This year, also known as the fourth and final year of my degree, I decided I was going to get a seat in the library. Never having been much of a studious library-goer (or studious full-stop) before, I had the sudden brainwave that if I could become one of those library regulars and make a seat my own, somehow I might finally get what this whole studying lark is about. And so, in the first week of Michaelmas, I chose my seat.

That seat, my seat, was on the top floor of the Pembroke library. It was towards the back, on a table of four, under the vigilant gaze of a bronze cast of George Stokes and in the shadow of the gently curving wooden beams that criss-cross the ceiling. There, I sat facing the cinema books: ‘Grierson on Documentary’, ‘The Skin of the Film’, ‘Death 24x a second’, and Braudy & Cohen’s hefty collection of seminal essays.

During my year abroad, cinema had slowly evolved into a central pillar of my MML degree and sitting in the presence of these eminent critics’ works was quite inspiring. That’s not to say I read all of them, of course. But the sheer potential of all the words and all the thoughts in all those books made up the distinct quality of the library air. A bit musty, admittedly, but fizzling with the opportunity for education like nowhere else.

There were (are, and will be long after I’m gone, as I’ve realised) three other seats at the table. Generally at least two of these were occupied by my study buddies, companions as much in the art of studying as they were in distracting me with fits of laughter that more than once forced me to leave the seat. We all became loyal to that table. When we couldn’t get those seats, there was a pathetic sense of entitled outrage at the fact that others had chosen them. They felt like ours. And staying for a week over Christmas – a bit like Harry Potter, if he had opted to crawl through a 10,000-word dissertation on idiots in Ionesco – I became ever more rooted in my spot. Not that it was always the dreamy academic experience the prospectus suggested it would be – a gentle osmosis of knowledge, slowly building into an everflowing stream of wisdom. Deadlines brought me close to breaking point in that seat but there were also moments when knowledge seemed to suddenly sew itself into a patchwork in my head, and I credit the divine intervention of exactly that seat.

A year ago, even a few weeks ago, I’d never have believed I’d be saying this, but I’m going to miss that seat. Perhaps it’s the crushing identity crisis of graduation looming on the horizon: the transition from undergraduate to unemployed through the early June haze of cheap cava and barbecue smoke isn’t exactly an easy one. But there’s no denying that the seat became a part of my student identity, and by losing that I’m a bit scared to lose something of myself along the way. Probably the only way to counter this is to let go of the entitlement of a false sense of ownership I built over the year, realising and relishing in the fact that I’m just one of many to sit on its slightly itchy cloth. To have felt that I belonged there, even just for a short year, was quite a special thing. •