Ah, Those Witty, Witty Cambridge People II

Outside a Cambridge student hall of residence:

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

With all the seriousness I've seen in the medical blogosphere recently, I sometimes forget I'm just a puny medical student, and that saving the world is not my responsibility yet. Thank goodness this week has never been short of reminders of life's silly side. Leafing through the local newspaper, Varsity, I am confronted by headlines like Cambridge Meat Cleaver Attack, Noisy Brothel Neighbours: Resident disturbed by prostitutes whipping customers, and Caius Superhall Carnage: Vomit and excrement on toilet floor.

Who said university was boring?

And so it is that on Halloween night, I am walking down the road to college when out of the Great Gate appear a couple of vampires. Yes, vampires, complete with pasty faces, fangs, and blood dribbling down their lips. The whole kaboodle. I blink, but they walk past me rather hurriedly, one even managing a "you alright mate?" and I think, what friendly vampires.

Then the Gate bursts open and the Head Porter runs into me at full tilt.

"Geddoutatheway!" he yells, nearly amputating my head with his huge porter-issue boots (I swear the Army supplies them) whilst behind me the two vampires take off into the night. Rambo runs screaming after them. It is only later, from Varsity, that I learn a fresher was assaulted that night after a Halloween bop. A group of boys had picked on a fresher using some wildly imaginative tactics demonstrating the superior intellect that got them into Cambridge:

A member of the group attempted to run into the fresher, failed, and instead ended up in a hedge. The assailant has also been sent to the Dean after "urinating on a table and then on a kissing couple" at the same bop.

Such genius! Such tactical brilliance! No wonder Cambridge is again top of the league tables this year.

As I was walking down King's Parade the other day, smack dab in front of King's College Chapel, I looked down at the tiles on the street and saw this:


Legend has it that long ago, in the early days of the University, the first ever Provost of King's College, Lord Duke Baron Earl Master Provost Professor Emeritus Dr B. Wigg looked over the lands at Oxford, and saw that their students were outperforming his. So he made the decision to pressure his students harder than ever, and introduced personal tutors, just like in Oxford. Only this time, in an effort to show the other place his obvious superiority, he equipped his tutors with motivational tools (read: whips), and gave them the more ominous title of 'supervisor'.

The first Cambridge supervisor

And this is why Oxford has 'tutors' whilst Cambridge has 'supervisors'.

But the kindly Dean of King's College Chapel at the time, the Rev Dr S.A. Maritan, took pity on the students' plight, and decided to create a warning to all future students and applicants of the life they would face here. And thus one night, when the Provost was snoring in his coffin in the Crypt and his supervisors were hanging upside-down in their belfries, the good Dean stole out and laid this tile in front of his chapel, so that it may serve to warn generations to come.

Sadly, the Dean didn't anticipate that the students of the future would be complete masochists, and that his tile would conveniently be left out of the University prospectus. Thus his thoughtful message, sadly, has been relegated to the status of local curiosity. It might have helped the poor student who scrawled this right outside the Department of Pharmacology:

(Before you even begin to ask, no, it wasn't me.)

I'm off to Nottingham tomorrow for the Nottingham Games, and as such this week's Cambridge Round-up will be slightly delayed. But it'll be worth waiting for...it's been a VERY eventful week filled with asses, fireworks, more protests, and more supervisors worth slamming your head repeatedly on your desk for. Stay tuned!