May 18 – July 7, 2024

May 4 – July 6, 2024

I. The World Worlds

It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.

Let’s begin with an early wonder of the Western literary tradition. In Book 18 of the Iliad, the god Hephaestus forges a shield for Achilles, who’s lost his armor in the bloody fog of war. But as Hephaestus works the shield’s surface, this peculiar blacksmith—being a god, after all—simply can’t resist creating a world, too:

There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea

Italy left it very late to secure 2nd place in their group against Croatia last night. Today, Marcus, Jim, Pete and Vish are here to dissect the key talking point from the game: Was Luciano Spalletti wearing a jacket or a cardigan?

Elsewhere, Pete upsets the Italians further by calling pizza cheese on toast. Plus, the Ramblers pay tribute to the amazing Luka Modrić and share their thoughts on what they want to see from England tonight.

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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Ahead of headlining Glastonbury for a fifth time – how the band have triumphed

9 min read

This blog post was written and researched by Thomas Sturgess

As an undergraduate history student at Oxford Brookes University, I get to explore a wide range of historical topics. My personal interests in political and cultural history were complemented by my placement at MOX as I could explore a unique part of Oxford’s history and further my research skills.

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History

The system of twinned towns in the UK is not one commonly known to the public, despite its long history dating back to the end of World War 2. In an effort to foster peaceful relations, various towns and cities in European countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands were formally linked to locations in the UK; the earliest established links included the likes of Dresden and Coventry, who both suffered heavy damage from bombings, and Oxford’s own link to the Dutch town of Leiden. From the 1970s to the 2000s, the town twinning scheme was boosted by the expansion of the European Economic Council (later European Union), and international events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991. By 2006, there were over 2000 formally twinned UK towns and localities. In recent years, due to a lack of resources within local governments, some have come to question the value and necessity of town twinning outside of economic and trade advantages, however the cultural and educational opportunities should not be understated. Oxford is one of the leading cities in the UK for town twinning, with its most recent twin being Padua, Italy in 2019 – home to Italy’s second oldest university, and Europe’s oldest covered market, Padua is home to many students and cyclists just like Oxford!

May 17 – June 22, 2024

March 3 – June 30, 2024

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult.

I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine.

The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong.

“You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.”

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