A lone woman of mystery

For these seven glorious months, it is very easy to forget you're engaged in any kind of learning activity at all.

Essays and lectures are submerged beneath a blur of pubbing, clubbing, mass Primark expeditions, scientific investigations into the accuracy of use-by dates, accumulating the obligatory hoard of pointless artefacts like road signs, traffic cones, inflatable barnyard animals and small pieces of bar furnishing, each with their own "guess you had to be there" memory attached, and watching even better students do inane things on YouTube.

From September to March, life is good. A trip to the upstairs kitchen is a social event, and there is always someone who will go to Tesco with you.

Yes, from September to March, university is just peachy.

It is a trip to sugarland in a banana boat sailing on a river of ice cream.

But here's the catch: it has to be, to make up for April and May.

Which, as I've discovered this week, are UNBELIEVABLY RUBBISH.

True, I've only been back a week.

And thinking rationally, no doubt things will improve as soon as term starts, everyone is back in halls and our loan cheques come through so I can eat again.

But after seven solid days of watching every old Friends episode tv-links.com has to offer (twice) with an open book balanced on my lap in the hope of a little osmosis revision, I am not thinking rationally.

I am thinking miserably.

I am thinking that a trip to the laundry room might be the highlight of my day.

At first it was a fun concept '” with barely anyone around, those who were only to be found buried from the neck down in revision notes quoting theorems to themselves and occasionally breaking into wheezy wide-eyed laughter, I thought I could be a lone woman of mystery.

I would flit about the capital being terribly sophisticated and enjoying my own company.

I would sit in Regents Park reading Virgina Woolf, smiling contentedly at people as they passed me thinking "what a sophisticated lone woman of mystery", and by the end of the week I would have ploughed through so much of my revision that I could feel all smug every time I passed the wheezy, wide-eyed people on the stairs.

Like most of my fun concepts, of course, it lasted about an hour.

While in my mind I may do "lone woman of mystery" very well, in reality I do "crazed, desolate procrastinating loser" far better.

So while I did go and sit in Regents Park, I spent it checking my phone every 36 seconds for signs of contact from the outside world (anyone whose heart has ever leapt at a beep that turned out to be from the loving folks at O2 will sympathise).

And the only flitting about I have done was roaming the empty corridors of my building to scratch at doors in the vain hope somebody might talk to me.

So yes, university is the best time of your life'¦ but only the times when you're not playing with Wikipedia for four hours a day and talking about yourself aloud in the third person to pretend you have some company.

Ooh, I think I just heard a voice at the other end of the corridor'¦ I'm off to scratch on their door and see if they want to take some Rescue Remedy and do some laundry for kicks.

Of course, the voice may have just been in my head, but I'll take my chances.

As long as I don't do something desperate, like revision, I should be all right.