Would a pandemic have prevented my freshers’ week walk of shame?

Poor old students eh? If new arrivals aren’t getting it in the neck for being snowflakes about possibly missing Christmas, they’re being scolded for spreading coronavirus by failing to keep to their rooms.

Whichever way you cut it, 2020 is a tough year to be heading off to university – especially for those starting courses, away from home for the first time.

Being limited in the number of people you can socialise with, and in some cases restricted to remote learning, is not the experience most students anticipated when they first imagined what it would be like to do a degree.

For many graduates, those first days and weeks at university live long – if a little fuzzy – in the memory. They can set the tone for the years that follow, or they can be a swift release of nervous energy before the hard work begins. People can make friends for life, or make mistakes they’ll regret forever.

From a social point of view, I mostly hated my freshers’ week, all of 23 years ago. I was shy, and the prospect of meeting new people largely filled me with dread, especially when doing so required being proactive. As it goes, I would probably have been quite relieved if I’d been told I could only hang out with the six people on my staircase.

Instead, there was forced jollity, anodyne chit-chat and a creeping feeling that I was out of my depth. Other first-years seemed so confident (especially those who had been at public schools) and so grown-up. My automatic reaction was to retreat, to avoid the parties and the trips to crappy nightclubs. I fought against my instinct only half-heartedly.

My nadir came when I ventured to a gathering of fellow history students, which was characterised by heavy drinking of cheap – and in some cases not so cheap – spirits. I consumed too much, too fast and after a trip to the loo found myself genuinely unsure about why I was in this part of the college at all, so far from my own room.

I remember that lack of certainty with odd clarity, knowing only that I was not in good shape and that I needed to descend the stone staircase ahead of me, cross a couple of courtyards and pass a library in order to get back at the building which was my temporary home. 

I tottered past a statue of a famous poet, weaving over worn paving that had known the soles of innumerable drunken students, breathing lungfuls of fresh air as I entered the first quadrangle. Very slowly I made it to a corridor on the other side of the manicured lawns, where I leaned against a cool wall.

The next thing I knew was waking up in my bed, to find vomit in my wash basin and my trousers very neatly folded on the floor. I was as surprised at my neatness as I was dismayed at my puking, and at the pounding of my head.

It wasn’t until weeks later that I found out I had been discovered in that corridor between the two quads by another attendee of the party, more or less bouncing from wall to wall as I tried to put one foot in front of another. 

Heaven only knows how many people had walked by in the meantime, happy perhaps to accept my slurred assurances that I was OK. Thankfully, my fellow party-goer had recognised a man – well, boy – in distress, and assisted me back to my room. When I learned the truth, my humiliation seemed complete.

Really though, I don’t suppose anyone else really thought twice about it, beyond some mild amusement. And sooner or later, most of my fellow freshers made a plank of themselves in one way or another.

Still, if coronavirus prevents a few first year ingenues from making such walks of shame, then perhaps that’s a modest upside of this otherwise challenging time in their lives.