Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda.

Tab readers reveal their biggest regrets this term.

Alcohol Budget cheating Cindies decisions mistake reget Relationships Sex too much wine vomit

This article ended up more serious than I intended it to be. There’s a fair amount of the usual drinking, sex and scandal, but it’s being looked at in a slightly different way. Less ‘whey!’ and more woe one might say if you were going to be a pretentious twat and attempt a very poor pun. I just did. Don’t judge me.

Anyway, it’s clear that a lot of us have done a lot of things we wish we hadn’t this term. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most frequently occurring topics were sex and relationships (minefield that), drinking too much and working too little.  One member of the Tab Team regrets “drinking so much that by 10pm I had to be carried home by a girl whose name has become a by-word for obscene drunkenness. You know it’s a bad night when she’s the responsible one”. Another girl put it quite succinctly revealing “I regret every night I spent the next day apologising for”. It’s not just your friendships and/or any dignity you have left that is at risk; it’s your bank balance. “I regret spending £1500 this term. Definitely not including my college bill. Definitely including Ballare”. This from the same person who got carried home before Grandma’s bedtime. Recurring theme? Perhaps: almost every person I spoke to listed alcohol as one of their top regrets. I regret telling a notorious gossip in our college something he really didn’t need to know. Under the influence you understand, but having such an eager ear of course he remembered. And now so does everyone else.

I’m not the only one with regrettable drunken revelations however. Someone else reveals they drunkenly apologised for sleeping with someone’s ex-boyfriend, only for her confession to be greeted with “He’s not my ex”. Fuck.  Another reason to keep your mouth shut when drunk, is the boy who called his DoS fat when inebriated. How he came to be in his DoS’ company whilst in such a state or whether it was indeed an accurate assessment has yet to be established.

Moving away from alcohol as we all are clearly planning to do following a Lent of pain, let’s have a look at your work situation. This was another big failure on most of our parts. A lot regret the pathetically small number of lectures actually attended, and fact most of the ones you graced with your presence were spent on the verge of vomiting/passing out/falling asleep and snoring in a most unattractive manner. Pretty much everyone involved regretted procrastinating so much. I regret getting so stressed about the whole thing when we’ve got eight weeks of hyper-tension coming up in the shape of exams. Yeah, depressing right. A Clareite says he regrets not complaining about a supervisor who made him feel like shit every supervision. Another male undergraduate regrets sleeping with his supervisor because every supervision since has been massively awkward. Guess who we have more sympathy for? Man points yes, sympathy definitely not if your problem is completely and utterly your own fault. The general theme, as you may have anticipated, centres on a lack of lectures attended, essays handed in on time and anything done without the infinite help of Wikipedia. Procrastination also plays a large factor. One boy told me he regretted the amount of time he spent on Redtube. Having no idea what this meant I googled and now really hope the college doesn’t monitor what we look at on the internet.

On the contrary, someone else says he regrets doing so much extracurricular that between that and keeping up some semblance of a degree he hasn’t seen any of his friends in about six weeks. At the same time I had a few of you lamenting your lack of extra-curricular. Someone else made me quite sad when she revealed “I’ve done all the work on time but I don’t have any friends here. All I do is work and I’m still not getting a first. That’s my biggest regret right now”. Hopefully that will help the rest of you feel less guilty. Also if any of you are from Queens’ maybe try and be nice to a really quiet girl in your year.

Then we have the regrets which are and aren’t regrets. I regret discovering Proplus but I couldn’t get by without it. I regret getting so little sleep but I have no idea how it would have been avoidable. Also I am well aware those two regrets are connected. This seems a perfect time to bring in the sex and relationships section, because so many of you are incredibly indecisive and a lot of these regrets I got sent in could fall either way. A Newnham girl regrets breaking up with her boyfriend. Someone else regrets the fact she got back together with hers. A second year regrets cheating on his girlfriend of a year but doesn’t regret the fact it led to them breaking up. Told you it was complicated.  Someone said he regrets not taking advantage of his drunk friend one night, but then again how can he be sure he wouldn’t have regretted it if he had taken advantage of her? Another girl regrets telling someone she liked him only for him to tell her he was actually interested in her best friend and could she please leave him to it. Knobhead.

I’d like to be able to have a clear cut line here, say that everyone who didn’t sleep with them regretted it or vice versa, but someone regrets “having sex with somebody because I was depressed and he was there”. Someone else regrets it “because everyone in college knows”. At the same time, another person regrets not doing it “just because I knew I shouldn’t”. Everyone who told me they didn’t do it seemed to regret it because they wanted to, and those that did regretted it because of how things turned out. Catch 22 much? The intensity of college gossip was also a big factor in a lot of your regrets this term. ‘Everyone knows everyone’s business and that puts so much more pressure on everything’ was the general consensus. ‘Really fucking annoying’ in other words.

Basically we’ve all done a lot of things we wish we hadn’t and no one seems to have ended up happy with what they choose to do (the grass is always greener). I regret the things I said, more so the things I didn’t; the work I should have done and the things I shouldn’t have. I regret a term of too much wine and not enough sleep. But then again, had I done it any other way I would have regretted that too. Maybe not as much; maybe more. And the same goes for every single one of you who sent me an email, an inbox message or spoke to me in person. So fuck it. Bring on the vacation.