Tis the season to do fuck all

Term is coming to a close: there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that tunnel is the fucking M25, because this bitch is escaping Camb for the vacay!

Its officially week 8, the rest of Michaelmas is a write- off, and you've started to become wistful, as you nostalgically cherry pick the rare highlights of the term, and completely romanticise the abject horror that was the last two months of your life.

You eventually accept that the nightmare is over. You have completed Michaelmas.

As Orwell himself wrote in his great hit novel 1984, (which is not in fact an allegory for Stalinism, but this hellpit we call Cambridge University,) "It was all right, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Michaelmas 2017."

some frazzled magical creatures

You scramble to your end of term DOS meeting- she asks you how you think you've progressed this term?

The knee-jerk responses of ‘I’ve managed to crack the perfect amount of caffeine to get me through the all nighters’, the ‘I have learned to survive on 3 hours of sleep’, and ‘I have mastered the art of writing an essay with wikipedia as my only source’, are true and impressive. Yet you settle for the, "I guess I’ve improved on time management". Weak. You liar. You loser. She looks at you and you fear she knows the truth.

much profundity

Your parents come to collect you and see the appalling state of your life. You jump into their arms as if you have been held hostage for the past 8 weeks. Which you have. They observe the carnage of the academic equivalent of a crack den; scrunched up essay plans, scattered staples, and tissue remnants of freshers flu. And naturally you’re extra exhausted, because you’ve been up since 3am pulling pins out of the photos of fake friends on your pinboard.

and I'm lying on the cold, hard ground

Whether you’re celebrating Crimbo in the sunny Maldives at Daddy’s client’s hotel or freezing your tits off in South London, there are the same universal holiday moments.

In my first week here, I genuinely heard somebody ask what to wear for this season, as they had never ‘wintered here before’, so please consider this article as a longform petition for a bipartisan constitutional amendment to prohibit using "wintered" as a verb.

Upon arriving back at your humble abode, you pound up the stairs, ignoring several family members as you go. The quest for a decent kip waits for no idle man or beast. The coma begins. And like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ without the beauty, you enter into a state of hibernation which lasts days, as your body starts to gain back all those all-nighters and emotional trauma of your supervisor telling you that your essay might as well have been a paper-aeroplane.

yaaas you are

The smell of food wafts into your bedroom and wakes you.

FOOD!!

Cooking !!

In the oven!!

Not a microwave!!

This must be some cruel prank! You open the fridge- a fridge devoid of the stench of rotten aubergines- and practically orgasm at the sheer variety of sustenance available. You're even offered a piece of fruit !! What are those mystical delights? You feel like Adam and Eve the first time they discovered an apple and then damned the whole of humankind. The last time you tasted a satsuma, you had self-esteem and a decent sleeping pattern.

bon appetite baby

Now the hols are in full swing, it’s high time to reconnect with old friends – and by this I mean, catch up on your Netflix! Your account misses you! And needs you more than humans do right now! So get up to speed with all your old faves, and even make some new relationships, start a new binge! You are the lord of your own destiny, the master of your own fate, except for the fact that this isn’t even your netflix account

sssssssss

And remember those little white lies you told yourself this whole term, that anything you’ve not managed to complete, you’ll simply catch up on during the break. Oh muchos lols. And, couple that with the extra work of making notes for mocks and coursework, double Lols. You simply plonk yourself in your bed and settle in to watching the Black Death on Horrible Histories, et voila, you are revising!!

Like Ross and Rachel, you ‘ARE ON A BREAK’, and therefore no rules apply.

If/when you see friends, you have to pretend you’ve been having a grand time; the entire reputation of Cambridge University rests on you. Your pals will bombard you with questions about your life at Cam. Remember, this is a test, they’re all at Notts and Bristol, and so they're ACTUALLY having a good time. It looks like you're having fun, they exclaim, as they refer to your weekly instas; little do they know these bad-bois are carefully constructed images, where in actual fact, you're totally sober, bopping to the 40 second remix of Cotton Eyed Joe, but post with the caption ‘blurry night’. Yes, of course, you’re a typical uniLAD, out on the lash, livin la vida loca! [as you scramble back with a bucket full of cheesy chips, to complete your essay at 11:38]

mistresses of the sesh

After an intense 8 weeks in the Bridge of Cam, you have to be slowly reintroduced to normal society, and re-socialized again. You can’t keep confusing your mum with your bedder – as you persistently leave notes on your door to not come in to clean today. And you can’t keep feeling a awash with panic and cold sweats if you've left your bedroom without your Cam-card. You’re still met with looks of bemusement as you start to ‘penny' family members at the Christmas dinner table, and shout at your relatives, ‘fine if you’ve had a nasty divorce!’ And when the fam snuggle down in their pjs, you parade around in your academic gown, as your new dressing gown.

All weird symptom of the good olde Stockholm syndrome.

Turns out, you can’t function in or outside of Cam – bravo!