Monday 9th June 2025
Blog Page 881

A Labour council is vital to defend Oxford’s public services

Tom Zagoria
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A Labour council is vital to defend Oxford’s public services

For most of us, the last few years haven’t been a time for optimism in politics. There are a lot of students who feel unrepresented in the dramatic lurches that the country has been taking toward a right wing ‘Little England’. There are, of course, plenty of reasons for pessimism. Over the past few years Britain has voted to leave the European Union, potentially threatening Britain’s economic stability and certainly threatening the futures of the thousands of EU nationals who live in Oxford. Moreover, we have seen seven years of austerity measures fail to bring down the national debt at all—in fact it has more than doubled—while the worst off in our society are suffering.

The instinctive response to this is to listen to any voices that promise a change of course. It’s true that we have a Conservative government and a Conservative County Council which have imposed devastating cuts to public services—surely anything is better than that? Suddenly, everything is framed as oppositional—if you are not currently in government, you can ‘oppose’. And if you can oppose the same thing, then you stand for the same thing. Thus we are all ‘progressives’.

But we need to remember that not all ‘progressive’ parties are the same, and not every ‘progressive’ vote will create a more inclusive, equal and open society. Just because the parties of the left and centre are all in opposition doesn’t mean they don’t still stand for something – or have records in office to show what they would actually do.

I’d never joined, campaigned, or voted for a political party before coming to uni, but I’ve been convinced that for the sake of our futures and that of the worst off in our society there is one obvious choice. I’m going to be voting for a Labour government and Labour councillors for one simple reason – it makes a difference, to us and our communities.

Let’s take the County Council elections on 4 May. In these elections there will realistically be two parties which can form the main opposition to the Conservative leadership or even deny them the majority—Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This election will be vital, for among other reasons the Conservatives have put together a proposal to make Oxfordshire a unitary authority, abolishing the Labour majority Oxford City Council. Make no mistake, Oxford is very different to the rest of the county, which is a sea of Middle England blue on electoral maps, and this measure is designed to ensure public services in Oxford are forever Tory-run. What’s the response of the opposition parties? Labour are against, Lib Dems in favour.

Who runs our public services does matter. At the local level Labour councillors still make a difference in protecting frontline services and improving affordability of housing. While many students won’t know what’s being done by each of the different levels of local government, the difference is stark. The Labour-run Oxford City Council has been able to keep almost all frontline services open despite severe budget cuts. Indeed, its homelessness budget has increased to £1.7 million in the last year, while the County Council has cut its homelessness services to roughly nil, closing all its shelters in Oxford and leaving the homelessness rate to skyrocket.

This is a record matched across the country. Labour councils build an average of 2,577 new homes every year (Oxford has recently set up a local housing company backed by local authority finance to provide more affordable homes), while Tory councils build only 1,679—and Liberal Democrat councils even fewer. And, while many Lib Dems are I’m sure honest in the reforms they propose, they remain the party which was in a government under which NHS spending entered its longest ever sustained reduction in spending as a percentage of GDP, a government under which tuition fees trebled, and a government in which the number of rough sleepers doubled across the country and the number of people reliant on food banks went from the tens of thousands to the millions.

In Oxford, we’ll have a choice in these local elections as to what voice we send to represent us in the County Council. And while we may be driven by desperation to seek ‘progressive change’ in whatever form, the narrative that ‘all progressives are the same’ poses tremendous dangers.

This is not the time to believe rhetoric over reality. There are other choices, but this is equally not the time for protest votes; it’s too important for that. To save Oxford’s city council and what remains of its public services, to help the homeless and make Oxford more affordable, and to provide a strong opposition to Tory leadership who can be trusted to actually oppose, there need to be one particular ‘progressive’ party in the County Council—and I believe that party is Labour. On 4 May, make your vote count.

Controversy stikes Oxford local council elections

Jordan Bernstein
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Controversy stikes Oxford local council elections

Oxford’s local election campaigns have been struck by controversy as polling day nears, after Liberal Democrat campaigners have accused the Labour candidate for the University Parks division of “lies and slander” in negative campaigning about her Liberal Democrat opponent.

The Labour candidate is Dr Emma Turnbull, with the Liberal Democrats represented by Lucinda Chamberlain, an Oxford student studying PPE at Brasenose.

A leaflet distributed last week by the Labour campaign claimed that Chamberlain did not “[w]ork hard for Remain during the EU referendum.”

Chamberlain, speaking to Cherwell, said this was a “blatant lie”, and an attempt to mislead voters. She maintains that she “gave 100% to Oxford students for Europe and… did everything in [her] power” for a Remain vote, including “being an incredibly dedicated phone bank manager”.

The claims were also strongly rejected by Harry Samuels, who was co-Chair of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats during the EU referendum. Samuels told Cherwell: “It’s deeply disappointing that Labour have resorted to outright lies about a fantastic, hard-working, pro-EU candidate in this election. Lucinda worked extremely hard in our campaign to remain in the EU.”

Samuels is also running to be a Liberal Democrat councillor in Cowley.

Chamberlain’s campaign has since produced a video detailing her work during the referendum campaign, which included volunteering in call centres and canvassing on the streets of Oxford.

Chamberlain has also received support from followers via Twitter.

Turnbull declined to comment on the allegations, and has thus far chosen not to apologise. A Labour Party spokesperson told Cherwell: “We are proud of our positive and progressive County Council campaign, which has prioritised increased investment in social care services and tackling Oxfordshire’s housing crisis.”

The Electoral Commission’s outline of electoral offences says: “It is an illegal practice to make or publish a false statement of fact about the personal character or conduct of a candidate in order to affect the return of a candidate at an election.”

An odd mix of Sophocles, Stoppard and Wilde

Katie Sayer
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An odd mix of Sophocles, Stoppard and Wilde
Speaking to Cherwell earlier this month, Simon Callow described the tone of The Philanthropist, Christopher Hampton’s inversion of Moliere’s Misanthrope, as “scintillating, witty and unexpected”. While these accolades do seem a tad hyperbolic, it is undeniable that this revival of a 1970s classic is clever and sharp, even if not ground-breaking.
Directed by Simon Callow, the production boasts an all-star cast, most recognisable to our generation through their forays into television comedy. With the principle roles played by Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners), Charlotte Ritchie (Fresh Meat) and Tom Rosenthal (Plebs), you could be forgiven for not expecting highbrow humour. It is perhaps refreshing then, that the brand of humour is far more subtle and understated than one might perhaps anticipate.
The first act is characterised by a level of word play and paradox that is almost reminiscent of Wilde—certainly, lines like “I’m a man of no convictions. At least I think I am” are redolent of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, and there are clever textual details that eagle-eyed theatre-goers may notice, such as the character names—“Phil” for Simon Bird’s philologist, and “Don” for Tom Rosenthal’s academic don.
However, as well as operating as a trivial comedy for serious people, The Philanthropist is engaging on a more abstract, meta-theatrical level, that seems more akin to Tom Stoppard than Oscar Wilde. The opening scene depicts a man describing his imminent desire to commit suicide to two academics, which is revealed, a minute later, to be merely a  rehearsed reading of his draft manuscript—a moment greatly reminiscent of The Real Thing. However, a minute later, critical reception of the manuscript and a misunderstanding leads the man to actually shoot himself in the head—a gesture Rosenthal’s character describes, in a darkly comic moment, as “absent-minded”.
The second act brings to fruition the more profound subplots foreshadowed in the first half, commenting on things like suicide and sexual abuse, but dissonantly maintaining the same absurdist, existentialist tone. While there are fewer laugh-out-loud moments to be had, the second half is all the more engaging for its critical exploration of the play’s earlier gags—the character development of Philip, whom we learn is a man plagued by his perpetual inability to criticise or show any kind of misanthropy, undermines the earlier jokes about his passivity and submissiveness. This thematic duality, with the poignant moments of the second act stemming from the comic moments of the first, creates a sense of antiphonal parallelism.
It seems strange to me that so few critics have considered the similarities between The Philanthropist and much fifth century Greek tragedy. The three dramatic unities are more than attended to: the action is based around a single dinner party, and happens over a single day in a single location (the set of an academic fellow at an Oxbridge-type university). Bird’s Philip has his fair share of cla]ssical hamartia, his inability to be misanthropic is ultimately his downfall (hence the ironic title of the show, and the inversion of Moliere’s classic).
Certainly, the play shares in a lot of classical tropes, but the ending, which is comedically anticlimactic, is somewhat lacking in catharsis. For a conversation piece that has consistently tried to seem purposeful, this is an odd paradox.
Aside from the script, many aspects of the production are also thoughtful and clever. Libby Watson’s set design is elegant and tasteful, and the costume design aptly reconciles the youth of the cast with the experience of their characters and the garish 1970s setting. The cast are also excellent, and while Bird and Ritchie are given the chance to demonstrate their more serious acting abilities through an emotional interaction in the second half, you almost wish we could see more of the rest of the cast as well—it feels like a waste of talent, especially of Matt Berry and Tom Rosenthal.
Overall, The Philanthropist is an odd mix of laugh-out-loud comedy, existentialist angst
and metatheatrical dark humour. At times it feels like there is a disjunct between the purposefully philosophical tone of the play and the audience, who expect a routine two
hour gag roll, but this is not a weakness in itself, and in many ways the departure from
expectation increases engagement with The Philanthropist as a didactic piece that makes
a point. I just wish I knew what that point was.

Oxford lawyers, quit your degrees. Now.

Michael Shao
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Oxford lawyers, quit your degrees. Now.

Computers have, and continue to, become exponentially better at understanding the world. Last year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, ten years earlier than expected. The field of machine learning and artificial intelligence development continues to grow, especially in the United States. So how does this apply to law? In large lawsuits, the discovery process involves, at times, literally millions of documents. Reviewing such materials was, traditionally, a task for the lower-level lawyers or paralegals to complete. But now, new software systems can do the job with increasingly higher levels of accuracy than their human counterparts.

Troubles facing the field of law are not entirely limited to future concerns. They are already occurring in the present. In the United States, young lawyers already face mounting difficulties with employment. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice, regarding basic inquiries, within seconds, with 90 per cent accuracy compared with 70 per cent accuracy when done by human paralegals. In the United States, H&R Block also runs a novel but increasingly popular service where Watson can help, if not nearly complete in totality, with your taxes, and on a broader scale with corporate and tax law. In the near future (next few years), a legally-trained Watson will be able to construct a system with a vast store of cases and precedent and create drafts of briefs: research and writing work that generally has been handled by associates in law firms.

Even quantitative legal prediction, a difficult process that typically requires a high level of personal, human competency on the part of the lawyer, has seen AI do better. Researchers at Michigan State University and South Texas College of Law constructed a statistical model that was able to predict the outcomes of 71 per cent of United States Supreme Court cases. Forget about Neil Gorsuch.

History has always faced the disappearance of certain industries, in both realms of services and manufacturing. In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85 per cent of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they filed for bankruptcy. I can only postulate this question to those who are much older than me, but did you think in the year 1998 that you would never take pictures on paper film again? Part of this willful cognitive denial is because of the non-linear fashion in which technology progresses. Digital cameras were invented in 1975, over two decades before Kodak’s collapse.

The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponentially developing technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became vastly superior and flowed product-wise into the mainstream. The same phenomenon is expected when it comes to artificial intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, and 3D printing.

But I don’t intend to cause fear, and most importantly, misinterpretation. The development of technology is always a good thing, because technology means complementary, not substitution. Within the interaction of man and all things machine, there is no trade off to the machine: we don’t trade with AI any less than we trade with lamps and sofas. Computers are tools, not rivals. Even in the countless times throughout history in which various professions were replaced by technology, the wealth created by these advances in technology, as technology always does, subsequently opened up entirely new sectors. Just as Apple drove dozens of other phone manufacturers to bankruptcy or to complete overhaul, their developments in smartphone technology have given rise to a thriving market of hundreds of thousands of mobile app developers.

That being said, you do not want to be caught on the wrong side of history. In this respect, it is important to think in the long term, to consider the state of the world on a greater scale. In today’s world, you will work, with near certainty, a job totally unrelated to the degree you are pursuing right now at some point in your life. At many times, this thought can be diffi cult: a set, well defined 400 meter track is always easier to run than a winding forest path.

However, it is always rational to prepare yourself for the most likely future. In American high schools, computer science credits are becoming a mandatory course. I only hope that the UK can get with the times. However, when it comes to law, there is no debate that some form of adaptation needs to be made. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the law curriculum at Oxford is accommodating to any sort of those necessary adaptations. I do expect certain forms of law, like litigation, mediation, and negotiation that require a living-breathing lawyer to do something in person, to survive.

But, if that’s not the case for you, young, budding, aspiring Oxford law student, then you’re out of luck. In addition, technology has always proved me wrong, and I only expect that to be an exponentially truer statement in the years to come.

Welcome to the fourth Industrial Revolution, Oxonians. Don’t get left behind.

A beginner’s guide to the all-night essay crisis

Eimer McAuley
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A beginner’s guide to the all-night essay crisis

So, you’ve found yourself sitting in the college library at 11pm, with a blank word document in front of you, some incoherent notes that won’t evolve into an essay, and a 9am deadline.

In Michaelmas you were handing in work early, in Hillary you went a couple of hours over the deadline, sure, but you’ve never been here before.

Perhaps you’ve even looked at people like me and wondered ‘how does she let her essay crisis get this bad?’. Maybe you’re the medic who stopped to tell me that my 800ml Red Bull intake meant I had consumed 1920 per cent of the recommended dose of vitamin B12.

That’s okay, I won’t hold it against you. We’re about to understand each other very well.

There are guides out there on how to survive the all-nighter already. They’ll tell you not to panic. You’re going to panic. They’ll advise you on how much coffee to drink. We’re talking pro-plus. They’re written by well-meaning students who were oh so organised until they got to Oxford, then found themselves In a bit of a pickle. They can’t help you. I can.

I am a veteran of the all-nighter. You’re talking to a woman who was plunging her head into a bucket of ice water to get through fourth year GCSE modules. I didn’t sleep for a week before the 11-plus. I once emerged from one all-nighter, plunged myself into a two hour class, threw myself with verve into a crew-date, pushed myself to the edge at Bridge, and then bashed out an essay in time for an erg session at 7am.

Together, we will ensure that you have produced a just-about 2:1 essay by sunrise. Let’s begin.

First up, lower your expectations. If Oxford hasn’t already taught you that you’re not the budding genius everyone thought you were in sixth form, then fast track that existential crisis and get ready to write a bad essay. The focus here is on hitting the word count, not a revolutionary argument.

Now that you’ve calmed down you need to stock up on snacks. I don’t care if you’re a blue, put down the kale smoothie and grapes and get real. You’re going to need energy drinks and carbs. The nastier the energy drink the better. Tesco shuts at 12.

Supplies in hand, it’s time to throw together an essay plan. With our lowered expectations in mind, use what you’ve got, fabricate evidence, flirt with plagiarism. The key here is that you don’t read back what you’ve written till you’re done.

Once you get into the swing of things you’ll probably start to feel quite positive, maybe your essay won’t be so awful after all. When the second can of Red Bull kicks in you’ll be thinking this may be the best essay you’ve ever written. That’s until you inevitably ignore me and read it back. You have now hit the wall.

You’ll realise that what you’ve written makes no sense, you can’t remember what you we’re supposed to be arguing, and you’re suddenly too tired to keep your eyes open. Do not go for a nap. If you do it’s probably game over. McDonalds is open till three, a walk and a cup of coffee should revive you.

Wall conquered, you need to keep yourself motivated with the prospect of seeing the majestic number 1500 appear in the bottom corner of your screen. It’s important that you don’t start thinking about the bigger picture. At this low point you might dwell on questions such as: ‘how is my Oxford degree relevant to the world I live in?’ or ‘why am I doing this to myself?’. If you find yourself looking up late UCAS applications you have gone too far.

Don’t allow other people in the library to distract from your all-nighter quest. Don’t spend an hour chatting with Tom and Alice only to find out that Tom is finishing his footnotes and Alice is 400 words over the word count. I understand that your need for unity is fuelled by your increasing desperation. I’ve found myself going for cig breaks with people who are not nearly as screwed as I am, and I don’t even smoke. But don’t fool yourself, this dismal deed you needs must act alone.

The walk to the porter’s lodge in the morning will be strange. The light will hurt your eyes, the birds will be mocking you with their song. When you drop off the essay try not to let the porter’s look of pity add to any feelings of self loathing you may be experiencing. You can now leave that essay behind, and me with it.

P.S. don’t sleep through the tute.

 

 

‘Absolute wally’ Cook’s Boat Race medal drama

Matthew Roller
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‘Absolute wally’ Cook’s Boat Race medal drama

A quarter of a million people were watching as Ollie Cook rowed Oxford to Boat Race victory at the start of April, but his phenomenal stamina, power and boyish good looks were not the reason he shot to national fame.

Indeed, the Christ Church student made back page headlines after managing to lose his winners’ medal. Jubilant after a narrow victory—by a margin of just 1¼ lengths—Cook swan-dived into the Thames with his medal proudly displayed around his neck, only to emerge with it missing.

“My first thought was ‘you absolute wally’,” Cook told Cherwell.

It was an especially disappointing moment for Cook, who ranked the triumph as his greatest sporting success despite his impressive career to date. “Winning the Boat Race was immeasurably special,” he said. “I won the World Rowing Championships last year, but winning with the team we had and with my brother was something that I will never forget.”

However, the very next day, Cook received a phone call he was over the moon about, to tell him that his medal had been rescued.

Family friend and photographer Hamish Roots was passing Mortlake the morning after the race, and decided to have a brief look around the area in the hope that Cook’s medal would be around.

“I was on the way to a job, and knowing that stretch like the back of my hand, thought there was a small chance the tide might be low enough,” said Roots.

“I wasn’t especially hopeful but the tide was going down and straight away there it was, a foot from the water, at my feet.  First [I saw] a little black strip of ribbon wafting around and then the medal, glinting silver in the mud.”

After a quick clean to remove some “glorious Thames mud,” Roots returned the medal to Cook’s family home.

Ollie himself, however, was not there, having set off for a Great Britain training camp the very next morning.

“The day after the Boat Race I arrived at Heathrow, unshowered and thoroughly hagged having not slept from the night out,” he told Cherwell.

Cambridge’s boat club president, Lance Tredell, has been Cook’s team-mate for Great Britain for some time, and there was a stark contrast between the two’s appearances the next morning.

“[Lance] was washed, clean cut and well rested after getting an early night.”

Luckily, the Boat Race did not appear to distract the pair in their pursuits. “We hugged and put the race behind us as we set our sights on the GB final selection trials in ten days’ time,” Cook continued.

“What was perhaps the most strange was how it didn’t feel strange rowing together at all—well, apart from having to put up with seeing a lot of mint green rowing kit around.”

Cook described the media attention he attracted as “surreal”, but said that “it is really enjoyable to see your name in the papers.” However, he admitted that there was a fair chance that people thought he was “completely ridiculous,” and “deserved to lose my medal after swan-diving in.”

Dispatches: ‘Marooned between past and present, not here’

Izzy Smith
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Dispatches: ‘Marooned between past and present, not here’

She knocked a mug onto the floor and her mother shouted, but that was okay because she was a pirate and pirates aren’t scared of anything and she drew herself with a bright red parrot on her shoulder under a sky of swirly blue clouds and the next day the climbing frame at school was a pirate ship and she was the captain even though Hannah wanted to be it. She was a better pirate than Hannah, anyway. She drew back into herself, pulling the cuff s of her blazer over her hands, as the group of boys who had yelled at her earlier piled onto the bus, as they spotted her and scuffled over, laughing and commenting and staring all the way. But that was okay, it was okay they told her, they were just having a laugh, and she rammed her headphones into her ears and turned up her music, her shaking thumb jamming on the volume button long after it had reached max. She could feel eyes on the back of her neck, her muttered name and other, worse words rasping over her skin, and wished that she had worn a longer dress. He had told them all, then. She should have known he would, it would only enhance his reputation.

But it was okay with half bottle of vodka inside her, everything was warmblurryfine, everything was fine, although too bright, but fine, everything was sad, how could he do that, she was numbed, but she was angry, couldn’t control the words as they came out, and they were laughing, god they were awful, god her head. She didn’t want to, but it happened anyway, just as it had happened with so many of her friends. She had just wanted to go home, but he’d stopped his car and wouldn’t start it, she begged him to, but ‘Not until…’ but ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ but ‘Don’t you love me?’ Yes, but—but she lay back, eyes wide open, and memorised every contour of the inside of his car roof, every crease and snag, the handles above the doors with a small hook attached—for coats, probably. Anything to step outside her body.

She walked home alone at night, but she wasn’t scared, she couldn’t feel a thing, which should be okay, preferable, but was almost more scary. This didn’t seem real, none of this was real, a dark sky, crowding buildings, pavement hard under booted feet. Pulling off a glove and running fingers over a rough brick wall. Muffled, detached, reality slipping away, the present pitching sideways, fluid, rootless. At sea, marooned between present and past, not here, not in this body, not quite a part of the world. She had wanted to escape, but this wasn’t on her terms… Six months into therapy her mother digs out some of her old drawings. She sticks a few up on the wall of her kitchen, smiles sadly and picks up her pencil.

Fresh ideas abound in new Netflix original ‘The OA’

Priya Khaira-Hanks
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Fresh ideas abound in new Netflix original ‘The OA’

I blundered into Netflix original series The OA expecting your standard sci-fi fare: alien abductions, hulking metal space ships, sexualised female leads, maybe some kind of cheap alien language conjured by a sound technician with acting aspirations and a vocoder. I gathered this impression mainly from the title art—two huge, stylized letters against a starry night sky, a female figure made to look vulnerable and small under the arch of the ‘A’—and settled down to enjoy some ten-a-penny aliens, maybe a reliable interstellar landscape or two.

However, the first episode resisted any kind of generic surety and rejected the conventional scene-setting. Instead, with the scope of an epic and the quiet ambiguity of a certain milieu of art house film, we were rocketed through a series of disparate situations. Gritty realism, as a waiflike, seemingly homeless woman attempts suicide, is destabilized by the miraculous: blind when she went missing from her home town seven years ago, she is refound by her parents with her sight restored.

The episode then proceeds to take us from a seedy, teen drama sex scene, to sweeping shots of snowy Moscow, via the small town claustrophobia of suburban Michigan and the somewhat eerie behaviour of the protagonist’s overprotective parents. By the time the title sequence kicks in, we are an hour into the episode and any hope of categorisation is lost: the viewer is forced to surrender to the fact that the show’s creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, have embarked on one of the most ambitious, risky, and truly original, series of recent years.

In this, it stands out from the two juggernaut new series of 2016, HBO’s Westworld and Netflix’s Stranger Things. Both are defined by paying homage to the past: the former to the 1973 film of the same name, the latter to 1980s science fiction, particularly the work of Steven Spielberg. Both achieve what they set out to do—create easily-consumable, addictive, thrilling entertainment—with style, wit and unquestionable talent.

However, neither could ever be perceived as breaking new ground, airing new ideas, or asking new questions. The OA, however, manages to do all three, whilst simultaneously having a strong, complicated, and compelling female lead.

The new ground in question is that of NDEs (Near Death Experiences). The phenomenon, though it can be the subject of real scientific study, is often hijacked by those with a religious agenda to push, and is most commonly found in popular culture in the pulp fiction of Christian conversion stores. Titles like 90 Minutes in Heaven and Embraced by the Light, with bright white light on the front cover and vicars’ testimonies on the back, are the mainstream face of NDEs.

The OA, then, sets itself the task of taking this emotionally charged subject and transposing it into a darker and more mysterious register. Whether the show is fantasy, science fiction or something else entirely depends on your belief in the reality of NDEs, and in that of an afterlife.

Though its main agenda is definitely to entertain, it flirts with the thoughtfulness and complexity of an altogether different kind of art: one concerned with not only amusing the consumer, but maybe, just maybe, giving them something totally new to think about. Westworld may engage with the issues surrounding artificial intelligence, and Stranger Things toys with the idea of parallel universes, but The OA goes beyond this conventional sci-fi territory, and begins to map out a more original blueprint. By the end of the first series, however, only tentative steps have been made: we will have to wait till series two to see if The OA is really carving itself a new dimension.

Life after cricket for Varsity hero Sam Agarwal

Matthew Roller
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Life after cricket for Varsity hero Sam Agarwal

Since 2013, only two men have scored a triple-century in a first-class match in the UK: Kevin Pietersen and Sam Agarwal.

Pietersen’s knock, a swashbuckling 355 not out against Leicestershire in a Division Two game, turned out to be his last ever in white clothing, as the very next week, England’s Director of Cricket Andrew Strauss informed him that he would not be considered for international selection going forward.

By a quirk of fate, Agarwal’s 313*—the highest ever score in a Varsity cricket fixture—was also his final first-class innings. Despite making headlines across the country and earning him a summer-long trial with Surrey, Agarwal’s innings failed to bring about the career he had dreamed of pursuing.

“I will never forget that game,” the 26-year-old told Cherwell this week. “I get nostalgic every time I watch the video of me scoring the 300th run.

“But more than just the feeling of scoring 300, my team-mates made that so special: I could not have asked for a better way to end my time at Oxford.”

“There is a significant difference between the standard of cricket between the Varsity Match and a standard first-class fixture,” Agarwal continued, “but it’s a great feeling to be mentioned in the same breath as him [Pietersen]. I’ve always considered him an outstanding player and a true entertainer.”

The Dark Blues went on to win the 2013 Varsity Match by an innings and 186 runs, after racking up a total of 550-7 declared in the first innings. Agarwal’s knock, which came from just 312 balls and included three sixes and a gargantuan 41 fours, was described as “once-in-a-lifetime” by his coach Graham Charlesworth.

Yet this innings was no fluke: Agarwal could play. Earlier that summer, he had scored a first-class hundred against a strong Warwickshire attack, his second first-class ton after a Varsity 117 in 2010. It was no surprise that Surrey had kept tabs on him, and the opportunity to play 2nd XI cricket for them came along in 2013.

“I’m really looking forward to continuing to work with Surrey,” he told the BBC that summer. “My next step is to score runs for them this summer and hopefully pursue a career path in cricket with them.”

“Playing at Surrey was where I enjoyed my cricket the most,” Agarwal continued to Cherwell. “I was fortunate enough to open the batting with Jason Roy, face Tymal Mills and Shaun Tait in a single match and above all share the field with Glen Maxwell in a series of 2nd XI T20 games.”

It was quite the summer for the Material Sciences student, and although the runs and wickets dried up towards the end of 2013, a professional career was still very much on the cards.

However, the Utter Pradesh-born right-hander faced a major challenge in England: the restrictions on overseas players. In order to discourage counties from recruiting too many overseas stars at the expense of the national team and the development of young English players, the England and Wales Cricket Board allow each side to field only one overseas player at a time.

That summer, Surrey’s overseas player was legendary South African batsman Hashim Amla, and Agarwal was aware that his opportunities in England would be limited: “I had to return to India.”

But over the course of the next year, Agarwal fell out of love with the game. Frustrated at a lack of opportunities to play first-team cricket, his form fell away completely, and the dream died.

“Frankly, I never really enjoyed cricket in India as much as I did in the UK, and that was the big reason for me to stop playing. Due to…a string of low scores, and the politics in the game, I decided to give it up.

“At the moment, I play cricket occasionally,” he continues. “I am the captain of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of India and play a few ‘Jazz-hat’ games every year.”

It is sad to hear that a player whose career had so much potential has slipped away from the game to this extent, but that is the situation Agarwal finds himself in. Pursuing a career after cricket, he co-founded an app, MyVote.Today, which aimed to “improve the standards of democracies across the world” by providing a quick and easy way to collate polling data.

“We found it difficult to monetise the traffic we gained through Twitter and on the app,” he said, regretting an opportunity missed.

“Now, I am working with my father at Indian Ceramic House. We manufacture precious metals for the tableware and glass industry: [it is] quite closely related to my Material Science degree.”

Asked for his advice to his Fresher self, Agarwal commented “each student faces numerous opportunities during their time at Oxford and often fail to recognise their importance, because they are too busy and think they will come around again…my advice would be not to take things for granted.” It seemed a cathartic reply from a man who is now finding that despite his regrets, there is life after cricket.

Inside Vogue with Alexandra Shulman

Megan Husain
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Inside Vogue with Alexandra Shulman

“The print magazine is still really where my heart lies. If I had a choice between allocating funds to sell more print copies or drive digital traffic, most often I would choose the former.”

So writes Alexandra Shulman, editor-in-chief of Vogue, in her new book Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year. She spoke to Sali Hughes at the Sheldonian about her experience in twenty-five years of editorship. Starting in 1992, Shulman has seen Vogue change over time, with the development of the website, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. She highlighted how this enables them to get a story out immediately, whereas it previously would have taken three months before it appeared in print.

Yet Shulman’s loyalty still remains with the physical magazine over its younger online sibling. This was borne out in conversation with Hughes, as Shulman stressed how important the physical object of Vogue remains for readers, with its glossy pages and aura of indulgence. “I still think that to look at a beautiful fashion shoot is so much better on paper than on a screen,” she says, as a rare moment of laughter erupts in the Sheldonian at her exaggerated mime of zooming in and out on a phone screen. From Inside Vogue, one gets the sense that the visual now seems to be Vogue’s strongest asset:

“Our ability to be the informers of which trends are the newest and strongest has obviously been diluted by the speed and reach of digital websites, where so much information will already have been published, but none of them has, as yet, managed to create the memorable imagery that we can. So this season I feel less bound by the stories being trend-driven than I have at other times, and more by the originality of the photography.”

Shulman, however, was not always interested in fashion: “It’s not a secret that when I first came to Vogue I knew nothing about fashion. My interest was always first and foremost in journalism and that idea was that I’d bring an ‘everywoman’ approach to this aspirational magazine.” Compared to her American counterpart Anna Wintour, Shulman explained how she is known as the ‘normal’ editor. She has always tried to stay clear of questions about her personal style, and anecdotes from her book serve to portray her as a surprisingly grounded individual.

“I find myself on the fashion floor Selfridges, which stocks every conceivable designer, utterly lost as to which direction to turn. Problem number one is that I don’t know where to find anything. I am the editor of Vogue. Surely, this should not be happening.”

Later in the book, she describes getting a dress made and fitted for Vogue’s centenary gala and trying cycling shorts on underneath to see if it would make her look better. Again, we get a brilliant moment of dry humour:

“I tell him about the removal of the shorts and he’s polite enough to say that it looks better without, though I immediately feel I’ve loaded him with too much information on the underpinnings situation of a fifty-eight year old woman.”

Despite this modest self-deprecation, Shulman is not a woman to be messed with. She talked to Hughes about how the rising power of celebrities and their PRs is making photo-shoots more and more difficult. She envisages the fashion industry moving away from photographing actresses and singers, and back to models, because “at least they’ll wear what you ask them to!” From her book, it is clear that Shulman’s attitude remains consistent —Vogue do not give copy approval or pander to celebrities:

“Her [Rihanna’s] ‘people’ want all the pictures to be in black and white, and there is a specific pair of thigh-high denim boots they want featured on the cover—which may well be hard to achieve as our covers in general are crops. And we don’t get told what clothes to put on them.”

Towards the end of the hour Hughes moved the session on to questions from the floor, and a young woman asked how Shulman feels about fashion and politics, particularly the Daily Mail’s recent ‘Leggs-it’ story. Shulman took an interestingly nuanced view on that, arguing that although the Daily Mail piece was wrong, she doesn’t want fashion to become estranged from politics, or any other field. She explained that she feels that many women take pleasure in what they wear, and she doesn’t want us to reach a point where it is not PC to talk about clothes.

In her book she berates the fact that brands lend clothes to ‘street-style’ girls as opposed to for example “the head of pathology at a hospital”.

“How are we meant to inspire young girls to be judged on criteria other than physical appearance when worlds they admire, like high fashion, don’t encourage the notion that you can mix being a fashion plate with working in other fields?”

Shulman acted on her opinions and Vogue’s November 2016 edition was called ‘The Real Issue’. It championed the everyday working woman, by only featuring women in professions that had nothing to do with fashion—‘a model-free area’. This was a pioneering and impressive step for Shulman to take and you can see the initial thoughts about it forming in her book.

But when questioned on body image and the success of Vogue’s ‘Health Initiative’ by another audience member, Shulman was slightly less inspirational. She admitted that Vogue’s ‘Health Initiative’, if put through the metrics, probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. She didn’t provide any alternatives, and just stuck to repeating the fact that Vogue don’t hire models under the age of 16, and have always taken care of them. Even in her book, she doesn’t provide an answer to the problem or a discussion of the issue. She simply berates the backlash she received for doing an interview on the subject of body image for a parliamentary inquiry. It must be a fine line to tread as Editor of Vogue when discussing such matters, and yet one cannot help feeling a little disappointed that Shulman doesn’t address these important issues more frankly, especially considering that her tenure is nearly over.

Shulman is due to leave her role this summer, and she explained to Hughes how her role as Vogue editor has expanded over the years, to become far more multi-layered—“If I’d known what the job would entail I probably would have been too frightened to take it!” she laughs. She feels like an ambassadorial voice of the fashion industry, and often gets asked to bring a ‘Vogue’ idea to it. “I have to take care of Vogue the brand, not just the magazine…Vogue is more than a magazine, it’s an idea”.

When asked her what prompted the decision to leave, Shulman explained short stay in Suffolk enabled her to focus her mind and solidified her decision to take a break. But that’s not to say she won’t miss her job. Shulman seemed genuinely saddened at the idea of leaving . She talked of how she would miss the act of coming into an office in the morning, something she’s done since the age of 23: “What’s a holiday without an office to come back to? What’s a weekend without work on Monday?”

But of course, as Hughes jokingly suggests, Shulman doesn’t seem the type to settle down. She’s already written three books—Inside Vogue, The Parrots, and Can We Still Be Friends, but she intends to write even more and become more involved with the Vogue fashion and design college. Her new predecessor has just been announced as Edward Enninful. He comes from being fashion and creative director at W Magazine where he has worked since 2011. Yet again Vogue seems to be paving the way and pushing boundarie—Enniful is the first male editor in Vogue‘s 101 year history, and the first black editor of a mainstream British style magazine. It is a tough job to take though, Shulman leaves very big boots to fill.

The Oxford Literary Festival was fascinating, and the audience clearly enjoyed their insight into a life at the centre of British fashion. Deeper thought about more serious issues surrounding the industry is perhaps on its way—despite her detractors, Shulman has been a progressive force.

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