When someone tells me they’ve read my column, it makes me feel superlative. It makes me feel absurdly pleased. It gives me a dignified sort of giddiness. 

When people quote my specific words back to me, it’s even better. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a helpful phrase, ‘It’s my lucky day’, as a way of putting minor inconveniences in perspective. It has since crept into my friends’ vernacular, and I love it. 

However – and this is a big however – my friends have started quoting this phrase to me whenever I decide to have a minor strop. And it’s actually really, really annoying. There is nothing more frustrating, when I complain about being in the library at 10pm on a Friday night, or that I have an essay draft due in 37 hours which I haven’t started writing, or that I can’t focus because someone at the next table has decided it’s an appropriate time and place to eat crisps, than having my own term thrown back at me. Naturally, I’ve decided that I only approve of the phrase when I make the rules. I’ve also decided that the ‘It’s my lucky day’ theory has a caveat: It does not work in week five. 

For those of you reading this who are lucky enough to not understand the sense of impending doom associated with week five, I will briefly explain. Oxford has notoriously short terms. There are eight teaching weeks during which everything – lectures, seminars, tutorials, society events, meetings, the list goes on – is crammed into caffeine-fuelled action where you forget what a weekend should feel like, or when you last went to bed before 1am. In the midst of all this lies week five, which has an uncanny ability to spring upon you multiple deadlines you never thought you could have, and is also a point in term that most people start to feel pyrotechnically unwell. When I joined Oxford in October, I was warned of ‘Week Five Blues’ and dismissed it as melodramatic fearmongering. Little did I know they were telling the plain and simple truth – it really is quite relentless. 

There is a general truism that a university student, particularly one at Oxford, can only have two of the following three things at any one time: good grades, good social life, good sleep. The thing about general truisms is that they’re generally quite true. Particularly in week five (which, if you hadn’t guessed, is the week in which I’m writing this column). 

I’d like to think I’m keeping on top of my grades, at least so far. I recently got some feedback from an essay which I poured my soul into over the Christmas break. Comments included (and I have selected these judiciously, mind you) ‘knowledgeable and persuasive’, ‘tantalising’, and ‘impressively professional’. I am going to pretend that they were, in fact, writing about my personality. That would be nice. I would also like to think that I have a decent social life. There’s always a lot to do in Oxford, and I’m constantly grateful for the most wonderful, interesting and interested group of people I’ve met during my time here. It’s a pleasure spending my time with them, and I’m very lucky. This means, by process of elimination, that I am lacking in sleep. 

It’s true. I can’t actually remember the last time I woke up before my alarm. Paradoxically, though, I have also become an insomniac. I wake up at around 4.30 every morning and think about my degree, which really is the pits. During a meeting in induction week, I was warned this would happen. I dismissed it as melodramatic fearmongering. How naïve I feel now, when I lie in bed listening to the dulcet tones of the bin lorry collecting empty bottles from Little Clarendon Street, panicking that my laptop will blow up and I’ll lose all of my lovingly documented notes. Or calculating how many words I need to write every day in order to reach my deadlines in time (571.4). Or worrying that I’ll never submit my essays because of some strange technological problem. In this panic, I envision myself as a new version of Miss Havisham but with a MacBook Pro and a strong proclivity for tea, gradually getting dustier as I sit at my desk and the online system politely rejects my PDF documents. You get the gist.

My friend likes to use the metaphor that ‘you can only cook with what you have in the fridge’ and I rather like it. I’m also glad that it’s only a metaphor, because at the moment the only thing in my literal fridge is a jar of marmalade (I told you that week five is taking its toll). She basically means that if you’ve got nothing in the tank, then you’ll get nothing efficient done. She’s right, of course. Although the harsh reality is that you do have to get things done when it’s week five and your metaphorical fridge is empty and it really doesn’t feel like your lucky day. 

Having been in Oxford since October, however, I’ve discovered a few handy tips that are actually quite helpful if you want to write 4,000 words by Thursday, maintain some semblance of a social life, and still resemble a functioning human. I will share them below in list form. This is ideal because it’s week five (did I mention?) and I need to reach my word count fairly quickly so I can spend the rest of the afternoon researching the lyric self. I am also naturally quite partial to a list, as you will know if you have read my previous instalments. And if you have read my previous instalments (particularly if you’re not morally obliged to because you’re my mother), then thank you, I love you very much. Without further ado: 

  • Study in coffee shops. This is good for multiple reasons. Firstly, because they’re busy and you have no excuse to stop working. Secondly, because if you stay there long enough you might make friends with the staff and they’ll bring you extra coffee and perhaps a doughnut when you’ve been behind your laptop for the whole of their shift and they’re concerned about you. I can attest. I was even given a teapot last week. (n.b. I was warned, when I arrived at Oxford, that I would become reliant on caffeine. I dismissed it as melodramatic fearmongering. Silly me.) 
  • Take your hot water bottle to the pub. This means you can have an evening out but simultaneously fool yourself that you’re having a cosy night in.
  • Bring back scheduled nap time. 
  • Ginger shots. The spicier the better. It doesn’t matter if it’s placebo. 
  • Remember why you’re here. This one is actually really important and now I feel a bit foolish for talking about teapots…

I was studying in a library (Somerville, Zoology and Ecology section) last week and noticed a series of engravings in the desk. Some were slightly bleak. One read, for example, ‘had an awful first term, signed, a fresher’. One said ‘TRY HARDER’ in aggressive capitals. Another stated, ‘Everything will be alright’, to which another hand had replied ‘Will it?’ 

The others, however, felt more optimistic. They included, ‘There is hope’, ‘It will be fine’, and, in an ever so slightly less aggressive use of capitals, ‘YOU SIGNED UP FOR THIS’. The most aphoristic, and slightly annoying but nevertheless quite true, read ‘Years of hard work led to this. Don’t give up now’. I’d like to meet the type of person who spends their time etching this sort of platitude into library desks. But I do think they’re quite right, despite the mild vandalism. It’s important to remember what a privilege it is to be studying here. Especially during the pits of week five. Perhaps this can be my ‘second draft’ contemplation for this column. 

My family have been having a small clear out over the last few weeks, which means that often my WhatsApp will ping with a photo of some relic from my time at primary school, or a painting that was potentially intended to be a self-portrait but actually looks like a block of cheese. Of all these finds, my favourites are the poems I used to write. One of them is simply titled, ‘Horse’, and includes the imaginative line, ‘clop clop clop clop clop’. Don’t laugh. Let’s not underestimate the power of simple repetition! What about Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’? Or Lear’s ‘Never never never never never’? Another poem, written a few years later when I was presumably learning about form and rhyme scheme, was about a woman who suddenly died whilst fixing her dodgy boiler. I will quote the final stanza in full: 

The church was heaving, packed full with mourners, 

Stuffing the aisles and all of the corners. 

Woeful and crying, they sang ‘Oh Hosanna’, 

She was buried quite quickly, still holding her spanner. 

I’m not really sure where the idea for this poem came from. What I do know, however, is that my younger self was a voracious reader and writer. Albeit with a slightly quirky imagination. If I could have told her that she would be spending her afternoon researching the lyric self in the Old Bodleian, she would have been pretty chuffed. I suppose it really is my lucky day.