Eights Week in Oxford always heralds the approach of midsummer. The various college boats strive to outdo each other on the river, with triumph and disaster being part and parcel of the experience. Everyone begins in the position that they held at the end of last year’s competition; the universal plan is to finish further up the ladder, but inevitably with the success of one crew comes failure for another. The dodo’s verdict in Alice In Wonderland that “everybody has won and all must have prizes” is foreign to the Isis, as our stretch of the Thames is known.