The sun is finally beaming down on us all. The clocks have gone back and the wind that chafes the faces of cyclists has lost its bite. Spring has truly sprung and that can only mean one thing: we are living in the end times.

This is my fourth and hopefully final exam term, and as such I have been conditioned to be incredibly suspicious of sunshine in Cambridge. While this may be one of the most beautiful cities in the world when the sun is shining, there are students stuck in places deep and dark within the UL where the sun cannot touch and no one can hear your sobs. It isn’t all doom and gloom. At least one reign of terror is coming to an end: mine.

While I have two months left of being a student, this is the last time I can call myself a columnist (I don’t actually refer to myself as a columnist – it sounds like a pretentious self-fashioning as Cambridge’s Carrie Bradshaw, and I’m scared of my DoS finding out about my extra-curricular career of self-promotion). I’m not sure what drove me to take this position – and after weeks of relocating misplaced hyphens, I’m not sure Varsity editors are either – but god it’s been fun.

I’ve never kept a diary. Such an effort at archiving one’s own life seems slightly excruciating to me. Although my capacity for both narcissism and introspection is endless, I am first and foremost an extrovert, and being in a protracted dialogue with myself scares me. Chronicling my misadventures for you readers and publishing sexual aggressive comments about politicians is much more appealing.

From the moment I lied about my age to get a Bebo profile in 2005, I’ve had my entire adolescent life to assimilate the philosophy that it is a normal impulse to validate any feelings or observations by posting them on the Internet. There doesn’t seem much point otherwise. As the old adage goes, if a girl goes to lunch and doesn’t post a picture on Instagram, did it really happen?

As an English undergrad, you may assume that I would have considered the ineffaceable historicity of literature earlier, but no. These are my finals, I thought, and I’ve finally found myself in a situation I can’t bullshit my way out of. But even this wasn’t when I learnt my lesson about how intransigent words can be. That came a week before my dissertation deadline when I lived every millennial’s nightmare. The day I broke my phone.

How poignant it felt when these events collided. The irony was not lost on me. With no final draft and my deadline rapidly approaching, it was not looking good. I slept through all of my alarms and woke in a bleary-eyed panic. Grabbing my phone, I hurled myself down the stairs and into the bathroom. I met my own bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and apparently over-enthusiastically moved towards the toilet. I heard a splash. My iPhone. How do you know you are a true child of generation Y? When you see your smartphone in the toilet and before you have time to think your hand is submerged and fishing it out.

Afflicted by more millennial traits, I wasn’t even patient enough to leave my phone in rice for 48 hours to rectify the water damage. I couldn’t find any rice, instead choosing to cover my phone in couscous, meaning I had concocted something that resembled a Banksy piece called ‘Gentrification Tabbouleh’ and smelt faintly of urine. I eventually found some rice belonging to my housemate and added it to the tabbouleh with the enthusiasm of a demented and sleep-deprived Jamie Oliver. My housemate would later tell me that I had effectively pissed in her long-grain basmati rice; I have yet to replace it. I left my phone in a Tupperware box of mixed grains and middle-class guilt for all of 20 minutes before giving up and running to Carphone Warehouse.

Obviously I am not the sort of person that backs up. My phone was a tragic case of hubris. I’ve always had a misdirected sense of pride for having the hedonistic capability to only live in the moment. This philosophy was sadly undermined.

I know this because as soon as the screen dissolved into nothingness and my life became a dead weight in my hands, I was flooded with worry and regret. I worried for how I would get through the next few hours in the library without a game of 1010. The future suddenly felt bleak and inevitable in a way that deadlines just don’t, until it’s too late. Sadder still was the loss of so many memories. Texts that I hadn’t thought much of when I sent them became memorialised with a romantic optimism that they could have become the holy writ of an epic romance.

It is only at this juncture between the moment and the end at which you become profoundly aware that you are writing history (even the secret one) and the future at all times. If there is any lesson to be gleamed from my columns and the life that inspired them it is this: don’t think first. Thoughtless or thoughtful, happy accident or bitter mistake – it is only looking back that any of it makes any sense. The best thing about these columns is that they have given me the opportunity to ridicule myself, and hopefully to make the seven of you that read this laugh along as well. Older, but certainly not wiser, it’s once more unto the breach, dear friends.