University is meant to be a time of transformation and hedonistic leisure. Rooms should reek of sweat, cum and cigarette smoke. As I walk down my corridor I smell Febreze and Earl Grey.

Because York terms start so late, I’d already heard stories from friends at Liverpool University’s Carnatic halls, where you can get the clap from just sitting on the carpet, will probably have your mattress thrown out the window and encounter dead-eyed beak addicts on your route to lectures. When I unpacked in Vanbrugh, everyone was alarmingly polite. I was reprimanded on my first night for having pushed to the front of the bar queue. Despite living next door to the kitchen, I’ve had no problems getting to sleep.

Our corridor decided to have a get together in the kitchen the other day, and ended up playing the old adolescent classics, ‘I have never’ and, feeling a bit naughty, ‘Truth or Dare’. The gulf of experience between city kids and their country counterparts is generally massive. While Scally Ann spent her youth having pilled-up threesomes the quiet one from Dorset passes on downing a drink, as she has never kissed a boy, and blushes at the idea of being ‘dared’ to do a cartwheel. What is it about people who are a bit clever, like most who come to York, and not wanting to relinquish their integrity?

It’s the same in my subject, English. Dispel any notions The dreamers or The Rules of attraction gave you. Modern English students divide into two camps quite easily. There are the boys who fancy themselves as the new Jean Paul Sartre, and dress accordingly, and then there are the girls who have clearly spent their lives, quilt wrapped, with one hand holding up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and the other dipping into a tray of Thorntons. The boys, who want the easy sex of wartime Parisians, have no chance with girls who want to wait till the fields of Barley seed have grown to a height that ensures privacy.

If you’re staring at your genitals in the hope that what is actually rust gathering from the last time you went to Ziggy’s is in fact the early stages of herpes, be consoled. I have some tried and tested methods to ensure life at York transcends tedious kitchen prattle and sexless loneliness. Give yourself a realistic rating out of ten and go for someone at least three digits below you. Et voila! Exciting, if desperate sex. Next, create a role for yourself as a polemic arsehole. Make known your views on topical issues, like the FTR rise. Instead of agreeing that it’s terrible, why not say that the new price rise means you don’t have to suffer the company of peasantry. What was once a prole chariot is now a kingly mode of transportation. As a Vanbrugh ents rep, I had boundless fun thinking up offensive themes in the wake of Porno V, like Concubine V, where members of the female persuasion are permitted only to serve tea.

Second term first year seems an uneasy transition. Bored of drunken games that involve getting to know people in the sense of how often they masturbate, and wary of second and third year shindigs, where people talk about their philosophy of life, drinking wine. You’re past the stage where you can be a bit of a slag, and people seem to be coupling off everywhere you look. Life at York seems a bit prosaic, and you long for some excitement; you want to sit, eating popcorn, as people lose control and all inhibitions on a daily basis.

I had a bit of a think about this, though, about how to settle in this strange York ambience, and was eventually grateful for the fact that I can go to sleep in a noiseless environment without fear that the person I expelled from my room gave me tertiary syphilis. I talked with some sage second and third years, completely accustomed to living here, and they advised me to become a more spiritual person, to get to know myself before judging others, to meditate.

Every morning, I duly chant the mantra: “Fuck off. Fuck off. Fuck off”.

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