Wednesday 29th April 2026
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‘Reversed’: An interview with Lois Letchford

Kurien Parel
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‘Reversed’: An interview with Lois Letchford

Lois Letchford’s memoir ‘Reversed’ follows her son Nicholas’ struggles with learning disabilities and the education system.

Nicholas Letchford completed his Doctorate in mathematics last year from Oxford University having been diagnosed with severe learning disabilities as a child.

To delve deeper into the issues raised by the book, Kurien Parel interviewed Lois, speaking to her about why she decided to write the book, and how she thinks the education system could be reformed to help students with learning difficulties.

KP: I spoke to Nicholas a few days ago and he told me he has only read bits of the book. He said he didn’t want to read it all because he was afraid it would bring back some painful memories.

LL: His comment to me was ‘I don’t want to read it, I lived it’.

KP: I understand Nicholas still has some difficulties. What exactly is his disorder?

LL: Today, they would call it Developmental Language Disorder. Nicholas was very slow with processing information. By the time he worked out that the teacher had spoken and has given an instruction, he was lost. Because people judge others on how they speak, the implications in the classroom are horrendous. People would think he is dumb. To me he is  now very articulate; yes, he is still slow with listening and he takes time to respond. But when he was a child, if he didn’t hear the first word or second word in a sentence, he would withdraw, and it would look like he was dumb.      

KP: So he takes time to understand what people are saying. He also mentioned he had dyslexia and some difficulty with writing. 

LL: Yes, it affected his listening and processing of information, and subsequently reading, writing and interaction with other children. It’s like dyslexia, only worse. Nicholas said he expected every word to represent a picture and only one picture. When you think like that, reading becomes very difficult because reading doesn’t work like that at all. 

KP:   Why did you write this book?

LL: Nicholas’ story should always have been told. Even if it was just a story of him going from non-reading to reading, it would have been a great story. Then he went from non-reading to the top of the school. That was a better story. And it goes on. He gets two honours degrees, and then he got a PhD from Oxford University. The story just got better and better. I wanted to tell this story, one because it was a good story, but also because it is a Helen Keller story. We must teach these children to read because we don’t know what is in their brains. 

KP: In the book you talk about a few of your students, in the USA. You lament how despite being in school for several years they can barely read a few words. Obviously, something is wrong.  What do you think is the problem with the education system and what should be done to reform the system?

LL: Do you know what I am finding? A lot of the problem is with the teacher’s mindset. Some say, ‘That child is just dumb. I tried this and that and the student couldn’t do it.” Some of them never say, ‘What do I, as a teacher, have to do to engage this child?’ 

Teachers often do not have enough knowledge of reading education – how to teach reading – partly because majority of children learn to read with ease. You only need this knowledge when you come across children who struggle. When a child struggles, it is easier to blame the child than to work out what the teacher could do differently. 

However, instead of pointing out the teacher is not doing their job, the question for principals and educators should be, ‘What can we do to support the teacher so the child can learn to read?’. Make it more collaborative and less accusatory. I don’t want to use the word accountable. I want to say when children are failing, let us have a discussion. Let’s work out what we as a school have to do to help this child rather than write him or her off.  See what we can do in a supportive environment for everyone. If we say you are accountable, it is almost saying you haven’t done the job. We want to keep teachers on our side, so they gain greater knowledge and teach more children to read. 

There are simple questions to ask: is the child being taught in a small group or in a big class?  How often is the child being seen by a teacher? And if the child is still not making progress, they should ask what else can be done. My feeling is that if we can teach more effectively the child at the bottom, we will teach everyone more effectively. It’s not a strategy that works just for one child out of a hundred but a strategy that affects everyone. 

When I first taught Nicholas in Oxford, I tore my hair out. I was crying and I was blaming Nicholas. It was horrendous for both of us. When I changed the teaching, teaching became so exciting- finding ways around the problem. One thing I had in Oxford was time. I had time to reflect, write and think what else will I could do. We need to give teachers time. 

KP: When your family went to Oxford for 6 months when Nicholas was in 2nd grade, you home-schooled him.  You mention this 6 months as a key episode in Nicholas’ story. Why?

LL: If you take out that first 6 months in Oxford, I would not have seen Nicholas in the light that I saw him. I would have agreed with the school that the kid can’t do anything. I would have said I know he is really dumb. I needed that time to see him blossom, so I could come back to school and say you are wrong and we are going to teach him to read.

KP: And then when you came back to Australia, the school retested him and said his reading had become worse. That must have been a shock. How did you deal with that?

LL: Well that was a fascinating day. It was 24 hours that changed my life. The morning I walked into that diagnostician, I was excited. I was so pleased with what Nicholas and I had achieved in Oxford. Nicholas’ thinking was coming out. All that time Nicholas was excited about learning. I had turned teaching around–from him hating learning to loving it. And then the diagnostician comes out and says, ‘he is the worst child I’ve seen in 20 years of teaching’.  She devasted me. I went home and thought about it. I decided I didn’t care what she called him, and that he is going to learn to read. 

Then, that afternoon the teacher sent him home with those sight words, ‘I saw a cat climb up a tree’, and Nicholas is cutting the cat in half. I recognised the problem was with the teaching. Nicholas only looks for the concrete meaning in each word, and he took the word ‘saw’ to mean ‘to cut’. The teacher hasn’t recognised the difficulty he has with words with more than one meaning and is using the same exercises to teach him that she uses with everyone else. He gets confused and they say he is dumb.  

KP: Why do you think Nicholas scored lower on the tests after you home-schooled him?

LL: They would have measured him before he left Australia. They would have been teaching and testing letters and sounds as well as sight words. I had not focused on the test. I focused on the teaching. What was important for me was that these letters and sounds and the words stick. When he came back 6 months later and was given the same test, he scored lower, but what he learnt with me was glued to his inside and he was never going to forget it. I was teaching him about the world and learning. They were teaching him to the test. 

KP: It becomes quite apparent in the book that the memoir is as much about you as it is about Nicholas. You see yourself in his struggles, since you too had learning difficulties. Do you see yourself in some sense living vicariously through Nicholas?

LL: I think Nicholas’ achievements blow me away. He has just got better and better and I am proud of him. But I look at my life, and I see today students from low socioeconomic circumstances subjected to poor teaching, and we don’t do anything about it. I see Nicholas as very privileged to get where he is.  I am feeling for every child that is not privileged. What are we doing for them? Their parents are busy putting food on the table, like my parents were. The parents aren’t reading to them.  Well, the parents are surviving. The school has to do it. The school is responsible for education. I don’t think I am living through Nicholas. But I want to use his story to say privilege should not be a prerequisite to learning to read. 

KP: One of the key points the book made was the level of abuse children with learning disabilities endure from teachers and others. One striking example was Nicholas’ math teacher that ripped up his work and humiliated him, basically implying he was too stupid to take her class. What is your advice to parents and schools to prevent this? 

LL: I don’t think we can protect them from the rest of the world. This is another reason why Nicholas’ story is so important because I think people learn from stories. Let’s open people’s minds. Our family met in Australia in 2016 and I read this part of the story to Nicholas, and he was still affected by it, 13 years after it happened. How do we protect them? I don’t know. It was true Nicholas went into this brand-new school, into junior-high. He didn’t know a soul. It was period one, day one, when that happened.

KP: In your book you talk about teaching struggling students, who sometimes could be difficult. For instance one of your students, Amy, would at times act out. What’s your advice to teachers who work with such students?

LL: Amy was 5th or 6th grade when I picked her up. Her father was illiterate. I could see Amy as this little girl who had been just left out of the system. She was really quite articulate. This goes back to our attitude. Do we see a difficult child or a child that cannot read and is trying to cover her difficulties?  She was quite stubborn. I recognise often when students act out it is because they are frustrated. I give them a break.  It’s hard in the classroom. I was teaching in the ideal circumstances. I was teaching one on two, five days week, an hour a day. Saying that, that’s what they deserved and what they needed.  

KP: What are the aspects of reading these children struggle with which teachers often may not be aware? 

LL: There is a disconnect between the oral language and the written language. We expect if a child can speak it that they can read it, but they sometimes don’t. People who are highly literate don’t understand the level of difficulty children who struggle with language have. A researcher in Oxford in late 1980s pointed out that children have problems with pronouns, particularly children in the bottom half of the class. We are now in 2018 and teachers are not aware of this research. Teachers sometimes say, ‘look this is so easy, why don’t you get it’, and that makes it so much worse. For example, many children struggle with the word ‘it’ for which they don’t have a picture. If you ask some children what is ‘it’, they will answer ‘it is nothing’. Another disconnect is between reading and comprehension. Reading is thinking, not just reading the words, and that was the problem I had growing up. Because I had struggled with reading growing up, I am more attuned as to what is going wrong with reading, as opposed to someone who has flown through it.

KP: Going back to Nicholas, were you worried when he was pursuing his doctorate in Oxford? What’s your advice to parents of similar children when they go to University?

LL: One of the best things we did was we had his documentation up to date. So, when he had trouble passing his first year viva, we could get support from the disability office. That was huge. We are in a world where we can’t ask everyone around us to change. What we can do is to be as supportive as possible and to remind him he can do it. Keep believing in your child. Since Nicholas had difficulty remembering academic discussions, his elder brother advised him to record everything, take pictures of the board and to use modern technology so he can get back to it. This is now out of my hands. I am just a mother now. All I can be is a shoulder to cry on. 

KP: What is your advice to parents with children with learning disabilities?

LL: Believe in them. Follow their interests and advocate for them. Accept they may have a problem but insist on them learning to read. Don’t let teachers write off your children. Parents should ask their teachers, ‘what else do I have to do at home, to help?’ Audio books made the difference to Nicholas and helped him go from the bottom to the top, through the exposure to language. Now we have computers at every home. Use the technology to help them read and get back to grade level. Read my book, and get in touch with me!

Lois Letchford currently lives in Upstate New York and holds a Master’s Degree in literacy, specialising in teaching students with reading difficulties.

Fatal attraction: why we smoke

Fin Kavanagh
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Fatal attraction: why we smoke

I am not going to start by patronising you about the various dangers of smoking. Nor am I going to fearmonger you with a cheerful assortment of cancer statistics. As both non-smokers and smokers alike know (the latter thanks to the rest of us persistently reminding them), smoking is in fact bad for you. It makes your throat both look and feel like a half-used tin of Tate & Lyle Black Treacle. It makes your breath smell like your grandad’s unwashed curtains. And it leaves your breathing like an asthmatic pug.

I acknowledge all of this as a smoker of over three years. So why did it take me so long to quit? The honest, yet often unpalatable, truth is for many of us smoking can be a lot of fun. Before you gasp in horror, write a letter of complaint to the editor-in-chief, or go full Mumsnet in the comments section, let me offer an explanation.

I started smoking for the same reason almost all smokers do- to fit in. I was working a minimum wage job waiting on tables, alongside six Italian people, two Polish people and a Lithuanian person, all of whom smoked. Smoking can unite people.  It transcends class, cultural differences and language barriers. As anyone who has seen “The One Where Rachel Smokes” will know, smoke breaks also used to count for a lot in the working world. They were often where the best chats happen, where the best gossip was shared and where a lot of decisions were unofficially made- sadly for the service industry this is still a reality.

Why do we feel the need to smoke outside of the workplace then? One answer is we think it makes us look attractive. Truth be told, to many people it does. No number of NHS public health warnings can make the image of James Dean lighting up a Camel Blue not look cool. Smoking is still very much associated with the music industry, rebellion and our intellectual and artistic heroes.

Smokers themselves are often viewed as having an aloof, devil-may-care attitude towards life. For those who have grown up in households with curfews and bedtimes (not to mention strict warnings about the very dangers of smoking), this can seem new, rebellious and sexy. Hence why we want to try it for ourselves.

So what about those who neither smoke in the workplace, nor care about the image? Those left largely start off as social smokers. To them smoking offers a means of escape. It’s a way to excuse themselves from the wider company, to break from the main conversation and have a more intimate discussion. Smokers can bond over their bad habit. They know full well that those in their company cannot judge them or tell them what they already know. There’s a reason that the Bridge smoking area is almost as big as the club, people enjoy this form of socialising. The cigarette itself is often secondary to the smoking experience.

All of this might make it look like I’m a lobbyist for Big Tobacco– trust me, I’m not. None of the reasons I’ve outlined mean smoking good for us. Nearly a year on from being a regular smoker and I can still feel some of the impacts on my health, to the point at which I would never take up the habit again. If we are open about why we smoke however, we are more open to being convinced not to.

For every casual smoker comes a point when they realise it’s not just for pleasure, but it’s an addiction. To use another Friends analogy, you stop being the cautious, naïve Rachel and start to feel like the veteran Chandler. The novelty and thrill that it once brought you are lost. It becomes as mundane as doing the washing up or taking out the rubbish, just another commitment to fit into your already hectic day.

From here onwards you begin to see the act of smoking differently. You stop feeling like Mick Jagger or David Bowie and more like Deidre Barlow from Coronation Street. Social inclusion turns into social isolation. Smoking stops being an opportunity to leave the room and starts to be the reason why you leave the room. Your non-smoker friends tolerate it, but you can sense their disapproval and mild discomfort when you come back inside with breath stinking of fags. The self-confidence it once gave you is replaced with self-consciousness.

This is about the time the physical impacts also begin to emerge. Cue the trademark chesty cough and croaky voice. Run for the bus? No thanks, I’ll wait for the next one and save on the embarrassing wheezing and panting. You may not notice that your clothes and bedsheets carry the smell of the stale smoke, but everyone else does— and this smell with never, ever be sexy.

This point is a crossroads for any smoker. They either attempt to quit and undo the damage done or accept the rather uncomfortable truth that (probably for the first time in their lives) they are addicted to a substance. The reality is it’s often a lot easier to accept the latter than to commit to quitting.

To quit smoking, you must actively expose yourself to both physical and emotional pain. You willingly strip yourself of the source of comfort, stress relief and that feeling of completeness you now depend on cigarettes for. You have to deal with discomfort of your throat repairing itself, the mood swings from nicotine withdrawal and the overeating to compensate for the void left.  You have to force yourself to stay inside, while others go out for a smoke, and never know what they spoke about. You must accept the loss of what inadvertently became a part of your identity.

Life becomes healthier, though ultimately more boring. This is why we still smoke.

Review: The Da Vinci Code

Michael OConnor
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Review: The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code begins with a glimpse of a painting. It is shown for only a moment before the camera shifts to Jacques Saunière and then tracks back to a blurry shot of his pursuer. We see Saunière desperately trying to pull ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ off the wall. His pursuer catches up with him and shoots him from a few metres away. The next day Saunière is found dead, his arms and legs splayed out in imitation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and a message in blood scrawled on the floor. Jacques Saunière’s spectacular death sparks off a series of events, which result in Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of Symbology, discovering a worldwide conspiracy. Simply put, the idea is that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife, that the Catholic church knows this, and that it is willing to kill in order to prevent this fact from becoming known.

Unsurprisingly, The Da Vinci Code was critically panned on release and vigorously denounced by religious groups for its historically unverifiable assertions. Yet it made $758 million at the box office and a survey commissioned by the Catholic church suggested that people were twice as likely to believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife after viewing it. What exactly was so attractive about this semi-coherent, deliberately controversial thriller? One of our best-developed skills is the ability to recognize patterns then re-arrange them into narratives that fit all the facts together into a common frame. The Da Vinci Code satisfies this narrative fallacy by linking together Da Vinci, the Catholic Church and Mary Magdalene in a conspiracy that stretches across thousands of years.

Even if we don’t believe The Da Vinci Code, it still appeals to this basic impulse to find patterns and construct stories. The theory at the centre of The Da Vinci Code consists of a sequence of non-sequiturs. Its central piece of evidence for Mary Magdalene’s marriage to Jesus is the contention that the figure beside Jesus in Da Vinci’s famous last supper is really Mary Magdalene. Apparently, the use of a word that may mean lover in an obscure apocryphal gospel also supports this theory. The figure isn’t Mary Magdalene and the word is entirely innocent of any sexual connotations. Yet the theory that the Catholic church has been hiding a potentially destructive secret for a thousand years and almost believable at first.

I am reminded of a book that my grandma sent me for Christmas called 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Its argument is roughly as follows. Chinese maps show America. Chinese sailors could have sailed to the New World. Some Chinese sailors sailed very far from China. Therefore, China discovered the Americas. Put like this, it’s very clear that the book is based on a flawed argument. But there’s something very persuasive about the way that the author constructs a complex narrative from a couple of maps.

The Da Vinci Code’s plot is entirely nonsensical and its premise is absurd. But the conspiracy theory at its heart is still oddly exciting and thrilling. The sheer amount of time it takes to explain the theory itself drowns out anything else in the film. There’s no time for character development or meaningful dialogue. Nonetheless, it still exerts an odd, guilty appeal.

Blind Date: “He put up with my chat for nearly two and a half hours.”

Ella Thomas and Tom Linden
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Blind Date: “He put up with my chat for nearly two and a half hours.”

Ella Thomas, First Year, History of Art, Christ Church

The date was really fun. We went for drinks, then dinner and had a look around both our colleges with a brief photo shoot at the RadCam in between. He was initially very easy to spot outside the pub at 6’6”. It was raining for a lot of the evening but he had his self-professed ‘f*ck boy’ umbrella which saved the day (still not entirely sure how an umbrella has those kind of qualities, but the umbrella definitely came in handy). We talked about everything from biceps to Brexit (although I think he was initially a bit worried about my choice of college and avoided talking about politics until near the end of the date). I am not quite sure how my art history chat about Oxford architecture went down as he told me “not to talk just to fill the silences”, but he politely put up with my poor chat for nearly two and a half hours, so I’ll allow it.

First Impressions?

Funny, well-dressed and very tall.

Quality of the chat?

Good – a solid basis of meme knowledge.

Most awkward moment?

Finding out his favourite flavour of crisps were Ready Salted.

Kiss or miss?

Miss.

Tom Linden, Second Year, Maths, Worcester

I had a fun time – she was very friendly and easy to talk to, even if our subjects clashed a bit. We bonded over our similar interest in music (my risky play of dropping house-techno in early payed off). It seemed like she took my humour quite well, which was a big tick. Having to chase a stranger into the RadCam to ask if they could take a photo of us and discussing the logistics of completing the raunchy Worcester challenges made up a couple of the more interesting moments of the night. I felt like she was a little bit disinterested at times; she brought up the fact that she had an essay to finish that eve. However, I think we got along quite well, even if we ended up discussing the colour of stone in Oxford to fill a break in the conversation. Riveting stuff. I’m sure she’ll find someone to bond over Art History with in the near future!

First impressions?

Fantastic choice of a gin and tonic first up, big respect.

Quality of the chat?

Very passable.

Most awkward moment?

When I brought up Schindler’s List. Yikes, what was I thinking.

Kiss or miss?

Near miss

Gender equality is not purely monetary

Katie Shepherd
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Gender equality is not purely monetary

April 2018 marks the first month in which British companies with over 250 employees are legally required to publish their gender pay gap data. Cue newspaper headlines, outing the country’s most renowned enterprises as being sexist, discriminatory and regressive in their practices.

I am a feminist who takes issue with headlines implying that women earn less than their male counterparts for equal work. This is very rarely true, and young women should not be graduating with this belief in mind – a belief which subliminally undercuts their self-worth and fuels resentment before having even established themselves as able professionals.

Equal pay is not synonymous with the gender pay gap, and legislation including the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Equality Act (2010) ensures that all individuals performing like-for-like work are receiving identical salaries. This is not without exception, of course. Unlawful gender discrimination is an ongoing concern, but this accounts for a negligible proportion of the gap.

Our growing obsession with pay gap figures is portraying gender equality as a monetary issue. This is far from what it is. In response to recent objection, six of the BBC’s highest-earning male staff have agreed to take pay cuts in a bid to remedy the gap. Shedding public light on the company’s gender imbalance is a step in the right direction, yet these kind of band-aid solutions and so-called female empowerment schemes are failing to look beyond the facts.

As a firm believer of equal opportunity, I would not want a pay raise to compensate for my lack of testosterone. Contemporary Britain seems far too invested in gender-related injustices to consider factors which should determine income. Considerations such as occupation, experience, age and education, along with a number of qualitative factors including diligence, flexibility and willingness to work in unpleasant or dangerous environments. The gender pay gap takes none of these into account. The majority of published statistics also omit part-time work. This is a female-dominated field and, when based purely on part-time employment, last year’s pay gap stood at -5.1% in favour of women.

A women’s decision to work part-time is too often shaped by societal expectations and the need for physical and emotional recovery post-childbirth. This is not always the case, and when statistics are broken down and viewed in terms of occupational segregation, much of the gender pay gap falls down to the different career paths chosen by men and women. Many of the most distinguished professional fields take root in a history of male influence which, many would argue, serves as a disadvantage to female candidates. This element of choice must nonetheless be respected.

Within Oxford, the traditionally highest-paying undergraduate degrees are still attracting male-dominated applicant pools. Engineering Sciences, for example, saw 2152 male applicants compared to 689 female from 2014 to 2016. Among the ‘typically lowest-paid’ degrees we have Fine Art and Art History, together attracting just 211 male applicants and 870 female.

In order to achieve complete equality in the workplace, it may seem reasonable to address the stark differences in subject choices at the earlier stages of our education. The problem with this is that our decisions are influenced by gender-typical characteristics. A man should not be assumed to bear masculine traits. Nor must a woman radiate femininity. Yet with this in mind, studies have identified certain characteristics as being typically female and typically male. Female traits include sensitivity and the desire to nurture; a logical reason for which professions such as early childhood education, social work and counselling continue to be dominated by women, and just so happen to pay below-average wages.    

The UK’s median pay gap of 9.1% is a result of female underrepresentation in highest-paying professions. Oxford, as written in the University’s 2018 Gender Pay Gap Report, “is no exception when it comes to gender equality”. This is widely recognised as the root of the problem – hence the University’s initiatives to increase the proportion of women in positions of leadership. Somerville College notes that women are overrepresented in the lowest paid roles such as housekeeping staff or ‘scouts’, as they are colloquially known among students. With the knowledge that scouts are lumped together with fellows, professors and principles in the same pay gap calculation, Oxford’s statistics suddenly seem a lot less informative and worthy of further clarification. The same applies to national figures.

Publishing data which provocatively draws boundaries between male and female employment will not solve the issue at stake, but exacerbates a gender divide which need not exist in an inclusive feminist society. Workplace equality will only be realised by putting an end to this checkbox-like analysis which classifies individuals according to a single variable. The implication of recent gender pay gap statistics is that the average woman earns less than the average man because she is female. Besides from being factually inaccurate, this observation overlooks the issue of persistent gender imbalance across employment sectors – the primary cause of the wage gap. This uneven distribution does not lay the groundwork for a future of absolute equality, yet a perfectly equal spread is not necessarily in accordance with our end-goal. A wage gap of 0% will not engender equality.

We must share the outrage of the Windrush generation

Meredith Davis
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We must share the outrage of the Windrush generation

Hearing the words ‘Windrush controversy’, it might be easy to disengage from as something that will not affect anyone you know. My grandparents’ arrival from Jamaica in the late 1950s connects me to these recent chain of events.

A chat with my grandfather’s dearest friend, known fondly as ‘Uncle Clarence’, who came to England as a young man enabled me to truly comprehend the impact of this sorry affair. Through the static crackling of weak reception he tells me about his close relative, who moved to England in 1964 aged 16, finishing school before venturing into the working world. For five decades he worked hard, started a family, and recently retired. Yet, unlike most retirees, he is currently burdened by the anguish of having to prove he is a citizen of the place he has called home for the past half century.

In a situation that can only be described as Kafkaesque, his own government is questioning and thereby undermining his right to belong. Despite recent apologies and promises of compensation, this elderly gentleman is still struggling through the onerous task of establishing his right to citizenship; for example, perusing his local library’s historic files to prove the existence of the long-demolished school he attended back in 1964. Given the severe stress being imposed on this community’s older generation, apologies for “anxiety
caused” seem underwhelming.

The situation speaks to the undervaluing of an entire community, people who were invited to Britain to become valued members of society and have since become an integral patch in the fabric of which modern day Britain is made. A lack of bureaucratic foresight has engendered the notion that the right to be British is a quality that can dwindle with time. Such an oversight demonstrates a lack of consideration for Brits with West Indian backgrounds. The fact that, instead of being protected by the government, individuals are having to protect themselves from the government is frankly disheartening. Such injustices have been a continuing trial for Caribbean communities in Britain for years, which begs the question why it has taken this long to come to light. Uncle Clarence tells me of an English born child, who attended a charity nursery he and my grandparents set up. Clarence had to bring objections when, in response to his carer passing away, the three-year-old was going to be sent to Jamaica to live with his grandmother. An infant was going to be sent to a country to which he had never been, to stay with a woman he had never met, with no social services to protect him should his grandmother no longer be able. To Clarence the government appears willing to jettison its own citizens, into what he considers a no man’s land.

This attitude should concern us all, mirroring as it does Enoch Powell’s view: “The West Indian does not by being born in England become an Englishman … he is a West Indian or an Asian still.” Clarence said he felt strongly that the nursery needed to protect the boy, so that he could go on to be educated and aspire to be a valued member of our community. It was my grandparents’ adoption of this glorious attitude towards education, protection and opportunity which led to my being able to write for an Oxford University student paper. Britons who have striven to be valued by this country are simply not.

This issue goes beyond recent controversies. My late grandmother’s good friend, having retired to Montenegro Bay on a pension she spent her adult life earning in Britain, struggles to visit her children and grandchildren as she must apply for a £400 visa. Whilst many are alarmed about ‘potential’ situations involving EU (white) immigrants, it is disappointing to see that the mistreatment of Commonwealth citizens (non-white) generates a fraction of the outcry.

Clarence concludes: “I am only one voice.” Yet there is a louder voice, the collective voice of this integral community within our nation, which carries strength and power and calls for a Britain that is willing to invest in its people as they are willing to invest in their country. We must now be willing to listen.

Don’t Look Back in Anger

Josh Travers
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Don’t Look Back in Anger

Only nineties kids remember this” is a familiar phrase for social media scrollers, one used to announce the inherent transience of any fashion trend, TV show, or other cultural phenomena. It is exclusive, an inside joke. It is the reserve of a demographic who are just old enough to remember a better time before that pesky Generation Z came along and ruined everything.

While my own sense of nostalgia for the nineties is limited, there is no doubt in my mind that this was the greatest decade in the history of film. Disclaimer: I am no Roger Ebert. There is little point in me trying to argue that this was the greatest decade in film in any objective sense. Rather, I can assure you that it is my own personal favourite decade and give you some of my best arguments. Feel free to disagree with me. You’d be wrong, of course, but that’s your prerogative.

Following the rise of the big blockbuster, cinema stood on the edge of a brave new world as the millennium drew to a close. The home video market increased the amount of revenue that films could expect to earn. This inevitably led to stylistic changes in filming and editing to cater for small – as well as big – screen viewing. Cinemas coexisted in perfect harmony with the trusty Blockbuster video store on the corner. It was a power shift that paved the way for the more recent rise of digital distribution media such as Netflix.

The increasing influence of the small screen complimented another hallmark of nineties cinema: the success of the ‘indie film’. Films from independent studios began to combine festival furore with the kind of box office success which had previously only been enjoyed by Hollywood blockbusters. By the end of the decade, several independent studios had been acquired by major ones. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got the decade off to a good start, becoming the most successful independent film at the US box office at that time. The film grossed over $100 million – not bad for its independent studio New Line Cinema, who became poster-boys for the ‘Indie Dream’. Cinema had never been so stylish. From its screening at Sundance in 1992, Miramax Films’ Reservoir Dogs became a classic of independent film. Two years later, Pulp Fiction made Quentin Tarantino a household name. The film achieved overnight success, winning the coveted Palme d’Or.

Tarantino brought pop-culture together with the pillars of traditional cinema, paving a new path for the film of the 21st century. 1995 saw our old friend New Line Cinema release the chilling masterpiece Seven, allowing David Fincher to exorcise the demons of his directorial debut, Alien 3. Then with 1999’s Fight Club, Fincher and Twentieth Century Fox proved decisively that the combination of indie talent and major studio muscle could be a winning one. Imagine cinema today without independent directors, without Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, or Guillermo del Toro. They, along with many others, came to the fore during the nineties.

There must have been something in the water because it wasn’t just the young blood who reached new heights. The decade opened with Goodfellas, a film many regard as the greatest in the career of Martin Scorsese. The following year, James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day became one of the few sequels to have bettered the original, while 1993 saw Steven Spielberg bring the novel Jurassic Park to the screen in the most awesome fashion. In the nineties, going to the cinema was a hard-hitting experience. These films were renowned for their groundbreaking use of computer-generated imagery, which expanded the boundaries of cinema. In the 21st century, the fetishisation of CGI has become one of the defining characteristics of blockbuster films. The most ambitious use of CGI came in the mid-1990s when Toy Story became the first feature-length film to be completely computer animated. The very fact that films of this kind are now considered ordinary is a testament to the legacy of Pixar’s early imagination, which produced the similarly successful A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2. At the same time, Disney underwent a renaissance, releasing animated classics such as Aladdin, The Lion King, and Hercules. These films gave us songs like ‘I Just Can’t Wait to be King’ that still ring around in our heads despite our best efforts to banish them to the back of our minds.

That’s the thing about nineties films. They’re still appreciated twenty years later, many of them even more so than on their release. They were born out of the fusion of old and new, of style and substance. Much of this article reads like a random list of iconic films from the decade, but there are so many more: Forrest Gump, Titanic, Independence Day, The Matrix, Scream, etc. If there isn’t a single one of these titles that resonates, where have you been for the last twenty years? In the nineties, film was changing rapidly. 90s films capture cinema at a critical juncture, a time of innovation, and that’s why so many of them are timeless.

Pink food: style over substance?

Julia Alsop
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Pink food: style over substance?

Pinkster, Edgerton, Hoxton, Gordon’s, and Beefeater – do these names mean anything to you?

Perhaps the gin drinkers will recognise these to all be prominent brands of mother’s ruin. But these are also a small selection of the increasing number of brands who have also developed pink gins. They’re pretty but, in most cases, just add synthetic fruit flavour (I’ll allow angostura bitters).

I have even learnt that port wine, made in tawny, ruby, and white varieties since the 1700s has fallen to the trends of rose-hued booze. First released ten years a go, rosé port has become incredibly popular in recent years. Much like pink gin, it is often served with tonic, or else neat in a pretty port glass. It is delicious, but almost like candy rather than the elegantly sippable taste of a more traditional port.

And now the Kitkat has fallen victim.

They are releasing the ruby Kitkat to the UK, rumoured to be with a higher price than the original, and with – as we could’ve guessed – a slight berry taste (why all the sweetness?)

Unless you’ve been hidden under a rock, you’ve seen the evolution of food crazes; we’ve had unicorn food (lots of swirls, stars, and purple), and seen charcoal– everything, rainbow grilled cheese sandwiches, not to mention intrically crafted smoothie bowls more photogenic than most mere mortals.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Instagram.

I’m one of those people who delight in a well-framed shot from a city getaway or, indeed, a chance to document my Sunday brunch particularly visually appealing shot of avocado toast (I’m a ’96 baby – a proud millennial).

However, I’m also a foodie with a penchant for pecorino, chili oil, and damn good quality gin. That is to say, looks can be deceiving.

In a world where one can publish a picture on Instagram at the tap of a finger (of course, only once you’ve added 30 hashtags and your obligatory filter– maybe Valencia?), it seems the Instagram-aesthetic is becoming the most important foodie factor, sacrificing flavour for the sake of ‘no filter-needed’ food art.

As much as I appreciate the allure of attractive, colourfully tinted drinks and foods in all shades of pastel, let’s be honest: the tastiest dishes are usually brown.

Universities’ spending on staff reaches record low

Isabel Morris
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Universities’ spending on staff reaches record low

While UK universities’ income increased by £915m (2.7%) between 2015/16 and 2016/17, the proportion of expenditure on university staff dropped to a record low of 52.9%, according to figures published by the the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) on Thursday.

The data also shows increases in universities’ reserves, which are up to £44.27bn from £12.33bn in 2009/10. Between 2015/16 and 2016/17, they accrued a surplus of £2.3bn, equal to 6.4% of income.

The percentage of expenditure spent on university staff has decreased by 6.54% in the past seven years, while percentage spent on capital expenditure is risen by 34.9% during that time.

https://twitter.com/ucu/status/989459801536155648

In a statement, the UCU said that these figures “made a mockery of universities’ claims that staff were a top priority.”

UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: “With capital expenditure shooting up and staff costs down to a new low, it is clear that universities are prioritising investment in buildings over their staff. This makes a mockery of claims that staff are a top priority and also suggests they ignore what students say they want.

“While universities’ income rises and they hoard huge reserves, it seems the only people to benefit are vice-chancellors whose pay and perks have long been a source of embarrassment for higher education. The time has come to address the fall in staff pay and we hope the universities will respond positively at next month’s pay talks.”

The latest financial statements for Oxford University show the university’s income at £1.4 billion, with staff costs representing 51% of university expenditure for 2016/17. This figure is 2.9% below the national average released by HESA.

A University spokesperson told Cherwell: “It is a key priority of the university to provide a safe, welcoming and inclusive workplace that enables everyone to develop and do their best work here.

“Our spending towards staff recruitment and development include, for example: expanding the support for staff who have family and caring responsibilities and launching the Allies and LGBT+ Role Model programmes to build on our work as Stonewall Diversity Champions to promote LGBT+ equality within the University.

“In addition, spending goes towards using the Vice-Chancellor’s Diversity Fund to support the implementation of a number of projects, including a project to diversify portraiture in the University’s public spaces and the Returning Carers’ Fund, which makes grants to researchers and academics to support their return to research following a period of leave for caring purposes.”

The spokesperson confirmed that staff costs increased by 5% compared to 2015/16 spending.

Death By Murder Review – ‘an endearingly ambitious bunch of clowns’

Charles Britton
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Death By Murder Review – ‘an endearingly ambitious bunch of clowns’

If I took anything away from last term’s improvised comedy offering, Mock Trial: An Improvised Court Case, it was an overwhelming desire to see somebody take this longer-form improvised storytelling to the next logical step: a single sketch spanning an entire performance, a fully-developed improvised narrative. A term on, fledgling improv troupe The House of Improv promised to provide just that. Their debut show, Death By Murder is a charming departure from what improv fans are used to delivered by an endearingly ambitious bunch of clowns.

The biggest challenge facing long-form improv is consistency, retaining spontaneously created information across the whole performance. Death By Murder immediately eliminates this problem that Mock Trial struggled with by using name tags to distinguish each character. Not merely a convenient cue for the actors, the tags give each audience member the chance to come up with a character name, which the actors would then pick out of a hat and have to embody from that time forth. This random method is fair, sure, but it inevitably leads to most suggestions never being realised as they remain, tauntingly, sitting in a hat at the front of the stage.

In fact, audience participation in general is poorly integrated into the performance. The key creative decisions the audience could influence, namely the setting and the murderer, were decided by clap-o-meter, impossible to quantify, open to bias: who’s to say the actors cannot just pick the most confident performer to give a monologue when the cheers sound about the same volume? Surely, a show of hands would have been more democratic. Still, after that debacle, we had the components of our story: a bonkers murder mystery romance on a submarine liner.

Fortunately, it is no exaggeration to say that the actors “embody” their characters. Everyone quickly established a unique identity, creating a distinctive party with an impressive range of character types, accents, and mannerisms, from J. $wag’s (Rick Stevenson) Irish-Canadian accent to Dr. Steve Twinkletoe’s (Jack Lawrence) tepid body language and submissiveness to his wife. All of this was accompanied by keyboardist Christopher Magazzeni’s surprisingly varied score. Some brief lapses of established character – Alfreda (Eliza McHugh) started swearing a lot more in the second half than her demeanour had previously suggested – rarely detracted from the consistency of acting.

Such attention to detail extended to recurring jokes, the standout gag being J. Swag’s misguided decision to create a submarine by sticking one cruise ship on top of another, leaving half the rooms upside down, a detail the crew are ashamed of. The actors all contributed to these motifs, exploiting them to the full. The dreaded upside-down rooms prompted Alfreda’s (Eliza McHugh) lament that “I don’t have sticky feet like they do in the movies”. Characters’ constant attempts to define themselves as either a scientist or an artist led to Dimitri’s (Emma Hinnells) ingeniously edgy line “I’m not a person. I’m a concept”, which was then refigured as “What is a concept to do?”. In that sense, House of Improv achieves a level of character development impossible to pull off in a sketch show, with no concept half-baked nor overdone.

Yet, behind this energetic bombast was an intimacy unrivalled by other improv troupes. The resounding impression I got was of a group of people who just love being in front of an audience together, perceptible in the way each actor went to select a name tag, read it aloud, and was greeted by laughs from their co-actors. This unintentionally led to one of the show’s best gags, in which Hinnells spent five minutes trying to peel off her name tag, only to find that the audience member had written the name on the wrong side. The fact that this happened twice was sublime. While the laughing did come across as amateurish at times, such as when the audience was deathly silent and the actors were just starting to establish a scene, or whenever somebody fell back on a quintessentially ‘studenty’ joke about employment prospects, the actors’ connection to each other and the audience was, on the whole, charming.

Saying that, there is still a lot that can be done to improve this formula. The predictable structure of cycling through each character combination did lead to some interesting parallels between the pairs but, more often than not, led to scenes feeling inorganic, especially when they remembered that conflict had to come from somewhere to build up to the murder. The whole structure of telling the story up to the murder and ending with the murderer’s confession seems a bit misleading in contrast the “mystery” that was advertised. Why not carry on after the murder, detailing each character’s response to the tragedy, with a detective, perhaps even played by an audience member, who has to interview each character? As it stands, the ‘Death’ in Death By Murder is merely a device to provide the show with a definitive end. What is it with recent improv shows and their fixation on murder, anyway?

To write off this promising improv troupe, however, would be an absolute crime – a murder, perhaps? I deplore my liberal use of the past tense in this review, but the nature of improvised comedy means that every night this show runs will be unique: all the more reason to go and witness it for yourself. With their undeniable ambition and charm, House of Improv have loosened the Imps’ monopoly on the improvised stage in Oxford. This strong debut is a promise of greatness to come.

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