A miniaturised book, no larger than a thumb, written by Vita Sackville-West, is to be published early next week. Originally written in 1922, the tiny volume was kept in the Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, a 1:12 scale replica of an Edwardian house, along with works by other eminent authors such as Thomas Hardy, J.M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Entitled A Note of Explanation, the novel was written exclusively for the project, and has never before been published.
Vita Sackville-West, a close friend and possible lover of Virginia Woolf, was said to have inspired Woolf’s parody-biographical novel Orlando. Elements of the gender-shifting protagonist were mirrored in Sackville-West’s own life and behaviour – she was known to cross-dress and had multiple male alter egos, the most well-known of which was Julian. Woolf even went so far as to dedicate the novel to her.
A Note of Explanation is a charming tale of a sprite who inhabits the Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, unobserved by the guests and Queen Mary. She fulfils a similar role to Woolf’s Orlando character, time-travelling through fairy tale history, and observing many of the major moments, such as Cinderella’s Ball, the creation of Aladdin’s palace and the kiss that awakens Sleeping Beauty. She has made a home for herself in this miniature palace, and the novel follows her delightful antics.
The new edition of A Note of Explanation will be a more easily readable 25cm x 17.5cm, featuring an afterword by Sackville-West’s biographer, Matthew Dennison. The Queen Mary’s Doll’s House collection is held at Windsor Castle, and available for visitators. The book, according to the Royal Collection Trust, “reveals that Vita came up with a similar conception at least four years before Woolf began Orlando.”
I saw Psarantonis play only once, at the Amari Valley music festival almost a year ago, in a tiny mountain village on the isle of Crete surrounded by the peaks of Kedros and the towering Psiloritis. He arrived late, staggeringly drunk, glaring out at the crowd and his fellow musicians from beneath a shaggy expanse of hair and beard.
Sitting hunched over like a gnarled olive tree in the middle of the stage with his lyra – a graceful three stringed, bowed instrument, not to be confused with the harp-like lyre of ancient Greece – he began slowly to play a traditional ritizika song, a slow historical narrative about the deeds of the mighty dead, tales which his native island has in abundance.
In between berating his fellow musicians and violently bash- ing his lyra, the septuagenarian growled ferociously into the mi- crophone in his thick Cretan dia- lect, roaring ‘my roots are eagles, I will have the light of the heavens’, as the bagpipes droned on and the thundering drums struggled to keep apace. There is truly no experience in music quite like a Psarantonis performance.
His appearance of a mountain man is no deceit, Psarantonis is a native of Anogeia (literally “high-ground”) a large village on the northern slopes of Crete’s tallest mountain; razed to the ground by Nazi forces during the occupation for harbouring mountain rebels and British spies.
Indeed “mountain rebels” is the title of one of his most intriguing works. This evokes the defiance of Crete’s heroic wartime resist- ance (the Cretans were the only civilian population to engage in armed resistance against the Nazis without an army) a struggle often overlooked in histories of the war. But it also refrences the island’s seven-century long struggle against foreign oppression at the hands of the Ottomans and the Venetians.
In the song most representative of his style, the spectacular ‘Dias’, Psarantonis masterfully builds up scratchy, almost dissonant layers of lyra melodies into a tempestuous, frenzied wall of sound. As the song reaches its wildest and most unrestrained, a voice begins to emerge from the vortex of sound, clambering out like Zeus himself from the Diktean cave.
This voice is inexpressibly rough. If some speak with a gravel- like voice, Psarantonis’ is a cliff of sheer limestone. It is a voice of a parched shepherd, the war-cry of an ancient warrior, a man bellowing at God.
In a place where people are constitutionally mistrustful of politicians and intellectuals, Psarantonis is something of a legend. The religious, historical, and mythological subject matter of his songs, the connection to deep musical traditions and his undeniable authenticity are hugely appealing to generations of Cretans who have begun to lose touch with the way of life practised on that island since the times of the Minoans.
In the eyes of many he already sits in the pantheon of Crete’s greatest sons, rivalling the great Nikos Kazantzakis and Domé- nikos Theotokópoulos (known to the western world as El Greco) as an artistic titan. Considering that Cretans can number Zeus, Ariadne, and king Minos amongst their number, this is no mean feat.
New writing is always an exciting prospect, particularly when the concept behind the play is so very daring, bold and imaginative. Indeed, it cannot be denied that Hannah Chilver-Vaughan’s Three Parallel Places lacked boldness or imagination; rather, the crux of the problem, for me, was how this intricately detailed world of imagination transferred to the stage.
Aesthetically, the play was stunning on-stage: the array of flowers hanging from the ceiling, the rectangle of immaculately green grass and the wonderful simplicity, almost ghostliness, of clear acrylic furniture all captured my attention, promising the audience a beautiful performance from the very pre-set onwards. Costumes, which underwent a transformation from an innocent white palette to a much more dark, sombre yet resplendent one, were immaculately designed also. So, I would be lying if I said this attention to artistic detail didn’t impress me or that the very nature of Ms Chilver-Vaughan’s epic endeavour didn’t intrigue me as an expectant audience member.
However, beauty and grandeur must be put to one side. I chose to go to see a play, not to look at a painting, and I felt that the play lost its way slightly as the convolutions of plot left me feeling rather confused, underwhelmed and to quote the audience member to my right, “a bit all over the place”. Fundamentally, the basis of the play was strong and the concept of three parallel worlds – Earth, Egalitaria and Autocratia – had the potential to provide a subtle political critique or social commentary that left me feeling that my own view of the world I inhabit had been questioned, tested and challenged.
It certainly did feel that reality was attempting to break through the fantasy element of the play during Omega’s (Alex Blanc) well-executed monologue which drew inspiration from the recklessness of ‘rich kids’ growing up in a limitless world of plenty at the expense of morality, goodness and truth. However, this was one of the few moments in the play that dealt with ‘earth as we know it’ and thus seemed ingenious but out of place. On the whole, the play lacked pace and a sense of direction which meant that the clever and passionate heart of the plot got slightly lost amid rather long and winding scenes which created as many problems as they solved.
The actors dealt well with a demanding script and at times, some quite heart-wrenching performances were given. Particular mention should go to Arun Somanathan, who took on the role of the golden child Antipars, and acted with subtlety at the play’s end, offering a more heartfelt performance as perhaps the only character that inspired any sense of pathos from the audience.
As for comedy, Jon Berry must be congratulated for his comic timing and wit. Mr Berry provided both light relief and integrity as a comic actor in his role as the Watch – his physicality was well-developed and his energy remarkable. Even with few lines as George, Mr Berry made the most of the mantra ‘acting is reacting’ in his scenes with Ambrosia, portrayed with commitment by Esme Sanders as a rather annoying, pleasure-seeking girl who matured into a desperate, exasperated young woman.
Ultimately, the play’s foundations had great potential and Ms Chilver-Vaughan delivered a memorable production – a production that I wish had spent slightly less time on aesthetic and slightly more on the delivery of lines, the subtlety of emotional expression and the power of non-verbal communication in moments of stillness.
As any elite-level athlete will tell you, preparation is of paramount importance. Naturally, this is no different in the case of college football. Indeed, with their hectic academic, extra-curricular and social schedules crammed into Oxford’s eight-week terms, players are under immense pressure to ensure that they are in the best possible condition for every game. Managers in the so-called ‘professional’ game always complain about fixture saturation, yet they have never had to organise their week to accommodate a game, essay deadline, tute and bop. The ability of college footballers to integrate their pre-match preparation into an already busy schedule is a testament to their own professionalism.
Obviously, it is absolutely vital for players to keep their bodies in peak condition, so that even when matches are brought forward last minute, they will always be able to rely on their fitness. It is something of a trade secret that one of the most effective ways to prepare the body for 90 minutes of high-intensity sporting excellence is to oversleep on the morning of the game.
If the lie-in is long enough, not only does it aid recovery from the inevitable visit to Park End the night before, it also ensures that the journey to the sports fields is less of a walk and more of a slightly exasperated-looking jog. This provides players with a warm-up before they even reach the ground, giving them an initial physical edge and a subsequent psychological one, as their less conscientious opponents become disheartened by their evident preparation. To the uninitiated, this tactic might seem suspect due to the risk of missing the team warm-up, but the ‘en route’ warm-up has one clear advantage: it does not take place in full view of the opposition. Why persevere through a meticulous training programme just to let the other team know what you’re all about straight away? Some of the greatest success stories of college football have been built on a minimalist attitude to training.
With so much to think about, mental preparation is just as important as physical. Despite the intellectual rigours of the tutorial system, preparing for a title decider is the toughest mental challenge that college footballers will face during their time in Oxford. It is important for players to maintain a high level of mental fitness for such occasions, and this can be achieved by performing certain exercises, such as thinking about college football at every opportunity. Any captain worth his salt will integrate these exercises into his daily routine, so that they hardly seem like exercise at all. Sitting in the library, apparently pouring over a problem sheet, their mind will in fact be occupied by thoughts on the next game. Or perhaps stuck at the back of a lecture, they might sketch out a couple of potential formations. To 4-3-3 or not to 4-3-3?
Beneath Oxford’s spires, the old adage that a game is won before the teams even step onto the pitch, certainly rings true.
A recent experiment performed by the US National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical company Sanofi could have just given the human race its best weapon yet in the fight against HIV. By combining three natural HIV-fighting antibodies, the researchers created a new treatment that tackles 99% of the virus’ different strains. This kind of broad attack is essential for combating the virus, since it takes many forms and is known to mutate very quickly. In tests on monkeys, the new treatment prevented infection in all of 24 subjects that were injected with HIV. The researchers published their results in Science on the 20 September.
The Science paper reports that HIV-attacking antibodies have been isolated before, having been extracted from patients whose bodies are fighting the virus. These broadly neutralising antibodies, referred to as bnAbs, have shown an impressive ability to combat HIV in multiple different forms and different levels of strength, and since 2010 many of them have been taken to the clinical trial stage.
However, they are not ideal. Every HIV patient has a different combination of strains, and the antibodies extracted will only be equipped to deal with a certain number of them. Even with the best natural antibodies, which combat up to 90% of current strains, most patients will have some form of the virus which resists treatment.
What makes the situation worse is that HIV is one of the fastest evolving entities in the world, due to its high rate of mutation. New varieties of the virus are constantly arising, and treating a patient with antibodies that only tackle some strains can speed up the evolutionary process by promoting those strains which are resistant. This means that a patient who is given natural antibodies could end up developing an even worse case of HIV than they had before.
In this new study, the researchers experimented by combining the abilities of two, then three different natural antibodies into one. The resulting “trispecific antibodies” were able to block the process of infection at three different places, covering an incredible 99% of strains, according to Dr Gary Nabel, the chief scientific officer at Sanofi. This means that the treatment is much more likely to prevent infection in a given patient than any currently known natural antibody, and this fact is reflected in the researchers’ successful tests on primates. The first human trials are scheduled for next year.
Responses from health organisations have ranged from intrigue to wild excitement, especially over the prospect of seeing clinical trials so soon. The president of the International Aids Society, Professor Linda-Gail Bekker, told the BBC that the research is “an exciting breakthrough”, and that there is an “urgency to confirm these findings in humans as soon as possible”, since the virus currently takes so many lives around the world.
HIV is one of the most persistent health problems across the world, since it has proved very difficult to treat and it attacks the body’s immune system, making sufferers very vulnerable to other diseases including cancers. According to the CDC, 36.7 million people were found to be living with HIV last year, and 1 million people died from illnesses related to AIDS, the most advanced stage of HIV.
This means that advances like the NIH’s and Sanofi’s new antibody, if they prove successful in next year’s trials, could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
One month, eight cities, four girls–and countless accounts of being physically harassed by men. When you put it in numbers, I’m not sure if it sounds shocking. What the numbers show, however, is that being a female traveller in 2017 is not massively different to being one in 1917. In fact, it might be even less safe.
When I initially started writing this piece, I was in a nice AirBnb in Brussels – the second stop on a month long interrailing adventure. I thought about how, as a female traveller in 2017, it’s standard to feel safe. My parents’ main piece of advice before I left was “don’t go anywhere alone,” and at the time I thought it was a little outdated. Now, on the train to Budapest (the eighth city on our list) I’ve been forced to change my tune.
Travelling is the norm nowadays. The Gap Yah’s, the Contiki tourists, the volunteers, the finding-themselves-in-Asia-while-engaging-in-mild-cultural-appropriation backpackers, the international glitter-covered festivals goers – we all recognise them, we all probably identify with a few of the archetypes.
Travel, once reserved for a tiny subsection of society, has become the norm for a vast range of people, including women. In fact, it has been the expectation for a long time. We’ve all heard our mums’ backpacking stories, and we’ve all read the Cosmopolitan Snapchat articles about why every woman should travel alone before she’s 30.
But the female traveller has more than just an extraordinarily heavy backpack. She also carries the stories of thousands of women, a rich and vibrant history. In a world before Airbnb and Uber, what was travelling like for a woman? The great ages of exploration between the seventeenth and nineteenth century were dominated by white men. The narrative of Western adventure and exploration has always been one of the white male hero encountering ‘savage’ lands and peoples. Home has always been the perceived place for women in every sense of the word. Looking to history, female travellers stand out because of their abnormality.
I see these women as heroes, and I think it’s hard not to. Jeanne Baret was the first woman to circumnavigate the world, between 1766 and 1769. In a time when women were firmly established as lesser beings, Baret’s determination to see a world previously limited to a constricting sphere of domesticity is incredibly admirable. As is to be expected from the eighteenth century, the French navy had banned women from their ships. Baret did her journey dressed as a man.
This is a persistent theme in both history and fiction. Young women see the Mulans of the world, the Elizabeth Swans, the Jeanne Barets, and we learn a few things. We learn that the world is no place for a woman unless they adopt a necessary masculinity. There’s something thrilling about that, isn’t there? The thought of sneaking onto a pirate ship, or into the Emperor of China’s army, and no one knowing. But right now, at stop five, I have a few more things to consider.
Instead of exhilaration and thrill, unfortunately I relate more to Jeanne Baret’s fear and apprehension. I wonder if she lay awake, paralysed, dreading what would happen to her if her cabin mates discovered who she really was. As well as binding her chest, she carried pistols with her for safety, and I can relate to this sense of unease. If this trip has taught me anything, it is that the sexualised nature of female travellers has not changed in the last 300 years.
On this trip, we have been catcalled in every European language at every possible location, which will likely not come as a shock to any woman who has left her house. This culture is indescribably demeaning – being reduced to a sexual object, based entirely on a perfectionist and westernised ideal of attractiveness.
Yet, it’s insidious because it’s normal. There is still a perception amongst men, however tenuous, that catcalling is a compliment. Every woman I know has experienced it at some point, to the point where we see it as an annoyance rather than what it actually is. Namely, it’s a power move. On our first night in Europe, being catcalled at a tube stop didn’t seem like a big deal. Now, it speaks to me of a larger web of inherent misogyny and unwanted sexualisation that women must face.
Another historical pioneer I relate to is Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian immigrant in Boston in 1894. Supposedly on a bet with two wealthy clubmen of Boston, she endeavoured to circle the globe in 15 months on a Columbia bicycle. Partly an effort to win $10000 and partly a symbolic destruction of Victorian ideals of female frailty and incapability, Kopchovsky achieved both: she finished her trip two weeks before the fifteen months was up.
I am inspired by both Kopchovsky’s bike and her adventure, as they represent symbols of freedom and independence. This is what being a female traveller should be, and for the most part, is. Travel is intrinsically tied to liberation, both in being able to explore the world, and having the right to feel safe while doing so. In this sense, there is a juxtaposition.
Travelling is one of the most liberating things that I have ever done. yet the process of existing in the eyes of men, and always being conscious of that, is frankly exhausting.
In 1889, Lillias Campbell Davidson wrote Hints To Lady Travellers, a handbook for
female tourists. It was the Victorian era that saw the first active female travellers because of the development of new, accessible, high-speed forms of transport. These were women whose legacies I couldn’t help but consider as I journeyed on trams across Europe. It is shocking that the independent female traveller has existed since the 19th century, yet today I still do not feel entirely safe. One senses that the women of the Victorian age may have been safer than those today, or maybe they were simply wiser.
The Victorian era woman knew she was regarded as a lesser being than men, while today’s woman assumes she is seen as an equal until proven otherwise. This might sound melodramatic, but in America, we have a president who is actively campaigning to take away women’s healthcare rights, who is moving to scrap on campus sexual assault resources, and who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to grab women by the pussy. It is this attitude on the large scale that enables, and encourages, the aggression that women feel everyday.
In Amsterdam, one of us was on the phone to her dad when a man cycled past and smacked her on the bum. As things go, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. As her mum put, it’s “something that happens to everyone”, which in itself speaks volumes.
But the visceral fear of being smacked, hard, while walking along in broad daylight, and having no idea who did it, leaves a mark. There’s a lack of account- ability there. For someone like Jeanne Baret, desperate to see the world but under constant threat of far worse, I can hardly imagine what travelling was like.
Travellers like Jeanne Baret had to actively compromise their femininity. However, there is another brand of unapologetically female travellers. Ching Shih, a notorious 19th century pirate, ruled the China Sea. She led an empire of 300 junks containing 20,000 to 40,000 fellow pirates. With good reason, she is widely seen as the most successful pirate in history. But looking back now, I feel like there’s no way she could have reached that point unscathed. She was able to be female because she was feared. Her femininity became second to her ruthlessness.
Another thing I’ve discovered about being a female traveller is that people aren’t scared of girls, really. A thirty-year-old man in a business suit was not afraid to grope one of my friends in a club. Another was not afraid to pull my friend’s hair on a subway escalator, and follow us out of the tube station. A sixty-year-old man was not afraid to stare at me and smirk on the metro, and when I moved, to follow me and sit down opposite me again. It’s acceptable and it’s normal, and it does not involve any fear of repercussion. Travelling has taught me to have a mental escape route, to be aware of other groups of women or people who look vulnerable to harassment.
That’s not to say that I’m scared to be a female traveller. It’s rather that, given our history, there’s something intrinsically fearless about being one. I just don’t think we should have to be fearless. I can’t imagine being Jean Baret, or Ching Shih, alone and surrounded by men, relying on my ruthlessness or my ability to hide and blend in. Yet, while it’s hard to identify with their specific circumstances, there is a common thread among all of our experiences. That is of being a lone woman in an unapologetically masculine world.
Female travellers of the past stand out to be not only because of their abnormality, but because of their loneliness.
According to a 2016 report by the George Washington University School of Business, nearly two-thirds of travellers are women. According to the US Travel Association, eleven percent of adults travelling for leisure are women by themselves. Evidently, being a lone female traveller is not abnormal. Rather, it’s a trend.
However, the vulnerability of being a woman by herself is still paramount. This suggests a dichotomy. The idea that women should only travel with men is outdated and ridiculous.
Yet, there is still the pervasive notion that I would be safer if accompanied by men. At one point in the trip, a male friend joined us for two stops. And while a part of me wishes this wasn’t the case, it’s true that I did feel safer when he was there.
No-one shouted at us on the way back from a night out, or followed us down the street. Coincidentally, these were the two stops where we went clubbing the most, and one night out involved a fifty-minute walk back (if you go to Amsterdam, avoid Techno Tuesday).
Having done that walk as four girls would’ve been an entirely different ball game. Threatening women – scaring them – is a game. It’s harder to play that game in the presence of someone that actually feels like a threat.
One day in Bratislava, and we were shouted at by men outside a tram stop. While walking away from them, an old man patted my bum. It’s demeaning in a way that words can’t really describe. It’s unsettling knowing that the casual harassment of women is a joke. If I had male friends with me, would it still have happened? Probably not.
Travelling and adventure have always been predominantly a man’s world. Being singled out as an outsider because of one’s gender is unsettling, and makes one feel vulnerable. A German friend of mine worked for a year in London.When she described her experience of the city, she said she’d never felt less safe. So maybe this is less about travel, and more about the distinct sense of being an outsider. I’ve done the walk home alone from Bridge at 2am and felt safer than I did on a train at 8pm in Prague. This idea of being an outsider is something that surpasses just womanhood.
As a lesbian, gay clubs have always felt far more comfortable to me. For people that identify as transgender, gender non-conforming, or even present as especially effeminate, there is a constant sense of threat that I can barely begin to comprehend.
My point in all of this is not to dissuade women from traveling. In fact, it’s the opposite.
We should be celebrating the achievements of historical female travellers, as much as, if not more than, their male counterparts. I’d much rather see a statue celebrating Jeanne Baret or Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, than one celebrating Christopher Columbus. But more than that, it’s a comment.
The world we live in is not so different from the one Jeanne Baret traversed. The male image of woman and vulnerable people – as sport, as objects, as fetishes – is as striking as it has always been.
The world of travel has evolved. The men who inhabit it have not.
For a long time now, skate brands such as HUF and Vans have featured in the wardrobes of young people. However, in the last few years, the influence of skater style has cruised its way upwards out of the mainstream and into the world of high fashion which is not, as of yet, bored with the board.
And it’s not just the fashion industry that has taken interest. In 2013, Palace collaborated with the Tate Britain when Lev Tanju, the brand’s creative director, created a new range of boards, projecting works by John Martin onto busts, creating photos that he then used as skateboard graphics.
Not long after this, the infectious creativity of such hugely popular skate brands as Supreme and Palace touched the world of high fashion with their celebrities and theatrical catwalk shows – something that seems the antithesis of the laid-back, carefree philosophy and style of skate culture. Designers such as Vestments and Goscha Rubchinskiy show collections that were clearly influences by skaters, with hoodies, oversized t-shirts and Thrasher-esque flame motifs dominating the catwalks. Unsurprisingly, as Rubchinskiy had become a darling of the industry, this new aesthetic quickly spread.
Soon, elements of skate culture were pervading the fashion world with pro skaters such as Dylan Rieder, Ben Nordberg, and Alex Olsen becoming models for major labels like DKYNY and Louis Vuitton. Skate style also became the choice off-duty uniform for many, from model Binx Walton to the mainstream artists Rihanna and Justin Bieber. Recently, Vogue even published an online article series, with the cringe inducing title ‘Skate Week’, including a piece on how to achieve skate style. This shows how obsessed the industry has become, treating the look more like a costume than a source of style inspiration.
Although skate style has not actually been championed by many designers, it is not surprising that it was so popular. Before Vetements arrived on the fashion stage in 2013, the seventies appeared on almost every catwalk. With Hedi Slimane’s rebranding of Yves Saint Lauren, all eyes seemed to be fixed on him as he brought a youthful edge to the long-established fashion house. With collections such as Nicolas Ghesquiere AW14 for Louis Vuitton going down a similarly retro trajectory, Vetements and Goscha’s laid-back sportswear-inspired collections were something new for the industry to get excited about.
Furthermore, the big skate brands had already made links between different areas of the cultural sphere, increasing their profile. Palace’s graphic designers, for example, came from outside skateboarding. Fergus Purcell was named design director at Marc by Marc Jacobs in 2013, and Will Bankhead was one of the main visual directors behind the Mo Wax imprint and Joy Orbison’s Doldrums. He cited skate magazines Transworld Skateboarding and Thrasher as his inspiration. Therefore, with skateboarding already appearing across the creative board, and Palace and Supreme growing ever bigger, the popularity of this new style could easily have been predicted.
Now, on both the high street and in vintage shops there is a multitude of skate-inspired clothing. From low rise baggy jeans to oversized hoodies, which are sometimes made more ‘skater’ by text or printed flames added down the sleeves. In the accessories department, high-top Converse and checkerboard Vans are making a comeback from our pre-teen emo days. As elements of skater style has made its way into the mainstream, it has merged with other styles popular among the urban creative youth, such as the 90s sportswear that has come from the rise of the ‘Wavey Garms’ look. Now in the nightclubs of the UK’s biggest cities you’ll see this new breed of creative youth lounging around in the smoking area sporting their Dickies and pulling out a packet of Amber Leaf from their across body bum bag.
This style has brought with it a new stereotype of the skater. Supreme is now a highly successful business, having recently collaborated with the fashion giant Louis Vuitton. Across the pond, here in the UK, the skater turned artist-cum-fashion designer Blondey McCoy is showing that skaters can be far more than the stoner dropout cliche they are usually associated with. Blondey skates for Adidas and Palace, while also acting as the creative director of the skate brand Thames. McCoy has recently launched his fifth exhibition, entitles Us and Chem, which includes a creative collaboration with the British artist Damien Hirst.
Some skaters do not seem bothered by the eclecticism and ambition of creatives such as Blondey. But unsurprisingly many are unhappy with the with way in which fashion designers have plucked out elements of their style, and gone on to be lauded by the industry for their creative genius, not to mention the financial remuneration the have received. Skaters are rarely involved in the conversation the fashion industry is so excitdely having about their culture and style, making the industry more vulnerable to their accusations from skaters that their pursuits are disingenuous. This raises questions about the nature of fashion itself, an industry inherently prone to accusations of appropriation, cultural or other otherwise. If a designer references something without belonging to that culture or subculture, does that immediately make their product problematic?
Perhaps the skaters who take issues with the industry are just reacting against the increasing inclusivity of their subculture. The opening up of their world to the general consumer may well result in a serious loss of authenticity, as the mainstream image of skate culture becomes all that they are represented by. Most significantly, when the fashion world decides that its skater crush is over, they will just be dumped by the wayside with all those other discarded trends.
“I’m not going to get myself… well I’ll get myself in trouble anyway.” Louise Richardson was thinking aloud in response to one of my questions. It did not matter which question. She is not, and has never been, confined by societal limitations on what can and cannot be said. She will contravene convention by answering the question, not rewording it.
Not afraid to go on national radio and justify why she deserves her pay, or fight for free speech on unpopular issues – the right of Islamic extremists, fascists, and homophobes to speak on campus, for instance – she has faced some backlash from student and national press alike.
The interview she gives to Cherwell is yet another example of her willingness to answer tough questions. She would be forgiven for wanting to keep her head down, to refuse to engage with the “mendacious media” she has recently lambasted. Yet she defends herself on each issue. I start with the most recent: claims that she wishes to erode the autonomy of the college – a ‘controversy’ sparked after her recent annual Oration to the congregation (the University’s governing body).
“The press the day after my talk interpreted this as an attack on colleges – it absolutely wasn’t,” she tells me. “This is about the sharing of back office functions, so that we can improve the quality and reduce the cost of infrastructure.”
The sharing of back office functions is part of a wider package of reform: “I think we have to be much more creative about how we fund ourselves. We can do that by philanthropy, links with industry, in spinning out companies, in helping start-ups translate the knowledge that our research is generating into immediate impact on the economy.”
Why is reform so urgently needed? “If you’re asking me, do I think we will be number one in 50 years time? In all honesty, I would say no.” This is clearly a leader who is conscious of the various global and domestic trends which pose a series of threats to Oxford’s status, and who is conscious that now is the time for action.
She is concerned that at this time of increasing global competition, Britain is embarking upon Brexit – a policy which in her opinion spells nothing but bad news for universities. “My personal preference would be for Brexit not to occur. I would love to see another referendum in which the result of this last one is reversed.” The reason is that Brexit poses threats to two seminal parts of Richardson’s life: Oxford University, and Ireland.
“I worry absolutely about our European academics and I worry that we will lose access to the networks of collaborators that we have across Europe and that we will lose EU funding, and of course that the number of EU students will decline. Being involved in these networks is absolutely critical to our number one status.”
If the government does not pursue her preference for a second referendum, the next best option for British universities’ post-Brexit relations with Europe would be for them “to be as close as possible as the pre-Brexit relations with Europe.”
With the government declining to preserve all rights of EU nationals living here, she worries about her European staff and their families. “Anyone who is good enough to teach at Oxford is eminently poachable”, and that the government’s position “makes them consider more seriously the many other offers they get from other universities”.
This anxiety is personal as well as professional. She grew up in rural Ireland, one of seven children in Tramore, a seaside town of 3,000 people. She remembers, as a child crossing the border, being stopped by soldiers at gunpoint and searched. Since then, Richardson says: “We’ve seen the end of a long, festering ethnic conflict, and the EU has played a hugely positive role, often behind the scenes, often providing financial support for cross-border initiatives.”
“The idea that we would go back to having a hard border… It would be an open invitation to the extremists to reconstitute themselves, it would give them a very obvious target for
their anger, and yet it is very hard to see how you can have a virtual border between the EU and a non-EU state.”
Not only was she one of three Catholics in her class at Trinity College, Dublin, she was of a completely different socio-economic background. Her Catholic convent did not send students – let alone girls – to Trinity.
She had two jobs – as a waitress and assistant librarian – for most of her university life, and financed her university education completely by herself. She was also active in the anti-Apartheid society, and in anti-blood sports – an activity which caused great hilarity when she returned to her family in the country.
She was a regular at the marches against increasing fees, occupations of libraries and various other forms of direct action. Despite this varied set of activities, she tells me: “I wasn’t a particularly big name on campus.”
Each step forward in Richardson’s life has been one step further away from Tramore. From Trinity, to a scholarship at UCLA in America, to a PhD and academic career at Harvard, to becoming the first woman to be appointed Principal of St Andrews, and then the first to be appointed Vice Chancellor of Oxford. “It’s very important to me that I’m a woman in a very senior position and very important to me that I’m a woman from a background that’s very different. I come from a very different world from the one I currently occupy.”
In the journey to the top of academia, Richardson has received her fair share of hostility. At St Andrews, the Royal and Ancient Gold Club refused to grant her honorary membership because of her gender, and on more than one occasion, female professors noted Richardson surrounded by men waving their golf club ties in her direction. She would rather challenge these individuals than lock herself in a safe space to avoid them. Such an environment is very different to the one she sees today. “Children today – especially middle class children – tend to be more protected than certainly I was, more cosseted by their parents, so perhaps less exposed to views very different than their own, or people very different to their own.” The result is something “broader than just the safe space movement… Everyone is willing to concede free speech to people they agree with, but not nearly enough people are willing to cede speech to people they disagree with.”
She says she uses the same arguments to defend the Christian Union’s right to attend the Balliol freshers’ fair as she would to defend the right of Islamic extremists to speak on campus (as she did when challenging the government’s Prevent programme). “I really believe that all legal speech has to be heard on campus, and all of us have a right to challenge and must have an opportunity to challenge speech we don’t like.”
Such strong feelings about free speech certainly do not make Richardson’s life easier, quite the opposite. She describes the press, in her view, twisting her words as “the part of my job that I least like. I’ve been astounded by the frequency with which words have been put in my mouth, then I’ve been pilloried for saying them.
“It’s frankly horrible when views that you don’t hold, have never held, and are antithetical to anything you’ve ever stood for, are attributed to you.”
The recent public debate over pay is one of those issues where she feels hard done by. After a speech in London she describes how she later saw a newspaper with the headline, ‘Oxford VC Accuses Minister of Pay Lies’. “I never mentioned the minister, and I never mentioned pay lies.”
That said, she does not hold back discussing pay: “I feel absolutely convinced that it is going to be harder for British universities to recruit university leadership from overseas as a result of all this public pillorying of academics for being overpaid”.
The debate seems to be moving in a new direction. It was reported this week that vice chancellors at Russell Group universities were ‘lobbying’ for modern universities to bear the brunt of any cuts.
Richardson appears to support the line of argument: “At my university, with fees at £9,250, we just break even for home students. But some vice chancellors have admitted to me that teaching a student only costs them £5,000.” She tells me the reason Oxford cannot take the lead and reduce their fees is because “we subsidise every student to the tune of about £8000. So yes we could charge less but it would mean the money would have to come from someplace and we would have to cut something.”
Her ideal day is with her husband and kids, and a good book nearby. “The wonderful thing about fiction is that it takes you out of yourself, out of your world, and you occupy the mind and world of another.” She cannot get much time for reading however, saying she starts work at 7 am and finishing at 11pm seven days a week for weeks on end. Does she get burnt out? “It’s very exhausting and hugely exhilarating”.
Only 18 months into her job, and just beginning on a set of reforms to secure Oxford’s future, one feels there will be plenty more questions given straight answers, and plenty more clashes with the media ahead.
The University and College Union (UCU), including thousands of university lecturers and tutors, have voted to take industrial action. 87% of members voted in favour of striking. The pensions row chiefly involves older universities, such as Oxford.
Results of individual institutions were not released. The furore was sparked by proposed changes to a pension scheme which could significantly reduce retirement pots. The UCU consulted about 40,000 staff members across 69 institutions.
UCU has said that any industrial action would have a disruptive effect on the education of thousands of students. The UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said in a statement: “This result sends a clear message that UCU members are prepared to take sustained industrial action in order to protect their pensions.”
Garrick Taylor, the President of the Oxford UCU, told Cherwell: “This vote was just consultative and not a legal ballot to take industrial action and at this stage there is no intention to strike. “It’s too early to tell whether industrial action will even be legally balloted upon, let alone happen. We will be watching the situation carefully.”
Across the world, there are encouraging signs of reform when it comes to drugs policy and public health. Some initiatives, such as the Portuguese model of blanket decriminalisation, have been running for decades, while others are still viewed as ‘experiments’. Many were born not from decrees passed down from high courts or the imagination of maverick ministers, but through the passionate campaigning of citizens.
Mexico especially has suffered bitterly at the hands of criminals and cartels, whose enterprises flourished under prohibition. Despite this, the country has seen a dramatic shift from a hard-line ‘just say no’ attitude, to one which instead prioritises patient health. In Argentina, a group of 136 families lobbied the Government for the right to treat their children with cannabis, and won. Back in Europe, Germany also gained its medical weed card this year, with unanimous cross-party support. Not so in Britain. The most recent piece of drugs legislation enacted in the UK, the Psychoactive Substances Act (PSA), has been described by the Government’s own former chief advisor on drugs as “the worst assault on personal freedom since the 1559 Supremacy Act decreed that the practice of Catholic beliefs was illegal.”
The Act criminalises the buying and selling of absolutely anything that gets you high, regardless of how harmful it is or isn’t, unless it’s one of a few exceptions: alcohol and tobacco (which by any measure are two of the most deadly and harmful substances), caffeine and, thankfully, food. This nonsensical legislation, rushed through to appease the tabloids without any consideration of scientific or medical advice, has been an unmitigated failure.
The majority of arrests made under the Act were for the possession and selling of nitrous oxide – the ‘laughing gas’ enjoyed unproblematically by the British aristocracy for over 200 years, and with a risk profile so safe it is routinely given to women in labour. When use started ballooning amongst young people in search for a hangover-free buzz, something had to be done, and fake news around nitrous oxide was a primary motivator for the PSA. But barely a year after the Act’s Royal Assent, two cases of possession with intent to supply have been thrown out of court, with the main target of the Act found to be exempt: a humiliating defeat for the Government that could be grounds for overturning numerous convictions.
Spice, on the other hand, is no laughing matter. The vague street name for synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists, Spice has been destroying lives and communities since it first hit the streets the 2000s. This is not simply a synthetic version of cannabis – a drug so physically safe that no-one has ever overdosed on it – but a highly addictive, physically destructive, and unpredictable cocktail of compounds soaked into plant matter, more often likened to heroin.
The PSA did succeed in closing down high-street head shops, where ‘legal highs’ were previously sold in at least a partially regulated and accountable way, diverting the supply chain to criminal gangs, who tend to care far less about customer welfare. Surging prices have plunged dependent users into increasingly desperate situations, with researchers estimating a prevalence of up to 90-95% amongst some homeless populations.
Debates on whether to decriminalise or regulate drugs often distil down to whether drugs are harmful or not, and unfortunately human interest stories of addiction or adolescent deaths continue to dominate over the admittedly dry statistics. Still, this would be a useful exercise had we the power to decide if these drugs existed in the world, but we cannot even keep them out of maximum-security prisons.
If we care about the people who use drugs, which includes all classes, races, ages, and genders – so, all of us, really – we must instead be asking what is the best way to reduce the harms of drugs. This may not be equivalent to reducing use.
The government’s boast of falling usage rates, at the same time as record-high drug-related deaths, sounds as hollow as their bragging of high employment rates at a time of increasing in-work poverty and food bank use. Currently, a third of all European overdose deaths occur in Britain; each death a scandal that could be prevented with supervised drug consumption rooms.
There are promising signs from the periphery, with some local police forces either scaling back operations against personal use, or supporting harm-reduction groups such as the Loop, who provide drug safety testing at music festivals. But for anyone other than self-proclaimed, VICE-reading ‘humans of the sesh’, drugs just aren’t a political priority, with neither of the two main parties having anything new to say. Perhaps this is simply British politeness – it’s fine that we have one of the most drug-taking cultures in Europe, but let’s not talk about it.
This may be polite but it is also cowardly, and fails the most vulnerable in our society. If we really care, it’s high time we demand more from our politicians – more rationality, more progress, and more humanity.
Joshua Harvey is the co-founder of the Oxford Psychedelic Society
Travelling is one of the most liberating things that I have ever done. yet the process of existing in the eyes of men, and always being conscious of that, is frankly exhausting.