Let’s be honest, muffins, in all their glory, aren’t really all that important a topic. They are one of those foods that’s barely a food. Is it a snack? Is it a meal? A cupcake in disguise or part of a nutritious breakfast? We just don’t know. No one wants a muffin top, this we do know, but here it seems to be something of an irrelevancy. 

The particular ambiguity of said pseudo-food results in two distinct “best” categories: best in that the muffin actually tastes good, which as it turns out is rare, and in the sense that it serves a purpose. Take, for example, the skinny blueberry muffin from Starbucks. It is not so much a pastry as a kitchen sponge with conceivably the same calorific value.  However, the spongy nature of this muffin makes it perfect for sneaking into the library in times of academic crisis: minimal crumbage. So if you are looking for something friendly to your figure and good for those wannabe bad girl tendencies, eat this. 

If you are looking for something that actually tastes like it’s meant to be edible go for the Missing Bean or Bleroni.  I’m a fan of the Missing Bean’s lemon poppy seed muffin; it’s very cakey, dense and quite large. It’s a meal kind of muffin. Their blueberry muffins look fabulous too, especially in their crinkly, yes-we-make-these-from-scratch wrappers.  I have not personally sampled the Bleroni muffins, seeing as they’ve been out each time I tried, but the banana chocolate chip version comes highly, highly, recommended. It apparently has “a unique blend of flavors, none overpowering the others. Thinly sliced bananas of goodness.” Given this description I wonder if they don’t have some kind of narcotic quality. 

To finish up let’s just say Patisserie Valerie, “gross.” And Nero’s muffins tend to come wrapped in plastic.  Not a good sign.

In our first term at Oxford, we may all have undergone changes that we didn’t expect ourselves to be capable of. For me, I did something I never imagined would be possible without serious obstacles three times a day: befriend a vegetarian.

I think of him on Sundays, while every pub and every home in Great Britain radiates with the unmistakeable perfume of pork crackling, roast chicken or lardy potatoes, and I thank the high heavens that I have not allowed the guilt of dying animals to burden me with vegetarianism. Likewise, in summertime I have nothing but sympathy for the cowering herbivores that hover in the corner of a garden-party barbecue. Instead I take a moment to congratulate myself again for refusing to surrender to the animal-loving seven year old that I once was, and gleefully chow down my third sausage and burger sandwich.

And it’s this very situation that confuses and stumps me every May. While the entire nation is cooking on coals the minute the weather permits this novelty to be acceptable, vegetarians are quaking in their non-leather boots as they are exiled from the savage feast and tremble back to the crudités and salad stand, furiously checking if there’s gelatine in the guacamole.Well, perhaps they aren’t all the shrunken frail waifs that I’m illustrating. In fact most would probably be over the moon with a Quorn hot dog to shadow their vacuous meat-gut, but why you’d make a decision not to eat meat and instead favour a pitiful processed counterfeit, is beyond me and frankly, fraudulent.

At the risk of hypocrisy, I also deeply resent their preaching. All of them. The life-long veggie, who grew up in a solar powered mud-hut and ate nothing but organic cabbage is no worse than the week-long fad dieter who’s trying it out for a bet. Each one of them has convinced themselves that they are on the path to righteousness and exemplary health, and most of them are of the opinion that they might seize me as a convert. Well, they can try.

In fact one did last night, spurred on by shots of Dutch courage. Embarrassingly, at the time they seemed convincing and I’m pretty sure I promised to try it for a day. But now we’re both hungover, and while they may be bedridden with a piece of dry toast and green tea, I’m getting to the end of my bacon-double-decker and feeling better than ever. Ha! Who’s healthy now? Once again I’m feeling very smug with my (a)morality.

Sudan is a country that you are far more likely to see on the front pages of the newspaper – whether for the war in Darfur or the ICC’s arrest warrants against President Al-Bashir or the recent referendum where nearly 99% of southern Sudanese voters decided that they want an independent South Sudan – than in the travel section. But even in as politically volatile a place as Sudan, there is an incredible amount to see and do and learn and absorb, to enjoy and to engage with, to celebrate and to embrace.

At the end of 2010, I spent four weeks in the capital, Khartoum, working as a political observer for the US-based Carter Center, observing and reporting on preparations for the historic referendum, the unassailable results of which were announced in February and which will officially lead to the creation of the world’s newest country in July. Khartoum is in the North, where the prevailing sentiment was pro-unity, albeit with salient pro-separation pockets among Southerners living there. There was thus understandable anxiety in the capital about the impending fracture of the country, and trepidation about the potential for renewed violence after decades of civil war.

Khartoum itself is a hot, vibrant city, with such a mix of cultures and economies that it can be difficult to paint a cohesive picture. The blatant economic inequality that is the hallmark of much of the developing world takes on a particularly problematic character here as it often matches ethnic divisions. A half-hour drive from the grandiose Presidential Palace and the stunning Libyan-built 5-star Burj Al-Fateh hotel on the tree-lined Nile Road, are the sprawling, sandy, often bitter IDP camps populated by those who fled the fighting in the South during what is Africa’s longest civil war, as well as more recent entrants from Darfur.

The city is made up of three distinct areas, divided by the Niles and linked by impressively imposing bridges: Khartoum proper, the official and commerical downtown core;  Khartoum North, a more industrial part; and Omdurman, the cultural heartland. Khartoum is home to a particularly interesting geographic landmark – Al-Mogran, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Arab poets have called it the ‘the longest kiss in history’, and it is a wonderful symbol of confluence and harmony in a city where so much history and so many hopes so passionately collide.

The people that I met and worked with in Khartoum are some of the warmest and kindest I have had the fortune to come across. The Northern Sudanese culture is very clearly marked by such generosity and hospitality that it can be overwhelmingly heart-warming. This could especially be seen by the way people, even strangers, greet one another – with the warmest smiles, handshakes and hugs all around.

The Sudanese are also known for being very honest and trustworthy. I witnessed this first-hand when a random labourer who found my mobile phone when I dropped it somewhere, went out of his way to first contact me and then to bring the phone back to me, despite barriers of distance and language. Another arresting image is that of seemingly abandoned stalls, as shopkeepers would go for Friday prayers, with their wares still out until they returned. It speaks volumes of a society that is characterised by such mutual trust and cooperation.

Although the Northern Sudanese speak Arabic, there is also something distinctly African about them, an earthiness that is quite different from their co-linguists in the Gulf (where I grew up). And there were many other unexpected and  fascinating inter-cultural links I found.  Khartoum is probably the last place I would have expected to be introduced to the magic of Bob Marley, but people there are ardent fans of reggae music, evident in the amount of playtime it got on the referendum campaign trail. Even more unexpectedly, I encountered many Bollywood fans; in fact, the only thing that could displace reggae in the car stereo was Hindi love songs! Aside from politics, there were numerous heated discussions about that other most divisive of topics – football, with the English Premier League having some seriously keen followers. Finally, the fact that we were staying in a Chinese hotel (quite a bizarre experience) further underlined how Sudan is not as isolated as it may seem.

Though social lives in Khartoum tend to revolve around families and food, there were a multitude of other activities for us to indulge in. The Nile provided great opportunities for boating and fishing, its glimmering waters a perfect foil to the sandy bustling streets around it. I also attended two very different concerts – one by a drug-abusing pop sensation that inspired near-frenzy in an outdoor amphitheatre; the other by a group of young people performing powerful spoken word poetry in a tucked-away café whose owner acts as a patron of the (often alternative) arts in the city.

I had the most amazing food in Khartoum. There are many different restaurants in the city, serving everything from chicken tikka to red velvet cupcakes. But the most memorable things were definitely the local ones – the hot fluffy bread, balady, that we grabbed from the corner shop each morning; the platter of fried fish just caught from the Nile that afternoon; the packets of ta’miyya, crunchy falafel buttons; and the freshly squeezed juices available everywhere, with the guava packing quite a punch.

The community aspect and down-to-earth nature of Khartoum society can also be seen in the ubiquitous tea stalls in Khartoum, which serve small glasses of shockingly sugary though deliciously customised (mint for me!) tea and coffee. Whether alone on a street corner or grouped with others in something of an outdoor cafe, these tea stalls provided relaxation, revival as as well as opportunities for lively conversation, another memorable hallmark of Khartoum life.

My best food memories were those that also reflected uniquely Sudanese social experiences. We often lunched on ful, cooked and mashed fava beans with sesame oil poured and crumbly Sudanese cheese added on top, eaten with local bread, with a side of boiled eggs. Although served in smarter establishments, this staple meal is also sold by street vendors, and we would often sit on multi-coloured plastic crates, under the shade of a tree, chatting away as we happily dug into the communal bowl of ful.

Contrasting with the simple food was Souq Omdurman, a huge bazaar, a hub of commercial activity and a fantastic place to wander around, soaking up the sights and sounds in the different sections – clothes, shoes, knick-knacks, and also ground hibiscus, gazelle bone jewellery and black henna. However, even the enlivening energy here was no match for what we witnessed at a weekly outdoor gathering of Sufi whirling dervishes. Dancing in circles, stamping their feet rhythmically and chanting repeatedly, for hours, participants were in a spiritual trance, a uniquely expressive and communal custom among these Sudanese Muslims.

Despite Khartoum’s political uncertainties, the obvious poverty and marginalisation, it is ultimately the rich culture and incredible hospitality that left the most lasting impression on me. I was fortunate to be there for work that involved travelling all over the city, focusing on local dynamics and talking to a wide range of people – the best way to be a truly authentic visitor. Travel is always a learning experience, and this is perhaps especially profound in the places you least expect it.

I have a traffic light system – green means I can do what I want, orange means they’re slightly smarter but I can probably get them, and red means just released from Broadmoor – move away!’ Hearing Dom Joly describing how he decides whether or not to prank his victims is listening to a master deconstruct his craft – the man, for many, is the original prankster. His show, Trigger Happy TV, spanned two seasons and two specials, has been sold to over seventy countries, and even the soundtrack was a bestseller. However, Joly explains the original idea was to make a political satire show.

‘[Trigger Happy] would have been an attack on Cool Britannia, but the woman who was the commissioning editor had just finished doing Brass Eye and basically just couldn’t face any more legal stuff and she just said can you make a really simple show – I don’t want anymore lawyers ringing me up. And actually it was a blessing in disguise because if I’d made the satirical show, it might have been good, but it wouldn’t have got such a wide audience, I don’t think.

’Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an intelligent, pithy political satire on the BBC gaining the worldwide recognition that THTV did – typical sketches include Joly in the role of a park keeper, accusing elderly park goers of misdemeanours from setting of fireworks to pushing people in the pond, or dressed as a traffic warden, ticketing motorists stopped at traffic lights for illegally parking on double yellows. That said, surely some of the socio-political commentary planned for the political satire influenced a show which was, more than a prank show, an observation of Britishness, a facet echoed in its handpicked indie rock soundtrack? No, apparently; ‘I hate things trying to make a point, trying to teach you something – the stuff I make is pointless’. Fair enough. But perhaps the question is really, how did a man now famed for pranking, travel writing and a not-all-that-brief spell in the Celebrity Jungle come to be writing a political satire show in the first place?

After graduating in Politics, Joly first interned for the European Commission as a diplomat in Prague, before returning to the UK to do political television around Westminster. After 6 years of working as a political researcher for ITN, New Statesman and others, he landed a job as the political researcher on the Mark Thomas Comedy Product – a blend of surreal stunts and political journalism that was both satirical and insightful in equal measures in a pre-Brass Eye time. After being asked if he wanted to ‘drive a tank through the McDonald’s Drive Thru’ – ‘yeah, course’ – he started to get into comedy, and in his own words, ‘I haven’t really done a day’s work since then’.

Looking at a rundown of Joly’s activities since then, it would be hard to agree with this. Besides pranking, in World Shut Your Mouth and The Complainers, Joly has written three books, stood in the 1997 general election (for the Teddy Bear Alliance), produced a number of television shows including the well-received Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, came fourth in I’m A Celebrity, and somehow found time to write columns for The Independent, The Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times. Now he’s off on a live tour, because, quite simply, he’d never done it before.‘Everyone always assumed that I’d done stand up before Trigger Happy, and [the fact that I hadn’t] used to really bug me.

When I did my book and I took it to literary festivals, they just expected me to stand there and read it, which struck me as really dull, so I started, you know, showing my holiday snaps, and stuff, and I really enjoyed it, so I thought fine, I’ll do it bigger.’ The light nature of the show doesn’t stop there – the audience can buy rocks from the foyer to throw at Joly while he performs (presumably not real ones), and during the interval a book is left out for questions from the audience, which Joly answers in the second half of the show. In typical Joly style, the ten tour dates have now become a full seventy, from Berwick to Brighton. So far there haven’t been any instances of mistaken location, despite the confusing fact that, ‘for some reason Warwick University is in Coventry, so I almost said hello to the wrong people… Oxford’s easier’.

Whilst half of my friends knew Dom as ‘that guy who did the stuff with the big phone’, the other half knew him as ‘that guy who does travel columns for The Times,’ and as he admits, Joly has a certain fixation with travel.

‘I’m obsessed with it – I have wanderlust’. The weird offspring of this love of travel, a penchant for a drink or two, and a keenness to ‘take the piss out of Long Way Round’ was Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, in which Joly and his de rigueur ‘idiot friend’ Peter Wilkins explored drinking cultures around the world in a gloriously irreverent spoof on the traditional travel show. When they weren’t drunk (which wasn’t very much of the time), Joly and Wilkins goofed around in what was a mostly improvised show. The most recent equivalent is probably Team Gervais’ An Idiot Abroad (also on Sky One), though Joly is not a fan. ‘I thought it was appalling,’ he said, very matter-of-factly, ‘I quite like Karl Pilkington, and I think he’s funny, but it was just one joke – the bloke doesn’t like going abroad.’

When asked what he thought on recent pranking shows such as Facejacker, Balls of Steel and Olivia Lee, Joly revealed that he doesn’t really watch other comedy shows – ‘I find British comedy a bit dull. I watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and because I’m on tour I’ve got about a thousand Seinfelds.’ I pressed him – surely he must have seen something recently (my extensive iPlayer knowledge, which before had seemed so useful, was suddenly looking like a poor investment).  ‘Just recently there’s been some stuff I’ve liked; Campus and Twenty-Twelve,’ he conceded, ‘but I certainly don’t want to watch stuff similar to what I do – either it’s really good and it makes me angry or it’s really bad and it makes me angry.’

He was however, an avid fan of I’m a Celebrity, and jumped at the chance to be on the show last year. ‘Everyone said I shouldn’t do it, and I just thought, ‘I love that show – I’m going to do it’, and I really enjoyed it.’ That said, he found it a lot more ‘hardcore’ than he’d expected; ‘It’s as close as you can get to a hostage situation – you don’t speak to anyone, you’re very reliant on your captors, you get fed tiny amounts, and the boredom is insane. And you’ve just got to deal with it.’

The pop-culture kick didn’t stop at Celebrity – Joly is now a full-time Twitter user, with over 80 thousand followers, with whom he interacts on an hourly basis. He answers questions (with brutal brevity, mind), replies to those who insult him (which is better than Giles Coren, who simply blocked me when I offered a less than favourable review of a video of his), and even runs mini-competitions for his followers to win free tickets to his live show. More than that, he loves its practicality on a global level. ‘When I travel it’s incredible – if I’m in Phnom Penh or somewhere I just say ‘I’m in Phnom Penh ’ and people tell me where to go and so on – I love it.’

After the tour, a hard earned break is in store, before a return to what is an increasingly packed schedule for Joly – round the world in a week for I Newspaper, a television show for ITV, starting work on his new book Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, in which he’ll be looking for mythical beasts in the Congo, and then getting onto the long awaited Trigger Happy film that fans have been waiting on for years now. ‘People are saying it’s the Trigger Happy movie – it’s not,’ Dom insists, ‘It’s the people who made Trigger Happy (Joly and his cameraman Sam Cadman) and it’s hidden camera but it’s got none of the characters. It’s on a huge scale, so I’m calling it the Ben Hur of hidden camera movies.

’With so much work in so many areas, both in the past and in the immediate future, does Joly feel there is a lack of direction to his career? ‘I’m a completely confused idiot – I have no career plans whatsoever, and I’ve just sort of muddled my way through. I guess I get bored really easily […] I normally don’t know what I’m going to do, so when something interesting comes in I can say yes. I just love doing different things – I’ve blagged ten years of doing nothing, pretty much.’ From where I’m standing, far from lacking direction, Dom Joly’s career has one only clear bearing, and that’s up.

Dom is appearing at the Glee Club on the 17th July

As the Oxford University website explains: ‘Students currently come from 138 countries around the world and study a wide range of subjects. [International students] make up one third of our student body, including 14 percent of our full-time undergraduate students and 63 percent of our full-time postgraduates.’ Arguably the least interesting of these countries is the good old U. S. of A. I hail from that land of the almost free with its purple mountains and Big Macs.  However, I do not technically fall into this category of full-time international students. I, along with a motley crew of somewhat undesirables, inhabit the strange limbo that is the life of the “visiting student.” To be more exact, I am an associate student at Hertford College, not a visiting student at Oxford University. We are not merely Americans, which, let’s be honest, is bad enough, but Americans here for that brief interval between one term and one academic year—a year sans finals and lectures. We are frauds leading half-lives, sentenced to live in social siburbia.

As the Oxford University website explains: ‘Students currently come from 138 countries around the world and study a wide range of subjects. [International students] make up one third of our student body, including 14 percent of our full-time undergraduate students and 63 percent of our full-time postgraduates.’ Arguably the least interesting of these countries is the good old U. S. of A. I hail from that land of the almost free with its purple mountains and Big Macs.  However, I do not technically fall into this category of full-time international students. I, along with a motley crew of somewhat undesirables, inhabit the strange limbo that is the life of the “visiting student.” To be more exact, I am an associate student at Hertford College, not a visiting student at Oxford University. We are not merely Americans, which, let’s be honest, is bad enough, but Americans here for that brief interval between one term and one academic year—a year sans finals and lectures. We are frauds leading half-lives, sentenced to live in social siburbia.

Siburbia is a term I have proudly coined for those of us with silly pink Bod cards, bad accents and houses on Botley Road. We live in some combination of suburban landscape and Siberian social standing. We huddle together at necessarily incestuous house parties to stay warm. The advice given to us at our orientation, on the ever-important subject of how to “integrate” with British students, was to sit next to them in hall and strike up a conversation with a stranger in this confined and comfortable social setting. However, after having eaten a stewy dinner whilst crouched on the end of a table populated by Goth kids effectively ignoring this fact, one realises that this is awful advice. You must understand that we want desperately to “integrate.” Botley road just plain sucks. The term “integration” itself, in all its official implications of otherness, really says it all.

Luckily for me last term some fairy godmother, incarnated for god knows what reason as my brother-in-law, led me to a coffee date with a “real student,” as we outsiders must call them. Somehow, in this crazy, mixed-up world, something resembling genuine friendship blossomed under the rather adverse circumstances. This tenuous position as friend-of-British-girl made me particularly able to assess the strange social anachronisms between you Brits and those less cultured masses—i.e. us. 

Well, let’s start by saying I went to my first ball a few weeks ago. I realise to you people both the term “ball” itself and the party it refers to is part of the normal university experience, but to us it’s still synonymous with a Cinderella type event. I go to school in what is effectively a mud pile, populated by philosophy students in flannel and frye boots. I do not own cocktail dresses, let alone a ball gown. We wear jeans and dirty shirts to go out, if with a little mascara. Here girls have several ball gowns, and they aren’t even royalty or anything. 55 pounds out on a ticket, 60 on a dress, 20 on heels, some more on makeup and body lotion, and I was ready for a princess moment. It didn’t really come. 

The ball consisted of burnt and cold hamburger meat and oh-so-much alcohol in tiny plastic cups. The champagne bit at the beginning was a classy mislead really. The night ended, if we’re going to be honest, with friends crying on my floor and me crouching in the toilet. But I did like the dress – you know, the one I’ll never wear again. 

The not-so-strange difference we can point out here is that you guys can drink. More than water. This makes a big difference on the way social gatherings manifest themselves. (However, my college back in the states has a sum total of 2,000 students and a reputation as the “biggest dinner party school,” so, hey, what do I really know?) While going to clubs is entirely legal for y’all, us Americans are less lucky. We are the frequenters of house parties, equipped with too much booze, no mixers and red cups. There is no kind of temperance or middle ground with us. There is a lot of rolling around on someone else’s un-vacuumed floor — or, as I once experienced, walking inebriated and dazed through someone’s living room whose only decoration was a small camping tent. Liberal arts schools and Universities perhaps differ in this way. Regardless, we’re kind of a mess, and old habits die hard. Any chance we get, those of us Americans — lumped together, left out of the regular Oxonian loop, intentionally or otherwise — have thrown parties at every semi-decent opportunity. They were all themed. 

This is a weird thing about Americans. Perhaps to compensate for the unconscious perception of the parties’ pathetic-ness we feel the need to add some extra pizzazz in the manner of thematic rapture. This rapture is, of course, just a means for public nudity. (Interesting, because another strangeness involving our perception of British lifestyle is that many American ladies find British club style a bit naked. Yes, we’re asking for it, but you guys wear sheer blouses. I don’t know why, but apparently we can’t cope.) Some themes of American people parties include: ‘golf pros and tennis hoes’, ‘hoes and bros’, and ‘ABC: anything but clothes’. If you noticed- unlike the generally ambiguous themes of the bops, ‘jungle fever’ and what not- ours have an unavoidably chauvinistic tinge. Note that ‘ho’ was used twice. I am a feminist. Pro-choice and all that. But still I donned a trash bag top for ABC. To be fair some men showed up in towels. Even less subtle. 

In some way, however, I’ve come to realise our house parties and the balls aren’t really all that different. I don’t mean to go all ‘we’re really all the same on the inside’.  No need for kumbayas. But really they both involve relatively small groups of people who know each other, wearing costumes that will allure the opposite sex and drinking until somebody passes out. My mother keeps telling me that the difference between American and British students is that over here the kids don’t get ‘blado’. But I know some people, lovely, posh, and conceivably brilliant, who have weed on themselves. 

I can’t tell which group takes themselves more seriously. Because this, I think, might be the real reason there is no cross -over between the two dimensions, why we exist as denim-clad ghosts haunting the Rad Cam without ever really being seen.  All of us like to dress up: to be, in some ways, someone else for the evening. I am going to a bop tonight where we are all to dress like cowboys and aliens. It is strange because in reality here I feel as though I am a bit of both. Perhaps there should be a bop where the Americans must dress as Brits and visa versa. Let’s just get all the stereotypes out on the table, and then start making out on it. This feature has turned out a lot raunchier than expected, a lot more about underage drinking as well. But when it comes down to it, we have better bagels. Trousers are pants, chips are fries, crisps are chips, and a fizzy drink is a really awful name for a soda. We really aren’t so very different, and yet we seem very intent on pretending that we are.  Kids these days. Next time you’re in the library, look for me. I’ll be wearing red white and blue. You know that our flags both have those colours, right?