Category: Perspective

By Nicole Ruf

When I was a child, crying fits were a frequent occasion. Whether because I felt things more intensely, or for attention, I am unsure. Something would hurt, and I would cry. And cry, and cry. My father would come to me, kneel to meet my eyes, and explain things to me. He would dissect the world with logic, step by step, with scientific methodology. He would make me breathe and count to ten. And by the time I reached ten, my cheeks were already dry, and those enormous feelings had shrunk into a solved problem, neatly labeled and ready to be forgotten. A gentle lesson in rationality. 

Girls are taught from childhood that emotions are a thing to be contained, that logic and composure are signs of maturity, and that feeling is synonymous to failing. 

This is how we learn to explain things so as not to feel them. 

But these feelings grow as we do, and so does the habit of tidying them away. Somewhere between girlhood and womanhood, the language of reason slips quietly into a language of restraint. What was once a kind lesson becomes a nasty habit. Instead of counting to soothe our tears, we count the calories we eat, the words we speak, the glances we attract, the eternally unbridgeable distance between who we are and who we should be. We become self-conscious, rehearsed, reflective. Somewhere in the process, we trade our chaos for poise. 

What a funny, cruel thing to be a woman; to carry inside all these feelings so vast and so deep, so uncontainable they deform you from within. Worse still, to live in a world that demands you hand them over, tears them from you, turns them abnormal, rationalises them until they have lost their pulse. Your sadness must have a cause, your anger justification, your passions their limit. What a strange thing, to force your heart to fit the mold of the Other, your wishes to their commands, your needs to their whims. You always end up losing. 

The female archive is scattered; diary fragments, forgotten poetry, therapy sessions, late-night conversations with a friend. Each whisper a familiar refrain, carrying the shared burden of attempting to name what is so fervently silenced. The impulse to rationalise one’s feelings is almost universal among women raised in the cult of composure. 

An excerpt from my own diary: “Perhaps I am trying to rationalise my feelings too much. Perhaps I should stop.” 

These recurring phrases and patterns, which my own writing is not exempt from, are not just the bitter aftertaste of personal unrest, but of a collective one. The inheritance of generations of women unsettled by their intellectualised pain and muzzled emotions. 

Private thoughts, or public scripts, whispered into women’s minds and passed between their lips: 

If I am not small I cannot be a woman (not properly, nor successfully). 

If I do not learn silence I cannot be desired. 

If I am so intense, so much, I cannot be of interest. 

With my convictions so sharp, my desires so defined, 

I cannot be softened, cannot be shaped. 

If I cannot be shaped, I cannot please. 

If I do not say what they want to hear, 

I will not be wanted, 

The same goes 

if I do not do 

what is asked of me.

If I am whole, 

I will not fit. 

And if I fit, 

I will disappear. 

If I am not small 

I cannot be 

a woman. 

The catechism of femininity. A doctrine without scripture, taught through repetition; smile, soften, submit, smile, soften, submit. In this faith salvation is found in self-denial and damnation in desire. It demands devotion, asking us to kneel before our own subjugation. 

We bury these thoughts, hide them away from the world because they are too ugly to be seen, and far too irrational (that much we know, even if we all think them nonetheless). Yet as we dig them their graves, we unknowingly pile all that dirt onto ourselves, bury ourselves alive. Beneath the ground, we grow unsatisfied, unfeeling, hollow. To be functional means to be numb, the byproduct of a world that values control more than it does authenticity. 

We learn to see our bodies as burdens; too heavy, too loud, too visible. We are insistent, intense, speak too much, and too soon. Our presence spills over boundaries already drawn out for us. The female form becomes a site of conflict between selfhood and social expectation; being and appearing. To occupy space is a transgression of the worst kind. 

We praise women who take up less room, who bend like silk, soften their edges, make themselves light enough to be carried by a man’s gaze. Those who become what is asked of them; desirable, sensual, small. Mastering the art of being almost, of being seen but never truly known. In this currency we convert performance into power, obedience into love, stagnance into grace. So we all try to fold ourselves thinner, to disappear beautifully, so the world too might applaud. Yet the more we shrink; less air, less noise, less hunger, less body, the more the truth claws its way out, gutting us in its path, leaving us emptied, depthless things. Taxidermied and ready to be used at the will of others. 

It is no coincidence that women’s emotions are pathologised; the hysteric, oversensitive, irrational. The language of medicine and reason has long been used to domesticate feeling. There are times I still find that same sobbing child, hidden away in a corner of my body. I want to tell her there are wounds that only heal if you feel them, that not everything must be explained, much less solved. Perhaps what frightens us is if we stop explaining away our feelings, they might drown us. Perhaps that is exactly what we need. Not to contain ourselves, but to let something overflow.

Featured Image: Tashy Back

By Siena George

‘They’re just spider plants, they can survive anything.’

I was once told this after expressing worry for my most loyal of houseplants, the humble spider plant. The comment was flippant, expressed with an air of cruelty, and clearly meant as something obvious. Everybody knows spider plants can survive ‘anything.’ But it never occurred to me that I was meant to be caring for something simply so it could survive.

The culture around house plants reflects our desire to engage with the non-human. In a world organised around the dominance of humanity above all others it is a potentially subversive act to love and care for a plant, something so easily portrayed as useless. The extent of our care, and how we care for plants is not the same as care toward a friend or a pet but this difference does not mean it is not love. The ritual of watering and sheltering our houseplants could not be a reflection of anything other than care.

As humans living in the 21st century, we are constantly exploiting or degrading plants and vegetation – whether directly or indirectly. This is what makes the phenomenon of houseplants distinct and one that fosters a greater bond between human and plant. The dynamic has shifted, and we are able to appreciate the non-human plant outside of its potential for human advancement or profit. It is in caring for the sake of caring rather than caring for self-reward that makes the relationship between human and houseplant so rich. We give up time, space, capital and water for plants as a means of acknowledging the plant’s existence, purpose and autonomy in our world. The plant takes on meanings beyond its material existence as the human constructs feelings of familiarity and connection in relation to the plant. Similarly, the plant is intimately tied to the human through its dependence on the human for not merely survival but prosperity in the non-native environment of a home.

This seemingly ‘worthless’ love between plant and human is an important act of resistance against the ever-increasing emphasis on productivity. The ways we love and care influence our ability to create new understandings of the world around us and the incredible diversity of actors within it. It is imperative that we question why we should only love those who are portrayed as ‘lovable’ or ‘worth loving’ and who gets to define these categories? How can challenging the normative performances of care enable more equitable relationships between humans, non-humans and wider planetary systems?

The more we care to promote collective welfare, as opposed to accepting basic, biologically defined survival, the more we expand the possibilities in our worldly experience. I want to care and love as widely as I have the capacity to and never as an idealistic aspiration but as an essential mode of living. Perhaps it is silly, but to me it could not be more apparent that my spider plants are as justified in receiving love and respect as you or I.

As humans we love not because it is necessary, but because the world is deserving of love.

Featured Image: Ju Seonyo

By Henry Tennessee

I’m watching an interview with Erich Fromm. I know nothing about him. He speaks very eloquently, and speaks truth.

It makes me want to write something that hopefully, you will be reading now in the goose publication.

How do I convey a feeling in such a way that you might understand? What am I trying to say?

What has inspired me, moved me so much to start trying to attempt this, this thing?

God.

Let’s call it God.

But what I am trying to get at is not so much the religious version of it: yet in some ways it is. But that’s my personal journey. I do not want to confuse the two right now.

Here lies the problem I feel I must address.

I love life. I could never find something to do, because the true love of my life is it itself.

It is a joy to be here. 

Do you ever have these moments? 

Do you ever realise, that right now, you are breathing, and the more you realise this insane fact, you realise all the things around you are equally as magnificent and worthy of your adoration?

Here we find ourselves in 2025, and many a smart and wise person just under 70 or so years ago began to say “look, we might be screwing it a bit”. In 2025, we find ourselves scratching our heads wondering what the bloody hell is going on. I want to tell you what I believe is going on.

What I believe is going on, is the evolution of man, or of society. I believe that this has happened before, around the 60s and perhaps before as well. Why do I believe this? Look at how people talk on social media. Some of the things I see are very wise indeed, and it comes out as people just talking on their phones, getting information out to as many people as they can, because they feel they must. They must because that’s how wisdom works. It flows from one mouth to ears willing to hear, and so on. 

This is happening more and more. But it has happened before.

I believe that’s what the 60s was. The parallels with our time are plausible. Vietnam and Palestine, for example.

The need for more expression. Many people believed we would wear less clothes by the 50s. Isn’t that a strange thought?

But what stops it? Money. People that believe they own this glorious land. You don’t own it. I don’t own it. God owns it. 

It is not meant to be owned, to be dominated, it is meant to be lived on and with.

I believe that the elite classes are still clawing on. They claw because it is all they know, it is all they must do to survive. Their model is archaic. They know it is dying. To borrow a phrase, a wart must come to a head before it may burst. Well, the head is now. 

That is why people are rising up. That is why people are slowly, very slowly, beginning to understand that God is not a white man on a cloud, but a loving entity that goes beyond anything we could conceive. Some call it the universe, or talk of vibration. But this loses its awe and only holds the logic as sacred. 

How does this all sound? Crazy? Reasonable? Why?

Crazy because the idea of God goes out of your head, or perhaps you see it as a more religious entity? 

Reasonable because you feel something in my words?

I tell you God is writing this. Not Henry. I get this when I play music. People say ‘how does that voice come from you’, and I say it’s not mine, it is a gift. I say it’s not Henry singing, it is a voice on loan. And the more you go into this thought, this feeling, the more you realise what God is, you begin to see not the differences between religions but how identical they truly are. And this is not trying to down play the beauty of each individual religion. Their traditions are unique, this is undeniable. 

Now here is why I wrote this in the first place, I am realising the point now. The antidote to the problems of the world are what I have just described. What I have just described is how to access God, not from a materialistic stand point, nor an egoic one- that is to say an identity, but purely leaning into God. Remember, God is the adjective, not the noun. And if we, collectively, can realise this faster, we have the potential to divert catastrophe. Because as we go into ourselves, the things that used to satisfy us no longer do. They can not because everything becomes superficial. The things that you love become more and more apparent, not what you think you love. You dissolve. I have dissolved and set and dissolved many a time, and will probably continue to do so. We are doing this inevitably. True progress is this realisation, it has to be. And if enough of us collectively realise this, we are amplified enough to create a better world. A truer world. 

This is the feeling of Christ. It is hard to do. What made him so remarkable was he did it 24/7. Go into yourselves. Really. Especially whilst you are young and at university. It may feel like you have many exams and things to worry about, but I promise you that you are at a time of your life where you can entertain these notions with more ease. It is dark at times, and very lonely. But it is truth.

Image Credit: Tashy Back

By Liv Thomas

“For whom is the funhouse fun?”

‘Lost in the Funhouse’ makes up one out of four short stories within John Barth’s 1968 collection of the same name –  Lost in the Funhouse.

The opening lines of the tale ask a question to the reader that not only evokes the meaning of its own title, but, in doing so, also introduces one of its central themes – the formation of identity. 

Having read that question (“For whom is the funhouse fun?”), I – like many other readers, presumably – gave my own subconscious answer that I only vaguely remember… I found it interesting that the text then gave a response to its own musings with the contemplative “Perhaps for lovers.” Through this, we are offered the perspective of its central character, Ambrose, for whom, instead, the funhouse “is a place of fear and confusion.” 

Already, the text gives the reader a glimpse into its own identity crisis, flitting over various stages of question and answer, only to provide its own unsure conclusion.

For the use of voice to convey a message, I saw these opening sentences as an ascension of perspective varying from the reader, narrator, and central character, constructing a point I note as the story’s ability to inquire into what we think is reality – or in this case, the funhouse.

To summarise, Lost in the Funhouse follows a thirteen-year-old Ambrose on a Fourth of July outing with his older brother Peter, their parents, Uncle Karl, and their fourteen-year-old neighbour Magda, a girl both brothers are attracted to. Upon finding out that the beach is closed, the group enter a funhouse, in which Ambrose and Peter fantasise about walking alongside Magda as they pass the winding mirrors and shadows. As he wanders, Ambrose begins to associate the funhouse with things beyond his teenaged understandings – sexuality, desire, and the choking inevitability of getting older. Lost in the funhouse, Ambrose realises he isn’t like Peter or Magda; the laughter and illusions that delight others only unsettle him.  

Now, Barth’s work belongs to that late-twentieth-century literary niche in which writers discovered that their work could become realised – self-aware, even. He might be grouped with like-minded authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Robert Coover, all of whom challenged whether literature still had the potential to offer clarity in a world increasingly obscured by its own reality. 

With this in mind, in Lost in the Funhouse, Barth not only deconstructs the awkwardness of adolescence as it’s portrayed within the coming-of-age genre, but also the awkwardness of fiction itself. Each metafictional aside exposes his realism as artificial, all while Ambrose’s understanding of his youth is increasingly disturbed.

I would like to believe that this was the sole reason for my initially confused first read-through of the short story, in that it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be reading a narrative that was so – some may say critical, others introspective – of its own style and plot. 

“Is it likely, does it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a thirteen-year-old boy could make such a sophisticated observation?”, questions Barth. 

Speaking outside of Ambrose’s perspective and addressing the reader instead… Not only does this line disturb stereotypes as to how thirteen-year-old boys like Ambrose are portrayed within the coming-of-age-genre, but it also forces the reader to question these verisimilitudes. 

During my second read-through, the whole point of deconstruction became more apparent to me with the story’s own writing-out of linear plots. In particular, the listing of “The beginning […]”, “The middle […]”, and “The ending […]” made me feel as though Barth’s writing had its own painstaking way of telling the reader exactly when and where to expect key moments, all while shamelessly condensing such specification to three sentences on the sixth-something page. 

Here, Barth is not just making a statement on the culture of fiction surrounding adolescents but is also contesting the use of conventional narratives to effectively portray the fragmented reality of such characters. 

Truly, Lost in the Funhouse stands out to me as something I need to understand better, the same way Ambrose supposes he needs to understand the course of his life, but the tale nonetheless stands out as a contemplation on writing and those who are both appreciative and critical of it.

Feature Image – dustjackets.com

By Samuel Davie

Bless, O Lord, 

Us Thy servants who minister in Thy temple, 

Grant that what we sing with our lips, 

We may believe in our hearts, 

And what we believe in our hearts, 

We may shew forth in our lives. 

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, 

Amen.  

“the Choristers’ Prayer” 

The organ stirs from silence, the ponderous sighing of the pedals scarcely audible, yet shaking  the woodwork, as technicolour whirls of cavorting songbirds, or glistening waterfalls, or raging torrents, or a distant, sombre procession rise above – perhaps a far-off echo of the ‘royal banners,  forward go[ing]’we sometimes sing of. Into this strain emerges a pair of purple-clad snakes, first a train of slightly ragtag, smaller figures, some clutching waterbottles, or still wearing trainers  from their school PE lessons earlier that same day; following them, six larger figures on each  side, solemnly disinterested in their surroundings. The clergy follow behind, and all bow  together toward the altar upon entering their allotted stalls. The organ subsides, trailing off to  give a starting note for the cantor, who dutifully intones: ‘O Lord, open Thou our lips’. 

‘And our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise’, the choir responds. Thus begins yet another  service of Evensong. 

Service is an interesting word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives three principal definitions pertaining to personal actions:  

‘a form of liturgy or ritual […] for an act of worship’ 

‘the action of serving someone or something’ 

‘the state or condition of being a servant’ 

Singing Evensong places one in all three of these states at once; one is a servant, serving God  (and also the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral) in an act of worship. If one serves, the question surely follows, why does one serve? To answer this is a complex task. Since it is as  part of an act of worship, surely there is some personal devotion or other belief at work?  

To speak personally, I’m not sure; if asked about my religious beliefs, I generally  answer stating that I am a Christian. On a matter-of-fact basis, this is true: I am a communicant,  confirmed member of the Church of England, who regularly participates in public worship. Unless one is of one of the schools of thought that assert that Anglicans are not Christians, I  meet the standard definition. I affirm my faith, along with others present, in the words of either  the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds, laid down over a millennium ago as statements of faith  encompassing what the Church as a body believes (disputes over added lines aside). And yet,  I am frequently not sure exactly what I believe. 

I suppose a better word would be ‘hope’. I hope that a man put to death in a truly  barbaric fashion two millennia ago was, as claimed, the Son of God, thereby offering those to  follow a path away from eternal damnation, should such a thing exist. I’m not sure I believe it,  though; there’s still a lot of doubt. Why would God subject and denigrate Himself to render us  that service, if we were so undeserving of Paradise because of our own actions? Those with  any theological background reading this are probably already silently screaming at me to read  x or y; I apologise for my ignorance. I will, however, continue on: if we are so undeserving of  Paradise because of our conduct, then why is the sacrifice required of us for redemption so  small? Not being wilfully horrible, and owning up to it or any inadvertent mistakes should they  happen is hardly a big ask: frankly, it’s just being a decent human being. Flawed as I’m well  aware this reasoning may be, I suppose this is exactly why I hope in the way I do – by not being  an awful person, I have an opportunity to avoid something that may or may not happen to me  in the future, but that I have no possibility of ascertaining. 

I still wouldn’t say that this is why I sing the eight services a week that I subject myself  to, though. Frankly, part of it is the money: although the relatively low remuneration may  be a fairly frequent source of griping, the money has meant that I have (for example, and rather  fortunately) never been overdrawn. It would be dishonest to suggest that that weren’t an  incentive. Day to day, however, the money is sufficiently low (sufficiently insufficient, if you  will) that it doesn’t really matter. Besides, the effect of a sharply worded rebuke ‘Mr Davie,  would you care to look at the music?’ is such that a purely mercenary attitude cannot apply:  such a rebuke is cutting in a way beyond that of merely being called out for not being ‘on it’.  Such a rebuke is instead, in my personal view, a rebuke against my very abilities at a musician,  those that I generally view as defining me. It is therefore evidently the case that I view the  service I render, day-in-day-out, as a defining part of who I am; the pursuit of perfection in my  craft is something which I allow to define myself, thereby exposing me to the harshest impacts  of such a rebuke. 

A well-known Ancient Greek maxim is that one should ‘know thyself’. It is however  apparent that knowledge of oneself is – or should be – crafted, not acquired by happenstance.  To take ownership of the acquisition of knowledge of oneself requires courage: Rollo May,  writing in Man’s Search for Himself, defines courage as ‘the capacity to meet the anxiety which  arises as one achieves freedom’ and ‘the willingness to differentiate’. Further, he describes the  opposite to courage as ‘not cowardice: that, rather, is the lack of courage’, stating instead that it is ‘automaton conformity’. Whilst we must remain conscious of the fact that May was writing  seventy years ago, reflecting on his patients in a very different world to now, I believe the core  message remains true: a blank sheet is itself devoid of meaning; a meaning must be created for  it – for myself, I must create a meaning for my own blank slate, and it is courage that is required  as a virtue to do this. Thus, courage is required for one to know oneself.  

How does this relate to service, though? I see a number of ways: firstly, is that I have exercised the courage to expose an aspect which I have adopted as crucial to my identity (that itself requiring courage to do) to rebuke, and also to offer it to a larger purpose. I may not be  sure what I believe religiously, but I have undertaken the courage to exercise the convictions I  do have; I do this by rendering a service, as part of a service, in the state of a servant. I suppose  it is courageous, too, to be willing to decline my own status to that of servitude for a greater  purpose that I’m not wholly convinced I believe in. Reflecting religiously again, the  Crucifixion was thus an ultimate act of courage – willingly declining and submitting to the greatest denigration imaginable, to render a service for the benefit of all. 

I would always encourage anyone I meet, should it come up in conversation, to attend  Evensong, regardless of any bovine ruminations on courage; it is a wonderful opportunity to  take less than an hour out of the day, to sit with others and maintain a centuries-old living  tradition in ancient buildings. A time to reflect, and to enjoy music offered as a service,  regardless of any religious sentiments one may or may not have. Should you attend, however,  or if you attend any display of personal craft: music, theatre, visual art, sports or anything else 

– take a moment to appreciate the courage that those individuals have undertaken, to expose  themselves and to render a service to you, the viewer enjoying their craft, and to themselves,  to their own betterment and self-knowledge. Finally, take the message of the Choristers’ Prayer  from the beginning: exercise the courage you undertake in order to serve others, in order also  to better know yourself.

Feature Image – Matthew Dodd

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“Famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in this world […] and her appalling taste in clothes” – Kingsley Amis 

I am a thoroughbred republican. Gaudy displays of wealth, inherited titles, birthdays (of which they have more than the average poloi), and dogs seldom impress me. Faced with the prospect of another royal wedding, jubilee, or cause celebre I turn my back and grumble. Armed with my quip that they don’t actually contribute anything to our economy, I have come to loath anything that merely is touched by the royal hand, orientating their ordained seal of approvals into the category of the hopelessly unfashionable and tragedy of organised, mandated fun. In recent years it has become easier to hold this, what for some is, offensively ‘un-British’ opinion of our rulers as each line of succession has slowly snipped away at the ties that hold it in a place above the rest, forcing them to decline and fall to a cacophony of disgrace as clamorous as Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’.  Where I falter, where the entertainment and pride that this family bestows upon the nation is finally realised by my red-blooded heart is in the ever-contentious Princess Margaret. 

Margaret’s name is synonymous with the idea of being ‘spare’ – that provocative term that her great-nephew would coin into popularity many years later. Living in the shadow of her sister, Margaret was unable to escape the sphere of influence of centuries-old orders and rules about how a royal should behave. The more her sister performed her role as matriarch, the less influence Margaret had at court, slowly slipping down the ranks of succession and jobs. Given both the regiment of her life, and the lack of purpose given to her as an individual, her name became a by-word for royally bad behaviour. Late nights, excessive drinking, large bills from hairdressers, jewellers, and designers. She pioneered a great brat-ishness as opposed to a great Britishness, making herself well known in both tabloid and broadsheets with her wryly brutal comments and controversial love affairs. As she later said to avant-guard filmmaker and harbinger of pretension Jean Cocteau, “disobedience is my joy”. The pomp and circumstance of her position stifled her and, whilst it certainly gave her the grace and excuse of lofty privilege, ultimately left her with little shape to carve out her own public persona, unless she actively took a step against protocol. It is in this very quote, said to a French Surrealist no less (not the usual member of a royal audience), that makes Margot more than a spare; she understood what she, and in turn the monarchy could be: artistic, engaged, interesting beyond expectation, and ultimately colourfully characterful. 

My disdain for the royal image often extends beyond the national, as I scorn their attempts to invade the personal privacy of my own phone with their out-of-touch, Cath-Kidston-meets-Barbour-inspired Instagram shoots that somehow always worm their way into my algorithms. This attempt to be ‘modern’ and ‘relatable’ misses the mark, royally. These people will never be ordinary; why pretend that they are like us? Modernity doesn’t mean engaging with us in forms that are new, but rather  encapsulating a new age and the interests of a time, and knowing how to position yourself within this. The public persona of the royal family is a difficult PR stunt to execute, but only difficult if the authenticity is taken out of it. Growing up my nonno would recite the phrase “anche la Principessa Margherita mangia pollo con la dita (even the Princess Margaret eats chicken with her fingers) at any sly attempt to rise above our station as children; why though, with her name being a by-word for gaudy exuberance and privilege, is Margaret’s name invoked as a way to quieten children and for them to be humble in their actions?  Margaret did nothing but show the public herself, who wasn’t afraid to get her fingers dirty in order to further her own cause of making herself look modern and engage with the contemporary society around her, refusing to be stuck in the lofty illusions and portences of being different to her subjects. 

The eclipsing power of the royal family is another strike against their name in my books. Erring continually to the side of caution in a scrambled attempt to save their faces they pass round their hands and some well-briefed, sensible words of praise, shielding their real feelings with cliched sayings and sentiments, hoping the camera will stay focused on their extended hands and the label of their dress. With her fate sealed, Margaret realised no matter how she behaved her name would slowly climb down the list, eclipsed by each announcement of a new royal birth. Her entrance in society gave her the first instance of agency in curating her own look and name amongst the crowd of other majesties. She rose to this occasion in 1951 wearing a Christian Dior dress.  She debuted her adult persona in the New Look, hoping to bring the principles of this new fashion in her time as princess; modern, a new shape that dismisses traditional expectation, feminine, cosmopolitan, active, sexual. This first slight, her first disobedience, gave her the joy that inspired her to later run off and create a new look for what a royal could be and could look like.

Cameras came to love her through her ability to strike against protocol. Tweed was swapped for silks. Shoulders were worn bare. Bright colours with bright patterns swayed against revealed legs. The tiaras and heavy metal seen around Margaret’s face were brought with her own money in auctions, suited to her own tastes, rid of the weight of inheritance. She drank with the Beatles. Ate with artists. Danced with Presidents. Wanting to be seen frequently besides what she loved, she positioned herself within the urbane interests of theatre, dance, music, and fashion. Whilst public tastes moved from the countryhouses of Wilde to the Salford kitchen sinks of Delaney, Margaret lavished recognition within the royal box of whatever play the theatre could offer her, regardless of traditional tastes and images. During dowager dinner parties, Margaret and Armstrong-Jones, her commoner husband (if you look past the private education, Society debutant mother, and Earl step-father), would create piles of pieces of torn bread, each nugget representing another cliche that had been passed around the table with the wine. Despondent to hackneyed sentiments, the President of the Royal Ballet and the patron of the newly built Brutalist National Theatre took the tabloids by storm in their fashionable silhouettes and sophisticated tastes, turning their backs to the traditional, country-centric interests of previous princesses, and embracing the lavish artistic explosion around them. 

Rising from the hairdresser’s chair, as she so frequently did, Margaret goes to sign the cheque for her obedient servant. ‘Margaret’ appears on the dotted line. Simply ‘Margaret’. No HRH. No Princesses. No Windsor. The tragedy of the royal family, the reason I believe they grow to become so terrible or simply bland, is their lack of vocation. From the moment they are born they have one job to do and are told they can never want for another. This is what is desirable: waiting in line and shaking hands until it’s their time to wear the headgear. Instead of descending into ruin within this maddening, archaic environment, Margaret made her job ‘the Margaret job’, not the royal job. The unfairness (a boldly sympathetic word for a republican to use, I know) of such a dogmatic dynasty was exposed in Margaret’s youth, not just through her position as ‘spare’ but also in her unfortunate affair with Group Captain Townsend. Living in her sister’s shadow and orbit, governed by the cruel spinster of centuries-old royal protocols and Acts, Margaret refused to throw a silver spoon out of her mouth and complain, but played by her own rules, being simply Margaret, not just a pawn or a rebel. By fashioning herself as a cut different to the rest, she built a persona of modernity and hedonism that suited her. Her push and pull of the rules that governed her life allowed her to both uphold her position and tear down the farce of pomp and circumstance. Craig Brown’s wickedly witty biography on the Princesses is aptly subtitled ‘99 glimpses of Princess Margaret’, because the princess only gave us peeks of the life she lead. Her dazzling provocative exchanges with the public eye fashioned her as a sight of modernity and difference, often obscuring her declining place within her own family and the difficulties of protocol. 

Whilst Margaret certainly had a privileged life (to say the least), and neither desired to be nor was considered ordinary, she dismissed the idea of being of a different cut to the people around her. As the Elizabethan age came into definition, Margaret learned to change with the times and aim towards modernity in building a persona that she could comfortably recognise as herself.  She didn’t pretend to be anything she was not; she didn’t want to relate to us, to appear to us in a football scarf for a team she would have no relation to, or to say some shallow remarks about a cause she had been told to care about. She didn’t try to be liked by all, as she knew that was impossible, in the same way she knew her job of being the perfect princess was also impossible. She gave us Margaret, not a Princess. She was self-affacing and affected, yes, undeniably, and at times she was stuck up and rude. At other glimpses she was bohemian and cultured; in the next instance she could be lost in a sea of organised celebration maintaining her royal name. However, in all these sightings, in person, press, or in piercing rumours, she was always Margaret. Not the Princess of York, or the Countess of Snowdon, or Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret Rose, just Margaret, acting in her own interests with her own agency, wherever possible. 

Featured Image: Margot in Kingston, Jamaica at the races, 1955 / Popperfoto

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