“It’s just like… like, I can’t even describe how… it’s that thing of, like…” And with one, simple question, Ross Noble – who’s just spent two and a half hours on stage taking the piss out of a theatre full of delighted Yorkshire locals – is tongue-tied.

I’ve asked the comic what it is that he loves about touring. It can’t be the money; these days TV work is far more lucrative. Yet he’s spent more of the last ten years on the road than off it, and pops up on our tellies only once a year, for an obligatory appearance on Have I Got News For You. The answer, it turns out, is rather sweet.

“You know how, if you’re in the street, and somebody smiles at you – how that lifts your day? Well imagine that, concentrated. For a couple of hours you just see hundreds of smiling faces, and it’s just…” He falters again, his mouth opening and closing so that, with his naturally wide-eyed expression, he looks a bit like a goldfish as he tries to find the words to complete his sentence. Finally, the Geordie concludes with typically northern directness: “What a great way to live your life.”

To tour or not to tour is not a decision that most successful comedians have the luxury of making. Shackled to a TV audience that finds them funny enough to watch from the sofa but possibly not to spend twenty-odd quid on seeing them live, they stick with panel games and a sketch show or a series, if they’re lucky. Noble, however, is in the enviable position of being able to make the occasional TV programme here and there, and still attract sell-out audiences to his live shows.

Like his hero, Billy Connolly, he has a reputation for being much funnier in front of a theatre audience. Anyone familiar with his stand-up routines will know that finding the right words is rarely a problem Noble comes across because, in the years that have passed since he first took the microphone at his local comedy club aged 15, he’s developed a baffling ability to improvise. In fact, ‘routine’ seems the wrong word to use for a comedian who can walk onstage, see – as he did at his York show two weeks ago – the hand of an elderly woman in the front row brush against her husband’s crotch, and then riff for twenty minutes on the sexual problems faced by the over-50s and, if we’re going to go into specifics, how to cure erectile dysfunction. (His answer? “Helium injections.”)

I meet Noble after his gig in York, which is one of 36 stops he’s making up and down the country on his much-awaited Nobleism tour. Backstage, things are unexpectedly quiet considering that he’s the biggest celebrity to come to the city in recent months. Only the man himself and a few of his “crew” – who are removing a large, inflatable replica of his head from the auditorium – remain. He seems exhausted, but is incredibly polite, offering up first his chair and then the pick of a bright bouquet of Haribo sweets as he packs away the last of his things. A DVD with three semi-naked women on the front is hastily tucked into his backpack. I raise an eyebrow; he laughs and jokes: “That’s a Dixie Chicks documentary by the way, in case you thought, ‘Oooh, he’s got a stash of porn.’”

“When I was in a terrifying brothel in Amsterdam, I didn’t think, ‘oh yeah, I’ll talk about that onstage in the future”

Off-the-cuff banter like this – quick, perceptive but not, he assures me, mocking – is, I think, trademark Noble. Watching him, you often have the unsettling sense that any pre-prepared wit is being impulsively thrown to the wind in favour of what seems to be his favourite pastime: spotting the gag-potential in faces that stare up at him onstage. Intrigued by this, I ask how much of the night’s show was ‘something he’d written earlier’. He looks almost insulted. “It’s not like I’ve sat down and I’ve gone, ‘right, I’ll write it down, these are my jokes,” he says. “I like going off on a bit of a tangent and then… well, just sort of seeing where it’ll go. Like, the danger is that you go, ‘right, this is the show,’ and then there’s no room for it to expand, and flow, and just kind of evolve, you know?”

Tonight, I’m told, just three or four jokes were thought of beforehand. It’s unsurprising information, given that, aside from helium-filled penises, most of the first half revolved around his latest visit to York: the infamous sword shop (“brilliant”), the Jorvik Viking Centre (“shit”) and the cab drivers (“fucking nuts”). As Noble’s own saying goes, ‘If it’s in the head, it comes out the mouth.’ “A few years ago,” he reflects, “when I was in a terrifying underground brothel in Amsterdam, I didn’t think, ‘oh, yeah, I’ll talk about that at some point in the future.’” Yet tonight the incident popped into his head and soon an innocent, but messy encounter with a stout, middle-aged Dutch prostitute was shared with an auditorium full of strangers. Soon, no doubt, it’ll make it onto YouTube.

As it happens, Noble is one performing artist who’s embracing the virtual world with open arms. He not only has an official internet site (www.rossnoble.co.uk), but is signed up to both MySpace and YouTube, where he sporadically posts clips from his gigs. Perhaps because of the uniqueness of each of his performances, the internet revolution doesn’t seem to have cheated the comedian out of ticket sales. In fact, more noticeable is the growing gaggle of fans who appear at not one but a number of his shows up and down the country. Here in York, when one group cried out in unison, “Ross, tell us about the Eskimos!” the rest of the audience looked perplexed. “That was pretty much the whole show in Birmingham,” he explains.

It seems to be a mark of pride with Noble that on his tour, muffin humour aside (he’s known to like finding faces in them), the same joke never gets told twice: “What some comics do is they’ll have their thing and then they’ll just milk it, but I refuse to go back.” It’s not surprising, therefore, that he admits to forgetting many of the stories he’s told as the shows behind him begin to blur into one. The constant flow of creative energy required onstage – dreaming something up on the spur of the moment, acting it out and half-teasing the audience for finding it funny – seems to have led to him suffering from some kind of performance amnesia. When the Brummies piped up, he too was puzzled. “Here, it’s like, I can’t even remember it,” he says.

Once, Noble recalls catching himself on TV in New Zealand doing a gag about cherubs (“my basic theory on cherubs is that you never trust anyone who plays trumpet in the nude”). “Even though it was me, I could remember about five per cent of it – it was this sort of hazy kind of memory,” he says. “I was pissing myself laughing… It was like watching someone else.”
To be fair to Noble – who, judging by his rapturous reception in York, will be egged on to return to the helium, the prostitute and the budgerigars (‘why’, I’m now asking myself, ‘do they need ladders?’) at some point in the future – he’s never going to be able to remember everything. In fact, I realise, given the pace with which he’s still pounding around the international comedy circuit after ten-odd years, he’d be lucky to retain a fraction of it.

It’s easy to forget myself, sitting opposite him, just how celebrated a stand-up comic Noble is. In all honesty, now that his trademark dark, messy tresses have disappeared underneath a brown baker boy hat, the man originally from Cramlington, Northumberland isn’t someone you’d necessarily recognise if he passed you on the street. But, log onto the Channel 4 website and you’ll see his name there, voted in at number ten in the broadcaster’s list of the 100 Greatest Comedy Stand-ups – behind the likes of Connolly, Bailey and Kay, but in front of Dee, Gervais and Carr. You see, while they rule the telly waves and The Office funnyman has pipped him to ‘cracking America’, it is Noble’s career that is reaching more adventurous, if less glamorous, highs. His comic travelogues for Radio 4 (yes, 4) are a case in point. Despite linguistic, cultural and social differences, whenever Ross Noble Goes Global he has audiences laughing from Egypt down to Cape Town; from Eastern Europe all the way across to China.

As his experiences in Amsterdam suggest, all this time spent on more distant roads also has the potential to offer up more new material for Noble to use in his performances. On his recent tour of Australia then, I ask, were there any episodes which could rival the brothel gem?
“I did the whole thing on my motorbike,” he begins. “I did this 26,000-kilometre road trip right around Australia, just doing a gig every night. And while we were doing that, yeah, there was some fairly mad stuff that happened. One night I met a guy who had a Harley Davidson hearse.” I look confused. “Like a motorbike and sidecar, you know? With a bit for a coffin? So in this outback town, right in the middle of nowhere, basically I jumped into the bit where the body’s supposed to go and we just went driving round this graveyard.” He grins, remembering the scene. “That was pretty cool.”

The boy, it seems, is into his toys; and particularly the fast, two-wheeled kind, suggesting that in life, as on stage, he prefers getting kicks to getting comfy. The hearse anecdote is soon followed by one about a confrontation with “one of the most poisonous snakes in the world” whilst filming Down Under in Darwin. Nothing came of it, of course, but the idea still makes a female member of his crew, wheeling the wardrobe rail out from his dressing room, shudder. Her reaction soon gets Noble thinking.

“You know, snakes and spiders, and just all of that stuff – it doesn’t bother me. Because I just hate the way how, nowadays, in modern life in general, you can’t have a puddle of water on the floor without somebody putting a ridiculous, yellow thing over it with, ‘Don’t Slip On This’ written on it. You know, people suing coffee shops for burning their mouth…” He trails off, evidently disgusted. “But not only that, but like, some people try to sue McDonald’s for making them fat. It’s like, if you’re doing something because a clown told you to do it, then you’re a fuckwit, you’re a fuckwit who deserves to get fat! It’s retarded. It’s absolutely retarded.

“Now I’m ranting, but that’s the way I feel. Because I’m into my motorbikes and stuff, and you know when people go,” – he puts on his best whiny voice – “‘Ooh, they’re very dangerous.’ And you go, ‘Yes, they are. Good.’ It’s like…” There’s a sigh of exasperation. “If you spend your whole life trying to protect yourself…”

Suddenly, mid-monologue, what started out as a rant about snakes, coffee and motorbikes, touches on reality TV contests and bizarrely acquires a more severe tone. Noble’s carefree philosophy on living life, it appears, is wound up with a serious philosophy on the pursuit of one’s dreams and life ambitions.

“The natural state of the human mind is not to live in a perpetual state of bliss… All these people on the bloody X-Factor and all that, they’re there just going, ‘This was my dream and I can’t believe it’s over.’ No it’s not! If you really wanted to do it, you would crawl across broken glass, you know? Like, I’ve got the respect for those guys who are singing in pubs, where people are chucking shit at them. Even if they’re not very good, they’re still doing it. They’re still going out there and, fair enough, they might not be selling out arenas or whatever, or performing in nice venues and stuff, but they’re still going out there and doing it because they love it. I think people who sort of, who avoid things because of, you know, ‘What if this happens, what if that happens’… That’s just life, isn’t it? It’s just like yeah, okay…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but what Noble essentially seems to be saying is: “get over it”. Things might be rosy for the boy from Northumberland now, but he remembers well the trials of performing on the pub-club circuit. Audiences weren’t always as receptive to his daft, chit-chat style, or as willing – or even conscious enough – to be the subjects of a little ribbing.

“I can never wait to get to work. Imagine turning up to the office, walking in, and a thousand people just cheer”

“I used to do quite a lot of fairly rough kind of nightclub gigs,” he says. “Everyone was dancing and pissed, and then they’d just turn off the music and go, ‘Right, here’s your comic.’ I think the worst gig I ever did was in a sports centre in Manchester; it’s the only one where I’ve ever turned up and just gone, ‘absolutely no, no way.’ It was a giant rave, basically, and there was probably about a thousand, two thousand people there. I was in the chillout room and there were people unconscious, just lying there, just fucked. And I just went, ‘er, no thanks.”

Things are very different now. In an analogy typical of a man who likes to burn rubber, Noble describes doing stand-up comedy as being “a bit like driving a car.” If this holds true, he’s upped several gears since his days on the rave circuit and is currently cruising. These days, people come to shows ready and willing for him to make them laugh, which makes striding onstage, he says, an entirely unnerve-racking experience. “Imagine getting up every morning and just going, ‘I can’t wait, I can’t wait to get to work’. That’s what it’s like. It’s never, never work, it’s never a chore. Imagine turning up to your office, and you walk in, and everyone, a thousand people, just cheer. Imagine that, just turning up at the office.” He’s animated now, and he sits up, raises both arms and roars like a football fan. “‘Yeeeeeeeeeeeaaahh!’ And then everyone just sits there, you know? And you get to make people laugh.”

Someone pops their head around the door of his dressing room; there are a crowd of fans waiting for him outside. Maybe they’re looking for an autograph, but chances are they’re hoping for just a few more laughs and a bit more banter before the night’s over. Either way, he’s up and off. The bets are on that they’ll be going home smiling.

Music, free love, mud: three terms that defined Woodstock’s celebrated namesake but seem, at first, to make for rather unfortunate comparisons for the York version. Mud? It’s difficult to dirty the concrete that paves the delightfully named Vanbrugh Paradise. Free love? Tricky to feel its vibe when metal barriers have been used to cage in the specified ‘festival area’ and Door Safe check your bag for booze on the way in (and, should you drink too much, put the metaphorical boot to your behind on the way out). Woodstock, I’m afraid freshers, this ‘Woodstock’ is not.

Or not entirely. What remains, luckily, is the music; and coupled with the fact that this is live music you can listen to on the cheap, with all your friends and in your own backyard, it is the 12 hours of pure, unadulterated, home-grown music which makes this campus event one that you should definitely RSVP to. This year in particular, prepared to be surprised, if not awed, by the talent on offer. Battle of the Bands finalists, jugglers, choirgirls, flamethrowers, Fenna – they’re all here.

From the top down, then. Headlining are BoB’s trio of medal-winners: Make It Better Later, …Accept Instruction (formerly known as Clip the Apex) and Apply the Brakes.

Make It Better Later’s rise to the coveted 11.15pm slot is the ska punk kid’s inspirational story of rags to riches, if ever there was one. After just a year and half together, the band’s first notable achievement was getting knocked out in the BoB heats in 2006. They’ve gone on, however, to play Leeds Cockpit, record a soon-to-be-released album and share a stage with Wheatus (and the less well-known Zebrahead). Now they’re on the top of the bill at Woodstock. “It’s quite surreal,” said the band’s lead singer, Aaron Carey, “I can’t quite believe it myself.”

The rest of the group of late-night performers are a mishmash of newbies and old hands. Both …Accept Instruction and Apply the Brakes came from nowhere to reach the final of (and, in the former’s case, win) BoB 2007 back in March and now, with “about two other gigs” to their names, are also headlining. But no Woodstock would be complete (in this day and age at least), without Fenna Rhodes, golden boy of the York hip-hop scene. He is rumoured to be appearing for the last time with his band, The True Ingredients.

The real selling point of this year’s festival is the number of acts allowed to perform on the day. About 30 bands, musical ensembles, dance troops and the like have been allotted a slot in the schedule. The reason? The organisers have not only constructed a stage outside on Vanbrugh Paradise, which will play host to the more mainstream bands, they have also built one inside Vanbrugh Dining Hall, on which the likes of Vudu Guru, Arctic Fury, and Continuum will appear.

It’s an impressive plan that increases the variety of performances on offer, resulting in a line-up that encompasses music genres from indie to rock, interspersed with a bit of gospel, a turn of eardrum-crushing samba beats and, who could forget, some moves from the limber ladies and gents that make up Pole Exercise.

The SU’s cunning food and drink provisions mean that it’s perfectly possible, as I learned first-hand last year, to spend an entire day within the Woodstock enclosure. There’s a barbeque from 2-8pm and two bars, open from midday until 11pm.

Sam Daunt, this year’s Woodstock Coordinator, says, “This is an event that you just can’t miss. It’s a 12-hour event with lots of alcohol, food, and music and, at £3 , it’s insanely good value for money. And it’s all for charity, which gives people an excuse to drink even more than usual! As it’s not ticketed entry, people can just come down whenever they want and see what’s happening.”

If you don’t fancy paying the £3 entry donation, however, or don’t want to face the queues that build up to get into the event during the evening, then a crowd usually congregates on the steps by Central Hall, swigging their supermarket-bought beers and enjoying music away from the clamour around the stage.

From what my spies – sorry, sources – have been telling me, Nouse has built up something of a reputation for itself on campus. Apparently, I’m told, as well as having opinions about the stories inscribed on the pages of this ‘ere university rag, our readers also make judgements about those of us that wield the pen.

Here in the hustle and bustle of Nouse headquarters, the editorial team are forever aware, not to say thankful, that the newspaper is worked on by upwards of 50 members of staff, all of whom reflect a diversity of viewpoints, as evidenced by the heated disputes that accompany each new edition. Yet it is inevitable (if somewhat bizarre for us) that by working on Nouse, we take on a collective identity for those who browse the pages that we’ve inscribed and together bear the criticism when we aren’t seen to accurately represent campus opinion.

So what exactly do you lot think of the Nouse ‘brand’? And, over the past year, have you thought that Nouse has reflected your views? This week it was my mission to find out.

It’s with the news story, of course, that a newspaper ultimately makes its mark; a choice headline on a lead article or even (as we found out to our detriment) a controversial minor article can engage the most apathetic, disinterested student in a debate on campus politics – if not on journalistic morals. One friend may have sheepishly admitted, “Honestly, sweetie? I never really read it,” but she could still link Nouse to at least a few of our more divisive exposés.

A case in point would be what our esteemed editor has termed ‘mock-execution-gate’: the report that revealed how members of the University Officer Training Corps had filmed said execution while on exercise and, in wisdom that could only have been acquired at an army boot camp, put the footage on YouTube. It was one of the stories of the year and, three months on, everyone has an opinion on it. Yet while there are disappointing calls of “victimisation” and “slander” from some expected quarters, the majority verdict seems to be this was one time we got it right. Loosening the reigns on our ‘gonzo-attack dog’ reporter has earned us all a collective pat on the back for uncovering a story that not only satisfied campus’s thirst for scandal, but also offered a curious insight into the activities of one of its shadiest societies. “I think it was completely justified,” a second-year English student told me. Another punned: “The OTC shot themselves in the foot – they thoroughly deserved it.”

Sometimes, however, we find ourselves swimming against the tide of student opinion. An issue that seemed to unite campus but divide it from both its newspapers was race. To recap, Nouse led in the week 3 edition of this term with the headline ‘Are we a racist university?’ The consensus, among the racially diverse collection of people I spoke to this week, was an overwhelming “no”. Reflecting the exasperation of the reader who wrote to us to complain at our “unfounded ‘racist university’ crusade”, the general view was that the hard-hitting headline didn’t match the reality that students experience; we were jumping on the race bandwagon and, as one interviewee opined, “just having a poke at Vision, really.”

For another, otherwise pro-Nouse student, the racism story was yet more evidence of the paper’s position on the majority of campus issues: “It does seem to have an anti-University stance. Although it tries to be serious, it gets carried away, and sometimes you do get these screaming headlines, like ‘are we all racist?’” Interesting, I thought. Nouse is believed – by one person, at least – to be prejudiced in its reporting of events involving the University administration. Another conversation I had went further. If Nouse had a defining statement, I was told, it would be this: a serious, wants-to-be-broadsheet newspaper (evidently there’s some truth in that), turning its nose up at the brashness of its tabloid rival, Vision, and sniffing at any mention of the establishment.

The opinions of these two forthright readers reminded me of one of our most outspoken critics, who also objected to what he saw as Nouse having an agenda. One thing the aforementioned OTC story did bring to light was the dissatisfaction of many right-wing factions of campus with what said critic termed the paper’s “liberal-left” slant. In that instance, there was little need to explain ourselves: a smudged photocopy of the first ever edition of this paper clearly states its aims, one of which is to be ‘progressive’. However, when it comes to students holding the University to account, the campus media is one of a select few mediums that allow them to effectively do so.

It seems that many of you realise this. The front page best-remembered from this year by most people I talked to was the one displaying our open letter to Vice-Chancellor Brian Cantor, signed by academics, staff, students and alumni, demanding that management ‘Bring back our porters’. Where YUSU have failed to mobilise students in support of a particular cause, the student body is thankful that the media has taken the lead: “One of YUSU’s problems at the moment is that they’re not very good at actually reaching people with a message and rallying people to a cause,” said one active campaigner on campus. “That’s why I really welcomed the issue with the porters’ campaign… I thought at long last it was an expression of student opinion; before that, no-one had stood up and said, ‘That’s not good enough.’”

Saying ‘do better’. Holding people to account. It’s what we like to think is part of our job as campus hacks – and it’s what we hope that you, our readers, will say to us. And you do, whether you’re part of a JCR or society demanding space to publicise your events or applaud achievements or whether you’re discussing the latest issue over coffee in Vanbrugh debating its merits and deriding its mistakes. We love it – and we want you to continue. Otherwise, my spies will be on hand to report back.

Reading a Guardian headline last week – a smiling, chubby toddler next to the words ‘Why having one of these is the worst career move a woman can make’ – after getting past the un-PC overtones, I had to admit there seemed to be some degree of truth in it. Having a baby pretty much signals the end of things, right? We, the Cosmopolitan generation, believe that women can have it all. Yet we still assume that members of our female faction must follow the correct procedure to collect their due – and giving birth to a little one comes right at the end of the ladder that takes you from school, to university, to a job and then to marriage (if you choose to err on the side of traditional). Unless you’re Anna Wintour or Kate Winslet, the act of procreation in lieu of a ‘career move’ is today seen as an obstacle to progression towards the peak of modern womanhood.

But what about the ordinary people who don’t just finish up with a kid but get the work/homemaking trajectory the ‘wrong’ way around? And what about the women who have babies before even arriving at what is supposed to be one of the first steps to a career: university?

When asked about her life pre-motherhood, Rose Howd drifts back a few years and admits, somewhat sheepishly, that even at 18 she wasn’t looking to become a high achiever. “I didn’t really think about things before I had her,” she says, referring to her four-year-old daughter Charlotte. “It was just like, I have to go to school, A-levels are better than working, and I’ll just go to university because that’s what you do.” The option of continuing her studies beyond sixth form, however, was soon crossed off Rose’s checklist. In her final year of secondary school, she got pregnant and everybody – including herself – seemed to think that this effectively halted her academic journey. “My dad had always wanted me to go to university, but even he thought I’d give up on it now I had a child,” she says, shrugging. “And I thought my life had ended, to be honest. I didn’t want a child at all. I thought that I was just going to have to sit in my house on my own, forever.”

‘For Rose, trying to have it all – when ‘all’ includes a degree, baby and fledgling social life – is a delusional endeavour’

Today, perched on the edge of a seat in Langwith bar at the University where she is now a first-year Mathematics student, Rose can reflect on the initial terror she felt facing motherhood. It seems that she needed to take a significant mental leap to even reconsider the prospect of applying to university. Talking about how she had initially intended to support Charlotte, she says, “when I couldn’t get a decent job I just thought, I may as well start university – I don’t want to have a life where I’m scrimping and saving for everything. It’s terrible sitting on benefits by yourself. And also I’d always been expected to go to university, so I thought I should go – for want of a better plan, really.”

Rose speaks about the process of applying to university with a certain emotional detachment, but it’s been a long struggle for her to get here. With only a ‘D’ grade in Maths from her A-levels, she enrolled at the Open University to take a further course in the subject. “I was working from home and Charlotte wasn’t in nursery. So I was exhausted, up until half five in the morning to get my assignments done.” The course, as well as Rose’s daily work routine, was a compromise of motherhood; once she had hoped to study Music, now the plan is to become a Maths teacher. “I always wanted to teach. I never wanted to do Maths, but I am now, so…” She trails off.

For Rose, unlike many of the 18 to 20-year-olds that arrived in York last September, university is her key to a new future; not one unlocking a world of independence and glorious hedonism, but one releasing her from the “terrible, horrible” area of Newcastle that she grew up in and offering her a means of fulfilling the all-important responsibility she now has for her daughter. “I just know that I appreciate everything that I have more than I would’ve done,” she responds when asked how her outlook on university is different from how it may have been at 18. “And everything revolves around her now, obviously. I don’t have anything for myself anymore.”

After the pains of childbirth and the trials of being a single, studying mother, coming to the University should’ve offered Rose a measure of relief. But for a young woman who admits that the straightforward route she was once taking is “all messed around now”, it’s not that simple. The reference to a shift in focus from ‘me, me, me’ to ‘her, her, her’ suggests parenthood has not only given Rose a different outlook on student life, but means that she experiences it in a strangely parallel universe. Five months into a three-year course, and Rose is working all the hours of a science degree; but instead of then pursuing an extra-curricular interest or socialising with friends, she’s going home to Charlotte. Orchestra practice is an evening activity (it’s been four years since she’s picked up her trumpet, anyway) and friendships, partly because the mother-daughter pair aren’t in halls, have never gone beyond coffee in a study break. In the suffocatingly close quarters of York, Rose feels “cut off” from the rest of the student populace.

I meet her after putting up a notice in the campus nursery asking to speak to any students who would be willing to share their experiences of parenting at university. It can’t have been an enticing prospect, and out of the 13 students who have children at the nursery, she is the only one to have replied. But despite the slight awkwardness when we’re chatting about what must be the tedious details of motherhood, she seems nervously eager, rather than reluctant, to talk.

“It takes me about an hour to get here in the morning and an hour to get back on buses. I don’t have any family here, I don’t know anyone, I don’t have a social life at all,” she laughs. “But I’m that tired it doesn’t matter, to be honest! It’s just a case of getting here, doing work, going home and sleeping, really – I’ve never been on a night out because I have no-one to watch Charlotte. But I do sit and have coffee with people. I would like to have the option to socialise a bit more… but then,” as she puts it bluntly, “you always want what you can’t have.”

In Rose’s mind, it seems, the snags in the old feminist mantra of ‘having it all’ have been torn wide open: struggling for ‘all’, when ‘all’ would include a degree, a baby and a fledgling social life, is a somewhat, if not entirely, delusional endeavour.

“Provision for student parents has slipped by the radar, and obviously they don’t have the time to fight their corner”

The irony is that, in Rose’s case, hers needn’t be so difficult, or at least so lonely, an experience. Like other higher education insitutions, York doesn’t make available records of the number of its students with dependents. Existing statistics, however, colour the area a very vague shade of grey, suggesting Rose is one of a sizeable group of parents who have come to the University. There may only be 13 students with children at the campus nursery, but the Student Financial Support Unit granted 26 Parents’ Awards in the last academic year – and as the Unit’s manager, Sharmila Gohil, said, “at best this can only indicate the minimum number of student parents.” The figures from the Accommodation Office are more enlightening: the University owns or has nomination rights on more than 50 family houses; all of these are taken and there are currently 35 students on the waiting list.

The difficulty for parents – especially those, like Rose, who are young and single – is that there is currently no easy way for them to get in contact with one another and no official support network that they can rely on. At one point, a student-run Student Families Association provided the vital means of connecting them but now, according to the Students’ Union Welfare Officer Amy Foxton, because of financial and staffing issues, this has all but “faded into oblivion.” This year, no freshers with children have been able to secure a place in the University’s family accommodation and so they must rent property off campus – far from the intense social networking experience of their childless, college-bound counterparts. These parents don’t have access to the details of other freshers who find themselves in a similar position and no-one – either at the University or on YUSU – has representing the interests of the collective in their job description. As Foxton admits, “Provision for student parents has kind of slipped by the radar… and the problem is that obviously all student parents are going to be really busy because they’ve got children, so they’re not able to give up as much time to ‘fight their corner’, as it were. That’s where we need to step in.”

Offering YUSU a hand into the ring is Sarah Metcalfe, 27, a Sociology undergraduate and single parent to five-year-old Jack. She has recently approached the Union about setting up a new Student Family Network and establishing it as a society that works with the Union to develop a support network for student families and encourage their integration into campus life. This, she believes, would not only benefit current student parents, but also the University and community at large, by making it clear that “coming to university is possible regardless of a person’s social or economic position.”

Sarah’s experience of university life is akin to that of Rose, but her assessment of York, a university that claims it is committed to widening participation, is more damming: “The main thing I was looking forward to at university was meeting other people, learning new things and time to myself to feel like me, rather than a parent,” she says. “I think I’m disappointed in the whole experience of university now, mainly because I haven’t been able to take part in many activities. It’s been an isolating experience – and it really gets you down when you’ve got no one to talk to who’s going through the same kind of thing.”

The proposal for the Student Family Network, marked out on a colourful Word document taken to YUSU President Rich Croker two weeks ago, sketches out plans for a single parent support group, a school drop-off and pick-up scheme – which would enable parents to stay at lectures or society activities past the 6pm after-school club cut-off point – and a partnership with RAG and Student Action to encourage families to get involved with child-friendly charity events. It’s a student-led initiative and Sarah, with the backing of YUSU, believes it could make a real impact on the lives of parents. Besides, as she states “even if you’re just improving one student’s life, then it’s worth it.”

Nevertheless, there is definitely room for expansion. For bigger ideas, Sarah and YUSU need only to look 30 miles eastward to the University of Leeds, where the Union’s Women’s Officer has just opened an online forum for student parents and runs twice weekly ‘Stay and Play’ sessions to help parents meet each other. The problem for YUSU, according to Foxton, is that it is limited in what it can do. “The way things work at York,” she explains, “is that generally the University seems happier to provide welfare assistance and perhaps doesn’t give the Union the amount of financial backing we’d need to do as much [for student parents] as we’d like to.” She cites Leeds as an example of where the reverse is true. “It’s something that the University needs to look into.”

The University might prefer to take care of students’ welfare assistance, but its provision for student parents is, in general, restricted to that offered to all non-parenting students. Its main strength, to date, seems to be in providing financial assistance: on top of the loans that all students have access to, and the Parents’ Learning Allowance (course-related costs) and Childcare Grant from their Local Education Authority, students with dependents at York are also offered an annual Parents’ Award and prioritised for the University’s Access to Learning Fund. However, unlike many other universities, there is no one whose job it is to deal with the welfare issues specific to those who have children.

At the University of Cambridge, there is not only a student-run Family Society, but a designated University Childcare Advisor who maintains an online guide for student parents and sends out weekly bulletins with child-related information. Of the people I spoke to in the Finance, Welfare and Accommodation offices, because of “data protection issues”, nobody even seemed to have a clear idea of how many student parents they were dealing with.

And there are issues on which student parents do need representing; from campus nursery opening hours (it shuts fifteen minutes before the official University day is over) to the lack of accommodation. The Accommodation Office operates a waiting list policy, which, it says, is “the fairest way” of allocating family residences. However, because demand far outstrips supply, this means that freshers find themselves looking for a place to rent off campus and then move onto campus in their second or third year. As to whether there will be more family accommodation on Heslington East, the official line is that “the University will continue to review the position and to seek ways to add to our provision. At the moment, we have not put any numbers on this possibility.”

In York, Marco* keeps the story of his life a closed book. While other gap year graduates enthuse about the experiences that have taken them out of their hometown and into the ‘real world’, very few people are privileged with information from his travel journal – one that records the events of not one but three years in which he went from Harvard academia to wartime Iraq. These basic plot details are, you sense, where he’d like the story to end and ironically, with the click of the Dictaphone, even they take an effort to confirm. His eyes narrow and I notice that his arms have folded across his chest. He’s cut across me before I can get my first question out. Quick, but curt: “There are some things that I won’t talk about with anyone.”

Officially, Marco only closed this last chapter of his life by agreeing that some of the particulars would be ‘forgotten’ on paper. Before beginning his studies at York he was a naval officer in the U.S. Armed Forces, a career that, at 18, he had been keen to sign up for but one that, after it had taken him onto the battlefield, he was desperate to escape from. In managing to get himself released early from duty, he – like all retiring officers – had to sign a contract of non-disclosure, consenting to protect details about his experience that are, for now at least, considered ‘classified’. He says it’s a small price to pay for the distance that’s now between him and the conflict still occupying our TV screens. “As soon as I got out there I was like, ‘I need to get out of here, right now.’ And when I got out, I was like, ‘I am never going back.’”

‘Boot camp is just about brain-washing. They make you all into a group of fanatics, and then they give you a bunch of weapons and tell you to do, go, accomplish.’

Perhaps Marco’s desire to leave Iraq, and his reluctance to revisit the country now, in conversation, both have something to do with his denial that he is a “real veteran” of the conflict. For him, having been in the war zone and worn the uniform of the invading force isn’t enough to elevate his experience to that of the men and women he served with. “They have a real sense of duty, which I never really had,” he admits. “It takes courage and faith too, and I guess I didn’t have that either.”

In retrospect, Marco admits that it was arrogance that made him decide to drop out of one of America’s top Ivy League universities in order to enlist in the Navy. “Harvard was very challenging academically, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to be challenged,” he explains. Instead, he had set his mind on joining the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, a faction of the Forces responsible for disposing bombs in war-torn areas. “That just seemed like the ultimate challenge, a way I could prove myself. In the EOD. you’ve got to be able to think quickly, solve problems, be creative, make decisions… I thought it would be an altruistic thing to do, too. It seemed more realistic to me than academia did, more practical rather than theoretical.”

Marco’s preparation to enter the EOD began at boot camp, where training all officers started their training, whether headed for the special or conventional forces. The two months were more of a mental test than he had anticipated. “From day one in the military, they start brainwashing you,” he says. “They take away any sense of individuality that you have. All of a sudden, you follow any order, no matter how stupid. It’s mind games basically – you have to just shut up and obey. Any sort of curiosity about what you’re doing is frowned upon. I had to really push myself through it.”

On 20th March 2003, however, the day when the United States declared war on Iraq, the coming months suddenly seemed a lot tougher. “We were in our bunk beds when they told us. A lot of people were excited, but a lot of people were kind of scared.” Marco, however, believed he had a way out. “I couldn’t sleep that night, I was anxious. But I had a lot of training ahead of me at the time, and I thought that hopefully, when I’d finished it, the war would be over. I knew there was the possibility I’d go to Iraq but I thought that, if it happened, I was going to be so well trained with EOD that I would survive – I’d have been in danger, but I’d just be so well trained that the odds would be in my favour.”

Marco continued onto ‘A’ School to begin training as a parachute rigger, which was to be his field of speciality until he reached the EOD. It was another two months of preparation, but this time in an environment “where they beat you all physically to try and weed people out.”

He talks enthusiastically of the four a.m. wake-up calls, the mornings when they’d be ordered to put on swimming gear, wade out into the freezing sea water and lock arms and stay afloat on their backs until given the instruction to come back. “The cold really gets to you; you always felt it was too long. But to a certain extent you do enjoy it – not because you like the pain, but because it’s about pride and confidence. I’m still proud right now that I went through as much as I did and I didn’t quit. It was tempting at times to say ‘this is enough.’”

As the physical endurance of the recruits improved, however, their increasing confidence was having an effect on the collective’s attitudes and outlook. The Marco slouched in his chair now seems somehow different from the 18-year-old who, he recalls, was prepared to square up to a group of men on a night out after training, knowing that his new “buddies” of just two weeks were standing, ready to back him up, behind him. “I was a different person,” he admits. “I was kind of stupid and narrow-minded. They made us into this group of really arrogant and overconfident, but really motivated people. In retrospect, they really do make you fanatics, and then they give you a bunch of… well, we called them toys, but weapons basically, and tell you do, go, accomplish.”

Marco, however, didn’t finish his training. His first physical screening at boot camp had revealed stress fractures in his bones and while he was allowed to continue with his training – “I told them I felt good, even though I didn’t” – they got worse. By the time he was in dive school, EOD was definitely off, and the route that he had seen himself taking in the Forces became “completely different”. While on medical hold in Virginia Beach, he was deployed on a naval ship. It was headed for the Persian Gulf.

“I didn’t want to do this anymore. I was like, ‘what is going on?’ I had to call my family and tell them I was leaving really soon – in just a few days we were shipping out.” Military training had been marked out clearly for Marco. Recounting his first assignment aboard a naval ship, however, he begins to struggle to put a time scheme on things. He was to be deployed for seven months, using his skills as a parachute rigger to do maintenance on the troops’ essential survival gear. “We were out there maybe a month or two. The days really start to blur into each another because you’re working shifts and there’s no weekends, no Friday, no Monday, every day’s exactly the same. Seven days a week, at least 12 hours each day.”

Life on the ship he describes as “very cramped and surreal. You lose all sense of things, especially when you’re on night watch. You’re always in fluorescent light, you don’t see the sun, it’s always dark; you’d go to sleep before the sun came out and you’d wake up after the sun was gone. They said the freaks came out at night, because we’d be all pale. We hadn’t seen the sun for a long while.”

‘You’re trying to stay as calm as you can. You’re not thinking about politics, or trying to get home – you’re just trying to do your job as fast as you can and hopefully you’ll survive.’

It’s during his time here, on this narrow stretch of inland sea, that the specifics anchoring Marco’s narrative become obscured. For an unknown reason, he was pulled from the ship and sent to work on land with the marines in Iraq. It was a harsh daylight to wake up to. Despite all his training, he had not been prepared for the situation out on the ground. He was occasionally required to stand watch at the American checkpoints. “I had thought that I would be okay. I hadn’t thought that I’d just be standing on the street like that, just waiting to get shot.

“I can’t tell you enough how vulnerable you feel when you’re standing watch. It doesn’t sound scary: you have to go up to each driver, ask for ID and then wave them through. But he could have a shotgun across his lap, he could be a suicide bomber. It’d be really easy to take you out.”

Luckily, because Marco wasn’t a marine, his main job was, as he puts it, to be “the bitch”. “I was like an extra hand out there. When we were on base, I was in charge of the people cleaning toilets and I would do a lot of maintenance on the gear.” In terms of combat, most of the time Marco was there, he only faced what he calls “skirmishes and ambushes.” Looking back, he paints himself as the timid naval officer caught in amongst “the brave guys” of the marine convoy. “They just shoot at convoys as you’re driving by, down the main highway. I was the one who was always trying to get them to drive through it, because I knew that even if there was one guy it was too dangerous for me.”

He wasn’t part of the major assaults that we associate with the war effort but on the ground, he says, there were still incidents that raised his awareness of the possibility of the danger. “One time we were in a hummer and we started getting shot at. We didn’t know where it was coming from, so the guys sprung into action and I just basically covered my section. It was kind of scary, not knowing where the shots were coming from, just knowing that you could be in the crossfire right at that moment. You know you have to stay still and you’re trying to calm yourself down, but you really want to just get in the hummer and run. It got kind of crazy there for a second, but…” He breaks off mid-sentence and shakes his head, giving an attempt at an apologetic smile. “I don’t really want to talk about it any more, actually.”

The blank is there now, however, wanting to be filling in. How did he deal with these kinds of situations? “The way I explain it to my younger brother, back home, when he asks is that combat, for me, was almost like playing American football. I hate to make the comparison, because here, if you miss your tackle, so to speak – well, you get shot. But it’s the same in that it is all really fast and kind of violent, but you are just completely focused on your job. You’re trying to stay as calm as you can so that you can see where the fire’s coming from and where the cover is. You’re not thinking about politics, or trying to get home, you’re just trying to do your job as fast as you can and hopefully you’ll survive.

His frustration at the situation is palpable. “There were just so many people dying, and once you’re on the ground, I don’t see how you’re going to avoid some of the situations.” You don’t think as much when you’re actually scared of dying. You don’t even know who’s firing at you a lot of times. You just see figures, the missile flash in the night, or the dust moving in the day. They’re not people when you’re shooting at them like that, unless it’s hand-to-hand, and that rarely happens. So you just shoot the…” He breaks off. “You shoot the enemy.

“So that, that, that,” he stresses, “really does get to you.” He struggles to explain the effect it had on him. “I was kind of cynical before that, but I think something died in me when I went out there, when death was thrust in front of me like that.” His words sound bitter. His eyes flinch toward the Dictaphone. “Can you turn that thing off for a second?”

After four weeks in Iraq with the marines, Marco was welcomed back into the baking heat of the Gulf. For another three months, he was back on the shift system, either on watch at night or working the oxygen shop and fixing equipment in the day. His real release, however, was a trip to Italy with two other servicemen when he was on leave. “It was like going back to the world. Just the juxtaposition! God it was weird. We rode a bus down from Naples, down the Amalfi coast, and it was just the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. There were a few times I got pissed off because I was getting lured back into my previous life – it was almost like Iraq never happened. I tried talking to the guys I was with about it, but I guess they just didn’t want to think about it. They wanted to pretend it never happened. I did too, I guess – it was like, ‘I like this better! I don’t want to do that again!’ I remember just feeling so happy, those three days, just because of the distance. I was really sure I wanted to continue with that, and not go back.”

His deployment ended when his naval ship docked in Norfolk, a major naval base in the state of Virginia. He stayed there for around six months, but by that time he was determined to get out. “Back in the US, I started making good impressions on people, gaining their trust and their loyalty. I eventually found a friend in the legal department who took me through all the regulations and helped me put in a special request for discharge. It was based on them sending me from medical hold into the conventional forces, when I had a special forces contract.

Of course, in the end they’re pretty much allowed to do whatever they want with you once you go into boot camp. But I did get some sympathy, because they usually don’t do that.” With a year and two months left on his contract, he was let out on an early discharge for education.
A few months later he arrived in York. “I wanted to get out of the US, because I wasn’t feeling like an American, I guess. I felt kind of ashamed of being an American. That’s kind of simplistic, because not all Americans agree with the war. But I wanted to be more international.”

Marco has listened to the media analysis of the failures in intelligence gathering that led up to the declaration of war and, having spent the last of his teenage years witnessing the human cost of the coalition governments’ mistakes, expresses his anger with the politicians he sees “sitting in their offices, dealing death, basically. “I don’t know why they went to war. I really hope they thought there were weapons over there and they were just too stupid to confirm its.If not, then they’re guilty of something far worse than stupidity.”

Of President Bush, however, he says: “It’s hard to label him stupid at the same time, because he seems to manipulate the American people well enough. He did win two elections. He seems indoctrinated, I think that’s the problem, in this culture, this ex-military culture, that’s so proud to be an American that they’re willing to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.”
Despite his disillusionment with the conflict, however, Marco has respect for the servicemen that he fought with and that remain in Iraq. “I have respect for them because they have something I don’t, I guess. I admire that they can still believe, that they’re still optimistic. In the end, to be there, to risk your life like that, they all have to have faith, on some level, that it’s worth it.”

* Name has been changed

Tube stations, mosques and now universities: according to the Guardian, the campus is the government’s new focus in its fight against ‘extremism’. In a report published a week last Monday, the newspaper claimed to have obtained a document from the Department of Education and Skills warning of the potential spread of radical Islam amongst undergraduates. Worryingly for civil rights campaigners, the 18-page file also laid plans to ask academic staff to spy on suspicious-looking students. Suspicious, and – in a spectacularly un-P.C. twist – “Asian-looking” students, that is. After suggestions of snooping that had critics screaming ‘McCarthyism’, came a disastrous new low for relations between Downing Street and the Islamic community that any ‘extremist’ would have been happy to have orchestrated.

Time, yet again, for the government to shift gears and accelerate into damage control mode. The Communities Secretary, Ruth Kelly – an experienced handler of these potentially problematic political situations – predictably rubbished the Guardian’s report. There was absolutely zero possibility of “picking on individual students or spying on them”, she reassured listeners of BBC Radio 4′s World At One programme, and the Labour government would not dream of discriminating against Muslims or Asians, or anybody else.

Amidst all these denials, however, was an admission from Kelly that the government did consider it its duty to “protect” university students. She defended what she tactfully described as the “sensible monitoring of campus activities”, arguing that it was necessary in the ongoing – and ever expanding – War on Terror.

Her words had the National Union of Students fuming. In a statement, President Gemma Tumelty said the Union was “deeply concerned” that the proposals could border on “contempt” for students’ “basic civil liberties”.

Talent-spotting terrorists arriving in York would survey the overwhelmingly white, smugly middle-class student population and head down the road to Bradford instead

Professor Anthony Glees, Director for the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, is one of a number of academics – and Kelly supporters – who disagrees. An advocate of an aggressive approach to the War on Terror, who also supports imprisonment without trial, he believes that university campuses are liable to infiltration by Islamist groups. Writing in his online blog, he claims that “campuses offer a secure space for extremist activity” because of the value that universities traditionally place on freedom of speech. Last year, he conducted research that depicted extremists as keen recruiters to their causes on campuses. In ‘When Students Turn to Terror: Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British Campuses’, he said that extremist organisations, such as the BNP and various Islamist groups, including Hizb ut Tahrir, had been detected in more than thirty higher education institutions. Many of those institutions were high-profile, such as London School of Economics and the University of Manchester. The BNP was suggested to be at work in York and an Islamist group in nearby Leeds.

The case made by politicians like Kelly and academics like Glees forces us back onto an age-old but ever more relevant debate: how far can the government justify an intrusion into people’s private lives in the name of public protection? There are two striking aspects to these proposals, however, which help explain the unanimous fury that the report has provoked from academic, student and religious bodies. Firstly, the suggestion that universities, an arena of free speech and supposedly healthy, intellectual debate, may be subject to supervision by the state. And secondly, the idea that one group, Muslims, should be singled out as a danger – despite all the reassurances from British Muslims to the contrary.

Both of these prospects have set alarm bells ringing amongst some of York’s Muslim students. “It is freakishly reminiscent of Hitler’s time when you’d have kids sitting in school spying on Jewish neighbours and reporting them to their teachers,” says Sara Sayeed, a non-practising Muslim in her second year of a degree in English Literature. “It just doesn’t breed a good atmosphere at university, which is often the first real opportunity that people have to find their own voice.”

Sitting around a table in Vanbrugh Dining Hall at lunchtime, members of the University’s Islamic Society committee, past and present, agree. Heads nod as Ogtay Huseyni, the current President, says that: “One of the great things about British society is that we have free speech.” The worry is, as they go onto explain, that in the future, Muslim students may feel unable to openly discuss the sensitive issues that some other people find ‘uncomfortable’. Their main concern about this form of self-censorship is that the implications of stifling discussion and debate could be counterproductive, and even lead to the extremism that the government fears.

“We need to be able to debate things,” says Ogtay. “If people can’t express themselves through free speech at university, they are going to turn to other avenues. If they can’t air their own views, they’re going to turn to more extreme views. We at ISOC encourage discussion, even amongst ourselves. It’s an important part of our society.”

Indeed, the Islamic Society at York considers itself “a forum for debate”. Its members include Muslims and non-Muslims, practising and non-practising, moderates and fundamentalists. They invite speakers to the University, celebrate religious calendar events together and hold weekly meetings exploring the religion and the Quran, which anyone at the University can attend. Its current society membership has decided not to use itself as a tool for outsiders to use; e-mails considered to be attempting to stir up opinion amongst young Muslims, for example, are deleted rather than passed on to to its members.

With this self-moderation already in operation within the society, the immediate implications of the government’s proposals for ISOC will, in all probability, be limited. The chances of ‘extremism’ reaching York in the first place are minimal. Our concrete campus seems to be a barren, rather than a “fertile recruiting ground” for extremists. Any talent-spotting terrorists arriving in the city would survey the overwhelmingly white, smugly middle-class student population and likely head down the road to Bradford or Leeds instead.

Furthermore, the proposals themselves seem unworkable, in York at least. The response from the academics who were approached for this article was unequivocal: they would not take up this government-issued directive if it meant jeopardising the trust that they have built up with their students. Dr. Paul Chirico, a lecturer in the York English Department, says: “I expect this kind of racial profiling would be pretty universally unacceptable. It’s obviously not the job of lecturers to spy, or to take guesses at students’ non-academic ideas or intentions, or to spend teaching time trying to investigate their political opinions.”

Fellow English tutor and lecturer, Dr. Helen Smith, agrees with her collegue: “I suppose if I did stumble across some terrible plot – whether constructed by Muslim students or anyone else — I would feel the need, after consultation, to contact the appropriate authorities, but that’s a long way from being asked to “check up” on students who are under suspicion only because of their surname or the colour of their skin.” She adds: “I feel strongly that universities should offer support and understanding to those who may become victims of racism and the current culture of fear, rather than add to the dangers of oppression and misinformation.”

It’s not likely, therefore, that our small campus will turn into a haven of spying and intrigue. For its part, the University says that it is “unaware of any communication from the Government to members of the University on this issue” and there has been no “suggestion in the past about monitoring Asian or Islamic students.”

In the current political climate, however, members of the Islamic society committee say that government-authorised spying on British Muslims is not, in their opinion, unimaginable. “I believe that this leaked report is probably true,” says Ogtay Huseyni, President of ISOC. “It’s the gradual next step in the ‘War on Terror’ on the domestic front. I am surprised at it happening in Britain, but then politicians just do whatever they want now, anyway – they don’t care what Muslims think. They reckon that they can do anything and justify it by saying, ‘we need to protect Britain’.”

In a worrying statement, he adds, “For me personally, Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Ruth Kelly – they are inherently against Muslims, as seen in the last couple of weeks.”

Ogtay’s view is one being rehearsed over and over again in the media by those on the frontline of Britain’s increasingly angry Islamic community. Only the day before the Guardian’s report was published, the Muslim Council of Great Britain, responding to what it considered an inflammatory speech delivered by Ruth Kelly in Parliament, said that while the Communities and Local Government Department she headed claimed to be “promoting community cohesion,” it appeared to have subscribed to a “blinkered anti-Muslim vision.”

Accurate or “inaccurate”, as Ruth Kelly described the Guardian report, it has been taken by many followers of the Islamic faith as evidence of the government’s antagonism towards their members and religion. That even a reported leak of a draft document can really upset things is evidence of the extreme sensitivity of the relationship between the Muslim community and the government.

Professor Haleh Afshar is a prominent Muslim academic at the University who has sat on various committees set up by the government to look into race and related issues. She says that the government must be careful, in its fight against ‘extremism’, not to demonise the Muslim community. When I made an initial telephone call to Professor Afshar about this article, she dismissed the proposals as “a load of rubbish”. When we meet the next day, she is more thoughtful.

“It’s would be very problematic to identify one particular group, be they Catholics, Communists or, in this case, Muslims, and then decide to supervise their activities but not other people’s,” she says. “It just feeds the fact that they have now categorised Muslims as ‘the enemy within’. It’s like saying, ‘They are the baddies and we are keeping an eye on them.’ It’s very reminiscent of the Americans persecuting the Communists and there’s a danger that Muslims will see themselves as under siege.”

The picture Professor Afshar paints is one of a government not really trying understand the situation and being too ready to ‘think in snapshots’, instead. “My problem is that the government’s approach here is not participatory. The government is into snapshots, and snapshots don’t tell you anything. They’re superficial and more trouble than they’re worth.

“They’re targeting universities only because it’s more manageable. They can’t get into the mosques, they’ve tried. The universities seem much more permeable – anybody is allowed in, anybody is allowed out.”

If the government wants a greater understanding of the Islamic faith and Muslim students, they should join Islamic societies on campus, says Professor Afshar. “Spying isn’t good. I don’t think you can just get names and say, ‘This is a baddie, and this is a goodie.’ If they’re interested in Islamic societies or want to monitor activity, they should join the societies. They should come in, and they should find out what’s going on. They would be very welcome. Muslims have nothing to hide – put this in big letters! And if it’s a learning process then I don’t see any reason why anybody would not welcome it. If measures are intrusive, if it’s about finding ‘the enemy’, then of course it’s a problem. No society wants someone who’s spying on them. Every society welcomes people who want to participate.”

Participation, according to Professor Afshar, is the only way to avoid taking a simplified snapshot of British Muslims. “It would be jolly good for them to come and see that these Muslims are not the ‘enemies within’. They do have conversations about controversial issues, and some are for and some are against in the debate, but there is a dialogue. If you actually go to the Islamic societies then you will discover a huge diversity of opinion, that Muslims are not monolithic with one view about everything. The dialogues within universities are very vibrant between Muslims when they discuss their different interpretations of their religion. It would be very instructive. The government might learn something. Come on in!”

Which other societies could be targeted?

Scott Franklin, Christian

“If these ideas come into force, it won’t affect my behaviour at all. When you look at countries around the world where, every day, Christians are persecuted and murdered for their beliefs, it really puts into perspective how lucky we are to live in a democracy. There’s little that the government could do that personally would make me feel less comfortable about talking about things that I believe to be true. So long as we all approach sensitive topics with maturity and love then, in my experience, we can all have discussions without a problem.”

Michelle Wheeler, Socialist

“It is shocking that such measures can be proposed. Everyone has the right to think independently, even if their views are not universally acceptable to the overwhelmingly white and middle-class based political norm.

“If socialists were to be monitored, I would feel victimised by an oppressive and Orwellian government. I see these proposals as severely misguided and threatening to democracy; my opinion of the government has only been further battered after these measures came to light.”

Michael Rutherford, Tory

“We at the Conservative Association would be very worried if professors were spying on us. We might feel unable to express our opinions and under pressure to conform to mainstream thought. I am completely against these proposals – they would compromise civil liberties and, in a liberal democratic system, anything that could compromise free speech must be avoided. Sadly, this Labour government has not stood up for liberty. As Britons, we must defend free speech – otherwise, what have we spent decades fighting for?”

Tons of information is being thrown at new blood on campus this week. The University has delivered its rulebook (shelved), YUSU has plastered the kitchens with posters (ignored) and the local pizza delivery service has stuffed your letterbox with flyers (which, as of 2 a.m. this morning, proved the most useful of the lot). Most of this hyped-up, overblown bumf screams out how staggeringly amazing your first term is going to be. Little, however, advertises the fact that your initial weeks at university could potentially be the most stressful and scary of your life so far – as well as the most exciting.

Where else but university would it be expected that you stay out drinking until 3 a.m. and make a valid contribution to a 9:15 seminar?

Already into the first of a two-week, YUSU-led offensive, freshers are currently following a demanding timetable of late night partying and early morning meetings, aimed to help them settle in, make friends and discover what’s available to them at their university. It’s a hurricane of activity and with any luck (and often little choice) you’ll get swept along. But, as many a wizened second year will admit, at some point this term – if not this week – you might feel alone and, bizarre as it may sound, under attack. Perhaps your STYC has crashed drunkenly into your corridor in the middle of the night once too often, your seminar tutor has ripped into your first essay or your kitchen has been ruthlessly plundered by the flat upstairs – but you’re left wondering why on earth you came to York, or even applied to university, in the first place.

The issues faced by freshers are well recognised by the Students’ Union Welfare Officer, Amy Foxton. “Leaving home, family and friends is a lot harder than most people realise,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure on students, to succeed academically, to make lots of friends, to go out every night of the week and still get a good degree.” While her fellow Union officers spend Freshers’ Fortnight marshalling first years from bar to bar, downing shot after shot, it’s Foxton’s job to fend for their sanity. She emphasises the need for freshers to anticipate that “it can take time to adjust to a completely new lifestyle. Where else would it be expected that you stay out drinking until 3 a.m. and make a valid contribution to a 9:15 seminar?”

Foxton’s advice is echoed by Mandy Alderson, Acting Head of the University Counselling Service. Every year, Alderson and her colleagues at the Counselling Service see freshers at York struggling to cope with the pressure to do everything – go out, meet people, join lots of societies and love every minute of it – while battling the inevitable feeling of homesickness, which, according to recent estimates, affects up to 75 per cent of new students. “We see a lot of first years in the first term”, she says. “Homesickness and loneliness are the main issues. Others are concerned if this the right place for them, or whether they will fit in.”

Long after Freshers’ Fortnight has slipped into hazy memory, a blur of passing faces and crowded bars, even students who survived – and perhaps enjoyed – the experience may begin to feel uncomfortable in their new situation. Many of Alderson’s conversations with first years focus on helping them answer, in retrospect, the entirely obvious question: “why am I here?” Often students have felt and, despite being many miles from home, continue to feel pressure from their families to complete and succeed in what is today a virtual rite of passage for many young people. “They’ve done well at school and come here because it seems like the automatic next step,” explains Alderson. “But when they get away from their teachers and their family, they’re not sure if it’s the right move.”

With much of the responsibility and cost of higher education now falling on the students themselves, it’s not just pressure from outside that’s puttting people under large amounts of strain. Today’s student wants more from the university experience; the opportunity to immerse yourself in Aristotle or get to grips with quantum theory just isn’t enough anymore – if, a degree often being merely a means to a career, studying has ever even been a factor in your decision-making. Coming to university was an expensive decision, involving loans, debt and first-time contracts and, thanks to ‘top-up’ fees, you want your money’s worth – in teaching, in accommodation and in your social life. The bad news is that these factors aren’t always easy to balance. There’s nothing worse than waking up at 7 a.m. with a post-Toffs hangover because the builders have started demolishing the block next door, to find an e-mail from your tutor refusing you an extension for the 2,500-word essay due the next day. Well, except knowing that you’re paying £3,000 for the privilege, that is.

But your university days are the best days of your life, right? That’s what Melissa-Lauren, 21, thought when she arrived at York this time last year, ready to start an English Language degree. She was soon disappointed: “In my first term I realised that the course I’d always wanted to do was nothing like I’d expected it to be and I found it incredibly hard. I’d never thought about doing anything else and I suppose I felt like my dream was shattered.”

Melissa-Lauren waited until her second term to speak to somebody about the problems she was having with her studies. “I tried to carry on with my course and sought help from one of my lecturers, but in the end I realised it wasn’t for me. I think it’s important to follow your instincts and not to feel like you’re the only one who feels that way, because it happens to a lot of people.” Claire Rees, a careers advisor at the Careers Service, sympathises with students who find themselves in this position. “Making a decision about what to do can take time. It is hard not to worry when you feel that things are not working out but there is lots of help available.”

If there are problems that you’re having difficulty dealing with, don’t worry if there isn’t someone you’ve met in your first week who you feel you can talk to. It’s a strange kind of environment that you’re in now and there is something almost taboo about admitting that you might need help; it’s not something you necessarily would want to publicise to people who, as of yesterday, are your new ‘best mates’. This week, everybody’s taking everybody else’s name and college, mobile number and A level grades, but sharing anything more personal is strictly avoided – or left for instantly regrettable nights of deep, drunken conversations over tumblers of Tesco Value gin in your kitchen.

If you do want to talk to somebody, there’s no lack of willing, trained listeners on campus. Last academic year at York, over 500 students registered with the Counselling Service. This involves an initial 30-minute chat and, if you want to continue, a course of one-on-one sessions to follow. Alternatively, if you’re having problems with your course or are worried about your post-university prospects, drop into the Careers Service between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday to Friday. Both services can be found in the centre of campus, behind the Computing Service, just off Vanbrugh walkway. Your supervisor is also available for a talk about academic or personal problems; otherwise, your college welfare team offer weekly drop-in sessions for a more informal chat and a cup of tea. Nightline is also on hand between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m for phone calls or visits to its Goodricke headquarters.

The good news is that you’ve come to a University that retains the majority of its student body. The Times Good University Guide predicts that, based on York’s previous drop-out rates, 95.1% of students arriving here this year will graduate, a statistic that compares favourably with other higher education institutions. So will you make it through your first year at York? Probably, yes, but not without some problems – and possibly some help – along the way.

Where to find support at York

The Counselling Service:
01904 432140
counselling@york.ac.uk
www.york.ac.uk/admin/scs.
Free, professional and confidential counselling.

The Careers Service:
01904432684
careers@york.ac.uk
www.york.ac.uk/services/careers
Trained advisors and a wealth of resources to help you decide what next, whether or not university’s for you.

The Overseas Student Association:
Help for foreign students having difficulty adjusting to living and studying in the UK.

Nightline:
01904 433735
nightmail@york.ac.uk
www.york.ac.uk/student/nightline.
A confidential, friendly and student-run listening and information service located in Goodricke College. Open between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.

Your supervisor:
Personal support available throughout your degree in academic or personal matters. Email, call or drop in to their office.

Your college JCRC Welfare Representative:
Weekly drop-in sessions at your college for a cup of tea and a chat.

Tips from the Counselling Service

Give yourself time to adjust to the new situation.

Don’t feel like you’re the only one feeling homesick.

Keep in touch with family and friends at home – you’ll need your support
networks while settling in.

If you’re feeling unhappy, seek support and try to talk about your experience.

Don’t expect to find your best friends during Freshers’ Week.

This summer York sends its first comedy show to the Fringe under the directorship of Robbie Dale and with a hefty £4,500 worth of backing from the University Alumni Fund. Chipping Stortford Goes Large: The Bid For City Status (Sweet Grassmarket, 4th-27th August) revolves around the crusade of a village, based on Heslington, to get itself onto the map. It will certainly be the most visible to theatre-goers in Edinburgh; the cast are taking the show to the streets between performances, using banners, balloons and petitions to campaign for the fictional place to become “Britain’s next metropolis”. “The kind of comedy we’re going for is like Brass Eye,” says Dale of the play, “something that’s a bit more intelligent rather than just ‘ha, ha, cock’ or whatever. It sounds wank, but thematically it’s sort of a satire on ‘Pop Idol’ culture and people believing they can do what they want even though they haven’t got any talent.”

There were questions over whether Will Seaward would make it to Edinburgh with his production of Bouncy Castle Hamlet (Rocket @ Demarco Roxy Art House, 3rd-19th August); last week he was lacking the most vital piece of staging and an actor in the lead role. Now, however, the first year English student has got hold of a bouncy castle and a Hamlet and the play has quickly become the bookies favourite to win that elusive media review, following pre-show mentions in The Guardian, The Times and The Scotsman as a festival “oddity” to watch out for. The idea for BCH, which, Will confirms, “does exactly what it says on the tin”, came to him while mulling over the original play at a children’s birthday party in Argentina. It’s now stretched to a £6,000 budget and involves trampolines, rope ladders and pogo sticks (for a publicity bounce around Edinburgh’s Royal Mile). A visual distortion of the original play, then; will this, together with Will’s “philosophy of directing – that you can’t respect the text at all”, make Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy completely unrecognisable?

Somehow, Will also plans to perform in Chris Bush’s quick-fire comedy Man and God (Smirnoff Baby Belly, 3rd-27th August)), which starts half an hour after his own production finishes. (“Luckily,” he assures us, “the costumes of the Ghost and God are quite similar.”) Despite the title, this play, which ran at the Drama Barn back in May, isn’t serious, issue-based theatre of the intensely philosophical variety; Edinburgh audiences can expect gently thought-provoking witticisms on religion, the media and the cult of celebrity, but not a spiritual epiphany. Chris’s heaven runs as a corporate enterprise that, in ‘reality’, is controlled by two angels acting as image consultants to make an out-of-touch, grandfather God appeal to twenty-first century consumers. Unfortunately, God’s return to earth to prove his existence to unbelievers is overshadowed by the appearance of an suave, suit-wearing impostor God who talks the talk as well, if not better, than the real thing. Cue what Chris (who was planning to shave his trademark long hair off to help cover the £4,000 budget) admits are “some really bad puns” and affectionately blasphemous slapstick to balance out the brainwork: his rule, as writer and director, was that “for every reference to nineteenth century philosophy, somebody had to fall over.” His view is that “theatre’s there to entertain… it’s not to be taken too seriously, really.”

From religion to television, What’s the Question? (C Central, 20th-28th August), written by Kimberley Datnow and Stuart Young, is another comedy that parodies the interactive game show. Boasting a host with “David Dickinson’s orange tan, Alan Partridge’s personality and a really bad magenta suit” it plans to draw audiences to its ten a.m. showing by giving away bizarre prizes in the interval and free coffee before start. All the characters, which include a Jamaican grandmother, devoted Christian, BNP supporter and college professor, cohere to form what Stuart claims is “a genuinely original idea”.

Two children’s productions are also going to Edinburgh: Alice Through the Looking Glass (Bedlam Theatre, 3rd-19th August), directed by Alison Neighbour, and Fantastic Mr. Fox (C Central, 4th-19th August), directed by Ollie Jones. Both have adapted their stories in original ways. Lewis Carroll’s dark fairytale is accompanied by specially composed music and uses puppets, while the adaptation of Roal Dahl’s eighties children’s classic will project animations of the characters of the Fox and ‘Boggis and Bunce and Bean’ with the features of the actors playing them.

The final word goes to Return of the Actor (Rocket @ Demarco Roxy Art House, 7th-19th August), a full-throttled farce following the tragic misfortunes of two well-meaning but dangerously incompetent backstage assistants. Described by director Kate Lovell as “cathartic comedy for other Fringe performers”, it’s designed “to make people laugh and lose themselves for 45 minutes. It has no pretensions and is what the Fringe is all about, performing and sharing high-quality, entertaining theatre with theatre-lovers from around the world.”

To book tickets, visit www.edfringe.com

Few taboos remain in theatre, but there is one that is rarely tackled on stage. Paedophilia is not obvious material for a sensitive, searching drama, and offstage it can provoke reactions from sickened disgust to venomous public hysteria. Yet Nick Payne and Will Bowry, two York undergraduates heading for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer, have devised a play that probes the illicit and illegal desire of a grown man for a young girl without, they believe, becoming a platform from which to condemn or condone. Instead, by questioning received notions of love between adults and children, it asks how the line between sexual attraction and sexual abuse may become blurred and, in a test of the generally liberal, un-shockable Fringe audiences, attempts to investigate the psyche of a paedophile.

It is a brave move, especially for a student writer and director. A non-sensationalist view of paedophiles, associated in the public consciousness with figures like Ian Huntley, is not one often made in the public forum, and a month’s run at the Fringe is far from a three-day stint in the comfort of the Drama Barn, with much more – a £5,000 budget, to be exact – riding on the response they receive.

When I meet Nick, the writer, and Will, the director, however, it becomes clear that money is not high on their list of concerns and people’s disapproval barely registers.

Both issues, in any case, quickly disintegrate at the prospect of being a part of what Will calls the “real, thriving environment for debate” that is the Edinburgh Festival.

Nick had just finished the script of Cild (the world for child in Anglo-Saxon) when we met and, from his description, it is indeed much more subtle than suggested by the pre-show publicity, which shouted “vigilante attacks, abuse and self-proclaimed innocence”. The reasons that Joe (Ed Watson), the accused, has moved up to the north of England are only gradually uncovered through his interactions with his brother, played by Tom Hunt, and two siblings who live in his new block of flats, Katie Kelly and John Hoyle.

The revelation that the relationship he has unwillingly left behind him was with a pre-pubescent girl is delayed almost until the end; and, importantly, it is never explicitly confirmed as having been sexual. Nick’s aim was to allow the audience to explore Joe’s character, “who has lost this relationship and who you engage with”. He wanted to put the emphasis on Joe’s love, rather than his desire, for the child.

“It’s all very sensitively written and very understated – there’s nothing graphic or gratuitous, because that would be sensationalising it,” offers Nick. “The sort of response I want is a genuine, emotive response, not, ‘oh that was horrible, that was disgusting.’ I don’t want that at all.” The project, he continues, was “just about writing something that represents how a paedophile may feel and how they might express themselves.”

So what is it that drives someone to spend months exploring this, something that the rest of us try not to think about? “It’s always about trying to push ourselves,” explains Nick, while Will says he was inspired to take on the challenge of tackling a “very dangerous topic” by seeing an “atrocious” play about rape at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough.
Both were spurred on, however, by the research they did into paedophilia before starting to write the play. This involved reading government reports and meeting with Dr. Carol-Ann Hooper, a specialist in child abuse and protection at the University, but it also, for Nick, meant trying to contact a number of self-confessed ‘paedophiles’ over the internet. To his surprise, after his first e-mail, responses quickly began to arrive in his inbox. “I got in touch with a few people who, although they wanted to remain anonymous, openly wanted to be considered as paedophiles,” he explains. “They let me send them questions and they responded.”

An initial, instinctive disgust at what the men told him soon developed into an intellectual interest in paedophile psychology. “It has been quite grim – I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t – but it has also been pretty fascinating,” he says. Of the people he and Will came into contact with, a number were part of a paedophile liberation faction which likened itself to the gay rights movement of the last century and believed that, in another hundred years, sexual relations between adults and children would become the socially accepted norm. Both naturally “absolutely disagree” with this idea but, through other discussions, they found that their assumptions about paedophiles were being confronted and challenged.

“What was interesting was the way that they spoke,” says Will. “One guy, when he spoke about his feelings for children, used the kind of eloquent and affectionate terms that you would have expected him to use for a wife. If you removed the word ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ and replaced it with ‘man’ or ‘woman’ it would almost be quite endearing.”

Neither director nor playwright can hide their disdain towards the tabloid media for what they see as the encouragement of vigilantes in the wake of the Sarah Payne case, though Bowry offers that the average Festival-goer “probably tends more towards the broadsheets”. They condemn the News of the World’s campaign to “name and shame” abusers for cultivating a fear factor that led to attacks on suspected offenders.

Although Will tactfully submits that “it’s a very, very difficult subject to be able to get the dividing line”. Nick speaks adamantly of his scorn for the creation of fear in the national media and even York’s own local rag: “Some of that stuff is really inappropriate. Reading the York Press, for example, every day they seem to have a big headline saying, ‘lock this guy up’. What are they saying – that we should all walk around in fear, that we should all be panicked? I just don’t quite understand the logic.”

He presents Cild as a theatrical antidote to this tabloid frenzy. “It’s trying to get rid of this image of ‘stranger danger’ – men in long coats lurking at school gates – and get past it, really, because from the research I’ve done that’s not really what happens. Obviously it goes on, but only in an absolute minority of abuse and molestation cases.”

“I don’t think that you’re ever going to solve the problem of why society has the problem of paedophiles and how we should treat them if you’re hung up on this one image of a mythical, horrible child snatcher, unless you’re willing to understand or at least begin to talk to them on a basic human level. If you are so repulsed by paedophiles that you are never willing to actually listen to what they say and point out the flaws in their kind of logic, and you just shove them in prisons, you are never going to tackle the problem properly. To write them off as monsters, I can understand, obviously, because it’s such an emotional subject, but I think that it’s important to go the next step and say, ‘why did you do this – what do you believe you’ve done?’ I wanted to write something that could re-establish a channel of communication.”

The cast of Cild will do a reading of the play at 6pm in the Dixon Studio on Tuesday 27th June. Tickets cost £2.

Recent York plays to go to Edinburgh include Candide in 2003, which the Edinburgh Guide rated as five out of six.

The student, who cannot be named for welfare reasons, had to be pulled from the river by the Emergency Services following an alcohol-fuelled night in town with friends. He was given a health check and spent the night in police custody, but was let off with a fifty-pound fixed penalty notice for being drunk in a public highway.

The student became separated from his friends after leaving the Gallery at an unknown time “in a horrific state. The next thing I knew, I was floating in the River Ouse, wondering what on earth had happened. Due to my drunkenness, I wasn’t particularly worried – more bemused.”

He now suspects he either “accidentally staggered into the River when I was walking too close to the edge or I thought it would be clever to swim home.”

The student was spotted by “some good Samaritans” who called the Emergency Services. He was pulled out by the Fire Service with a ladder.

“I have to commend them on their help as it must be annoying to help drunks when they probably have more important matters to attend to. Although I laugh now, I was so drunk I probably could have easily died of hyperthermia had no one arrived to help me.”

PC Chris Pool of North Yorkshire Police agrees that the student was extremely fortunate not to have suffered more serious injuries.

“Nearly everyone who goes in the river has to be taken to hospital. The currents are very, very strong and there have been fatalities in recent years.”

The student said “I consider myself very lucky that my strong disposition helped me to avoid a stomach pumping.

“Let this be a lesson to all you binge drinkers out there. Whilst it may be fun to go out and get trollied, don’t go swimming in the Ouse because it will catch up with you.”

Swimming in the river is not a criminal offence and the student admitted that the fine “was more than acceptable considering my predicament.

The attraction will soar 60 metres above the city and offer a 20-mile panoramic view, taking in the city’s historical centre, as well as the Minster and the river Ouse. It will have 42 viewing capsules, each with a capacity of eight people.

The wheel is expected to open at the National Railway Museum’s Leeman Road site in April of this year.

According to the NRM’s head, Andrew Scott, the wheel would “not only provide a fantastic opportunity to see the city as it has never been seen before, but would also bring many more visitors to York”.

He estimates that, over the three-year lease agreed with World Tourist Attractions, the owners of the wheel whose own bid to construct it near the Ouse was withdrawn early last year , the number of visitors drawn to York by the attraction could potentially reach one million.

The joint venture will also create around 30 jobs locally.
While not as large as the London Eye, which measures 135 metres, the wheel will become the second tallest structure in York, just ten metres below the Minster’s famous Lantern Tower.

Organisers at the NRM told Nouse that on a clear day passengers in the capsules will be able to see as far as the University water tower.