There used to be really good documentaries, and now it's all just really sexy. In the adverts the women make the dinner and then feel all satisfied for having slaved — it's crazy.
You can disagree with the politics, but I just wasn't prepared for the personal attacks. The fallout from his protest has just become much more personal, though, and unnervingly Orwellian: last week the Home Office rejected Oldfield's application for a spousal visa, declaring his presence here "not conducive to the public good". Barring a successful appeal, after living in the UK for 12 years he will be deported back to Australia. Oldfield hadn't worried about his immigration status when he dived into the Thames.
People were joking and laughing, and the police were saying: 'What was all that about then? It was only later when the police, urged on by a Tory MP, upgraded his charge from a public order offence to public nuisance — an arcane common law carrying a maximum sentence of life — that alarm bells began ringing.
The idea of the protest had come to Oldfield only four days before the Boat Race. It was the week when the Queen gave royal assent to the bill "privatising the NHS", the Data Communications Act was introduced, and a minister urged the public to report their neighbours if they suspected them of planning to protest at the Olympics. He wanted to protest against the iniquities of elitism, symbolised by Oxbridge, and in the book he writes that he had "no choice but to swim". But protest is perfectly legal in this country, so why the need to break the law?
Indeed, the police wrote repeatedly to Oldfield before this year's Boat Race, without apparent irony, to "strongly recommend you work with us to ensure your protest is a success". That's the problem, Oldfield explains. I've done all the right things, I've worked in all the right organisations, I was invited to join the Royal Society of Arts, I've done every possible thing through the right mechanism — and there comes a point when you can only really use your body. People who do direct action talk about this.
If you feel the democratic system has such a deficit, you feel that you only really have your own body left to do something with. At the time Naik was teaching in Saudi Arabia, and Oldfield had emailed her that morning to say he was popping out for a coffee.
Hours later her inbox suddenly became deluged with emails, with one from a friend headed, "Did I just see what I think I saw? It is an industry that has existed for years but has been particularly booming for the last five decades. The Urban Industry is a complex that includes most universities, mining companies, agribusiness, property developers, aristocracy and the small elite of most nations.
The insatiable greed and pettiness of the political classes means governments willingly coordinate, fund and make the laws to assist clearing the land of people for global corporations.
At the time only 10 per cent of the Indian population lived in cities, by over 52 per cent had moved to cities. Cities have been and remain death camps for most indigenous peoples where diseases, everyday prejudices and institutional racism are inflicted all to easily. Deaths in custody are unimaginably high. It is a well-documented unofficial war; genocide. An Australian man who was jailed in the UK for his controversial protest against elitism believes efforts to deport him from the country are vindictive and his case is purely political.
The annual contest, which pitches the rowing teams of the country's two most prestigious universities against each other, bills itself as one of the oldest sporting events in the world. He was convicted of public nuisance and sentenced to six months in prison. The now year-old served seven weeks and after his release had to wear an electronic tag for two months.
Mr Oldfield wrote a book about his experience of the British prison system but since then, he and his wife, who recently gave birth to their first child, have sought to return to their lives and work. In doing so Mr Oldfield, who grew up in Sydney, applied this year for a spousal visa, which would have allowed him to remain indefinitely in the UK. It was rejected on the basis of his prison sentence and in turn, he was ordered to leave the country. He was told in a letter from the British government he was "not conducive to public good".
Mr Oldfield, who has lived in Britain since and had never before been convicted of a criminal offence, says that suggestion was a surprise. A long-standing, mature democracy which has been able to accommodate and welcome this kind of dissent and protest, so I didn't believe the scale, the vindictiveness would go so far," he said.
If I was deported, my wife would somehow have to find a way to pay the rent, look after our young child, exist without her partner. It's pure, kind of, performative politics.
Mr Oldfield is appealing against the decision to deport him from the country and will present his case before a tribunal, chaired by a single judge, on December 9. Naik looks a bit guilty at the reminder of a tiff. Their finances, meanwhile, are in a parlous state. When he was identified as the protester, many newspaper reports focused on his education at an expensive Australian boarding school and at the LSE, where he took an MSc in contemporary urbanism.
Those credentials, it was suggested, rather undermined his anti-elitist beliefs. Anonymous help with the legal fees has, as a result, been essential. Oldfield also has cause to be grateful to the more than people who have written letters testifying to his good character, among them an Old Etonian academic.
That, the couple say, has been a humbling experience. What the judge might want them to say, I suggest, is that this is a good man who made one uncharacteristic mistake. At this, though, Oldfield demurs. As he speaks, his wife is trying to soothe their daughter by giving her spoonfuls of mint tea. And if I say I regret it, what was the point?
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