WEEK ONE NEWS ROUNDUP: Evacuations, Insensitive Queens’ Dean, and Grindr

Glorious Week One, how you welcome us with open arms! Stumbling hungover and ill from fresher’s week, we are greeted with all our favorite things about Cambridge: the cold expanses of libraries that haven’t turned on their heating, the supervisors who think all we ever do is work, and the sweet embrace of Sainsbury’s Basics, having spent far too much money last week.

Of course, this is Cambridge, and if scandal wasn’t always a-brewing we’d worry we were in the wrong place.

Weapons of Mass Construction

The English Faculty library, normally so welcoming, staged an evacuation on the 28th of September, due to a “strong smell of gas.” Of course, anyone in there was probably trying to get a head-start on this term’s reading, so serves them right.

The Queens’ building works remain unfinished, with the building works began last year still ongoing, leaving the college, like our self-esteems, sinking ever lower and lower.

On the subject of colleges and their insistent rebuilding and renovating, Pembroke students were welcomed to college by a labyrinthine set of blocked passages, whilst “work over this summer to replace most of the underground heating pipes” was being completed

Cause the library wasn’t unwelcoming enough already.

The bursar reassured the undergraduate body that “major heating works of this type happen perhaps once every thirty years,” leaving returning Pembroke students confused about what the major heating works going on this time last year were.

(Not) The Queens’ of Tact

An email was sent out by the dean of Queens’ College, making reference to the ongoing building works taking place in the college. His email was, well, let’s just say there’s more considerate ways of warning people of the dangers in jumping off scaffolding. 

A brand new publicity platform

The Last Five Years, the Week One musical, took to new stages in order to get the word out, publicising their ticket sales on Grindr, the famous gay hookup app.

A matriculation ‘mare

We all worry about going too hard one night only to wake up having missed something important: a supervision, a DoS meeting, your matriculation…. An unfortunate fresher had to be dragged out of their room, presumably hungover, by a porter and forced to endure the humiliation that is taking a matriculation photograph. A memory they can cherish every time they visit their nan’s, their only family member who purchased a matriculation photo.

Christ’s loos

The lavatories were a hot spot at Christ’s during freshers week, with some students mistaking the Darwin Garden as loos, and others mistaking the loos as an art studio, painting dicks on the mirrors using toothpaste.

Who doesn’t love self expression? College staff, one assumes, who sent an email damning the artists in question and asking the incident not be repeated.

The theme of Cambridge students not knowing where to put their bodily fluids continues. Perhaps this is what happens when you let intellectual elitism fester.