The things every fresher will acquire by the end of first year

Freshers’ Week. For most of us, it stays in our memories as a distant haze of alcohol, strobe lights and blurred faces, a taunting reminder of freedom as the first deadlines of semester two loom closer.

Yet, however vague and vodka-addled your recollections are, the physical reminders of Freshers’ will remain in your room for days, weeks, or even months afterwards. How many of these do you still have lying around?

The cone

No-one really knows who picked it up, or at least no-one wants to own up to it. Chances are you had nothing to do with it – you just wandered blearily into the kitchen on the morning of day four and saw a new luminous orange addition to the furniture.

Nobody wants to deal with it, so it will squat in the corner like a fluorescent dunce’s cap of rebuke until your first flat inspection, when it will suddenly vanish into someone’s room and later be smuggled out under cover of darkness.

Other people’s glasses

Somewhere around day three, in a bid to get to know more people from your halls, you and your flatmates will host pre-drinks in your tiny kitchen. This will seem like a really great idea until the next morning, when you’ll clear the empty vodka bottles off the table and discover it’s also host to half a dozen glasses which were brought over and then abandoned after six rounds of Ring of Fire.

The ones belonging to people in your block will find their way back to their owners pretty quickly, but there will always be one brought by your neighbour’s boyfriend’s course-mate, whom you’ll never be able to track down. Nobody will feel totally comfortable claiming it, so it’ll collect dust in the back of a cupboard until the next time you host pres, when the cycle will start again.

Mystery phone numbers

You probably already have a few contacts in your phone whose owners you don’t know and can’t remember meeting. But you will never acquire as many in so short a space of time as in Freshers’.

When you first arrive at uni, you’ll have several brilliant, alcohol-lubricated conversations with people who you’re convinced will become your best buddies. They will not. Chances are you’ll never see half of them again.

Nevertheless, you’ll swap numbers with everyone in case you lose each other in a club, and then check your phone three months later to find you can’t remember who anyone is, or which of the two Jordans is the one you actually know. My advice is to delete them all before someone steals your phone and texts “You up, sexxy??” to All Contacts. Trust me.

The Jeremy Corbyn flyer

You could be a UKIP voter, a hard-line Tory or completely apolitical, but if you walk through campus on certain days during Freshers’, chances are pretty high that you’ll end up with a red flyer bearing a legend like “Take our Democracy Back from the Capitalist Machine” or “Down with the Youth-Hating Pig Fellatio Fetishist!” (I may be paraphrasing slightly, but this is the gist.)

The reason for this is that Socialist Students soc reps are terrifying. When someone is brandishing flyers with that level of righteous anger, most freshers will meekly accept one and run for the shelter of the Union.

The emails                                                       

Oh God, the emails. You’ll receive at least one from every society you naively gave your contact details to at the Freshers’ Fair, which for first years means upwards of a dozen. They will all be written in tones of unnerving enthusiasm and will try to extract money and/or membership from you. Beware of hyperlinks – if you check your emails when inebriated at any point during September, you may wake up to discover you are now a proud member of the Rubik’s Cube and Puzzle Society, or that you’ve paid £30 for the right to go caving. 

The Domino’s

For anyone who’s just arrived in Leeds and can’t face having to cook for themselves yet, the permanent Domino’s marquee outside the Union is a godsend – in fact, it will become a kind of pilgrimage site. No matter how long the queue is, no matter how small the slices are, the important thing is that they’re free.

If you live near campus, chances are this will be your lunch every day during Freshers’ Week, and probably an afternoon snack too. The giant sloganed Domino’s bags will overflow the boundaries of the cupboard under your sink, but it will be worth it. No regrets.

The potted plant collection

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever had the faintest interest in botany – if you walk past the plant stall outside the Union during Freshers’, you will inevitably be seized with the desire to create an indoor garden.

The obligatory tiny cactus will be lovingly placed on your windowsill, soon to be joined by leafier companions which will look amazing for the first two weeks, then gradually wither away until you come back after Christmas to find a forlorn brown husk.

The cactus, on the other hand, will stay on your sill until either it falls off or you dump it in a rage after it stabs you in the hand.