Places don’t just seem better when you’re about to leave them – they are better. They seem better because we (misguidedly) apply ideas of scarcity value: things appear more valuable when you have less time in which to appreciate them. In a sense this is true, because if we value making memories of a place and the chances for doing that are limited it instils a sense of urgency. But it does not follow that things actually improve as we are about to leave them – their apparent scarcity just makes it seem that way. Yet, I think, the illusion is augmented by truth – things are often truly better in a place you are about to leave.

First, when an end is in sight, you can put up with stuff. The music played by the mad Bulgarian next door is muted by the thought that soon you will be out of here. Grievances and enmities are relieved of their import when you know that the less amenable of your fellows will imminently be eating your dust, and the consequences of your actions are limited too – if you make a mistake with social repercussions, you only have to deal with the fallout for so long. This is one explanation for the so-called ‘gold rush’, a phrase which describes a phenomenon I have yet to (passively and scientifically, of course) witness. Apparently, towards the end of their time at university third-year undergraduates go sex crazy. It happens, no doubt, for the same reason that people are horny on holiday – women (and men, for that matter) out of any long term social circle do not risk being known as slutty, and fears of commitment are dispelled by the knowledge of certain ending. As one is about to leave the consequences of the actions of others on you are diminished, and so are the consequences of your actions on them. It is a liberating lightness.

Yet it is a lightness that can also be disabling, like trying to run in a dream. Having the end in mind when you act can make you feel that you have already reached it. If your actions have fewer consequences, they also lose permanency of meaning. Why bother throw yourself into your work now when you are leaving so soon? Why, in fact, begin any new endeavour? It is already too late. This is a psychology I frequently hear iterated. When you get caught by the anticipatory nostalgia of an ending, you sometimes can’t help getting a strange feeling – the feeling that, in some ways, you have already left.

When we talk about a story in English, we talk about its "ending". I write ‘in English’ because in other languages – French for example – the relevant word is of a different character. "La fin" means "the end", a phrase that is used in English, but which is less common than the present participle form "ending" that French simply cannot create. "Ending" is a beautiful word in English, because it contains within it the sense of continued movement, of interminability, of the lie told by the word "end". One can always ask of a story ‘what happened next?’ – the endings given by authors are never final. There is always an extent to which they are arbitrary. The endings we experience are like that too. "Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell," writes Walter Benjamin, but until that point there are endings, not ends. As we begin to inhabit them, life is only going to seem – and truly to get – sweeter. Cambridge is never going to look, or to be, more perfect than when we leave it. It will never be more resonant, never be more written over with memory, and the tales that its street corners, courts and archways tell to us will never be more present – never sweeter – than they are now.