Michaelmas officially ends at midnight tonight, so I thought I should finish the term with a piece of good news featured in Die Welt. World-famous polar bear, Knut, is celebrating his first birthday on Wednesday – a year after zoo staff had to bring him up themselves after he was rejected by his mother in the Zoological Gardens in Berlin. After animal rights activists’ calls for the cub to be killed (opposition to the bear being raised by humans… so the solution is to kill it, right?), the zoological fiasco travelled round the world and featured prominently in the foreign press eager to fill those Easter-time gaps. Knut survived the whole caboodle of life-threatening challenges, and I guess it’s now time to celebrate. A wonderful achievement!…by the PR department of Berlin Zoo.

I will be continuing to blog here over the Christmas vacation, but I should just say thank you to Cherwell24 editors Leah Klement and Fiona Wilson for maintaining a brilliant site this term and putting up with my insane desire to post more frequently than Guido Fawkes with Tourette's. And good luck too to the new editor, Selena Wisnom, in her quest to retain this standard. Have a great vacation!

UPDATE: The BBC had this tale on their front page on Wednesday night. You can even see Knut in action here.

Cherwell 24 is not responsible for the content of external sites

I like Belgium and I like Belgians. Not like-like, I mean, I don’t love any of them, but they are genuinely  nice people, and genuinely welcoming too. For example, I have just come back from taking my boots to  the cobbler. I used to take them to Bob the Cobbler on Turl Street and he’d spend his time mending them once ever three weeks. This time, I took this pair of boots to the cobbler’s and he inspected them  then said,

'Amen, ils sont mort.'

Then he giggled. He just wants to mend my boots, and he sees he cannot.

And then the other day I went into a church and this old lady gave me a guided tour, and she knew tons  of things about each detail of the baptismal bucket (one of the seven wonders of Wallonia, the Walloons  are wonderful), and was happy to tell me about them. She kept waving her hand around it, setting off the alarm.

My mum came to drop some stuff off for me, and though she means well she is not a directly amicable  person. Nevertheless she gets herself invited to a dinner at one of the other teacher’s houses with me,  she sits there, supercilious, but these are genuine people she has in front of her, and genuinely nice.

That’s why I felt so bad about my discourse on the fun fair incidents. The girls I went with are genuine  and friendly people, and really open, and as hard as I try to be the cynical distanced intruder, I’ve given  up.

May I? May I quote Gatsby? “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up the blogging, it simply means I’m a little more – integrated.

May I?  “I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler.”

By Hannah Nepil 

It is unfortunate that the most antagonistic of questions are amongst the most frequently asked.

Given the long list of tacit diplomatic no-nos which overshadow every social situation, you might have expected that the dreaded question “what’s next?” would have been outlawed long ago.  But, to speak for embittered post-finalists everywhere, I can tell you it definitely hasn’t.  Instead, it is assumed that the status of recent graduate lends itself to a little amicable interrogation, and we are again and again called upon to air our dirty laundry in public, to answer that question, and to justify our existence.  

The intensity of the anguish triggered by this line of questioning is directly proportional to the amount of time we have spent dwelling on the matter ourselves.  Those whose chosen career or further study path seems, not only to have been mapped out for them, but to clarify their entire previous existence, are able to sidestep the angst.   On the other hand, those who find decision-making a source of trauma are landed, ironically, with a seemingly infinite collection of choices.  Suddenly they are confronted with something that their comfortable sail through the education system has left them unprepared for. 

It is these types who fall prey to the seduction of the ‘Random Job’, which can hold them captive for several years before they finally come to their senses. To this they can be spectacularly unsuited, as one graduate testifies, who spent her first year out of university as a pathologically squeamish anaesthetist. Luckily for her, however, she managed to exercise mind over matter by averting her gaze as she injected the fluid. “Did the patients never notice?” I asked. “I don't think so,” she answered thoughtfully, “they never said anything.”  

For many, the heartless ejection from the education system triggers the instinct to grip for dear life to the umbilical chord, inducing a bee-line for postgraduate study of even the obscurest denomination. Happily there are plenty of courses which cater for this particular existential crisis. Between an MA in Adventure Tourism Management from Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies and the Msc in Playstation Studies from Sheffield Hallam University, we are spoilt for choice.  

Others prefer to define a lack of direction in more straightforward terms, under the all-embracing umbrella term, “Nothing”.    

“What do you mean, ‘Nothing’? How can you do ‘Nothing’?” I asked my friend incredulously.

“I mean, Nothing. I'm not working. I'm not studying. It's exhausting. I'm getting very into my daytime TV and I find there just aren't enough hours in a day” and he smirked, presumably at his own dazzling wit.  

I could have asked how he was funding his “Nothing”, but given my stance on my student loan – “It's like monopoly money” – that had carried me through my three years as a student to Italy, Spain, China, New York and back, I did not want to risk sounding hypocritical.  This attitude, I found, would come back to haunt me as I approached the close of my third year, forcing me to call my bank and attempt a negotiation of my overdraft. “What do you need it for?” I was asked by a frankly hostile third party.

“Oh, you know, my day-to-day living necessities”, I answered, struggling to annunciate my words through my Pret salad. 

Surprisingly, I was unsuccessful and it was under dire financial straits that I decided to face up to my responsibility as a fully functional adult, giving up my place for a Masters and procuring for myself a job in an Estate Agents. When, two days in, I was turfed out, due to general ineptitude, until further notice, I rationalised away the shame.  

Well. I didn't need them. I had a degree in Music, so I was bloody well going to use it. The next day I went busking, setting up camp outside the French Institute, round the corner from the infamous Estate Agents.  For a couple of hours I regaled the hapless passers by with endless renditions of the French National Anthem, hoping to capitalise on the location. It was only when a fuming optician and two sheepish youths sporting orange City Council T-shirts sidled up that I realised that the game was over: An acknowledgement I was forced to revisit on my humble re-admittance to John D. Wood and co. where I found the following email in the collective junk inbox,  

“Further to getting the boot, Hannah can be found “busking” outside the French Institute”. 

The real world could wait.  My masters course was beckoning, and with no more affectations of resistance, I followed.   

The O3 Gallery is a tiny place at the back of Oxford Castle’s miniature restaurant plaza. Through a few gravelled puddles and around a truck of laundry the glass door opens into a stone round-room washed in grey. Two wiry flights of stairs lead into the lower half, where more supporting wires give the place a weird gleam of modern minimalist cool, though very little space for proper viewing.
O’Sullivan is a graduate of De Montford University but also boasts a Masters at Gloucester and Cheltenham College, and is involved in local art projects. Her work is full of psychedelic clashing and rigidly-bound abstract colour juxtaposed with gorgeous bleedings such as in NYC (midtown). Each piece layers grid after grid onto free-flowing backgrounds. The straight-line meshes suggest something of the rapid single-minded rigidity of city-living, the free natural world let loose in the background upon which they tread.
Her main work is all acrylic and giglee prints – not for fans of representational art, colours which agree with each other, or indeed, any richness of texture at all. The lines upon lines upon lines are carved delicately into the canvas to ensure their rigidity; she separates the reflection on a skyscraper into vicious rectangular shapes. Nothing moves except in a ruler-straight linear fashion, as in Painting 02, NYC Series. The urban landscape is displayed in grid street patterns, road markings, neon colours, all bristling with the rushing routines of a city – and the monotony. In another series, white foremost in white grids carelessly exclude a background of running acrylic, and all aslant – bizarre window blinds barring the indistinct outer world. Some series of grids just look like weaving in a mechanical, mathematically straight fashion, as in 21 NYC, Tomkins Square.
The SP/02 Series has a large centre square, or diamond, which is the focus of its adjacent lines. As I descend the stairs, the square rotates, drawing the lines after it as the eye naturally moves between one work and the next. Like the sky between skyscrapers, the space moves as the viewer moves, changing between black and white for night and day, flickering immediately with accelerated time. Bowery Garden and Bowery Kitchen are mosaics of colour between street grids or window frames – there need be no distinction – and the diamond skyscapes roll between them.
O’Sullivan’s drawings are dramatically different. Dark, strong charcoals of willowy line, which deviate between the thick and slender, bold and elegant. Triangles open to trumpets of bulb-like depth, and light and shade is emphasised to create mass and energy: very Georgia O’Keeffe. The undulating lines of Close swell towards each other thickly; there are charcoal bristlings, smudgings and crossings, but a very distinct division of colour between grey, white and black. The opposite states of colour are forbidden to mingle by the thick line ground into the canvas. Square Drawing quashes these patterns together, thin and thick cross each other and absorb each other; the result is almost womb-like, dark and all-encompassing.
O’Sullivan’s idea of city life seems to relate to exclusion. The colours provide the variety of identities, or movements, running past, over and under each other in webs of determined exclusion: a tapestry of clashing colour whose contact is never transformative or merging. Go and see this if you happen to be passing, and maybe pick up a card – the works do look better off the walls – but definitely not something to visit before you die. The venue is sweet and trendy, however, and makes a good backing for the new and interesting.
By Hannah Thompson

By Lewis Goodall

One and all, welcome to Macbeth – Cluedo style. Yes indeed, when watching this Macbeth I could never quite escape the feeling that I was an unhappy victim of one of those unfortunate murder mystery weekends. All characters clad in rather exquisite evening gear, the slightly dodgy ‘Murder She Wrote’ music, and the altogether camp performances. Still, at least it’s a new take on a story everyone knows, a story of love, revenge, deceit and delicious duplicity.

The play starts as it means to go on – slightly bizarrely. Everyone’s favourite three witches look more like this year’s Russian Eurovision entry than the ghoulish sisters we’re all so familiar with. The director Will Cudmore has kept the play as fast paced and edgy as possible, but with hefty dialogue pruning as the inevitable consequence. The witches’ famous ‘double, double toil and trouble’ line mercilessly cut among others. Still, the merits of such pruning include keeping the play mercifully pithy but part of me still felt robbed.

However, as we all know, we don’t go to Macbeth for the Witches. We don’t go for Duncan or Lennox or Banquo, or any of the cornucopias of other minor characters who are altogether uninteresting. We go for Macbeth, Lady Macbeth and their enduringly fascinating relationship. In Cudmore’s production though, I feel we were served a decidedly unbalanced relationship. Ed Chalk gives a stellar performance as the unhinged Macbeth (albeit it seems that either Cudmore or Chalk equate deteriorating mental stability with increasing campness), he moves from a slick power-player to a gibbering Mika seamlessly. I am sad to say however that his power is not matched by his Queen, Anna Popplewell (of Narnia fame) as that consummate politician, Lady Macbeth. For most of the play, Popplewell exudes a sense of dramatic apathy, a sense of being slightly uncomfortable in Lady Macbeth’s shoes. Popplewell, fine actress though she may be, was overshadowed by Chalk, which credit to him though it may be, goes against the grain of the play, where Macbeth is the manipulated, the controlled, the used. I’m not sure the audience got that impression here.

Still, I’m at risk of being overly harsh. The adaptation is a fundamentally good one, with some production problems. For example, Mr Cudmore, enough with the smoke! We get it, it’s a murky situation, it’s Scotland, it’s foggy, it’s in the past. But there’s a line. And I think when the audience can only see the floating heads of the actors that line has been well and truly crossed.

Having said this, it’s well worth a visit. It’s fast paced and at times genuinely quite exciting (watch out for the fighting scenes, Jackie Chan eat your heart out) with some top quality performances. If nothing else go for the old-Etonian interpretation of Duncan, complete with sash, Herfordshire drawl and Patrick Moore squint. If that’s not worth a fiver, then I don’t know what it is.

 Macbeth runs at the OFS Studio through the end of the week at 7:30 PM, with a Saturday 2:30 matinee.

Oxford's chief tourism officer has claimed that the release of the film, 'The Golden Compass' will generate an extra £15 million for Oxford from tourism.
It is predicted that the publicity generated by the film would push the numbers of tourists visiting the city to record heights – 10 million are expected in 2008, the highest ever. The City Council plans to launch a 'Lyra's Oxford' themed tour aimed at the 'set-jetters' who visit cities that are the sites of famous movies.
The adaptation of Philip Pullman's novel filmed several scenes in Oxford earlier this year, with locations including Radcliffe Square, Christ Church, and Exeter College, and adds to the list of many movies shot here.
Jane Lubbock from Oxford City Council told the Oxford Mail, 'People planning their holidays next year will see the film and it will remind them that Oxford is a great place to come and see. Set-jetting is going to be a new form of tourism.'
'This film is great news for Oxford.'
8.8 million tourists visited Oxford in 2006, and the final number for 2007 is expected to be 9.5 million.

by Frankie Parham

How can blood on a wheelchair be funny? You only have to get down to the BT for this all too short comedy sketch show to find out. Newly written (with heavy whiffs of improvisation) by Joe Markham and Joe Parham, Humphrey’s Unpleasantness is all that outrageous comedy should be: full of lisping clergymen, masturbating accountants and paedophiles wearing reindeer antlers. Yet it’s not all just made to shock. Sterling character portrayals come from the very same writing talents: Joe Markham comically crumples his huge stature into the shapes of a little schoolboy and an old woman, while Joe Parham sports a highly impressive facial flexibility, contorting his mouth and wildly glancing in all directions.

As with all double acts, a useful third wheel appears in the form of Ross Young, but he is by no means side-lined. On the contrary, appearing in two solo scenes of his own, Young not only fuels his characters with amusing vigour, but manages not to corpse. This is more than can be said for either Joe, each visibly quivering with awkwardness as the lights come down and the audience’s laughter increases at the end of each sketch. As a result, the show feels like an ensemble piece, rather than a self-righteous opportunity on the part of the writers to show off their comedic skills. The number of scenes controlled by a single character is balanced between each of the performers, without any one of them standing out more than another (although Parham is somewhat dwarfed by Markham’s lofty figure).

By the end, all the actors (just) hold their own, and what results is a pandemonium of “Oh no they didn’t!” moments. A lot suffers to be ruined by revealing too much, but to get an idea of the boundaries these guys are willing to break, it’s worth knowing that the first sketch alludes to cannibalism and a nail fetish, both within a traditional all boy’s boarding school. Such an example colours what most of the scenes achieve: a hilariously clever balance between stereotype and filthy behaviour. You’ll leave feeling guilty that you ever laughed, but don’t take it as a reflection of your moral integrity: you’d have to be dead not to!

9:30pm, BT Studio: Run ends on Saturday 1^st December

A number of people who took part in Monday’s protest outside the union debate have been pictured on fascist website Red Watch.
More than fifty pictures from the demonstration have been posted on the site accompanied by the request ‘Any further info on the freaks below will be gratefully received’. Martin McCluskey, OUSU President, was given high priority, appearing fourth on the list.
The website claims to be an ‘online informational bulletin for White Nationalists to use to identify potential attackers from violent Marxist groups’.
‘Members of such groups as ANaL (Anti-Nazi League) and the AFA (Anti Fascism Action) have a long history of violence against us and it is their tactic to 'expose' our supporters by supplying their activists with details of where we live.’ The website states that it exists in order to give these people the same treatment as they are being given.
In a statement issued to the Online Press Gazette, Red Watch responded directly to the question of why they publish photographs, saying, ‘Members and supporters of White nationalist organisations are at constant risk of violent attack by political opponents. It is essential for people distributing Nationalist literature, for example, or perhaps stewarding a Nationalist event, to be able to identify opponents who may seek to cause them, or members of their party, harm’.
As well as people who spoke out at the rally, many of the photos included were of ordinary people simply attending the protest. Gerry Gable, publisher of anti-fascist magazine Searchlight told the Oxford Mail: "I think they should expect a level of harassment. They may get phone calls in the middle of the night, hate mail or even a brick through the window."
The website is being investigated by the Home Office and the police.
  See also: video coverage of the protests

Rhiannon Nicolson interviews George Galloway on his presence at the Union protests.
Listen here
 
 

The Oxford University Tory Reform Group is to merge with the Oxford University Conservative Association, in a surprising move announced yesterday.An emergency meeting was held last week to debate the future of the TRG, and voted unanimously for its dissolution. The group has been struggling to attract members. There was a distinct lack of interest at Freshers’ Fair this term, and events have been badly attended for the last two years. Even the emergency meeting itself had a poor turnout and only just reached quorum. Attendance has been declining dramatically since the end of 2005, when David Cameron was made leader of the Conservative Party. Members believe that this is one of the main reasons for the TRG’s decline, as both OUCA and the Conservative Party itself have shifted more towards the centre-right, and the TRG as a special group has become superfluous. In an email to TRG members, current President Luke Connoley said, ‘It is very easy for the student press to portray OUCA, given its history, as an elitist society, but I do believe that it has genuinely become more liberal. Being a broad political society as it is, and containing all wings of conservative political thought as it does, there will always be OUCA members to the 'right' of the political spectrum, but there will also always be OUCA members on the TRG side’ ‘The OUTRG has been in existence since 1965, which is ten years longer than the National TRG has existed. Seeing such a long-lived organisation with such a history of inviting interesting speakers, and challenging the views of Oxford students perish is inevitably sad.’
OUCA President Alex Stafford said, 'This speaks volumes about how both the Conservative Party and OUCA have adapted and changed for the better. I am very pleased that the TRG want to re-join us, and we welcome them back into the fold.'
Some students have been sceptical about the merge. A Regent’s Park 2nd year said ‘This is exactly why people are losing faith in political parties, all their views are merging and becoming the same. Cameron is appropriating Labour’s more trendy ideas and the differences between the parties are becoming fewer and fewer. I am not a conservative, but I do think that this shows a wider problem across British politics.’ All TRG members are being offered free membership of OUCA. ‘Should the political climate change significantly, either at a local level,or on a national level – significantly enough for there to be a renewed need for a liberal, centre-right conservative society in Oxford – then the OUTRG can always be re-formed and re-established,’ Connoley concluded.