The Mysteries of May Week

Once a year, after the end of 'Easter' (summer) term, the students, colleges, and other institutions of the University of Cambridge undertake to enjoy a week of revelries known as 'May Week'. Being Cambridge, and therefore one of the more eccentric cities in the country, this of course takes place in mid-June, after both exams and the pressures of term have come to a close. May Week consists of a flurry of - extremely grand - balls, and slightly less extravagant garden parties. Unlike in Oxford, where such events take place spread over the three terms - albeit, admittedly, with a conglomeration of 'Commemoration Balls' at around the same time as Cambridge May Week - the inhabitants of her sister city seem to take the approach of cramming all of the revelries and relaxation forgotten for the rest of the year into as short a space of time as possible.

I think I may be whatever the Scrooge equivalent for May Week is.

Obviously I would be Patrick Stewart's Scrooge.

This is, partially, down to finances (a statement met with surprisingly blank looks from several of my fellow students - have they access to an academic philosopher's stone about which I know nothing?). During a year in which living costs are tight enough to warrant Mr S and I keeping a strict expenditures book clocking down our weekly funds, I simply couldn't imagine spending £310 (the cost of a pair of non-dining tickets for the May Ball at my college, Queens') on a night out for the two of us. To refer back to an earlier post, you'd get a good 100 jars of home-made pesto out of that - enough to keep two people going for 200 days, if you could stomach the repetition.

That aside, I'm also not 100% sure if I would want to spend that much even if I could afford it. This is no reflection on the many people who do spend that much on a ball - I very much hope they enjoy themselves! - but I'm the kind of person who feels automatically guilty at spending any money on herself. I go through internal paroxysms simply justifying a spend of twenty pounds on a new dress (will I wear it in enough? Do I really need it? Does a wardrobe half made up of items bought when I was in school really need freshening up?), and I can't quite imagine what contortions of guilt spending £155 on a single night, however pleasant, would put me through. Once again, this is simply my own peculiar mindset, but I have a feeling that, personally, I would spend so much energy worrying about getting £155 of enjoyment out of my time at such an expensive ball that I would, well, fail to enjoy myself.

However, I also find the concept of May Week as a whole a little discomfiting. It is a time of so much conspicuous consumption - of food, of alcohol, of spectacle. It feels somehow both a little wasteful and a little excessive. I worry in an ill-defined way that this week is one of the traditions that makes Oxbridge - which has a lot to offer potential applicants from all backgrounds - seem a little remote, and a little strange. Or at least, it is the type of thing that makes journalistic commentators declare that Oxbridge is remote and strange, in spite of the best access efforts of both universities. May Week is grand and lavish and entirely unselfconscious of how that might make the university in which it occurs appear to bemused outsiders.

Mr S and I are escaping to the country tomorrow to stay with my parents. This is mainly because we have been promising to visit for some time, and it is our only chance, but we are also quite relieved to escape town for the week, not least because in mid-June it is crawling with tourists, and colleges, now filled with the construction of gazebos and tents and soundstages, have ceased to be the quiet havens from the main thoroughfares that they were in previous weeks. However, that is not to say that we haven't taken a small amount of second-hand pleasure from May Week. This afternoon, we went into Queens' and sat in the gardens to observe the set-up. 

And what a set-up it was. Every previously un-covered pathway was lined with a gazebo, to keep ball-gowns and white tie jackets dry in the case of rain, low, amoeba-like tents had been erected over dance-floors which covered pristine lawns (I winced for the gardeners' doubtless emotional trauma at such a sight), and - most amazingly of all - an entirely new bridge, constructed from scaffolding, had appeared out of nowhere across the Cam, providing a second connection between the two halves of college in addition to the famed Mathematical Bridge. This I eyed with some dubiousness, but I couldn't help but feel impressed as I observed the effect of several coats of glossy black paint over somewhat nondescript scaffolding. It would certainly look impressive once finished, and the whole thing was an incredible effort. After finishing our picnic, we walked back through college, passing countless palettes piled high with goodies - penny sweets, bagels, digestive biscuits (?!) - and a troupe of actors rehearsing Shakespeare in front of the Tudor Gallery. An old-fashioned and somewhat delicate-looking merry-go-round had sprung up within an impressively small patch of space next to the river. Anyone going tomorrow is sure to have an incredible night - so long as the new bridge holds!

Contrary to myth, this bridge wasn't designed by Newton, and has
always had bolts.

This evening, we heard the sound of fireworks from our flat, and dashed outside to a good patch of grass some distance from our building. A mile as the crow flies from either Trinity or Clare Ball (it could have been either), we could hear the music and see the display quite clearly. I was delighted that they included a few of my favourite fireworks (the gold ones that go 'wheee' in a shrill voice - I have child-like tastes in such things, I fear) but mildly perturbed to think of the sheer expense of the display, which went on almost as long as any big Bonfire Night performance. For the most part, however, I just enjoyed our private viewing of the array of colours and explosions which filled the night sky for a good 15 minutes. They had some especially beautiful effects which I had never seen before - ones which combined fuzzy gold streamers with bright pink rockets, for example* - and for once I found the music paired with the fireworks (Brahms at one point, ending with the 1812 overture) to be enjoyably apt.

May Week. An eccentric, and slightly overwhelming tradition, well suited, if nothing else, to an eccentric and slightly overwhelming place.



*I fear I will never get a job as a reviewer of firework displays...

The Hiatus Cycle

This post comes by way of an apology for my silence lately. Last Friday I handed in my Masters (or is it Master's, or Masters'? I'm never entirely sure) dissertation, an event preceded by around three weeks of stress, running around the library, and reading and re-reading my three chapters until I wanted nothing more than to throw them all into the Cam and cycle away as fast as I could. In the end, the pages stayed dry, and are as we speak heading towards the desk of the two mystery examiners, but it was a close run thing.

Anyway, this has resulted in me failing to write anything on here for over a month. I have lots of things I want to write, but I knew that the first thing I needed to do was to break the hiatus cycle, hence this post.

The hiatus cycle is a close cousin to that scourge of students everywhere, procrastination. It is the mindset you get when events have conspired to prevent you doing something for so long that by the time you actually get the chance to do it, you feel so ashamed for having taken so long that you can barely bring yourself to actually complete the task. So you delay further, and then the next time you think of it, you feel even more embarrassed. And so on.

So this is me - breaking the cycle, albeit with a fairly bland post. More anon, now that I have got over that first hurdle.