Heid Jerstad visits the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan in search of temples, politics and the truth behind Gross National Happiness
 Young people these days are cynical, they say. The time of utopias is gone, wars continue, democracy becomes meaningless as political parties converge, religion is outdated and commerce reigns – so one might as well take that job with Goldman Sachs. But rather than give up on modern life entirely, throwing yourself into a completely alien culture and discovering a different, alternative way of life could be just what you need to regain some of your interest and faith in the world around you.

This summer my normally stingy college granted me five hundred pounds towards making a six-day trip to Bhutan. This Tibetan Buddhist kingdom locked between India and Chinese Tibet set up a monarchy in 1907 and has ruled itself since, with India as its main trading partner and mentor. Wherever we went roads were being built by Indian workers with whole families splitting stones or shovelling gravel – and an Indian army soldier keeping an eye on them. I never actually took photos of this (being slightly nervous about what the army might think) but the sight of these low-caste women, teenagers and old men doing such backbreaking work as we drove by in our huge Toyota made me wonder why they didn’t use road machines. (I only discovered later that it is in an attempt to employ the poor, as was done in post-1929 America.)

Before this trip was suggested to me I hadn’t actually heard of Bhutan. This says a lot, as I did an option on the Himalayas last Michaelmas and studied Tibetan when I was 16. In my defence, tourism in Bhutan has been heavily controlled and gaining access to the country is difficult. A visa can only be obtained through an agent, and visitors can only travel in a group with a guide and driver. There are beneficial side effects to these limitations too; much of the detrimental impact tourists have had on countries nearby (notably India and Thailand) has so far been avoided in Bhutan –  there is a complete absence of beggars, for example.
Being a Buddhist country, all sentient life (and it is oddly evocative of Star Wars to hear men in robes talk of sentient life) is taken seriously – numerous stray dogs roam the streets without fear and the driver of our large SUV would always brake so as not to harm a bird or cat. Whether it really is compassionate to let animals live when they are obviously starving or ill is unclear to me, though dogs near monasteries always looked healthy and well-fed.

The importance of religion is immediately evident once you arrive in Bhutan. Whilst visiting Taktsang, the Tigers Nest, a temple complex situated more than half a kilometre above the bottom of the nearby valley, we met two middle aged ladies with their sleeping bags and food on their backs who were planning to walk up and around the auspicious mountain, sleeping outside if need be. Pilgrims must be the original backpackers and these ones were very cheerful, if rather out of breath.

So what of the population? Nobody actually knows how many people there are in Bhutan. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) the two million estimate given by CIA Factbook is inflated, invented because of a belief that nations with under a million people were not allowed to join the UN. The real number is probably closer to seven hundred thousand. There is a huge economic divide between the well-off urban population and the farmers who use traditional but labour-intensive methods on steep and remote fields. They seem to have found this situation acceptable until the arrival of satellite television in 1999, Though certain un-Buddhist and immoral channels were banned after a few years (MTV and wrestling – schools had seen a marked increase in violence) villagers still have access to a multitude of channels which of course make it clear to them what they are still lacking in thier lives, and shows a world where leisure seems to be the norm. New problems such as lack of family time and teenage drug abuse are side effects of this exposure, we were told.

The educated youth flock to the few emerging towns, attracted by the Bollywood glamour and high-status government jobs. But there are not enough of these to go around resulting in educated unemployment, while migrant workers from India provide manual labour. One industry that is supporting increasing numbers of young people is domestic film production, which is doing a thriving trade, having pushed Bollywood out of the competition in Bhutan without financial support from the government. We were guests of a filmmaker to see an unusually dark film about a curse, charmingly shot with cowpats littering the background, endless romantic songs and dance scenes and a dramatic suicidal ending.

I went to Bhutan primarily to assist my father in preliminary research for a documentary film on Gross National Happiness (GNH), a fascinating concept which is officially a policy of Bhutan. Unsurprisingly, measuring the happiness of an individual or population is far from easy. Various books have been written and studies done on the subject but it remains elusive, certainly in terms of national policymaking. Conclusions reached concerning money and happiness never seem to translate into social policy. For research, we visited the Bhutan Studies Centre, established to do cross-sectoral research (i.e. think holistically about what each ministry has separate responsibility for) which is working on GNH. The only women there were secretaries, so I felt a little out of place, receiving endless snacks and tea while the scholars explained their work to my father. They are halfway-through their mammoth survey (although the results are yet to be processed) with around half of nine provinces covered. The 123 page questionnaire is delivered personally by the researcher and takes up to 8 hours per person. The idea is to discover what aspects of life are important for people’s happiness. For instance, would they prefer their virgin forest to be cut down and sold (likely to cause erosion and farming problems) if it meant they could build a secondary school in the valley or would that be a lower priority than increasing crop yields or developing cash crops? After all, the importance of crops in Bhutan should not be underestimated – there is even a large market in Japan for certain Bhutanese mushrooms which resemble Viagra.

The reason this research into national happiness needs to be done now is that the first ever national elections are scheduled for spring 2008. The theory is that the data should inform the incoming government on what areas are important to the people.  Most of the duties of the king have already been delegated to a national assembly and cabinet of ministers and his powers will no longer be absolute when the democratisation process is complete. In fact, the coronation of the Oxford-educated crown prince (currently acting fifth king) will probably take place after the election, on a date to be decided by astrologers. The forming of political parties is becoming increasingly common, with educated individuals choosing to leave their jobs in the civil service or the media to become involved in politics. This phenomenon has resulted in an interesting situation in which only three ministers have chosen to stay out of the party system to rule the country until the election. Our meetings kept getting cancelled or delayed because the person we were supposed to meet had decided to enter politics.
We talked to the election commissioner (who had just received registration applications from the two main parties) about these issues and discovered an astonishing fact. Having only been there a few days, enjoying the food and friendliness I had not completely realised that Bhutan is not a Shangri-la, a Tibet that was never assimilated, a land of spirituality and utopia. Despite the many water-turned prayer-wheels, the harmonious coexistence of regional administration and monasteries in the same building complex and the picturesque architecture and national dress, it is a country with very real peculiarities and problems. In fact religion brings its own problems when Western-style politics are on the agenda. Islam is not the only religion which has a ‘democratic problem.’ In Ladakh, the partly Buddhist region of Jammu, and Kashmir, India, they have experienced this with their Hill Council. A few Rinpoches (high lamas, sometimes reincarnated) got into politics and won landslide elections, not for any particular policy but simply because of the respect the population had for them. What the commissioner in Bhutan told us (and there was even a leaflet explaining this) was that all robed (religious) persons would be excluded from any political activity whatsoever, including voting. Religion, apparently, is ‘above’ politics. Taken at face value this does reduce the validity of the Bhutanese political system, but perhaps it is a necessary measure. One wonders what the reaction would be like in Russia or Italy were priests to be denied the vote. 

After the election it will probably take some time before anything becomes clear concerning the success of their democratisation project. The apparent lack of corruption and the revenue from abundant hydropower are positive clues to what has so far been and looks like continuing as a success story. I would certainly be up for a heated discussion on humans being incapable of trying for something better. But then again, I am an optimist.

This is a book that needed to be written. It is a declaration of defiance and warfare against one of the most dangerous threats to civilisation today. This is ‘one man’s fearless exchanges with Internet spammers’.
Ostensibly written by Bob Servant, a 62 year-old ‘unemployed gigolo’, the book is essentially a transcript of eight e-mail conversations between ‘Bob’ and the spammers, people posing as anything from Russian brides to African military generals, all in an effort to extract money from naïve web surfers. In each case, Bob neatly turns the tables, leaving a trail of comic carnage as he gradually draws the unsuspecting crooks into his own outlandish schemes. Granted, the conversations hold little literary merit, but they are eminently readable and absurdly funny. Highlights include a supposed lawyer who becomes involved in creating recipes for ‘Uncle Bob’s African Adventure’, and an exchange with a man who claims to be the son of ‘late King Arawi of tribal land’ and ends up trying to persuade Bob that he can indeed send talking lions to a Scottish zoo.The book is similar in style to other popular humour, consisting principally of ludicrously surreal outbursts to complete strangers and, while certainly amusing, quickly becomes repetitive. Often the funniest parts of Bob’s conversations are the replies, as the bewildered victims resort to increasingly ham-fisted attempts to extract money from a raving madman. However, the book really succeeds as a manifesto on how to take revenge on those who fill our inboxes with junk. We can all sleep a little more easily now that Bob has taken up the challenge of out-spamming the spammers.By Jonathan Tan

Michaelmas…sub-fusc…matriculation…on top of my modern languages degree, this time last year I had to learn the oxford lingo and prepare myself for one of those special ceremonies that remind you just how damn superior you are supposed to feel to the rest of the world, and widens the town/gown divide. Once you get over the initial shame of parading through the streets looking like a Harry Potter reject, it’s actually quite fun once you get into the swing of things. Most of the morning is taken up with the college photograph, where you’ll undoubtedly be squashed between two complete strangers who have nothing more in common with you than your height.

After a couple of hours of posing in the cold, for it will inevitably be freezing, you get herded into the Sheldonian, past the paparazzi tourists who by this time are circling in a frenzy of unintelligible excitement like a flock of carrion crows, and you settle down to enjoy the show. The show is difficult to enjoy because it’s read out by the Vice Chancellor of the University in Latin, not hugely relevant to those of us who weren’t born and bred at Eton. But it does add to the feeling of sacred other-worldliness that makes up such a large part of our weird and wonderful institution (as it does Hogwarts, admittedly).

The words themselves are unlikely to register but Google tells me that they involve promises on our behalf to generally behave and refrain from leading any cattle or livestock we might own onto the fields of Christchurch. You are not officially a member of the University until this ceremony, and once over, you can emerge into the light feeling cleansed and godly while the uninitiated others flounder in the mud. This feeling of civilised supremacy will no doubt soon deteriorate into a debauched  and potentially messy pub crawl that will probably include the Turf and the King’s Arms somewhere along the way. Meanwhile, the rest of Oxford’s residents look on and mumble something about how young people today have too much money and not enough sense. I wish.By Victoria Lazar Graham

Deputy Fashion editor of The Guardian (and former editor of Cherwell) Hadley Freeman warns Daniel Rolle that fashion journalism isn’t all about doing lunch, meeting celebrities and bitching.Hadley Freeman is by no means the kind of journalist we usually associate with the hair-flicking, airbrushed world of Vogue, Tatler, or even the fashion section of the Guardian.  As she walked over to the reception area of 119 Farringdon Road (the Guardian HQ) she immediately struck me as quite a normal person. No ridiculously puffed-up hair, no huge bag stuffed with the entire cosmetics section of Selfridges – not even, it seemed, wearing any make up.  Fashion journalism brings with it images of a champagne sipping, celebrity mingling, Chihuahua-cuddling world. If we take Hadley for our model, so to speak, then this could not be further from the truth.

Hadley’s journey to her current position as Deputy Fashion Editor of the Guardian, and a contributing editor of Vogue, started surprisingly close to home. Hadley was an English undergraduate at St. Anne’s, which she descrbies as “that ugly, concrete one”; she also honed her journalistic prowess here at Cherwell, where she was Editor in Michaelmas 1998. “I knew I wanted to do some form of journalism at University, so I went along to Freshers’ Fair and picked up a card for both the student papers. When it came to going along to meetings, I found that Cherwell had been clever enough to put a map on the back of the card. So I ended up there, and started writing film reviews.”

Hadley is quick to explain that the world of fashion journalism differs greatly from the stereotypes generated by films such as The Devil Wears Prada. “Most fashion journalists are not calorie counting, champagne guzzling, peroxide-blonde darlings; the fashion world, and in particular fashion journalism, is a highly demanding, highly competitive industry.” Fashion journalism seems to suit Hadley Freeman, both personally and as a journalist: she comes across as someone who, thankfully, does not take herself too seriously. This is apparent from her writing, which is often very tongue in cheek without appearing to be aloof; a balance which is hard to strike when dealing with some of the characters she has to handle on a day to day basis. Her columns and articles on Guardian Unlimited are a testimony to this: topics range from Kanye West and his Derrida-esque linguistic strategies to Paris Hilton’s chihuahua’s latest brush with the law.  In essence, then, Hadley is quick to recognise the fundamental paradox of her trade: “As a fashion journalist you must be aware of the silliness of your subject, but not apologise for it. Fashion has a stigma; nevertheless there’s no reason to feel guilty about it.”

The fashion world has a marked relationship with celebrity and Hadley’s blog is filled with insightful, witty comments about celebrities and their ‘love’ for fashion. Our discussion led to the recent activity of Sean ‘P.Diddy’ Combes – ‘rapper’, ‘producer’ and all-round party animal. “I’m convinced that P.Diddy was sent to this planet to make me laugh…he’s like a pseudo-ghetto court jester”, Hadley notes.  Indeed, she has a number of excellent Diddy-related anecdotes, the best of which relates her experience at one of his own fashion shows. The star held it to market his clothing line Sean John, but it seemed little more than a front for nudity. He had a number of women walk out wearing nothing but suede bikini tops and g-strings – resembling what Hadley refers to as “Flintstones go porn.”
Any conversation concerning the fashion world these days undoubtedly touches on that media favourite, the body image presented by the industry and its effect on teenage girls.  Hadley’s stance on the subject is interesting; particularly her response to claims that modern fashion overly sexualises women. “The idea that feminism is incompatible with fashion is absurd. Feminism is not about having hairy armpits and wearing frumpy dresses. We have this idea that women’s fashion is designed purely for male gratification. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Moreover women lead the fashion industry wherever you look – it is a supportive industry, where it is quite normal for a woman to be incredibly high powered.”

The end of our discussion led us to the future of fashion journalism: where is fashion headed? What does the rise of the internet mean for the press?  First of all, Hadley quite rightly points out that print is very much still the way forward: “You can’t read a Blackberry on the beach – it just wouldn’t be practical; similarly, the fashion press isn’t going anywhere: we are like cockroaches”. Moreover, Hadley predicts a push within the industry towards more sustainable fashion and a move away from the throwaway culture of late.

Either way, it is clear that Hadley Freeman is one to watch in the future of fashion media. Whatever the next few years hold, she promises one thing: she will never forget those hours spent cultivating headlines for front pages, rewriting shoddily written features and formulating letters addressed to herself at ‘that little pink building next to Christ Church’.Hadley Freeman is by no means the kind of journalist we usually associate with the hair-flicking, airbrushed world of Vogue, Tatler, or even the fashion section of the Guardian.  As she walked over to the reception area of 119 Farringdon Road (the Guardian HQ) she immediately struck me as quite a normal person. No ridiculously puffed-up hair, no huge bag stuffed with the entire cosmetics section of Selfridges – not even, it seemed, wearing any make up.  Fashion journalism brings with it images of a champagne sipping, celebrity mingling, Chihuahua-cuddling world. If we take Hadley for our model, so to speak, then this could not be further from the truth.

Hadley’s journey to her current position as Deputy Fashion Editor of the Guardian, and a contributing editor of Vogue, started surprisingly close to home. Hadley was an English undergraduate at St. Anne’s, which she descrbies as “that ugly, concrete one”; she also honed her journalistic prowess here at Cherwell, where she was Editor in Michaelmas 1998. “I knew I wanted to do some form of journalism at University, so I went along to Freshers’ Fair and picked up a card for both the student papers. When it came to going along to meetings, I found that Cherwell had been clever enough to put a map on the back of the card. So I ended up there, and started writing film reviews.”

Hadley is quick to explain that the world of fashion journalism differs greatly from the stereotypes generated by films such as The Devil Wears Prada. “Most fashion journalists are not calorie counting, champagne guzzling, peroxide-blonde darlings; the fashion world, and in particular fashion journalism, is a highly demanding, highly competitive industry.” Fashion journalism seems to suit Hadley Freeman, both personally and as a journalist: she comes across as someone who, thankfully, does not take herself too seriously. This is apparent from her writing, which is often very tongue in cheek without appearing to be aloof; a balance which is hard to strike when dealing with some of the characters she has to handle on a day to day basis. Her columns and articles on Guardian Unlimited are a testimony to this: topics range from Kanye West and his Derrida-esque linguistic strategies to Paris Hilton’s chihuahua’s latest brush with the law.  In essence, then, Hadley is quick to recognise the fundamental paradox of her trade: “As a fashion journalist you must be aware of the silliness of your subject, but not apologise for it. Fashion has a stigma; nevertheless there’s no reason to feel guilty about it.”

The fashion world has a marked relationship with celebrity and Hadley’s blog is filled with insightful, witty comments about celebrities and their ‘love’ for fashion. Our discussion led to the recent activity of Sean ‘P.Diddy’ Combes – ‘rapper’, ‘producer’ and all-round party animal. “I’m convinced that P.Diddy was sent to this planet to make me laugh…he’s like a pseudo-ghetto court jester”, Hadley notes.  Indeed, she has a number of excellent Diddy-related anecdotes, the best of which relates her experience at one of his own fashion shows. The star held it to market his clothing line Sean John, but it seemed little more than a front for nudity. He had a number of women walk out wearing nothing but suede bikini tops and g-strings – resembling what Hadley refers to as “Flintstones go porn.”
Any conversation concerning the fashion world these days undoubtedly touches on that media favourite, the body image presented by the industry and its effect on teenage girls.  Hadley’s stance on the subject is interesting; particularly her response to claims that modern fashion overly sexualises women. “The idea that feminism is incompatible with fashion is absurd. Feminism is not about having hairy armpits and wearing frumpy dresses. We have this idea that women’s fashion is designed purely for male gratification. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Moreover women lead the fashion industry wherever you look – it is a supportive industry, where it is quite normal for a woman to be incredibly high powered.”

The end of our discussion led us to the future of fashion journalism: where is fashion headed? What does the rise of the internet mean for the press?  First of all, Hadley quite rightly points out that print is very much still the way forward: “You can’t read a Blackberry on the beach – it just wouldn’t be practical; similarly, the fashion press isn’t going anywhere: we are like cockroaches”. Moreover, Hadley predicts a push within the industry towards more sustainable fashion and a move away from the throwaway culture of late.

Either way, it is clear that Hadley Freeman is one to watch in the future of fashion media. Whatever the next few years hold, she promises one thing: she will never forget those hours spent cultivating headlines for front pages, rewriting shoddily written features and formulating letters addressed to herself at ‘that little pink building next to Christ Church’.
By Daniel Rolle

POLICE officers arrested a drunken man who violently attacked students at a Wadham house party on Iffley Road last Saturday night.
The man, who witnesses described as shaven headed and in his early 40s, broke into a neighbouring property at around 10:30pm before climbing a wall and throwing bricks at students.
The incident came after vandalism at a nearby Volkswagen car dealership at another Wadham party the night before, during which a windscreen was smashed and car rooves damaged when bottles were dropped from flats above.
One student, who wished not to be named, was threatened with an £80 fine after police officers on patrol caught him urinating onto a car in Charles Street.
Wadham second-year Charlotte Houldcroft said of Saturday night’s events, “There were four of us walking in a group down Cowley Road, and this guy, was by the roadworks. He’d moved one of the barriers across the footpath, and was pretty obviously drunk, incoherently laughing and mumbling.
“He made some joke to us, but we just moved the barrier back out of our way and walked on, thinking he’d just had a few too many as he didn’t seem threatening.”
James Neale, a first-year at Wadham, said, “We were all pretty drunk when a man appeared on the wall, and he was even more intoxicated than us,” Neale said. “He didn’t have particularly good dance moves so someone threw gravel at him, then bottles and cans, and that made him really angry.”
After a bottle struck the man on his temple, he threatened students with a brick he had found on the wall while staggering around dripping blood.
Police arrived after two first-year students called the emergency services, using a taser gun to subdue the man before placing him under arrest.
A police officer attending the scene suggested that it was unlikely anyone would press charges as there was a “mutual” confrontation between the man and students.
Neale added, “It was probably the students’ fault for starting it. We could have handled the situation a lot better than throwing shit at him.”By Peter Wright 

TROUBLED PPH Wycliffe Hall has come under further pressure after the Church of England announced this week that it had brought forward a scheduled inspection earlier than planned.
The Bishops’ Committee for Ministry is to carry out its inspection next October, three months before the original date of January 2009.
Wycliffe Hall’s Principal, Dr Richard Turnbull, denied suggestions that the inspection had been brought forward because of concerns about recent events at the Permanent Private Hall.
He claimed that the earlier date of inspection “allows the normal inspection of Wycliffe at the beginning of a wider inspection of the Anglican theological institutions in Oxford”. He added, “There is no urgent or rapid inspection since there is no need for such.”
Inspections at the Hall, a leading centre for evangelical training, normally occur every five years.
The PPH, which can present students with Oxford degrees in the same manner as colleges, has become mired in controversy surrounding its leadership.
Earlier this year, three former Principals called for the resignation of current Principal Richard Turnbull.
In September, a University panel concluded that Oxford’s seven PPHs were at risk of not providing a broad liberal education. Referring to Wycliffe, the report raised concerns that it did not offer an “an Oxford experience in its essentials” and was not “a suitable educational environment for the full intellectual development of young undergraduates”. It recommended that school-leavers be barred from going to Wycliffe to study for their undergraduate degrees.
Last month Council member Clare MacInnes resigned, and five other staff members have also left in the last year.
Louis Henderson, a spokesperson for the Church of England’s Communication Office, said that it was unlikely Wycliffe Hall would lose recognition from the Church, which would advise on management and how to rectify any weaknesses.
Henderson said, “If an institution is failing so seriously, appearing unable or unwilling to rectify the faults identified by the inspection, the Bishops’ Committee’s ultimate sanction is to recommend the House of Bishops, to which it reports, to withdraw recognition of the institution for training for ordination. This, I might add, is almost inconceivable, and certainly has never happened in my time.”By Mohsin Khan 

 Millie Maler, DPhil Candidate, AstrophysicsA third year graduate student at Christ Church reading for a DPhil in Astrophysics, last year Millie took astrophysics tutorials at Exeter College. In her spare time, she says, her favourite hobby is definitely baking cakes – closely followed by making mischief. For grey autumn days, she recommends this simple vegetable soup with rice.Vegetable Soup and Rice12 Tomatoes
3 Bell Peppers
2 cloves garlic
5 small onions
2 pints vegetable stock
50g rice
Handful of chopped basil
Small pot of creme fraiche1 Preheat oven to almost as hot as it will go
2 Rinse all the vegetables off under running water and peel the onions and the garlic.
3 Bake in the oven for about 15-20 mins or until all the vegetables have hints of brown all over them removed from the oven and put on the kettle, then stick it all in a blender
4 Add the chopped vegetables to a large pot on the stove top, put on Medium heat, add 2 pints of boiling chicken or vegetable stock. Add the rice and serveWineA good bottle of rosé will go well with this soup – as will a full bodied red. Try Tesco’s ‘Finest’ range – especially their Cote de Province reds.

Known for cringeworthy music, precarious outfits and floors sticky with the spilled vodka-cokes and lager of over-excited or over-drunk students, the bop is as much a part of Oxford life as libraries, boaties and the emergency hiding of Shisha pipes. Like it or loathe it, the bop looks to be one of those things which will not go away.

The name alone suggests that this is an institution which has been running for quite some time.  A quick search on that other Oxford staple, Wikipedia, reveals ‘bop’ as a “party or club night at many British universities” but I have yet to find a friend from another uni who uses the word.  We’ve all been there, ridiculed in our home towns for letting slip the word ‘bop’ in company.  “Bop?” they laugh, derisively, rolling the word around their mouths, “how…quaint.  Will there be ginger ale and a jive competition?”  And we laugh along, all the while cursing them as we explain that, in fact no, ‘bop’ is just a word for a college party and we really are very cool indeed.  Worse still is when mothers or more often grandmothers begin to smile distantly, their eyes glazing over in reminiscence of bops to which they were escorted back when the word ‘bop’ – as well as ‘yonder’, ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ – was still in common usage.  “Oh yes dear,” they say, their carpet slippers tapping away to a half remembered rhythm, “I remember I met your grandfather at a bop in the town hall.  He came straight up to me…I was a looker in those days, you know, everybody said so…and he asked me to dance and he took me by the hand and we did the lindy hop until nearly eleven when my father came to fetch me.”  And we nod along soberly, thanking our deity of choice that our bops aren’t like that and wondering what on earth the lindy hop might have been.
We have email these days and, sometime early in the term an email arrives containing the first bop theme.  Somewhere within the title the word ‘naughty’ appears.  Or perhaps ‘dirty’.  Or ‘undressed’.  Amongst these inevitable terms you find the actual theme and with it the realisation that you have absolutely nothing to wear. I mean literally having nothing suitable to wear, like Cinderella.

Once you have your theme, inventiveness is the key. Christmas bops, for example, bring out hoards of ‘Slutty Santas’, which, though I never complain too bitterly, were all overshadowed by a girl who came dressed as a present.  Resplendent in a large cardboard box, neatly wrapped and with a bow attached she may have struggled to get through the door and spent most of the night apologising for the way in which her outfit kept walking into people without her knowledge but at least she tried.  Take heed of her example: do not be tempted just to head for Primark or the Party Shop. Approach your bop costume as you would an exam paper: take a few moments to fully read the question and gather your thoughts before you dive in.  Try thinking outside the box…like going Back to School as a bike shed (illustrated).

Your costume, whatever it may be, should be designed and constructed with certain things in mind.  Firstly and most importantly you should not be over constricted.  Whilst dancing is not my forte and I have in fact spent most of my life thus far trying to avoid doing it in public – I am always tempted by the one-hand-clutching-an-ankle-and-the-other-behind-the-head-such-that-the-knee-and-elbow-meet-in-time-with-the-music move: always a crowd pleaser but for all the wrong reasons – but I once made the mistake of producing a costume with such limited arm movement that I could not get my drink to my lips without assistance. 

If you are inclined towards dance then you should curtail your drinking slightly to compensate. Funny to watch you may be, but your embarrassing antics will only be a source of frustration to your friends as they are forced to select photos to add to facebook, subsequently tagging and captioning them all. Also, be aware that whilst air guitar may be fun and, in some situations even cool, there is a time and a place, and in the middle of an ever-expanding circle of startled onlookers, YMCA pumping out of the speakers, is neither. 

When it all comes down to it though, most people at the bop will be just as drunk, badly-dressed, badly co-ordinated and, frankly, uncool-looking as you anyway and those who aren’t haven’t tried hard enough to pass judgement, so just get in there and have fun.

Let’s flashback a few years. Remember waiting anxiously for those A-level results to see if you’d ever get to punt on the Isis and have drinks at the K.A.?

Pretend, for a minute, that you hadn’t made the cut. How would you have felt about attending, as a substitute, a fictional university I call Oxford.net, right from the comfort of your own computer, where your loving parents could still feed you Sunday roast dinners? That option might not be far off, if developments on my side of the pond are any indication.

For years, we’ve been seeing educators take advantage of the Internet through articles and books published online. That was Internet 1.0, all about aggregating as much information as possible to make it easy for the reader looking for say…an essay answer on the French Revolution to find everything he needs.

Now we’re into Internet 2.0, all about connecting information in unpredictable ways. The best Web 2.0 ideas aren’t information collected for one audience, and Web 2.0 readers aren’t in search of information on specific topics in quite the same way.

Today, the best ideas are written and disseminated to a first audience online, on a blog like this one, and if they’re successful, they end up in everyone’s inboxes. The process is viral—you send this post to your friend, he posts it on his blog, someone reads it there and Googles my name and finds a You Tube video of me at the beach and maybe links back to my posting on You Tube, which might lead someone searching “beach” on You Tube, to this post about education.

The goal of Internet 2.0 is to spread information around, not collect it in one place. Which means the goal of Education 2.0 is to spread education to everyone, and not confine it to university campuses.

As I just described in my column , something like this is happening in the United States: U.C. Berkeley has just launched a YouTube channel , where I can learn from Berkeley professors, even though I’m not an enrolled student. MIT and Princeton are in feud over real estate for the campuses they’ve established in Second Life, a virtual world where users set up a persona, or avatar, who can then buy property, attend movies and interact with other avatars representing real people all around the world.

Professors from each of these schools interviewed in the press argue that the new technologies are more than cool gadgets for them: they are new ways of thinking about teaching, and they are changing the way students learn. you don't have to pay for Princeton to go to Princeton in Second Life. You don't have to get into Berkeley to simulate biology labs by video conference.

A tutorial system like Oxford’s would probably work even better online than an American university’s, where the emphasis is on putting students in classes together.
Reading and writing for tutorial essays is a solo task, and in tutorials, all you really need is your tutor. If digital libraries like Project Gutenberg are putting all your sources online, and your tutor has an avatar too (like the professors at MIT do), how many more young people would suddenly have access to an Oxford education?

This is education, of the highest caliber, universally accessible, yet without undermining the experience for the on-campus select and I think it’s just around the corner.

But is the experience good enough to replace university for a student who can’t afford it? Would you trade in Oxford for an online download? Would you send your children to Oxford.net? And if not, what do you make of the virtual experiments of American universities?