“Jaffa cake?” These are the first words I hear upon stepping into Oxford’s Death Café. We’re in the Old Fire Station on George Street, a venue for all kinds of offbeat activities: indie theatre, standup, and its kitchen, which operates as a social enterprise run by women refugees. At 5pm on a Monday, it is deserted. Already running late, I get lost on the street, knock on the wrong door, and finally blunder into a lobby where there is absolutely no noise or company. Tiptoeing timidly to the desk (and banishing mental descriptions like dead silent and silent as a tomb), I stage-whisper into an intercom: “I’m here for the Death Café.”

Was that right? Should I look sadder, perhaps? A receptionist tells me to go right; I nod and shuffle past with a solemnity that instantly strikes me as pompous. It is already unspeakably awkward.

Theoretically, I know what to expect. Death Cafés emerged as a movement in Switzerland and France in the 2010s and spread across the world. Billed as casual discussion forums, they encourage participants to engage in frank dialogue about the end of life: what is death? Why do we fear it? How does dying shape the way that we live? It is a specialist salon, a café philosophique turned morbid. Bernard Crettaz, the sociologist who inspired the cafés, wants to end what he terms the “tyrannical secrecy” around death. We should be able to discuss it without stigma, he says – the subtitle of his book is Sortir la mort du silence (‘Bringing death out of silence.’)

So far, silence is prevailing. In the Old Fire Station’s canteen, a dozen strangers sit around a table; none of them are talking (sepulchrally silent, silent as the grave). I am conspicuously the youngest. Anne*, whom I later learned is the group facilitator, heads the table. She is 84 and strikingly sprightly. Cheerfully, she slides me a cardboard carton: “Jaffa cake?”

We all take some. There’s an air of manic jollity about the whole thing; it reminds me of people who dress up as Disney princesses to visit children’s hospitals. For about five minutes, I gaze into every unoccupied corner of the room, counting tiles and committing wall art to memory. No one says a word – small-talk has been utterly disabled.

When we finally start, Anne asks us to introduce ourselves. Then she smiles and says calmly: “We’re all going to die. Not pass away, not go to a better place: we’ll die.”

It’s a bit shocking. Around me, though, other participants are nodding: a few chime in with agreement, saying that they only learnt the stock phrases as a way of sounding decent around others. “I couldn’t say ‘my dad’s dead,’ it sounds crude” – these euphemisms are not coping mechanisms but social rites, like wearing black. Someone adds that their kids are confused by decorous phrases. If her grandmother has “passed away”, does that mean she’s coming back? If she’s “gone somewhere”, where is she? We are all here to try and regain the abilities we had intuitively as children – speaking forthrightly, living in the present.

Anne’s ban on euphemisms sets the tone: we discuss the ways in which dying is sternly practical. A printout on how to arrange a Power of Attorney circulates around the group. If death is grand and mysterious (“that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”), dying is relentlessly banal. We discuss bedsores, waning appetites, the larcenous cost of burial – someone laments that they had to take weeks off work to care for their critically ill father, despite only anticipating days.

“I don’t want people to find my body”, somebody pipes up.

“Because it’ll upset them?’

“No – I’m scared I’ll smell bad.”

Slowly, imperceptibly, the ice breaks. We talk about things we want to do before we die (for me: write a book). We exchange concepts of the afterlife. Death Cafés brand themselves as nonpartisan, “with no agenda, objectives or themes”. I do notice, however, a preponderance of Buddhists and spiritualists in the circle; a theory that we all belong to one ‘indistinct mass of energy’ is advanced and receives approving nods. It is not that these belief systems are more morbid. In fact, the opposite may be true. If death is the resetting of a cycle, a passage to one more mortal lifetime, then why fear it? Why hold it apart from – or even contrast it with – life? It is an illuminating thought, and impresses even me, the staunch nontheist. 

Interestingly, two people in the group are ‘death doulas’. Members of this burgeoning profession, including Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, pitch themselves as midwives for the end of life. While not medical professionals, they provide emotional and practical assistance to the dying. The two at the table describe their training, which includes lying in a wooden box and imagining their own funeral.

Is it useful to picture death? Is it helpful to talk about it, or just self-indulgent? Over the course of the meeting, the dread that I felt at the beginning was slowly replaced by shock, then relief. The Death Café is mundane. I had worried about lacking the special vocabulary, the necessary concepts. But what I saw was that death is pieced together from the most commonplace pieces of everyday life. Grief, tedium, guilt, vanity, humour, superstition. None of it requires a new language – just the courage to use the old one. Death is silent (as a crypt, as a vault, as a mausoleum). We don’t have to be silent about it.

* Not her real name.

Death Cafés were founded by Jon Underwood based on the work of Bernard Crettaz. Information can be found at      deathcafe.com.

A new secondhand bookstore opened in Oxford city centre last week. Located in the Golden Cross shopping centre, just off Cornmarket Street, the bookstore stocks hundreds of secondhand books, ranging from accessibly priced paperbacks to rare and expensive antiquarian first-editions. It was previously home to dessert cafe Fluffy Fluffy, and before that, it was an optician’s.

Its four co-directors, Helen Flatley, Mehdi Bensenane, Scott Moynihan, and Sumner Braund, who have backgrounds in medieval history and philosophy, opened the store in order to provide a boost to secondhand bookselling in Oxford. Helen, a medievalist and history lecturer at the University of Oxford as well as co-director of the store, said: “Some of us did our PhDs here and have been thinking for quite a while that Oxford needs more secondhand bookshops, so that was the inspiration for it.”

“Effectively, we’ve built the kind of bookshop we ourselves would like to go to”, Helen told Cherwell. The store stocks a wide range of genres, including ancient philosophy, medieval and modern history, and fiction. Its site dates from 1496 and is thought to have links to Shakespeare. According to the store’s Instagram page, the bard is rumoured to have stayed in the building in the seventeenth century, when it was a coaching inn. He is also rumoured to have put on a production of Hamlet in the Golden Cross courtyard. The courtyard itself is one of the oldest parts of medieval Oxford, dating back to the thirteenth century, Helen explained.

The owners said they have been delighted with the response they’ve had since opening the store in May, especially from students. “We’ve been especially heartened by the amount of students that have been in”, Helen told Cherwell. The store aims to cater to students’ needs both in terms of stock and prices. Helen said: “It’s one of the things that we thought would be important, to have a range of prices, so we have many books that are accessibly priced, as well as some more rare and expensive things.”

Some of the store’s most noteworthy antiquarian books include a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s 1984, priced at £1000, and a 1863 copy of George Eliot’s Romola, priced at £200. The store also stocks some early illustrated editions of Shakespeare. The owners hope to expand the antiquarian side of the business, Helen told Cherwell.

As well as catering to students’ needs, the owners hope the store will provide tourists with a special insight into Oxford. Mehdi Bensenane, a philosopher originally from Paris, said: “When people come to Oxford, they do not go to Disney World or Paris or London, they come here for a reason. They are interested in the history of the place, in the humanities, and in the sciences.

“But Oxford can be rather opaque when you think about it from a tourist’s point of view. Buildings are defined not so much by what they do but who was their benefactor – Ashmolean, Bodleian. Colleges can be hard to access, too, as you have to pay to look around. So we wanted to create that Oxford feel, but with an open door. We’re hoping to create a network and a feeling of community for independent bookshops, whilst addressing the expectations of local communities and tourists.”

A number of Oxford’s independent shops have been threatened with closure recently. Riverman Records, a second-hand record shop and music store on Walton Street with a cult following, is facing an uncertain future as its landlord has submitted a planning application to turn the premises into living accommodation. Oxford’s longest-running independent cinema, The Ultimate Picture Palace in Cowley, is also facing the prospect of closing after its landlord, Oriel College, refused to extend its lease in order to allow vital investments and renovations.

Blackwell’s on Broad Street used to run a thriving secondhand and antiquarian books section, but has scaled down its operation in recent years. In addition, the future of the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles’s Street has recently been thrown into doubt after Regent’s Park College, which owns the premises, submitted a planning application to turn the premises into an MCR. The application was rejected by Oxford City Council, and Regent’s Park has said that it is considering its options.

President of New College JCR Harry Aldridge was removed from office late last night in a motion of no-confidence.

The motion received 115 votes in favour, with 71 JCR members voting to keep Aldridge as President and 15 abstaining, out of a total of 421 New College undergraduates. The vote came just four weeks before the end of Aldridge’s last term as JCR President after eight months in the role.

The motion, brought to a JCR meeting on Saturday evening by third-year undergraduate Jacob Newby, accused Aldridge of holding “too many officerships across a multiplicity of university societies”, and prioritising “Oxford Union and Labour Club elections over the JCR”. According to the motion, this led to a “widespread view amongst members of the JCR…that the President has failed to live up to standards expected of the leader of the JCR, and indeed the standards of recent Presidents”. The motion claimed that Aldridge had failed to implement any manifesto pledges, and noted vacancies in the JCR’s Vice-Presidential positions. 

During his term as JCR President, Aldridge has held several senior student society positions, including President of the 93% Club, Co-Chair of the Oxford Labour Club, Associate Editor of The Oxford Student, President of Media Society, Secretary of the Oxford Union and Oxford Union Librarian-Elect. At the same JCR meeting, Aldridge proposed an amendment to the JCR Standing Orders to “bar JCR Officers from Holding Concurrent Positions in the Oxford Union”, a motion seconded by Newby. This motion was approved overwhelmingly by JCR members, with 149 votes in favour and 28 against.

In emails sent to JCR members before and during the poll, Aldridge acknowledged that “many people feel the JCR has not operated to the best possible standard this year” and “there were periods when communication was not good enough”. He noted that “it is important that I acknowledge publicly that mistakes were made”, but said he hoped to have met “the vast majority” of his manifesto pledges by the end of his term. He described serving as JCR President as “the greatest privilege” of his time in Oxford, and said he was “incredibly grateful to everyone who placed their trust in me at the start of the year”.

Defending his record, Aldridge told JCR members: “I have never missed a JCR meeting, have consistently made myself available to students and have tried to approach the role with energy and genuine care for the community”. He noted progress on accommodation rent negotiations, changes to the JCR website and progress towards free printing for finalists, and urged members to consider the need for “a proper handover to the incoming committee”. 

Following the result, Aldridge told Cherwell he was “deeply upset” by the outcome of the vote but “incredibly grateful” to students who had supported him during his presidency. He added that he was saddened that “the college will now lose the opportunity for a proper end-of-term handover and the completion of several ongoing projects”.

Aldridge also criticised the way the no-confidence process had unfolded. He told Cherwell that, following earlier discussions with the original proposers of the motion, he had believed concerns about his presidency had been resolved, and described the motion being “unexpectedly revived” at the JCR meeting on Saturday evening as “a genuine shock”. He also alleged that “the atmosphere surrounding the vote became increasingly personal and politically hostile”, and said he had received “anonymous abusive messages”, including some “genuinely threatening in nature”.

An unsuccessful no-confidence motion was brought against University College JCR President Robert Mylne held earlier this term, but successful no-confidence motions are rare. In 2023, the Magdalen College JCR President was forced to resign following several resignations of committee members, but avoided a no-confidence motion. 

According to the JCR Standing Orders, if the position of President becomes vacant, the Vice-President for Welfare and Equality will perform the duties of President until a by-election is held. Announcing the results by email to New College undergraduates, the JCR Secretary said more information would be given “in the coming days” to outline the details of a by-election for the position of President for the remainder of Trinity Term. According to the Standing Orders, Aldridge would be eligible to run in any by-election for the position of President. 

First-year undergraduate Paarth Goswami was elected New College JCR President for the 2026-2027 academic year earlier this month.