In anticipation of the vague yet inevitably incredible future success that awaits the diligent English student, this week I have made my first teetering steps towards the brave new world of theatrical stardom, and landed an audition in a small and intimate Shakespeare production of Titus Andronicus.

I have a strong feeling that this particular dramatic cat is in the bag. From what I gather from a quick Wikipedia search, it’s basically just a really long-winded story about baking pastries, which is right up my street. Patisserie Valerie is my spirit animal. Also, it’s not like I’m not qualified for this acting thing. My interpretation of 'third shepherd' in my school nativity was a masterpiece of carefully controlled rustic charm, a theatrical triumph that saw several semi-menopausal audience members actually weeping in the aisles.

Still, treading the boards is not for the faint of heart. As such, I devote myself to intensive preparations. Every morning I drag myself from my futon, don my authentic 1960s Fred Perry headband, and engage in a brisk round of jumping jacks. My Medic acquaintance makes me a complex drink involving six raw eggs and a liberal quanity of tequila, which I quaff with all the gusto of a seventeenth century drinking pledge. 

Next, I hop onto my elegant Raleigh bicycle and cycle out into the hinterlands of the fens. Gradually the trappings of civilisation slip into oblivion, until it’s just me and raw, wild nature. I park my bike and scream the classic Shakespearean phrase “YE OLDE” over and over in the vast emptiness of a field of cauliflowers. I am the last human being on earth. There is nothing but soaring skies, crumbling, sunburnt soil and, caught in between, my own wonderfully tenebrous voice.

I get back to college in a fluster of endorphins, and enjoy a light meal of steamed vegetables. Then I don my vintage bathing suit and collapse into the bath, waiting impassively for Medic to revive me with red bull. My hair escapes its £6.99 Topshop scrunchie and floats, Ophelia-like, on the surface of the bathwater. I sigh mournfully. I think about life. I think about death. I think about Wyndham Lewis.

The actor’s life is most definitely the life for me. The nobility of making a living from nothing but my own formidable talent. The authenticity of it. The quiet desperation.

I don’t get the part.

“We’re sorry” says the director, his face a cold and heartless mask, “but you’re just not suited to the roles we’re looking for. You’re not really Titus material. Also, you have way too many arms to be Lavinia.”

I beg. I plead. I scream “YE OLDE!” until I am blue in the face.

“I’m serious, love. You’re going to have to leave.”

I watch sixteen episodes of Gossip Girl and cry myself to sleep. At 3am I am woken by the sound of a reveller being sick in the street, and suddenly the familiar gurgling is no longer the joyful herald of vomit-based tomfoolery, but the stifled shriek of Western civilisation brought face to face with the abyss. All at once, I am beset by the isolation of the hopelessly and irredeemably gifted. I am Finn, dying in agony on the stinking banks of the Liffey, the brutal cycle of human history rushing through my hopelessly advanced cerebellum. I am Stravinski. I am Tristram Shandy. 

I write a will in iambic couplets. To Medic, I leave my pipe, my antique stuffed fox, and my favourite poster of Virginia Woolf. I think about slipping into the Cam, and letting the dark and seamless waters close over my tortured brain. Two thousand years from now, they will look back, with their spacesuits and their shiny, shiny chrome, and they will weep at the tragic fate of a thespian so woefully beyond her own time.

Still contemplating my impending demise, I wander to the kitchen to make a bowl of Rice Krispies. For some elusive reason their tenderly wistful “snap crackle and pop” begins to approximate, through a sort of cereal based mimesis, the gentle whisper of falling snow. I imagine it plummeting down in great flurries, swooning sweetly, softly, on all the living and all the dead, and I shed a single, solitary tear in recognition of the unforgivingly horrifying nature of existence.

To be or not to be? That, dear readers, is the question.