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Boredom rules


Lily

Lily is 19 and from Kingston-upon-Thames. She's studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at York University. Will she survive studentdom on the road to graduation?
Entry: 4
Date: 15/01/2007

Swinging into her second term at uni, Lily has been reflecting on squirrels, flat-sharing fears and accidental drunkenness.

Press pause again to resume play, because nothing's changed. I don't quite know what I was expecting from the second term. Maybe I thought that all the students would've gone home and decided not to come back or that everyone had been secretly meeting up without me over Christmas, so I'd come back and feel excluded. Well, I'm pleased to announce that neither of these things happened. There are still many cups of tea to be drunk and a moderate amount of essays to be written. Although I've returned with a renewed passion for the wildlife - there's nothing quite like watching a squirrel sitting outside your window or a swan chilling by the kitchen window to soothe a hangover.

As ever, we've fallen back into the weird space-time void that is university. We've only been back here a week and I feel like I never left to go home for Christmas. Having said that, my block was eerily quiet at first. Some people have had exams, so only the tap-tap-tap of keyboards has been echoing through the halls. Keyboards that were messaging their neighbour profound revelations regarding The Democratic Tradition and Calculus I, I'm sure. Or perhaps the messages went more like this: "Oh my God I'm sooo bored. I've been playing Minesweeper for three hours and I can't move my finger anymore. Have you seen our video up on YouTube yet?"

"I woke up and felt like death, so I downed the water next to my bed. The water turned out to be vodka..."

Mild stress and forgotten duck poos

And underneath all the 'stress' of revision (lest we forget there are a lot of students whose first year doesn't count towards their final degree, so actual stress levels aren't that high) there are also houses to be found. I didn't realise how soon everyone would have to find houses, but most of us were in groups before Christmas, if not already registered with a letting agency. Of course, it's not deciding who you're going to live with that's a problem, because everyone's been 'secretly' discussing that since about day two. Far more alarming is the thought that within the next couple of weeks we all have to get off our arses and actually find somewhere!

But this weekend, our first one all back together, everything was forgotten. It was a frenzied revelry of being exam-free for another few months. Club D was the pinnacle of festivities on Saturday night; there's nothing like the sweet sight of a boy still drunk and in fancy dress at three o'clock on Sunday afternoon. "The thing is, I only accidentally got drunk again today," said a certain gentleman who shall remain nameless. "I woke up and felt like death, so I downed the water next to my bed. The water turned out to be vodka..."

The spirit of freshers' week revisits us as we're all happily reunited, embracing people we didn't really miss like they're long lost relatives and sharing happy catch-up chats and cups of tea with people we really did miss. For now, we're all on our second honeymoon

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