Sports & Socs

Thom Cuffin-Munday In the past month, the student-led campaign ‘Royal Holloway on Ecosia’ has successfully managed to convert our university to Ecosia, a search engine that uses its income from ads to fund tree planting projects. To date, over 115 million trees have been planted worldwide (as of 14th December 2020) as a result of those who use Ecosia. With the campaign now adding Royal Holloway to the list of contributors to the project, we have to recognise this tremendous achievement by some of our students! Ecosia began in 2009 in Germany after the founder, Christian Kroll, experienced the issues of deforestation around the world. The main focus of Ecosia is to plant trees in areas that need reforesting – such as restoring the watersheds in Brazil, where the first trees were ...

...not to panic as it’s almost Christmas. Oh, god- I’ve still got presents to buy.  It’s that time of year once again. Somehow we have made it through two national lockdowns and arrived at the festive season. This of course brings its own challenges as we prepare to be ‘locked in’ with relatives with nothing on TV but endless repeats of the Snowman and the ticking time bomb that is the monopoly board.  his year my festive spirit is being bolstered by my advent calendar, a boozy little number from Brewdog. Some days it takes a lot of willpower not to open the door, retrieve the can nestled inside and sink the whole thing while my girlfriend looks on horrified. She’s just jealous because hers is only dairy milk. All jokes(?) aside, the holidays are a very stressful time for...

Claudia Hall With Christmas fast approaching and a growing need to shop more sustainably and ethically, here are five brands that are promoting environmental and conscious shopping decisions. Tala Any British Gen Z or late millennial that has an Instagram account has surely heard of this brand. The brand created by fitness influencer and businesswoman Grace Beverley needs little introduction to most. However, in case you missed it, Tala aims to make sustainable fashion affordable. Their garments use 92 percent upcycled materials, and all packaging and product labels are fully recyclable and can either be planted or composted. ​An average pair of leggings is £40, and I can attest that their items are incredibly comfortable and cute. Patagonia I was surprised to learn that th...

Claudia Hall Owen and I are both masters’ students who work five jobs between us, play hockey (myself being VP), write for the Orbital and somehow manage to maintain our social lives and a relationship. To say we’re constantly stressed would be a massive understatement.  Unsurprisingly I am prone to the odd breakdown, this usually involves lots of crying, refusing to eat and worrying my mum and Owen senseless. The last one was after working 30 out of 32 days. I was overworked, tired and in a very bad place mentally. After phoning my mum, I knew that I had to come up with better coping mechanisms. It was not healthy to disappear into myself or want to run away from everything. I realised that I had to learn to take time for myself before the point my mental health started to spi...

A university student mental health survey conducted by The Insight Network – Dig In – in 2018 suggested that nine out of ten students in higher education (of the 38,000 surveyed) struggled with feelings of anxiety, a third suffered from loneliness often or all the time, more than 1 in 5 had a mental health diagnosis, and over three-quarters concealed their symptoms from friends due to the stigma attached to mental health.  This, in a nutshell, is why I campaigned to ratify a mental health student group here at Royal Holloway University – this, and because I felt that there was a real lack of representation and support for students who were suffering with their mental health at university and I believed that there was an opportunity to change the university experience for students ...

Owen Williams and Claudia Hall Lacrosse recently introduced a new committee position this year, a position that is very new or non-existent to most sports or societies clubs. So, Owen sat down with them to talk about the importance and reasoning behind this new role.   What is the role of social and wellbeing secretary? The social side of it is once a week online socials, that keeps the club morale up and interconnected in a physical way as we have so many teams. Then the wellbeing side is new, it is making sure that there is someone that people can talk to if they’re not doing so great, feel unwelcome or not enjoying the experience as much as they should.  What was the reasoning behind this new role? There were no serious wellbeing issues that brought forwar...

Owen Williams Whilst exploring the local area to our university I came across the Air Forces Memorial on Coopers Hill Lane near Kingswood. Ordinarily I have found the gates to be shut.On this particular day, however, the gates were open revealing the impressive portico of the grade II listed memorial.  The RAF memorial on Coopers Hill Lane It is a beautiful building, the views over the Thames and London are incredible, you can even see Windsor castle. There’s a haunting element to its beauty, as the walls and columns are inscribed with the names of missing and dead men and women of the RAF, some of the twenty thousand who died in World War Two, with their names engraved in stone. Specifically, this memorial not only commemorates British air force personnel, but those ...

Claudia Hall In this month’s edition of ‘Editors Try’, we focused on what Royal Holloway had to offer outside of Sports and Societies. This was inspired by my love of fruit and houseplants; the latter not being particularly enamoured with me. In my defence, not that Owen would believe me, it was not solely my fault that the chilli plant bit the dust – these things are a team effort. Regardless, as editors we tried; Market Day, the Plant Sale, Virtual Yoga and the Outdoor Cinema. Although Campus has a lot on offer in terms of alcoholic events, we felt that as keen drinkers ourselves, that deserved its own edition.  So, lets kick things off with ‘Market Day’. For those of you that haven’t been, market day is held every Tuesday in the SU main hall with fresh fruit and veg stalls, a fre...

A magazine written by people of colour creatives with submissions for the first issue closing on the 26th October. Owen Williams What is ‘Our Voices’ and how did it come about? Our Voices is an online magazine for BAME and Creators of Colour, open to any creatives at Royal Holloway who want to share their voice where they won’t be overshadowed or under-heard. It is a platform that people can use for sharing whatever they believe really needs to be heard. It started in the summer after the resurgence of Black Lives Matters and we began to think about working on a project in our creative writing class to put together poems for sale. But with Black Lives Matter, rather than it be for profit, we realised that we can put the money towards the movement and black charities. Why d...

We try so that you don’t have to.  So long carbs, it’s been fun. In the first of a regular series, we, your Sports & Societies Editors, try various diets, trends and challenges so that you don’t have to.   On the face of it the Keto diet is actually pretty simple: it’s a low or no carbohydrate diet. By eliminating or drastically reducing the amount of carbs you consume, it forces your body to burn its stores of fat for energy. I managed to rope my deputy editor Claudia into doing this with me and if you’re wondering how I managed that, well she’s currently living with me so she didn’t really have much of a choice; I wasn’t going to suffer through this alone.  Like I said on the face of it, Keto seems simple as you’re only removing one food group fro...