In anticipation of my graduation this year, I’ve spent the entire year fretting about my imminent departure from Cambridge. Some time around the middle of Lent, my friends and I started marking our ‘lasts’, a practice that quickly turned from sentimentality to silliness. After marking actual milestones – last weekly essay, last Homerton bop – the ritual slowly became ridiculous: “This is my last time studying in the Waterstone’s cafe”; “This is the last time I’ll ever get a book out of the UL”; “This is the last time I’ll have a supervision at Newnham on a Monday…”
Time is life’s Achilles heel, an injury magnified by the three-year-long, formative experience of university. No matter how far through you are, time suffocates: in first year, you worry about spending such a long summer away from your friends, while in second year that same summer seems far too short to read every single Greek tragedy ever. And as for third year, well, it goes without saying.
As we wade through the dregs of Easter term, I’m proposing we collectively enter a delusional state in which we see time as on our side. Contrary to popular belief, there is time to have fun during Easter, and once exams are done, social and temporal conventions are thrown completely out of the window anyway. Walking out of the exam hall on the 12th, I will not be thinking about the medieval supernatural and whether Margery Kempe would feel her famous “gret sorwe” if she read my paper. Three glorious weeks will be stretching out before me, begging to be filled with just about anything except studying. I owe it to those weeks, Cambridge and myself, to fulfil this divine prophecy.
“We were putting in eight-hour shifts at the pub instead of the library”
Having spent the past three years ‘locking in’ to academic work, job applications, and maintaining sanity, my friends and I are more than ready to lock in to fun. Post-exams last year, our alarms were still set (albeit several hours later than before), but we weren’t waking up to pump out practice essays or memorise Milton: we had plans for Jacks on the Backs, window shopping, and yes, a lot of pints. We were putting in eight-hour shifts at the pub instead of the library. Cambridge is kind enough to grant its undergraduates a few weeks of relaxation to mitigate the entire year of stress.
The post-exam period fosters spontaneity. You go to a May Ball, wake up at 3pm the next day, and then decide to randomly walk to Grantchester, or to buy a coffee without (shock horror) instinctively pulling out your laptop. This year, I’ve decided to do things differently, and have composed a comprehensive bucket list of everything I want to do in Cambridge before leaving. 27 days is not a long time to relive all the best parts of three whole years. My friends and I are keen to accomplish the bucketlist, our bank accounts and livers less so. But fun must prevail. So here’s what I’ll be getting up to this June.
The art of doing nothing
In Cambridge dialect, ‘doing nothing’ directly translates to ‘not studying’. But ‘the art of doing nothing’ becomes re-intellectualised and thus sanctioned when you flip it around to ‘doing nothing, in art’. I wouldn’t be doing justice to my former titles as Arts Writer, Arts Editor and Vulture Editor if I didn’t encourage you to make the absolute most of Cambridge’s arts scene while you can. We are incredibly lucky to have access to so much of Cambridge’s culture, often for free. I refuse to leave Cambridge without going to consider the Kettle’s Yard lemon one last time. Go to an exhibition, a play, a poetry reading, anything – before you realise it’s not nearly as easy to do these things elsewhere.
“It would be completely understandable if you take a vow to not read a single book for the next six months”
Library crawl
The concept is not fun if it involves taking your exam stress with you into every available study space in Cambridge. It is fun, however, if like me you have reached full capacity for the amount of books taken out of Cambridge libraries and need to return them before you go home. I will greatly enjoy walking into the English Faculty Library knowing I don’t have to sit down and work for the next eight (or nine, or ten…) hours. I might even make a weekend of it, as I don’t think I can quite manage lugging 20 books around Cambridge. It would be completely understandable if you take a vow to not read a single book for the next six months after your final exam. However, if you can stomach some light reading, the library crawl is a perfect way to return all your course-related books and take out books to read for fun. (Reading for pleasure – a radical idea, I know!). Across all of Cambridge’s libraries there are 16 million books. We often forget that not all of those books contain niche, dry criticism about a topic nobody outside of the Cambridge bubble will have heard of, let alone care about. There are so many contemporary fiction and non-fiction books that are available for borrowing. When else will you ever have such a vast selection of books just a stones throw away from your bedroom?
“I intend to reclaim such moments in nature (while dodging the odd flying cork)”
Tracing roots
Once the (medieval) supernatural has vanished into thin air, the natural will need tending to. In other words, I will be needing nature to tend to me after spending more time in the library than my own room. Cambridge’s green spaces are far and few, but the ones we do have more than make up for this. I’m envisioning spending long afternoons reading in the Botanic gardens, replicating C-Sunday on Jesus Green, and getting sunburnt in the orchard (or just not rained on). Moments of peace are also far and few at Cambridge, and I intend to reclaim such moments in nature (while dodging the odd flying cork from prosecco sprayings).
Cakes and ale
Two culinary staples have marked my university experience. Each Sunday during term, no matter what state my weekly essay was in, I’d be queueing up for either brunch or a roast. A couple of quid in exchange for a plate of unimaginable joy in the form of hash browns or cauliflower cheese is, to me, a fantastic deal. As well as perpetuating my hall presence, I’m going to level up both meals by splashing out on a Fitzbillies eggs florentine or a pub lunch.
Speaking of pubs, we’ve reached the activity that will be dominating my post-exam period. My friend Lucy and I are the proud founders of Friday pub tradition (you’ll never guess what that entails), so we’re more than qualified to point you towards a well-poured pint. The Granta and Byron’s Bear are perfect for sunny afternoons which beg for a beer garden. The Pick is a student staple, while the Eagle is a Cambridge rite of passage (and somewhere my dad insists on taking me every time he visits). For a balance between cosiness and claustrophobia, The Free Press and Champion of Thames pour a healthy dose of each. The Rock or Prince Regent are just far enough to qualify leaving Homerton without bothering to go back into town at the end of the day. And when I can’t be bothered to leave at all, I simply fall out of bed and into the Griff, the hidden gem that is Homerton’s bar. I reckon I could easily take on a pub a day for three weeks, in my plight to toast Cambridge farewell from the Regal to the Eagle.
“The connections I’ve made here are what have changed me the most (and I’m not talking about the LinkedIn kind)”
The Cambridge characters
We all probably have about 30 people we know fairly well here – friends from clubs, college, your course – who’ll all be needing a catch up over coffee (a flat white or an espresso martini). But I’ll bet there are five to ten people who have defined your last three years, and who will logically dominate your last three weeks. I love Cambridge, I love Homerton, and I love studying English, but the supportive network I’ve found and the connections I’ve made here are what have changed me the most (and I’m not talking about the LinkedIn kind).
Friends get you through the everyday of uni: you work, eat, and even live together. They are pretty much the only thing that remains constant in such a transitory period. Despite the downsides of cramped college accommodation, living on top of each other means that friendships are cemented for life (alongside your mortal enemies, if the college ballot lottery did not work out favourably). Therefore, do not take this unique proximity for granted!
I’ve met the most amazing set of people who I feel privileged to support and be supported by. I met my girlfriend in Freshers, and we’ve been together ever since. The people who I knew when I didn’t know anything – about living alone, doing a degree, being an adult – have stuck around, and we’ve watched each other grow up, and grow as people. So going to the pub is in fact not the most important thing on my bucket list. It is making the most of the people who are not just part of, but are my university experience. And going to the pub with them.
Pretty much anything goes during the last few weeks of Easter term. And everything goes when you leave, except your memories and your mates. So keep those things around. And don’t miss brunch on Sunday (unless it’s a roast this week, in which case don’t miss a roast).
