Tab Cribs: St John’s

When it comes to accommodation, do you consider yourself privileged? Do you consider yourself lucky? If you have answered, ‘yes’ to either of those questions, or indeed if you have answered ‘no’, you are about to be blown away by just how much you are missing.

This lucky triumvirate have hit the jackpot.  Few sets can match theirs in terms of size, beauty and extravagance.  Read on, and remember exactly why it is that we’d rather be at Oxford than St Johns… pure, rancid jealousy.

Room Stats:

Lounge (complete with window seat, dining table, sofa set and electric piano.  Polo mallets fitted as standard)

3 Bedrooms (one of which is panelled in dark wood)

Kitchen (sizeable, private)

Bathroom (the BIGGEST bathroom I’ve ever seen.)

How did you get the room?

A simple recipe. Take one Dean of Discipline (now resigned), three bedders (now deported) and a few empty bottles of Laphroiag (now traced back to the college accounts). Simmer until the juices start flowing, then suddenly lift the lid. Season with suggestive photographs and corroborating witnesses, before turning up the heat. Allow to stew. Before you know it, you’ll have cooked up first place in the room ballot. Bon appetit!

What are the main perks of the room?

What’s the best thing about the only room in Cambridge with its own postcode? Walks of shame are a thing of the past – no casual pull would ever turn down the opportunity to visit. And the college was so kind as to supply a Downton Abbey-esque staff. It would have been a bore to run the place without footmen and a valet.

Has anything scandalous happened here to your knowledge?

We’ve had some fun in here, but nothing compared to some of its former incumbents. Wordsworth would never have started writing about daffodils without a couple of years here experiencing the effects of some slightly more exotic plants. Then there was the time Wilberforce got his gimp mask out for the other abolitionists. Oh, and have you seen ‘One Man, One Jar’? That happened here too.

How would you rate this room?

What’s this room worth, you mean? Difficult to fix a monetary value, but we’ll put it like this. You show me Florence Nightingale, Shakespeare’s first Folio and the last panda left in the wild, and I’ll show you a group of things I’d happily throw in an incinerator to buy one more night in this palace.