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.

By Ella Milne.

“How are you? Had a good week? Lovely. Well Back to me!” (Miranda Hart)

Miranda Hart was my first taste of comedy, as a post ‘Strictly Come Dancing it Takes Two’ family watch before bedtime. Her series is the ultimate comfort show when I am feeling in a rut or stressed, a common word associated with third years! Added to which, anyone who has survived my driving knows my car is named after the one and only Miranda Hart.

So here are my three reasons why Miranda Hart is ‘such fun’: Bear With, Bear With, Bear with – Back:  

1. Her unique comedic style: Hart’s style of physical and verbal comedy that is both childish, silly and relatable. Her willingness to make fun of herself and her awkwardness is endearing, something I portray in myself! Her self-deprecating humour is the epitome of British female comedic characters. Yet she can also play a kind midwife I would want by my side when giving birth.

2. Her ability to connect with her audience: Not only does she connect with fans when breaking the fourth wall but she is also able to create a sense of community with her fans, who often feel like they know her personally. Having had the pleasure to meet her, it is genuine and infectious.

3. Her positivity: Miranda is known for promoting body positivity, self-love, and mental health awareness. She has used her platform to inspire others to be kinder to themselves and to embrace their unique qualities. Stevie can be found asking her in her show “What have you done today to make you feel proud?” (Heather Small). I ask myself this everyday!

Ultimately Miranda Hart has been a huge influence on my own acting and lifestyle, she is a talented comedian and actress who has a unique style and an ability to connect with her audience on a personal level. Thank you for reading and remember to keep calm and gallop on! 

Join Fiona Walker on her journey as she navigates the cutthroat corporate world beyond university. As a former student of the arts, she’s used to playing different roles, but can she keep up with the office politics and drama of corporate life, alone? A new one woman show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, written and performed by Ella Milne and directed by Alice Holmes, CCTV is a show filled with wit, theatrics and all the struggles of a modern day drama graduate. 

Follow the creative process: Instagram: @madeyoulookprod

By Cosmo Adair.

Spare a thought for Carlo Kureishi. After his father Hanif Kureishi’s collapse in Rome on Boxing Day, Carlo has transcribed his father’s thoughts, daily, and published them on Twitter. To write on behalf of an incapacitated father was enough to drive John Milton’s daughters furious—but even they didn’t have to transcribe a fragmented memoir, a meditations-type-thing, with stories involving cunnilingus, sex and drugs. And I know that if I had to hear my father’s lyrical reminiscences about someone he’d shagged, then I’d have slipped something into his food a long, long time ago. So we must thank Carlo Kureishi each day, what he transcribes might feel uncomfortable, but I believe that these reflections are also going to become a definitive work of contemporary literature; and one of the reasons for that is that it’s being dictated by Hanif Kureishi with the knowledge that it could well be the last thing he ever writes. 

On the 6th of January, 2023, Kureishi tweeted, “Dear followers, I should like you to know that on Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall.” 

From this moment onwards, his Twitter threads began to weave themselves into literary history. His description, in this first thread, of the moment he regained consciousness is horrifying: “I then experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semi-circular object with talons attached scuttling towards me. Using what was left of my reason, I saw this was my hand, an uncanny object over which I had no agency.” His delayed recognition of his hand expertly conveys his alienation and dissociation from his own body. 

Since then, he has drifted through time, down a now-characteristic stream of free-associations—one marked by a quick authenticity, and by the illusion of spontaneity (each entry is carefully planned, Carlo has said)—and discusses themes as varied as the consistency of Uniqlo trousers, Manchester United, Italian eyebrows, TV soaps, photographs of authors, fountain pens, and the sartorial style of Graham Greene. One entry is even entitled ON CUNNILINGUS, ENVY, AND OTHER MATTERS, and opens, “It doesn’t follow that just because one is severely injured, one doesn’t think about sex. Indeed, one might think about sex more.” From which I deduce that paralysis has not diminished Kureishi’s libido. 

His threads abound with pithy observations: on Hollywood screenwriters, “some are employed just to write the endings of the movies. Others are better at the beginning.. I wonder who writes the middle”; on Italy, “Italy is one of the great gay civilisations of Europe. The Vatican is gay as is the fashion industry. The entire aesthetic of the renaissance is based on polyamorous sexuality.” And then there are the stories: how he learned to type, “I started to blindfold myself with my school tie and soon found I could write the right words in the right order without even looking”; or on the hospital, “In the gym today a man tried to sell me a horse. He showed me a picture of the horse. I can confirm the horse is very pretty. I had to explain to him that my garden in London is not big enough for a horse.”

Kureishi, with only a handful of words, has constructed a voice which is impersonal enough as to be universal, and personal enough to feel real and de profundis. His self-reflections and analyses are the more profound for it. Each time the voice speaks up from its hospital ward in Rome, one can see how Kureishi has shored these fragments up against his ruin: not only that, but through these tweets he is asserting his identity, his presence, how he is still a writer and is hanging on to life as well as he possibly can.  Equally, it is hard not to dwell on what this could mean for the future of Literature. After years of bland, mundane, and downright poorly written, short stories and poems being splattered over Social Media with a tedious importunity, finally there appears to be something noticeably literary appearing on Twitter. More than that, something literary written by one of the previous generation’s greatest talents. And so, whilst Twitter has been the home of political commentary for sometime now, could it possibly be becoming a new home of Literature? After years of bold and prophetic pronouncements that Social Media is bringing about a new age of Literature, finally we have some proof.

By Clara Tyler.

It is commonly assumed that the relationship between art and science is dichotomous and irreconcilable. In separate spheres of influence, the artist and the scientist fight for the title of official commentator on the human condition. Is our understanding of what it means to be human determined by our scientific make-up, or is it our abstract ability to craft from our surroundings? With every cast and sculpture, Dame Barbara Hepworth forged her revolutionary mark on British modernism by going some way into bridging the abyss between science and art. In her own words she developed her sculptures to reflect the development of society and, through doing so, offered a reconciliation between art and science. 

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) was born in Wakefield and grew up surrounded by the Yorkshire moors. Her rural background was interrupted by brief episodes of urban life, leading her to pursue her studies in art. She studied at the Leeds school of art from 1920 and in 1921 was awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art (RCA) from which she graduated with a diploma in 1924. It was at RCA where she met Henry Moore, who became her friend and competitor in the field of sculpture. 

Hepworth’s permanent move to St Ives in 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war is suggestive of her disillusionment with the urban environment. Her art is indicative of such sentiment: she used natural materials to create her sculptures and was an avid ambassador for the new movement of ‘direct carving’, where the artist crafts the sculpture out of an original material, as opposed to using casts and moulds to fashion the sculpture. Through the process of direct carving, Hepworth showed the close link between the artist and their form. By leaving her etching marks on the sculpture she draws the viewer closer to her art by encouraging them to touch the sculpture, implicating them in the artistic process. Hepworth once said, ‘everything I make is to touch’, and her donation of one of her sculptures to a school for the visually impaired shows her to be true to this statement, requiring her viewers to engage with the hand of the artist through the use of their own hand.

Hepworth’s use of spaces and hollowed areas in her work requires her audience to engage with their bodies when looking at her art. One of her most famous sculptures, Two Forms, particularly challenges the viewer to involve themselves in the art work through the presence of holes. These voids in the work encourage her audience to investigate the view through the holes and how they can change it. Hepworth’s attention to fine details also draw the viewer closer to the form, her choice to polish the oval recess in the sculpture goes some way to softening the transition between sculpture and sky behind, whereas the abrupt gap between the two semi circles creates a severe disjuncture in the work. The context of this sculpture is important; produced in the same year of the moon landing, Hepworth is perhaps commenting on human progress. By encouraging viewers of her work to immerse themselves in the sculpture, and showing the infinite possibilities to see what they want through the holes, she is perhaps experimenting with the representation of the limitless possibilities of mankind. Critics have suggested that the circular shape of the hole is perhaps emblematic of the moon, if looking at the sculpture at the right time and place, you would be able to see the moon right through it, however, I wonder whether this is a too crude reading of the work. Rather than encouraging a specific interpretation of the sculpture, Hepworth shows the boundless capability of scientific progress by encouraging a reading unique to each viewer.

Hepworth wished her work to engage with daily life and, in a reciprocal fashion, for daily life to immerse itself with her work. Her legacy suggests she achieved this: the opening of her home and studio in St Ives as a Tate gallery allows viewers to walk all over her life and work. But, perhaps the specific work most involved in daily life is Winged Figure (1963) clamped to the side of the John Lewis flagship store in Oxford Street in London. It is intriguing to me that Hepworth was chosen as the artist whose work should be hung off one of the busiest streets in London. Throughout her career, Hepworth frequently alluded to the tension between natural form and the human figure, and Winged Figure is one of those works, where the stretched out aluminium figure is restrained by stainless steel rods. The tension embodied in this work is a frequent feature in her portfolio and shows the relationship between nature and human progress. Rather than Hepworth showing the two forces to be opposing and incongruous, she instead suggests human progress and nature stretch and test each other, and are ultimately implicit with each other. 

Hepworth’s life was blighted by significant personal events. Her first marriage to John Skeaping ended after 8 years, when she met and fell in love with the painter, Ben Nicholson who was also married at the time. She had one child with Skeaping, Paul, who died in a plane crash whilst serving for the Royal Air Force. Whilst she travelled to Greece to mourn the death of Paul, her friend sent her a large shipment of Nigerian guarea hardwood and her work briefly turned to Greek-inspired woodcarving when she returned, resulting in sculptures such as Corinthos (1954) and Curved Form (1955). 

She had triplets with Nicholson in 1934, naming them Rachel, Sarah and Simon, and the significance of their birth was also reflected in her work, most obviously in Mother and Child, produced in the same year. Again, Hepworth’s style of direct carving allowed her to engage more closely with the material and is suggestive of the vitality of the subject of mother and child. Furthermore, the void in the centre of the work is emblematic of the space in which the child once occupied, but is now separate from the mother’s body. Both child and mother are made from the same piece of Cumberland alabaster, alluding to the creation of child from the mother’s flesh. There is also meta-artistic significance in the parallel between the crafting of child from mother, and art from artist, and through drawing this parallel Hepworth refers to the notion of the ‘woman’ artist. She once stated: ‘a woman artist […] is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one’s mind’. 

Does the position as a ‘woman artist’ allow Hepworth to make a more nuanced argument in comparison to that of Henry Moore in his bronze sculpture of the same name, Mother and Child (1954)? Henry Moore’s piece shows the nurturing role of the mother, especially in a post-war period, where the infant is shown to be fiercely suckling from the mother’s breast. I believe Hepworth instead portrays a fluid representation of the reclining mother with the infant resting on the figure, showing the beauty and symbiosis of the two; the child nurtures the mother just as much as the mother nurtures the child. It is possible for Hepworth to make such a statement due to her position as a woman artist and a mother, and she uses this unusual position to create subtle feminist undertones in her work. 

After the birth of her triplets, Hepworth’s work moved noticeably from figuration to abstraction, from depiction of the human figure, to more non-specific sculptures suggestive of the landscape. We can support this change in style of her art with contextual knowledge of her life: the outbreak of the second world war instigated her move from her hometown of Wakefield to the beauty of the Cornish coast, where her work became increasingly abstract. It is possible to argue that this transition in her art is resemblant of her disillusionment with human progress, but I believe it is more likely to be representative of the reassurance she receives from the permanence of the presence of our landscapes. 

Hepworth was a unique artist in many respects; being a woman in the twentieth century modernist movement is one such reason, but also her shrewd knowledge of current affairs and scientific progress made her work relevant to her context. In this way, she challenges the perception of art as irrelevant to daily life and raises its applicability. I don’t pretend to equate art and science through looking at Barbara Hepworth, and I also don’t believe that is what she intended to portray. However, I do believe that Hepworth’s work shows the entwined nature of science, art and our environment. It is not possible to totally isolate these fields of knowledge and Hepworth shows the importance of having an all-rounded awareness in order to be able to make astute judgements of the human condition.