The end is nigh!

Tomorrow I leave university and go home for the summer. Today people are starting to leave, and the atmopshere is melancholy. The last few weeks have seen everyone finishing their exams and campus has been buzzing: groups of people sprawled across the fields in clouds of barbecue smoke, music blaring from bedroom windows, queues outside the ice cream van parked in the piazza, the pub packed out with people who have been in there six hours straight and are starting to teeter on their stools.

For many people, post-exam life has been one big sleep-deprived party. Now, everything is starting to wind down. Rooms are bare, the walls stripped of posters and the hideous pastel-coloured and questionably stained university bedcovers returned to the beds. The abusive signs we pin up on each others' doors (I woke up one morning to find one that said I'M GONNA CREEP INSIDE YO LIKE A WARM KITTEN! with accompanying illustration, inspired by the Mighty Boosh) have been taken down. People stagger up and down the corridors with suitcases that look like they're about to explode. Even the sight of the empty fridge makes me a little sad, and I miss having to delve through piles of gone-off vegetables, pizza boxes and bottles of vodka in order to locate my milk for a cup of tea.

I can't believe my year as a fresher is over. It seems like only last week I first walked into my room, nervous, excited and friendless, ready to introduce myself to the strangers in the rooms around me. Those strangers are now my best friends. This year has been so surreal: existing in a little bubble world populated entirely by fellow students, and living side-by-side with them too, cooking and sharing a bathroom. Our first year results don't count towards our degree, so it has basically been like a year-long holiday to the Land of Irresponsibility, going out three or four times a week, sleeping until stupid o' clock in the afternoon. Next year won't be the same. We will actually have to do work, a thing most of us have forgotten how to do.

Since I'm in a nostalgic mood, I'd like to share a few things I have learnt in the first year of university, because I believe I've become a completely different person over the months I have spent here - hopefully in a good way.

• Your mum (or dad, let's not stereotype) is pretty much the best person in the world. It's only when you're kicking the broken change machine in the laundrette, moving aside mountains of scabby plates and pans covered in month-old congealed food to find enough room to eat your dinner off the kitchen table, or filing outside at 4am in tiny pajama shorts in the rain because some drunken idiot has failed to accomplish the simple task of making toast without setting off the fire alarm, that you truly appreciate what an amazing job your mum does.

• In the first year of university, your sense of humour recedes to what it was when you were about twelve. Since you're not required to be a responsible adult anymore the most juvenile things become funny again: unpicking the lock and bursting in to the bathroom cheering when someone else is having a shower, jumping on top of someone who has for no reason just jumped spreadeagle into a bush, waiting until your friend has left his door open with his laptop on and then changing his Facebook status to "just wet himself in Tesco, how embarrassing!" and his profile picture to a really, really fat person. The other day my dad asked me how we made each other laugh at uni in the absence of unfunny Dad Jokes. "By throwing each others' mattresses out of the top story window," I replied. He thought I was joking.
  

• If you thought you were clever, university soon teaches you that are in fact irrevocably stupid. There are many, many, people who are cleverer than you. You will probably end up in a small room with five of these people listening to them hotly debate, in a deeply philosophical way, whether the bloke who decides what font to print a book in is in fact an artist. You will stare at your shoes and slowly lose consciousness.

• On a more serious note, you must study a subject that you love. Never choose a subject for its academic prestige, because if you secretly hate it, it will show in your work. Even if you love a subject, when you study nothing else except it, it becomes a bit like a black hole that mercilessly feeds on your enthusiasm and turns you into a bored, cynical wreck. Honestly, I already feel like I've read enough Chaucer to last me a lifetime, and if I ever hear anyone open a friendly anecdote with the line "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" I think I will snap and transform into some kind of bizarre literary version of the Incredible Hulk, destroying all in my path. If this is what has happened to me, think what would happen to you if you hated your subject to start with.

• You'd think that, with only a few hours of lectures and seminars a week, you would have plenty of time to pursue hobbies and spend your time productively. Not so. You will find that you never get anything done, ever. This is because you will spend most of your time doing things necessary to being a respectable human being such as washing, feeding and cleaning up after yourself; when you are not doing these things you will be too lazy to do anything else. Hence you will lie on your back on a field trying to find pretty shapes in the clouds, watch three series of one TV show in a week, take two naps every day, tape over your door with newspaper and then burst through in a dramatic fashion - anything except the work you are supposed to be doing.

• Friendship is totally different at university. You probably know the feeling when you spend all day with a friend, and then sleep over at their house; by the next morning you are fed up with each other and can't wait to be alone. Well, at uni you spend every day and every night with your friends, but you don't get fed up with them. Instead they become like a second family. You miss them a ridiculous amount when you are split up from them, as I am now split up with my friends for three months, and you can't pop over to see them because they come from all over the country, and often from other countries too. I grew so used to being around them constantly that now I am home alone I am bored senseless. I don't know what to do with myself. Which is mostly why I'm writing this blog.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. I learnt many more important things whilst at university but I don't remember most of them, meaning most of them probably weren't all that important anyway.