Snapshots Of Hell: The Cambridge Round-Up, Week 1: Of Whale Skeletons, Jobless Linguists and Teetotaling Emergency Physicians

So ends the first week of the new term in Cambridge! And I've only missed 6 lectures by oversleeping (out of the 7 or so that have been held so far), failed one audition, pulled one quadriceps muscle (hey, House has made hobbling around on one leg sexy again --Ed) and been called part of "the worst batch in living history" by my Director Of Studies. Oh, it's going to be a fantastic year.

Join me for a quick look at the week that was in Cambridge:

Jesuans Get Back In The Saddle (Of A Whale This Time)
(In case you're wondering - and I know you are - 'Jesuan' is the term given to students of Jesus College to sound cool. And to give our cheerleading teams something to use to refer to us when we play against those arrogant Johnians. Not to be confused with a certain religious order. --Ed)


Last year a drunken fresher at Jesus made headlines when she was caught riding the extremely tempting horse that lies in First Court (so named because it's the first court you see as you walk into Jesus. Clever eh? --Ed) and is part of the College's attempt to distinguish itself by littering its ancient grounds with completely unrelated pieces of modern art. Since then, great advances in Jesuan academic and intellectual performance have been made (believed to have been stimulated by the Chaplain screening 'Kind Hearts and Coronets' on cinema night, and the Master striding up and down in his long black robe for no other apparent reason than to strike terror into the hearts of unproductive students --Ed) and this year, we see the result at last.

Jesus students have increased their tastes. Graduated to a whole new level of culture, class, and taste.

This time they rode a whale.

This whale, to be more precise. Outside the Biochemistry lecture theatre is a huge replica of a finback whale. After a particularly inspiring chav-themed bop, two students somehow scaled the walls of the Zoology building and found themselves drunk, alone and cold, with only a large whale skeleton and group of rather angry security guards for company.

What a great year for Jesuan achievement.


Linguists Lament Portuguese Pull-out
Driven both by a need for international publicity and a Patricia-Hewitt-like drive to save money, Cambridge University has decided to axe Portuguese from next year onwards. Whilst the Portuguese Ambassador scrambles to the Brazilian Embassy to get other nations together to try and knock some sense into our dons, linguists start to realise that maybe they should've done another degree that gave them more job security, as this sketch from Varsity illustrates:


(Rather like MMC, innit? --Ed)

It's Official: Cambridge Students Are Drunken Idiots
Here in Cambridge we students are subject to intense pressure. Just because we come to Cambridge our lecturers (many of whom step out of their labs once a week and have been wearing the same shirt since they made their first breakthrough in 1969) expect insanely high amounts of work from us, and the worst thing is that some of us actually DO work that hard. For the rest of us normal folk, tension release comes in many forms. Some of us blog (*cough* --Ed), some of us take to the stage (*cough cough* --Ed) but mostly we just drink. Or at least says Addenbrooke's Consultant Emergency Physician Dr Boyle, who adds that hazards for drunken students involve "falling off bikes, falling into the River Cam and having unprotected sex". He also says student binge drinking "sets the ground for alcoholism in future".

So I'm going to be an alcoholic doctor with only 3 years of clinical exposure instead of the usual 5 enjoyed by medics from other universities.

Why am I here again?