At some point, all of us will feel guilty. No one is exempt. There are vast numbers of things to feel guilty about at university.

when you haven’t got any booze you trawl first year kitchens

Here are a few: You haven’t done any work. You’ve feigned illness to get out of a supervision. You’ve cheated on your girlfriend. You’ve cheated on your girlfriend with your girlfriend’s best friend. You’ve given someone Chlamydia. You forgot Mother’s Day. You accidentally sent your mother a text message telling her that you’d given her Chlamydia that was intended for your girlfriend’s best friend. You like to watch videos of other people falling over and hurting themselves on the internet. You like to set booby traps for other people so that they fall over and hurt themselves while you secretly film them. You don’t have any friends who are members of ethnic minorities.You haven’t really thought about what you’re going to do after university and now the idea of “taking some time out, doing a bit travelling maybe, you know, getting things sorted in your head” seems stupid. You drink alone. When you haven’t got any booze you trawl round first-year kitchens looking to steal their lager. You’re an alcoholic. Your carbon footprint is the size of Wales. You told a homeless person you hadn’t got any change when in fact you had fifty quid in your pocket that you were about to spend on Davidoff cigarettes and Courvoisier. You don’t know anything about the Israel/ Palestine situation although you think you should if you’re going to keep up this trendy, liberal, King’s student public image. You’re a work shy ignorant layabout who is squandering the taxpayer’s precious money by watching Friends and drinking expensive smoothies when you should be at lectures.

The other day I bumped into a friend of mine who was stuck with a common dilemma. Having had the entire Easter holiday to complete an essay he’d left it until the night before the deadline to begin. “I’m a waste of space” he said, quite seriously. I began to think about all the deadlines that I’d missed and all the supervisors that I’d pissed off. I thought about every time I’d suffered that all too familiar sense of self-loathing, the guilt of not living up to expectations in this unashamedly elitist university culture, where failure is often a reason to berate a student and ostracise them for slipping out of the margin of the best of the best. Guilt is a given for the Cambridge student. It’s the constant driving force that keeps us all on our toes and reminds us that we’re not in the happy go-lucky educational playground of secondary school any more. You slip up, you’re fucked. Go suck on that lemon.