Category: Perspective

Robertha Green Gonzalez

The Original Hans Christian Andersen tales could be frightening, cruel and surprisingly uncompromising. They introduced children to punishment, loss and death without necessarily explaining them, and rather than protecting children from difficult emotions, they trusted them to encounter them. It reminded me of A Monster Calls, one of the first books I read that made me cry. What stayed with me was not simply its treatment of grief, but its refusal to suggest that emotions need to be understood before they can be expressed. Conor, the central protagonist in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, does not understand what he feels, but that confusion does not lessen their reality. Instead, Ness positions this uncertainty at the heart of his portrayal of childhood: children can be unreliable narrators not only in what they say, but in what they understand about themselves. A Monster Calls turns that gap between feeling and understanding into a feature of its narrative. 

Whilst A Monster Calls is a young adult novel geared towards 11–14-year-olds, its treatment of grief deliberately extends beyond a child’s understanding. Giskin Day writes that ‘The book draws on conventions of children’s literature to create a sense of familiarity that helps to balance the emotional stress of the story.’ Day’s emphasis on “familiarity” is important because Ness places Conor’s grief within a world that is immediately recognisable to a young reader: school, bullying, family conflict and the helplessness of having little control over what happens to him. The monster, its three stories and the fairy-tale structure then give these experiences a familiar fantasy framework through which difficult emotions can be explored. But familiarity does not mean simplification. Ness deals openly with anger, guilt and the frightening wish for suffering to end, trusting his younger readers to encounter emotions they may not yet have the language or experience to understand. Conor wants his mother to survive, but he also wants the uncertainty and suffering to end. The monster gives this contradiction a physical form before Conor can articulate it himself. A younger reader can accept the monster as part of Conor’s reality, whilst an older reader may interpret it as grief and emotional repression given a body. Ness therefore leaves room for both readings, and it is precisely this uncertainty that shapes the novel’s narrative perspective: just as Conor cannot fully understand what he feels, the reader is never given a completely authoritative explanation of what the monster is. 

Conor O’Malley is therefore an unreliable narrator in every sense but the technical one. Although the novel is written in the third person, everything is filtered through what Conor perceives, fears and cannot say, so his limited understanding governs what the reader is allowed to know. His unreliability has nothing to do with lying. He simply does not yet have the vocabulary to name what is happening inside him, or the self-control to contain it once those feelings surface. The ancient yew tree that stands in the churchyard behind his house gives this inability a physical form: at seven minutes past midnight it transforms, walks to his window and refuses to leave until Conor tells it the truth. Later, Conor destroys his grandmother’s sitting

room, smashing the couch, bookcase and treasured clock until only the display cabinet remains. Afterwards, he stares at his own bloodied hands, unable to understand how he could have done it. Ness refuses to provide the explanation that Conor himself cannot give. When his grandmother returns to the wreckage, she does not demand an explanation or punish him; she walks straight past him and pulls down the final cabinet herself. The scene is left unresolved, just as Conor’s feelings are. 

The same refusal to settle the truth surrounds the monster. Ness never definitively reduces it to a metaphor, keeping it in the same territory as a child’s imaginary friend: unprovable, but not therefore false. Its importance lies in what it allows Conor to express before he can express those feelings himself. This openness also allows an adult reader to take the more sceptical view that the monster is Conor’s grief given physical form, without forcing a younger reader towards that interpretation. Magritte makes a related point in his 1929 painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe: the painted pipe is not literally a pipe, but it still represents one. The monster may not be a monster, but it is the only visible form Conor’s feelings can take before he is able to recognise them. Even his moment of complete honesty arrives through representation. The monster tells three stories before demanding a fourth from Conor: his own. He can only tell the truth by turning it into a story. We are therefore never given Conor’s feelings directly; we encounter them through the monster, through his violence and finally through the story he struggles to tell. His unreliability comes from the gap between feeling something and understanding what that feeling means. 

Day describes the novel as confronting “the psychic burden of the impending loss of a parent through cancer”, and Ness’s response is not to make that experience smaller for children, but to give it a form they can enter. The monster makes fear, anger and guilt visible without reducing them to a simple lesson, while the novel’s uncertainty allows both child and adult readers to make sense of what Conor cannot yet articulate. His unreliability is therefore not a failure of understanding, but part of what makes his grief believable. Ness trusts children to encounter difficult emotions before they have the words to explain them, leaving the reader with something more honest than a neatly resolved version of grief: sometimes a child can know what they feel long before they understand why.

By Pedro Couto

Throughout history, humanity has been fascinated by the question of what the future might hold. Some have thought the problems of their time would be resolved, solutions ushered in by the arrival of new technologies. Others, in light of said technologies, have not seen the future in such a hopeful light. As we look back on history, we see that this worry and foresight into the problems of the future, as well as its solutions, was such a concern that humanity has even attempted to predict its end countless times in many apocalyptic myths or prophecies.

Dystopian literature, as a result, has become increasingly popular, as the idyllic hopes for the age of information and its promises have continually been crushed by wars, mass surveillance, and the manipulation of the populace with what the Roman poet Juvenal coined, ‘bread and circuses’. From the classic dystopian novels of the 20th century: Brave New World, 1984, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to newer titles in the 21st century like The Hunger Games and Ready Player One, and even in shows and movies such as Black Mirror. Dystopian literature is incredibly useful for our reflection on the trajectory and likely problems our society will face as a consequence of developments in technology, cultural attitudes, and politics (to name the three biggest), and during a year that has felt as turbulent as 2026 has, it seems all the more pressing to consider what the trajectory and likely problems our societies will run into. It is also notable that in the late 1950s there was a comic strip of an American Newspaper titled Closer than We Think, which was designed to illustrate ideas of how technology would change in the future (for the better in their eyes), and it is from such panels we get predictions of flying cars and the like.

Here, I wish to do something similar to that old comic strip, though not quite as cheery, and present what dystopian omens the future seems to hold both technologically and culturally. I look out into what I perceive to be problems already in 2026, with the aim to present these to you, dear reader, in order that you may reflect on my fantastical notions and consider whether these are real possibilities or not; and most importantly whether the problems that suggest them are problems at all, and if they are, how we may go about doing things differently.

Law by AI — The first thing on anyone’s mind when I bring up the future and its dark road is likely the use of Artificial Intelligence and especially Generative AI, which is exponentially developing and becoming more and more prevalent. There are many things AI will likely be used for in the future and already is. One I have seen people discuss the least, and I think is one of the most important, is that generative AI will have the potential to effortlessly produce forgeries of legal documents, anything from contracts to witness statements, etc. This risk has already been acknowledged by the International Bar Association (https://www.ibanet.org/authenticity-of-disclosed-documents-and-AI), yet the recommended way forward seems to me likely to be ineffective in stopping the use of AI in forging documents or in detecting its use preventatively. As such, we may expect a future in which the courts are run by attorneys and prosecutors alike, wielding AI to fabricate evidence for their own case so as to better compete with their opposition and in which increasingly the truth becomes irrelevant in court, but guilt is instead weighed on the attractiveness of the stories told by lawyer and machine together. Further, we may expect for innocent people to be accused with such evidence used against them, and for the guilty to defend themselves by claiming that real evidence is a fabrication of AI — which of course would lead to massive delays in justice to try to authenticate the legality of these documents (if AI will even be capable of being detected then). Even if AI becomes further regulated or less accessible to the common public, which seems to be the direction in which legislators are prepared to take, who does this benefit? Will not the state or companies be the ones with access to this technology? So the monster we call AI looms its ugly shadow over our destinies all the more, and we would be wise to beware of its coming.

Plurality in fragments. With regard to our wider culture in the future, there have been many worries about eugenics as gene editing technologies advance and the worries of the banality and meaninglessness of sex as society becomes ever increasingly more licentious. Personally, I do not feel threatened by these things; if anything, these worries have been so at the forefront of legislators’ minds and the general public that these aspects of culture and applications of technology have, in large part, been restrained. Instead, a much more threatening and looming danger can be foreseen and, in a dystopian world, is likely to be taken to its extreme; this threat being the fragmentation of society leading to, in its extreme, civil war(s). What I mean by fragmentation is that people in the 21st century, especially, but not limited to, the West, are differing more and more on their opinions, beliefs, and traditions, and so the cohesive shared vision of a healthy society — at least one that is well-ordered — is becoming a distant memory (before it is forgotten completely). If it were just disagreement, this could be tolerated — after all, humans have always disagreed and will continue to do so; I am not trying to suggest that every society ought to be a monolith. Rather, the danger emerges from precisely the intolerance of disagreement, whether on political, religious, or even ethno-cultural lines.

This intolerance first begins as hostile conversation, which quickly censors any kind of conversation that dares disagree with the status-quo in a particular context (this may be a small group of friends or a superpowered nation). The status quo then becomes moral law, incapable of being questioned lest one suffer the pain of complete character death. And after character death comes real physical death, since aggression and hostile opposition to disagreements do not persuade anyone of their oppressor’s cause but strengthen the conviction of their persecuted beliefs. The final stage is violence reproducing violence and, as such, the breaking out of a civil war. With the rise of social media, cancel culture, and a time of general political unrest, it seems evidently clear that no matter your politics, your religion, or anything else you believe, there are people online and perhaps even in person who not only disagree with you but would call for your death because of what you believe. If we as a species cannot learn to communicate without the threat of violence or censure, then we will be led into the dark; into a future in which countries break out in schismatic wars over political ideology, religious beliefs and even traditions of culture, thus creating a world in which plurality — which would be the ideal of tolerance despite disagreement — is itself fragmented into many tiny tribes all perpetually at war with their moral enemies.

Extinction of Cultural Diversity. We can further imagine a future in which the rise of globalisation, supercharged by social media, civil wars and unrest, creates a monoculture or the death of many different cultures worldwide as those that are militarily or economically weaker fail to have enough power to exert themselves into the global zeitgeist. We are seeing this already today as American media is unquestionably dominant with no real competition — whether it be Hollywood, TikTok influencers, or news stations — the whole world seems to revolve around American communication. What’s more, communication (especially repeated communication) inspires thought, beliefs, and values, and as American communication is globally widespread, so are American thoughts, beliefs, and values, such as the necessity of individuality, of liberal freedom, and also of consumerism en masse. Therefore, it follows that if this trend continues, the world itself will be American eventually, and with that, no longer a diverse ecosystem of variable history, ideals, and traditions. I leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether this is a good or bad thing and whether diversity is itself a cause worth fighting for. Nonetheless, I do consider this lack of diversity dystopian in so far as it is removed from what has been the natural order of human history up to this point.

Hopeful Note. If you are someone who gets anxious or overwhelmed with bad news, then this article probably hasn’t done you much good. So here’s a final note to help ease you out of the depression of worrying about the future. In the same way that many things become worse with the rise of technology and developments in culture, many things will also become better. The purpose of dystopias is to help reflect on the challenges we are currently facing so they do not lead to problems in the future, yet it is important to note that dystopias never come to fruition as we think they will. Orwell’s totalitarian state as in 1984 never came true (though many problems involving mass surveillance have become reality), nor did Huxley’s Brave New World or the Hunger Games. This is because while the human condition is doomed by many misfortunes to worsen the lives of many, it is also filled with the hopeful striving towards the betterment of those very same lives. We may foresee a future in which cures to cancers are found, climate technology advances and the air we breathe is cleaner, in which education and medicine is more readily available, and many more such developments. All these things are just as possible as the omens discussed in this article, so hold onto this hope and consider the possible evils only insofar as we think about how to make a difference now, so as with the dystopias of these great writers, they may never come to reality.

Featured Image: Pexels

By Isabella Tarttelin

Complaining about the weather is our national pastime, as ancestral as a hot cup of tea, but these days, ‘terribly tense’ applies equally to the afternoon forecast and the morning headlines. As an unusually hot September day blurs the line between a changing climate and a turbulent political arena, it is time to look closer at how we talk about both spheres and find that they are not as separate as we have been socialised to believe. Through literature, film, and so many of the creative arts, there is a solidified dichotomy between the greys of metropolitan and the greens of Eden. Take, for example, the rise of Romanticism; William Wordsworth wrote an almost 10,000 line poem describing the natural environment as an otherworldly place that is entered through a deep spiritual understanding. I may not have reached the same development of my prefrontal cortex at the humble age of 20, but can I not claim connection with nature without having undergone some sort of spiritual psychosis? Or is the reality far simpler, and that the boundary between the human and natural worlds is entirely artificial, and everything we do is inherently natural, because we are? In exploring this question I’ve leaned heavily on Timothy Morton’s ecocritical work, The Ecological Thought and how the boundary between contemporary and natural are explored within the fields of creative works, particularly Seamus Heaney’s Field Work and director Martin McDonagh’s film The Banshees of Inisherin.

In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton argues that the modern climate crisis can only be resolved if humanity awakens to the reality of the deep, inescapable way in which we are connected to other beings. This perspective stands in direct contrast to William Wordsworth’s Romantic ideal, which relies on a lofty spiritual pilgrimage to access a sentient, separate, and capitalised ‘Nature’. To truly embrace Morton’s philosophy and reject this romanticised illusion, we must turn instead to the visceral poetry of Seamus Heaney. Written against the tumultuous backdrop of the Troubles, Heaney’s work shows a landscape entirely entangled with human conflict. In his poem “Glanmore Sonnet IX”, Heaney reflects on his retreat to County Wicklow. Seeking refuge from the violent political climate swarming Belfast, Heaney relocated his family in 1972 where they stayed until 1976, under the assumption that fresh immersion in the rural world would offer a sanctuary. The speaker becomes confronted by a rat, and promptly kills, following which he is wracked by guilt and shame for doing the very thing he moved for four years to escape from. As the speaker laments on line 5: ‘Did we come to the wilderness for this?’, the unanswered question underscores his guilt. By using the word ‘wilderness’ to imply a total removal, the speaker desperately aims to draw a line between human savagery and natural peace, instead revealing the boundary already collapsed. By fleeing Belfast for County Wicklow, Heaney tries to cross an imaginary border from a political world into a natural one, treating nature as a passive, neutral sanctuary where human conflict cannot and should not exist. However, the intrusion of the rat and an immediate resurfacing of violence smashes the speaker’s illusion and reinforces how human politics and natural ecologies are completely interconnected, just as Morton argues. Through the speaker’s lament and the penultimate positioning of the sonnet, Heaney presents the escape to Glanmore Cottage as a failed one, as it proved that human politics of violence, trauma, and choices are entirely native to the natural world. Such concepts are not alien to the ‘wilderness’ but are instead interconnected, as Morton emphasises.

The idea of violence, traumas, and petty social politics being native and interwoven into rural spaces is explored further in the film Banshees of Inisherin. If Heaney proves human politics cannot be left at the boundary of the ‘wilderness’, Martin McDonagh’s 2022 film The Banshees of Inisherin completely annihilates the boundary itself. Set near the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, the film takes place on an island off the west coast of Ireland. While the fictional remote island of Inisherin is isolated from the actual fighting, gunshots and explosions from the mainland conflict act as a backdrop to Colm and Padraic’s trivial arguments. In McDonagh’s narrative, such an ambient and violent backdrop completely infects the seemingly romanticised, spiritual sanctuary from the distant gunfire on the mainland. The isolation in fact becomes a claustrophobic stage where any artificial divide between human affairs and the natural world is completely torn down. The feud between Colm and Padraic becomes trapped within their own geography, escalating into arson and mutilation, proving that the island’s sweeping cliffs and rolling hills offer no romantic peace, but instead a catalytic cage. Passive background elements become intimate casualties of human pettiness, when Padraic’s donkey Jenny dies from choking on Colm’s mutilated finger. By showing the physical toll our ideological conflicts take on the supposedly ‘separate’ natural world, McDonagh captures the ultimate reality of our ecological existence: our politics do not happen apart from nature, but happen within it, with catastrophic consequences for the entire living ecosystem. McDonagh’s narrative therefore runs parallel with Timothy Morton’s insistence on changing our outlook on the natural world as one that enshrouds and is enshrouded by the human experience.

We return, then, to our unseasonably warm September afternoon and our polite complaints about the weather. Our instinct to separate the natural world from our political structures has always been a comforting lie, a way to pretend that the ecosystems we inhabit are merely passive backdrops to our human dramas. But as Timothy Morton’s interconnected thinking reminds us, there is no separate fortress of the realm called ‘Nature’ to escape to. We cannot leave our trauma at the threshold of Heaney’s wilderness, nor can we pretend our ideological violence does not bleed into the rolling hills of McDonagh’s Inisherin. If everything we do is inherently natural simply because we are, then ecological responsibility is not a spiritual luxury for the enlightened few, but the crux of our political reality. It is time to drop the illusion of any boundary and admit that the storm inside Westminster and the storm outside our windows are parts of the exact same sky.

Featured Image: Cara Crofts

By Lara Rusinov

‘When I get to heaven, I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting.’ These are the words of Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister through the Second World War and again in the early 1950s. Yes, I know. I was thrown too on discovering not only that Churchill painted, but that he painted rather well, and prolifically.

Some reviews have dismissed Churchill’s canvases as amateur and short on technique. Yet there is more to learn from our former prime minister than the limits of his technical abilities as an artist. The exhibition, Winston Churchill: The Painter, housed in The Wallace Collection in London until 29 November 2026, is a heartfelt defence of the amateur, a reminder of the importance of stepping away from the real world into the realm of creative sublimity.

For me up until this point, Churchill has been the prime minister of VE Day, the booming voice on the wireless, the bald, cigar-chomping, hunched figure of The Crown. This exhibition pulls the pedestal out from under him and he comes down to earth to meet us face-to-face. Not only are Churchill’s paintings displayed, but his personal possessions too, including his spectacles, individual brushes, and travel easel. While these objects add an interactive level to the exhibition, more significantly, they play a part in making us feel closer to the ‘human version’ of this figure who we feel we ‘know’: we see Churchill as a person rather than simply as a statesman. The cult of the politician dissolves; in its place we are gently introduced to Winston, a man we can begin to unlock and understand. 

In his book Painting as a Pastime, Churchill explained that ‘painting is complete as a distraction… I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind.’ Churchill makes it clear that the goal of his painting was not to produce critically acclaimed masterpieces, but rather, he painted to escape. Churchill himself even dismissed the value of his own paintings, referring to them as ‘daubs’. This raises the question: must art be ‘good’ to be worthwhile? For Churchill, painting was not only a worthwhile escape, but essential. To put it in 21st-century terms, it was the statesman’s detox, and an addictive one at that: the almost sixty works on show at The Wallace Collection make up only about a tenth of his estimated total output. The exhibition makes an affecting case in defending creative impetus as a vehicle for increased productivity. Our time away, absorbed in creativity, is key for enhanced performance. Seemingly, some of the apparently useless things we do might well turn out to be the most useful.

Perfection is not always attainable, nor always the height we should be striving for. Churchill valued the simple pleasures associated with his creative hobby: ‘we cannot aspire to masterpieces,’ he said; ‘we may content ourselves with a joy-ride in a paint-box.’ Indeed, sometimes a ‘daub’ is enough, and sometimes that daub is the very thing that propels us into an elevated, ‘flow’ state.

By Verity Browne

Content warning: This article discusses grief, trauma, mental and physical health problems, suicidal feelings, sexual abuse and abortion.

My first encounter with Dame Tracey Emin’s work was at the Tate Modern this summer, at her exhibition A Second Life. A confessional, iconoclastic, and introspective showcase of sculpture, painting, photography, installation, film, writing, and textiles, Emin traverses media and, in doing so, encapsulates the female experience. It was from here that I was hooked on her story, which she details so poignantly throughout her evocative oeuvre. In viewing her exhibition, I picked up on themes of trauma and grief, and in her most recent works, physical illness, as Emin creates art reflecting upon her battle with bladder cancer. In earlier works, this idea of using bodily vulnerability and physical trauma as a subject is also present, as Emin’s two medically complicated and mentally challenging abortions in the early 1990s play a large role in shaping the narrative of her works – as well as triggering an artistic and personal reinvention.

As can be proven by her first-class degree from Maidstone College of Art, before her attendance at the Royal College of Art in 1987, Emin possesses a breadth of technical ability and prowess. In her school years, she favoured printmaking and woodcuts with a German Expressionist feel, without exploring too much the abstract; her subjects were often either dark landscapes inspired by her hometown of Margate, or representations of her turbulent relationship with Billy Childish. Her rarely seen 1980s watercolour paintings depict seascapes from her home in Kent, and interpretations of cityscapes as she explored her familial heritage in Turkey, for example, Istanbul (1989). However, while there are some differences in medium and colour scheme, Tracey’s rendering of people remains, throughout her oeuvre, Munch-like, with distorted or simplified faces, as can be seen in Disposition of Christ (1990).

Around 1990, after her abortions, Tracey Emin experienced what she refers to as an ‘emotional suicide’. Severely depressed and battling intense physical and psychological trauma, she burned all of the paintings which she had previously produced, in a vehemently driven attempt to rid herself of a part of her life which she believed no longer purposefully served her, or positively benefitted her. At her Tate exhibition this summer, I noted a wall decorated with small photographs, ordered in rows, of all of these destroyed works. To me, this arrangement seemed almost cemeterial and struck me in its emotional weight, while I simultaneously could appreciate there was an eerie beauty in such an homage, in Emin’s recognition of the brutality of her past. It can be difficult to comprehend the sheer significance which art has in her life, in order that the eradication of her artworks might be likened to a suicide of part of her soul, and that a material act of destruction can mirror an entirely individual and intimate mental one. In many ways this was the beginning of Emin’s effort to fracture the norms of how art is perceived: not only in the way that it is created and appears, but in the way that it resonates with all who encounter it. She meant to, and means to, challenge what art is and what it can signify – in her case, her art is a part of her very being.

A hiatus from art and creation ensued after her ‘emotional suicide’, until a return in 1993 at White Cube, with her first solo exhibition – My Major Retrospective, in which she debuted a tender assemblage of memorabilia, text, and paintings. Already, a drastic shift in style was apparent, Tracey adopted a more diaristic, honest tone, while also beginning to favour raw imagery of the female body in her paintings and sculptures, and the painting of rageful canvases inspired by her history as a victim of sexual abuse. She was experiencing an emotional rebirth, and this had encouraged an artistic switch from expressionism to a philosophical, and culturally critical, postmodern exploration.            

Like the Moon, You Rolled Across My Back, 2022, monoprint

In 1998, Emin created her seminal installation My Bed, and we are thus provided with another example of how reimagination is so vital in her art and in her life. At the time, My Bed divided public opinion and shocked critics. As pictured below, the installation featured a precise replica of her room after a four-day depressive episode, in all of its uncensored and intimate reality. Despite intense initial backlash to Emin’s confrontation of taboo topics, from depression to sexual liberation, it was nominated for the Turner Prize and had immense commercial success, being sold at Christie’s London in 2014 for over £2.5 million.

My Bed, 1998, at the Tate Modern 2026

My Bed pushed what art could be to the very precipice, and is now accepted and celebrated for having done so. In Artist Talk: Tracey Emin (2025) by The Yale Center for British Art, Emin confesses that this installation saved her and opened up doors for her. There is something remarkable about the fact that a recreation of one of the most pernicious times in her life could have been reclaimed in a positive way. Moreover, in this interview, she explains her process of installing My Bed each time it is exhibited and how she subtly changes certain elements – it is constantly being adapted and reinterpreted depending on her memory and perception of the site of her depressive episode back in the late 1990s. Thus, My Bed is subject to physical alteration as well as alteration of what it means to its creator; every aspect of the installation is always morphing, and from destruction, Emin produced something insightful and resonant.

The End of Love, 2024        

(Beds became a motif in Emin’s later works.)                            

In both her personal and artistic life, Tracey Emin has undergone a metamorphosis; from mental and physical turmoil, she takes inspiration and is constantly developing her style and improving upon herself. She has reclaimed her trauma by making it into beautiful, emotive artworks which evoke pathos and convey feminine rage, while remaining sharp and socially conscious.

Interview: Artist Talk: Tracy Emin (2025), YaleBritishArt

Featured image: Like a Cloud of Blood, 2022

By Cadance Whawell

Durham’s mining history, despite its importance in shaping the cultural identity of the North East, often is unfamiliar to the city’s term-time inhabitants. Unknown to many students is the swarm of people, who flood Durham for one day every summer. Colourful banners, brass bands, and a proud community, alien to Durham’s term-time self, transform the city into a day of remembrance, celebration, and solidarity. 

It’s the 11^th July 2026, and it is clear this is no ordinary day. As I approach the Gilesgate Roundabout, there is a noticeably shorter wait to cross the usually busy road. It’s only 9am, yet families are already making their way into the city centre, whilst a whisper of music crawls up Claypath. By the time I reach Market Place, the few families have turned into dense crowds, and that distant sound has amplified into the distinctive blast of marching bands. From the Market Place, to Saddler Street, to Elvet Bridge, Durham has been transformed by parades of bands, crowds, and emblematic banners. The Big Meeting has begun.

After weaving through the crowds, and dodging the banners of mining collieries and trade unions, I find the perfect spot. Elvet Bridge in front of me, and the County Hotel directly behind me, I keep hold on my ‘barriers spot’ and wait impatiently for the procession to begin. 

Signalled in groups towards Old Elvet, processions converge from New Elvet and Elvet Bridge before advancing towards the Racecourse. Mining lodges, trade unions, community and political organisations pass by me carrying their distinctive banners, accompanied by the sound of brass bands and bagpipes.  Many of the marchers stopped outside the County Hotel, where bands electrified the crowds and onlookers from the hotel’s balcony with renditions of contemporary hits such as Freed from Desire and Sweet Caroline. The juxtaposition of modern music and traditional instruments and symbolic banners poignantly captures this year’s 140^th anniversary theme, ‘The past we inherit, The future we build,’ emblazoned across the balcony. A reminder to all that this is not only a celebration of the past, but hope and solidarity as we move towards the future.

After two hours of observing the parade, word of food and festivities at The Racecourse inspired a change of location. Following the procession down Old Elvet, we arrived at The Racecourse, except this wasn’t the familiar picnic spot many students enjoy during Easter term. The green field was concealed beneath a sea of people, lined with the gala’s historic banners, and alive with stalls, food trucks and a main stage. Transformed into a festival celebrating North East and working class culture, The Racecourse was certainly not a quiet cricket pitch today.

This festival ground offered the perfect opportunity to admire the Gala’s emblematic banners. Their symbolism, craftmanship, and detail gave the day an artistic dimension. Like wandering through an open-air gallery, each banner told a different story, reflecting both the histories and the present-day identities of the communities it represents. From mining lodges and miners’ families, to trade unionist, and campaign groups, the curation of banners created a unique representation of solidarity and community spirit.

In the midst of the activity of the day, it became impossible to see Durham only through the sheltered lens of its university prestige. The Big Meeting offers a glimpse into the region’s history, yet football chants ahead of England World Cup match that evening and brass-band rendition of Three Lions revealed how tradition and modernity coexist, allowing heritage to continue evolving. Durham Miners’ Gala is a reminder that the North East’s heritage is not simply something confined to the past. Contemporary culture slips naturally into the event through its songs and festivities, allowing tradition to evolve and be alive in the present, without losing its historic roots. Whilst the Gala preserves and celebrates working-class history, its message of solidarity continues to resonate today. Its socialist foundations continue to adapt to contemporary causes, bringing over 200,000 people to Durham each year from across the country.

Although Durham is best known for its historic landscapes, defined by its cobbled streets, cathedral and architecture, it is the annual Big Meeting that brings the city’s history to life, showing how heritage continues to live within communities today. 

By Robertha Green Gonzalez

I was feeling rather nostalgic and decided to revisit the classic romcoms I grew up loving: Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality, Jerry Maguire, Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, and 10 Things I Hate About You. The films that convinced an entire generation that love was funny, complicated and, above all, inevitable. Before I continue, I should make one thing clear: I’m no cynic. Quite the opposite. But as the credits rolled on each of these films, all I could think was…

Where did it all go wrong?

And not to sound like Carrie Bradshaw at the start of every Sex and the City episode, but how on earth did we let these films shape our idea of the perfect relationship? How did manipulation become persistence, jealousy become passion and grand gestures become the ultimate proof of love? More importantly, when did romcoms convince us that poor communication was chemistry and emotional chaos was destiny? That if someone hurts you, lies to you or disappears, they’ll eventually realise what they’ve lost, turn up at your door in the pouring rain and deliver a speech so moving that everything that came before simply doesn’t matter. Perhaps that’s the biggest fantasy of all. Not that love conquers everything, but that love excuses everything. Watching these films back, I realised that almost every one of these iconic love stories would raise more than a few eyebrows in 2026, and yet we still use them as examples in casual conversation of what we want in our own relationships.

Take Two Weeks Notice. For years, we were encouraged to cheer when George races after Lucy, finally realising he can’t live without her. It’s framed as the ultimate romantic revelation. Yet watching it now, it’s hard not to notice that he only seems to recognise her value once she’s prepared to leave. We’re taught this is love. In reality, it often looks more like someone taking a person for granted until they establish boundaries.

Then there’s Miss Congeniality. Eric spends much of the film teasing, challenging and undermining Gracie, and somehow we’re meant to interpret this as chemistry. The message is clear: if a man irritates you enough, it’s probably because he secretly likes you. That lesson has been thoroughly tried and tested, and I think we can all agree it’s aged really, really poorly.

Another one: Jerry Maguire may be responsible for one of the most famous romantic lines in cinema history: “You complete me.” At the time, it felt profound. Now it feels like an awful lot of pressure to place on another human being. The idea that one person should complete us suggests we’re somehow unfinished on our own, waiting for someone else to provide the missing pieces. And the worst part? My heart absolutely breaks for Dorothy, who has clearly been pining after Jerry the entire film. “You had me at hello”? More like, “I had my standards on the floor. You took me for granted, and now you’ve decided to give me the credit I deserved all along, which somehow excuses all of your previous behaviour.”

Pretty Woman? Edward climbing the fire escape to rescue Vivian is iconic. We all wanted the fairy tale. We all wanted the grand gesture. Yet beneath the fantasy sits an idea that appears again and again throughout romantic cinema: that happiness arrives when somebody comes to save you.

Even Notting Hill, and this one I hate to critique. I really do, especially because it’s one of my favourite films of all time. I firmly believe Anna Scott’s line that love is “a violin-playing goat” is exactly right. But even Notting Hill isn’t immune. Anna’s declaration “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her”  is beautiful. It remains beautiful. But vulnerability alone doesn’t automatically make a relationship healthy. Throughout the film, Anna drifts in and out of William’s life whenever circumstances allow, she even cheats on her existing partner with him and yet we’re encouraged to overlook the instability and the relentless red flags because the speech is just so good and Julia Roberts… well Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts and how could you not forgive her.

Then there’s 10 Things I Hate About You, are we forgetting the central romance begins with outright deception. Patrick is literally paid to date Kat. Of course, he eventually develops genuine feelings, but the foundation of their relationship is built on a lie. Somehow, because Heath Ledger sings on the bleachers, we collectively agreed to ignore that part.

The more I watched, the more I realised they all sell a similar fantasy. Not that love should be kind, communicative or dependable, but that love should be dramatic. That the right person can behave terribly for most of the story, provided they deliver a sufficiently moving speech before the credits roll. What’s worse is that none of this occurred to me the first time around. I believed every airport dash, every last-minute confession and every grand declaration that somehow made years of emotional chaos worth it. And that’s because romcoms sold us a very particular version of love. Love doesn’t require accountability because, if two people are meant to be together, they’ll forgive each other anyway.

I found myself needing to be reminded that healthy relationships don’t make particularly good cinema, and the problem is that we started believing those obstacles belonged in real life too.

Featured Image: Disney

By Matthew Dodd

That’s how it starts. A freshers’ week tour, groups designated by alphabetised surnames; a social faux pas in a stranger’s accommodation; the first stumble into the local night club. Frantic piano clatters against an empty soundscape. A suspended A chord, rife with all the unresolved anxiety of a journey as yet unbegun. Underneath, the crawling encroach of a rumbling bassline, taming the distempered piano into a steadily alternating rhythm. A pint with a new friend; a surprisingly interesting lecture; the slow realisation that life may not have ended. Order out of chaos, reconciliation out of terror. Your first week at university.

Though I’d been familiar with their work for years before, it wasn’t until my second term at university that I really started to appreciate LCD Soundsystem. The mid-2000s New York Dance-Punk outfit, the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist James Murphy, are not, perhaps, the most natural musical accompaniment to the medieval meander of Durham but, as I wandered the almost familiar streets of the town, their music began resonating with me in a newfound way. Riverside walks were invariably soundtracked by the wryly pugilistic tones of Murphy and the lithe electronic sounds of the band at large. They came to soundtrack a mode of university living that, foreign at first, had become natural to me. Their record ‘45:33’ even had me almost considering going on a run. In particular, I was caught by the clear notion that their 2007 track ‘All My Friends’ might just be the best song ever written. 

The eight-minute-long track, built on a relentless piano riff and pounding bassline, is certainly the most energetic expression of aging’s innate melancholy ever recorded. The first two verses tell a hazy story of chance encounters and wild nights – ‘if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up, if the sun comes up and we still don’t want to stagger home’ certainly reminds me of several recent trips to Observatory Hill. Against this narrative of youthful excitement, choruses stick out as reflections on the ephemeral nature of such experiences: ‘you spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.’ The entire song is a kind of challenge to the listener: a diagnostic check as to whether the underlying sadness of the lyrics resonates enough to overpower the groove. Indeed, it is that urgent juxtaposition that gives the song its strength: a beat that, like time, will not stop for any reflection. 

There was always an undercurrent of sadness to the song, but it’s only really in returning to it now, at the tail-end of a degree, that it has started to sink its teeth into me. I imagine that, in the not-too-distant future, I’ll retroactively understand this time as yet more of the formative hedonism which I’ll one day miss, and consider myself foolish for thinking of it as an ending. Such is the nature of nostalgia, outpacing experience by forcing us to consider everything as a memory in making. In ‘All My Friends’, these early years of young-adulthood are understood as a time where nothing matters but trying to capitulate to societal expectation. Certainly, that seems the case, recalling every night out forgone in favour of writing my ‘dissertation’. The song reminds us, then, that life is intended to be lived rather than remembered. Listening to the song across my degree, I have looked ahead with fear to the time when I, like Murphy’s speaker, will wonder where my friends are tonight. But the song isn’t a grim concession to overpowering ennui. Indeed, the existence of LCD Soundsystem’s oeuvre is a testament to the possibility for late-stage reinvention: Murphy didn’t start the band until he was 32. At 22, the age this writer must accept as his own, Murphy had already turned down a potential life writing for Seinfeld. I doubt I would’ve made the same mistake.

‘All My Friends’ is, fundamentally, a dance track. Its lyrics tell a story of ageing, of losing contact with friends, of accepting the realities of adult life – but this is only half the story. The music itself is alive with the excitement of outsized possibility. It is relentless and unforgivingly seized by motion. The 140bpm gives the keyboard player a nigh-impossible task in keeping up. The message, therefore, is not that life ends at 30, or indeed graduation, but that life is composed of farewells and transformations, and that we must keep dancing through them all. Throughout the LCD Soundsystem discography, Murphy ruminates with half-ironic detachment the possibility of clinging to youth. It’s a fool’s errand, played for laughs in ‘Losing My Edge’, but one that nevertheless grants the band their peculiar mix of ennui and ecstasy. Every moment is fleeting, no friend will stick around forever, but all of that synthesised joy and sadness makes up the grand dance of life. We might not be with all our friends tonight, but we can dance at the thought of them.

In August 2024, the summer after my first year at university, I was lucky enough to see LCD Soundsystem live at London’s All Points East festival (note to reader I think it was also fortuitous and fated that my erstwhile Editor in Chief and my esteemed co-Editor in Chief were also in attendance in the crowd). The set was incredible and, quite possibly, the most deliriously exciting act of artistic expression I’d ever witnessed. As is characteristic of them, they finished with a transcendent rendition of ‘All My Friends’. The song meant a great deal to me then. As I stood in the wilds of Victoria Park – having consciously forfeited my barrier spot to find my friends further back – I was struck by the synchronicity of the event. Amid a mass of buoyant fans, I was there listening to ‘All My Friends’ with all my friends – the mawkishness of this sentiment didn’t phase me. James Murphy’s howling refrain engenders a different feeling depending on our answer as listeners: ‘where are your friends tonight?’ Back then, I was sure: they were stood next to me. As such, the song was a revelation of the wonders of the present moment. Now, as I stand on the precipice of graduation and the grand miasma that lies beyond, I can no longer answer with such security. Postgraduate degrees, Grad Schemes, unemployment, and all other intermediate options see my friends scattered across the country and the world. As we shift from one stage of life to another, from getting with the plan to trying to be with our friends again, there is a pain in slowing down, and knowing ourselves to do so. 

At their 2011 farewell concert, James Murphy paused at the start of ‘New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down’, to ruminate on the finality of the act. ‘I only get to pause an eternal amount once more,’ he lamented, ‘this is my last endless pause.’ For many, myself included, university has been an endless pause: an often terrifying but largely joyful buffer between adolescence and the adult world. Now, the final endless pause is over; the real world awaits. And yet, in the all-consuming ennui of graduation, another of Murphy’s lines come relentlessly back to me, as a balm if not a cure: ‘I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.’  

Featured Image – Matthew Dodd

By Sam Billings

Hyde Park, Leeds. Perhaps the epitome of metropolitan student living. Its alleyways and occupants are of the same charming, chaotic disposition. In their fluorescent grime and friendly aggressions, the streets’ pubs, offies, and takeouts inspire a symbiosis with the students’ invariable endeavours towards absolution. Whilst only occasionally successful, such ventures are consistently characterised by absolute intoxication. By 8pm, one comes to recognise the average gait of a Hyde Park resident to be reminiscent of the flails of doggy paddle; they likely won’t drown (or fall face first into the tarmac’s recently claimed doner kebab) but they’re hardly making their way through town in style. I maintain that Hyde Park, the little corner of Leeds I have called home for the past two and a half years, operates in a similarly hindered yet resolutely resilient manner. 

Aspiring to avenge their Tory forefathers’ failed austerity fuelled ambitions to cripple the town, a new generation of North Londoners have had their gentrifying aspirations similarly met with a principled and unflinching spray of Tetley’s. The soul-sucking plight of matcha coffee houses, natural wine bars and Gail’s couldn’t possibly make a dent in Hyde Park’s identity. The town’s stalwarts of grime, culture, and joy, such as Brudes, Hyde Park Picturehouse, and Pizza Canó, all have too much integrity, too much resolve to fall into the hands of corporate inauthenticity. 

It is this plucky nature, this unshakable character that causes me to proclaim that I love Hyde Park. My true and honest love, fostered by the true and honest shithousery of the place itself, has made me unwaveringly loyal to my new home. Bohemia in Hyde Park is living and breathing; it is not yet lost as it is in places like Camden and Shoreditch, once made glorious by the art amongst their gunge. Anything that should threaten the sanctity of Hyde Park’s character, therefore, must be resisted. And such threats still loom over its terraced roofs and graffiti-clad walls. This time, however, they have taken shape, not in gentrification or austerity, but in the form of a different scourge: the scourge of the Uber Robots. 

“But they’re so sweet!” I hear some of you say. That, my friends, is what they want you to think. These godless automatons are something of a techbro’s wet dream, a horribly pristine love child of Musk and Zuckerberg, not a reincarnation of your once-loved Tamagotchis. And, oh yeah, so convenient… Not only do you no longer need to make the mighty five-minute trek down to HFC for some well-earned grub, now you’re greeted with the dulcet tones of a corporate, automated jingle. You needn’t even speak to a human being! 

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. But do these whirring little beasts belong anywhere other than the sterile glitz of Canary Wharf? Maybe… But they sure as shit don’t belong amongst the streets of Hyde Park. Here the constant burning of rubbish-fuelled bin fires and the blasting of fireworks is a staple simply because, in this dirty, humdrum nook of Leeds, you can. It is no safe place for a good night’s sleep, let alone for the commercial ventures of Uber. 

Thus (perhaps unsurprisingly) Hyde Park’s anarchic disposition gives me great hope for the eventual downfall of the Uber Robots. In fact, we’re already beginning to see how the town’s penchant for chaos is claiming the droids. My recently adopted habit of kicking (and occasionally flipping) the robots on my bleary strolls home from the library is almost deferential in comparison to how many treat these little harbingers of our oncoming cyber-dystopia. Students seen replacing their signature drunken stumble with an adoption of an often-uncooperative Uber Robot as their neo-steeds, for example, is by no means uncommon. Hearing their whirs descend into mechanical moans of struggle under the great weight of human freedom sat atop their robo-backs fills me with optimism. 

No act of resistance, however, could possibly inspire such extensive delight as the one I witnessed the other day. In the early hours of the morning, as I walked towards the park itself, where the Uber Robots reconvene in times of idleness, I came across the magnum opus of Hyde Park’s battles against them. Having been rudely awakened from their slumber (in which they undoubtedly dream dreams of an algorithmically-orchestrated stream of Uber Eats adverts) the robots had been fashioned to the will of Hyde Park. 

Here they stood, beeping wildly in distress, one on top of the other, as little driverless cars forced to partake in a hilarious robotic rendition of the human pyramid. Standing at about seven feet tall, it baffles me how on earth anyone managed to achieve such a feat; these androids are dense little creatures for one. Nonetheless, here it stood: a farcical testament to the undying character of Hyde Park. The people and the place had, in typical unruly fashion, made their statement: bring on the Uber Robots, and the only profit that will be made will be for our entertainment, not for your pockets. 

Featured Image: Alamy

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

Part of the holiday ritual was always writing a postcard. Off we would set to a shop selling ice creams, beachballs, booze, and tat, to stand in front of the revolving galleries. The glossy sheen shone back at our suncreamed faces as we would choose the ones with the nicest photos of flowers or donkeys, or with the most vibrant Word Art font to attest to the fun available at the destination it read out. We always wrote them, be it to grandparents in Blighty, or school friends we had felt a particular attachment to in the school year just gone; I don’t remember a holiday without them. We spoke of the crunchyness of sandwiches with foreign bread and sand, the infinite fun a child can conjure up upon being provided with open water, all in a sprawling, phonics directed hand. Now, my handwriting is less sprawling and my excitement over water has lessened into a blissful anticipation, but my postcard writing remains. Chances are most people whose names appear  on my phone’s contact list will have received a postcard from me. I still write them, and offer them as my preferred medium of communication. I never graduated past primary school postcard activities offered by my parents, the letter form never really stuck with me, but I am content with my little postcard world. 

I had never given postcards much thought, attributing my attachment to them with a misquoted Virginia Woolf phrase – ‘there is no such joy like receiving post’ (which I think explains most of our Vinted habits too). These A6 tokens are dime a dozen, but they have a particular specialness to them. Something irresistible in their form keeps me coming back  whenever I need to say anything. Subconsciously my habit of choosing a postcard at a young age was helping form a visual language for when words couldn’t fit. In looking for postcards with flowers and animals, I was hoping to provide the recipient with more than just the juvenile details of a holiday, but a symbol representative of my time.

Berger’s 1972 series Ways of Seeing, based on his collection of essays under the same name, scrutinises the way art has come to exist in the 20th century. Reproductions of art are everywhere. If Berger could have seen how this would evolve into being able to see Carivaggio from a tool in your pocket I wonder what he would say. As a result of all this reproduction, postcards of your favourite works are readily available at any good or bad museum across the world. ‘Pictures [are] like words rather than holy relics’ observes Berger, using the postcard epidemic as a case study. No longer contained within the sanctuary of the museums or chapels they live in, art has come to take a new meaning that is less shrouded in its uniqueness to one place.  Each postcard stuck on your fridge, wall, or mantel piece, regardless of their content or the photo/reproduction on the front, helps form a ‘visual language. Used for describing or revealing experience’. The back and front work in tandem, building a vision from words and symbols that captures the moment in which you are writing, the location of where you are, the reason for your stamping the address. The postcard becomes the most ephemeral form, capturing a fleeting language of a holiday or period that necessitates the visual. 

I stick the postcards I receive in return all over my walls, lodged inside my books, and wrapped in ribboned piles once the walls and books get too heavy. I can’t bear to throw them away. It would be like throwing away a little piece of the personal history of myself and the sender. ‘Wish you were here!’ is not merely just a cliched saying but an invite into the sender’s perception. The thought of you was triggered and aligned by the postcard they brought, the images on it, aspects of their perspective while abroad brought them back to you. It is very rare to see how other people actually perceive you, and is a major source of thought if you are a vain twenty-something year old (insert THAT quote from Jemima Kirk). The postcard allows us to see the visual language the sender uses for you. Pieces of art people thought I would like. Holidays people thought of me on. Designs and objects people recognised me in. While postcard writing was originally an exercise provided by my parents to ensure we wouldn’t return back to school having lost all ability to write, now the postcard becomes the relic of a moment. Its small, undaunting form can be scribbled out in the spur of the moment. Moments of thanks, longing, or simple upkeep of a relationship all compel the postcard into creation. When we write to someone while abroad, or simply just away, we are telling them through this very act, regardless of how simple or cliche the message, that we are thinking of them there in that moment. That despite the distance, our existence remains aligned with theirs, existing against these new insights and perspectives. 

By writing we hope to preserve, to cross through time, and for our words to land at someone’s feet. Be it postcard form or longer form, as I am writing to you now, we hope our words capture and travel. We hope our use of language become symbols for sentimentality, symbols of a life. Laced in every postcard is the complete ephemerality of a moment and a journey. Thoughts, perspective, symbol,  emotion, and weather land at your doormat, containing it all in only 105 x148 mm of space.

Featured Image – Pinterest