Category: Perspective

By Alicia Mora de Rueda

There was a time when waiting was simply part of life. Waiting for a letter to arrive, waiting in line  at the market, waiting for a friend to show up, it was a time when such pauses were natural, even expected. Today, though, simply standing by feels almost anachronistic, like a small relic of a slower past that is no longer compatible with the rhythm of modern life. In a world that prizes efficiency and instant gratification, waiting without distraction has become a rare act, a form of  quiet resistance against the systems that reward urgency and production.  

Spanish philosopher Carlos Javier González Serrano calls attention and patience “acts of rebellion in an accelerated world”, describing the culture we live in as one that rushes us from task to task, and demands immediate responses for measurable results. Our days are punctuated not by quiet moments, but by notifications, deadlines, and a persistent pressure to keep moving towards the next showcase-worthy  achievement, the next task, the next visible sign of progress. To wait: to linger with uncertainty,  with discomfort, with unfilled time is a dangerous step off the treadmill.  

And yet, in its quiet defiance, waiting is more than a delay or an inconvenience. It is a space where  thought deepens and emotions find a place to settle, where presence takes root and distraction is gently but firmly prohibited. It forms the “quiet room” inside a noisy life so that we might find a  moment where we might actually notice something otherwise lost: the texture of a conversation, the way time stretches between words, the pause where we realise what we really want. 

At times it is possible to catch glimpses of patience in the background of daily life. Slow smiles  exchanged when someone offers their seat to you, the habitual pause before speaking in a  conversation, the thoughtful brewing of a cup of coffee. Such moments call for a mindful presence that resists interruption and welcomes human stillness. They are not the task-oriented, efficiency-driven interactions that we are used to, but call for an unhurried willingness to notice and understand. 

Yet it has almost become second nature for us to cut these moments short, so that stillness becomes  anxiety and waiting is filled with scrolling through kilometric feeds. Patience, once a quiet constant  of human experience, has come to feel like a skill to be relearned rather than something we instinctively carry. Impatience is normalised and even celebrated to the point that we perceive it as an ally to reach creativity, when in reality it does nothing more than stifle the depth and clarity  needed to truly engage with the world in a fully human way. 

So one cannot help but think: what does this mean for how we live, how we relate, how we build  community? If we lose patience, do we lose something essential to being human? González Serrano  suggests that reclaiming patience isn’t about turning back the clock but about resisting a culture that  equates speed with value. It is about recognizing that not all progress can or should be measured by  how fast we move. It invites us to ask deeper questions so that “how quickly?” becomes “towards  what, and at what cost?”  

The complexity and contradiction that comes from waiting is something that only time itself can offer us, if we allow it to become an experience to be inhabited rather than a tool to be managed. It lets us sit with uncertainty rather than rushing to conclusions. It creates room for empathy, for understanding perspectives that do not neatly align with our own. It slows us down just enough to notice nuance. In waiting, we learn to hold multiple truths and tolerate discomfort: a practice increasingly needed in a disjointed world that rewards certainty over reflection and speed over understanding.  

Perhaps then, patience is quietly radical. It challenges the dominant narrative of acceleration and  constant output. It insists that some things (relationships, creativity, healing, trust) simply cannot be 

rushed; they must not be. In doing so, it reconnects us to rhythms far older and more human than the clock on our screens, but rather those shaped by slowness, attention, and the quiet unfolding of time.  

So the next time you find yourself stuck waiting for a train, for a message, for a decision, consider it not an obstacle but an invitation. To pause, to observe, to inhabit time differently. In a world hurtling forward, waiting might just be the most rebellious act we have left.

Featured Image: Honor Adams

By Tashy Back

Many of you who are opening this article may be sitting there wondering what on earth Endometriosis even is. Indeed, I would be pleasantly surprised if you did know. Since being diagnosed a few months ago, I’ve had to explain it to friends, family, colleagues — truly everyone in between. And yet, what if I told you that endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women of reproductive age? That’s about 190 million people worldwide. You would surely expect something so common to be widely understood. Yet, astoundingly, the majority of people are woefully uninformed about it.

The Oxford Dictionary defines endometriosis as “a condition resulting from the appearance of endometrial tissue outside the uterus and causing pelvic pain, especially associated with menstruation.” This tame and clinical-sounding description is foreign to me, and I am sure to all endo sufferers. What it doesn’t say is that endo can mean chronic pain, fainting spells, vomiting, inflammation, bloating, diarrhoea, chronic fatigue, digestive issues, nerve pain, and even mobility problems. It can lead to infertility in up to 50% of cases. It can mean losing organs. It can mean wearing a stoma bag. It can even kill through complications, through cancer links, and through the devastatingly high rates of suicide among sufferers. Hopefully, this already gives you an idea of just how serious and totally debilitating endometriosis really is.

When I first received my diagnosis, I spent days doomscrolling TikTok — which in its eerie, algorithmic fashion seemed to know exactly what was happening in my life. What I found were hundreds of women across the world telling the same story: dismissed by doctors for years, told their pain was “normal,” finally given surgery only to discover that the endo had spread to their bowels, bladder – even their lungs and heart. Some were stage 4, where it’s growing on your vital organs, before anyone took them seriously. Some were told their fertility was already gone. That’s another important thing: the only way to get a formal diagnosis is through an invasive laparoscopy – surgery that takes a month to recover from – and even then, there’s no cure. Only management, and often a poor one at that.

Doctors often try to slap a plaster on it: hormonal birth control, gaslighting comments about “dramatic young women,” and the endlessly patronising reassurance that “painful periods are natural and normal.” (A direct quote, by the way, from one of my doctors.) No wonder it takes on average 7–8 years to get diagnosed in the UK — a delay mirrored worldwide. In that time, the disease continues to grow and spread. Lives and futures are being stolen by neglect.

And it’s not just personal suffering. Economically, endometriosis costs the UK around £8.2 billion a year in lost productivity and healthcare. In the US, it’s closer to $78 billion. This is a public health issue. A crisis. And yet, only 5% of global healthcare research and development funding goes towards women’s health. In an ironic twist, more money and research has been spent on male pattern baldness than on endometriosis. The minor aesthetic concerns of men get better funding than a disease that can grow lesions in your lungs, nasal cavity, even on your heart and brain. Lesions so complex they’re sometimes called “mini organs” because they can develop their own blood supply, nerves, and hormone activity. If that doesn’t sound like a medical emergency, I don’t know what does.

It’s not as though endo is new. It was first described over 300 years ago, and there’s evidence of it in 15th-century mummies. This isn’t some new-fangled mystery — it’s one of the oldest documented conditions in women’s health. Nevertheless, here we are in 2025, still treated like hysterical girls complaining about “bad periods.” Meanwhile, the only major study in 2013 didn’t look at mortality risks, fertility, or treatment options. Instead, it examined how endometriosis supposedly affected a woman’s attractiveness, with the men conducting the study baffled by the outrage that followed. To understand the absurdity of this study, let me paint a more cohesive picture of the widespread impacts of Endo, this is a disease that:

• Affects nearly 200 million people.
• Can cause infertility, organ damage, and in some cases, death.
• Costs billions to economies worldwide.
• Requires invasive surgery just to diagnose.
• Has no cure, high recurrence rates, and woeful research.
• And still is dismissed by doctors and governments alike.

Endo is chronic, it is life-altering, and it is proof of how badly women have been let down.  Yet, this isn’t just about endometriosis. It’s about how women’s pain is systemically ignored and belittled. It’s about a crisis in women’s healthcare — one that tells us our suffering is “natural,” our bodies are inconveniences, and our futures simply aren’t worth investing in. The struggles surrounding Endometriosis are thus truly emblematic of the crisis that is ongoing with women’s healthcare in this country, and it’s time that women’s pain was taken seriously. Indeed, even just while writing this article the severity of the issue is abundantly clear as a woman, only 27 years old, has died of untreated cancer, despite 20 prior visits to her GP where her pain was repeatedly dismissed. Thus, I hope that as the eyes of the country slowly start to turn to the crisis of women’s healthcare, the sufferers of endometriosis will not continue to be overlooked.

So, to conclude, no. I would say that people with endometriosis don’t get a fair ride.

Featured Image: Honor Adams

By Bel Radford

My new bedroom overlooks Durham bus garage and the lucky passengers on the top deck I’ve managed to flash a handful of times. I’ve taken to sitting on my window ledge each morning equipped with cigarettes and coffee, soundtracked by Spotify’s finest Gregorian chant mix, and conducting some furious online shopping. The rituals are already piling up: a cyanotype bra, a top my housemates mistook for an upcycled binbag and anti-bloating pills that I suspect (and maybe hope) are some kind of black market Ozempic. 

This has become the best part of my day. It’s a very soothing practice, bringing various receptacles up to my mouth, sipping or inhaling their contents that soothe and corrode in equal measure. Freud would have called it symptomatic: a psychosexually stunted adult pacifying herself like an infant. And the chanting complicates things too. I don’t especially enjoy it, but perhaps that’s the point. Exposure therapy via my shitty wired headphones – sip, puff, submit to whatever sonic affront the algorithm conjures.

The more I think about my morning rituals, they resemble a kind of budget hedonism – a far cry from the Gatsbyesque sort that populates novels, but a cheaper pursuit of sensation that still feels vaguely philosophical. Epicurus is more flattering than Bacchus anyway. He distinguished between kinetic pleasures – minor ecstasies of caffeine, nicotine, tracking parcels across the country – and static pleasures – the quiet equilibrium that follows. This pursuit of modest satisfactions works to stave off acute pains, or the pain of seeing everyone you’ve ever gone home with in Tesco, or the indignity of subpar university grades. Epicurus deems such static pleasures the ‘highest good attainable’, thus dosing oneself in indulgence perhaps aids the aimless plane of existence that one finds themself navigating as a student. 

I try to believe I’m a good little Epicurean, yet instinct tells me I’m a twitching meatbag human stupefied by sensation; gawking, shopping, sipping and grasping at that which makes me feel alive. And here is where the self-awareness hits – am I just trying to excuse my own laziness because the world frightens me? When my mum asks why I’ve only bought antipasti in my weekly shop, will Philosophy shield me? Doubt it. Epicurus reads less like a moral compass and more like a cover letter for being a glutton, exhibitionist and a sloth. Student life seems to be the ideal laboratory for such negotiations between obligation and desire. Pleasure-seeking as a means of self-preservation is interesting to me, and shooting up dopamine to punctuate the banal rhythm of campus life is like shock therapy: drinking too much, spending too much, sleeping too much. Health is boring, people are boring, virtue is boring – there’s simply too much else to be thought about.

Deleuze might argue this laziness is honest; an openness to ‘affective intensities’- pleasure as a defibrillator rupturing inertia’s hold. I think of myself perched on the window ledge, limbs jittering, and I wonder if pleasure is as much about agitation as it is about tranquility. Perhaps to hyper-charge oneself is to insist on presence and refuse flatness while our limbic systems are still half-baked and irresponsibility is still charming. This might explain my fondness for my errors. The hob left on overnight after heating chicken soup; repeatedly getting the wrong train home from work and ending up stranded at the seaside; discovering two nights before a holiday that my passport is marooned in Durham. Horrible, dangerous and inconvenient, yes, but there’s a certain pleasure to be taken in the intensity of mistakes. The sheer unpredictability of my own half-formed adulthood feels like proof that I’m still in motion and irresponsibility has not yet calcified into flaw. 

I’m not sure these scattered thoughts (or excuses) arrive at any conclusion. The practice of mashing flesh onto theory and hoping it sticks seems vapid and closer to decoration than revelation. We contort ourselves into narratives, retrofitting philosophy to excuse appetites, and tell ourselves Epicurus or Deleuze would understand our overdrafts and intensities when they perhaps wouldn’t. But if Epicurus really did think modest (often superficial) pleasures could stave off pain, and Deleuze really did believe in the pursuit of fully charged embodiment to be at one, then I’d like to think these small indulgences aren’t failures as much as methods – undignified but workable. Chainsmoking and listening to Gregorian chanting is hardly a grand pursuit of ataraxia, and missing every important train doesn’t really gesture towards ‘becoming’, but the theory bends and clumsily adapts alongside us. My parcels, my Year-Of-Rest-And-Relaxation-adjacent amount of sleep, multiplied by the pills I take and caffeine in my blood don’t make me enlightened, but they keep me moving. If that makes me a glutton and a sloth, so be it. Philosophy can posture all it wants –  the bus passengers don’t seem to mind. 

Featured Image: Kirsten Dunst on the set of Marie Antoinette (2006) / Unknown paparazzi

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘It wasn’t for long, I wasn’t there long. But drinking bitter black coffee I catch that medicinal smell in a cloud of ancient tobacco and something touches me in that still place and a wound from two years ago opens like a cadaver and a long-buried shame roars its foul decaying grief.’ – 4:48 Psychosis

House lights on. Audience, now visible, is made of a wash of parents, siblings, and supportive peers. Five teenage girls blink up as the lights turn on. There is mascara running down their face. Their hair is knotted, tangled, and shines against the lanterns. Ribbons surround them. Small little ribbons litter the stage, peeping out in gaps where they dared to tread. Long red ribbons slink and slack around the girls’ arms, crawling up their wrists and following them like a veil. No one claps. No one smiles. The girls are out of breath, cautiously grinning at each other, unable to speak until the examiner dismisses them. Still, no one claps. They rise, bow, and begin to clear the stage. Still, no one claps. These spectators have just watched somebody kill themselves for 45 minutes. Can their clapping augment the pain? Can their proud smiles for their daughters exist against the ferocity of violence and the macabre they have been subjected to in their slightly too small classroom chairs? Was it a play even? It was the vast violent living of Sarah Kane. 

Sarah Kane lived in the shadow of a decade that pickled sheep for art, pumped music out of factories, and prescribed an incessant need to be ‘Cool’ to combat a Britain that lay bare, devoid of iron. Her short career spun across the 90s, beginning with the Balkan Wars and ending with a cri de coeur of disillusionment and defeat. Her stages gorge and delight in all consuming actual violence and self-violence. Blasted transforms a Leeds hotel room into the epicentre of brutality and manufactured human violence, where an eyeless journalist and a soldier violently mourn one another, attempting to carve survival out of an obliterated, wretched reality. Boards are trodden with obscene language, an unhinged sexuality, and bloodshed that appears unflinchingly before the audience’s eyes. Equally, flowers ‘burst upwards, their yellow covering the entire stage’ that was once filled with blood; daffodils blossom from Cleansed’s arena of furious passion. Love exists with violence; disgust resides in the belly of beauty. To experience the vast violent living is to experience, to bear witness, to learn to stomach and scream at all the frightening dualities Kane caught within her stage. 

Roland Barthes’ A Lovers Discourse is the key that unlocks the maddening world of Sarah Kane. ‘Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous “event” is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli is the lover’s discourse.’. The discourse Kane flings on stage is personal, a ‘sacred history’ of both self and society that exists both within language and action. Love exists not behind rehearsed lines and revised scripts, but in a fraught mentality catapulted on stage that examines all the crevices of consciousness that define love’s existence. Barthes furthers Kane’s manifesto by celebrating the theatre for being a place in which extremes can live, where the consciousness of love and life can be understood in its capacity for juxtaposition. Beauty, horror, violence, adoration, sex, lies, truth – all exist layered on top of one another, crashing together, muddling and catastrophising our world view. In one instance the stage is a funeral pyre, in the next instance it is transformed into a wedding. 

The glaring surface of Kane’s work is cruel and provocative. It dares to be disliked. After leaving Blasted’s Press Night, critics called it a ‘feast of filth’ and ‘devoid of intellectual and artistic merit’ due to its obscene portrayals of human suffering and longing. Kane is still stained by this, even today. She is ‘tricky’ to put on, and people question whether an audience would even consent and pay to watch something so dark in a place of entertainment. However, this is not the full picture. The shock of the violence is a stinging reminder of the pain that comes with living; that living can be strained and fraught with peril, and yet there exists a capacity for a hopeful growth within the bleak depths of humanity. That flowers can grow again. That a scene of abject horror can change into one of comedy. That love will always exist, in its mysterious and desperate ways, amongst the fall out. Kane both wrote and experienced suffering, yet also loved, vibrantly and violently. She danced to Joy Division – an action that cements the duality of her works; songs of deep darkness from a band named after a grotesque Nazi operation, changed utterly by the action in ‘pure hypnotic moment[s]’, holding both woe and wonder within that instance. 

The battle of locating ‘artistic merit’ within violence was not instigated by Kane. The trenches ran deep in the popular consciousness of how art should be. ‘Father of Cruelty’ Antonin Artaud wanted theatre to induce ‘very violent reactions’, leaving the audience with ‘no misunderstanding’ that going to the theatre was not simply a pastime for melodramatic entertainment, but a spectacle to encapsulate human resilience and variety. His manifesto, The Theatre and Its Double, holds true to Kane’s desire for the full force of life to be displayed, to have Barthes’ instantaneousness of love play to effect; for every feeling, action or thought there is an equally fierce opposite, its double. For Artaud, as for Kane living in the grey waters of post-Thatcherism, ‘our sensibility has reached the point where we surely need theatre that wakes up heart and nerves’. Classical ideas of catharsis were reinstalled, where breaking point and release had to be met by both actor and audience alike: a communal epiphany and energy beating back against the ordinary.

100 years prior to Artaud, Percy Shelley’s The Cenci caused equally shocking waves amongst theatre goers. Banned and brutalised for the play’s demand for the audience to witness the relentless abuse of the real Beatrice Cenci of Rome, the murder of a patriarch, and the godless, lawless abandon of his house. The secular venom in which Shelley approached his radical theatrics caused the play to be censored, never performed in his lifetime. The rebellion within both Shelley’s original material and Artaud’s Cruel interpretation of The Cenci force a new perspective, capturing the full capacity of human extremities, asking audiences to not fear the abhorrent but to stare it in the face. Kane’s plays act as a late 20^th century renewal of these demands. Her violence is not without reason, and her manifesto lies within a radical tradition of redefining theatre in the quest for accurate realism. 

The cruelty Kane inflicts is not baseless. It is a mission to find the double, the duality, the full picture of life. Her final, posthumous play cements this mission. The interpretation of 4:48 Psychosis as a performed suicide note helps soften the blow, diverts the attention from the screaming pain and wrongdoing that lies within its core; it is a play about misunderstanding. Kane’s theatre continues to be misunderstood, and upon her own suicide in 1999 her work still brayed on her mind, her critics unable to decipher her poetry. Her own suicide has come to be misunderstood, as her staged suicide did. 4:48 comes from a writer, and centres its ambition in a place beyond tears, in a place away from sentimentality and sensibility. The poetics of mental decline hold the audience hostage. The tragedy is unrefined and unapologetic in its brutality. 4:48 pivots on the inability for true feelings to be communicated, with no designated speaker or roles, and is at once confessional and deeply private. Stifled conversations, the inability to decipher reality within the pain of mental anguish – nothing on Kane’s stage is sacred or secure. The realities of living with severe mental anguish are documented, as a speaker cries ‘my life is caught in a web of reason spun by a doctor to augment the sane’; suffering is misunderstood in order to be palatable to those without pain. In order to attempt to reason the unreasonable, it is only through achieving a true, cruel, Artaudian realism on stage that the misunderstanding of Kane’s reality can be understood. By unrelenting in the tragedy, Kane exposes a realism to the audience that is not a pretty or entertaining reality, but a harsh one. Yet one that is not pure violence and tragedy but showcases the abundance of life even under the strain of tragedy; 4:48 is the moment in which laughter, love, sorrow, loss, anger, and desperation co-exist in a gaudy explosion of life at the edge of death.  

Kane’s dramatic manifesto demands you to ‘watch me’, to endure and experience all volumes of life. By turning away from the violence we forget about its unfortunate reality, and we demand that art must engage in only certain forms and demerit the poetry of the darker shades of living. Kane did not intend for people to enjoy her plays, but to be moved by them. Whether 4:48 is met with the stunned silence of concerned parents, or the stage becomes a flower bed of praise, it doesn’t matter. The lamentable, the obscene, the catastrophic is the concern of Kane’s punching poetics, and her need for radicalism, for discomfort, for upset helps theatre achieve its full capacity of realism, even in its strangest stagings. The shockwaves from her performances will always ring out, cringing upon audience and critic alike, her formidable ideas still causing contention. But when the flowers rise from the boards, when blood spills across the audience, when moments of vulnerability are documented with force, Kane shows the realest truth of all in her theatre; that life, love, and passion have never been so violently fragile, obliterating and launching at once.

Featured Image: Marianne Thiel / Getty Images, 1998

By Rohan Scott

Leave thy home, O youth, and seek out alien shores…

Yield not to misfortune: the far-off Danube shall know thee,

The cold North-wind and the untroubled kingdom of

Canopus and the men who gaze on the new birth of Phoebus or upon his setting…

Poem by Petronius found in the flyleaf of A Time of Gifts

A slip of the mouse threw me into my spam inbox: Freeprints, eBay, that arena of smugness and comparison — LinkedIn. Scanning the rows of advertising and unemployment shaming, I catch sight of an email from a blog, titled Patrick Leigh Fermor. Without hesitation I click on the page, a site I had not visited in well over five years, to reconnect with the legacy of ‘Paddy’.

I was introduced to the writings of Patrick Leigh Fermor — ‘Paddy’ —  by an English teacher at the wide-eyed age of thirteen. Tasked with penning a travel piece in the style of Paddy, I became captivated by his words and then his story. I proceeded to consume A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road (posthumously edited and published from an incomplete manuscript). These three volumes detail a story of wonder and whimsy woven into Paddy’s endeavours from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933/4. With the lexical field to match a dictionary, Paddy lucidly frames scenes, experiences, and conversations that transport the reader back to the lost world of interwar Europe. Whether in a schloss in Bavaria or a shepherds hut in the Carpathians, Paddy carried himself with confidence, charm and naivety in equal parts.

This hobnail journey became a blueprint for me; one that inspired a love of adventure, walking, art — culture, if you will. An even more thought-provoking element that stamped his travels were the unexpected misfortunes, unlikely friendships and even unforeseen romances. Paddy’s ability to embrace the unknown and to navigate change seemed unparalleled; this is perhaps why he made such an excellent SOE operative during the Second World War. It was this flexibility and pragmatic attitude towards life and adventure that served as my greatest lesson from a young Paddy.

Now at twenty-two, I find myself at a crossroads, not too dissimilar to the one that an eighteen-year-old Paddy faced before setting off for Holland. Whilst I might not have been expelled from school, setting out into the world with a history degree feels as though our ‘career’ prospects are not too dissimilar. 

Paddy toyed with the idea of a Sandhurst commission before opting to become an author in London. When the burden of financial stability caught up with the struggling writer, Paddy set off on his trans-European odyssey. It certainly is a privilege to be able to cast down ‘responsibility’ and set off on an amble through Europe. Considering that Paddy was a destitute writer, it is worth noting that he was a beneficiary of some much-needed pocket money from his mother. Nevertheless, with a fistful of youth, Paddy made do with little in order to follow his desire to learn, to travel, to create.

This crossroads of life that Paddy faced resonates deeply with me. A keen desire to enter a creative field, an even keener desire to wander the planet, and the stark realpolitik of our capitalist world. I have been toying with many ideas, including the desk-borne rat race and postgraduate prolonging. Now, reminded by my affinity for Paddy and his tales, I know that despite what LinkedIn might tell you, adventure is not found staring down the barrel of an Excel spreadsheet. 

This is not an envy-ridden dismissal of those who have secured employment, neither is it an affront to those oh-so-important jobs in finance. What I hope to convey is a lesson that Paddy gifted through his works. Our youth is precious and direction and stability are fickle. The only certainty lies in change. So for those at a crossroads of life — lacking direction and stability — adventure is the antidote. I am not under the impression that money grows on trees, but therein lies the beauty of walking. Once a pair of hobnails are secured, the mode is free in every sense of the word. Paddy set out for Europe with no more than a pound in his pocket, a set of army surplus rags, a notebook, The Oxford Book of English Verse and the first volume of Loeb’s Horace. Despite this humble set of worldly possessions, Paddy embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. He wandered Holland, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and then Turkey. His adventure of 1933/4 never really ended; a stint in Constantinople took him to Mount Athos in Greece, followed by a return to Romania that carried him to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Paddy had a zeal for adventure, a passion for life and a love for people. Through adventure, he managed to forge a successful ‘career’. As a soldier in Crete, his most noted exploit came in 1944 with the abduction of Nazi General Kreipe. As a writer, he found stability through early works Mani — Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli. His celebrated success came from A Time of Gifts, written and published some forty-three years after completing his wander through Europe. Paddy’s adventure continued until he died in 2014, at the age of ninety-six. Having been reminded of the life that Paddy led, I hope to somewhat emulate him, at least for some time before the trench whistle blows and I become shackled to a desk.

If you too, feel at a crossroads in life, I suggest you pick up a copy of A Time of Gifts and find your next adventure.

Image Credit: patrickleighfermor.org

By Nathan Gellman

29^th of August 1966, The Beatles played a sold-out concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Their United States tour followed the release of their 7^th studio album, Revolver and came at the height of their popularity, a period aptly named Beatlemania. This made the band’s decision to stop performing live shows bewildering to fans, but perhaps it was the best decision they ever made. 

1966 was a tumultuous time for the band. Their world tour, which saw them play in West Germany, Japan, the Philippines, Canada and the United States was rife with controversy following John Lennon’s claim that the band was more popular than Jesus. They endured threats and physical danger, throughout their tour, with former fans burning vinyls and t-shirts in the streets. This was the final straw for the band with the physical and emotional exhaustion of over 1400 concert appearances internationally taking its toll.  

This coincided with the self-revelation that the band’s strengths weren’t best utilised as performers, as Paul McCartney famously remarked after their final show: “We’re not very good performers, actually. We’re better in a recording studio where we can control things and work on it until it’s right. With performing, there’s so much that can go wrong, and you can’t go back over it and do it right”. 

Following their decision to stop live performances, they entered the studio in late 1966 to record their 8^th studio album. For the first time, the band were not restricted by the parameters of performing these songs live – this album would be perfected and immortalised on vinyl. This allowed them to use the studio in ways that were uncommon during the 60s, implementing tape loops, orchestras and the surreal sound of backwards guitars. 

What resulted was The Beatles’ magnum opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This album was hailed as revolutionary at the time, announcing the 1967 Summer of Love. The album’s stellar reputation stuck with it into the 21^st century, with the Rolling Stone ranking it as the best album ever recorded in its 2003 top 500 albums of all time, despite it dropping to 24 in the 2020 edition. 

Beyond Sgt, Pepper’s, the band continued their innovation with the Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album and Abbey Road. In these further three albums they were able to experiment with more untraditional studio techniques. Ironically their final studio album Let It Be signposted the band’s desire to return to live performances which never quite happened as planned. What is clear is that none of these albums would have been possible under the constraints of a touring schedule and having to perform these songs live. 

The Beatles helped redefine what a band could be, not entertainers but artists. Their inventive and imaginative methods in the studio paved the way for other albums such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Radiohead’s OK Computer. They set a precedent that albums are a cohesive statement not a collection of singles and stop gaps. Every song had a meaning, not a word was wasted, the singles were the headliners, but the album tracks were more than just fillers. They didn’t merely hold the album together, they elevated it to a whole new level. 

The decision to quit touring was unbelievable, but it was the turning point that allowed The Beatles to reach new artistic heights. When looking back at The Beatles’ legacy, it is impossible to try and define it. However, if I had to try and pin it down, it wouldn’t be their early work and the crazed Beatlemania, but what came after it. What the Beatles made clear in a way that only they could: the best way forward is to stop. 

Image credit: vinterior.co

By Cristina Tarruella González-Camino

It always begins innocently… the pulse of music, a glass raised, a warm laugh rolling through a crowded room. At university, drinking has sunk into tradition. A silent agreement. Something shared, expected. Drinks are not always poured for joy, but as a shortcut to courage, to connection, and to forgetting. While drinking culture promises fun, it rarely admits how often we drink past the moment. Not out of desire, but out of habit. And so, the line between celebration and excess begins to blur.

Alcohol is a slow unravelling, a gentle thief. An inhibitor. A central nervous system depressant, offering comfort at first. Easing the grip of social anxiety , softening the edges, as GABA and dopamine neurotransmitters, swirl though the brain offering calm and lift. But as the drinks keep coming, your brain’s balance tips. And it’s deeper mode of action hits: inhibition, governing the prefrontal cortex, section of the brain responsible for reasoning. Impulse control. Self-awareness. All beginning to dim.

You think you’re fine… but biologically, you’re no longer in a position to judge. 

And so, thresholds are crossed not in rebellion, but in silence. In laughter.  In forgetfulness. The next day, we pay in quiet currency: that grey fog of a brain stretched too far. Lost time. Fractured sleep. A memory that stutters. Cortisol surges. The body, still working through the chaos of the night, can’t quite return to baseline. A celebration now became a cost. A night erased; a day quietly lost.

And the cost runs deeper than we let on.

Even when spread across weeks, repeated heavy drinking reshapes the brain. Cognitive neuroscience show that frequent intoxication disrupts the hippocampus. The memory keeper. And the Hangover, often laughed off, it not just a headache. It’s the brains recalibration of its chemistry; dopamine depleted and cortisol peaking. A system seeking balance, finding static instead.

What if the fullness of the experience of the night lies not in more, but in almost? The almost-dizzy. The almost-tipsy. The fragile space where warmth meets clarity, where you can feel everything, and still remember it all. The night does not require to vanish to be beautiful. It can linger in soft focus, in slowed breath, in a loosened laughter, not a loosed bile.

This is not a call for abstinence. Just… presence.

To leave a little space between you and oblivion. In tasting, not chasing. In choosing to feel it all: the awkward, the tender, the real.

This is not a warning. Not a lecture. Not a moral decree.

It’s a reflection for a generation taught to treat hangovers as badges of honour and forgetfulness like freedom. To drink consciously is not to deny joy. It is to reclaim it. To understand the body is to respect it.

Because when we do, we still get the night. 

But we also keep the morning.

Follow: @Unbottled_Durham on Instagram for content and information around this topic.

By Matthew Dodd

Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature Asteroid City begins with a stark clarification: ‘Asteroid City does not exist’. A television presenter, played by Bryan Cranston, explains to us that, within the context of the film, ‘Asteroid City’ is a fictional play, the production of which has been dramatised for the purpose of a television programme on contemporary American theatre. Its characters are fictional, as are its actors, its writer and its director. As the audience, we fill in the implicit additional reminder: we are watching a film, this is not real. Wes Anderson has always toyed with the conscious artificiality of his films – The Royal Tenenbaums presenting itself as a novel, Rushmore as a play – but Asteroid City sees the director take this notion to its logical extreme. It is a film which plays on at least three narrative levels at any given time, revelling in the complexity of its construction. It’s easy to get lost along the way: we follow Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed photographer who suddenly meets an alien at a junior stargazing event, as well as Jones Hall, the actor playing the part of Augie Steenbeck. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s television host erroneously appears within the play and questions ‘am I not in this?’ On a first watch, Asteroid City may appear a disorienting and ultimately pointless venture, wherein emotional truth is submerged in a mess of muddled narratives and overly quirky stylisation. Yet, it is precisely because of its deliberate artificiality that the film works so well and, in truth, bears such a sincere emotional heart.  

Throughout the film, characters hold the reality of their feelings at a strange, syntactical remove. Tilda Swinton’s Professor Hickenlooper remarks that ‘I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should’ve.’ This kind of overwrought dialogue is typical for Asteroid City. In classically Anderson-ian style, lines of this sort are delivered in a macabre monotone, as though these Oscar-winning actors were amateurs in a small-town production. It is this register of unreality which imbues Asteroid City with its special strength. What could be read as overt quirkiness – something Anderson is regularly accused of – is in fact representative of something deeper, an emotional detachment which dogs the film as a whole. Characters hold their emotions at arm’s length, plays exist within films, nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite says what they mean. 

Things happen in Asteroid City for no apparent reason. First, it’s a car exploding, then it’s an alien coming to steal an asteroid, and then that same alien coming back to return said asteroid. When faced with the unexplainable, humans are troubled. We like to rationalise and we like to understand. The other major event to take place in Asteroid City without a reason, prior to the events of the film itself, is the death of Augie Steenbeck’s wife, the mother of his four children. The alien’s pointless invasion becomes a symbol of her death, a moment in time with no motivation or purpose but which fundamentally alters life as we know it. Photographing it, Augie hopes to have some kind of closure, some elucidation of this bafflingly pointless event, but he doesn’t find it. 

Grief can be a destabilising force, rendering the world a soundstage and the rest of humanity actors. And so, when Augie Steenbeck, in the midst of the heady commotion on screen, turns to the camera and says ‘I still don’t understand the play’ before, quite literally, walking off the set, the layers of over-drawn hyperreality are levelled, and this moment of meta-theatricality becomes, instead, an intensely human moment of derealisation. In the face of grief, he becomes an actor in the play that is his life and, noticing this, decides to leave the stage. The audience’s confusion over what is actually happening – where in the film/play/television programme are we? – is mirrored by Augie’s confusion over what the play is actually about which, in turn, mirrors that deeper, nagging confusion that we all feel throughout our lives: why do things happen the way they do? The exchange between Augie/Jones and his director is, understandably, read as the central illuminating moment of the film. After 90 minutes of confused, deliberately ambiguous drama, our protagonist sits down with the director of his own story and asks the question that we, as audience, feel equally drawn to, what is actually going on? Except, this isn’t quite the question Augie ends up asking. Though he dwells on his confusion – ‘I still don’t understand the play’ – his real question is a much more direct one: ‘am I doing him right?’ 

By now the walls of meta-theatricality have collapsed into a central emotional truth. Jason Schwartzman’s role is, at this point, not quite Augie Steenbeck the character, or Jones Hall the actor, but rather a strange amalgam of the two. He asks his question, ostensibly, as an actor, but on a truer emotional level as a widower, a lost and frustrated man left to care for his children, alone. It is the genius of Asteroid City that these disparate roles are pressed together as one, setting the performance of an actor trying to convincingly play a role alongside the performance of a single father trying to behave as though everything is alright. We search for meaning in life how we search for meaning in a play; we want the alien to mean something just how we want death to mean something. As he walks through the backstage, Augie runs into the actor playing the alien – a magnificent cameo from Jeff Goldblum – explaining how he plays the alien as a metaphor. ‘Metaphor for what?’ Augie asks; ‘I don’t know yet’, the actor responds. Asteroid City very deliberately plays with its own apparent meaninglessness, a parody of a Wes Anderson film, dollhouses within dollhouses. Yet, it is precisely because Wes Anderson constructs Asteroid City so artificially that it is able to be so sincere. Raw human emotion is buried under an endless veneer of obfuscation and detachment. Asteroid City is confusing because the world is confusing. We are all actors in plays with no obvious themes. The question, therefore, isn’t what the play is about, but rather how good our performances are. The simple, revelatory answer that Asteroid City provides, through the animus of Adrien Brody’s role as director, is that it doesn’t matter, as long as you ‘keep telling the story’. 

The emotional linchpin of Asteroid City lies just beyond this moment, however, in the immediately succeeding scene. The actor Jones Hall, having gone for the fresh air his director assures him he won’t find, runs into the actor cast in the absent role of his deceased wife. ‘It’s you’, he says, ‘the wife who played my actress.’ By this point there is no illusion of specificity in the players at hand – both characters are at once the actors and their roles. Whether this is an actress playing a wife or a wife playing an actress is of little relevance, the lines read the same. The two exchange a few words before the actress/wife, played by Margot Robbie, delivers her lines, cut from the play. Robbie, simultaneously the actress and the wife, announces the central emotional torment at the heart of the film in a strange, surreal soliloquy about alien planets and the secrets of the universe: ‘maybe I think you’ll need to replace me’. We know Asteroid City isn’t real, we know the characters are illusory, we know these are just lines being read by actors, and yet none of this makes any difference. This moment is as emotionally direct as they come, a wife giving her husband permission to move on. ‘I can’t’, Jones/Steenbeck responds, to which the actress/wife replies, ‘maybe I think you’ll need to try.’ The camera, having held both characters in a balanced side-on shot now cuts brusquely to Robbie’s face. ‘I’m not coming back Augie.’ This focal exchange is held at a distance, both by the myriad of meta-narratives and the dialogue’s own modality of detachment: the truth – ‘you’ll need to try’ – is qualified by these separations – ‘maybe I think’. There is a desensitisation, an alienation from reality which pervades all the characters and their interior lives. The painful, shameful, impossible decision to journey through one’s grief, to allow oneself to move on, is hidden beneath this labyrinth of confusion. The exchange is, textually, just a recitation of some lines by two actors, and yet it transcends the layers of meaning becoming, out of something wholly artificial, something wholly earnest. Augie Steenbeck, like so many of us, buries his grief deep within and so it only follows that the truth of his feeling should be buried so similarly in this narrative sprawl. Asteroid City is unreal because grief, pain and life are unreal. The effect of the meeting on Jones Hall, the actor, is unclear, but that doesn’t really matter, its relevance is clear, the heart of Asteroid City unlocked.

Asteroid City – the city itself – takes on allegorical relevance as a kind of purgatory for its residents. Every character, excepting perhaps Steve Carrell’s motel owner, is there visiting, and yet none are able to leave. It is a neutral zone in which to deal with traumas unseen. Midge Campbell bears pretend bruises which become an avatar for the implied abuses suffered at the hands of her second-ex-husband. As she runs lines with Augie, she works through the pains of a failed marriage held at the remove of dramatic artifice. As it does throughout the film, art becomes a useful intermediary between ourselves and our emotions. Both her and Augie are afraid to move on from the events which have scarred them: as long as they are stuck in Asteroid City, they are stuck with them. To move past their unexplainable traumas, they can’t just sit with and try to analyse them, they must acknowledge them and let them go. You can’t expect to overcome your pain if you don’t first accept it. Or, more simply, as Willem Defoe’s drama teacher endlessly chants, you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Visually, Anderson employs a register of oversaturated detachment, evoking the paintings of Edward Hopper, the preeminent visual documenter of mid-century American alienation, trapping characters in frames-within-frames, focally positioning the endless flatlands that surround each of these characters. In the end, the characters leave Asteroid City overnight, with little ceremony. Our final image is of that unending desert into which our heroes recede, as an upbeat skiffle cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train plays us out. There’s no true conclusion to Asteroid City in the same way there’s no real conclusion to the desert as it drifts on endlessly, in the same way there’s no true conclusion to grief and no true answer to life.

The characters in Asteroid City are lost, bursting out of the seams of their text to find some answers to the grand mysteries of life. We might imagine ourselves as characters in plays: wouldn’t we want to walk offstage and ask our directors what the central theme of our existence is? Asteroid City understands and sympathises with such a desire but knows all too well that these sorts of questions don’t matter. We’re all playing characters just how they were written, and there’s no point trying to fight that. There is no scholarly consensus on the thematic relevance of death and loneliness. For much of his career Wes Anderson has placed real characters inside doll-house existences, drawing out the rich humanity that can only be truly realised in these hyperreal scenarios. In Asteroid City, he takes the characters out, plays with the fakeness of their existences, before returning them to the dollhouse, accepting after all that life is an incomprehensible play, devoid of morals and structure, but that this is no reason to give up on it. 

By May Thomson

There remains an oddly enduring idea that queerness – and particularly Sapphism – came bursting into existence with all its rainbow ribbons at the precise turn of the nineteenth century. With the exception of Wilde, Victorian LGBT literature seems utterly elusive – lost, if it is there at all. 

This is, of course, a myth. And manifold factors work to mystify, omit, and  revise queer literary history. Saliently, many pieces of literature were never actually written, with the queer Victorian fearing the consequences of inhabiting a space beyond contemporary notions of virtue. That said, the Victorian era saw the beginnings of a movement towards sexual emancipation and, despite the dominant current of sexual repression, nineteenth-century sexologists like Havelock Ellis became pioneers in gender and sexuality studies. 

Victorian queer invisibility also arises from modern impressions in the enduring critical hesitance when interpreting literature and primary sources as in any way LGBT. This is an idea Susan Koppelman articulates compellingly in the preface to Two Friends, a brilliant collection of nineteenth-century lesbian short stories by American women. In opposition to queer denialists, who claim that queer identity is being retroactively imposed, she writes: ‘if we read about a man and a woman loving each other in the way… that Abby loves Sarah in “Two Friends” … we would not wonder what the story was about or quarrel about how to label the relationship. We would know.’ Her frustration is clear, and her stance invites a shift in reading practice. She later says, of the stories in the collection, that they were chosen because ‘they feel like lesbian stories to [her]’, encouraging readers to trust their own affective responses – an approach that borders on a reader-response, even phenomenological, reading of literature, with meanings emerging from lived experience and perception rather than rigid taxonomies. 

As a result of both the uneasiness with calling texts queer and the underrepresentation of explicitly queer voices in the historical record, the practice of archiving becomes crucial for the preservation and restoration of this overlooked part of literary history. Creating and engaging with banks of primary sources is essential to the work of LGBT literary recovery, offering the possibility not just of uncovering lost texts, but of contextualising, interpreting, and learning from them. Rooted specifically in the Dickinson College archive, this article will trace some forgotten queer literary fragments and ask what it means to remember that we have always existed – loving, creating, and leaving traces where we were not meant to. Queer love and identity were not absent from the Victorian world but rendered illegible by dominant moral standards. The practice of queer archival recovery, as exemplified by this archive, offers not just historical restoration but a radical reimagining of how we read, remember, and recognise love.

‘The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
     Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore’

Written in the shadow of Victorian respectability, these lines declare an unwavering commitment to authentic love in a world that refuses to see it. They honour devotion and literary vision seemingly powerful enough to fuse two beings into one: indeed, the vow above belonged to Michael Field, the shared pseudonym of lovers and writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley. The pair, though now largely obscure, were acclaimed by contemporaries Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and George Meredith, with Field deemed a promising talent before ‘his’ womanness was erroneously revealed. Whilst analysis of the literature of Michael Field could (and, in my view, should) fill thousands of pages on its own, this fragment is just one of tens of documents in Dickinson College’s Victorian Queer Archive. The archive, established by Professor Joanna Swafford, Professor Sarah Kersh, and teams of their respective students, aims to address the lack of publications of queer texts and to contribute to a fuller picture of Victorian literature. Accessible to anyone and fully digitised, it is one of the very few archives that seek to document and celebrate the often overlooked but certainly extant records of homoerotic desire, love, and identity. 

   ‘There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!). I loved her and even now love her very much.’    

This extract, from 1844, comes from the diary of ten-year-old Emily Pepys, recounting a dream she had the night before. It is an extraordinary little artifact – seemingly unremarkable, yet brimming with emotional and historical complexity. Notably, Pepys recounts her engagement not with shame, but with curiosity and warmth. However, she also makes a specific note of her gender (‘I (a girl)’) in a parenthetical aside, as if trying to reconcile the dream self with the waking self. This seems a moment of cognitive dissonance – a flicker of questioning that complicates gender identity and desire alike. This demonstrates that queer feelings do not emerge from cultural indoctrination or some ‘modern ideology.’ They are – they always have been. But, instead, are often complicated or diminished by the world of heterosexual norms and expectations. Indeed, she later describes hoping she will be ‘let off’  for her dreamy, forbidden affection. 

Whilst from a constitutional perspective the story of Queen Victoria refusing to criminalise sexual relations between women as they ‘did not do such things’ is impossible, lesbianism has been particularly overlooked throughout modern history. This text is a study in the consequences of ignoring queer love and existence, serving as a time capsule of a world that could not conceive of love between women.

‘THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. . . . They say love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth.’

In this brilliant fragment, Oscar Wilde offers us a different but equally rich example of queer desire, existence, and resistance in the nineteenth century. Wilde is a central figure in the gay literary canon, not simply because of his sexuality, but because queerness permeates his work. Although Salome’s desire here appears heterosexual, Wilde saturates his play with queer longing and aesthetics: gender inversion, camp excess, and erotic obsession. Her desire – exemplified through her stream of excitable interrogatives – is excessive, theatrical, and repetitive, even bordering on self-parody in its sheer sensuality. Salome has also been reclaimed in queer readings as a gender-transgressive figure for unapologetically commanding male attention, sharply refusing passivity, and ultimately dominating the male body. Indeed, Wilde’s rendering of Salome was deemed scandalous at the time for disrupting Victorian gender roles and sexual decorum. This is an excellent example of Koppelman’s idea about the ‘feel’ of text. Whilst not explicitly describing a queer relationship, this text exudes the flamboyance and theatricality often integral to gay culture. One example of Salome being viewed through a queer gaze is Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork. Nugent, a gay writer and painter, depicted Salome as a queer symbol of sexual defiance. Ellen McBreen argues that he was influenced by a ‘widespread gay understanding’ of Wilde’s version, further evidence of the value of perception and queer readings.

To trace queerness into the Victorian archive is not to impose modern, anachronistic categories, but to recognise what has long been obscured, silenced, and missed out of history. These texts, however veiled or fragmented, do not simply gesture towards queer existence but assert it, often with more clarity and courage than they have been appreciated for. 

The art of queer archiving is about both recovery and reanimation, making visible that which dominant histories have rendered unreadable. In reading these fragments, we not only challenge a heterosexual canon but honour the reality that queer people have always been here. This archive isn’t quiet. It hums with coded longing, risk, beauty, and defiance. To read – and, indeed, to create – archives of this sort is to remember that queer people were not just present: they were passionate, prolific, and determined to write themselves into eternity.

By Poppy Reed

saudade

/saʊˈdɑːdə/

noun

1. (especially with reference to songs or poetry) a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.

I am often caught in saudade. Never having heard this word before, I now feel like something has shifted, and I share it with you now. A Portuguese sentiment, an untranslatable word. But I think in its bleakness a sense of solace can be found, and, paradoxically, an understanding.

I feel it in the folkish melody that lingers long after the old busker on the bridge has finished playing, it is the sound of a lover’s breath that echoes in your ears long after they’re gone, it lives in the spaces in between. It acts as a tender reminder of what is lost, but somehow will remain in the fabric of your mind. New faces remind me of old ones, I am often stuck in past time.

The children are shrieking in the playground opposite my window, and suddenly I’m there. This longing and yearning for something I once had is consuming. But it’s more than just missing something. What I miss can never return to me, this is the melodramatic melancholy of it all. Saudade.

It feels like the timid sorrow that blooms in moments of small joys. I feel love and I rejoice in the remembrance of these memories, and slowly I begin to enjoy the dance I have in these spaces between time.

The way that the wind sifted through my hair that one specific day last year, and the beep…beep… beep of that Australian traffic light reminds me of this one 80s song I first heard a while ago. Now when I look above at the deep cerulean abyss, the sky suddenly morphs into the ocean and a wave comes crashing over me and I am engulfed in my own memory. Saudade.

Bittersweetness, a cold yearning intertwined with a warmth for what once was. Growing up can seem like a morbid experience, seasons fly by faster and each time they appear more and more fleeting. Life no longer feels infinite like it once did. My dog’s hair greys, and his eyes cloud over, people I know have died.

When I walk past the school now, I hear my little sisters giggling amongst the children in the playground and I am transported backwards again. My parents looking down on me, crawling and melting into my mother’s lap, being a part of someone else. Now as I stand alone, I feel precarious and on the verge of tipping over at all times. I often wish I had strings attached to me, so that I could be pulled in a direction without the need to decide on anything, a break from the endless crossroads of adulthood. As I grow older, I resent the uncertainty that comes with knowledge. The exuberance that I once felt waking up on a birthday, the moment just after you wake up when you feel blankness and opportunity used to spark a fire through my young bones. A moment of hope and anticipation, but increasingly that fire has put out, transforming into a black smog that hovers over my restless head.

I now welcome the whispers of saudade, I let her in and begin to worship her visits. As whilst I know what has gone cannot return, there is the relief that in my nostalgia I can be witness to these pockets of light again.