Thursday 17th July 2025
Blog Page 806

Oxford student who stabbed boyfriend appeals sentence

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Oxford University student Lavinia Woodward has filed an appeal against the suspended prison sentence she received in September for drunkenly stabbing her boyfriend in the leg with a bread knife.

Woodward was convicted of unlawful wounding, and given a 10 month prison sentence, suspended for 18 months, by presiding judge Ian Pringle QC at Oxford Crown Court. She has applied to the Court of Appeal to review her sentence.

A spokesman for the Judicial Press Office told Cherwell: “Lavinia Woodward has submitted an application for permission to appeal. The next stage is for a single judge to consider the application on paper and if permission is granted it then the substantive appeal will be heard in court before three judges.”

The attack by the Christ Church medical student took place in December 2016 when her partner , a Cambridge University student whom she had met on Tinder, was visiting Oxford.

In the initial trial, judge Ian Pringle QC stated, “It seems to me that if this was a one-off, a complete one-off, to prevent this extraordinarily able young lady from not following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to would be a sentence which would be too severe.”

Whilst Woodward’s lawyer, James Sturman QC, said these comments were later misunderstood and treated out of context, they led to accusations of judicial leniency and inequality, with Woodward being branded “too clever” for prison.

John Azah, chief executive of the Kingston Race and Inequalities Council, told The Daily Telegraph at the time: “If she wasn’t Oxford-educated, if she came from a deprived area, I don’t think she would have got the same sentence and been allowed to walk free.”

Whilst passing sentence, however, Pringle noted that there were “many mitigating features” which led to the judgment. He also noted that, “You have demonstrated over the last nine months that you are determined to rid yourself of your alcohol and drug addiction and have undergone extensive treatment including counselling to address the many issues that you face”.

Pringle had deferred Woodward’s sentence for four months earlier in the year to allow for such an opportunity to show good behaviour. She has attended a drug and alcohol clinic and received care for an eating disorder.

Woodward, an aspiring heart surgeon, voluntarily suspended her studies at Oxford but could still return. Three complaints against the presiding judge Ian Pringle were dismissed on the grounds they did not concern his personal conduct.

The Death of Stalin review – ‘it straddles that oh-so-narrow line between repellent and comic’

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Near to the beginning of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale) is distributing the names of all those who are to be arrested that night. Authoritative and mildly bored, he points out one name and says to kill “her first but make sure he sees it,” in a moment of weary professionalism, a microcosmic representation of the absurd horror which fuels the film’s comedy.

It shouldn’t be funny, but in the hands of Beale and Iannucci, it straddles that oh-so-narrow line between repellent and comic, between jaw-droppingly awful and gut-bustingly amusing. In the cinema I was in, there were shocked splutters, followed by laughter.

Iannucci, lead writer of cult British comedy The Thick of It and the first four seasons of Veep, takes his brand of comedy, one fuelled by escalating political insanity, relentless narrative momentum and an absolute ton of swearing, and mixes it with the elevated stakes of Stalinist Moscow. Instead of media outcry following a public scandal, the characters are faced with the constant risk of death. Instead of low-level ministers and civil servants, the core cast is comprised of the most powerful individuals in the USSR. The resulting concoction is intoxicating.

The trappings of his style transfer remarkably well to this heightened scenario. While they occupy the summit of Soviet political life, his characters are never in control of events. Instead, they are hemmed in by the legacy of Stalin, by their loyalty to the party, and by the machinations of their colleagues. They scuttle around, plotting and counter-plotting, cocking up and righting course, endlessly reacting to wild shifts in the balance of power. This instability makes the film tick, it lends every scene a boundless energy propelling it forwards.

This is complemented by tight writing. In one meeting of the Central Committee, every vote is passed unanimously because no-one wants to vote against the party. Their hands go up, one by one, like a bureaucratic Mexican wave, in what is a masterful display of comic pacing. Meanwhile, the prolonged, futile struggle between Stalin’s alcoholic son, Vasily (Rupert Friend), and a guard lasts so long that it goes from being funny, to unfunny, to funny all over again; the camera never once looks away and the background acting of the ensemble is given time to shine.

The cast is incredible. Devoid of any weak links, they sell the heightened reality of those fateful days in the wake of Stalin’s death. Particular praise must go to Beale and Jason Isaacs: Beale for his fusion of menace and humour, Isaacs’s for his rough-and-ready take on General Zhukov. Nevertheless, the film is always aware of the bleakness of its material, and never shies away from it. Beria is shown to be a sexual predator, his interactions with the main cast inflected by our knowledge of his abusive proclivities.

As the plot reaches its denouement, everything just stops being funny. There’s still the shouting and swearing and absurd leaps of logic, but it’s no longer amusing. Somewhere, almost imperceptibly, the film shifts gears, and its final moments are brutal and unsettling and impossible to forget. The Death of Stalin takes something which has no right to be funny and transforms it into comedy gold, driven by its own warped logic which has been moulded by the instability at the heart of the plot.

The Death of Stalin is excellently written, brilliantly cast, and soul-crushingly funny. Get out, and watch it this very instant.

How To: Survive Oxmas

As seventh week arrives and we all surrender to the inevitable zombie-like exhaustion, Scrooge’s words can seem more pertinent than ever: “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?” However, the trick to surviving, if not thriving, during Oxmas is recognising that even if discernible reasons to be merry are a bit thin on the cobbled ground, we all have the right to enjoy ourselves after weeks of gruelling term time.

The first and most crucial tactic for getting through Oxmas is to engage in mental time travel, or at least intense wilful ignorance. Accept the fact that a college Christmas tree is up, and that Hall is serving inexcusable numbers of brussel sprouts and soggy Christmas pudding over a month before the big day.

It is worth highlighting here how uniquely Oxonian (read: illogical and freakish) these premature festivities are. Nowhere else in the country are the not-so mellifluous tones of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ so universally audible, from the cheese floor of Park End to the depressing shops of Westgate – although, let’s face it, they’ve been decked up in festive trimming since their opening in October.

My second tip, although admittedly this may be one more for the girls and anyone identifying as such, is to find any and all festive formal events, and shamelessly exploit this opportunity for sequins and red lipstick. Let’s be honest, gratuitous formal events (and the consequent Instagram material) are the USP of an Oxbridge education.

When academic zeal fails you, and you find yourself crying over the Shmoop summary of Paradise Lost and an unsympathetic cup of Mug Shot instant pasta, put your name down for as many Oxmas formal dinners as you can find within a one-mile radius. Then, spend whatever remains of your student loan (for me, this is a humble £6.20) on a glittery ASOS mini dress. It doesn’t matter if you only attend a single guest formal with incredibly disappointing prosecco: there is always next November!

Poirot’s enduring appeal

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Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express must be at least the third adaptation I have seen of the famous novel. It seemed to me that, while the Belgian detective’s little quirks had been picked on and exaggerated by previous television efforts, all of the real charm of a Poirot mystery had been sacrificed to the construction of a flashier, rather incredible and perhaps more popular sort of character, a character who was not Hercule Poirot.

Nevetheless, I soon discovered that I was wrong. It was a tiny detail in Branagh’s performance that gave me hope as to the insight his new adaptation could offer into one of Christie’s masterpiece. For, all through the film, Branagh’s eyes had the right sparkle.

In the books, Poirot’s small eyes are of great importance. They are always full of expression shrewd and vigilant, and the light that animates them is often secret knowledge, a private joke.

This knowledge often corresponds with the solution of the crime at hand, and the joke is invariably on Hastings, or on whoever, including the reader, is witnessing Poirot’s display of genius.

There is indeed something incredibly satisfying in an Agatha Christie mystery, at least when one uses one’s ‘little grey cells’ and gets the solution right. John Curran, the editor of Christie’s notebooks, ascribes her long-lasting, boundless popularity to the fact that: “No other crime writer did it so well, so often or for so long; no one else matched her combination of readability, plotting, fairness and productivity”.

While all these elements are certainly true, and would be enough to grant any author eternal fame, however, they are not the only things that appeal to us in Christie.

They are the mechanics of her greatness, its sinews and bones – they are not its heart and soul. Similarly, one is usually given the impression that, behind the little sparkle in Poirot’s eyes, there is something more than the solution to a problem, something more than the frantic working of his ‘little grey cells’ and the serene application of ‘order an method’.

Indeed, all through his series of exploits, there is some greater, deeper secret ‘papa Poirot’ is in the knowledge of: that is the secret of understanding life and its power, as much as murder and its appeal.

There is a real appreciation of life in Poirot’s characters. It is something that goes beyond the mere insight in human nature that is essential for the solving of all Christie’s mysteries. When I first started reading Christie, I pledged my full devotion to Miss Marple over Poirot. Indeed, the extraordinary working of her mind is something she certainly shares with Poirot.

A crucial aspect, however, that differentiates Miss Marple from Poirot, is that while both revel in solving crime, the sweet old lady genuinely enjoys pointing her wrinkled finger towards those who have committed it; for Miss Marple, that justice will be served is as crucial as that the murder should be solved. Not so for Hercule Poirot, who believes in the existence of good and evil, but who also understands compassion.

This is not to say that Poirot would ever let a criminal go unpunished, but he does recognize that there are many more diverse layers to justice than Miss Marple would ever notice. In 4.50 from Paddington, the unyielding old lady regrets the fact that death penalty is no longer available for punishing the abominable murderer she has just exposed. By contrast, Poirot, more than once, mercifully allows his murders the shortcut of suicide. This ability to recognize the complexity of the world, to hate the murder and, at the same time, feel pity for the perpetrator, stems from his joie de vivre.

In An Autobiography, Christie writes: “Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy of being alive … there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life.” This true enjoyment of life is present as an undercurrent in all of Christie’s most enduring successes, and perhaps her greatest mystery.

Rusbridger fails in bid to keep painting of murdered model at LMH

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Alan Rusbridger, the principal of Lady Margaret Hall, tried unsuccessfully to raise £8,000 to keep a painting of a murdered Irish model at the college. The painting was sold at auction in Oxford today for £6,500.

The former Guardian editor set up a JustGiving page on Wednesday to prevent the painting being sold away from the college. However, in the two days since the petition was launched, just £80 was raised.

Rusbridger told Cherwell: “I only heard about the painting being auctioned two days ago and it was always going to be a very tall order to crowdfund the money within that time.

“It would have been lovely to have had it on public view at LMH. We gave it a go but sadly time wasn’t on our side and the moment has passed.”

William Strang’s portrait depicts Eileen ‘Dolly’ Henry, an Irish model who was murdered in 1914 by her lover, the artist John Currie.

On his JustGiving page, Rusbridger wrote that the painting can “serve as a resource to reflect on sexual violence, obsession, the role of the ‘muse’ and changing ideas of female sexuality”.

He added that it seemed fitting for the painting to hang at Lady Margaret Hall, the first college to admit women.

Rusbridger said Currie was Henry’s “on-off boyfriend”, and abused the model until she escaped to London.

Currie stalked her to her new Chelsea apartment, spent the night with her, and then shot her.

All That Fall review – ‘Powerful and perturbing, with something of the uncanny about it’

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All That Fall seems like an ambitious choice for directors Nicole and Sonny. The Beckett Estate had insisted it was only to be performed as a radio-play, a request that, amazingly, was circumvented by blindfolding the audience. We are listeners then, eavesdropping on the bleak journey Maddie takes to and from the train station in Boghill, a fictional town in Ireland. The accents are impeccable, bringing each character to life in Beckett’s unusually naturalistic play.

The play starts with Maggie, brilliantly played by Miranda Mackay, panting and groaning across the traverse stage. ‘Oh if you had my eyes… the things they have seen… this is nothing’ she cries out, her voice raised yet always feeble. This is whilst a whole series of villagers come and go, all too pre-occupied with their own lives to notice or care for her deep-set sadness. Jonathan Berry plays Christy, a carter, with alacrity as he tries to sell her dung. Mr Tyler (Patrick Orme) frustratedly tells her of his broken bicycle, and Tommy (Christian Edwards) receives a blow from Mr Barrell (Daniel Cummings) in a confusing scene of busy hysteria.

Punches in the stomach and a broken bicycle contribute to the sense that the characters’ worlds are slowly decaying.  Mr Rooney, played by Fred Lynam, powerfully laments that he has lost his sight, a line which takes on a new significance to the blindfolded audience. It feels exposing, the decrepitude of Beckett’s world suddenly becoming all too real.

In the absence of a setting, sounds became the stage-props, and it is exciting when these then became artistic statements in their own right. The hotchpotch of farm animals that come through the speakers is deliciously overdramatic. A staff is passed around by the characters; sometimes alerting the audience to where they are positioned, and at others creating a wall of cross-rhythms that is all-encompassing.

The arrival of a train comes during the play’s central climax. A wall of surround-sound envelopes the audience; voices are shushing repeatedly, whistles are blowing and a dramatic audio blares through the speakers, before opening up into the bustle of a market scene. The space is utilised and my ear is overtaken with a polyphony of sounds. Here I really appreciate the decision to adapt the script from a radio to a stage play.

Sometimes, however, a lack of energy and pace leaves sections feeling half-baked. Perhaps there was a particularly square audience tonight, but the absence of laughter was noticeable in a play intended as dryly humorous.

From Miss Fitt’s affected piousness at church, to Mr Slocum and Mrs Rooney’s innuendo-filled exchange, Beckett frequently invites the audience to laugh at the absurdity of his characters. ‘I’m coming, Mrs. Rooney, I’m coming, give me time’, Mr Slocum cries, coming round to extract Maddie from the driver’s seat of his car. The intense focus on the tragic elements of this play, however, doesn’t leave room for these much-needed moments of comic relief, which are largely unfelt.

Yet this is a minor point in an otherwise ambitious and successful play. I met the directors before the opening night. Nicole had watched a performance of Not I in London last year. The darkness of the auditorium, the pace of the monologue, and the terrifying intensity of a single pair of lips smacking together within a wall of blackness had transfixed her. Their own production is similarly powerful and perturbing, with something of the uncanny about it. I left feeling strangely disorientated, and a feeling of being off-kilter that took a few minutes to shake off.

The strange death of Constable’s rural idyll

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We often look to the British countryside as a place of solace. In a forever changing world, the countryside is a place where things remain still – where hardworking men with calloused hands labour from the cock’s morning crow until the sun’s western farewell, where the problems of modern Britain seem distant.

Urbanites might even remark that some patch of the countryside resembles the paintings of Gainsborough or Constable. Yet a passing glimpse of one of those paintings will show us how wrong we are to imagine that the land in rural England has remained constant. Look at John Constable’s The Cornfield (1826), and you will see a landscape unlike any that survives in Britain today.

The Cornfield is a particularly apt painting for discussing the changes in the British countryside since the advent of the industrial revolution. It depicts a boy leading sheep down a dirt path, stopping for a moment to take a drink from neighbouring stream. Above him tower mighty elms, and on the other side of the dirt path there is a hedgerow which demarcates the end of a field out of frame.

In the background is a farmer with his plow, working in the titular cornfield. The whole scene is the picture of unchanging rural idyll. And yet today no such landscape exists. Look at a modern British landscape, and you will see no elms, and rarely a hedgerow. Even the shape and structure of the cornfield will be radically different.

Let’s begin with the elms. Most British landscape paintings from before 1900 feature a treescape dominated by elms. Far more than the beech, ash, and oak with which we associate our rural woodland today, elm was the British tree. Yet today you hardly see any elms. Indeed in Britain, elms are a conservation priority. Over 90% of all elm trees in Britain died in the span of only a few decades, due to one invasive fungus from China.

This fungus causes Dutch elm disease, which blocks the xylem from moving nutrients up the elm, killing it. In elms’ place, trees which are more familiar to us – such as oaks – have grown, and your average British countryman would likely be unable to point out his nearest elm.

Hedgerows are often seen as being a quintessential part of the British countryside. These strips of hedge have delineated fields from each other for millennia, and in that time have evolved a unique ecosystem. Many birds and butterflies have evolved to be obligate on hedgerows, unable to live anywhere save this artificially constructed environment. The last half-century has seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of hedgerows found in Britain, and with it a decline in those species which rely on hedgerows.

This change in the landscape is a byproduct of the Green Revolution, when farming became properly industrial. Farms grew in size, and with that growth came the removal of the hedgerows separating fields. But more devastating for the hedgerows was the growth of fencing. Aided by government subsidies to modernise British farming, and driven by a new industrial profit driven mode of production, hedgerows across Britain have been torn down to make way for more efficient, but less ecologically useful, fences.

Farming itself has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000, a product of the Green Revolution and the widespread use of scientific methods in agriculture. Of course, in the early 20th century, the sort of hand-driven plough that we see in The Cornfield had long disappeared, but the principles of farming hadn’t changed. The growth of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides, as well as scientific breeding, has changed all that.

Our crops are more uniform than they would have been in Constable’s day. Our corn grows in straighter lines, and requires less tilling, meaning that we are getting more food for less manpower. Even the structure of the soil has changed with industrial agriculture, killing off native communities of micro-arthropods, earthworms, and fungi in favour of bacterial monocultures.

Look at The Cornfield again. Is it still that unchanging rural idyll that you see as you drive between Oxford and London? Or is it a bygone era, with a flora and a fauna unlike any which we see in modern Britain? Less than two centuries separate us from The Cornfield, yet it is unlike any cornfield you will see in Great Britain today.

Fire started by welder at Radcliffe Science Library

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A fire that broke in the Radcliffe Science Library was started by an independent contractor carrying out welding work, the RSL has confirmed.

The fire – which begun in the Plant Room – was quickly contained, and students allowed to return to the building after an evacuation.

A spokesman for the library told Cherwell: “The welder stayed behind for ‘fire watch’ after completing the work, for reassurance that nothing had been ignited by the hot particles produced during welding.

“During fire watch a large quantity of smoke started issuing from a nearby cavity and was seen immediately. The contractor tried to stop the fire with a CO2 extinguisher but when this was not successful they activated the fire alarm.”

While the fire did not spread beyond the RSL’s Plant Room, the entire building was evacuated.

Melissa Talbot, a first year physicist who had been studying in the library, said: “We didn’t see any fire. We were super confused.”

Fire service crews quickly extinguished the blaze and, after an hour, students and staff were permitted to return.

No one in the building was harmed and there was no damage to either the collections or the Plant Room.

The RSL has stated it “remains committed to its current fire safety arrangements, and sees no reason to alter the current system”.

A spokesperson said: “The RSL has a fire risk assessment which is reviewed regularly. The safety arrangements for this work were suitable and sufficient, and the contractor followed them entirely correctly.”

Although disruption to students was minimal, some were not prepared to see their trip to the library rendered futile.

Student Arthur Morris said: “I got there as the fire engines arrived, then went back after about 20 minutes and had to find my book whilst the alarms were still going off”.

Life Divided: Do you miss Oxford during the vac?

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For

Priya Vempali

Ah, Oxford – a cruel mistress if ever there was one. During term time it torments me with deadlines, FOMO and existential dread, but once I’ve withdrawn from the academic prison I’m left eagerly awaiting my return.

The first week of vac is usually when the worry sets in. Why does no one around me know what an Oxfess is? How am I meant to survive the next few weeks without the culinary delights of Hussain’s? What am I meant to do on a Thursday night, now that queuing for hours outside Bridge is no longer an option? I’m at a loss.

Yes, the vac provides me with a break from churning out subpar essays, dazed and confused after my fifth coffee a night, but there’s something comforting about suffering in solidarity with other students. Unlike my home friends, they understand what it means to be crumbling under the weight of crippling academic pressure, just trying to make a 2:1 without having to attend any 9am lectures. I don’t have to explain to them why Emporium is the worst club that’s ever existed, or how my college bar tab is fuelling my growing alcohol dependency.

Worse still, the lack of structure that inevitably follows my return home is frightening. At least in Oxford I have a sense of what day, week, even month it is – thanks to the stringent deadlines imposed on me by my tutors. At home, by contrast, my pillow fort and I can go days without human contact, comforted instead by the familiar embrace of Netflix’s ‘play next episode’ button. The feeling of complete stagnation is wonderful, liberating even…until it’s 3am, and you’re struck with fear over the thought of selling your soul to some corporate City firm for the rest of your life.

All in all, I can’t wait to be back in the city that crushed my dreams of being a bright-eyed academic. Yes, it may be hell, but by God, it’s my hell – and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Against

Joanna Lonergan

I don’t miss Oxford. I don’t miss the straw sack passing for a mattress, I don’t miss drifting off to the sweet sound of my neighbour having sex, and I’d take Mum’s Spag Bol over questionable hall curry any day. I’d seriously question your sanity if you disagree.

For the next five weeks I don’t have to worry about anyone stealing my ice cream from the freezer, or figure out how to wash my hair in the sink because the shower can only manage a lukewarm dribble. I’m free from the niggling guilt that comes with choosing sleep over 9am lectures, and from the realisation that once again I’ve left myself a single night to churn out an essay.

I can take a break from typing out the same apologetic emails, with my sorry excuse for an essay reluctantly attached. I don’t have to see the look of disappointment in my tutor’s eyes when they hand it back to me, decorated with red pen, or the frustration with which they answer me when I ask them for the fifth time to repeat the question.

In Oxford, I’d forgotten what sleep felt like. If I got into bed before 2am I was proud of myself for having an ‘early night’. I was neither a night owl nor an early bird – more of a permanently exhausted, dishevelled pigeon. Over the past week I’ve averaged 8 hours a night, and I’m really not exaggerating to say that I don’t believe my uni friends would recognise me now that I’m no longer a bleary-eyed corpse. Gone are the nights interrupted by 2am fire alarms because some halfwit had a craving for toast but didn’t quite grasp the workings of a toaster.

So no, I can’t bring myself to miss Oxford. Yes, the friends, the Bridge queue, the Hussain’s in Oxford are wonderful, but you’ve just got to appreciate home comforts.

Life Divided: Cuppers

Pro Cuppers

Claire Castle

It is a sunny afternoon, in early May, but right now I don’t notice the weather. My ears are filled with the thudding of blood, and my heart pounding in my chest. Adrenaline is coursing through every part of my being.

There is a single word on the lips of everyone around me. They call it a chant, but that could never encapsulate its beauty. This is a symphony, a moment of awless rapture; brought out in a guttural cry, rising from the depths of each individual soul, and swelling to envelop us all in the same cloak of celebration and joy, so much contained in just two syllables. “Keble”.

But what is this moment of such beauty, such joy, such climax you ask? The answer should be clear: it is the winning of the rugby cuppers final.

In this moment, I am sure there has never been a group of people more closely bound than we are now. I am not simply a student at this college, at this sporting event, I am every one of us. Every player, every spectator, every poor soul trapped in the library learning of the game only through sporadic texts. We are each cells of the greater body that is the college, moving, rising and falling together to the beat of a drum only we can hear. In this moment of epiphany, I feel I finally understand the Buddhist concept of Interdependent Co-arising. And every cell sings with the same pride, for the college, for the team, for the self that we all become together. How could anyone claim to be a better college, when we have so clearly proved our infinite worth by being the best at passing balls across a large field?!

If this experience has taught me anything, it is that cuppers must be something fantastic, to bring us together with such force, and to raise college pride between us to such extent. To question it is to question the very fabric of college society as a whole.

Against Cuppers

Alice Ritchie

To the uninitiated, cuppers seems to offer a non-threat- ening and relaxed introduction to Oxford’s inter-collegiate competition.

You are lured into a false sense of security when you hear that comforting phrase which all enthusiastic (but useless) competitors, such as myself, long for: “it’s the taking part that counts.”

But that’s not what it’s about.

As with everything at Oxford which contains even the remotest hint of competition, those who participate are out to win, and absolutely obliterate their comepetition, without even a shred of mercy.

So much so, that the unsuspecting fresher who signed up, confident in the knowledge that no-one else could sprint either, is suddenly up against quasi-Olympic athletes. And the keen amateur dramatist who thought their cameo appearance in the school’s rendition of We Will Rock You would cut the mustard, finds themselves on stage with those who would have attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, had the Oxford offer failed to come to fruition. Masquerading as an unintimidating way for anyone to enjoy the extra-curriculars on offer, cuppers sets the average Joe Bloggs up for failure and humiliation. So traumatising is this experience that many return to the comforting embrace of the library, never to be seen again.

Peel away the amicable veneer which once enticed you, and the true nature of cuppers is revealed: it is not the golden ticket to stardom and lifelong friendships that it pretends to be. Nor is it the perfect opportunity to hone your sporting acumen in order to score that chirpse.

In fact, the only thing I can say for certain is that it’s just not my cupper tea.