Category: Culture

By Max Shanagher

Sitting on the DLR to Woolwich, I started to question the life decisions that I had taken six months previously. Six months ago, at the Library bar in Durham, my friend and I decided to start an Immersive Theatre company. My only problem was that I didn’t really know what immersive theatre was. In my head, I must admit, I had a hipster version of the London Dungeon where over-confident actors are followed by over-pretentious audience members.  

So as I sat on the DLR to Woolwich, I was questioning whether it was wise to get involved with a theatre company that specialises in it. These questions were finally given an answer when I reached my destination: Punchdrunk’s ‘The Burnt City’.  

Now, these four words may not make any sense to you (they certainly didn’t to me) so I shall define both ‘Punchdrunk’ andThe Burnt City. Punchdrunk is an immersive theatre company that was founded in 2000 who hire large venues and convert them into elaborate, multi-room spanning plays. In New York, they perform a play called Sleep No More that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel, an abandoned hotel from the 1940s. Sleep No More is a Noir adaptation of Macbeth, and audience members are allowed to explore the hotel and to decide which rooms they want to stay in or which actors they want to follow.  

The Burnt City is this premise of audience autonomy brought to two large arsenal buildings in Woolwich Dockyard. The play takes place over two spaces and is set at the time of the Trojan War, with one building being designated to represent Greece and one to represent Troy. I went with my family and was excited to see their reaction to the completely converted arsenals. 

Entering the arsenals, I was struck by the scale and detail with which the set was constructed. I was able to wander into rooms and read letters sent from soldiers back home. I lost my family quite quickly, as encouraged by the actors at the start, but once entering the wide expansive room representing Greece, I saw a man who seemed to have found the only seat in the whole venue, and I assumed it to be my dad. You are not allowed to talk in Punchdrunk performances, but I approached this strange figure and asked him what he thought of it so far. Thankfully, it was my dad, but I wasn’t thankful for his one-word response: ‘bizarre’. I suppose it was bizarre. All the audience were wearing masks and were dotted around the different rooms searching for meaning in these choreographed spaces. That was the joy I thought though, the feeling of being able to choose my experience and choose what I get out of the play was unlike any other theatre I had been to. 

It seemed fresh and new to me, and reinvigorated my passion for theatre. It may have felt fresh, but it wasn’t particularly new. In the 1980s, Laura Farabough wrote and directed Surface Tension which took place in a swimming pool, first performed at UC Berkeley Campus. In India, there have been performances of Ramlila since the 19th Century, the play having been inscribed into UNESCO world heritage status in 2008. In a performance of Ramlila, according to UNESCO the ‘audience is invited to sing and take part in narration’ and the audience take active roles in the production. This is the blueprint for immersive theatre: audience autonomy and transforming spaces into theatrical realms.  

Why this type of theatre feels to me particularly relevant to modern times is because of the theatrical potential for virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI. Virtual reality has almost the same premise as immersive theatre: transforming the virtual space and allowing the participant to have autonomy in their decisions. Augmented reality similarly is about transforming space and AI may have the potential to change the ability to improvise in theatre. Immersive theatre allows for audiences to have real, lived experiences where they might have otherwise had a virtual experience. Making the effort to see a play in person and seeing the dedication that actors and the crew put into creating a performance is unlike anything that can currently be achieved by these technological advances.  

There is no hiding in immersive theatre but that is the joy of it. Seeing live performances, with their brilliance and their mistakes is what makes theatre, to me, so great. The allure of being able to decide your own journey does not have to be limited to the virtual world, but can also be physical and present. All this I realised on the slightly less bleak return journey from Woolwich. 

Which brings me to Antony and Cleopatra, a play I’ve been directing for the past few months. We have hired Durham’s Student Union Ballroom, and for three performances, are transforming it into Egypt and Rome across two rooms. The audience can decide at the start whether they would prefer to be in Egypt and Rome, and from that point on will have different experiences. Getting actors (some of whom specialise in classical theatre) to imagine the audience in rehearsals and work on their improvisational skills has been a joy.  

Thanks to Hetty, Kate, and Teagan, our student writers, we have been able to create a simultaneous script for Egypt and Rome, inspired by Shakespeare’s script. Shakespeare’s language is key, however, and supports our reasoning that the play would adapt well to immersive theatre because of its focus on space and the occupation of different spaces. One of my favourite lines from the play is Enobarbus’ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale | Her infinite variety’ in describing Cleopatra. In many ways I see these lines to describe theatre as well, immersive theatre, in my view, currently contributing a small but important part to theatre’s ‘infinite variety’. 

Antony and Cleopatra will be performed on the 10th and 11th of November in Dunelm House. Find out more via @walkaboutproductions on Instagram.

Photo Credit: westendtheatre.com

By Cosmo Adair.

“All romantics meet the same fate

Some day, cynical and drunk and boring

Someone in some dark cafe.”

Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

Hollywood Boulevard, 1940. Two lovers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, are strolling along as the blue sky fades to pearly darkness. He recites a poem. They notice an advertisement outside of a record store which reads: “Make your own records — Hear yourself speak.” They enter, and he begins to speak into the microphone, reciting John Masefield’s “On Growing Old”, before reaching its final couplet: 

“Only stay quiet while my mind remembers

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.”

That second “beauty” gets caught in his throat. He reads on, now his favourite poem, the one whose words have found their modern reimaginings in so many of his works, John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. He dwells, quite lovingly, on each delicate syllable, before tailing off at the close of the third stanza, where he misquotes and says: “And new love cannot live beyond tomorrow … Or beauty cannot live.”

Herein lies both the biographer and the critic’s dream — a moment of recognition, as a percussive sadness sets in, one which turns back with vague glimpses of the past, and looks forwards, ‘beyond tomorrow,’ and sees the exit-lights dully flashing. As Jonathan Bate questions in Bright Star, Green Light was Fitzgerald, here, moved by a sense that Keats was not only writing of his own fears of mortality, but with an “uncanny anticipation” of Fitzgerald’s own fears that his twilight relationship with Sheilah Graham would soon end, and that the beauty he had sought in his novels would not survive? After so many miserable years of alcoholism and depression, of “the process of breaking down” as he calls it in The Crack-Up, had he now found an aesthetic close, an ending befitting his characters — those great Romantic heroes, all of whom are cut-down or beaten or embittered by the realities of an unforgiving world, but who receive some restitution of dignity in the recognition of the beauty of their dream. 

Throughout his life, Fitzgerald suffered from prolonged bouts of depression and from an indefatigable alcoholism. An early literary career, imbibed with phenomenal talent, which had promised so much — with This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, all published within five years of each other — tailed off into alcoholic black-out, with only one more novel, Tender is the Night, published in the next fifteen years. There is, throughout his life and works, a sense that the impossibility of squaring his romantic pursuits and ideals — of beauty, of love, of Art — with the real world condemned him to sadness and a presiding sense of failure. 

In The Crack-Up, a candid sequence of three essays dealing with his depression, he writes that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and yet still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This seems a fitting guide to both his life and to his characters: that despite the hopelessness and futility of life, you need to keep the dream alive — of Daisy, in Gatsby’s case, or else of Beauty in Fitzgerald’s — so that life might remain bearable. 

That’s at the heart of The Great Gatsby’s famous conclusion: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Had Gatsby not been killed, he would have navigated a disillusioned 1930s in much the same way as Fitzgerald did: as soon as the ideal of Daisy has been shattered that elusive green light loses its meaning. Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, would have adhered to Joni Mitchell’s words in the above quote: “All romantics … [become] cynical and drunk and boring.” The child whose sandcastle has collapsed becomes an advocate for the futility of sandcastles. So it is with our dreams and ideals — but ours tend to be smaller than Gatsby’s, smaller than Fitzgerald’s, and we must ‘run faster, stretch out our arms further’, even if all we meet is failure and futility. 

For Fitzgerald, the dream’s death was like the death of the sun; after it, he could only declare, “I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous.” But in that recording of 1940, as he stutters over ‘Beauty’ and misquotes Keats’ “Nightingale”, there is a sense that — somewhere, between the mists of depression and booze, under the influence of a beautiful but fleeting love with Sheilah Graham — he recalls that dream which once so enthused and justified him and his life’s work, and that there is a sadness, an inenarrable sadness, in the recognition that he so easily relinquished his dreams and that so much beauty was wasted. And so, that year, as the bombs began to fall in London and Europe shrunk to the size of a map, Fitzgerald drank himself to death at the age of only forty-four, taking him with him a little bit of the Beauty and the Romance so needed in a world which, day-by-day, was self-flagellating into ugly and brutal deformity. 

I’m often asked why our magazine is called Wayzgoose or what it means, and upon further inspection, I found that a Wayzgoose was a party that “marked the traditional end of summer and the start of the season of working by candlelight.” And so, with the Autumn equinox having passed and the halcyon days of summer receding quickly in the rearview, I have curated an autumnal, or Wayzgoose-themed playlist, if you will. Put this on while walking to lectures, cooking supper for your friends, or, fittingly, working into the wee hours. I’ve picked each song perhaps for a specific autumn referencing lyric, or maybe the album art looks as though it was photographed in October – I’m a simple man. But beyond that, all these songs have a particular warmth and introspection to them that, to me, is reminiscent of this season. Autumn is inherently transitional, often prompting a bit of reflection or solipsism (whatever you prefer to call it). So have a cup of tea and wander around the bailey, romanticising the oncoming chill and its accompanying heating bills and colds.

1. Summer’s End – John Prine 

To kick us off, we have perhaps the saddest song on the playlist. Prine’s rich and wise voice imparts words of comfort to the listener. A wistful ode to lost summer love and reminiscing upon happy memories best sets the tone for this playlist.

2. Color Song – Maggie Rogers   

At this time of year, the clocks change, and the days grow shorter; Rogers opens this track singing, “now that the light is fading”, her crystalline Appalachian harmonies ebbing and flowing like a mountain stream – the perfect accompaniment to a walk along the river at dusk. 

3. Friend of mine – Whitney 

This song from Whitney’s sophomore album sounds like a rollicking road trip through Northumberland as the leaves change, creating avenues of burning colour. The guitar and brass post-chorus sound like the low harvest-time sunlight sliding through the tree line, bathing everything in amber.

4. These days – Nico

Full of regret and longing, this song plays in Wes Anderson’s ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’. Set during “fall” in New York, ‘Margot’ steps off a bus, wrapped in a mink coat, exhaust fumes steaming around her in the cold, and locks eyes with a past love. For those who think Anderson’s style is unemotional and too focused on the aesthetic, watch this scene; the choice of song may just change your mind.

5. Smoke signals – Phoebe Bridgers

I’d be remiss not to include Phoebe Bridgers, queen of autumn, for her melancholy comfort and recurring ghostly imagery. With a title evoking images of bonfires, she writes of a week in the country, where she and a partner played at being Thoreau in ‘Walden,’ a book alternatively titled ‘Life in the Woods.’ It affirms the craving many of us have during October to be more in tune with the natural world.

6. Girl from the North Country – Bob Dylan

Dylan sings of a time,

“When the rivers freeze and summer ends

Please see for me if she’s wearing a coat so warm

To keep her from the howlin’ winds”

Thematically, this track is a perfect companion to ‘Summer’s End’, bottling the hazy nostalgia of a bygone romance. Moreover, the cover art with Dylan and his girlfriend walking down a street, bundled in jackets, on a characteristically bright and crisp autumn day, is rather appropriate.

7. Harbor – Clairo

Recorded at Allaire studio, in the mountains outside Woodstock, during October of 2020. The rustic setting of the recording: log cabin, candle-lit dinners, open fires, and long hikes through the woods permeates the track sonically. Seventies Wurlitzers and pianos eddy beneath Clairo’s voice as her lyrics and melodies unspool like a ball of tangled wool.

8. Old Friends / Bookends Theme – Live in Toledo, OH – November 1969 – Simon and Garfunkel 

Posed in polo neck jumpers on the cover, this pair sings of two old friends recalling memories, wrapped in overcoats on a park bench as the wind pushes fallen leaves under their feet. This live version specially marries the tracks together and has a profound intimacy.

9. Blackberry Stone – Laura Marling

Laura Marling’s pastoral folk is particularly suited to this season with its traditional old-English melodies. I have often put on her music whilst rambling through the Somerset countryside, where apples (it is the home of Thatcher’s cider) and blackberries are in abundance at this time of year. 

10. Harvest Breed – Nick Drake 

Anything from Nick Drake’s oeuvre is worth mentioning here, but I’ve gone for the most literal choice to close out this playlist. His bucolic music is the perfect accompaniment to Autumn.

“Falling fast and falling free you look to find a friend

Falling fast and falling free this could just be the end

Falling fast you stoop to touch and kiss the flowers that bend

And you’re ready now

For the harvest breed”

Other worthy mentions:

Hammond Song – the Roches

Shelter – Ray LaMontagne

Hello rain – The Softies

By Maggie Baring

Fans of the Leicester-based indie-pop group, Easy Life, have recently been deeply saddened by the ridiculously surreal news that the band are being sued by the large, corporate brand easyGroup for being “brand thieves”. Easy Life announced on their Instagram on the 2^nd October that ‘Easy Jet are suing us for being called Easy Life’, whilst also making light of the pettiness of the claims: ‘for those of you that bought gig tickets and ended up on a budget flight to Tenerife, I apologise’. The band’s sarcasm casts light on the almost laughable situation which has formulated; a large, well established corporate brand bullying a relatively small band formed in 2017 by talented young musicians, for no apparent reason. Easy Life’s two previous albums reached no. 2 on the British charts, their top song, “Nightmares”, has 59 million streams on Spotify, and they have amassed 182k followers on Instagram. The situation that has unfolded has proved, once again, how difficult the life of a musical artist can be. The commercial flaws in the industry allow such injustices to take place, with a simple case of ‘corporate greed’ (as MP Kevin Brennan wrote), showing that the odds are continually stacked against the creative industries. Even when successful artists such as Easy Life earn enough to live comfortably off their career, it is nothing compared to the expense of defending themselves against unfounded lawsuits which would cost ‘upward of a million’ pounds in legal fees. 

Easy Life fans have greeted this news with an outpouring of love and support for the band, outrage at easyGroup’s intimidation, and suggestions to set up crowd-funding pages to finance the band’s ‘very, very strong case’ (Matravers, 5^th October). The evidence that easyGroup’s case against Easy Life is unfounded is concrete and obvious, as the band formed and played their first gig in 2015, whilst easyGroup only applied for trademarking of the name, ‘Easy Life’ in 2022. Furthermore, in a similar case involving trademarking and easyGroup in July 2021, a judge ruled that ‘the word ‘easy’ is not distinctive. It is a descriptive word’, suggesting that ‘easyGroup’s claims over the ownership of the word, ‘easy’, are unfounded. Nevertheless, the band cannot afford the legal fees and must give into the ‘David versus Goliath’ situation that they find themselves in, even with the frustrating knowledge that their chances of winning the suit were high had they been able to afford to defend themselves. 
The band have had no choice but to give in to easyGroup’s bullying, and on Friday the 13^th, played their final concert in London at Koko. On the same day, they released their final song as ‘Easy Life’, called ‘Trust Exercises’. The song aptly celebrates those in your life who are trustworthy enough to fall back on in moments of need. Easy Life fans have done just this – realising the words of the song in real life: ‘open up, you know you’re family | This is a trust exercise, you can fall back on me’. The bond between the fan and artist has always, for me, seemed a sacred thing. The audience places great trust in the artist when they listen to honest and open songs about difficult experiences which they may relate to. The artist’s responsibility to uphold this trust through their song writing and music must be continually recognised in order for this trust to grow in strength. This strength of support can then be used, in turn, for the artist to fall back on in their times of need. We see this on countless occasions when an artist-fan relationship has exhibited its power. When Lewis Capaldi’s mental health and Tourette’s Syndrome prohibited him from finishing his set at Glastonbury in June, so his fans finished off his set for him with rousing singing, for example. Easy Life may not be able to fight against the wealth and power of easyGroup, but the outpouring of support from their fans prove that their impact, and the market into which they are sharing their songs, is one of love and support. Easy Life’s victory is a moral one, and I know which side of the dispute I would far rather be on.

Photo credit @easylife on Instagram

By Cosmo Adair.

There is a building somewhere in Alexandria. Once, in 1919, an ageing, if elderly man — the poet, C.P. Cavafy — stood in one of its rooms. Beneath the signature circular-framed, tortoise-shell glasses, his eyes saw not what was there but what had once been there. “This room, how well I know it,” he thinks to himself. It may be an office, now, on the occasion of his visit, but it remains familiar. “Here, near the door, was the couch … On the right — no, opposite — a wardrobe with a mirror. / In the middle the table where he wrote.” The reader follows Cavafy’s wandering mind as it reconstructs the room according to a preliminary mental sketch made so many years ago, as if, even then, he expected to one day return. 

He writes on; the pared directness of his lyricism reads almost like disinterest. “Beside the window was the bed / where we made love so many times.” Here is the room’s relevance: in his youth, one of his lovers lived here. But the poem’s reserved tone, quickly, begins to hurt:

“Beside the window was the bed; 

the afternoon sun fell across half of it.

… One afternoon at four ‘o’ clock we separated

for a week only … And then —

that week became forever.”

There is so much contained in that one brief detail of the afternoon sun — the open blinds and the long summer; the laziness of love, tumbling about in bed through the afternoon; and, poignantly, a sense that love, like the afternoon itself, will dissipate and fade into night. The ellipsis shows a little shudder pass through him as “that week became forever.” Here, then, despite the sparsity and the directness of the poem, is not only the history of an affair, but of a person: bundled into it, you see between the lines, beneath the words, the shrill and deafening conditionals of life. 

“The Afternoon Sun” makes for a nice introduction to a certain area of Cavafy’s poetic imagination – that which is written by a man whom André Aciman called “someone who was … already awaiting nostalgia and therefore fending it off by rehearsing it all the time.” A poet whose canon includes such poems as “Days of 1896”, “Days of 1901”, “Days of 1903”, “Days of 1908”, and “Days of 1909, ‘and 10, and ‘11”, could not be anything but nostalgic. But his nostalgia is unusual. He seems to embody a mood of almost ‘present nostalgia’; it is as if, in the very moment of experience, he imagines the nostalgia with which he will look back on it. He sees the beauty of the moment and he knows that this beauty must die. Thus, in the moment, he detaches himself in observation and remembers what is around him and how he is feeling. He saves up memories in a sort of mental pension-fund. By detaching himself from the present, he both glorifies and extends it. 

“Their Beginning” discusses this process. At first, you expect the ‘beginning’ in question to be that of a relationship. But instead, it’s the ‘beginning’ of the idea of the poem itself. He opens by stating that “Their illicit pleasure has been fulfilled.” The lovers leave the house “separately, furtively” and the poet wonders if their shiftiness will betray them to onlookers. He then writes of how one day he will look back on this moment as the beginning of both a memory and a poem:

“But what profit for the life of the artist:

tomorrow, the day after, or years later, he’ll give voice

to the strong lines that had their beginning there.”

The moment itself was brief. Their sex appears to have been sordid and rushed. The ‘beginning’ is, instead, of a memory and a poem which he can keep. It is as if he wanders the streets of Alexandria like a butterfly-catcher, his net ever ready to capture a moment or an experience which he might gift to his memory. So, even though beauty dies and passion fades and each of these passings might contain a sort of grief, he realises that we should still treasure them. Most thoughts, feelings, and experiences enrich us and have taught us something. Therefore, they deserve to be remembered. 

The idea that you should not only treasure the passing moment or feeling, but that you should respect it and say a courageous “Goodbye” to it as it passes, is the central notion of his finest poem, “The God abandons Antony.” It concerns loss in a broad sense. In Plutarch’s Lives, he describes how the patron god of Mark Antony, Bacchus, abandons Antony to the sound of flutes. It signals the end of Antony’s Alexandrian revels and the reversal of his fortunes. Soon, Caesar will defeat him. Cavafy’s poem addresses an imagined Antony, advising him to stand, courageously, at the window and to drink in the sound of the ‘exquisite music’ of his past joys departing. He should accept the reality of their departure with a Cavafian resignation, since it is futile to mourn that which cannot be prevented. Cavafy writes, 

“As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,

go firmly to the window

and listen with deep emotion, but not

with the whining, the pleas of the coward; 

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”

To me, at least, these are words it seems careless to paraphrase. There is little, I think, I can say or explain which the poet has not done better. But there is something quite startling in the dignified way in which he urges Antony to accept and enjoy the passing of his delights. 

In these few poems, it seems to me that a strategy for life seems to tease itself out; one so removed from the YOLO-kind-of-Paterian approach of “experience without examination.” Instead, there can be something beautiful and rewarding in detaching oneself, ever so slightly, and thinking how will I remember this? What will this mean to me? How will I write this? Then each passion, once cold, and each room, no longer visited, will outlast its given hour — and, in the case of Cavafy, will no doubt last an eternity. 

By Maisie Jennings

It felt like the perfect time to revisit the writing of Joan Didion during the lazy, early September heatwave. Didion’s elliptical, startling vignettes of the American cultural landscape in the 1960s and ‘70s evoked the sense of a long, sultry summer just about to burn out. So it began — my daily routine of sitting in the garden, chain-smoking, and flicking through the terse pages of The White Album. 

I first discovered Didion two years ago; she would die only a few months later. A friend had lent me a copy of Play It As It Lays (inadvertently stolen, I should admit, as it still sits on my bedside table), and it unnerved me in the acutely exciting way that marks a budding new obsession. Didion’s forensic prose balances the banal and tragic on the blade of a scalpel – cutting through the glamorous veneer of Hollywood, rock n’ roll, and the East Coast. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” is how Didion begins The White Album, a collection of essays that curate the zeitgeist of her native California and explore her own nervous breakdown. In one apt sentence, she exposes the flimsiness of human perception and explores the raw, essential process of storytelling. If stories are largely understood as pieces of description written toward some climax or another, Didion’s writing oscillates boredly along a constant precipice. Her narration exudes a withering apathy towards a period of massive cultural upheaval. 

It’s this distinctly female literary apathy that interested me in my first reading of Play It As It Lays. Maria Wyeth, Didion’s jaded protagonist, is a C-list Hollywood actress — revealing, through flashbacks, a life of beach house parties and barbiturates, a failed marriage, and a hospitalised daughter. She expresses a bored, shallow nihilism; Maria is at the whims of the ‘game’ of life, which she views with the same easy carelessness as her frequent gambling in casinos. It’s clear, however, that Maria’s nullified existence is incited by her manipulation by men. The most disturbing scene in the book occurs when Maria’s husband coerces her into getting a backstreet abortion, which unravels her sense of reality in a blur of nightmares and hallucinations. Didion explores how Maria’s life is totally disembodied because she is denied any control over her own body. 

At the same time, Maria makes no effort to escape her gilded cage, in fact, she endeavours to maintain all the niceties of being a suburban housewife. This is, in part, informed by the privilege apathy requires. Maria is so ambivalent towards suffering, especially her own, because the comfort of wealth exceeds the desire for change. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a similarly beautiful, wealthy narrator pharmaceutically induces a year-long coma in an attempt to reset her stagnated life. Like Maria, the unnamed narrator’s apathy manifests in an inert, disembodied state. 

I think this is a stark contrast to the excessive physicality expressed by disaffected, male literary figures. It must be said that men in fiction are constantly apathetic, and they become literary rock stars to swathes of teenage existentialists. Novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and the literary oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis all depict brooding, uncaring male protagonists – seeing the world and its establishments as pointless and inconsequential. Obviously, it follows that there’s no alternative other than to get recklessly pissed off. These alienated men exercise their apathy with a masculine heavy hand; they pursue and abandon sexual relationships, seek out violent altercations, kill whoever they please, and occasionally engage in acts of depraved brutality. Rather than being forced into a placated, disinterested state like Maria Wyeth – their apathy is indulgent, selfish, and expressed through physical agency. While Maria’s apathetic outlook is deeply repressive, theirs is an anti-establishment cri de coeur. 

This raises a number of feminist issues. Ostensibly, writing either apathetically as a woman, or writing apathetic women, seems somewhat anti-feminist. Indeed, Didion scathingly criticised second-wave feminism in a 1972 New York Times essay – declaring the feminists of her day as immature and misguided. Moreover, writing about women who do nothing and stand for nothing directly opposes the strong-willed female rebels of feminist literary interpretation. Perhaps representations of female apathy are not feminist at all, not even implicitly, but there is, to me, undeniable value in writing women who are complacent, shallow, and sometimes caustic. Didion didn’t spark revolutions, she observed them, and she didn’t write on behalf of womankind, she wrote for herself. In writing, and indeed reading, about apathetic female characters, the notion of a singular, universal ‘female experience’ is challenged. So, I suppose I’m urging, without a shred of apathy, for you to pick up a Didion book, or two. 

By Max Shanagher.

One existential crisis in a day usually causes me to sit rocking back and forth in a dark room. Two existential crises in a day causes me to rock back and forth for a week. Now, finally, I have emerged from my fugue state and turned the lights on in my room. What was the cause of this state? Social media’s insistence that I go and see the films Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.

Reluctantly, I admit that I failed to see them back to back. I wanted to see Oppenheimer in its intended IMAX format and sadly Barbie didn’t have any showings which paired up to the allocated time slot. So I had to plan my day: there were two options to follow.

See Oppenheimer first in the morning, accompanied by a black coffee and a cigarette. Leave Oppenheimer and go and sit in a park for two hours, staring at the birds and the trees. Then get a pre-planned call from a friend, asking if you would like to go to a bar and have a nice cocktail or two. Once enjoying this pre-planned buzz of social reacceptance, going to the bar and getting a little bit drunk. Not so drunk that I would fail to appreciate the golden age of Hollywood-inspired glamour of Barbie, but drunk enough that I am able to put a veil over my eyes that avoids Mattel’s obvious attempts to kick start their own toy cinematic universe. I would exit Barbie cheering and whooping. What fun. 

I decided against this. I woke up, and put on the best Ken costume I could find. Quickly fast forwarding through the trailer, I established that Ryan Gosling’s Ken’s job in the movie is the elusive ‘Beach’. So for inspiration, I picked out a combination sported by many Durham students on the sunny beaches of Seaham and Crimdon. Pink shorts and a cream linen shirt. I walked down the street to see people blinded by my Kenergy. Somebody fainted so I had to call an ambulance. We arrived at the cinema, accompanied by two small tins of some ambiguously named cherry cocktail, and sat back for the movie. What a bizarrely fun movie it was — highlights being Margot Robbie’s inability to ugly cry (more ugly crying will appear later) and a highly coordinated dance off between Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu. I emerged from the movie with a big grin on my face. I then looked at my phone.

The far-right on Twitter had decided that the portrayal of Ken was a demeaning portrayal of their masculinity and Ben Shapiro had created a forty three minute video DESTROYING Barbie. I think what occurred here was more Greta Gerwig DESTROYING them; a grown forty year old man sitting in front of a camera complaining for forty minutes shows that the film touched a nerve. Gerwig not only creates a matriarchal Barbieland lacking wars or hatred (suggesting how the patriarchal ascription of some notions of violence to masculinity has caused some problems) but also shows through the disaffection of Kens the importance of the universal equality of the sexes. It was an advert, a well executed advert with genuine feeling and a strong feminist message but an advert nonetheless. Admittedly, if anyone would like to sponsor me to get an ‘I am Kenough’ jumper for 60 dollars, message me and I’ll give you my PayPal. How the far-right could be so affected by an advert demonstrates the power of the movie in itself, by responding to it with such hatred they have shown the problems with the values which they so admire. 

Much like Superman changing into his super suit in a telephone box, I chose the Vue Cinema toilets to be my location where I switched into my Oppenheimer garb. Gone were the contact lenses, flicked out with reckless abandon and replaced with tortoise shell glasses. I stripped off my pink shorts and replaced them with jeans and accompanied the shirt with a black turtleneck. Apart from embracing chelonian clothing (a word I have discovered, which means turtle and tortoise-like), I was embracing a more intellectual look. Less successful than my Ken outfit, to my dismay, I arrived at the IMAX five hours later to see people wearing lab coats and Oppen-styled hats. I was a fashioned embarrassment, munching popcorn in an over-hot jumper. 

The popcorn munching began five minutes into the movie because the queue to the concession stand created a general crush outside of the IMAX doors. If anything happened of note in the first five minutes please do let me know, I was very sad to miss it (Mum and Dad I have to blame you for your insistence that my girlfriend and I could carry all the snacks, there were too many snacks, far too many snacks). Once the movie began, I was mesmerised. The three hour run-time passed surprisingly quickly, with no points at which I felt it was dragging too long. The sound design, I thought, was the best part. In typical Nolan-style it was difficult in parts to hear dialogue but I couldn’t care less as I felt the blast-wave of an Atomic bomb just by its sound. Cillian Murphy’s performance was brilliant; worries for a brooding Tommy Shelby with an American accent were quickly displaced. I’ve enjoyed afterwards watching Robert Downey Jr’s promotional material for the film. Nolan challenged Downey Jr to perform as the ‘Salieri’ to Oppenheimer’s ‘Mozart’, and I thought through this premise the intrigue was sustained through to the film’s conclusion.

Once again, I picked up my phone upon leaving the cinema to read Twitter. This time, more liberal voices argued that Nolan failed to give voice to the Native Americans and Japanese people who were affected by Oppenheimer’s actions. I agreed with the lack of voice given to Native Americans who were displaced in Los Alamos; they were reduced to a few throw-away lines and Oppenheimer was obviously aware of their presence by suggesting upon the closure of Los Alamos that the ground be restored to them. I disagree with the argument that it lacks a Japanese voice. The reason I disagree is because I thought that the movie captured the genuine American nationalism that was occurring during the war through the lead up and the fallout from the nuclear bombings. It would have been interesting to portray Oppenheimer’s visit to Japan in 1960, particularly because it occurs only a year after Strauss’ nomination by Eisenhower (which the film covers). 

Japanese film has captured the impact of the war on the citizens of Japan so strongly that they could be shown as perhaps a much stronger accompaniment to Oppenheimer than Barbie. I watched Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies when I was 10 and living in Japan. I would suggest not showing the film to a ten year old because I cried for weeks, and every time I have watched it since, I have cried in a way that would put Margot Robbie to shame. Nolan succeeded in capturing the scariness of American nationalism both in the ease with which the decision is made to drop the bomb (to the despair of petitioning scientists), and the ease with which a new enemy is created through Mccarthyism.

Nolan himself created an enemy out of Warner Bros in 2021 when criticising their new HBO Max streaming service. He was so critical that he gave Oppenheimer’s distribution rights to Universal rather than Warner Bros. This decision, perhaps, caused Warner Bros to move their tentpole film of the summer, Barbie, to the same weekend as Oppenheimer. Rather than creating the monopoly on the box office weekend that they intended, both films performed well at the box office because of the Barbenheimer trend. Barbie had the biggest opening weekend for a female director whilst Oppenheimer has already surpassed Nolan’s previous film Tenet in ticket sales after two weeks.

                These successes demonstrate how social media can both give and take. The criticism of the films, whether valid or not, gained significant traction. Ben Shapiro’s forty minute rant has gained 2.3 million views on Youtube. A comment on Twitter about the underrepresentation of Japanese voices in Oppenheimer gained 75k likes and many more interactions. On the more positive side of things (and one of the reasons I have left my room), social media has effectively countered Warner Bros’ attempt at undermining Nolan’s box office presence. In the wake of both the writing and acting strikes, which have affected both films’ promotional runs, the crazy event that is Barbenheimer suggests that the audience has more agency in which films it chooses than movie executives would believe. A movie populated by AI writers and AI actors is not an artistic feat, but both these movies are. Unless, of course, you’re Ben Shapiro.

By Cosmo Adair.

Martin Amis (1949 – 2023) was an English novelist. 

I once went to a van Gogh show at the Tate with a girl. I had an adamantine crush on her and I’d tried every possible mode of flirtation. But she wasn’t interested; in fact, she couldn’t have been further from being interested. But we went to the Tate. This is an odd place to start a piece on Martin Amis, I know. But please – bear with me … 

By the time we were in the third room of the exhibition, and the sombre Prisoner’s Round (after Gustav Doré) was whitewashed by industrial lighting, I began to stammer out a few words. “Th-the impasto, you know — so marvellously done, and after Doré as well … Really, incredible. It reminds me, you know, of something Di–Dickens once wrote. ‘A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned …’ Oh fuck. Sorry. Forgotten it.” I couldn’t work out whether she was bored or whether she had seen through my act. Possibly both. “God, Cosmo,” she said. “You really like van Gogh, don’t you?” And she rolled her eyes. Her lack of interest was palpable. I shut up. After the exhibition, I feigned a commitment in East London so I could go to a different tube station. I had to end this torture quickly. There was only one thing in my head. “FUCKING MARTIN AMIS.”

I read The Rachel Papers when I was a sixteen year-old who had recently started reading ‘proper’ books. I was in the Holiday Inn Express, a few miles from London Gatwick, and stayed up until four in the morning reading in the hotel bathroom. This was the shit. The prose was electric. But not only was this a manual for writing; it was (I thought, naively) a manual for life. The above idea was taken from the novel — although the novel’s hero, Charles Highway, delivered his lines at the Tate’s William Blake show much better than I did. Like Charles, I had visited the exhibition the day before, had written notes and devised a sequence of intelligent witticisms which I could spring on the girl, as if spontaneously. Life can sometimes resemble fiction — but my own attempt couldn’t have been further from the book. 

Charles Highway (‘It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these. I wear glasses for a start, have done since I was nine’) was like me … except, of course, the regular sex and his superlative retention of poetry. And at that time, those were the only things I wanted in life — regular sex and a superlative retention of poetry. In fact, back then, both of those things were interchangeable — and if The Rachel Papers had taught me anything, it was that one quite easily follows the other. 

So, I would walk around my bedroom in recitation (‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness banes, no – FUCK – pains my senses.’), thinking I was Charles Highway or even Martin Amis, and would survey my future. I supposed that, like Charles and Martin, 1) I would be some Casanova of the literati, and 2) that I was a genius. I wanted to be Martin Amis (hair-cut, dress-sense, prose style, etc). Most blokes I knew looked up to, I don’t know — Harry Kane, Alex Turner, Richard Branson? But I looked up to Martin Amis and that — if I wasn’t already arrogant enough — made me even more convinced of the two aforementioned suppositions. I even copied Charles Highway’s technique of arranging the books on his bedside table and floor before a visitor comes. (‘The coffee-table featured a couple of Shakespeare texts and a copy of Time Out — an intriguing dichotomy, perhaps, but I was afraid that, no, it wouldn’t quite do … After a quarter of an hour I decided on Jane Austen, the mellow Persuasion, face down, open towards the end, by my pillow.’) I was relentless in my desire to be Martin Amis — and I took Charles Highway to be a teenaged Martin Amis verbatim. 

I revisited The Rachel Papers a few years later, when I was a little more mature. I was now aware, of course, that The Rachel Papers is very much a send up of the kind of guy I was so desperately trying to be. There was one sentence which really stuck out on this rereading: ‘Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.’ It’s such an apt description of any young person’s romantic characterisation of themselves as a writer. 

Since then I’ve read more of Martin Amis’ novels. His unique cocktail of the lowest of low culture with the highest of literary styles is astounding. His entourages of characters are amongst some of the finest in post-war English fiction: the likes of Keith Talent, the murderer of London Fields, of whom Amis writes:

‘Keith didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer’s dog. (No disrespect to Keith’s dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn’t in the least resemble anyways.’)

And John Self, who is ‘addicted to the 20th century’:

‘My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I’m just junk.’

And Richard Tull, the failing literary novelist, so envious of his friend’s success:

‘These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him, so he drank and smoked a lot.’

There are moments when you’re reading Amis novels which rank among the most sensual literary works in the English language. But his ingrained cynicism sometimes makes for a soiling experience: it’s that Dominoes feeling of utter delectation followed by grave sunkenness. He was the greatest prose stylist England produced in the last century. And his influence is everywhere — from Zadie Smith and Will Self, to some of the lamentable crap I churned out and called fiction in the first lockdown. His vocabulary, his eye for the zeitgeist, and his arrogance are unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. And it seems a terrible shame that such a deserving novelist never won so much as a Booker or a Nobel Prize before he died — only the Somerset Maugham award in 1973 (his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, had won this award some twenty years prior, making them the only father-son combo to ever win the award). 

I could say much more. But writing — now, more than ever — in the shadow of Amis, it seems a crime to even write a sentence. To read him is to become aware of the crass and error-ridden sentences which we all churn out on a daily basis. My only advice is that you read him. It seems apt to finish with this: 

‘Writers don’t realise how good they are because they are dead when the action begins: with the obituaries. And then the truth is revealed 50 years later by how many of your books are read. You feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: Time.’

And so long as we’re not a semi-literate society, which only thinks and writes in dictation to ChatGPT, then I hope there will still be people reading Martin Amis, encountering the same levels of joy, awe, and (at times) sunkenness as his novels have made me feel.

By Ida Bridgeman.

‘A third of the way around the planet in a vehicle you swapped for a bag of crisps…Welcome to the World’s Greatest Road Trip.’ This is how the Mongol Rally introduces itself. I spent a snowy March evening nestled away in the corner of the Swan and Three Cygnets pub, hearing about the plans of four young men with a serious mission ahead of them. They plan to take on the Mongol Rally 2023, a road race from England to Mongolia in which they are given next to no guidance or help. The organisers of this event say that their ‘only job is to tell you where the finish line is and wait for you to turn up a battered but better person’. 

As all good stories do, Charlie starts his with ‘We were in the pub one day…’. Having met in the early weeks of their first term at Durham University, the four young men proceeded to, as is now a regular occurrence, chat the night away with tales of stupidity and plans of adventure. When given too much free time and a couple of pints, they have a habit of ‘coming up with dumb ideas’. Charlie in wistful reminiscence tells me that ‘we were going to sail a bathtub across the English Channel’, but then, in reflection he adds ‘you forget about the choppiness’, followed by ‘and bathtubs aren’t particularly stable’ (Not quite a sieve, but something of that Edward Lear poem ‘The Jumblies’ springs to mind). Unlike the failed bathtub race though, the Mongol Rally actually exists, as does the boys desire to partake in it, and so they shook hands and were set. 

The trip has been branded ‘Tour 4 MMM’. They proudly regard it as ‘a very clever multi-layered name’. Four young men, raising money for the charity Men’s Minds Matter, by touring across Europe and Asia in a rattling tin can. Their slogan? – ‘Eat my rust’. It’s a tacit nod to the boys’ style: speed is necessary at all costs, and a little rust never hurts. Or does it? I’m not entirely convinced by the quality of mechanics skills on hand. Fortunately, ‘Ralph studies engineering’. This reassuring statement seems to be their answer to any mechanical mishaps they might encounter along the way. 

Friends of the boys thought it was a ‘pipedream’ until ‘Nina’ showed up in Durham. The love these four have for one car could quite frankly compete with any Hollywood meet cute. Think love at first sight but the car dealer version. Ralph found it on Ebay, and Archie and Charlie went to check it out in some slightly dodgy looking industrial estate. They spoke to ‘a proper wheeler dealer’, with an earpiece in and a supposed long list of clients desperate to buy the car if these boys didn’t. One test drive alongside some haggling and it was a done deal, that was their car. ‘It’s the look we’re going for’ is the fond way they describe the rusted top, jammed close sunroof and awkwardly square bonnet of the tiny Nissan Micra. They were hooked. And the next week ‘Nina’ (the name taken from a sort of anagram of Nissan) arrived. 

The role of securing sponsorship and heading the campaign is given to Archie aka ‘Mr corporate chat’ himself. He is also head navigator because, unfortunately at 20 years old, he still can’t drive. A skill one might think useful for a multi-week road trip. This did not seem to faze the boys; they are convinced he will learn before the summer – nothing will deter this team. I asked who would be the man to get them out of a sticky situation and Archie is their answer – at least he can talk if he can’t drive.

George, head of socials and marketing, has big plans for spreading their story, aiming for 1,000  Instagram followers by next term. The Instagram page in question is a combination of amusing stories and serious content, ‘come on boys take this seriously we need a picture for our corporate post’ we were told on the photoshoot. It was hard to balance that with George’s insistence on ‘more sex appeal’, if we’re going to look like a boy band (as a passer-by suggested them to be) we want more Oasis and less Blur. 

Charlie is ‘Head of finance’ or so they say – Archie usually chips in before a heated debate ensues regarding who best lives up to their roles. They meet in the Swan to discuss plans, a pub where electronics are banned and storytelling encouraged, an environment fitting for the remote nature of their upcoming mission. When I asked the location that they are most looking forward to travelling in, Ralph suggests anywhere remote, ‘when the road goes from tarmac to dust, then we’re getting serious’.

‘What’s going to be your go-to meal?’ I tentatively asked. Archie’s face lit up as he explained that he is in the process of gaining sponsorship from MRE empire, an army rations company. Quite a pragmatic answer to the pertinent issue of eating during the trip. The same couldn’t be said for George’s insistence on bringing ‘one of those blow-up mattress things’ along with him for five weeks in a car that barely seemed big enough for themselves. Another sponsor that Archie has worked hard to secure is ‘Fuel the Adventure’, providing the boys with iconic jerry-can shaped electrical power banks. CEO Barry Jenkins described the boys as ‘4 lunatics’ but has said in a comment ‘I am delighted to be supporting such a worthy cause as they fuel their adventure for MMM’. Then, George piped up with ‘do you want a joke for your article?’:

‘Who can drink 20 litres of petrol?

Jerry can.’

(There we go George, joke included)

I inquired, in true Desert Island Discs fashion, what luxury items they would be taking – they will be camping and roughing it with the bare minimum of luggage. Ralph initially said a pillow, which they all agreed was a necessity, before settling for loo roll. In my opinion loo roll is a given – but there you go. Archie picked a satellite radio so he can listen to football – the language barrier won’t be an issue he insists, ‘I could be listening to it in German, you can still understand ‘1-0’. 

Charlie contributed with ‘I’m a pretty simple man I don’t really need any luxuries in life’ and mentioned something about maybe a pot of olives. In the meantime, George, as a diligent PPE student, has decided he will bring a book or two to enrich himself along the way; he’s recently been reading Hawking’s ‘The Theory of Everything’. He reckons he’s cracked physics, now I wonder if he should move to a car manual. 

Loud would be an understatement when describing these four. I overheard someone put to them the question of whether they might run out of conversation. My opinion? No chance. The only silence will be when they have a hugely over-dramatic argument over who messed up the cable ties that were holding the wing mirror together. Not unlikely given it fell off during a drive to the coast. I asked if they think it will fall out and the responses were mixed. Let’s hope the team doesn’t implode from within like a supernova surpassing Chandrasekhar’s limit, but only time will tell. This phenomenon (dredged from my non-existent knowledge of physics) happens when a star’s core surpasses a certain mass, which leaves me wondering what the mass limit is for a Nissan Micra to carry four blokes, an armfuls of army rations, George’s blow-up mattress, a slab of hopefully correct visa paperwork, and a couple of tinnys thrown in for those not driving (so Archie all the time at this rate). 
The Mongol rally organisers give some helpful words which I think are quite fitting: ‘if the sky falls on your head, prop it up with a stick and carry on. If you break down, find a way to fix it, buy a horse or start walking’. Our interview ended with imaginary maps being drawn in the air, and across the pub table, the words border crossing, getting lost, and avoid war zones blended into the general evening buzz.

A psychological reason of why you’ve been feeling zoned out recently

By Paula Wengerodt.

Picture this: I’m on my bike on the way to work. There is rush hour traffic, meaning dozens of bikes back to back over the bridge from Nørrebro to the city centre. Danish yummy mummies with three blonde children in a cart attached to the front of their bulky electric bikes, red-faced middle managers in their suits and ties, slicked- back Danske girlies with Asics on their feet and airpods in their ears. Everyone is truly on top of each other at this time of day, wheel-to-wheel. The lights begin to turn green, everyone wobbles forwards, but one woman just won’t move. When she does, it’s at a glacial pace. Road rage fills the air. I overtake, and she is literally scrolling on Instagram. This happens three more times that day. I know the Danes are comfortable on bikes, but there’s a time and a place – and I’m noticing this level of distraction more and more.

I see it at work when I have to call a customer’s name five times whilst looking them square in the eyeball before they register I’m talking to them. I see it in the street when someone cuts off my path because their attention is fixed on a phone. I see it at restaurants where (many) couples now have dinner whilst texting absent friends rather than conversing IRL. People simply seem increasingly detached from their surroundings. But why? Is daily reality in one of the world’s most beautiful cities just too hard to face?

I am no innocent in the tug-of-war between reality and the digital void. Lately, I too have been visited by the spirit of Our Lady of Perpetual Distraction. She is the patron saint of overstimulated brains, tired eyes and short attention spans… and she visits every twelve minutes, according to a 2021 Ofcom report. This is how often the average UK adult checks their phone, the survey found.

Having a panacea of information at your fingertips at all times is, after all, a pretty difficult thing to be self-disciplined about. If the magnetic pull of your attention towards the little flat box in your pocket after a good minute of focussed work or the irresistible ping of a potentially important email are familiar sensations, you shoulder no blame. Contrary to what Elon Musk wants, we still have animal brains with animal impulses, and our devices are designed to exploit those.

Good news: your brain has a built-in solution: selective attention. It is an essential part of filtering information into what is and isn’t worth paying attention to. It favours the loud, the bright, and the important. The bad news: when we are surrounded by loud, bright and (seemingly) important stimuli competing for our attention at all times, our selective attention mechanism can become over-stressed leading to functional blindness¹, a kind of passive, half-aware autopilot state. This confirms that attention is a limited resource. Our brains have a finite pool of mental energy to exert, which explains why I threw a £20 espresso machine filter away with the coffee grounds at the end of a long shift last week and then put an empty bottle of wine in the fridge instead of the recycling. The hypochondriac in me rejoices – this is not early onset dementia! My synapses are just a bit overwhelmed.

Our Lady of Perpetual Distraction is not a harmless presence, however. Exposure to distracting stimuli during a task increases the likelihood of disrupted memory formation, information recall and other cognitive processes. We notice less “irrelevant” detail such as the colour of a leaf on the ground or an interesting feature on a building. As a person who finds joy in the little things, the ability to see them is not something I want to lose. I want my brain to have a bit of perceptive energy left over, to draw inspiration from the everyday and to take in my surroundings. Doing without my favourite podcast when walking somewhere and not taking my phone to the toilet are the first steps (not that there is much beauty to be experienced in a poo – but it’s all about practice).

Perhaps I’m clinging on to an old way of moving through the world, however an ample body of research exists to support the real physiological and psychological effects of overstimulation, interruption and constant partial attention to multiple stimuli. Raised cortisol and adrenaline levels can cause inflammatory effects on brain cells which is linked to depression and anxiety, whilst consistent distraction and interruption has been linked to a drop in IQ scores double the effect of habitual weed use. 

So how do you avoid distraction fog? In the event that you do not have the time or energy to resist the tides of change and retreat to the land to work the soil like our Amish friends (which I have certainly considered), there are a few solutions echoed by experts.

1. Read a physical book for pleasure. This will help you train your brain to get back into a juicy flow state and make deep levels of concentration more accessible in the long run. 
2. Meditation or sitting in silence. Learning to recognise a drifting mind can help you practice holding sustained attention.
3. Getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night. This isn’t news, but insomnia and overstimulation can form a vicious cycle that becomes harder and harder to break. 
4. Physical exercise, around 150 minutes a week. Happy hormones released during aerobic exercise will bolster your brain cells against stress. 

This list may sound boring to some, but that’s exactly the point. A bit of boredom is good for you. For those to whom boredom is a luxury, I get it! Increased connectivity means increased expectations of being accessible at all times. Whenever you can, prioritise stealing a few moments for yourself. Although unwinding after work by scrolling mindlessly might feel like the most appealing thing to do, build in some moments in silent contemplation. I promise they’ll go by much slower than ten minutes on TikTok. 

¹According to the linked article by Craik, functional blindness is the “failure to carry out deeper perceptual processing”. It is a similar sensation to anxiety dissociation. The dorsal pathway which is responsible for guiding behaviour without object recognition or analysis takes over – your body walks, for example, whilst your attention is elsewhere.