May Week can be just a little intimidating. Garden party invites jostle for space in inboxes and along mantelpieces with those for various May Balls, Events and Affairs. The novelty of post-exam celebrations and Pimm’s stains is exhausted before the week has even begun. Perhaps such giddy diversity is a fitting conclusion to the year. Cambridge is unrelenting in its distractions, whether they be in the form of the half-dozen weekly email subscriptions which provide a lasting reminder of the scattered intentions of a Freshers’ Fair, or the endless flyers that, up to the very last days, crowd the mail room.

Life never fails to offer a barrage of sweaty prospects. The adverts which sprawl over the walls of Indigo Café point to the unexplored avenues of Cambridge jaunts and aspiring, unknown talent. In a few stolen minutes of caffeinated release we attempt to manage the increasing demands which life forces upon the semi-adult: how to maximise the possible future of a past acquaintance or how to restore the morale of friends in the shared experience of being alive. In consumer centres identical from city to city it is possible to identify the same routine: the communal space of the University falls away and here at last we may speak and think (and at the same time experience a moment of common humanity with ‘One Regular Frappuccino, No Whipped Cream’ sitting at the next table.)

The snippets of coffee house confidences which float our way can be depressing, with their constant re-affirmation of frustrated lives: conversation reflecting a society which desires everything on the menu without being able to remember what it ate for breakfast.

Whilst it may seem discouraging that once-treasured ambitions can, and no doubt eventually will, fall by the wayside, it is comforting to remember that it is our interests and talents that justify where we find ourselves.

Such knowledge fuels self-belief, but also informs an awareness of the endless variability of existence. The convention of summer holidays offer an opportunity at age to escape into fiction, dream a different reality and review a past year. Seated thousands of miles above the preoccupations of the world we can look out of the plane at the ephemeral clouds beside us, or the anonymous landscape below, and remember that our destination is still unknown.

The wash of champagne and strawberries which marks the end of term masks an uneasy sense of the future: exam and job results, the fate of once fated relationships and dry-cleaning bills. Yet even as summer appears to remove the careful certainties of a year’s schedule, it is long overdue. Walking off the beaten track is frightening, yes, but it is impossible to predict what new paths we might create in the process. With the torrents of May Week at a close it is time to move on to newer experiences and to see something of life: it’s time to get that cappuccino ‘to go’.     
          
Guy Stagg and Fleur Brading

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