A sobering flashback to times past: a long weekend spent in the company of old friends, and now just hours later, back in the Big Empty, listening to the soundtrack that shaped my musical life more than six or seven years ago, and suddenly, everything’s very serious once again. No more drinking, no more raving - back to the books; facing up to the harsh reality of why we’re here, once all the revelry is done. Time to once again try to face this monstrous challenge of academia.

Uni is a new world, and it can seem that everything in it is geared to highlighting that fact - that it is completely different from anything experienced thus far. Our past lives of secondary education - or whatever - are left behind for this one, and they become very separate: Uni time, and holiday time, where holidays are a return to the old world. But when they come together, we have this strange merger; these rare moments of refreshing familiarity when two very different states cross over - mix in lots of alcohol, and suddenly when they separate out once again, and we’re left with the here-and-now, the very real, very present New, it’s something of a rude awakening. And now once again the friends are distant, in some remote place; the worlds divergent again.

I think that’s why it feels so euphoric at the time, because we are made to think that we’ve lost this past - that it is just that: the past - but when we’re reminded in such an overt way that we still have these connections and these friends and these experiences, it’s a huge subconscious jolt. But one for which I am very grateful.

“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.” -Yeats

The last light fades in the West… the pressure rises… Student, cast off thy shackles… Storm clouds on the horizon… The Great Reckoning is almost upon us… we enter the long, dark mulling-over of the soul…

Fourteen days to go until the main body of exams begin, and the campus undergoes a remarkable transformation. Sneaking in under a week of high temperatures and cloudless skies, a new ambiance has ingratiated itself into the student body - the sudden and inescapable spectre of revision. “Some time off” is now “two weeks away” (which, with five modules, boils down to an average of three days maximum spent on each subject) and a feverish pissing-contest now grips the halls as two camps emerge - those struggling to slave away for as many waking hours as possible, and those committed to perpetual procrastination.

It comes as something of a crux for the student, who, so recently freed from the burdens of assignments and all but a handful of weekly lectures, suddenly has a lot of free time on his hands. Without the safety net of regular lectures, however, he suddenly has to put in a lot of graft before he feels he is “working”. The great fear, at this time, is of not doing enough, when one’s peers seem to be making superhuman advances that would make Stakhanov redouble his efforts. The shortcomings of previous terms, it seems, must be atoned for by efficient use of every hour. It is a competitivist nightmare of massive proportions.

And with a lack of lectures, time disappears. My timetable is currently reduced to four regular hours a week, giving two whole days off (plus weekends). Rising at 10 or 11am, napping mid-afternoon (intentionally or otherwise) and investing some time in cooking make for days that vanish with frightening speed, and that plague of the late starter - that constant feeling that the time should be about three hours earlier than it is.

And before examinations proper, the fearful introspection, dogging your efforts to sleep, eat, concentrate: did I listen enough? Are my notes sufficient? Should I be on this course? Coupled with the gradual return of assignment marks from the previous term, the rise in pressure is tangible; a slow but steady thickening in the rarefied atmosphere of the campus bubble.

Only time will tell. As we prepare to do battle with the administration one thought sticks in the mind: “thank God I didn’t come here in the hope of escaping the ambiguities of secondary education.” Oh, wait…