Features - The Cambridge Student

Transcription

The Cambridge Student
Volume 8 Issue 7
Image by Chiara Perano
November 9, 2006
Beyond the birds and the bees:
the dark side of “a bit of fun”
Cambridge in Crisis:
Issue 3
Student activism “dying”
Jimmy Appleton
An estimated 25,000 people enjoyed the annual fireworks display and fair on Midsummer
Common on Sunday.
Amy Blackburn
CLAIMS THAT students today are more apathetic than
their parents’ generation have
met with a mixed response
from students and academics at
the University of Cambridge.
At a conference entitled
‘Fees: Focusing on the ‘F’
Word’, Esmee Hanna, a PhD
student at Leeds University,
argued that because of tuition
fees, students today are more
focused on work and getting
value for money from their
course. Hanna told the conference, “Student activism is dying; it is almost dead. Students
just don’t have time for it any
more. Student union politics
today is just a fashion parade
for the few who want to go into
mainstream politics. If students
are unhappy about something
nowadays, they go down the
legal route. “
Hanna highlighted the lack
of student activism currently
in comparison to the 1960s: “I
think if we were in the 1960s,
the issue of tuition fees would
have triggered so many more
demonstrations and meetings.
The fights of students in the
1960s for a student voice in
institutional decisions has ultimately been won, but [it has
happened] through the power
of the pound in an increasingly
marketised system of higher
education.
“Back
then, students
stormed the barricades over
the war in Vietnam and changes to grants and the curriculum.” She compared this to
the reaction to the Iraq war in
2003. Hanna claims that, even
though thousands of students
marched in the initial demonstration, frustration and disen-
chantment followed. “There
was no immediate gratification
after the demonstrations, so an
idea that protests don’t really
work prevailed.”
Hanna’s findings, which are
based on interviews with students and discussions in tutorials, follow a number of poor
turnouts at various demonstrations organised by Cambridge
students. Just 10 protesters
were present at the King’s College Student Union No Top-up
Fees Rally last month. 59 members of CUSU attended the National Union of Students (NUS)
demo against top-up fees last
week out of an undergraduate
population of 11,693.
“One of the
most important
parts of a
university
education is
questioning the
status quo
”
Dr. Owen Saxton, Senior
Tutor at New Hall, believes
that the decline is student activism is part of a more widespread phenomenon. “I don’t
think top-up fees are responsible for student apathy”, Saxton
told The Cambridge Student.
“Most people - not just students - are more apathetic than
they used to be. There’s a wide
disillusionment with politics - a
recognition that even with the
best will in the world things
can’t be changed as easily as
we once imagined.”
Saxton considers it unlikely
that Cambridge students are
motivated principally by their
financial future. “I doubt that
many students here are working primarily to get a wellpaid job to pay off their loans,
which are still a small fraction
of the mortgage they’ll need for
their first house.”
However, Saxton acknowledged the potential long-term
implications of the tuition fee
increases: “There may be a real
impact on the numbers willing
to take relatively low-paid jobs
in the voluntary and service
sectors.”
Lianna Wood, CUSU’s
Higher Education Funding
Officer, echoed this concern:
“What is being lost is the idea
that there is a worth in education for education’s sake,” she
told The Cambridge Student.
“One of the most important
parts of a university education
is questioning the status quo
and having the chance to discover what you really believe
in. The marketisation of education is only going to get rid
of this richness of higher education.”
Other student activists were
more optimistic about the future of student protest, arguing
that top-up fees are helping to
galvanise students into action.
Sofie Buckland, a convenor
of the Education Not for Sale
(ENS) campaign and a member
of the NUS National Executive, said, “Clearly it’s true that
students have less time than
they used to because of fees
and the removal of grants, and
many have to work long hours
at low-paid jobs to support
themselves.
continued on page 3
INSIDE: FASHION - PRINTS A GO-GO p28 / FOOD - SEX UP YOUR KITCHEN p30 / INTERVIEW - TWIGGY TODAY p8
The Cambridge Student November 9, 2006
2
News
In Brief
Green protesters against
short-haul flights...
Vets get naked for charity
Environmental activists from
the University of Cambridge
demonstrated against shorthaul flights outside a travel
agents in the city centre on
Monday. Campaigner Laura
Robertson said, “Short-haul
flights are completely unnecessary, so cutting them out is an
easy step we can take toward
getting our greenhouse gas
emissions under control.”
Alys Brown
...but Cambridge scientists may have the
answer.
Scientists from the University
of Cambridge and the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have designed a
silent, energy-efficient plane.
The plane, currently known as
SAX-40 (Silent Aircraft eXperimental), has the potential to
be up to 25% more fuel-efficient than a standard plane. The
researchers are hoping to turn
their design into a reality by
2030.
Blighty gets pricey for
international students
International
students
believe Britain is the most
expensive place to study
in the world, a survey has
revealed. The research by
consultants i-graduate helps
explain why the UK is rated
behind both the US and
Australia by students living
in emerging market countries, such as Pakistan and
Bangladesh. William Archer,
the director of i-graduate,
said: “We need to be seen
to be offering more if we are
going to stay ahead of our
competitors. It could mean,
for instance, some intelligent use of bursaries.”
And now volcanoes
are bad for the environment...
A research team from the
University of Cambridge
has discovered that volcanic
eruptions destroy ozone and
create ‘mini-ozone holes’.
The new research, which
was led by Dr Genevieve
Millard at the Department
of Earth Sciences, found
that even relatively minor
volcanic eruptions can create localised ‘holes’ in the
stratosphere because gases
released during eruptions
accelerate reactions that
lead to ozone destruction.
MG & RS
Emma
triumphs
in cookoff
One for the ladies...
Christopher Bamford
CAMBRIDGE VETERINARY
students have stripped off in
aid of charity. Male and female clinical students from
the Queen’s Veterinary School
have posed for a tasteful nude
calendar in aid of the Veterinary School Trust.
Following the success of
last year’s calendar, which sold
around the world, the Trust
was very keen to see the students bare all to the cameras
again. This year’s calendar
will be made up of six months
each of male and female shots
in various scenes.
The calendar, which costs
£9, can be purchased by
sending a cheque payable to
...and for the gents.
CAMVET to Heidi Paddy at
the Vet school. You can also
visit www.vet.cam.ac.uk/trust/
for more information on the
Trusts work.
Every year over 3,000 seriously ill and injured animals
benefit from the expertise and
facilities available at the Veterinary Hospital, accepting
referrals from throughout the
UK.
The Veterinary School Trust
raises money to fund a variety of projects within the vet
school. Since its creation in
1983 the Trust has raised over
£7-million enabling the completion of Europe’s first Cancer Therapy Unit for animals,
along with specialist centres
for small animal, equine and
farm animal work.
Pancreas gives hope Lecturers ill through
to diabetes sufferers overwork
Victoria Brudenell
Amy Hanna
A CAMBRIDGE scientist is
leading research into Type 1
diabetes, with a view to developing an artificial pancreas
for children and adolescents
with the condition.
Dr Roman Hovorka and
the Department of Paediatrics has received £500,000
from the Juvenile Diabetes
Research Foundation (JDRF),
with clinical trials on children
due to begin in January.
Type 1 diabetes requires up
to six insulin injections daily,
as well as finger prick tests to
measure the amount of insulin in the blood stream. This
manual testing is both imprecise and cumbersome, and can
be misleading, especially as
young people with the condition tend to have more fluctuating levels than adults.
The artificial pancreas
would offer a more precise
regulation of insulin, which
is vital as a stable insulin level
dramatically lowers the risk of
serious complications such as
blindness, stroke and premature death.
The artificial pancreas
would consist of a computerised glucose sensor, a computer program to calculate
how much insulin is required
NEARLY HALF of all lecturers have been made “ill by
overwork.” In a poll commissioned by the University and
College Union (UCU), 1000
university lecturers were asked
about features of their work.
Over 40% highlighted bureaucracy as the worst part of
their job and nearly two-thirds
said they had considered leaving the UK to work abroad.
The union survey also
found just over half (52%)
had considered leaving the
profession for the private
sector, while 55% said they
would not recommend the job
to their children.
These findings are published
as a new charity is launched to
assist stressed staff in higher
and further education, known
as College and University Support Network (CUSN). This is
an expansion of the Teacher
Support Network that has experienced more and more lecturers using services primarily
aimed at school staff. It will
be the first national counselling telephone support line for
university and college lecturers, and their families.
The union has asked universities to do more to ensure
lecturers are not forced out
JDRF
and an insulin pump. The sensor would test the levels on a
minute-to-minute basis, and
wirelessly transmit the reading
to the computer which would,
again wirelessly, transmit the
information to the insulin
pump. Dr Hovorka hopes
that, if the two years of clinical trials are successful, the
artificial pancreas could be
available commercially in four
to seven years.
In Type 1 diabetes the body
stops making insulin and the
blood glucose level becomes
very high. This type of diabetes usually appears before the
age of 40 and accounts for between 5 and 15% of all people
with diabetes. Removing the
need to test manually would
allow children with diabetes
a much more flexible lifestyle,
as well as greatly reducing the
risk of dangerously low glucose levels.
of the sector. UCU joint general secretary Sally Hunt said:
“Universities must take the
lead on this issue of excessive
workloads or we risk losing
a generation of talented academics to the private sector or
abroad as well as struggling to
fill future vacancies.”
Hunt wants universities to
sign up to an agreement forged
by the government with doctors and nurses to reduce extreme workloads. However,
The Universities and Colleges
Employers Association, which
represents higher education
employers, rejected the survey
claiming it to be “extremely
limited and vague”. It said
employers supported the development of a healthy worklife balance and worked with
unions in all aspects of employee relations.
The Higher Education
Minister, Bill Rammell, insisted there was no evidence to
indicate lecturers were leaving
the profession and asserted
that the government was committed to reducing externally
imposed bureaucracy.
Universities UK, a group
for Vice Chancellors, said that
universities were working with
the government to tackle bureaucracy but accepted more
needs to be done.
EMMANUEL COLLEGE has
swept the board in a cookery
competition between the chefs
of various Cambridge colleges
held at Pembroke College.
Head Chef Matthew Carter
led a team of five to victory
in all three categories entered.
He won a gold medal and best
in class for his plated starter
with a press pork knuckle and
foie gras terrine, also for the
plated main with a trio of autumn rabbit.
In addition, he won a silver
medal and best in class for the
platted main with petit jambon de volialle avec haricot
blanc et tomate cassille.
His teammates Kevin Balaam and Edward Cook also
won bronze medals for the
plated starter. Edward Cook
won a second bronze medal
alongside Thomas Jeffery’s silver medal for the plated main.
These medals contributed
to Emmanuel winning the
Steward’s cup for best overall
point score. The gold medal in
the 4th category went to Nigel
Tumber from Sidney Sussex .
Matthew Carter said he felt
it was “a good team effort.
Our hard work was rewarded.
We are very happy with the
result.”
Organiser Bill Brogan, catering and conference manager
at St John’s College, said: “The
event was a great success. The
standard was very high, and
lots of people came along to
watch.” There is hope that the
revival will be permanent and
Matthew Carter says that Emmanuel will be back to defend
their achievement next year.
One of the winning dishes...
...and for dessert..
November 9, 2006 The Cambridge Student
Oxford divided over
proposed reforms
Will Bulman
THE UNIVERSITY of Oxford
is preparing for a critical vote on
controversial modernisation proposals. Next Tuesday, the 3,500
strong Congregation - the university’s ultimate decision-making
body - is to vote on proposals Vice
Chancellor John Hood claims will
bring Oxford up to date and address its grave financial problems.
Critics have compared the Vice
Chancellor’s plans to “the targetfilled management of the NHS”
and drawn parallels with New
Labour. Meanwhile, his supporters allege that those who stand in
his way are suffering nostalgic delusions and exaggerated fears.
Hood’s original proposal was
to reduce the size of the council,
the 26-man select panel which
dovetails with the Congregation,
and also to replace its members
with external appointees, many
from the realm of business. Hood
has a long history in the business
world himself, and felt that such
a move would help the leadership
to become “less remote and more
efficient”. This move was voted
down by Congregation in May
2005. Although Hood has toned
down his proposals, he is still in
favour of a new council of 15,
which would include seven outsiders.
Physics professor Susan Cooper said that the the potential leaders would “not understand that
academics need to be differently
motivated to those in corporations”. Colin Thompson, a fellow at St Catherine’s College,
echoed her concern: “What we
fear most is concentration of too
much power in the hands of too
few people.”
However, Professor of English
David Womersley said: “‘Nobody
wants to run Oxford like a business”.
Death of protest
continued from page 1
“However it’s not the case
that student activism is dying.
It’s taken a hard knock, as activism in general has, following the defeat of the labour
movement in the 80s and 90s,
and the lack of willingness on
the part of the NUS leadership
to fight or lead militant campaigns.
“Despite this, the student
activist scene is looking healthier than it has been for a long
time; hundreds of thousands
of students marched against
the war and the NUS national
demo against fees last week
saw 10,000 students taking
to the streets despite the fact
it was the first such demo in 3
years.
“At a grassroots campus
level activists like those from
ENS who occupied the Sidgwicksite last week are taking
up the fight where NUS has
previously refused to. Activism is still alive and well, and
growing.”
Madeleine Jones, a member
of CU Amnesty International
Executive Committee and the
Amnesty rep for St John’s,
told The Cambridge Student
that Hanna’s findings should
be viewed with caution. “It
sounds to me as if this academic is perhaps looking back at
her own student days through
rose-tinted spectacles, or else is
falling into the easy trap of regarding her own experience as
representative of the times. If
New research centre goes
back to the beginning
Charlotte Philips
THE UNIVERSITY of Cambridge has received funding
to build a new £6 million research centre that will study
the origins of the universe.
The Kavli Foundation has
provided the endowment to
bring together scientists from
the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, the Cavendish Laboratory and the Department
of Applied Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics to work
on the project.
Unlocking the secrets of
those few precious moments
after the Big Bang - popular
theory states that the universe
as we know it today originated from a dense soup of energy and particles that rapidly
expanded - could open up our
knowledge of the universe in
its current state immensely.
A better understanding of
the mechanisms behind star
and galaxy evolution should
lead to more accurate predictions as to the future both of
our galaxy and the universe
as a whole, so to host a new
research centre in which this
branch of science can be examined further is an exciting
prospect for Cambridge.
The Kalvi Foundation, set
up in 2000 by entrepreneur
Fred Kalvi and based in Oxnard, California, supports scientific research seeking to further our understanding of the
universe and has gifted millions of dollars to the project.
The partners hope to involve up to 50 scientists from
the three departments - experimental, theoretical and computational physicists alike - to
tackle the problems at hand
from all angles possible. The
Foundation is not only committed to research, but also to
improving public understanding of science and so plans to
put on lectures and seminars,
open to all, on the research be-
3
ing carried out.
Professor Alison Richard,
Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said:
“Cambridge is very pleased to
be forging this new partnership with the Kavli Foundation. We applaud and appreciate Fred Kavli’s determination
to accelerate, through international collaboration, our
understandng of the Universe,
and we are delighted to join
this endeavour.”
A modest turnout at King’s No
Top-up Fees rally.
she was politically motivated
as a student she may well have
surrounded herself with likeminded people, but actually
have been part of an island of
engagement in a sea of general
apathy.
She added: “Looking round
Cambridge, it is really hard to
justify any claims of blanket
student apathy. The Amnesty
mailing list has over four and
a half thousand names on it,
over a quarter of the undergraduate population, and on
our recent Weekend of the
Letter we got over 4,300 letters and signatures forprisoners of conscience around the
world.”
Richard Braude, of the ENS
campaign, issued a rallying cry
to students: “I’ve never noticed
any diminution in the wealth
of theatre, sports, music and
language learning in this uni-
versity which correlates with
the amount of work people
have to do. When it matters,
you make the time - and what
could be more important than
fighting to maintain the quality of the scholastic education
we
receive?
“I entirely agree that many
students are overly concerned
with value for money due to
top up fees - and that’s the exact
attitude and policy against
which ENS are fighting. Quality of education is not about
figures and quotas - it’s about
excitement and passion, so
the more passionate we are
in fighting for our education
the more it will inevitably improve.”
Lianna Hulbert, of Cambridge People and Planet, said:
“Certainly a lot of people feel
passionately about environmental despoilation and social
injustice: you only have to look
at the freshers fair this year,
where there were at least 10
societies in some way related
to campaigning or ethical issues. However, the focus seems
more to be on ‘soft’ events like
talks and debates rather than
more radical direct action. “
However, she added that
Cambridge Students Against
the Arms Trade and People
and Planet are “towards the
more radical end of the Cambridge spectrum” and regularly attend careers events to
hand out leaflets.
Da Vinci judge sets
Selwyn stumper
Jack Schennum
THE JUDGE who presided
over the copyright case involving Dan Brown’s bestseller,
“The Da Vinci Code” has created a new code especially for
students at Selwyn College.
Mr Justice Peter Smith
famously included a coded
message in his written judgement on the case. The Selwyn
alumnus has done it again, including a code in the college’s
newsletter and promising a donation for development work
at the college if it is cracked.
In April 2006, he ruled on
the case of plagiarism brought
by the authors of the book
‘The Holy Blood and the Holy
Grail’, in which they alleged
that Dan Brown had copied
major themes from them in
writing “The Da Vinci Code”.
Mr Justice Smith found
that Dan Brown had not
breached copyright and in
his written judgement he in-
cluded a series of capitalised,
italicised letters that when rearranged spelled out: “Smithy
Code Jackie Fisher who are
you Dreadnought”. This was
a reference to Admiral Jackie
Fisher, builder of the warship,
HMS Dreadnought and a hero
to Mr Justice Smith. The start
of the trial almost exactly coincided with the one hundred
year anniversary of the launching of the Dreadnought.
Mr Justice Smith’s newest
code, contained in a Selwyn
College alumni newsletter is
once again a series of capitalised, italicised letters. The
letters are: UTUCJBOTTOLLAL. If someone provides a
correct solution to the code
within a month then Mr Justice Smith, sole judge of the
competition, will make a donation to his old college.
Although the newsletter has
only recently been sent out,
people are already submitting
solutions to the code.
News
Calls to
end science
culls
Pete Wood
THE GOVERNMENT announced yesterday that it is
to allocate an extra £75m of
funding to help ailing university science departments.
Last Friday, the Prime
Minister spoke in Oxford,
highlighting the importance
of science in combating challenges of the future. During
the speech, he stressed the importance of science in the new
‘Knowledge Economy’ and
insisted it was time to “galvanise the young” .
The announcement comes
in the wake of criticism that
there was little strategy in place
to preserve or improve science
teaching in the UK. Speaking after the Prime Minister’s
speech, Sally Hunt, Secretary
of the University and College
Union (UCU) said, “Seventy
science departments have been
shut in the last seven years,
whereas in China and India
they are opening, not closing,
departments.”
The UCU had rallied round
to protest against the closure
of the University of Reading’s
award-winning Physics department. Courses at Exeter
and Newcastle Universities
are also under threat as fewer
students choose degrees in
physics and chemistry.
Hunt said at the time: “To
move science forward in this
country and meet the global
challenges of the 21st century
we all need to be pushing forward together. We welcome
the prime minister’s support
for the future of science today
and we are calling for an immediate end to the culling of
science departments.”
The Higher Education
Funding Council for England
has responded with a new
package, which will provide
a further £1,000 per student
on courses in chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, and
mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering.
A spokeperson for the University of Cambridge declined
to comment on the closures,
stating that, “Science at Cambridge remains extremely
strong”.
CU Physics society demonstrate the Bernoulli effect.
5
Focus
Is marriage still a necessary institution?
THE PANEL
Since its 1972 peak in the UK, the number of marriages has declined steadily. Nearly all the financial and
legal rights and responsibilities of marriage now apply for civil partnerships. Increasing divorce rates suggest
that marriages cannot force commitment. Aside from residence permits, what can marriage still offer?
2. Karuna Ganesh,
1. Richard Neill,
co-founder of the
University dating
website,
http://romance.ucam.org
“
3. Madeleine Teahan,
a medical student,
working for a PhD in
molecular biology
“
President of Cambridge
University Pro-Life Society
“
Read the articles and identify the writers from this week’s panel… (answers at bottom of page)
In an age when the
divorce rate is soaring, unmarried cohabitation is socially
acceptable and more children
are born outside marriage than
within it, why marry? The cynical might cite the financial and
legal incentives of marriage,
but such benefits are increasingly being extended to those in
other forms of long-term relationships. On the other hand,
there is the sheer romance of
having a special day for a couple to celebrate their love – even
if the statistics suggest that this
happiness might be ephemeral.
Apart from these reasons,
social compulsion is cited as
the only motivation to tie the
knot. Rather than a blow to
the proponents of marriage,
the influence of society on the
popularity of marriage can be
seen as a strongly positive factor. The social pressures influencing people to get married
also induce them to stay married. There is good evidence
“Recent evidence
suggests that
for men at least,
marriages equates
to higher life
”
expectancies
that individuals in a marriage
are less likely to split up than
those merely cohabiting; at the
very least married couples tend
to work harder at staying in the
relationship, and are less likely
to give up than unmarried
couples. Perhaps such social
obligations mean that married
couples are less perfectly happy
than unmarried couples, but
this is not necessarily awful.
Simply having someone who
knows you well, no matter how
imperfect, to come home to and
with home to share one’s life,
can be less traumatic than riding the emotional roller-coaster
of drifting from relationship to relationship in search
of a mythical ‘perfect’ match.
Psychological equanimity can
be conducive to the ability to
work better, enjoy better relations with other friends and
family, and in general allow
one to enjoy one’s life better
than the drama of the single
life. Indeed, recent evidence
suggests that for men at least,
marriages equates with higher
life expectancies.
Even if it is possible to enjoy
a stable relationship outside
a marriage, the institution
acquires its greatest importance when children become
involved. The stability of the
parental relationship in a marriage is generally viewed to be
conducive to a beneficial childhood environment. Further, the
public declaration of mutual
commitment made by the parents is important in establishing
a child’s identity as part of a
family unit, and as a member
of a wider society. Moreover,
marriage remains the principal way in which the private,
individual-centred act of love
can become part of the public
domain. Marriage draws in
extended families and society
at large, and thereby provides
a social safety net for the individuals involved and also especially for any children that they
might have.
The erosion of the institution
of marriage is symptomatic of
the ascendancy of the values of
the individual – arguably social
Darwinism at its worst—at the
expense of the values of the
collective, of society. In this
context, if we wish to impart to
our children values other than
those of consumerism and selfishness, if we wish to see them
value society, if we wish to be
looked after in our old age, the
institution of marriage remains
incontrovertibly relevant.
”
B. When trying to under-
stand what one means by institution, ‘established’ is a word
commonly used. Reflecting on
the word ‘established,’ and the
question of marriage’s necessity, arguably the increasing
disestablishment of marriage in
this country credits it no longer
as an ‘institution’ with connotations of respect and importance.
Although marriage was once
deemed necessary, this is merely
a reflection of the traditional
social attitudes that prevailed
decades ago.
I agree. Namely, the necessity of marriage is determined
by social expectations and in
current British society the institution is declining and deemed
irrelevant. So if marriage is only
as necessary as any particular society deems it to be, we
should therefore question what
Britain’s social values actually
are and thus what is necessary
in order to uphold them. British
politicians generally speaking
still claim to advocate respect,
social stability, justice for our
children and individual freedom. If these are our principles,
then marriage is certainly necessary in meeting these social values. But the error New Labour
incessantly makes is expecting to reconcile the values they
supposedly uphold with their
silence on the necessity of marriage. Such values are timeless,
and rightly we do not compromise on these so why should we
abandon a paramount institution which fosters their development?
My critics will cry for ‘respect
for freedom and equality’ which
involves minimal state interference into the life of the individual and equal recognition of all
relationships as recommended
by The Law Commission in
June. Interestingly, unmarried
couples are five times more
likely to break up than married
couples, according to the Bristol
Community Family Trust’s
research published at the beginning of last year. Furthermore
75% of all family breakdowns
affecting young children involve
parents who are not married.
There is a tendency to roll
one’s eyes at statistics but I am
convinced that it is clearly logical that marriage is necessary in
“75% of all family
breakdowns affecting
young children
involve parents who
are not married
”
a society which values our children‘s futures, social cohesion
and individual freedom. New
Labour is constantly thinking
of weird and wonderful ways to
extend the state as it prefers to
invent obtrusive solutions rather
than seeking to anticipate problems and advocate the best preventative measure. For example,
take the increasing correlation
between family breakdown and
crime. As one who values individual freedom, I would much
prefer support for marriage
through the tax system, rather
than spend an estimated £800
per year per taxpayer to remedy
family breakdown, with such
interfering New Labour methods as ‘parenting classes‘.
And yes, one may retort that
the state providing tax breaks
does not guarantee more people
will marry. But then the state
does attempt to foster welfare
through promoting education
and health, so why not attempt
to promote marriage? The government’s challenge is to find an
appropriate practical approach,
which of course does not dictate
to the individual but promotes
the institution which is necessary for a society striving to
uphold such values.
”
C.
What is marriage?
Marriage is when two people,
who love each other, make a
lifelong commitment to each
other, witnessed by their family and friends, and before the
Church and the State. Or is
it? It is perhaps necessary to
dissect this traditional view.
The Church is increasingly
irrelevant, except for the small
minority of people who still
actually believe in God. For
them, a church service and
the religious commitment is
a truly beautiful thing; as for
the rest of us, it seems rather
dishonest to start a new life
based on such a foundation.
The State does still have a
vested interest in social cohesion, but very little power
to create it. There are now
essentially zero financial
advantages to marriage: neither tax-breaks, nor inheritance. Cohabitation and samesex civil-partnerships have
the same rights. [Incidentally,
the semantic distinction made
between marriage and civilpartnership based on sexuality is particularly abhorrent.]
What of social reputation? It used to be the case
that married couples had a
high social standing, whereas
those ‘living in sin’ were
ostracised. Fortunately, such
“Stigma is now
attached to
the one-third
of couples who
”
divorce
moral snobbery is largely forgotten, and sex before marriage is accepted as normal.
If anything, stigma is now
attached to the one-third of
couples who subsequently
divorce: if unsure, it is better
not to have been married in
the first place!
And family and friends?
Well, a wedding is a terrific
excuse for a party, but as
for the whole ‘solemn declaration’ bit, everyone realises that it is not permanently
binding. Those who go into
a marriage in complete innocence frequently regret it.
So, given my above cynicism, why is it that I believe
that marriage is still a valuable (if not strictly necessary)
thing?
Firstly, love. If two people really love one another,
then getting married is the
ultimate way to solemnise it.
It is still a serious commitment, even if it now has a getout clause. The intensity of
focus is a great opportunity
for starting life together.
Secondly, romance. There’s
something really special about
a wedding and all the things
that go with it. It gives the
couple a chance to exist solely
for each other, and to behave
like newlyweds.
Lastly, and most importantly, children. It seems to
me that the ultimate lifelong
commitment is having a baby.
A couple who want to start
a family ought to be committed enough to get married! Families are wonderful
things, especially large ones.
So yes, I do believe in
marriage, albeit in a ‘modern’ sense. I will leave the
last word to a friend, who
believes in commitment to her
partner, but not in the State
Institution. As she happens
to be religious, she plans to
get married in Church without signing the registry book,
thus becoming married to her
partner before God, but not
before the Queen!
”
Article/Writer: A2, B3, C1
A.
6
Editorial
The Cambridge Student
November 9, 2006
Here at The Cambridge
Student, we’d really rather be
producing this paper in a climate of political fervour.
From hippies chaining
themselves to things all over
the place to posh women being
force-fed, political protest has
a lively history which makes
for much better column inches
Political protest? I can’t - I’ve got a play on...
than ‘Erm, we don’t really
mind, to be honest...’.
It is bizarre that the pages
of student newspapers are
crammed with news of eight
plays a week, numerous live
bands, colleges fielding six
novice boats packed with 54
early-rising loons... and yet a
feeble ten people turned up to
King’s to complain on behalf
of the near 4,000 students
paying top-up fees. You could
barely put on one college play
with the number of people
who bothered to go to the
NUS march last weekend.
Without the enthusiasm
which verges on the deranged
Cambridge would be a very
Letters to The Cambridge Student
Dear Madam,
To describe something as
‘Byronesque’ is praise in most
literary circles.In the TCS
Music Section, it should be
an insult. Dickie Byron was
Volume 8, Issue 7
inexplicably allowed to roam
the English language with a
taste for contrived obscurism
and awful music (Volume 8,
Issue 4, 19/12/06) Whilst I
agree with Dickie that the only
route to liking jazz is coercion,
I was unimpressed with his
different place, and not the
one we know and love.
So why don’t we care that
much about student politics?
The funny thing is, the Union
is jammed every week, but
when we are called upon to
get out of the cosy debating chamber and actually go
somewhere and shout angrily,
top-up fees and Iraq stop being
disgraceful and start being
“Well, quite bad... but I’ve got
an essay on...” and a thousand
and one other excuses.
Although there is some
heart-warmingly hippy-style
action going on - from dressing up as planes to a sleepover in Sidgwick, the fact that
flyering has been described
as “the more radical end of
the Cambridge spectrum” is a
hair-raising comment on political apathy in Cambridge.
I’m definitely going to a
rally - as soon as I’ve finished
producing this newspaper...
must rethink what he thinks
of music and how he should
use the English language to
describe it. For the latter goal,
he could read a few volumes of
his namesake. For the former,
he should stop obsessing over
jazz in the hope of earning a
reputation for being the guy
everyone goes to for what’s outside the Top 40. After ten seconds of listening to him, they’ll
quickly return to the fold.
Yours faithfully,
Charlie Parker
Homerton College
[email protected]
attempts to convince me otherwise. ‘Cats’ like Miles Davis or
Charlie Mingus have enduring
reputations despite, not because
of, their music. To say Dickie’s
article was meant to intrigue
me about jazz and make me
reappraise it is a guess. It veered
from pointless name-checking
to a plea for student apathy
to a suspect claim that jazz
and social justice are the same
thing. If he’s set on writing
about music, I’d recommend
that Dickie take a step back
and a deep breath. Then, he
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Think you’re up to it?
The application deadline is Monday 20 November.
Email [email protected] for an application form.
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2
3
4
4
9
5
6
7
8
DOWN
10
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12
13
14
15
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18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
ACROSS
1 Something to be swept
away inside Jacob we
believe? (6)
4 Latin bus wrecked
Turkish city. (8)
9 Genesis follower? (6)
10 Prostitute in toboggan is
surprised (8)
12 Be inclined to look after
(4)
13 Creature’s extreme
aptitudes in wager (5)
14 Singular fish (4)
17 On table puce can oddly
be intolerable (12)
20 Pretend atom consumed
loving (12)
23 I fled the country (4)
24 Court orders returned
amid sobs and cries (5)
25 Notice blemish (4)
28 Sure acrd ruined
campaigner (5,3)
29 Hog writing implement
in animal enclosure (6)
30 Holy man, search for
creature (8)
31 Temperature problem
creates material (6)
1 Lunatic followed box to
tree (8)
2 Man contains own kind
of motion (8)
3 Hollow mouse turned
back by American birds
(4)
5 Redesigned sofas in
attic provide pleasant
feeling (12)
6 Race around large area
(4)
7 Shout underneath
trapped learner (6)
8 Rungs finally kill snake?
(6)
11 Vulnerability when not
so much aid started by
loch (12)
15 Deride and eat quickly
(5)
16 Joint quiver returned
without noble heart (5)
18 Secure tubes in
instrument (8)
19 Condemn and order
Scene Ten (8)
21 Funny programme - it’s
strange on some computers
(6)
22 God positioned vase (6)
26 Cow’s leg? (4)
27 Fruit for bird (4)
DON’T
1
9 3
TCSUDOKU
1
Set by Leah Holroyd
7
5
5
1
5
2
1
6
7
2 9
1 4
9
4
2
7
7
Chess Challenge
6
8
6
7
8 9
2
TCS Difficulty Level:
Tricky
TCSudoku is made
possible by the lovely
people at http://www.
sudoku-puz zles.net .
Go. Do some more.
CU Chess Club meets every Saturday 4-6pm in
Trinity Junior Parlour http://www.srcf.ucam.org/chess
White to play
Both sides have dangerous-looking attacks
against the Kings; how does White ensure that
hers succeeds first?
Solution to this week’s puzzle:
J.Polgar - Fernandez-Garcia, 1993. The Polgar sisters
are proof that girls can play chess too! For many
years Judit has been one of the world’s elite, serving
some harsh lessons in chess to her male rivals. Here
she destroys Black’s defences with 1)Qxh7+! Kxh7
2)Rxf7+ Kh6 3)Rh8+ Kg5 and in a position packed
with major pieces the humble pawn move 4)h4 is
checkmate.
The alternative 1)Rxf7+ is just as good: 1)…Kxf7
2)Qxh7+ Kf6 3)Rf8+ Kg5 4)h4 (again!) mate.
The Cambridge Student Crossword no.6
7
DELAY.
THERE’S
THE OPPORTUNITY TO
JOIN ONE OF THE GREATEST NAMES,
PLAYERS AND INNOVATORS
IN WORLD BANKING
–
GONE.
THE
CHANCE TO
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TOP-QUALITY
AND
WHAT ABOUT
AND THE
GRADUATE APPLICATION
WE
DEADLINE:
NOVEMBER 19, 2006
APPLICATIONS ON HOLD.
IS
BUT THIS
IS AN IMPORTANT REMINDER:
NOVEMBER 19, 2006.
IF
BUT
MAYBE
NOT WHERE YOU’RE GOING.
THE SPIRIT OF COOPERATION, THE TEAMWORK
LIFELONG FRIENDSHIPS YOU WOULD HAVE MADE IF ONLY YOU’D GOT YOUR
APPLICATION IN ON TIME?
DO UNDERSTAND. WITH A THOUSAND AND ONE OTHER THINGS ON YOUR MIND, IT’S EASY TO PUT JOB
JPMORGAN
TRAINING AND PHENOMENAL DEAL FLOW?
SOME
PEOPLE SAY YOU CAN’T MISS WHAT YOU’VE NEVER HAD.
WHY WOULD YOU RISK IT?
THE DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS TO
YOU MISS THIS, YOU MISS MORE THAN A DEADLINE.
jpmorgan.com/careers
THIS IS WHERE YOU NEED TO BE.
JPMorgan is a marketing name of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its subsidiaries worldwide. ©2006 JPMorgan Chase & Co. All rights reserved. JPMorgan is an equal opportunities employer.
8
Interview
Taking Time With Twiggy
Debra Glendinning talks to the sixties icon about fame, fashion and animal cruelty...
“She’ll last a couple of weeks” were the
words of one fashion editor in 1966 when 16
year old model Lesley Hornby shot to fame.
40 years later, imposing images of the glamorous ‘Twiggy’ are posted over billboards
and buses worldwide.
In the fickle and fleeting world of fashion,
Twiggy is something of an exception. She
possesses a timeless beauty and exudes an
irresistible combination of fun and sophistication. Yet her astounding success seems to
stem from something else; something beneath
her stunning superficies. Her diligence and
unabashed ambition, are what mark Twiggy
from the rest. Throughout her career so
far, she has become an accomplished model,
film, TV and stage actress, has co-produced
for the stage, has hosted her own television
shows and has released an album as well as
a bestselling autobiography. These are truly
incredible achievements and I think it’s safe
to say that this woman has well and truly
conquered the land of show biz. But when I
finally catch up with Twiggy, she is unsurprisingly juggling several new projects…
I soon realise that the pace of Twiggy’s
life has not slowed down at all. If anything
she seems to be taking on more than ever.
She has recently appeared in several TV dramas, and in December 2005 played ‘the good
fairy’ in the critically acclaimed Jack and
the Beanstalk Christmas pantomime. This
year she returned to the US television show
America’s Next Top Model, as a judge. The
show was aired on Living TV and became
compulsive viewing for many in the UK
too. Twiggy enjoyed making the 6th season
of the show but admits that it was “tough
work at times”. Time for break? Not likely.
Twiggy was still modelling for the Marks
and Spencers’ Summer 2006 collection, since
becoming the face of M&S women’s wear in
2005. Her place in the advertising campaign
has been viewed as something of a phenomenon. It’s been reported that the store’s profits
have soared 35% since Twiggy was taken on
board. The girl’s still got it.
I have to ask how this whirlwind career
started. “Well, it was a long time ago now…
God, way before you were born!” She laughs
a soft cockney cackle. I ask her what she was
like before it all started. “I was one of those
weirdos that actually quite liked school!
But I was always obsessed with clothes and
fashion.” Living in the capital, as a teenager,
she became very fashion conscious. “I was
a mod. If you know what that means? And
I made all my own clothes ‘cause we didn’t
really have much money. I learnt to sew from
my mum and older sisters and I planned to
get into art school and be a designer. But I
suppose fate stepped in!”
When she was 14, Twiggy, (then known
as Lesley), got a Saturday job at the local
hair salon where her sister worked as a hairdresser. At 16 she met the brother of one of
the hairdressers- Justin, who became her first
boyfriend and later, her manager. Ten years
her senior, he realised her potential and put
her in touch with a friend who had contacts
with the famous and reputed hairdresser,
Barry Leonard. “Leonard spent 8 hours cutting and dying my hair. I had really long
hair at the time and he just cut it all off into
this bob that tucked behind my ears.” You
wouldn’t guess from Twiggy’s recollections
that ‘this bob’ has become perhaps the most
iconic hair style of all time. “He did tell me
that I was photogenic and the photographs he
took of me that day were posted in his salon
but I thought nothing more of it. I went back
to school and that was the end of it.” explains
Twiggy.
But fate did step in. A few weeks later the
fashion editor of the Daily Express walked
into the salon. “Apparently she was having
her hair done and she noticed some of the
photos and just said ‘Who is that girl?’”.
The rest, as they say, is history. But was this
young working-class girl prepared for the
attention she was about to receive? “To be
honest I thought I was weird. I didn’t like
my body and I suppose I was just the same
as any teenage girl in that way. I loved make
up and fashion and of course I’d talked about
modelling with my friends but I don’t think I
ever thought I could be one myself. Actually
I used to get people taking the mickey out
of my figure all the time. My boyfriend’s
brother, much to my annoyance, used to call
me ‘sticks’ because I was so skinny. This
got changed to ‘twigs’ and then of course to
‘Twiggy’ by the press”.
Although she talks so diffidently about
her looks, they are seen by the fashion world
today as something of a revolution. Turning
the curvaceously sexy figure of the 40s and
50s upside down, Twiggy made the waif like
figure fashionable. With her oversize eyes
and painted on lashes, her look epitomised
the innocent energy of the 60s. She was aptly
named “The Face of 1966” by The Daily
Express and the title has stuck. By starting
the age of the supermodel and sporting the
fun and cutesy fashions of the time, Twiggy
became the image of London in the 60s. She
explains however, with her inherent modesty,
that you don’t really notice when you’re part
of such a huge movement. “I certainly look
back now and realise that really a revolution
was taking place. A revolution of art, fashion, music… and London was the centre. The
eyes of the world were on London. I suppose
I didn’t see a lot of it because I was working
and travelling so much in the late 60s”.
Twiggy travelled the world modelling and
was a big hit in Europe and Japan. When she
arrived in New York though, she was in for
a shock. In the US she had become a household name already, and found it impossible
to walk the streets without being mobbed.
“It was so tiring! I wasn’t ever really much
of a party girl. I’d prefer to do my jobs and
then get an early night. I don’t think people
realise how hard models work- and it’s even
harder now!” Sure enough, by 1970 Twiggy
was burnt out. “I retired from modelling full
time.”
But she didn’t sit still for long. “I met the
film director Ken Russell and said he wanted
me to star in the film The Boyfriend. I’d
never done any acting before or even thought
about it really. It was like this secret garden
had opened up that I didn’t know anything
“I was always
obsessed with clothes
and fashion... I made
all my own clothes ”
about. I loved it and I’ve been acting ever
since. It’s all performing really. Modelling,
singing, acting… you’re just putting on a
performance for an audience.” And it obviously comes naturally to Twiggy. “Although
I’m really not an extroverted personality at
all. Off the stage people usually say that I’m
quite quiet and I’ve been like that all my
life.”
There’s certainly more to Twiggy
Lawson’s life than the stage. When I ask her
about the animal charities that she supports,
her voice becomes even more animated than
her usual excited tone. “Animals are much
nicer than people. It’s such a shame because
all charities need publicity but you just can’t
support them all. You’ve got to go from your
heart.” Twiggy is a patron of the Animal
Samaritans, the Dog’s Trust, the Greyhound
Trust and Bolton Wildlife Hospital. She
chuckles “my dad came from Bolton and
I still visit sometimes. The people at the
hospital for the animals there are lovely
and they don’t receive any support really.”
Then she tells me about her involvement
with the Greyhound Trust and her commitment and passion for her charities bursts
through her voice. “I was sitting in my local
vets and I read a leaflet about them and it
nearly brought me to tears. I got so upset and
I got in touch with them. The people at the
Greyhound Trust are amazing, they work so
hard. They really are unsung heroes. It’s such
a wonderful organisation and it receives no
government funding. It’s so sad. They really
need the press. There y’go- write an article on
that for your newspaper!” And she means it.
It’s rare to hear someone in her position feel
so involved in such issues. “I do feel involved.
Other people, like Stella McCartney though,
she’s wonderful. She does so much to help the
causes that she believes in”.
“I think battery farming is terrible too. I
grew up in the 50s before supermarkets and
we ate mostly local produce. I mean all the
crap they pump into food now. If you don’t
care about the animals think about your
body!” Twiggy thinks that healthy eating
habits are really important and like all models claims “I’ve always eaten normally. I love
good food”. Then she starts talking about her
love of cooking and her favourite dishes and
I realise that she really does enjoy her food.
“My daughter takes after me, she loves cooking. And eating!”
But how does she feel today as the woman
that made skinny fashionable. “There is definitely a big problem with girls’ body image.
I don’t think every human being should be
thin, people are different. It’s just important
to be healthy.” She seems slightly uncomfortable talking about it. “I think that fashion
magazines are to blame, I really do. They’re
the main offenders.” She admits that she
can’t see a way out of the problem. “I used to
get stick about people having eating problems
though. It was really hard because I do just
have those genes. And designers like skinny
girls.”
When Twiggy excuses herself to take an
important call for the fourth time during the
interview, I realise what a hectic life she still
leads. She has boundless energy and enthusiasm with a good dose of grounded, British
common sense. I can’t help but feel there’s a
lot more to come.
9
Features
iPod therefore I am.
The iPod has just turned five and Igor Guryashkin is wondering where the time went
Last week was the fifth year anniversary
of one of the greatest style icons this young
century of ours has produced. Almost five
years ago to this day a rather large white brick
was brought screaming into this world, along
with a stream of dancing silhouettes, starch
white headphones and a rather addictive scroll
wheel. From this point on, our perceptions of
music, fashion, and even how we interact with
our fellow man altered for good. No longer did
we have a huge circular bulge in our pockets
fed by a CD collection in our bags. Instead
we could carry every song in one shiny white
package and beam with pride. The death of
the Discman marked the birth of the iPod
generation.
The truth is everyone has an iPod. I have an
iPod; my mum has an iPod, and even George
Bush and the Queen both have iPods (though
something filled with country music is nothing to be proud of). Karl Lagerfeld, the chief
designer for Chanel has 70 iPods, since his
collection of 60,000 CDs has been ripped. We
are rapidly becoming an iPod world. Though
other mp3 players are hot on their tail, the
pearl like earphones of Mac’s pride and joy are
still dominant and ever present in our visual
landscape. But apart from the obvious appeal
of your entire music collection being finger
click away what is it about the iPod that has
seized our attention and affection so unconditionally?
For our parents it was vinyl and for us it
was CDs. There was something special about
buying long awaited albums or singles, be it
the smell of the packaging, the artwork or the
anticipation of the notes hitting your cranium
as the CD was loaded. There was a ritual to
love of new music. The ritual today consists of
waiting for an album to leak illegally several
weeks ahead of a scheduled release. The alternative for the law abiding is to download it off
a site where tracks are sold separately. While
undoubtedly there is an air of nostalgia, it’s
also a cold hard fact the way we view music
has changed.
Albums and singles have taken on a new
dimension with the growth of the digital age.
Whereas in the past, albums were seen as whole
coherent bodies of work, the focus has shifted
to the key tracks. Many of us will download
“
A lot of people don’t like to be
left alone with their
thoughts and the
jukebox in your jacket offers an alternative.
”
three or four stand out musical moments and
dispose of or ignore the rest. While it’s fair
to argue that the mediocrities highlight truly
great moments on a body of work, we have to
accept that we have entered an era of choice.
It’s easy to lament the ‘death of the album’ as
a body of work, but perhaps not in terms of
record sales. While some forecast that record
sales would drop with the birth of the digital,
download-happy era, major artists still attract
heavyweight sales figures in both the real
Monarchs and Corgis have more than being out of date in common, but neither of them will survive the 21st century for having iPods.
When the revolution comes, the corgis will be first against the wall.
and digital arena. The well-publicised case of
Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ topping of the charts
on download sales alone indicates that we are
in era of transition rather than stagnation, in
terms of our attitudes to music. The iPod is the
tool by which we exercise our right to how we
own, listen and even dispose of music.
Next time you are lucky enough to be on
the tube at rush hour, with your head lodged
into someone’s perspiring armpit, pause, and
take a look around, and you will probably
encounter an army of enamel coloured headphones staring back. People in the middle of an
everyday routine are listening to a soundtrack
of their lives courtesy of the little white critter
in their pocket. Music has a cinematic quality
that enables us to escape the mundane tiring
world around us, or at least delay our entry.
Research has shown that on commutes people
will use the same half a dozen tracks for several months, for their journeys, with each part
of the journey having a particular song. We
not only try to escape the everyday, but also
try to control it. By listening to that prog-rock
solo before we come to work, we perhaps feel
slightly better when the photocopier breaks
down. A lot of people don’t like to be left
alone with their thoughts, and the jukebox in
your jacket certainly offers an alternative. But
is the result an anti-social, isolated group of
people in small musical bubbles? With people
shutting themselves away from each other until
they feel they are forced to a stark question
remains. What becomes of the public space,
when the public space is privatised?Does the
world become colder if everyone is plugged in?
Perhaps there is no need to be so pessimistic.
Studies have shown with the urban space, that
the more it’s inhabited, the safer you feel. The
individual feels safe if you can feel people, but
you don’t want to interact, but when you are
forced to, you are more likely to be content and
relaxed having had some aural therapy before-
“
I have an iPod,
my mum has an
iPod and even
George Bush and
the Queen both have
iPods.
”
hand. The iPod allows people to find pleasure
in the place they exist in.
This isn’t restricted to the acne-clad teenager or fashionista; the universal appeal of
the iPod means that everyone from your pious
parish priest or imam, to the punk rocker is an
owner of vast quantities of music at the touch
of a button. People can DJ at parties with just a
scroll pad, download music in fast food joints
and share music with each other instantly. But
as with everything there is a price to pay. With
the ability to share your playlist online with
co-workers and colleagues, music snobs amuse
themselves looking at other people’s music
collections. Be it the pretentious new age jazz
of the person you least suspect, or the whole
discography of S Club 7 of your boyfriend,
‘playlistism’ expresses an anxiety of what people may think of you based on your music collection. Suddenly Boney M or Village People
become a shameful pleasure. People preen
their playlists before divulging all.
With the iPod in its sixth incarnation there
are no signs of it slowing down. With plans
for bluetooth iPods, the way we obtain music
is going to keep on steamrolling forward. Soon
we will be able to download music on the go,
directly to our player. The whole world will
soon become our music collection. With the
demise of singles and differing perspectives
on albums, emphasis has moved to live performance as a way for the public to interact
with the artist, with bootlegging a thriving
industry people can enhance the live experience as well as discover new music at the
same time. Though not directly responsible,
Arctic Monkeys certainly benefited from the
mobility of modern music, and must give some
nod to their biggest fan, the iPod. With the
radio waves dictated by advertisers’ needs, and
dominated by stagnant playlists podcasts have
signalled a new direction for broadcasting.
Ricky Gervais’ recent podcasts attracted over
one million downloads, figures that radio-stations envy. Many people were surprised that
this week was the fifth anniversary; such is
the power of the product. For something that
has been around for five years it persists in
appearing modern, sleek, and most importantly essential. While the silhouettes and
Bono are a great distraction, the idea that we
can soundtrack our existence with the aid of a
white box is most attractive of all. The future
is bright, the future’s white.
10
Features
My Body. My Choice.
09/11, 8.00pm, Union Debate: ‘This house would make it harder to have an abortion’
Madeleine Teahan, President of Cambridge University Harriet Boulding, CUSU Woman’s Officer and TCS colPro-Life society, sets out the pro-life stall.
umnist wonders where the women are in this debate.
I must confess I found myself surprised to see
the above debate scheduled for the Cambridge
Union this term. Abortion is an issue which one
finds is rarely embraced as a topic for conversation as it always proves controversial and for
some is a wearisome debate which ended with the
Abortion Act in 1967. This allowed abortion for
‘social reasons’ for up to 28 weeks, subsequently
lowered to 24 weeks in 1990. Hence the law has
reflected since 1967 a pro-choice stance on this
issue.
Interestingly the architect of this legislation
Lord Steel re ignited the debate during the summer of 2004 by describing current law as outdated. Namely according to Lord Steel, “If it’s
simply the decision of the mother then the limit
should be 12 weeks. I personally believe it’s likely
to happen.” So in fact he who is so strongly affiliated with the pro-choice lobby and still remains
pro-choice has called for current law to restrict a
woman’s access to an abortion. Steel’s reasoning
is, “a foetus can survive at an earlier stage than it
could in the past.”
This point was reinforced by Professor Stuart
Campbell at the beginning of October in a broadsheet commentary entitled, “Don’t tear a smiling
foetus from the womb.” This powerful imagery is
based on the 4-D scanning technique introduced
three years ago. Campbell describes how at 11
weeks in the womb a child can yawn or even take
steps and how at 24 weeks, significantly given our
current law, they begin to cry, smile and frown.
He argues witnessing such ‘signs of humanity’
have prompted a re-assessment of his own opinions and a conclusion that the maximum age for
abortion should be reduced to 18 weeks.
In my experience it is commonplace for the
response to any male commenting on abortion, such as Steel and Campbell, that he has
no right to as he would never be in the position
that women are. I challenge this assertion on
the grounds that there is another fundamental
position to consider in this debate and that is the
child, boy or girl. Furthermore, men are often
criticised for not supporting a woman during and
post-pregnancy which implicitly recognises his
rights and responsibilities towards his child. Thus
I do not see how these rights and responsibilities
are suddenly removed on such a crucial question
Marcia Reich
as to whether he wants his child aborted or not.
However whether one accepts these objections or
not opinion demonstrates amongst British women
that there is popular support for a more restrictive
law on abortion. At the beginning of this year a
MORI poll revealed 47% of women believe the
legal limit for an abortion should be reduced from
its present 24 weeks, and another 10% want the
practice outlawed altogether. This MORI poll
reveals although the Abortion Act is often viewed
a victory for Second Wave Feminism, one must
“The humanity of
the unborn child
exists before birth and
here a woman’s right
to choose ends.
”
not be too hasty in assuming restricting abortion
rights is considered hostile to women’s rights. On
the basis of this should it therefore be harder for
a woman to get an abortion by reducing the time
up to which a pregnancy can be terminated? As
Lord Steel emphasises legalising abortion was not
done in order to increase the number of abortions
rather prevent back street abortions and, “It was
always the intention that the operation should be
carried out as early as possible.”
I was once struck by a phrase, “It’s a child not
a choice,” as it summarised my own viewpoint
on abortion in the simplest of ways. When the
Abortion Act was passed it did not permit abortion after 28 weeks for social reasons. This is a
recognition on the part of British law that the
humanity of the unborn child exists before birth
at some stage and here a woman‘s right to choose
thus ends. Therefore restricting abortion further
would not in fact fundamentally alter the principle which underpins current law. But the extent
to which we should apply such a principle is
surely challenged by the evident humanity of the
unborn, as described by Campbell. To continue
to ignore this through the preservation of our
current law as it stands, is denying the reality of
the actual choice a woman faces.
Contrary to popular belief, women do not have
the automatic right to an abortion in this country.
The decision is made for them, by doctors who
do not know anything about them. To me, the
abortion debate is about women – their bodies
and their fundamental rights. Yet the rights and
experiences of women are so often overlooked in
these arguments. Historically, I accuse both sides,
the anti-choice and the pro-choice, of neglecting
the experiences of women in this debate. A recent
speak-out event in parliament in which women
shared their experiences of abortion was a most
welcome sign that, for the first time, the voices of
women are being heard.
The national focus in this debate has been overwhelmingly on the biological and medical aspects.
When does an embryo become a person? Is a foetus
an individual or a potential human life? These are
all things which should be discussed. Indeed, in
some ways it is easier to talk about the medical side
of things. People look to science for a definitive conclusion, to tell them right from wrong. Completely
overlooking the social factors surrounding how
we understand scientific knowledge, anti-abortion
and some pro-choice campaigns place the onus on
science to provide the answer. As someone who is
concerned with women, I have to look at something
far less definitive and more difficult - women’s
emotions, lives, and experiences. What does one do
when there is no perfect answer? No woman wants
to be in a situation where they need an abortion.
No woman would prefer to have a late abortion.
The exclusion of women from this debate has
allowed the idea that women who have abortions,
especially late abortions, are ‘reckless and blasé’ to
flourish.
Who are these women?
What rights do they have?
What is their experience
of abortion? Carrying a
pregnancy to term poses
more risk to a woman’s
life than having a legal
abortion. If you force a
woman to carry and bear
a child against her will
you deny her control over
her own body. This is a
basic right that men can
“ The
abortion
debate
is about
women
”
take for granted. For women in the UK getting an
abortion is a difficult experience. A woman must
prove to two doctors - who do not know anything
of the individual circumstances - that continuing
with the pregnancy would involve a greater risk
to her physical or mental health than an abortion.
Doctors who object to abortion are not legally
obliged to refer their patients to another doctor.
“If you force a
woman to carry and
bear a child against
her will you deny
her control over
her own body.
”
Women are subject to a post code lottery in which
some local health authorities force women to wait
for up to 8 weeks between their referral and their
abortion. This is one of the main reasons that abortions need to be performed after 20 weeks – delays
and obstructions on the part of the health service.
The decision to have an abortion often has to
be made by very vulnerable people. Often they are
young girls who do not think that they can become
pregnant and young women who do not recognise
the early signs of pregnancy. Britain has the highest
teen pregnancy rate in Europe, yet sex education
is not compulsory or standardised in this country.
190,000 women are raped every year. Domestic
violence also contributes to the abortion rate. In
many cases domestic violence begins during pregnancy. These are the situations that many women
face, and these are the decisions that they have to
make.
Examining the role of women does not provide
us with easy answers. That is exactly why it is
vital that we do so – it becomes clear that, rather
that punishing women, we should be asking for a
consistent and accountable NHS, greater research
into women’s health, and compulsory sex education. It’s time the voice of women in this discussion
were heard.
Image by Astrid Atihuta
play
Don’t miss out.
Inside: the symbiosis of literature and art
13
Culture.
Utopia, artistic collaboration and a happy hippo
Just some of the things that make Tod Hartman think...
Literary Circles: Artist, author word and image
in Britain 1800-1920, at the Fitzwilliam Museum
(Trumpington Street) until 30 December 2006. Mellon Gallery (Gallery 13) . Free admission
As D H Lawrence was to out find sometime after
the historical remit of this stellar exhibition at the
Fitzwilliam Museum, it is entirely more satisfying to live in an idealised version of the past than
the always-mundane present. After travelling the
entire world and finding it uniformly disappointing, he declared that true happiness was only to
be found in a long-dead pre-Roman Etruscan civilisation about which nearly nothing was known.
Looking at Literary Circles: Artist, author, word
and image in Britain 1800-1920 in its entirety, this
same idea of impossible utopia seems to be an unstated thread that runs through much of the work
on display. To a large extent, the diverse range of
literary and artistic products here constitute odes
to an impossibly glorious past. One discerns this in
Dante Rossetti’s morbid obsession with medieval-
Self-portrait, Dante Rossetti.The Fitzwilliam
Museum
ism and the work of his namesake, Aubrey Beardsley’s stylised, romantic depictions of Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur or the pre-Raphaelites eager
sanctioning of the dead Keat’s vision of the Italian Primitives as the artistic ideal par excellence.
Utopia is not, however, entirely rooted in the past:
the Book Beautiful is William Morris’s vision of
an integrated literary product-cum-lifestyle based
on the Arts-and-Crafts philosophy, meant to exist
in opposition to the alienating mass-production
and division of labour between artists, writers and
technicians that had begun to characterise publishing by the middle of the 19th Century.
The overall theme of the exhibition is that of collaboration within circles of artists, writers and
critics, and the tremendous body of innovative
work that these relationships engendered. What is
remarkable is that the vast majority of the items
in the exhibition are taken from the Fitzwilliam’s
own collections. Many of the works featured were
acquired by two directors of the museum, Sidney
Colvin and Sydney Cockerell, themselves immersed
in various of the literary and artistic circles considered here. One comes away with the feeling that
these groups constituted not so much ‘circles’ that
‘extended beyond the author, to embrace the advisors, listeners and critical commentators who form
the necessary ballast in the creative enterprise’ – as
the exhibition’s beautifully-put-together catalogue
suggests – but rather quite exclusive little cliques,
or collaborative duos. What is highlighted here are
the intimate, personal connections between artists
and writers – some, in the end, destructively consuming, as between Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth
Siddal, some tinged with silly affection: a highlight
of the exhibition is Edward Burne-Jones’s touchingly ridiculous caricatures of William Morris – a
little rotund ball of a person, squeezed into a tiny
barrel-shaped bathtub, or turning a cartwheel underneath a crudely-drawn moon and stars like a
happy hippopotamus in a children’s book.
One result of these intense collaborations was that
they produced hybrid products that were entirely
BeMyFriend.com./please??
Beth McEvoy writes - ironically - about the dangers of not talking
Writing things down has long been my favoured form of communicating. For three
months, when I was six, I only answered people by writing on paper with a purple felt tip.
I was saved from counselling by the fact that
my quirk of madness pushed me into forming
prematurely accomplished joined-up writing.
I am a fully signed up sympathiser of the cliché that there is nothing nicer to receive than
a hand written letter, but few of my friends
are, so I write weekly to several 80-year old
aunties. E-mail is the godsend that allows me
to shirk talking on the phone. I don’t answer
my mobile to numbers not in my address book.
The irrational levels of fear I feel about this
would be merited only if I was in a Witness
Protection programme.
Through letters, I can go to emotional excesses that my family of hard faced women with
cores of blancmange would find intolerable if
spoken. But recently all of this typed communication has taken on an air of surrealism. I
don’t talk to my friends from home anymore,
I comment them on myspace. My whole life
and opinions of 2006 have been measured
out in exclamation marks, qwerty-originating birthday greetings and yes, shockingly,
the odd emoticon. It took the Long Vac to remember that these people, who I adore (in different amounts, admittedly) had organs, nails
and and different pitches to their voice. Flesh
and blood had melted into mates’ latest posted
photos. It is a convenient, yet depressing state
of affairs.
With over 90 million users worldwide, Murdoch-owned myspace has infiltrated popular culture to the point where it is rapidly acquiring
the whiff of being passé. The old Fox himself
has a personal page, with a headline calling
himself “The Dirty Digger” and the standard
announcement that he “is in your extended
network” replaced with the piss-takingly pertinent “Rupert Murdoch is everwhere’. Of
course, the septugenarian probably didn’t put
that page together himself. Just guessing. But
many, many celebrities have fallen for the site’s
charms. Myspace’s fostering of music is often
praised, but it is also the home of sordid spats
that make the National Enquirer look like
old-school party propaganda. Travis Barker,
of Blink 182, has engaged in very public webinterfaced slanging matches with his soon
to be ex-wife (Shanna Moeklar, of Playboy.)
Travis’ 32,000 plus “friends” - from around
Blast: Review of the great English Vortex, Percy
Wyndham Lewis.The Fitzwilliam Museum
unique and original, rather than importing the bulk
of their ideas from abroad. There is scant evidence
that other contemporaneous trends outside of the
South of England were given serious consideration
and when they are, for example those concerning
France, we seem to enter the realm of dystopia.
Take Blast: Review of the great English vortex, a
magazine manifesto produced by Percy Wyndham
Lewis, leader of the now-forgotten movement of
Vorticism, who reacts against the perceived overaestheticism and Francophilia of William Morris
and his circle:
Yet Paris was an unavoidable destination for many
19th Century Brits with literary or artistic pretensions. Charles Conder, one of the main exponents
of English impressionism, travelled there in 1890,
and summed up his impressions in a pen, ink and
watercolour drawing entitled A Dream in Absinthe.
Conder, who is very up-front about the state under
which the drawing was composed, depicts a sinister, jumbled world of giant birds with malevolent
human features, seedy cabaret girls, lots and lots
of empty bottles, hat-wearing bourgeois flâneurs,
and bizarre, Japanese Geisha-like figures. There is
a sense of Flaubertian misanthropy here, a horror
of the pushiness of the boulevard, a paranoia of
irretrievably falling into the squalor of the French
capital.
For whatever reason, Dante Rossetti is the spiritual
figure who looms over this collection of literary
the world - are posting messages of support. In
reality, these are strangers – on myspace they
are Travis’ mates.
Nastiness aside (and there have been documented cases of myspace and msn bullying),
myspace feels like it has replaced human contact. In many ways, it facilitates our communication, and I have been able to update friends I
have fallen out of touch with on the mundane
matters of my life, all in the click of a mouse.
But if it wasn’t there, would I be forced to finally
use up my prized embossed stationery, replete
Facebook. Not at all our prime method of communication from the office
and artistic artefacts gathered at the Fitzwilliam.
Perhaps this is because one is presented with his
self-portrait, flanked by a lock of his hair taken on
the night of his death, immediately upon entering
the exhibition space. In any case, one comes away
with the feeling that Rossetti remained a morbid,
attention-seeking adolescent throughout his life
– the Self-portrait shows a beautified young man
who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, his intense eyes and perfectly-pencilled eyebrows staring forward with a posed aura of tragedy. How different are his portraits of Lizzy Siddal,
his muse, obsession and wife, and the portrait of
sister Christina that the exhibition features. The
former is depicted, in a manner that borders on
kitsch, or even cartoon-like, as the embodiment of
impossible beauty, with her perfectly-formed features, enormous mane of hair and eyes half-shut
in profound contemplation. Poor Christina, on the
other hand, is offered up to us as a kind of preRaphaelite wicked witch: stern, elderly-looking,
her lips are formed into a permanent grimace, her
hair pulled back in a pious and painfully-tight bun,
and her eyes look out with distinct displeasure.
One might be tempted to see a certain spitefulness
in this representation.
William Morris, turning a cartwheel by moonlight,
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones.The Fitzwilliam
Museum
with stickers, drawings and gel pens? Rather
than organising my birthday half-heartedly
over the dreary browser of facebook, would I
have sent out tantalising paper invitations? I’m
worried about where this might lead. What if
something bad happens to somebody? Would
I myspace my sympathy? What an odd, stilted
way of telling somebody you care.
Sometimes, the time delay between typing a
comment and having a reply can be considerable. Yet I have found myself feeling, when I
write to my friends on the web, as if I am having a conversation rather than leaving a hasty
and badly spelled missive. But of course this is
not true. There is still a gap between you. In a
very odd, very intangible way, I am speaking
to nobody at all. Jean Baudrillard reckoned
there was “nothing more mysterious than a
TV set left on in an empty room. It is even
stranger than a man talking to himself or a
woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is
as if another planet is communicating with
you.”
EM Forster wanted us to “only connect”. Now,
“connect” as a verb has more connotations of
dialing up to the internet than of reaching out
and understanding somebody else. Maybe this
is an interesting warning to our culture. Or, as
Joseph Priestley warned: “the more elaborate
our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
14
Music.
Interview: The Cooper Temple Clause
Dickie Byron
Image: Alex Toumazis
Emily Drake sees this through and leaves
The Coopers: the hair that launched 1000 shit indie bands
Once upon a time, The
Cooper Temple Clause were
the darlings of the NME;
gracing its covers every second issue, having their hair
discussed at great lengths, everything seemed harmonious.
Three years, one missing bass
player (Didz Hammond left to
join Carl Barât’s Dirty Pretty
Things), and one record label
move later, with no album
release until January 2007,
the NME has forgotten about
them; but their fans haven’t.
On the day of the last date
of their second tour this year,
singer Ben Gautrey seemed
suitably out of it when I spoke
to him, and suitably impressed
by the crowds of loyal fans
that stuck around during the
hiatus. The tours, he says,
were specifically intended to
be intimate, playing smaller
venues with very little publicity, so as to “give our genuine
fans a chance to hear the new
songs before everyone else.”
They have also served as low
pressure training grounds for
the band to get used to their
new five-piece status, “You
James Garner enjoys Luxembourg
Elly Shepherd says ‘Viva Hate...Morrissey’
‘Elly Shepherd, you have killed me, you have killed me....’
tant reason: Johnny Marr.
Morrissey brought the theatrics and the drama queen
antics, but Marr brought, you
know, the music. Let’s face
it, performing on ‘Top of the
Pops’ with a gladioli attached
to your arse does not make
you great. It makes you a
twat.
A twat who sweats too
much. On an average gig,
Morrissey will change his
shirt four or five times. This
is not out of some misguided
sense of glamour or ‘showmanship’ but simply because
that’s as long as it takes for
him to sweat through a shirt.
Even just writing about it,
I feel really quite ill, as if
Chris de Burgh himself just
vomited all over me. Yes – it
is that bad. He’s a middleaged Mancunian with bad
hair and an ego the size of
fully welcomed back as the
only exciting thing happening in British music at the
moment. They don’t feel like
courting media attention, and
if they carry on playing gigs
like this they will never need
to.
They’re heavy, they’re
electronic, they’re romantic, they’re mental, and any
band who can convincingly
pull off such a schizophrenic mentality is allowed to
take bloody ages to record
a new album, which guitarist Dan Fisher insisted during
the gig is “worth the wait.”
Ben assured me that the new
album will be a treat, “It’s our
most melodic album to date
but also our most eclectic,”
comparing various tracks to
bands such as Kraftwerk,
Weezer, The Kinks and the
Beta Band. So in their time
away from the public eye, The
Cooper Temple Clause have
honed their skills as a fivepiece, developed a whole new
style of writing music and
continued their reign as one of
the best live bands around.
Shove This Down Your Noise Pipe
How Do We Make It Die?
I hang around with a lot
of people who love indie. I’m
not a prejudiced woman. I
can accept them as people,
despite not really understanding why they don’t like ‘pop’
music when it’s exactly like
indie only with one or two
less guitars. What I can’t
understand is how much they
love Morrissey. I just don’t get
it. It makes me feel unclean. A
sensation markedly similar to
realising that the nasty thing
you’ve been smelling is some
dog shit you stepped in several hours ago.
Why can’t they understand
that merely having a big face
and singing like someone’s
holding your testicles in a
vice like grip does not make
you some kind of idol? These
are intelligent people, with
fully developed hearing and
reason faculties. I also kind
of thought that, in those indie
circles in which Morrissey
achieves a status akin to godhood, that, like, not writing
your own music was, like, so
not cool. Yet Morrissey only
writes his lyrics, and let’s face
it as important and lovely as
lyrics are, they really don’t
make music. Music makes
music. All Morrissey himself
adds is a whine like that of a
bemused sheep, or some kind
of forest creature in pain.
This is unfortunate.
OK – so The Smiths were
a great band. One of the best.
This was for one very impor-
can’t go from being a six-piece
to a five-piece and expect to
be as good live…it was like we
were a new band.”
If this is the case, the new
Coopers are lacking nothing
of their old incarnation, sonically. One member down and
still producing a massive wall
of sound with old favourite
‘Been Training Dogs’ and
recent single ‘Homo Sapiens’,
combined with moments of
genuine beauty with songs
such as the next single
‘Waiting Game,’ this is a band
on top of their game. Perhaps
the added pressure of making
up for the three-year gap has
been an advantage. They seem
determined to move their
crowd, even if the one at The
Junction are disappointingly
lethargic for the first seven
songs. Dance, you bastards!
Or at least jump around a bit.
This band deserves that much
at the very least. When the
crowd finally livened up during the punishingly massive
‘Film Maker’ it was clear that
The Cooper Temple Clause
had been forgiven and right-
Ireland.
He’s also the kind to hold
grudges. He wrote a whole
song about betrayal when he
got a bad review in the NME.
Frankly, he should get a fucking life. Even Cambridge
thesps don’t get that upset
about bad reviews.
All these things and more
I could forgive if he actually
made good music. But unfortunately, Morrissey has only
a passing acquaintance with
good music. This was when
he was working with Johnny
Marr. That was, now, a very
long time ago. I want him to
stop. He’s not a musician; he’s
a self-important tosser. The
day he puts his microphone
down, the world will be just
that little bit more joyful. I’m
already planning the party.
When most new bands have
a six month shelf-life between
their first gig at a dive off
Wardour Street and a critical
backlash Luxembourg are an
exception. They recorded their
first material as long ago as
2001 but a streak of perfectionism has meant that their debut
album Front has only just been
released.
Stylistically the band run a dangerous line between Pulp and
the Communards which really
shouldn’t work and probably
doesn’t. But nonetheless, their
wonderful literacy is empowered by the keyboards and falsetto that in other hands would
sound so hopelessly passé. The
album is a mix of synth-driven
pop songs and indie ballads
dripping with angsty melodrama and breathtaking sincerity.
The band’s greatest strength
is their lyrics: not only are the
observations pertinent and the
conclusions apposite but they
are expressed with panache.
This is so much the case that
on the album’s most powerful moment, ‘Making Progress’,
they get away with a two minute
spoken word section. This takes
us on a tour of ills which passes
through the consumerist treadmill, third world children, the
hard sell ‘and the fact that aircraft are chimney-stacks with
wings.’
The album contains four
songs already released as singles. Of these it is ‘Luxembourg
vs. Great Britain’ which is the
defining moment of the album
The chorus is catchy as hell and
the lyrics are a glorious, combative dissection of the nation.
One verse in particular is
effortlessly vitriolic: “You think
you’re very special but you’re all
the same/a pathetic apathetic
pissing life away/while slaving
all these hours to pay for finery/
and for fresh air, bottled water
and binary/but it’s not about
the money/it’s the hegemony
- that depresses the hell out of
me.”
On the newer songs the effect
of years in the wilderness is
clear, there is more swirling discontent than resistant braggadocio. The highlights are ‘Faint
Praise’ and ‘Relief’. A lyric on
‘Single’ explains this change of
ideas: ‘I can’t spend another
summer burning copies of my
debut single in my bedroom.’
The new material is still polemical but underpinned by a quiet
desperation.
When Luxembourg provide
something this good, it seems
churlish to bemoan the omission of the anthemic ‘Success is
Never Enough’. Front may be
consigned to oblivion but with
it the band have created an
increasing rarity, an important
record.
Clicky:
www.luxembourgband.com
Download:
‘Luxembourg vs Great Britain’
‘Making Progress’
Tonight
Radio friendly power poppers NewSum Turn play with
danceable new wavers Six Nation State at the Loft. Promising sibling band The Shills and
the piano-heavy Dead Letter
Society at The Man on the
Moon, while the fun filled altpop of Yo La Tengo features
at The Junction. On a softer
note, folk-hopster Emma York
& Gallactica beat boxes into
CB2.
Friday
Ethomusicologist and prolific
recorder Bob Brozman gives
an afternoon workshop at the
Portland Arms, kicking off at
1.30pm. For a back seat however, Scottish charmer Karine
Polwart plays at The Junction
Shed. Casiotastic post-punkers
The Lost Levels with typical
trendy sounds from Kneehigh
and Lindas Nephew at The
Loft.
Saturday
Royston blues rock merchants
St Elmos Fire play the Loft,
while Macunian beat heavy
rockers Amplifier stop in at
the Portland Arms on their
Euorpean tour.
Sunday
Fairly catchy female fronted
four piece AngelSoul play The
Rock, while The Six Bells join
the ranks of pubs with jazz on
a Sunday.
Monday
A host of hopeful Cambridge
soloists play at the Portland
Arms. However, band of the
moment ¡Forward Russia!
strut their new wave stuff at
the Junction and Gaz’s pa,
John Mayal, play with the
bluesbreakers at the Corn Exchange.
Tuesday
Ex-Rolling Stone and remnant
of 60s and 70s folk-rockness
Bill Wyman turns up at the
Corn Exchange. Wonderful
mystical psych-oddities Matt
Valentine and Erika Elder
play CB2 with local tone deaf
strangeboy The Doozer in
support. For the more mainstream, The Bluetones play the
Junction
Wednesday
Long standing statesman of
rock Joe Brown plays at the
Corn Ex with his daughter,
Jools’ favourite singer, Sam
Brown, while Michael Chapman at the Junction shows
how little distance some have
travelled since Joe’s days. Finally, digital junkies the Resistance play the Portland Arms.
Picks of the week:
St Elmos Fire (Saturday)
Matt Valentine (Tuesday)
November 2nd @ The Junction
Half way into Badly
Drawn Boy’s set, Damon
Gough announces “This is
great – I’m actually enjoying myself onstage, for the
first time in ages”. Thank
god for that. I’d heard Badly
Drawn Boy in a bad mood
spells disaster for the audience, and the looks of concern when I told people I’d
be going to the gig said it
all. I fully expected to be
in for a night of rambling
monologues, cockiness and
point-blank refusals to play
decent songs. Instead we
got a laidback, enjoyable
gig in which the focus was
squarely on the songs rather
than on Damon’s mood.
The long wait between
f a i rly- go o d - b ut- no t h i n gspecial support band and
the main act didn’t bode
well (you’d think with all
the money Gough saves on
Album:
The Magic Numbers
Those The Brokes
[Heavenly]
When The Magic Numbers
first emerged last year, it was
a breath of fresh air. Their
jingle-jangle pop songs were
exciting in that they sounded
so damn happy when compared to other emerging guitar bands like Maximo Park
and Hard-Fi. Perhaps more
importantly, their eponymous
debut was timed perfectly to
coincide with the summer.
This time around though,
they’ve got more than just the
timing wrong.
Both albums clock in
at about an hour long, but
whereas The Magic Numbers
could have done with a few
tracks cropped off the end,
Those The Brokes seems like a
sprawling monstrosity all the
way through. There’s barely
enough interesting material
here to fill an EP. Considering
the length of the album, and
the fact that more than half
of the tracks are over five
minutes long, it seems The
Magic Numbers are confident
in their ability to craft pop
masterpieces. Listening to it
though, it sounds like they’ve
entirely forgotten how to write
clothes he could afford a
watch), but once onstage
he soon redeemed himself.
Badly Drawn Boy is on tour
to promote Born in the
UK, his nostalgia-infused
new album about growing
up in seventies and eighties
Britain. Wisely, the band
alternated between tracks
off the new album and old
favourites from Hour of the
Bewilderbeast and Have
You Fed The Fish, in the
boy’s words “to keep you
lot interested”, which we
generally were. Some of the
new songs – ‘Promises’ and
‘Walk You Home Tonight’,
to name two - blend into
one another, albeit in a very
pleasant way, but the new
single ‘Nothing’s Gonna
Change Your Mind’ is as
melodic and gorgeous as any
of BDB’s big hits and the
album’s title track is a sursongs altogether.
With most of the songs
here, the Numbers take one
good idea and then stretch
it out. There will inevitably
be long stretches of “Ooohoooh-oooh”s and soft words
sung into the microphone, and
at least once the drum beat
will stop, presumably to show
just how very heartfelt the lyrics are. The perfect example is
‘Carl’s Song’, which has a nice
summery guitar jangle followed by a playful drum roll,
which is great, but it somehow
manages to go on for five-anda-half minutes. The second
half is entirely “Ooohs” and
soft words. In doing this, The
Magic Numbers gain a more
intimate sound but sacrifice
their sense of playful fun.
It’s not all bad though;
the first halves of some of
the tracks here are genuinely
enjoyable. ‘This Is A Song’,
‘Runnin’ Out’ and the aforementioned ‘Carl’s Song’ seem
to have the band back at their
best. It’s just the second halves
that drag on a bit. Couple
that with some tracks that are
seemingly pointless all the way
through (‘All I See’ is a particularly horrific example), and
the fact that there’s not really
much variety on offer, and
what you’re left with is a boring album that can seem more
like a chore than a delight. If
ever there was a record in dire
need of editing, this is it. It’s
a shame that the moments of
genuine enjoyment which can
be gleamed from Those The
Brokes are so hidden.
4/10
Simon Drake
prisingly rousing homage to
all things British. There’s
something refreshing about
Gough’s all-embracing love
for the clichés of British
life, from the Silver Jubilee
to Maggie Thatcher and
fish and chips.
Regularly accused of
being a shambolic live act,
Badly Drawn Boy didn’t
exactly exude professionalism, several times stumbling through songs and
needing to start again; but
luckily he knows how to
turn these moments to his
advantage, and the times
when things didn’t work out
(for instance when he tried
to whistle at the end of
‘Pissing in the Wind’ and
found he couldn’t) were
some of the high points of
the gig. The most unexpected moment of the night
came when Gough launched
Album:
Moby
Go - The Very Best
of Moby
[Mute]
There is something unnerving about Moby. Listening to
his greatest hits, you repeatedly ask yourself where you
have heard the ensuing tracks.
Then as the last fragile notes
of ‘Porcelain’ fade away you
realise where you have braved
his ambient electronica before:
everywhere. In 1999 Moby’s
album Play became the first
album to commercially license
every track. The soundtrack to
our lives, for that year at least,
consisted of Moby’s songs of
peaceful, relaxed resignation,
typified by gospel vocals set to
layered drum patterns reminiscent of DJ Shadow. While hardly original, the songs possessed
an undeniable ability to imbed
themselves into the psyche.
The album opens with the
early hit ‘Go’, essentially an
upbeat, generic dance number
with obligatory sombre synthesisers, mid tempo beat and the
cyclical lyric “yeah”. A track
that should be labelled “remix ready”, is by no means
a fitting opener to an album
that has highlights worthy of
high praise. The proceeding
Music.
Image: Damian Robertson
Live: Badly Drawn Boy
15
into an improbable cover of
‘Like a Virgin’. Apart from
the inevitable “You’re dead
clever in Cambridge, aren’t
you?” crack there was little joking, but just enough
chat to build a rapport with
the fans, and some uplifting audience participation
on Gough’s remarkable solo
rendition of ‘Once Around
the Block’.
The mixture of energetic,
full band songs and quiet,
acoustic numbers kept the
audience on their toes for
the whole two and a half
hour set. The encore, an
enchanting solo version of
‘Magic in the Air’, summed
up the whole night – low
key and beautiful, but perhaps lacking energy. Every
now and then I found myself
wishing badly behaved boy
would put in an appearance, if only to liven the
audience up a bit with some
swearing, but the quality of
his songs won me back each
time.
Olivia Humphreys
tracks of ‘Why Does My Heart
Feel So Bad?’ ‘In This World’
‘Porcelain’ and ‘In My Heart’
are classic Moby. Desperately
sad gospel vocals soar against
minor chord compositions that
remind you of everything from
car adverts to commercials for
cancer charities. You can virtually hear advertising executives
rubbing their hands with glee
to the delicate percussions of
Moby’s dream like soundscape.
But it is precisely here that
Moby’s greatest weakness comes
to the fore. Play was his third
album. Moby had come across
a formula that finally found
commercial success. However
it seems that it was a trick that
was hard to repeat. The remaining tracks are the sound of an
individual trying to hard. ‘New
York, New York’ is his attempt
to recreate the success of ‘Go’
to nauseating effects, while
‘Slipping Away’ and ‘Move’ are
both substandard disposable
songs, providing a stark drop in
quality. As the final song ends
one is left with a bitter taste in
the mouth. You ask why Moby
could not repeat the magic of
Play. Perhaps the truth is that
when you set out with the aim
of making an advertisers life
easier it’s hard to repeat the
same successful feat of old. The
stand out tracks here all from
his aforementioned album, and
for good reason. They are made
to seem even better by the deficiencies of his later efforts. For
those wishing to listen to Moby
at his peak, should buy Play,
rather than the obvious moneyspinner on show here.
6/10
Igor Guryashkin
Badly Drawn Boy: Everybody loves a tramp.
Singles
Roundup
After an album of songs
about trying to be cool, Art
Brut return with ‘Nag Nag
Nag Nag’, a song about
throwing a hissy fit while
trying to be cool. But whereas singer Eddie Argos’ lyrical aspirations may not have
changed much since their
debut, the music certainly
has. ‘Nag Nag Nag Nag’
boasts a driving guitar line
that has more in common
with the Stereophonics’
‘Dakota’ than anything
from 2005’s Bang Bang
Rock & Roll. The signs are
good for their follow-up.
Ideally, they’d start singing
about something a bit more
interesting, but ‘Nag Nag
Nag Nag’ is so much fun it
almost doesn’t matter.
By way of contrast, Paul
Simon’s ‘Outrageous’ is
about how he’s not cool and
nobody wants to listen to
him anymore. Which almost
entirely sums up anything
I could say about this single. The funny thing about
grumpy old men writing protest songs is that they end up
sounding like grumpy old
men.
Taking Back Sunday are
very angry about something,
but I really don’t care what;
‘Liar (It Takes One To Know
One)’ is as juvenile as its
title implies. You can practically hear the spittle flying
off singer Adam Lazzarra’s
lips in sheer rage. Now there
may be people out there who
enjoy being spat at down
their headphones, but I don’t
know them. This band just
needs a good sit down.
There are some good oldfashioned indie bands trying to peddle their wares
this week as well. Whereas
Captain’s ‘Frontline’ is dull
beyond words (they have
Keane in their MySpace top
12, which says it all really),
Boy Kill Boy’s ‘Shoot Me
Down’ is just lovely. Plus!
It’s all for chari-dee. Which
makes it doubly lovely. With
its falsetto chorus and gentle
guitar strumming, this is a
very warm song, perfect for
an autumnal stroll across
Jesus Green. Seasonal!
But then Orson reappear, ready to ruin my day.
According to their press
release, they’re just completed their third headline
tour of the year. How?
Why? ‘It’s Already Over’
doesn’t provide any clues.
Sounding like every other
song they’ve ever sung, it’s
full of big guitars, overextended metaphors and lyrics
that really don’t make any
kind of sense. They rhyme
“I only wish you well” with
“You’re a psycho bitch from
hell”, for God’s sake. With
the “bitch” bleeped out, of
course.
Simon Drake
16
Film.
Emma Dibdin spends some time with Little Children
On paper, the premise of
director Todd Field’s newest
Oscar-tipped offering sounds
familiar at best: adultery between young married-couples,
an exploration of outsiders
in a closely-knit town community, the American Dream
gone awry. These are cinematic
paths well-trodden in previous
years by the likes of Alan Ball,
Patrick Marber, Larry Gross et
al., and on first glance it would
be easy to assume that there is
little left for Field to add. But
it’s clear within the first few
minutes that there is a lot more
to Little Children than initially
meets the eye.
Set in a picturesque American suburb, the kind of town
where mothers gather in the
playground to exchange gossip
and where the town pool is the
centre of social life, the film tells
the story of Sarah (Kate Winslet) and Brad (Patrick Wilson),
both of whom lead seemingly
normal, happy lives with their
spouses and children. Both,
however, are secretly miserable
in the idyllic lives in which they
find themselves trapped: Sarah
is a stay-at-home mother who
resents her largely absent husband’s freedom, Brad a stay-athome dad whose failure to pass
the bar exam has led to him becoming strangely emasculated
in his marriage to a domineering, bread-winning wife (Jennifer Connelly). Predictably, the
two meet and are drawn into
an affair that sees them both
feeling alive for the first time in
years.
In spite of its complex and
often controversial subject matter there is never a danger of
the film pandering to its audience or shying away from the
realities of its drama – the depiction of Ronnie (Jackie Earle
Haley), a recently released sex
offender who moves into the
neighbourhood to live with his
elderly mother, is a particularly
impressive measure of the film’s
integrity. Rounding off this corner of the drama is retired cop
Larry (Noah Emmerich), whose
reaction to Ronnie’s arrival is to
launch an all-out attack that develops swiftly into harassment.
The beguilingly mundane
settings of the film’s action: the
playground, the town pool, the
well-kept yet oddly impersonal
family houses, create a sense
of comfort which jars with the
frequently disturbing emotional
content - most notably in the
haunting use of the playground
in one of the film’s final sequences. Equally effective is the
voiceover narration, delivered
with a wry solemnity which
serves both to highlight the
moments of subtle humour in
the film and to convey a vague
sense of foreboding throughout:
we are well aware that there is
no cut-and-dry Hollywood ending awaiting these characters.
The performances are topnotch: Winslet effortlessly captures the struggle of a woman
who has given up on her own
Brad risks marital disharmony for a woman in dungarees
goals in life in order to be a
full-time mother, and her overwhelming sense of guilt over
her lack of connection with her
daughter is especially palpable.
Wilson, meanwhile, radiates the
kind of bland likeability appropriate for a character dubbed
“the prom king” by the local
gaggle of gossiping neighbourhood mothers.
But the real stand-out here is
Haley, who along with writers
Field and Tom Perrotta deserves
credit for the insurmountable
achievement of making a genuinely sympathetic character out
of a paedophile. Haley’s performance provides by turns an
uncomfortable, unsettling and
occasionally moving experience,
but there is never any attempt to
gloss over the fact that he is fundamentally a deeply disturbed
and ill man with monstrous impulses that he is unable to control. Any temptation to oversimplify characters or resort to
stereotyping is firmly rejected
by the writers – it would have
been easy, for example, to portray Sarah and Brad’s respective
spouses as entirely unsympa-
thetic villains so as to increase
the audience’s sympathy for
their affair, but both characters
are handled impressively in spite
of their limited screen time.
The two central plot threads,
while both compelling and skilfully developed, seem only tenuously linked for the majority of
the film, until in the third act
Field pulls everything together
with a shattering intensity that
leaves the audience filing out of
the theatre in awed, near-reverential silence. This is not what
anybody could call an easy film
to watch – it is a demanding
and often uncomfortable experience, and the genuinely unsettling atmosphere will stick with
you for several hours after the
credits roll.
But if you can set these things
aside, this is a film more than
worth the entry fee. Skilfully
paced, intelligently written and
flawlessly acted, Little Children
is a thought-provoking exploration of isolation, appearances
and the extent to which our
judgements of others and of
ourselves can be proved wrong
upon closer examination.
Izzy de Rosario tells us why running Catz Tor Krever gives us the other side of the
story about Borat
Films is more worthwhile than it sounds
Sacha Baron Cohen is a ance at a rodeo. But here we identity. We laugh at the culA week ago I was talking
to a friend in the first year
at St Catharine’s about Catz
Film, who in all fairness, was
a little drunk. Dom and I will
have been running Catz Film
for a year by the end of this
term, and so we are looking
for someone else to take over
the society. My friend was
interested, but then half-jokingly asked a crucial question – what’s in it for me?
Aside from assuring him that
everyone begins their plots
for world domination from
somewhere, and that you get
to choose the term card, the
rewards on offer for running
Catz Film seemed paltry.
There has been a film society at St Catharine’s for many
years, but about three years
ago it was given a timely kick
up the backside, by Dr Thorne.
This has since ensured that
St Catharine’s College Film
Society does have a budget
and does show films. Catz
Film has gone from strength
to strength, generally filling
up the Ramsden Room every
Monday night. This is surely
because the premise of Catz
Film has become to fill the
void left by other Cambridge
Film Societies. Our two aims
are to show films that are entertaining, and to show films
that most people won’t have
had a chance to see before.
Both aims endeavour to give
students the chance to watch
even more good films.
We are also the only free
film society in Cambridge,
Catz: Not a bad place for a film society
due to a tidy little loophole we want, as long as we adhere
somewhere in the laws regard- to the budget. Should we deing, well, film showings, so I cide on a term card of 1920’s
am told by Tom, webmaster Japanese silent films or of Bela
extraordinaire and legal-man- Lugosi’s lesser known masterin-residence.
Furthermore, pieces, that is our prerogative.
we were lucky enough to se- Being a free society enables
cure sponsorship from Richer us to make up our own rules,
Sounds, which means that our rather than living up to anyDVD player and surround one else’s expectations. For
sound speakers are on free the sake of getting people to
permanent loan.
come to our showings, and
This all brings me back to because we choose the films
what you can get out of run- we want to see, we take sugning Catz Film, aside from an gestions from Catz students
extra gold star on your CV. and agree on a list with the
What’s in it for you is making committee. Finally, if you can
the most of the opportunity see good films, for free, on the
it presents. The college gives big (projection) screen, then
us money and tells us to show what’s stopping you? Unless
films once a week – within you’ve got better plans for
that remit we can do whatever 8.30pm on a Monday night…
funny guy, no question about
it. And the character he created in Borat is hilarious, his
appearances on the Da Ali G
Show raucously funny. But the
Borat movie, in spite of gushingly positive reviews from
some quarters, is a grave disappointment. Its large reliance
on scripted material, a deviation from the television sketch
format which garnered Borat
and Cohen such widespread
popularity, is arguably its most
damaging shortcoming.
A painfully long segment
ostensibly depicts Borat’s home
town in Kazakhstan where we
meet his family and neighbours. We learn by implication
that Kazakhs are incestuous,
homophobic, anti-Semitic and
generally primitive in their
living standard, fashion, and
morals-”She is my sister. She
is number four prostitute in
whole of Kazakhstan,” Borat
announces proudly. But is any
of this necessarily funny?
Not unless it elicits equally
offensive responses from individuals who consider themselves respectable, upstanding
citizens in a tolerant, liberal
society. For Borat’s humour
lies not in his bumbling incompetence or xenophobic and
racist comments, but in the
way those around him react to
his behaviour and rhetoric.
No wonder the film’s highlights are those parts which
stick closest to the television
format. One genuinely hilarious segment is Borat’s appear-
don’t laugh at Borat’s chauvinistic proclamations or the
explicitly jingoistic lyrics of his
fake Kazakh national anthem.
Rather, the humour lies in the
implicitly jingoistic reaction
of the American crowd-their
zealous applause to Cohen’s
suggestion that Bush should
“drink blood of every man,
woman, child in Iraq” and
equally impassioned disgust
when Cohen debases the StarSpangled Banner.
There would be little funny
about Borat were Cohen to do
his act as stand-up comedy.
Sure, there is some shock value
to his boldness, but anti-Semitic and homophobic statements aren’t inherently funny.
Nor are rabid generalizations
about the backwardness of
Kazakh culture particularly
amusing; the germ of Borat’s
humor was never his Kazakh
tural ignorance and condescension of the people with
whom he interacts, such as
the woman who boasts how
quickly Borat could become
“Americanised” only to turn
around and explain at length
to a perplexed Cohen how to
use a toilet. One wonders how
she thought he’d been getting
by in the preceding weeks of
his American odyssey.
Cohen’s comic genius lies
in his ability to keep a straight
face while eliciting absurdity
from the unwitting and, typically, bigoted people around
him. By taking Borat to a medium in which large parts of
the narrative are scripted, Cohen and company lose what
essentially makes Borat funny.
There are of course some gems
but, for the most part, the film
is mediocre, the humour facile.
Sacha Baron Cohen: Quite funny really
17
Jack Sommers just can’t get enough of The Prestige
Christopher Nolan must have known he was
asking a lot of his audience when he decided to
make ‘The Prestige’. The screenplay, which he cowrote with his brother Jonathan, has the same
warped chronology as his best film to date – ‘Memento’. But unlike that film this isn’t about fairly
dull people, it’s about magicians. So you’ve got a
narrative structure that can accommodate up to a
billion plot twists and a story about people who lie
and deceive for a living. It could have been a disaster of confusing proportions. So all the more kudos
goes to the Nolans for making something that’s not
and, on the contrary, is really rather good.
The film starts with the death of master magician Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) in a trick
gone wrong. Another illusionist, Alfred Borden
(Christian Bale), is suspected of tampering with the
apparatus that killed him. Waiting to be hanged,
Borden is visited in jail by a lawyer willing to pay
a lot of money on a client’s behalf for the secret
to his teleportation trick that had once made him
a stage sensation and a small fortune. When the
answer is no, the lawyer gives Borden the deceased
Angier’s diary and departs. Borden reads it and we
go back in time to when he and Angier are colleagues who then become rivals who then start to
obsess over outdoing and sabotaging one another’s
performances. Not in that order of course – the
narrative moves from one time and place to another seemingly at random. ‘Seemingly’ is the key
word there.
If there’s something wrong, it’s that too many
themes are crammed into two hours of action. The
proceedings are perfectly easy to follow, but every
line contains a treatise on the pressures of fame,
the nature of friendship or the morality of intense
competition. If that gripe seems a bit trivial, it’s because it is. It’s the only negative I could think of. At
a push, you could also say David Bowie’s cameo
as real life eccentric scientist Nikolas Tesla is a bit
wooden but that doesn’t stick. His detached expression and forlorn moustache correspond pretty
well with my image of a rejected scientist and if
they don’t correspond with yours then shut up and
have some respect, it’s David Bowie.
As said, there are perhaps too many themes at
work but Bale and Jackman have the range to be
at once majestic performers of epic feats and petty,
obsessive schemers. They’re not too much alike
either. Jackman has more delusions of grandeur
while Bale relishes playing a more grounded but
equally egotistical performer. Michael Caine has
an undemanding supporting role as Cutter, the
stage engineer whose allegiance is torn between
the two of them. His presence submits to the leads
but he is competent, if not that distinctive, during
his own screen time. Scarlett Johannsen plays the
stage hand-cum-love interest who, like Cutter, is
a turncoat. She, Johnny Depp and possibly Ben
Affleck are the only Americans to ever not sound
Australian when attempting a British accent. Bale
and Jackman perform their tricks in enormous
theatres and tiny rooms behind pubs with all the
moves that make them seem like the real thing.
The visuals are just as good. The tricks that involve
electrical bolts are the nicest eye candy I’ve seen in
the cinema for a while.
It doesn’t give anything away to say there’s a big
twist at the end. The constantly ambiguous plot direction makes that obvious. But the odds are, like
mine, your constant guesses as to what happens
next won’t be distracting or even close to the mark.
Don’t waste too much time trying though. Unlike
most films that completely reverse themselves at
the end, this isn’t a stupid film that thinks it’s clever.
This is a clever film that thinks it’s clever. The plot
twist – and here I will have to be careful with spoilers – isn’t contrived, ridiculous, too predictable or
too random – it’s just right, like the 130 minutes
that proceed it.
This is an incredibly ambitious film. The cast
alone says as much. Christopher Nolan’s return
from an exciting but pretty emotionless comic
book adaptation is a film that looks every bit as
slick as ‘Batman Begins’ and is just as good as ‘Memento’. Using uncertainty to create suspense runs
the risk of producing something incomprehensible.
‘The Prestige’ isn’t incomprehensible but that’s not
why it’s brilliant; it’s brilliant just for being brilliant
on nearly all counts.
Sam Law on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
A lone figure on horseback passes in silhouette
along a vast mountaintop at sunset. Tired and
lonesome he continues on, driven by the insatiable desire for revenge, bound by a promise to a
recently killed friend. The audience sit rapt by the
magnificent desolation onscreen and gripped by
the prospect of impending redemption, the inevitable result of our protagonist’s arduous journey.
Has there ever been a genre more inherently
cinematic than the western? Great directors from
John Ford to Quentin Tarantino have been drawn
by the iconic landscapes and the lonely and violent characters who inhabit them for as long as
movies have been shown on the big screen. From
the spectacle of Monument Valley to the arid wilderness of the border country, there is yet to be
found a finer location on which a lense can be
trained or in which a story told.
With ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,’ this year Tommy Lee Jones added his
name to the list of legendary directors who have
made the genre their own. Teaming with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros), he has
crafted likely the film of the year and the greatest
entry to the western genre in a decade.
Focusing on the killing of an illegal immigrant
(the eponymous Estrada), and the struggle of his
best friend Pete to both fulfil a promise to the
dead man to bury him in his native Mexico, and
to gain some degree of personal release for himself, the film examines the trials of small town
American life and the nature of loyalty, friendship, love and redemption.
Dragged along for the ride, Barry Pepper’s border patrolman (the man responsible for Estrada’s
death) is to some extent the foil to Jones’ taciturn
cowboy. His will broken, and emotions sidelined
til the final reel, Pepper’s tortured performance is
the equal of Jones’ superb, award winning turn.
Although undeniably as close as the film gets to
attempting to identify a villain, Pepper’s character, and his own personal struggle to save his soul,
are as integral to ‘3 Burial’s’ emotional resonance
as any number of burials. This becomes particularly significant as the film takes its massive leap
of faith in the final scenes.
Impressing once again with his ability to transform a relatively simple story into something
genuinely special, Arriaga’s intricate script fragments the initial events so the audience appreciate
the gravity of events leading up to Melquiades’
Tommy wasn’t going to let supper get away this time
death and those directly after, before drawing
the story into a beautifully flowing narrative as
the film draws towards its climax. Equally impressive, veteran cinematographer Chris Menges
captures both the monotonous squalor of small
town life and the vivid beauty of the open countryside with a visual palette that seems broader
than any used before to capture the sprawling
vistas of the America/Mexico border. Yet for all
of the fine performances and technical virtuosity
to be found throughout such a layered work as
this, ‘Three Burials…’ works best when viewed
as a series of moments, each one so rich in heartwrenching emotion and beauty that it’s difficult
to comprehend the film as a whole. The summation of an entire relationship in one 30 second sex
scene. A touching romance that flourishes with
barely a word spoken nor a kiss exchanged onscreen. The tense beauty of the events at Estrada’s
final resting place. The heartbreaking encounter
with the blind hermit, a scene with more sadness
in its few minutes than ‘Brokeback Mountain’
managed in two and a half hours.
It would be impossible to communicate the
full brilliance of this film in ten sides of writing,
but rest assured, whether a fan of the Western
genre or not, there is a measured depth here that
is impossible not to be drawn into. Everything
from the unpronounceable title to the difficult
subject matter means that ‘3 Burials…’ is not a
film open to much hype, but those willing to take
a look will find layer upon layer of artful accomplishment beneath an admittedly tough exterior.
Cambridge African Film Festival
Presents: A Season of African
Film
11 November - 3 December 2006,
Arts Picturehouse Cinema
Cambridge African Film Festival
returns to the Arts Picturehouse with
four weekends of African film throughout November and December: including old classics, UK premieres, documentaries and shorts. This season puts
the focus on East and West Africa,
Sudan and South Africa. For details
see our website www.cambridgeafricanfilmfestival.co.uk and watch out
for new additions to the programme,
directors visiting and new films.
Film.
The Pervert’s Guide
to Cinema teaches
Joshua Davis
everything he needs
to know
There’s a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s
“The Conversation”. Gene Hackman’s private detective, hired to bug an apartment, realises from next door that a murder is about
to take place. Running to the balcony, he
sees a body slam against a frosted glass window, a spray of blood, and he runs back inside in panic, closing the curtains and cutting
himself off. There’s a clear meaning to this
scene, narrator Slavoj Zizek explains. Hackman, listening in on the murder, fantasises
that he is actually watching it. The frosted
glass shows that in fantasy he can never get
more than a blurred image of the truth, but
the image is enough to drive him for the rest
of the film.
This is what happens when a philosopher
and Freudian psychoanalyst starts to take
apart the meaning of some of the greatest
works of 20th Century cinema. Zizek leads
us on an adventure into the minds of directors like David Lynch, Andrei Tartovsky
and Alfred Hitchcock, and deeper into the
realities of the film world, showing how the
medium can convey fantasy in a way that reflects the realism of the real world.
It’s a wonderfully educational experience. The sheer breadth of films, from Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers right
through to “The Matrix” and the latest Star
Wars, Zizek deconstructs every aspect of cinema – from cinematography down to symbolism. Using footage from the movies cut
with footage of Zizek on the sets of the movies themselves. It creates the illusion that we
are being taken right into the heart of each
film, like Woody Allen but with better psychoanalysis.
Erudite to the extreme, Zizek leads us
through three separate aspects of cinema.
The first part amounts to a Freudian interpretation of movies. Everything is examined afresh. The Marx brothers are shown
to be the perfect representation of the psyche’s division between Ego, Superego and Id.
So do the floors in Hitchcock’s “Psycho”.
Meanwhile “The Birds” is shown to be allegorical, Melanie’s arrival causing an upset
in the Oedipal family balance of the Brenner household. The second part examines
the role of fantasy in sexual relationships in
fascinating detail. Focusing on Lynch’s “Blue
Velvet” and “Lost Highway”, male confusion and impotence is shown to be a result
of his over-reliance on fantasy. The female
libido becomes a threat to male identity, a
bewildering entity that confuses the relationship in his mind between cause and effect.
The final part examines appearances – Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, “The Wizard of Oz” and
the intrinsic link between musicals and Communist show-trials. All these are dealt with
in amazing detail, and many more.
This is a film for film lovers. A decent
level of knowledge is helpful to provide at
least a background for the dazzling array of
movies introduced, analysed and left behind.
It’s a film for anyone who wants to know
why great cinema has the impact it does,
why great directors are a cut above the rest
and, most importantly, what’s going on in
the mind of a director like David Lynch. An
enlightening and fascinating experience.
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is out from
Monday at the Arts Picture House.
19
Theatre.
Dancing with the devil by
the pale moonlight
Fay Pownall sells her soul for one evening at the Round Church
If the audience were feeling
uncomfortable perched precariously on wooden benches, we
were soon put at ease as director James Norton announced
that toilets were ‘in the car
park round the corner for a
cost of 20p’ and there would be
free tea and coffee in the interval. In fact there were biscuits
too which was an unexpected
bonus. As the play began I
was reminded of the limitations of theatre in the round;
presented with an actor’s back
and unable to see characters
at points, I began to question
whether these practicalities
would overshadow the play
itself? I was proved well and
truly wrong as it became progressively more engaging and
impressive thanks to a consistently strong cast.
Norton describes The
Crucible as a ‘parable, warning
against the dangers of fear as a
motivational force in any societal context’, and this was certainly apparent in his interpretation. Beatrice Walker’s childlike portrayal of Abigail was
a reminder that the tragedy
of the play is in the triviality
of the foundations the Salem
Witch Trials are based on. This
was confirmed as an authoritative Hale quizzed Abigail, who
called out for Tituba in fear yet
in the same breath accused her
nanny of witchcraft. The pace
of the dialogue as Tituba was
interrogated was exhilarating
and gave a sense of the panic
of the girls and desperation to
remove themselves from trouble. The acoustics in the old
building took the action to a
breathtaking new level as the
girls’ increasingly impassioned
accusations were set against
Hale denouncing the devil in
true evangelical form, screaming and Paris praying fervently.
This climax was starkly contrasted with a blackout and
from the darkness came the
ironically angelic sounding
voice of Abigail singing ‘When
Mothers of Salem’ featuring the line ‘suffer little children to come unto me’ which
was particularly poignant. (I
should point out I am reliably
informed this is hymn number
666 in the hymn-book-to-befound-under-your-pew which
makes it all the more eerily
fitting.)
If I thought Act 1 could
not be topped in terms of
spine-tinglement I was to be
proved wrong yet again. Act
3 was awe-inspiring. Angus
Wight played an impenetrable Danforth, delivering long
speeches with ease and conviction and the screaming of
Mary Warren (Alex Guelff)
echoed in monotone by three
young girls who stared transfixed at the ceiling was truly
terrifying. However, more
than just the hysteria, the presentation of human nature as
capable of false accusation in
order to preserve one’s self was
all too believable. The audience were frequently presented
with the weight held by empty
words visually as bits of paper
(confessions) were produced
and tossed around the stage,
and through the tragic and
repetitive repentance of Corey,
‘I mentioned my wife’s name
‘Why aren’t people angry?’
“They were robbed. What was theirs was given away. What was foredoomed to fail failed. And they aren’t angry.” ‘The Permanent Way’
publicist Monica Sobiecki tells us what Hare’s masterpiece means.
David Hare’s ‘A Permanent
Way’ is about a problem
as intrinsically British as
Marmite. Railways. These
might not, on paper, appear
thrilling. Yet, one need only
look at the initial reception to
Hare’s play when it was first
performed at the National in
order to see indeed how gripping and emotionally challenging it really is. David
Hare first set out as a sort
of interviewer-cum-journalist to collect the experiences
of those who suffered deep
emotional and psychological
trauma: as a result of nothing
other than the corruption at
the gut of the British political
system, the ultimate testament
to British mis-management
.The play serves as a record of
the disinterest and refusal to
accept blame endemic to the
Civil Servants, Bankers and
Government Officials unwittingly embroiled in their own
parody.
However, although it
attacks the self-interest
of Jarvis, Railtrack, John
Prescott: faceless bureaucrats
and train companies, it’s
not about politics. It’s about
people, from the humorously named members of the
Permanent Way gang, to the
disgruntled passengers of the
first fateful train. And how
very odd it is: a play about
trains, that isn’t really about
trains. It is filled with competing voices, struggling to
place and displace the blame.
The cast and directors,
faced with such a difficult theatrical concept, and one that
hardly lends itself to immediate public appeal, pull it off
superbly. Cambridge Amateur
Dramatics can seem daunting to a Fresher; it’s daunting
enough that the productions
seem astoundingly semi-professional, despite being pulled
off in a matter of weeks.
They are helped immensely
in that task by Jenni
Mackenzie, and Susannah
Currie, whose interpretation
of Hare’s invigorates it, and is
laced with clever choreography and interpretation intuitive to Hare’s original purpose.
Take the opening scene,
for example. The colourful
accents, odd mannerisms and
outrageous opinions highlight that these commuters
are symbolic, a cut from the
cake of British society. The
characters are created to be
provocative, fashioned to
be genuine, and completely
believable. Meticulously choreographed through the seemingly restless motions of the
commuters….an approaching train is created. It builds
to a monstrous crescendo,
an explosion that sets the
tone of the play throughout,
with powerful and moving
performances from the victims, such as Molly GoyerGorman as a mother appalled
by the behaviour of the Police
over the death of her son at
Southall. Mark Maughan, as
the bumbling John Prescott is
definitely not to be missed.
It is not a lighthearted play.
Apologetic authority figures,
incriminating masses of testimonies, anger and blame…
but what does this all mean?
permanent way, n Brit. / p
m n nt we /, / p m nt we /,
U.S. / p rm( )n nt we /
The finished roadbed of
a railway, together with the
track and other permanent
equipment, esp. as distinguished from a contractor’s
temporary workings………
Tues 14th - Sat 18th
ADC Tbeatre
Tue - Thu £7/£5, Fri & Sat
£8/£6
Going off the rails.
once and I’ll burn in hell for
that’. This unwitting betrayal
of a spouse was echoed movingly as a pained Elizabeth
Proctor told a ‘natural lie’ in an
attempt to protect her husband.
This delicate balance between
truth and lies was emotionally
explored in Act 4 until when it
came to Proctor’s confession,
the tension in the audience was
tangible. The sound of a pen
scratching on paper has never
been so painful.
By the end of the production I had forgotten about my
limited view which in any case
was forgivable considering the
creativity of the production
which is to be congratulated
and encouraged in future ventures. As I stepped out of the
Round Church I could not be
sure whether I was shivering
due to the chilly November
evening or if darker forces were
at work…
ADC presents ‘The Crucible’
by Arthur Miller. 7pm, Round
Church, until this Saturday.
20
Theatre.
Swiws Swizz? No. Swish? Yes.
Heather MacEachern
The choice of ‘See What I
Wanna See’ by CUMTS for
the Michaelmas musical was
certainly an ambitious one. I
arrived at the theatre full of
anticipation for the European
premiere of this brand new
musical. It is refreshing to see
a team brave enough to try
something new and innovative.
The question was whether the
cast and crew would be strong
enough to meet the challenge
head on.
The show, which received
rave reviews after its sell out
ran on Broadway last year, cen-
tres around three interwoven
Japanese tales by Ryunosuke
Akutagawa and over the course
of the evening the audience are
invited to consider the notion of
truth. Five actors alone play all
of the roles within the production and therefore had a heavy
weight of responsibility on their
shoulders to perform a great
show.
Both acts began with the
story of Kesa and Morito. The
prologues were filled with sexual tension as both Kesa and
Morito conveyed the complex
dynamics of their lustful but
doomed relationship to the
audience. While the prologues
were well choreographed however they seemed to be a pretty
diversion rather than an integral part of the plot.
The first act focuses on
the dark and chilling tale of a
murder in New York City. The
audience was presented with
three versions of the grim events
of the evening in question. The
action moved swiftly between
each version of the story and
the audience seemed genuinely
interested in the world being
created before their eyes.
The second act focuses on
the tale of recovery and redemption following the tragedy of
9/11. While I found the first
You’d better Stopp
Cally Squires
“Your sins always find
you out” quoth a member of
the cast, and this production
demonstrates just that. The
Stoppard Shorts are in fact
two one-act plays, connected
by their theme of deception
and marital infidelity. As the
name intimates both are written by Oscar-winning British
playwright Tom Stoppard of
Shakespeare In Love notoriety.
The first, Another Moon
Called Earth, is set in a fictional reality where Britain is
the first nation to land a man
on the moon. Claire Wells
plays Penelope, a lady of leisure who entertains an affair
with her rather unscrupulous
but delightfully smug physician
(Sam Hindes). Wells portrays
the eccentricity of her character aptly, tenderly bordering
on the brink of sound mental
health without descending into
downright lunacy. No doubt
the most accomplished, sensitive and effortless performance
came from Dave Walton as
Penelope’s distracted husband.
Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to recognise her treachery he half-heartedly indulges
her whimsical behaviour until
the inevitable can be denied
no longer. His eventual and
almost naive dawning realisa-
tion of Penelope’s indiscretions
in Another Moon contrasts
well with the calculation of the
involved parties in Teeth. Here
a dentist (Edmund Highcock),
aware of his wife’s tryst with a
patient (confidently performed
by James Everest), mercilessly
torments his rival whilst he is
in the vulnerable position of sitting in said dentist’s chair. The
precarious dynamic between
Highcock and Everest begins
tentatively but develops rapidly
into a highlight of the show.
The “L” shape of the theatre at the Corpus Playroom
results in the audience being
dissected in half by the stage.
Director Miranda Barty-Taylor
addresses this without any obvious difficulties, however I suspect some seats had a slightly
better perspective than others.
Costume, lighting and sound
effects obviously aid the production but do not merit particular mention in their own
right. The reception from the
audience was surprisingly subdued in parts, considering the
overall excellent quality of the
play. Laughter filled the appropriate moments but applause
was rather minimal. However
there is something to be said for
quiet contemplation and appreciation, especially in a play such
as this which juxtaposes comedy with an underlying more
half a little underwhelming
the second half was extremely
funny, while at the same time
thought-provoking.
The acting was generally
strong and the cast worked
together as a solid team.
Annabel Lloyd’s portrayal of
‘Aunt’ was highly amusing, and
Mark Stanford stood out in
the role of the Priest, which he
approached with a subtle blend
of humour and fear regarding
the direction in which his character’s life was heading.
It might be argued that the
almost continuous use of music
detracted from the overall production simply because It was
difficult to hear the actors over
the orchestra, and this was a
real shame as some of the subtle
complexities of the piece were
lost. In addition, the songs in
the production occasionally
seemed as if they were difficult
to handle, and the exceptionally
tough challenge set for the cast
meant that occasionally they
fell just short of the mark.
Director Adam Lenson
should be congratulated for
an intelligent and heartfelt
interpretation of the text. The
musical staging was bold and
strangely compelling in parts,
and the set design and space
were used effectively as the
action moved through different
countries and time periods. The
lighting design was also strong,
adding to the dramatic tension
of the piece. The cast received
a great reception at the curtain
call, and deserve to for their
bold approach to the project.
Definitely worth-watching for
musical fans and others alike.
Wed 8th - Sat 11th Nov
CUMTS presents
See What I Wanna See
Tue - Thu & mat £8/£6, Fri
& Sat £9/£7
Megan Prosser doesn’t know why ‘nice
men don’t like their mothers’...
sobering thematic. Stoppard
Shorts is not without darker
moments. For instance the first
act ends with Bone’s chilling
discovery that his wife, apparently remorseless, has killed
her supposedly cherished childhood nanny. However these
were somewhat overlooked as
emphasis tended towards levity.
If you have a spare hour it
is certainly worth seeing this
weeks engaging offering at the
Playroom. Guaranteed for a
few laughs it also manages to
provoke deeper thought. A few
obscure references to 1950’s
games shows aside, it is definitely accessible to all. The
cast isn’t huge (eight people in
total) but this suits the venue
and more importantly they are
all capable and well rehearsed.
Corpus Playroom (£4/£3)
7pm until this Saturday.
What a spacious and workable space the Fitzpat is. Having
only ever seen ‘Gardie’s the
Opera’ there my recollection of
the space certainly did not do
it justice. Ah well, back to the
matter in question.
Sophia Broido’s production of John Osbourne’s ‘The
Hotel In Amsterdam’, in only
its third-ever staging, began
with graphics which actually
worked! They are often a risky
move but the jittery exposition
of the movie theme was cool.
The opening twenty minutes
or so of the production with
its jazzy music and overlapping chit-chat, complete with
clandestine comments that
‘nobody knows we’re here’
gave us snatches of unrelated
clues to the setting, and Dan
(Owen Holland)’s comment
that ‘I hate the working classes,
that’s why I got out’, clues to
the nature of the people we will
be sharing our evening with.
I’ll get two thirds of my
quibbles about the production
out of the way now so we can
get onto the interesting bit.
There seemed to be a couple of
forgotten lines and the volume
for the first half was poor. But
that aside, we quickly became
involved in wanting to know
who was fucking who and who
‘KL the dinosaur’ might be.
Who indeed. Among the
non-sequitor comments, medical neuroses and transparency
of self we find three couples
(although the boundaries are
blurred) and a number of
tense relationships such as that
between Sweet Secretary Amy
(Hayley Richardson) and the
extravagant and crisp Annie
(Kate Kopelman), and, once
the proactive and nervous
women have commenced ‘disappearing of to the bathroom’,
we uncover the guilty secrets
of the men, circulating around
Tom Rose’s fantastic ‘Laurie’,
part Alan Partridge, part Flash
from Blackadder, part exquisite impersonator.
The play was written in
1968, and feels like it, with its
multiple references to ‘faggots’
in Covent Garden (in fact, is
Laurie’s fixation with imitating homosexuals something
we should have been watching more closely?). Laurie, as
the writer’s mouthpiece, just
as Jimmy Porter was over a
decade before, is distinctly
Osbournian, although the
threat of violence comes from
Holland’s Dan rather than
Rose, showing how Osbourne’s
writing and set characters must
have developed over the intervening years. The ‘over the sofa
hand clasp’ was also used to
great effect to show the emptiness of the physical affection
between the characters, and
set the scene for Kopelman and
Rose to blossom into their very
own love story only alluded to
before the point at which she
embarrassedly says ‘don’t look
at me’, a real insight into this
character. My only final quibble was that if we are to take
Barthes’ standpoint and insist
that when someone says ‘I love
you’ what they’re in fact saying is ‘do you love me?’ (which
many disagree with but which
would seem to hold water in
a play, so centred on desperation) then why was there no eye
contact to check reactions in
the love scene?
Nevertheless, with its loose
structure, and relaxed tempo
(despite one of the more memorable lines from the play being
that ‘spontaneity puts you at
the mercy of others’) this is an
obviously ignored piece of writing and a poised and quietly
hysterical interpretation which
takes a remarkably well-executed bloody turn at the end.
11pm, Fitzpatrick Hall Queens’
College, until Saturday.
21
Theatre.
Amy Barnes
1, 2, 3, 4, (5) is a truly
mind-blowing piece of theatre. It has it all, laughter,
violence, affection, sorrow,
and tons of miscommunication. Written by Cambridge
graduate Luke Roberts, it is
the inconsistent, naturally
rapid and supremely welltimed flow of the dialogue
that keeps the audience
wrapped – a feat that is
no easy challenge, yet one
that is perfectly mastered
by every member of cast.
This play presents on stage
a selection of scenes that
depict the trials and tribulations of domestic life, in
which the characters antagonise each other almost to
the point of despair, which
is perfectly matched by the
humour created in amongst
the audience.
Sarah Brocklehurst (1)
plays the mother figure
of the familial group, and
is well suited to the part,
showing her exasperation
and affection in the same
breath without flinching,
whilst Lizzie Crarer (3)
brings girlish enthusiasm
and flamboyance to her
lover / daughter role. The
interesting clash is derived
from the way that members
of the same sex (especially
the females) calmly and
harmoniously relate to each
other in contrast to the discord between the sexes. As
Sam Sword (4) unhappily
sighs, “Maybe we shouldn’t
be married” to his young
love, it hits home how eerily
reminiscent the petty arguments on stage are of our
Clinically hilarious?
It can be all too easy to sit
at home curled up in front of
the fire with a good book, a
Cognac in your hand and an
aged Labrador snoring at your
foot. Going out and being
entertained can be difficult and
often disappointing. So why
then would anyone in their right
mind bother to shift from their
self-induced paradise to see a
pantomime? I’ll tell you why.
It’s because you’re not at home,
you’re in a damp and cramped
College room. There is no fire
and instead of a book you’re
hunched over a laptop watching…well, you know what.
The Cognac is a Pot Noodle
and the dog is an intoxicated
Land Economy student who
thought your now vomit-covered slippers were his bed. You
are worthless and emotionally
defunct
Still not convinced? Well,
what if I told you that this pantomime was like no other you
had ever seen? You would say
I was lying, well fuck you. This
sort of thing is exactly what you
need to escape the depressing
reality of your life and the selfharm inducing nature of fifthweek blues. This panto is the
audiovisual equivalent of a big
hug from your mother. It will
make you feel that life is still
worth living and that humour,
honesty and good will toward
mankind still exist in the world.
It will make you laugh and it
will make your cry (in a good
way). That’s a good thing,
properly good, like when you
get triple points at Boots or
something.
Enough about you already.
“Seeing this panto will make
me feel better but what about
the starving Africans?” I hear
you cry. Good point well made,
your middle-class upbringing
and matriculation into King’s
have served you well. I’ll be
blunt. The Africans will have to
go begging for now…literally.
The charity this pantomime is
helping works a little closer to
home. It is Premrose a group
dedicated to improving the care
for premature babies and their
families. And babies are cute,
right? There aren’t any babies
in the panto - just medical students, a couple of doctors and
that girl who sang the Facebook
Song.
So there you are. If you still
don’t want to come you’re obvi-
ously a socially retarded freak
with a borderline personality
disorder who would rather
fester in their grotty griefhole of a room eating beans
straight from the tin. Either
that or you’re busy (wanking
probably).
‘Coma’s Odyssey’ (The
Addenbrookes’ Panto) runs
from Tues 14th to Sat 18th
Nov.
7.30pm Mumford Theatre
ARU. Box Office 0845 196
2320
Tickets: £7.50 (£6.00 concessions).
Tickets also available at
Stock Shop, Addenbrooke’s
Concourse.
own lives. Yet whilst all the
cast are strong, and Tom
Williams’ (5) minor role is
comic precisely due to its
fleeting nature, it is really
Rory Mullarkey (2) who
dominates the space with
his stuttering indignations
and realistic outbursts of
anger, provoking the audience both to laughter and to
nail-biting suspense.
The set is very simple,
further
enhancing
the
hyperrealism of the objects
discussed and used on
stage. Hard times indeed,
when a lowly chair becomes
the cause of so much excitement and rebellion, and a
tea-pot becomes an unsuspecting weapon of destruction amidst seemingly
sound family relationships.
Director Osheen Jones uses
his simplistic set to give
drive and attention to the
dialogue, forcing the actors
to light up an otherwise
plain back drop with their
subdued emotions and dazzling wit. With such superb
written and writing talent,
1, 2, 3, 4, (5) really is a
Start the winter already Frozen
Catherine Watts & Peter Wood
Looking into the soul of man
sometimes leads to unexpected
discoveries. From the icy heart
of ‘Frozen’ we are invited to see
the effects of paedophilia, both
on its victims and its perpetrator. What follows is a chilling
display of emotion that asks
us whether to understand is to
forgive.
Bryony Lavery’s script never
becomes oppressive in spite of
this foreboding. The play is
distinctly minimalist, with no
scenery and a handful of props.
All of these add the vital realistic touches needed to engage
with such intense thematic
issues. With visual distractions
banished, the play floats purely
on the not inconsiderable talents of its cast and direction,
each character isolated in the
spotlight of their memories.
The play hinges around the
death of Rhona, and the reactions of her killer, her mother
and the psychologist investigating the icebound workings
of the criminal mind. In this
emotional piece, the audience is
confidant as well as onlooker to
the characters. Through a series
of soliloquies each individual
shares with us their inner feelings. Watching all three slide
down more and more irrational
paths, and witnessing their progression, we nonetheless begin
to understand why they move
as they do. They are trapped in
a prison of the past.
Much of the first act has
passed before there is dialogue
between characters, but the
monologues preceding this are
engaging, diverse in the emotions displayed and contrasting
between characters. Having
gathered a sense of each individual’s persona, we long to
see how they will interact.
The play continues in its
clear, focused manner and
at its moderate pace, which
allows us to absorb the ideas
raised without ever being too
overwhelmed.
Released in 1998, Lavery
pre-empted the current hysteria over paedophilia which
first occurred as a reaction to
the murder of Sarah Payne.
The issues raised in the play
seem to be more relevant
now than when it was written. It challenges us to understand the socially demonised
figure of the paedophile and
given understanding, could
we, should we, forgive?
The characters age over
30 years from the play’s
beginning to its end, throwing into stark relief their
changing situations. Yet the
cast have to respond to this
through subtle changes of
costume. With such a young
cast, we feel closer to the
characters, we are nearer to
the vitality and confusion
of their rapidly changing
worlds. We also lose some of
the distance that age brings;
the Paedophile is a confused
twenty year old, not a sleazy
old man, and do our feelings
for him change because of
this?
Frozen is an engaging,
piece that deserves praise.
Its strong performances and
the unoppressive way that it
deals with dark themes recommend Frozen for the first
cold nights of winter.
Fitzpatrick Hall, Queens’
College, until Saturday.
7.30pm
joy to behold, taking stubbornness, tea-drinking and
missing shoes to a whole
new – and rather unnerving
– level.
Thurs 9th - Sat11th Nov
M arlowe
Societ y
presents
1, 2, 3, 4, (5)
by Luke Roberts
Wed & Thu £4/£3, Fri &
Sat £5/£4
Smoker
Review
This week:Tom
Cruise, pushy
shop assistants,
left handers and
vegetarian pizzas. Lisa Hagan
tells us more...
Particularly striking performances in this week’s
smoker came from Helen
Cripps throughout the show,
but most especially when she
played Annie. The comical
dialogue could perhaps have
received the same laughs from
any actress performing it but
Helen brought an individuality and remarkable talent to
the role that made it ‘her’
performance. The stand-up
comedy coming from, what
were for me, new faces at
the ADC were outstanding
performances; diversifying
from the unusual topic of
genital hair from Becky Greig
to Tom Swarbrick’s standup revolving around political correctness, showing a
natural, seemingly effortless
talent. The phrase from the
first sketch “We’ve all got our
days” mirrors the notion that
this performance was definitely these people’s nights,
this was their time, we were
their audience and we went
away thoroughly amused.
Final Smoker of term
Tuesday 21st November...
22
What’s On.
Club
Theatre
Music
Film
Random!
Urbanite
The best in R&B and hip-hop
9pm-2am; £3-5; Soul Tree
The Crucible
Arthur Miller’s classic drama
7pm; £6; The Round Church
IndieKation
King’s; 9pm-12am; £3
Proceeds to Engineers Without
Borders
La Haine
French urban tension
8pm; £2; Christ’s Films
Cambridge Guitar Club.
8pm; St James Centre, Wulfstan
Way; £3
Friday 10/11
Shut Up and Dance!
Funk, Hip-Hop, Electro, Breaks
FREE Union Members; £3 non
Union Bar; 9pm
1, 2, 3, 4, (5)
11pm; £4; ADC Theatre
Winner of the RSC/Marlowe
Society Other Prize.
Karine Polwart
7pm; £10-£11; Junction
The Passenger
5.30pm; Arts Picturehouse
One of Antonioni’s finest, yet
unavailable for years.
Saturday 11/11
Jazz Jam Session
Emma Bar; 8pm-12am
£2 (FREE for Emma students and
instrumentalists/singers)
Frozen
7.30pm;
Fitzpatrick Hall, Queens’
Launch: Churchill Intercultural Musicology Centre
8pm; Wolfson Theatre, Churchill;
£10/£5
Cairo Central Station
3pm; Arts Picturehouse
Egyptian film which shocked
contemporary audiences
Katherine Winfrey
Earthenware inspired by folk art
Primavera
Sunday 12/11
The Sunday Service
Commando - you interpret it...
9pm-2am; £4; Club 22
Footlights Comedy Festival
UK’s hottest student comedy
talent
7.45pm. £7.50-£12; Arts Theatre
Andy Bowie Quartet
be-bop, swing and modern jazz.
8.30pm; Free; Elm Tree
Requiem For a Dream
The horror of drug addiction.
7&10pm; John’s Films
Stella Dina
Summer flowers.
New Hall
Monday 13/11
Fat Poppadaddy’s
Big night, big tunes.
9pm-2am; £3-5; Fez
Chicken Shack
7.30pm; £23.50; Corn Exchange
R*E*P*E*A*T Presents:
CaiMbo, Kutosis and The Males
£3; Cellar Bar
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
5.30pm; Arts Picturehouse
Slavoj Zizek performs psychoanalytical dissections
Belly Dancing
No experience necessary
£4 non-members.
Union Bar; 8pm
Kinki
Boogie Nights - 70s
9pm-2am; £3-5; Ballare
The Permanent Way
Hare’s mismanagement parable
7.45pm; £5; ADC Theatre
Britten Sinfonia At Lunch
1pm; £3-£6; West Road Concert
Hall
The Prestige
12:30, 3:15, 6:00, 8:45 PM; Arts
Obsessed deceitful magicians
Ray Of Light
Hot glass and mixed media.
The Ark, Abington
Rumboogie
If you have a Hawks’ card, the
queue hates you.
9pm-2am; £4; Ballare
Dogg’s Hamlet
11pm; ADC Theatre
Michael Chapman
Yorkshire blues
7pm; £10-£12; Junction
Imperial War Museum:
Christmas Under Fire
1pm; Arts Picturehouse
Men and women in war-torn
places find solace in Christmas
Thursday 09/11
Tuesday 14/11
Wednesday 15/11
- Cost of Flyers =
£300
- Street team to sort
out Q Jump = £150
- Entry price = £4
(bargain)
- Seeing a member of
the Hawks committee
enjoying himself at
the Sunday Service =
PRICELESS
For everything else
theres:
The
Sunday Service
Every week at
Club 22
£1.50 Vodka
Redbulls ALL
night long!
23
Features
Siobhan Ni Chonaill explores romance.ucam...
Oh, finding love is indeed a tricky business.
Beautiful, interesting, intelligent folk don’t just
come knocking on your door. You have to look
for them. But where? The whole ordeal is made
even more difficult for those of us who tread the
cobbled streets of Cambridge. After all, depending on your college or faculty, it is eminently
possible to find your entire social circle limited
to corduroy wearing, daffodil-loving, floppyhaired Romantics or drug-addled, depressive,
unshowering misfits. What’s a girl to do? Where
are all the ruggedly handsome, fiercely intelligent, prospective millionaires? They’ve got to
be out there somewhere. And when you finally
realise that you ain’t going to find one knocking
around the college bar, then I guess its time to
log on and embark on that minefield of internet dating. It’s all very depressing, but luckily,
there is a romance website (romance.ucam.org)
which is solely dedicated to bringing us lonely
and loveless Cambridge students together. And
it’s bloody fantastic! It probably won’t find you
any love but, by God, it’ll cheer you up in the
meantime. For those of you unfamiliar with the
concept, students submit their profiles (height,
hair colour, hobbies etc.) with silly nicknames
(‘hot lips’, ‘sex machine’ and so forth) and, if
willing, attach a nice, flattering photograph of
themselves. Then you’re all set for love and the
offers should come pouring in. Doesn’t quite
work out that way though.
The first problem of course is that since the
website is restricted to the university popula-
tion, it is very likely that we all know people
who are signed up on it. Their identities are
supposed to be masked by their nickname but
really, most of the time, that’s the biggest giveaway of all. It is remarkable how many friends
or acquaintances you can identify simply by
their ridiculous pseudonym. And then you can
have your suspicions confirmed by reading their
profile. If he calls himself ‘Wolverine’ and has
the same height, hair colour, eye colour and
hobbies as your X-Men obsessed neighbour, it’s
pretty likely to be the same guy. A good friend
of mine (who shall remain nameless for my own
safety) is signed up on ucam.romance.org and
was recently ‘approached’ online and asked out
on a date by another love-seeker. This would
all have been fine had he not, quite obviously,
been the ex-boyfriend of one of our friends. Not
only did every detail in his profile and physical
characteristics match, he even signed the email
with his real name - just in case we were left in
any lingering doubt. So, what do you do? Write
back and tell him that you know who he is. Or,
alternatively, write back, say nothing, and have
a little fun of your own (“Yes, I’d love to meet
up. How about Friday 8pm? Oh, and if you see
your ex in the meantime will you tell her she left
her jacket at my place?”).
Then, there’s another problem, although this
one pertains to all internet dating sites. The photograph. Why, oh, why would you post a picture
of yourself at your graduation? This could only
happen in Cambridge, I’m certain. Who are you
trying to impress, because the only women who
will respond to such a photograph are likely to
be either your mother or grandmother. Equally
bizarre are those awful arty photographs. You
know the ones - dimly lit, strange angles, subject
gazing pensively off into the distance. Just plain
annoying. And then there are the huge close-ups.
What’s going on there? What’s wrong with taking a picture from a respectable distance of three
feet? It’s really quite alarming to be leaning over
your computer and then, all of a sudden, to
“ Three dates. Two
weirdos and one noshow ”
see an enormous head pop-up in front of you.
It really shouldn’t be possible for someone to
count your pores from your photograph. And it
makes those massive smiles that so many members seem to be sporting all the more unsettling.
Having browsed through a great many profiles
over the past week, I’m convinced that people
who join this website are possessed of twice as
many teeth as those who are off-line. We get it
– you’re friendly. Now, please, stop it.
But, really, the biggest problem with finding
love on romance.ucam.com is that there are not
many people offering it. Aside from the lonely
nineteen-year olds who are usually looking for
friendship and someone to punt down the Cam
(bless!), the site is populated by rather less soulful types who are more keen on knowing your
vital statistics than your music tastes. Each time
I encountered another self-confessed ‘horny’
member who was seeking no-strings sex, I had
to double-check I was still on a ‘romance’ site.
There was one guy who was looking for a girl
to have a threesome with him and his girlfriend.
Hell, I thought, why date one person when
you can date two! But he did specify that the
prospective third-party would have a fit arse so
I decided I’d better swiftly move on (although,
really, if you’re looking for someone to have a
threesome, particularly in Cambridge, I don’t
think you’re in any position to be making such
demands. Beggars, as they say, cannot be choosers). Then there’s my favourite - the Casanova
who just wants a shag and describes himself as
‘owning a double bed’. And apparently that’s
enough information. So, while finding love in
the college bars and sweaty clubs of Cambridge
might be a remote prospect, I’m not convinced
that it is any easier to achieve on the internet.
According to one ex-internet dater, ‘it’s not all
it’s cracked up to be. Three dates. Two weirdos
and one no-show.’ Perhaps, the only thing we
can do is reconsider our idea of the ideal man if
we wish to entertain any hope of finding some
romance. So, if you can forget about looking
for a man with charm, intelligence, and good
looks, and instead settle for finding one with a
double bed, then I might just know the perfect
guy for you.
...and Lowri Non wonders where all the sex is. Just like the rest of us.
Where is the sex in Cambridge? An important question for some of the 500 or so students
who have just arrived in the last month. Settled
in and comfortable, they move onto the next
step - asking where to get laid. That’s certainly
what I was doing two years ago, and it’s not
easy to get an answer, so I’ll answer it for you
– anywhere. With 46% males, we almost have a
1:1 ratio so finding someone can’t be hard. And
the choices of where to take it after meeting that
special someone are endless, only beware of the
CCTV – something a Pembroke couple weren’t
too careful about last month!
But why, with 16,000 undergraduates in one
place, is sex so hard to find? Nobody will tell
you. It’s like it’s some big Masonic secret that
no-one is supposed to know about. It’s not in
the alternative prospectus, it’s not in any of the
freshers’ guides and even your parents (of the
one-year-older college kind. At least you’d hope
so.) won’t tell you. A fair few of us are having it
‘apparently’, but nobody feels able to talk about
it. Before you give it all up and decide on total
abstinence, let me give you some third year wisdom on getting it on in Cambridge: The good
news first, it may not be obvious but, there’s
more to sex in Cambridge than the STD talk in
the first week with condoms and cucumbers, or
with the ribbons, depending on which college
you’re at. In fact, at least from a girl’s point of
view, Cambridge has a great variety of men for
whatever you want. Only a lot of them are kind
of geeky, and kind of desperate and that’s not
really what you want. Well, at least it’s not what
I want.
My favourite finds have been in Cindies and
Life, perfect places to find someone similarly
inclined… to move on to somewhere a little more
private. But, if the sweaty dance floor is not for
you, don’t feel you’re missing out. Cambridge is
made for meeting people. Any club, society or
group of friends will have a formal swap at some
point. Whatever excuses people give, the main
aim of the swap is to go home with a boy/girl(s,
in some cases. Wahay.) So, choose a bottle of
wine, something nice to wear and underwear
to match.
One great new medium for coupling is
Facebook. I accept that Facebook is mainly a
network for keeping in touch; poking however I
cannot conceivably believe to be any more than
a flirt. A boyfriend may tell you not to flirt
with other men, this will, more likely than not,
include poking. I can see where he’s coming
from to some extent, my friend Sarah actually
met her fiancé on Facebook.
So, with these outlets and more all over
Cambridge, I wonder, why is sex an unspoken
word? Is it the formal surroundings, the risk of
turning the corner and bumping into your DoS
or that feeling pumped into your head that this
is a place for working NOT procrastinating and,
indeed, procreating? Yes, it’s a taboo in this
dowdy old University town. But taboos subside
- if they didn’t, pregnant women would have to
be in exile for 6 months and women wouldn’t
be allowed to show their ankles. Whatever the
reason, it’s got us in a pickle. You may be getting
some, but I bet it can always be better.
If you have a problem with something in
your subject, you mention it to a supervisor. If
you have a problem with your health, you talk
to your doctor. What do you do if you have a
problem with your sex life? Who do you ask
for advice if you can’t reach an orgasm? Who
do you mention the unmentionables to when
you think you’ve caught something but are too
embarrassed to go to the doctor?
Talking about sex was the whole point of
being 16 to me, but why should it stop now?
Surely, I haven’t learnt so much in 4 years that I
don’t need any help.Back home once, my friend
Beca turned to me in Safeway, between the
wine and the nappies, to say “I had the best sex
with Dave last night, I came three times… I’ve
never come before”. To be honest I was slightly
stunned, as were the shoppers around us. Becca,
of course, was unphased. “I was on top, it was
amazing”. Hmm? A week later I tried it for
myself - it was good.
Now, after a few years learning and a boyfriend who likes sex, talks about it and wants to
experiment with it, I have a good sex life. But,
what comes next? Two people only have so many
ideas. This is where talk with friends becomes so
important. Friends make your sex better. One
very short chat with a friend made sex the next
night ten times better just from a few tips. That’s
not all they do. Friends will hold your hand if
you have an uncomfortable appointment at the
doctor, they may even know what’s wrong with
you from their own experience. But you only get
this kind of help if you can talk about it. If you
don’t feel you want even your friends to know
about all this stuff, remember there are college
welfare and women’s officers, and the CUSU
team are there too.
Sex is important. It’s part of everyone’s lives.
Most people think about it most of the time
– let’s face it. Do it, don’t do it, think about
it or shun it, but for God’s sake, please talk
about it.
24
Features
You’ve got mail! (And possibly stalkers)
Amy Barnes registers at takemetodinner.co.uk...
Salmon and champagne anyone? Bangers and
mash? It’s all down to luck – and looks – when
you get your profile set up on takemetodinner.co.uk. The website that has taken over the
infamous ‘Oxbridge Escorts’ service has been
the hot topic of conversation this week. This
website claims itself to be an internet dating
site that is “far funkier” than every other dating site on the net, set apart from those that the
“geeks and nerds” use. It has style, class, and a
glossy, attractive outlook. It is also just another
money-making business. “The great thing about
our site is that all our members want to go on a
date, whether they want to pay for it or be paid
themselves”. In other words, this service has
rocked the student world by providing a very
practical solution to deal with the problems of
financing a university degree, gaining a huge
influx of student members with the introduction
of top-up fees. Promoting itself as a free, userfriendly, accessible way to meet people, share a
little romance over an evening meal, and to possibly get paid for it (unless you initiate the date,
in which case you are the one that must pay for
the pleasure, on top of the 10% commission the
website requires), the service provides a really
simple way to making very easy cash. But just
how easy? Is this service really just about dinner?
How far is a paid date really expected to go? I
had to find out what all the fuss was about.
“How far is
the paid date
expected to go?
”
The first thing I noticed when visiting the
website is the categories that prospective ‘dates’
are placed in. You can click on the carrot
if you’re after a vegetarian, on the attractive
blonde girl if you’re specifically after a blonde,
there’s the ‘Londoners’ for those that can only
meet in the capital, the £20-and-under for those
short of cash and lastly the option that gives the
whole concept a notoriously Oxbridge feel; the
‘Oxbridge and Ivy League’. As the website says,
“‘Oxbridge Escorts’ was unashamedly elitist
and as far as our Elite Dates go, so are we - all
our Elite Dates are exclusively the products of
Oxbridge (University of Oxford, University of
Cambridge) or of Ivy League institutions” and
can be graduates or current students. No qualms
there then. Even more interestingly, Take Me to
Dinner goes one step further by explaining that,
“[We] seek to provide a service whereby bright
and charming young people can get paid to show
off their skills”. And what skills exactly would
they be? The art of chat?
“I signed up to takemetodinner.co.uk as a
dare” a friend sheepishly admitted. “It was just
meant to be a laugh. I wrote horrendous things
on my profile and charged £100 for a date.
But I got 5 invitations that week!” This is the
kind of story I’ve been hearing all over campus.
And it’s not just men looking for women either.
Cambridge males have been setting up profiles,
some of them serious (“I’m looking for lovely
ladies who will want to talk all night, be taken
care of by a real gentleman, and can appreciate the finer things in life – I’m a romantic at
heart!”), some for charity (“I am traveling to
Thailand to live with a Northern Tribe and help
build a water-system – I’m in this to fundraise”)
and some just out of pure comedy (“Handsome,
well-spoken, witty medical student seeks elderly billionairess with a heart condition and a
penchant for extreme sports”). In fact, when I
signed up it took me almost two hours before
I could drag myself away, having so much fun
as I was trying to spot mates, get dates and witness the most hilarious lengths people will go to
outshine their peers. Yet amidst all the flirtatious
games, you cannot help but feel that there may
be something more sinister lurking beneath the
surface.
Realistically, a ‘date’ must feel the pressure
of something more expected of him/her other
than an endless stream of small-talk and forced
laughter at their dates ‘jokes’ if they’re to earn
the money they are asking for. What’s more
there is the very tricky question of money. It
would feel rude to ask for it upfront; on the
other hand the security of being paid a lump
sum before the evening has begun would be
coupled with feelings of anxiety. Should I show
my gratitude by hitching my skirt that little bit
higher? Casually brush his hand with mine as I
reach for my (paid for) wine after my (paid for)
meal? Even go and find a hotel room for which
to earn even more of this ‘easy cash’ through
sexual favours?! It seems to me there is a clear
commercial transaction, yet no clear guidelines
as to what exactly is being bought and sold
by each party. The site clearly indicates that
“We live in a “push button” society where we
expect everything to be immediately available,
and dating should be no different”. Now it may
just be my prudish sensitivity, but if ‘dating’ can
be bought at the click of a mouse, then surely
it encourages a man (or indeed a woman) to
expect to push all the right buttons on the night
in a subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) exploration
of just how far their date feels obliged to go. An
article in the Sunday Times (June 2005) was
titled, “No lesson in love with Student Escort”
and preceded to claim, “[With the escort] it’s all
wink-wink, nudge-nudge…I’m again wondering exactly what she will offer for her money”.
After an evening of pleasantries and animated
discussion, the reporter soon becomes bored.
“Little less conversation, little more action, I’m
“ I got two
connect-icons
within 20 minutes
of registering.
”
thinking. So I pluck up the courage to float in the
question of any “extras”. She splutters into her
Martini and with horror says: “This is a dinner
date and that’s it!””. This undercover reporter
certainly reiterates what must be on every client’s
mind – “I’ve paid a lot of money for this; now
prove you’re worth it!” However, Nick Dekker,
the Oxford Classics student who set up takemetodinner.co.uk, contests the implicit messages
that the site propels, claiming “It’s for dinner
dates only and anyone who tries to use it to buy
or sell sex will be banned”, it is hard to deny
that some clients’ profiles positively reek of the
prospect of possible sex to their dates. A male
commented, “I dress well and take good care of
my body, and I love older ladies. I promise not
to disappoint!” Another female invitingly offers,
“An evening full of fun and flirting underscored by intriguing conversation and sporadic
meaningful glances”. It’s a Catch-22 situation.
On the one hand, the subtle suggestive hint is
intriguing, enticing, ensnaring, and ensuring of
walking away with a nice fat cash-filled envelope
at the end of an evening. On the other hand,
there are always the dangers of sexually aroused
and frustrated clients, misunderstandings that
could lead to aggression, and the possibility of
attack, rape, abuse or even murder. Which ain’t
worth any amount of money. It could also be just
what it says on the tin. An easy and safe way to
make money by making a few lonely businessmen/women feel happier, as long as you take
the necessary precautions. A kind of partakeat-your-own-risk system. Tell someone where
you’re going. Arrange for someone to keep an
eye on you or call you halfway through. Don’t
go down any dark alleys, that kind of thing. I’m
not going to lie to you – I have not experienced
a Take Me to Dinner Date. I have not witnessed
anyone asking me for ‘favours’. I do not believe
this is the most ethical way of making money.
Yet I have instinctively put up the sexiest picture
I could find of myself on the website. I have over
estimated my looks on my profile. I have upped
my price when I got two connect-icons within
20 minutes of registering. Because let’s face it;
sex sells. Big time.
25
Features
Caroline Walton and Elly Shepherd talk abstinence, faith and ask CICCU questions.
CW: So - Sex outside of
marriage?
CICCU: The heart of
the issue is what the God
who made the universe
wants and what his stance
is. As Christians we believe
that God has spoken to us
through the Bible and that
in the Bible he has revealed
what is best for us. He clearly
tells any form of sexual relationship outside heterosexual
marriage is wrong. It is not
wrong because it breaks a
religious rule. Rather, it is
wrong because it is rejecting
our Creator and saying that
we know best. The Bible has a
high view of sex but says it is
something precious and to be
enjoyed within marriage.
CW: Contraception?
CICCU: The official
“ The Bible
is clear that
any form of
homosexual
relationship
is sinful
”
Roman Catholic view – that
using contraception is sinful – is unjustified biblically.
Contraception is probably a
neutral thing but in so far
as it encourages extra-marital sex it is unhelpful. There
may be perfectly legitimate
reasons why a married couple
may want to use contraception although it should also
be noted that the Bible often
links sex with having children
– although not exclusively. It is
a question of balance. Other
tricky issues arise where the
contraception is abortive and
is therefore murder.
CW: What is your policy
on sex education in schools?
CICCU: Because we believe
God’s law on all matters is for
our good, it follows that absti-
nence is more in line with his
revealed will. Therefore abstinence outside marriage has
intrinsic worth. However, in
an atheistic country teaching
on abstinence will inevitably
be skewed. It will be presented as one option among many.
Christian morals only achieve
their full worth if someone is
a Christian – someone who
has submitted to Jesus as
Lord. This is fundamental to
the Bible’s teaching – that we
become a Christian to obey
God’s law. We don’t become a
Christian by obeying it.
CW: What about gay marriage?
CICCU: The Bible teaches
that marriage is only between
a man and a woman and that
marriage is the only context
for sexual relationships. For
someone of homosexual orientation, total abstinence
would therefore be required.
Further, the bible is clear
that any form of homosexual
relationship is sinful – again
because it is saying we know
better than our Creator. We
shouldn’t single out practicing homosexual sex as worse
than any other sin. The Bible
is clear that even lusting after
another person is a sexual sin.
God dislikes all sin equally
because he is perfect. To anyone who says homosexuality
is OK nowadays, God retorts
in the Bible
“I the Lord do not change”
and “Jesus Christ is the same
yesterday and today and forever”. God’s moral standards
do not change.
CW: What information
would you give to freshers
on matters such as sexual
health?
CICCU: Abstinence is a
good thing but the concept of
only having sex within marriage only really makes sense
within the context of knowing and having been saved
by God. The true motivation
for abstinence is not sexual
health but a desire to please
God. So, as a CICCU we
don’t advise freshers on individual moral issues. Rather,
we would focus on the heart
of our problem – a sinful,
rebellious nature ignores God
every day and says we can
take care of our own lives.
We can’t be forgiven by God
by doing good things or ‘good
living’ – mainly because we
are so wrapped up in our
own sin that we can’t break
free from it (the Bible says
we are slaves to sin). For
this reason we need a saviour,
Jesus Christ, who can give us
new hearts so that our natural instinct is changed and
“ God’s
moral
standards do
not change
”
we want to please God. We
are ‘born again’. He did this
by dying on the cross, taking the punishment from God
we deserve and allowing us
to be called God’s children.
Only as God’s children does
it make sense to say “You
are not your own, you were
bought at a price. Therefore
honour God with your body.”
(1 Corinthians 6v20)
CW: how does CICCU
regard drinking societies?
CICCU: It’s not the drinking society that is the problem
but the drunkenness which so
often ensues. We find it distressing how little responsibility people take for things that
they do when drunk. It’s quite
ironic that people who love
to make their own choices in
life give themselves up to a
state of being where they have
no control over themselves.
This is usually expressed in
doing things God has said we
should not do and so getting
drunk just highlights how
tied to sin we are. However,
CICCU doesn’t look at drinking societies and think that
the people any worse than
ourselves. People in CICCU,
as much as any other student,
deserve to go to hell since we
rebel against God, try to live
our own way and don’t live
up to his perfect standards.
Because of this, Jesus came to
die for us, to rescue from the
punishment of sin and to give
us new life.
CW: Is there anything else
you’d like to say?
CICCU: As you will have
seen, as Christians, we take
quite a different stance on the
above issues compared to many
other students. However, ours
is the view expressed in the
bible and so we must ask what
the current sexual ‘state’ of
the world, the various sexual
perversions we are exposed to
daily and the broken relationships which result all point
to. We believe they point to
a more fundamental problem
summed up by the following
Bible passage.
“For although they knew
God, they neither glorified
him as God nor gave thanks
to him, but their thinking
became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Although they claimed to be
wise, they became fools and
exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images
made to look like mortal man
and birds and animals and
reptiles. Therefore God gave
them over in the sinful desires
“ Sexual
relationships
outside of
heterosexual
marriage are
wrong
”
of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their
bodies with one another. They
exchanged the truth of God
for a lie, and worshipped and
served created things rather
than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Roman
1 v 21-25)
In short, we all know there
is a God and that his way is
the right way. Still we chose
to go our own way and we
are paying for that in the
present as God allows us to
carry through with our sinful
desires. The responsibility is
ours because we have rejected
God and the consequences
are terrible because we have
exchanged God’s truth for a
lie.
A
s an atheist I understand that I don’t have
very much insight
into what it means to be a
Christian. I have a lot of respect
for religions, both that of my
birth (Catholicism) and of other
faiths I come across. For me, a
Christian friend put it best: ‘In
my understanding, a Christian
life should be about love. Love
is fundamental. Christianity
should not be about shouting
people down, upsetting other
religions and persecuting people. Nevertheless do not mock
faith. Do not mock belief in
God. Faith, spirituality and
love that most religions teach
are important. In a practical
sense the pure concept of a
higher being, the concept of
God, can actually put a perspective and focus on life.’
I respect faith. However, I
find the concept of characterising homosexual acts as sinful
offensive. In all honesty it makes
me sick. I find the persecution of
women who’ve had abortions,
and of the vocally pro-choice
despicable. I think any painting
of another person’s sexuality
as in any way wrong is, to me,
abhorrent. This has nothing to
do with love, and, in my opinion, not a whole lot to do with
Christianity. In my own family
there are children alienated by
their parents because they’ve
rejected ‘the faith’.
Again and again I’ve heard
the argument ‘well that’s what
it says in the Bible’. It says lots
of things in the Bible. It says
little ‘clearly’. Even the most
fundamental Christian picks
and chooses. There are rules
in Leviticus about what kinds
of clothes you can wear, so
why get het up about sex and
reproduction? Punishing other
people’s sexuality leads to a
horrible cycle of alienation and
guilt.
There is little that is as personal as a person’s sexuality. In
my view, the most loving thing
to do is let people get on with
their lives.
Elly Shepherd
26
Travel
Camels and cultural unity on Mount Sinai
Alia Azmi learns a little about religion and a lot about effort
To set the scene: 3 terribly unfit students
decide that a painful day of camel-trekking is
not enough, oh no; it has to be followed by an
all night climb up Mount Sinai, situated in the
Sinai peninsula, Egypt. This triangular peninsula, famed for Moses’ burning bush and the
10 commandments, is a popular destination
for tourists seeking its historical sites and
fabulous beaches which provide a haven for
divers, hippies and potheads.
After failing to get any sleep before our
mountain trek, we were dropped off at the
foot of Mount Sinai at midnight, the witching hour. Luckily, - or not, depending on the
way you see it, the thick blackness surrounding us meant we couldn’t actually see how
high the mountain was. And so we began
walking, torch in hand, up the dim passage
ahead of us, which fell away at each side to
differing degrees of a most rocky end. To be
fair, they might not have resulted in death,
merely paralysis; but we decided to stay well
in the centre of the narrow passage at any rate.
However, our cunning plan was thwarted by
swarms of practically invisible camels going
up and down the path carrying lazy (unlike
our fine, fit selves!) would-be climbers up the
mountain.
Half an hour down the line, we were
exhausted, cursing ourselves, and looking
back to that golden age when women “had
the headache” from anything more strenuous
than a short walk in the park, and out came
the smelling salts and burnt feathers. They
had the right idea… whereas we, we were
stuck clambering our way up a never-ending mountain, constantly checking for camels
before and behind us, dragging our wilting
bodies up and up, further and further…
Looking back now, I still can’t believe we
made it up to the top. The combination of the
path and 750 steps took us 4 draining hours
in total, and, well, I would be lying if I said
I thought it was worth it, but watching the
spectacular sunrise from the top was pretty
incredible.
Closely situated at the top of the mountain
is a mosque and a church; Muslims believe
Moses received the 10 commandments at the
site of the mosque, while Christians believe
it was at the site of the church, 10 steps away.
But in any case, there was a great feeling of
unity in our shared heritage as we recalled
the story of the burning bush and the moment
when God spoke to Moses.
We then began the descent along a different
path leading onto the Steps of Repentance,
which my guidebook tells me were ‘ hewn by
a penitent monk. The 3750 steps make a much
steeper ascent from the monastry, which is
hell on the leg muscles. Some of the steps are
a metre high.’ Sorry brother monk, but steps
over a metre high are not steps in my book.
Still, there were comic diversions and things
to be learnt on the way; the man who would
strike poses reminiscent of Gilderoy Lockhart
every few steps to have his picture taken; the
nuns so old they looked like ancient relics
themselves, but could still give us a run for our
money down the mountain; the police officer
who kept appearing like an angel every time
we were floundering and needed someone to
carry our bags (my friend actually really did
think he was an angel); the toilet that nearly
made me cry… I could go on.
We eventually made it down, safe and
sound, at which point I gave up on life, sought
refuge on a friendly looking rock and retired
under my big grey coat in search of a restoring nap.
Never again, we concluded. Mountains are
pretty enough, but really, they should be seen
and not climbed. Ever.
27
Travel
Into Tibet, in great discomfort
Tom de Fonblanque bribes his way to Lhasa very, very slowly
The bus to Tibet left from Yecheng, a dusty
Muslim city on the fringes of the Taklamakan
Desert in Western China. A share-taxi dropped
us in the middle of town; we walked, as inconspicuously as possible, past police stations and
army barracks to the bus station, several kilometres away. We were not at all inconspicuous. When we arrived, we were hustled into
a back room with drawn curtains. We sat on
the floor for several hours; we were brought
food; we weren’t allowed to leave. At dusk, we
watched the bus to Tibet pulling away with
our luggage on the roof. Half an hour later, we
were hurried into a taxi, which drove quickly
through a police checkpoint and pulled up
next to the bus at a lay-by, deep in the desert.
We got onto the bus; we drove on.
The precautions were melodramatic, but
necessary; it’s illegal for foreigners to travel
along the Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, a 2500km
unpaved road linking the Silk Road city of
Kashgar with Lhasa. So we’d bribed the bus
company to take us; and they wanted to bribe
as few policemen on our behalf as possible.
Felix and I settled into our bunks – sheets of
plywood slung across the backs of two aisles
at head height (this was a ‘sleeper’ bus) – and
tried to find a way to suppress the vibrations from the road, which made it difficult
to see. Suspended ten feet behind the rear
axle, though, this proved impossible, and we
had only the driver’s insatiable appetite for
Chinese techno to console us, as we climbed
hairpins through the night.
The Taklamakan is at sea level. By morning we were at 4000m, and driving through
Aksai Chin, a border territory disputed with
India (and the reason we weren’t allowed to
be there). The scenery was starkly beautiful: the light strong, the sky an intense blue,
the low sides of the flat valleys a curious
oxidised red, dusted with pale green grazing. In a truckstop unknown to Hungarian
cartography (the Hungarians have an unlikely
monopoly on maps of the region; there are
no towns), Felix breakfasted on watermelon.
By lunch, he was in gastric turmoil. Mocked
by the owners of a restaurant when he asked
for the toilet, he took a malicious shit in their
generator hut, and crawled back to the bus.
That night, we climbed to a 5400m pass in a
spectacular lightning storm, and everybody
got altitude sickness. The Chinese turned blue,
I suppressed waves of nausea. Felix looked
semi-conscious. In this state we crossed out of
Aksai Chin and into Tibet.
We woke up in the strange, Potemkin-town
of Rutok (a fig leaf for the local military base
– it was built, but no one could be induced to
live there except policemen), where Felix and
I hid under our stinking blankets to avoid
attention. We drove on to Pang-Gong Tso,
a lake shaped like a crooked finger, 20km
wide but 120km long, protruding west into
Ladakh and pointing accusingly at Pakistan.
A sign claims that the local detachment of the
Chinese navy is the ‘highest in the world’ – but
Hungarian cartography asserts that the Indian
end of the lake is 14m higher, so this may not
be true. From here it’s only 100km to Ali, the
main staging post on the way to Lhasa, and
I assumed the road would improve. It will,
but only when it’s built; at the moment it’s in
100m sections punctuated by earth walls and
deep trenches. There’s no temporary road.
About 18 hours later, we arrived in Ali, and
stopped shaking.
After 50 hours passing only one settlement
larger than a truckstop, Ali comes as a surprise. New-built as an administrative capital
and army base from the late 1950s, it has fivestory buildings, traffic lights, taxis, and neon
signs. How any of these arrived in Ali, roughly
half-way between the nearest cities of Yecheng
(1000km) and Lhasa (1500km) is unclear.
One perverse effect of Ali’s isolation is that
everything there is very expensive. A second
is that it’s a dump. A third is that it’s very difficult to leave. To compound this, we found
that we’d arrived in the rainy season, and the
Lhasa road had been washed away in several
places. Nothing was getting through in less
than five days, and this made many drivers
unwilling to try. There was no traffic to hitch
with. After four days trying to combine soliciting transport from strangers with keeping a
low profile, we managed to buy tickets for the
weekly bus, a battered beast raised several feet
above the ground on huge shredded tyres.
Our fellow-travellers on the Lhasa bus
included a detachment of teenage soldiers
and their commander, ‘the colonel’, an officer
so neatly pressed and rigid that he lived
in constant danger of self-parody. He could
be perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal,
according to the time of day; but he could not
bend. ‘Note’, I wrote in my diary: ‘we never
see him eat, drink or defecate’. We spent the
first day heading east along the Upper Indus,
which will go on to irrigate much of Pakistan
but here is only about 30 feet wide. At points
the young river had taken liberties with the
road, as we’d been warned, and we had to ford
several stretches. Gunning through one deeply
flooded section we passed a Landcruiser listing half-submerged into the stream, and felt
better about having taken the bus. Light and
colour were as intense here as they had been in
Aksai Chin, but the snow peaks on the horizon and the sediment-yellow river itself added
drama to the landscape. I stuck my head out of
the window into the clear, strong light of the
afternoon, and grinned inanely at the scenery
for several hours. Then we arrived in the dire
Chinese town of Napuk – two intersecting
streets of white tiles and blue glass fringed by
a water-line of rubbish and semi-feral dogs
– and it began to rain.
The next day was spent crossing the Chang
Tang plateau, the world’s largest nature
reserve, which our fellow-travellers rubbished
liberally from their windows. At about midnight, we got stuck in a soft earth bank by
the side of the road. Everyone got off, wearily,
and we pushed the bus free. The bus drove
away. At first, nobody seemed very concerned.
But then its tail lights disappeared, and we
realised it wasn’t stopping. We waited for it
to come back. It didn’t. It became clear that
we’d been marooned at 4500m in the middle
of the night, about 100km from settlement. It
began to rain. Little knots of people tried to
make fires from the tufts of grass that covered
the ground, but there was no proper fuel to
burn. People milled around. Felix and I looked
to the colonel for leadership; but it was his
soldiers, delirious with responsibility, who
took command. They stripped down to the
waist, pressed their jackets on us, ran round
in circles, and shouted orders at each other.
Eventually, they cajoled the passengers down
the road in the direction of the bus’s escape.
It wasn’t much above freezing, so we tried
to return our jackets, but they refused: ‘I am
sorry. Bus no come. I am so angry. Chinese
army, we fear no cold. Best wishes to your
parents. Welcome to Tibet.’ Three hours later,
we found the bus; it had got stuck in another
soft earth bank. There were harsh words with
the driver. Several hours later, a police jeep
arrived to take someone to hospital.
Much of the next two days was spent getting stuck and getting free again. Pulling a
bus at 4500m is hard work, so the passengers bonded (though the colonel continued to
flinch at the sight of Felix and I in the PLA
jackets we had kept). Ninety-eight hours after
leaving Ali, we reached the Lhasa valley, and
drove along the Brahmaputra in a spectacular
dawn. We reached Lhasa in time to watch
the sun set behind the Chakpo-Ri – a steep
hillock opposite the Potala – picking out in
silhouette the radio mast which had replaced
the national Medical College in the Cultural
Revolution.
Yecheng to Lhasa had taken ten days. You
can fly to Lhasa from Beijing in five hours; a
bus along the legal road from Xining takes
about 30; and the new railway link means
you can reach Lhasa from Beijing in 50 hours
on a train with special oxygen masks. The
Xinjiang-Tibet Highway, then, is not an efficient way of getting to Tibet; but it is spectacular, it’s little done, and it’s enticingly
illicit. There can’t be many more punishing
or memorable bus journeys in the world. Just
don’t try it if you get car sick.
28
Fashion
The Printed
forest
Prints this season are heavy and bold. The only way to manage them is to put them all together. Leopard with tartan
with florals with feathers- there is no blending in. No need
to alarm though, the look can be quite nymphette, as Lowri
shows us...
Photographs Dan Marmot, Styled by Bea Wilford and Lauren
Smith.
Right: Jacket, £65 at MissSelfridge, Top £30 French Connection.
Below: Hat £55 Boudoir Femme, Coat £75 Miss Selfridge.
Above: Dress £70 French Connection, Cardigan £32 Miss Selfridge
Above Right: Dress £28 Miss Selfridge Chiffon Top (beneath) £30
Miss Selfridge. Tights and boots stylist’s own.
now offers a 10% student discount
T
ights: a very wintry issue, and one
which I have been thinking about
a great deal recently, or ever since
the unprecedented wave of icy cold
swept over Cambridge last week.
Tights are absolutely necessary because,
as most of us are aware, wearing trousers
every day is dull and wrong.
Tights right now must be either opaque
or woollen. Bright neon colours and leggings are horridly last winter. Colours still
look good, but the difference this season is
that they must complement the outfit, and
be muted: none of the riotous mismatching
that looked so good a year ago.
Woollen tights are delicious on several
counts. Firstly they are one of those precious fashion items that get better as they
get dowdier. Marl grey tights are good,
but thick ribbed and patterned sludge coloured woollen tights are fabulous. They are
warm, and they remind one of being very
little. They look good with almost every-
thing, toning down a too severe pencil or
updating a too archaic vintage dress. Like
all great garments, they are also very hard to
find. The best are to be found in the bins of
charity shops or the children’s section of department stores (age 13 upwards is usually
alright). They are also very hard to ladder.
Opaque tights are a perfect respite once
your wardrobe has a healthy stock of ribbed
woollens. Notoriously difficult to wear, the
smaller the denier the better. A daring attitude is required before the thinnest tights
are worn, but once an entire evening has
been spent in them without a snag, true
adulthood has been achieved.
One last word for leggings, footless they
are intolerable, with a stirrup to keep them
around the foot (worn outside the shoe)
they are heavenly. BW
29
Fashion
A
Ripping Yarn
Lauren Smith on the sweater-dress
F
All things woolly are
“
back with a vengeance
this winter
”
or once, the must have of must-have
items this season, the item that is declared a classic, a wardrobe staple, is one
that would incite rabid lust in your reliable Aunt Maureen as much as it would a
Louboutin-clad fashionista. I am of course talking
about the sweater-dress, the sartorial equivalent of
thermal underwear in it’s sheer beauty and practicality. Not only is it a combination of two of my favourite things- novelty knitwear (a reliable inhabitant of my Christmas stocking since nappy-hood),
and of course the holy grail of style for lazy girls
worldwide- the dress, it also possesses the Merlinesque ability to magic away the winter cold, and
smother your torso in a flattering, lengthening
sheath of cosy wool. Now many of you may have
unfortunate memories of knitwear- I am probably
alone in my shameful love of badly made festive
jumpers, but I know I am certainly not in my hatred of itchyness; not all of us can afford cashmere,
but do we deserve to be abused with a rash that
makes you look flea-infested?
All things woolly are back with a vengeance this
winter, as designers indulged their Anglomania and
resurrected Arran, Cable and Fair-Isle knits for all
to see - Dolce and Gabbana’s show in particular
some sort of amusing Ski-Barbie pastiche - woolly
pom-pom boots anyone? Thought not.
W
hilst layering is just too much
effort (and a grungy mess), the
sweater-dress remains a foolproof item that comes in a variety of styles that clash rather nicely
with stubbornly grey days. My personal favourites
are the pieces that are like a woollen extension of
the dress’s summery self; New Look does a roundnecked wool shift in black or cream, with a pearlencrusted neckline and belt- deceptively elegant
and expensive-looking, but it costs £28. There are
also about a million different copies of an Alberta
Ferretti baby-doll long-sleeved jumper knocking
about the high street, but it’s the finer knits and the
brasher colours that will really set off that black
tights and ankle-boot combo. If this is all too pretty and whimsical for you, deep V-neck oversized
jumpers are a delightfully boyish and baggy alternative, and the same effect can be achieved with
a large men’s jumper from a charity shop and a
skinny belt. For me, the main allure of the sweater
dress is its versatility- it will keep you cosy in the
day, but as the nights draw in fast, why bother
changing when you can just cinch in the waist, slip
on some heels and pop out into the frosty night?
Winter may be here, but with the sweater-dress
you can play a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
30
Food and Drink
Jakob Ingvorsen
Great Grub at Galleria
Helen Undy enjoys a winter warmer by the Cam
Galleria is one of those restaurants that I’d heard of, and
was pretty sure was supposed
to be good, but didn’t actually know anyone who’d been
there. In fact I think I’d only
ever seem it from a punt... so
I wasn’t even sure it was a restaurant, not just a collection
of tables along the river bank.
Anyway, my trip to Galleria
set aside any such worries,
proving that it is in fact a restaurant, and a very good one
at that.
Whenever anyone talks
about Galleria, it always
seems to be about how good
the view is of the river, as it has
a beautiful balcony where you
can sit and watch the punts go
by. However, we went to Galleria on a very cold night last
week, when no-one in their
right mind would want to
eat a meal sat outside watching the odd, extremely drunk
person bump repeatedly into
the river bank. What people
don’t seem to mention about
Galleria (maybe because everyone always sits outside so
they never actually see it...)
is that the restaurant itself is
beautiful. Aside from the usual meaningless ‘abstract’ restaurant art entitled ‘chocolate
orange’, the décor was the nicest of any of the restaurants I
have reviewed this term; light
and airy with massive curved
windows along the front of
Due to broken camera, this is not Galleria’s, but a generic sticky
toffee pudding, in case you can’t imagine what one looks like.
the building and a raised balcony, giving a good view of
the whole restaurant, perfect
for nosy people like me.
The menu at Galleria is a
varied collection of French,
Italian and oriental influences,
as most menus seem to be these
days, but the dishes were imaginative and there was plenty to
choose from. To start we went
for split pea soup (£3.95) and
a pan fried tiger prawn salad
with spring onion, carrot and
pak (£6.95). The soup, while
affordable, was pretty unexciting; it tasted just like puréed
split peas, so was pretty bland.
However, the tiger prawn salad was much better, although
the price does reflect this. The
prawns were very big, served
with good fresh greens and a
hot chilli dressing that gave it
a real kick and added a nice
wintry dimension to what
would, otherwise, have been
a fairly summery dish. For
mains I opted for Thai-style
poached monkfish fillets with
lemongrass, sweet chilli and
coconut cream, tiger prawns,
leeks and button mushrooms
served with basmati rice
(£11.95). The monkfish was
delicious, perfectly cooked,
and went beautifully with the
flavours of the sauce, which
was actually quite hot, so
watch out if you don’t like
spicy food! Generally, this was
a great dish, the flavours were
well chosen and the portion
was generous. My lovely dinner date for the evening chose
the roasted duck breast with
braised chestnuts, plum sauce
and sweet potatoes (£14.95),
which was also excellent. The
portion of duck was very generous, and nicely cooked, and
the sweet potatoes were particularly delicious. For desert
we shared a sticky toffee pudding with toffee sauce, and a
winter berry parfait with fruit
coulis and whipped cream
(£4.95 each). Although fairly
expensive, the deserts were
both great. I tried the sticky
toffee pudding in The Vaults
a week or two ago, and while
that was good, this one could
teach it a thing or two. It was
perfectly dense without being
too heavy, and was covered in
a beautiful runny toffee sauce
that saturated the sponge (my
mouth’s watering thinking
about it!) The parfait was also
very yummy, nice and light
and refreshing, so the perfect
end to a big meal.
To drink we opted for a
glass of Embleme d’Argent
Chardonnay (£3.50 glass,
£12.50 bottle) and a glass of
Pinot Grigio di Vento (£3.95
glass, £13.95 bottle), both of
which were good. As anyone
who reads this section regularly will know, I’m really no
wine buff, but I’ll do my best!
The Chardonnay was dry and
light on the palette, and quite
zesty and refreshing. The Pinot Grigio, my favourite of
the two, was of a gentle medium weight with a refreshing
taste and citrusy smell, a nice
easy-drinking wine.
Galleria isn’t a cheap restaurant (our three-course meal
came to £45 for two, with just
one glass of wine each), but
there’s no corners cut in the
food, the service, or the décor
– even the toilets were pretty
swish! So don’t just wait until you can sit outside in the
summer, I’d recommend Galleria for a romantic date on a
blustery winter’s evening, or
dinner with the parents, or an
end of term celebration with
friends, or any other excuse
really!
Galleria
Bridge Street
(0870) 1413516
This week...Chestnuts
You can tell that the festive
season is drawing near when
chestnuts start appearing on the
market, so embrace the chilly
weather! Roast some chestnuts and serve them up to your
friends in newspaper cones, then
go for a long wintry walk along
the backs, singing Christmas
carols and rolling around in the
snow... or alternatively eat them
as a healthy snack while you’re
working – if your room is anything like mine it’ll feel about as
cold as rolling in the snow anyway.
Chestnuts are higher in carbs
and lower in fat and protein
than other nuts, so they’re a
good choice for anyone on a
low-fat diet. They also contain
fibre, potassium, iron, zinc and
manganese.
After picking, chestnuts slowly
dry out and shrivel up. Choose
nuts that are heavy for their size
with smooth, shiny shells, and
give them a squeeze to check that
they’re plump and full inside.
‘Is that a carrot in your pocket, or are you just
pleased to see me?’
Stewart Petty sacrifices his balls for The Cambridge Student
If by any remote chance a
girl poses this question to a
guy – and she would have to
be pretty weird - the answer
could actually be ‘both’. Believe it or not, eating carrots is supposed to make us
horny. In antiquity, Middle
Eastern royals would call
upon the humble phallic
root-vegetable to facilitate
seduction. I find this concept difficult to grasp. However, the thought of anything
turning me on right now is
proving to be rather evasive
as all I can hear is my roomy,
retching after an evening of
drinking society debauchery.
I apologize for that anaphrodisiac image.
In past centuries, food
symbolism was more potent
than today. Nourishment was
difficult to achieve and this
led to lower fertility rates and
loss of libido. Consequently,
our frigid forefathers started
to believe that any food possessing a vague similarity to
their genitals offered aphrodisiac qualities. Produce that
resembled semen or seed was
Food and sex? Related? Don’t be ridiculous...
approached with the same
sexual optimism. Naturally,
oysters, eggs and snails were
all on the menu. The latter demonstrates that those
frisky French may be right
about something for once.
The properties of the
chilli pepper are believed
to simulate some aspects of
sex such as inducing an increased heart rate and sweating. What’s more, if you consume many of the fiery pods,
you will discover that your
genitals become irritated
and a burning sensation occurs in your urinary tract. I
must inform you that taking
a shortcut to these masochistic sensualities is not advisable. That’s right, no touching
yourselves in inappropriate
places after preparing that
chilli con carne. Listen to a
man who knows; my balls
became martyrs for the sake
of this article.
On the subject of beverages, there can be nothing
better than a glass or two of
wine to arouse the senses.
Image by Chiara Perano
Or three. Ok, maybe four.
However, try not to become
the victim of gratuitous pennying at formal hall if you
intend to get your groove on
after dinner. As I’m sure we
can all appreciate, too much
of the devil’s drink can result
in a sleepy stupor rather than
a lascivious libido. As for us
blokes, too much wine may
leave us with a monumental
case of Mr. Floppy, as Jip
from the film ‘Human Traffic’ so aptly phrases it. And
lads…whoever said ‘I don’t
give a fig’ – ignore them.
Ladies love the sight of their
beau ripping open a sticky
sack of seeds and devouring it. Ok girls, so maybe my
description didn’t get your
juices flowing. However, the
fig seeds are meant to symbolise the female sex organs.
Next time you fancy getting
down and dirty, a salubrious
spread of carrots, snails, oysters and the occasional fig is
certainly le plat du jour. Remember to season with chilli
pepper for that essential hot
flush.
Whilst these foods may
truly possess aphrodisiac
powers and induce insatiable sexual appetite in the
consumer, one theory is that
they only appear to work
because we believe that they
do. Anyway, enough of that.
To preserve the dignity of
this article, if I say that a
carrot is an aphrodisiac then
it bloody well is. Besides,
rabbits eat them…and you
know what people say about
them. Go on. Get munching.
Oven roasted chestnuts
Preheat the oven to 225 degrees
C
Wash the chestnuts and, with a
sharp knife, cut an X into one
side of each to allow the steam to
escape – if you don’t do this, you
will end up with hot chestnut
goo exploding all over the inside
of your oven.
Arrange the chestnuts on a baking sheet or shallow pan, with
the cut sides facing up, and pop
them in the oven.
Roast for 15-20mins, or until the
chestnuts are tender and easy to
peel.
Peel as soon as they are cool
enough to do so (hotter ones
peel easier), or alternatively serve
them as they are and get your
friends to peel their own – but be
sure to remove the inner skins as
well as the shells.
Try eating sprinkled with a little
salt.
31
Double Victory for Oxford
Sport
Orienteering
Yvonne Ang
I was in a meadow, surrounded by cows and nettle patches. I
could see the cup, peeking enticingly out from behind the bush,
which would have the alphabets
I needed to collect to continue
on to the next point on the map.
Only one problem- between my
target and I was a river. I wasn’t
dreaming, I was orienteering. A
few Sundays ago, I went for IntrO, the Cambridge University
Orienteering Club’s first session
of the year. Having never heard
of orienteering till a couple of
weeks before, and being blessed
with a sense of direction that gets
me lost even in the town centre,
I had no idea what was in store.
Or whether they’d ever find my
body.
Thankfully, after a quick lesson on compass reading and map
interpretation- “blue is water, not
advisable to swim across!”- I was
sent out with Anya, who started
orienteering with her parents
almost 15 years ago. We set off
on the short course at Coe Fen,
2.7km long, with 15 cups with
letters to be found and recorded.
Before long, I got my first taste
of the best part of orienteeringfinding a cup checkpoint! You
wouldn’t think something that
costs £1 for 25 at Sainsbury’s
would be such a big deal, but the
sense of accomplishment was exhilarating. I felt like an intrepid
explorer searching for treasure,
but better- unlike Indiana Jones
I was safe in the knowledge that
Anya was there to right my oftupside-down map. The club attends events all over England,
including a weeklong training
camp in the Lake District, and
that they even went to Sweden
for their last Varsity Match to
orienteer in the snow. The variety of the sport really struck me,
along with how it could be enjoyed by people from such a diverse range of expertise levels.
Forty-five minutes later, we
raced up to the wooden hut
where the course had begun. I
couldn’t believe we’d been jogging for so long; the great company and the thrill of hunting
down markers made the time
pass quickly. Wrong turns and
all, it was a hugely satisfying afternoon.
Cambridge athletes fall behind in the Freshers’ Varsity Match
On Sunday November 5, Oxford kicked off the Inter-Varsity
Athletics season with a vehement
victory at Cambridge’s Wilberforce Road, but it wasn’t all bad
news for the Light Blues.
Oxford’s Johnson opened the
day with an impressive performance in the men’s hammer throw,
and he later went on to win the
discus and shot-put events, his
best shot-put throw was in excess
of 18m .
Away from the throws the
men’s pole vault event was a wellfought battle between Bates and
Henshaw - both of Cambridge
- who disposed of their Oxford
counterparts shortly after starting. In the end they both achieved
a height of 3.10m, but Bates won
on count back. Cambridge also
dominated the men’s long jump
competition. Ayo Adeyemi won
the event with a jump just over
6m, though this was his third
jump after two no-jumps, and
Alex Bates made another strong
appearance as a guest for Cambridge with a jump of just under
6m. As Oxford veteran Sean
Gourley is no longer eligible for
Varsity selection and Cambridge’s
best jumper is only in his second
year this certainly bodes well for
this year’s main Varsity Match.
James Kelly – one of the new
stars of the cross-country scene
– had an easy first two laps in the
men’s 1500m but still managed
an easy victory. Kelly’s later dominance of the 3k would silence any
Oxford claims to the contrary.
Kelly is clearly a very gifted runner, despite his own claims that he
is presently unfit. He’s definitely
one to watch at the upcoming
Cross-Country Varsity Match,
and then later in the year at the
Athletics Varsity Match, where
he will be joined by – amongst
others – former rival and present
college-mate Will George. The
110m hurdles proved a very
close race. Cambridge’s Andreas
Petsas was neck-and-neck with
his Oxford counterpart from the
very start and only lost out due
to an unfortunate collision with
the final hurdle. He was followed
closely by teammate Tom Stoker,
but this still meant that Oxford
gained another point advantage.
The men’s 100m brought a
clear Oxford win. The men’s
800m was very tight towards
the finish. Both Cambridge men
stuck close behind the Oxford
runners with Dobin holding onto
second for the first lap, but towards the end of the second lap
Oxford began to pull away. In
the men’s 4*400m relay, however, Cambridge were dominant
from early on. Pole-vaulter Tim
Henshaw led the light Blue scoring team from the first leg, and a
slow changeover was not enough
for Oxford to get back. In the
women’s match Steele, formerly
of Cambridge, won the hammer
event with a throw of just over
29m. At the other end of the track
Sarah Williams dominated the
women’s pole vault. In women’s
long jump Murphy’s impressive
jump of 5.24m for Oxford took
the victory from Sarah Williams,
who had come straight from the
pole vault to jump just under
5m. Erica Bodman won the high
jump for the Light Blues in her
first competition against Oxford.
This event was a clear victory for
the Cambridge women.
Lucy Spray represented Cambridge in the women’s 400m
hurdles. She stuck closely behind
Oxford’s hurdler and drove on
Sarah Williams dominates the pole vault
in the home straight to finish not
far short of victory despite only
recently returning from injury.
As in the men’s race, the 100m
brought Oxford a clear victory
in the women’s, but in the 800m
both Cambridge athletes were
off to a storming start, pulling
away from the Oxford girls by
the end of the first bend. They
led the whole way by a considerable distance. But Oxford continued to dominate the track in the
women’s 400m in the 4*400m
relay Oxford took an early lead
that Cambridge failed to recover
from.
Oxford may have won both
the men’s and women’s competitions at the Freshers’ Varsity
Match, but with the loss of some
of their major athletes, and the
retention of a lot of strong Cambridge competitors, the other two
Inter-Varsity athletics matches
look like they should be close,
but with Cambridge as favourites to take home the trophies
this year.
Drama at Granchester Meadow
Leika Gooneratne
Two pm, on Sunday November 5, was cool - but not freezing,
cloudy - but not overcast, and dry
enough to produce some extra
speedy times for college crosscountry on the hardened terrain.
These were perfect running conditions for the women ran a course
of around 3km and the men who
ran exactly double that.
Owles (Selwyn) led throughout the women’s race, showing
vast improvement and shaving more than a minute off her
time last year. Spence (Wolfson)
and Mort (Christs) showed the
importance of depth, running
strongly to gain 2nd and 3rd
places respectively.
The men’s race was supremely
exciting, won at the very last
100th of a second. The battle was
between seasoned runners George
(Jesus) and Natali (Christs), and
Girton fresher Brownlee. With
200m to the finish, George and
Natali were head to head, with
George just pulling ahead. 100m
later, Natali drew upon a hidden
source of energy and clambered
in front of his nemesis. Neck
and neck now, with every muscle strained full to the tether, they
strode to the finish, Will clinching
1st place by just one-fifth of a second. Brownlee followed in third,
with Harper (Clare) running impressively to nab the 4th spot.
Girton College, with an extraordinarily strong ten-man
team, went to the top of the College League, usurping Jesus. The
Trinity women’s team overtook
Selwyn to gain first place in the
women’s College League.
Lacrosse Blues 19 - 2 Walcountians
Chris Jones
Walcountians
opened
the scoring and it was soon
to be 2 – 2. The shock appeared to awaken the Blues,
and after this point goalie
Smith was relatively untroubled.
The first half of the match
was scrappy, both sides being wasteful. On the far
wing, Riley Newman, not
scoring quite so prolifically
as usual, did finish some
nice goals from range, making good use of the low sun,
which was troublesome for
the goal keepers throughout
the game. Alan Bowe also
looked dangerous with his
cuts from behind goal.
After the break Alun
Turner assisted greatly with
the Blues’ clearances; his
pace too much for the Walcs’
midfield. Hassling by the
Blues forced mistakes from
the Walcs’ defence, and several balls were reclaimed by
the Blues without the ball
crossing the halfway line.
On one occasion this lead
the Walcs’ goalkeeper being
dispossessed twenty yards
from his goal; Bowe profiting by putting the ball into
the untended goal.
A comfortable win ensured the Blues a place in
the second round of the
Flags tournament. They will
be traveling to Southampton University in January,
expecting a tougher challenge than that supplied on
Saturday.
32
Sport
Queens’ and Jesus boaties
dominate on the ergs
Max Beverton reports from Queens Ergo Competition 2006
Each competitor is screamed at by their coach, cox and fellow team-mates
Photo: Matthew Doughty
On Tuesday October 31
over 1000 novice rowers descended on Queens’ College
for the annual Queens’ Ergo
Competition. The ‘erg comp’
is the second largest indoor
rowing competition in the UK,
only topped by the British Indoor Rowing Championships
in Birmingham, and involves
almost all the Cambridge colleges. After seven long hours
of competition the winners of
both the men’s and women’s
division were declared: Queens’
were the eventual victors in the
men’s competition and Jesus
received the title of fastest women’s crew.
For those uninitiated in the
world of Cambridge rowing, the
competition involves ten heat
races, two divisions for each
sex and two finals involving the
fastest ten crews from the top
divisions in men and women’s
category. Up to fourteen crews
of eight oarsmen competed in
each race and each competitor
rows five hundred metres in relay for the crew. Between each
sprint there is a twenty second
change over period where one
exhausted novice falls off the
rowing machine whilst another
adrenaline fuelled rower jumps
on. This all takes place while a
torrent of cheese and motivational music mixed by a live DJ
at the front (‘Eye of the Tiger’
is a prerequisite for every race)
bursts out of the speakers. There
is nothing quite like Queens’
Ergs in terms of its scale and the
atmosphere. Each competitor is
screamed at by their coach, cox
and fellow team-mates, urged
to go faster whilst their legs are
rapidly giving up on them. “The
atmosphere was charged … before I climbed on the erg there
was a lot of adrenaline pumping… I was excited to do it for
my boat” said Lucy Anderson, a
Queens’ Second Women’s Boat
rower.
As well as many worn out
rowers, several voiceless coaches
emerged from the competition
hall, hoarse from their exuberant and mildly aggressive encouragement of their crews. If
you cycled along the river by
the boathouses on the weekend
before the event you will have
heard the same yells from coaches, trying to make sure that their
novices would be winners. A
coach from Robinson while preparing his novice women for the
novice race was heard to have
explained, “If you can still see
at the end of the race then you
didn’t work hard enough!” This
was an extreme of the mentality
that many went into their race
with, and resulted in collapsed
figures in the corner of the hall
trying to regain their vision!
Caius first novice boat
emerged from the Women’s upper division heats in the lead
closely followed by Queens, Jesus, Magdalene, CCAT (Anglia
Ruskin Boat Club), Jesus 2nd
boat, St Catz, First and Third,
Trinity Hall and St. Edmunds
who all took up positions in the
final at 11pm. Selwyn third boat
emerged as the fastest women’s
crew in the lower women’s division with an average split of
1:59.33 per 500 metres with
Jesus thirds coming in second,
compounding a successful night
overall for JCBC. The women’s
final was an incredibly tense
affair. With the race starting
later than planned, the novice
women had been waiting outside the arena in anticipation.
Queens’ women led the race up
until halfway, buoyed by shrieking spectators from the balconies above and a large crowd of
Queens’ senior rowers surrounding the machine. After this point
it was difficult to call who was
in the lead from the virtual river
projected onto a large screen at
the front of the hall. Jesus first
women wrestled with Caius for
the top spot and emerged from
the race as champions. First and
Third women had a very successful final coming third after
being placed eighth in the heats.
The immense pride of their
coach was clear at the end when
the commentator, the irrepressible George Disney, announced:
“…and Trinity come third!
Where the hell did they come
from?” Trinity also held the
distinction of having the fast-
est individual female rower, the
fastest ever woman in the eightyear history of Queens’ Ergs.
Corinne Vannatta rowed an
absolutely incredible individual
time of 1:38.2 for five hundred
metres, a feat of pure athleticism
which would put her in most
first men’s boats.
The men’s heats were just
as engrossing as the women’s
competition Queens’ first men
earned their place in the final
with an average time of 1:32.0
per 500m. Jesus, Caius, CCAT,
Trinity Hall, Homerton, Girton,
Fitzwilliam, Magdalene and
Queens’ second men were to
join them at the climax of the
evening, the men’s final. The
men’s final was a pure joy to behold. From the perspective of a
senior Queens’ rower, the result
was fantastic and the competition itself, from all boats, was
extremely fierce. Queens’ first
men led the field for the first few
minutes of the race, as their female counterparts had done half
an hour earlier, but were pressed
by CCAT who were closing in
on their lead and overtook them
by the sixth rower. What followed was an amazing spectacle;
the race was led by CCAT with
three other boats closely tailing
them. Jesus first men, coming
from behind this group rapidly
increased their challenge whilst
CCAT flagged. Jesus duelled
with Queens’ first men in the
last thirty seconds of the race
and when both had finished,
they looked to the control desk
expectantly, unsure of who had
won. The marshals at the front
had to go to the ergs themselves in order to crown the
victorious crew. Queens’ had
won by less than one second
overall with an average split of
1:32.50 compared with Jesus’
1:32.62. This was a heart-stopping conclusion to a fantastic
night. Queens’ had also recorded the best individual performance with Tom Welchman
as the fastest rower across the
night with a time of 1:25.9.
Further successes included
Queens’ second men who beat
off first boat competition to
enter the final as the only, and
therefore the fastest, second
boat. Queens’ and Jesus also
managed to enter in the highest number of crews with nine
each; this included a unique
sixth boat from Queens’. Congratulations must be extended
to the victorious Queens’ and
Jesus crews, but also to everyone of the 1016 rowers who
gave it their all on the ergs to
represent their clubs. Queens’
and Jesus came out of the
competition having achieved
the most out all the competing
boat clubs and will be keenly
watched to see if they can repeat
their successes on the water.
Adrenaline Rush Photo: Matthew Doughty

Features - The Cambridge Student

Transcription

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