Opinion

By Ruby Sharkie As with half the nation at the moment, I have been glued to my screen watching the new season of Black Mirror. The seventh season in the series, currently stands at No. 3 on the Netflix trending list as of the time of writing this. The show highlights societal issues within thriller/sci-fi style story lines and my favourite episode so far has to be ‘Common People’. Common People, the first episode of the season, follows a couple, Mike and Amanda, who are trying for a baby. However, one day, Amanda collapses whilst at her teaching job, it is revealed she has a brain tumour and will die without a medical procedure that costs £300 per month. The couple subscribe to the procedure, but over time, the company changes their privileges and forces them to pay more money, cau...

Photo by diana kereselidze on Unsplash. By Isobel Carnochan, Associate Lifestyle Editor Last Autumn, Hayden Anhedönia, professionally known under the stage name Ethel Cain, posted a rant on Tumblr expressing her frustration at the modern obsession with reducing everything to an online joke. It sparked some controversy, and she was accused by many of ‘compliment fishing’, but I’m pretty confident that the majority of us can see where she was coming from. Every time I make the misguided judgment of opening the proverbial door of Instagram, X, or TikTok, an onslaught of shallow jokes about anything and everything seem to fall into a jumbled heap at my feet. The most concerning of these jokes? The ones about global politics. Zelenksyy’s infamous meeting with the White House was, ...

By Giovanna Paganini By definition, ‘time’ is ‘the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.’ So why is it so difficult to stay grounded in the present? Why is it that our minds travel between past and future so seamlessly but can never rest upon and find solace in the present? Time is paradoxical by nature. It stems from the dichotomy between the literal ‘time on the clock’ and the subjective perception of time. As Virginia Woolf puts it; “The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by on...

By Matthew Gibbons ‘Timeless’ is a cliche adjective for British literary classics, the texts they made us study for English - think Dracula, Frankenstein, or Sherlock Holmes. Characters such as these are undeniably memorable though, inspiring endless reimaginings for over a century. Despite the many stylistic changes in popular adaptations basing the original concepts around contemporary trends and culture, there is always a recognisable identity to these characters. Dracula will always be the definitive vampire, Sherlock Holmes will always be the genius detective, and ‘Frankenstein’ transcends context completely! This kind of legacy merits a ‘timeless’ status.  To be timeless then, is not to be unchanging. Something can still be timeless so long as it has an identity that is u...

Keira McTernan – Associate Agony Aunt After finding out the theme for the magazine; a timeless issue, I was twiddling my thumbs as to what to write. Usually, topics come to mind relatively swiftly but this one left me a little stumped. As a philosophy and sociology student, much of my writing comes from my experience and interest in this doctrine. Therefore, when thinking about a timeless, repeating topic within my studies, philosophy peered through, as it usually does. Philosophy being one of the oldest teachings should be a great line of discussion for this issue - hurray I finally stumbled across my theme for this article. But then there’s another problem: philosophy is a huge topic! How on earth am I supposed to pick one small, tiny aspect to discuss in the limited space I have? Af...

Tahseenah Khatun When I think of the future, I think of still having my loved ones around. My friends, my family. They’re all still a part of this vision I have of the future. But this vision changed around two months ago, when my mum suddenly passed away. There was a time when I thought my mum would be around forever. But now, I have to navigate a new reality without her. It’s been nearly two months since she passed, and I still have the image of her in the hospital in my mind. That was the last time I saw her in this world before she left. That image of her in the hospital, the state of her, has haunted me since. It follows me wherever I go, whenever it wants. It pops up when I least expect. When I’m in class, when I’m talking to a friend. Nothing triggers it, that’s the thing. It...

Ahh, the 2020s. So far an era of unprecedented pandemics, graphic global wars and crippling economic downfalls. Oh, and of immigrants. Namely individuals seeking improved standards of living in a new location on this shared planet. Their lives are none of our business, you might say. But, somehow, these individuals have become nothing but business, becoming one of the top concerns for people in the UK and around the world. Bizarrely, the ‘solution’ against them is, for many governments, a priority above economies, health, and wars. Immigration is a contentious topic but there are always reasons behind why people choose to become immigrants. For many people, what disturbs them is that people are ‘illegally’ immigrating, with many entering the UK via ‘small boats’ across the English Chan...

By Dorothy Banaityte Superficiality and obsession with beauty is often considered to be a modern invention boosted by the rise of Instagram posts, TikTok trends and celebrity culture. However, when looking back through time, society’s devotion to beauty runs deeper than just that. Going back to Greek statues or to the characters that we tell our stories about, physical beauty has always correlated to moral virtue and good character. How deep does our obsession with beauty truly go? In literature, traces of this idea can be seen everywhere. In our oldest piece of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad, only two characters out of the staggering couple of hundreds of those named are described as ugly. Incidentally both the characters are also presented to lack common sense and moral values,...