The Pembroke Bullfrog, Hilary 2012 by Pembroke College, Oxford

the life of

Marr

Robert Stephen Hawker

Arthur Evans, Minoan Ritual and Reconstructing the Past

PEMBROKE

An Interview with Andrew

BULLFROG

THE

Football in Lebanon: a Remarkable Renaissance

Italy, Il Padrone di Piemonte

Review Joan Didion, Blue Nights The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo The Westbridge, Royal Court Theatre Graham Sutherland, An Unfinished World

Hilary 2012 The Pembroke Bullfrog

Editorial HARRIET BAKER

MADELEINE STOTTOR

Where is your favourite place to eat in Oxford? Sofi de France, the Covered Market

Where is your favourite place to eat in oxford? Edamame on Holywell Street

What is your favourite magazine to read? The White Review

What is your favourite magazine to read? National Geographic

Who would be your ideal dinner companion? Ali Smith

Who would be your ideal dinner companion? Someone who’s promised to take me to the Randolph for tea

What was the last film you saw? Morvern Callar

What was the last film you saw? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Favourite quotation: “So many pieces of me! I must hold tight.” (Edwin Morgan)

And a little quotation: “My heart is your piñata.” (Chuck Palahniuk)

JOE NICHOLSON Where is your favourite place to eat in Oxford? Can’t beat a pub lunch at the Turf What is your favourite magazine to read? The London Review of Books Who would be your ideal dinner companion? One of our superb editors, Harriet or Maddy What was the last film you saw? The Rum Diary with Johnny Depp Favourite quotation: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” (Helen Keller) ANDRIS RUDZITIS

DOUGLAS SLOAN

Where is your favourite place to eat in Oxford? Wok ‘n’ Roll – purely for the name

Where is your favourite place to eat in Oxford? The Croissanterie

What is your favourite magazine to read? The Bullfrog...pfft. Erm...More magazine

What is your favourite magazine to read? The Economist

Who would be your ideal dinner companion? Christopher Hitchens

Who would be your ideal dinner companion? Thomas Jefferson

What was the last film you saw? A Beautiful Mind

What was the last film you saw? The Rum Diary

And a little quotation: “No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp / And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene ii)

And a little quotation: “They hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” (Douglas Adams)

The Pembroke Bullfrog

The Pembroke Bullfrog Hilary 2012

Contents

The Demise of the English Eccentric 4 An Interview with Andrew Marr 6 Hilary Talking, ‘Happiness is a Matter of Personal Choice’ 8

Alex Joynes Madeleine Stottor and Joe Nicholson Responces

“Do you fools listen to music or you just skim through it?” 10 Charlie Coldicott Photo Essay, Hong Kong 12 Natasha Griffiths Il Padrone de Piemonte 14 Claire Cocks Football in Lebanon: a Remarkable Renaissance 16 Fitzroy Morrissey Ghana, Sponsored by Vodafone 18 Ed Grimer Photo Essay, Buenos Aries 20 Oliver Ford Short Story, Moma Said 22 Ziad Samaha Letters to Friends 26 Ted Delicath Arthur Evans, Minoan Ritual and Reconstructing the Past 28 William Bond The Life of Robert Stephen Hawker 30 Mike Kalisch Poetry 32 Anne Brink, William Bond Review: Books, Stage 34 Anne Brink, Robbie Griffiths Review: Film 36 Madeleine Stottor, George Kenwright Photo Essay 37 Nora Schlatte Review: Exhibition, Music 38 Harriet Baker, Alex Fisher Poetry 40 Mike Kalisch, Robbie Griffiths Mask 42 Dyedra Just

Graham Sutherland Trees Under Mynedd Pen Cyrm, 1939 Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford

The Pembroke Bullfrog

The Demise of the English Eccentric Alex Joynes

Have you heard the Nick Clegg joke? Did you read what

David Cameron said?! At the time of writing this, I hadn’t. Or if I did, I wouldn’t remember. In fact, it’s quite easy not to remember a single comment made by the Prime Minister or character trait displayed by his deputy. Both figures are, it seems to me, personality voids, bereft of a single quality or foible for which they could be celebrated or lampooned. The only amusement ever to have stemmed from the two are the Facebook pages in their ‘honour’, my particular favourite being: ‘David Cameron wants change? Give him 30p and tell him to f*ck off ’. Nor are the two of them alone in being spectacularly forgettable. They are representative of twenty-first century public figures as a whole. The age of beige is a boring place to be, but its greatest crime of all is in dismantling the Great British Eccentric and reducing it to a relic of the past. One only has to take a glance at paradigm shifts in the media to observe this: whilst it seems the current three main party leaders could have emerged from the same production line, twenty-five years ago Spitting Image was one of the most-watched and discussed programmes on British television. Political figures were immediately identifiable by their exaggerated caricatures: a terrifying Margaret Thatcher clad in a suit and chomping on a cigar doing battle with an aged

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Michael Foot. Both sides had a cast of similar grotesques, with John Major singled out for his quite literally grey demeanour. Plans to resurrect the show were afoot in 2006, but nothing has been produced. The reason why is clear: what material could they possibly work with? Ed Miliband’s appeal, for instance, disappeared with his adenoids. It is easy to see now why American comedians were openly panicked as George W. Bush left office, bringing an end to eight years of material. One figure remains firmly in the mould of the political character, and that is the sheepdoggish blond bombshell himself, Boris Johnson. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his buffoonery, the man has undeniably filled the role absent for so long, and in the process has earned the title, as his biographer states, of “our only box-office politician”. Despite claims that this may be engineered by a ruffling of his hair before a public appearance, here at least is a politician who is recognised by the public, and excites them. Nor is this sad decline in character reserved for politics alone. The death of Elizabeth Taylor this year marked the end of old Hollywood, where glamour, one-liners, and Martinis abounded, all enabled by the stars themselves, who realised the sheer fatuousness of showbiz and their parts within it. How can one fail to be entranced by a woman who proclaimed, “You can’t cry on a diamond’s shoulder, and diamonds won’t keep you warm at night. But they’re sure fun when the sun shines”. Nowadays, the only time we hear celebrities talk is to promote their perfume, or teach us all how to save the world. Where rock stars once bit the heads off fluffy animals, they now post links to their wife’s weekly lifestyle newsletter.

It is the media, I believe, that is responsible for this cultural decline in eccentricity and character. Where eccentrics were previously celebrated, they are now mocked, and even vilified. The beloved tabloid epithet of ‘oddball’ is regularly wheeled out, quirks are transformed into faults, and innuendos abound. The obituaries for Jimmy Savile, that “self-confessed loner” and “confirmed bachelor” are testament to this: a gentle nudge to the reader in written form, playground whispers writ large. Maybe though, the meaning of eccentricity has been distorted. The notion of people conducting their lives quietly in their own way, and brightening the lives of others in the process, has been reduced and all but destroyed by reality television. On these programmes, at least half of the contestants will proudly proclaim to be ‘mad’, before conducting attention-seeking acts and then fading into the background over the course of the series. Eccentricity for these people is a cynical ploy to win votes and garner publicity; eccentricity for them is ostentatious, affected. These people exist in the real world too. The only thing worse than a world with no eccentrics is one of contrived and forced quirkiness, populated by those types who are very aware of what they are doing. A rule of thumb that I have always found reliable is that those people who say that they are eccentric are not. Eccentricity, once a defining characteristic of the national make-up, is now something that is distrusted and hated in equal measure.

It is difficult to ascertain exactly when this change happened. In the political realm, perhaps the disappearance of character came with New Labour, when, more than ever, there was careful consideration of what it was that the public wanted, encapsulated best, perhaps, in Tony Blair. In attempting to present himself as an Everyman, a tactic whose success subsequent leaders have attempted to emulate, Blair effectively stripped down his genuine persona to become a projection of sorts, a figure about whom everybody could find something they liked. This meant that he started his career as at least one of the most popular prime ministers in recent history, and one who was very much packaged as a political celebrity. He brought with him a new age of politics where PR dictated personality, and ultimately, therefore, lack thereof. We need individuality and character, and those who are happy to march to the beat of a different drum. They may represent something altogether more important in the process. John Stuart Mill wrote: “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and courage which it contained.” Conformity is sometimes necessary but this must never come through sacrifice of individuality. So perhaps eccentricity, by its nature a rare thing, can be a lesson to us all. These individuals should be celebrated, because as long as they exist, we can be safe in the knowledge that we live in a society where great heights can be reached and strength of character endures. Oh, and the Nick Clegg joke? ‘Why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he said he wouldn’t’. How very sad that we know him not for who he is or what he believes but for what he is not.

Illustration George Kenwright

It’s all become so very serious, and not nearly as exciting in the process. We laugh only at the sheer ludicrousness of it all, the celebrities themselves failing to be in on the joke.

The Pembroke Bullfrog

An Interview with Andrew Marr

Madeleine Stottor and Joe Nicholson

Journalist, political commentator, newspaper editor, broadcaster, writer, historian, TV presenter: Andrew Marr has had a fascinating and wideranging career. He has written several books, including A History of Modern Britain, and, most recently, The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and her People. What are you working on at the moment?

Which

What

Very hard. I’ve always been fascinated by the eighteenth century because of the explosion of thinking called the Enlightenment, and because among my favourite writers are Boswell, Fielding, Hume, Smollett, and Burke. I’d love to have been given listening-rights at Dr Johnson’s famous Club.

I’m putting the final touches to three films about the Queen which will go out in February, and filming an eight-hour BBC1 History of the World, which will come out with a thumping big book...so it’s half sweating in libraries and half sweating in airport lounges. prompted you to write your most

recent book,

The Diamond Queen?

She has become a unique figure in modern history, with a sixty-year reign which took her from the world of Stalinism, the empire and Eisenhower to today’s time; and for me, the world of the royals was unknown and fascinating. I wanted to make a serious argument for modern monarchism too.

Which

What sity?

I’ve had a guest on Start the Week who was – almost literally – too nervous to talk, beyond ‘hmm’ and ‘mmph’, which didn’t make good radio. It was a long time ago, but I still get jittery thinking about that half hour. Again, some years back, a food programme had been in the studio beforehand and left bottles of illegal US moonshine, which of course we tried. Not only did our tongues become slightly numb, but the numbness spread across our faces. It was one of the worse acts of broadcasting I’ve committed.

was your favourite part of univer-

Friendship, generally alcoholically aided, was most important; but I loved the tutorials and the freedom to read widely, kept going with hot cheese scones and coffee at the (sorry) Cambridge University Library.

You studied English at university: who is your favourite author and have they influenced your own writings?

Any journalist will begin with Orwell, who teaches all of us how to write; but I have always adored that earlier journalist Charles Dickens and, in poetry, Coleridge and Yeats...to be admired from afar.

What

English Did you always envision being a journalist, or did you originally have another career in mind? provoked that leap from

to politics and history?

I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. Lots of possible employers – including the BBC – turned me down. I’d started a PhD but it was the early 1980s recession and I realised if I wasn’t careful I’d get stuck. So, a certain desperation to find a job and I was lucky in a traineeship suddenly falling vacant on The Scotsman when another young hack moved on (I think the current editor of The Financial Times was responsible!). 6

historical figure or period inter-

ests you most?

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do you most enjoy: writing, pre-

senting, or interviewing? Why?

No contest. Writing. Everything else is just mucking about.

What

is the strangest experience with

or request from an interviewee you have ever had?

Whom would you most like to interview?

Well, Barack Obama again, but the two who are missing from the Sunday show and cause me most pain are Vladimir Putin and Bob Dylan. But not necessarily on the sofa together.

In My Trade, you offer a history of journalism: what is your perspective on the current state of journalism? How much impact has the internet (particularly blogging) had?

We are going through the worst time for British newspapers I have known. Many old sins have stumbled blearily into the light of day, and it isn’t a pretty sight. This would be bad enough but the impact of lost advertising revenue on newspapers caused by the digital revolution makes it a perfect storm.

My optimism comes from the thought that someone, soon, will find an economic model for online journalism and when that really works, the trade could go through a big revival. Blogging is no more good or bad than writing or talking; but there are some fairly unpleasant trolls hiding behind anonymity, and ‘citizen journalism’ cannot replace people who are paid, and spend all day working hard, to find things out.

How

much of an impact

do journalists’ own political leaning have on the news? Is this right?

On the BBC, I hope, none. We have our organs of political opinion snipped off by the director-general when we join the political staff, and placed in a jar of formaldehyde for the duration. In the printed media, it’s (rightly) completely different, though I still believe in keeping factual news stories and opinion pieces distinct, which makes me now look very out of date.

Are

current

journal-

ists draw from a wide enough social range?

that world too biased and, if so, how?

Journalism, like most of the better-paid British working world, is a sticky network of cliques, pretending to be an open meritocracy. This is bad for journalism and bad for the country generally.

What

advice

would

you offer any would-be journalists?

Be able to do everything – to write quickly and to a deadline; to broadcast; to Blurg, Twaddle, Greet or whatever new digi-skills come along; and to be just a bit more irritatingly persistent that the next person.

Photographs Harriet Baker

The Pembroke Bullfrog

/ Hilary Talking

‘Happiness is a matter of personal choice.’ “I try to live by one line from Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own: ‘No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.’ Its message appears simple and precise: be yourself and you will find happiness. This idea of ‘being oneself ’ is not unfamiliar; it is repeated often from the day we are born. ‘You will make friends’; ‘you will perform well in school’; ‘you will fall in love’, all if you can just ‘be yourself ’. And yet, living by this mantra is harder than it appears. The world we inhabit is full of external expectations that interfere with our ability to stay true to ourselves. Especially in a place like Oxford, one is filled with a sense of obligation, both academic and personal. ‘I should sit for three hours and write’, ‘I should be social and go out tonight’. The essential thing to remember, however, is that there are no right or wrong choices. I have discovered that being happy is about breaking down expectations and obligations, and that sometimes doing so means completely disregarding what everyone else is doing. On the surface, this may seem selfish; and yet, if one is not fulfilled and creatively inspired by their own choices and sense of self, they inadvertently negatively affect others around them by being dishonest in their existence. Being happy is about moving beyond the notion that we must devalue our sense of self to be happy; it is about breaking down external messages, and realizing that many of the expectations we perceive from others are false, supposed roads to happiness that may or may not be the right path for us as individuals. Being oneself is about rethinking what honestly makes us happy and being entirely present in those decisions. When we fail to allow ourselves to make choices and live spontaneously in the moment, we miss opportunities to be happy. We miss how beautiful the Rad Cam looks in the middle of the night with a full moon overhead. We miss climbing stone walls and eating figs from the trees in the garden on the other side. We miss sneaking into medieval churches and lighting candles at the altar and singing folk songs inside while the rain subsides. We begin to understand that happiness becomes attainable when we allow the world to be magical, when we refuse to be controlled by the others’ expectations. Oftentimes, we allow ourselves to believe that if we make our own decisions, if we choose to live intentionally on our own terms, we will achieve nothing. And yet, being truly happy means trusting our ability to kick our minds into gear when needed. The reality is that one can care deeply about their work, and do extraordinarily well in their studies, without letting external expectations overrun their lives. The things that need to get done will get done. We learn to trust our ability to do well; it is this sort of confidence and discipline that got us into Oxford in the first place. Living on our own terms does not mean being careless and disregarding the advice and wisdom of others, like close friends or tutors. Rather, it means being intentional about what we choose to take to heart and follow. Most importantly, it means having a simple awareness that every moment we experience carries equal weight. Walking in a meadow for two hours and writing an essay for two hours are both equally important. Each choice we make has the potential to bring us incredible happiness, if it is an intentional choice from within.” – Anne

Brink

“Let’s contemplate a person in a default position of unhappiness. And then ask, ‘What are the causes of their unhappiness?’ In my view, the first question is whether the person in that position has any control over, or the power to mitigate, those causes. If not, the next question is whether they have the ability to deal or cope with what is causing their displeasure, such that they become happy. If an individual can control the causes of their unhappiness, or has the ability to cope, then by omitting to exercise that control or that ability, they chose to be unhappy. However, sometimes people do not control the causes of their unhappiness, and simply cannot cope with the source of their sadness; the tragic example of a cancer patient springs to mind. In such a situation, to suggest that happiness is a matter of choice would be perverse.” – Tom

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Barber

“Not for the religious. Not if you’re shackled by an authoritative totalitarian God who tells us we can’t be happy unless we mutilate the genitals of our children against their will and stone to death anyone that commits adultery or chooses to apostasise from their religion. Then again, for those proud of their chains, abject and wicked acts like this are a matter of personal choice...” - Anonymous

“The operative word here is ‘personal’. How far can our families, friends, jobs, and relationships affect our happiness, and how much can they affect it in juxtaposition with our own attitudes? Happiness depends on somebody’s propensity easily to be made happy or unhappy. One person’s slight hiccough could ruin another’s day. I compare my outlook on life with that of my family, because they probably share my thoughts on life the most, and have helped to shape my own; in general, I think they have given me a positive outlook, and this has shaped, even changed, my perception of events in my life. But even within a family, with each member having nearly all the same experiences, one can see from varying reactions that one’s personal disposition certainly affects happiness. There are, obviously, complications like depression, or even something such as seasonal affective disorder. It’s easy to think that this is the case with all people who don’t like the cold winter and its shorter days, but for some it is more serious, and stems from a lack of light. The phrases ‘a darker time’ and ‘dark days’ exemplify this, showing that something as simple as light or a lack thereof can greatly affect someone’s happiness. Clearly, some external factors are beyond control. However, I believe that happiness has to be a matter of personal choice, because happiness that we can’t control can’t be true happiness. Those who are depressed nearly always seek help for their depression, and because everyone wants to be happy, when it is in their control they make themselves so.” - Anonymous

Hilary Talking /

“The circumstances surrounding a person determine the range within which their happiness can lie. It is then a personal choice as to where in that range your current happiness level sits. For instance (and I’m going to use a few numbers) say that your happiness ranges from zero to one hundred. Then, external circumstances, such as a family death, promotion, etc. determine a range of possible happiness, say between fifty and sixty. You choose whether you want to be ‘sixty’ happy, or ‘fifty’ happy. Obviously, the ranges can differ. For an optimistic person, their ranges will be on average higher than for a gloomy person. However, even the most optimistic person in the world cannot be ‘one-hundred’ happy all the time.”

– Jonathon Page

“Eternal dissatisfaction…is there a better way of describing the way humans think? We shouldn’t exaggerate, or get bogged down in a swamp of pessimism; the human mind is the source of many beautiful thoughts and feelings. And yet...jealousy, discontent...we see them every day, although, curiously, they are more noticeable in our neighbours than ourselves. One of my favourite sayings is ‘the grass is greener on the other side’. It exists in almost every culture...with little variations. Be it the French ‘L’herbe du voisin est toujours plus verte’, the Polish ‘trawa jest zawsze bardziej zielona po drugiej stronie rzeki’, or ‘La hierba siempre parece mas verde al otro lado de la valla’ in sunny Spain; they’re all the same. The human mind is a masterpiece of subjectivity, perceiving only the side of the coin it wants to see. A neighbour earns more money, or a friend has fewer essays...immediately a deep sense of injustice is born in the depths of our soul...It’s not fair! And somehow, surprisingly, we fail to notice that the neighbour has a bigger family to feed, or that the friend has double our amount of tutorials. But, in my humble opinion, the most curious example does not concern the neighbour, or the friend, but ourselves. The saying about grass does not only concern our surrounding, but being treated like a child by adults, learning from our concerns the flow of time and the change of perspective. How many times have we succumbed to a feeling of nostalgia while reminiscing about our childhood, the so-called freedom, lack of responsibility, and problems? From our adult perspective, kindergarten and primary school were a period of trouble-free games and imaginary travels...but aren’t we forgetting something? The frustration of being treated like a child by adults, learning from our own mistakes, boredom. This does not mean that our childhood was a nightmare, but nor was it always bright pink. How easy it is to forget that at kindergarten we couldn’t wait to go to school, but at school, we wished to leave as soon as possible. Dissatisfaction is an innate human characteristic...for that kid, who doesn’t yet understand love, responsibility or honesty, is instinctively jealous of his mate’s shiny toy car, and dreams of being an adult. Nevertheless, let’s not give up hope. The human mind might be inherently prone to displeasure, but it is also capable of great happiness. Life is beautiful, and if, from time to time, we make an effort to take off the lenses of jealousy and dissatisfaction, we might be able to perceive that the grass is just as green on our side of the river...” – Piotr Galeziak The Pembroke Bullfrog

“Do you fools listen to music

failure. Last year, just forty percent of African-Caribbean boys achieved five good GCSEs including English and Maths, compared with the national average of just over fifty-eight percent. Adolph Cameron, head of the Jamaican Teachers’ Association, has said that in Anglo-Caribbean culture, the notion of black masculinity says that “if as a male you aspire to perform highly it means you are feminine, even to the extent of saying you are gay”. You cannot separate “the culture surrounding and articulated by rap” from the music itself, as Charlie McCann implied in her previous Bullfrog article, ‘The Rap Sheet’ [The Pembroke Bullfrog, Michaelmas 2011]. We do not live in an egalitarian society, but how can we expect to when kids are told by their idols that society is out to hold down ethnic minorities and the poor?

or do you just skim through it?”

Charlie Coldicott The

summer riots of 2011 were a series of three overlapping events. Firstly, they began with an initial protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan. This was then escalated by the involvement of organised - and mobile - gangs against policemen, whose actions were characterised by mass arson as well as theft. Finally, opportunist looters, driven by greed and the absence of controls, took hold of the movement and spread it nationwide.

This was not “criminality, pure and simple”, as David Cameron claimed, but was at least at some stage an expression of deeply-engrained social, economic, and cultural problems, particularly in inner-city London. The youths who smashed and looted were, in part, reacting to their perception of an unequal society. In a world where politicians and bankers can steal far more than a Cornish pasty from the local Greggs and get away scot-free, it is easy to see why some might have sympathy for these young men and women. Undoubtedly the gap between rich and poor in the UK, wider now than forty years ago, should be foremost in our minds as we grapple with understanding how the worst rioting of the generation could have occurred, but such an investigation is too lengthy to do here. My point is only that hip-hop music must share at least some responsibility for the powerful message of disillusionment and antiestablishment that drove those who transformed the protests over Mark Duggan’s shooting to all-out rioting. It is certainly true that hip-hop has evolved over the last thirty years to resemble something much more like an inoffensive branch of pop music. In fact, the mainstream audience is now full of white, spotty, middle-class teenagers looking for 10

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some music to go with their Malcom X T-shirts (we all know a “Wigger” or two). Yet, there remains a significant proportion of rap music that sends out the message that the system is a stitch-up, that a black man can never make it in a white society, that the poor will never be fairly treated by the rich, and endorse gang life and violent disorder as the only honourable, indeed sensible, paths remaining. It is the danger that this message can pose when it speaks to a small, unprivileged minority that we must face up to. Inner city kids, particularly black ones, already face great barriers without erecting further ones within their minds. Much of the British hip-hop scene has its roots in the Afro-Caribbean generations that arrived in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, and who were met with indifference and hostility. Yet Britain has changed dramatically since the political battles in the 1980s and 1990s over racism in the public life, and police-black relations are now vastly improved. Parts of rap culture, however, have not moved in-step with these changes. They play on a feeling of embattlement, conflating the British and American experience, such as Giggs’ ‘Don’t Go There’, which tells a cross-Atlantic storyline in which Giggs must move into drug dealing because the ‘feds’ are on his case. It is a worrying fact that over fifty percent of the rioters in London, Birmingham and Manchester were black. Is it any wonder that the children of impoverished inner-city communities turn to gang life when songs like Lethal Bizzle’s ‘You’ll get Wrapped’ commend carrying lethal weapons for protection? The worst of the rappers send out a message that authentic black men don’t do self-improvement, which has often become a self-fulfilling prophecy of

Undoubtedly there are bigger issues at play here, such as youth employment (which now stands at twentytwo percent), and the withering away of old structures of meaning It’s just his Ghetto point-of-view The renegade You been afraid I penetrate pop culture Bring ‘em a lot closer To the block where they Pop toasters And they live With they moms Got dropped roasters From botched robberies

...

Cause see they Call me a menace And if the shoe fits I’ll wear it But if it don’t Then you’ll will Swallow the truth Grin and bear it Now who’s these King of these rude Ludicrous lucrative lyrics Who could inherit the title Put the youth in hysterics Usin’ his music to steer it lyrics from

Jay-Z, ‘Renegade’

and restraint, like the two-parent family, the teacher, the bobby on the beat. Still, rap music cannot go unblemished. Major hip-hop artists have encouraged the unprivileged in society to form gangs and obtain weapons for protection. These were the strong core (twenty percent of those arrested in London were identified as gang members) who advanced the exchanges beyond the Mark Duggan protests. They were angry with what they saw as an oppressive system, and they followed some of the lessons they had picked up from rap culture. The video to Lethal Bizzle’s ‘Babylon’s Burning the Ghetto’ begins by showing an angry kid smashing up symbols of respectability and ambition: first a framed picture of two children in school uniform, then a picture of Jesus in his home, before heading out to throw fire bombs at policemen. After this, opportunistic looters, following a ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ logic like that espoused by 50 Cent, spread the criminality into a national emergency.

Yes, accuse the politicians, the bankers and the parents. But do not ignore the one group that much of today’s youth actually listens to. In Jay-Z’s ‘Renegade’ he throws down the gauntlet to his listeners by questioning, as in the title of this piece, whether they are recognising the serious points he is making, or merely skimming through, simply listening to the beat. Charlie McCann is correct to state that rap’s audience is not “without agency” or “incapable of independent, rational thought”, but to believe that a primetime slot on MTV or the centrefold of The Source magazine does not illicit some sort of authority for what they say or what they do is, quite frankly, naive.

RostronParry Financial Public Relations for the: Unworldly, unwieldy, unfriendly, unprofessional, unacceptable, untoward, unctuous, unforgiving, unforgiven, unelectable, unelected, unjust, unfussed, unloved and incredibly people from Cambridge.

We are never non-U.

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/ Photo Essay

Hong Kong

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Photo Essay /

Natasha Griffiths

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Il Padrone di Piemonte Claire Cocks

There’s an old saying in Italian that maintains, ‘chi mangia bene, vive bene’ (he who eats well, lives well). True, it didn’t require the three months I spent this summer in the regions of Piemonte and the Valle d’Aosta to prove this old idiom right but this time visiting again the small, obscure northern Italian paese - the village of Borgofranco d’Ivrea - I saw it with different eyes. Piemonte and the Valle d’Aosta are bordered by the Alps, and these regions are proud of their mountain lifestyle with their diet rich in carbohydrates. Their essential beliefs remain centred upon the need to remain loyal to the ingredients and traditions of the local area. Indeed, food itself is bound up with the Italian lifestyle, be it in the mouthful of that first sun-warmed fig, sticky with sugar, or in the fistful of basil, held like a prize in the triumphant return to the kitchen to grind into fresh pesto. Picture one of those hazy, long Italian summer days (they even have a word for it, afoso), in which the desire to do anything is lost. We are sitting around the outdoor table of Via Lombardi, no. 2, spending a pleasant few hours with our family friends, and doing what Italians do best: eating well. Perhaps it is fresh river trout caught yesterday in the mountain springs higher up in the valley, or maybe even a risotto al porcino or alle margherite. It’s what generations of the family have always done; and a lazy walk by one of the surrounding lakes of Borgofranco will undoubtedly follow lunch. But the conversation takes an interesting turn this time as someone at the table mentions in passing the old station of Borgofranco (now sadly fallen into disuse) and its inhabitants: “We’ll take a walk up there if you like?” And so we do. We look along the platform, at the tufts of grass now sprouting up between the tracks, at the station clock, the hands forever frozen indicating the imminent arrival of a train that will now never arrive. And so, the story begins: the tale of Antonio Carluccio. Carluccio’s family-named Italian restaurant chain was established in 1991, and is now well-known through-

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out the UK. Born on the Amalfi coast in the Province of Salermo, Antonio spent his early life in the region of Piemonte, Borgofranco d’ Ivrea to be precise. His father, so I discover over lunch, was the railway station master at the station of Castel Nuovo Belbo and later Borgofranco d’Ivrea itself. Indeed, it is said that Carluccio’s earliest memory of living at the village station was of running home as the last train of the day came and went to tell his mother to boil for the pasta. Characterised by his passion for good, simple food, Carluccio’s recipes have been handed down through the generations. This the sense of family is contained in the restaurant’s name, Carluccio, a home away from home as it were. It is a name which expresses a connection with that family of Borgofranco, and the lifestyle that we can still see there today. The question is whether such a meaning has now become lost in the commercialised world, where you can buy your pot of pesto or box of amaretti in any supermarket at an extortionate price, consoling yourself that it’s ok because ‘it’s a taste of Italy’. One can’t help but feel slightly disillusioned as the Italian staff that serve you your spaghetti look blankly as their customers stammer over the Italian names of dishes as if they were some tropical disease. Carluccio is now in his late seventies, having in the past few years handed over the management of the hugely popular chain for over £10 million, and was awarded an OBE in January, 2007. It has now reached international acclaim, with restaurants as far away as Kuwait and Dubai – a long way from the once-familiar streets of Borgofranco. Sitting around that table at Via Lombardi, the story draws to a close; our friend’s father knew the Carluccio family, as he went to school with one of the younger brothers of Antonio. I discover that Carluccio has not returned to live in Italy since the day he left, aged twentythree, following the tragic death of his younger brother,

“And so, the story begins: the tale of Antonio Carluccio.”

Enrico, who drowned in a nearby lake. It was after this that Carluccio moved to Vienna, then to England, never fully to return to Italy. It would seem that food served as therapy for Antonio, a way of returning to his roots and rediscovering a sense of community and family that he felt somehow lost. I also noticed, during that lazy lunch, that this enduring sense of belonging is clearly evident in the daughter of our friends’ family. Aged nineteen, she wants to return to Borgofranco after university, as she feels at home in the mountains. Perhaps this is campanilismo at work, one of those untranslatable Italian words that expresses something roughly along the lines of ‘patriotism for your particular home-town’. It derives from the Italian word for bell-tower, campanile, traditionally the tallest and most prominent building in any town or village, which has become, in the concept of campanilismo, an enduring symbol of devotion to one’s region. It symbolises something more than a birth-place, offering a sense of belonging and identity. Nowhere is such a feeling more prominent than in the Italian attitude towards food, as I was to discover on my first ever mushroom-foraging expedition. An essential piece of equipment is the bastone, or wooden stick used for searching for mushrooms and for helping the forager on the uneven mountainous paths. Families return to the same spot each year, but it is a question of looking in the right place, having the right weather conditions and getting up at an early hour of the morning, so I am told.

Photographs Claire Cocks

That love of food, of foraging in the way that your grandfather, and his grandfather before him always have done is essential to the regions of Piemonte and the Valle d’Aosta. The traditions are not lost; not yet anyway. Walking through the streets of the old paese of Borgofranco, dangling my feet over the edge of the old abandoned station platform, I began to discover that undefinable something that Carluccio hoped to communicate in his food. He is a man that has always cooked in the way that he knows and loves: the true Padrino of Piemonte.

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Football in Lebanon: a

In the time that I’ve been here, Lebanese football has experienced a remarkable renaissance, with the national side catching the attention of press, politicians and public in the wake of its incredible 2-1 win over Asian giants South Korea in a World Cup qualifier on 15th November.

Remarkable Renaissance Fitzroy Morrissey

When I found out that I’d be spending my year abroad

in Beirut, my attention soon turned to the football scene in Lebanon, owing to my love of the beautiful game. Little did I know then that Lebanese football was to become one of my abiding passions. No sooner had I arrived than I set about familiarising myself with the peculiar workings of the game in Lebanon, publishing my thoughts on my blog ‘Football in Lebanon’. Barely a week into my stay, I was attending Lebanon’s World Cup qualifying game against Kuwait, urging Lebanon on along with forty-thousand Lebanese and ten fellow Arabic students from Oxford. I really caught the bug that day, and soon I was writing for The Daily Star, Lebanon’s English language newspaper.

Barely two months ago, fans were being barred from watching Lebanon play against the UAE, a legacy of the stadium ban of 2005. Yet now, it seems they cannot get enough of football here, with around fifty thousand attending the South Korea game and many more cramming round television sets across the country. Most importantly, people are beginning to realise that getting behind the national team and sharing in its success can unite a country long divided by sectarianism and political feuding. These extracts from some of my articles reflect the wider importance of football for the country’s health, and capture the growing excitement surrounding football in Lebanon.

… ‘International Success Heralds New Dawn For Lebanese Football’, footballinlebanon.tumblr. com, 10th October, 2011 “…the first decade of this century was not one that many Lebanese football supporters will remember fondly, with its stadium bans, league results marred by conspiracy theories, football-related violence, the exile of the biggest domestic stars, and consistent failure on the international stage. The UAE result, some have tentatively suggested, might mark a turning point in the troubled history of Lebanese football. That it was so unexpected has only added to the sense of expectation amongst supporters, players and commentators; before the third qualifying round, Lebanon had failed to beat group rivals Kuwait and UAE in three separate qualifying tournaments (1994, 1998, 2006). Now, admittedly after only two games of a six-game mini-league, Lebanon sit third in the group, just one point behind Kuwait, who they’ll overtake if they can pull off a win on Tuesday. While it would be wrong to get carried away by just a single victory to 16

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the point where we’re proclaiming the beginning of a bright new era for Lebanese football, it does seem like the result against the UAE is part of a broader narrative pointing to the slow but sure revival of the national football scene….” ‘Huge Crowd A Cause For Optimism: Lebanon 2-2 Kuwait’, footballinlebanon.tumblr.com, October, 2011 “…Seeing as tickets weren’t required for the game, we needed to get there early to make sure of getting good seats, arriving a good hour and a half before the game was to kick off. No matter; as far as the crowd were concerned, things had already kicked off. Walking towards the stadium, stopping to buy Lebanon caps, t-shirts, and flags, already you could hear the commotion. The presence at the gate of gun-wielding policemen, who confiscated our sharp-pointed flagpoles lest we use them as javelins, bespoke the authorities’ nervousness. When we finally got into the ground, the scene was like none I had experienced before. To call

it a party atmosphere would be to do the Lebanese a disservice. This was more like a carnival… …Though the game did not pass entirely without incident in the stands, for fans supposedly bitterly divided by sectarianism there was little evidence of irreparable conflict between groups, as all came together to support their national side. Most of all, I got the overwhelming sense that fans were just happy to be finally able to get back doing what fans do best: supporting their team. Being able to attend games allows football fans to breathe; being united in a common cause is a transcendent experience, hence why football supporting is often compared to religion. The government and Lebanese Football Association will doubtless note the success of allowing fans back in. And with the national team obtaining another decent result, hopefully this might be a new dawn for Lebanese football. This game showed that the Lebanese do not have to be divided. And that, surely, is one of the most powerful messages that football can bring.”

‘Akhaa Breaking Down Barriers’, The Daily Star, 29th October, 2011

‘Lebanon win long ball battle’ – Kuwait 0-1 Lebanon, The Daily Star, 12th November, 2011

“…When it comes to sectarianism in Lebanon, football is generally seen as part of the problem, rather than a potential solution. Consider 2005’s crisis after Rafik Hariri’s assassination: the government’s responded by banning supporters from stadiums, fearing that rivalries between fans would descend into full-scale armed conflict. With most football supporters grouped by religious confession, and most clubs relying financially on a particular political party, the game in Lebanon reflects deeper, wider social divisions. After the first round of league games last weekend, however, the club at the top of the domestic ladder isn’t one backed by a political party. What’s more, Akhaa Ahly draw their supporters from across sectarian and political divides, actively encouraging the cooperation between different religious and political groups. Akhaa board member Fares Kobeissi explained how a boardroom overhaul fundamentally changed the club’s operation: “Two years ago, we decided to have a new board that included people from different political affiliations and different religious confessions,…to represent a geographical area [the Mount Lebanon region] rather than a political faction.” Lebanese football recent history shows how a vicious cycle can be set quickly in motion: sectarian conflict led to a stadium ban, causing markedly decreased advertising and ticketing revenues for the clubs, so that clubs turned to political parties for financial support, which only increased the sectarian divides. Yet Akhaa Ahly, to its great credit, has broken out of this. Through independence from politics and a focus on the local community, the board has recognized that the club can, in the words of [Akhaa chairman] Abdel Latif, “break through the rigid walls of sectarianism.” This, surely, is the true role of football: not to divide people, but to bring them together.”

“When they come to write the story of how Lebanese football awoke from the ashes of abject misery, Friday evening’s win over Kuwait will feature prominently. So too will coach Theo Bucker, who has overseen a remarkable renaissance in the national team’s fortunes since his return to Lebanon in August. At the end of last night’s famous win, players and staff celebrated on the pitch as if they had qualified for the World Cup itself. In a way, it felt like that. This was a landmark moment for the Lebanese game. The players demonstrated togetherness, tactical discipline, and adaptability, characteristics vital to any successful side, and found the inspiration to create a high-quality goal when required. For that, they were worthy winners.” ‘Lebanon ready to host South Korea in World Cup Qualifier’, The Daily Star, November 15, 2011 “…More than all of this, Lebanon can surely rely on another big turnout in the stands. Much has changed since only 8,000 attended the UAE game in September, and, with the Lebanese FA issuing tickets for the match, some supporters may even be disap-

Photographs Fitzroy Morrissey

pointed. Almost incredibly, it has been reported that Hashem Haidar, president of the Lebanese FA, has met with Prime Minister Najib Mikati to see if workers in the public sector and schoolchildren could be given time off to watch the much anticipated match. There is surely no better indication of how interest in the national team has been revived…” ‘Lebanon win without ‘parking the bus’’ – Lebanon 2-1 South Korea, The Daily Star, November 16, 2011 “Don’t be fooled. Lebanon’s 2-1 victory over South Korea may well put them in the class of giant killers extraordinaire, but this upset didn’t follow the formula of so many before it. After a string of good results, Lebanon didn’t arrive at the Cite Sportive content to park the team bus in front of the goal, attempting only to prevent South Korea from scoring. Coach Theo Bucker had stressed before the game that his players had nothing to fear, and was true to his word by refusing to resort to the defensive strategy that a more cautious coach would no doubt have employed… Since an unexpected victory in Kuwait last Friday taking them to second place in World Cup Qualifying Group B, interest in the national side from the press, politicians, and fans has peaked to an unprecedented level. Prime Minister Najib Mikati even agreed to give workers and schoolchildren time off Tuesday for the game. Some sides would have crumbled under the expectation: not Lebanon, not under Theo Bucker. The hosts thrived in the spotlight, liberated by the chance to perform on the big stage. Most importantly, through Bucker’s and his players’ courageous tactical approach, Lebanon demonstrated that they can do more than just spoil the big guns’ party. Instead, they showed that a Lebanese team can play proper football, remaining patient when in possession, playing the incisive pass when required, and defending with organisation and discipline. Simple tactics, but football is a simple game when played effectively…” The Pembroke Bullfrog

Ghana, Sponsored by Vodafone Ed Grimer Last

year, I volunteered in a village called Bukuruwa in Ghana. Since gaining independence in 1957, the country has come to be recognised as one of the most promising in Africa, despite being plagued by poor sanitation and poverty. Nevertheless, what impressed me was the country’s pride, and genuine joy of its people.

But at the same time, this attitude creates frustrations. There is no planning in Ghana, and no such thing as a schedule. Hiring a tro-tro (a makeshift minibus) for five o’clock the next day in no way guarantees you’ll get a trotro. Making a reservation at a hotel really means the hotel is full and you’ll be sleeping on the streets. Greenwich Mean Time becomes Ghana Maybe Time, and soon we gave up trying to formulate any sort of routine. One wonders how Ghana is the top developing country in Africa. It would seem this reputation has been established by global corporations wheedling their way in to every crack left in this commercialised world. In the village I stayed in, I was hard-pushed to find a house that wasn’t elaborately decorated with Vodafone logos. When asking a lady why she chose to advertise Vodafone on her

When I first arrived, I was welcomed by the local equivalent of the area’s MP, Isaac Gyampong. He also happened to be the headmaster of the primary school I was working at, and explained to me how everything was run. Every day, the children, aged two to fourteen, arrive at school with twentyinch machetes to start the day off with agricultural work. A small ten-year-old boy named Affah was sitting on the steps resting his chin on his machete; when another boy ran and jumped on his back, I suddenly saw the logic in why we don’t distribute machetes in schools. During a later geography lesson, a peer of mine asked, “Who can tell me the capital of Ghana?”. He was rewarded with a Mexican wave of children jumping and screaming. Amidst all the noise, one child was adamant he knew the answer; he was beaming as he shouted, “NIGERIA!? BARCELONA!? MESSI!”. I noticed that international stars like Essien, Beckham, and Messie have a tremendous impact on these children. Football is an integral part of their lives; if you don’t enjoy football, you don’t enjoy life. There is an English parallel; every eight year old boy wants to be a professional footballer, and when playing on the school playground, each child adopts a professional name and pretends to be that player. It’s the same in Ghana, except that each child tries to keep that name back in the classroom. If I didn’t call Affah, ‘Lampard’, he’d snub me as a stupid ‘Obreni’ (‘white man’). The top-played song in Ghana states, “So low mi mek mi talk but mi waan fi talk mi have nuff mi say, so mi a go live my life today, mi love mi life today”- which means (I think), “When I’m low, I don’t want to talk ‘cause I have nothing to say, I’d rather live my life today, I love my life today”; an equivalent to carpe diem. And it’s true, most Ghanaians do love their life, and live each day as it comes. 18

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house, she replied that she needed the money. When I asked how much she was paid, she was too caught up in the fact I was English to answer, and began to plead that I take her son home with me to England, to the point of demonstrating how he could fit in to a suitcase. Obviously he didn’t actually get inside my suitcase, but sadly his mother genuinely sought solace in the idea. Desperation is ubiquitous in Ghana; hawkers and beggars appear everywhere. When arriving in the capital (which, for all those that don’t know, is not Lionel Messi, but Accra), we jumped off the tro-tro and were met with a swarm of chancers, their hands diving in to our pockets, tugging on to our bags, running away with our hats. Other locals quickly reprimanded these individuals, attempting to salvage Ghana’s friendly reputation. Witnessing these attacks, and another incident soon afterwards, it soon become clear that aggravating the locals was not a good idea. On one evening, we were waiting for entry into one of the capital’s nightclubs. Two relatively young males stumbled out the club, arguing with one another. After a few angry words and shoves, one reached in to his trouser pocket, pulled out a revolver and shot the other.

The memory still creates a massive kick of adrenaline, shunting a pool of blood straight to my head. Astonishingly, despite aiming at point-blank range, the gunman missed, and his target fled down the street. The gunman gave chase and shot at the man for a second time, only to miss again. The sensible action then would have been to ring the police, but, in nighttime Accra, most police are manning the roads, being bribed commuters who have overloaded their cars. Ghana is not all shooting and begging, though. In a wonderful gem of a place called Kokrobite, we were greeted by a welcoming Rastafarian community. They put on extremely colourful performances for us, a mix-

Photographs Ed Grimer

ture of dancing, acrobatics and circus-esque tricks, and invited us to sing along with them. After several shots of Goal, a local spirit derived from cane sugar, I found myself centre-stage, snakes draped around my shoulders, fireballs thrown in my hands, and erotic dancers writhing around me, much to the delight of the locals. This was not the only incidence of finding myself performing for a crowd. In the small town of Mpraeso, I was walking with friends when we heard loud dance music. We went to see what was going on and came across a concrete quad, where from the outskirts we watched a colossal dance festival. Being white, we stood out, and were hurled by the locals into this celebration, and found ourselves before a crowd of around a thousand people. The only woman in our group, with her noticeable blonde hair, was pounced upon by no less than eight local men; Fuzzy Ducks is nothing compared to this. But the men were all in good heart, and indeed simply mesmerised to see a blonde, dancing white girl in Ghana. After the music stopped, we were forcibly ushered to Photographs Ed Grimer

prime seats, creating an agonisingly awkward moment when they dismissed the mayors and other town leaders in favour of us, white foreigners. We tried respectfully to refuse, but there was no room for negotiation. We were treated like kings, given free alcohol, food, the best view of the festival. However, we were fully conscious of the stares of those people whose seats we’d inadvertently stolen. Being welcomed into strangers’ houses was quite a common occurrence. Most are proud of their homes, whether grand or not. One girl asked me to go and meet her grandmother, and when I accepted was taken to a fairly modern home. Her grandmother was very inquisitive and I found myself almost giving a life story; intriguingly she made notes as I spoke, and when I asked what she was writing down, she told me that she wanted to write letters to her family about how she met an Obreni from England. I felt almost famous. Everywhere we went we’d receive attention, good and bad. Occasionally, you would run in to other travelers or nonGhanaians, and still be warmly welcomed. For example, we met one Dutch couple, who weren’t actually travelers but had been living in Ghana for fourteen years, leaving their hectic life in Holland to set up a monkey sanctuary. They had not a care in the world, and invited us to their home. Amongst all the talking, my friend asked, “Has everyone taken their malaria tablet today?” which met with much laughter from the Dutch couple, much to our confusion. The man said, “You buy those!? I had malaria a few months ago, I just had a beer and it went!” They continued to persist that we didn’t need them and that we were being ripped off back home. I wasn’t going to take any chances, but one does wonder if we might be a little over the top on safety and precaution, becoming almost neurotic about buying ‘necessary’ drugs; the Dutch couple seemed to be in perfect health. Despite awful roads, poor healthcare and sanitation, Ghana also boasts amazing landscapes, stunning waterfalls, and golden beaches. While walking down the street, it wouldn’t be surprising spontaneously to dive into conversation with a stranger. Most of the people live in poverty, but many simply do not care and still live in great happiness. Ghanaian culture is beautiful and fascinating, and my experiences there have definitely influenced my life back in the UK. Certainly, I will never forget the sheer delight in the children’s faces as we turned up to their school in a tro-tro, and had them running alongside screaming our names. The Pembroke Bullfrog

Photo Essay Oliver Ford

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Short Story

Moma Said Ziad Samaha

Moma slapped her right across the cheek. It didn’t look like it hurt, but Milly’s eyes started watering, and she cried.

She always cried. Moma used to say that the noise she made when she cried could make the glass in the windows smash. Milly ran to the corner of the kitchen behind the counter where Moma couldn’t see her, but I knew she was probably biting her lip and clenching her fists trying not to make a sound because she knew Moma hated hearing her sobs. I was sitting at the kitchen table the entire time, but it was only when Moma hit her that I felt guilty. Moma hadn’t hit either of us in a long time, and I didn’t think Milly would get into that much trouble. The last time she hit Milly, there was still snow on the porch, and it made clouds when you breathed out. Moma had hit her right outside in front of the neighbours, because Milly had tried to carry a big pitcher of water into the garden because I told her it would freeze overnight and make an ice-angel, but she slipped on the steps and the jug crashed on the ground. Moma told me to pick up the mess, but all I could think was how much like snow all the little pieces of glass looked, shining and glittering in the sun. Moma lit one of her cigarettes and I knew it was time to go outside, so I took Milly by the hand to sit on the grass in front of the house. It was so hot outside, and the grass was yellow. Some of the other houses had sprinklers that shot out jets of water, but Moma said that we weren’t allowed one because it wasn’t a toy and we would break it. Milly and I sat on the ground opposite each other, but when I looked at her she shuffled around and started sucking her thumb. “I told you not to make her angry,” I said, “I told you what would happen.” Milly stared at the dry, crinkly grass, and I could see her eyes were still wet. “Don’t you remember what Moma said?” I asked. I just wanted her to answer, or say something. I hated it when she didn’t speak. She was my younger sister and sisters should always be friends; that’s what Moma said.

“Why didn’t you tell her about the matches, Kate?” Milly asked. She still had her thumb in her mouth, but her other hand was playing with the edge of her dress, scrunching it in her fist,then letting go. It was funny that her dress was covered with pictures of all sorts of colourful flowers but the grass was so yellow and all the daisies and dandelions that usually grew on the lawn weren’t there anymore. “What were you afraid of?” she asked, shuffling round to face me. She stopped sucking her thumb and she looked more serious than I had seen her in a long time. “Nothing,” I said, “let’s play something.” “I know what you were afraid of. You’re afraid of the big car, aren’t you?” she said, hunching her shoulders. “You’re not going to tell, are you?” I asked, looking at her face for some sort of reaction. “You promised you wouldn’t tell.” She didn’t reply. “Fine, why don’t I pretend to be a moma and you can be my baby?” “I hate that game, why are you always the moma?” “Because I’m older. Let’s play something else then, what do you want to play? You get to choose.” It had been a long, hot summer, and we had spent almost everyday sitting on the front lawn playing in the sun after school. We were the only kids in the neighbourhood who played outside now, and even Susie Quinn’s mom said she had to play inside because of the girl who went missing last year. I thought that was stupid anyway, so I was glad Moma didn’t stop us from going on the front lawn. Sometimes we played pretend princes and dragons, or nurses and patients, or sometimes we played with the old tennis ball. It was faded and yellow, like the grass, and it made me think of grandpa’s wrinkly old hands. We visited him every weekend, but he never seemed very happy to see any of us, and when he coughed he had to spit afterwards. He was always just saying things, things that no one thought made any sense, but 22

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Short Story he had said the same thing about the big car that Moma did. At the beginning it just used to drive around the neighbourhood, but after a while it began parking outside our house. It was very big. Well, not big, but long. Long and black, with those windows that you can look out of but not see in. I wondered how the person driving it could bear to sit in it, because Moma said that black was the worst colour in the heat because it made things hotter. And it was so shiny. Maybe that’s how the person driving wasn’t too hot, because all the heat was reflected off. It had all of these glistening silver bits too, on the front, like big silver teeth snarling in the sun. Our car was white and small, and only had two doors at the front so that when we had to sit in the back Moma had to push one of the chairs forward to let us in. But the black car had four doors, so no one would have had to move their chairs to sit in it. “I don’t want to play with you, not now. I want to go back inside,” Milly said, standing up and straightening out her dress. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said, “Moma is probably still angry, and she might hit you again.” “But I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me,” she replied, stamping her foot on the ground. “Don’t do that,” I told her, “it’s unattractive for a young lady to behave in such a manner.” My school teacher, Miss Lockly, had said that to me once and I always remembered it. We were young ladies, and one day I wanted to be a grown up lady like her. She wasn’t just saying things: she knew what she was talking about. I would have told her about the car immediately, because she had always told us that if we ever saw any suspicious people we should tell a grown up as soon as possible, especially since that girl had gone missing last year. But school had finished when the big car started stopping outside of our house and I didn’t want to tell Moma in case she was annoyed. I didn’t tell her a lot of things. But one day when it had been outside since the morning, when she came home from work I said to her that it was always there, how it was big and long and black, and that at first it didn’t stop but now it did, and that the person inside couldn’t be hot even though his car was black because it was shiny. “It’s not true is it, what Moma said?” Milly asked, sitting down and facing me again. “About what?” I asked, fiddling with the grass between my fingers. I knew what was talking about, but it scared me and I didn’t want to show Milly I was a scaredy-cat. Maybe Moma was right, maybe we should have listened. I tore some of the grass out from the lawn and it made a bald patch on the ground. The grass was so dry it was like hay, like in a barn, and it crumbled between my fingers. It was so hot. Milly and I both had wet foreheads from just sitting outside. “The car and the man in the car. You know: what she said. It’s not true, is it?” Milly seemed more concerned now, and tried to look me in the eye as I fiddled with the grass. “I don’t know,” I replied, but I wondered what Miss Lockly would have said. I don’t think Moma believed me when I told her about the black car with the shiny bits on the front because when she looked outside it wasn’t there and she told me I was lying. I wasn’t the liar; I didn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t lie. Then she said that if I had seen a black car it probably belonged to the men who went around the

Illustration Nora Schlatte

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Short Story Moma Said neighbourhood looking for naughty girls and boys, and if they asked you to go with them then you had to because they knew when you were naughty, and if you lied to them it would only make it worse, and you had to go with them if they asked you because if you didn’t you’d only get in more trouble. I told Milly all this before we went to bed one night and she couldn’t sleep at all. Neither could I, but I pretended so Milly didn’t see. “What if she’s right, Kate? What if what Moma said was true? You’re in big trouble.” “Stop it Milly, it’s not true. We’ve been naughty plenty times before and nothing’s ever happened. No one ever gets out of the car. No one’s going to take me away.” “Yes they are, you’ve been naughty and you’re going to be punished!” Milly screamed with glee, laughing and giggling and making her face go all pink. “It’s not. I’m not. You said you’d never tell anyone, you promised!” “The man in the black car’s going to take you away, for ever and ever and ever.” “He’s not!” “He is.” “Not,” I replied, but this time I couldn’t look at her anymore because I felt my eyes get wet and sting and I didn’t want her to see. “Is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is!” And then she stopped. Just like that. She stopped, stood up, and stayed very still. I sat up and rubbed my eyes, but I wasn’t crying because I wasn’t a cry baby like Milly. Before I could say anything, I saw what she was staring at and then I was very still too. The black car was parked on our side of the road, but this time one of the dark windows was down and I could see a man’s face with glasses staring out. I couldn’t see him very well, but he shouted to us. It must have been us he was shouting at, because there was no one else on the street, not even Susie Quinn. “Why don’t you come over here?” he shouted at us, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen, like the water in the snow in the winter. “You,” he said and pointed at Milly, “come and talk to me. I won’t bite.” Milly looked at me when he said this and I looked right back at her. Why was he talking to Milly? What did he want from her? She looked at her dress and then back at me and I could see that she was as scared as I was, but she started walking towards him. When she reached his big car door she stood on her tiptoes and leaned her head forward so she could see inside, and I saw the man talk to her but I couldn’t hear what they said. I couldn’t hear anything and I was angry that he was talking to Milly and that Milly was talking to him but I was scared of what they were saying to each other. She looked at me and stared as if she wanted me to say something, but I couldn’t. She pointed at me and looked at the man in the black car and nodded at him, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but when she looked at me again she was smiling. The man in the car moved away from the window for a second, and when he came back he had a toy in his hand that he gave to Milly, and she started laughing. Moma didn’t say this would happen, she didn’t say the men in the cars would give us toys, she only said they would take the naughty children away, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t scared anymore because I was angry that Moma had lied to me. Then Milly nodded again at the man and then she opened the back door, climbed in and then I didn’t see her anymore because of the dark windows that you can see out of but not in. I couldn’t see in. I couldn’t see her. The man closed his window, started his black car, and drove away and all I could do was sit there, because I didn’t understand why he had taken Milly and not me. It was my turn to go, not hers. “But,” I tried to say, “but, the matches, it was my fault, I was playing with them. It was my fault. I was naughty.”

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Altarnun Cottage

Contact details for booking are: Mr. & Mrs. Dunkley Rose Cottage Tanhay Lane Golan Near Fowey Cornwall PL23 1LD or telephone 01726 832807

The Pembroke Bullfrog

Letters to Friends Ted Delicath

“Regret swells the heart…Reluctant lovers fight genuine emotion with the hopes their unattached lust doesn’t transform into binding love. Revolving door lovers leave the head spinning, and the heart traumatized. Too many lovers truly make the heart go blind. More than one ‘the one’ may carry a piece of your heart. Such a fact shouldn’t deter a suspicious woman from loving a man she has doubts about. The final lover should be the culmination of all those from the past…Promiscuity lives in the moment and acts as a sunblock that is applied to sunburnt flesh. It is pointless to reside between the legs of nameless shadows. They hide shame and place a veil over regret. When the lonely lover looks into the mirror they can no longer look their image in the eyes; instead their attention is now focused on the far-off memory of a love that they, like so many fools, didn’t realize was the reason they could sleep at night… Their eyes close, their minds run blindly, and they lie next to the imprint of a body that merely asked for them to trade hearts. That offer no longer remains, for no one wishes to trade for a broken heart.” Bedtime Story ¶ “Life has no pre-requisites…To achieve our dreams, they can no longer remain amongst the clouds of our mind, but must be brought down to earth. We must look our wants and dreams and desires in the face and exclaim, “No more will I allow myself to have you reside above me”… …Ever notice when you walk into a place you’ve never been to before with people you’ve never met, and you get sized up…Why do we do that? Why can’t we be embracive and then repel this new individual away from the universe in which we are at the center of if we don’t find them particularly appealing? I’d rather give someone the benefit of the doubt and look foolish than to be such a pessimist I complain about an off-shade blue on a cloudless sunny day. Kindness is not weakness. We seem to have forgotten about that. We seem to have forgotten about a lot of things...”

I’m not quite sure my motive

“We are never the crisp one dollar bills, fresh off the press. We are the crumpled up wads of cash that are pulled from the pants, which were just taken out of the dryer. The trick is to see how many creases, how many imperfections, we can flatten out until we look in the mirror and genuinely adore the image looking back at us. It should not be our goal to be the crisp, clean, flawless bill…Our creases are necessary. They are our kinks, our dirt, and our imperfections. What people try to hide is what you want the people who love you to know. Those quirks that make you such an odd creature culminate to create the peculiar soul that some come to love, others detest, and most of the masses pass by in ambivalence, because they will never be let into our strange world. We should not try to strive for a Facebook full of strangers, and a Twitter full of followers. We should strive for the receipt of handwritten cards in the mail, the unexpected knock at the door...” 26

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Losing a friend

“Someone asked me today the major difference in the learning experience here. Below are my remarks: Autonomy! Here independent and argumentation-type essays drive the pursuit for knowledge. This type of learning has made me question what it means to be intelligent. Is it the ability to regurgitate a robust amount of facts (excuse my apparent cynicism towards our US institutions) or the ability to birth a genuine idea? The latter, of course, can only come from being steeped in the former, but when we are merely meant to provide concise essays of what was, are we neglecting our ability to perceive what might be?” The US education system has mined our minds ¶ “I’m not smart enough to go here. Let’s be real. I’m not. The plain truth is that this institution is above me. While I realise this fact, it is not a deterrent. Ordinary men have often accomplished greatness. My abilities are dwarfed in comparison with those students to my left and right. So then why subject myself to ridicule? (Oh, the ever so grammatically incorrect rhetorical question, which English professors detest, and slash with red ink.) Well, let me appease all of those grammatically correct elites of the world with an answer: I choose to embark on this journey because if I should fail, at least I shall know my limits.” I’m not smart enough to go here

“It’s been a week since I arrived in this foreign land. The differences I’ve encountered are vast and numerous…my starry-eyed amazement for this land is just beginning to fade, as the effects of euphoria begin to dwindle. By no means am I downhearted, or homesick. Of course I miss the daily routines that once filled my life…But I’ve been blessed with a unique opportunity, the kind which comes around seldom and should be labelled ‘fragile’ and ‘handle with care’. Thank you for being part of the reason I can embark on such an excursion. My self-confidence is not a result of the self-assurance I have in myself, but of the good fortune of having you, people that genuinely believe in me, in my life. Your presence has altered and shaped me in drastic ways…it is preposterous to believe I could ever repay you for your goodwill, but it is quite practical to express to you my gratitude. It is most aptly summed up in a short and simple expression of sincerity: thank you.” Thank You ¶

“These words will have little effect, but I think this is more productive than Xbox.” Money consumes ambition The Pembroke Bullfrog

Arthur Evans, Minoan Ritual and Reconstructing the Past William Bond Arthur Evans, writer

and archeologist, was Keeper of the Ashmolean from 1884 to 1908. He is most famous for his excavations of the palace of Knossos in Crete, and his enormous hoard of findings now makes up the larger part of the Ashmolean’s Aegean World collection. For his time, he was something of an innovator, known for a ‘scientific’ and empirical approach to his work. While in Greece in the early 1880s, he came across Cretan seals, with symbols on them, which he identified as fragments of a pre-alphabetic language. He trekked across Greece a decade later, building up his collection, and found that the seals were rarely thought of as historically significant by the locals; rather, they used the seals as charms for breast-feeding mothers. Finally, the trail led him to Crete, where he was inspired, by the growing picture of a civilization older than that on the mainland, to start excavating. He worked

at the excavation from 1900 to 1935, uncovering a vast palace, and a huge amount of artwork, belonging to a people even earlier than those of Classical Greece. However, Evans’ excavation was not a simple matter of discovery. He was following in the footsteps of Henry Schliemann, a German Archeologist who had excavated sites at Troy and Mycenae, believing he was uncovering evidence for the literal truth of Homer’s Iliad. While Evans didn’t quite share this view, his calling the civilization he was then uncovering ‘Minoan’ points to a similar interest in classical mythology. He coined the term in reference to Minos, the mythological king of Crete, who in the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, as told by Ovid, sends for a tribute of Athenian teenagers every nine years to feed the Minotaur in the labyrinth beneath his palace. The mythical Minos could be the fictional reflection

of a real man, but if so, we know nothing his relation to the palaces being discovered at the turn of the twentieth century. The palace uncovered by Evans is extensive, and there are lots of underground basements, but there’s no labyrinth, and obviously no minotaur. Yet, he chose to map that name with all its connotations back onto his findings. The decision helped to place his discoveries within a recognizable cultural frame, that of the mythology and history of the classical world. However, we can see in his decision an attitude fairly different from that of the empirical collector. His half-sister, Joan Evans, said that part of his attitude as an archeologist was a ’didactic impulse’ to make his findings ’intelligible’ to others. He wanted not simply to discover, but to render comprehensible. In a comment quoted in the Ashmolean exhibition,

she said of Evans that he was “always committed to his principles, as well as to his sense of the preeminent importance of his own mind.” This might point to a key conflict for Evans. On the one hand he wanted to present scientifically what he found, while on the other, he had a personal agenda - a desire to make his discoveries accessible, and a belief that he was right to do so. His term ‘Minoan’ may have been the first part of this bringing the unknown into the light, but the next stage was much more explicit: he commissioned reconstructions of the palace. As well as rebuilding parts of the palace itself with unnecessary detail that he couldn’t know was accurate, he had pictures made of what the palace would have looked like inside, including ornamentation and even people which have subsequently been shown to incorporate artifacts and decorative styles from a variety of different eras. Evans has often been criticized for going too far in his attempts to give an accessible picture of the Minoans. What his efforts betray is the attitude that there is a distance which needs to be bridged in order for us to understand such a distant civilization: the evidence we have is in fragments, and someone must piece it together and fill in the gaps for the modern observer. Whether or not Evans did go too far (and there is no consensus on that issue), I think it is possible to find some ways of bridging those gaps, left by what Joan Evans called the “unusualness” of his findings, without filling it in. One cabinet in the exhibition is arranged and labelled according to time period, apart from a section at the end, where we find the heading Cult and Ritual.

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Compared with the generous time brackets, this label stands out. It is difficult to say exactly what was believed about the figure of the snake goddess, or why there are so many depictions of bulls, both figurines and frescoes. But we feel confident that they have something to do with religion. Various ideas have been posited about Minoan beliefs, including the theory that their religion was matriarchal, and focused on the figure of a central fertility goddess, and a deep cultural interest in nature seems to be upheld by the prominence of natural scenes and animals in their artwork. But an actual statement of belief is impossible to formulate. What we can be comfortable with asserting though, is that they practiced ritual. The word has some pejorative connotations today, being associated with thoughtless repetition, and beliefs no longer held. It is part of the language of exclusivity, and has to do with social affirmation within a select group. However, part of the reason I think that we are comfortable with giving

that label to the practices of even such a distant civilization is that ritual (that is to say action performed regularly and communally, having social significance) might reflect not only the beliefs of a particular society but a desire, innately human, for regularity and community. In the evidence of Minoan ritual we have there are many pieces which seem entirely alien. For example, there is the famous fresco depicting a teenager somersaulting over the back of a bull, while another holds its horns and a third stands, arms outstretched, behind its back legs. While the physical reality of bull-leaping is unlike anything practiced in modern Britain, there is a theory that it was the central part of a coming-of-age ritual. Ageing, and coming into adulthood is still an important part of our society, and one set of rituals we still perform is that surrounding birthdays, and in particular those birthdays which mark a point of transition from youth into adulthood. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think there is a point of contact between

Images courtesy of The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

our civilization and theirs in the beliefs about the actions themselves. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, after all, why the young man is jumping over the bull, or whether they thought that that action itself had an

important effect on or for him. Rather it is the fact of the ritual itself, the desire for regularity and communality which is shared.

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‘I would not be forgotten’: the life of Robert Stephen Hawker Mike Kalisch

“Posthumous fame is of little value. It is like a favourable wind after a wreck.” Pembroke, rightly, makes much

of its alumni. A quick flick through the prospectus, and you’ll be reminded that this was Tolkien’s college, and Bannister’s too, and whilst walking around Chapel Quad, it’s hard not to feel, at least as an English student, you’re in the portly shadow of Dr Johnson. One name not mentioned, however, is that of Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, who, from his windswept cliff-side Cornish retreat, built from the timber of old shipwrecks, and fondly known as ‘Hawker’s Hut’, became one of the most accomplished, and eccentric, poets the College has produced, and one of the most desperately disregarded and under-valued, within the University and beyond. The son of a doctor-turned vicar, Hawker was born in Plymouth, on 3rd December 1803. The accounts of his childhood paint a picture of an exuberantly imaginative boy: he ran away from a number of preparatory schools, is said once to have painted his father’s horse black and white, and dressed as a mermaid to confuse a local farmer. Such eccentric mischief became a recurring feature throughout his life; rather refreshingly, he never quite grew out of these kinds of japes. After stints as a disruptive schoolboy in a couple of local grammar schools, Hawker came up to Pembroke in 1823, the same year that he married forty-one year old Charlotte I’ans. The reasons for this perhaps unlikely pairing have been the source of much intrigue. The common story (and there seems to be more than a degree of truth in it) is that Hawker, not unlike our other empty-pocketed alumnus Johnson, was having trouble paying his university fees, and so concocted a scheme with his father to 30

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schmooze one of the four unmarried I’ans daughters. Charlotte, being the eldest, was thought the best chance of success, and so it proved. No likeness of Charlotte survives, though a description of her does appear in Margaret Jeune Gifford’s, The Diary of an Oxford Lady 1843-1862: “a lady with a sadly strong Cornish accent, but a woman of good common sense, well read and informed: in her youth she must have boasted no small beauty.”

Such an account does, however, perhaps do Hawker something of a disservice: whatever his intentions when wedding Charlotte, their marriage proved to be a long and seemingly happy one. Shortly after her death in 1863, he recorded in his diary “Nearly forty years and never five nights away from her”. Regardless, Hawker’s marriage to Charlotte ensured that he could stay on at Oxford, though sadly no longer at Pembroke, which could not accommodate married couples; he moved instead to Magdalen Hall, where he lived with Charlotte and her two sisters, which

gained him the less than catchy nickname of ‘the man with three wives’. Little is known of Hawker’s time at Oxford, and the Reverend’s own recollections are rather misleading. He imaginatively records, in 1861, for example: “How I recollect their faces and words – Newman, Pusey, Ward, Marriott - they used to be all in the common room every evening discussing, talking, reading”. There are some definitive statements we can make regarding his time at Oxford, though. He won the prestigious Newdigate Prize in 1827, for his poem ‘Pompeii’. In the same year, he wrote perhaps his most famous poem, ‘The Song of the Western Man’, which, as Hawker’s most recent biographer, Patrick Hutton, observes, has “effectively been adopted as Cornwall’s national anthem”. The poem commemorates the 1687 imprisonment in the Tower of London of Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of Bristol, and its refrain is widely known:

And have they fixed the where and when? And shall Trelawny die? Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why! Details of Hawker’s life immediately after his graduation from Oxford are, again, rather hazy, though we know that he became a deacon in 1829, and was an ordained priest by 1831. It was in 1835 that Hawker begins his residency as vicar of Morwenstow, a desolately bleak, wind-battered spot on the Cornish coast, where he was to stay for the remaining forty years of his life.

It was at Morwenstow that Hawker’s eccentric tendencies and tastes flourished. He dressed in a scarlet cloak, refusing the vicar’s traditional black garb, and kept a pet pig, which he would walk on a leash. For a time, he took to dressing as a sea-faring vagabond (a few of the surviving portraits of him in later life show him in a fisherman’s jumper and large Wellington boots), and he is also said to be responsible for the Harvest Festival, one of perhaps the least Christian celebrations in the Church calendar. Part of this eccentricity, it seems, was fuelled by Hawker’s taste for opium. He was said to smoke vast amounts, sitting in his cliff-side hut (known as ‘Hawker’s Hut’, it is the National Trust’s smallest property), which he built from the timber of shipwrecks, whilst writing poetry. The hut, accessible only via a narrow, overgrown rough path, remains a place of desolate beauty, built snugly into the cliff-side, amateurishly yet sturdily pieced together from mismatched timber. Much of the interior, a small sanctuary from the high winds that sweep across the headland, are now covered in more recent visitors’ engravings, walkers’ initials, and many roughly-turned declarations of love;

the spot remains a popular retreat for walkers going up the coast to Higher Sharpnose Point, or down on their way toward Duckpool. It was from this vantage point that Hawker could track the smugglers’ ships which attempted to navigate that treacherous stretch of coast, and warn them of immediate dangers. Through this, he is said to have been responsible for saving numerous lives, and those he did not reach in time, he gave a Christian burial; a quietly radical service to provide for smugglers at this time. His great poem of this period, ‘The Quest of the Sangraal’, shows the mark of Hawker’s substance experimentation, but is also scorched by grief; Charlotte died, at the age of eighty, in February 1863. Never a man to be second guessed, however, Hawkers sprang a surprise upon all who knew him by marrying, in October of that same year, a Polish governess, Pauline Anne Kuczynski, some forty years his junior. The marriage, it seems, provided a second youth for Hawker, and the couple had three daughters together. This new family, though the source of much pride and satisfaction for Hawker, also led to a decline in his health, as the cash-strapped Reverend now struggled to provide for them. His writing of this period is marked by a lack of inspiration, by desperation, and his popularity as a poet dwindled considerably; indeed, it has perhaps forever suffered because of the slapdash nature of his late

work. He spent his last years in relative obscurity, ill health, and poverty. Hawker did, however, have one final surprise to reveal: he was received into to the Roman Catholic Church on 14th August 1875, the day before he died. Controversy still swirls around those final few hours; the perennial questions of whether Hawker was in a fit state of mental health, or whether he was unduly influenced by his wife remain unanswered and sorely disputed. As a final act of fearless - and dramatic - unpredictability, it seems entirely in keeping with the rest of his life, as indeed was his funeral, in his home town of Plymouth, on 18th August: the local paper recorded the following morning that the service was particularly noteworthy because, ‘the mourners wore scarlet, rather than the traditional black.’

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Images courtesy of the Robert Stephen Hawker Society www.robertstephenhawker.co.uk

He set about, financed by his wife’s vast wealth, transforming the parish, building a new vicarage (which he designed himself, and which includes a rather incongruous turret apparently inspired by that of Magdalen College), a bridge for the mouth of Coombe Valley (still standing), and a school.

/ Poetry

Field Anne Brink

It is early morning, and we walk through the field to find them, over the grass to find them. And looking under the branches, the bushes, the ground beginning to unthaw, exposing the path beneath our feet. We can see the sun rising above the trees as snow melts in springtime. I found one and it was frozen. The body frigid, dark, as if it had been lying there for a time. Time to pray but not soon enough to save. I could feel the heart, as though still beating in my hand, bloodless now as I placed it on the woodpile beneath the tree. In springtime the wind is cold. I lay down shuddering, as though it were I and not him cracking apart, the frozen earth no match for the sun. Nothing can prevent an inevitable disintegration. The pile lay next to an hollowed out apple. The flesh long gone and only the raw skin remaining, uneaten in the morning.

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Poetry /

Damming on North Beach William Bond

On the stretch of beach between the heaped-up crest and the sea at its highest tide, two boys are playing together. They’re scooping out pits and trenches, (which quickly fill with water) and pushing up walls around them, and adding to these with handfuls of sand, breaking the cool, clean surface of the beach to connect up troughs and long straight walls. And behind the highest wall, the water builds. And wandering streams, on their way to the sea, find this artificial lake and where initial effort had it deep, the streams bring sand and fill it out, and widen it, so the boys are forced to draws new lines and extend the dam. They watch the building water, patching breaks, and seeing to the damage of a mis-step. They’re waiting for the turn, when the waves will come rolling and stretching back up the flat, reclaiming the ground. Slow at first, a few slight touches will undercut the outer ridge. Then a harder push will leap the wall and smooth the top and some of the resting water will pour away. And finally they’ll watch, as the breakers come in late afternoon, to flatten the dam, and they’ll stop attempting repairs, and stand where their lake had been, while the waves come on, until the sea has risen around their shins, and mostly washed the sand off their knees.

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Books

Review

Joan Didion, Blue Nights Anne Brink

Reading Joan Didion’s recently published memoir Blue Nights could best be compared to eating at an expensive restaurant when you’re really hungry: a small portion not entirely satisfying, yet incredibly beautiful in its arrangement. Blue Nights is Didion’s latest memoir, following the success of 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a reflection on the year following the death of her longtime husband, the filmmaker John Gregory Dunne. Tragedy seems to be a recent and poignant topic for Didion of late, as it has once again become the inspiration for Blue Nights, a recollection of times spent raising her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, who passed away in 2005. I went in reading the memoir expecting to learn about the relationship of Didion to daughter. And yet after reading, Quintana remains a mystery, Didion typically mysterious, in her reflections and most importantly, her questions. Blue Nights is a book is filled with uncertainty and little answers. Didion asks- literally- again and again, creating a beautifully metaphysical work which at times can be slow to process. Her repeated questions leave the reader a bit frustrated, as if forced to keep digging because Didion will never relinquish answers. “Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying? Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was?” writes Didion as she imagines herself staring out the window of the ICU at New York-Cornell Hospital in Manhattan, just days before her daughter’s death. At the mention her daughter ‘thought she was’ dying ‘years before’, Didion not only leaves speculation about Quintana’s briefly mentioned anxiety issues, but also directs the book’s tone to a sense of guilt. She further builds on the idea of failure, both physically with Quintana’s passing and metaphorically as a mother, two experiences she can’t quite seem to fathom. If anything, Didion seems to be grieving not just for the past itself, but yearning for the future with her daughter she never saw completed. Nonethess, Didion does have some time to reminisce. She’s just as talented at name-dropping as she is infusing her reader with sadness. At times, Blue Nights is like reading the ‘Nostalgia’ section of American Vogue, imagining glamorous Hollywood couples boarding exotic flights and toting babies around like precious pieces of treasure. Didion on raising Quintana on movie sets: “We took her with us to Tucson, where The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was shooting . . . the babysitter asked her to get Paul Newman’s autograph.” She describes a planned trip to Saigon shortly after Quintana’s birth: “Donald Brooks pastel linen dresses for myself, a flowered Porthault parasol to shade the baby, as if she and I were about to board a Pan Am flight and disembark at Le Cercle Sportif.” One gets the sense that in describing these experiences, Didion fears not just her daughter’s death but the death of a life she once led. Like a late Woolf piece, Didion’s work seems to be self-referential no matter the intended plot, writing to a sense of rhythm and dwelling in raw experience.

Michael Lewis, The Big Short Robbie Griffiths

What will be your career path after getting a degree? Uncertainty makes it easy to feel the allure of the City as big banks come sharking at Careers Fairs like 3rd years at one notorious nightclub. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short would have you think again before you step into their arms. He says that his first book was written in the ‘hope that college students trying to decide what to do with their lives might read it and decide that it’s silly to… abandon their passions…to become financiers’.

Stunning miscalculations with huge amounts of money abound throughout. In 2005, a strawberry worker in California with an annual income of $14,000 was given a loan of $724,000 to buy a house. The value of his loan was grouped as a bond and traded. This bond was rated with triple-A safety as it was assumed that only a few of these loans could fail at one time. Business models at investment banks didn’t allow for the housing market to stop growing, since money was rolling in. When it did falter in 2007, and the bonds became almost worthless, Howie Hubler lost nine billion dollars for Morgan Stanley. He took a holiday and never came back, taking several million dollars with him. How was this legally possible? Purchase the book.

But this isn’t a wishy-washy liberal dream book against all banking: The Big Short is primarily an incredibly readable narrative, which explains the 2005-7 financial bubble caused by sub-prime mortgages by telling the stories of the few who predicted its burst. Neither is it boring. Lewis has previously made compelling best-sellers from sports statistics (Moneyball and The Blind Side, made into Sandra Bullock’s Oscar-winning movie), so finance is relatively thrilling territory. In his measured, easy-to-comprehend prose, Lewis gives engaging profiles of the individuals who didn’t believe what the market told them (thus bypassing jargon). Through them he reveals the misguided many.

It deserves to be read by any Pembroke student who’d like to begin to understand what All Souls’ Sir John Vickers is facing at the Independent Banking Commission, or better compute the News at Ten. It should also make us ask questions about ourselves: can banks justify paying inexperienced Oxford students thousands of pounds in the space of a few summer weeks? Is the City as vital to the national interest as it tells us it is? Will I ever be able to afford a house? Sadly, my conclusion to all of those questions was no but, after reading The Big Short, the financial world became a little less murky for this reviewer.

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Review The Westbridge, Royal Court Theatre Joe Nicholson

Stage

The Westbridge is the most recent example of new writing to come to the Royal Court Theatre. Written by first-time playwright Rachel De-lahay, a graduate of the theatre’s Unheard Voices Writers Programme, the play is worthy of the critical acclaim with which its opening has been greeted, taking the Royal Court by storm after its beginnings, being performed in an old factory in Peckham. De-lahay’s play exceeds expectations: upon walking in to the studio playgoers are greeted by a simplistic three-sided stage surrounding seating, an area of chairs locked to the floor in fours, each facing a different direction. The strangeness of the seating and the minimalism of the whole affair reminds one of a Fringe show; indeed, the very mention of new writing provokes an expectation of amateurism. The Westbridge is nothing of the sort. De-lahay’s script is alternately tense and entertaining, moods supported by a relentless pace and commendable staging, a remarkable transition to professionalism from the play’s original performances. Centering around a community living in the imagined Westbridge estate in London, the play explores the reactions of residents to the rumour that a teenage Pakistani girl was raped by a group of black boys, focusing on the interrelations of three families. Sound and lighting are made to work well together in an intense performance with a serious subject-matter: fluorescent tube lamps around the stage flicker on and off to transition with actors to different areas of the Westbridge estate which is portrayed, allowing a seamlessness of movement that builds the enthralment in the audience. Sound, too, is used to great effect in changing mood and introducing those sounds that immediately evoke violence and fear: police sirens, wild shouts and smashing glass. The result is an undercurrent of tension throughout the production which frames the main plot and follows the relations between estate residents onstage. Nevertheless, The Westbridge is saved from collapsing into cliché by Clint Dyer’s direction, which used the sides of the stage and a balcony area with innovation, whilst the seating means that the audience is endlessly shifting to face the action, in a state of flux which mirrors the movement of the actors onstage. Scenes shift rapidly as the rumours of violence focus in on a black teenager, Andre, whose suspected guilt sends shock waves through those who live near him. De-lahay contemplates what race means in London’s multicultural society as the relationship between the mixed couple Soriya and Marcus becomes frayed. Chetna Pandya’s Soriya and Ryan Calais Cameron’s Andre stand out in The Westbridge, convincingly presenting characters in their home neighbourhood, yet play their parts to engineer the ultimate frustration for an audience, seeing events and tensions escalate out of control without any solid foundation. Topical drama can be dubious, but any such wariness of The Westbridge is unfounded. De-lahay’s script evolves into production successfully with a talented team of creatives, and does well to explore how one event and long-held tensions can erupt into violence rather than attempting political commentary on the August riots themselves. The Westbridge is a play which succeeds with the increased budget that the Royal Court affords, proving much more worth that its first production in Peckham indicated. Probing the effects of rioting as well as the more long-term concerns of race relations in multicultural city, De-lahay’s first play carves a niche for itself successfully in the Royal Court, and shows young playwrights how to tackle contemporary social and political concerns in the right way.

Images courtesy of Keith Pattison

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Review The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo George Kenwright

Film

The trailer of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo describes it as the ‘feel bad movie of Christmas’. The book and the films have reveled in their reputation for extreme sexual violence; however, the R-rated material is more an aesthetic choice than a symptom of some deeper subversion. Beneath the sheen of rape, incest, and murder is a traditional detective story - and not a very good one. A writer is summoned to an island to solve a mystery; there he stumbles on various clues, Scooby Doo style, until the villain is dramatically revealed. It is tempting to compare the film to Northern European art house fare like Festen or The White Ribbon. Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, those films explore the dark histories of seemingly respectable families, and in doing so comment on the pasts of their respective nations. However, this is never fully developed, obscured by the film’s more sensationalist elements.

On paper, it sounds a bit mad. A Scorsese-directed 3D fantasy adventure set in 1930s Montpartracing the story of a young orphan, a broken aua bitter old toymaker (plus an out-of-place Sacha as a railway security guard). Really, I suppose it but it’s also one of the best films I saw last year.

Hugo Madeleine Stottor nasse station, tomaton, and Baron Cohen is a bit mad;

It’s about love, family, home: a lovely, pretty, feel-good Christmas special. But it’s also about filmmaking. Though shot in flawless, high-tech 3D, with stunning visual effects, its story stretches right back to the birthpangs of Victorian cinema, when audiences rushed for shelter when they saw an approaching train on screen, for fear it might career all the way into their seats. Hugo looks at cinema through the work of Georges Melies, whose innovative use of special effects like multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and hand-painted colour earned him the title of the ‘Cinemagician’. Melies directed five hundred and thirty one films during his career (less than half of which survive), covering a huge generic range from Lumiere-like documentaries, to comedies and feeries (fairy stories). What is so fascinating about Hugo is not its own special effects, in and of themselves. Yes, the film is practically worth seeing for the opening shot’s manipulation of the Paris panorama, but more interesting are the questions Hugo raises about the history of cinema and its future, through its presentation of Melies. In just over a century, we have moved from jerky, hand-painted rockets catapulting splat into the eye of the moon, to deeply detailed 3D cinematography. Where might we be another hundred years from now? Attempts to create 4D viewing experiences, with all the scents of a scene available to cinemagoers, are already underway. Will we one day be able to touch the figures on screen; even walk through a shot as if we were living it? Hugo is a wonderful narrative and visual experience, though not perfect. But it is made all the more engaging by the intricate connections it shows which knit the films of Melies’ day to our own. Key to both cinematic periods is audience reaction: a film’s ability to make those watching frightened, joyful, upset. Melies’ films were so popular in the nineteenth century because they offered their audiences an escapist unreality, just as films like Hugo do today. Scorsese’s film is one of the 36 The Pembroke Bullfrog most ambitious 3D projects yet attempted, but I wonder just how long it will take until we’re really able to fly into the eye of the moon.

In fact, it shares more with the James Bond series than it does with Festen, opening with a Bond-style credit sequence. At one point Daniel Craig is caught by the villain and taken to his high tech secret base where he is prepared for an elaborate execution. The villain announces: “we’re not so different, you and I”, then goes on to hubristically explaining his evil scheme – all very Austin Powers. Even the title sounds more like the name of a James Bond film than the upcoming Skyfall. That said, the film is much better than it should be. The performances are all strong, despite some dodgy Swedish accents; Rooney Mara stands out, more than matching Noomi Rapace in the original. However, it is director David Fincher that makes it. He has dealt with similar themes in his other films, particularly Se7en - the central conceit of which is mirrored in one of the narrative strands of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. With his other literary adaptations, most notably Fight Club, he created original, cinematic interpretations of his source material, rather than staid illustrated versions. The Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was originally made as a television series, then edited and distributed as a film for an international audience. Fincher improves on the made for TV original. He can make a conversation as thrilling as a car chase through editing alone; the opening of The Social Network is perhaps the best example of this. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo one of the most exciting scenes in the film involves a character highlighting sentences on a police report; Fincher can make some of the least cinematic things totally enthralling. His tour de force comes in a scene in which Blomkvist breaks into an empty house. It is made unbearably tense by Fincher’s use of diegetic sound. The whistling of wind through the sparse modernist building becomes an incredibly unnerving soundtrack, reminiscent of Coppola’s best sound work. But Fincher regulates the sound according to camera placement, cutting at a regular pace between the creaking sound of a draught in the empty house, and the roar of the gale outside, in an amazing mix of the diegetic and non-diegetic. Nobody can cut and pace a film like Fincher, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is immeasurably better for it.

Thorn Head, 1945 Indian ink, black crayon, and grey wash on discoloured laid paper Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Bequeathed by Paul Clark, 2010

/ Photographs Nora Schlatte

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Review Exhibition Graham Sutherland, An Unfinished World Harriet Baker Modern Art Oxford presents a vast body of work by the British artist, Graham Sutherland. Originally specializing in printmaking, Sutherland turned to painting after the Wall Street Crash in 1929, which destroyed the print market. The exhibition falls into two parts. Presented first is Sutherland’s relationship with the Welsh landscape, especially with Pembrokeshire, before his familiar inky shapes transform themselves from rocky outcrops into derelict buildings, a documentation of the human debris of the Second World War. Sutherland described his relationship with the Pembrokeshire landscape as both ‘calming and exciting.’ To be surrounded by the expanse of hills in dramatic lighting was, he said, to stand ‘on the brink of some drama.’ To view his work is to enter a process of defamiliarization. The forms of trees are depicted in inky whorls; thorns become great spikes, and rocky outcrops are detailed in the various slants of a calligraphy pen. Sutherland creates a grainy mix of materials on paper; expanses of thick, inky black are offset by the watery marks of wan watercolour, as light gleaming off hillside and rock. Gouache, pencil, and chalk are used to create texture on the paper, but also texture of colour; darkness is smooth, whilst pale pinks are evoked in scratchy contrast. A black and white hillside is mottled with earthy pink, as the boundaries between earth and sky meet, as in ‘Rocky Landscape with Sullen Sky’ (1940). The monochrome, symmetrical miniature, ‘Mountain Landscape’ (1936) shows outcrops of sharp rock evoked through pen and ink, while the murk of the day lingers behind in a shadow of grey watercolour. To view these works is to drink them in; the eye roams over lines, marks, and textures, which mark the land from the sky, the path from the wilderness. There is something frighteningly internal about Sutherland’s landscapes, as if, in their abstraction and gleaming darkness, they are the landscapes of dreams or stories.

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In ‘Road Mounting Between Hedges: Sunrise’ (1949), the light is gilded against the black, clouds explained through pencil and ink lines scrawled into the yellow sky. There is the stamplike ‘Five Studies for Entrance to a Lane’ (1939), which displays colour, character and humour, as berries in hedgerows are depicted as glinting eyes. It is through his smaller pieces and studies that Sutherland creates his sense of immediacy; taken from his sketchbooks, they encapsulate the image of the artist rambling through the hills, enraptured by his environment. The series ‘Tree Forms’ (1939) evokes Sutherland’s wellknown style. Inky notches of bark are scratched into a grainy, watercolour brown background. The knotty embrace of the socalled ‘Two Trees’ (1947) characterizes knots of bark in inky whorls and spikes. Fine lines are woven with speckled ink, cross-hatching, and faint watercolour shadows. Sutherland’s later work, as Official War Artist between 1939 and 1945, reveals a different kind of dialogue with his environment. Here, Sutherland is transposing the ink from hillsides and rocky outcrops to derelict buildings, mines, quarries, a fallen lift shaft. The inky darkness becomes appalling, huge expanses illuminated eerily only by faint washes of watercolour in pastel shades. There is the sense of disillusionment towards these derelict human environments; his series, ‘Devastation 1941’, is a bleak documentation of bombed houses. In ‘Devastation of the City: Twisted Girders’ (1941), the rocky outcrops have been exchanged for ru

ined human habitations, exposing the artist’s attitude towards such human environments. Smudged ink is smoke, surrounding the gaping ruined insides of a bombed house in ‘Devastation 1940: A House on the Welsh Border’. Knotty trees and stark rocky outcrops have been exchanged for collapsed

roofs and smoky spirals; the human aspect has changed, the relationship of man to nature is destructive. However, these darker, disillusioned pieces maintain the darkly beautiful aspect of the earlier works. The Japanese-style inkiness of hills surrounding quarries like waves is still beautiful, revealing the sense of an individual confronted with a dramatic environment, and interpreting it, translating it into a single landscape, that still has the effect for the viewer as of looking upon a dream.

Review Music Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto Alex Fisher

Landscape Study of Cairns, 1944 Gouache and pencil on paper Pallant House Gallery (Kearley Bequest through the Art Fund, 1989)

To try to create something ‘new’ nowadays is a particularly difficult task, so Chris Martin’s decision to create an album that involves a conceptual love story and elements of the hit American TV series The Wire seems an innovative combination. Moreover, the impetus to compete with the likes of chart-topper Justin Bieber have forced the band into ‘new’ territory, infusing tracks on this album with a whiff of pop, or a scent of R ‘n’ B. Yes, Mylo Xyloto promises a great deal, but not in the way that the band are advertising it. The idea of an album that tracks a story is not original – think of The Who with Tommy in 1969 (now that was groundbreaking!), right up to Daft Punk’s Discovery in 2001 and beyond. Nor is Martin’s desire to chime in with the rest of the formulaic melodies of the modern pop chart so new. What Mylo Xyloto does provide us with though is a set of songs composed in Coldplay’s inimitable style with poetic lyrics and its ability to stand alone.

Dark Hill – Landscape with Hedges and Fields, 1940 Watercolour and gouache on paper 48.9 × 69.8 cm Swindon Museum & Art Gallery

Two Trees, 1947 Ink and wash with black chalk on paper Pallant House Gallery (Hussey Bequest, Chichester District Council, 1985)

Concerning the lyrics, the album is weaved effortlessly with memorable tag-lines and clichéd phrases that seem to take on a greater meaning, or at least a greater poignancy (who can forget ‘Violet Hill’’s ‘If you love me, won’t you let me go’?). ‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’ is a good example of this. The line ‘I’d rather be a comma than a fullstop’ cannot help but make you smile; ‘Oh you, use your heart as a weapon/ And it hurts like heaven’ achieves a similar effect. Whilst Charlie Brown may be a step too far on the cliché scale (‘stole a key, took a car downtown where the lost boys meet’), the song itself is pleasant enough. As on Viva la Vida, occasional instrumental tracks (‘M.M.I.X.’ and ‘A Hopeful Transmission’) function almost as prefaces to the bigger songs (‘Every Teardrop is a Waterfall’ and ‘Don’t Let it Break Your Heart’). So where does the ‘new’ come in? Arguably, one has to wait until Rihanna’s appearance in ‘Princess of China’ for Coldplay’s competition with other artists. Whilst I like the song, it feels as though it should be Rihanna featuring Coldplay. The electro-pop vibe to the song does not feel out of place on the album, nor does it sound alien to Martin’s song-writing style. I fail to see what is new here apart from a collaboration with one of the biggest-selling female artists of the moment. I like Coldplay, but all the hype surrounding their new album is somewhat misleading. I cannot escape the feeling that this is still the same band creating the same music that I enjoy listening to on a regular basis. Maybe, instead of looking for the new, we should perhaps enjoy the past and appreciate what we already have. The Pembroke Bullfrog

/ Poetry

Little Barley (Jecminek) Mike Kalisch

A breeze parted the rows of barley And the queen disappeared, The colour of her hair so blending With that of the barley, That she was invisible from the road Later When she was rescued by some village women, She had a new born babe in arms. For, meanwhile, alone in the field, She had given birth to a son. The women carried Her and the little one To the village, And cared for them. They called the infant Jecminek.

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Poetry /

We Never Introduced Ourselves Robbie Griffiths

We never introduced ourselves When moving in this year, So through the muffled walls It’s a mystery we hear The low sounds of voices with The line breaks of a laugh. At mealtimes we hear mumblings But the language doesn’t last. You can sometimes hear the doorbell go Or the ‘phone when they’re not in. If you’re quiet in the attic hear a showering someone sing. I sometimes think they live their lives in a daze that’s just like mine. As often in the evenings we watch the news at the same time.

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/ Illustration Dyedra Just

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