Come tomorrow morning fifth week will be over, and that means so will the fifth week blues. The notorious fifth week blues are said to have a contagious quality to rival that of freshers’ flu, brought on by a realization of no longer being in a 0th week bubble of giddy excitement, but caught in the liminal mid-term period, trapped under a piling workload and impoverished from countless trips to Tesco for half price wine. To mitigate the blow of the blues, I was granted a reading week by my tutor (essentially a week of lounging and catching up on New Girl), as well as being offered various food-related freebies and parcels by the college welfare team – coincidence? I think not.
I have been wondering if the fifth week blues epidemic is born of the appeal of being able to legitimately diagnose the inability to get out of bed for rowing practise or an 11am lecture? Or perhaps I have just been lucky, with my week of guilt-free lie-ins and self-chosen ‘reading list’ of trashy mags, to have missed the worst of this supposed triannual virus.
In fact, looking back on freshers’ week, I would say that I had a greater dose of the blues then: barely surviving the Freshers’ Fair by escaping the torrent of free pens and pencils alive (and then the stream of emails inviting me to things I can’t remember signing up for); and the many ice breakers, icy 7am fire drills and ever icier stares from studious third years whilst on a tour of the Rad Cam maze. Tiny shivers ran up my spine at the mention of a ‘crew date’, fearing both the lack of boundaries and regulations to ‘sconces’… and the prospect of possibly never being invited to one. Although with fifth week retrospect I can tell you that a crew date is not half as bad as I had imagined, and it can even be, dare I say it, quite fun. In addition to Rosie’s article on crew dating tips, my top trick is to keep ‘pennying’ the glass of the person next to you, while lifting your own with agility and always with a palm on top. Far worse than the crew date is the the 10am tute-after-the-crew-date-before, which I have also survived, if only admittedly by having a tutorial buddy willing to act as the mouthpiece while I tried to keep last night’s chicken korma down.
Perhaps it’s the endless reminders of the onset of the unavoidable fifth week blues that render the blues just so unavoidable and bring on that feeling of the world caving in on you like the Gladstone Link open shelves. Without a doubt though, I’ve realised, as everyone around me has been frantically finishing their problem sheets or pulling all-nighters, that fifth week is a kaleidoscope of different shades of blue, looming far more darkly in some colleges and for certain subjects than others. And if your fifth week nights can’t be sweetened by copious amounts of sugary tea; or the company of a college cat fails to make you immune to the gloom around you, put ‘Gotta get thru this’ on loop and remember that it’s almost over.