So, after a rollercoaster ride of a mindboggling year, here you are in May Week. Those who have questioned its dubious title will have already dipped their toes in its history. And – let’s face it – since its title is misleading to say the least, this is the case for most of us. Here instead are the May Week highlights which adorned Varsity issues of the past.

The paper was officially founded in 1947, and so we know that in the late forties, excited "fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles and aunts" came pouring into the city in May Week.

However, this surely promising event was met with an ennui bordering on despondence. "Everyone finds it odious…", mourns one writer in 1952. "To a number of undergraduates, May Week is what Christmas was to Scrooge." The cure to this middle-class malaise was May Weeks stories of old. Apparently, a rich St John’s student once "turned his rooms into a sumptious garden – painting the ceiling blue and carpeting the floor with real turf which was duly watered each day", a setup that lasted until the floor collapsed a week later. Despite the high entertainment value of this story, the ’52 article concludes "May Week has lost its May Week touch". Surely to combat this lapse in entertainment standards, Varsity published ‘Farcity.’ Self-subtitled ‘the degenerate newspaper’, this questionable publication came out every May Week in the late forties and early fifties. It turned the idea that some dons posessed a certain semblance to turtles into front-page material, and trod the fine line between offending others and offending itself.

Writers of the sixties often took some of the most imaginative approaches to May Week. Quirky gatecrashing advice, such as "The ball-crashers’ hands always get dirtier than the legitimate participants, so take a small polythene bag pack of Kleenex", began to appear. While some journalists of this generation treasured May Week and its history, others treated it with disdain. "May Week is organised for people who like to think they’re smarter, hippier, and more sophisticated than they are and since that’s all of us, everybody has a good time," bleats one such cynic. An article supposedly explaining The Bumps ends with a downhearted "You’ll find things a lot easier when you buy a program". Not much sixties spirit there, then.

Be that as it may – if you forgive the pun – these were very different times indeed. Back then, the best tea in Cambridge at then was at the Union, at 2s 6d per tea. Back then, King’s College, which now hosts the King’s Affair every year, held one May Ball every two years. And back then, with flower power in full bloom, May Ball fashion advice was very à la mode – and put together with only the pleasure of the male undergraduate in mind. One proud headline boasts: "It doesn’t matter what you wear, as long as He likes it!", followed by a double-page spread of outfits He might like and why.

Given that the female kind were so few and far between – a rare species found only at Newnham and Girton – Varsity would allot a special space on its back page to photographs of good-looking broads. Girls from outside Cambridge who were brought to May Balls were labelled ‘imported goods’. Despite this, some of the fashion editors’ words of advice ring true even in this modern world: "Make-up, hair-do, stockings – all those things you forgot during exams, or ignored the rest of the term, must now be put right", they implore. And remember to "avoid bunchy dresses, unless you’re a beauty who’d look good in anything." The dangers of the bunchy dress: "They collect grass stains off the lawns, and break glasses, which could be dangerous."

A pleasing bizzarerie of the 60s was the replacement of Farcity with an entertaining 8-page magazine, ‘May Week’, in which often not a single article related to its title. Instead, the unsuspecting reader was presented with a cornucopeia of agreeable factoids about organ rim trimming ("Cambridge colleges have long been strongholds of this demanding and highly specialised art") and extended articles on flying saucers and bullfighting.

 A ‘Woman’s Page’ gave girls advice on what to do when not ceding to patriarchal fashion trends, mostly consisting of throwing parties and cooking. This odd combination of the traditional and the unconventional clearly thrived, as epitomised by the following sentence. "The May Balls are the apogee of a Cambridge summer," – coos a journalist who clearly expects the average reader to know that an apogee is a loose term for an apsis, the most far-away point from the Earth in an elliptical orbit – "… so if you are to compete, be the ultimate in female desireability."

Later issues never quite prodded May Week from so many perspectives. Highlights include descriptions of duck racing and a guide to alcohols worthy of Withnail’s Uncle Monty ("Mayweek, that major dome of vicarious pleasures announces again the scent of honey…"). From the mid-seventies to the late eighties Varsity merged with ‘STOP PRESS’, a radical student newspaper, and rarely covered May Week in detail. We know that there was, however, a tradition of punting to Grantchester for tea the morning after a ball. In 1972, the May Week edition of Varsity also made categorically no mention of any events but was printed entirely on pink paper. On the other hand, the 1992 paper punctiliously reviewed almost every ball. At Selwyn, it consisted of "no beer and lots of sweaty people sitting on the floor", recommended only "for couples over 78". Trinity had hot air balloon rides. Jesus Ball promised a hostess called Rosie, "the original sexagenarian raver". St Catherine’s Ball that year is, sadly, described only as "unfortunately, not a raunchy affair."

Thus concludes my brief escapade into the realms of Varsity issues past. For dessert, perhaps you’d like to mull over King’s students’ attempts to launch Cambridge’s first pirate radio station in May Week 1966. How about alternatives to May Balls – the Cambridge Midsummer Pop Festival of 1969, apparently "the greatest free pop extravaganza staged in Europe", or the Alternative May Ball organised by the Corn Exchange in 1971? Perhaps dessert isn’t necessary – we all knew the cherry on the cake of May Ball facts is that Peter Cook met his wife posing for a Varsity May Ball photoshoot. Or… did we?