Rosie Hore: Week 4

This week I discovered that two hot cross buns are the perfect size to cover my modesty.

I have an excuse. The time has come round again for the shooting of the RAG Sidney Sussex (nearly) naked calendar. Our month was March, so, in one of the oldest rooms in college, we took our kit off and arranged ourselves into an Easter tableau of bums, boobs and bunnies. It was the most fun I’ve had with my clothes off in WEEKS.

This is the third time I will appear in the calendar. Three weeks into freshers, and I was in the nude with people I hardly knew, discussing in all seriousness the merits of a cereal-box codpiece. In second-year, for exam month, the girls were demurely hidden behind a file.

The effects of introducing baked goods into the mix were new this year, however, as we discovered when a particularly large moth became interested in the stickiness. Just imagine the coordination required to discourage a moth whilst preventing nipple-slippages. Coordination I don’t possess, apparently.

Leaving Cambridge, I will have 36 months worth of Sidney lovelies getting their jigglies out for charity. We don’t appear to be a college cursed with shyness, and every year the senior tutor has the enviable task of deciding which particular patch of pube is so rude it needs to be photoshopped out. My mum even saw last year’s, and decided that she’d rather the rowers than the rugby team (sorry lads).

Getting naked has got me philosophical about the role of colleges in the Cambridge experience. There really is nothing like it in real life. Your college is a bit like having 300 flatmates. You eat together, you drink together, you sometimes take each other’s socks out of the laundry when you need to put a wash on. Our essay deadlines fall into sync, as does a kind of Week 5 PMS.

We also, it turns out, get naked together. Sometimes we get naked for charity. Sometimes, we’re naked and shivering outside because college decided to do a fire practice at 6 in the morning. Sometimes we even get naked one-on-one, and then find it a bit awkward afterwards when the eating and the drinking and the socks continue as normal.

But, however large or small your college is, remember that these are the people you’ll be bumping into in airports in 10 years time. Make the most of them.