Dirty Dishes
NIGELLA TALKS DIRTY—a YouTube video I found the other day, which manipulates scenes from Nigella Lawson’s various cooking shows to make it sound as if she’s having sex. “If you want to squeeze”—and here the video cuts—“my plumptious beauties”—and again— “then be my guest”.
Ode to Joy
When I first began to touch myself it wasn’t “masturbation”—it was nothing but an expressive action. Its implications and attached politics were unknown to me. I was unencumbered by any words or conversations that may have inflected my private action with shame or disgust. I was, at least fo
‘We’re Not Heroes’: The ISIS meets the Night Climbers of Oxford
Night has set upon the city of dreaming spires. Rain pours over the freshers hastily making their way back from Cellar. The queue for Hassan’s spirals around Turl Street. The sound of joyful revellers intermingles with the patter of rain against gravel. You sense something above you, a fleeting in
“Devil’s Advocate?”
It’s 2016 and I’m in a History class. The end of the year is fast approaching, making most students drunk with apathy. I’m busy trying to answer the teacher’s question but she’s since lost interest and seems more preoccupied with picking her nail. Then I noticed a boy, Jack, shifting in hi
Invisible Illnesses
Having a period is not a unique experience. Many of us have had and will have periods. The symptoms and challenges that accompany them are experienced by each individual and by all women; they connect us together in mutual pain and discomfort. But those with endometriosis suffer more than most. The
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