Freshers 2011: Cambridge A-Z, Part 3

Here it is, the final installment of The Tab‘s Cambridge A-Z. Firstly, if you’ve only just clued up – check out A-H, and I-P.

Q is for Queen, The: The queen is particularly close to Cantabrigian hearts. She is indirectly responsible for producing the Duke of Cambridge, and is therefore very important. It is crucial that if the Queen is floundering in your glass of own-brand wine that you rescue her with immediate effect. If this happens, you have been ‘pennied’, and you will need to drink everything in your glass very quickly so that Her Maj can breathe once again. If you go too slowly your fellow citizens might scream patriotic words of urgency such as: ‘THE QUEEN IS DROWNING!’ or ‘DOWN IT, FRESHER,’ which will either encourage you to save Liz with heroic speed, or to panic and inhale her with the final mouthful of Chardonnay. This can cause both offence and indigestion, so is best avoided.

R is for Revs: No one goes to Revs anymore. It’s rubbish.

S is for Sundays: At home, Sundays are for roasts and chilling, possibly with a Gran. At Cambridge, Sundays mean brunch and a night out at Life.

Twice a year, though, they get a whole lot more sinister.

Caesarean Sunday happens in Week 3 of Easter Term (the one with the exams in it). To mark the end of Fun As We Know It and the beginning of Weeks of Woe, everyone gets very drunk, some get quite naked, and a few take part in an organised fight upon Jesus Green. The fight between the Girton Green Monsters and the Jesus Caesareans is fairly scrappy and harmless, because the participants are drunk and dangerously close to collapse by the time war is waged.

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Caesarean Sunday in full swing

Many drinking societies ‘initiate’ new members on Caesarean Sunday, forcing wannabe lads and ladettes to perform the kind of debauched acts that make the national press spunk themselves with delight, jizzing headlines like: ‘CAN THESE DISGUSTING ANIMALS BE THE BRAINS OF THE NEXT GENERATION???’ and ‘CLEVER PEOPLE HAVE FUN?!’ and ‘OH SHIT ARE WE FUCKED’ all over their front pages.

Suicide Sunday marks the end of exams and the beginning of May Week. Again, Cambridge students self-medicate for depression and fear using alcohol. It is likely that you will attend two or three all-you-can-drink Garden Parties on Suicide Sunday – they start at 9am, so it’s also likely you will be battered by lunchtime, and napping at teatime. Don’t be fooled by the ice creams and the bouncy castles; Garden Parties are not for children (although many of the be-chinoed guests do still call their mothers ‘Mummy’). If you wish to stagger into Life at the end of the day, be tactical: one burger for every five drinks, and a power nap every fourth hour.

S is also for Stash: Things are different at Cambridge. It’s no longer cool not to put your hand up and to look down upon the crochet club who smelt of old lambs. Now you want to plaster your achievements, no matter how small or irrelevant, across your undergraduate chest. Get t-shirt printing…

T is for townies: From Sunday to Thursday, Cambridge is dominated by students riding audaciously across all lines of decency, politeness and the highway code: rugger lads vomiting off bridges, dickheads recycling ARU jokes and cocky engineers cycling through red lights whilst supping lattes (‘t’yuh, babe, that’s right: no hands! Casual.’)

Fridays and Saturdays in Cambridge tell a different story, for this is when the townies emerge to reclaim their turf. Head into town once the sun has set on the working week and you will be amazed to find that some humans between the ages of 18 and 23 don’t devote inordinate spans of the best-looking parts of their existence to studying the gardening techniques of the Harappan civilization, or raising an arrogant eyebrow and ordering ‘a panino’ (and a slap, if the barista is sensible) in Caffe Nero. In fact, Cambridge has some normal people in it!

Spoons? The Regal? Who knows.

If you drink cider and black because it is ironic, smell like Burton menswear or study PPS (PPSIS? SPS?), then it might be a good idea to get down to St Andrew’s Street on a Saturday night and make some notes on the social phenomenon that is Real Life. Just don’t go to Ballare at the weekend. Saturdays at this popular Tuesday-night haunt are called ‘Danger Cindies’ for a very good reason.

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Count chavs with The Tab

U is for the Union: For most UK universities, ‘The Union’ is the hub of student social activity, drinks promotions and big name DJs.” But, as we’re sure your head teacher told you, Cambridge is not like Most Other Universities.

The Union chamber

The Union’s past speakers include The Dalai Lama and Julian Assange, and the debates often spark national interest. The Union café sells coffee for a quid and smells of rich leather, and you don’t have to be a member to go there, so it’s a good bet if you are cold, or thinking of buying a leather sofa. Last year, it even offered pole dancing classes.

The Union is a members’ club, so you pay to take part in their activities. But, remember: it is the JCR, your college students’ union, or CUSU, the university students’ union, that you need to complain to if your buttery is giving everyone dysentery or your wireless is whack. The Union can’t help you there.

V is for Varsity: So, you’ve imbibed your pint of double-concentrated hatred cordial (see O for ‘Oxford’). Varsity is the word for every occasion at which you can express that hatred. Just because our opponents call their terms by different names (Trinity? What is that all about?) and live in a town that is a bit bigger than ours, we must try and conquer them at every sport.

The Varsity Ski Trip was some lunatic’s idea of a good time: reduce the already frosty inter-institutional atmosphere to one that is literally freezing. Add loads of booze. Put both Cambridge and Oxford students onto a mountain, in salopettes, and encourage them to engage in the posiest of sports: skiing. By all accounts, The Varsity Trip is actually one of the best weeks that students enjoy at university (probably due to the fact that it takes place outside term time, and involves no work. We also hear shagging happens). It is also a bargain, at £309 for Early Bird tickets, and £339 thereafter.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy_tELPFelI

Or if Skiing not your bag, why not try Doxbridge? It’s a chance to face off against not just Oxford but also Durham, and show both who’s boss in the sport of your choice. You also get to party in Dublin, showing them Cambridge are kings of not just the pitch but also the dance floor. Read how The Tab got on at Doxbridge last year.

W is for work: This happens, we’re afraid. You will get some annoying berks who never, ever do any work, and watch their 1sts emerge cleanly from their wombs of wisdom with hardly a bead of sweat breaking across their well-groomed brows, maintaining both a flat stomach and an unbroken pelvis. There are others who labour long and hard to squeeze out a 2:2, destroying their proverbial vaginas in the process and eventually presenting their essays smeared in placenta after days spent screaming, prostrate, in their beds. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that neither of these two extremes is desirable.

Do some work, obviously; you’d be a bit silly not to – you’re in a good place, and you might be one of the lucky ones who enjoys their subject. Do not stay in the library past midnight if you are in your first year. Work is hard and there is a lot of it, but some subjects suffer more than others when it comes to the volume and intensity of the workload. If you are a History of Art student, do not complain to a medic that you ‘have a lot on.’ The fact is that you might well do, but you should remember that medics are also very adept with a scalpel, and might cut your tongue out if you rile them while they are writing their third essay of the week.

Avoid going to The UL until Exam Term

You will soon learn that the majority of students here experience intense feelings of academic inadequacy – and if they don’t, they are probably academically inadequate and got in ‘cos UCAS went wrong. So try to stay calm, and save your work-related freak-outs for third year.

X is for X-Rays: There is a slight possibility that you will hurt or break yourself during Fresher’s Week, but treatment is never more than a six hour wait away in Addenbrooke’s A&E. Incidentally, Addenbrooke’s also has an excellent Food Court, and a Body Shop. As hospitals go it seems very clean but we still would not advise licking the floor, even if the queen is coming (see ‘Q’).

There is a greater possibility that you will contract the notorious Freshers’ Flu. This is caused by eating shit, drinking too much and sleeping too little, and then snogging loads of people from far-flung corners of the country (Hertfordshire, Kent and Cheshire, for goodness’ sake!) while your immunity is impaired. Symptoms include snot-filled face, hacking cough, and missing mummy terribly. Man up, freshers: our Boots is massive, and we’ve got a Superdrug too. Try to snooze a bit during lectures, and make sure you go to the GP (remember to register) if your cough persists into November, because you might well have TB. No one wants that.

Y is for Youth: There are two colleges exclusively for graduate students (Clare Hall and Darwin) and four that admit only mature students (those over the age of 21 at the start of their studies) or post-grads: Hughes Hall, St Edmund’s, Wolfson and Lucy Cavendish. Understandably, the mature college students generally socialise among themselves: the UCAS process has changed quite a lot since 2004 and they have played more rounds of ‘Never Have I Ever’ than is healthy; they have no interest in 18-year-old chat.

Hughes Hall May Ball

Z is for ZZZ: Do it as much as you possibly can, because it makes your face look like there’s lots of energy behind it, as opposed to it looking like an old flannel draped on a balloon. Wikipedia tells us that, without sufficient sleep, one can experience severe tremors, growth suppression, and even extreme yawning.

This is the most exciting thing to do in a bed, no matter what the Karma Sutra tries to tell you, but don’t worry if that’s not possible. Powernap in the queue at Sainsbury’s, or catch forty winks in the shower. If you find yourself sleeping a lot, you don’t have chronic fatigue syndrome, and you need an excuse other than ‘I am lazy’ for your excessive indulgence in the duvet, then you could always pull the old ‘but I’m newborn!’ line. Babies need up to 18 hours sleep a day.

So. We hope our A-Z has been of use to you new-faced, eager freshers. Well done to you, we look forward to bumping into you at some point, and do remember The Tab is always looking for new writers so get in touch if you’re keen. Email [email protected] – no experience necessary.