We’ve reached the halfway point of Lent term, which means that we are halfway through the academic year. Scary, right?

This being my last year in Cambridge, I feel as though I should be seizing every day I have left in this beautiful city before my time is finally up. A combination of age and wisdom should enable me to smile stoically in the face of my eleventh ‘Week 5’, all the while producing essays that continue to question and redefine the fine line between bullshit and mediocrity. As Storm Imogen threatens the lives of all us cyclists making the brave journey to the Sidgwick Site, I want to feel like an Epic hero cycling towards death or glory. But I don’t. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I feel bored.

My mum’s voice rings in my ears – “Only boring people get bored, Miranda”. Well, it’s not true. I can’t be a boring person, Mother, because if I were then my self-absorption would have found a limit by now, and clearly it has not. I have even started to subject people to weekly instalments of my self-indulgence in the form of this column. Thus (as with everything else that I am not willing to accept fault for) the problem must lie elsewhere.

The workload tends to a crescendo at this point in term. I admit it feels strange to complain about boredom when I have constant deadlines, an inexhaustible reading list, and a half-arsed attempt at a dissertation lurking somewhere in the abyss of my hard drive. All of these things should be absorbing my attention, but somehow the ‘fight or flight’ response to stress plateaus, and we succumb to stagnation.

Amid as much stress, confusion and as many hangovers as one can fit into eight weeks, having some kind of routine is imperative. I have perfected the art of an 11-minute turnaround from being asleep to walking out the door. I am a well-oiled machine, one that budgets only half a minute to eat a crumpet while applying liquid eyeliner. So ingrained in my muscle memory is the cycle from home to Sidgwick that I could, and practically do, execute it in my sleep. Who cares if by the time I arrive the harsh weather has my make up streaming down my face, and I spend the first hour of the day distracted by indigestion? I possess the robot-like efficiency that could make me the bleary-eyed poster girl in any workplace under a totalitarian government.

The downfall of the drills put in place to get by is the tedium that accompanies them. Day after day, essay after essay, the Corpus clock ticks on, and so do we. To feel as though you are living your own Cambridge-based Groundhog Day is all too easy.

I’m sure this phenomenon is not only specific to me. I know this because a young man in the Cindies smoking area once tried to persuade me to go home with him based on his conviction that we had slept together the week before. I explained to him that this had not happened, but he held his ground. Believe me when I tell you that my sex life is not such a complicated or hectic narrative that I would have forgotten this event. My cynicism tells me that this was simply a line he was using to try and dupe women into sex, but I find it difficult that someone could be quite so obnoxious as to believe that anyone would be stupid enough to fall for this. Not even me – although I did appreciate the creativity he brought to the Cindies pick-up line, when usually the promise of a stop-off at Gardies en route to bed is deemed sufficient. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I choose to think he was stuck in his own time loop.

Desperate ploy or not, it made me consider the possibility that we are all stuck in this cycle of repetition. How do you break the cycle? In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray falls in love with Andie MacDowell, and she inspires him to relinquish his selfish hedonism and find meaning in his life. The easy breaking of such a curse only exists in romcoms and, unfortunately, we aren’t living in a romcom (I’m actually quite happy about this – if I were in a romcom I’m sure I would be overlooked as romantic lead, instead having to accept my lot as lead’s brazen friend who jokes about being hungry and not having a date to the fairytale wedding at the end).

Boredom is an involuntary and undesirable state of being. I feel guilty about being bored, truly I do, but hours of toil in the library will inevitably arouse feelings of restlessness. I don’t know where the holes in the Cambridge time/space continuum are, or how to fix them, but I hope I find out before advertising myself as a less-glamorous but more literal incarnation of ‘Factory Girl’ attracts the attention of any nineteenth-century industrialists looking to fill a position at the cotton mill. Unlikely, I admit, but not as unlikely as being cast as romantic lead – I don’t want to take any chances.