Flatmate Number One and I have just been talking about “The Fear”: the genuine panic that sets in pretty much exactly one week before your final exam. “The Fear” is vaguely motivational, but largely incapacitating. It is really more of an abstract realisation that you have created a situation from which it is too late to change one’s destiny, apart from to make it worse; ie you have to work your arse of just to maintain the status quo.

“The Fear” is the most depressing part of finals. The constant work and the close relationship that you have with your favourite desk at the library are not exactly crucial elements of a fulfilling life in my eyes, but the worst part of exams by a long long way is the fact that you are more likely to go down than up, and that your fate has really been sealed. Most people at this university will get a 2:1. A 2:1 is a good degree; I am currently in line for one. If I worked really hard and got asked nice questions in the exam (by nice I mean ones that are tailored so that I could answer them in my own, unique style, wowing my examiner with my precise knowledge and my original slant upon the said inquisition), then I maybe could get a first. But knowing that me and 90% of the people around me are getting 2:1s before we have even sat the exam is rather depressing. There is a sense that there is no point in working, because we shall all get the same result, but if we don’t work, there is that chance we will get the lowly 2:2. But worse, all this work, the last month of not having fun and getting drunk, of endless reading and staying up late in the library, will somehow seem wasted and anti-climatic whenever I read my grade off the noticeboard and see my number, along with hundreds of other numbers, reading 2:1. For me, there will not be a sense of achievement. Just standard, like everybody else. And then, what would have been the point of all that work? Of course, because we are all doing it. Nobody I know is skiving off, not bothering right now. We have all come this far, and we are probably all just about as smart as each other, we probably deserve to be ranked just about the same as each other. How democratic.

I have a wish right now. I wish that my ever-so-pretty ballet pumps were not made of synthetic materials, but leather. Right now, they make my feet sweat, and therefore my feet smell when I wear them. A nasty and unfitting context to their prettiness. I suppose the solution would be to get some odour-eaters for them. Its on my Tesco wishlist. Along with toilet paper, razor blades, sparkling water, strawberries, and some form of meat. The basics of human existence.