are fully integrated, and share a positive relationship in all aspects of running the club. With respect to behaviour, I am pleased to say that I have never experienced anything that I would consider offensive to myself or others during my time here, and I am confident in saying that I believe we foster an environment where such behaviour would not be tolerated.

The annual varsity match at Twickenham is surely one of the highlights of rugby at Oxford. How was your experience playing at such a prestigious venue, in front of a crowd of 22,000?

I have been lucky enough to play three times at Twickenham and have experienced three very different environments. In my first year we played an outstanding game and won a resounding victory, which remains the proudest moment of my time at Oxford. The feeling of shared accomplishment with 23 of my best mates will be very hard to beat. This year we lost which was, as you can imagine, another experience all together, but it highlighted to me the importance of perspective in sport. We didn’t win the game but that did not diminish the team’s achievements throughout the season.

This year, the match was played in suboptimal conditions and Oxford lost both the men’s and women’s matches. What positives do you think the team can take away from the match?

We learnt a lot that day about executing a plan and adapting to our environment. We had developed a highly attacking game-plan that suited our team well, but we weren’t able to move away from this when it really mattered. It is an important part of leadership to recognise the changing landscape and devise a way to overcome the obstacles and I think this was a lesson we all learnt that day. Despite this, we spoke all year of seeing changes as opportunities and not looking for excuses when things didn’t go our way and I think it was a real strength of our team that we persevered with our attempts to attack and play the way we knew best.

Many British university rugby teams never get to play at Twickenham, unless they reach the final of the BUCS Super Rugby Championship, a tournament which Oxford and Cambridge blues don’t even compete in. Do Oxbridge teams deserve this privilege? Does it perpetuate a perception of exclusivity surrounding Oxbridge, and is this part of an access issue?

I think that we are indeed very privileged to play at the historical home of rugby, but this is justified by both rugby clubs’ status as historic powerhouses in driving participation and the development of the game. Up until the professionalisation of rugby in 1995, the annual Varsity Match was, in a lot of ways, a trial game for the England team with games being played in front of capacity crowds of 60,000, matching and in some cases exceeding crowds for international matches. OURFC is 150 years old and has 340 ex-international players, including 41 British and Irish Lions. I certainly think that matches of this standard deserve to be played at the most prestigious ground in the country.

In modern times, the professionalism of the game has increased the competition for crowds’ attendance and now we only draw around 22,000-25,000 but recently the Varsity Match company has been pushing free tickets for local school children who would not otherwise be able to attend a rugby match at Twickenham. In this way the Varsity Match not only gives young children an opportunity to get into rugby, but it also gives them a very real connection to both universities. We have players now who first decided they wanted to come to Oxford from watching the Varsity Match on TV or in person and so I think if anything, the game improves the visibility and accessibility of the university.

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted much in the world of sport. How much of your sporting life has changed? In general, how has university sport been affected?

Well as we’re all aware, the movement of Trinity term learning online means that the vast majority of sports won’t be able to organise team sessions or competitions. We have had to cancel the men’s tour to Croatia, as well as the women’s tour to France and as well as this we had scheduled historic fixtures for the men against the Barbarians and for the women against the Penguins which have been postponed. We have also lost the semi-finals and finals for the cuppers competitions which we are currently working with colleges to reschedule.

Although we are now in our off-season, as a team we have been impacted through the loss of team skills and fitness sessions, as well as access to our gym. These are pretty key losses, as the off-season is a great time to improve the small things that take longer to develop.

How will training carry on? What are you doing to stay fit and also connected to your teammates?

We have been given training programmes by our Strength and Conditioning coach which are great to keep the body moving and keep some sort of sanity in these pretty hectic times. We’re also in the process of doing video analysis of some Premiership games to maintain an awareness and understanding of the game – it also gives us the chance to watch some rugby! Obviously, the boys have our various group chats which have been going off recently and these are keeping everyone together as a team.

Trinity term is going online. Does this mean more time to focus on things other than sport?

Well if it is true that we will be given the same amount of work as would otherwise be set, then it’s just going to be another Trinity I guess. It’s unfortunate we are going to lose some pretty historic socials such as the forwards vs. backs cricket game, but these are of course small sacrifices in these times.

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