Will HeavenTime to leave Neverland
God, it’s happened. By the time you read this column in Nouse – my last for this newspaper, by the way – I will have my degree result. Yes, I have sweated my way to Langwith College, clutching my library card. I have jostled with other terrified third years, scanning the noticeboard [...]
Will HeavenA recipe for success
Unlike many of my bitter and disappointed peers, I never applied to Oxford or Cambridge. In fact, my teachers sensibly discouraged the idea. “Most decent universities turn students into scholars”, one told me, “but at Oxbridge you have to be a scholar when you arrive”.
I was no scholar. At my very [...]
Will HeavenAdmit it. When Susan Boyle strode onto the stage wearing that 1978 frock, you were booing too
Will HeavenGail Trimble: hag (oxon)
I always knew there was something off about Gail Trimble. It was the jumpy hair swoosh, the chipmunky teeth and the nervous way she would look down – or slightly to the side – after saying a correct answer. Something didn’t add up. Now the truth has emerged, and it has proved [...]
Hearing Israel’s caseWill Heaven travelled to the Middle East to witness the Israeli elections
Snow days: a chance to show what we’re made of
“Gather the last of the firewood, draw the curtains, and call your family to say goodbye – there’s a blizzard on the way, and we might not make it.” Call me melodramatic, but my amateur weather forecast last week was one of foreboding panic.
We’ve become complacent, [...]
The north versus south debate is over. The southerners got bored of it and northerners – well, the northerners are for the most part clinically obese. So they waddled home to eat troughs of black pudding and discuss coalmining and beat up their ballet-dancing brothers.
Fine, you got me. I’m a southern fairy or, as I [...]
Will Heaven talks to Johann Hari, the firebrand left-wing columnist who won last year’s Orwell Prize
The application headache starts
“Outline a situation in which you have, by your leadership of a team, overcome a difficult obstacle.” That’s right, leadership. We secretly know that you are chubby middle-class third year student with no experience of the real world, but we want to see how well you can blag this. What’s it going [...]
By all accounts, great men seem to have ‘a dream’. Not-so-great men have many, so two of mine are: to learn the Italian language, and to develop a love for football.
So its President isn’t exactly kosher. And yes, buried in the Zagros mountains there is probably a warhead warehouse nearing completion. But Iran does some things well: like Khoresht-e-Gheimeh.
The good news: YUSU President Tom Scott has dropped his silly pirate act. Forget his West Country chat and his creepy band of followers. It may have won him the election, but now he is trying to do the job properly, with maturity and – no doubt – aplomb. The bad news? He has failed already.
Quickly, this performance was apparently far from amateur. Led in through the back entrance of the York Studio Theatre, the audience were warned about the violent content by Wright – just in case we had missed the posters outside.
But I decided to go Oirish. I ordered a Shambo with bacon, brie and cranberry. A shambo, I found out, is toasted bread in the shape of a shamrock with herbs – rosemary, I think – baked into the top. It worked well.
My granny is a little bit bonkers. Not in the same way as her husband – who thinks he is a Captain in the navy again – but bonkers nonetheless. While he parades around the house shutting the curtains at midday and ordering the dog to stand up straight, she (aged 80) plays tennis and makes delicious wedding cakes.