By Emilia Brookfield

St. John’s College. 7:36pm. The window looks tiredly below at St. Mary the Less. The bar is not open yet, there can only be one thing left to do, become the “reader”. 

When my reading list for 1^st year English arrived those many weeks ago, the sight of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre caught my sneering eye off guard. What a field day it would have as I scorned the text for daring to exist next to Austen’s masterpiece of Emma; how could such a juvenile piece, sneered at by even the ever cynical 13-year-old Emilia, have reared its head as I emerged into the complexities of a degree level reading.

 Charlotte remains my least favourite Bronte. The turbulent, destructive (yet witty) Branwell ranks higher than her on my charts. His cartoonish scribbles of a taunting death at one’s elbow reach wit and gothic twistedness far beyond Charlotte’s reach. Bronte’s accompanying fresher’s author, Plato, rally’s that art is full of mimesis, simply layers and layers of shadow, light, and imitation; these imitations are especially apparent in Charlotte’s writing as she tries to emulate the broodiness of her sisters. Charlotte appears to only mimic those feelings that her sisters so perfectly put. When other’s swooned over the plateable gothic of Jane Eyre or the wildly stormy, yet ultimately dull, Villette, I cemented myself further away from Charlotte’s camp, declaring myself to be a firm comrade of Emily and Anne. Although perhaps in being so obstinate, I was more Eyre than met the eye…

Reluctantly I settled down to the opening chapter. The wind whips down the Bailey, swathes of tired students scurry along, the Victorian graves sigh under the weight of the leaf carcasses; I read in both this world, and the hauntingly similar world of Jane, from my window seat. 

Jane’s stubborn procession through life has become an oddly great comfort to me. Trapped in the red room alone, haunted by the whispery ghost of her uncle, I took solitude; I too am that girl afraid, in an unknown room, haunted by the spirits of those who lived before me, hiding behind the curtains of some haunted hide-n-seek.  Floating along in this strange newness, the first few weeks of freshers are full of expectation more than anything. Unknown voices rise around Jane in her new Lowood environment; threads of conversation catch her ear, yet she cannot grasp them. She is surrounded by people her own age, yet is unable to distinguish a single person.  This constant feeling of overcrowded loneliness permeates Freshers. The voice across the dining hall belongs to a physics student, yet turning you lose them, unable to connect that voice with yours in harmonious conversation beyond the parameters of the department they belong to and the papers they sat one June afternoon. 

Thrown into a tumult of new places, names stick when visuals can’t be mustered. Thornfield, Lowood, Millcote, Gateshead, Lowton – all these decidedly English names that could be anywhere. The anticipation of what these mythic places look like as you finally are asked to meet for an audition, a meeting, a seminar, in one of these made-up halls. Jane believes herself to be smart, admirable, respectable upon leaving Lowood; graduation to Thornfield displaces this. She has no idea where she is going, asks to help too often, and is naïve to the stately and suspicious goings-on. Out of depth is the best way to describe her, and as a fresher in those formative weeks. 

The window is fogging up with that Durham dampness. Only the leaves remain. My four walls creak under the weight of many maddening bodies. Am I that brooding girl? Or are we all her. Her adventures, dull and dangerous, make for a great selection of anecdotes, and is that all we can hope for at this moment? The gothic works as it takes the familiar and distorts it; you feel comfort whilst also checking behind you as you walk down the corridor. It’s that faint familiarity we hold on to when finding our ways back. Charlotte may have some merit as a trusty guide or a stoic beacon in the mist. 

Summer term

Going into the summer term of my second year at Durham, I anticipated scenes of warmth, freedom, and partying.

As I stared out the window of my LNER train from Kings Cross to Durham with Taylor Swift on full volume, I dreamt of walking to Tesco not wearing my thermals, two jumpers and a goose-down puffer coat. Waking up with my only decision being whether I have sushi or sashimi for lunch. Days spent on the racecourse sipping enough Somersbies to be entertained by a football. Playing games of “snog marry avoid” whilst my slightly intoxicated friend chauffeurs me in their VW Golf back from Tynemouth beach. Screaming, “I’m loving angels instead” whilst enough alcohol bubbles through me that I start to question whether DJ Dave B is actually attractive. These were the scenes I imagined. It’s safe to say I was fairly surprised to find myself sitting in a Durham Magistrates court, putting forward my witness statement against a man who was being charged with stealing my knickers. 

I was not only surprised because all the knickers I own are M&S high-waisted women’s briefs, meaning they’re not only undesirable for anyone other than my own comfort, but they’re also probably less valuable than the one-use plastic bags half the student population seem to “accidentally forget to scan” at the Tesco self-checkout. I couldn’t work out whether it was more surprising anyone wanted to steal them, or that the police had time to charge someone with such a low-value theft. Nonetheless, there I found myself on the 26^th of May, in Peterlee’s magistrates’ court, telling the judge I was rather upset that David Ian Wales had stolen my knickers.

Storytime

This unexpected situation all started when I was sitting in the TLC writing an essay in May and got a random phone call: “Hello, Kitty, this is the Durham police. We need you to come down to our office immediately.” These are not particularly settling words when you don’t remember walking home from Babylon the night before. Luckily, they quickly reassured me I wasn’t some Exeter-like cretin who accidentally stole a child on the way back from a night out thinking it was Yoda – but was rather a suspected victim of theft. They refused to comment on the details of the theft until they saw me in person.  I jumped out my TLC seat and ran the fastest km splits of my life to the Police station whilst simultaneously searching up my car insurance details. My red golf, appropriately named Valentine, was my only possession I thought could possibly be worth stealing. I arrived, darting through the police station doors, demanding if my Valentine had been stolen. The police officer was rather baffled.

The PC sat me down to ask if I recognised various items found in a man’s house in Gilesgate. The first piece of evidence, “250 Snappy Snaps printed photos’” found nestled in a black box underneath the man’s bed, alongside an ordering receipt with my name on it. I looked at the photos, instantly recognising my gap yah Snappy Snaps collection I had been looking for since January. The PC insisted we look through the entire folder to confirm they were mine. My heart rate doubled. 

Me eating a jamon baguette on the floor of a Venetian chapel; me tactically squatting in every corner of Europe; me pretending the Leaning Tower of Pisa was my massive cock; me drunkenly posing with the Barcelonan Policemen as if they were my gigolos; my friends pretending to give each other fellatio in the confession box of the Sistine chapel. 

Yes, yes, yes. They’re all mine.

When documenting my gap yah travels, it’s safe to say I had not prepared for them to end up in a police forensic investigation wallet and to be sat with an officer by my side identifying each one as mine. Luckily, he only seemed mildly phased. 

We then moved on to the “main criminal damage.” The officer said this piece of evidence was “too large for the forensic investigation wallets.” I was taken to the next-door room to view it. Of course, this couldn’t fit into an investigation wallet. There lay piles of thousands and thousands of pants. This Police investigation room looked more stocked than a Victoria’s Secret Warehouse. 

Thongs, hipsters, tangas, cheekies, boyshorts.

Blue, pink, black, grey, orange, ambiguous.

Ann Summers, Calvin Klein, Gucci, Gap, Tesco.

Spotty, striped, seamless, stained … at least David Wales was not picky. 

For panty sniffers, this was Willy Wonka’s factory. For most, this was an apocalyptic graveyard of generations of Durham girls’ pants.

The PC ruffled through them to reach what he believed to be mine. He picked out the ugliest pants of them all, some high-waisted women’s briefs, with my school’s name tapes hanging down. For some, a uniformed PC handing you back your knickers could feel like living the start of a kinky low-budget Hollywood drama; for me, this was little more than a public exposé of my greatest hidden pleasure … “Oh yes, the massive granny pants are mine too.”

After much embarrassment, I was eventually dismissed from this rather traumatic trip to the police station, returning to the TLC questioning whether the portobello mushrooms I had for lunch were, in fact, magic. An Outlook email from the Durham Constabulary shortly confirmed this was not a hallucinogenic trip, detailing the case and asking if I was available next week to provide a witness statement in court. 

So that’s the story of how I found myself on the 26^th May, in Peterlee magistrates court, telling the judge I was rather upset that David Ian Wales had stolen my knickers.

Court day 26^th May 2023

It was my first ever court case, so my nerves woke me early. I showered and put on my smartest clothes – a white linen shirt and some black suit trousers. To be safe, I was, of course, commando. 

I was driven to court promptly by another victim’s fuming parents, who had driven 8 hours from their home to bring their daughter justice. Annoyingly, David Wales was less concerned about timings and arrived 5 hours late, with no legal representatives. Thankfully, however, he was not dressed from head to toe in knickers; instead, he was in a biker jacket and jeans.  After brief discussions, the court concluded that his panty-thieving was too extensive to be dealt with at a magistrates court, so the case was raised to a higher court. 

Three months later, on the 12^th of September 2023, David Ian Wales pleaded guilty to all charges at the Durham County court and will spend the next 3 years in prison. David Ian Wales was finally, well and truly, caught with his pants down. 

By Henry Worsley

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a strange and whimsical book, constantly oscillating between long, detailed passages which explain the literal nuts and bolts of motorbikes, and equally long, meta and open-ended spiels that dive into the philosophy behind a bike, how it can serve as a tool not just to dissect man’s relationship with machines, but also the machinery of the human mind in and of itself – why a motorbike is both a bold expression of Romanticism, but also of cold, straight logic.

I started reading Pirsig’s book in Florence, towards the end of my own two-thousand kilometre journey on two wheels. I had set out from London a month earlier, in the dead of night, my Kawasaki GPZ loaded with virtually everything I owned, or would need, for the next year: two pairs of jeans, three shirts, some books, some tools, a battered sleeping bag and a can of chain oil. The destination was Rome, where I would be living for the next ten months. I wanted no motorways, no toll roads – just the back lanes that trace the ancient pilgrim path to the Eternal City: the Via Francigena.

The most challenging part of this journey would doubtless be the Alps. My bike is twenty-four years-old; it is carburated, with a manual choke, no ABS, no traction control, no fuel gauge (when it starts to splutter, you twist a petcock below your left knee to open the reserve tank, like a Spitfire). It is, essentially, an old-world piece of engineering – and I’m no mechanic. So as I began to ascend towards the Cime de la Bonette, the highest road in France and the second highest in Europe, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.

Why ride a motorbike? That’s the essential question Pirsig poses to his readers. To look fucking cool is one answer, and it’s an answer that any honest owner of a bike would give. Motorbikes just look cool; they make you feel macho, powerful, sexy. But there is more to it than just the testosterone and the adrenaline – motorbikes are also beautiful, almost magical; they feel somehow alive, which is why people give them names. That’s one way of looking at them, as hunks of steel and alloy and copper wire that seem to have some sort of soul, yet they are still just hunks of steel and alloy and copper wire – and this is also the point, that motorbikes are the product of a ruthless, exact science. So in this sense they represent both schools of thought – the Romantic and the Rational; Lord Byron and Nikola Tesla.

Sure enough, as the Kawasaki and I gradually climbed from one thousand metres, to fifteen hundred, and finally to two thousand and above, I started to feel this thing that I was sitting on change – to pant and gasp for air. The revs at idle halved, barely turning over; I was afraid that if I stopped then the bike would stall too, and I would end up stranded in the lunar wasteland near the summit – a nothingness, an airless void, grey and snowless peaks, the odd Maginot bunker emerging from the rockface.

Another reason you should ride a bike: it’s terrifying.

Motorbikes are death traps, or at the very least, they make death much more probable in an accident. When I rented a bike in Jamaica, a group of guys in their twenties approached me and, eyeing up my sweet new ride, started pulling up their trouser legs or taking their shirts off: ‘this, from a wheelie’, one said, indicating a missing chunk of flesh in his leg; ‘this, head-on collision, smaaash!’, said another, running his finger across his chest, where a deep pale scar crossed it like a lightning bolt.

Three thousand metres. You reach the summit of the Cime de la Bonette, and you feel like Zeus, jacked and omnipotent. Looking out over the vast, wonderful ruggedness of the Alps, smelling the clean air, thin and diluted, deliciously crisp, you appreciate the meaning of another word often associated with motorcycles: freedom. That star-spangled, bald-eagle kind of freedom, that freedom to ride wherever you want whenever you want – but not only that, because that would be no different to a car. When you’re in a car, and you’re looking out of a window, you may as well be staring at a television – you don’t sense anything. On a bike you feel the wind, the heat from the tarmac, the vibrations of the engine, you sense your whole centre of gravity shift as you take a corner. Italo Calvino wrote about the concept of the ‘infinite city’, the boundless metropolis, a city which he argued the modern world had already produced. By taking trains, planes and automobiles, we put ourselves in little teleportation capsules from urban island to urban island – the motorcycle is an escape from that, it is an exposure to the places in between.

From three thousand metres that sense of freedom becomes sharply defined: you see a matchstick town ten or so miles away, you hop back on the bike, and after a few turns you return to that zen state Pirsig was talking about – the bike disappears, you’re flying, and you feel fucking cool.