Friday, May 30, 2025
Blog Page 933

PTSD rewrote me

Izzy Smith
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PTSD rewrote me

TW: This article includes references to suicide, emotional trauma and PTSD.

It is scrawling fragmented, panicked punctuation across the comfortable, rounded phrases in which my personality was inscribed, pouring ink across the chapter headings of who I am, and how I feel, and how I respond to everyday, ordinary challenges.

I incurred my illness by supporting a suicidal friend: walking on eggshells, on landmines, on his fragile, extinguishable life. I learnt to be cautious, to live in suspense. I learnt not to breathe. I had to be perfect, I have to be perfect.

I forget two items on a trip to the launderette, and cry and have to lie down.

The worst night, he said he’d definitely end it, definitely that time, this time he’d keep trying until it worked. His face as he told me “it’s okay”, the moon fracturing, silver, broken by tears, the cold, my hands numb, my feet numb, my mind numb, lungs heaving. “Please no, no, stay for me if not for you.”

Driving home from school after working late, the tears and scary fast breathing overwhelm me, and it’s not safe to go any further. Ending up stranded alone, my parents have to come and pick me up several times. I feel myself become a burden.

For months, my promise of confidentiality went unbroken. My friend, my first priority. My friend, my only concern. I hid myself from him, hid myself from everyone, like I hid the scars in which I exclusively confided some genuine emotion.

A year or more on, I cannot be alone. I cannot engage with my own thoughts. I cling to my friends to try and stop myself being dragged back into the past.

My therapist said EMDR and bioacoustic feedback therapy should help to “scrub out” trauma networks that have built up in my brain. I feel some improvement—perhaps the process has begun of refiling my traumatic memories to the past where they belong. But the first panic attack since therapy tasted of bitter disappointment. I am not yet healed. My pages are not yet clean of vandalism.

C-PTSD rewrote me. If some of the scrawls have been scrubbed out, they haven’t left the original neat text of whom I am untouched beneath them.

The reduced presence of panic, flashbacks, and catastrophising, feels like an absence. I have to get to know myself again. I need to remember: I have learnt from this. I am wiser, and stronger, and better equipped. I have constructive experience, my compassion is better directed, more practically applied, and applied to myself as well. I am an unfamiliar draft, but I am an improved copy.

Sport Science: Is Protein good or bad for you?

Andy Frey
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Sport Science: Is Protein good or bad for you?

Protein is an important part of your body. It helps repair and build tissue in bones, blood and skin, but here we are focussing on the muscles.

After working out, our body repairs damaged muscle fibres by fusing them together in cells, forming new muscle protein strands. These repaired strands or myofibrils increase in number and thickness to create muscle hypertrophy. Muscle growth can only occur if the rate of protein synthesis is greater than the rate of muscle protein breakdown. This is achieved by forcing our muscles to adapt, by generating stress that is more intense than the one our body was previously used to. Muscle growth occurs while resting after workout. For this process to work successfully we need enough protein to sustain the cells, and that is when our protein shakes may come in, after the workout.

Protein, unlike carbohydrates and fat, cannot be stored. Proteins are ultimately digested to form ammonia. This ammonia is broken down into urea in the urea cycle. Left over carbon skeletons are converted into glucose, which can be used by our bodies to generate energy (in the form of ATP) through respiration. If our cells have enough glucose, and there is no space left to store it as glycogen, the excess glucose is converted into fat and stored. Our fat storage is pretty much endless and thus excess protein intake will result in weight gain in the form of fat. It is very easy to overshoot the intake, as one serving of protein contributes to about one third of the recommended daily intake.

Protein supplements can be healthy, but they have to be taken with caution and always as a supplement, never as a dietary substitute. Some people cut down their carbohydrate intakes when they start to use protein, however this can lead to a state of ketosis (dehydration, vomiting and confusion). My recommendation is to adhere to a balanced diet of fish, lean meat, fruit, vegetables, whole grain and carbohydrates, and supplement it with protein shakes if necessary.

Remembering the King of Soul

Jeannie Stanley
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Remembering the King of Soul

When I was eight, I moved into my new bedroom. It was luridly pink – with pink walls, pink fluffy cushions, and a hot pink CD player. The only problem was I didn’t own a single CD. For the princely sum of £15, my mum bought me Now That’s What I Call Music! 59, because that’s what all my friends were listening to and I spent many hours happily performing my own dance to ‘She Will Be Loved’ – a classic, of course, even twelve years later.

Before that visit to Woolworth’s, however, she gave me one of her own CDs: the compilation album Wonderful World: The Best of Sam Cooke. Cooke was shot and killed in 1964, allegedly in self-defence, at the age of 33. She told me this before handing over the CD, but I felt no sense of melancholy at all as I played through those twelve songs.

My first favourite was the album’s second track – ‘Only Sixteen’. The guitar strums just once before Cooke’s voice resounds almost cheerfully with the song’s refrain.  Cooke sings: “she was too young to fall in love / And I was too young to know”- at my tender age, I obviously thought sixteen very old and couldn’t understand what he was on about. I loved the exuberant joy of ‘Everybody Loves to Cha Cha’, especially because I thought the “baby” he sang about was his child, not his girlfriend.

The song that I played over and over again, however, skipping to it as soon as the CD player came on, was number seven: ‘Chain Gang’. The song is short (about two and a half minutes) and oddly repetitive; it begins with the sound of the clinks of the chain, and the grunts of the men as they begin their work – the kind of song that could never achieve quite the same impact performed live. In fact, Cooke was apparently so concerned about achieving the vocal effects he wanted that he went back to the studio three months later to re-record them.

His melodic voice doesn’t cut through these sounds of the chain gang – it fits itself between them, drawing his listener to them with “I hear something saying…”. These laboured sounds rhythmically continue until Cooke sings out: “that’s the sound of the men / Working on the chain / Gang”.

At eight, I had no idea what a chain gang was – and I didn’t ask. I didn’t know how they were associated with the chaining together of African-American convicts particularly, nor did I know that Sam Cooke was involved with the Civil Rights Movement – I hadn’t even heard of such a movement. Arguably his most famous song, what Rolling Stone called “the civil rights anthem, ‘A Change is Gonna Come’” was not on my compilation CD.

What I could understand, what anyone may understand, on listening to Sam Cooke for the first time and every single time after that, is the simply incomparable nature of his voice. The best adjectives to try and describe it are perhaps: pure, clean, and immensely powerful in a confident and understated way.What these can’t capture, however, is how such a voice, four decades after it was immortalised in vinyl and cassette, utterly enchanted me, so that I listened to it over and over, through an album that I quite clearly didn’t understand at all (even less so than ‘She Will Be Loved’ or any of the other songs on Now 59).

When I passed my driving test two years ago, I dug out Wonderful World and played it as I drove to and from school. I finally learnt what a chain gang was, researching it and some of the history of Cooke’s other songs. And recently, I watched a recorded live performance of the ninth song on my album: ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’. It was one of the most strangely moving things I’ve ever seen: the vital voice I knew so well booming out of the clear figure of this beautiful man from 1963, just a year away from his death. Cooke bounces, dances and twists the night away, his voice just as incredible as the very first time I heard it.

Zoom In: the Hollywood sign

Cherwell Film & TV
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Zoom In: the Hollywood sign

The Hollywood sign recently came to attention when residents of LA woke up on 1 January to discover that the letters had been changed to read ‘Hollyweed’. But this is far from the first time the world-famous sign has been subject to alteration.

1887: Horace and Daeida Wilcox founded Hollywood as a religious community. Both were prohibitionists, and alcohol was banned.

1923: The original Hollywood sign was put up as an advertisement for a local real estate development.

1991: Social activists changed the sign to ‘Oil War’ in protest to the Gulf War

2010: Environmental activists changed the sign to read ‘Save the Peak’ in protest to the selling of land nearby. The success of the protest was somewhat blighted when the process of changeover led to ‘Save the Pood’ radiating from the California Hills.

2017: The most recent adaptation, a comment on the new law legalising recreational marijuana, is merely the latest addition to a growing list of adaptations made to the blockbuster landmark.

What Labour can learn from Tony Blair

Aimee Reynolds
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What Labour can learn from Tony Blair

Tony Blair has recently announced that he is returning to politics. Personally, I’m very excited. It’s a bit like hearing that Bobby Charlton is returning to the England team, if the England team was a morally corrupt political elite and Bobby Charlton was the least popular man ever. Much like with football, Tony Blair is known for being disappointing, wealthy beyond belief and starting fights that seem inexplicable and pointless. Unlike football, he and the Labour Party are no longer successful in the north of England, where UKIP remain solid in the polls, and yet Liverpool seem quite good.

It is possible that Tony Blair’s return could trigger some important debates about British politics. Jeremy Corbyn is 5’10, Gordon Brown and Ed Milliband are both 5’11. Tony Blair is 6’. Have the last three Labour leaders’ failure to break the six-foot barrier prevented them from seizing the political initiative? It certainly seems that way. On the other side of the dispatch box, David Cameron is 6’1 and Lord Salisbury was taller still. Height doesn’t seem to have been a problem for Teresa May, but then again she is still yet to win an election.

Perhaps the Labour party is therefore less like football, and a lot more like basketball. There is very little appetite for either in the UK at the moment, but it seems that height is a key attribute in both.

Aside from touring the country, shooting hoops in some key marginal constituencies in the name of a soft Brexit, there is very little that Tony Blair can do to convince voters that he still has anything to offer. But the party spin doctors that Jeremy Corbyn has kept gagged and locked in his cellar should take note. The day will no doubt come when the Labour Party goes looking for someone who may actually lead them to electoral victory. Third Way politics may be no more than a distant memory, but this is not the only thing that Blair brought to the table.

Quiet entreaties should be made to appoint four time Olympic gold medal winner in women’s basketball Lisa Leslie as Labour’s next leader. At 6’5,with a masters in business administration and a former contestant on The New Celebrity Apprentice USA (hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, not You-Know-Who), there doesn’t seem to be anyone better qualified for the job.

Spotlight: Basic Space

Natalia Bus
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Spotlight: Basic Space

Basic Space are an Oxford-based duo creating music perfect for lazy Sunday mornings or ruminative late night walks. Daniel Keane’s soft vocals fuse with Benjamin Lock’s gentle piano for a quiet yet memorable rendering of jazz fusion and electronica.

‘Driving Nowhere’ sees a set of punctuated piano chords accompany Keane’s rich tones until a low beat propels the track to a relaxing fade.

Their latest release, ‘Airports’, starts off as a more acoustic venture, slowly building to a layering of sounds complete with a subtle flugelhorn section in the background. As Keane begins “You dropped me at terminal five / It was all pain in my eyes”, the subtle bass sets the scene of painful farewell.

Basic Space have so far only four releases under their belt (all of which can be found on their Soundcloud page), including a witsful cover of the 1937 Richard Rodgers and Lorenzo Hart musical hit, ‘My Funny Valentine’. But coming off an impressive performance at Gin & Phonics last term, the genre-spanning duo appear all set for a bright future.

If Keane’s warm, subdued tones don’t leave you wanting more, I don’t know what will.

Why Oxford should resist the NSS

Lily MacTaggart
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Why Oxford should resist the NSS

For students from working class backgrounds, hundreds of things about university can be off-putting. A huge factor however has to be having a large headline cost figure, which is always described as debt. Ultimately this makes university a terrifying financial prospect for many, even if the reality of how fees are paid is more manageable. The impact of this exclusion on social mobility is catastrophic in the job market which currently exists, where higher paid and socially valued work is often accessible only with a degree.

Last year’s Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is only going to make this problem worse. The TEF was originally proposed as a counter-balance to the heavily research based league tables, which can be an untrue reflection of student experience. This sounds like a good idea, until you look a little closer at exactly how the TEF works.

It is based partly on the NSS scores a university receives, and the employment statistics of graduates. Neither of these are a particularly good measure of teaching quality—various studies have shown the NSS can be skewed. This is through unconscious bias against women lecturers and lecturers of colour, as well as the fact that what makes a good lecturer may not be what makes you want to rate a lecturer highly on an anonymous survey. Employment statistics income bias the TEF towards universities with a highly rated “brand”—Oxford being one of them. As a result, the quality of teaching at a university has little to do with how it will score in the TEF.

But even if the TEF was a foolproof measure of the quality of teaching in universities, it is how the TEF is being used which is the really awful news for higher education. Because now, performance in the TEF will determine whether universities can raise their fees in line with inflation. After a few years, this means “elite” institutions like Oxford will end up costing much more than other universities.

As a student, already worried about money, the thought of applying to more ambitious and more expensive university is doubly off-putting, and fewer people from working class and low income backgrounds are likely to risk applying to “better” universities. The impact on social mobility is only going to get worse, and the increase in fees goes on whilst at university, because they can go up during your degree. Oxford has already confirmed that this will happen for current first years (no other years though, thanks to the hard work of OUSU sabbatical officers).

Higher education should be accessible to all and must lose its elitism. Part of losing this elitism has to come from an end to prioritising higher education over other paths in life, such as apprenticeships. But these don’t need to come at the cost of higher education. We need to build a society that cares for everyone’s development, and if money wasn’t wasted on arms subsidies and taxes for the rich weren’t cut, that would look a lot more possible—ultimately it is possible, as multiple European countries prove.

What can be done to defend our universities? Firstly, if you are a finalist, boycott the NSS. Do not fill it in. If it gets under 50 per cent response rate, it is invalid and the government cannot use it in the TEF. Get your JCR to pass a motion condemning the TEF, and action your OUSU representatives to vote in line with this. Like the ‘Free Education Oxford’ page on Facebook, and come along to our events. Lobby your MPs, in Oxford or at home. Above all, keep spreading the word and speaking out about the very dangerous future that awaits higher education.

Courting Controversy: against conservative callousness

Daniel Kodsi
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Courting Controversy: against conservative callousness

This past weekend was the last before Donald Trump ascends to the Presidency of the United States—and this is horrific.

It is easy to pretend it is not. As best I can tell, the world has yet to literally cave in on us. But as is so often the case, reality is deceptive. Things seem normal, but they are not. The Republican Party, with a narcissistic buffoon at its helm, is about to take control of the unified federal government, a proposition which should be terrifying for every decent person.

I am often struck by the phenomenon of normalisation, which is a phrase I would like to despise but am unable to; I suppose the punditry cannot help but hitting on a concept of value every so often, just as a broken clock is occasionally able to correctly mark the time. While I am not so sure that the digital chattering class is right about the process of normalisation, it seems undeniably true that certain things which are clearly very bad are not treated as such by virtue of being normal. Climate change appears to be one such phenomenon; eating meat is probably another. Treating Donald Trump as if he were a normal President or the Republican Party as if it were a normal political party would be a third.

I do not intend to be outrageous by saying this. Although something tells me others might disagree, I do not even believe my position here should be considered controversial. It is not that I deny that liberals (including—no, especially!—myself) believe things which are wrong, even dangerously wrong. I don’t know, or pretend to know, who is right about the tax code (although I suspect a flat tax would be disastrously bad) or the minimum wage. I have strong views on public education and social security, but am willing to cede that these are legitimate points of contention. But on so much else, I think that the political positions of the incoming administration are morally repulsive—and that there is no way to claim a moral equivalency between liberalism and contemporary conservatism.

No liberal view comes close to the heinousness of the conservative positions on health care, the death penalty, the penal system, gun control, the Syrian refugee crisis, and climate change. The conservative movement in America today is characterised by a deep callousness towards the value of human life. Conservatives like to describe themselves as ‘pro-life’, in reference to their position on abortion, but this belief in the sanctity of life is nowhere to be found in the current conservative agenda. Tens of millions will spend years in prison—their liberty and dignity stripped away—if criminal justice is not reformed; people might literally die, and will undoubtedly suffer, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed without replacement. Others certainly will if firearms regulation is not passed or the federal government continues to turn away the persecuted refugees of civil war. Again, there are lives in the balance if the United States fails to act on climate change (as well as economic catastrophe).

And I simply don’t understand how any of this is conscionable. I believe that most people are basically good people and vote in accordance with their conception of what would be best for their country. But I fail to comprehend how there can be any sufficiently good reason for handing control of the full coercive apparatus of the federal government to a party committed to erasing all its most valuable functions. I am not sure I could explain, if asked, the value of human dignity—poetry and literature are probably better vehicles for such an endeavour than a 750-word newspaper column—but I would also find the question perplexing. It just seems self-evidently true: that people deserve to be happy and don’t deserve to suffer, no matter who they are. Somewhere along the way, the Republican Party appears to have forgotten this, and the rest of us behaved as if it were an acceptable thing to forget. I don’t know if I could easily recall any ‘serious’ journalist actually explicitly stating over the course of this election that human life matters, and matters in itself. It sounds like something which is said very often, but it isn’t—even though it really should be.

In any case, Donald Trump will be inaugurated in four days, and within a couple months, once he has appointed a new Supreme Court justice, conservatives will have completed their coup of Washington DC. Liberals will have to work with the new administration: obstructionism isn’t an option because unlike conservatives, we need the government to perform its obligations. But even if we have to work with Trump and his cronies, we must not and cannot pretend they are acceptable.

Cocktail of the week: raspberry basil highball

Sam Purnell
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Cocktail of the week: raspberry basil highball

Coming back to Oxford after the festive season, many of us will have overindulged on stodgy food and copious amounts of alcohol. Pairing this with the usual New Year’s resolutions of dieting and giving up drink, we thought it would be worthwhile to start this weekly segment off on a healthier note with this fun and easy mocktail that can be enjoyed with or without alcohol. The bitterness of the raspberry and lime is countered by the sweet maple syrup for a lively flavour.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup fresh raspberries (85-90 g)
5 fresh basil leaves
170ml mineral, sparkling or soda water
20ml lime juice
1 tsp maple syrup
A handful of ice cubes
SERVES 1

Method:

1. Muddle raspberries, basil and maple syrup together in a shaker until you have a wet mixture.

2. Add mineral or sparkling water and lime juice to the mix.

3. Gently stir all the ingredients together. Serve in a highball glass over ice. Add more fresh raspberries to garnish.

Having said all this, once collections are over feel free to add as much alcohol as you want to forget the little revision you did for them and celebrate being back in Oxford. We would recommend adding either gin or raspberry vodka to give this mocktail a little extra kick.

As always, enjoy, and drink responsibly!

Let’s be positive about 2017

Jordan Bernstein
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Let’s be positive about 2017

Everyone, from newsreaders to late-night talk show hosts, is presenting the coming year as the light at the end of the tunnel. After all of the electoral upsets, celebrity deaths and general dreariness of 2016, we are being told to hold our heads high and welcome the warm embrace of 2017.

At a glance this seems absurd, for in fact what we are likely to see is the realisation of many of the things that hung, like rotting fruit, over the past few months. Trump, a name that, across much of the news, is synonymous with doom gloom and bad decision-making, will take the oath of office and become the 45th President of the United States. If we hated it when the Donald was just talking and tweeting, imagine what it will be like when he has power.

Of course, our own government will formally enter Brexit negotiations in 2017 and, not to be the bearer of bad news, but as the catchment area of what we would define as a ‘celebrity’ widens rapidly, what seemed towards the end of the year like an epidemic of deaths, shows no signs of stopping altogether.

The truth, however, is that the shocks and surprises of this year have made us so cynical that 2017 will need to do much to impress us. Honestly, right now, it looks like it may even be, dare I say it, boring.

So I’m looking forward to everyone and everything calming down in 2017. Does anyone remember when the news was—what’s the word?—dull? When our daily lives were not envel­oped by politics, where we could get through a dinner conversation without someone accusing another of xenophobia or being a soft lefty? Where each episode of Question Time was marked by something other than ‘Does Brexit mean Brexit?’ and UKIP was an interesting irrelevance, albeit an entertaining one.

My positive take on 2017, or I suppose more my wish for 2017, is that everything settles down. We’re leaving the EU and we’re going to start negotiating, instead of meta-arguing about meta-negotiations. Trump is going to enter the White House and start governing.

We can argue about the extent to which he will implement this or that policy, but with any luck those who berate him (often justifiably) will begin to allow him to be judged on his actions and policies, rather than his character, or the fact that he lost the popular vote.

Let’s not forget that, according to most fore­casts, the daily life of the average American won’t change so dramatically. Maybe, just maybe, our news will once again become tedious. Or at the very least, the arguments we do continue to have over politics will be largely policy rather than personality-based—in other words, tedious.

Of course, 2017 will be a year in its own right, not just a concluding part in the 2016/17 televi­sion series we call life. So, on the same theme as the DiCaprio Oscar, Pokémon Go and Paris Agree­ment moments that interspersed themselves in 2016, let’s not forget that we’ll be getting some solid DC/Marvel/Star Wars movies, more Houses and Games of Cards and Thrones, and much else besides.

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