41 days ago
You get a different class of chant at the Oxford Cambridge women’s football match. Held in a 12,000 seater stadium, that of Cambridge United, more than 1,500 folks crammed into one stand made some noise. “I’d rather go to Durham than Oxford” they chanted. That is far more genteel abuse than that which daughter 2 and I used to hear at the old Upton Park.
968 days ago
The folly of the industrial-scale corruption of so many teachers is revealed today with more taxpayers’ cash being pissed away as universities are forced to bribe students to stay away.
1286 days ago
Yesterday a French Muslim beheaded a teacher who had made the mistake a few weeks earlier of showing his students pictures of the prophet Mohammed. The class was one of free speech. French cops believed that the murderer was wearing an explosive vest and he was certainly still carrying a knife and they shot him. Now read the Twitter take of Dana Nawzar Jaf who completed his masters in anthropology at Durham three years ago. I am sure you share my delight in how our taxes were well spent on improving this fine young mind and celebrate that a chap like this wanders freely amongst us.
2761 days ago
The Colombian referendum really has got the liberal elite out in force showing their contempt for the "little people" when they vote the wrong way. In the comfortable groves of academia, a haven for lazy and overpaid folks who engage in an intolerant form of group think, the sparks were flying. We have already met Dr Caroline from Sheffied University who thinks we "should never have referendums on things that really matter" now meet Scott Bellows from Durham. Scott, the Prof, tweeted:
3371 days ago
My strange dream of Friday night about a failed third interview at Oxford brings back memories of my first two bites at the cherry – the whole process was surreal and almost of another era. The year was 1985.
It had been decided that I was capable of applying for Oxford and that I should sit the exam in the fourth term of my sixth form at Warwick School for boys, an establishment that these days also takes girls in the sixth form. The choice of college was not in doubt. My grandfather (Sir John Winnifrith), my father and his brother Charles Winnifrith had all gone to Christchurch as had Richard Hobhouse who married my father’s younger sister Lucy. My maternal grandfather had studied (very little) at Pembroke and my mother had attended St Anne’s which was just about to start accepting men in the year of my application.
Elder cousins Helen & Corinna Hobhouse had both failed to get into ChristChurch so it was not a family connection shoe in. A rather studious cousin Charlotte Winnifrith was already up and so as I always rather liked Lotte who has a hidden wild streak I went for the family choice.
The day of the exam came and I can still remember utterly screwing up an essay answering the question “Is poverty relative?” Of course it can be viewed in relative terms but it is absolute poverty that we must eradicate and that can only happen through the joys of capitalism which requires inequality of wealth for it to work. Greed, the desire to be richer than the best man is the only way to drive enterprise and so to make all of society better off, including the poor. There. I have answered the question in 45 seconds but in November 1985, sitting in the second desk from the front next to the wall, I made a right pig’s ear of it.
Despite that I was called up to the House for interview. The Christchurch of the mid-eighties was a frightful place, known as the home of the Sloane ranger. Do you remember Olivia Channon
