The ISIS, Hilary 2016

hilary 2016

editorial

Do you have a lucky number? We do.

The ISIS was founded in 1892, and the magazine in your hands happens to be the one thousand eight hundred and ninety-second issue.

Our publication rate has reduced significantly over the years. We used to go to press every week; now we are a termly publication. At the current rate of production, it will take another 630 years before the next 1892 issues are produced, which will land us in the year 2646.

If this issue—with features on reforming the UK’s backward penal system, an Oxford student’s experience of bourgeois sex work, and the current ‘President’ of Sicily—would have raised Victorian eyebrows in 1892, we can only imagine the scandalised confusion and intrigue that would result were a copy of The ISIS, issue no. 3784, to fall through time and land in our laps.

We’ve had numbers—and names—on our minds this term. We were alternately moved, tickled and stirred by the entries we received for our 500-word writing competition.

The seven shortlisted entries all shed new light on ‘Names & Numbers’—the stuff of our daily lives which we nonetheless rarely stop to think about. These pieces are, in the best sense, provocative.

As we sat upstairs in a Turl Street establishment at the end of last term, grieved by the blustering winter winds without (a timeless Oxford affliction) and the fickle WiFi within (a bugbear particular to our century), we set out to make a magazine that would be equally provocative. Provocative, not in a sensationalist manner, but in a way that makes you reconsider and reflect upon both the familiar and the unfamiliar of its time. That is how we are trying to continue the ever-inquisitive tradition of The ISIS. And that’s also why this is not The ISIS of 1892 or 2646, but The ISIS of Hilary 2016.

But enough about our numbers, here are our names:

ALEXANDER HARTLEY

IONE WELLS

contents SHORTS

pp. 3–8

FEATURES F.C St Pauli and its Hooligan Activists

10

Franco: An Antidote to Reality

14

No Life for Lifers

17

Seeking Arrangement

21

Degrees of Remoteness

24

Cuba and Cola

28

Tuzla: The City of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’

31

The Meaning of Arts Cuts

35

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin

38

An Interview with Victoria’s Cinematographer

40

The War on the War on Terror

43

Modernism’s Tower in the North

45

FocusE15

47

Coffee with Michael Frayn

50

Whippersnapper

53

Rhodes

54

NAMES AND NUMBERS

pp. 55–62

FICTION A Record

64

The Garden Party

66

Two Tranlsations

67

Perfectly Equal

68

Study

70

Aftermath

71

2

shorts

IN CELEBRATION OF THE PLASTIC BAG Úna O’Sullivan CHARGE

Just because we’re pale and delicate, because we curtsey daintily when the breeze ruffles past us, people thought they could walk all over us. But I’ve always known we were more than that. David Attenborough thought we were cheerfully innocent when he filmed us bobbing in the Pacific. He was mistaken. We were plotting: our occupation of the ocean was a coup, not coincidence.

you biodegradable humans could ever do.

So, now you’ve finally recognised that we’re worth something. 5p may not be much, but it’s a stepping stone. No longer will we be an invisible army at humanity’s beck and call. No longer will we be as worthless as toilet paper at Tesco’s selfservice machines. From cheap one-night stands we have become mistresses, living in someone’s home, ceremoniously granted partnership in the shopping experience. This is the foothold we needed.

We know our capabilities choking sea birds, drowning fish, cluttering up the footpaths you like to keep neat and tidy. These are our protests. We live for hundreds of years.

We can roll, swim and even fly more than

And so our march for civil rights continues.

THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BRA Anna Livesey

Bra-burning: one of the most iconic images of second-wave feminism. But the modern bra, which was not burned but binned—alongside false eyelashes, hairspray, and makeup, into a ‘Freedom Trash Can’ at the 1968 Miss America pageant— was actually born out of a Victorian clothing reform movement spearheaded by feminists. It was the cry of women’s rights activists, over a century earlier, to “burn up the corsets!” that gave us the bra.

1.

1910s: Mary Phelps Jacob, seeking freedom from the mono-bosom of her corset, ties two silk handkerchiefs together with string, christens it the ‘backless bra’

2.

1920s: The desired boyish silhouette of the flapper era results in the creation of loose camisoles and bandeaus

3.

1922: Ida Rosenthal establishes Maidenform, a rival to ‘boyish form’, selling bras which lift, rather than flatten, women’s chests

4.

1950s: Conical bullet-bras draw attention to the female form beneath the knitwear of so-called ‘sweater girls’

5.

1977: Designers Hinda Miller, Lisa Lindahl, and Polly Palmer-Smith emancipate female athletes from the unfortunate coupling of sports and breasts by creating the world’s first sports bra

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1990: Madonna’s iconic cone bra, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, proudly announces her sexuality on her Blonde Ambition Tour

Now, female magazines testify to the growing trend of women going “unfettered” by bras, how-to guides on going braless translating an image of female emancipation into a new example of female oppression. Yet the simple decision not to bother with a bra rebels this body-policing, in the same way that choosing to wear a bra, not a corset, did in the early twentieth century. Freedom to choose: the ultimate act of bra-burning.

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THE BREAK-UP TRAVEL GUIDE TO OXFORD Lulu Smyth Your relationship has been waning for months, and you’ve finally decided that you want out. Just when you’re about to drop the blade, however, your loved one makes an announcement: they’ve booked a weekend visit to Oxford in a last-ditch attempt to make things work! Oh no! It’s make-orbreak in the city of dreaming spires. Here’s how to guarantee the trip is a complete failure, forcing you both to realise you’re a match made in hell.

but you often need to book in advance. After a twenty-five minute walk, you arrive to find it’s full. Walk back to the centre of town and go to Pizza Express. (It’s Friday, so no 2-4-1).

Day Two Wake up early for a day of culture, heading to the Ashmolean Museum at eight a.m. You arrive to find that it doesn’t open until ten a.m. Redirect yourselves to the Botanic Garden on the other side of Oxford, using your Bod card to get in for free while your partner has to pay two pounds. Smirk. Walk around in the rain.

While you’re on this side of town, it’s worth checking out the Magdalen Bridge Boathouse. Who cares if it’s minus four and chucking it down? It’s punting! It’s romantic! Rent out a punt (£20), then lie back like an anoraked Cleopatra while your soonto-be-ex tackles the river in high winds.

Watching the water fill up in your boat, you’ll realize this is all a tragic metaphor for your relationship. Consign it to the scrapbook of memories. After an hour, it’s time to dry off and head to a place for brunch.

Getting there By train: Take the direct London train from Ealing Broadway. This stops at every station from Twyford to Pangbourne to Cholsey, and is always horribly packed for the first forty minutes. Leave plenty of time to coincide with rush hour.

By car: Suggest that your loved one drives, then direct them to the city via the ring road.

Again, rush hour is imperative.

Day One Begin with a romantic stroll down Cornmarket Street. One of you is guaranteed to get pickpocketed here, shat on by a pigeon, or accosted by a group of tourists—(Ideally all three). The disorientating bustle of street-sellers, cyclists, and slow pedestrians will ensure an aggressive atmosphere whatever the weather.

Once you’ve found your way to the other side, head down the High Street towards the famous Bodleian Library. Dating back to 1602, this majestic monument has stood the test of time (unlike your crumbling relationship). As you stare up into the sky, noting the gargoyles and the details of the frieze, you’ll realize how infrequently you’ve come here throughout the course of your degree, and how much work you have to do for finals. You just don’t have time for anyone else right now. Rehearse the lines in your head. Strengthen your resolve.

For a bite to eat, try Oli’s Thai down in Cowley.

This is one of the best restaurants in Oxford, in terms of both price and quality of food,

Need somewhere quiet to have that painful conversation? Look no further than KFC. This tucked away gem perches beside Itsu on Cornmarket, and provides an ambient atmosphere as well as lightning-speed service. As you stare into your loved one’s eyes and explain the reasons you no longer like them, a final chicken bucket to share will be just the ticket.

Once you’ve pulled the plug and sent them packing, it’s time to enjoy single life. Forget your earlier resolutions about library regimes: march straight to The Bear Pub for a day of drinking. Established in 1242, this higgledy-piggeldy tavern on Blue Boar Street has plenty of corners to hide in so come five p.m., no one will notice you sniffling into a craft ale, texting: IM SRY ;( TAKE ME BACK.

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THE ACCIDENTAL LIBRARIAN Olivia Constable-Maxwell 10th November 2015 My laptop broke today and so I am using the desktop computers in the Rad Cam. So far so good.

a new shelving system, and managed to reorganise the entire Upper Camera before lunch. I am feeling so much more perky! Going to make a start on the ground floor. This job just makes sense to me!

13th November 2015

23rd November 2015

Four people today have asked me where the toilets are. Confused why, but work was going slow so I decided to show them. They seemed pleased enough and now I’m feeling pretty good about myself.

One of the other librarians has begun to clock on and reminded me that I don’t work here. I told her to go fuck herself and went to restack the shelves.

24th November 2015

14th November 2015

If I keep going at this rate I’ll have the whole Lower Gladstone Link colour-coordinated before December. Can you imagine? A bit of brightness and order in the darkness! Note: Managed to lure the head librarian into the Lower Gladstone Link movng shelves, and trapped her! Haha! It’s now one a.m., and she’s probably still stuck there. It’s days like this that make me realise I do just have the best job imaginable.

A girl today asked me how to set up a PCAS account, so I showed her. Do they think I’m a librarian? Confession: I don’t really even mind!

15th November 2015 Today I had a huge list of things to do, but was so caught up in the library that I didn’t even scratch the surface. Directed nine people to their books, showed a visiting student to the toilet, and scanned tonnes of books into SOLO. It was tiring, but so much more rewarding than normal work. People really do treat you with respect here.

25th November 2015 MERRY OXMAS! Today I issued Bod cards to all the tourists outside to spread the festive librarian love. Major confusion at the reception desk. Hoping they’ll soon learn who’s the big dog around this town (and that’s me).

16th November 2015 Caught a boy trying to steal a couple of books. High fives all round!

27th November 2015 Was thinking about taking the weekend off and maybe going to see a friend in London but then I realised—what happens if people don’t know where to find the self-collect checkout? Have sold my ticket and am attending to my duties in the Rad Cam.

19th November 2015 Stayed in St Anne’s today … I’m feeling quite miserable, to be honest. It’s as though I was just starting to make a really solid group of friends, and now this feels like a total step in the wrong direction.

1st December 2015

20th November 2015

Is the library even open at Christmas? And if not, then why not? This issue needs addressing.

Handed in my essay, headed to the Rad Cam to get to begin reshelving. I had a vision for

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3rd December 2015

5th December 2015

So today I found all my favourite library books and used them to make cut-out snowflakes to stick in the library’s musty windows.

Some students were laughing, but it went down like a lead weight with all the other librarians. Where’s the Christmas spirit?! They were all having kittens, and I heard something about a lifetime ban. I didn’t really pay attention, though, because all I could think about was all the windows that still needed decorating.

Back home, and I’ve never felt more alone.

Just been kicked out of Saffron Walden Town Library for issuing a DVD to a couple of kids.

Not really sure what the problem is but think I should give them some time to cool off.

8th December 2015 Today I just stood on the streets directing people to the toilets. Can’t remember how I used to spend my time before this whole librarian thing happened. In the meantime, I need to find some direction in my life.

SALMON AND SOUL-SELLING Eleanor Biggs Internships: the race is on. Amid a flurry of interviews, even the most composed individuals have started to crack. Ironic vintage ski jacket, away with you—suits aren’t just for weddings these days. The statement, ‘I came in the bottom five percentile for that psychometric test’, elicits suppressed gasps of horror—or relief?— from ‘housemates’ and ‘friends’ whose fingers are still twitching from their own latest online application. At least their future career prospects haven’t gone up in flames … yet.

just ‘have fun,’ but life’s not really about that any more, is it? The stakes are high.

Potential legal internships have got us running in magic circles. In multiple venues across town, alliteratively-titled networking events provide a stage for the most ambitious among us to smash the student’s two main goals: getting a job and eating for free. Pizza and Prosecco, Macarons and Martinis, pave the way for glamorous career opportunities! But everything comes at a price. Next week: Salmon and Soul-Selling. See you in the City.

Sure, it would be great if we could all

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HOMESICKNESS

Jessica Lee When I was little and hadn’t gone anywhere else at all in the world, I knew only my home well, and best of all my room. Beneath the window there was a concrete window-box, painted cream, which held a big bougainvillea plant that bloomed deep pink. The bougainvillea was formed in a sprawling cluster of papery, veiny, flushed flowers amassed in a bright riot; when the wind brushed through the mass of heat-dry flower and leaf it rattled thinly against the pebbled concrete, and when the sun beat down in thick yellow slants the weight of it would press from the bougainvillea an acrid scent like burnt syrup.

My memory is a physical thing. It is rooted in childhood objects, tastes, and smells. Occasionally in Oxford, when there is a spit of snow riding the air, I am struck quite sharply. There it is: a fierce feeling of disassociation and a sweep of memory, a longing for small things, old things, like the sun on the flowers outside my window. Because Sylvia Plath’s first exterior reality was the ‘cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic,’ she said that her vision of the sea was ‘the clearest thing I own’; because my childhood world had bougainvillea blossom in it, it is one of the things I miss most. Small pink flowers set against a white wall, giving off a faint sweetness, rustling a little as the breeze shakes them.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNELECTABILITY Rachel Deely It’s a word with a tale as old as western democracy; a battle fought with the embodiment of pragmatic, capitalist austerity leading one army, and innocuous left-wing idealism leading the other. Civilians, though many were initially innocent bystanders, eventually chose a side. Some wistfully spoke of the tenets of an ideal leader, chiselled jawline, charisma and all, as if it were a Platonic Form only closely fulfilled by the man with the cadence of a public-school education in his voice. Others adorned their champion with flower crowns as the media cruelly branded him “unelectable.” But it was a word of such condemnation that their valour was all in vain, and long after his defeat his good name remains besmirched. From the wreckage of his downfall a new leader has risen, a man who inspires hope and doubt in equal measure as he charges forth on his infallible Chairman-Mao bicycle.

SLICED HAM

that lingered in his nostrils long after nightfall.

He spoke of the customer who grew furious at his inability to identify a specific type of olive.

Far worse than any of these, however, was the ordeal of slicing ham. It was “difficult,” he sobbed, and sometimes he “fucked it up a bit.”

The tears streamed down his face and into his silvery beard: a man of sixty-five reduced to an emotional wreck by an unsliced joint of ham.

I recoiled from my milk and trifle, and backed out of the cold canteen, worldview shattered. I turned and ran towards the shop floor. I burst through the doors, scattering trolleys in my wake. With messianic fervour I hurled my body at the sliced bread aisle, ripping and slashing, tearing and biting. Hovis flew through the air. Kingsmill was pummelled into dust.

The river flowed on. The war had begun.

Dom Hewett

“The best thing since sliced bread.” But what of sliced ham? This short essay will contend that the invention of sliced ham was in fact more significant than that of sliced bread, and, were it not such an inane thesis, it might be substantiated using supporting data and socio-political contexts. Instead, the argument will rely heavily on a single, fairly trivial, anecdote.

A friend of mine, a former colleague at a wellknown UK supermarket, worked on the delicatessen counter, while I worked in the café. On one occasion, over a glass of milk and a bowl of trifle in the staff canteen, he confessed to me the horrors of the job. He spoke of the stench of cheese

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features

PIRATES OF THE LEAGUE

FC St Pauli and its Hooligan Activitists

Jacob Lee

I was sitting by the harbour in Hamburg this summer when I heard the familiar siren of chants and shouting coming from the other side of Landungsbrucken station: football fans, and lots of them.

be about.

It is not for the quality of football at the Milerntor stadium that thirty million people worldwide call themselves FCSP supporters. The club has hardly excelled on the field. Since being founded in 1910, it has played in the first division of the Bundesliga just eight times. Yet it has more supporters than most clubs in Germany and its 29,000-capacity ground is almost always sold out for games. Unlike Premier League teams, FCSP owes its popularity not to the quality of its football, but of its fans.

An ordered troop of twenty riot police trailed behind a less ordered mass of flags, banners, and 300 fans. At first I thought it was a neo-Nazi rally.

I then saw a T-shirt a fan was wearing: black, with white lettering in the style of RUN DMC, that read: ‘FCK NZS’. Two men with speakerphones led the chorus of fans, decked out in all forms of FC St Pauli gear as they lined up on the steps by the waterfront, loud but peaceful. Then they moved on.

The club became the Kult club it is today in the mid-eighties. Fans began to see FCSP as a refreshing alternative to other Hamburg clubs, where games were often marred by commonplace fascism and racism. The popularity of FCSP grew as a direct response to the fascist far-right following

The fear and apprehension I felt as I approached the procession was a result of what I’d come to expect from football hooligans. It was only until I found out just how unique FC St Pauli (FCSP) was that I changed my mind about what football could 10

at clubs like HSV Hamburg, FCSP’s fierce rival.

Matches became an opportunity not only to party (the Milerntor stadium has beer pumps in a number of seats), but also to campaign against issues that were giving football a bad name. For FCSP fans, it’s not just about football: it’s about the opportunity to celebrate. After every game, win or lose, they take to the streets to campaign against homophobia, racism, sexism, and fascism.

after a game, 10,000 FCSP fans joined a demonstration march around the city in support of refugees. Nick Davidson, author of Pirates, Punks and Politics, writes: “Football fans supporting an issue seemingly unconnected with their football club—can you imagine the fans of any club in England leaving the ground and foregoing a trip to the pub to march, peacefully, around the city until nearly midnight?”

Everything I found out about the club seemed to contrast with my ingrained stereotype of fan culture: football supporters are predominantly male yet FCSP boasts of having the greatest number of female supporters in Germany. Football fans are not always known for their hospitality. The recent racism scandal in Paris, when Chelsea supporters kicked a black man off the metro, is just one example of this. Yet since 2004, FCSP fans have regularly visited refugee centres around Hamburg, bringing clothes, food, and lawyers to help the migrants navigate Germany’s complex asylum applications.

It is not just the values that FCSP stands for that make it unique, but also the way it celebrates football. I asked John Wadmore, a dedicated fan and founder of a UK fan site, to expand on this: “The attitude towards alcohol is markedly different. In German football stadiums you are positively encouraged to drink and party before, during and after the game. There are rarely restrictions on the sale of beer and you can stand or sit and watch the match with a beer in one hand and a smoke in the other.”

It’s important to be cautious when comparing FCSP with English football. It is not just in England that football struggles with problems such as racism and fascism. But for clubs keen to improve their image, FCSP’s example seems a good place to start.

In 2013, 300 refugees from the Italian island Lampedusa arrived in Hamburg. They received a mixed welcome, with a number of far-right groups calling for their return to Italy. In reaction to this, 12

“Take me out to Germany, Take me out today, Take me to the Reeperbahn, With the fans of St. Pauli, Standing on the terracing, We’ll back them all the way, No Nazi scum will overcome The fans of St. Pauli.”

13

FRANCO: AN ANTIDOTE TO REALITY OR

Better Alone Than In Bad Company

Jake Boswall, Jamie McGowan Stuart

“Welcome to the New Sicilian Republic”

the commune revealed a collapsing lean-to functioning as the communal living space, and a collection of farmyard animals. Surrounding this was several acres of unmanaged land; each metre-squared, we were told, played a central role in the Republic’s economy. Scanning the dusty landscape, it became clear just how basic our surroundings were. Here and there rested a javelin of bamboo, thick as a wrist; at the top of a hill was a sputtering pipe, the commune’s water supply.

Finally, we arrived at a steep slope bristling with large fuzzy mounds—“extra housing for when the commune expands” was our guide’s explanation.

Franco’s building techniques were clearly rudimentary and would struggle to deal with a large population influx. But where was the man himself?

Since arriving he had been nothing more than a shadow; a stooped, muttering penumbra. We ignored this small mystery and busied ourselves with sleeping arrangements. By evening, our ramshackle excuse for a ‘tepee’ had been erected—a relative triumph given the cliff face it was rooted to. It was to be home for the next month. Franco soon appeared in the doorway. He resembled a

Franco is by no means spectacular. Plump and calloused, he hunches at 5’6”. His upper vertebrae are so worn that his neck is permanently locked forward, which leaves his eyes to frantically adapt, manically darting from corner to corner. His wardrobe, too, is unusual; far from extensive, a maroon toga is about its only occupant. And yet to those who know him, he is the self-declared President of the Independent State of Sicily. Or as he prefers, the President.

Sometimes it’s not easy knowing what to do over the summer. It was perhaps with a sense of impending ennui that we stumbled across Franco’s advert on ‘Workaway’. The pictures looked harmless enough: recent graduates, bronzed and topless, no doubt in search of a valedictory taste of hippiedom before a lifetime of work; a couple of treehouses, shoddily constructed; a muddy duck and a cabbage patch. The tagline told us to ‘come live, learn and love in an independent commune’.

We bought flights the same day.

Upon stepping out of the dusty Fiat, a tour around 14

huge baby. His tartan toga was soiled with a sticky red substance, which on closer inspection, also dripped from his fingers—blood, or, we hoped, mulberry juice. He greeted us with a signature Sicilian “salve”.

Under Franco’s instruction, we became loyal citizens. Our skin was smothered in the commune’s finest olive oil as its sole protection. We either harvested or bartered food - it was never bought.

In terms of farming, handcrafted manure was the fertiliser of choice. We lived by daylight; the commune’s solitary torch was the only alternative.

Endless days were spent dismantling bamboo, or picking fruit; every action was for the commune.

We gradually adapted to living completely offgrid.

For us, the experience was as refreshing as it was peculiar. We understood Franco’s disillusionment with the realities of Sicilian life. After all, living self-sustainably is a noble choice these days. However, the apparent absence of Franco’s family and friends was a little unnerving. The President had only one permanent subject. He was called Marius but, due to an errant attachment to Britain, was known as ‘Mr Bean’. A Romanian migrant, he had been handpicked by Franco as a kind of protégé.

We never asked the circumstances of their first meeting, and neither could we guess. Mr Bean informed us proudly that he had been living in the commune for four years. He was nineteen when he first arrived. He seemed happy. But as the days progressed we began to speculate on Franco’s complete isolation: had Sicily built a wall around

Franco, or had he built a wall around himself?

As the heat ebbed away and the commune gathered, the President would emerge. After the taxing work, he used the early evenings to justify his Republic. We would listen intently, only ever interjecting to clarify a particularly opaque point. Beyond his love of choice, he spoke of care and control. “If you don’t care, nothing will ever change,” he mused wistfully after yet another tomato and pasta dish.

It transpired, across the course of several evenings, that Franco was done with the outside world. He spoke with unquestionable, if often inscrutable, enthusiasm. His accent, Sicilian alloyed with mysterious English roots, illuminated the room in a way that the dim torch could not hope to. We could not deny that his philosophies weren’t enacted. His commune’s decisions were generally communal, and we, as his subjects, cared for one another. We didn’t need money or electricity. The Republic was a physical manifestation of its President’s philosophies.

Within two weeks, our patience began to wane.

The tepee now housed us, an array of insects, and a rabid, albeit friendly, kitten. It was the day we discovered a family of hornets within Jamie’s mattress that we decided to confront the President. Enticed by the prospect of coffee we coaxed him out from the darkness of his bedroom and explained how the Republic’s housing crisis was, again, at breaking point. Calmly he had raised a blistered palm and uttered the only words that

could have infuriated us further: “You take it or you leave it”. We stormed back to our tepee and set about erecting a mammoth insect net. Days later when Franco descended to our hut, he surveyed the work indifferently, and then ruminated, “You had the freedom to decide”.

an attempt to escape his privileged past?

Franco’s long-time companion, Mr Bean, agreed with our suspicions. It was disaffection that had led Franco to break away. While he spoke of communes and liberty, all he wanted was distance: distance from a world that he had grown to hate. As a result, cooperation was never a priority in Franco’s commune; instead, he emphasised choice. But he was never especially involved unless the choice directly influenced him. For instance, when the commune’s housing options were on the verge of collapse, we were left to construct more durable equivalents. Franco seemed perfectly happy to let his shacks fall to ruin, just so long as his own asbestos-riddled dorm survived. Franco may have created his Republic for everyone, but it operated only in the President’s interests. Days before we left, Mr Bean, a subject for three years, admitted his fears and begged us to smuggle him from the Republic back to the UK. In the ultimate Francosian tragedy, he is now living in Telford. Will he return to the commune, we asked him over Facebook? “Maybe just for the day.”

Franco’s frustrating attitude left us confused. We had a sneaking suspicion that the President’s dreams roamed wider than the commune. We had witnessed him engage in heated debate in the local cafes—so what were his political views on Sicily? With our curiosity piqued, he took the opportunity to present his grand ambition: Francosi, his own Sicilian independence movement.

To Franco, the slogan embodied choice and freedom. He translated it to us as ‘FREE-YES’. We probed—was he a nationalist? Not in his mind. To Franco, ‘nationalism’ was “a readiness to die for a cause—and all I want is an escape from a commercial world”. From the depths of his dorm emerged boxes and boxes of campaign material. It started with business cards, posters and draft manifestos, all professionally printed, all unused. Then came the extraordinary. First, an official New Republic of Sicily stamp that Franco insisted on using on our passports, much to the later dismay of UK border officials. He then produced minted currency—the Francosian Dollar. He had even devised an exchange rate—0.3F$ per Euro. Franco insisted that the currency was recognised all around the local area; this claim proved entirely false when tested the following weekend.

On the final night, the President descended gravely to our tepee. He hesitated in the doorway before looking at each of us in turn. Solemnly, as though the bearer of bad news, he asked us to be his chief-advisors. The post was not to be a longterm one: three months at most, before he found suitable replacements. He offered a lifetime’s supply of olive oil as further incentive. It was with heavy hearts that we declined the job offers.

We were intrigued by the President’s past, particularly his relationship with his parents. Near the end of our stay, in a drastic break from convention, Franco took us to meet them. They were living in an air-conditioned complex in the city and embodied the life that Franco scorned. However, once in their company, his character changed. No longer was he the dominant President we had come to know. Despite his age, he assumed the role of moody adolescent. Petulant and bored in his parent’s presence, the sixty-year-old was treated as though still a child. Was Franco’s new reality

Franco’s notion of breaking from civilisation was, in principle, admirable. As was the determination with which he sculpted his New Sicilian Republic.

It is difficult not to admire a man who has accomplished his choice to leave society. And yet, it is even harder not to pity him: he has fulfilled his vision, but without company to share it with. He himself said, “Francosi will have to be fed by those who have similar feelings as me”. Ostracised from the outside world, and with Mr Bean gone, Franco cuts a lonely figure. What is a President with no one to lead?

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NO LIFE FOR LIFERS? Ffion Dash 17

Long term and ‘whole-life’ prisoners are part of a parole system that was challenged as “cruel” and “inhuman” in the European Court in 2015—but the ruling has changed little about the real life misery of jail and the arbitrariness of release.

clear from talking to Gunn that the prison system as we know it is functionally inadequate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fickle and seemingly interminable parole process that saw Gunn released twenty-two years after a being given a ten-year-minimum tariff—largely for opposing the system.

Ben Gunn, a convicted murderer, was released on licence on the twenty-second of August, 2012, from Sudbury prison, after thirty-two years of confinement. He did not pick up any personal possessions from the moment he entered the prison system, such as the civilian clothes he was wearing. “HMP pays out a small fortune in compensation for the property they lose, so hanging on to anything for thirty-two years was unlikely!” he says, describing how he left the prison with the “accumulated detritus of my life till then, dragged across the prison car park on an old bin trolley.”

To be clear, Gunn has never disowned his crime: he beat an eleven-year-old boy to death with a steel chair leg, fracturing his skull. But the devil’s in the detail. Gunn was only fourteen years old; he had lost his mother and was placed in care; he lashed out in a fit of temper with no intent to kill. He confessed immediately, sent for an ambulance and stayed with the victim, showing remorse throughout his incarceration. Paint him one way, and he was a vicious, out-of-control thug who deserved to spend most of his adult life in jail. Paint him another, and he was a boy with severe social problems who spent three decades rehabilitating himself, and who deserved a much earlier release date. The ‘whole-life’ tariff, which means the perpetrators of the most serious crimes can die in jail with no parole unless given a lifeline by the Secretary of State for Justice, is a particular point of issue for Gunn. “Holding any sentient being in confinement and denying them fundamental needs is always going to degrade the individual,” he says. “My fundamental objection to whole life is the lack of review … A review accepts the possibility of change, growth and reform.”

The prison “helpfully releases prisoners with their property in large bags, emblazoned with HM Prison Service, just to ease the transition into society,” he recalls, bitterly. Left alone, he put the majority of his property, mainly loose paperwork, in his loft. It remained there for a long time, unopened, because it was too great an emotional burden for him to sort through, forcing him to relive what he calls the “often sheer stupidity and wastefulness of prison.”

This surreal exit into the real world echoes the experiences of American former prisoner Otis Johnson, whose video, ‘My Life After 44 Years in Prison’, went viral with ten million views. Johnson may have emerged, aged sixty-nine, blinking into the lights of Times Square, wondering whether headphones were connected to CIA activity, whereas Gunn tipped out onto the streets of a small town in Derbyshire. But the feelings are the same. Gunn describes “the sheer possibilities presented by freedom. In prison, one can only rise so high or sink so low. Here, outside, anything seems possible.”

In February 2015, the whole shaky edifice of parole-board release, with the ethical unfairness of its ‘whole-life tariff’ component, might have come down altogether—if one triple murderer and rapist, Arthur ‘The Fox’ Hutchinson, had succeeded in his attempt to challenge his life sentence at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

It’s not easy to know how to feel about the shabby circumstances of Gunn’s release, because it’s not clear what we want our prisons to do. On one level, they’re there to serve up punishment, to exact vengeance and to keep prisoners inside for the time deemed necessary. On another level, they are there to rehabilitate and humanise those who have been failed and broken by society.

On the twenty-third of October, 1983, Hutchinson murdered Basil Laitner, his wife Avril, and their son, Richard, after a wedding reception in their home, in an armed robbery gone wrong. He also brutally raped their eighteen-year-old daughter, Nicola. He was sentenced to life on the fourteenth of September, 1984, with a recommended minimum term of eighteen years. The notoriety of the case led then-Home Secretary Leon Brittan to place Hutchinson on the list of prisoners for whom life should mean life.

Today, more people are serving longer sentences, with fewer opportunities to rehabilitate themselves, than ever before. We may not serve recalcitrant prisoners a hideous gunge-like substance like the US system’s disciplinary Nutraloaf, but it’s

Unable to accept this, Hutchinson commenced battle with the system. With two appeals exhausted, his case seemed closed. However, in July 2013, a controversial ruling by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Human Rights deemed that 18

British whole-life tariffs breach human rights. The Court said that there had been a violation of Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights, relating to inhuman and degrading treatment, on the basis that whole life orders were not ‘reducible.’ Hutchinson saw his window of opportunity and appealed to the ECHR.

Ben Gunn, who feels that there should always be the hope of review, decries the idea of set release dates. “Risk is dynamic and not static,” he argues.

“And so fixing a sentence and ring-fencing it at conviction denies future change. And whole life terms are not awarded due to dangerousness— they are given on the basis of the seriousness of the crime. In this sense, future risk is irrelevant.”

But, crucially, in the 2013 ruling, the Court did not say that whole-life sentences were incompatible with the Convention. Instead, they ruled only that there had to be the possibility of a review. Faced with a swift and aggressive challenge from the UK Court of Appeal judges, the European Court changed tack again.

The prison “helpfully releases prisoners with their property in large bags, emblazoned with HM Prison Service, just to ease the transition into society”

In the 2015 judgement, the European judges found by a majority that the legal situation in the UK is in line with human rights laws, on the condition that whole-life sentences are reviewed within twenty-five years of sentencing. They also underlined the power given to the relevant secretary of state to release a prisoner on license if they are satisfied that there are exceptional circumstances that justify the prisoner’s release on compassionate grounds. For Hutchinson, in particular, it must have been a devastating judgment. And, beyond Hutchinson, it must have hit whole-life prisoners hard. It effectively meant that the British parole system was untouchable.

Part of this drama may be political. Radical barrister Richard Furlong feels that the ECHR has been under “considerable pressure” from the British government. A number of senior British judges have spoken out against the development of human rights law, including former Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, and Lord Sumption, a Justice of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the immediate past president of the ECHR, Dean Spielmann, has publicly called the strength of feeling in the UK in favour of leaving the Convention a “political disaster.”

As a long-serving—though obviously not wholelife—prisoner, it’s the inevitability of these wholelife terms that has made Gunn an active prison-reform campaigner. The parole board “twists itself into knots to find reasons not to release high-profile prisoners, but it does so on occasion—Harry Roberts (a police killer) a couple of years ago,” he says. “But for whole-life tariffs, the reality is that, no matter what the review process, they are extremely unlikely to gain release even in the last few weeks of life. The review process is but a legal fig leaf. It’s meaningless in practice.”

Keeping people in prison for life serves “little purpose”, says Furlong. Plainly, there is “another choice at this point” in the sentence. “It is … unfortunate that the individual case is subject to political pressures rather than being simply a legal or medical decision of the United Kingdom,” he feels. As for Hutchinson, Furlong feels that there is little hope of his release, because “the parole board is also subject to political influence and I very much doubt that they would consider releasing Mr. Hutchinson unless he were at death’s door.” Unsurprisingly, Hutchinson is reported to be returning to the ECHR for a fresh challenge.

According to Gunn, the parole board process is weighted overwhelmingly against long-term prisoners. There are, he says, two significant barriers to release via the parole board. The first is that the ‘risk test’ that requires a prisoner to pose no more than minimal risk to life or limb can be “impossible for prisoners to demonstrate.” Then, too, says Gunn, the board indulges in what he calls “intellectually dishonest tricks,” reasoning that if you are willing to break prison rules then you must be willing to break the law. “The fact that prison rules bear little relation to reality, or that rules broken out of protest are rotten ones, just aren’t factors for the Board.”

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In America, one man’s struggle with an implacable judicial machine hit headlines after Steven Avery’s case was investigated in the Netflix television series Making a Murderer. This case involved the violent death of a young photographer Teresa Halbach, supposedly at the hands of Avery and his nephew. Viewers were outraged at potential violations of evidence, seemingly prejudicial behaviour from the sheriff’s department, and what appeared to be a determination to frame Avery.

Some 488,246 people have signed a petition to Barack Obama begging for his release. In Britain, sentencing injustices will not end until a similar case ignites the public. Such action is urgently overdue: Furlong feels that sentences for murder in England and Wales have become “significantly longer.”

force behind increasing sentences, and that this has been insufficiently discussed. “Victims generally seek vengeance rather than justice, for which they cannot be criticised,” he points out, “and a justice system in a democratic society should not place too much weight on that in deciding on the appropriate punishment for an offender.”

“I think legitimate criticism could be levied at longterm sentences on the basis that the parole board and prison system is under-resourced,” says Furlong. “There has been a system of mandatory life sentences for a second serious offence in place on and off since the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997, and a large number of prisoners have been unable to apply for release because the courses they are required to complete in order to have any chance of success have simply been unavailable.”

“The justification for the increases in sentences for murder has been largely politically motivated,” he says. “To that extent, it represents the will of a democratically elected government.” But he feels that in practice it has been “undoubtedly been more punitive.” This is because there are a large number of offenders serving terms of imprisonment with no fixed date of release. To secure their release, they are dependent on a favourable decision from a “quasi-tribunal—the parole board— that is unpredictable and creates uncertainty and, some say, psychological ill-effects in the mind of the offender.”

Furlong feels that if the system of restorative justice were formalised, it could reduce victims’ desire for vengeance and the constant ratcheting up of sentences might come to an end. Shorter sentences might be possible within the context of a formalised restorative justice structure, and could provide a solution to the glacial slowness of the parole board.

Out of prison now and facing fifty, Ben Gunn’s life remains a work in progress. “For killing my friend, my penalty was ten years,” he says. “For being a bit of a pain in the neck, I served an extra twenty-two.

The moral balance there utterly escapes me.”

Furlong argues that victims have been a driving

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SEEKING ARRANGEMENT An Oxford Student’s Experience

Nervous as hell, I scaled the stairs of Green Park station, debating for the millionth time whether to button or unbutton. Would I display my ridiculous, entirely artificial cleavage or not?

I was selling my body, after all. I also had to maintain the charade that it was a normal date, solicited from a normal dating website—Seeking Arrangement. Only I was twenty, he was well past fifty, older than my dad, and willing to ‘gift’ me an ‘allowance’. Sugar daddying. Is it sex work? Yes. But neither party ever admitted it.

who know what they want” alongside “attractive people looking for the finer things in life.” While match.com might promise to help users find a date, partner or even future spouse, Seeking Arrangement is considerably more prescriptive in the roles that each member must play in a relationship solicited from this site. In addition to the usual online dating profile, potential ‘sugar babies’ (those who seek the finer things in life) and ‘sugar daddies’ (those who give it to them) detail their respective ‘lifestyle expectation’ and ‘lifestyle budget.’ These determine at what price members are willing to sell or buy each other’s time.

Seeking Arrangement is a dating website, but with a twist. The difference being that members consist exclusively of “successful men and women

My profile on this delightful website has the 21

nauseating byline: “Alice: Oxford student looking for a good time.” Alice is youthful, fun loving, articulate and just a little bit naughty.

Alice likes nice food, wine, listening to middleaged men’s thoughts, and—most importantly—a ‘good time’ at the end of the evening. Alice likes sex. But Alice is nothing like me. I am not Alice; Alice is a heightened stereotype I’d created to meet the wants, and desires, of the countless men on Seeking Arrangement. Alice was my ticket to a decent ‘allowance’ and an interesting summer job. She is successful at abusing rich men’s insecurity, misogyny and deep pockets.

was, quite simply, a physical extension of my waitressing job: now my entire body would be used to earn cash and have a good time.

That’s why being a sugar baby was so perfect for me. I could now sleep around and get paid.

any sugar baby they paid, I struggle to see how most sugar babies (myself included) could earn their living from Seeking Arrangement. Any sugar baby who was expecting romance and riches would be left with nothing but disappointment.

I was, of course, in a very privileged position.

I just wanted some extra cash to subsidise my bourgeois lifestyle and maybe visit my friends on their year abroad. I was not turning to Seeking Arrangement looking to pay off any major debts or transform my life. I just wanted a good summer, and this niche of the sex industry allowed me to do so. Whilst many of my sugar daddies subscribed to the notion they were saviours to

I didn’t view selling myself as much of an issue—in fact, I was actually intrigued by this idea. Selling— whether physically or otherwise—is a common act. Banking or consultancy internships may pay out, but one does have to give up their summer: essentially, selling their long vac. Previous summers, I had sold my smile and charm for tips in a restaurant. With the prospect of a dull summer ahead and an ever-decreasing bank balance, I turned to Seeking Arrangement. It

But who were these men willing to ‘gift’ me an ‘allowance’? They were quite a sad bunch, really.

Some were recently divorced and lonely, others unhappily married and looking for something more casual than a long-term affair. For a large number, a sugar baby offered company to old, depressed and worn-out men. More often than 22

not, the sugar daddies I spoke to were Oxbridge graduates. On one occasion, I spoke to an Oriel grad who now owns a consultancy firm. I had a lovely lunch with a hedge fund manager who similarly graduated from Oxbridge with a history degree. Indeed, my first ever sugar daddy was a history graduate from Balliol. He described himself as a patron of the arts with a twist, that twist being he wanted blow jobs.

History degrees aside, these men all shared one other feature: sexist attitudes. They were paying for the dream girlfriend. Alice became the fictional ideal they had been conditioned to expect since birth. She was the ultimate product of the patriarchy—a part I was more than willing to play. These men yearned for a woman who was young, attractive and entirely void of any negative emotions. It was not uncommon for them to ask for happy and drama-free sugar babies. Alice was to be reliant on them for nothing, minus the small exception of her salary. All emotional baggage was to be left at the door of the luxury restaurant or hotel. I was not to be a person. I was simply Alice.

Seeking Arrangement could easily be seen as a product of the hypersexualised and commercialised internet age. However, to me, it is simply an exaggerated reality: an amplified version of the traditional heterosexual relationship. For countless women, getting dressed up, enjoying free meals, drinks and jewellery is a regular part of their intimate relationships with men. Women are ‘babies,’ grossly sexualised and financially beholden to men, or their ‘daddies.’ Men are defined by their financial success, with which they can buy themselves a woman, who is only there to entertain them and reflect their opinions and tastes. I think this is why Seeking Arrangement has been the focus of so much conservative criticism;

it forces people to confront the hypocrisies of their own romantic relationships. My sugar daddy was unknowingly so right when he continually tried to rationalise our ‘arrangement’ by describing it as “the most traditional type of relationship.”

Sugar babies may get laid faster than most other women, but ultimately both those inside and outside the ‘sugar industry’ receive the same two things: sex and money. For sugar babies, such an outcome begins with a formalised agreement stating payment and conditions. For many other women, the relationship begins with a drink at a bar or a private message via match.com.

So, I resolved to button up my cleavage, created by a ridiculous push-up bra. Alice would only show her chest after some serious cash had exchanged hands. I arrived at an upscale Italian restaurant to meet my first sugar daddy for lunch, hoping to find we were compatible both socially and financially. We got on fantastically. He was keen to lament the injustices of Amazon and how they had not given his book a fair deal. He also gave the best cunnilingus I have ever had. The latter took place at five-star hotel, following a West End play and a delicious seafood dinner, including oysters and copious amounts of champagne.

The next morning I woke up four hundred pounds richer. Looking in the bathroom mirror of the hotel suite, it was no longer Alice staring back at me. She had disappeared along with the makeup and push-up bra. As dawn broke and the glamour of the previous evening faded, I bade farewell to my sugar baby alter ego and hurried out of the hotel. I wandered the streets of Soho, feeling like I had when I lost my virginity: sleep-deprived and slightly ashamed, but drunk with happiness from my new intoxicating secret.

Benjamin Davies

This poster shows president Xi Jinping and his wife superimposed on famous Beijing and Shanghai landmarks. The caption reads 盛世中国梦: “The Golden Age of the Chinese Dream”.

DEGREES OF

REMOTENESS

The ‘Chinese Dream’ is an integral concept of Xi’s propaganda. Nationally, it is about turning China into a developed nation, with a broadly educated populace. On a personal level, it is about making families wealthier. As a concept, it touches every part of China from the megacities like Tianjin and Guangzhou to places like Wuzhang—the mountain village in Jiangxi province, a thousand miles south of Beijing, where I found a poster (opposite).

As China moved towards privatisation, the government sold off the flats and many residents bought them rather than moving out. In a city with a financial boulevard to rival Wall Street, over 150 branches of McDonald’s and the world’s second largest shopping mall, there are still those who cling to the buildings and lifestyles that defined communism in their lifetime. Many make up China’s ageing population, and while they continue lifestyles that pay homage to communism, their children and grandchildren grow up in what is, paradoxically, now one of the world’s most materialistic societies. The very oldest may not speak Mandarin, and their grandchildren often don’t speak the old local dialects. Social disparities like this, alongside the progressive ideal inherent in the concept of the ‘dream’, mean that China’s elderly are being marginalised, either abandoned in rural places like Wuzhang or becoming ghosts in the cities. That’s not to say that the filial piety of Confucius has disappeared entirely from Chinese culture, but rather it now opposes some of the more individualistic elements of the ‘dream.’

Wuzhang is very quiet. Most of the old housing is abandoned and overgrown. In the ancient courtyards, elderly men, dressed in old military uniforms, nap in plastic chairs. Women and their daughters dance to Chinese music videos, displayed on a wall-mounted TV. The dump trucks that run the main dirt road all day, carrying stone from nearby quarries, are the noisiest part of life there. The one child policy would never have been implemented in Wuzhang, yet there are few young people here. Many have moved out of rural villages, and into growing urban centres. The village of Wuzhang is slipping away into obscurity through remoteness, and the posters and televisions seem like accidents. Soon it is likely to be abandoned or paved over.

I look at the river skyline of Guangzhou (overleaf), a megacity next to Hong Kong. Workers come here seeking employment from Jiangxi and much further afield. Economic migration into the cities fractures generations and strains marriages. Often, parents from rural families move to cities like Guangzhou and leave their children behind, in the care of immobile or ill grandparents.

Beijing is separated from Wuzhang by at least fourteen hours of travel. There, I found an alleyway (opposite) into the ‘socialism building’, the city’s first communal tower block, built in the mid-twentieth century. All the kitchens and bathrooms are shared. It’s cold inside. Some light bulbs glow intermittently in the darkness of the hallways, but the brightest thing is a glowing exit sign. On the stairway the graffiti reads 别找死: “Don’t go looking for death”.

The government downplays these problems by encouraging homogeneity. On trains, buses, and ferries all across Guangzhou a video plays on loop: an animation where a young Chinese girl 24

claps happily as a bird flies back to its nest. The words 国是家 close the video: “Country is Family”.

It’s a mantra that keeps the Spring Festival tradition of returning to one’s hometown strong, but further alienates those who are ashamed to return in debt, unable to afford gifts or decorations.

forms the great noise of China’s public space.

Most of the Central Committee of China’s ruling party were born in the 1950s, and its members’ average age is unlikely to change soon. While the privileged elderly dominate politics, the vastly poor ageing population continues to live and preach the old social orthodoxy. The aspirational youth are trapped somewhere between these two in everything they do. Access to education has increased hugely in recent years, but the schools, especially those in rural areas, marginalise the arts and barely make considerations for disabled students. At university one of the most popular subjects is English and Business; most emerge without being able to speak English to any great degree, and the business qualifications are often patchily regulated and complex. Many new graduates work in gruelling and underpaid jobs without proper health insurance or regulations.

Among contradictory social and economic signs, this youth doesn’t know quite when they will inherit the right to realise the Chinese Dream.

In modern China, people often find themselves separated from family and friends. For the young, great geographical distances often exist between hometowns and the cities they live and work in.

The physical distances between people seem to close up superficially: smartphones and WiFi are now accessible everywhere. But other factors push people apart: contrasts between social and economic classes, the divide between political ideologies of the old and young, and the inevitable language barriers for those in remote areas.

China remains an unfathomably huge place to grow up in. The nearest middle school of my town had 7,000 pupils, seventy to a class. Even just the physical space between the pupil and teacher in the classroom is big, and the effort to be heard above everybody and everything else is what 26

CUBA AND COLA Tara Doolabh

has fostered its own iconic brands. The national soft drinks brand Ciego Montero and the famed Havana Club rum, for example, have attained a cult status in Cuba that comes close to the one enjoyed by Coca-Cola and Bombay Sapphire in America and the UK.

Fidel Castro famously described advertising as “alienating and noxious”. The noncommercial economy that the Cuban revolutionary put in place as a result has had a lasting impact on the country. The 1960 trade embargo imposed on Cuba by the US prohibited big-name brands from attempting to infiltrate Castro’s communist island.

But in the eight years since Castro stepped down from office, the government’s stronghold on the economy has loosened. Trade and travel restrictions have been relaxed and the country has been dropped from America’s list of ‘State Sponsors of Terrorism’ (which now only features Iran, Sudan and Syria).

For years, Cuba has looked beyond their American neighbours to enhance their economy. Indeed, the country’s modern history is largely traceable through the brands that operate there.

The Chevys and Pontiacs of the pre-revolution years now share the roads with Lada vehicles and Yutong buses—the legacy of a relationship with the Soviets and a newfound friend in China. Entry into their economy therefore seems to be accompanied by a shared ideological and political stance against US economic dominance.

Currently governed by Fidel’s younger brother, Raul, Cuba’s economic climate is still a far cry from our consumerist culture. Currently, advertising is not listed among Cuba’s 181 approved professions. However, it would be a mistake to assume that Cuba is a brand-free zone. There is a thriving black market supplemented by friends and relatives from abroad, and, for the past two years, ‘El Paquete’, a weekly digital collection of TV shows, local advertisements, and music, has been circulated as a substitute to broadband internet. In the absence of McDonald’s and Starbucks, the island

The relations between the US and Cuba have, in recent years, been a focus of international attention. In August 2015, the American embassy reopened in Havana after fifty-four years, marking a new era of diplomacy between the two countries.

However, for most Cubans, the biggest change came in 1997, when Raul Castro allowed them to own and rent property. This allowed the Cuban

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people to profit from a growing tourist industry and offer bed-and-breakfast-style services in their own homes, known locally as Casa Particulares. Airbnb, which launched in Cuba a couple of months ago, is trying to provide a platform for the thousands of Cuban homeowners whose main source of advertising is word-of-mouth recommendations between tourists.

For an American brand like Coca-Cola, the Cuban market has been dormant for over fifty years.

Naturally this kind of blind spot in brand development might worry advertisers. But, in fact, Coca-Cola’s Cuban history may help it to reintegrate into the country’s now expanding market. Even so, brand legacy has never been a guaranteed route to commercial success. Guinness has been forced to adapt and reinvent itself in Nigeria, ensuring it remains attractive to the dynamic and youthful culture that is emerging there. Nixon says advertisers in Cuba must do the same: “They will have to choose to stand for something exotic and different, bringing the excitement of elsewhere into the Cuban market.” However, with limited internet access and no TV or print ads in circulation, it is difficult for advertising agencies to forecast how they might launch a campaign. Outdoor billboards, he predicts, will be “a natural first step” in commercially accessing a Cuban audience. For now, though, the country’s most successful brands are their socialist revolutionaries: the iconic image of Che Guevara with “Socialism or Death” emblazoned below it.

Matthew Nixon is a senior advertising planner at CHI & Partners, who currently represent Argos, British Gas, and Lexus. What excites advertisers about Cuba, he explains, is that “they haven’t had the decades of exposure to advertising that can create this kind of cynicism towards advertising.”

The difficulty, he says, will be ingratiating a brand to this new audience. The risk? “Trying to find a way to fit into Cuban culture from a standing start.”

Based on his experience of emerging markets, companies are likely to be forced to adapt their strategy for this foreign market. “Look at Guinness in Nigeria,” he explains, “there, it’s felt to be an authentic part of Nigerian culture, despite its obvious Irish heritage.” Guinness, he points out, has been established in Africa since 1827 and enjoys the advantages of a strong brand legacy in Nigeria.

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TUZLA

Still the City of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’

Jack Saville

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Previous page: site of the Tuzla massacre

ly Serb, if not in demographics then certainly in character. In Banja Luka, this entity’s capital, every single mosque was razed to the ground during the war, and none have been rebuilt since.

Arriving in Bosnia in early December to research war memorials, I had arranged a trip that covered the famous locations of the war, place names that sound as familiar as Paris and Berlin, infamous in their tragedy: Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Mostar. However, as I began to look further into the painful topic of post-genocidal Bosnian society, Tuzla came up more and more often. It was referred to almost jokingly as an exception to prove the rule of Bosnia’s continuing cultural division. “Maybe in Tuzla” was an answer to my naïve suggestion that the new generation of Bosnians might deal with the war’s legacy better. One friend even laughed off my interest in Tuzla with the claim, “it’s a red city.”

“The city felt somehow more present than Sarajevo, looking forward rather than looking back” So, as I arrived in Tuzla, my interest piqued by conversations I’d had in Sarajevo, I almost immediately began to discern the difference there. The weather was below freezing. The fog lay thick over the decaying roofs of baroque streets as I walked through the centre. The city reflects its heritage: Mosques, Catholic churches and Orthodox Cathedrals are dotted about in the city centre. These bordered large public spaces where, despite the bitter cold, people drank coffee, skated on the public rink, and stopped to converse in the squares. In some ways, it was similar to Sarajevo: a place where civilisations had met and grown around each other organically, where calls to prayer echoed through distinctly European plazas.

This sentiment was interesting. It placed Tuzla— Bosnia’s third largest city after Sarajevo and Banja Luka, the respective capitals of Bosnia’s two separate entities, the Federation and the Republika Srpska—in its own context, as a place where ethnicity didn’t have to matter. Another acquaintance in Sarajevo explained to me the attitude towards Tuzla. They described how the city’s maintenance of an ethnically mixed population was a source of pride in Bosnia. Yet, as I had learned, it was also regarded wearily, even cynically, as ‘the exception to prove the rule.’

Demographics in Bosnia are hard to discern, given that the last national census was conducted in 1991, some time before the war that would plunge the Former Yugoslav Republic into ethnic cleansing and genocide. However, at this time, Tuzla had an ethnic mix of around forty-seven per cent Muslim, fifteen per cent Serb, fifteen per cent Croat, fifteen per cent Yugoslav and five per cent other. This made it more ethnically diverse than even Sarajevo. What is interesting here is the high number of ‘Yugoslavs’. This term encompasses all peoples of the region without further distinction.

It can apply both to those people with mixed heritage, and also to those who identify with a larger Yugoslav nationality, in the mould of Josip Broz Tito’s desire for Yugoslavia to be a land of ‘Brotherhood and Unity.’

I was struck by a feeling here, an atmosphere that was hard to describe. The city felt somehow more present than Sarajevo, looking forward rather than looking back. The tourist office advertised the salt lakes in the north of the city, instead of the ‘war tours’ which one could find in many other Bosnian cities. Yet I was here to research precisely that. I wondered how this place had come to terms with its past, and continued so hopefully into its future, in a way that many of the other cities hadn’t. It may be exceptional in its tolerance and hopefulness, but it certainly wasn’t exceptional in its experience of war. Tuzla had suffered its fair share of trauma between 1992–5, but somehow had made this shared experience the sustenance of unity, rather than of division.

Tuzla’s exceptional position clearly warrants explanation. Here we have a city that defied, and continues to defy, the process of mass ethnic displacement that almost all other areas of Bosnia underwent from 1992–5 and thereafter. Sarajevo, once a symbol of ethnic unity, has become an almost exclusively Bosniak city. Many other cities in the Republika Srpska have become almost entire-

On my second day in Tuzla, I walked up the hill on the north side of the city to the Slana Banja Memorial Park. Directly translated as “Salt Lakes”, the park sits above the three shallow salt lakes to which it owes its name. The memorial park is large, and though its primary function is to commemorate the fallen of both the second world war and the Bosnian War of 1992–5, it is big enough and 32

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green enough for people to stroll through it for pleasure. As I made my way around it, I saw people walking their dogs, young couples on dates, and even a bunch of kids playing with an air rifle in the wooded areas. Clearly, the space is functional as well as decorative, and the immediate impression is of a living memorial, which serves a purpose in the city, and not simply as a silent and brooding reminder of the past.

piece of graffiti, scrawled in pencil, marks one of the unpolished marble walls. “Edin”, it reads, Bosnian for “unique”.

As my journey continued, I began to place these “unique” memorials in an older context. A long path, called the “Avenue of Freedom” stretches from the memorial to the war of 1992–5 right the way to the other end of the park, where the memorial to the Fallen Partisan Fighters of Tuzla sits, having been built here almost half a century before. This area bears all the hallmarks of a traditional socialist memorial, including socialist realist relief sculptures of rifle wielding partisans, poems to the glorious fight against fascism and imperialism, and a gallery of busts of decorated war heroes, centred, of course, on Josip Broz Tito. Then I noticed that the woods surrounding the memorial are full of small memorial plaques, each in varying stages of decay, commemorating individual soldiers. Their placement seemed random, dotting the wooded hillsides that border the memorial’s central sculptures. Yet as I walked through, I noted in the random placement of the stones the complete intermingling of different ethnicities of partisans. Again, Brankos (Serb) were laid next to Rasims (Bosniak), all sharing the partisan identity that their placement in this cemetery gave them.

The first memorial one sees on entering the park is perhaps the one with the greatest impact. Sitting high on the hill is a cemetery to the seventy-one civilians killed on the twenty-fifth of May, 1995, when a Republika Srpska shell hit the main square as mostly young people sat drinking coffee. The cemetery is almost unprecedented in Bosnia, however, as the victims of the ‘Tuzla Massacre’ are all buried together in this one place, irrespective of ethnic background. Elsewhere in Bosnia, memorials and graveyards are split according to ethnicity, with the tragedies that befell Serb, Bosniak and Croat citizens during the war rarely being remembered as a whole.

The decision to bury all these people together was not one taken lightly. At the time of the burial in 1995, many local religious organisations demanded that the members of their religious community be buried separately, in religious cemeteries.

Tuzla’s local government, however, along with the parents of the deceased, decided that, as the war entered its final bloody stages, the city had to commit itself to the principles that the deceased had pursued in life. These people had grown up together. In the square they had died together as they drank coffee; they would lie in death together also. The effect is profound: lines of identical graves laid out, with the dates attesting to the tragedy of these young people’s deaths; Rusmir Panjovic, 1974–1995, reads one, Adnan Hujdorovic-Kinze, 1977–1995, another. Above the graves are wreaths of flowers in the shape of a heart with “Tuzla” written on a sash draped around them. As much as this is a cemetery of individuals, the idea of the collective is very present.

Walking back, the architecture of the whole park began to make much more sense to me. I left the memorial to the partisans, and walked through the Avenue of Heroes. Here, Tito’s bust stood proudly, looking down the Avenue of Freedom which connects the visitor back to the memorial of the defenders of Tuzla. The physical space marks a literal continuum between the unity in death of the partisans in their fight for Yugoslavia (via Tito, architect of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’) to Tuzla’s preservation of this spirit of unity, diversity and tolerance in the war of the 1990s. The walk through the park is a walk through the history of the city, and of its “edin” and exceptional character.

I felt, on leaving Slana Banja, and then Tuzla the following morning, that to some degree my questions about the indescribable atmosphere in the city had been answered. The city had turned its shared trauma into a forward-facing experience, using remembrance to build a future. As I headed, perhaps appropriately, to Srebrenica, the site of the largest atrocity in Europe since the second world war, I thought about what had made Tuzla so different from the other places I had been in Bosnia. It was, to me, the exceptional maintenance of what so many other places had lost in the war: it was still the city of ‘Brotherhood and Unity.’

Further into the park is the memorial to the fallen defenders of Tuzla, 1992–5. The structure is simple: four marble walls with names engraved in black stand around a central pagoda. This shelters a small obelisk engraved with a fleur de lis, the symbol of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. Absent is any religious or overtly national symbolism, and reading down the lists of names one can quickly see Borislavs (a Serb first name), Abdulehs (Bosniak) and Brunos (Croat) equally represented on the walls. A small 34

THE MEANING OF ARTS CUTS Sam Dunnett I am waiting to go onstage during my secondary school’s adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, wearing a shop-bought fancy dress costume that is meant to transform me into Geoffrey Chaucer. Other schools are putting on Hairspray and West Side Story. In whispers and gasps, news flits around the backstage area behind me. All that I can make out before I go on is that it is to do with The Brewhouse Theatre. By the time I arrive back in the shadows, the mutterings have shaped into a simple report, a single sentence that conveys exactly what has happened. The Brewhouse has closed. It has gone. Its doors have shut indefinitely. We all stand shocked, in our absurd medieval outfits.

that survive to this day; the setting for teenage crushes, arguments, raptures of imagination, and understanding of the world around me; the location of a truly disastrous adaptation of an Edward Bond play in which everybody forgot their lines. From my pre-teen years through to my late adolescence, the backrooms and corridors of the theatre became as familiar to me as those of my school, and the like-minded people I met there were as important to my sense of belonging in the town as any of my school friends were. I would be a different person without it.

Funding from Arts Council England saved The Brewhouse from two previous threats of closure, in 2005 and 2009. Then, in 2011, Somerset County Council responded to central government cuts with a one hundred per cent reduction in arts funding. The budget was replaced with roughly equal funding for ‘creative enterprises’, which, as community drama groups, public art classes, and secondary school instrument teachers soon

Back in 2013, The Brewhouse was an arts centre and theatre, the only organisation of its kind in my hometown of Taunton. For me, it will always be the place where I spent bleary-eyed Saturday mornings in a black-room that smelled of paint and wallpaper glue; the catalyst for friendships 35

and support for arts organisations. This dichotomy is dubious; others go further and argue that institutions such as the Brewhouse simply should not expect taxpayer’s money and that to survive they must learn to be commercially viable. When local Conservative MP Rebecca Pow was challenged by my sixth form’s politics society on the issue of arts funding, her response was that it was right that organisations were forced to examine their ‘economic sustainability’. According to her, all that happened in 2013 was that The Brewhouse resolutely failed the test presented by the removal of grants. It was unable to make youth clubs and public classes compatible with profitability, and was justly punished.

learnt, translated as media and advertising. The Guardian called it ‘D-Day’ for the arts in Somerset, and it soon became clear that its effect was unambiguously to break organisations and projects across the county. All direct grants to arts groups ended immediately and The Brewhouse’s financial director warned of “death by a thousand cuts”.

The closure of my beloved theatre tapped into a gnawing suspicion of mine that many in positions of authority see the arts as expendable. To them, it didn’t matter that something was important to my memories, to my community, to my generation, to all perpetually exasperated inhabitants of provinces far from London where the arts are neglected; if it was deemed wasteful, it had to go. The loss of a theatre was my wake-up call that anything anyone values for its social rather than economic function is under threat from the same politically effective but logically inconsistent rhetoric: that of waste and thrift and tightening belts. Of course, there would have been far more damaging ways to learn how the narratives of austerity impact individual lives, but the lesson was the same. Even if theatres and arts centres are believed to be non-essential, not universal or egalitarian enough in the demographics they benefit, it is exactly the same reasoning that led to the slashing of funding for so much else from 2010 onwards, from Legal Aid to Housing.

As it turned out, the Brewhouse did not close for good that February. It reopened the following April, its lease bought by the Taunton Theatre Association. Presumably Pow would be pleased that it now knows how to focus on making money. I soon learned what this meant in practice: for months after the theatre’s apparently permanent closure, this new state of affairs seemed to apply only to the state schools in the area. Private schools could afford the necessary rental fees to stage one-off performances of their end-of-term plays and musicals at the newly commercially-viable theatre. Our Canterbury Tales wouldn’t have stood a chance.

A year later, I raise this point anxiously, very conscious of the private school students sitting around the table. A few friends and I are in a cramped office space within the shell of The Brewhouse, surrounded by students from across Taunton. We have come together to demand a meeting with those responsible for the maintenance of the buildings and the potential return of the theatre.

We want to ensure that youth services for students

Many political arguments for arts cuts ignore this link between everything endangered by the ideology of this government and the last one, and focus instead on comparing arts funding unfavourably with other public expenditure. At a 2015 general election hustings in Taunton, I watched the Labour parliamentary candidate justify his vote as a councillor for the one hundred per cent cut as a choice between support for vulnerable people

“anything anyone values for its social rather than economic function is under threat from the same politically effective but logically inconsistent rhetoric”

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seats, preparing the dirty, ageing place for something new. Our concerns are a distraction.

of all backgrounds are at the heart of any attempt to resurrect The Brewhouse. The meeting is undeniably disappointing. We know there will not be another one. I know, as I look into the face of the woman in charge of the preservation of the theatre, that I will never forget it. It is sad, and deeply pessimistic. She may not care. She may sincerely want to help. She may be dreading new ownership of the theatre, or she may have welcomed it when it finally came. Either way, she has been leading teams of people of all ages in clean-up operations for weeks: keeping the stage primed for unlikely future performances, lifting teetering stacks of chairs, dusting the corridors, cleaning lighting and sound equipment, washing the faded

I knew then that the following year, when I left for university, those battles would cease to be mine to fight. It would be a new generation that would benefit or lose out from how, when, and in what form the Brewhouse reopened. Our receding childhood memories, along with the opportunity for future young people to experience the theatre, were kept from despair, but only just. They teetered on the edge in the shadowy auditorium; hung on by their fingernails in the air of the hollow corridors I once loved.

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ONE CITY, ONE NIGHT, ONE TAKE.

an interview with Victoria’s cinematographer Jacob Lee

It is very rare at the end of a film for the cinematographer to be credited before the director.

But after watching Victoria, a film lasting two and a quarter hours and taken in just one shot, it’s easy to see why cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen was given this honour.

The film begins at four-thirty a.m. in a club in Berlin. Flashing lights fade into the face of Victoria (Laia Costa) as she bounces to pounding techno.

She then meets four “real Berlin guys”, and the five of them venture out onto the streets of the German capital. Moving across more than twenty locations and escalating from the first hour into unyielding, break-neck action, Victoria offers its audience total immersion: we live every minute

of it.

There was no guarantee that Victoria would be released as a one-shot film. The cast and crew had just three chances to shoot it using that technique; otherwise it would have been cut in a similar style to Hitchcock’s Rope and Iñárritu’s Birdman. It is a testament to everyone involved that the third take that made up the final film is not a gimmick, but a spectacular example of modern filmmaking.

In January, I was lucky enough to interview the film’s cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen to ask him how such a film came about.

How was the process of filming Victoria different to other films you’ve done?

Earning the actors’ trust was important. When you are with three people in a tiny elevator, the camera is right up in their faces and there is hardly any room, it helps if you are on good terms. The actors and I became a little clique, a gang.

How did you prepare for filming constantly for that length of time?

Usually you shoot a very tiny piece of the staged reality and you do it over and over again and at the end of the day you have a shot—if you’re lucky, one or two minutes of screen time. Here we are in the middle of it for the whole two hours fifteen minutes. That was both exhausting and exhilarating.

I did a lot of running with heavy equipment and some basic back training because I was holding the camera in my wrist a lot. Before every rehearsal I warmed up for half an hour as if I were running a marathon. The camera weighed around five and a half kilos, which is not too heavy but for two and a half hours you do feel it.

What was the feeling after the third and final take?

I was physically exhausted but at the same time I just wanted to do it again. I felt the first take we did was better technically, so in some ways I was a little disappointed. But at the same time the director Sebastian Schipper told me that he was very happy with this third take and that gave me a lot of confidence. The performances and energy of it made for the best film.

I also wanted to make sure nothing got caught while filming so the camera was free of cables and the same went for my clothing. I made sure I didn’t have pockets or shoelaces and I had this kind of ninja costume on, with wrist and back support and kneepads. I looked ridiculous but I had to make sure I was comfortable moving in all sorts of positions.

I read online that Sebastian asked you to film as if you were a war photographer. How did that work?

Which scene are you most proud of?

He wanted me to be completely in the moment.

We’d got to know the language and structure of the film in rehearsals but there was no scripted dialogue and a lot of the film was improvised. I just had to go with whatever was happening around me and react to everything very intuitively.

The one right at the end in the hotel. That late in the film everyone was worried about fucking up so I was quite nervous. It wasn’t a shot I had planned.

The timing of Laia Costa starting to cry, and me being so close to her at that moment, made for a great shot. The angles just felt right.

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Were you worried about making mistakes, given that it was all shot in one go?

I think a mistake can become really beautiful art.

For me it is definitely a general view but Victoria was the ultimate test of that. There are no mistakes in this film because there are no cuts. Everything was going to be part of it. If something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen then we had to embrace it.

Often I get the best shots by accident. Sometimes when I’m filming something I hand my camera over to my assistant and he puts it down on the floor and all of a sudden you get a beautiful frame.

You’d normally never think of that shot because you are obsessed with these conventional ideas about how you should frame something, or where you should point the camera, and how the story should be told. I think if you are to break free from that you have to be open to letting your mistakes into the visual language.

How did you work with lighting?

We put a lot of lights on the roofs along the streets where the cast were walking for the first half of the film. We were shooting in 360 degrees and were potentially looking everywhere so we couldn’t just put up a lamp. We had to make it part of the set as well. As it became day we were less dependent on artificial light. One German newspaper thought Victoria was shot in natural light. I thought that was a real compliment to my gaffer.

Nils Frahm produced the soundtrack for Victoria.

In a film with no cuts, the soundtrack helped transition between scenes.

I think by the time Nils Frahm came on to the project Sebastian had a good idea of what angle to take with the soundtrack. He talked to Nils about creating silence in the film. For me, the soundtrack helped distort the viewer’s perception of time: even though the film is in real time the soundtrack helped to draw out or shorten certain scenes. For example, when the score is playing in the elevator it feels like the characters are bonding much more than if the audience were in on the conversation.

It became more of a moment.

Has your opinion of the film and your work in it changed since it was released?

I have always been very self-critical. It’s hard for me to have an objective view of Victoria now. One really good thing that has come out of this film is that I have learned a lot by having to think and talk about it a lot. It would be great if I could take as much out of every film as I did with Victoria.

When filming, do you focus more on aesthetics or narrative?

Definitely the narrative. For me to do my best possible work I have to really understand the story and the psychology of the characters. I get a little worried if I’m looking for the most beautiful shot rather than the right shot.

The film premiered at the sixty-fifth Berlinale film festival in February 2015 to astounding success. Victoria is due for release in the UK this April.

THE WAR ON THE WAR ON TERROR AN INTERVIEW WITH CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH, FOUNDER OF REPRIEVE Ella Gannon

Predictably, the name ‘ISIS’ functions as an icebreaker. “I loved the idea of doing an interview for The ISIS magazine,” he laughs. “I hope you are not planning on changing it.” I assured him that it didn’t look like that was going to happen any time soon.

him whether he thinks that the US death penalty will be outlawed in his lifetime.

“It depends how many G&Ts I drink.”

More seriously, he tells me that the death penalty is likely to be abolished in the US around twenty to thirty years from now and that, looking at this in an optimistic light, this may reflect a growing respect for human rights. On Reprieve’s website, the USA appears alongside Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and many others in a list of countries where the death penalty is still practiced. To an organisation whose function is to help individuals suffering extreme abuse from the state, there is little to distinguish between the west and countries experiencing ongoing internal conflict.

Clive Stafford Smith is more preoccupied with the other ISIS than most. He founded the human rights organisation Reprieve in 1999 with the goal of outlawing the death penalty in the USA. Ever since the events of 9/11, Reprieve has been working in opposition to the ‘War on Terror’. Now based in the UK, it continues to press for the universal abolition of the death sentence from the USA to Pakistan. At the time of our conversation, he was taking a look at the UK government’s ‘kill list’. “Yes, our government has a list of people all around the world it wants to kill. It’s funny and also terrifying.”

As it turns out, the majority of people on Death Row suffer from mental disorders. One of the reasons for this is that it makes them more vulnerable to prosecution. Not long ago, Reprieve did an IQ test on Death Row, Mississippi, which proved that around a third of inmates were at that time mentally disabled. How can this have happened? “Under American law, citizens on trial for the death penalty are made to represent themselves. This has created a situation in which someone who can barely read or write is made to defend himself or herself against one of the most complicated systems of law.”

We discuss the UK government’s recent decision to carry out drone strikes in Syria. “Drones strikes lower their threshold for going to war. Politicians are now more able and more willing to kill people—essentially wage war all around the world— without impunity to themselves. They feel as though they are being brave doing this, but there is nothing brave about killing people from a position of utter safety.”

Talking about power afforded to politicians, I ask 43

“The third thing is the most difficult. Politicians need to offer an alternative dream. These rich politicians don’t understand the way the world works.

We need a dream more like the one which socialism offers: that of a more compassionate society”.

I ask if a more collective effort to acknowledge mental disability, especially from early on, would help the situation. Stafford Smith sees things slightly differently. “We are not going to eradicate mental illness. The answer is to educate people in general on the subject.” Stafford Smith suggests that we, as a society, should try to find further sympathy and empathy for people in these situations, and treat them as individuals rather than criminals.

“When someone we love commits a crime we look for explanations, but when it’s a stranger, society teaches us to be vengeful and unpleasant.”

Yet compassion and society do not appear to go together. Stafford Smith sees evidence of this in the way our society educates its children. “We are not taught how to have a relationship with another person. Nobody teaches us how to raise a child.”

I suggest that society also forgets to teach us how to admit that we are wrong: a lesson that more than a few politicians could benefit from. But the problem with respect to drone warfare goes deeper than this. In order to be able to admit that you are wrong, you first have to be aware of the mistakes that you are making. Stafford Smith elaborates: “The problem with politicians is that they answer the wrong questions.” He references the film Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise, whom he doesn’t seem to like). “In this film, people are arrested for things they have not done yet. This is exactly what our government tries to do, prevent crimes that are not real, that have not been committed. But that is not their job; their job is to make the world safer. Osama bin Laden estimated at the time of his death that there were 100 members of al-Qaeda. Today members of ISIS are in the thousands. This is what the ‘War on Terror’ has done.”

Like the death penalty, he argues that the ‘War on Terror’ has done more harm than good by employing tactics that create more militants than they kill.

“The strikes are completely counterproductive, of course.” Stafford Smith claims that he discovered this from reading documents retrieved from the computer of Osama bin Laden. These documents made it clear to him that retaliation tactics, such as drone warfare, were necessary to elicit sympathy for Bin Laden’s cause.

Stafford Smith suggests that bin Laden’s intended strategy was to utilise people in the west to target the west. “Consider how since 9/11 all of the socalled ‘terrorist attacks’ within the UK were done

by British people—people who were already here.

Strategies such as drones strikes are the best way to militarise disaffected youth to join organizations such as al-Qaeda. These are people who are angered and disillusioned by government policies such as the death penalty and drone strikes.”

This, Stafford Smith says, was the genius of 9/11, using an American plane to attack America.

I ask him what alternative approach he would take in Cameron’s place.

“It’s obvious!” he exclaims.

“To begin with, we forget war as a solution. If we look at all the conflicts of our history, it is clear that no war has ever achieved a meaningful goal.”

He references a Michael Franti song: “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb the world to peace.”

“The second thing is to have an ethical foreign policy. The death penalty is outlawed as barbaric in our own country, yet the drone strikes are the death penalty without trial. The reason so many people in the Middle East hate us is that we have a corrupt foreign policy. We need to stop supporting countries with reprehensible regimes such as the one in Saudi Arabia. “ 44

MODERNISM’S TOWER IN THE NORTH

Alex Shaw

I follow Newcastle’s medieval West Wall uphill, where it threads behind twenty-first century Chinatown. Morden Tower sits halfway along this stretch. A two-storey turret, it is backed on one side by the Chinese kitchens of Stowell Street; on the other side, its semicircular facade juts out towards the concrete swathe of Gallowgate. A blue plaque records the tower’s construction in the

late thirteenth century and its partial rebuilding in 1700, as well as its use “by the Company of Glaziers, Plumbers, Pewterers and Painters.”

Unacknowledged on the plaque is the tower’s more recent function—as an international poetry hub. Since the local poet Connie Pickard took out a lease on Morden Tower in 1964, it has hosted 45

readings by an array of eminent poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Carol Ann Duffy and—most famously—Basil Bunting, who gave the debut performance of his magnum opus Briggflatts at the tower on the twenty-second of December, 1965.

Today, readings are only occasionally held at the tower.

the power of concision. He took inspiration from artistic economy in the work of Domenico Scarlatti (who “condensed so much music into so few bars”) and in stonemasonry: The mason stirs: Words!

Pens are too light.

Take a chisel to write!

When I visited, the gate to the Tower was locked.

The architectural history sketched out on the blue plaque was inscribed in sandstone blocks and newer red brick. There was no evidence, though, of the tower’s place in poetic history.

The half-rhyme that binds “words” and “stirs” evokes what MacSweeney called “the living word”: even language in stone stirs the mason to life. Bunting eschews a “light,” verbose pen in favour of sparse, chiselled diction. To the poem’s original audience, surrounded by Morden Tower’s medieval stonework, the continuity between the austere, ancient art of the stonemason and Bunting’s spare Modernist poetics would have been physically palpable. As Bunting put it, “Then is diffused in Now.”

Morden Tower’s contribution to postwar British poetry can hardly be overstated. It was most significant as a centre of Modernist poetics in the 1960s: a place where American poets such as Gregory Corso, Ed Dorn and Lawrence Ferlinghetti inspired, and learnt from, a Northumbrian grouping centred on Bunting, and the younger Tom Pickard and Barry MacSweeney. At a time when mainstream British poetry—under the Movement’s grip—was at risk of sinking into parochialism, Morden Tower became a byword for the international cross-fertilisation of late Modernism.

Not only did Morden Tower shape the writers who gathered within its curved reading room, but it also shaped the image of Modernist poetry to the outside world. In leasing Morden Tower from the council, Connie Pickard made an appropriate choice. What was built to defend Newcastle against Scottish invasion was transformed into the North East’s point of contact to the wider poetic landscape—becoming, ironically, the favourite performance venue of firebrand Scottish nationalist Hugh MacDiarmid. And yet the tower retained something of its original military function: it was repurposed in the conflict between Modernist poets, particularly concentrated in the geographical margins of the British Isles, and the Movement poets of the cultural establishment. In the seventies, this conflict would break out into what Peter Barry describes as the ‘Poetry Wars’, skirmishes fought for control of the Poetry Society.

Performances at Morden Tower have become literary legend. Speaking of the tower’s formative influence on his writing, MacSweeney jubilantly recalled his exposure “week after week [to] the living word!” in the tower—“What better introduction to writing could a young poet have had?” The tower had a similar impact on older, more established writers. Ginsberg considered Morden Tower’s influence on his work to be far greater than that of the ivory tower—after having frequently given readings at universities. For example, following Ginsberg’s performance at Morden in 1965, Bunting admonished Ginsberg: “Too many words, condense still more.” Ginsberg’s trademark sprawling lines of free verse might seem far from economical, but think of ‘September in Jessore Road’, his raw evocation of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. This stark poem culminates with shocking images:

There is no blue plaque for the poets of Morden Tower. Which is fitting, because the tower didn’t concentrate poetry so much as diffuse it. Poetry was diffused between contrasting national traditions—in particular, the largely divergent traditions of England and post-Whitman America. Between generations, too—between Bunting, who knew the early Modernists Eliot, Pound and Yeats, and the children of the sixties. But the most crucial diffusion of all was across media: from oral performance to the more permanent space of the printed page, as writers were indelibly moulded by what they heard at the tower. Bunting was right.

Then is diffused in now.

millions of brothers in woe millions of children nowhere to go.

Condensed noun fragments, shorn of verbs, capture the hopeless stasis of the war’s survivors. Perhaps Ginsberg, then, was right to claim that he learnt to strive for concision after meeting Bunting at Morden Tower.

Bunting’s own poem Briggflatts demonstrates

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Focus E15 Kazi Elias

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London area. As Focus E15 mother Jasmin Stone states, “We soon realised that our stories were not unique; they were the tip of the London housing crisis iceberg.”

It’s July, and I’m at a festival. A deep, thumping bass, emanates from a nearby stage and the distant cries of partygoers reverberate around the small tent. Inside, something grips the attention of the swelling audience. Two members of the Focus E15 group recount their experiences campaigning against forced evictions in the Newham area on stage. One has to wipe away tears. He recalls a time when the ‘Olympic legacy’ was more than just a distant hope. Amidst the mud and revelry, the effect on the audience is profound. I find myself questioning the hedonistic excess around me as I walk back to my tent.

The Focus E15 leaflet’s cry of ‘Social Housing!

Not Social Cleansing!’ is not an exaggeration, as gentrification continues to sweep through even London’s poorest areas. The emphasis is now on the wider problem of affordable housing and social cleansing; the Focus E15 hostel itself closed in autumn 2013, as a result of a £40,000 funding cut from the local council. Equally, the abandoned Carpenters Estate, where 400 council houses lie unused, has been earmarked for demolition to make way for a retail and regeneration development that many worry will be priced at a more affluent market. The expansion plans do little to alleviate fears that the local council is mishandling its priorities. Grandiose schemes for regeneration and redevelopment seem a distant prospect.

Six months on, and the endeavour of Focus E15 is as strong as ever.

On a blustery January morning, Focus E15’s weekly stall on Stratford Broadway consists of little more than a table and a sound system with a microphone plugged in. Two volunteers manually hand out leaflets to passers by, but the open mic is the centre of attention, inviting anecdotes from anyone with a contribution to make. Despite its appearance, this weekly stand has evolved from the mouthpiece of twenty-nine young and expectant mothers into a symbol of the palpable discord that exists between London’s council and housing authorities and the people that they represent.

Focus E15 campaigner Saskia O’Hara hints at an ulterior motive behind these forced relocation notices. “If you don’t accept that housing, then you’ve made yourself intentionally homeless—it’s very sneaky. It means you’ve got the council saying, ‘Well, we want nothing more to do with you,’ so it’s a kind of fast track into moving people out, saying if you don’t accept this then that’s it—it’s blackmail.”

“gentrification continues to sweep through even London’s poorest areas.”

The group offers practical, everyday help to those who most need it. “We fight evictions; we go to housing meetings with people … the people that accompany them fight their case, because it’s hard for someone who’s in such a vulnerable position.” O’Hara identifies the Focus E15 website as something which sets the campaign apart. “We’re doing lots of different work, about exposing people’s stories, we’ve got a website that’s really good for that. We know the council are watching it because the people whose stories go on there normally get a phone call from them the next day.”

Focus E15, the social campaign group, began as a result of the forced eviction notices served to the twenty-nine original residents of the Focus E15 hostel in Newham, to locations as distant as Manchester and Birmingham. Faced with the loss of their support networks, these forced evictions and relocations compelled the evictees into the world of local grassroots activism. Now, the campaign is increasingly under the national spotlight and has been made the subject of a recent play, E15, first shown at the Edinburgh Fringe. Public attention has brought a new vigour to the debate regarding the availability of affordable housing within the

Focus E15’s direct approach, from occupying the disused Carpenters Estate and Olympic Flats to confronting Boris Johnson atop a double-decker bus have garnered an unfavourable response from a council now clearly at odds with the group.

There is an undeniable tension between Focus E15 and, perhaps surprisingly, the Labour-controlled council of Newham. When confronted by the group in summer 2014, Newham mayor Robin Wales had little sympathy for their plight, retorting “if you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham.” The conflict was exacerbated when Wales was found guilty of breaching 48

Newham Council’s members Code of Conduct for his abrasive response to Focus E15 campaigning at the Newham Mayor’s Show in July of the same year. Campaigners have recalled being wrestled to the ground and harassed by Wales and his entourage.

facing forced evictions and record increases in rent and living costs in the Newham area—recently named as having the highest increases in housing prices, at twenty-two per cent, in the country for 2015—will be able to afford this sum, is another question altogether.

In a response published in the Guardian several months later, Wales gave a conditional apology for the actions of his council, focusing on the squeeze faced by local councils as a result of government spending cuts as the root cause of the problems.

Whilst there is undeniably an element of truth in this, it provides little consolation to those facing huge uncertainty about their future in the Newham area, and little justification for the hostility experienced by those within the movement.

Back in Stratford, it is clear that Focus E15 has forged a bond with the local community that is missing between Newham council and its residents. For O’Hara, it seems that persistence is key. “People are used to being just let down, they think it’s useless and you can’t win. But I think this campaign is going somewhere … people see that they can do something.” Certainly, Focus E15’s progress in Carpenters Estate is striking a chord within the community. The forty homes reopened due to the campaign’s success are a “tiny drop in the Ocean”, but a drop that, nevertheless, constitutes tangible progress for those who now have a place to call home.

One year on, the selling off of council housing stocks as a result of the Government’s latest Housing Bill, an extension of the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme will, in the words of Labour London Mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, be “catastrophic” to those who rely on affordable housing schemes. Housing and homelessness charity Shelter predicts Hammersmith and Fulham in West London, and Camden in North London, will lose roughly half of their affordable housing stock. And these concerns are not limited to London, with Cambridge predicted to see a decline of forty-six per cent of its affordable housing. David Cameron has done little to alleviate fears over the depletion of council housing stock, promising to discard rules requiring developers to build affordable homes for let in a bid to encourage the building of more homes for first time buyers. And yet, within the London area, this threshold for properties for the first time buyer was capped at £450,000. Just how many of those

Perhaps the most essential part of the group’s campaigning is its exposure of a local council failing in its paramount duty to protect its most vulnerable residents. But the message of Focus E15 moving forwards is one of positivity and community. In a manner characteristic of their admirable defiance, mother Jasmin Stone declared, “This is the beginning of the end of the housing crisis.” It would be easy to dismiss this as wishful thinking in the face of the malevolent beast that is the ever-worsening housing crisis. And yet, in the face of such hardship, Focus E15’s passionate defiance inspires hope. This really is only the beginning of the end of the housing crisis. But it is a beginning with firm and indefatigable foundations. So purely wishful thinking? I wouldn’t be so sure.

COFFEE WITH MICHAEL FRAYN

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Tom Ball

Search long enough and you’ll discover that there exist some neat patches of parkland on YouTube that haven’t been marred by the graffiti of endless Vevo commercials or the dog-shit vitriol of the comments box. One such sequestered glade is the modest archive of seventies BBC documentaries, a trove of early social reportage, from a time when television cameras and a remarkably darkhaired David Dimbleby first inveigled their way into communities (Born Black, Born British, 1972), schools (The Best Days, 1977) and homes (The Family, 1974). But surprisingly, alongside these prototypes of the production line that would eventually churn out the Kardashians and Davina McCall, can be found Three Streets in the Country, a paean to suburbia, written and presented by the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

The house where he lives with his wife, the biographer Claire Tomalin, is shielded from the road by a thick white-washed wall, high enough only for gawpers on passing double-deckers to see over.

The tall wall’s density becomes clear to me as I press the intercom and fight to make myself heard over the yowl of the traffic. Beyond the wall it is markedly quieter: a square and carless enclosure of gravel introducing the symmetrical and steeproofed house.

I ring the doorbell and wait, squirming somewhat with forced nonchalance in the suspicion that I am being watched through the spy-hole (a natural sequitur, perhaps, from my muffled declaration over the intercom). The door then opens and Frayn stands before it. I am welcomed in to a hallway lined with books, where I take off my shoes (the day is wet) and follow him into the kitchen for coffee.

Frayn occupies a unique position in the modern British canon. “Bernard Shaw couldn’t do it, Henry James couldn’t do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it,” quoth John Updike. That is: to write for the stage and the shelf with equal success. For his plays he has won the Tony Award and the Laurence Olivier Award; for his fiction he has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Whitbread Award and been nominated for the Booker. And, for what it’s worth, he is, to my mind, one of the greatest comic authors of the past century.

Born in 1933, Frayn may have missed the second world war, but he was an early conscript into the west’s war on communism, selected for a Russian interpretation course as part of his national service. However, as a self-labelled communist, he took to the course with conspiratorial enthusiasm, so much so that after two years of service he continued his study of the language at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Though the initial political impetus soon wore off, Frayn has since used his Russian to become Britain’s most eminent translator of Chekhov.

It was, therefore, with bemused pleasure that I stumbled across Three Streets in the Country several years ago. Featuring a young—and frequently stern—Frayn, it’s a meditative programme, pitched around the semi-academic tone in which the BBC would come to specialise, discussing London’s rampant suburbanisation in the twentieth century. More accurately, however, Three Streets in the Country is a televisual reminiscence, as Frayn returns to his hometown of Ewell, in Surrey, to wander and remark upon those three well-kempt streets of his childhood, rustling through old thicketed haunts and peeping over creosoted fences to the soundtrack of old English folk ballads. It was, he says, the perfect place to grow up, and the perfect time too, for the war meant that there was little traffic and many bombsites and abandoned buildings for children to play in.

An aside—I am both a Russianist and a fan of Chekhov, so I suspected that we might have something to talk about. What I hadn’t foreseen though was the fertility of the common ground yielded by our respective tertiary educations: in spite of the sixty-year and seventy-mile expanse that divides us, collegiate conversation is curiously indefatigable, allowing us to trade a succession of minor anecdotes and probe at potential mutual acquaintances. One English novelist described the interview as an “anxious and exhausting” affair “with the interviewer fielding about eighty per cent of the nerves”; but as we stood waiting for the coffee those wheedling anxieties began to dissipate with the shrill hum of the Nespresso machine.

We move next door to a sitting room darkened by the wall’s obscuration of the low winter sun, and he recounts to me the story of how he came to realise that acting wasn’t for him, when he nearly pulled down half the stage set in a student production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector while attempting to exit a scene through a jammed door. Neither, though, did his fledgling theatrical

Three Streets in the Country was broadcast over thirty-five years ago; Frayn’s own residency in Ewell began over eighty years ago. Now, following a lifetime spent living in the inner city, first in Manchester, where he worked for the Guardian, and later in Camden Town, where neighbours included Alan Bennett and Mary-Kay Wilmers, he has moved back to London’s fringes.

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endeavours offstage meet with much success. As he explains, each year a West End theatre would produce a Cambridge Footlights Spring Revue; but in the year that Frayn wrote the skits, the show was unanimously rejected by London’s producers, who deemed it too abstract. In what he terms a “sour-grapes” reaction to the flop, he wouldn’t write for the stage again for fifteen years.

the play. But it’s so well done that it doesn’t seem like that.” I don’t need the dictaphone to remember how animated he became here, the intonation of his speech rising and falling with ever greater cadences. His respect for Chekhov is clearly enormous. The vocal undulations reach their zenith with the mention of Donald Rayfield’s biography of the Russian, which was written following the opening of supressed archival documents pertaining to Chekhov’s private life: “he had always been considered this rather saintly doctor. But in fact he was an extraordinarily sociable man, who enjoyed drinking and eating just as much as he did writing. And his sex life, well … It was very powerful indeed.”

I listen to these stories with wide-eyed, parted-lipped attentiveness, feeling a little boyish in my shoeless state, as though I were listening to the battle stories of an avuncular relative. My captivation is therefore largely responsible for the lack of direct speech thus far; for I had first forgotten, and then been reluctant to acknowledge, my dictaphone, which, to extract from my pocket, seemed like a gesture of hostile intent. So then we talked about Chekhov and the red light listened on the table between us. It tells me now that:

He is quick to stress the humour in Chekhov (“It took a long time for people to realise that much of the comedy lies in mocking and self-deprecation”)—unsurprising, perhaps, given that Frayn also first found success on the stage through farce and comedy. And, though I am wary of making this all tie together too nicely, the comparison between the two writers may be further stretched.

Chekhov too was, after all, accomplished as both a playwright and a prosaist. But he bats away the suggestion modestly, instead acknowledging his debt to Chekhov. The discovery of plot in Chekhov is particularly important for him, a personal revelation which he invokes as a rebuff to the plotlessness advocated by modernist theory. Plot is, for Frayn, “the net which fiction can impose upon life … to give it understanding … to bring out something in the world that is difficult to grasp without it.”

“The translating business began in the nineteen-seventies or eighties when the National Theatre asked me to translate some Goldoni, to which I said that I didn’t think I could do it because I didn’t have any Italian. But the dramaturg said, ‘Good God, you don’t need to read Italian to translate Goldoni! Just go out and buy some standard translations and hash them together to make your own version.’ So I duly went out and bought some Goldoni translations—but I couldn’t make out at all the sense of the original.”

In the end, Frayn responded by asking if he might translate instead from a language that he did know, and after a brief skirmish with Tolstoy’s unmemorable Fruits of the Enlightenment, he took on the task of working his way through Chekhov’s theatrical oeuvre. He is now not only Chekhov’s finest English translator, but also his most complete, having translated all of his plays with the exception of The Wood Demon and Ivanov.

The discussion of plot ends with a disagreement over whether Martin Amis’s Money is a plotless novel, leaving a minor silence. The dregs of my coffee are long cold and I start to think about taking my leave. I extinguish the red light and we walk to the front door where I lace up my shoes as he courteously holds the arms of my jacket out for me. And only then do I recall Three Streets in the Country, the documentary I had come across years earlier. Standing by the opened door I remind him of it and once more his features enliven. “Where did you find that?” he smiles. I ask whether his current home is much like Ewell and he says not, but notes the familiar echoes and the congeniality of suburban living. “As I think I said in the film, people traditionally look down on the suburbs, but most of the population of London lives in them. It is ridiculous that they should be so patronised. We all live our lives with the same degree of seriousness, painfulness and pleasures as each other.”

But translation is a difficult and often thankless task. As Cervantes complained, reading a translation can be like “like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre.” Frayn, however, is confident in his powers to convey the original: “translating is wonderful. To translate a play well, one must become utterly marinated in it. The more deeply I became involved in Chekhov’s plays the more taken I was by them, and struck by surprising discoveries—that it’s all plot! Why those last four plays work so well with audiences everywhere is that they are incredibly tightly plotted and every line is driving forward the business of 52

A Meditation on my Grandfather’s Dementia Joanna Kaye

Whippersnapper You called the dog Whippersnapper because you could not remember its name. You were friends, allies of sorts, with your illicit trades under the tabletop: a corner of your cake slice exchanged for a wag of the dog’s tail or a stroke of its black head for a friendly grin. But you could not even remember its name. Details like these were the first to disappear, and there was no way of knowing what would be next: my name, perhaps? My sisters’, my father’s, or even my mother’s—your own daughter? The disease had no limits, no morals, no conscience. It was relentless; a thief, stealing possessions one by one, leaving no visible trace of its invasion. The losses were not immediately acknowledged: not until the ransacked home had nothing to offer but the naked building’s framework. The thief would then take that too. He would tear away the wallpaper, strip the floor, pull apart the electrical wiring, ease the glass from its frame, and, in his sadistic game of Jenga, he would enjoy pulling the bricks out of their careful alignment, waiting until you collapsed, crumbled, obliterated yourself into a mound of indistinguishable rubble.

ten and uneaten, and whisky glasses to be kept on the top shelf of the fridge. It was painful. Repetitive.

Tragic. Monotonous. Upsetting. Inspiring. You did not crumble. Not really. You maintained your dignity. You maintained yourself. You were an off-balance stack of bricks, tottering occasionally, yet resisting gravity. You still laughed and you still whistled and you still wandered around the garden, plucking the deadheads of withered daffodils. You remembered us, your family, and this, your home.

But for you? What was it like for you?

In flashes. That is how it would happen in Hollywood: in a dizzying blur, as honey-lit scenes reduce to pixelated grey. Memories would be relived for a second time, but just as you stretched out to retrieve them for safekeeping, they would burst into flames. Your scorched fingers and the ash confetti are from a fire you do not remember. A poetic, romantic idea: an ending in blazing colour, a beacon illuminating the dark horizon, a fanfare screaming through the night.

And then what?

For us, that crumbling was gradual. Conversations were constructed in circles, the diameter deceptively expanding only to shrink moments later. Where are we going? Isn’t it lovely/awful/strange weather?

What’s the dog’s name? To the supermarket. Yes, it is. His name is Sam. Old Whippersnapper. What happened to the old dog? She died. What’s this one called? Sam. There were strained voices, forcefully participating in replaying conversations as we chased each other round and round a circular track, occasionally attempting to lead him off into the unexplored territory of topics as yet undiscussed and questions as yet unanswered. Only to be back at this: Old Whippersnapper. What’s his name?

A vacuum. An infinite darkness stretching onwards and outwards and inwards and endlessly. The credits. Then the rest of us leave the cinema, popcorn trodden into the carpets, back to streetlights and car horns.

But for you? Forgetting is never like that. Forgetting does not allow you convenient last farewells or moments of consideration. Forgetting is the crumbling, the disintegration, the fade-out into nothing.

It is momentarily losing the distinction between your wife and your daughter, as you slowly condense everything into one: into one, single, obtainable truth; waterproof, fireproof, thief-proof, and perfectly immortal against the grappling hand of dementia.

Forgetting is just that. It is replacing substance with absence. It is a whitewash, ready to be painted new.

For us, it was terrifying, until it wasn’t, until it became normality, with yesterday already dissolved into non-existence, until moments became isolated in the present, unable to be converted into memory, until it was commonplace for meals to be left forgot-

And then what?

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Colonial apologism is still rife in Western society.

2016 began with a YouGov poll that found that forty-four per cent of Britons are proud of Britain’s colonial history and an announcement from Oriel College that Cecil Rhodes’s statue would remain.

than the emotions of students of colour. What they overlook is that a statue is in no way a neutral record of a historical person. Rhodes’ statue represents idolatry towards him and his ideals.

The statue’s removal would not be an erasure of history but a refusal to monumentalise and glorify the architect of such a shameful tradition.

Following Oriel’s promising decision in 2015 to hold a six-month review into the possible removal of the statue, the end of the year saw an outbreak of media hostility against the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign. Academics and journalists condemned the movement’s leaders as spoilt students keen to erase history by imposing modern morals on the past. As the media furore spread, a number of Oriel’s wealthy donors soon caught wind, and threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth over a hundred million pounds if the statue was taken down because of the “shame and embarrassment” that the movement had brought the college.

A common criticism of the movement is that students should be focusing on day-to-day problems like systemic racism. What this view fails to acknowledge is that the RMF campaign does not focus on the statue alone, but on a much wider interrogation of racism at Oxford. The campaign against the statue spearheaded a call for an address of racial bias, the lower chances of getting a place at Oxford for students of colour and a curriculum that consistently prioritises white ideas. But the statue must remain at the spearhead, because what it represents cannot be separated from the enduring racial bias experienced by students of colour. Only by fully acknowledging the history behind the racism that students of colour face can we begin to attack this racism.

It seems it’s now ‘shameful and embarrassing’ to condemn a figure who saw black people as a subspecies and used a private army to commit the genocide of approximately 60,000 black people. Journalists and academics defend Rhodes as a figure representative of his time, citing the impossibility of transposing modern moral values onto the past. Even by his contemporary standards though, Rhodes’ actions easily cross the line of acceptability. We must ask why it is more important to defend inanimate effigies to dead white people than to acknowledge their acts of racism. The standards to which we must hold the past are not those of political correctness, but those of fairness and justice that equalise the position of students of colour rather than benefit those who are already privileged.

The debate over the statue, Rhodes’ legacy, and colonialism as a whole will continue: Oxford’s RMF campaigners will not be silenced and neither will their opposition. We have to ask why the attackers of the RMF campaign are so desperate to preserve a status quo in which the bronze figure of a white supremacist looms daily over students of colour. Like much of British society, Oxford has been built by figures that on one side of history are innovative, philanthropic, brave pioneers, and on the other side are murderous, unjust, and unlawful. If we ever hope to end the hierarchy of one racial colour over another, we must stop allowing one side of history to dominate and recognise the uncomfortable truths represented by statues like that of Cecil Rhodes.

Those who campaign against RMF see the ‘history’ represented by a statue as more important

Charanpreet Khaira

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names and numbers 500-WORD COMPETITION

JUDGES: Sarah Sands (Editor-in-Chief at The Evening Standard),

Julian Baggini (Philosopher and Edi-

tor-in-Chief of The Philosopher’s Magazine),

Hossein Amini (Oscar-winning screenwriter and director, screenwriter of ‘Drive’ and ‘Two Faces of January’) and

Polly Toynbee (Columnist for The

Guardian and Vice President of the British Humanist Association) 55

WINNER

Counting Sheep It was already dark when my mother and I got back from the station, though only five o’clock.

A month past the winter solstice. The year’s midnight. Teatime. My gran and my father were still out in the fields, doing a last walk round the sheep and lambs to check for scours, soremouth, ewes in labour. When I went up to the back garden to call for them, I could see Dad dimly, a quarter of a mile away. My grandmother was standing near the gate, peering out into the darkness and chanting underneath her breath.

conter, dick. Yan-a-dick…tan-a-dick. Is it two there.

Tethra-dick, methra-dick, bumfit. Yan-a-bum, tana-bum. There. ’Ow many?’ Seventeen lambs in this half of the field, I thought. ‘Aye. Well, that’ll do.’

What was that rhyme, I ask her as we’re walking back. My grandmother left school at sixteen and married at twenty. She’s worked on the farm all her life. Five weeks in France over the past twenty years. ‘Yan Tan Tethera.’ She’s laughing at me, my stubborn ignorance of farm business. One two three. ‘First task in’t morning and last at night: count the animals.’ She pauses, serious again.

‘When I come from Wensleydale to Swaledale after we married,that were strange. We counted different at home. Peddero, pitts, tayter, later. Not that mether, pip.’

She turned when she heard me, then smiled. ‘Now then. How do.’ Back to the sheep. ‘Counting t’buggers. Not much good in this dark, eh.’ I scrambled over the barbed wire, and we stood staring for a moment, trying to pick out the smaller shapes from their mothers’ pale bulk. Gran started her fast muttering again. ‘Yan, tan, tether. Mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker,

My grandmother’s numbers are nothing to do with algebra, long division, Arabic concepts. These are not used to be written. They stay outdoors. When you reach twenty, you put a stone in your pocket and you start again.

In the kitchen, my mother has been doing the accounts, and is unsympathetic to my grandmother’s demand for a cup of tea. Nobody asked her to go out there and get frozzed. ‘I’m having a nightmare!’ She begins clumsily gathering up her papers. ‘Been slaving away with these sums, and I can’t see but that we’re losing money. See, supermarket pays more for these January-born lambs. Easter lamb. But doing this early lambing season means more on vet’s bills. More mastitis— spreads through the new mothers in the barns— more pneumonia—don’t have space for them all inside.’ She’s banging pots and pans about, blethering on as though she can coax the figures into some form of sense by repeating them. If Morrisons pays £4.40 a kilo in April but only £3.20 in September. Empty fields up and down dale, barns crammed with dozens of sheep. The percentage of live lambs now versus the percentage in April.

Balancing cost with gain. She sits down abruptly, sighs. ‘I’m that worried wi’these sheep. I’ll never sleep tonight.’

Rosanna Hildyard, Jesus College, Oxford

Polly Toynbee “A lovely evocation of sheep farming, old and new, crisp and not a word wasted.”

Hossein Amini “My favourites lines in the whole competition” Sarah Sands “charming, great concise use of language and excellent punch line.”

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Second Generation Haikus 1 ‘Since they can’t pronounce What we wanted to call you We chose Jane instead.’

2 ‘Hey, what’s your number?

I’ve got an Asian fetish, I’ll get you a drink.’

Rose Chen, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford

Hossein Amini “Loved the simplicity and wit of the first haiku. Just perfect.”

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Number One. Fran sat me down the other day and whispered ‘I’m a fraction’. Praying for patience, I asked her what she meant. She’d gone to see some quack, a ‘Dr Decimal’ she’d read about under the horoscopes section. Apparently the fraudster had ‘diagnosed’ her as ‘two-thirds’, non-degenerative—I have that to be thankful for, she reassured me, looking brave. Wafted around the kitchen murmuring that, come to think of it, something about her and Ed just didn’t quite add up. Maybe he was a sevenths person? I asked myself, again, why I took on a tenant my mother described as ‘quirky’ and went to work.

tor in the shape of a heart. Finally, he looked me up and down and announced, ‘Four-fifths, roundup complex.’ I almost didn’t bother asking. He said, think about the common phrase ‘my other half’. We see ourselves as incomplete pie charts, and love fills the gap. His clinic uses fraction theory to boost your probabilities of a successful combination. All the time, people miscalculate. Divorces are nearly inevitable with top-heavy fraction couples. Some people actually are a ‘one’, and are fine, truly, by themselves. And if they meet another ‘one’, the relationship is just as perfect. They call it ‘one’ love. Multiplication, see: one times one is one. But that’s rare. Most people suffer the lack syndrome.

Two days later, a humourless secretary was lisping down the phone to me that ‘last-minute cancellations are not refundable.’ Turned out Fran had booked me in for ‘basic love ratios’. She worries I’ll be a bachelor for life.

‘And, treatment…?’

He must have missed my wry tone because he just tilted his head and looked sympathetic. Very convincing, very convincing; I gave him that, as I left.

Kept looking at people at the till in M&S, and seeing lonely percentages. Bill and Annie’s wedding invitation came today. Laughed so hysterically at the ‘plus-one’ tick box that Fran went all owl-eyes and force-fed me herbal tea. I’m just tired.

God knows how, but the next morning found me muttering like a fool to the woman on the desk that I was there for ‘Dr Decimal’. Would I please take a seat in the waiting room?

There was a dating website poster on the wall which promised me I would find my common denominator. Surely people don’t buy all this crap, I was just thinking as a beaming couple emerged from next door and, after them, the great LoveDoc himself, gesturing me in. As the door closed behind me, I heard an excited voice exclaim to the secretary, ‘We’re the right sum!’.

Sophie Badman, Trinity College, Oxford Polly Toynbee “A funny idea well executed.”

‘So, Mr Smith, do you consider yourself single, or unattached?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Unattached, I think.’

‘W, w … that’s … they’re the same thing. What do you mean, “you think”. ’Hem. I’m single, yes. So?’ ‘Defensive. Interesting.’

He proceeded to ask the most ridiculous questions, and tapped away into an oversized calcula-

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Mr Hughes has been teaching long enough. It isn’t the marking or the lesson planning, it’s the names.

He just can’t learn them any more. He has turned over too many students. It has become a manual effort, like tilling soil. He exposes fresh minds to the same ideas—for no matter how many times the government rearranges the syllabus, there is only so much information that can be logically encompassed under the discipline of Geography.

make him flustered. Now, he asks fewer questions, lecturing continuously instead. It is no way to teach. He does not blame them for yawning.

There are times when he forgets to pick up the milk, but his only punishment for that is dry cereal in the morning, not a churning stomach of guilt.

He has considered retiring. In more financially forthcoming times, he would have done it already.

Now it seems impractical. It seems like giving in.

He would give way. He has taught enough physical geography to know that trickles quickly become landslides. If he retires, he will forget more than names. Surrounded by hundreds of faces, he can distract himself from the fault lines forming in his mind, and the memories slipping away like shaken-up sediment.

His students always look so injured when he stumbles over their names. He grasps at syllables, while they have their hands raised to answer questions or sit petulant, waiting for a ticking-off after causing a disruption. They look so hurt. They never forget his name, but then there is only one of him.

Hughes has tried seating plans but all the papers

Hetty Mosforth, Somerville, Oxford

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Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, diamonds in genitals and a murderous piece of charcuterie have very little to do with each other. Though I can’t speak with any certainty of the second, I doubt the great nineteenth century Rabbi and scholar would have gone anywhere near the latter. Similarly unconnected are the harms of smoking, the imminent end of the world and last December, however poorly we might have felt Michaelmas term had gone. This is not entirely true: what runs through all of these is a single three-digit number, 608, of which they are all rearrangements, albeit not in English. Hebrew, like many other languages, contains within it a numerological system, in which each letter from the first ‘aleph’ has a value of between one and nine hundred. Known as gematria, derived from the Greek ‘geometry’, the system suggests that words or phrases with similar values are on a certain level connected; that in being constituted in some way from a similar numerical total, they are just shadows from a similar light source. Hebrew cannot claim exclusive rights over this; the system, like Judaism itself, was born in and around Mesopotamia among Assyrians and Babylonians. Nevertheless, in true Jewish fashion, it has come into use regularly as a tool for the expression of wit and wisdom alike. The Talmudic tractate of Eruvin, for instance, grants us the Hebrew equivalent of the Latin in vino veritas with nikhnas yayin yatsa sod, which might literally be rendered as ‘in came the wine, out came the secret’. Both wine (yayin) and secret (sod) total sev-

enty in value, implying a neat equilibrium in the reaction between the two—more than a passive association, as many of us will know.

This goes for names as well, notably. Moses, having mediated the delivery of God’s commandments to the Jews on Mount Sinai in Exodus, is known among Jews as ‘Moses Our Teacher’. The value of Moses’s name totals 613, or the number of commandments incumbent upon Jews according to Talmudic law. Moses, in his very name, then, embodies his role within the Jewish religious narrative, determining or in a sense, predicting his position in Judaism both within the Pentateuch and thereafter. We are most certainly not our names.

However, viewing them as an arbitrary signifier that merely differentiates us from others might be a little superficial. Somewhere in between, gematria lies as an interpretative tool that reveals a careful mesh of signification that the right awareness can unpack. This shouldn’t be overstated, of course, since ‘Moses Our Teacher’ amounts to Carla Bruni, and the theological implications of such an overlap may have international repercussions. For now, what about the aforementioned 608? 608, genital diamonds and all, is my own Hebrew name.

Daniel Amir, Wadham College, Oxford Hossein Amini ”very clever and intriguing from the start. Reads like a series of little puzzles with a very satisfying solution.”

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Proxy There is, some people know, a secret rating on Tinder. An internal calculation of desirability, a ratio of how many swipes left to swipes right a person has ever received. What most people don’t know is that the government also has a rating for you.

It’s a complex algorithm—including a measure of how promptly you file your tax return, multiplied by the number of times you’ve gone to see a film and found that it’s no longer playing by the week you got your act together.

It was so accurate that it seemed only logical to mandate the tattooing of the numbers. So that you could judge a person without having to run a search on the database. Or having a conversation.

The lower ranks didn’t fight back, but they did try to find a workaround. Illegal tattoo parlours would turn threes into eights, and twos into unconvincing eights. Skin grafts could turn sixes into nines.

Of course, the work was shoddy—most tattoo parlours were operated by fours.

Big data. That’s what it is. From the inbuilt GPS in your phone, they could tell how many steps you’d walked (and also that you can afford a phone with inbuilt GPS). From the Tesco shops you paid for by card, they knew that you’d made a new year’s resolution to eat more healthily, and given up on the eighth of January—buying two ‘sharing’ packs of smarties, despite having no intention of sharing them. And despite them being on three for two— you dolt.

So the system worked. Not perfectly, but adequately.

Which was to be expected—it was invented by a six.

Emma Levin, University College, London

No one in the government’s Department for Information admitted to coding the rating.

It was just there, one day, when a civil servant noticed the script running in the background. Silently ranking the United Kingdom’s population.

Similarly, no one owned up when the ratings were leaked. ‘Is this the end of credit ratings?’ asked the Guardian. ‘ARE BRUSSELS BUREAUCRATS GIVING TEENAGE MOTHERS CANCER?’ asked the Daily Mail (running the numbers story on page four, between a candid photograph of a buxom celebrity sunbathing and a comment piece on how the British Government’s surveillance was a gross intrusion of privacy).

People should have been outraged, they knew, but they were too busy comparing their numbers.

Overnight, marriages broke down, as it was empirically demonstrated that one part of the couple was getting the better deal. The numbers proved to be so accurate, they soon replaced job interviews. It was just a case of turning up, and showing your number. Highest number got the job. Like top trumps, with a single category.

It was convenient. It was easy. It was accurate.

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The Art of Naming Right, OK, let’s have a look at this thing. Well, that’s just a piece of old pipe, isn’t it, standing there in the middle of the floor—it’s just a single lonely jutting thing made out of some grim grey stuff the colour of wet iron. Isn’t it an odd thing. It just sort of stands there, doesn’t it, very plain with nothing painted on it or anything, not part of any bigger thing, just bare and sawn-off and part of what used to be a pipe. You probably couldn’t call it a pipe any more, actually, could you. I mean, it’s supposed to be art, it’s standing here in this gallery, although it is sort of tucked away here in this corner, not exactly announcing itself, is it? If you get closer and put your ear up to its sawn-off mouth, listen, can you hear that? All those little buzzings and tappings and scrapings, sounds that call up the idea of a bunch of clinky gratey metal things being knocked and rubbed together. And they’re coming out of this tall jutting thing that has a look of something you’d find in a scrapyard anyway, metal-ish, so you kind of get the idea of the two being related, the sound and the look of the thing.

And along with the sounds which say this is metal and the strong grey clangy metal-ness of appearance there’s this breath of air that comes zipping out of the open end, that whispers on your cheek with chilled steel fingers, cold air, because the air that plays around inside the body of metal catches

the cold from its metal skin, and blows it out, cold, onto your face. Look at it standing there pointing its jagged end skywards and whooshing out its gusts of frosty breath and humming its wordless metallic tune. I’ve kind of caught the idea of the thing. Like, OK, this thing that kind of looks like a pipe is actually someone’s conception of what the word metal is, because that’s what it feels like, right, like someone thought about metal and metal things and played around with different sorts of iron or something in a studio and used a saw to pare shavings off of it to see how strong it was and left it out at night to let the cold sink into it and listened to what noises it made when it knocked against other things of its kind, and sort of reached a point of just knowing, knowing what the word metal meant, and then worked the knowledge about and came up with this thing, this bit of art, the idea of metal and metalness in a nutshell. Handily condensed for the viewer. Yes, I’ve got it now. I’ve named it, in my head.

Hang on, look, there’s a little plaque thing over around the other side of it, that’s probably got the artist’s title on it, let’s have a look—oh. Now why’s the artist gone and done that? Why would you call this thing An Exercise in Stone?!

Jessica Lee, Exeter College, Oxford

62

fiction

A RECORD

Tom Ball

64

They say that dreams in which the dreamer loses their teeth is indicative of a latent suspicion of sexual inadequacy; on that basis, is actual tooth loss a sign that one really is a damp squib in the bedroom?

attempts at displacing the tooth with my artless tongue, I discreetly probed at its position with the tip of my little finger in such a way that any onlooker would see only a man surgically ridding his gums of an irritating strawberry pip.

Joyce, of course, suffered greatly from his teeth.

As did Nabokov. Even gargoylian Amis (the younger) did, too, I believe. So it would seem that dental distress is the lot of the styliser; a lot which I find myself to have now drawn also. But while they all lost their teeth under the persuasion of steely instruments, mine have recently begun to fall out completely unaccountably and quite without warning.

Eventually the thing gave way and I was able guide it, with a guise of normality, into my hand. It was rather a strange thing to behold, when taken from its natural gum-fastened context, and I was struck by the thought that such a sight hadn’t confronted me since early boyhood, when I would have squirrelled the thing away beneath my pillow in the hope of a twilight visitation from some winged sprite-cum-cash machine. The sight of it didn’t seem to worry me as much as it should, and it was only later, when making my way home through the cold night, that I began to consider the reasons as to why a tooth had so easily fallen from my jaw. But for now, I examined my four-pronged trinket with nothing but curiosity. Swivelling my chair to turn myself away from any potential gawpers among the congregation of library users, I placed the tooth on the edge of my desk so that it could be better studied in the light of the streaming dusk.

The first loss came (or went) a fortnight ago. I was sitting in my librarian’s corner—which the university insists constitutes an office—after another long meeting with the exams committee. This week’s grand summit had left me fretful after the rather alarming suggestion that the library be kept open throughout the night during the summer term; and as I surveyed the rows of tightly crowded readers, stooped, hunched and hunkered above their desks, terrible visions of greasy-pawed nightshift temps were dimly silhouetted across my thoughts. Dejected, I was supporting my stare atop two clenched fists, lightly kneading at my cheeks, when suddenly the jowly flesh beneath the knuckle of my left ring finger gave way. No pain accompanied this dull shift in my face’s topology, and it was several moments more before I even thought to remove my fists and investigate further.

I don’t have to struggle to remember how it looked then, for it sits in front of me now—along with the three others that have subsequently exited my mouth. Like its enamelled brothers and sisters (two molars and a canine), it is virtually rootless but for a small snubbed extension, markedly whiter than the tooth itself. Of course, not at the time of departure though. Then, in the tired light of the late afternoon, the tooth appeared in my palm like a newly-delivered baby, flecked with gore and greased with sputum, altogether more brutishly anatomical than the cleansed condition in which it lies before me now.

I possess an inelegant tongue. Unlike others, which I have had the opportunity to surreptitiously observe, it does not discreetly lie flat in the marshy pit of the mouth, but instead lollops about, unable to settle down owing to its grossly bloated shape.

Despite its defects, though, I sent it rambling along the slippery stepping-stones of the lower molars, canines, incisors, canines again until finally it reached, with a shock of eventual pain, a small pit of horror—a killing field of mutilation caked in cloying iron-blood, where once a tooth had stood.

They say that in the case of grisly murder investigations—the type in which the victim has undergone such horrors that they cease to be a ‘corpse’ and instead become ‘remains’, invariably scattered to rot under a moor or behind a sewage pipe— dental records provide the only means for identification. Teeth are, each and every one, unique (though one scarcely hears its usage in place of the time-honoured ‘snowflake’ cliché—less romantic, I suppose). No two dental shapes will identically resemble one another. Particularly so when one takes into consideration the superficial marks: the chips and the fault-lines, the brown tidemark of thirty years’ worth of free cafeteria coffee, nicotine staining and the traces of botched whitening attempts. And grubby though these blemishes are, I look on them with the faint burn of fondness: as ineradicable documentation of the habits, tastes and experiences that form a human life.

I sat erect, small currents of fear darting and writhing. It was, perhaps, the only time that I will ever feel sympathy for my tongue who, like a lost piglet stumbling through the woods, found himself at the doors of an abattoir only to then run away, squealing in unabashed fright. How it wished it could have sunk into the marshes like all other tongues! But the poor thing could only cower on the other side of the mouth, desperately trying to nestle itself into the folds of an unadulterated jowl.

As for the tooth itself—this was discovered during the follow-up investigation. It too had become nestled in some fleshy fold, where the veined underbelly of the tongue curves towards the jutting reaches of the lower jaw. After several failed

So that the historians of the years to come may observe and know that I was an assiduous teeth-brusher, who smoked a packet a day and drank his tea without milk.

65

THE GARDEN PARTY It’s hard to tell which is more spotless: the antebellum rush of white chiffon, grooving the portico’s Ionic line of columns, or this widow’s habit of lace and linens after Labour Day. While guests gather and part on the pedicured lawn, she, statuesque, for fear of coffee stains and conversation, sits at remove. Her stare misting over with righteousness and longing, she holds her drink and wears her smile so stiff and far from her own face, that you might think her ancient frock to be a wedding dress.

Pierre Antoine Zahnd

66

母 （I）

Mother (I)

亡くなった母とおなじ 九十二歳をむかえた今 母のことを思う

Like my late mother I now welcome my 92nd year I remember my mother

老人ホームに 母を訪ねるたび その帰りは辛い

In the care home Every time you visit mother That homecoming was painful Still, I always follow her with my eyes

私をいつまでも見送る 母

Mother

どんよりとした空 風にゆれるコスモス

And the overcast sky Wind shook the cosmos I clearly remember her even now

今もはっきりと覚えてる

Closing one’s eyes

目を閉じて 目を閉じると お下げ髪の私が 元気に かけまわっている

I close my eyes and With my hair loose I am happy Running around A voice calls me – my mother’s

私をよぶ 母の声 空を流れる 白い雲 何処までも広い 菜の花畑

The sky washes away – white clouds Wherever thick The rape blossoms bloom in the garden

九十二歳の今 目を閉じて見る ひとときの世界が とても 楽しい

I am 92 years old now I close my eyes and see Moments of the world It is most enjoyable

Toyo Shibata

Translations by Naomi Morris Omori

67

PERFECTLY EQUAL Niloo Sharifi

“So … do you eat both of them?” Bahram screamed internally, chuckling in response to this question that he hated most. He chuckled, to avoid responding with the truth. Not just because of the embarrassment it would cause to himself, but because Bahram respected the sanctity of impersonality wordlessly enforced at these sorts of events. If he’d answered the question, his colleague wouldn’t have known what to do. Imagine!

Yes, every day. The man, Nigel, would have felt a slight queasiness and his jocular tone would have quickly become strained, artificial. Bahram would be punished for his honesty with a cleared throat, shifting eyes and a series of non-sequiturs concluding with a change of subject to something more agreeable. Nigel would regret feigning interest in Bahram’s hobby at all. This is why Bahram didn’t like work socials—all people do is try not to talk about work by asking each other questions they don’t want the answers to, quietly hoping someone brings up work. As Bahram chuckled, Nigel noticed his eyes and felt uncomfortable, so he laughed again and said, ‘Right, nature calls.

You know how it is once the seal is broken!’ Bahram watched his broad back slaloming through the restaurant, thinking about how silly the concept of a work night out is.

‘What were you talking about with Nigel just now?’

Kate interrupted his thoughts, which annoyed him, but it was just as well because Bahram only goes to the work dos for the free booze. It wouldn’t do him any good to think too hard. He turned to look at the blonde woman addressing him. ‘Did I hear you say something about Instagram? I’ve got a teenage daughter so I know all about Instagram,’ she told him. Bahram didn’t want to talk about it. He explained that he’d received some media attention recently for his Instagram account, which had four hundred and ninety-six thousand followers.

‘Wow!’, she said, making an impressed face. She asked more questions and pretended to sip her drink. She didn’t like to drink around other people, because it made her tearful. Bahram noticed that Kate was missing a false nail on her left hand.

They were mauve to match her skirt, the kind that are sharpened to a point, and he imagined how much it would hurt if she poked him in the eye.

He sort of wanted her to. He thought about asking her. Instead, he said, ‘It’s kind of a food blog’, and didn’t elaborate. She asked more questions, and then Nigel came back. Bahram didn’t want to look at their glassy eyes any more. He didn’t want to talk to either of them. He didn’t want to hear funny stories about their boring children doing stupid 68

things. He stood up and left, picking up a half-full bottle of wine from a table on his way out. On his way home, he went into a shop and bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

ferred to wash plates by hand because it reminded him of Iran. When he was eight, he was in Iran over the summer holidays, and his mother was talking to her uncle about Bahram, projecting her voice obviously so that everybody in the kitchen knew it was for his benefit. Bahram was standing on a stool, washing dishes. ‘Bahooshe vali tanbale. He is a smart boy, but he is lazy. He tells me that when he grows up he wants to buy me two big houses, one in England and one in Iran, but I tell him you have to be hardworking.’ She carried on like this for a while, but was interrupted by his Maman joon, his grandmother, who had entered the room without anyone noticing. ‘God forgive you for saying such a thing about my child. Look how well he washes dishes! Not a mark. He will do anything he wants to.’ He remembered this now as he washed the dish, wishing he could still talk to his mother.

She wasn’t talking to him at the moment. She had always been relaxed about everything—she came from the kind of Iranian family that made their own wine. But his father’s family had gotten wind of that article, and they had called Bahram’s mother to express, at length, their disgust and disapproval at hearing she raised a gay son. Last time Bahram spoke to her, she was in tears; she had called him inconsiderate for not being more careful.

Sometimes he wished his apartment was smaller.

He spent the last part of his day on his computer.

When he opened his email, he had enough offers for sponsorship that he could choose between them—they had been pouring in since that article was published. He had only read it once himself. It had made him cry. ‘Bahram, or as his fans know him, @perfectlyequal, is an Iranian man who makes beautiful, symmetrical breakfasts every day for his lucky partner, Harry.’ He closed his eyes at two a.m. Lying in the middle of his queen-sized double bed, he forgot his accomplishments and allowed the word that had been clattering around his head all day to take centre stage. ‘Boring’.

That’s what Harry had called him.

The next day was Saturday. Since the breakup, Saturday was his least favourite day, because it was almost impossible to coax himself out of bed without work to go to. He didn’t really have any friends of his own, they had all been Harry’s friends, and they left with him. All he had was his little hobby.

He woke up at around eleven a.m. with a hungover, fuzzy mind. He smelled of stale smoke. He squinted at his room suspiciously and, sure enough, the smug carton he expected to find was lying there triumphantly. ‘Smoking kills’, it said, sarcastically.

He flung himself upright, emptied his bladder and got a pint of water and a Lucozade from his kitchen, and threw away the cigarettes. Then he went straight back to bed. He read the Guardian until two p.m., by which time he was hungry enough to get up. He pottered about his kitchen, worrying about aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East.

He hated cooking now, or more accurately, he hated doing things now, but his Instagram account represented a considerable enough cash flow that it didn’t make sense to quit. So he dutifully unwrapped the latest package from his sponsors, this time an organic food company. They had sent him manuka honey and vegan butter. He made croissants, and cut up slices of strawberry. A food decoration company had sent him a heart shaped stencil, which made Bahram laugh bitterly. He set two rectangular slabs of slate on his large wooden table. They had cost him £40 each. These were the sorts of luxuries he would miss if he stopped doing @perfectlyequal. His job at the office paid enough for this neat one-bedroom apartment, which boasted a light, modern colour scheme and a deceptive open-plan design that made it look more spacious than it was. But Bahram had always had expensive taste. He liked his fashionable slate plates, and he liked how the strawberries he was arranging into a complex pattern stood out in relief on the navy black. Very gothic, he thought to himself. He used the heart-shaped stencil when he dusted the plates with icing sugar, and put a teaspoon full of manuka honey on each plate in a tasteful curl which he made by brandishing his spoon and swooping it towards his body the way he saw chefs do on cooking shows. By the time he had finished arranging the breakfasts, it was four p.m. By the time he had taken the perfect photo, edited it, and constructed a caption, it was 5.10 p.m.

As he drifted into sleep he remembered the next day was that stagnant cesspool, Sunday. That night, he dreamed of arranging a symmetrical banquet. People stood around, making impressed faces. Just as he was preparing to take a photo of it, he noticed a mushroom out of place. After he fixed it, an awry crumb of hash brown caught his eye. Then a drip of sauce that ruined a pattern.

Then a hairline crack in a bone-white plate. A new imperfection appeared every time he corrected the last one. All night, his hands darted between dishes frantically as he ran about the room. He woke up in the morning with a knot in the pit of his stomach.

By 5.30 p.m., he had eaten and washed his fashionable plates. He had a dishwasher but he pre69

STUDY

Jack Bradfield

man and dog cross zebra by bulb-stained building while man and man clap cold hands, they guide their blood while women three huddle like penguins from shark, the oldest, mother, hums ear worm song from withering what? west-end musical. clear conman across road limps up, offers something looks like yours, red ring. above kiss couple with curtains carelessly open. above again woman’s lampshade hair falls around her one keen eye. she sees me then she is gone doctor help: i have no patients. doctor hannah: there is worrying lack of trauma in tonight’s intake. walls of the hospital are pictureless. a tap trickles by the only one who has ears and eyes all open. she crosses the road i wonder whether the buzzer still buzzes. the buzzer still buzzes. quickly, in sum: bricks stay put. occult bookshops remain closed. no significant marriages, deaths, sentences, major bird nests. it is said on evenings of no-event, souls hang lower from celestial ropes. their feet grasp your hair.

AFTERMATH Adham Smart

And on the day the sun rose in the west, the wide-eyed ones were mustered in their masses to tell the world to stay inside and look no further than the line of tape, no longer than it takes to fill the bath, look nowhere other than down. Look or don’t look, we won’t stop you; cold hands and cracked lips will make you turn your head away. Avoid, avoid it all like picking up the phone in lightning weather, don’t come to us with swooping banners and yelling, there is no time. Curse us unto the seventh generation in every blood-born language if it helps, but you will not go outside. It’s not forbidden, it’s simply not an option any more.

Your house is now the only breathing home, and that’s the same for everyone. Drag your bodies itching to the windows, open them and smell the ashy wind, remember how you like your food in cans, and while you wonder how scrambled eggs without the eggs will taste, we will remind you of the burnt-out days we have survived to be here now.

In all your minds a non-stop ‘last time on …’ starring stormish banners sweeping the streets and bodies thickening under earthworm skies, torn lips and cities bathed in ash, the mouths on mouths of hooting non-survivors, bile in fossil burbles frothing from cokey lungs, seven years of thousandfold destructions and iron languages unmake the land.

Look, friends, we are protecting you from this.

71

Image Credits: Hannah Chilver-Vaughan 50 Benjamin Davies

pp. 24-7

Lara Kotecha

pp. 28-30, 53

Jacob Lee

pp. 10-13

Andy Maguire

45

Ruby O’Grady

pp. 21-3

Andy Roberts

49

John Rogers

47

Jack Saville

pp. 31-4

Stu Spivack

37

Frances WhorrallCampbell

pp. 35-6, 40, 42, 55-62, 64, 66-68, 71

The marbled paper in this magazine was handmade in a cat-litter tray by Hannah Chilver-Vaughan, Anietie Ekanem, Lara Kotecha, Ruby O’Grady and Frances Whorrall-Campbell.

staff Editors

Ione Wells, Alexander Hartley

Deputy Editors

Fintan Calpin (fiction), Christian Hill, Melissa Thorne, Lucy Valsamidis

Sub Editors

Jacob Lee, Lulu Smyth, Katherine Hodgson, Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe, Olivia Constable-Maxwell, Anisha Gururaj, Eleanor Biggs

Creative Director Assistant Creative Director Creatives Broadcasting Director Assistant Broadcasting Director (Social Media) Assistant Broadcasting Director (Documentary) Broadcasting Team Events Director Events Team Business Manager Business Team Blog Writers

Frances Whorrall-Campbell Lara Kotecha Hannah Chilver-Vaughan, Anietie Ekanem, Ruby O’Grady Jacqueline Otagburuagu Marcus Knight-Adams Persis Love Úna O’Sullivan, Charlotte Tosti, Niloo Sharifi Sophie Aldred Ella Gannon, Paul Gaither, Jessica Yung Shakeel Hashim Katherine Plummer, Karan Jain Anna Tsui, Daniel Abu, Charanpreet Khaira, Erica Li, Miriam Gordis, Melissa Hinkley, Paula Gaither, Brian Wong, Rosie Collier, Sophie Dowle, Alison Woodward, Luke van den Barselaar

OSPL Chairman

Steven Spisto

Managing Director

Josh McStay

Finance Director

Tom Metcalf

Secretary

Pernia Price

Directors

Harriet Bull, Mack Grenfell, Oliver Johnson, Emma Lipczynski, Helen Stevenson, Robert Walmsley