Thursday 19th June 2025
Blog Page 682

Feeling comfort while in the uncomfortable

Barney Pite
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Feeling comfort while in the uncomfortable

What is the appeal of music that makes you feel uncomfortable? Does it allow the listener to explore aspects of themselves which lie hidden in their day-today lives? Does it provide a sense of emotional release from the dull normality of work and family? Or is it just fun to shout the house down every once in a while?

For Swans, an experimental rock band playing out of New York, conveying a sense of profound threat is at the heart of every record they put out. With grand, reverberating guitar riffs and percussion ostinatos rising and falling with an oceanic swell beneath the texture, it’s hard not feel a little ill-at-ease.

Michael Gira started Swans in 1982. After receiving critical acclaim for the raw and abrasive sound the band fostered, and after releasing ten albums in fifteen years, the band broke up. The band’s early work drew on a wide range of influences, including grunge, punk, and metal; it garnered a dedicated, if small, community of fans. After some thirteen years of hiatus, Swans got back together. Gira said that he, after To Be Kind performing a song ‘The Provider’ by Angels of Light, the band he formed after Swans, felt “a nascent urge right then to re-form or reinvigorate Swans because I remembered how elevating and intense that experience was”.

There have been four albums since Swans’ reformation, including . The project is probably the most intense I’ve ever heard. At two hours in length, boasting a ten-song tracklist, the album packs a kind of punch most bands don’t even dream of. The central track on To Be Kind is called ‘Bring the Sun / Toussaint L’Ouverture’. At a little over 34 minutes, ‘Bring the Sun’ includes extended sections depicting sun-worship and stretches featuring Gira shouting the name ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’, the best-known leader of the Haitian revolution from the late 18th century.

Gira’s textures, always dense and overwhelming, incorporates the sounds of wood saws and horses galloping, and voices shouting in French and Spanish; synths wail and build to a point where the timbres reach complete incomprehensibility.

It’s hard to listen without shivering a little, or wanting to start a fire in your college accommodation whilst sacrificing livestock to the devil. On ‘Just a Little Boy’, Gira whines above an ominously lilting bass-line; some four minutes in, he sings – or more accurately, groans – the phrase ‘I’m just a little boy’, with a high-pitched, maniacal voice.

It’s the stuff of nightmares – deeply and distortedly unnerving. But across their grand maximalist textures and hypnotic minimalism, and their quasi-meaningless lyrics, all that Swans are really trying to do is get beneath your skin. It’s safe to say that they succeed.

There’s an aspect of art this arrestingly complex that demands total focus. Easy listening music is aptly named; and so is hardcore. It is rarely a fully enjoyable experience to listen to a band like Swans. But, every once in a while, it turns out to be a rewarding one.

Collaborators Review – a comedy of Stalinist Russia

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Collaborators Review – a comedy of Stalinist Russia

Mikhail Bulgakov was an anti-Soviet writer of the first half of the 20th century with one unique trait: Joseph Stalin adored him. In spite of this, before 1938, little of Bulgakov’s work was published or performed due to Soviet censorship, the main exception being The White Guard, which Stalin himself saw 15 times. Thus, Bulgakov’s bizarre decision in 1938 to accept a commission of a play about a young Joseph Stalin forms the basis of John Hodge’s Collaborators.

It is clear from the beginning that the play deliberately avoids treating Stalinist Russia with seriousness and reverence: the opening scene is a recurring dream of Bulgakov’s in which he is chased around a table slapstick style by the General Secretary of the USSR himself, only with silent movie piano music in the background. Think of the Benny Hill theme tune and you’re not far off.

The horrors, atrocities, and cruelties of the Stalinist purges (in which 1 of 18 Russian citizens were imprisoned or killed) are not portrayed in a grim, grey, depressing light. Instead, their severity is offset by the abundance of humour throughout the play. The lunacy of Stalinism is portrayed as exactly that, initially evoking a laugh, but later making it all the more hard-hitting when you realise it’s truth.

Bulgakov’s lodging mates provide a plethora of wisecracks and mockeries of Stalinist-era Russia in the opening scenes, with Praskovya’s “It is imperative that I remember nothing” comedically highlighting the level of state-control over citizens’ lives and thoughts in an Orwellian dystopian sense. A series of witty interactions between Vasilly, an ex-landowner under Tsarism, and Sergei, a staunchly Communist factory worker, drew some of the biggest laughs of the night providing the timeless right vs left political debate in its characteristic form.

Particularly moving interactions between Angus Fraser (Bulgakov) and Alison Stibbe (Yelena, Bulgakov’s wife) provide brief moments of sorrow and sympathy when Bulgakov is diagnosed with nephrosclerosis (an anagram of ‘Censorship loser’), though these do not detract from the sheer joie-de-vivre of Bulgakov and co. throughout the rest of Act 1.

Soon, Bulgakov is having meetings with Stalin underneath the Kremlin and in a strangely humorous turn of events, the pair swap jobs. Stalin assumes the role of writing the play, and Bulgakov takes to ruling the USSR. After his meetings with Stalin become more and more regular, Bulgakov’s commitment to oneself and one’s principles seems to wane in favour of the idea that “the individual doesn’t matter” when the collective good is at stake.

Blurton’s Stalin (bonus points for the real moustache) is suitably deceiving: supposedly enamoured with Bulgakov Stalin the genocidal egomaniacal dictator is initially cuddly, fanboying, borderline obsessed with Bulgakov. It isn’t long though before the twinges of the true Stalin appear as Bulgakov falls deeper and deeper into his traps, though these clues were a little too subtle at times the. This movement from comedy towards a darker tone culminates in Act 2. This drastic change in tone proved a little challenging for some of the cast to negotiate immediately post-interval but it wasn’t long before the new profoundly emotional tone took hold.

The simplicity of the staging, consisting only of a table and chairs, a cupboard, a telephone, and a gramophone (with no real ‘scene’ change throughout) allows for the play to maintain a fluidity and pulse that would otherwise be non-existent given the number of scene changes there technically are. The back wall, a block of Communist red, serves as a looming reminder for the audience: this is Stalinist Russia, you cannot escape the State. The only escape from this is provided in black Cyrillic text: “manuscripts do not burn.”

Collaborators presents the dichotomy of the individual and the collective. For Bulgakov, in order to protect his own collective of friends and family, he needed to remain true to himself as an individual, instead of becoming another passive obedient of the Stalinist regime. Bulgakov only stood out from the wash of red through his dissenting works, the black Cyrillic against a wall of red. For all its hilarity and vivacity, Collaborators also had moments of profundity, with the timeless words of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margharita, his last (dissenting) novel, “manuscripts do not burn”, serving as a message to all those believing their individuality is insignificant in the face of the collective.

How To Save A Rock With A Circle Preview – ‘conveys urgency with a sense of humour’

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How To Save A Rock With A Circle Preview – ‘conveys urgency with a sense of humour’

Five days ago, three quarters of Venice flooded as high winds and heavy rain hit Italy. And this may not be an isolated incident. Projections of rising sea levels show that many heritage sites in Italy are under threat. So much for the centre of the Roman empire and cradle of Renaissance – one day the treasures of Italy may be submerged by water.

Despite Trump’s insistence that climate change is a hoax, it is undeniable that global warming very close to home. It is perhaps rather timely that the Extinction Rebellion, a protest movement against the government’s lack of spending to mitigate the effects of climate change, took place this Halloween’s eve in London.

It is against this backdrop that I previewed the upcoming student production How To Save A Rock With A Circle. Written, directed and produced entirely by Oxford students, the play examines our relationship with the climate and explores how a looming climate apocalypse could have a real impact on our daily lives.

The play is set in 2028. Fracking is in full swing across north England and people are getting angry. Small earthquakes and power cuts have become the norm. Many are deeply concerned and unhappy about the lack of human endeavours to improve the situation. Hence, political unrest ensues, and mass protests become a regular feature of people’s daily life.

The actors showed me a scene in a London airport, where four friends are trying to get on a flight to Iceland. They’re trying to reach a polar bear that one of the characters is in love with (they met online). Trapped on an ice cap that has just broken off from Greenland, the polar bear is drifting towards Iceland – a dangerous place to be heading as, by law, they are required to shoot any polar bears that come their way. This is not borne out of irrational hatred towards the cuddly polar bears, but out of practicalities – the government cannot afford rescue missions for polar bears on a regular basis. The group is against the clock – they need to meet the polar bear in three days. However, things don’t really go their way.

With tickets in hand, they run into a wall of silent protesters, blocking their way to the terminal. This is where the scene gets interesting – the actors attempt to climb over the audience, immobile in their seats very much like the silent protesters, on their fictional journey to the terminal.

This scene seems to epitomise the core philosophy of the play. The company are trying to convey a sense of urgency and unease, but they always do so with humour. They want everyone in the room to feel involved with what’s happening on stage. After all, it will take a lot of co-operation if we ever hope to save our planet.

The play is also a zero- carbon production. Actors will ride on a bicycle which in turn converts energy into electricity, and elsewhere solar lighting will be used. Instead of playing sound from speakers, it will all be created live on stage.

People may think that a play about climate change might not be engaging. But by focusing on ordinary people who are themselves finding it difficult to get to grips with environmental disaster, this play eases itself into these difficult topics. Innovatively designed, it is definitely be a thought-provoking experience.

Oxford Philippines Society ‘express concerns’ at Pacquaio’s Union address

Daniel Hall
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Oxford Philippines Society ‘express concerns’ at Pacquaio’s Union address

The Oxford Philippines Society has issued a statement noting their “concerns” about the visit to the Oxford Union of Manny Pacquiao, a professional boxer and current serving Senator of the Philippines.

The statement was released shortly before Pacquiao addressed the Union this evening. Within it the Society listed some of Pacquiao’s political positions which they say “undermine fundamental human rights”.

After acknowledging Pacquiao’s achievements as a boxer, the Society said that “it would be remiss in its duties if Mr Pacquiao’s visit to the Oxford Union is not properly put in its context.”

In the statement, the Society said: “The Society believes that Mr Pacquiao’s invitation to the Oxford Union should not be viewed as a validation, directly or indirectly, of Mr Pacquiao’s performance as a legislator in Philippine Congress.

“Mr Pacquiao has commented that people who engage in homosexual relations are “max masahol pa sa hayop” (worse than animals). This comment sparked outrage worldwide, which is not surprising given that many people are making efforts to tackle the issue of homophobia in sports.”

The statement also refers to Pacquiao’s advocacy for the reintroduction of the death penalty for drug-related offences, a policy which is being pushed by controversial Philippine President Duterte.

Pacquiao’s vote against a bill promoting sex education and contraception is also cited as a concern by the Society.

The statement concluded: “Mr Pacquiao is only capable of directly hurting other human beings by jabbing at them in boxing matches. But as a well-known athlete with the world at his stage, the reach and influence of his words, if left unchecked, might harm and knockout the incremental progress we are making to ensure a fair, equal, and just world.”

President of the Oxford Union, Stephen Horvath, told Cherwell: “Members are welcome to ask questions at our events.”

Depraved Genius of Caravaggio

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Depraved Genius of Caravaggio

Caravaggio’s ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ was a unique self-portrait. Ostensibly, it has all the predictable features of the iconic Old Testament story. David adopts the traditional pose of personifications of justice. He is compassionate, youthful, but perhaps just slightly more melancholy than might be presumed for a young shepherd who has just miraculously defeated a philistine giant. Goliath also appears to meet expectation. He’s intimidating, brutish, and grotesque. Yet what’s unexpected is that this infamous villain, this archetypal ‘monster’ bears the unmistakable likeness of Caravaggio himself.

This was exceptional in contemporary art. Conventionally, the self-portraits of artists were ennobling – praising the artist’s own ability to create grace and virtue in a grim world. They were not supposed to act as ugly admissions of wickedness as is the case here. Clearly Caravaggio was wracked with profound guilt. Themes of culpability and sinfulness had always permeated Caravaggio’s work. In his ‘The Beheading of St John the Baptist’, Caravaggio’s signature is written in the Baptist’s spilt blood. Similarly, Caravaggio included himself in ‘The Martyrdom of St. Ursula’, peering through the dark to catch a glimpse of the murder. In addition, there is the ever-present shadow and metaphorical torment that eats away at the borders of the action in so many of his paintings.

He had always skirted the edges of public acceptability and indeed deeper morality. He was notorious for brawling in particular, even in a city where public fighting was endemic. But ‘David holding the head of Goliath’ came at a particular moral low, after the murder of a young man in a brawl. On the run, with a sizeable bounty on his head, the painting was to be a redemptive gift to Cardinal Borghese, who had found him a papal pardon.

So Caravaggio was not just the archetypal ‘monster’ artist, an angry, violent subversion of the sensitive, ruminative stereotype, but he is also the perfect example of an artist whose background and character is inextricable from their art. But can we separate the past and personal attributes of an artist from their art, even in cases where themes and ideas that dominated their real lives don’t seem to be present in the artist’s work? There might be some cases where this seems relatively straightforward. Richard Wagner was a virulent and notorious anti-Semite, but a lay person might find it quite difficult to read this anti-Semitism into his music and hence could well admire it untroubled.

This is in stark contrast, then, to the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the state-backed Nazi filmmaker who documented and glorified the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in The Triumph of the Will. Yet this film, a love letter to Nazism which apotheosises Hitler, is still considered by many a technical masterpiece. It features in Steven Jay Schneider’s list of ‘1001 Movies to See before You Die’, described as “an awesome spectacle, vulgar but mythic, and technically an overwhelming, assured accomplishment”.

We should be able to separate content and form, at least in theory. This is quite easily done in the case of The Triumph of the Will, where those faceless masses and overblown military processions inadvertently stress Nazism as the ridiculous, perverse pathology it was. It’s a little more difficult in the case of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. One of the film’s key revelations, that the villain of the piece has raped his daughter when she was 15, serves as an inescapable reminder of Polanski’s own history as a rapist and sexual abuser. Of course you might watch the film and never consider the director. His personal imprint isn’t as visible as Caravaggio’s bruised dangling face staring at his audience. But of course even describing Polanski and Caravaggio next to each other places them neatly in the single category of ‘monster’.

Most of us would agree that morality exists on a spectrum. But the uncomfortable arbitrariness of this spectrum will result in different responses. This inherent subjectivity is the key. Sometimes audiences can demonstrate a rather surprising disregard for the personalities of their favourite artists. Picasso’s misogyny didn’t turn people away from his revolutionary cubism. Paul Verlaine’s bouts of violence haven’t diminished his prominence in Decadent movement poetry. Even the murder Caravaggio committed can hardly be said to have negated the impact of his art.

Yet, audiences were repulsed by the rape and sexual abuse in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and perturbed by the rape, robbery and violence of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. But this shock and moral outrage was directed entirely at fiction. The authors were not criminals, but were respected, and lauded as intellectual. Maybe we can forget the David Alexander on our relationship with morally reprehensible artists presence of the artist. Roland Barthes famously argued for this approach in his seminal 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’. He argues that to avoid limiting the possible interpretations and significance of a text, we have to forget its author and all their political opinions, as well as the wider, unconscious influence of their historical context and their personal identity.

This seems simple in theory but there are cases where the very name of an author irredeemably taints a piece of art. After all, we might well say that the art is in the space between a piece of work and the audience, but in a sense the audience’s objective appreciation is immediately skewed as soon as they hear the name of the artist. Who would not look at one of Hitler’s paintings differently on hearing his name? A corollary of this is that the more we strive to understand the fullness of art, by looking into its context and consulting its meaning as prescribed by critics and experts, the further we taint the ‘purity’ of an uninformed response. Think how dramatically different a reading of ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ might be if the audience was unaware of Caravaggio’s likeness to Goliath.

The practical difficulty we have in detaching art from artist, and following Barthes’ imperative, is seen all around us. Earlier this year, for example, students at the University of Manchester painted over the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’, inscribed on a wall of the newly refurbished Students’ Union. They explained that they did so because they considered Kipling prominently opposed to ‘liberation, empowerment and human rights’ and the author of ‘racist’ works. But ‘If’ is not a racist poem itself, yet it was deemed inextricable from the views of its author. We should avoid prescriptivism. Art is not a one-way process, whereby a piece can be ascribed an objective value on its release. The quality of any piece of art is something that can and should be passionately attacked by one person, doggedly defended by another and apathetically shrugged at by a third. It is, in other words, determined wholly by the individual.

The individual audience member therefore decides how much the personal qualities of an author interfere with their appreciation of their work. We might go back to ‘David holding the head of Goliath’ and remember, finally, that it acted for Caravaggio as both a literal and artistic plea for redemption. Ultimately, it didn’t save him, and he died on the way back to Rome from Naples, his saga of exile tantalisingly close to completion. Yet perhaps we can consider this a metaphor for how we approach all art produced by the personally repulsive and the morally detestable.

The work of ‘monsters’ might be virtuous, truthful, and beautiful, but it can’t absolve the artist of immorality. Should this paradox really surprise us? Why are we so shocked that people can do appalling things and yet create art that is admirable? Isn’t that the fundamental contradiction in humanity itself?

Christ Church dean faces coup

Iggy Wood
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Christ Church dean faces coup

Rebellious academics are reportedly seeking to oust the Dean of Christ Church Martyn Percy, as they take issue with his modernising agenda.

The Reverend Professor – who has held the post since 2014 – has spent the last two week in Wales on sick leave, allegedly as a result of a “hellish bullying campaign by dons”. He is set to face an internal tribunal, which could result in his removal from office.

While the attempted ‘coup’ is officially concerned with academic pay, which the Dean determines, Cherwell understands that the real motivation is Percy’s status as a reformer.

His tenure has been characterized by a focus on increased social inclusivity and attempts to increase the college’s state school intake. The process of removal reportedly began in September, when he sought a pay review of college staff under gender pay gap rules. Previously, he had helped derail the appointment of Philip North – who refuses to acknowledge ordination of women as priests – as Bishop of Sheffield.

For a tribunal to take place, both the Governing Body and the ‘Chapter’ of Christ Church must both determine that there is “sufficient evidence” of grounds for dismissal.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, a Christ Church insider complained that “the everyday governance of the college has all but ground to a stop.

“The dean has done nothing wrong apart from upset a number of academics close to retirement.”

A Christ Church spokesman said: “The Governing Body and Chapter of Christ Church have agreed to set up an internal tribunal with an independent chair in accordance with the college’s statutes. The tribunal will review a formal complaint made against the dean. It would not be appropriate to comment further at this time.”

‘It was Beauty killed the Beast’

Meha Razdan
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‘It was Beauty killed the Beast’

The “beauty and the beast” trope has been a recurring motif across every culture’s storytelling tradition since time immemorial. The trope reaches its most famous incarnation in 1756 with French writer Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Her tale La Belle et La Bête engendered one of the most famous stories in the Western storytelling canon, but unlike the works of Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, it was not first published in a book of folklore. Beaumont wrote the story for her Magasin des Enfants, a magazine intended to teach young children the value of manners and good breeding.

Her version of the story is an instructive kind of fable about navigating arranged marriage – a fate many young girls at the time would have expected. Scholar Maria Tatar writes that ‘Beaumont’s take attempted to steady the fears of young women, to reconcile them to the custom of arranged marriages, and to brace them for an alliance that required prefacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a “monster.”’Whilst this kind of moral seems dubious under our modern scrutiny, it speaks to a longstanding tradition of people using monsters to grapple with a deepset fear of the “other.”

This fear of the other soon crossed with the xenophobia in Britain and America. In the 1933 King Kong, the eponymous ape presides over a nation of island natives. He is brought back to America in shackles and killed by the American military. But his death is, of course, a good thing – we know this because Kong’s nature as a dangerous predator is made clear to us by his fixation upon abducting Ann Darrow, a beautiful white American woman. When Kong finally dies, still in his pursuit of Darrow, a character declares: “It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

The most troubling connotations of this narrative emerge when you take into account that this film was made at a time when mainstream American media was still promoting scientific racism and depicting black people as ‘apes’, propagating horrific notions of white supremacy and promoting a ‘civilisation versus savages’ narrative that echoed colonialist ideals. Bearing this context in minds, psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff and culture historian Annette Kuhn have viewed the original King Kong as a racist allegory attempting to demonise interracial relationships by depicting one in which the “carrier of blackness is not a human being, but an ape.”

And this dichotomy – in which marginalised people are vilified as monsters, while the white women that they prey on become symbols for the status quo that white Britain and America were so terrified of losing – carried on throughout the monster genre for years. Creature From the Black Lagoon finds its villain in the Amazon, a scaled fish-man obsessed with the beautiful Kay Lawrence. By the end of the film, Kay is safely reunited with her boyfriend, handsome white protagonist David Reed, and the creature is peppered with bullets and left to a watery grave.

Of course, the blatant racism behind such narratives gradually faded from the mainstream, and people grew more conscious of this disturbingly bigoted coding. Soon, they started altering or subverting these tales – in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong, Ann and Kong form a genuine bond, and a scene in which they play in the snow in Central Park echoes a romantic comedy. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast turns the beast narrative into a tale about inner beauty being more important than outward ‘monstrousness’, and flips the narrative trope of the handsome, strapping white hero by instead making the equivalent character, Gaston, the real villain.

Monster love stories saw new life in 2017 with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. With monsters having so long been treated as conduits for marginalised communities, it’s no surprise that members of these communities have felt some sort of kinship with the very characters used to demean them in the western gaze. In an interview, del Toro explained that the fish man was inspired by Creature From the Black Lagoon. “What a beautiful movie,” he says, “but what a horrible deal for the creature! He was at home, swimming, and these guys barge in. He gets excited, and thinks maybe he’s in love, and then they kill him!”

In The Shape of Water, the creature gets his happy ending. And del Toro makes the connection between “monsters” and the marginalised explicit – protagonist Eliza is no longer a symbol for a straight white able-bodied status quo that is under some sort of threat. Instead, she is a character who is disabled, and finds kinship and empowerment in falling in love with a monster. Eliza’s friends and allies are a black woman and a gay man, and the three of them work together to protect the monster from the villain – a powerful white man, bigoted and cruel. “As an immigrant… I still feel there is this sort of demonisation of ‘the other’ very present,” del Toro explains. “I needed to talk about the beauty of the other.” In terms of representing marginalised people in stories, there are of course a million miles of progress to make. There is still a dire need for representation, for allowing creators of colour to tell their stories. But while we work towards representation, there is an undeniable catharsis in subverting an age old narrative of monsters and heroes, in loving our differences rather than fearing them.

Stephen King’s It: the horror novel that sparked a love affair

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Stephen King’s It: the horror novel that sparked a love affair

This time last year, everyone was talking about It. Cashing in on a wave of Stranger Things-led 80s fever, the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel took cinemas by storm. So like any good, pretentious English student, I went to read the book first. Drowning in renaissance plays, I was hoping for nothing more than a quick break. I haven’t been able to put King down since.

The compelling, lucid and effortless prose had me devouring It. There’s no stylistic snobbery; no qualms about what shouldn’t be explored, even in fiction; no chance to catch your breath as you’re plunged through tale after uniquely-unsettling tale. This is a book that embraces its monsters – both the fantastical, and the depressingly mundane.

It’s also a monster of a book – lets admit that, first. Pushing 1300 pages, this isn’t one for the commute. King has a story to tell, and he’s more than happy to handcuff you to the desk until he’s done. But his mastery makes it manageable. It is divided into sections-within sections, a turbulent journey with mid-sentence time jumps of thirty years. If you’ve seen the film, this will be the main difference; while the 2017 adaptation will have a sequel to show the gang’s adult exploits, King shows the two stories concurrently.

This may sound overwhelming. In most books with multiple perspectives, there are sections that feel like a slog, a sentence that must be served before you can get to the really good bit. King doesn’t give you the chance to feel this way.

Not every section contains blood-curdling screams or cosmic confrontations, but they are no less chilling for this absence. The hard-hitting villain in It isn’t the multi-faceted creature hiding under a sleepy town in Maine. What stays with you is King’s unflinching look at the darker side of human nature. In one of the first encounters with Pennywise, homophobia is as much the enemy as the eerie clown. The harrowing history of racial persecution in Derry is more upsetting than any incongruous balloon. And for much of this book – where the main characters must return to their childhood to have any hope defeating their demons, and kids are distorted and damaged by the adults who should be protecting them – there is a real sense in which grown-ups are the true threat.

But in the spirit of Hallowe’en, let’s talk about the literal monsters. King provides a kaleidoscope of them. The joy of having a creature that shifts to fit its victim’s fears is a potentially endless cast of gruesome opponents, including characters from recent horror films. ‘The Teenage Werewolf’ appears, ‘Its muzzle wrinkled back and yellowish-white foam seep[ing] through Its teeth’. King doesn’t shrink from excruciating descriptions of his subjects, unconcerned with creating intellectual detachment or psychological trickery. He truly embraces his genre of all-out horror, and in doing so, creates a novel infinitely more enjoyable than much of the canonical drudgery I’ve put up with for my degree.

This is one thing that makes King such a compelling author. There’s a sense throughout the book that he writes exactly what he wants. For some people, this might seem indulgent; if lore isn’t your thing, there may be sections you’d mark for the cutting room floor. But to me, it’s a rewarding sign of a writer in love with his craft.

You wouldn’t come to King looking for Nobel-winning literature, and he makes no pretensions as such. In his introduction to Salem’s Lot, he remembers his editor mentioning a concern with its publication: “You’ll be typed as a horror writer,’ he said. I was so relieved that I laughed. ‘I don’t care what they call me as long as the checks don’t bounce.” This captures the essence of It: a bloody, good read.

One year on: England’s Young Lions

Cal Flintoff
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One year on: England’s Young Lions

He scores the third goal and suddenly England lead in circumstances that would have been unfathomable just half an hour earlier. Then he scores the fifth goal, the score now 5-2, and a wave of raw emotion washes through the England Under-17 team as they wheel away, unsure where they’re running or who they’re saluting; the realisation hits that they have won the World Cup. The jubilation hits fever pitch. The final whistle blows moments later: right here in this moment, Phil Foden is on top of the world.

The diminutive Stockport-born playmaker stands a world away from home on a balmy night in Kolkata, clutching the World Cup trophy in one hand and the Golden Ball trophy in the other. His sticky England jersey is turned around so it bears “Foden 7” to the cluster of lenses gathering; ticker tape engulfs the presentation stage erected as the 66,000 fans begin to spill out of the Salt Lake Stadium and into the night.

This week marks one-year since that famous triumph in India and what felt like a seminal moment for English football: a second youth World Cup in the same (Indian) summer, decades since the last youth tournament victory in the 80s. To grasp the magnitude of the occasion is requisite to understand the sacrifices another outstanding young England player has made to be so prominent on its anniversary. Just months earlier, the same two teams – England and Spain – had done battle in another final – The European Championships – and in a comparatively discreet affair it was Spain who had then come from behind to defeat the Young Lions from the penalty spot.

In England’s quarter-final game versus the Republic of Ireland, just 879 fans filed into a downbeat Croatian second division stadium on the outskirts of Zagreb to witness Jadon Sancho – a flamboyant winger on the Manchester City books – fire his side to a 1-0 victory.

In the final, with a 2-1 lead to protect and tired legs the first to be jettisoned, Sancho is substituted in the 83rd minute and can only watch on in despair as La Roja equalise three minutes later: powerless to mould extra time with his pace, trickery and pure unpredictability. Sancho picks up a consolatory Golden Ball, visibly a level above his peers, but it is at the World Cup where the true extent of his forfeit becomes evident.

In the off-season period bookended by two major tournaments, Phil Foden and Jadon Sancho take divergent paths. The duo have been so impressive dovetailing in the Manchester City Academy that it catches Pep Guardiola’s eye and they are both invited on a bumper pre-season tour to the US with the first team.

It is Foden that boards the flight across the Atlantic – shining in Houston, labelled a “gift”- whilst Sancho queries his game-time behind such a stockpile of high-grade talent and is omitted from first the tour, and then the club: he signs for Borussia Dortmund in lieu of a new contract. It is here that a history of personal sacrifice and burdensome decisions manifest yet again for a boy who left home at the age of 12 to live in digs at Watford and then at 15 left his family behind altogether to make the move north to Manchester. By 17, Sancho’s Instagram regularly shows off Dortmund’s leading stars cleaning his boots.

It is Dortmund’s executives who hand him the prestigious 7 shirt vacated by the departing Ousmane Dembélé, but, by the same hand, they abruptly decide to recall Sancho from the World Cup after dazzling in the Group Stages. So as England dismantle a strong Brazilian side, Sancho skulks quietly back to Germany and makes his debut for the club against Eintracht Frankfurt.

Now in the present day, Sancho’s rapid ascension barely needs retelling: he leads the assist tables in Europe’s top 5 leagues; has signed a new bumper deal at the Westfalenstadion; has become England’s first 2000-born international player and according to the reputable Transfermarkt is the second most valuable 18-year-old of all time. Number one? Kylian Mbappé.

So when you read the rumours this week of a glorious return to the Premier League, a warming reunion back in Manchester, allow yourself to pour scorn on believing it might be about to happen. The circular narrative is tempting, but why would Sancho sacrifice everything in life, forgo his shot at standing on top of the entire World, simply to return home and re-join the queue, his expectations heftier but his path no clearer?

The closest Foden has come to recreating his Indian summer a year ago? Just down the road in fact, at the Kassam Stadium. There, he gives a virtuoso display capped off by scoring at the car park end in front of a pocket of canny fans trampling the roofs of television vans to catch a view. For now at least, the Oxford shade is all Foden can raise to Sancho’s yellow wall.

The two may have sketched very different journeys so far; as football fans, you hope someday they may conquer the World together.

Greta Thunberg – “we need both individual and systemic change”

Libby Cherry
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Greta Thunberg – “we need both individual and systemic change”

The last few years have been characterised by poor climate policies from countries that have traditionally been seen to lead the way.

Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, the UK has recommenced with fracking, and Germany and Poland continue to engage in dirty lignite mining. Given this, targeting Sweden for environmental protest seems a bit misplaced. Within the EU, which already considers itself the bloc leading the way on climate action, Sweden is one of the more vocal and has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2045. The country appears a model of reform.

This is the myth that 15-year-old Greta Thunberg is trying to dispel.
“Sweden is one of the top ten countries in the world with the highest ecological footprint.
“We need to start reducing emissions by 15% every year, and in 6-12 years we need to have zero emissions. But emissions are increasing.”

Greta Thunberg’s project is simple: to force the Swedish government to align with the Paris Agreement and to “treat this crisis as a crisis.” At the moment, the EU bloc as a whole is set to exceed the emissions permitted for two degrees of warming – let alone those for 1.5 degrees limit prescribed by the Paris Agreement.

When I speak to Greta, she is preparing to go out on protest as part of her #FridayforFuture campaign. Instead of attending school on Fridays, she will be sitting outside the Swedish Parliament – “unless I am sick or something like that” – until they implement a suitable climate policy.

Yet for all Greta’s detached analysis of the situation, illustrated with statistics quoted in flawless English, there is a palpable frustration. When I ask her about the inexplicability of politicians’ seeming inertia on the issue, she pauses before saying, in a worryingly world-weary way for a girl of 15, “I just don’t know.”

Risking her own future to help safeguard others is a noble aim, but how does she deal with the unfairness of the whole situation? Why should politicians expect a student to change a country’s cultural attitude for them?

“Sometimes I am angry but mostly I am sad,” she says. “I try to think that maybe they [the politicians] don’t know, and when they know they will do something and soon something  will happen. But I need to do what I can. That is my
moral duty, and this is something I can do.”

Greta’s whole campaign is couched in this language of morality: she speaks of richer countries “stealing” from poorer countries and future generations, and of these same countries needing to make “sacrifices” to save our planet.

“It’s such a serious problem because what we are doing now, if we don’t change, we might reach a tipping point, a point of no return, and then there is no going back.” Activism can only do so much. “We need both individual change and system change,” she emphasises.

While her own way of life may seem extreme – she is vegan, refuses to fly, and actively avoids buying any new goods – it is clear that the only way for humanity to continue to have any semblance of normality in the coming decades is for this, and more, to become the norm.

Greta pinpoints the global population’s inability to grasp how urgent and widespread these reforms are as being caused by structural ignorance. Climate change is still considered a fringe issue, and it is often only due to localised weather disruption that any mention of it reaches national news. The first thing we should all do to be successful activists, Greta recommends, is to “read about the climate crisis so that you understand it
better and how important it is.”

It is this lack of education, and the utter absence of climate change from national discourse, that Greta finds so concerning. Indeed, her own discovery of  the dire consequences of climate change was almost by accident. She was fortunate enough to have a teacher at school that was interested in climate change and discussed it with their pupils. “I know not every teacher is like that,” she admits.

“They told us to turn off the lights, to save paper, and so on, and I wondered why. They said because there is something called ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ – that humans were changing the climate.

“I found that very hard to believe because if humans were able to change the climate of the Earth, that would be our top priority – everybody would be talking about it all the time but no one said anything and we didn’t do anything about it.”

In the face of such lack of education on the issue, Greta explains, individual action is the only solution. Across Europe, hundreds of people have emulated Greta in sitting outside their local government buildings, and her international media coverage has garnered the support of thousands more. Politicians from a variety of different parties have come to speak to her at her home in support of her work, and she has had a number of invitations from climate change activist groups. Just this week, she took the long overland road to Parliament Square to join George Monbiot, Molly Scott-Cato, and Caroline Lucas to address 1,000 environmental activists. She has reached international acclaim and was nominated for the Young Climate Activist of the Year award.

Yet Greta firmly points out that, however much it may look like a mass movement, the formation of a group is not on her agenda.

“It started as an individual, and I will continue to do it as an individual. I haven’t organised this at all – people do this as individuals, not as organisations or groups. I think this is what makes this so special – that one person did it by just sitting and it got international [attention].”

This is true. Although Greta makes videos for her 20,000 Twitter followers, their aim is less to attract likes and re-tweets for the sake of it, than for raising awareness. There are no flashy effects or action: they are filmed simply on a phone, in the Sweden woodland. She may segue into a rhetorical call-to-arms – “Why should we be studying for a future that soon will be no more and when no one is doing anything whatsoever to change that future?” – but most of her speech is educational. Urging the global population to “live within the planetary boundaries”, she is less a charismatic leader of a movement, than a too-easily-ignored pigtailed Cassandra.

Although the lead-up to the Swedish elections proved the formative period in taking Greta to international fame, as her protests helped to raise the issue of climate change nationally, she admits that her campaign probably didn’t alter their outcome.

However, this is nothing to do with any flaws in her campaign. She was unable to endorse any party – even the Greens – because none of them had policies drastic enough. Instead, there are were merely “better and worse alternatives.”

“Politicians, they need to win elections and win votes, and you don’t win votes by having a radical climate policy,” she sighs.

This complete lack of representation means that, while Greta speaks of herself as representative of the “future generations”, her movement is not primarily made up of similarly fresh-faced teenagers. On her Friday strikes, it is the office workers on their lunchbreak that join her outside the Parliament. The absence of climate change from any
kind of political debate means that it is not just those too young to vote that find
themselves disenfranchised.

After all, it was Greta herself that first emphasised the issue as one of dire importance to her parents. “I read about it more and more and maybe when I was about 11 years old my parents started reading about it with me. They became very aware of the climate crisis.”
She was lucky, she adds, to have their support, and she had “a very good childhood.” While her mother toured Europe as an opera singer, she and her father – a “housewife”, she says in a rare moment of giggly childishness – followed in train. Yet it is worth noting that she talks of these former carefree times firmly in the past tense. Waking up to the burgeoning nightmare of climate change she herself refers to as a seminal moment, perhaps signalling the end of youthful innocence.

She has certainly demonstrated a very adult grit. For all her social media popularity, there is no getting away from the fact that Greta’s campaign is primarily physical. Publicly protesting on the street, and unshielded by the computer screen, there is no avoiding the truth of how vulnerable she is. Has she had any bad experiences with climate change deniers?

“Yes,” she says matter-of-factly. “Some of them start screaming, and get aggressive, some of them are just shaking their head as they walk past.” She isn’t prepared to dwell on the subject. “It happens less than I thought.”

What seems more frustrating for her are less the angry and dogmatic, than those who are simply ambivalent. When I ask her about whether she has had any support from her peers, she answers flatly “No.”

Her teacher’s response was more mixed. “She supported me as a friend and as a human being, but not as a teacher.”

Nor do the outcomes of the Swedish elections seem particularly promising, as the major parties focused their campaigns mostly around their immigration policies. When Sweden does surface in the British media, which is rare, the narrative has focused around the rise of far-right, populist party, the Swedish Democrats.

Surely populism – with its simplistic, short-term solutions to complex problems – is the antithesis of the self-sacrificial, long-term plan required for effective climate action?

“I used to be scared of them, yeah,” Greta says. “But I’m not anymore because now I know about this climate crisis – and they don’t have a position on that, they don’t care about that…I don’t know, I haven’t thought about that much.”

And Trump? She pauses. “Some people say that Donald Trump is the best thing that could happen for the climate and for the environment because he’s so extreme, people rise against him. So, I don’t actually know. Maybe it can be good.”

It is this single-mindedness and tempered hope that characterises Greta’s campaign. Her own future may be uncertain – “sometimes I want to be a scientist, sometimes I want to be a politician” – her indecisiveness indicative of the endless Catch-22 that has defines any climate action. Be a scientist, researching climate change explicitly, but unable to convey your seriousness of your findings; or be a politician with a voice, but burdened with the distractions of short-term fixes that parties find rewarding in the election cycle.

But for the next few months at least, her fate is sealed. “I’m going to sit here and do what has the most impact. If that means recruiting people or just sitting here – I don’t know,” she ends, modestly.

Greta doesn’t claim to have all the answers. But her model for individual change can not only be emulated by us all, but is fundamentally necessary in a political climate where the most critical issues, both domestically and internationally, remain obstinately ignored by the parties meant to represent us.

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