Sophie Thorpe

“I am alone and miserable”, Frankenstein’s monster cried to his creator. At one point or another, we’ve all felt like this.

Maybe it hit you midway through an all-nighter; maybe halfway through that cheap bottle of wine; or maybe on a cold winter’s night in student accommodation without double-glazing.

It’s how I’ve been feeling of late. Those Week 5 blues have dragged on and on. Then yesterday I found myself sobbing at my desk, still attempting to read about word-order variation in Finnish.

It’s not that the word-order variation in Finnish overly distresses me. Nor is it that I’m alone; I’ve got friends, and good friends at that. It’s not that I don’t have a man in my life; just the other day I had a perfectly pleasurable encounter with a certain gentleman from The Other Place. Nor is it that my family don’t care about me.

There is just something about Cambridge that can suddenly overwhelm you and make you feel completely and utterly alone, abandoned and isolated.

My natural instinct is to fight such a feeling, to tell myself to man up and battle through it. So that’s what I have been trying to do for the last week. But a trip to Oxford and one horrendous drunken evening – complete with a lot of carbs – didn’t help.

While I tried to bury that ghastly feeling, it was biding its time, building up the strength to burst out and attack me when I least expected. And so yesterday, in the middle of word-order variation in Finnish, out came the tears. A lot of tears. It was monsoon season on my face.

I admitted defeat, marched to the train station, and bought a ticket home. Now here I am, in dreamy Dorset, a world away from Cambridge.

On the way back from the station my mother and I stopped to herd a cow back into its field. When we got back to the house, we sat down and had a glass of champagne in front of the fire. There is something about those magical bubbles that makes everything right in the world: they are the cure to any woe, filled with hope and happiness. With bubbles in hand, a fire in the hearth and my mum nearby, I knew it was all ok.

Once you get away from the cobbled world of Cambridge and escape the bubble, it’s easy to see how little it all matters. I’m not saying let’s all run away to the country and give up our degrees; but I realise now it’s not the end of the world that I missed a supervision today, or that I haven’t done my essay this week, or that I’ve given up going to lectures.

It’s annoying, and, yes, I’ve been rubbish at life recently. But it doesn’t make me a pathetic failure, it doesn’t mean I can’t do my degree, and, at this point in time, it really doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s alright to run away from it all. Sometimes you just need a glass of champagne.