Kealey’s Campus Confessions

I like to think I’m a stable human being. During exam season I can usually be found under my bed writing ‘failure, failure, failure’ over everything I can get my hands on. But for most of the year, I’m pretty together. However, it recently occurred to me that for me, in a few months time, THERE WILL BE NO MEN.

Let me explain: right now, this teeny tiny campus is a supermarket of men. You can’t move for the attractive, single, under 25s who have been specially and helpfully selected by the University of York for enjoying thinking, and were then put onto a small campus containing lots of gyms. Unless you study History of Art (where you might only ever meet four men… and they’re gay) you will spend three years swimming in an educational soup of virile sausages with barely any constraints on their time and with nothing better to do, if the moment strikes you both, than to have a gentle prod (if that’s what you want. No generalisations here). Best of all, because York is so small, all you have to do when you meet a new man, is ask someone, anyone, and chances are they’ll know his sexual credit rating, a concise list of his previous partners, and the consensus on performance quality. Three years at York are basically the best ‘compare the pecs’ service ever. Not that that’s particularly healthy.

Now, fortunately, many people would never dream of worrying about this, and would rather be getting on with their lives thank you very much than talk about men, and I’m almost with them. But I might just possibly, at some point in the very, VERY distant future, want someone to help me wrestle my children into the awesome Pokémon outfits I’ve bought them, and compliment me on my morning breath. So I guess, after this year, if something horrible and unfortunate happens to our current boyfriends (by this I mean a break up, not death), our choices are to either handle the stress and embarrassment of an office romance (scary, scary) or to start assaulting good looking strangers in the street – and in all events to trust in a life that functions outside of the Willow Toilet Knowledge Database of All Information on All Men.

Alternatively, there is always the option of following in the footsteps of one of my more manic friends who wrote a list entitled, “The friends I’ll think about marrying if I never find love again, in the order of not terrible, to fairly terrible”, which, worryingly, culminated with her cousin.