I’m unbearably hot and there’s an awful swooshing sound surrounding me. My body feels as though it is rocking side-to-side and I’m beginning to feel nauseous. No, this is not the aftermath of a night of too much wine, nor is it the state I get into on an evening when I start dwelling on the fact that I do not have a graduate job lined up. It’s rather just me, leant back on a punt, graced with the occasional splash of Cam water from the end of the punt stick.

It’s on days like this when you really think ′wow Cambridge IS nice huh’. Of course, I’ve known this my three years, but there have been days where this is the last place I wanted to be (please refer to my Lent Week Seven when two diss deadlines, two essay deadlines and a Varsity print edition fell lovingly into one week). But now I’m approaching my final term, all I want to do is be here – soaking up the river, the streets, even the tourists on Magdalene Bridge who still gripe me after all this time.

“I usually am storming through King’s to get to Sidge rather than appreciating its lusciousness”

All of my nostalgic musings hit me with full force on this punt. Leaning back, one can appreciate the beauty that is horrendously overlooked on most days. I am usually storming through King’s to get to Sidge rather than appreciating its beauty in the sun. But the punt allows a slow pace. As I’m bombarded with facts (did you know Darwin’s evolution text was missing from the UL for years until it was randomly returned with no words spoken? – I like to inform and entertain in my articles), I realise that in this place people pay money to visit, and dream about coming to study at, I have literally been there, done that, and got the t-shirt (and sweatshirt, puffer, and bauble).

I came to Cambridge because I simply loved reading. After three years, that love has gone through many phases. Progressing to hatred, to frustrated hair-pulling as I grappled with Aquinas, and, to the largest turn I did not expect, that I would love medieval literature. This is why the punt feels so therapeutic. I’m cast back to the beginning of Cambridge, long before it was even graced with my presence, and simultaneously I think about Year 12 me, the first in my family to go to university – two different beginnings on a different scale happened in the same city. And just as Cambridge has grown and become so beautiful, I like to think I have grown too.

“I wish I would have done more, seen more beyond the city centre”

The punt also offers a glimpse into the Cambridge I have perhaps missed as a student here. On this trip, I’m a shameless tourist, asking questions like “What’s your favourite college?” to the punt driver (sorry, I’m unaware of punt vocab), acting as if I won’t be offended when he inevitably doesn’t pick mine (Churchill) and instead opts for Darwin (a choice I’m still getting my head around). It’s easy to become wrapped up into the weeks, wishing the time away as we beg for the deadlines to end, before realising that our time in the privileged position as a student is quickly wrapped up. I wish I would have done more, seen more beyond the city centre, and gone more to the wonderful museums that we have here (specifically to dwell on that legendary lemon in Kettle’s Yard – are they hiring for another ‘lemon replacer’ I wonder, because I need a job).

There’s something faintly absurd about needing to be sat on a punt to finally look at Cambridge properly. Three years of rushing, of mentally mapping the quickest routes between lectures, libraries, and yet it takes being physically forced into stillness to notice anything at all. I’ve walked past these colleges hundreds of times, but always with purpose, as though time itself were chasing me down King’s Parade. The tourists, for all their lingering and loitering, might actually be doing it right. They pause, they stare, they take photos of things I barely register anymore. And here I am, briefly one of them, craning my neck at buildings I once claimed as part of my everyday life, realising I’ve never quite seen them like this before.

“The tourists, for all their lingering and loitering, might actually be doing it right”

It makes me think about all the smaller, almost forgettable decisions that led me here – choosing to apply in the first place, saying yes to things I might easily have avoided. None of them felt particularly momentous at the time, but together they’ve shaped the version of me sitting here now, slightly seasick and overly sentimental on the Cam. It’s strange to think that my own three years, which have felt so all-consuming, will dissolve into something just as small in the grander scheme of the place.

The water ripples around me as I’m wrapped up in my blanket, hot water bottle in lap, and umbrella braced just in case. It is these ripples that drew me to writing this article, these knock-on effects that led to my being here, to the friends and choices that I’ve met and made along the way. But just as the ripples never have a defined beginning and end, I realise that my time in Cambridge is not meant to be abruptly shut off. It will always be a part of me, making up some of the ripples of my self, always there to look back on, and always shaping who I will become once I leave the flows of the River Cam.