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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.

Independent learning more beneficial than contact hours, report finds

Theo Davies-Lewis
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Independent learning more beneficial than contact hours, report finds

A recent report by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) has found that independent learning is more effective than taught sessions in the development of key skills.

The HEA 2016 Engagement Survey was based on the responses of 23,198 students at 29 institutions, but the University of Oxford was not involved in the research.

Notable findings in the report included how there was a four-percentage point positive difference in perceived development of academic skills such as writing and critical thinking among students with eleven or more hours of teaching each week, compared to those who receive ten hours of teaching a week.

As well as this, 94 percent of those surveyed felt that their course encouraged them to develop their own independent learning, despite the fact that students feel they are not engaging with fellow students or academics

Students also said that studying more time out of class could be twice as beneficial in developing active learning skills, like innovation and creativity, compared with even more teaching sessions (six percentage points to three percentage points). For civic skills, such as developing values and ethics, or perhaps being informed and an ‘active citizen’, the difference was five percentage points to three.

Reacting to the report, Camille Kandiko Howson, senior lecturer in higher education at King’s College London, explained how its findings showed the drastic need to expand learning outside of the classroom, saying: “Students still think contact hours are what they need, but this gives us evidence that students’ skill development is greater when they spend more time in independent study.”

According to Times Higher Education, the results could have consequences for England’s teaching excellence framework, which could use contact hours “as a proxy for standards”.

Dr Kandiko Howson added that policymakers should move beyond this “very narrow” view of learning, especially considering that the report found that extracurricular activities were found to be beneficial to skill development.

The report also found that students who took part in sports or societies, for example, had academic skill development seven percentage points higher than those who did not participate, in addition to how volunteering gave a six-percentage point advantage.

The report also found that undergraduates at pre-92 and post-92 universities had significantly different experiences of their education

For example, students at older institutions usually worked harder, with 63 per cent of respondents saying they had eleven or more contact hours a week, compared with 50 per cent of post-92 respondents. When it came to spending 11 or more hours studying independently each week, the gap was 57 per cent to 49 per cent.

However, those students at post-92s suggested they were more engaged in their learning, with higher levels of skill development in every area except academic skills.

Week in Science: 30/04/17

Cherwell Science and Tech Editors
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Week in Science: 30/04/17

It’s not easy keeping up with all the events going around the University. With Week in Science, the Cherwell Science and Tech editors bring to your attention interesting talks around the city, all of which they attend religiously.

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The concept of time in biology, and the unity of life 

Source: Oxford Martin School

Presented by Oxford Martin School and the Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests 

Date and Time: 8th May, 17:30 to 18:30pm

Location: Oxford Martin School, 34 Broad Street, OX1 3BD

Speaker: Professor Brian J. Enquist

Description: One of our biggest technological innovations is that of time keeping. From the atomic to the astronomical scales, our technology has enabled us to precisely measure time. Our timekeeping uses clocks that all tick along the same time scale – a time scale that is also relative to how we perceive the passage of time.

For biology, the passage of time, however, is not only different but reveals deep truths about life. Across the diversity of life, the passage of time from bacteria to humans to giant Redwood trees is perceived differently. Instead of a constant ticking of a clock – the pace of life is reflected in scaling laws that characterise the variation in the cycles of heartbeats, metabolism, growth and reproduction.

In this lecture Professor Brian J. Enquist, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow, will introduce a second concept of time – physiological time. Physiological time enables us to better understand why we age, the emergence of disease and cancer, the functioning of ecosystems, and the diversity of life. Physiological time is one of the most significant characteristics of life and helps unite the study of biology. A deeper question is what ultimately sets the pace of life.

As will be discussed, the search for a universal biological clock that unites life’s cycles is the most intriguing Holy Grail of biology.

Entry: Free, register early to avoid disappointment.

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Puzzle Competition

Presented by The Oxford Invariants Society

Date and Time: 2nd May, 20:00pm.

Location: Maths Institute Café, Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.

Description: This week we’re having a puzzle competition!

It starts at 8pm on Tuesday (2nd May) in the Maths Institute Café. Bring your friends or form a team of up to 4 people on the spot and solve some fun maths puzzles! Of course, there will also be snacks and drinks for everyone and some great prizes for the winners.

Entry: The event is free for members and £3 for non-members. Memberships is also available for £15, for life.

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Lorna Casselton Memorial Lecture: The International Search for Life Beyond Earth – From Mars to Extrasolar Planets

Presented by St Cross College

Date and Time: 3rd May, 17:00 to 18:00pm.

Location: Main Lecture Theatre L1, Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, OX2 6GG.

Speaker: Dr Ellen Stofan, NASA Chief Scientist.

Description: The 3rd Lorna Casselton Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Ellen Stofan, former NASA Chief Scientist, and entitled “The International Search for Life Beyond Earth – From Mars to Extrasolar Planets” will be at 5 pm on Wednesday 3rd May 2017 in the main lecture theatre, L1, at the Mathematical Institute, Woodstock Road, Oxford.

Entry: Free, register early to avoid disappointment.

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Life Divided: Croquet

Akshay Bilolikar and Esme Ash
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Life Divided: Croquet

For: Akshay Bilolikar

It’s the first swing, but also the final. It’s that almost intractable angle hiding in plain sight on an Oxford college lawn. It’s the croquet bug: an insatiable seasonal desire to pick up the mallet, set up the court, and hit wooden balls through hoops. Between shots, there’s conferral with your partner. Grand and arcane schemes are orchestrated. Your vision must compete with your opponent’s if you’re to master the court. Little, if anything, ever goes to plan. Perhaps the sun is in your eye, but in any case you can’t quite master the angle on that last shot.

The game isn’t lost yet. There’s still possibility, even if it’s only in reach with a healthy dose of Lady Luck. One hoop behind, it’s not yet over. Two, a triumph becomes distant, yet almost within reach. On the third, there’s no way to win except to take—ruthlessly—all the opportunities your opponent gives you. Half the time, the game ends there—the leader’s advantage is not easily waived. Just often enough, however, the golden window presents itself. Jumping through the window of opportunity to snatch success from the jaws of defeat. Strategic thought, almost like chess on grass, to match your opponent on the court.

And yet, the croquet bug is not solely an infection of the mind: it’s an infection of the soul, one rooted in the summer air and the scent of the good months ahead. The game always takes longer than you allocated it time. You inevitably have to deputise to hold your place. Frustration mounts, pitilessly, but it never overwhelms because the balance of possibilities will, one day, swing in your favour. Day after day, you find yourself returning to the court. Some of your friends—the immune ones, who don’t see the possibility at play between the hoops—will balk at the hours you spend in the summer sun doing little more than hitting balls through hoops. And yet, you’ve got the bug, and you’re doing so much more

Against: Esmé Ash

Croquet? Seriously? You’d be forgiven for mistaking this pointless game as a tasty snack (see croquettes), but for some unfathomable reason, the tradition of whacking balls with sticks à la Alice in Wonderland—minus the flamingos—hasn’t died out when it really should have by now, along with boater hats and braces.

There are lots of wonderful eccentricities that are part of the fabric of college life, but croquet does not earn its place in the hall of fame for three reasons. Firstly, the “sport” (if you could call it that) is inherently unfair. No matter how flat the quad, it’s never a level playing field when cuppers rolls around because prime time for practising is invariably Trinity term, when anyone who has exams, or studies a real degree, is too busy for such frivolity.

Meanwhile, hordes of E&M students spend hours honing their skills, Pimm’s in hand, ready to crush the opposition within minutes of setting up those little hoops on the grass. No, I don’t know what they’re called—and any self-respecting student won’t know, either. But, sore losing aside, the institution of croquet and its association with Oxford is just another stereotype we have to fight, to break the misconception that we all wear red trousers and pinstripe blazers. “What’s so special that means they can play on the grass?”, prospective students wonder as they skirt the quads.

The format of the game leaves little room for mistakes, too, dissuading even the bravest of timid freshers from stepping up and having a go in case they ruin a team’s winning streak. Finally, Oxford in the summer is a beautiful thing to behold—and there are so many other things you can do which lie beyond the well-groomed lawns of your particular college.

Try rowing, punting, touring colleges, and venturing out to Cowley, Jericho or another quirky corner of the city. Croquet is a spectator sport, best served with strawberries and cream.

Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

Chloe Dootson-Graube
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Fashion in Paris is moving in the right direction

One would be hard pressed to find anything in fashion journalism as sacrosanct as the concept of ‘The Parisian’. The recent elapse of fashion weeks across the globe saw fashion publications taking to the streets in an attempt to document the street-style turn out and I defy you to find a look more widely aspired to or applauded than the ‘Parisian’.

But what is meant by the term in its sartorial use? To channel Bardot and Birkin, or to don a starched shirt, neat trousers and sensible shoes, has become the ubiquitous ‘Parisian’ trend. But many would argue that it is more a state of mind than a particular type of attire. Vogue identi es it as an “overall air of gamine insouciance”, and one of the movement’s foremost IT girls, Caroline de Maigret, attributes it to the personality of the wearer, and the “effortless” air they possess.

Others suggest that the de ning feature of Parisian style is largely the cultivation of a personal image. Ines de la Fressange and Carine Roitield’s nurture of this plays a big role in their esteemed fashion credits and Vogue supports this notion: “No deliberate statement-making, no peacocking of designer freebies […] it’s not about fitting the clothes, see: it’s about the clothes fitting you.” The integrity of the cut, the strength of the silhouette and the shape of the fabric seem to be what is valued.

One of the many benefits of this is that by embracing the individuality of the wearer, many of the stigmas that plague the fashion industry have been ostensibly removed. For example, many of the movement’s IT girls are significantly older than is typical in the fashion industry: well respected figures like Caroline de Maigret, 42, de la Fressange, 59, and Roitfeld, 62, are all far older than the teens and twenties of the Kendall Jenners and Gigi Hadids of New York.

There do however remain certain gaping holes in the movement’s liberal inclusivity. After all, “the overall air of gamine insouciance” comes part and parcel with a certain waifish slender-ness. One would encounter some difficulty in attempting to identify any plus-size figures at the forefront, or indeed, even in the background of the movement.

Moreover, it ought to be noted that the scene remains disproportionately white for a city with a population that is 10-15 % Muslim and 18 % black. With a city with such a substantial non-white population, is it not somewhat suspect that this diversity finds no representation? Why is it the neat black garb of impressionists that finds itself highlighted, rather than the hijab?

Furthermore, this notion of an individual personal style only seems to go so far. It is perhaps somewhat melodramatic to describe Parisian fashion as a policy of ‘uniformization’, but De Maigret herself concedes in a Refinery 29 interview that she believes “sometimes French women are so scared of the faux pas that they’re not adventurous. I think sometimes maybe it’s a bit dull”. The Gucci Gang, a Parisian style collective who have turned the heads of fashion publications such as I-D and Vogue, make the claim that in France, “everything is taboo”.

Yet it must be said that minimalism and uniform dressing are not universal facets of the day-to-day Parisian dress. My grandmother is a born and bred Parisian and her approach to fashion is buying clothing with a price below double digits. While I’m certainly not naming my own ageing relatives as the epicentre of innovative fashion, this sort of the out-the-box thinking is beginning to proliferate. Take the Gucci Gang, for example, who have been making waves with their Parisian fashion is ‘mort’ attitude. Thaïs, one of their members, said in an interview that “there is a great energy in the new generation of Parisian designers”.

Moreover, Rihanna’s Fenty Puma line —which debuted at Paris Fashion Week last year—makes the case for both decadence and ‘trashy-dressing’, combining the indulgent ruffles and baby pinks of the classic ‘Marie Antoinette style’, with standard sportswear staples. There is still a long way to go, but Parisian fashion is proving itself to be a diverse medium, not limited to the stark standards set by its forebears.

A day in the life of… an assistant director

Rebekah King
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A day in the life of… an assistant director

Adjusting the bosom of another woman, as you pull closed the clasps on her corset, is an intimacy best reserved for the more advanced months of a friendship. Unless, of course, you are Assistant Director for a period-costume play, in which case you may find yourself fondling others and making introductions at once:

“Hello, I’m Rebekah; I’ll be helping Sarah out.”

“Hi, I’m playing Charlotte Brontë. Should I take my bra off first?”

To be an Assistant Director is to multitask. One has, therefore, a truly unique perspective: a hands-on closeness to all aspects of production.

As first mate, I have watched the captain of our ship bring Brontë safely into port. Sarah Pyper (a development officer at St Peter’s) is one of those directors whom actors and production folk alike adore. She is intelligent, practical, and calm, and has done wonders with a difficult but rewarding script.

Here’s the problem: Polly Teale (our author) wants to write for television. Many’s the time when Sarah has cursed her for a stage direction such as ‘Lights change: it is 1835’ (“Ah!” thinks the lighting designer, “I’ll fetch my 1835 bulbs”) or ‘Emily releases the hawk’ (“How expensive is it to hire a bird of prey for a fortnight?”). But once the tidying up was done, Brontë started to look like a touching and, at times, truly poetic script: a fitting cousin for the BBC’s recent To Walk Invisible.

If you know and love the Brontës, this is a play for you. If you can’t quite remember who wrote Wuthering Heights, and had forgotten that the third sister was called Anne, the play will invite you to discover a world of purple moors and wild imaginations.

Being Assistant Director is a much more important role when things go wrong. It’s a bit like being the younger brother of king: if he’s loved you’ll never get to feel the inner contours of the throne. But open rebellion on a play-set is an excitement I have witnessed before and will happily do without.

Thistledown Theatre is not a student company, and everything feels rather more relaxed. Sarah and the rest don’t need my guidance, and for once I can enjoy the ‘assistant’ half of my job-description.

Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

Carmen Martinez
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Rewind: “Our greatest work may be found in our escape”

In 1925, Theodor Seuss Geisel—more commonly known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss—started a postgraduate degree in English literature at Lincoln College, but he never completed it. His lecture notes on Shakespeare quickly became scribblings of strange beasts, as he found life at Oxford stifling. Seuss himself later imagined his tutor thinking he was “the only man he’d ever seen who never ever should have come to Oxford”. This tutor advised him to leave Oxford, to broaden what he knew about the world, to travel Europe with schoolboy guides to meet the world in real life.

The scenes in the colourful pages of his storybooks can seem an escape from real life, and indeed it was cartoons that offered Seuss an escape from the course at Oxford which he felt he was gaining nothing from. His time at our university is summed up well on Lincoln’s website: “While finding a course in the punctuation of Shakespeare dull, he began to draw pictures and doodles during his lectures.”

When Seuss took a couple of example cartoons he had drawn to illustrate ‘Paradise Lost’ to a certain famous Broad Street bookshop, cheekily hoping he might be commissioned to do many more, he was turned away, having been told: “This isn’t quite the Blackwell type of humour.” Forty years later his books were the main event in the shopfront window.

In looking back over Dr. Seuss’s works, I see what these doodles eventually amounted to. I am drawn into the mundane quibbles of furry, odd but also strangely majestic creatures with names like ‘Sneetches’ and ‘Zax’. The characters find themselves in trouble against a backdrop of improbably colourful trees and hills, but tend to work out their differences, in dialogue with the rhythm and rhyme that made their author so important to helping children learn to read.

However, the tales of Dr. Seuss’s wacky beasts don’t lack a didactic angle, and criticism of the sources of hate in our world. In ‘The Zax’, a North-Going Zax and a South-Going Zax meet in the middle of a desert and in refusing to budge come to resemble a political deadlock:

“Never budge. That’s my rule. Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east! / I’ll stay here not budging! I can and I will / If it makes you and me and the whole world stand still!”

While the books’ settings are a zany escape from real life, there is value to be gained from mocking this kind of behaviour. Dr. Seuss artfully fused his skill for creating doodles with stances on morality. He helped children around the world to love reading and it started with drawings which seemed a product of distraction and not the ‘right thing’ to be doing in his time at Oxford.

Perhaps our greatest ‘work’, like that of Dr. Seuss, can be found in the marginal scribbles of our essay notes. Our greatest work or product, found in our ‘escape’.

College Insider – Worcester

Cherwell Life
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College Insider – Worcester

Everywhere you turn in Worcester, you see Chanel. And no, I’m not talking about thousand pound skirt suits, but the Provost’s West Highland Terrier.

It’s a strange Sunday morning when I don’t run into Coco Chanel, out for her morning stroll round the lake, on my way to brunch. There’s nothing like a tiny white bundle of enthusiastic yelping and friendly tail wagging for a hangover cure. And the anticipation of the meal ahead isn’t bad either. Sunday brunch at Worcester comes to about £1.40 for a plate heaped with a fry-up and pastries and, if you’re suave and subtle like me, you can usually nick a couple of bowls of cereal as a bonus. If the bursar is reading this, may I amicably suggest that you consider installing CCTV at the self-service bar?

Worcester isn’t generally considered one of the superlative colleges—it isn’t the richest, or the smallest, or even the sportiest. Occasionally it gets called the prettiest, and I wouldn’t disagree. But the label I really think Worcester deserves is the keenest. I cannot imagine another college where a girl’s Cupper’s football match, at 10am on a freezing cold Sunday morning in January, would gather a crowd of ten to fifteen people, from across year groups. Sure, we may have pitches on-site, but last term’s building works meant that getting to them involved a bit of a trek—it wasn’t just a matter of rolling out of bed. We take it pretty seriously, and it’s something I would sacrifice a lot to remain part of.

But let’s be clear, Worcester isn’t some kind of pastry-filled paradise, peopled only by fluffy dogs and supportive friends. It’s a college like any other, and of course, it has its problems. For example, my first year room inhabits a concrete block about half a mile away from main quad. A tactical befriending of someone living on main quad is the answer: many a night I have crashed on a certain friend’s beanbag for a box of Brannos’ finest and a quick power nap, before heading back to my room.

With Trinity beginning, the inevitable approach of the post-prelim lake swim is beginning to cost me sleep. The prospect of emerging from a grueling set of essays, only to be doused in whipped cream and bubbles, and then forcibly dunked in ice-cold, swan shit strewn waters is not exactly the stuff of daydreams. But, a Worcester challenge is a Worcester challenge, and who I am to fight tradition?

Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

Sandy Elliot
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Tolkien and ‘the problems of another place’

I do not know precisely, or even approximately, how many hours of my life have been passed watching The Lord of the Rings. Just watching each of the three films once in their theatrical cut amounts to about twelve hours of screen time. In the extended editions (arguably the only correct way to watch them) it’s even more. Time spent watching those well-loved DVDs stacks up effortlessly, in part because very few films have been made that are so profoundly watchable.

But watching The Lord of the Rings, while a source of great happiness to me and whoever my viewing companions may be, is not, for lack of a better word, very productive. For all the immense effort and expense that went into making the films (Sir Ian McKellen once told me personally that about one third of the entire process for the actors consisted of hiking around New Zealand) watching them seems to be an innocuous, but not a useful pastime.

Who says art should be useful? What does ‘useful’ even mean? Thinking about it for long enough (as with most things) our consumption of media is just another surreal aspect of a surreal existence: we like to stare at the marks on a page or the pixels on a screen, and one way or another this brings us great delight. No need to drag in Jean-Paul Sartre or Oscar Wilde to realise that The Lord of the Rings is not deep social critique. It does not have, nor does it pretend to have, a function as an instrument for political or social change.

If anything, it plays into and even invents the archetype of a fantasy film with an all-white cast, with only three prominent female characters, all of whom are in completely different parts of Middle Earth being ruled over by different men. This is despite the fact that the role of Arwen Evenstar was considerably expanded in the process of book-to-film adaptation.

Indeed, in Tolkien’s world, the Elves, “wisest and fairest of all beings”, are also emblematic of absolute sexual orthodoxy. In defence of the novel (and to some extent, the films) there are very worthy environmental messages to be found in the plight of the Ents. But The Lord of the Rings nevertheless does not seem a particularly useful instrument for getting out of the current mess. Indeed, some would argue that such escapist works are part of the human instinct to run away from our problems rather than addressing them. Our attraction to them based on the ‘escape’ that they offer is, in this view, almost irresponsible.

I believe that this is a preposterous argument, for the simple reason that paradoxically, escapism is an inalienable part of who we are as humans. The true reason for this is that even at its most privileged, life itself is so very limiting. We feel confined to this insignificant rock named Earth like Prometheus in his chains, and on a deeper level, we can even feel lonely in our own bodies, entrapped by the cast-iron borders of our souls—the ones we erected to keep barbarians out.

That is why on the night of Trump’s election, Obama said that the sun would rise in the morning whatever the outcome, and also why that statement could be of no comfort whatsoever, for it was a reminder that we are so alone here.

Our world is endlessly spinning, and when our fellow humans commit such a senseless act as elevating a mindlessly destructive and bigoted creature to the purple, we cannot filter à l’anglaise—take the French leave—and close the door quietly behind us. We cannot hand in a letter of resignation from humanity when we see children gunned down in the school playground. Perhaps we, like the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey hope at each stage in the history of our evolution for some new level of transcendence, to find new and even more ‘final’ frontiers.

Or perhaps, like Job, we feel that the meanderings of our lives are a joke played by the Almighty—that we cannot even hope to understand why it is that we live in such a senseless, cruel world, that we wouldn’t even be capable of understanding. It seems that all we can do is find new and ever more creative ways to escape. If, say, the Bible and Mad Men have one thing in common, it is that they are both works of escapist art. Even works which deal in grit and realism have the escapist quality of being something else: a problem other than our very own, no matter how familiar it may be.

As I place my DVD of The Return of the King in the disc drive for the umpteenth time, I am enjoying a truly majestic, life-affirming work of art, but fundamentally I am escaping to a world that is not my own and problems that are none of ours.

Watching The Lord of the Rings on a rainy day may not do the world too much good, but it does wonders for the soul.

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