I realised I’d made a mistake last week when I opened my bank account with both eyes closed. Clicking on the app, I let my screen buffer fluorescent before I even dared to look. I’d bought a ticket to Emma May Ball and it had left a £170 shaped dent in my transaction history.

I’d already begun to soothe my conscience, with interviews booked to work at other colleges during May Week. I’d calculated that if I worked two or three events that ticket price could be repatriated, and it shouldn’t be too expensive to give the illusion of black-tie if I found an evening dress on Depop and put on some false eyelashes. But it was more than the cost that bothered me: it was the fear of missing out. After all, I was a fraud of a Cambridge student: I had matriculated over Zoom, could count the number of formals I’d attended on one hand, and my experiences of May Week last year concluded in a trip to Spoons and a drunken swim in the Cam. It was finally time I got the ‘real experience’, so I’d agreed to go. I’d been lured by a siren call and leapt from the boat, bank card in hand, and nobody had tied to the sails.

“Anger was directed at the cost and inaccessibility of something deemed to be so universal within the ‘Cambridge experience’”

As themes have emerged and tickets have been released over the last fortnight, the cost of attendance was met with shock by many undergraduates – many of whom had not even matriculated when the last May Balls took place. With tickets ranging from around £90 to £225 for a singular evening of festivities, Camfess was yet again laden with those angered by the cost and inaccessibility of something deemed to be so universal within the ‘Cambridge experience’.

The May Week President’s Committee has been continuously toeing the line that May Balls are an increasingly inclusive, sustainable and accessible event. But let’s be frank, most people’s expectations of such a reality ever transpiring are low. Whilst SU led initiatives like Access-a-ball and Sustain-a-ball are highlighting important issues with the organisation of May Balls, their existence is a result of the inherent inaccessibility of the events themselves in the first place. Attempts to open up the May Ball have only illustrated their current inadequacies – and perhaps something more fundamental about the events themselves.

Take, for example, the cost of the ‘bursary ticket’, a new initiative introduced by some May Ball committees. Some balls have seen ticket prices halved, while others offer discounts of around £10-40, and so the claim that May Balls are now affordable to all, because of the bursary ticket, is not only an act of egotistical performativity, but a patronising insult to the students it ‘seeks’ to include. Many students, despite these discounts, still cannot afford to go – and the students that are ineligible for a bursary and similarly unable to pay is an entire discussion of its own.

“It is elitist- students who want to enjoy the fun make a Faustian pact to wait on their peers in return for a ticket”

Additionally, for those who do not attend their own college’s May Ball, a price tag is still attached, where many colleges force out resident students for the entirety of the event. Those with vast networks at Cambridge can find a floor to sleep on with ease, but for the rest, an inevitable hotel stay has its own costs. Either way, the practice is outdated and forces students who cannot afford the event to become homeless – all while making room for those that can.

The issues regarding the accessibility of May Balls fit into a larger story within Cambridge. Many students that form the increasingly diverse demographic that the University boast about are unable to fully partake in Cambridge’s unique undergraduate experience. Whether that’s due to increasing costs of rent, variations of expensive dinners like Halfway Halls, or financial pressures, at a university that bans undergraduates from taking on employment during the term, Cambridge remains closed off despite its modernisation. Wealthier peers take on a Kirsty Allsop-esque persona with hypothetical budgeting solutions,the issue remains unchanged, and May Balls go ahead as usual.

We fill each other’s heads with narratives that justify these traditions. I have to wonder, however, if the ‘value for money’ argument that is so often employed in the defence of the May Ball, where £100+ for a few hours of fun is a bargain, is ever actually used by anyone with one foot in the real world. Are the different stages and world-famous acts really worth the money, when all we really want is a good night in college to remember with our friends? If we have to spend this much to have a good time, then it might be more telling of us than the May Ball itself.

These events were once a very different occasion: all-male, stuffy and formal. Today’s May Ball is a very different affair – but, ultimately, the May Ball must go. May Week doesn’t have to be defined by its elitism, where students who want to enjoy the fun make a Faustian pact to wait on their peers in return for a ticket.

So here I sit, with an Emma May ball poster already pinned to my wall, as a blistering hypocrite with a dwindling amount in my bank account, wondering whether there are some traditions we shouldn’t have resurrected post-pandemic.