by Michael Leong It is 3am now. A couple of us had been playing ice hockey; afterwards, JJ and I retired to my room and decided to plan next term’s Oxford Mental Health Support Network launch over a couple of beers. Our conversation returned, as it tends to do, to the people we’re hoping to […]
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An original composition for piano, by Chris Hill. Download the score here
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by Amanda Higgin On the last day of Summer Eights, Oriel’s first crew walks away from the river exhausted and a little disappointed. A couple of promising bumps in the first races were followed by a few uneventful row-overs, leaving them the fourth boat on the river. Close enough to take the headship next year, […]
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by Teofil Camarasu Upon arriving to watch a dress rehearsal of the The Lieutenant of Inishmore, I was told that I would be watching the first run of the show with genuine fake blood (until then they had used water instead). The first row of seats had provisionally been designated a splash-zone, and was covered in […]
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An original composition for piano, by Chris Hill. Download the score here.
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by Alice Correia Morton Avocados are the hipster ingredient du jour, present at every brunch and scattered over every instagrammed salad. But even if you’d usually steer clear of such fads, avocados still hold their own: they are highly nutritious, with over 20 vitamins and minerals, and a filling centrepiece for vegetarians and vegans. Unfortunately, […]
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by Alice Correia Morton This isn’t strictly from the reduced section of the supermarket, but this week courgettes are bizarrely cheap in Tesco (4 medium for 79p or 60p). After the recent shortage and hike in price, this might come as a pleasant surprise. Although simple, omelettes are both filling and, since this one includes […]
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by Alice Correia Morton Although I didn’t give myself enough time to make this recipe vegan, it is completely vegetarian. The key ingredient of the dish is one of Tesco’s pre-prepared medleys of ‘vegetables with herbed butter’, particularly the one comprised of asparagus, edamame beans and tender stem broccoli etc.. It tends to be in the […]
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by Georgia Robson. Listen to the playlist on Spotify here. Often, we would think of ‘fracture’ in music to be negative. Smooth, slick and overproduced pop has been the order of the charts for quite some time now. Yet there are many great artists who challenge this. To me, fracture has three possible meanings in […]
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by Alex Waygood For a man who has a lot to say, Brian Eno doesn’t always say that much. High Life, his 2014 collaborative album with Karl Hyde, is relatively verbose; Eno is nowadays best known for his pioneering albums of ambient music, beginning in the 1970s. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find any of […]
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‘We want people to hear the stuff and make up their own stories because we captured a snapshot of this feeling that is available. Lyrics have to allow the music to talk on its own in-between and the music has to let the lyrics stir you, burn, lift you.’ – A.O.S.O.O.N. by Jennifer Potter The […]
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by Joe Wilson I was first introduced to the music of T. Rex, when I watched the childhood classic film Billy Elliot, which opens with Billy placing Electric Warrior on a turntable and skipping the needle to ‘Cosmic Dancer’. However, Electric Warrior was released almost thirty years before the film was, at the end of […]
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by Fifi Korda Ever wanted to be lost in some bar down in Columbia with only a funk band, cocktails and some crazy dancing to entertain you? If so, this is the album for you. At the age of just 23, Derek Trucks released his third studio album Joyful Noise on 2 September 2002. Having […]
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by Eleanor Juckes Fleetwood Mac are described by many as the epitome of a ’70s band. They were cool, they were troubled, and they produced music that went straight to the soul. Fleetwood Mac developed very different musical feelings over time as their band changed its line-up multiple times. The way members would leave and […]
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by Alice Correia-Morton Apologies for the repetition of the salmon theme from last issue, but it is consistently reduced and so worthy of the feature. However, this recipe would work equally well with any oily fish, such as trout or mackerel. Although it may or may not be a fad, the omega oils found in […]
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by Alice Correia Morton The supermarket ‘reduced to clear’ section can be a treacherous place. Away from the bright lights of the aisles, unpacked in the kitchen, the purchased bargains can baffle. Foods thrown together by virtue of impending use-by dates don’t always lead to the most appetising of meals. But with the help of a […]
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by Anna Wawrzonkowska In 1992, Gerard Nolst Trenité, a Dutch academic and linguist, wrote his famous poem: the Chaos. It is, perhaps, the best summary of the helpless confusion any non-native speaker feels when put against the whirling maelstrom of English spelling and pronunciation. Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you […]
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by Jenny Potter It’s 5:15pm and we’re standing amongst rows of records, reeling in the late-summer-evening humidity and pretending to browse through DVDs. There are perhaps a dozen people scattered throughout the shop in the same state of pretence. Approximately twenty minutes later, Leftwich appears and we form a misshapen semi-circle around the corner where […]
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Will Tant, 1st year MPhil in Theology, comes to Oriel after a career in pro-surfing and as a professional model | Interviewed by Jacob Warn | Photo by Seth Stafford Surf’s Up Will’s surfing career began in Florida, where he would surf with his brother. By his sophomore year in high school, Will had made […]
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by Jo Flynn Eating enough of the right foods can be difficult, especially during times of stress. We’re all quick to guzzle orange juice when we feel a cold coming on, but what can we eat to help mental health and mood? Deficiencies in certain vitamins and minerals have been found to be associated with […]
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by Luke Sherridan Staring at the sculpted rock before us, no larger than my hand, I offered an answer: ‘It’s a woman’. We had been asked for our first impressions on this ancient object. ‘And why do you say that?’, asked our guide Dr. Mallica Kumbera Landrus, quickly and excitedly, and with a curiosity which […]
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by Aidan Chivers Some of the most charming moments of big family events are the retelling of old, familiar and utterly worn-out stories of past times. Told with delightful precision – and often, it is vaguely suspected, highly fabricated plot details – these family favourites resurface year after year, with no innovation or variation in […]
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by Sophie Barnes The Poor Print’s definitive Coffee Map of Oxford is downloadable here!
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by Emma Gilpin It was a secret that we all had and we kept it, ashamed, embarrassed, scared about what it all meant. I suppose that’s because it meant adulthood, but it also meant something much more intimidating than that: womanhood. I got my period when I was twelve. I didn’t, couldn’t, tell anyone about […]
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by Christy Callaway-Gale The beginning and end of everyone’s year abroad (yes, I am about to generalise, which in Oxford’s terms is the bait for your tutor to rip your essay into unbelievably miniature shreds) can be summed up by the question, how are you feeling about leaving? Surprisingly, I think both my answers, although […]
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by Alec Siantonas In what we now call the Ancient Near East, beards were a sign of dignity. Beards adorned the virile and the vigorous, the warrior and father of warriors. I myself have small desire to sire warriors, but I sympathise with the viewpoint. I delight in my hair, in all its luxuriant abundance. […]
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by Aidan Chivers After the dizzying blur of my first Oxford term, it was a strange feeling to find myself back, walking our dog, retracing the same route which had become a familiar after-school routine throughout my school days. After eighteen years in the same place, no tree, lamp-post or speck of moss on the […]
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by George Prew How do we put together the history, society and beliefs of a civilisation from which we have no (or very few) written records? Such is the case with the Etruscans (the Italians before the Italians moved to Italy) and the Mycenaeans (the Greeks before the Greeks moved to Greece). After all, what […]
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A recipe provided by Marjory Szuko To a pound of Flour, put a pound of Butter, eight Eggs, Yolks and Whites, three quarters of a pound of Sugar Powder, a glass of Water, a little Lemon-peel chopped very fine, and dried Orange-flowers ; work the Paste well together, then cut it into pieces of what […]
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by Aidan Chivers The skin yields satisfyingly beneath my eager teeth, which dive hungrily into the citrus depths. Top teeth meet bottom, and the juicy pulp is happily sucked away, leaving a perfect, circular crater in an otherwise unblemished sphere of fruit. New things in life can bring with them immense pleasure and excitement. Fresh […]
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by Tacita McCoy-Parkhill
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by Sophie Barnes We have produced more plastic in the last ten years than we have over the last hundred, yet it takes approximately 500-1000 years to degrade. Zero Waste is an attempt to reduce what we throw out to zero, making our lives 100% sustainable. It’s a growing online community. The Zero Waste Bloggers […]
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by Elizabeth Stell and George Prew Very often archaeology in its perverse way will present us with an object with no obvious function. It may have been a misshapen Stone Age mousetrap, a Mayan hole punch, or a Roman cat carrier – we will never know. When the artifact turns up in a modern day […]
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by Ben Koons There is an absolute hush, and even kneeling as close as I am to the priest I can only barely hear his whisper, ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’ He speaks these words of consecration softly to what was mere bread and what is now Our Lord and then as he kneels a […]
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by Jacob Warn This article may be disturbing to some readers, particularly if they are meat-eaters. To understand my story, you have to understand my perspective, which is, currently, about as dark as you can get. Blind, bald, skin-seethed, dead. The action began just three hours ago, although life stretches back six whole weeks. I’m […]
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by David Maw Thursday’s Child Pierre Boulez was born on Thursday 26th March 1925 in the quiet provincial Loire town of Montbrison. An older brother of the same name had been born in 1920 but survived only a few months. His older sister, Jeanne, born in 1922, was to be a staunch supporter and confidante […]
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by Aidan Chivers I barely had time to walk over to my seat, sit down, and look up nervously before my interviewer fired me the question: ‘So what’s the point of literature?’ Fumbling around frantically for a suitably profound response, I remember stammering something about its potential for uniting people and the common ground it […]
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by Lucy Mellor A common character description, be it in a novel, short story or play, is ‘doesn’t like change’. Whether said explicitly in the writing or, in the case of more crafty writers, implied by the character’s actions, it often seems to be an easy way of giving their personality that extra quirk, or […]
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by Jacob Warn Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. So too with happiness. Or so we’d like to believe. But our culture of happiness has long since faded into an Arcadian past, and we are really only left with […]
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Andrew Boothroyd Strident, assured, passionate, virtuoso. These are not words normally associated with the viola, one of the more modest and inconspicuous members of the orchestral family. But anyone who hasn’t heard the distinctive sound of this unheralded stringed instrument should have been at the Oriel Champagne Concert in Michaelmas Term 2015, where we heard […]
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The Poor Print 