Oh Cambridge, I can see it happening again. Everybody acknowledges the Week 5 blues, that halfway turning point at which the student population’s frowns refuse to turn upside down, and the mound of essays which has been piling itself ever higher now looms mountainous above you and goads you to be its Sisyphus. Less acknowledged than the mounting stress and depression of Week 5 is the declining capacity of reason and normativity that characterises Week 7.

Actions which under normal circumstances would be unquestionably illogical now present themselves as perfectly valid. The work mountain which has amassed itself is unerringly omnipresent and now casts a shadow over your social and sexual relations. Maybe I am being more monastic than average, but all I know is this: this week I needed to write something down whilst on the phone and I couldn’t find a post-it and so convinced was I that my naked flesh wouldn’t be seen by another human until travel day that I scrawled "Meeting at 12, Free School Lane" onto my pelvis. Reasonable in the situation, but still, one feels, symptomatic of something.

By now, all those tiny little commitments you have made throughout term have similarly all clustered together and rather than each being a cute little distraction, they have fused together into an angry mosaic that jogs beside you in the street as you scurry along; it tugs at your shirt-sleeve, begging "You said you’d do me, why won’t you do me?" All the small things are those that erode your sense of self – a mailing list you forgot to send out to your society is all it takes to undo an otherwise competent and functional being.

I think my situation is exacerbated by a dissertation with which I become gradually more and more obsessed. I spend my days working in a primary school observing gendered behaviour, and then bound into the kitchen waiting to pounce on some naïve individual who might accidentally catch eyes with me, and then I unload a bucket of Judith Butler over them as I explain my observation notes in detail. This particular problem is borne of the self-obsession that eases its way to the fore by this point in the term; increasingly, all those individuals who once milled randomly around you in college and in the streets become an amorphous shifting unit.