Thursday 30th April 2026
Blog Page 515

Personal History

Kavya Deshpande
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Personal History

 

CW: sexual harassment

1.

AKTHAR: There was a contract between him and his class. Quite what the contract was or what it involved would be hard to say. But it was there.
                                                    — Alan Bennett, The History Boys

If you must go to Cuba, go with a toothache. Reclining under a ceiling fan in a dental clinic off some side street in Havana will situate you in a place far removed from its image. Here is where the Bay of Pigs and the spectre haunting Europe and the CIA assassination plots (and the poisoned scuba suit and the exploding cigar) and the revolution that happened as well as the one perpetually in motion are all momentarily relegated in significance. What begins to matter more are the quieter workings of the past. The literacy drives. The efforts towards social welfare. A national striving for dignity when dignity is denied by external forces that operate without it. You will get your broken crown fixed for nearly nothing, and you will leave understanding that history is not made of straight lines.

I learnt this when I was sixteen, in a classroom with windows that faced away from the sun and tables arranged in a horseshoe. There were other things I learnt that year, too.

I learnt that everybody in the world knew the limits of their understanding of mathematics and science, but most did not know what they did not about the past. I learnt that I was being trained in a delicate and arcane art, that I would live my life as a custodian of its secrets and that they in return would exempt me from a blindness to complexity that apparently afflicted all those who were not sitting in this classroom with windows facing away from the sun and tables arranged in a horseshoe. I learnt to look for holes in everything, and if I couldn’t find any, to make them, because a well-constructed challenge to an accepted interpretation would not just please an examiner, but would stand in its own right as something beautiful. Every argument had an architecture, and we were in the business of building cathedrals. I learnt to receive everything I read or heard with suspicion so as to better counter it — everything, that is, except all of the above.

I did not learn, until much later, about the small distance that exists between learning something and being taught it. I was never told about the many delusions and compunctions that this fissure is capable of holding.

In hindsight, I don’t think I learnt very much about history at all.

2.

“Shinto belief: division btwn real world of today and spirit world of past is a permeable gauze. Past is always superimposed onto present.”
—My notes from a lesson on nineteenth-century Japan

To understand why I would happily trade the clarity with which I remember all that I am about to tell you for a better ability to recall where I left my keys or for a few more memories from early childhood or, frankly, even for a biscuit, you have to understand how it all happened. You have to understand Michael.

I must admit that I am still yet to. In the years since, all of us who were taught by him have cautiously approached the problem amongst ourselves, and each time the conversation arrives at the same precipice. Here is what we know. We were anxious children who, for two years in a classroom that remained half-dark in the equatorial afternoon, had our nerve endings stitched back together. He made change and continuity, decline and reform, feel urgent and personal. It was demonstrated to us that everything had its cause, and everything had its future. We were encouraged to believe that, despite rejections from universities and acrimonious families and that constant grinding cycle of self-loathing and loathing others that lends the experience of adolescence its apocalyptic quality, so did we.

And in the end, everyone I have discussed the matter with concludes that a person so skilled in helping one understand remains himself beyond understanding. I myself have only fragments of evidence with which to approach even the edges of who he was.

He was the only teacher I ever saw cry. In the beginning, nobody participated in the class discussions he initiated because they often took imaginative detours from the syllabus and demanded a level of engagement that most of us found unnecessary for passing an exam. One day, after an invitation to talk about Che’s dress sense met another prolonged silence, he broke down. He told us that he had grown up poor. That what had rescued him from the ineluctable shape of his own life was the ability to care about art and literature and history. “You won’t get anywhere without it,” he said, welling up. “Passivity is not your friend. Trust me.”

“Ah, the speech, did he cry?” said a friend who was in the class he taught an hour before ours.

“Ah, the speech, did he cry?” said a girl from the year above when she heard people discussing the incident in the library.

I may have wondered for a second about the precision of the performance. But it was only for a second. I had been won over by the sight of an adult man crying. I had learnt to care.

There was enough reason to. “When the Fascist Italian government put the Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci on trial for writing subversive material, d’you know what the prosecutor said in his concluding remarks? We must find a way to stop this brain from working. You now need to knuckle down, to commit yourself to your craft in the same way, so that the examiner reading your essay will be forced to say the same thing about you.” This is what Michael told us after he marked our mock papers, and found them to be more than lacking. Michael had a special talent for making you feel human when the circumstances would not allow for it. Perhaps this was another warning.

“He’s so unprofessional,” complained Jake as we exited the classroom one day. Jake came from a fairly-large-c Conservative family and he had attempted to argue in line with his allegiances during a class discussion on the EU referendum before Michael summoned every major historical example of failed democracy to silence him. “I mean, this isn’t even history. It’s happening now. He had no right.”

We laughed it off because none of us were old enough to vote for anything, and had we been we most certainly wouldn’t have voted Leave.

“He’s kind of creepy, too. Have you noticed how all his favourites are girls?”

And we didn’t laugh this time but neither did we think too much of it because Jake was getting on everybody’s nerves by this point.

Michael thought I was clever, and he let me know this on occasion. He told me I saw things the same way as he did. I liked the beautiful parts of history — the geometry of Soviet propaganda, the way sentences fit together in Castro’s early speeches, the theatricality of the Tokugawa shogunate. I received an email from him the day he found out that I worshipped Bowie just as much as he had when he was my age. Knowing your love for Dave, I think you might enjoy this, it read, and contained links to songs by a band called The Tears. I think, on reflection, him believing I was clever was more a function of him being convinced that he was. I can listen to The Tears these days without being reminded of the email. I have learnt by now that it brings me no closer to understanding.

The last thing he ever taught us was a saying that he had discovered in his reading. It was the final class before we dispersed for study leave, and he was telling us what a pleasure we had been over the past two years. “In Ubuntu philosophy, they say that people are people through other people,” he said, looking over the tables arranged in a horseshoe. “I want to thank you all for making me feel like a person.” And for a moment I thought he was welling up again.

“I’m telling you, there’s something off about him,” said Jake later that day.

3.

“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.”
—Richard Hofstadter

He slipped through our lives, and we let him because we believed him to be a quantifiable presence. He listened and advised. He followed up the next day to check whether the advice had been taken, and if it hadn’t, he would listen all over again. He helped read over personal statements before they were submitted though it was not his responsibility to. I remember a comment that he made on a friend’s draft: “You’ve explained very well why you’d make an excellent candidate for this course in terms of your skill and extracurricular activities. But I think it might be worth mentioning something else — that you are an unusually kind individual.”

Michael believed firmly in kindness. It was presented to us as a kind of first principle in the study of the past, more important than economic factors or political shifts, and every twitch of history could ultimately be explained by its absence. He made this so obvious to us that it would only make sense that he himself was kind. I no longer think that history can be explained in terms of kindness. I did not know who Richard Hofstadter was then or what he had suggested fifty years prior, but I do now.

So here it is. Here is how we were taught that the things that we thought we understood did not happen.

The news came in slowly, then very quickly, and then stopped altogether. Kindness had been a front for deeper ambiguities, ones that nevertheless emerged as damning on paper. There had been instances of indiscretion. Testimonies of discomfort. Liberties taken. Jake, in short, was finally validated, although I think he had long stopped caring about what became of Michael. After he was let go and subsequently vanished, the rest of us tried to follow suit. It was the quick way of negotiating betrayal. Not thinking too much, consigning it to a lesson learnt.

You have to understand what it is you are learning though, and I don’t think anybody did. You want to understand how someone could be two people. Why you failed to recognise it at the time. How it was possible for you to have believed that the things you were being taught rescued you from a blindness to complexity, when in fact you were plainly blind to the convolutions of the person teaching them to you. I wish there was some way of locating a grander logic in the way things turned out, some way of extracting the general from the particular, of making social history out of the personal so as to distance myself from the specific discomforts of what happened. Something to do with personality or intent or to substantively prove that giving unhappy children a sense of worth will make them turn the other way when you need them to.

I have tried, and have found nothing. History is not made of straight lines.

You

Lily Kershaw
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You

The pain starts to burn before I realise that it is there at all. Opening my fist, I glance down to see four angry half-moons, indented on my palm. No matter how many times I go through this, I am always nervous just before I see you. I have managed to build up a tolerance for almost everything else, feeling a sense of indifference towards most things – grieving over friends and loved ones has developed into a habit, if not, almost a chore, and work has become a form of silent meditation. Very little can anger or frustrate or scare me. Sometimes I feel like an iceberg, a total zenith of peace and security, adrift in an ocean that is still and silent, except for a mild wind.

When I was young, I used to miss you. I used to spend days, weeks, decades weeping over you, visiting your many graves spread over many continents. I remember placing flowers in Tuscany, Adelaide, São Paulo, Bombay. I have lain upon the moist ground above your two unmarked graves and I have slept in the cool marble of your first mausoleum. Each time we meet, we fall back in love and we age together: sometimes we have children, sometimes we exist in a peaceful solitude. Until you die, and it all starts again. Each time I feel as if everything is ripped away from me; as if nothing matters anymore. Each time, I am stripped of all the wrinkles and scars that I gain while by your side, slowly returning to how I was when we first met, all those centuries ago.

Strangely, watching my white hairs turn black, and feeling my arthritis disappear always provokes a profound sense of melancholy within me. Regaining my youth only means losing you all over again. It is like rewriting my own personal history, as if all the experiences which we have shared are wiped clean – almost as if they had never existed at all. Witnessing myself age before returning to my late adolescence is rather distressing. I am constantly peering over a cliff, preparing to jump, before being ripped away. Starting a journey which I know I can never complete.

Slowly this deep, raw warmth returns to my cheeks. All these feelings are so foreign and yet I recognise them so well. My chest tightens and my mind races. I am overwhelmed by a kind of nervous excitement, as if the whole world has taken on a soft glow. Hazy and amaranthine. As I emerge, leaving behind this chrysalis of apathy, I feel the warmth of the sun’s fervid rays upon my skin. I become aware of the dew drops impearled on every leaf, and of the butterflies who hover about them like sleep-walkers. The sky seems to expand before me as if it were some kind of vast ocean. I am ready to find you again.

We were always destined to be with each other, but the constant waiting often makes me feel impatient and hopeless. While you have been reborn a total of thirteen times, I have lived through 1494 years, about five hundred of which I have spent alone. In that space of time, I have acclimatised to solitude, never allowing myself to form new friendships and relationships until I start my life with you once again, fearing that these additional bonds would just create additional complications. Five hundred years of immortality, I know now, is five hundred years of lassitude and boredom.

I can never really predict when you will come back. All I can do is regularly check my reflection, waiting to see the familiar eyes of that girl who turned nineteen over a millennia ago and who has returned to that same age a dozen times since. I never know what you would look like, how you would talk or even who you would truly be. Meeting you again is always like meeting a completely new person, raised in a different place, with a different language, with different customs. Yet, despite all these differences and this vast chasm of time which always exists between us, I can always tell that it is you.

I always get nervous as if it were the very first time.

As I await seeing you once again, I vividly recall being near you, lying on the moist grass of a nation whose borders have since been squeezed far tighter. The weight of your hand in mine as we gazed upwards, searching for meaning in a universe which seemed so great and impersonal. The porcelain serenity of the moon fixed in place alongside silky constellations, filling the vast forgetfulness of the sky. Yet, despite the intimidating emptiness of this expanse, you were able to translate the silence of the stars. Speaking in a language that is now long forgotten, you traced out the invisible bonds between each pinprick in the sky with your index finger and, in doing so, linked them to us. The warmth of your touch brought context to this dark immeasurable abyss. I could not have longed for anything more than to stay there, touched and touching you.

Yet, in these empty moments when I feel adrift in my self-imposed isolation, my sense of self has only strengthened. In the silent decades, between wars, between deaths and between loves, I have come to find a kind of bliss in my own company. I am always there, a universal constant. It may have taken well over a millennia, but I feel that I have come to appreciate myself in the way that only an immortal being truly can. While my eternal life used to feel like a burden, I have now lived long enough to realise my own joy.

I still feel this shaky impatience. My heart races as my eyes scan the street, hoping to sense you pass me by. We cannot be severed as we are one, and to lose you, when I am this close, is to lose myself. I miss you. I long for you. You may be different people from different generations, but your soul always remains the same. I wouldn’t wish you to be anything other than who you are. It hurts to know that you are so close by, and yet you are a stranger to me. I am on fire. I want you. Need you.

And then I see you. The sense of yearning remains, but all the tension inside of me evaporates. I can already feel your touch again.

At the Station

Klara Zhao
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At the Station

The station has become the gathering place of the men and women in bright orange vests: the station staff, who hang about to watch the trains come and go. How lonely they must be, not the staff (who have the company of each other, at least) but the empty trains, which make the long journeys across the country only to be greeted by some laughter into the silence, to be watched by the station guards who wave their little white flags to the bare hills in the distance. The occasional leaf blows by from a nearby tree, grown full in its springtime form and happy to be rid of the excess burden. But otherwise, the stations are still, frozen in a perpetual wait. The steam keeps pumping, the engines keep running, yet one could not help noticing how painfully embarrassing this wait was, knowing, even before the arrival, that the invitation to the journey would be declined. Sometimes, the driver might change: a friendly exchange at the head of the train, but one that passes all too quickly. One driver steps off, the other one on, and all is silent again.

And imagine all these empty tubes, travelling like dreamy snakes across the plains… travelling, as though in a sort of daze. Some run underground, too, and as they pass from tunnel to tunnel, daylight occasionally breaks in as a series of flickering squares that seem to turn on and off as though controlled by some mechanical device. In the empty compartments they come and go, acting as entertainment for the one or two masked men sitting metres from one another, barely daring to make eye contact for fear of getting too close to each other.

The train will arrive with the station with relative fluency, if louder than usual as the screeching of the rails echoes into the silent station. And as one disembarks this hollow metal beast, one receives the very same greeting as the lonely train previously observed. A laugh into the silence, a step into the stillness, and a single breath seems to make the station tremble.

En Attendant

Klara Zhao
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En Attendant

For what, then, is there to wait?
For last season’s wind to abate,
For the summer that has come too late,
Or for the blossoms that have bloomed, at any rate…
———
Sitting amongst the greenery,
By the river that smiles serenely
At a sky, bare and lonely…
———
Waiting for a dream that sits idly, and
Twiddles its thumbs in mockery,
Hanging about like the last unwanted crumb.
———
One might well, then, say,
For Nothing, does one wait.
And for that, it is never too late.
———
To hope for Godot to come some day,
For the years to come by and say,
This time, let’s leave it up to fate.
———
So sit on the roof and watch remotely
The wind that makes the spires dance there, slowly
As in the dream told by the blackbird’s singing.
———
Waiting about like the hollow men, who
Still in the remnants of their souls make room
For the hope cast by illusions on the moon.
———
So let us wait then, let us wait,
And see how the world turns in the shade
Of the river that flows by coolly,
—
Of the blossoms that come and go so quickly,
Of the tolling of the bells that cry,
“Hurry up please it’s time,”
—
To sit by and simply watch time running,
To sit by and watch the geese come, hurrying
To keep the lone man company.

round

Maria-Minodora Grosu
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round

the world is round so I find it natural
     I find it only natural
         to walk in circles

                      it makes you feel natural

it makes you feel grounded
     even
         philosophical
             it channels new ways

                     of feeling directional

like
     new oranges
         rolling out of foliages
             round all year round

like
     memories
         from thrown
             away
                 frisbees
                     ultra
                 dimensional

like
     multi
coloured
     CDs
storing
     laughter
         and pleas

like
colour-coordinated plastic
rings

eyelids and
eyebags

like
iris

and others

other planets
quick tours

the world is round so why
would I not rotate with it
until it all feels
extra-terrestrial

Now That’s What I Call… Poetry?

Calum Taylor
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Now That’s What I Call… Poetry?

Somebody once told me there are a lot of bad song lyrics out there. Imagine, for every subtle, elegant song you hear, there’s bound to be a hundred clumsy ones that, sadly, are never gonna say goodbye. Some will try to fix you; others will continue to bless the rains. If anyone asks if we’re human or if we’re dancer, they don’t deserve an answer. Such, it seems, is the state of popular music: trite, sentimental, trivial. True, everyone might have a song in them, but that, in most cases, is where it should stay…

Complaints like this are common. It’s so easy to do. Far too easy. The issue is that it gets you nowhere. For the most part, popular music never claimed to be poetry, nor does it need to be. For most people, its joy comes from rhythm, melody, stirring vocals; its value, from feeling, memory, raw emotion. What’s more, you can find clumsy writing everywhere, from tabloids to tweets to romance novels. Why should it be any different here? With pop lyrics, I guess, it’s more noticeable. They’re everywhere, and you can’t escape. But if you are approaching The Beatles expecting Blake, you’ll be disappointed. If you search for Milton in Morrissey, Keats in Kate Bush, Coleridge in The Cure, you will be searching forever.

That said, anyone who bemoans our apparent morass of insipid lyricism really ought to readjust their focus. The strength of a chain might be in its weakest link, but it is surely the opposite with art. We ought to praise artforms on the merits of their finest examples, not their most glaringly awful ones—and that, I think, is where we are at now with these lyrics. In recent years, there’s been a growing shift towards allowing certain pop lyrics through the pearly gates of literature. The past few years alone have seen the illustrious Faber and Faber publish, among others, the lyrics of Lou Reed, Kate Bush, and Neil Tennant. Even Shaun Ryder has been granted entry. And while this might twist the melons of some high-brow purists, song lyrics as a form are now much harder for them to ignore. When Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy seemed, in essence, to canonize this tradition, a previously undermined outlet for literary expression. And certainly, ranging from Joni Mitchell to Joy Division, there are so many songs worthy of recognition and praise.

But the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself. Throughout time, music and poetry—both, in origin, oral traditions—have been tangled up together. From Ancient Greek lyre-accompanied recitations to the countless songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the two arts share a rich past. Don’t forget, the word ‘lyric’ comes from the ‘lyre’, the musical instrument itself. We hardly have to scratch the surface of our own literature before we see the omnipresence of music, in Middle English lyrics, folk ballads, Auden’s libretti, the songs of Burns, Blake, and Paul Muldoon… a long and winding list. It is perhaps only when the written page became the perceived ‘home’ of literature that their two paths appeared to diverge.

Then, if the distinction between pop lyrics and ‘literature’—low-brow and high-brow—is essentially a fallacy, why has it taken the wider literary establishment so long to accept it? There are many reasons, not least because of how relatively recent the form (as we know it) is. Issues as far ranging as perpetuating poetic faults (cliché, overuse of rhyme), depreciating the worth of poetry by effectively equating the two forms, even corporate interests come into play. But for me, the most vital part of all of this is remembering the simple fact that these words exist within music. Reading Nick Cave’s Complete Lyrics will only ever be a secondary supplement to the songs themselves. As Bob Dylan articulately grumbles in his Nobel lecture, ‘songs are unlike literature’ in that they’re ‘meant to be sung, not read’. Being tied to music, they are simultaneously limited by the temporal and generic constraints of song, and also unlimited in the boundless potential of the two media, playing off each other.

While it’s important for us to conserve the esteemed literature of the past, it’s equally important to welcome new forms into the so-called ‘canon’. And with the lyrics of popular music, we enter an intriguing situation. After all, song lyrics are for so many people their most immediate access to any kind of poetic expression, and while they will never be able to replace the nuance and formal delight of poetry, they can at least accompany them, respectfully and respected, as yet another platform for beauty. There are many bad song lyrics, yes. But remember, there are good ones too, worth our appreciation: shooting stars that break the mould.

Illustration: Isobel Falk.

‘Normal People’ of Oxford

Elizabeth Bircham
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‘Normal People’ of Oxford

Those who have not yet seen the BBC Three series Normal People might be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about. The 12-part drama, based on the Sally Rooney novel, could have been another trite teenage romance in which the characters (played by actors well into their 20s) engage in excruciating will-they-or-won’t-they encounters in school corridors to the symphony of adolescent drooling. However, as its audiences will attest, Normal People provides a surprisingly delicate assessment of the human condition. Through the lenses of Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal), we are permitted to re-examine the world in which we live – one in which, as Rooney puts it, “class is the structuring principle of our social lives.”[1]

This re-examination is all the more needed because our relationship with class has recently changed. 23 years after John Prescott claimed that “we’re all middle class now”[2], Normal People reminds us that the disappearance of flat-caps and coal mines has not prevented class from dictating the ways in which we live and interact. Of course, this was something many of us already knew, and none more so than Oxford students from “normal” backgrounds.  Connell and Marianne might be from Carricklea, Sligo, but they could just as easily have been from Blaydon, the small north-eastern town where I went to school. Likewise, Normal People follows the couple’s journey to Trinity College, Dublin, but the scene in which Connell stares at its grandiose old buildings could have been set in any Oxford college. 

At their Sligo comp, Marianne is disliked in that particular way posh, clever girls often are in state schools – those that wear “ugly thick-soled flat shoes” and no make-up. Meanwhile, Connell is a brand of unassuming-and-inoffensive that quietly fits in. This changes upon their arrival in Dublin, as evidenced when a friendless Connell bumps into the thriving Marianne at a house party. As Annie Lord of the Independent remarks, “Where before at their state school ‘normal people’ meant a lower-middle-class upbringing and a penchant for period jokes, at university ‘normal people’ means Mykonos mini-breaks, Barber jackets and people who like dismissing arguments by saying, ‘well yes, but that’s subjective.’”[3] Replace Mykonos and barber jackets with maxi-skirts and ‘finding yourself’ in Malaysia and you might just get an accurate depiction of Oxford.

It is difficult to describe why the likes of northerners and state-schoolers can struggle at Oxford, because as a group, we’re not really oppressed.  If you’ve had a childhood of Majorca trips or football coaching, it sounds like privileged attention-seeking to suggest that you’re distressed by southerners saying “bath” wrong. But by showing us Trinity through the eyes of Connell, Normal People finally captures what we’ve been trying to say all along. The reason Connell struggles to find friends at uni is not just because he’s poor, it’s because he’s been conditioned all his life by a culture and by social norms that no longer apply in his new setting.

In the world he’s now in, the main social division is between chino-wearing Eton men who make long arguments for free speech and their flares-clad rivals who talk about “straight white men” in RP tones.  Neither are necessarily doing anything wrong – it’s just an alien environment that requires Connell to re-learn everything about fitting in. This is an experience felt by many Oxford students from a similar background. Personally, everything that made me weird at school makes me normal at Oxford, and everything that makes me weird at Oxford made me normal at school. I spent most of first-year trying to re-mould my brain so it could recognise this new reality. Connell articulates making a similar effort – “I feel like I’m walking around trying on a hundred different versions of myself.”

Close-up shots of Paul Mescal perfectly convey this loneliness – one in which you become a constant observer of this foreign culture, only slowly learning how to partake in it.  A friend from Leeds said:

Speaking to students at Oxford feels like speaking to the popular kids at school, only there’s no consolation in the idea that you’ll ‘do better in life’ than them. The very reason that they’re different to you is that they’ve grown up better and will continue to be more successful because of that. I literally cried watching Connell in his first seminar – the way that he actually downplayed the intelligence of what he was saying when faced with all these confident people shouting about their opinions is something I thought only I had done.

That scene hit home for me, too. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a tutor in my first Hilary, in which he pointed out that I started all my sentences with “I might be wrong, but-“.

It is important to stress that Normal People does not get everything right. It’s a story about a heterosexual, white couple; it does not explore how class intersects with structures such as race and sexuality as it shapes social paradigms. Crucially, it does not challenge the assumption that the Irish class structure is predominantly a white one. This assumption is widely held, despite 6% of Irish 15-24 year olds coming from non-white and mixed race backgrounds. However, its portrayal of Trinity does start a dialogue about how class shapes our university experience, even amongst students who could ordinarily be described as privileged.   Whilst many students who experience  class-based culture shock are from low-income families, many are the children of teachers and nurses, or of electricians and engineers who may have never worried about putting food on the table. Many  are from white, English-speaking backgrounds. However, understanding that it is not only oppressed minority groups that find Oxford difficult allows us to appreciate the scale of the problem. And surprise, surprise, the problem is huge.  

Currently, the only Oxford discourse on privilege is identity-based; thus, it implies that students who are not from specific marginalised groups will not struggle here. This would be a sufficient discourse if Oxford was a microcosm of British society. However, Oxford is not a microcosm of society; it is a microcosm of the establishment. Oxbridge recruits more students from eight private schools than nearly 3,000 state schools put together[4]; it is not just that there are not enough students from some groups, but that there are too many from another. Of course, addressing the former should be our first priority (and identity-based activism is a necessary and important part of doing so) – but it is not enough. Unless we address the latter, progress will be tokenistic and elitism will continue to flourish. Furthermore, by ignoring the varied ways in which class affects our university lives, we risk reductive Us-vs-Them rhetoric taking hold in those who feel unseen. All the while, the establishment continues to thrive.

It is hard to articulate how class-based culture shock presents itself to even the most well-meaning elite students. Having grown up knowing only how the elite behave, they assume that this is just how people behave, and therefore cannot fathom what the rest of us experience. The best we can come up with are statements like those given by Connell – “it’s all loafers and chinos and what-not” or, “I don’t think I understand them is all, they’re just a bit different from my own friends.” The fact that class is so hard to define allows the elite’s culture to continue perpetuating itself; Marx believed that we use norms to promote the creation of roles in society, and that they support the functioning of the social class structure.[5] By having their own distinct culture, the elite can identify us as not being one of their own. Normal People is so compelling because it gets that the elite are the weird ones, not us. It was this very sentiment that Pulp so astutely captured in their 1995 hit:

“you’ll never live like common people / you’ll never do what common people do.”

Maybe university is called a “great leveller” not because of its formal education, but because it is a crash course in the culture of the establishment. It’s a lesson in how to post artsy disposable camera shots on Instagram instead of posing in front of your cooker; it’s a lesson in how to smoke like Marianne and her friends, gesticulating and blowing rings rather than standing and swaying like Connell at the Debs. We may learn how to fit in by forming meaningful friendships that transcend class barriers and by finding joy in the subjects we love, however, this may come at the cost of alienation from the places where we grew up.

“I think that I thought that if I moved here, I’d fit in better, that I’d meet more like-minded people,” says Connell of moving to Trinity. “I left Carricklea thinking that I could have a different life, but I hate it here….and I can’t get that life back,” he tells a counsellor, sobbing with the realisation. Obviously, class doesn’t completely determine how you’ll feel about Oxford – but for students who do struggle, feeling unsettled here is made more difficult by discovering that you’ll never truly be who you were before. The old ‘you’ has just been relegated to yet another version of yourself.

Last Trinity, I attended a Union debate on the motion “Thatcher was a hero to the working class.” When the audience was allowed to participate, another student got up and said, “my grandparents were working-class miners from County Durham, and thanks to Right to Buy they were able to leave.” I really wanted to speak.  I had researched the 1984 miners’ strike for my A-Level coursework and I come from a line of miners too, but my family are still in the North-East. But something stopped me – the fear of getting up and making a scene of myself, of drawing attention to the fact that I’m not even meant to be at Oxford, really – the fear of being found out. I said nothing and watched a load of students with clipped accents talk with so much authority about an area they’d researched for a few days, one in which I had lived my entire life, as though I wasn’t there, as though none of us were there – those of us that have never found Oxford “normal”, those of us who’ve had our whole understanding of what it is to be “normal” subverted by being here.  

On the same album as “Common People”, the lesser known song “Mis-Shapes” cries : “we don’t look the same as you / and we don’t do the things you do / but we live round here too.” By bottling this reality and turning it into a few episodes of a tv drama, Normal People is a reminder that we are all, in fact, here – quietly observing as the establishment lives out their youths. For many viewers, Normal People provided a close study of human connection and what it means to have relationships. It is this and more; it might be set in Ireland, and it might be a teen romance, but Normal People starts a dialogue much needed at Oxford today.  

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jH_0rg46Es

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6636565.stm

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/sally-rooney-normal-people-love-class-paul-mescal-daisy-edgarjones-a9482811.html

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/britain-privately-educated-oxbridge

[5] Marshall, G. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology

In Conversation with Kris Hallenga

Isabella Colletta
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In Conversation with Kris Hallenga

In 2019 Kris Hallenga posted a letter addressed to her past self on the CoppaFeel website, recognising a decade since she had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Reflecting on everything from successes to failures, she muses at one point “you’re going to like the idea of writing a book but probably never get on with it”. A year on and she is writing her book How to Glitter a Turd after successfully crowd funding for it. Based on her blog of the same name, the book follows Hallenga through her diagnosis and the process of learning to live with a life limiting disease whilst founding a charity. She recognises that her experience of breast cancer is “extraordinary” because “I’ve survived with this for such a long time, which is obviously rare so I really wanted for people to know that a story like this exists. So if someone is diagnosed they know that actually there is someone who survived it for a long time, and it gives people hope.” When I mention the uncertainty she expressed a year ago as to whether or not she would ever write a book she laughs: “Yeah, I shouldn’t doubt myself like that”.

It has now been eleven years since Hallenga was diagnosed with cancer, and since CoppaFeel was founded. “I had no knowledge of breast cancer and didn’t know I should be checking my boobs, so I didn’t”, she tells me. When she was 23 she found a lump in her breast, “I got it checked out and after 8 months of going back and forth to the GP it was diagnosed as stage 4 breast cancer.” The late diagnosis meant that the cancer had spread from her breast to her spine, and whilst it could be treated it couldn’t be cured. A couple of months later she decided to found CoppaFeel alongside her twin sister Maren, a decision borne in part out of “the frustration and the anger, the whole situation got me really baffled about why no one was telling young people to check their boobs”.

From its early beginnings, spreading breast cancer awareness amongst young people was the drive that pushed CoppaFeel forwards. “We wanted to start a conversation with young people about their boobs,” she says, “to normalise that subject of checking your boobs, touching your boobs.” One of their first steps, before even receiving their charity status, was to go around music festivals and initiate a conversation with young people about breast cancer. From this, the motivation to educate young people about the importance of checking themselves for symptoms grew, even though “we didn’t know how we were going to do that or what success looked like to us, but we had enough evidence from going to festivals and speaking to young people about their boobs that showed that there was a severe lack of knowledge and understanding.”

One of the charity’s big aims which continues today is “to stamp out late detection altogether”, Hallenga tells me, and she expresses the determined belief that “cancer doesn’t have to be diagnosed late”. I’m curious as to how she learned to define success during the early stages of the charity’s foundation, and particularly as it began to slowly grow in the public’s consciousness. For her, it was when the first person who informed them that their message had helped her to be diagnosed early which “became the indication that what we were doing was having some impact”. As individual stories began to flood in, “success suddenly became evidence, anecdotal evidence from these young people saying ‘I was diagnosed early because of you guys’.” 

Alongside talks at schools and universities, CoppaFeel have maintained their campaigning work at festivals, have hosted flash mobs and they’ve launched a number of successful social media campaigns with numerous companies. Throughout it all the charity has maintained a positive tone in their education, since “the truth of the matter is you’re talking about boobs and getting to know your boobs isn’t a scary conversation”, Hallenga suggests. “Cancer, the realities of cancer, are obviously. But people don’t even have to consider what life with cancer is like they just need to check their boobs.” 

The organisation’s work at festivals across the UK has been enormously popular, and they have launched their own event “Festifeel”, which Hallenga describes as her “baby”. The annual comedy and music gig takes place during October for Breast Cancer awareness month, yet planning for the event this year has been subject to deliberation amidst the pandemic. “The idea that it might not happen this year is really sad”, Hallenga tells me. The event has been part of CoppaFeel’s fundraising and awareness activities for years now, but “coronavirus has interrupted a lot of events and a lot of things, so Festifeel is perhaps a small fight in comparison to something.”

Avoiding the topic of coronavirus would be impossible, and charities are particularly struggling with the challenges the pandemic has created. However, CoppaFeel has continued to find new ways to spread awareness and continue key aspects of their work. “I think we are really lucky cause we are quite a digitally savvy organisation anyway” Hallenga acknowledges, “so it means that we can put a lot of our services online. So our boobettes who usually go out to do talks in schools or workplaces we’ve now set them up to do webinars online instead.” They even have a Boob Bot, a programme on facebook messenger which informs you on how to check your boobs and what to look for in real time. Whilst the organisation has adapted to the challenges posed by going entirely virtual “in terms of fundraising that’s a far bigger challenge. Because a lot of events have been cancelled and a lot of people are obviously thinking about money, so it’s a real challenge for all charities right now.”

Especially as a relatively small charity, the long term implications of the pandemic present a concern. But Hallenga has worked to create a strong voice for CoppaFeel since founding it, and in 2014 she was asked if her life and work could become the focus of a BBC documentary. Opening up about her experiences of living with stage 4 cancer whilst running a charity on camera presented its challenges. “At first it was quite hard to do”, she tells me, “I found the video diaries the worst, I just found them so awkward.” However the process of filming and building rapport with the crew allowed the film to become therapeutic, and speaking to a camera “sort of became really natural and I think that’s what has made the film so successful because it’s been very authentic, and very real and very raw.”

Hallenga has also spoken openly about breast cancer and the reality of living with the disease in various newspapers and magazines. But it was the Check ‘em Tuesday campaign she ran with CoppaFeel in The Sun in the form of a weekly column which truly propelled the charity into the national consciousness. This “was monumental” she says, because “it kind of got a health message into a paper every week for eight months”. The column focused on the charity’s breast cancer awareness message, but also allowed Hallenga to share her story of living with the difficulties of a life-limiting illness. She’s previously described how the column became a kind of therapy for her, because “it allowed me to express what it was like living with cancer, and that’s not something you tend to read about in newspapers. It was just a normal person with a very abnormal story, sharing what life was like.”

The campaign faced a level of criticism for its association with The Sun, but this was something they were prepared for, Hallenga tells me. She is still strong in her belief that voicing the message of the column was the most important thing: “we were quite firm on how we believed it was going to make a difference, given that 6 million people read the paper everyday.” As the column progressed, its impact began to parallel the early success of CoppaFeel, and people began to send in anecdotes and stories of how the campaign encouraged them to get symptoms checked. By the end of the eight month campaign, there had been a real movement in national awareness of breast cancer. “We saw such a huge shift in the checking behaviours of the people who read The Sun compared to other papers,” she comments, “and we can kind of go “do you know what, we can prove that this has made some change”. The eight month campaign not simply drove forward the charity’s central campaigning message, but also gave a rare opportunity for CoppaFeel to embed itself in the national consciousness; as Hallenga explains, “small charities don’t get opportunities like that very often.”

For a charity such as CoppaFeel, whose central intention is to spread a message of awareness, publicity such as this is important. National attention from the film “Kris: Dying to Live’ and the charity’s column with The Sun only propelled the organisation’s message further, and in July 2017 cancer awareness and education was put on the primary and secondary school syllabus. “I mean that was amazing,” Hallenga recalls, “the day we realised that getting something written up in the curriculum that was potentially going to really help people was incredible.” Achievements like this should be celebrated, but she is quick to remind that the work is never done. She moves onto new projects quickly, but she suggests that the celebration is important in maintaining the drive: “I guess in a way you’re more motivated to keep going and it keeps the momentum going, which is great.”

Given the current circumstances, judging what the future holds for CoppaFeel is challenging. Hallenga stepped down from the position of CEO of the charity in 2016, a move which she describes as “a dream come true”. Since founding it in 2009, she affirms that the charity has grown to a stage where it no longer requires her to lead it, and for her, the combined role of founder and CEO is not always a helpful position. “I just don’t think the founder should run charities forever, I think it can really hinder them”, she explains, “and I also wanted to be able to step away at my own choice, at my own decision and not as the result of a new cancer progression.” However, she still works closely with the charity and continues to work around breast cancer awareness and education. For Hallenga, it’s a message that continues to be incredibly vital, and continuing education confirms her optimism that in the future “I really believe that cancer will be looked at as this thing that happened, that doesn’t kill people anymore”.

The Sheldonian

Klara Zhao
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The Sheldonian

The concert hall was evidently constructed with the peculiar intention of casting an experience of multiple worlds within one polystratinous edifice. The best seat is right at the very top, on the level that affords but half a view of the entire orchestra down below (for the sight of the orchestra powering away at their metal and wooden contraptions was never the main attraction), and a more complete view of the concert hall itself. After having settled down, chosen the row that suits one’s comforts best, one must take the time to have a good glance around, carefully careless so as not to attract voyeuristic suspicions. The primary aim of your line of vision will be the sight of those sitting across from you: the pre-concert shuffling and steady formation of a relatively composed crowd, the constituents of which appear quite minuscule in the midst of the grand scene – like newly formed buds on the trees of early spring, or floral icing patterning on a wedding cake. Strange, what these voiceless humans become when sitting so high up. The ceiling is closer to us than the concert hall, and one’s head could almost touch, though not quite managing to do so, the artwork looking down on the curious audience. The requiem will be playing in the background, or the foreground, if it is for that which one came. But it is a sight indeed, simply to gaze at those across the hall – and it is passing from the distant world of the orchestra pit up one stratum, two strata, and as the gaze crosses the line dividing the top and middle floors, then one is suddenly transported. Flown off to another world, the idle eyes passing over the individual souls that speckle the semicircle around semi-views of a concert in formation. That is the beauty of the concert. Music threading its way in and out of the thoughts of a hundred vague spirits in the audience.

And in a moment, they all disperse into the night. A bumble of contented bees that move out together and then divide themselves into the starry skies.

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0; image has been cropped

Unterwegs

Klara Zhao
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Unterwegs

Let us meet at the station, and see where we go –
To the park, to sit under the shade of the trees perhaps, under the parasols of conker leaves,
and watch the pigeons heave
every crumb, every speck of dust between their beaks…
And in those grey streets, we’ll see none of the beasts,
which have haunted all our lightest dreams –
The shadows that hung, that draped the scene
and left us in the dark for months, and lean
towards a future that we cannot see.
———
So let us meet at the station, then,
and what happens after we can decide again –
perhaps the cafés will have reopened,
perhaps the concert halls will have chosen
to host another show before we leave.
Perhaps, then, we shall sit together, drink together,
laugh together as in those early days.
———
But for all these hopeful fantasies,
we shall only see
the leaves of spring trees standing in our way,
as we laze in our chimeric daze,
and see, perhaps, that this will never be.
———
But let us meet, in any case,
at the station, and let us haste,
and see which one of us will win the race –
The race to build the dreams of man,
the long-lost fantasies that so often can
drive those wood doves to lands crafted by unknown hands
and paint the picture of a timeless past.
———
And by the time we’ve both stopped dreaming,
stopped painting and stopped hastening,
Then perhaps it will be next Spring,
and no more will we need to hide in the shadows of the station wing.
———
Six O’ clock, and the day goes by,
the weeks, the months, the years,
how they sigh!
Perhaps it is better to abandon the fears –
indeed, of losing oneself in such fantasies!

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