PART II: I to Q 

Identities They say postmodernism is all about fragmenting identities, and Cambridge is a wonderland for playing around with the image you present to the world.  At the same time, classifying people based on the Holy Trinity of college, subject, and society makes grasping people’s true nature so much easier. Go to John’s? Snob. Land economist? Posh. Blues rower? Bye bye degree. I mean, it’s so hard in the Real World when you actually have to get to know people in order to judge them!

Jesus You’ve probably heard them all before, but Jesus College is an endless source of pun-induced mirth. You can’t really snigger at people saying “Come over to Jesus” or scream “Go, Jesus, go!” at a sporting event in a non-Cambridge environment without your local church sending you off to burn in hell for all eternity.

King’s College Chapel You came to Cambridge because it offers the best course in sociology in the whole world, or because you want to study integers with the world-class leaders in the field. Cut that personal statement nonsense and embrace the fact that you might well not have chosen Cambridge at all if it all looked like a Churchill-style 60s bunker complex. It’s touristy, it’s clichéd, and you probably don’t want to admit it, but there’s nothing like gazing at the iconic structures of King’s College Chapel and the rest.

Lawns When you get weird looks avoiding the grassy bits in your local park, you know you’ve been brainwashed by the ‘keep off the grass!’ mantra. A lawn just isn’t a lawn if you can walk on it – where’s the excitement of clandestine experiments with grass?

May Week The very reason for your Cambridge existence, the time to go all Brideshead Revisited, and your chance to feature in the Daily Mail as a generic over-privileged idiot. Need I say more?

NatSci and other slang Going away to university is a big life change. Coming back and not being understood anymore is an even bigger shock. Being able to throw in ‘NatSci’, ‘plodge’, ‘Tripos’, and even ‘Emma’s boys bumped Maggie’ and not being deemed as suffering from mild brain damage is always a relief.

Orgasm Bridge It’s always rather embarrassing going home and getting out of breath at even the slightest incline. You might want to place the blame for your disgraceful aerobic performance on your diet consisting of your college’s lavish formal offerings or your exercise being confined to hopping around in Life. But the truth is, central Cambridge is largely as flat as a pancake – with the exception of the great ascent that is Orgasm Bridge. Coping with the physical exertion of normal, undulating geography makes you miss how any such effort in Cambridge is restricted to that one structure.

Porters The porters are Cambridge’s very own Big Brother effect. You might think that privacy is generally a nice thing to have, but there’s something soothing about knowing that the porters most likely know everything you’ve been up to from stepping on that lawn to tucking into cheesy chips in the library. And you’ve got to love that knowing glance you get from them after emerging to brunch after a night out!

Queens’ apostrophe Everyone loves a teeny dose of grammar pedantry every now and again. There’s something quite adorable about the enthusiasm with which Queens’ and non-Queens’ students alike like to remind their less grammatically enlightened peers about where the apostrophe goes in the College’s name. Who said Cambridge wasn’t full of perfectionists?

Stay tuned for the final part of this alphabetical journey through nostalgia; The A to Z of missing Cambridge: Part 3 will be out soon.