Famine in the Forum

Here at the University of Exeter, we are fortunate enough to have been graced with this elaborate Forum, in which I am sitting to write this. It cost £48m to develop, an extortionate amount for a building that is essentially a large airport terminal with a library stuck on the side. Now don’t get me wrong, I love this place, and can often be found pretending to work in the seminar rooms, or wandering between Costa and Marketplace. However it is the latter of these two situations which has caused my latest distress. For those of you with misfortunate equal to my own, who have exams early this week and have been here for a few days, you may have noticed that over the weekend just passed there was nowhere to eat on campus.

Even corporate Costa offers no relief to starving students.

By this, I mean that by 1pm, your average lunch hour, Costa had run out of food, and everywhere else was shut. This delightful campus has countless eateries; be it the RAM, Marketplace, Costa, The Terrace, La Touche, or even the meagre options available at the Peter Chalk Centre, yet the only one that was open was the multi- national franchise. And it had run out of food. I’m talking about the biggest weekend of cramming since summer exams, and there was no food to be found! Even the vending machines, a last resort at best, were broken.

This irksome situation was what picked me out of my well-moulded chair in the library,and walked me all the way down Stocker Road, all the way along Prince of Wales Road, until I got to Saunders. Bear in mind that by the time you reach Saunders, anyone living in Exeter Halls or Vic St or Devonshire Place could have got home to make something instead. So as a result of there being nowhere to eat on campus, I made a nice 45 minute round trip; 45 minutes that I’d have rather spent sitting at my desk getting some last minute revision done. I just cannot understand the sense in closing everywhere on weekends, specifically this weekend, and I wasn’t alone in my despair. Dissatisfied students (to put it lightly) hopped on Twitter to vent their outrage, whether it was because they now had to stay at home where there was food, or because the one working vending machine – a drinks machine, still no food – had served them the wrong beverage.

Saunders: the unlikely source of salvation.

We are students, and science has proven that our brains need food to work effectively. Without food, many of us like to turn to energy drinks to see us through the long days – good luck getting one of them with the Marketplace shut. The result of this disparaging weekend is that I spent far too much money on Costa coffee, and wasted far too much time either queuing out the door there, or walking to Saunders to get food, when really I should have been working for my impending exams. And if my results aren’t as promising as I’d hoped, I suspect I won’t be the only person banging on the Catering Manager’s office door.