Observing Blackbirds
For three or four years we’ve kept chickens in our back garden. One of the things about chickens is that they really tear up the ground, and once they’re done with it the earth often doesn’t have much vegetation left at all, so we’ve started to rotate our chickens around the garden to let th
Invisible Illnesses
I have been stuck outside many doors in my life. I do not mean figurative doors, though I could probably expand on that, but literal doors. The door to the kitchen in the house I live in; the door to the Montague Place entrance to the British Museum; the multiple fire safety doors that block [&helli
Invisible Illnesses
Beginning life at the University of Oxford as an international postgraduate is a momentous event and one that brings a host of new challenges as you settle into life in an entirely different country. Just finding suitable accommodation as a postgraduate is a herculean task and inevitably leads to we
Switching Off: The Pleasures of Idleness
Boredom today is the absence of a good 3G signal. I think that it’s worth asking whether or not that ought to be so – whether modern society’s conquest of boredom is something worth celebrating. * Boredom is the feeling we get when our surroundings imprison us – the feeling that there is not
Old English, Old Oxford
Two months ago, I found myself at an English formal with the rest of the English freshers at my college, and all our tutors. I imagine the nerves—as well as the prospect of free wine—must have got to me, so I ended up fairly tipsy by about an hour into the evening. I was sat […]
Letter to the Isis: #1
The existence of an academic elite at Oxford can never be justified unless it is open to students of every background – The Isis, October 1978. This is a statement made in the first article of the 1,684th edition of The Isis, and despite being published nearly forty years ago, it still rings painf
Unfair and Lovely: Exploring the World of Skin Lightening
Most girls have fond memories of sneaking into their parents’ room, aged 6 or 7, to play with their mother’s makeup. You could barely reach the dressing table, but once you’d climbed onto a stack of books, you just about managed to reach her fancy red lipstick. You inspected your new plaything
The Problem with Facebook
Like most people my age, I used Facebook throughout my teens. I still check the site every day, several times a day. Realistically, I check it several times an hour. Yet using Facebook never sat easily with me. It put me on edge, and I always vaguely meant to consider the exact reasons for these [&h
Civil Rights and Black Panther
‘I don’t remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.’ – Edward Said When the fictional superhero Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four #52 in the summer of 1966, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing