Tuesday 10th June 2025
Blog Page 913

Cocktail of the week: Raspberry fields forever

Sam Purnell
-
0
Cocktail of the week: Raspberry fields forever

Hailing from Liverpool, I couldn’t not make at least one reference to the Beatles in my time as Food & Drink editor.

Yesterday got you down? Oxford got you working eight days a week? Well don’t let me or your hangover brunch down and make the most of brunch with this refreshing cocktail. In my life, I’ve not had many cocktails better than this—all the flavours come together in a perfect blend and the fruity tastes are the perfect accompaniment to your brunch. You can’t buy me love, but you can sure buy yourself some alcohol-fuelled happiness with this cocktail.

After a few of these cocktails, you’ll be nostalgically singing any Beatles song, as we all should be doing when drunk.

Ingredients:
2 Parts (Raspberry) Vodka
1 Part Raspberry Puree
Lemonade
1 Piece Lemon
1 Whole Raspberry to garnish

Method:

1. Add a handful of fresh raspberries and a sprinkle of raw sugar to the bottom of a glass.

2. Muddle your raspberries to create the puree. Use a muddler (a wooden spoon will work too!) to smash your fruit until it has the appearance of jam.

3. Add Vodka and ice to the glass.

4. Give the drink a good stir to make sure everything is well mixed.

5. Top up with lemonade.

6. Garnish with a lemon slice and a fresh raspberry.

Enjoy (with a little help from your friends)!

Oxford allegedly in talks to open campus in France

Daniel Curtis
-
0
Oxford allegedly in talks to open campus in France

Reports suggest that Oxford University are in talks with the French government about the possibility of opening a campus in France.

According to The Telegraph, French officials met with the University last week to discuss the proposed site. Should the campus be established, it would the University’s first ever foreign campus.

A spokesperson for Oxford University told the Telegraph: “Oxford has been an international university throughout its history and it is determined to remain open to the world whatever the future political landscape looks like.”

The Telegraph claims that construction of any such site would begin in 2018, with courses being restructured to accommodate the prospective partnership.

Oxford University have been contacted for comment.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated with more information as we receive it.

Rag’n’Moan Man: human after all?

Dom Saad
-
0
Rag’n’Moan Man: human after all?

Let the record show that Rory Graham, a.k.a. Rag’n’Bone Man, has a gifted voice. The BRITS 2017 Critics’ Choice Award winner’s debut LP Human is studded with moments that demonstrate this. But albums aren’t built on voice alone.

Human occasionally gets it right. The title track has a dark, warm sound, fortified with gospel vocals and driven by a cucumber-cool bassline. The catchy chorus of ‘Arrow’ revels in jangling percussion and rich instrumentation. Ballad ‘Love You Any Less’ employs strong harmonies and samples faraway murmurings to layer a thick atmosphere.

However, the debut from East Sussex-born Graham is troubled by the confused direction in which it attempts to push its talent. Many tracks are let down by their lyrics, the songwriting, the production, or some combination of the three.

The four-chord faux-melancholy of second single ‘Skin’ rings hollow. Its sheer soppiness will pique the interest of renowned cheesemonger Avicii, who’s almost certainly cooking up a spicy EDM remix as we speak.

While some tracks, like ‘Ego,’ stylistically embrace the soulful sound of Graham’s voice, others reach out to more varied genres with what feels like token effort. ‘Be the Man’ begins promisingly enough with a canned hip-hop beat, but botches it completely with its sickeningly saccharine hook: “We’re going through changes/ changes/ changes yeah/ you gotta have faith in/ faith in/ faith in me”. More often than not, it’s hard to believe Human is taking its blues influences seriously.

The production does shine on a few tracks. ‘Innocent Man’ opens with a sunny, relaxed bass groove and a drum beat that is delicately dynamic, bouncing with reverb. But the song is let down by its chorus, as subtlety is abandoned with the addition of huge, clobbering crash cymbals and ‘make some noise’ handclaps. It’s a shame that this is the path chosen for many of the tracks on Human, for Graham’s voice shows real talent and would do well amidst a more organic sound.

This is, at the end of the day, a pop record under an alarmingly thin ‘soul’ veneer. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Human is heavy-handed and walks into a few too many clichés to convince us that there’s much beneath the surface of that raw, gutsy voice.

The winter’s dead, long live the Spring King

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
-
0
The winter’s dead, long live the Spring King

A two-tiered support is just what’s needed to get a crowd riled up on a Sunday evening at the Bullingdon. Kent-based gnarly pop rockers Get Inuit open to a packed-out floor, but it is punchy guitar four-piece The Big Moon who provide the ultimate warm-up for alt-rock Macclesfield titans Spring King.

The highs of The Big Moon’s set come in the chorus-style “ooh” vocal lines, where all four musicians sing unashamedly gutsily into their microphones, lead singer Juliette Jackson’s ponytail flailing out behind her.

Break-out single ‘The Road’ sees Jackson rub foreheads with guitarist Soph Nathan, as the two sway alongside each other in a fiery guitar break. These sweet guitar shreds, all at the top-end of their instruments’ necks, please the ever-livelier crowd after the song’s slower beginnings have thrown the audience’s need for incessant jumping off a little.

The Big Moon are surely not the easiest of bands to mosh to. Their songs suddenly halt with seemingly no warning, leaving the unaware listener balancing on one leg for a little too long. Latest release ‘Formidable’ is similarly, and joyfully, a little rhythmically disjointed, with charming interplay between Nathan’s lead guitar and organ-like electronics from drummer / keys player Fern Ford, as the band prove the worth of their tightly-crafted tracks.

Incredibly, a furious mosh pit breaks out even before The Big Moon take to the stage. Half the room, sweaty in their band t-shirts, jump about to the between-set tracklist which plays out over the loudspeaker. By the time Spring King, the main act and most riled-up band of the night appear, it is surprising the crowd have any energy left at all.

I’m not sure Spring King are quite the “smallscale art-pop-punk project” an online profile announces them to be. What they do bring to your ears is a wall of noise, fiery basslines, pounding drums and bouncy, often aggressive, lyrics. They are a lot of fun, a fact that may be misconstrued behind the perhaps pretentious term “art-pop”.

“Can I get the lights up for a sec? I wanna see your beautiful faces,” calls Tarek Musa, the quartet’s drummer, singer and producer, as soon as they come onstage. Musa is the life and soul of this set, pelting away at his kit with a sustained ferocity.

Spring King hit straight into it, the fast-paced songs giving them little breathing space at all. ‘Detroit’, the latest single off their Tell Me If You Like To debut, is an irrefutable anthem. “I don’t wanna be / No where else / Except Detroit City” screams not only Musa and his bandmates, but the crowd altogether.

‘City’, too, has the whole room reciting “Who am I? What does it matter?” in a spree of reckless enthusiasm. It is these anthemic lines which carry the band’s fervour: short, snappy motifs which the sweaty crowd latch onto and serve back to the band through their own exasperated chants. The track was, impressively, the very first by any band to be played on Apple’s Beats 1 radio when it first aired in June 2015. Burgeoning drums yet again set Musa out as the heart of this project as he pushes the number into a real driving theme.

Effects are in full spin. This is a band who have toured with Courtney Barnett, Antipodean guitar fuzz queen, after all. And their name can’t ignore the Spring King effects pedal, adding reverb and a real crunchy space echo to vocals and guitars both on-record and onstage.

A lot of what they say is shouted. Live, this detracts from the profundity of many of the lyrics, as the poignant “This is the year of our saviour / 2000 and misery” of ‘Take Me Away’ gets lost under a sheen of smashed-out guitar.

To the guy who takes his top off, and proceeds to wave it, as a flag, over his head, Musa calls, “Just make sure you don’t catch a cold when you leave the venue tonight”. After that wall of gallivanting noise, it’s more my ears I’m worried about.

Spotlight: Bad Sounds

Will Cowie
-
0
Spotlight: Bad Sounds

When you’re naming a band, calling yourselves ‘Bad Sounds’ is either a touch arrogant or self-aware to the point that you realise forming the band is an exercise in futility. Luckily for the Merrett brothers (on vocals) and the rest of the troupe, they’re definitely not the latter, although they might be the former. If one word could describe most recent single ‘Wages’ it would be “swagger”—it was made Hottest Record in the World by Annie Mac, and that’s not even hyperbole. It sounds like a funk homage, with a Primal Scream edge, perhaps with a dash of 2014-darlings Jungle (remember them?) thrown in.

So that’s the good news: the slightly more disappointing side of things is that the other songs they’ve released so far, including latest single ‘Meat on My Bones’, don’t quite cut the mustard, although that’s only when compared to their belter of a single. We’re still awaiting a full album from the boys—the jury’s still out on this one, but if they can recapture their magic then their ‘Wages’ will be paid in full.

Single of the week: Katy Perry’s ‘Chained 2 the Rhythm’

Natalia Bus
-
0
Single of the week: Katy Perry’s ‘Chained 2 the Rhythm’

If there’s one thing you can’t fault Katy Perry for, it’s the dedication of her marketing team. Days before her single release, she had them running around, chaining disco balls to anything they could find. The marketing stunt mobilised fans around the world, snapping photos of themselves literally “chained to the rhythm”.

Equally, however, the majority of the less keen population too felt a dose of muchless-fun oppression, as disco balls appeared virtually everywhere. Perry made sure we were all chained to her new single.

And what a single it is. Exposing the mundane and repetitive nature of modern life, Perry has managed to create a track which, fittingly, is both mundane and repetitive. “Are we tone deaf?” rings out the second verse, a fair question considering that Perry nearly broke Spotify on the first day of release, tallying a huge three million streams of the song.

For a track so steeped in irony it’s almost drowning, I cannot help but wonder whether the whole thing is meant as a clever piece of social commentary by the pop princess at her own expense.

Review: The Homecoming

Lael Hines
-
0
Review: The Homecoming

After the play finished, a few good friends walked towards me. “Wait, so what happened?” My friend Alex’s facial muscles were contorted. “What the fuck just happened?” It is in this question that the play smacked the nail on the head. The actors did an excellent job of portraying the tensions and ambiguities of this sexually charged, clenching domestic drama. Like Alex, I clenched and contorted my face all the way through, and watched as confused neighbours did the same.

Hugo Macpherson did a particularly excellent job of capturing the quick-witted, sinister pimp, Lenny. Macpherson’s performance stood out to me, as his character seemed unaffected by the violent and sexual motifs. It was in this nonchalance that the play’s effect became all the powerful. Why is no one caving under the pressure? Why is Lenny acting so ‘normal’, when everything seems to be on the brink of collapse? Other characters gave a more emotional performance, particularly Rupert Stonehill as Teddy. He played an angry Teddy, rather than the passive figure I took from reading the play.

I like to think of Pinter’s plays as an arrangement of characters. The audience witnesses this arrangement, and takes what they will from it. In a speech at the National Student Drama Festival, Harold Pinter explained: “I do all the donkeywork, in fact, and I think I can say I pay meticulous attention to the shape of things, from the shape of a sentence to the overall structure of a play. This shaping is of the first importance—you arrange and you listen, following the clues you leave for yourself through the characters.”

My one criticism would be this play was a bit heavy handed in expressing these ‘clues’. I was unsurprised when Sam alerted the audience that Mac had slept with Jesse, after strongly insinuating this fact through the pauses in his early speech. The play was wrought with strong clues and emotions, which made it slightly less alarming and perplexing for the audience. Adam Goodbody’s performance of Uncle Sam was incredibly unique and intriguing. He played the part with a slight smirk and his own brand of boyishly handsome restraint. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this production, and deem it a loyal and intriguing rendition of the play.

Oxford’s driverless destiny

Josephine Pepper
-
0
Oxford’s driverless destiny

Could you start by explaining what Oxbotica is and what it’s doing?

Oxbotica is a software development company, developing software that’s going to enable autonomous vehicles and self-driving vehicles. It is a spin out from Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group. Through this we have licensed more than ninety pieces of intellectual property from the University, representing around 160 years of previous development by the University.

We work to develop the software ourselves and then we work with customers to help them access our software and integrate it into their own products. Some customers are interested in licensing our complete autonomy software while others may be more interested in licensing small parts of it.

I understand you are also working on a project called Gateway…

The Gateway Project is in Greenwich. We are working with other companies to pull together a fleet of seven or eight autonomous shuttles. These vehicles will be in operation sometime in the second quarter of 2017 and open for public demonstration for two or three months, ferrying people around the back of the Dome and around the Greenwich peninsular.

It is a research project to understand how the vehicles will mix with pedestrians, how people react to them, and also how the vehicles will react to people.

What is the public attitude to driverless technology?

By and large we have found people to be very accepting of driverless technology. Already existing is the driverless Docklands Light Railway, with no real negative feedback. The Heathrow Terminal Five pods are completely driverless and again there has been huge customer acceptance of that. These are the same pods that we now bring to Greenwich.

If well received and working well, what are your visions for this technology? Will we see lots more of it in the near future?

There’s definitely a market for autonomous vehicles in the smart cities of the future. The advantages of these vehicles include that they are by and large electric, meaning less output pollution, and the energy can be generated away from the city itself, creating less urban pollution. Another advantage of autonomous vehicles is we are able to schedule where they are, where they go, what they do—such planning allows us to cut down on congestion as well. We see brand new cities in China being built around the concept of autonomous technology like this, which certainly represents a huge potential export market for the UK.

One of the big focuses in this industry is around improving road safety and reducing avoidable accidents. We know that over 95 per cent of road accidents are caused by driver error and driver inattention.

Do you find yourself in competition with the autonomous vehicle projects in Silicon Valley?

Our model is very much one of allowing companies to licence and access our intellectual property and then integrate it with products. We see these companies working in this area as potential customers and have very good relationships with most of them.

Where are the main obstacles with this type of development?

Probably one of the major challenges has been finding the right number of suitably qualified engineers to work on the project for us—they are in very short supply in the UK, and in fact worldwide as this is such an explosive technology. The other blockage to large scale production at the moment is the cost of sensors. We are waiting for the cost to come down in 2020 or 2021 as the mass market kicks in.

Are there security concerns or threats of malicious hacking?

We have built cyber security into the software, both into physical access and remote access. The software is very secure—as secure as your bank account. We don’t really see any particular issues from that perspective, although of course lots of people like dreaming about it.

Could you elaborate about the software?

Our software is needed to give a vehicle intelligence to understand three things: where it is in the world, what’s around it, and then what to do next. So the first part is all about navigation and localisation, understanding where the car is. The second part is about understanding things around the car (people, roads, traffic lights). The third part, which is by far the most difficult, is planning how to get to where we need to be, given that we understand where we are and what is around us.

Presumably this involves a degree of teaching and learning responses by the car?

Yes some of our software is self-learning and over a period of time it will improve, for example in its recognition of pedestrians or cyclists, and it will start to recognise specific situations and be able to share this learning of situations across multiple vehicles.

Typically we use two or three different types of sensors. We use cameras, particularly stereo cameras, lasers ([a type] more commonly called lidars), and radar as well. We fuse all the data from the different sensors together, so we have one big picture. Each sensor has its own strength. The cameras are very good at the angle of separation between things whereas lasers are good at telling you exactly how far away something is.

From this information the [engineers] try to create models of how the vehicle is moving through the world. From this model they start coding and developing software we can put into the vehicles which we can then start to test. It is very complex and we rely on some of the cleverest people in the world that come to us from Oxford’s PhD programmes to make it possible.

Christ Church JCR vote against ‘sesh reps’ motion

Cherwell News Team
-
0
Christ Church JCR vote against ‘sesh reps’ motion

At a general meeting last Sunday, Christ Church JCR voted down a motion to rename their Entz Reps to ‘sesh reps’.

Sigfried Thun-Hohenstein, who proposed the motion, suggested that ‘sesh’ might be a more accessible term for freshers than ‘entz’, which is an Oxford-specific term that requires new members of the college to learn jargon.

He also alleged that ‘sesh’ might encourage entertainment reps to promote non-drinking events in college, rather than focusing exclusively on the organisation of club tickets.

Speaking in opposition, some members of the JCR suggested that the term ‘sesh’ had connotations of lad culture that might foster an uncomfortable environment in college and damage Christ Church’s reputation across the rest of the University.

Others worried that although the joke of ‘sesh rep’ might be funny now, it might become a stale joke that members of the JCR tired of.

An amendment was proposed to review the name of the entertainment reps annually, and change the name of the position in the standing orders and constitution of the JCR, but the motion as a whole was voted down by a significant margin.

The ‘sesh’—an abbreviation of session—is a term that came to massive prominence last year following the creation of the satirical ‘Humans of the Sesh’ Facebook page in 2015.

One student who requested that they remain anonymous said: “The sesh is an integral part of youth culture.

“Students can frequently find themselves alienated in the elite and old-fashioned environment of Oxford.

“The familiar notion of seshes, and the ‘sesh gremlin’ will help to reassure many students. I’m extremely disappointed that this motion has failed.”

Balliol second-year, John Maier, told Cherwell: “I was disappointed when I heard the result. As a self-confessed ‘sesh head’, I was chuffed to see Christ Church ‘blazing’ the way for Oxford to become as cool as like Bristol where all my sick mates are”.

Wadham SU tight-lipped over drone purchase

Cherwell News Team
-
0
Wadham SU tight-lipped over drone purchase

Members of the Wadham Student Union (SU) have remained tight-lipped about plans to buy the College a drone using money won from voter turnout figures in last week’s OUSU elections.

Last Sunday, Wadham debated a motion at its SU meeting, proposed by the President, Lucas Bertholdi-Saad, to buy the college a drone because “they are cool and have popular support”.

The motion was amended to instruct the Tech Rep to investigate how best to spend £150 of the £300 Wadham has won on a drone.

SU committee members and Wadham students appeared unwilling to speak to Cherwell about the plans. The Tech Rep, Saul Mendelson, had allegedly “strongly advised against offering comment” to student reporters. He later informed Cherwell he was “just kidding”.

According to the motion, the SU plans to use the drone “to make exciting access videos, to film Wadstock [the college’s annual music festival] from above, and to be rented out to other colleges when they need a drone”.

Oxford University Students Union awarded £300 to Wadham after it came second for turnout for OUSU elections. Teddy Hall, who came first, won £600.

Teddy Hall JCR President Amelia Gabaldoni informed Cherwell that the college was “most probably” intending to use the money on welfare teas.

The Wadham motion intends to use £50 on the “purchase of donuts, snacks and drinks” and donate a further £50 to each of the two nominated RAG charities, which were decided in the OUSU elections.

Amongst students who were willing to voice their views, opinions on the drone were mixed.

On the SU’s Facebook page, one second-year student said: “The drone is clearly an essentially needed aspect of college life.”

However, other students were more critical. Rachel Collett, a Wadham first-year, told Cherwell: “A poor quality camera filming football matches or promotional Wadham videos is a complete waste of money that could be used to actually benefit the SU and Wadham students.”

She added: “Fundamentally the money could be put to much better uses like buying condoms, tampons, or other welfare-related things.”

Another student, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “I think it’s ridiculous that Wadham SU are considering spending such a large amount of money on what is little more than a rather flashy toy.”

They said the drone “will be something only a small group of people will enjoy using”.

Bertholdi-Saad, the motion’s proposer, did not respond to Cherwell’s request for comment.

1...912913914...2,508Page 913 of 2,508

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley