It’s stormy times across the UK University press this week as Universities from Southampton to Cambridge (basically just those in the South really) hunkered down for the worst weather since 1987/2006/last year.
“STORMAGGEDON”, screams the Southampton Tab while Oxford’s Cherwell actually set up a live blog to cover in real time the end of society as we know it. Well, if you’re reading this, the University is still standing, so yippee for that.
Moving on, as freshers across the country settle down into the banal drudgery of University life, student media outlets have been largely moved away from the traditional “freshers week woes” stories. Yet inevitably the hangover from that infamous week still lingers on, especially when it comes to that age old problem of accommodation.
We might complain about accommodation in York, but we have nothing on the unfortunate students of Anglia Ruskin University (that’s the other University in Cambridge, by the way) who, TCS reports, with just a little schadenfreude perhaps, have had to move some students to the local Travelodge due to an accommodation shortage.
Yet even this has its perks as these unlucky students are receiving treatment that most York students could only dream of. Their room are cleaned once a day and they also receiving a daily bowl of fruit.
Being a member of a ‘second’ University doesn’t prevent you from living the high life. Student newspapers across the country have been agog at the news that four Oxford Brookes freshers have been cautioned by the university warden for plucking the feathers of 17 partridges they had hunted in broad daylight outside of their block, creating a terrible mess, before hanging them upside down in their communal kitchens and bedrooms.
The tweed jacket wearing quartet insisted the University had overreacted and that they had broken no rules, but one wonders whether they had forgotten which University they were actually attending.