Varsity Issue 946

Yearbook & Review 2026

Inside ● Cambridge’s dating site p. 10 ● Investigating exam adjustments p. 36 ● In conversation with Ed Davey p. 42

Software Developer: £60k Business Analyst: £60k Technical Engineer: £60k Service Analyst: £45k Account Manager: £60k Implementation Specialist: £45k

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’m writing this editorial in the middle of May, with the threat of exams looming large – hopefully, by the time this Yearbook is in your hands, those will be a semidistant memory. It’s something of a cliché, but yet another year has flown by, and before we know it, we’ll be packing up our rooms to head home. You should never wish your time away – especially during what is, by all accounts, such a magical time of your life – but I have to say the arrival of May Week is a relief after what has been a very long year.

Varsity’s reporting this year has taken us to every corner of the city. The News team found themselves out on the streets speaking to countless protesters, the success of the campaign to save the Vet School demonstrating once again just how powerful the student voice can be.

Like always, we’ve heard from several famous faces: Ed Davey (p. 42) tells us about his plans to defend the UK from far-right populism; Harriet Lamb (p. 40) recounts her time as Fairtrade Foundation UK leader and the joys of activism as Green Party CEO; Motherland writer Helen Serafinowicz (p. 60) talks about the creative process of making a television show. Switching from the individual to the collective, this Yearbook hosts several features, so turn to p. 32 to hear from young carers at the University, p. 34 to learn about Jewish life in Cambridge, and to p. 36 to see whether students think their exam adjustments are actually helping.

It’s no secret that a Cambridge degree can be somewhat… challenging. Most of us need that little extra something to get us through the long

library-imprisoned days when our love for the subject isn’t quite enough. For some, this may take the form of a creative outlet in Arts (p. 26) or in Fashion (p. 44), or, like me, some may throw themselves headfirst into a society – whether that’s student politics (p.

20) or the Footlights (p. 38) is your prerogative – ideally, though, not headfirst into the Cam. For those who want something with a little bit less commitment involved, you might turn to Music (p. 22) or the big screen (p. 53) for solace instead.

This Yearbook is the product of countless hours of planning, writing, drawing, and editing. It’s a celebration of Cambridge talent, in all its various forms. It has been a learning curve for all those who worked on it, myself in particular. There were times when we couldn’t quite see the light at the end of the tunnel – thankfully, the sun shone down right in the nick of time for our own exam periods to begin. More than anything else, it’s been so much fun, as well as proof that Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’ and The The’s ‘This Is the Day’ cannot be overplayed.

It has been the greatest privilege of my time at Cambridge to take on the challenge of editing Varsity – I have truly fallen in love with the paper over the last four terms, and I can’t wait for the long line of editors after me to have the same experience. Those of us who contribute to the paper (and frankly, never shut up about it) get so much joy from it – I hope

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Editorial

that, as you flick through this magazine, you’re able to share in that joy too.

So, as I finally return to my much-neglected degree (if you’re my DoS, pretend you didn’t read that), I’d encourage everyone reading this to take a break from theirs with this year’s Yearbook & Review.

Ellie Heeps

Editor-in-Chief, Easter 2026

Contents NEWS

5 The year in news

The biggest stories of the last three terms

LIFESTYLE

9 10Romance.ucam.org Horoscopes

Discover what May Week has in store for you this year

MUSIC

FASHION

student designers 22Predictions for OR3 44Spotlighting paradox of the live album 24The An analysis of Olivia Rodrigo’s newest era, through her lyrics

A love letter to the experience of music played to a live audience

Talking to students about how they incorporate identity into their creative practice

THEATRE

51Everybody’s a critic 26Arcsoc on life drawing 52All of Cambridge is a stage 12The finalist’s bucket list 27Bound for success FILM & TV Quiz 14 camera, Cambridge 28Look, don’t touch 53Lights, from a May Ball crasher 31Confessions FEATURES Fellows on films Caring in Cambridge 56 32 SCIENCE Helen Serafinowicz The language of lasts 60 16 life at Cambridge 34Jewish Discussing the community that can be gained from life drawing

Find some inspiration for your Talking to Cambridge stupost-exam celebrations dents who’ve taken the plunge and written a novel Figure out what post-night out food staple you are

How museum exhibits limit the sensory experience of art

An anonymous account of a daring descent into Downing May Ball

Speaking to those who are balancing a degree alongside being a young carer

Why endings, especially those at university, feel so bittersweet

Investigating antisemitism and Jewish identity among students

our degrees rotting our brains?

17Are 36Exam adjustments Exploring whether the use of AI is making us less intelligent

COMMENT

18

Talking to disabled students about their experiences of the exam period

the Footlights getting dimmer?

38Are

Discussing the limitations of theatre reviewing

Exploring the creativity behind student theatre staging

The Varsity team discuss the films and TV shows that have defined their time at Cambridge Speaking to subject experts about the biggest films of the year

The Motherland writer speaks about motherhood and working in television

SPORT

Cambridge sport accessible?

58Isreally

Putting the accessibility of university sport under a microscope ▼

My favourite dance Exploring whether the comedy floor is the one with my troupe’s golden era has ended friends on it Why it’s not the venue, but the people you’re with, that make a night special

INTERVIEWS

19

The Green Party CEO on activism, populism, and politics

Exercise and academia

How perfectionism finds its way into every aspect of Cambridge life

20

Controversy, infighting, and just straight up fighting

40Harriet Lamb 42Ed Davey

Speaking to the Lib Dem leader about his plans to tackle Reform

Debating whether this has been a good year for student politics

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Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

29Smoking area

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Take a break with some classic puzzles

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A conversation with the founder of Cambridge’s own dating site

ARTS

THE YEAR IN NEWS VARSITY’S BIGGEST STORIES OF THE YEAR, MONTH BY MONTH

OCTOBER Students launch women’s Uni commits to partial arms society excluding trans women divestment after year-long review At the end of October, three Cambridge students launched a single-sex women’s society, describing it as the first of its kind at the University. The society’s co-founder, Maeve Halligan, told Varsity at the time that the formation of the Cambridge University Society of

Women (CUSW) was prompted by the lack of single-sex spaces for women within Cambridge. In November, Varsity reported that CUSW’s GoFundMe page had raised nearly £14,000 since its launch the previous month.

CUSW was formally registered with the University at the end of November. The Students’ Union (SU) registered the society the following month, and released a statement “in response to widespread student concerns regarding the rights of our trans students,” clarifying that the SU was legally obliged to register “all eligible societies – even if they contradict our ethos.” Halligan told Varsity it was “disappointing” that the SU had felt compelled to justify the decision to register CUSW.

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The University Council voted in October to divest from companies which produce “weapons illegal under UK law,” in response to a report by the Working Group on Investments. The group was established in 2024 to assess Cambridge’s financial connections to the defence sector.

The report outlined three possible avenues going forward: maintaining the current approach, applying a formal 1% limit to conventional weapons investments, and total divestment from weapons manufacturers. A vote on these options was expected in November, but Varsity later reported that this was pushed back to February, with councillors requesting more information about the University’s current invest-

NOVEMBER

ments. However, at its February meeting, the Council again did not reach a decision.

In April, Varsity reported the Council had voted to introduce a transparency system regarding defence investments. Under this system, if the University’s exposure to companies primarily manufacturing weapons surpassed a pre-determined threshold, a report outlining the details of these companies would be released.

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▴ ISAAC OHRINGE

DfE counter-terror unit contacted Uni over PalSoc speaker concerns

Colleges cut support for transinclusive football league

The Department for Education’s (DFE) counter-terror team contacted the University in November in relation to a speaker event hosting a Palestinian journalist. The event was organised by the Cambridge University Palestine Society (PalSoc), but was u l t i m a t e ly cancelled, after it emerged that the speaker,

In November, colleges told women’s ance, meaning transgender women and non-binary college football cap- would no longer be eligible to play in tains that they would be cutting all sup- women’s competitions. port for the newly established ‘IntercolAlso in October, college rowing legiate League’, which was created in captains voted to conform to British response to new Football Association Rowing guidelines by maintaining the (FA) guidance regarding the inclusion gender division in competitive rowing. of transgender and non-binary players This led to the creation of an ‘open divion women’s football teams. Captains sion’, separate to the women’s division were told that colleges would only sup- which was subsequently restricted to port the women’s teams in the future those assigned female at birth. if an official women’s league was re-established that was affiliated with the University Sports Centre and conformed to FA guidance.

In October, Varsity reported that the Cambridge University Women’s Association Football League had changed its consti- ▴ AMIKA PIPLAPURE tution to conform with FA guid-

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Abubaker Abed, made posts on X (formerly Twitter) in which he described members of Hamas as “resistance fighters” and called the group’s October 7th attacks “a great day”.

Varsity reported at the time that the DFE’s counter-terror unit was never in contact with PalSoc directly in relation to the planned event, but that the team “raise[d] concerns” with the University, as the event had been flagged under their counter-terror protocol. It was reported that prior to the event’s cancellation, Newnham, along with the University, had been looking into “potential mitigations” to allow the event to take place.

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

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THE YEAR IN NEWS DECEMBER

Fury ury after Uni recommends end to Vet School

Cambridge students accused of ‘gleeful’ racist hate crime

In a meeting of the Council of the University’ss School of the Biological Sciences in December, academics voted unanimously to recommend that the University end its veterinary medicine course, citing “long-running losses” being incurred by the veterinary hospital.

At the time, the plans involved the Vet School closing in 2032, with students applying for 2026 entry being processed as normal.

The resulting ‘Save the Vet School’ campaign attracted huge support – Varsity reported in January that the campaign’ss dedicated website had already received more than 1,000 messages of support from students, staff, vets, and members of the public.

The announcement came after the

Guillotina, a local drag performer, post- a new social movement, ‘Cambridge ed on Instagram in December about a is Chopped’, which aims to highlight racially-motivated hate crime he expe- incidents of racism in Cambridge. He rienced in central Cambridge, which he told Varsity he sought to collate inforalleged was perpetrated by university mation about people's experiences of students. He reported being called a ra- racism, and use this to identify the cial slur by a young white person, who places where these most commonly was standing with a group of people occur, in order to put pressure on venwearing Cambridge University Lawn ues he says are not doing enough to Tennis Club jackets, all of whom ig- tackle racist incidents. nored the incident. Guillotina claimed that he had reported the incident to police, but that he was told by Cambridgeshire Constabulary that this did not constitute a hate crime because the comment was not made to his face.

In January, Guillotina announced that he had launched ▴ AMIKA PIPLAPURE

Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons found in November that the veterinary course had made significant progress with its recommendations, following a review last year that stated the course failed to meet 50 of its 77 accreditation standards.

▴ AMIKA PIPLAPURE

JANUARY

Trinity Hall faces backlash over private school outreach plans

Conservative Association drops ‘far right’ speaker after backlash

In early January, Trinity Hall received significant public backlash after a leaked memo showed the College had approved a proposal to target elite private schools as part of their outreach approach, to shore up the number of students applying for certain subjects.

The memo stated that for subjects such as classics, music, and history of art, private schools offer “the strongest

The Cambridge University Conservative Association (CUCA) cancelled a planned speaker event with YouTuber Tom Rowsell in January, after the Cambridge University Labour Club (CULC) accused him of having links to the “far right”.

Rowsell has previously criticised what he describes as left-wing efforts to “undermine the idea of identity itself, particularly for the English people.” The campaign group Hope Not Hate alleged that Rowsell attended a gathering of Neo-Byzantium, a private members’ club that operates as a branch of the eugenicist organisation the Human Diversity Foundation. In a post on X, Rowsell denied expressing any racist or eugenicist views.

CUCA cancelled the event and distanced itself from Rowsell's comments.

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applicants,” due to their “rigorous academic environment” and “extensive support for university preparation”.

Varsity reported that a petition was subsequently started by a Trinity Hall student in protest against the policy, which has since garnered more than 2,500 signatures.

Alastair Campbell, who studied at Cambridge, told The Guardian that the policy suggested “a total departure from reality”.

The College stated in response to the backlash: “There has been no change to Trinity Hall’s widening participation policy. This modest additional activity is aimed at ensuring we get the best applications from talented students from all backgrounds.”

CULC was also critical of the decision to invite political commentator Jack Anderton, who has previously argued in favour of “mass deportations,” and argued in a blog post that Britain should not have fought against Nazi Germany during World War II. The talk went ahead in early F e b r u a r y, though Varsity reported that a small group of protesters gathered outside the venue to protest his invitation to speak.

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Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

THE YEAR IN NEWS FEBRUARY

General Board votes to continue vet course Towards the end of February, the University’s General Board unanimously agreed to continue admission to the vet course, after months of deliberation. Varsity reported throughout January and February that several large rallies, attended by staff and students, were held in support of the Vet School.

Prior to the decision, Varsity reported that nearly 1,000 members of Regent House, Cambridge’s senior gov-

erning body, had signed a petition calling for formal protections to be put in place to prevent any decision to cease veterinary admissions being made without the input of Regent House.

The petition was prompted in part by the news in January that Vet School applicants for 2026 entry had not received any offers yet, despite previous confirmation that this admissions cycle would take place “as planned”.

In March, Varsity reported that the General Board had decided to move management of the Vet School from the School of the Biological Sciences to the Faculty Board of Veterinary Medicine, in recognition of the need for “new leadership” in the aftermath of the decision to continue the course.

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Epstein contacted Cambridge academics about research funding Also in February, Varsity exclusively reported that newly released documents relating to the human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein revealed he had sought to make contact with various academics in Cambridge with the aim of discussing research funding.

Epstein attempted to contact academics through an intermediary, who referred to him as “Jeffrey Stein” to obscure his identity, as the communications took place well after he originally pleaded guilty to procuring a girl below age 18 for prostitution.

No evidence was found of

any donations or grants having been made. The documents also showed Epstein sought to visit Cambridge in the autumn of 2010, and requested to see specific academics, but this trip does not appear to have happened.

The documents, released by the US Department of Justice, showed no evidence of any wrongdoing by Cambridge academics. ▼ RYAN TEH

MARCH Unprecedented levels of rule breaking in SU elections

Union debates officer resigns after misconduct investigation

At the beginning of March, Melanie Benedict was elected undergraduate SU president. Their platform included policies such as reducing student workload, continuing to support the campaign for divestment, and raising the profile of the SU within the student body.

Jeeves Rohilla, who campaigned on the platform of improving affordability for students and reducing wealth inequality between colleges, was announced as the newly elected postgraduate president two weeks later, after various rule breaches delayed the results of the post-

This year saw fraught elections at the Cambridge Union. The Lent Debates Officer, Pollyanna Greene-Wright, resigned after an internal investigation found she had committed electoral misconduct, which led to her being banned from running for Union President for Michaelmas 2026.

Greene-Wright denied the findings of the report, describing the investigation as “totally at odds with the constitution”.

In the aftermath of her disqualification, several anonymous members of the Union launched a ‘re-open nominations’ campaign – at the time, they said that they were “motivated solely by the

grad election.

Rohilla was briefly banned from campaigning after he appeared in an Instagram post on the University's official account, which the SU said gave him an “unfair advantage” – however, it acknowledged that Rohilla had not been anticipating the post being released during the campaign, and that he notified the Elections Team of its existence, which meant he did not receive a full ban.

Meanwhile, Roman Shainskyi was disqualified from the postgrad race after he was the subject of multiple complaints, including voting on behalf of another student and being disrespectful towards SU staff – Shainskyi denied the allegations and appealed the ruling, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

principle that a presidential election should be a contest, not a coronation.”

Soon after this result, it was announced that Greene-Wright had successfully appealed against her disqualification, after an appeals panel found that the original investigation's findings were not “adequately supported by the available evidence”. ▼ RYAN TEH

▲ SARAH ANDERSON

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

7

THE YEAR IN NEWS APRIL Classics professor has sexual misconduct allegations upheld

Record-breaking donation will fund new School of Government

Simon Goldhill, a classics professor at King’s College, gave up his teaching duties in April after a university investigation found that he had broken several university policies “by making unwelcome and unpermitted sexual advances” advances towards one of

In April, the billionaire hedge fund been built on undeveloped land in the manager and investor Chris Rokos Cambridge West Innovation District. made a £130 million donation to the This funding surpasses the previous University, and agreed to provide up to largest donation to a British univer£60 million in additional funds, mak- sity, made by Stephen Schwarzman, ing it the largest donation given to a who donated £175 million to the UniBritish university in modern history. versity of Oxford in 2022 to fund the The funds will be used to estab- Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the lish the Rokos School of Government, Humanities. which will offer master’s degrees and PhDs, as well as facilitating research by political scientists, economists, and government experts.

The School is due to begin operating in autumn 2026 – it will be located at a temporary ▲ AMIKA PIPLAPURE site until its facilities have

his students.

Goldhill was able to continue teaching for several months after the investigation began – additionally, it was reported that as he is due to retire at the end of the academic year, it is possible that he could still be made an emeritus professor.

Later that month, it was reported that two more women had accused Goldhill of sexual harassment, with one incident having allegedly occurred in early 2024.

The Times reported at the time that King’s provost Gillian Tett had only learned of the University investigation’s findings on Goldhill when they were first announced in the press, and had yet to receive a copy of the report, despite it having existed since February.

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MAY

Joe Hesketh wins Union presidency by-election Elections for the president of the Union for Michaelmas 2026 were held in March. The disqualification of Pollyanna Greene-Wright, which was later overturned, meant that Equalities Officer Isaac James ran unopposed for President. However, re-open nominations received 88 votes in the subsequent election, while James received 51 – Varsity reported at the time that this was the first presidential election in modern history to have ended with this result.

A by-election was subsequently called, which was held towards the end of April. GreeneWright again stood for election, as did Joe Hesketh, the Lent Speak-

8

ers Officer. Greene-Wright’s campaign policies included more head-to-head speaker events, as well as a greater emphasis on welfare. Meanwhile, Hesketh promised a termcard that does not “platform online ragebait,” while not “shy[ing] away from difficult policies”. Hesketh received 63 votes, securing the presidency, while GreeneWright received 55.

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

Judge Business School seeks deal with Saudi defence ministry In May, Varsity reported that University leadership had approved a proposal by the Judge Business School (JBS) to sign a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry.

The agreement would cover “potential collaborations” in areas such as “executive education,” “leadership development,” and “healthcare administration strategies”. This collaboration would take place exclusively between JBS and “the civilian administration of

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the [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ministry of defence].”

Cambridge’s committee on benefactions and external legal affairs, which assessed the proposal on the basis of reputational risk, was told by JBS that “Strong mitigations were in place to protect against reputational risk, including emphasis within the draft MoU of its civilian-only scope”. Nonetheless, committee members expressed concerns regarding the human rights record of the Saudi government, as well as potential risks to academic freedom.

A JBS spokesperson said of the report: “Cambridge Judge business school has not signed such an MoU with the Saudi Arabia defence ministry.”

▲ BIBI BOYCE

For the final time, Alex Brian looks to the stars to determine your May Week fate ▼ASHLYN CHEW May Week will see both the creative

Neptune and the responsible Saturn enter your region of the sky.

Lean on those around you to strike the right balance, and ensure your celebrations don’t land you in Addenbrooke’s.

Aries

Cancer

With Mercury entering your sign, the time is ripe to be honest about your emotions. Is there something you have been meaning to tell someone before the term is over?

Exam term is a brittle time for relationships. Perhaps you succumbed to jealousy over your college sibling’s insane ability to lock in, but fear not. When the Moon enters Libra, your natural charm and diplomacy will return and help you heal those painful divisions.

Taurus

Leo

With Mars in Taurus, your patience and determination will shine amid even the fiercest of conflicts. If you are attempting to graduate without paying that £2 library fine, there has never been a better time to stand up for yourself.

Venus and Jupiter have come to visit you, just as endless parties, balls, and open-air plays provide ample opportunity for striking up friendships, partnerships in crime, or perhaps something more…

Gemini

Virgo

The stars are on your side if you attempt to break into a May Ball.

While Varsity cannot condone such behaviour, we can only imagine you have already concocted some hairbrained scheme as the rebellious Uranus enters your area of the zodiac.

As the Moon moves from Libra to Scorpio and then Sagittarius, your diligence is likely to wane. Leaving packing until late is therefore illadvised, unless you wish to incur the wrath of multiple college staff and/or family members.

Who needs May Balls when for Help! The end of term has raised the same price you could book some scary questions: what will yourself an impromptu trip, learn to I do with myself for the next four paraglide, or purchase a didgeridoo? months? Well, perhaps the Moon With the Moon in Scorpio, it’s entering Sagittarius later in the time to trust your instincts and be may give you some muchspontaneous.

Sagittarius week needed optimism for the future.

Pluto is moving in retrograde through Aquarius, bringing Capricorns are known for their Nature is where you should be with it meditations on a year of patience, responsibility, and spending your May Week. The Sun power struggles. Did that society ambition. Combine that with the Sun being in Cancer will only enhance election really merit such bitter being in Cancer and it’s safe to say your desire to remove yourself disagreements? Can you finally have a fair chance of reaching from the furore of college life and Capricorn you Aquarius reconcile with your tripos rival?

Survivors’ this year. reembrace the simple things.

Only time will tell.

Libra

Scorpio

Pisces

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In conversation with Cupid Ruby Randall goes behind the scenes of Cambridge's Y2K dating website were few opportunities for it.” ▼

Do you think things have changed?

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ost of your single friends will have something to say about dating in Cambridge – something bad, that is. We usually mention combing through Crushbridge or Camfess, multiple eye-contact Sidg-uationships, the desperate urge to go to a house party and meet someone you didn’t already know, and routinely fending off the creepy middle-aged men who seem to just spawn in on a night out.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a new problem.

There’s always been the issue of the ‘Cambridge bubble’, and since the dawn of the internet, there’s always been a space for online dating. You might have heard of romance.ucam. org (RUO3): a website which was created at the start of the millennium, that has experienced an unprecedented influx of members in the last few months, likely because of a Camfess post advertising it as a refreshing alternative to Hinge.

I sat down to talk to the website’s co-creator, Richard Neill, to learn more.

In 1999, while studying Natsci at Trinity, Richard dreamt up the idea of a Cambridge dating website with his friend, John Surcombe from St John’s: “We basically thought: well, there’s this new thing called the Internet, you can even order a pizza online, and the Americans have come up with these online dating sites. Why don’t we have this in Cambridge?”

John handled the code, and Richard adopted the title of 'Cupid' – essentially an admin-slashmatchmaker – which he still holds 26 years later.

So, why did Cambridge need a dating website?

“Dating in Cambridge is hard. I suspect it’s hard now for different reasons than it was back then, but the biggest problem was that everyone was far too shy. The stupid thing is, in Cambridge, almost the entire University has impostor syndrome. I know of a couple who had been making eyes at each other since Freshers’ Week, but only got together after Finals, because neither of them could find a way to broach the subject.

“It was especially a problem in the sciences: if you were a physicist or an engineer, only a fraction of the class were women. It was alright if you were the kind of person who could just go into a nightclub, get absolutely plastered, and then somehow feel comfortable making your introduction to the person you woke up next to the morning afterwards. The joke used to be that without booze, the country would die out.

But if you wanted to do things normally, there

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“I think that’s gone and people are much more comfortable with each other, but because people are so wrapped up in their own worlds – or their own devices – nobody knows how to break into another person’s consciousness anymore.”

And dating websites have been replaced by apps now. But there’s always meeting through friends, right?

“That works brilliantly if your friend circle continues to include a pool of people you haven’t met. Usually, however, it freezes absolutely solid at some point. But in terms of dating apps, there’s just been a complete erosion of trust.

We know that if you use Facebook, you’re the product,

not the customer, because you’re being sold as an advertising demographic. People have lost trust in technological institutions because they’re invading their privacy; if you look at what they do, they’re not on your side.

“The thing is, they gamify to trap you on the platform and sell you advertising; then they do some very dotty things with your 'super likes' or whatever it is. Tinder has no desire to lose its users. If they could actually find the perfect person for you, they might well not show them to you. There was a time when people were moving on from the site to dating apps, but I think this recent rise in RUO3’s popularity can be attributed to people realizing those other platforms are taking advantage of them. We’ve always put the user first.”

So what was different about RUO3?

“What made us different, in short, were our ethics (we are doing this to make people happy, not for the money), locality (everyone is a member of the University, so you can easily meet someone for coffee the same day), and cost (or lack thereof – it’s always been free). We also care deeply about people’s privacy.

“We came up with a lot of different ways to find potential matches, whether this was through a keyword search (a lot of people find it easier to list 10 things they like, rather than write a paragraph), or through the photo gallery page where you could mark who you fancied by liking photos, rather than messaging them, which kind of predated Tinder as an

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

idea. Many people don’t have photographs, and while this originates from an era where if you wanted a photo, you had to borrow a scanner, it results in a culture where people often open conversations with something more profound.”

But don’t you have to play a kind of game in matchmaking, to push people to get past those first few awkward hurdles?

“I think the description of a riddle fits best, because it’s the problem of: how do you find the person who likes you, and you like them, and you’re both single at the same time, and you’re both kind of thinking how to make the first move, which is still very difficult. You have to figure out how to end with two people happy together.”

How does the site help you solve it, then?

“A lot of people don’t want to tell everything about themselves. They may want to talk about something they love but not who they are. I would encourage people to talk about their interest in Shakespeare rather than their identity.

The least interesting thing about you is your name, address, college. So why share that first?

People often create personas or imaginative profiles too. That’s okay, I think, as long as other users are in on it.”

I suppose it’s about striking the right balance, then. How do you balance being both 'Cupid' and a website administrator?

“Some time ago, I was a member of the site to date, as well as to administrate, which meant I had two personas. I was very careful to keep the two ‘hats’ strictly separate, because being the site admin could be seen as an unfair advantage – though I haven’t used the site myself for quite some time.”

You’ve brought about at least 16 weddings, according to the site’s testimonials. Is there an element of living vicariously through the couples you’ve brought together?

“It is a great feeling to know that you’ve made someone else happy.

You know, it’s much easier to host a party than be a guest, especially if you’re organising it, because then you’ve got a reason to be there.”

Operating in a smaller and better-aligned dating pool, which runs against the current of ‘gamified’ algorithms, will definitely alter your perspective, most likely for the better. If RUO3 is a force for any kind of change in the future of Cambridge dating, I think it encourages a community more focused on honesty and the will to give each other a little grace, which, at the end of the day, is a lot closer to how actual human relationships work.

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The finalist’s ultimate Emily Cushion plans her post-exam celebrations

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n anticipation of my graduation this year, I’ve spent the entire year fretting about my imminent departure from Cambridge. Some time around the middle of Lent, my friends and I started marking our ‘lasts’, a practice that quickly turned from sentimentality to silliness.

After marking actual milestones – last weekly essay, last Homerton bop – the ritual slowly became ridiculous: “This is my last time studying in the Waterstone’s cafe”; “This is the last time I’ll ever get a book out of the UL”; “This is the last time I’ll have a supervision at Newnham on a Monday…”

Time is life’s Achilles’ heel, an injury magnified by the three-year-long, formative experience of university. No matter how far through you are, time suffocates: in first year, you worry about spending such a long summer away from your friends, while in second year that same summer seems far too short to read every single Greek tragedy ever. And as for third year, well, it goes without saying...

As we wade through the dregs of Easter term, I’m proposing we collectively enter a delusional state in which we see time as on our side. Contrary to popular belief, there is time to have fun during Easter, and once exams are done, social and temporal conventions are thrown completely out of the window anyway. Walking out of the exam hall on the 12th, I will not be thinking about the medieval supernatural and whether Margery Kempe would feel her famous “gret sorwe” if she read my paper. Three glorious weeks will be stretching out before me, begging to be filled with just about anything except studying. I owe it to those weeks, Cambridge, and myself, to fulfil this divine prophecy.

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My friends and I are more than ready to lock in to fun Having spent the past three years ‘locking in’ to academic work, job applications, and maintaining sanity, my friends and I are more than ready to lock in to fun. Post-exams last year, our alarms were still set (albeit several hours later than before), but we weren’t waking up to pump out practice essays or memorise Milton: we had plans for Jacks on the backs, window shopping, and yes, a lot of pints. We were putting in eight-hour shifts at the pub instead of the library. Cambridge is kind enough to grant

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its undergraduates a few weeks of relaxation to mitigate the entire year of stress.

The post-exam period fosters spontaneity. You go to a May Ball, wake up at 3pm the next day, and then decide to randomly walk to Grantchester, or to buy a coffee without (shock horror) instinctively pulling out your laptop. This year, I’ve decided to do things differently, and have composed a comprehensive bucket list of everything I want to do in Cambridge before leaving.

27 days is not a long time to relive all the best parts of three whole years. My friends and I are keen to accomplish the bucketlist, our bank accounts and livers less so. But fun must prevail.

So here’s what I’ll be getting up to this June.

The art of doing nothing In Cambridge dialect, ‘doing nothing’ directly translates to ‘not studying’. It is difficult to shake the belief, often instilled forcefully by our supervisors, that ‘not studying’ equates to being lazy. But ‘the art of doing nothing’ becomes re-intellectualised and thus sanctioned when you flip it around to ‘doing nothing, in art’. I would not be doing justice to my former titles as Arts Writer, Arts Editor and Vulture Editor if I didn’t encourage you to make the absolute most of Cambridge’s arts scene while you can. We are incredibly lucky to have access to so much of Cambridge’s culture, often for free and so close by to us. I refuse to leave Cambridge without going to consider the Kettle’s Yard lemon one last time. Go to an exhibition, a play, a poetry reading, anything – before you realise it’s not nearly as easy to do these things elsewhere.

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

Library crawl The concept is not fun if it involves taking your exam stress with you into every available study space in Cambridge. It is fun, however, if, like me, you have reached full capacity for the amount of books taken out of Cambridge libraries and need to return them before you go home. I will greatly enjoy walking into the English Faculty Library knowing I don’t have to sit down and work for the next eight (or nine, or ten…) hours. I might even make a weekend of it, as I don’t think I can quite manage lugging 20 books around Cambridge.

It would be completely understandable if you take a vow to not read a single book for the next six months after your final exam. However, if you can stomach some light reading, the library crawl is a perfect way to return all your course-related books and take out books to read for fun. (Reading for pleasure – a radical idea, I know!) Across all of Cambridge’s libraries there are 16 million books. We often forget that not all of those books contain niche, dry criticism about a topic nobody outside of the Cambridge bubble will have heard of, let alone care about. There are so many contemporary fiction and non-fiction books that are available for borrowing. When else will you ever have such a vast selection of books just a stones throw away from your bedroom?

Cambridge bucket list and pastimes so you don’t have to plan yours

Tracing roots Once the (medieval) supernatural has vanished into thin air, the natural will need tending to. In other words, I will be needing nature to tend to me after spending more time in the library than my own room. Cambridge’s green spaces are few and far between, but the ones we do have more than make up for this. I’m envisioning spending long afternoons reading in the Botanic gardens, replicating C-Sunday on Jesus Green, and getting sunburnt in the orchard (or just not rained on). Moments of peace are also rare at Cambridge, and I intend to reclaim such moments in nature (while dodging the odd flying cork from prosecco sprayings).

Cakes and ale Two culinary staples have marked my university experience. Each Sunday during term, no matter what state my weekly essay was in, I’d be queueing up for either brunch or a roast.

A couple of quid in exchange for a plate of unimaginable joy in the form of hash browns or cauliflower cheese is, to me, a fantastic deal. And that’s yet to mention the endless flow of coffee, juice, and conversation about your weekend antics. As well as maintaining my hall presence, I’m going to level up both meals by splashing out on a Fitzbillies eggs florentine or a pub lunch.

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Speaking of pubs, we’ve reached the activity that will be dominating my post-exam period. My friend Lucy and I are the proud founders of Friday pub tradition (you’ll never guess what that entails), so we’re more than qualified to point you towards a well-poured pint. The Granta and Byron’s Bear are perfect for sunny afternoons which beg for a beer garden. The Pick is a student staple, while the Eagle is a Cambridge rite of passage (and somewhere my dad insists on taking me every time he visits). For a balance between cosiness and claustrophobia, The Free Press and Champion of the Thames pour a healthy dose of each. The Rock or Prince Regent are just far enough to qualify leaving Homerton without bothering to go back into town at the end of the day. And when I can’t be bothered to leave at all, I simply fall out of bed and into The Griff, the hidden gem that is Homerton’s bar.

I reckon I could easily take on a pub a day for three weeks, in my aim to toast Cambridge farewell from the Regal to the Eagle.

The Cambridge characters We all probably have about 30 people we know fairly well here – friends from clubs, college, your course – who’ll all be needing a catch up over coffee (a flat white or an espresso martini – the choice is entirely yours and guilt free post-exams).

But I’ll bet there are five to ten people who have defined your last three years, and who will logically dominate your last three weeks.

I love Cambridge, I love Homerton, and I love studying English, but the supportive network I have

found and connections I’ve made here are what have changed me the most (and I’m not talking about the LinkedIn kind).

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We’ve watched each other grow up Friends get you through the everyday of uni: you work, eat, and even live together. They are pretty much the only thing that remains constant in such a transitory period. Despite the downsides of cramped college accomodation, living on top of each other means that friendships are cemented for life (alongside your mortal enemies if the college ballot lottery did not work out favourably). Therefore, do not take this unique proximity for granted!

I’ve met the most amazing set of people who I feel privileged to support and be supported by. I met my girlfriend during Freshers’ Week, and we’ve been together ever since. The people who I knew when I didn’t know anything – about living alone, doing a degree, being an adult – have stuck around, and we’ve watched each other grow up, and grow as people. So, going to the pub is, in fact, not the most important thing on my bucket list. It is making the most of the people who are not just part of, but are my university experience. And going to the pub with them.

(Refer to ‘Cakes and ale’ for a refresher on the best pubs to go to with your friends.)

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Everything goes when you leave, except your memories and your mates Pretty much anything goes during the last few weeks of Easter term. And everything goes when you leave, except your memories and your mates. So keep those things around. And don’t miss brunch on Sunday (unless it’s a roast this week, in which case don’t miss a roast).

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Emma Gower plates up the food destination to cure your next hangover...

Do you like clubbing in Cambridge?

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s? or Rev s ’ i k i K

Too many freshers?

e-way Kiki’s onem? syst

Are y staying ou un closing? til

Vodk a tequi or la?

Are y ou a PhDdoing ?

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n Clubbing o? y C-Sunda

Sup sem o or inar ?

Van of Death

McDonald’s

Taco Bell

Van of Life

Jack’s Gelato

You’re the kind of person who loves to live life on the edge. You’re the unhinged friend, but everyone loves you for it. And let’s face it, by this point, you’ve got a stomach of steel.

You get on with everyone around you, and you love to stick to routines, whether that be for studying or for going out.

Don’t be afraid to branch out from Wevs to La Raza sometimes...

You’re the person in the friend group who always hosts pres and you love that. You always say that you hate Revs, but if we’re being honest, it’s really your favourite place.

You’re the fun-loving friend who’s always up for an adventure. But honestly, everyone knows that you only really go on a night out to get Van of Life chips at the end of it...

You’re the sort of person who everyone likes. You might be quiet sometimes, but you’re very funny, and your friends can always count on you being tucked into bed by 11pm.

P L AT I N U M C O L L E C T I O N

That’s all, folks!

Pooja Gada explores why the end of term feels so bittersweet through the language of lasts

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n mid-June, a strange feeling settles over Cambridge. Finals are over, the sun is no longer a stranger, and May Week arrives in all its sleep-deprived, champagne-stained glory. It’s the feeling of that final supervision, the final formal, the final afternoon on Jesus Green – ordinary moments made poignant by the knowledge that they’re ending. Across cultures, humans have tried to give this ache a name. But where does it come from?

Japanese aesthetics has a name for this: mono no aware ( ), often translated as “the pathos of things”. Articulated by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga in his readings of The Tale of Genji, it captures the ache of transience: the way ordinary things become poignant when we know they cannot last. It is why every final thing feels different from all the others: nothing about the grass, the gowns, or the lukewarm prosecco has necessarily changed – what has changed, though, is our sense of time.

Psychology offers another vocabulary for the same shift. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that when people perceive time as limited, their priorities shift: they become less interested in abstract future goals and more drawn to emotionally meaningful experiences and relationships. Cambridge, in June, is full of these small countdowns; their scarcity deepens our appreciation of them. As mono no aware suggests, not all time is emotionally equal. The end of term feels precious because it makes everyday moments feel numbered.

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By June, Cambridge friendships have acquired their own strange shorthand: the person who saves you a seat in the library without asking, the friend who knows your coffee order by exam term, the group chat that becomes increasingly unhinged after midnight. Shaped by Confucian ideals and Korea’s emphasis on social bonds, jeong ( ) describes the affection that forms through repeated shared experience. It is the bond of having been there, again and again, for the same small rituals. Sociology offers another account of this shared intensity: collective effervescence, the heightened emotion and sense of unity that can arise when people gather around a shared event. The end of term hurts not only because time is running out, but because it reveals how

Not all time is emotionally equal

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much of Cambridge has been made meaningful by other people.

Sung at graduation ceremonies across Europe, Gaudeamus igitur – “so let us rejoice” – originates in a Latin manuscript from 1287 and belongs to the old tradition of carpe diem: an entreaty to enjoy life while we can.

This is not joy in spite of transience, but joy because of it. There is a cognitive reason this kind of joy endures. Emotionally heightened experiences are more likely to be encoded as lasting memories, partly because activation of the amygdala can strengthen the consolidation of salient events. At the end of term, those conditions are everywhere: relief after exams, novelty after routine, social intensity after weeks of private revision, and the awareness that the moment is finite. This helps explain why endings linger so vividly. As we throw ourselves into May Balls, late-night walks across the city, and the questionable decision to do it all again on far too little sleep, we are not just celebrating the end of the year; we are making the memories that will outlast it.

No single word or psychological theory can quite claim this feeling: relief, exhaustion, joy, longing, nostalgia.

But whether you’re a fresher watching your first Cambridge year slip away, or a finalist counting your lasts, take comfort in knowing you are not alone in it. Across cultures and centuries, humans have tried to name the ache of endings. In the meantime, this May Week, let’s make memories that will stay.

Is artificial intelligence rotting our brains?

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t the very beginning of the academic year, the University of Cambridge announced that students are now permitted to use AI tools in order to “support personal study, research, and formative work”. Nowhere has this change been more apparent than in our libraries – in any given study space, it’s likely that ChatGPT will be open on at least one laptop screen. As a growing number of students begin to rely on the use of generative AI to write elaborate supervision essays and complex Python scripts, does this new guidance throw into question the ideology that ‘degrees make us smarter’, especially as less of our work becomes authentically our own? Is there anything science can tell us about the potentially detrimental effects of AI use on our brains, or are we jumping to false conclusions too soon?

One particularly common motivation among students for using AI is to seek help with writing the occasional supervision essay.

Researchers from MIT set out to understand the effects of using AI on our brains by comparing the brain activity of people who wrote essays using either ChatGPT, traditional search engines, or no online tools. Those who used ChatGPT to write their essays displayed fewer, weaker connections between different parts of their brains, highlighting how using AI can influence the brain’s underlying architecture.

Moreover, the writers who used ChatGPT found it much more difficult to quote their essays correctly, if they could even quote them at all, unlike those who used traditional search engines or no online tools.

Throughout the process of writing an essay or studying for an exam, the hippocampus – a small, sea-

horse-shaped structure within the brain – is responsible for converting short-term memories into long-term memories. The hippocampus also stores important memories and retrieves them later on when needed, enabling us to remember crucial information from our previous study sessions during exams. However, using generative AI tools to write eloquent essays or make detailed lecture notes may lead to weaker activity in areas of the brain linked to memory formation, making it harder for us to recall important information when we need it most.

Researchers are also investigating how the use of generative AI can influence what’s known as our ‘cognitive effort’, which reflects how much mental energy we invest into performing challenging tasks, such as solving problem sheets.

Dedicating time to learning new information and solving complex problems is thought to be essential for keeping our brains fit and healthy, as engaging in difficult learning tasks can potentially help to rescue dying brain cells in the hippocampus – supporting the idea of ‘use it or lose it’ in maintaining a healthy brain. Avoiding this crucial learning process, such as by using generative AI to perform difficult learning tasks for us, may harm the survival of thousands of our brain cells every day.

Essay writing and note-taking are not the only reasons why students are turning towards AI for help. Some of the most popular motivations for using AI chatbots include coping with life’s challenges and providing an inexpensive, readily accessible alternative to therapy. This could potentially pose the risk of AI harming our emotional intelligence, especially considering the tendency of AI chatbots to agree with the user’s viewpoints, which runs the risk of reinforcing negative feelings. Relying on AI for emotional support during our most stressful times at Cambridge may add another layer of complexity to the potential impacts that AI could ▲ LYRA BROWNING have on our lives.

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While provoking news headlines may lead us to think otherwise, it is important to note that there is currently no evidence to suggest the long-term use of AI has a detrimental effect on our brains. To claim that ‘AI is making us stupider’ is therefore an inaccurate way of summarising what we currently understand about how generative AI use influences our intelligence and brain health. Many students would argue that using AI can actually enhance our education, for example, by structuring exam revision and guiding us towards up-to-date resources. Using AI tools to perform the time-consuming, inefficient parts of our studies is referred to as ‘cognitive offloading’, which allows us to devote more time and mental resources to delving deeper into the course content that interests us most. It’s certainly possible that cognitive offloading could ultimately improve the depth of knowledge we develop throughout our time at university, assuming that we only devote the additional mental resources to our studies.

Depending on the evidence that will inevitably emerge over the next few decades detailing any precise impacts of AI on our intelligence, Cambridge granting its

Harming the survival of thousands of brain cells every day

students permission to use AI could either be a helpful or harmful addition to the more traditional aspects of our education.

Our motivations for using AI to aid our studies, whether this is for essay planning, emotional support, or writing a shopping list, may also play a key role in determining the precise impacts of AI use on our brains. Crucially, we are in complete control over how we use AI tools within our degrees – whether or not we choose to embrace them is up to us.

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My favourite dance floor is the one with my friends on it Juliette Berry argues that the best night out is defined by the company, not the venue

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ow do we measure a good night out? Is it by the post-club food, the side characters you bump into, or by the intensity of your hangover the next morning? In planning this article, I attempted to separate and examine all of the blurry memories from my Cambridge club nights. But I was instead faced with a familiar collage: sticky floors, sweaty men and the same rotating cycle of indistinguishable pop songs. My setting and environment rarely stood out. One blends into the next in a fluorescent haze, defined less by where you are and more by the fact you’ve ended up there – again.

The rotation of Revs to Mash to Kikis (and the occasional pilgrimage to Junction) was one of the first lessons I learned when arriving at university, committing myself to religiously and blindly obeying these divinely chosen rules, trusting that I was in the safe hands of the clubbing veterans who seemed to know exactly what nights were the best. This circuit, however, soon lost its novelty, as you stopped to take a look around you and realised you were surrounded by the same collection of faces on a weekly basis. I knew Cambridge was small, but the selection of people who are brave enough to face its clubbing scene seemed even smaller. And yet, there is something strangely reassuring about that familiarity. However chaotic the night becomes, you’re never far from someone you recognise – whether you want to see them or not, and whether you’re entirely sober enough to remember how you know them.

It seems, then, that the destination of the night rarely changes the crowd it attracts – but this isn’t to say that I don’t have a favourite.

Revs behaves as the central hub of the Cam-

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bridge scene, which definitely says a lot about the state of our clubs. You can see this from the condensation that drips from its windows and the slow, army-like crawl you have to make to wade through the sweating bodies in search of the toilets. In saying this, ‘Wevs’ holds a special place in the undergraduate heart and is almost guaranteed to produce a run-in with at least one of your campus celebrities.

On the other hand, there’s Kikis. A place I have entered a solemn five times because of the unfathomable queue that it generates, leading to an inevitable one-in-one-out system that is bound to ruin even the most optimistic person’s night out before it has properly begun. Meanwhile, Junction behaves as a magical faraway land, promising an improved setlist but an expensive taxi journey, resulting in it acting as a once a term (or year) escape and a glimpse into what our nightlife could’ve been if we’d gone to our insurance unis.

Even La Raza remains, for now, slightly mythologised; as a meagre first year, I am yet to truly uncover it, but I hope that the older years’ gatekeeping is worth the hype, rather than another Bridgemas ball-style disappointment.

For those of you who are club educated, you may have realised that I have missed one out: Mash. As a proud ‘Frash’ fan, I am aware this is a controversial stance. But for me, Mash offers a less suffocating alternative to Revs – still cheesy, still chaotic, but with the added appeal of its queer nights, and, of course, a pretty fun name. When trying to defend Mash

Nothing beats an overpriced pint in a pub garden with a table of friends

▲ ROSIE BEYFUS

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Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

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to my friends (in an attempt to attend ‘Woo Wednesday’), I realised my fondness for it has less to do with the club itself, and more with the people I end up there with. Although this might be an unsatisfying conclusion, it’s unavoidable.

The success of a night out in Cambridge rarely relies on the venue but instead the people you arrive with, the people you find, and the people you eventually leave with.

For this reason, I find that the most memorable parts of the night rarely happen in the club at all. The pub, by contrast, offers something the clubs don’t – a place to actually communicate and bond. Conversations stretch, cards are played, and the night doesn’t require copious amounts of alcohol to feel sustainable. Nothing beats an overpriced pint in a pub garden with a table of friends (not even an end of term Revs).

So what makes a good night? I think I’ve found my conclusion.

The best club is the one you end up at when your friends all unexpectedly put down their work and decide to leave college. It's where you bump into your course friends and make future plans to meet up (even if these are never executed).

The best club is where you finish in Taco Bell with your college wife and a newfound group of strangers. Although Cambridge offers a limited rotation of venues, and a painstakingly repeated setlist, it is perhaps that very predictability that makes these moments possible. The nights themselves may blur together, but the people rarely do. In the end, the ‘best’ club matters far less than who you happen to find when you’re there.

In the end, the ̒best’ club matters far less than who you happen to find

Exercise, academia, and the Cambridge addiction to both

Amanda Ljunberg explores how the addiction to success follows Cambridge students from the library to the gym in a harmful way

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our first lesson at Cambridge is that you aren’t the only one to have been smart, or consistent, or taken on way too much and thrived in spite of it all (or even because of it all). But exceptionalism takes no prisoners. So if academic excellence is no longer what gives you that rush, perhaps your discipline can. Perhaps your body can.

Perfectionism, as some of the polymaths I have spoken to attest, can seep into every corner of your life. But there is something specific about the physical nature of exercise.

Obviously, it releases dopamine. It gets your mind off stress. But exercise plans also offer structure, break your time into sessions, distances, splits. It not only calms the overactive mind, but gives that mind something to dominate. You can apply the same high standards from your academic life to your fitness life, and begin to reap rewards from your suffering – not in that strange, delayed realm of mark schemes and feedback, but right in the immediacy of your person.

Most people I have spoken to tell me they find it a useful outlet. Some are wary of my expectation to find evidence strong enough to justify the word ‘addiction’. Exercise becomes such an ‘addiction’ when more and more is needed to achieve the same sense of relief, when other activities shrink around it, when a routine begins to feel compulsive. But I have found that most people at Cambridge think they have healthy relationships with t h e

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gym and their exercise. They agree that the gym improves their mental health, but insist that it isn’t a trade-off for the ‘big things’ in their lives.

If exercise is a helpful outlet for so many, it seems unfair to call a passion for it excessive, or disordered. So where do we draw the line?

Overemphasis on aesthetics is a part of it. This is a time charged with the need to go out, mingle, and look good doing it. When so much of our hard work is hidden in libraries and essays, a fit body is a visible proof of private efforts. Dedication can be an attractive trait. So can seeming resilient, low-maintenance, and hard on yourself. In fact, university itself heralds the arrival of a sudden wealth of overwhelming changes – not least the chance to independently decide where, when, and with whom you spend your time. How much of that newly found free time could you put towards making yourself perfect?

I suppose this returns me to what our ‘big things’ are. Your priorities can narrow sharply when left to your own devices. Your degree becomes an obvious anchor. But then what? You can invest in friendships, societies, work, creative endeavours. Yet how many of these offer the same tangible sense of progress?

When another application goes down the drain, and another night out underwhelms you, does that have to mean that you are doomed to float aimlessly through a realm without metrics, milestones, or measurable proofs of worth?

With only a grade as an obvious target to work towards, you can start to live an incredibly cerebral life. Then your body can appear to offer a fresh arena of agency. When the centre of your life, your degree, starts to feel uncontrollable, why not show yourself, someone, anyone, that you can still call the shots about something?

Cambridge is full of former prodigies playing long-form endurance games of acceptance. Since we don’t offer US-style scholarships demanding excellence in chosen

The competitive environment of our academic system thus finds a mirror in sports

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sports, dedication remains largely a matter of choice. The stifling competitive environment of our academic system can thus find a m i r r o r, or a new arena, in sports.

As high achievers, many of us feel perversely proud of our capacity to suffer, to not have slept last night, to have forgotten to eat all day. The sense that your body is something to be negotiated with in order to get the work done can, of course, tip towards addiction, making that itself an identity. But, as my friend Emma told me, “we have to remind ourselves that these things are supposed to be fun.”

A wish, or sometimes a requirement, to be at a lower weight in order to improve sports performance can become a gateway into unhealthy eating habits. This feels especially dangerous now, with the prevalence of ‘looksmaxxing’ and ‘skinnytok’ content as we come to the climax of an insidious obsession with protein, ‘toning’, and bodily discipline.

But my argument isn’t only about how ambitious students are more vulnerable to self-destructive behaviours. It’s about how ‘exercise addiction’, even in its looser forms, allows the student who is already willing to suffer for their degree to suffer in a way that can be visible and mistakenly praised as health, or even romanticised for just how unhealthy it is.

In our cultural moment, the distance between self-improvement and willing self-destruction is becoming horrifically thin. I have great empathy for the desire to prove your self-control in a volatile world, and exercise is definitely not bad.

But any hobby is dangerous when taken beyond moderation – and I think right now exercise is a particularly fraught one.

Any hobby is dangerous when taken beyond moderation – and I think right now exercise is a particularly fraught one

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Controversy, infighting, and Our editors clash over whether it’s been a good year for student politics

Ell Heeps

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ambridge’s reputation as a powerhouse producing an extensive dynasty of influential political figures has been tarnished by the diminished quality of student politics, which now resembles a caricature of the national scene.

One thing Cambridge student politics can reliably claim to do is reflect national trends: the year began with the formation of the University of Cambridge Left Society (UCLS), which quickly claimed support from Your Party founder Jeremy Corbyn. For a time, at least, the idea of a new political society with an active membership held promise. Nine months later, though, and UCLS has largely faded into obscurity.

Upon its formation, the society described itself not as “a recruitment agency for parliamentary careers,” but “a society dedicated to advancing independent working-class politics”. This begs the question: what have they actually achieved since then? Aside from advertising the occasional protest, it’s not clear UCLS has mobilised any kind of political movement that didn’t already exist at Cambridge, driven by other groups such as Cambridge for Palestine. This points to a decline in meaningful political activism within the student body – UCLS shouldn’t be faulted for trying, but almost a year on

a bid to safeguard their political futures, are attempting to court the new generation of the far right. If Cambridge remains a factory for the next cohort of parliamentarians, then we must expect a greater display of responsibility from those who stand to benefit from that privileged position. Opposing views must be engaged with thoughtfully – blindly inviting whoever espouses the most outrageous opinions is not serious politics.

My primary problem with student politics this year is this: it has become detached from political reality. It’s true that those participating in it may not be deciding national policy. However, those who are active in the political sphere now will likely continue to be so, and these people exert a disproportionate influence over our politics, given that the average person engages very little with political discussion. Should we not, on that basis, expect a more serious approach from those who do choose to put themselves at the forefront of student politics? Real-world politics is not a game, and if those engaged in Cambridge politics have started as they mean to go on, the future of British politics looks bleak.

made CULC members think – it made leftists think – ‘is my politics actually represented here? ’ And regardless of how many people answered negatively before deciding to join UCLS, the fact is that every student’s political journey became more intellectually interesting and assured.

On the right side of Cambridge, this year it was the familiar and established institutions of the University that all seemed to suffer from a common plague: speaker event horror shows. CUCA’s cancellation of their events hosting Tom Rowsell and Jack Anderton seemed to exemplify both a harsh embrace of extremism and a simultaneous cowardice in doing so. The Cambridge Union once more played jump rope with controversy, almost intentionally provoking the left with their invitations to the particularly provocative Katie Hopkins, Mike Pence, and more.

When speakers come, go, get cancelled, get protested against, it’s hard to find genuine

political progress amid the chaos.

The first thing we get wrong about this, though, is that inviting extremism is surrendering to its unreality. Like it or not, Reform is on the rise, Republicans run the show across the pond, and ideas we find nonsensical genuinely exist in large numbers outside our own social bubble.

Engaging with extremism, if anything, therefore shows that this place is taking the dangerous reality seriously. And all the chaos it entails for student politics is once more a necessary part of the political assuredness students need to find at university. Chaos leads to thinking, and thinking is meaningful political engagement.

Among the chaos, therefore, often lies progress. Of course, we should be engaging in student politics to the end of striving to improve on the often laughable state of our country’s ‘real’ politics. But the way in which the two mirrored each other this year was promising; preparation for the ‘real world’ post-graduation involves experiencing the ugliness, grittiness and, frankly, the bullsh*t that it has to offer.

Ben Lubitsh

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from their formation, they appear to have failed to spearhead any kind of political revival.

The attempted rejuvenation of left-wing student politics this year came alongside a total meltdown on the right.

The Cambridge University Conservative Association’s (CUCA) decision to host a talk from Jack Anderton, who argues in favour of “mass deportations” and suggested Britain should not have involved itself in World War II, was genuinely nonsensical.

No serious person is suggesting that rightwing politics should not be discussed in Cambridge: a diversity of political thought is essential within a democracy, because only by engaging with the alternate view can one confidently conclude that their own perspective is the better one.

But there is a difference between ‘hearing the other side out’ and inviting inflammatory figures just for the sake of it. I must agree with UCLS’ critique of Cambridge politics here: some CUCA members clearly see which way the wind is blowing with regard to Reform UK, which has been leading national polls for more than a year now, and in

’m sure most students agree that this year of student politics hasn’t been pretty, but the lack of perfection has actually exemplified exactly the type of progress student politics is supposed to make.

One of the more notable perfect imperfections of this academic year came on the left, with the formation of UCLS. Advertised as “the new home for left student politics at Cambridge,” the society opened the gates up for infighting among the glamorously dressed Sidge-attending leftists of Cambridge. Now, it is true that it’s hard to point to tangible positive consequences of the society’s formation (and it doesn’t help my case that, at the time of writing this, the ‘about’ and ‘term card’ pages on the website only offer an ‘under construction’ message), but it did, almost immediately, manage to do something. It created a new space for leftist thought that people may or may not resonate with – and that in ▲ J ORD AN I and of itself is a major win NGL IS for student politics in my books. It

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‘It’s feminine intuition’: Ell Heeps predicts what we can expect from Olivia Rodrigo’s

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eenage girls the world over (myself included, though I’ve sadly had to renounce my teen status since) rejoiced in April when Olivia Rodrigo finally announced her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. As with her previous lead singles, the build-up to the release of ‘Drop Dead’ later that month was defined by rumours surrounding a recent breakup – fans have scoured the lyrics for references to Louis Partridge, though with lines like “Pisces and a Gemini / But I think we might go really nice together,” one doesn’t necessarily need to look very hard. Nonetheless, Rodrigo has been reasonably coy about the subject of the record as a whole, describing the album as one made up of “sad love songs,” and never directly referencing the relationship in interviews, leaving the rest of us to ponder what exactly she has in store for us. I’m writing this piece having literally just failed to secure tickets for Rodrigo’s tour next year, which frankly made me reconsider the entire venture, but my passion for ‘Drop Dead’, and Rodrigo’s discography in general, trumps all – so, I’m going to make the fatal mistake of predicting what might await us in this latest release.

On first listen, ‘Drop Dead’, which at this point I must confess is one of my favourite songs of all time, appears to be a quintessential love song. This marks a departure from her usual topics of heartbreak and teenage growing pains: ‘drivers license’ and ‘Vampire’, which kicked off the previous two Rodrigo eras, are unmistakably breakup songs, and although much of the speculation around the new album centres on her failed relationship with Partridge, she has taken a different approach to this most recent rollout by beginning with a much m o r e upbeat lead single.

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She told Cosmopolitan that the song was inspired by a first date, and she perfectly captures the experience of that first rush of feelings, with dreamy synths and a soaring string accompaniment. However, she described the song upon its release as “the first chapter in the story,” which suggests that all might not be as it appears from the song’s jubilant tone.

Signs of this can be seen within ‘Drop Dead’ itself, if you look close enough. The lyrics reveal a deep fear, suggesting that what she’s actually articulating is closer to anxiety than real love. She speaks in absolutes throughout the song: “I hope you never finish that beer” becomes “If you let me stay the night / Well, I think I might just have to stay forever”. She repeatedly implies that the relationship is fated, with lines like “It’s feminine intuition / ’Cause I always had a vision of us standing like this,” but that doesn’t stop her uncertainty about the entire thing shining through: “I’m paranoid I made you up”. The music video embodies this panicked obsession: Rodrigo runs around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles as though trying to escape her all-consuming feelings. That she was allowed to film at such an iconic location (which has, until now, been notoriously strict in who it permits to use it as a backdrop), the first artist to be permitted to film specifically in the royal apartments, is testament to just how much she has outgrown her days as a Disney star, and found a musical identity of her own.

Her songwriting has matured with every album, and her recent work appears to be no exception. Listening to ‘Drop Dead’ for the first time, I felt like Rodrigo had genuinely read my mind. She articulates

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a universal feeling with startling precision, and her references to various different eras of pop culture help the whole thing feel timeless.

Sure, she wrote the song at a ge 22 about a particular English a c t o r w i t h a penchant for Guinness, but the music video is set in a 17thcentury palace, and Rodrigo sprints through the corridors wearing 80s-esque over-theear headphones, in scenes which evoke that one moment in The Crown where a young Diana rollerskates around Buckingham Palace, equally uneasy about her future.

Another song Rodrigo has revealed from the album, ‘begged’, marks a return to her angsty roots, as she sings about being left wanting more from her emotionally detached partner. The song could not be more different to ‘Drop Dead’, though presumably she sings about the same relationship. Her grand vision of a fairytale love story in the former is replaced by romanticisation of small, basic gestures from her partner: “All that I want is to sit here silently / And watch movies on TV / What a shame you’re not here”.

The lyrics use the same absolutist language as her previous single: she describes a need to “know undoubtedly / That you just have eyes for me,” and laments that her partner is oblivious to her “endless well of needs”. At the same time,

She perfectly captures the experience of that first rush of feelings

predictions for OR3 latest album through an analysis of her lyrics she downplays her emotions, pretending to be “cool and forgiving” despite receiving very little in return. She also utilises the language of water to emphasise the depth of her sorrow. She is “an anchor in the ocean,” “fight[ing] back the waves” of her discontentment. Both this song and ‘Drop Dead’ share the sense that Rodrigo is out of control: in the former, she feels stuck accepting the bare minimum from the person she loves, while in the latter she has been struck by overwhelming feelings of an intensity she has never felt before.

Her performance of the track on SNL in early May embodied the album title’s juxtaposition. In direct contrast to the ‘Drop Dead’ music video, Rodrigo is static in this performance: she sits motionless on the swing from her album cover, having been brought back down to earth by her partner’s indifference. The lyrics are much more clearheaded – EW she acknowl▲ ASHLYN CH edges that regardless of the affection she is shown, “it’s not quite enough when I know that to get it I begged”. This, it seems, is the type of song we can expect to make up most of the album: it’s the type of song she does best.

Much to the devastation of those of us who were hoping for love songs, Rodrigo seems to have found her niche in heartbreaking ballads about the agonies of rejection.

Despite her reluctance to directly reference the relationships that inspire her songs, the marketing for the album thus far clearly plays into fan speculation

about what actually happened between Rodrigo and Partridge. The album cover itself appears to draw inspiration from ‘The Swing’, an 18th-century painting in the Rococo style, which, incidentally, was itself a reaction against the architectural movement that inspired the Palace of Versailles. The visual art of the album then, for those of us who do our research, serves to represent both a rejection of the music video’s regal location, and the too-good-tobe-true relationship Rodrigo sings about from within it. The chronically online among us were quick to point out that Partridge had actually posted a picture of ‘The Swing’ on Instagram in March (though in fairness, it’s possible this was just a coincidence – whether he was referencing her or vice versa, I suppose we will never know). Even more implausibly, some pointed out that the Palace of Versailles was built under the reign of a king named Louis…

Now, I’m not suggesting I believe Rodrigo would be quite so on the nose, but Easter eggs like this have largely driven the fan discussion about the upcoming album, and Rodrigo has clearly chosen to fan the flames. One of the alternative music videos for ‘Drop Dead’ is packed with references to various aspects of British culture – red phone boxes, black cabs, pints of Guinness, and a range of London landmarks.

In interviews, she has described the album as being partly inspired by London, and “experiences that I’ve had” there.

One can’t help but see the connection there.

Though, this is perhaps not particularly surprising.

Rodrigo seems to pride herself on her confessional songwriting, and any artist following in the footsteps of Taylor Swift, whose penchant for writing about romance has led

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to every single interaction being dissected for all the world to see, is forced to suffer the same fate. Rodrigo has been subjected to this to a particularly vicious degree at times: the release of ‘drivers license’, believed to be about ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett, led to fan speculation about a love triangle between the two and Sabrina Carpenter, though in hindsight this was largely manufactured by people on the internet with not enough to do. Rodrigo walks a difficult line between using personal experiences as inspiration, and maintaining a semblance of privacy, which explains her reluctance to disclose who exactly a song as complementary as ‘Drop Dead’ might be about. Nonetheless, part of the ‘hype’ for the album will inevitably, at least for a subsection of her fanbase, be drawn from continuous (and, frankly, unwarranted) conjecture about Rodrigo’s personal life.

The album as a whole, then, seems set to tell a love story in reverse. Rodrigo will take us from the high of the very first date, right through the gradual breakdown of the relationship. “[S]ad love songs,” as she characterises them, are an interesting new approach – one might expect one or the other, particularly from Rodrigo, who is best known for her melancholic ballads.

But, if the first two songs are anything to go by, it seems she’s pulled it off. Is that the album of the year I hear?

Rodrigo seems to have found her niche in heartbreaking ballads about the agonies of rejection

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The paradox of the live album Francis McCabe immerses you in the indescribable allure of the live album facelift but ‘Four Out Of Five’ doesn’t quite translate onto the Albert’s stage; neither does ‘Brianstorm’, as Turner’s dragging delivery pulls on the reins of Helders’ fury of drums. Certainly, some tracks shine: ‘Pretty Visitors’ has the magnitude and Californian candour of a San Franciscothreatening earthquake.

But there’s another faultline in the Monkeys’ strange 90-minute halfway-house. Much to the vinyl-lovers lament, the mix isn’t quite right. Turner is (rightly) given prominence, but it sounds as if they’ve exiled Helders’ drums to another continent and given O’Malley a toy bass guitar instead of a real one. It’s almost impossible not to wince as Turner’s lyrical peaks bristle against the microphone.

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Loyle Carner & storytelling with sound Telling stories – it’s what music does. And something Loyle Carner does expertly on hugo: reimagined (live from the Royal Albert Hall). Carner, to a five-thousand-strong, wide-eyed and keen-eared audience, prefaces ‘HGU’ with ‘The Cycle’, embarking on a story about refiguring generational trauma. His story of driving lessons with his father in a “VW Polo, right from ’98, dusty red” with a “seatbelt that didn’t really click in," but just about “road safe, ’cuz he’s not a bad dad” emotionally stupefies when paired

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alongside HGU’s refrains of “I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.” Throughout the album, Carner cross-stitches evocative anecdotes with his lyrical acts of storytelling, turning each track into a cluster of lived moments that intensify emotional resonance.

But aside from the piano-draped dedications and childhood stories, hugo: reimagined also dazzles as an instrumental feat. The album serves as a gateway drug to Carner’s music for the rapuninclined, with masterfully anthemic production, unobtrusively wide and perfectly mixed. Collaborating artists like Sampha, JNR Williams, and Jordan Rakei each pull the crisp, well-contoured sounds of the studio-recorded source material into the moment and humanise it. One minute, you delight in the humanity of Carner’s lyrics, and the next, you’re shuddering along as Richard Spaven throws himself across the drumkit. ▼ EZRA IZER

ive music: better in every way compared to its studio-recorded sibling. But take that 60-minute set you’ve thinking of, heat it to 150°C, and press it: you now have a perfectly flat record of your three-dimensional gig experience. Go one step further.

Compress it. All the way down to 320 kilobits per second, producing a digital file for you to take with you anywhere you go.

It’ll never yield quite the same experience as that magical night where you could almost see the whites of the eyes of your favourite artist, even hear their fingertips against the guitar strings – you can’t fit that in a file.

And yet, the live album remains a discographic gem of almost indescribable allure. Your favourite artist might yield one, maybe two, if you’re lucky. The live album reanimates some musical archaeologist in us all, eager to catalogue what changes have been made and love them all the more, even if we have to lament our absence at the moment of the musical origin.

Arctic Monkeys & shifts in sound But take a gig performed in the same space, four years prior. A live album can equally sound like a strange identity-less mix, straddling the large gap between a band’s shift in sound.

The Arctic Monkeys’ Live at the Royal Albert Hall (2020) sees the band’s music-making try and retain the vigour of their earlier albums, but inject into it the languorous lounge-ease of Turner’s sci-fi pet project, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino (2018). It works – in places.

‘Do I Wanna Know? ’ is given a much-needed

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

Radiohead & getting it right With what seems to be becoming an everpresent truism of the music world, “Radiohead did it perfectly back in the 2000s," it seems that the only answer is their hybrid approach on The King of Limbs – Live from the Basement (2011). In their other live album, I Might Be Wrong (Live), muddiness fractures into militant sonic lawlessness. Meanwhile, TKOL offers a strange ‘goldilocks zone’ of a live album. The charming vocal editions and little jokes that adorn the periphery both build the imaginative picture of the recording as well as betray its true nature: Yorke’s quip that “this is a run-through, so I guess Jonny can do email at the same time,” and the prompts like “Let’s move on then,” draw attention to the fact that these are live performances, but ones picked from the best of the runthroughs. There’s no audience to associate with, but live kinetic energy remains.

So, it’s not quite live, but maybe it’s better. Floating along on the melancholic chords of ‘Codex’, atomised by the instrumental wash of ‘Staircase’, or even enjoying the recorded tea-break before ‘Separator’, it’s easier to imaginatively insert yourself here, in the basement, than in any concert arena or wood-panelled pub. Retaining the artistically capsulised nature of a studio recording but bubbling with incorruptible authenticity, it’s a happy harmony of reliable, yet experimentally delightful. If it’s a debasement to label this a perfect live album, I’m guilty. I think it’s as close as you can get.

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Looking back on a year of life drawing Daniel Kamaluddin sits down with ARCSOC’s head of life drawing

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ship between the sitters and artists. Z responds hearteningly that “some models are really comfortable with speaking to the people who are drawing. It breaks down the perception that you as the person coming in to draw are super separated from the model who almost becomes a sculpture.”

Given how much art and culture generally tend to idealise one type of body, I ask Z about how life drawing might help us understand the multitude and variety of bodies. She reflected that, “for the average person, we realistically don’t see that many naked people,” laughing a little – it feels like a funny thing to say in an old church. Life drawing teaches us that we all feel the same things, Z says: “to see someone in their most pure form creates a sense of human connection”.

Life drawing is about practicing attention and really seeing, for Z: “so often we notice things and we don’t question why we feel drawn to them. Let’s say you’re walking down the street and a particular tree catches your eye – it’s not something you really think much about. There’s always something more to that; it will be tied to an emotion or a memory.

Life drawing is about really slowing down and seeing things.”

Both of us conscious of having to rush off to the library to make a start on revision, I close our fascinating chat by asking Z about what she sees as the significance of the non-academic, non-competitive, art-for-art’ssake nature of life drawing.

She concludes that “our sessions are orientated both towards people wanting to start out and people who are a bit more comfortable.

It’s important to have that environment for people to come into and feel like they are able to practice their drawing skills,” she says earnestly.

“We try to keep the sessions relaxed; there’s not a super imposing structure, apart from the timings. It’s all about just keeping it open to everyone.” For me, this strikes at the heart of what makes life drawing so special and enduringly popular. It is a space without judgement that you can step into at the end of a long and tiring week, where you can let both your pencil and your mind wander.

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we are open to both students and members of the public.”

That said, for Z, life drawing could still be a little more social than it is: “people tend to come together in groups of three or four. The people who come by themselves are often more open to talking to other people. When I first started running life drawing I wanted to have a moment at the end of the session where people could lay out all their work on the floor and for people to mingle and chat to each other”.

She pauses a moment to think before continuing: “I think people were a bit too reserved and it didn’t really end up working out. Going forward, I would love to see more of that from life drawing, though I don’t know exactly how that would happen.”

I am keen to know more about the relation-

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s we sit down over coffee in a pair of converted choir stalls in the exalted atmosphere of Michaelhouse Café, Z, the Head of Life Drawing for ARCSOC (Architecture Society), points out it is perhaps not the most appropriate setting for the conversation we were about to have. ARCSOC’s Friday evening life drawing sessions have long been a fixture of the Cambridge arts scene, and it has only gone from strength to strength; a recent session I attended was so chock-a-block that Z had to rush out to squeeze in more chairs.

The events straddle a series of contradictions; taking in at once a sense of privacy and openness, making space for beginners and art aficionados, and the student body as well as the public. After a little preamble, I open the conversation by asking about the changes and continuities in the experience of running life drawing this academic year after being on committee last year. Z replies beamingly: “the structure of life drawing has been kept quite similar. I think the thing I didn’t expect is that the models have such an outward view of life; it takes so much bravery to model to people but most of them have a way of being comfortable in a room, even with people they know.”

Going into the interview, I am especially interested in how the organisers go about putting the models at ease, so I ask Z to talk a little more about the modelling experience: “our models are both Cambridge students and external and because of this we have a real range of body types and age. I have had one or two students that have been to our sessions before reaching out to say it’s something they are interested in, but most of the people who model have modelled for a while. There should be a big expectation for the people who come to draw to help create a comfortable and respectful environment.”

Creativity can often feel a solitary thing, especially at Cambridge, so I am keen to ask Z about how doing art communally changes the dynamic. “It’s so fantastic to sit with other people and see the different ways that they interpret,” she answers passionately.

“Everyone picks up on different details, and places importance on different facets.

That said, I would love to see people interact with each other more. What’s so special about ARCSOC, unlike college life drawing, is that

Bound for success?

Ollie Liversedge talks to both current and former students who could be the next Cambridge literary greats

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o many great writers have studied at the University of Cambridge: E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Catherine Airey, and the list goes on. Sometimes, walking down King’s Parade, I wonder to myself, have I just walked past a future literary giant? In this article, I talk to some of the student novelists who assure me that I have. I sit down with current students and graduates alike, asking them about their experience of novelling alongside their degree, as I try to figure out what makes Cambridge such a cauldron of writing talent.

Stan Wierzbicki, currently studying for a master’s in creative writing, reflects on how the degree has reshaped his writing. Wierzbicki came to Cambridge with a fully drafted 80,000-word magical realist novel and a second novel in progress, which, ironically, has taken a backseat while he works towards his master’s.

That said, he looks forward to returning to it for his extended project next year. Before Cambridge, Wierzbicki read English literature and creative writing at the University of Lancaster, where he says the pandemic limited his ability to interact with fellow creatives. Now, at Cambridge, he prefers the “collaborative environment” the creative writing MSt promotes: “through the people who surround me, I have found motivation.” Students arrive from across the world with diverse skills: poets, playwrights, novelists, non-fiction writers, and even video game designers. Wierzbicki says that writing poetry, as a relative beginner, alongside people for whom it is their whole focus, has “opened up” his writing.

Wierzbicki is also keen to stress the “playfulness” the degree promotes. It is not as “serious” or “academic” as people might assume. Classes include short warm-up exercises – responding to prompts or inventing characters – leaving room to “experiment,” to “be silly, and for that silliness to be

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taken seriously.” This philosophy underpins his writing and is part of why he got into writing in the first place: “to have full power” over what is created. That being said, Wierzbicki appreciates his supervisor’s demands for new writing. Writing consistently for his assignments has been new for him, as somebody who used to write only in short bursts, around work, when inspiration struck. “I can’t even tell the difference between what I wrote in a good mood or bad mood,” he admits, suggesting that sometimes you just have to sit down and write. “Just like children need time to play, so do adults.”

Writing is a chance to escape the world. Plus, Cambridge has such a literary history, he says, that it would be a shame not to take part in it.

Millie Redding, who graduated in July 2025 with a degree in English literature, agrees. She recalls drafting two novels in her final year, one of them a coming-of-age story involving Catalan triplets, inspired by a family holiday she took in her first year. The novel was complicated, and enriched, by her third-year tragedy paper.

“A lot of tragedies double as family sagas too,” she says, adding that their example “informed my own thinking around family dynamics and traditions.” Anne Carson’s Nox inspired the eulogy one of her triplets writes (on a square of kitchen roll), while Virginia Woolf ’s To The Lighthouse brought about Redding’s “creative turn towards detailed studies of character.” And, not just her reading, but the city itself, has shaped her writing; looking back over her past drafts and documents is like reading through an archive of herself, she suggests, some mapping walks she took around the city and others mapping the psychological terrain she has traversed since her matriculation.

“Writing is my way of making sense of the world around me,” Redding tells me: that is the “essence” of why she writes.

Writing has been her outlet since childhood,

I believe I have found two more of Cambridge’s literary greats to be

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a way of communicating her thoughts and feelings in words. Nowadays, whenever she is bored, she finds herself opening her laptop and trying to add a few hundred words to whatever she last left off.

“In most cases it is not about finding the time, but the time finding me.” Some days at C a m bridge, she would wake with a scene in her head and know she couldn’t make any progress on her essays until it was “out of my system.”

Looking back on the “chaotic” three years she spent balancing novel and essay writing, Redding is proud to have produced two half-drafted novels and achieved good marks in her finals. She’s humble about it: “someone with much better organisation than me may very well be able to finish their three years with a complete 80,000-word manuscript and a first-class degree.” She doesn’t think doing well in one means doing badly in the other – if anything, the opposite. “Sometimes your creative writing skills can feed directly into your academic writing,” and vice versa. As Wierzbicki said, thinking across forms means thinking more freely about the written word; it means finding where your voice sits between academic and creative registers.

Redding begins an English literature master’s in September, where she will keep “writing for pleasure” and dreaming of being published… “one day!” Wierzbicki, meanwhile, is weighing up a PhD, while focusing on getting his work on the shelf. In both of them, I believe I have found two more of Cambridge’s literary greats-to-be.

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Ellie Buckley considers what is lost when art and tactile objects become museum artefacts

Look, don’t touch 28

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ack in April, I visited the Wellcome Collection with a specific object in mind: a medieval birthing girdle. This rare artefact was worn by women during childbirth, its surface inscribed with prayers and images of Christ’s wounds, believed to offer protection in a moment of extreme danger. Now enclosed in a glass case, illuminated briefly by a timed light, it exists as something to be looked at carefully and from a distance. Yet it once functioned very differently. It was wrapped tightly around the body, handled repeatedly, and used with urgency. The visible wear on its surface – its faded inscriptions, rubbed illustrations – alongside scientific evidence of bodily fluids embedded in the fabric, testifies to its active role in birth. What we now preserve as history was once an intimate, tactile tool.

Because of its intricate decoration, the girdle can easily be classified as art. But this designation risks misunderstanding its original purpose. For those who used it, it was not an object for contemplation but for action. The shift from tool to artefact marks a broader transformation in how such objects are encountered. In the collection, the girdle is encountered visually, its meaning mediated through glass and controlled lighting. To wear it is for the girdle to become useful, to ease a passage in some way. Its tactile dimension – once essential to its function – is no longer accessible, and this loss of touch fundamentally alters the relationship between object and viewer.

This contrast raises a wider question about how art is experienced. Many museums privilege sight above all other senses, encouraging a mode of viewing that is observational rather than participatory. Yet there are notable exceptions. At Kettle’s Yard, for example, Harold Offeh’s exhibition ‘Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet’ created an immersive environment in which sound, fabric, and movement shaped the experience.

Wearing headphones, the viewer entered a soundscape that extended beyond the visible room, while suspended textiles invited physical interaction. Moving through these fabrics altered both perception and spatial awareness, producing a temporary sense of enclosure that was disrupted whenever another visitor entered. Here, engagement became active, where the viewer’s body became part of the work.

Experiences like this suggest that sensory involvement deepens our connection to art.

Even within more traditional settings, such as the Fitzwilliam Museum, visual encounters can evoke other senses. The textured surfaces of certain paintings can produce an almost physi-

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cal response, as if the eye alone were enough to register depth and materiality because the eye links to our sense of dimension and physical sensation.

This reaction is not purely visual; it is informed by memory and embodied perception. Smell, texture, and sound, whether directly present or imaginatively reconstructed, can trigger associations that connect the viewer’s present experience to their personal past. In this way, engagement with art becomes active rather than detached.

However, this sensory richness is often limited by the practical demands of preservation.

The glass case surrounding the girdle, like the controlled lighting that governs its visibility, is designed to protect it from damage. These measures are necessary, but they also impose distance.

Objects become flatter, more remote, less able to reflect the three-dimensional, sensory nature of the bodies that once interacted with them. The result is a tension between conservation and connection: to preserve the object is, in some sense, to restrict how it can be experienced.

This tension is not insignificant. The power of art to affect us sensorially is evident in moments when it is disrupted, such as acts of protest in which artworks are defaced. These incidents provoke strong reactions precisely because they intervene in the visual and material presence of the work. It is body-on-body crime, where the body of the viewer interferes with the body of the art. They remind us that art is not only seen but felt, and that its physical form carries meaning beyond representation.

Plato famously argued that art deals only in appearances, offering an imitation rather than the absolute essence of an object or person. Yet this view underestimates the role of the viewer.

When we look at a painting such as Van Gogh’s Chair, we do more than register its image. We imagine its texture, its solidity, even the sensation of sitting upon it.

In doing so, we extend ourselves into the work, engaging not just visually but imaginatively and bodily. The experience of art is therefore not confined to surface appearances; it is shaped by the interplay between object and viewer, perception and memory.

To encounter art fully is to engage more than the eye. Whether through direct sensory stimulation or through the mind’s capacity to reconstruct it, art has the potential to involve the whole body. When this happens, the boundary between viewer and object becomes less fixed, and the experience of art becomes not merely observational, but immersive and deeply felt, where the world of the art has the power to impact ours.

Many museums privilege sight above all other senses

Smoking Area CRYPTIC CROSSWORD DOWN

1 Defiantly say no when accepting amount of cash in modern times (8) 2 Bun made from mushroom, depleted of current (7) 3 Characteristic of some quiet hospices (5) 5 VIP formerly Ecuadorian (4) 6 Not grand, but honest (7) 7 Malleable sliver of metal (6) 10 Stand for trial (7) 11 More unfeeling cardinal? (6) 15 Wavy transgressions concerning you and the other place (7) 17 Baseline question of spirit (6) 18 Old elegist giving a bit of thought to meandering estuary (8) 20 Pirate French horns song (7) 22 Keen to arrange azulejos with no justice (7) 23 Puts up with Romeo turning into Juliet, but vanishes from the plane (6) 26 Vacuous; confined to an onset of emptiness (5) 27 From a distance, I have lost a piece of myself (4)

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SODOKU

ACROSS

1 Stolen cut (6) 4 Run through Australia after a hundred horsemen (8) 8 They say to stick around for Mass (6) 9 Worldly temperature of mouth (8) 12 Lizards which ordain us invalidly (8) 13 Loads of sticky stuff left out of language (6) 14 Pulls Americans (5) 16 Leave subordinate knight to become queen (8) 19 For instance, arsenic reacting with oxygen (8) 21 Sixpence confusion (5) 24 Einherjar gone spouting technical nonsense (8) 25 Maybe cow drink held by worker? (8) 28 Segregate fiscals roaming around entrance to Yale (8) 29 With a singular exception, where to start a piece (3,3) 30 Attackers risk collapsing with rest (8) 31 Charlie suspicious about English demographics (6)

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PUZZLES BY JAFAR DOWN

1 Origin of sorts (6) 2 Blackthorn (4) 3 Apparent (8) 4 Gland specialist (15) 5 Chronic breathlessness (6) 6 Three pairs of balls (4) 9 Copper plate print (7) 14 Proficient (5) 16 Rotationally yoked (3) 18 Aperture (7) 19 Without honour (8) 21 Double-check (6) 23 Place of rest (6) 25 Stuffs oneself (4) 27 Penalise (4)

’T

was the night before Downing May Ball 2025. My mates and I were about a dozen drinks deep at Jesus May Ball when we hatched a plan: we would do a May Ball bender on a budget. That budget being zero pounds – we were going to crash a May Ball.

But this story actually starts earlier that term.

I’d been told by someone going to Downing May Ball that the headliner had been announced: ENNY. ‘Charge It’, her most famous single, had been my most-played song in both 2022 and 2023, so the Ball FOMO hit immediately – and it only grew stronger as the term went on.

Now, I know May Ball crashers get a bad reputation: distasteful, selfish, dishonest – the list goes on. I could pretend that my choice to stay anonymous is about maintaining an air of mystery, but we both know I’m just trying to shield myself from an onslaught of Camfess abuse. I appreciate that crashing is a bit unfair to the paying attendees and the committee, but life’s unfair.

And, if you’ll indulge the rage bait, surely the hatred towards crashers is just jealousy that you couldn’t manage it?

Fast forward to that fateful night. Still hungover from Jesus May Ball, we spent the evening painting over our wristbands and scouting the area for a potential entry point. We slipped into all-black outfits in an attempt to camouflage ourselves. There was just one small problem: every inch of the perimeter of Downing was teeming with security.

Cambridge that night had two kinds of people: those inside the May Balls, and those plotting how to get in. As you wander the empty Cambridge streets on the night of a May Ball, the only other people you pass are fellow would-be crashers, which creates a strange sense of camaraderie. Knowing looks are exchanged.

Intel about where security is thickest gets quietly shared.

At one point, we tried to climb a wall obscured by trees when an ominous voice called out: “I know you’re there.

Come out from the dark.” We ran. The whole thing felt slightly horror-movie-meets-007. By this point we’d almost lost hope. But I live by the words “where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and so giving up wasn’t on the cards.

ACROSS

7 Worcestershire town (7) 8 A union (6) 10 Factual (4) 11 Marrow solution (5) 12 Student food (4) 13 Musical form (6) 15 Where all rationality lives, and then some (4,4) 17 The (second) farthest reach of civilisation (8,7) 20 Shorely (8) 22 Jump to conclusion (6) 24 Spread – like wild fire (4) 26 Herbivore convert (5) 27 Only fair! (4) 28 Mortar’s second partner (6) 29 Gather (7)

A magician never reveals his secrets, so I won’t disclose exactly how my mate and I eventually pulled it off. It was dramatic, but not in the way you might imagine. No jumping over

S YFU

E BE

OSI walls, no ▲R security guards chasing after us.

Instead, it involved the most elaborate blagging and improv I’ve ever attempted – and the first time my 9 in GCSE Drama has truly come in handy.

If all the world’s a stage, that night I delivered the performance of my life. The adrenaline high lasted for hours, and you better believe I drank and ate the equivalent of what a family of eight would consume. In hindsight, it was reckless, unnecessary, and dishonest. Would I recommend it? Probably not. Would I do it again? Well.

There’s a reason why I won’t disclose the details.

I’ll end with a bit of wisdom for anyone feeling brave (or in third year with nothing left to lose). Do not bring any form of ID: no CamCard, no driving licence. Scout the area beforehand, and don’t attempt any ridiculous stunts. Another friend who separately tried to break into Downing May Ball ended up in A&E that night…

Of course, you could just buy a ticket, be an honest person, and save yourself the hassle.

But where’s the fun in that?

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Caring in Wilf Vall speaks to students about of making their way through

C

▼JESSICA LEER

oming to Cambridge is an overwhelming experience for everyone. From the moment you put on your gown and sign the matriculation book you’re thrust into a whole new world with its own language and traditions. Freshers’ Week is a confusing whirlwind of excitement, hangovers, and homesickness that even the most put-together students struggle to process properly. A few days later you’ll be huddled in a library trying to make sense of Hobbes or Proust without the time to stop and think about the mania of the night before, or how your friends at home are doing. That’s kind of the point.

You’re a Cambridge student now, your l i f e should be contained within a threemile radius of Great St. Mary’s.

But for some students, it’s not that straightforward.

There are at least 350,000 young adults with caring responsibilities in the UK, making up about one tenth of the student-age population.

But Lucy, who has looked after her m u m

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since she was twelve, was convinced she was “literally the only carer at this entire University,” when she arrived. “I remember we had an induction talk from the Senior Tutor on the first day, who talked about how we should work 4050 hours a week to keep on top of our studies, and how we had to stay in Cambridge to make sure we ‘keep term’. I remember just thinking, shit, this isn’t going to work for me. I couldn’t think how anyone who cares for a loved one could do what colleges are asking for.”

Lucy isn’t alone in her isolation. The students I spoke to talked about a stigma around being a young carer. James, who helps care for his sister, explains how he felt “like lots of people have this idea of what caring is like that’s incompatible with Cambridge”.

There’s a diversity to care that he feels is often missed in stereotypes of it being “a full time thing you couldn’t possibly juggle with a degree. I know that is a lot of people’s experience, but that neglects how care can be done from a distance, it can be helping do the grocery shopping online, or just spending an afternoon on the phone when my sister’s having a rough day.”

For James, the ‘scare tactics’ of his college telling him how much he’d need to work over his first Christmas break exemplified that. “They told all the freshers to do 30 hours a week during the break. I get that it’s just done to scare us now, but at the time it just felt like having responsibilities other than my degree was banned, and that talking to my tutor or DoS about looking after my sister would land me in hot water.”

That lack of support is a serious problem across the country. Around 30% of students with caring responsibilities drop out of university to focus on their caring role. Sylvie, who looks after her mum, says she came close during Freshers’ Week. She talks of how she went on a night out for the first time with friends from her college, “It’s not the kind of thing I really got to do at home. It’s just me, my mum, and my little sister Evie. I took the lead when it came to looking after mum but Evie was picking up a lot of the slack for me when I left. Those first few days I felt like I had to be on call 24/7.”

She felt guilty for not calling her sister and mum at the start of the night, but as she relaxed and “got into my

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full ABBA superfan mode,” she started to enjoy herself. A typical Cambridge club experience followed; Lola’s till 2am then her first ever trip to Gardi’s. When she woke up in the morning “in that horrible state when you’re not quite sure if you’re hungover or still drunk” she saw five missed calls from her sister. Her mum had fallen down the stairs and was in hospital, and Evie had been calling to ask for advice about which painkillers were safe and who in the area could drive them home.

“When I saw those texts it just felt like someone had pulled a rug from under my feet. I’d had one night of being a ‘normal’ student and then everything just went wrong.” She decided – partly “under the influence of hangxiety” – that Cambridge wouldn’t work for her, and drafted an email to her Senior Tutor asking to intermit. Her mum, now feeling much better, texted her before she sent it off saying: “Don’t ever blame yourself for having fun. I love you, please keep being the amazing, talented angel that you are.” Lucy tells me of a similar experience. “I remember just being so anxious about Mum from the moment I got dropped off at College. I don’t think I’d ever been away from her for more than three days since I was twelve, and now I was five hours drive from home.” About four hours after being dropped off, during a college ‘afternoon tea’ icebreakers about where you live, what your parents do, it got too much. “I slinked off to a quiet patch in College, sat under this big tree and facetimed Mum sobbing, saying how sorry I was for leaving her, and that I’d come home if she wanted.

She just smiled and said ‘I promised you I’d be fine, I want you to promise me the same thing. I want to sit with and laugh about how you tried to drop out on your first day when you graduate’.” Three years later, at her graduation garden party, Lucy and her mum sat by the same tree “getting drunk on the free champagne, laughing about how I almost dropped out in less time than it takes to get home.”

Despite the guilt and isolation they all felt coming to Cambridge, all the students I spoke to were able to find support around them. “It took me like two terms to speak to my tutor about my sister, and once I actually got past that first hurdle so many doors opened up.” The issue of

I remember thinking, shit, this isn’t going to work for me

Cambridge the ‘maddening tightrope walk’ Cambridge as a young carer identifying himself as a carer was made worse for James by the opacity of it all. “I’m not your typical carer in that I’m not my sister’s primary source of support, so I figured I wouldn’t be eligible for whatever stuff the Uni offered, and that discussing it would just raise alarm bells”.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that Cambridge only holds UCAS data about whether students have caring responsibilities for a month, and in the experience of the carers I spoke to, it’s never communicated to colleges or the University Counselling Service. James says how his tutor was “shocked there wasn’t more explicit information about support for student carers when she did some digging, but even then the counselling and financial support I did get was an absolute lifesaver.”

Sadly, not everyone’s experience was as helpful. After discussing her caring responsibilities with her DoS, Sylvie felt like the college’s primary concern was “making sure looking after Mum didn’t mean I got a 2:ii”. While her college tried to find her support, “Everyone insisted that I wasn’t their problem. And I had to fill out so many stupid invasive forms that I just didn’t have the bandwidth for and ended up being a bigger distraction than help. It’s such a shame because I’ve heard stories of such great support for students in other cases, but it felt like because nobody expected a young carer to actually come to Cambridge, they just didn’t know how to deal with me.” After frustration with her college, Sylvie eventually turned to friends for some support, “even just little things like letting me vent to them over a cup of tea felt so liberating. It was a bit weird at times because they didn’t have caring experiences and I was scared they wouldn’t get it. But just having that human interaction when College had just thrown bureaucracy at me was such a big step.”

Sylvie wasn’t the first student carer to feel lost in Cambridge’s bureaucracy. Alice, who is the Class Act Society’s representative for carers, tells me of how, when she started at Cambridge as a research assistant, and later a master’s student, she found herself asking “where on earth is all the support for students?” There was no clear guidance for students looking for support from either their college or the University, and no clear mechanism of disclosing their caring responsibilities. “So me and a friend decided to

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start shouting about it at the University until we got somewhere.”

That somewhere was the Carers Working Group, which has been trying to help develop explicit care for student carers at University.

“It consists of some student voices who’ve got caring experience, and also people from across the University, including a member of the University Counselling Service.” The working group has existed for over two years, and is attempting to provide “some level of coherence and understanding” for carers, so that adequate support can be provided. Two of the central aims of the group have emerged from experiences of isolation and misunderstanding the diversity of care, with the group urging colleges to provide students an easy method of disclosing caring responsibilities without fearing consequences, and for colleges to provide training for tutors to be able to better understand and empathise with the diverse world of caring experiences.

Despite making progress, Alice admits that trying to affect major changes has “been really tough”. Cambridge’s traditions and idiosyncrasies “might seem harmless, but when you’re trying to get colleges and university departments to speak to each other, it becomes really difficult.” Alice is keen to emphasise that it’s not “out of malice or anything from colleges. When we do manage to get through to Senior Tutors who want to help they’re really understanding and helpful. It’s just that then getting that message across all the different university bodies is difficult.” This isn’t helped by the stereotypes of carers in Cambridge, “Every carer’s experience is different,” Alice says, “and trying to navigate whether you need to speak to the UCS or the EAMC, when nobody’s ever provided you guidance on how to deal with these different bodies, is a nightmare.”

This is made harder by the lack of an employee who works explicitly for carers:

Everyone insisted that I wasn’t their problem

“everyone we speak to is juggling loads of different responsibilities, and we’re all volunteers, so being able to make collaborative progress and just find time for meetings can be hard. It is frustrating, the University has so much money and have done loads great work for widening participation or counselling, but they do seem a little unwilling at times to try to properly make sense of the support for student carers.”

For Alice, as it was for everyone I spoke to, the best first step is starting a serious conversation about what it means to be a carer in Cambridge. The Class Act Society does socials for carers, which she says are “so great to just speak to someone else who gets what caring is like,” but awareness of caring experiences in the wider student body are a priority. “Just doing anything we can to start a conversation and get colleges to think more about carers and make them feel welcome and supported would be amazing.”

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‘Walking on eggshells’: exploring Jewish life at Cambridge

T

he experience one has at university is often defined by what they choose to do, and who they choose to be. Coming to Cambridge, I chose to be a philosophy student, an athlete, a student journalist.

But my experience has nonetheless been largely defined by a part of my identity that I didn’t choose: my Jewishness.

I’ve made my Jewish identity a far more open and unapologetic part of my life now, so perhaps this is to be expected. But why has that taken me so long to do? Why now does it define my experience in such an all-consuming way?

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m alone in having these thoughts; I stop having answers to my own questions, and so I turn to my community for help.

There’s no doubt that the Jewish community here at Cambridge acts as a haven for its members. One student described the community as a “safe space for Jewish students on campus,” another as a community to which they were able to “slot right in”. Yet, for everyone I spoke to, recounting the positive aspects of their experience, while clearly meaningful, merely acted as a preface to much bleaker reflections.

What immediately stood out to me is that Cambridge is no outlier for housing the worst of the Jewish experience. Many agreed that they feel much safer here compared with back home, where their presence in a Jewish majority bubble makes them a target. Yet falling victim to extremism and blatant Jew hatred still defines the experience of many. Students recounted various hate crimes occurring on the streets of Cambridge, involving statements such as “Heil Hitler” and “dirty Jew” being directed at them.

A particularly shocking story arose from the aligned testimonies of two students. One of them recounted how, over one summer, a student they previously had a friendly relationship with began to completely ignore them. That same person reportedly acted in the same manner towards another Jew-

34

ish student, this time immediately upon meeting them. After enquiring about this odd behaviour, the students were told explicitly that it was motivated by the fact that they were Jewish.

One of these students said: “The saddest bit was convincing myself that I was the problem.” The other reflected on the odd reality of the situation: “It’s just very, very weird and uncomfortable to know that somebody hates you, like hates you viscerally, but they don’t even know you.”

But the Jewish struggles at Cambridge aren’t limited to obvious cases of extremist influence – they extend to what can and is perceived as rational, righteous, and sensical. Indeed, during every one of my many conversations with Jewish students, the room we occupied also hosted a rather large elephant: the connection between that student – as a member of the Jewish diaspora – and Israel.

The problem is clear: criticisms of one are utilised as weapons against the other. And this happens most often through conflation of the two in truly nonsensical ways.

Again, many students recount negative experiences even when meeting people for the first time, where their Jewish identity is used as grounds for interrogation. One student described how time spent with friends would often get ruined by such conflation, noting that revealing their identity turned them into “the spokesperson of Israel”. They continue: “I’m exhausted […] I’m bored of it. I just want to have fun on my night out and not debate about Israel because I’m Jewish.” A similar annoyance was expressed by another student, who said: “often when meeting people I immediately get asked about my opinions on Israel […] it’s not a conversation I want to be having when I first meet someone.” And, indeed, why should it be?

Criticisms of Israel aren’t just projected onto Jewish students, but they’re weaponised against them. In Michaelmas of one student’s first year, their college parents decided to ‘disown’ them. The supposed reason was ▼C LIO that SZE

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they ‘thought they may be a Zionist’, despite the student stating no political opinions at that time.

Another common theme across my conversations was learning about direct public attacks involving a pipeline of verbal abuse, starting with Israel and ending with overt Jew hatred.

As part of just one of these stories, a student recalls “it started ‘f *ck Israel, f *ck that’, and then it went on to ‘f *ck the Jewish people, Jewish people are the devil’.”

Getting treated in this way leads to habits of hiding one’s identity to prevent stumbling into such uncomfortable situations. One student said: “I used to wear my Star of David necklace everywhere. And I stopped […] because I got fed up.” The same caution was prominent in the testimonies of many others: “I’m walking on eggshells, I can’t be visibly Jewish. I might not wear my jewellery or certain clothes in order to protect myself.” The same upsetting reality ensues for a different student: “I won’t do things that will intentionally put me in harm’s way, and I do feel like wearing anything that indicates that you’re Jewish is just going to do that.”

What I then discovered is that the apparent need to hide one’s identity comes from the mutual feeling that, as put by one student: “there are definitely more Jews than allies.”

A different student with family in vulnerable areas, including Israel itself, also recounted how they have never received an unprompted message of support from some of their closest friends following an attack that could have plausibly impacted them directly. “I’ve always told myself that getting mad at that was unreasonable, but given that these are truly some of my best friends, I can’t seem to shake that.”

In another conversation, I received validation of my original hesitance to publicly embrace my Judaism: “The hardest thing about going into Freshers’ Week is that most people are anonymous – but as soon as you tell people you’re Jewish, you’re no longer anonymous. People are now projecting their ideas of what Jews are onto you, and you’re either going to fit into their narrative, or you’re going to have to work hard to try and change it.”

It seems, therefore, that I’m not alone – I am far from the only one whose university experience is defined by their Judaism. Whether that’s a good, bad or neutral thing remains everchanging and ambiguous, and, in truth, out of our own control.

You’re either going to fit their narrative, or you’re going to have to work hard to change it

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‘Exam adjustments are awarded on Friday 12th June 2026

VARSITY

This is a closed book exam. You may not start

‘K

eep calm and carry on’. ‘Just keep swimming’. ‘Put one foot in front of the other’. If you’ve ever found yourself amid an academic nightmare – coursework deadlines piling up, yet-tobe-revised-for exams around the corner, and a concerningly high caffeine concentration in your bloodstream – you’ve likely been offered this advice. I’m certain that on receiving it, while you might be appreciative of the sentiment, an internal eye roll commences; we know that empty sentiments like ‘take it one day at a time’ don’t quite cut it. However, for a significant proportion of students, a ‘more positive outlook on life’ during the exam period is not just a patronising suggestion, but misses the mark entirely.

Exams, by nature, are a standardised means of testing, but for many these standards are impossible to meet. Whether it’s dyslexia slowing down processing speed, or chronic back pain making focussing impossible, the range of disabilities with the potential to negatively impact exam performance is expansive. ‘Reasonable adjustments’ (or more formally, ‘exam access arrangements’) encapsulate the list of preventative techniques. In Easter term 2025, 24% of Cambridge students sat adjusted exams.

With such a considerable cohort, is the University managing to successfully support them?

“I don’t know what I’d do without them,” “the difference between passing and failing,” and “degree saving” were answers provided by three students when asked if they believed their access arrangements make a difference, alongside similar responses from 15 others.

So, it’s clear – the answer is yes, and they’re a legal entitlement under equalities law in the UK. Unsurprisingly this does not solve the

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problem, nor does it answer the question of whether disabled students are being effectively supported.

When you try to marry standardised testing with the 3,500 Cambridge students who receive exam access arrangements, it’s inevitably not a simple fix. “If we want efficient processing then we need to standardise [it] […] At the same time, by standardising things […] you can miss out on the nuance of an exam access arrangement,” says Interim Deputy Head of Education Services at the University Sarah d’Ambrumenil.

As the head of the Student Administration department, Sarah offers me an insight into the perspective from the other side. When a student joins Cambridge, the University’s Access and Disability Resource Centre (ADRC) acts as the “main gateway into disability support,” by compiling a Student Support Document (SSD). An SSD, formal diagnosis, or JCQ18 qualification can be used as evidence by the Exam Access and Mitigation Committee (EAMC) to award that student exam access arrangements.

We know that disabilities form a spectrum; no two students are the same, and the exact things they need to “level the playing field,” as Eleanor Girt-Izod, Joint Head of the ADRC, puts it, will reflect that. “I always go back to that tension between having an efficient process but one that also treats everyone as individuals,” Sarah reiterates. As one student put it: “[Exam access arrangements are the] best way to make it more even […] but you can never really measure whether it’s the right amount.”

Here lies the crux of the issue, which was echoed by the majority of the students I spoke with: to what extent are exam access arrangements awarded on a one-size-fits-all

Before I came to Cambridge, I thought I wouldn’t get any of this, but they seem almost too willing to give it to me

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Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

basis? And is this causing disabled students to feel unsupported?

One student said: “I suppose [my adjustments help] because they’ve flung the kitchen sink at it […] Before I came to Cambridge, I thought I wouldn’t get any of this, but they seem almost too willing to give it to me.” I asked both Sarah and Eleanor whether they think ‘one-sizefits-all’ is a fair assessment; Sarah described it as “very understandable,” but Eleanor had a different answer: “I wouldn’t agree because it’s in discussion with [the student] that we come to a conclusion.” This contrasts with more than one student testimony: “I’ve got this really niche condition […] they didn’t really ask me about it.

They said ‘OK, you’ve given us proof, so here’s an exam arrangement’.” One described how she had screened positive for ADHD with the ADRC but hadn’t been awarded any reasonable adjustments as her processing skills were ‘high enough’. “If you can identify the inattentive traits of ADHD, why do my processing skills dictate that decision? It doesn’t matter if I’m using the extra time to understand the question [or …] stare out the window.” Another detailed a wild goose chase with the ADRC: despite being on medication for anxiety, she wasn’t granted adjustments due to a lack of a diagnosis; she then screened negative for ADHD but positive for low processing speed; they couldn’t diagnose her with processing issues because she had hearing problems.

“If anyone is unhappy with the recommendations we’ve made, they’re always welcome to come back and talk to their advisor […] [who’d] be horrified if a student felt that they had not been understood properly,” Eleanor says. But the issue stands: many students don’t know they can have these subsequent conversations. One student referred to a “big culture of having to advocate for yourself […] if you’re a pushover, you’re just going to accept it”. She went on to describe how there’s a lack of space for conversations t h a t provide students with “the exact adjustments they need, rather

a one-size-fits-all basis.’ Discuss.

Forename:

TRIPOS

Surname: reading the article below until instructed to do so. than an unhelpful baseline that coerces you into accepting it.”

This tributary feeds into a larger running theme: students feel there is a lack of communication. Several made references to unclear deadlines that were “easy to miss,” and others commented on not fully understanding how their adjustments worked. “You have to really hunt for a lot of this stuff […] It takes a lot of digging.” Uncertainty about exam venues was also listed, with one stating that the tours took place before her lease had even begun. Indeed, the one student who did visit the venues noted she was “practically the only one there”.

In the ADRC 2024-5 Annual Report, under section 3.2 ADRC Adviser rating, it states: “Students […] held the ADRC responsible for a perceived lack of authority in ensuring adjustments were made”. Under 6.1 Barriers to learning: “Academic staff showed a perceived lack of awareness of disability leading to insensitivity or a failure to offer support proactively.” There’s a gap between the ADRC and University staff and, again, more than one student validated this. For a typed paper, one student wanted to handwrite – her DoS recommended against this in case of a biased examiner. “A friend pointed out that would just be discrimination […] [my DoS] should know that.”

Sarah explains how one goal is to create an automated process through which students already familiar with their reasonable adjustments can self-declare, removing the administrative layer currently handled by colleges. In parallel, Eleanor mentions wanting to reduce the individual number of SSDs. Although this may sound like the opposite of moving away from one-size-fits-all, it will streamline the system, creating space for those who do need that more nuanced conversation. “In an ideal world in education, students wouldn’t have to selfidentify because they would have their needs addressed from the start.”

This stands against rhetoric, purported by more than one student, that there ought to be harsher regulations. One described how he only needs rest breaks but has also been awarded extra time. “[It makes] a massive difference, but I don’t think it’s exactly fair.”

One described the way they utilise their adjustments as “cheat-

ing,” others used the word “tactical,” and one mentioned feeling guilty about asking for adjustments, despite acknowledging she “definitely needs” them.

Eleanor takes a justifiably harsh stance against this. Other students lay on Eleanor’s side of the debate – including myself. I believe the notion that exam access arrangements constitute ‘gaming the system’ is born from the cut-throat competitive atmosphere that the University fosters.

It’s easy to jest during school, when you’re up against every other 16-year-old in the UK, that you can’t share notes in case they raise the grade boundaries. However, in cohorts a thousand times smaller, remarks like this hold some sincerity. As pointed out by one student: “exam adjustments will only benefit you if you actually need them” and making them harder to obtain would be detrimental to disabled students. Another countered the idea of ‘cheating’ – the disability that warrants the adjustments may also have a longer-term negative impact during the revision period: “it evens it out by giving them a bit more of an advantage in the exam.”

Multiple students gave weight to this statement, commenting on how their adjustments affect the whole exam period. “Obviously you still feel nervous, but I despair less about how exams are going to go.” Of course, this was almost always caveated with a comment about extreme pressure: at Cambridge, the volume of content is immense and “when you have specific learning disabilities, that just really doesn’t mesh well.” Others mentioned feeling less confident or struggling for the first time when starting at Cambridge, referencing the lack of structure and parental support.

However, Cambridge does offer specific advantages: Sarah explains how the college system makes it harder for students to slip through the cracks, and Elea-

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nor states that “at another university, there wouldn’t be this same level of support.”

One student described struggling during school, where it was “never a conservation that could’ve been had,” but at Cambridge it was easier than she expected: “I didn’t know how to ask for help […] somebody just giving me that space to try something new and to say that it’s okay has made me so much more comfortable.”

My conversations often ended with the student granting the University some slack. “I don’t think there’s much else the University could do without completely restructuring itself.” Some mentioned how time-consuming extra time and rest breaks make their exams but admitted they have no other solution. Another suggested that exams are too restricted, even for those who don’t qualify for adjustments: “if the exams were less demanding, people could showcase what they know better.”

To a similar effect, one student said: “I wish it was easier for everyone [but that’s like saying] I wish the world was rainbows […] it’s just a silly thing to say.” But what if it isn’t?

My final question to Sarah is on the permanence of the three-hour unseen exams. She says: “There have been real efforts to diversify assessment, however that three-hour exam still remains a critical component in many Triposes,” and Eleanor expresses that this “needs to be challenged”. Trends suggest we will only see increases in the number of students who need exam access arrangements, and it’s unlikely that a university famed for academic rigour will soon weaken its means of testing academic potential. What remains certain, though, is that disabled students deserve clarity beyond an email forgotten in a stale inbox, and they deserve answers beyond just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

I don’t think there’s much else the University could do without completely restructuring itself

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Are the Footlights Mary Anna Im evaluates whether the glory days are over for the

“F

ootlights seem[s] to be behind about half of the stuff worth paying attention to,” wrote former Footlight David Mitchell in his 2013 memoir. If you think of the Footlights, names such as Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Robert Webb, and Olivia Colman may come to mind. These people all have one thing in common: they have made it big in mainstream media. It seems, however, that there is a dissonance between the Footlights’ illustrious reputation and students’ current perception of it.

For many, the Footlights’ legacy no longer aligns with the quality of its contemporary output. Some variation of the sentiment ‘I’m not hearing massively positive things about the Footlights’ was a common response from students regardless of whether they had seen many of the society’s shows. One student, previously involved in the Footlights herself, put it bluntly: “If you say the Footlights are funny you’re in the minority at the moment,” adding that this is unexpected from a troupe that has produced so much talent in the past. “They’re supposed to represent the pinnacle of comedy, they’ve launched careers – so why has it suddenly gone like this?”

This sentiment rings especially true for students who grew up watching shows like Taskmaster and Peep Show. One student recounts how her family, who are “very into comedy,” were thrilled when she received her Cambridge offer, partially because she would now have the opportunity to join the

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Footlights. However, reality did not meet her expectations when she arrived in Cambridge.

Her perception of the Footlights as a “powerhouse of comedy” that produced “all of the great [British] comics” was quickly dispelled after she saw them perform. “I didn’t laugh once, and it was only made more painful by what was essentially a laugh track supplied by the front row – who were clearly the performers’ friends.” Despite this, another student who has stewarded both Smokers (shows that do not exclusively involve Footlights members) and the Spring Revue (which do) expressed the opposite view: “I’ve always found [the Footlights shows] very funny,” though he points out that “you can tell that they think they’re funny.”

The Footlights’ prestige is a double-edged sword; it’s helped launch comedians’ careers, but it also means the talent of current Footlights is only ever measured against that of those who’ve ‘made it’. Recent members have found success within comedy, but few can claim the same level of recognition as the previous members that cemented the Footlights’ formidable reputation.

When I speak with the previous president, James, about his time overseeing the society, our discussion centres around his instigation of a movement to reform the Footlights. The internal structure of the Footlights isn’t simple: in order to be eligible for membership, you must be either a finalist, master’s student, or PhD student.

This automatically limits the talent pool, and during his time as president James proposed scrapping membership altogether. “I think that the issue is you have a society called the Footlights and that implies when you join, you’ll be a Footlight, right?” During his time as president, he compiled a document of everything he’d ▼ LY learnt:

There is a culture of recycling the same people over and over again

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“[It was] basically suggesting that we get rid of membership, because it’s ruining it […] just get rid of the idea of being an ‘official Footlight’.”

Freya, the new president of the Footlights, says that this appears to be the direction the society is heading in.

“I think at its heart it just makes it more inclusive and allows […] for a wider range of voices within [the Footlights]”. This proposal, however, raises pressing questions: have the Footlights reached a point where such radical change is necessary? And does the push for a wider range of voices reflect a desire to diversify, or a need to address concerns about the quality of its output?

The counterargument presented by James when I suggest it may be the latter – that the Footlights’ are just no longer producing mainstream stars at the rate they once did – is that this is a misconception. “There actually has been a lot more people coming from Footlights in recent years than people realise,” James tells me.

Freya echoes James, assuring me that “there are so many Footlights who have graduated recently who are really big,” though caveats that statement with the qualification that they’re often “famous in the comedy scene, but not necessarily in the mainstream.”

Both Freya and James cite Ania Magliano, a Girton alumna who graduated in 2019 after reading English. Magliano has emerged as one of the leading stars in contemporary British comedy, after appearing as one of five on series 20 of Taskmaster, which aired in autumn 2025, and even more recently as a permanent cast member on SNL UK. Despite Magliano’s relatively quick rise to fame since graduating, when recalling her own time at the Footlights to The Guardian, Magliano rather damningly critiqued the troupe as “at risk of producing a very samey, repetitive type of comedy” and stated that she hoped “things were changed for the better”.

Before 2018, the committee (members of the Footlights society) and the Footlights (those performing in shows) were one and the same. These two entities are now separate, although there is often overlap. The decision to do this was not immediate, and, as suggested by Magliano, outstanding: “By the time I

getting dimmer? comedy troupe, or if they were never there in the first place

was on the Footlights committee, there were lots of conversations that were well overdue happening about representation and diversity.” This concern is still held by many current students, despite it now being seven years since Magliano graduated. One student who used to be involved in script writing and sketch shows for the Footlights tells me that “there is a culture of recycling the same people over and over again”.

This discourages people from a wide range of backgrounds and levels of experience from getting involved, as they may feel as if they are “crashing an already existing culture”.

The decision to separate membership and committee in 2018 was presumably made as an attempt to remedy the nepotistic management tendencies.

Speaking candidly about his occasionally difficult time as president, however, James explains that this decision was not the panacea people thought it might be.

Lockdown soon followed, leaving unanswered questions about whether this system change had been successful. James tells me that after his time as president, he has “[come] to the conclusion that it very much isn’t working”. The creation of a Footlights ‘membership’ has created more issues than it has solved, according to James.

“People aren’t really doing the shows for the sake of doing the shows, they’re doing shows to try and get that membership.”

James adds that this “bizarre, nebulous membership” has posed a barrier to new students getting involved, simply because it is difficult to wrap your head around.

The alleged stellar reputation of the Footlights has posed difficulties for its recent members.

James recalls how two years ago, when directing the Footlights’ tour show for the Edinburgh fringe, he experienced a massive “culture shock”.

Performing to a sold-out show of “older people who were expecting Hugh Laurie, Mitchell and Webb, [and] Emma Thompson,” the audience were sorely disappointed with their performance and so they “had to rewrite the entire show to their sensibilities”. What this anecdote

proves, in James’s view, is that the Footlights are always going to be held to an impossibly high and arguably outdated standard. He adds, however, a silver lining: it gives thick skin to the students involved, something necessary for survival in the entertainment industry. “In other societies, you don’t get that criticism. And having that criticism makes you improve massively, and you’re [therefore] prepared for anything the

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era was marked by a relatively clear route from Oxbridge into mainstream media, a pathway that has largely disappeared. James highlights this overall positive change as the fundamental explanation for the society’s reduced visibility in mainstream entertainment. “We can’t deny that there was a bias towards Oxbridge students. […] They were getting TV shows immediately after graduating, which is obviously a crazy idea to think about now.”

Freya is also keen to highlight that mainstream media was “far more elitist in the past,” and that comedy is now saturated – shows that catapulted former Footlights to fame are no longer novel. “[Recent Footlights] are doing hilarious things.

They’re so entertaining, but people aren’t seeing them or accessing them in the same way because of the amount of media we have.”

So, perhaps the Footlights aren’t on a tragic Shakespearean t r a j e c t o r y.

Maybe they were never that funny, and were simply propelled by the entrenched Oxbridge elitism of the late 20th century; or maybe they are that funny, but are held to impossible standards that, realistically, a group of 20-year-olds juggling demanding degrees and developing frontal lobes are never going to meet. There’s no doubt it’s time to face the music and acknowledge the need for reform.

But, after all, walking out of a student comedy gig and complaining that your deaf cat could have done better stand-up is an essential part of the university experience. We only remember the funniest and now famous former Footlights, but as one student astutely put it: “I’m sure there were plenty of shit ones in 1995 too.”

Varsity Theatre reviewers described Mitchell and Webb’s first two man show as “the most obviously underrehearsed production ever”

industry throws at you.”

Digging through Varsity archives, it is clear that the success of previous members is not at all predictable from student opinion. Mitchell and Webb’s first two-man show in 1995 was not particularly well received. Varsity Theatre reviewers at the time described how “near disasters occurred in every scene,” describing the show as “the most obviously under-rehearsed production ever to appear on a Cambridge stage.” The polished, sharp comedy produced by former Footlights we see on TV comes after years of practice after graduation, and the hilarious lines in shows and movies they star in are often written by expert script writers – indeed, Peep Show was written by neither Mitchell nor Webb.

A comment on a whole-scale societal shift is unavoidable. The Footlights’ supposed golden

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Is politics going Rosalind Howell sits down to of politics and activism with UK leader and Green Party CEO

W

hen I ask if a Cambridge education prepared Harriet Lamb for her life as an activist, she screws up her face in confusion. I laugh off this frank rejection of my question, and the tension in the room melts away as I begin a wideranging conversation with the mind behind Fairtrade UK, the CEO of the Green Party of England and Wales, and alumna and honorary fellow of Trinity Hall.

After describing her work in India after university as integral to her development as an activist, Lamb reconsiders my question and reflects on the interplay between academia and activism.

“I switched [from English] and did social and political science in my final year,” she concedes.

“That did give me an opportunity to start to think about some of the ways in which politics works and how we can all play our part.”

Our focus moves from Cambridge to Costa Rica, where Lamb began her fight against inequality within the banana trade. “I went out to Costa Rica to do some research and to meet with the unions there, and they told me about how the use of chemicals […] on Latin American plantations had left thousands of people sterile.” While the bright yellow fruit is now synonymous with Fairtrade, it was a tough fight to get there. Lamb was “hooked on the politics of bananas” and eventually “bananas became as iconic a Fairtrade product as coffee” – one of her “big, iconic moves” was convincing Sainsbury’s to stock Fairtrade bananas: “However low your income was, if you were shopping in Sainsbury’s, you could buy Fairtrade bananas.”

As we move from her past in activism, to the future of the field, the passion in her voice is almost contagious. “You can have so much fun as part of the social movement for change.

I’ve got to recommend it!” she exclaims, grinning from ear to ear. “You’ll always be working with such lovely and committed people.” Lamb

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sees the individuality and creativity required to navigate career activism as imperative for social change. “You have got to forge that career yourself, and find the places where you can make the biggest difference.”

Lamb’s experience at Fairtrade is invaluable in her current role as CEO of the Green Party. Both projects were decried as unrealistic, but were met with widespread public embrace. She lets me in on her secret to success: timing. The important thing is creating a moment which can “catch the zeitgeist. You can create it, catch it, and then roll with it” she explains.

Lamb reckons that the frustration people feel with the current political milieu is one such moment which has led people to join the Greens “in their thousands”.

As their membership grows and opinions diversify, I wonder how the Greens will prevent schisms within the party.

Some of the openness Lamb displayed during our conversations about activism fades as we enter the thornier territory of party politics. Citing the party leader Zack Polanski, she states “if you agree with 7 out of 10 of our policies, that’s great; if you agree with 10 out of 10 that’s a bit weird.” It is the vision that matters, not the minutiae of policies. “I do think where the Left is united is that we’ve absolutely got to beat the rise of Reform,” she adds with urgency.

The Green Party and Reform UK are superficially similar: populist parties which have shaken up the “dusty old parties,” and the political status quo. However, they lie on opposite sides of the political aisle. I’m curious what Lamb makes of the label ‘populist’, given its frequent association with right-wing politics. “People can get themselves tied up in knots about ‘What does

One of her “big iconic moves” was convincing Sainsbury’s to stock Fairtrade bananas

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populism mean? ’” she reflects, but concludes that populism is not a uniquely right-wing phenomenon. “Populism should be about being able to reach out to the public more broadly” she explains, confidently adding that “eco-populism can absolutely do that on the Left”.

I question the longevity of this unity. We have seen how making lofty promises during an election can backfire as the party struggles to rise to the heights of their ambitions once in power.

Undeterred by my apprehensions, Lamb sees the scope of the Green Party’s ambitions as an advantage: “When you have a mandate from the public and they voted for you because of your bold politics, that can help steel you to resist the forces that will try to pull you back.” She contrasts this approach with the “very managerial view” put forth by the Labour Party. Lamb suggests that Labour’s current issues have stemmed from this, with the party becoming “even more managerial in power”.

We then move to some of the controversy surrounding proposed Green Party policies. For example, proportional representation has long been resisted due to the risk of opening the floodgates to extremists in Parliament. Lamb believes that ship has long sailed: “just look at the rise of Reform.” She also emphatically rejects the notion that wealthy people will be driven from the UK by wealth taxes. “I think most wealthy people want to live in a country that’s well run,” she explains, adding a blunt message to those who would not be willing to contribute to the country they claim to love: “Please go”. Lamb entertains more nuance while discussing national security, taking a pragmatic approach to the Green Party’s pacifist stance. It is her view that we can’t achieve national security “if we can’t even operate our own army or our own armed forces without reliance on the US”. She also emphasises the importance of conflict mitigation by “tackling

You’ve got to forge that career yourself, and find the places where you can make the biggest difference

bananas? discuss the future former Fairtrade Harriet Lamb the root causes of much of the global insecurity,” citing fuel, food and climate insecurity as key factors in current conflicts.

Lamb finds celebrating small victories along the way keeps the party motivated to achieve their goals. “We really welcome all those many, many people who chip in […] so that the Greens can go on being a force for change here and now, while also building up towards winning more MPs in the future.” Harriet Lamb is no stranger to winning seemingly impossible fights. If she could take the banana trade from a fringe issue to a global sustainability movement, who is to say that she can’t work similar magic with the Green Party, catapulting them to mainstream success?

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Ed Davey: Mary Anna Im speaks with the leader of the Liberal

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few days before the local elections, I stumble across a TikTok edit of Ed Davey to the viral SOPHIE song ‘VYZEE’ with the lyrics “We can stay here, or we could go up, up, up…”

‘We can stay here’ plays alongside clips of Keir Starmer doing the 6-7 motion, images of him looking awkward, and that infamous photo of him cosied up beside Mandelson. ‘Or we could go up, up, up…’ accompanies clips of Ed Davey – the perfect foil, feeding animals and campaigning with a beaming smile. This is not a niche political edit from an A-level politics student putting off their work; it was created and posted by the Liberal Democrats’ official TikTok account.

“One thing we [previously] failed to do was have a stronger social media presence to show our ideas and what we stand for,” Davey admits. So, the edits and leaning into internet culture are a bid to win the support of young people – who would have guessed? I speak with Davey just after he’s delivered a talk at the Union which, unsurprisingly, attracted an older crowd.

He assures me his party is working to change this: “I think as we improve our social media presence […] young people will be more attracted to what we say, partly because it’s very principled, and partly because it’s more pragmatic and realistic.” Although Davey’s ambition to expand the party’s social media presence is

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clearly strategic, it occasionally comes across as rather haphazard. Furthermore, given he himself admitted a lack of social media fluency to The Guardian – “When I said I’m leader of the Rizz Dems, I didn’t quite know what I meant” – questions about whether his stunts undermine his credibility naturally arise.

Davey’s persona has always been the reasonable, centrist dad with a kooky affinity for bungee jumping, tumbling off paddle boards, and watersliding – and that’s yet to mention hobby-horsing. To cement this persona into the public imagination, Davey waltzed onto the stage at the Lib Dem spring conference to the tune of ‘Daddy Cool’ by Boney M. The video posted on the party’s official TikTok – which uncannily resembles David Brent’s motivational speech scene in The Office – is captioned ‘(Centrist) Daddy Cool’. Davey’s quirkiness was certainly an effective tool in the 2024 general election, winning the Lib Dems 72 seats – the biggest success for the party in just over a century. The Lib Dems have somewhat carried this momentum forward in the local elections, gaining 155 council seats.

But it doesn’t take a political analyst to spot that this number is dwarfed by the 1,451 seats gained by Reform UK. Compared to the rhetoric of Farage, when Davey lists the things his party stands for – “very pro-European, very strong on the environment, belief in civil liberties, […] sorting out NHS and care” – to me, at least, they are not remotely extreme.

And perhaps because

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these views are not conducive to the kind of attention-grabbing social media clips that populists like Farage have mastered, Davey has had to lean into the wacky stunts and (verging on ‘brain-rot’) memes.

Two years on from the general election, however, the political landscape has changed; not least because of the supercharged growth of Reform UK. When the next general election rolls around, there will be a new generation of voters aged 16-21 who were ineligible to vote in 2024. We know that young people are moving towards the Green Party in huge numbers: 72 ‘young Greens’ were elected into 74 council seats. While the Lib Dems have enjoyed success in the recent local elections, they cannot afford to be complacent – and, frankly, social media stunts are not enough to win the affection of young voters.

Davey, however, warns that this shift towards the Greens is somewhat alarming: “Under Zack Polanski, they’re taking the Green Party to the far left so they’re attracting people who used to believe in Corbynite labour politics, [which is] quite a left-wing position.” We talk about why this shift has been so rapid; however, Davey’s diagnosis comes across as slightly patronising. “Some will have understood that and supported it. Other people may have gone a l o n g with more of a vibe and not quite realised what they’re signing up to.”

The Lib Dems will be far more powerful than people are thinking

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‘The Lib Dems are going to stop Reform’ Democrats about their plans to win over young people The same is true for Reform voters, Davey would argue. With the Greens gaining significant traction, that’s certainly a lot of people “not quite realis[ing]” what they’re signing up to.

Perhaps some people have passively “gone along” – but surely this is also a signal of people’s distrust of main party politics. There is certainly something to be said for Polanski’s ability to capitalise on young voters’ distrust. Davey tells me that the challenge of rebuilding trust in politics is “one of the most important things facing our country.” He adds: “Democracy is so viable but people at the extremes, particularly Nigel Farage, want people to think that politics can’t deliver. And that’s a very dangerous place for us to be: when extremists who are dangerous to our democracy play on those fears and that lack of trust.” But how can that trust be rebuilt by a party like the Lib Dems which has a chequered history of neglecting the interests of young people, typified by the breaking of their student loans promise back in 2010?

We talk about his time at university, where it ought not to go unnoted that he and his cohort paid virtually no tuition fees. To my surprise, politics was not at all on Davey’s radar at that time.

You might assume that while reading PPE at Oxford, he was a union hack; however, he was not involved in a single political society.

There’s a slight irony in an Oxford-educated politician sitting in front of me at the Cambridge Union explaining that “life isn’t just about exams and grades”.

When Davey begins to reminisce on his university days, his face lights up: “I’ve got so many friends from my university days and they have helped me keep sane and healthy.” It is these lasting bonds and memories from beyond the curriculum that have HOUSE OF COMMONS CC HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/3.0/ ▶

shaped his advocacy for a “rounded education”.

He adds: “[when] more children and young people are able to do sports, arts, crafts and music […]

people with different skills shine. I think that’s a great way to bring different people together.”

I get the impression that Davey is motivated by genuine conviction and one that stems from personal life experiences. As a young carer for his terminally ill mother as a teenager, and now a carer for his disabled teenage son, improving the care system has always been a priority. Now, Davey tells me that combatting the threat of the far right is his party’s primary concern.

“The Liberal Democrats are going to stop Reform and the Tories because we can [persuade] that one-nation, traditional liberal Conservative voter who is appalled by Kemi Badenoch’s shift to the right and appalled by Nigel Farage.”

Davey is certainly confident that his party’s growth trajectory is positive.

“Through the way I lead, the Lib Dems will be far more powerful than people are t h i n k i n g .”

Whether the endearing ‘centrist dad’ persona will be overshadowed by other political characters or withstand the test of the next general election is an entirely different matter, however. I suppose only time will tell if we’ll “stay here,” or “go up, up, up”.

Spotlighting student designers

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s a city so steeped in traditions, fashion in Cambridge is often associated with college gowns at formal dinners and blacktie dresses for May Balls. Attempting to balance creative pursuits with a university degree can sometimes seem like a perilous task. Fashion design, in particular, can prove difficult to break into. For some aspiring fashion designers in Cambridge, this is why it feels especially important to create space for garments that speak through identity, background, inheritance and experimentation. We sat down with designers studying at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts (CSVPA) to better understand the processes of young artists working in this historical city.

Jessica Hammond For Jessica Hammond, a politics finalist at Murray Edwards College and founder of ‘Zwuanli’, fashion is rooted in movement. Inspired by her Tanzanian heritage and British upbringing, her wearable art moves between memory, material experimentation and cultural fragmentation. When asked to describe ‘Zwuanli’ in one word, Jess chooses “rhizomatic”.

The term, she explains, comes originally from gardening, but has since been taken up in sociology and political theory. Rather than growing upwards like a tree, a rhizome grows horizontally, without a single centre. “If you remove a part, the whole thing just regrows”. Her garments work in a similar way: moulded and remoulded, broken and re-formed, allowed to continue growing. Her fashion is thus circular rather than linear.

That concept also reflects her own upbringing.

Born in London, Jess moved with her family to South Africa, Malawi and Nigeria, before eventually returning to the English countryside. “It’s been an open journey,” she says, one that has shaped how she thinks and creates. Her biodegradable bodices are made through a process that is both intimate and physical. Laughing, she says, “I literally cook the garments in the kitchen.” She melts down the low-melting-point biodegradable material before stringing it directly onto the body, cutting and casting as she goes. Every line on the final garment therefore marks a point of contact.

For Jess, this turns the garment into a record of collaboration. The process requires learning what parts of the body the wearer wants to show or hide, and “sometimes I see freckles they’ve probably forgotten they have,” she adds. The finished piece becomes an accumulation of shared time, memory and conversation. This sense of connection became especially significant during Jess’s exhibition in Tanzania. She describes going there partly to understand her mother better. In Moshi, in the rural Kilimanjaro region, she found herself working in a kitchen with a model she had never met, across a complete language barrier. Yet through that process, real friendships formed. There was “laughter and understanding that didn’t need a shared language”.

That experience brought her closer to questions of inheritance and loss. Her mother is Tanzanian, but “I don’t know my mother’s tongue,” she says, “and that broke my heart a little.” For her, this is at the centre of her practice: “what gets carried across fragmentation and what gets lost in migration and exile.”

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Dhruv Tank Dhruv Tank, a second-year fashion design student at CSVPA with a parallel interest in theology, also approaches fashion as a way of carrying inheritance. His work is “bold, silk-led and deliberately garish,” drawing on Hindu thought while paying homage to Indian heritage through print, fabric and form.

Dhruv’s interest in fashion began in his childhood. His mother introduced him to the sewing machine when he was young, and he started by making small things: teddy bears, beanbags, and eventually clothes for people he loved. “When I was eight, I made a pair of trousers,” he recalls, laughing. Made from a Ben 10 bedspread and stitched together with pyjama bottoms, they were, by his own admission, a “very loose attempt” at trousers – but he still has them.

Though his mother owns an accountancy firm, she is “very crafty” and has always pushed him and his sister towards creative fields.

One of Dhruv’s most striking looks is a silk piece with a sculptural headpiece made entirely from recycled silk cocoons. Usually used in Korean beauty for exfoliation, the 5,000 cocoons were due to be discarded before he separated, recycled and reused them. The dress itself is made from two vintage saris belonging to his grandmother. Each sari is around seven metres of handwoven silk, and the two, he says, “matched perfectly”.

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The look stages a conversation between raw and finished silk: the cocoons in the headpiece and the sari silk draped across the body. Dhruv deliberately kept the fabric continuous, almost like a sari, instead of cutting it into a conventional pattern. Conceptually, the piece asks where silk comes from. After conducting a survey, he found that many people did not know about the insects behind silk production. The work also considers colonisation and the movement of Indian textile traditions into the UK. Theology deepens this symbolism. Drawing on Hindu thought, Dhruv became interested in the four sources of authority and wisdom, especially the importance of texts that are spoken and listened to rather than only written down. In the West, he observes, written words often carry a particular “credence”. By contrast, the four ear-like forms in his garment appear to converse with each other, exchanging knowledge and wisdom. The piece is closely tied to his religious identity and cultural background, and he wanted to place “as much meaning and nuance into it as possible”.

As a vegetarian, Dhruv is often asked about his use of silk and leather. He acknowledges the ethical difficulty, especially because silkworms are killed in silk production. But for him, the issue is also environmental. Synthetic alternatives are often derived from crude oil and can be more harmful to the planet. The question, then, is one of conscious making. One carefully made leather jacket, he argues, has a very different impact compared to a fast-fashion brand producing thousands of leather-like garments. “The cost of death and the environmental impact, are always things I have to weigh.”

Lily Crosbie Lily studies art history at Lucy Cavendish College, and sells handmade jewellery online across the country, and to students here in Cambridge.

Her designs are inspired by historical jewellery, and often incorporate repurposed pieces and fragments of broken treasures. Her chainmailmaking abilities are also seriously impressive.

As an art history student, Lily has always been interested in fashion history, and she tells me her favourite thing about jewellery is “the way that jewellery fashions basically haven’t changed since Ancient Rome.

Even in the Fitzwilliam Museum, they have some Ancient Roman signet rings and some earrings, and they kind of look like stuff that people are making and selling today.” And the techniques jewellery makers used haven’t even changed that much either – much like Lily, the Ancient Romans were hand-making all of their jewellery. Lily tells me that a big part of the appeal of the history of fashion design is that “I love that I’m using the same techniques as the Ancient Romans!”

It may seem like a daunting task to get into designing jewellery while completing a degree at Cambridge, and Lily explains that she started

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making jewellery before coming to university, and would sell her work in a local gallery in Brighton.

This is what inspired her to start selling in Cambridge, from which she’s found a large demographic of people interested in her work, noting: “It’s great to be able to see stuff I’ve made when I’m out around town.”

Lily tells me about her jewellery-making process, explaining that she will “usually stay up very late at night and spread all my beads and everything out on my bed. I’ll put on an album, so when I’m making things I get so locked in, I don’t check my phone for hours.” As she shows me the most recent pieces she’s made, she remembers that she was listening to Rebel by EsDeeKid on repeat while making them. For Lily, music is reflected in her creative work: “whatever I’m listening to or what I’m watching when I’m making things, the craft gets imbued with it. [...] I can remember exactly what I was listening to when I was making it.”

What strikes me most in our conversation is Lily’s explanation of how unusual the sensation of touching chainmail is. She notices that “the first time touching chainmail is so exciting because it’s such a weird texture, it moves in all directions. It’s like fabric.”

I love that I’m using the same technique as the Ancient Romans!

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She goes on to explain her approach to creating ideas, which involves scavenging unique charms and pieces: “I like to find something, like a piece that’s broken or detached from something, and then I’ll build the jewellery around it. For example, I’ve made pieces out of broken jewellery I got from my grandma – I like to repurpose a lot.” She also shows me how her interests influence the way she puts different pieces together, “I’ve got a piece made from a charm I got in Prague, with the Infant Christ of Prague on it, and I found I had all of these other charms which felt relevant, with fleur-de-lis, crosses, and stuff.”

It seems incredibly impressive to me that Lily is able to balance all of this creative work with a degree. She points out that “the university does have a good creative community,” mentioning that she would never have had the opportunity to sell at a market if it were not for a student-run zine. Although Cambridge does not offer an art degree, Lily does not view this as a disadvantage. On the contrary, she believes it makes Cambridge’s art scene moreinclusive: “I think if there was an art degree at Cambridge, the art scene would exclusive.”

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Erika Sereno Erika studies at CSVPA, and creates designs inspired by her Spanish heritage, as well as bespoke tailoring with her company Serene. Her designs are tailored, elegant, and timeless, with stories stitched into every seam.

Serene was created with the intention of creating bespoke garments in conversation with customers, drawing on their individual fashion interests to create pieces separate from anything you’d find in a shop. Erika explains that she is inspired by the style of her grandmother: “I look in my wardrobe, but I have so many pieces from my grandma.

And I think, now I have plenty of garments, but in the future, could I give these garments to my own daughter?” This leads her to think about durability in everything she creates, an incredibly important factor in creating sustainable fashion. And in the creation of a bespoke garment, Erika wants to get to know the customer she’s designing for.

Could I give these garments to my own daughter?

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Erika’s designs are built on her varied history of creative experiences. During the pandemic, her grandmother inspired her to buy a sewing machine while she was studying in Spain. After working with plenty of designers, studying at CSVPA, where she tells me she was pushed to be her very best. She notes how much she has learned from her teachers, remembering when she started making the decadent gold jewellery for Heredara out of clay “which was quite difficult because it can break – my teacher would test it for me, and one day she threw it and it didn’t break. That was when I learned how to do it. It’s a process.”

Together, these designers show that fashion in Cambridge is not confined to May Balls or formal dinners; it can be an array of wearable art, shaped by history, migration, theology, heritage, and personal narratives. Whether through Jess’s biodegradable bodices, Dhruv’s silk dialogues, Lily’s repurposed treasures, or Erika’s lasting garments, each designer reminds us that what we wear can tell stories of its own. In a city often defined by tradition, their work shows that fashion is also a site of experimentation for intimacy, memories and connections with our surroundings.

~ Joanne Yau & Flossie Bullion Photographer: Amika Piplapure & Clio Sze Shoot Co-ordinator: Paige Griffiths Models: Elizabeth Omondi, Aishwarya Khadka, Dara Osinowo, Aaliyah Haque, Ismene Forsyth

▲ ERIKA BUNJEVAC

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The reviewers: reviewed Eleanor Baldwin thinks everyone’s a critic

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heatre is fleeting. A performance lives on stage for merely a few hours, surviving beyond that through our dialogue and memory only.

The reviewer takes a front-row seat in this ephemeral space, crafting an immediate response in the hours after leaving the theatre.

Historically, critics held a powerful gatekeeping role: a handful of broadsheet reviews could determine a production’s commercial fate, either extending or curtailing its run. In a digital age where anyone can publish their opinion instantly, this raises the pressing question: what is the role of the theatre critic today?

Part of the difficulty lies in the nature of reviewing itself. Theatre reviews are often written in the narrow window between the falling of the curtain and the following morning’s publication. This overnight response relies on quick first impressions, posing the question of this initial reaction’s validity – were we ‘wrong’ the first time around? Last summer, I watched an outdoor production of Twelfth Night outside Lichfield Cathedral. Thinking it to have been a delightful iteration of Shakespeare’s renowned farce, I worried that the cathedral’s stunning backdrop, bathed in the setting sun, had romanticised something otherwise mediocre. Yet, when I saw a different production at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in January, I was reminded of what had first entranced me. My first response remained the same, and I loved the play all the more the second time around. Perhaps, then, the issue is not that first impressions are inherently flawed, but that we ask them to stand as definitive final judgements.

The digital age has only complicated this demand further. With blogs, social media, and a wealth of public platforms, you can scroll through hundreds of opinions without ever leaving your bed. The conversation is only getting bigger, and the authority once concentrated in the hands of professional critics has diffused into the crowd. Audiences are now active participants in criticism, rather than passive recipients, generating a constant stream of reaction that sits alongside, and often competes with, traditional reviews. This democratisation is not without value. Theatre has never been a monolithic art form but encompasses everything from major commercial spectacle to small-scale experimentation. It depends on a plurality of perspectives to remain alive. A wider critical landscape allows for voices historically excluded from broadsheet culture to shape the conversation, broadening its reach and relevance. We are all contributors to the cultural conversation that surrounds the narratives posed on stage.

Interpretation, after all, belongs to the beholder, a vision inflected by personal experience, taste, and cultural context.

Yet, this expansion comes at a cost. The sheer volume of commentary can create an echo chamber where judgement is driven by immediacy and algorithmic

favour. The question is no longer simply who can speak, but whose voice is heard above all the noise; and on what grounds we choose to trust it. Media outlets are under pressure to generate clicks, and long-form reviewers struggle to compete with content that is faster and more instantly gratifying. Algorithms have eroded the authority of the salaried expert, privileging immediacy over reflection, and spotlighting responses which are easily digestible at a glance. It is easy to find yourself pulled into a stream of compressed, short-form reviews that distill complex works into a minute of reaction or edited clickbait. Lost in this process is detail and the space for ambiguity, contradiction and sustained thought. The trend risks flattening art into a series of quick and dirty consumable fragments.

The demand for cultural commentary has not diminished; if anything, it has intensified. What has changed is not the appetite for judgement, but the conditions under which it is formed and consumed. As the movie reviewer Pauline Kael once observed: “the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising”. That independence still matters, perhaps now more than ever. The role of the critic is shifting, subtly but decisively, from the delivery of definitive judgements to offering perspective and reaction in a saturated and fast-moving context. Traditional criticism is changing shape, but the reviewer still has a front-row seat.

Varsity’s favourite productions of 2026 Private Lives

Bringing 1930s glamour to the ADC, Clementine Rice’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Private Lives certainly proved a highlight of this year’s Cambridge student theatre. Encapsulating the most theatrical and concealed characteristics of a relentless yet enticing love, Kate Woodman and Leo Morad bring to life Amanda and Elyot’s charismatic, irresistible chemistry, while skilful directorial decisions allowed moments for these individual actors’ talents to radiate throughout. Perhaps what this play does so masterfully, is speak to our guilty pleasures and the facades of unvanquished love that we so frequently prescribe to. Teeming with wit, comedy and sensitivity, Private Lives clearly proved a public success.

– LUCY FARMER

The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is one of my favourite stories. This production perfectly captured

▲ FLORENCE GIBSON

the essence of everything I love about it.

From the flapper dances and sparkling dresses to the bold lighting and smooth New York accents, every aspect blared with the unashamed charisma of the Jazz Age. Lost in their own wealth and exuberance, joyful moments of self-indulgence and eccentricity were juxtaposed with a romantic longing which makes this story endlessly relevant, even to us today.

This play gave actors the chance to breathe new life into some of the most loved characters in the literary canon, and did so wonderfully!

– ELLA HARDY

A Streetcar Named Desire A Streetcar Named Desire is encompassed by tension, psychological complexity, and its sultry New Orleans surroundings. Directed by Bella Ofo, the actors in the ADC’s production brought Williams’ fascinating characters to life. In particular, Coyle’s enamouring southern accent and intricate rendition of Blanche’s trauma swept me back to the National Theatre production with Gillian Anderson. The actors playing Mitch and Stella, Lauren Akinluyi and Jacob Mellor, captured the essence of their characters – Mellor’s balancing act between aggression and Mitch’s awkward masculinity were exquisitely expressed, and Akinluyi’s cry to Blanche brought tears to my eyes. Without a doubt, a fivestar production with incredible performers.

– NIKITA VAJRALA

Noises Off Staged on an incredible rotating set, Noises Off was a side-splitting iteration of Michael Frayn’s formidable farce. Amid the fiasco’s synchronised timing and carefully rehearsed movement, the cast embodied their characters perfectly. Each actor moved seamlessly through the dysfunctional drama, pulling the audience through their emotional whiplash with admirable comedic timing. The stage crew should be equally highly commended, coordinating the complex details of the slapstick anarchy. As a farce within a farce, this play delightfully demolished the fourth wall, guaranteeing laughter from its audience.

It truly was the best show I have seen in Cambridge to date.

– ELEANOR BALDWIN

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All of Cambridge is a stage

Lucy Farmer looks back on student theatre’s most creative stage spaces and innovative scenery

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the audience’s ears through a live recording from an offstage studio, such as in the Footlights’ 2025 pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. In other productions, musical accompaniment has quite literally taken centre stage, as in the ADC’s most recent offering Medea, positioning the band upstage amid the dramatic action.

The ADC’s stage has been frequently refashioned and moulded to suit different produc-

of Amanda and Elyot’s twinned honeymoons.

Housing a wide variety of technically ambitious plays, the ADC remains an unparalleled space to accommodate the elaborate creativity of student theatre.

Even so, the ADC represents just one drop in a vast ocean of per- formance spaces available in Cambridge. The Corpus Playroom has become a vibrant host of productions, ranging from emotive pieces such as A Breakfast of Eels, to candid comedies such as Stags and Hens.

Its intimate audience proximity allows for confrontational yet poignant dramatic effect, which has been masterfully capitalised on by many directors and technical teams this year. The use of the aisle as an entrance point was well mastered by my own fresher’s play DNA,, adding to the suspenseful murder narrative at the production’s core. Having a door onstage as an exit/entrance vessel can prove clumsy and problematic in the Playroom, however, when executed well, it can add to the surprise and chaos of certain plays. This was especially well done in Stags and Hens, Hens with the

▲ FLORENCE GIBSON

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hether it be an impressively detailed set, or the innovative use of stage space, Cambridge student theatre is uniquely rich in its breadth of performance spaces, and this year has certainly shown that. Student directors and technical teams have increasingly been treating performance environments as not only the backdrop, but a part of their dramaturgy.

This is evident in the rising use of unconventional spaces, such as the chapel; staging Macbeth, Hamlet Hamlet, and Measure for Measure, Measure, these reverent spaces are perfectly suited to tackling the ambitious themes of religion and power deep-set within these iconic Shakespearean plays.

Performance spaces look set to only continue in their variety – with the advent of Easter term and (hopefully) better weather, May Week will showcase a host of different plays staged outside.

One thing is for sure: this year’s productions have certainly pushed technical boundaries to their limit.

Even the use of the stage at one of the most renowned performance spaces for student theatre in Cambridge, the ADC, has become increasingly ambitious and technically evolving.

The Great Gatsby comes to mind here, with its life-sized pool fastened to the edge of the stage. The pool is arguably one of the most iconic symbols and settings in the novel – a marker of artificial wealth and the pivotal location of Gatsby’s tragic demise – so the incoming audience might have been left wondering just how the production would pull this off. Yet, as the stage became covered in an aquamarine wash and we saw Eddie Luchmun’s Gatsby roll off into this prop pool (in what seemed like a risky stunt), it was clear that the ADC’s The Great Gatsby appreciated the importance of this quintessential prop. Also featured in Gatsby, the rising use of a live band in theatre brings with it new technical challenges and endeavours. Some productions ensure that music greets

❝ tions on an even larger scale, demonstrating the brilliance of this adaptable space and the creative support of the staff. Little Women saw the introduction of a double-tiered platform, which was used to support the March house structure created on stage. Symbolising a creative safe space for Jo, cascading backdrops of parchment and suspended book pages helped cultivate the play’s sphere of female literary creation. Boundaries were equally created on stage in Private Lives Lives, recreating a swanky hotel suite with 1930s inspired checkerboard flooring. Patio door structures were rolled on stage, with a rope and two identically mirrored balcony spaces set up, all building up to the comic, inevitable reveal

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The stage became covered in an aquamarine wash use of the door for a toilet cubicle, concealing the drunken pursuits of characters. Pembroke New Cellars likewise proves an adaptable and intimate space, staging plays such as Ringing which was able to split the performance area into four quadrants to create the illusion of differing locations connected by the smartphone.

It is clear that student creativity has thrived in adapting different environments for the stage.

Here’s to the next year of transformative spatial adaptation!

Lights, camera, Cambridge Jess Gotterson asks Varsity’s writers for the onscreen media that best captures their time in Cambridge

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dults, an FX comedy series about five friends in their 20s living together for the first time while fumbling through the early stages of adulthood, instantly springs to my mind. Though this show will leave you in stitches, it simultaneously manages to address the serious anxieties of people our age. Who here hasn’t been forced into the sudden realisation that some people from their past are blatantly awful, like Kyle, an old high-school acquaintance who makes the national news for sexual harassment. Severely intoxicated, the group try fixing their broken water heater in episode one – a particularly relatable situation that once involved too much wine after a formal and us morphing into emergency plumbers to unblock our clogged toilet (more by luck than skill). Then there’s Billie, who develops rectal bleeding from stressing over her job; as much as I’d like to think that this would never happen to me, it could, especially with the kind of high-pressure environment that Cambridge cultivates. I also can’t pretend that dropping an AirTag into an attractive man’s bag isn’t exactly the kind of unhinged thing me and my friends would do… As housemates, they later host their first ‘proper’ dinner party, where the chicken turns out to be raw, much like that time in first-year we all attempted Christmas dinner in a gyp. When the group finally decide to trawl through their backlog of mail, they realise Paul Baker’s visa is expiring – eerily similar to the moment I missed a supervision after neglecting my Outlook inbox for too long. The friendships which see these newly turned adults navigate their messy lives, everyone figuring things out together, are exactly what my time in Cambridge has been all about.

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n the loosest sense of the word, the ‘film’ that defines my time at uni is none other than John Mulaney’s Netflix standup special Kid Gorgeous. With his signature dapper look and classic old-timey cadence, Mulaney is (arguably) at his peak as he prances around the stage lamenting “the worst financial decision [he] ever made”: going to university. Now, I don’t personally feel this way (yet* – I am an MMLer!), but in the wake of my firstyear exams, something about his comedy resonated. Whether that was simply because my work was done and I could binge-watch to my heart’s content, or because the unserious seriousness of uni – summed up as he jokes “I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to read Jane Austen, and then I didn’t” – had finally become clear to me.

I loved Cambridge, and I hoped I’d done well in my exams, but I was also just a first year and they literally didn’t matter – and now I was eating pesto pasta in bed in the middle of the day while my flatmates continued to work their asses off.

It was legitimately one of the best weeks of my life, Schadenfreude epitomised, and after eight months of imposter syndrome I could finally rest knowing I’d done enough to make myself proud. Uncovering the treasure trove that is Mulaney’s comedy was simply the cherry on top.

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very unseasonable choice, but Love Actually has frequently provided solace to me when Cambridge has got too tough. Let the record show that I’m a longstanding fan of this film (yes, I’m aware it’s aged quite poorly), but I got a new perspective on it watching it with my college wife at the end of our first Michaelmas. Cambridge was still so new to us, and I was still figuring out who I really wanted to ‘be’ in my time here, but getting to share what is such a Christmas staple for my family with a new friend reassured me for the first time that I might eventually feel at home here. As someone who had always been a diehard supporter of the Hugh Grant/Martine McCutcheon storyline, discovering that some people watch Love Actually for the mess that is Andrew Lincoln pining after Keira Knightley was… eye-opening. It was the perfect way to round off my first eight weeks in Cambridge, and I’m sure next year, when both my college wives have abandoned me for their respective years abroad, I’ll find myself putting it on again, trying to recall the magic it carried in first year.

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Holly Sahota

he day after submitting my dissertation, I rewatched (for approximately the millionth time) Mary Poppins, featuring the national treasure – that is, Julie Andrews. As a child, this was the movie that made me love movies. There was a behind-the-scenes documentary on the 45th anniversary DVD, detailing every technique pioneered and perfected to create this entrancing urban fairytale.

I watched it on a loop, enthralled by the artistry of this brilliant, dedicated team. I remember every detail every time I watch the movie: the tiny pinholes in the matte paintings, creating the flickering lights of a smokey London twilight; characters flying on wires; stop-motion animated toy soldiers marching into the toybox. It reminded me, in my semi-delirious state, that to me film is a labour of love, just like the time we spend in Cambridge. Film is teamwork, the shared labour of a thousand pairs of hands, every frame the product of loving, human hard work and imagination; our degrees are too, to some extent, the product of this same shared labour and love from the friends who surround us. They are the ones that get us through the stresses of exam term. Light refracts through the eyes of love: this is the real ‘movie magic’, and it’s utter joy.

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he first film that comes to mind is one of the most influential of my adolescent years: Educating Rita. Originally a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell, it follows protagonist Susan (‘Rita’) White, a working-class Liverpudlian hairdresser who enrols in an Open University literature course to broaden her horizons. Rita is an endlessly endearing, incredibly powerful and spirited character, with her 80s perm and clacking heels that sound over the university grounds as she navigates her way to the cynical, alcoholic office of Frank Bryant. Although from two very different classes, upbringings and worlds, their professional relationship of mentor-student grows into a heart-warming friendship that leaves you at once struck with warmth and an enduring melancholy. One scene feels particularly poignant now: Rita is in a pub and she feels alone, even while surrounded by her friends and family, when she describes a distinct feeling of inadequacy, not in herself, but in her circumstances.

A song begins to play on the radio and the whole pub joins in until Rita notices: “‘when I turned around, me mother had stopped singin’, and she was cryin’.

I said, ‘Why are you cryin’, Mother? ’ And she said, ‘There must be better songs to sing than this.’ And I thought, yeah – that’s what I’m trying to do, isn’t it? Sing a better song’”. We are all at university for a reason, and that reason is summed up well in this moment of glaring truth, that we want for more; more discovery, more freedom, more passion, more knowledge; to sing a better song. When the credits roll, a question emerges: what song will you sing?

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Jen Shaf toe

ne of my friends bought a cheap projector back in Freshers’ Week and we would watch films on it in big groups, sprawled around his room. A lot of our conversations at dinner involved wrangling over what to watch next; while sitting beneath the vaulted roof of Peterhouse’s dining hall, I advocated for Star Wars’ political thriller Andor. I already loved the show, and this was a chance to share it with my friends. It’s an intense production, filled with subtle dangers and chaotic, violent resolution.

On a projector, surrounded by my friends, this tension and release burnt off the screen. It was fun to watch their faces through every escalating moment of each episode. There is something deeply affirming about sharing something you love with the new people you have come to love. Sometimes, when you rewatch a film, you catch things you hadn’t noticed before. I think you can also notice things in the person you’re sharing it with, if you watch closely enough..

If the area of the outside square is 100cm², what is the area of the inside square?

What percentage of respondents successfully solved this?

The year in film, acc Dylan Ingram & Georgia Gooding interview Cambridge professors to

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he last year has been great for movies, from high-concept science fiction in Project Hail Mary to the deep cultural implications of The Secret Agent and Sinners.

But what did the experts think?

We sat down with four Cambridge academics to discuss films related to their research.

▲ LYRA BROWNING & AISHA AZIZUL

The Secret Agent: Dylan Ingram The Secret Agent is a Brazilian political thriller nominated for Best Picture earlier this year at the Oscars. Set in Recife in the 1970s, under the military dictatorship, it follows researcher Armando as he evades two hitmen and tries to maintain a relationship with his Jaws-obsessed son. I spoke with Professor Maite Conde, who has written on early Brazilian cinema and modernity. She also hosted Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho in Cambridge in 2017, where he shared his work on his 2019 Pictures of Ghosts and gave an interview to Varsity.

I start by asking about the political background of the film, which lurks under the surface like a shark threatening to strike. The Secret Agent is set during Brazil’s military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964–1985, but it was written during the far-right authoritarian Bolsonaro

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regime, which styled itself on that dictatorship.

Conde tells me that in Brazil crimes committed by the dictatorship weren’t prosecuted, which resulted in a kind of cultural forgetting of what it felt like. Filho, in this film and in his previous work Bacurau, aims to remember the period, and the film itself is invested with different kinds of memory: urban legend, archival material, and family ties. This strange memory results in a film that is surreal and hard to parse for those not in the know.

Under the dictatorship itself, Conde describes the “weirdness” of a society held between a paranoia-inducing authoritarian government and a surprisingly playful, thriving film industry. The only film to challenge Jaws at the Brazilian box office in the period was 1976’s Dona Flore And Her Two Husbands, a sexual comedy about a woman who remarries after her husband dies, and then imagines having sex with both husbands at once. The poster features her in bed with the two men. Conde said the least censored films were the most sexual ones: there was a surface-level liberal, consumer culture alongside deep, repressive forces. This might be represented best in the film when the ‘hairy leg’, a real urban legend invented by the press to report on police brutality, beats up gay men cruising at the beach. This moment is strange and gory and funny, but underscores a repeated pattern of conflict between a free culture and a corrupt, authoritarian state that feels so unique to the film’s texture.

If you liked The Secret Agent, Conde recommends Filho’s earlier Bacurau and 2002’s beloved City of God for other depictions of the military dictatorship.

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the film’s unreality begins and ends with its inclusion of vampires. I sat down with Dr Ali Meghji, a professor of postcolonial sociology at Sidney, to investigate whether Sinners really walks the walk.

I start by asking Meghji about the film’s tackling of ‘myths’ surrounding this era of history – a concept addressed by the main characters, Smoke and Stack (Michael B Jordan), who attempt to quash their cousin Sammie’s (Miles Caton) fantasies about the salvation that awaits Black people in the north without the Jim Crow laws. They advise him against believing everything he hears, stressing that Chicago is just “Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations”. Meghji confirms this reality, describing the unofficial segregation that plagued the city’s housing and education systems. The twins learned this truth the hard way, having left their Mississippi hometown in pursuit of a better life up north. This nonlinear trajectory – Smoke and Stack’s ‘escape’ leading them right back to where they started – particularly struck Meghji. The Great Migration, he explains, is largely understood without nuance; it was not a singular, one-directional movement from the south to the north, but rather it encompassed movement within the south and, prominently, from the north back to the south. There was “no one ‘Great Migration’ [...] just an ongoing

Sinners is a celebration of AfricanAmerican culture

Sinners: Georgia Gooding Coming off a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations, it’s safe to say that Sinners has received a fair amount of praise. Francis Ford Coppola himself raved about the film, applauding its ability to invite him into a life “he could never know any other way”. This rings true – with me, at least. Sinners sheds a light on the ambiguous realities of life as a Black person in the Jim Crow-era US, and as an average viewer, the film appeared to do a great job of correcting misperceptions about the Black experience at the time. I was left wondering, however, whether

Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

▲ LYRA BROWNING & AISHA AZIZUL

ording to the experts get their takes on the three of biggest films of the year ▼ AISHA AZIZUL

practice of movement”.

As well as a tale of racial inequality, though, Sinners is a celebration of African-American culture – principally shown through Sammie’s supernatural musical ability which summons past and future members of the community to dance together. At a time where it was thought that society “was only white society” (Meghji notes, referencing W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘veil’ theory) and Jim Crow therefore refused Black people “the capacity to have social organisation”, Sinners presents a defiant truth: that there were, in fact, “pockets of space” for Black people. Sinners’ highlighting of Black-run shared spaces and religious organisations demonstrates that Black communities could “fulfil the criteria of a functioning society” – even if they did only exist because of segregation. It demonstrates that there was a life ‘beyond’ the veil – and that segregation is not the “only way to present a story of Black life in the states.”

It would be remiss to end this interview without touching on the film’s headline-grabbing vampires. Widely understood as a metaphor for cultural appropriation, the vampires feed not on blood, but on Black characters’ “stories”.

I was struck by the film’s emphasis on the selective nature of this thirst – summed up by Slim’s remark, “white folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people that make it.” And when I bring up this quote to Meghji, he asks: “how is that different from this movie?”

Films like this, he explains, are often embraced by audiences today, achieving critical acclaim, but their treatment of such media’s creators is a different story altogether. This year’s BAFTA Film Awards disappointingly played right into the film’s self-commentary, complimenting Sinners with 13 nominations, but neglecting to protect Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo (Slim) in their failure to edit out the N-word being shouted at them by an audience member with tourettes, despite other similar moments being cut. The connection makes itself: white institutions are seemingly all too happy to drink up the success of this Black-made film, but they draw the line at treating its makers with respect.

Overall, my conversation with Meghji highlighted how the film addresses areas of misconception among its viewers and characters alike – elucidating the sad truth about the illusion of escape from oppression, while also rejecting the idea that African-American people didn’t experience community in the same way

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that white people did. All of this to say: whether you loved, hated (which I doubt) or just haven’t seen Sinners, it’s hard not to respect its commitment to justly honouring the Black experience.

Project Hail Mary: Dylan Ingram Project Hail Mary is a science-fiction film about a desperate space mission in which Earth’s top scientists send Ryan Gosling to the distant star of Tau Ceti in an attempt to solve a world-ending crisis: the Sun getting dimmer.

It turns out there’s an alien microorganism, ‘astrophage’, living on the Sun and Tau Ceti harbours a natural predator, the microscopic ‘taumoeba’. Gosling’s Ryland Grace teams up with the adorable alien Rocky to collect a sample of the taumoeba, which they ship back home to feast on the astrophage and control its population.

Dr Justin Gerlach is a tutor and fellow at Peterhouse and an expert in conservation biology, ecology, and evolution – we begin our interview by discussing this attempt at biological control.

Gerlach has conducted extensive research on species interaction, discovery, and evolution-

NASA have considered using algae for fuel in space

ary history. When we talk about the biological control in the film, his first point is that it tends to go wrong! He tells me that most predators are not evolved to be specialists and typically eat a lot of different organisms.

When introduced to a new ecosystem, this flexibility means they end up eating things you don’t want them to. Maybe Rocky and Grace will have to deal with the disastrous consequences of their poorly thought-out ecology in Project Hail Mary 2.

A key plot point in the film is breeding the taumoeba to a stable population. Gerlach says that maintaining a healthy and sustainable breeding program for conservation can take ten to fifteen years. The film squeezes this into a couple of months, which makes sense for a film – even if it is almost three hours long. Even after that time investment, though, Gerlach stresses that the process of conservation itself might hurt the success of the organism’s population. The film addresses this idea in the most dramatic way possible, as the taumoeba escape captivity, and cause chaos on Grace’s ship.

The mysterious astrophage is a high-concept organism, able to use the light energy from the Sun to power its propulsion. I spoke to Professor Chris Howe, leader of the Howe Group, which pioneers research into photosynthesis. Howe who describes photosynthesis as a process “using light energy to strip electrons out of water”. Some bacteria, as well as plants, can photosynthesise, and when they do, they sometimes release excess electrons.

In the film, the scientists use the astrophage’s extreme interaction with light to power a longdistance spaceship. Howe’s research group were able to harness these electrons to generate enough electricity to power small-scale electronics like microprocessors. The scale of these circuits is limited, so powering a space ship is a pretty out-there idea, but Howe tells me that NASA have considered using algae to produce hydrogen for fuel in space or for use in waste management and food production.

He emphasises the fundamental importance of photosynthesis to life on Earth, calling its development the “most important event in the history of the Earth,” and this relationship between light and life is at the centre of Project Hail Mary’s conflict.

The key takeaway from my conversations with Howe and Gerlach was that the more science fiction tries to explain its high concepts, the less believable they become. All of these films are deeply researched and are heavily invested in, if not perfect accuracy, the stakes of their subject matter.

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The imperfect privilege of Cambridge sport Tristan Sykes explores whether Cambridge is as accessible in practice as it is in theory

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aking sport accessible to all in Cambridge has long been a principal focus of the University and its colleges in equal measure. The success of these initiatives has sparked debate among students who are concerned about a wider framework of issues surrounding accessibility and equality. While issues of accessibility with regard to Cambridge as an institution in general are undoubtedly unresolved, sport represents one of its most progressive achievements.

The foundation of this successful movement towards accessibility is college sport, providing access to a wide variety of competitive and recreational endeavours – often for free. The separation of sports into the collegiate system is of course crucial to this progress. The most notable example of this is rowing. Rowing is obscenely expensive in itself as a sport. A topquality shell for eight can cost well over £50,000 – yet, Cambridge’s top collegiate rowing clubs make such equipment, alongside telemetry (onwater sensor systems that measure data to allow the analysis of stroke, technique, power and efficiency), accessible to students who want to give the sport a go.

Given the financial investments and risks that colleges engage in, the opportunities supplied to students are an incredible privilege, with some colleges not even having membership fees. These opportunities can be further bolstered with college sports funding, which is not limited to those representing the University, and can be obtained for the pursuit of trying out new sports when finances may have proved a limiting factor.

College rowing is equally accessible in its emphasis on providing opportunities to students in spite of previous rowing experience – or sporting background in general. Taster sessions throughout the academic year ensure the sport can be accessed at any point in a student’s degree, while colleges will often have as

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many as four crews per gender to accommodate degrees of proficiency and involvement. Those not wishing to compete also have the opportunity for a more casual and leisurely approach to the sport. College rowing – and even rowing for the University – is not a restrictive system. It is common for the top rowing boats of Gonville and Caius and Lady Margaret Boat Club (two of the current top three in the open division of the May Bumps) to include those who had never rowed prior to their time at Cambridge.

The 2026 Boat Race saw Carys Earl represent the Cambridge women’s blue boat in the same vein. Bumps, rowing camps, and regattas across the country, all for a relatively tiny cost, give Cambridge students participating in college rowing the opportunities to compete and enjoy a standard of sporting excellence which other universities only supply to the athletes at the top of their respective sporting fields – a privilege which must be celebrated.

College sport also generates a sense of community and pride in Cambridge. The recent college football Cuppers finals have seen the sidelines of Grange Road filled with ecstatic supporters. Cardboard signs bearing slogans and the names of players, megaphones, and vuvuzelas create an intensely jovial atmosphere, with those competing spurred on by friends and college peers. These displays of collegiate sporting pride can also be seen in rugby and cricket fixtures, creating unity among those who represent the college, and those who support them.

Sport is equally accessible to students beyond the county of Cambridgeshire. This year’s ‘Super Sunday’ football Varsity fixtures saw about 200 Cambridge students travel to Oxford by coach to support the men’s and women’s second and third sides – an impressive figure given the distance. The Blues’ game itself saw even more spectators at Grange Road.

The rugby and cricket equivalents took place in London, at Saracens’

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StoneX stadium and Lord’s respectively, providing similar opportunities for support at prestigious venues. However, the cost of transport, as well as the time taken away from students’ degrees to travel to such fixtures, may well still have put attendance out of reach for some.

It must also be acknowledged, then, that Cambridge is – at least in part – inherently inaccessible. Its focus on academics depletes the role of sports, unlike universities like Loughborough or Oxford Brookes, whose emphasis is the reverse.

It is something to be celebrated that sport is as accessible as it is despite the intensely academic workload, and Cambridge’s nature as an academic institution cannot be neglected. Yet it is equally paramount to acknowledge that Cambridge is a largely meritocratic place. It is crucial to maintaining the University’s prestige, reputation, and enduring quality that such a focus must take centre stage. While this precedent will always endure, it is necessary that it adapts to a more accessible framework. Now, more than ever, there is an expanding plethora of sports to be enjoyed, alongside an ever-growing demand among young people to engage with this growth. Cambridge’s new Padel club is the clearest example of this: a rapidly growing sport taking advantage of the accessibility of sport in Cambridge, leading to more than 150 participants in their first social session of Easter term.

Sport in Cambridge is, on the whole, accessible. The opportunities to participate and compete in sports which are typically out of reach to all but elite athletes is a privilege which must not be ignored. The collegiate sporting system provides a sense of community and inclusivity to Cantabrigian sport, enforcing a structure which enables those of all abilities and expertise to engage. Finally, Cambridge’s sporting scene is undoubtedly deeply rooted in its prestigious heritage as an academic and sporting institution. However, sport in Cambridge has developed to such an extent that this heritage is reconciled with accessibility, ensuring that Cambridge provides opportunities and accessibility which cannot be obtained at other academic institutions across the country.

Cambridge provides opportunities and accessibility which cannot be obtained at other academic institutions

Helen Ser

Bibi Boyce speaks to the Motherland writer and two-

“I

t’s the worst torture because you never switch off.” “Torture” is not often the first word people use to describe their line of work, but perhaps for Cambridge students it’s rhetoric that will resonate when they next lie awake thinking about diss proposals, or having visions of integrals dancing in the shadows cast by branches on their bedroom walls. For writer and television producer Helen Serafinowicz, this manifests as “everything [becoming] a possible line”.

“Once I painted a wardrobe while I was on hold to BT – I always wanted to have an episode of Motherland where one of the characters was on hold for a long time, and we managed it when Julia’s on hold with the Verlux window people when she’s falling in love with her builder.” Unsurprisingly, Motherland, like many sitcoms, is based in reality – “embellished situations that have actually happened” – and listening to Serafinowicz only revealed more and more scenes in the show that have been directly lifted from her day-to-day life.

“When we were pitching Motherland, the initial reaction from one of our producers was ‘it just sounds like a lot of moaning women’, but there’s a much deeper insight to it.”

As a show written by women, about women, and for women – to me, at least – Motherland is an inherently feminist show. “It’s funny you say this. We didn’t – or I certainly didn’t – have the intention of making a feminist show.

The school gates is typically a female-heavy environment, full of mums who are juggling everything or have sacrificed their careers to raise their kids. They’ve left a grown-up job to join the world of people that are left behind in society.” The beauty of Motherland stems from how clearly the writing reflects real-life experiences, rather than a script produced through imagination. “We wrote series three during COVID. It was quite poignant because we were all women trying to write a sitcom, but also acting as the glue of our households. We felt like we were probably the only writing team that were just hanging out the washing and putting the dinner on as we were on Zoom.”

But, of course, Motherland is far from the only project Serafinowicz has been involved in. “I’m 52, and I still don’t know what I want to be.” She started out at Cartoon Network: “I kind of tripped into a job, which was to watch loads of cartoons and make little trailers for

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them. It was so much fun – we were all in o’clock, and the residents were complaining our 20s, and it was quite typical to arrive and about the noise. And so they’d hand out lolsomeone would be hiding under your desk to lipops, and that would quieten them; so I used jump out.” Alongside this, she began writing that in real life and brought lollipops with me sketches: “I was on holiday, and there were on the next school trip. It was quite a genius these two couples that were British and Gertrick.” Listening to Helen’s anecdotes, I find man. You could see they’d become friends, it hard not to chime in with my own. I have but couldn’t really communicate. And so I relatively quirky parents – my father greets wrote this sketch for Armstrong and Miller of the postman in a fez and dressing gown. a British couple trying to explain what crazy She brings up how sports day differs bepaving is to a German couple.” She explains tween independent and state schools; I how being a writer was never something recount how, at my village primary she’d aimed for; she presents it as a career school in rural Norfolk, my that evolved by chance rather than through mother attended sports careful engineering. day for the first time. At It’s the mundane that provides Serafinowmidday she brought icz with her material, and the birth of Mothout the Pimms, erland was no different. only to discover “I became a mum, and that was not noticed that there were appropriate. a lot of funny things hap“Write it pening to me. I had this down, write Google Doc, not knowall of this ing where it was going d o w n ,” to lead, but I would just Serafinoadd to it all the time. It wicz rewas almost like having sponds: a journal. I was forming “you nevcharacters and situations er know just from what I was obwhere serving. The best comedy you can comes from experience.” use it She touches on how her “mission” when first later entering the world of motherhood was to on.

I find her “cohort,” and follows immediately go back with an anecdote from a friend who was to my once late to a baby group: “At the entrance, old docuanother mum who looks kind of similar to ments her – unshowered, hair’s a bit of a mess – and and ICZ OW she said to this woman, ‘do I smell of wine?’

N I AF ER and she replied ‘no, do I?’ and they became NS E really good friends.” For any fans of the EL ▼H show, you’ll recognise this dialogue between Julia and Meg in season two.

“I really like to stick my nose in the school and look at the funny side of it. I went on this trip and the coach driver gave paracetamol out to the parents because he was preparing us for what a headache the day would be. The next time, I brought lollipops because I’d heard this advice from a police officer, who had this problem with a bingo hall.

All these women would come out after their night of bingo, all yapping at 11

The best comedy comes from experience

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Varsity YEARBOOK & REVIEW 2026

afinowicz time BAFTA winner about her career in television

BI BI B

OY CE

page, and we also try to limit as much ad libbing and improvisation as possible.” Seeing the actors

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think ‘great, I can use that’.”

I ask what other advice she’d offer to a student hoping to pursue a similar career. “Avoid using AI! I get a lot of scripts sent to me that are clearly AI’d up the eyeballs. People can recognise they’re in a funny situation, so I get a lot of ‘have you ever thought about this?’ – the world is rich, but it’s the execution of it that’s the skill.” As a first step, she suggests “writing to the people that you admire,” or “[volunteering] to be on set to help the art department. It’s such a great experience because you can watch as the writing becomes alive, and see what each department of a crew does and how laborious and tedious it can be.”

During filming, there’s always at least one writer on set. “Perhaps there’s a prop that’s very important in the script, but doesn’t seem important to the crew.

Sometimes l i n e s can be misinterpreted if it’s not coming through on the

bring the characters to life is unsurprisingly incredible: “you have to pinch yourself [...] when we cast Motherland,, the actors were exactly who I had in my head.” When she mentions Joanna Lumley, it’s obvious she still can’t quite believe both her involvement and how well she portrays Amanda’s mother.

Looking back to the earlier stages of production, we discuss the start of the scriptwriting process: “Kicking off the show, we were in a room filled with hundreds of these colour-coded cards. These anecdotes or situations would then be streamlined for each character we’d created – finding little stories that would fit them was so much fun. We’d then split away into pairs, write three episodes each, and then swap them over. We would fiddle and edit these scripts up until we’re on the set.”

For the majority of university students, the world of motherhood is entirely unfamiliar on the one hand, yet all too recent on the other – watching the show, I can spot these scenarios and characters in my childhood memories. With a work-

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ing mother, my father did the school run for his two daughters. He’d cry at all our school reports with pride, and the vivid picture of him attempting to dry our damp tights with a hairdryer will never leave me (which, I’d like to highlight, was an unsuccessful technique) – he seems like a textbook Kevin. However, it was my mother who made us breakfast, packed our lunches and made sure the tights had been washed in the first place, all while dealing with some irritating message from her own mother and getting herself ready for work – she really was a textbook Julia. I want to know if Helen’s childhood perspective ever informed her writing: “Oh it’s so different. I grew up in Liverpool; there were no drop-offs, pickups.

It was just ‘get to school and make sure you come home’.

Now I’m sort of middle class, but working class at heart – I guess it’s allowed me to observe this world that I was unfamiliar with. All the ‘Amandas’ in my life were pretty alien to me until I became a mum.”

When Motherland first aired in 2016, I was 11 and my sister nine – we were at each other’s throats every day and only calmed down when we started playing Minecraft (or Mein Kraft?) together. Our mother couldn’t bear to watch the show as it was too excruciatingly accurate – this is something Serafinowicz anticipated: “Would I want to spend my evening, having put the kids to bed, after a day of relentless handwashing and cleaning up puke, to then sit down and watch that again?”

Clearly this didn’t put enough mothers off, considering the show’s roaring success, and ten years later my mum can enjoy watching it without feeling at risk of a stress-induced rash.

We finish our chat on a subject ever-present to both of us: both of Serafinowicz’s children are now at university.

Every time I move back to Cambridge, I give my mother all my laundry the night before, we leave three hours later than planned, and I’ll have forgotten my pencil case. “Nothing changes. Motherhood is a relentless stream of experiences that I can tap into, and I don’t think it will ever end.”

All the ‘Amandas’ in my life were pretty alien to me until I became a mum

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▲ JORDAN INGLIS

WITH THANKS TO...

▲ SCOTT GRANGER

THE VARSITY TEAM: EASTER 2026

VARSITY BOARD Dr Michael Franklin (Chairman), Dr Tim Harris, Michael Derringer, Mark Curtis (Company Secretary), Sophie Ennis, Hugo Gye, Wilf Vall, Anuk Weerawardana (Directors), Lotte Brundle (Guest) & Zoah Hedges-Stocks (Guest) Cover illustration: Jordan Inglis With special thanks to Bibi Boyce’s speaker, Ben Lubitsh’s dinner runs, and the ‘delete message’ function on Microsoft Teams.

VARSITY ISSUE 946. © VARSITY PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2026. All rights reserved.

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EDITOR Ell Heeps editor@varsity.co.uk DEPUTY EDITORS Bibi Boyce & Ben Lubitsh deputyeditor@varsity.co.uk VULTURE EDITORS Jess Gotterson & Mary Anna Im magazine@varsity.co.uk VISUAL EDITORS Jordan Inglis (illustration), Amika Piplapure, & Clio Sze (photography) SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS Georgia Gooding, Maddie Harding, Elijah Jacobs, Daniel Kamaluddin, & Niall Quinn socialmedia@varsity.co.uk SENIOR NEWS EDITORS Alessia Fietta & Maria Eduarda Paixao news@varsity.co.uk DEPUTY NEWS EDITORS Hayley Butler, Maebh Carey, Benjamin Pine, & Neve Wilson FEATURES EDITORS Olivia Goodman & Emma Tenzler features@varsity.co.uk COMMENT EDITORS Juliette Berry & Amanda Ljunberg opinion@varsity.co.uk INTERVIEWS EDITORS Rosalind Howell & Isadora Vargas-Mafort interviews@varsity.co.uk SCIENCE EDITORS Pooja Gada & Lucy George science@varsity.co.uk SPORT EDITORS Nicholas Hall & Sam Ho sport@varsity.co.uk ARTS EDITORS Daniel Kamaluddin & Ollie Liversedge arts@varsity.co.uk

FILM & TV EDITORS Georgia Gooding & Dylan Ingram filmandtv@varsity.co.uk FASHION EDITORS Flossie Bullion & Joanne Yau fashion@varsity.co.uk FASHION SHOOT CO-ORDINATOR Paige Griffiths LIFESTYLE EDITORS Emma Gower & Ruby Randall lifestyle@varsity.co.uk BLIND DATE CO-ORDINATOR Ruby Randall MUSIC EDITORS Otto Bajwa-Greenwood & Francis McCabe music@varsity.co.uk THEATRE EDITORS Eleanor Baldwin & Lucy Farmer theatre@varsity.co.uk ILLUSTRATORS Aisha Azizul, Rosie Beyfus, Bibi Boyce, Lyra Browning, Ashlyn Chew, Marios Diakourtis, Ivi Fung, Florence Gibson, Ezra Izer, & Rachel Wang PHOTOGRAPHERS Gordon Chung, Scott Granger, Advaith Jagannath, Unmilan Kalita, & Teagan Rice SUB-EDITORS Daisy Cooper, Georgia Gooding, Marnie McPartland, & Lucia Taylor VARSOC PRESIDENT Wilf Vall president@varsity.co.uk VARSOC COMMITTEE Sophie Ennis (Secretary) & Anuk Weerawardana (Junior Treasurer) ASSOCIATE EDITORS Daisy Bates, Alex Brian, Ellie Buckley, Ben Curtis, Sophie Ennis, Nick James, Calum Murray, Charlie Rowan, Wilf Vall, & Anuk Weerawardana

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