BALLIOL may be relative newcomers to the upper levels of college football, but their start last week against Christ Church indicated that they had the talent to survive at this level. Their first home game, against a struggling Exeter side, provided the perfect opportunity to reinforce these credentials.
As the home side dominated the early exchanges, Exeter’s only chances came from Spencer Crawley’s terrific long throws which posed a constant threat, particularly as giant centre-back Ben Fox came forward to get on the end of a number of them. Crawley and Fox aside, the main tactic of the away side was to use striker Billy Bowring as a target man. This policy worked to a degree but Bowring, a lanky forward, had a predictably lumbering first touch and often miscontrolled the ball.
With neither side fully getting into their stride the first goal of the game was a surprise when it came, Ted Maxwell controlling a pass on his chest thirty yards out before launching a dipping volley past the keeper.  It was a rare moment of excellence in what was a scrappy first quarter.
The goal did little to change the pattern of play with the patchy football punctuated by the odd moment of excitement such as an excellent long range effort from Spencer Crawley and a dangerous foot high challenge from Joe Haley which put ‘hard man’  Paul Sagar to the ground.  Although Haley’s tackle deserved the booking he received, Sagar’s ludicrous theatrics on the ground afterwards were a gross over-reaction given no actual contact was made between the midfielder’s boot and his face.
It was with ten minutes to go in the first half that the game finally started to spark when Maxwell had his shirt tugged in the box and lightening quick wing Rory Campbell hammered home the spot kick. The goal did little to spark a disjointed Exeter side, but they found themselves a lifeline before the interval when Aamir Saifuddin’s speculative long range effort caught everyone off guard, including Balliol keeper Devine. As a scoreline, 2-1 probably was a fair reflection given Exeter had defended stoutly, even if they hadn’t offered much in attack.
Balliol started the second half the stronger and were unlucky not to score when they saw the ball get halfway across the goal line before being clawed back by the Exeter keeper and again when a Rory Campbell corner was headed off the line by Charlie Hill.
Perhaps feeling the game was turning in their favour Exeter finally made some progress up field, with Bowring, Hill and Crawley all having efforts on goal turned away by the excellent Chris Devine.
With time running out Exeter were leaving bigger and bigger holes at the back which were always likely to be exploited by the pacy Balliol attack.  Blues athlete Rory Campbell tore through a tiring defence to slot the ball past the keeper before Maxwell was bought down by a last ditch tackle to give Campbell the chance of a penalty to seal his hat trick.  He stood up to the challenge, slotting the spot kick into the bottom corner to put the result beyond doubt.

WORCESTER showed their class today against a New side who looked throughout as though they were chasing their title rivals. The reigning champions must surely be the favourites for the league now, having dispatched their main opposition with such ease, and relishing prospect of a season filled with games such as this.
The match began with some very scrappy exchanges. Neither side could find a way to dominate possession and as a result the watching crowd had to wait until the 11th minute for the first real attempt at goal – a speculative New effort which was comfortably over the bar.
As the game went on though, Worcester began to gain the upper hand in the midfield battle. Blues player Lucian Weston once again proved his class: his distribution was excellent as he repeatedly picked out the runs of his forwards. As a result, his side began to hold onto the ball and could build attacks.
Their first goal came on the half-hour mark, with the ball finding its way to Kunal Desai who wasted no time in firing a shot across the keeper and into the bottom left of the New goal. Worcester support grew louder from the sideline as spectators could see they were now firmly on top.
Things went from bad to worse for New when, after ten minutes of almost constant attack, Worcester broke through again. Dominant left back Tim Squires made one of his trademark surging runs into the opposition half, and when New goalkeeper Sam Evans couldn’t hold on to his stinging shot, Kunal Desai was on hand to nod in his second goal.
At this point, with only five minutes left in the half, Worcester launched an all out display of fantastically free-flowing one-touch football to the delight of the thirty or so fans on the touchline. That they didn’t manage to score again in this period was more due to their own misfortune than any particular skill amongst the New defenders.
New may have hoped for a change of luck in the second half, but Worcester didn’t let up, carrying on from where they left off and playing some very attractive football. It took just five minutes for Desai to secure his hat-trick, receiving the ball from outstanding left winger Danny Plaxton and deftly chipping it over the onrushing goalkeeper to find the back of the net.
With the game effectively finished as a contest, New managed to take advantage of Worcester easing up to win two penalties in the space of two minutes, only managing to convert the second.
However, it was too little too late and the New players were all too aware of this. By the time Worcester managed to steal a scrappy goal with fifteen minutes left on the clock, both sides had accepted the result was secure.
The Worcester players were obviously delighted with their victory against a side that had been touted as rivals for the title, and will be hoping to maintain their 100% record next week. For New it seems to be a matter of reassessing their aspirations, with left winger James Sutton stating “We’re not title contenders, we’re just hoping to play Premier Division football next year.”
While it is premature to talk of relegation, they will certainly have to improve to maintain respectability in this division.

AFTER their defeat of traditional heavyweights St. Peter’s last week, Magdalen were reminded of how difficult achieving Division One survival will be for them by a Catz side who ran in four tries despite conditions that didn’t allow for much running rugby.

Thanks to the previous week’s heavy rain this was the visitors’ first game of the season, and it was debutant Matt Perrins who stole the show, grounding two scores and putting in an impressive performance on the right wing.

The result could have been much closer but for the boot of Magdalen outside-half Andy Barnes, who missed four penalty efforts at goal and over-shot the dead-ball line with kicks from hand on a number of occasions. The Catz back three were also, for the most part, able to deal with the huge up-and-unders that Barnes continued to launch into their half.

With rain pouring down throughout it was bound to be a forward’s game, and it was St. Catherine’s who were able to dominate the early exchanges, driving back the home side’s scrum and forcing error after error. Catz weren’t able to turn territory into tries, however, and a panicky first fifteen minutes saw them commit as many mistakes as Magdalen.

The deadlock was broken on twenty minutes, however, as Catz captain Sam Donaldson’s kick over the top was not dealt with, and the ball was shipped wide to Perrins who touched down under pressure in the corner.

Despite the score going unconverted, Catz were now full of confidence, and it wasn’t long before their lead was extended. A five metre lineout was well claimed, and the visiting pack drove over for prop Nick Hargrave to claim his first try for the college. Another conversion miss followed, and the first period petered out with both sides unable to make anything happen in the midfield.

Magdalen, with the slope behind them, began the second half the brighter, with their scrum seemingly invigorated by substitutions. The Catz defence held firm, however, with forwards and backs alike putting in brave hits. Barnes had chances to close the gap with his boot, but penalty after penalty sailed wide of the posts.

The Manor Road outfit were rewarded for their defence as Magdalen tired, Donaldson taking advantage of a Peter Jones charge down to score under the posts before Perrins capped off a lovely move to finish with aplomb in the corner, sealing a well-earned win.

By Carl Cullinane 
*****At an impromptu Trade Justice Movement gig in 2005 local musician Thom Yorke sang “Gimme fair price, gimme fair price” during a new song called ‘Reckoner’. That line, along with almost everything else from that version, is gone. But the sentiment has been transposed from political commentary to a concept at the centre of an album release that has sent shockwaves through the music industry. While the voluntary donation method of exchange is not new, Radiohead have surely created the biggest honesty box ever seen. After 10 days of industry self-flagellation and debate on the value of music, could the album handle the expectation once download codes for In Rainbows had rained down on our inboxes?

The answer has been a glorious affirmative. In Rainbows has the swagger of a band sure of both their vision and their identity. The band’s last album, Hail to the Thief, was considered by many to be a half-baked disappointment that lacked the cohesiveness of their best work. Contrastingly, In Rainbows has been a tortuous 3 year labour-of-love and with the crucial return of Jonny Greenwood’s gorgeous string arrangements, a disparate set of songs has become a confident organic whole. Prefigured by the title, the music is prettier than anything Radiohead have ever done. But while freed of Yorke’s recent clunky political pronouncements, the lyrics are as darkly personal as ever, exploring themes of relationship breakdown and personal frustration.

Opener ‘15 Step’ brings the funk, and a playfulness characterised by the punctuation of exuberant children’s shouts. It’s difficult not to smile, and with that the battle is half won. The spectral orchestrated intro of ‘Nude’ paves the way for a sparse arrangement of building, aching beauty allied to lyrics of unrelenting bleakness; “Just when you’ve found it, it’s gone”. ‘Arpeggi’ soars from a humble finger-picked opening, before a vintage Colin Greenwood bassline takes it somewhere else entirely. But it is with the immense heart-exploding climax of ‘All I Need’ that the album places itself definitively towards the sweet end of bittersweet.

After the baroque Beatlesy ‘Faust Arp’, the aforementioned ‘Reckoner’ is an album highlight. Stunningly gorgeous, it features Liars-esque multi-tracked vocals over a simple repetitive melody,  culminating in a stately string-drenched finale. Only the closer ‘Videotape’ falls short of the skyscraping beauty of its live incarnation, while still offering their most heartbreaking lyric since Pyramid Song.

In an album of strange beauty, ‘House of Cards’ provides the most incongruous moment: Yorke, swathed in reverb, purring “I don’t wanna be your friend, I just wanna be your lover” over a laid-back reggae groove. It’s the sexiest song they’ve written. This embodies the shift at the heart of In Rainbows: innovation as a subjective rather than objective concept. Radiohead continue to push themselves forward, to places we never thought we would see them go.

A UNIVERSITY error severely delaying loan payments has stranded hundreds of students without the financial means to pay battels and basic living costs.
Undergraduates have been forced to loan each other money, and some have reported charges of up to £4000 on their termly battels after colleges included University tuition fees with charges for rent.
Around 1200 students were affected, with over £5.2 million in loan payments delayed.
JCR Presidents are to hold a meeting today in an attempt to force the University to correct the error before more students hit serious financial trouble.
The problem, caused by the University’s new online registration system, has prevented money from the Student Loans Company reaching students.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Oxford Student Information Centre (OSIC) charged with running the registration scheme admitted responsibility for the fault.
“One of the daily file uploads to the SLC that confirms student attendance had a problem. To remedy this the Central Administration section reconfirmed all enrolled SLC students to the SLC.”
OSIC claimed that payments for the approximately 300 students affected took three to five working days to process, although many students have disputed this.
Pembroke JCR President Chris Bennetts said, “The online registration process was supposed to make things easier, but for many students this year it has had the opposite effect. Students live on tight budgets and many cannot afford to wait for errors to be corrected.
“Despite completing the online registration in plenty of time for the new academic year, loan payments were not made.”
Martha Rowsell, a second-year language student at Brasenose, registered in time but still experienced weeks of delays before receiving her first payment on Tuesday.
“It’s outrageous that the loans have taken so long to come through,” she said. “It’s not so bad for students who can rely on support from their parents, but for those who can’t it’s been really hard.”
The University has refused to accept total responsibility for the delays, claiming they occurred nationally as a result of “heavy traffic loads on the SLC portal by universities confirming attendance”.
In a second blunder, around 900 other students face an even longer wait after failing to register on time.
“It took ages for all the relevant information to come through,” said one third-year St Anne’s student who wished to remain anonymous. “When I was finally able to enter my password and user name in late September, I was told the site was not yet operational. I think the whole process should be made less cumbersome.”
User names for the new system were sent to students’ contact addresses by their colleges, but passwords emailed from OSIC did not reach some respondents as University email accounts filtered them as junk mail.
OSIC said that of those who did not successfully register, 90 per cent of queries were dealt with within 48 hours.
The Student Loans Company, however, has indicated that late registrations could take up to six weeks to process, leaving students to rely on bank overdrafts or borrowing from friends when overdrafts have already reached maximum limits.
College bursaries were keen to stress their sympathy for students suffering financial difficulties. Mansfield has removed penalties on late battels payments while Pembroke offered some students short-term loans to cover rent.
Brasenose’s Bursar John Knowland said, “We will allow late payment when there is a genuine reason for being unable to pay on time, including the late arrival of money from the Student Loan Company.”
In reference to those students whose battels unexpectedly included tuition fees he added, “The College does not charge students the fees which it is obliged to pass to the University, if it has received confirmation from the Student Loan Company that those fees will be paid by the Student Loan Company.” By Michael Sweeney

Connie Han listens in rapture as Philip Pullman reads from his work at Woodstock Literary FestivalThe Woodstock Literary Festival is ‘a celebration of books, of all that is literary’. Set in the pretty village of Woodstock, a 20 minute bus ride from the city centre, it feels a world away from the bustling self-importance of the city. Armed with a Cherwell press pass, I go to just one of the many talks on offer, ranging from subjects as diverse as Diana Mosley’s personal letters to Biblical inspiration for sexual art.
“And which talk would you like to attend?” asks the cheerful organiser in the Green Room. “Philip Pullman, please,” I say. “Oh, Philip? He’s just behind you.” And that is how I came to be talking about Milton with Philip Pullman.
“You can’t just read Milton,” he tells me. “You have to read him aloud. You have to go into a secluded corner and read him loudly, or if you are embarrassed, in a whisper. But you have to say it. Poetry has to be tasted in the mouth.”  He quotes a long passage from Paradise Lost to me, from memory, savouring the beauty of the words, the esoteric descriptions, in an enraptured whisper. “That’s how you must enjoy poetry. It must be felt.”
The sound of words is clearly important to Pullman. His talk is pleasant but unremarkable (tales about readers, and his wife’s struggle with computer voice recognition software, some advice to writers – ‘never start with a blank page in the morning’) until he begins to read. His reading voice is incredible, expressive, surprising. He chooses two passages with Iorek Byrnison, the Armoured Bear. The children in the audience are captivated by his rendition. His Iorek sounds like a Norwegian Russell Crowe: nothing like how I imagined him, but profoundly powerful and unique. Pullman complains that in the BBC radio version he wasn’t allowed to do the voice himself but then adds with childish glee that Ian Mckellen (‘that’s right!’) is involved in the new film (‘do you know who is doing Iorek? Gandalf!’) The appreciative crowd loves him.
On the contentious subject of the film, Pullman is enthusiastic but gently ironic, (‘I’m glad to say they’re spending an awful lot of money on the fight scenes!’ ‘There are some fine actors doing it. Daniel Craig, he’s a very good actor, especially in swimming trunks’). At the end he gets bombarded with the usual questions. He takes care to answer those from children first. ‘What is your daemon?’ ‘Who inspired the characters of Lyra and Will?’ For your information: ‘my daemon, I think, would be one of those birds that steal things. All writers are thieves. Shakespeare was a thief.’ ‘All I know about Lyra and Will is that they are not extraordinary children. They are extremely ordinary. They are just in extraordinary circumstances.”  It is that sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary that has brought Philip Pullman to where he is, a best-selling author in 40 countries, climbing down from the stage to rapturous applause. 
 

CALLS for Oxford University’s animal testing licence to be suspended pending a full Home Office inquiry have been thrown out by Parliament.
Controversy surrounding the death of Felix, a macaque monkey used in the University’s animal experiments, led Portsmouth Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock to demand an investigation.
He asked the Home Secretary to assess whether the treatment of the monkey met with the terms of the laboratory’s license and to suspend the license in the meantime.
But on Tuesday, in a written Commons reply, Junior Home Office minister Meg Hillier said that the procedure was “in accordance with requirements of the relevant project licence.”
Hillier suggested there was no need to alter or suspend the license.
She said, “The University has advised that Felix was humanely killed in early June 2007 on completion of the work in which he was involved and in accordance with the requirements of the relevant project licence.”
She added, “I am satisfied that the requirements of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 have been fully met and I do not consider there is a need to vary or suspend the licence.”
Felix was used by renowned neurosurgeon Professor Tipu Aziz, a tutor at Magdalen College, as part of his research into Parkinson’s disease.
As part of the research, a toxin was injected in its veins to create symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, causing muscle seizures and electrically stimulating its brain.
In June, following the end of the experiments, which were needed before any human trials could be carried out, the monkey was killed due to legal requirements.
In response to Felix’s death, animal rights group SPEAK embarked on the first leg of its ‘Felix Campaign Tour,’ which aims to “end the fraudulent and grotesque practice of vivisection at Oxford University”.
The anti-vivisection tour will visit universities involved in what SPEAK considers to be abusing animals in laboratories. The campaign has already held a demonstration at Manchester University Medical School.
In response to the Home Office’s decision, SPEAK supporter Emma Speed said, “It’s a disgrace that the government is willing to allow experiments which have been banned in Switzerland and Germany and other countries due to the cruelty involved.”
She added, “These experiments do not work, they’re not ethically right. They’re not scientifically right. We’ll continue campaigning to stop them.”
Tom Holder, spokesman for pro-animal testing group ProTest said, “It is standard practice to terminate an animal after the research is finished. Is prevents the possibility of the animal living in any pain that may come at a later date as a result of the experiments. I am glad the Home Office has rejected Mr Hancock’s request.”
Felix has also been at the centre of campaigns by other animal rights groups. In April, an 88-year-old member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), an anti-vivisection organization, fasted for 48 hours in a small cage. Joan Collins was protesting against the experiments being performed upon Felix and other monkeys by Professor Aziz.
On Saturday, one SPEAK member will sit in a cage to raise money for the Felix Campaign. According to SPEAK’s website he will be “imprisoned and unable to move inside ‘the chair’…‘The chair’ is the name given to the tiny cage which Felix was forced to sit in whilst performing repetitive tasks for anything up to six hours each day.”
Last November Felix featured in the BBC documentary ‘Monkeys, Rats and Me’, which depicted the work on primates by Professor Aziz and his colleagues in Oxford and the controversy it has generated.
SPEAK promises to continue to hold demonstrations at Oxford University, protesting against the new animal experimentation laboratory being built on South Parks Road.By Mohsin Khan

Is anyone ever too young to indulge in a little nostalgia now and then? Perhaps there are babies who pine for the halcyon days of the womb. “Oh, alas for the amniotic fluid, the vitamin-rich food on tap, the lovely cosiness” they would moan if only they knew how. Instead, they pass their time wordlessly wailing for what has been. Perhaps there are children, on their first day of nursery school, who heave a little sigh for the dearly departed – the onesies, the high-chair, the cot – before stoically resigning themselves to the serious, grown-up business of tidying the Wendy house and making sure that the Cabbage Patch doll gets to bed on time.

Certainly, at the not-too-ancient age of twenty, I’m no stranger to a spot of ‘fauxstalgia’ – that is, nostalgia for those who are young enough to know better. Midnight essay crises tend to induce severe bouts of fauxstalgia, during which I pine for my spoon-fed, well-read school days when I was a mere snip of a thing at eighteen. Gender divides at parties, Billie Piper on Top of the Pops (RIP), Starbucks-free high streets, and fake IDs comprise some of the things for which I’m occasionally fauxstalgic. And I’m not the only one. Indulging in fauxstalgia is a national hobby, largely thanks to the wonders of digital cameras, which allow us to pore over a photo only a moment after it has been taken (“didn’t we look pretty five minutes ago?”).

Yet, the term ‘fauxstalgia’ does not only apply to this kind of premature nostalgia for things only recently past. Fauxstalgia also encompasses our false nostalgia for those things past which we never actually experienced ourselves. That today’s fashions are so heavily influenced by the styles of bygone eras, from the mini-dresses of the sixties to the maxi-dresses of the seventies, most likely represents a dearth of creative inspiration but may perhaps also be symptomatic of our fauxstalgic tendencies. In fact, this reverence of yesteryear leads to the irony that anything awarded the suffix ‘retro’, whether it be music, fashion or film, is automatically up-to-the-minute.

Unsurprisingly, fauxstalgia is a financially lucrative business. Cashing in on the trend are bands as musically diverse as Take That and the Pixies, both of whom have performed to sold-out arenas on their recent comeback tours, with tickets exchanging hands for more than £200 on E-Bay. In the case of Take That, it was notable that the only former member of the band who did not participate in their reunion tour of 2006 was also the only one to have enjoyed a profitable music career since their demise almost a decade earlier. Likewise, by the time of the Pixies’ reunion in 2004, they had been defunct for twelve years and the royalties had dwindled substantially. Yet, as the BBC website reviewer said of the latter, “If nothing else comes out of this comeback tour other than a healthier bank balance for the four members of the Pixies then that’s fine, but that doesn’t have to mean that I won’t be down at the front of the stage in 2014 for their next show, manically singing along to Monkey Gone To Heaven, pretending I’m a teenager again.” It seems that you can’t put a price on fauxstalgia.

The latest to be announced in this recent spate of fauxstalgia-friendly comeback tours is that of the Spice Girls. Despite reports that they will earn a not-to-be-sniffed-at sum of £10 million each for the tour, the sponsorship, the accompanying documentary, and the inevitable greatest hits album, Geri has staunchly denied that money is a motivating factor for their reunion. Instead she attributes the reason for the tour to “nostalgia”, which is interesting if we consider that it was she who brought about their demise, dramatically resigning her place in the band during their world tour in 1998, on the grounds of in-band “differences”. At the recent press launch she said, “we’re doing this because it’s a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to be a Spice Girl again. Who would turn that down?” Who indeed, particularly if your last attempt at a solo-album, Passion, was met with such a distinctly passionless response that it failed even to reach the top-forty on first release. “Obviously it’s nostalgic,” she continued, “but  equally, if new fans want to come along, that’s fantastic.” And fauxstalgia is certainly to be cited for the astounding fact that the £85 tickets to the London dates of the tour sold out in just 38 seconds. As LMH second-year, gleeful golden-ticket holder and fauxstalgic fan, Gerard Lee, said, “Geri had already left the band by the time I got the chance to see them at Wembley Arena in 1998 so I decided I’d have to go this time round and see them all together”.

From my adamance that Baby Spice and I were soulsisters (“we have the same name and we both have blonde hair!”) to my long-overdue epiphany as to the meaning of ‘Two Become One’, the Spice Girls are bound up with many of my formative childhood memories. Not least do I remember the tremulous thrill of buying a packet of Spice Girls photographs (the latest ‘official’ merchandise product to guzzle my pocket-money), only to discover that fate had dealt me a cruel hand since this new acquisition did not contain that rare photo for which I longed but rather was a duplicate of a packet I already possessed. Yet, despite my predilection for Spice Girls fauxstalgia of this kind, I shall not be joining the ranks of former fans in begging, borrowing, stealing or selling my vital organs in the hope of obtaining a ticket. In fact, I’m thoroughly disillusioned by the hype surrounding the Spice Girls’ reunion and, contrary to appearances, this is not due to any lingering photo-related bitterness.

In my opinion, seeing the Spice Girls on their comeback tour will never be able to mean to me now what it did originally, not so much because I myself have changed but rather because the five members of the band have changed. Though the intricacies of the feminist ideology possibly underlying the motto, ‘Girl Power’, were lost on me as a child, I nevertheless appreciated the spirit of female friendship and sisterhood which the Spice Girls represented to girls of my age. Yet, the photo shoot which accompanied the press launch for their comeback tour made it abundantly clear that no such camaraderie still exists between them. No longer resembling a cohesive five-piece, no longer even friends, they stood stiffly as five individuals, all of whom are unrecognisable from their former individual ‘Spice’ personas. Mel C, Mel B and Emma, once Sporty, Scary and Baby respectively, were indistinguishable from one another, demurely and blandly dressed in top-to-toe black. Geri, in stark incongruity, was serenely encased in swathes of white fabric, perhaps in a misguided attempt to dispel the image of her as the black sheep of the band.

Yet, the sight of Victoria alone, her impossible breasts vying for attention and chihauhua-like frame squeezed into a corset, was enough to confirm that the endearing ordinariness and outspoken, girl-next-door charm which accounted for much of the Spice Girls’ appeal has long been lost. Indeed, she is no longer the likeable and fun Posh Spice of old but rather she is one half of so-called ‘Brand Beckham’, ironically managed in this enterprise by Simon Fuller, the media svengali whom the Spice Girls notoriously sacked as their manager during their heydey. Ruthlessly dedicated to her own self-promotion, from ‘DVB’ perfumes to her personal online blog, her entire image has been strategically crafted by a team of publicists with military precision.

The Spice Girls’ comeback tour is a bloated, cynical and ultimately pointless operation, not unlike ‘Brand Beckham’ itself. It’s a half-hearted resurrection of what was successful in its day; a shadow of its former self. It can only disappoint those leagues of fauxstalgia-driven fans who have come to see the Spice Girls as they once knew and loved them. Save your £85 and see Girls Aloud instead. Fauxstalgia is so last year. 
By Emma Bernstein

To attain an Extraordinary Blue is no mean feat, but 2^nd Dan Black Belt Justine Potts is no ordinary girl; President of Oxford University TaeKwon-do, she juggles her martial arts with a classics degree, as well as rowing for her college and captaining Balliol’s cricket side. Furthermore, having begun TaeKwon-do at the age of seven and reached Black Belt before her twelfth birthday, she staunchly insists: ‘I don’t actually like fighting’ – extraordinary?

When her father took his seven-year-old daughter to a TaeKwon-do demonstration in the hope that she might be inspired to learn to defend herself, he could not have anticipated how readily she would take the bait. Thirteen years later with a varsity win, National and International medals and 5 years of teaching TaeKwon-do behind her, she has also cross-trained in a variety of martial arts. For Justine, TaeKwon-do is ‘a way of life, not just a sport.’ She explains: ‘it trains the mind as well as the body,’ and is keen to emphasise the sparring as part of training up, and not as an opportunity to smash another person in the face.

Oxford was the first TaeKwon-do club in Britain, and Justine is loyal to the style they practice (ITF), which she describes as faster and more elegant than that of their Light Blue rivals (WTF). ‘Varsity is a very big thing,’ Justine asserts; ‘because Cambridge practices the other variety, it becomes almost a defence of our style.’

Last year’s varsity victory was sweet for this dedicated Oxonian, but competitions are not at the centre of Justine’s martial arts philosophy. To compete, she says, ‘you really have to believe that you are superior to the person you are competing against, which is not something I like thinking.’ In earlier years she was accused by peers of hypocrisy for teaching and not competing herself, so she entered the TAGB British Championship at the age of 17. With the gold medal hanging around her neck, Justine successfully silenced her critics by proving that an aggressively competitive attitude is not necessary to train and be the best in TaeKwon-do.

After years of training and extensive reading in and around this field, it is not surprising that Justine has developed her own philosophies: ‘for me, TaeKwon-do is more an art than it is a sport. And I think it should be more of an art.’ The science and art inherent to martial arts may be accessed on both a physical and intellectual level, she claims, and quotes Bruce Lee, who described martial arts as an ‘expression of the human body.’ ‘It is a question of defending yourself and knowing the limits of your own power and aggression,’ she says; ‘when it comes to teaching I really insist on people having good experience of all martial arts. I teach practical self-defence, and often incorporate weapons training, with sticks of knife defence techniques. TaeKwon-do does not teach grappling, so I sometimes teach a class in that, inspired by other martial arts.’

Naming Bruce Lee’s ‘Jeet Kune Do’ as the other martial art she would be keen to train in because of its incorporation of different styles, it becomes clear that Justine’s success in TaeKwon-do is due not simply to her physical fitness and stamina, but is a matter of intelligence and attitude. Given this 19-year-old’s size and stature, her assurance that, ‘I really wouldn’t be put off by an 18 stone man attacking me’, seems preposterous. It is not by aggressive self-assertion, but with characteristically calm demeanour that Justine reveals her secret: ‘there are pressure points that will take someone down, no matter how big or small they are.’ What would a Blues boxer make of that, I wonder?

Have you ever had to defend yourself outside training?

“Luckily not. I have had to step in for people before, but often the key is to talk yourself out of the situation and when you’re in situation like a crowded bar, to position yourself correctly to protect yourself in case of trouble.”

What is the hardest thing you have had to do?

“In physical terms, my black belt grading was the most horrendous experience of my life. In one of the pre-grading sessions the motto was: ‘it isn’t real training if you don’t throw up.’ I remember turning around in the corridor to see the 40-year-old man behind me breaking down into tears because of the physical effort and extreme pressure on us. It sounds horrible, but it made me stronger, and taught me to never give up and to remain calm when facing difficulties.”

What is the most difficult break you have managed?

“Probably a jumping twisting kick, breaking three boards. I did it first time – I had to!”

Is there any situation in which you would be scared to defend yourself?

“Well, I would never even attempt to fight if someone had a syringe, and possibly not in the case of a gun. You see, with a knife you are likely to get cut, but there are techniques to ensure you are not cut in a place that will be fatal. This is not possible with a syringe. If it sticks in anywhere you could have AIDS and that’s it. It depends on the circumstances though – I’d always weight up the situation and try to talk my way out first.”