In a brilliant sweep of self-contradiction, I am actually a little bored upon having concluded my aforementioned news desk placement. There is simply too much spare time now. This strange repudiation of ‘spare time’ will be seen an unworthy complaint back at Cambridge. After surviving two years wriggling in its tight clutches, I know how warped our perspective on time becomes. If not prisoners to its pressure, heavy as an anchor dragging the weight of an ocean across the ocean floor, then we are held hostage to its hours. My bike basket was essentially a fully-stocked kitchen cupboard by exam term, snacking through a pot noodle at the traffic lights or finishing off a black coffee from a mug on the way to lectures. In any case, I made some grandiose poetic statements in my last column, such as being able to stare at a speck of dust for days and determine its symbolic secret whilst interpreting the concept of cracks, and unsurprisingly, clarification has been demanded. So with no more political articles to write, here's the chance to crawl into the cracks of time, ponder and prove the power of poetry.

The reflection on dust came while waiting for a train at Montparnasse Station in Paris on a cold winter morning. There was a striking poetic whisper and beauty in its barbed wire. The way it marched its sharp bristles in menacing swirls, warning you not to come closer, and yet clung like a child to its cloak of dust, shivering in the morning mist. Its dull grey sparkled to silver in the sunlight, eerily still, in spite of the swarming crowds of people below hurried on by the shifting nature of time. In fact, dust was its trace, the trail of touches left behind, people embarking on journeys or waving last goodbyes: a catch-net for the memories we are desperate to cling onto. In the same breath, given that the average person creates a third of an ounce of dead skin each week, roughly corresponding to the weight of a car key, I do not deny that dust is definitely a grim concept. I dread to think how many microscopic dust mites are nibbling at my dead skin cells. In all honesty, I sweep dust away like any person conscious of cleanliness does. However, I make a religious point of clinging with all my bones, and belonging to the poetic perspective, it inspires a philosophy with which I lead my life.

Poetry is a pair of spectacles that brings the world into focus. If we can see value and beauty in the dusty smog that smothers, the cold mist that moulds grassy mounds with grubby hands and iron grey knuckles, hovering in the hollowed-out gaps that lag between its concrete peaks, yet delight in the dust we discover, then life will be endowed with a much more positive light. In brief, the world is not inherently beautiful, ugly, or evil; for the most part it is how we choose to project our interpretation.

I am now on my year abroad in Paris. I was placed under the exchange scheme in a residence block in Belleville, the 11th district. While the literal translation of 'belle' and 'ville' corresponds to 'beautiful city', let's just say it falls very much short, especially when in comparison with the impressive architecture of Cambridge. It is grim, not quite disgusting, but definitely not the flower-boxes and balconies I naively had in mind eight months ago. In any case, one adjusts and learns to appreciate beauty wherever one can steal a slice. There's a gristle grey that runs through this city of love, subtle as the rats that scuttle after the metro has closed. Sometimes I fear that it will grow inside my heart, turn the meat bad, that its cold will creep inside my soul. However, believing in poetic value is not just proof that beauty can be practically anywhere but more that the human mind and its imaginative chamber can be an incredible positive life-changing force.

@JadeCuttle