The past is an ever present part of the undergraduate experience at Cambridge. As each year succeeds the next, the transmission of traditions and cultures occurs almost unconsciously, and we are aware of centuries of history around us.

That’s why the legacy of Covid still weighs so heavily in student life however – it ruptured this continuum. It is only now with a new class of students that student life is resuming ‘normality’, or what we think was once normality. As a second-year undergraduate, there is a sense of being trapped between past and future – caught between the Covid survivors in third year, and the first years whose university experience has been untainted.

Gertrude Stein, in a fit of accrochable rage, shouted at Hemingway that ‘you’re a lost generation!’ when her car broke down and the mechanic couldn’t fix it. Are we, a century later, also a lost generation? At once, attempts to resurrect past traditions of the undergraduate experience are converging with new ideas about what undergraduate life should be about. Students may still watch Withnail and I, and maybe even the 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. But they seem to depict a foreign world.

There is no college better fitting the description of being caught between past and future than my college, Caius. On the one hand, there seems to be a strong desire to bring back tradition. It has just made Formal wear for Friday Formals compulsory. In November, there is a Latin mass to honour our three sixteenth-century martyrs. On the other hand, there is an impetus to forge new and original traditions, like the Caius Open Mic nights. They’re both successful moves and yet they are polar opposites: the former attempting to embrace the traditional Cambridge of the past, the latter wanting to replace it. And it was lockdowns that made it possible, by suddenly leaving students almost unsure about how to experience Cambridge.

Lockdowns have cast a long shadow in the lives of students, whether we have been aware of it or not. Prosaic things such as Formals hosted at Caius every weekday, or access for students to visit any college are lost in time. Students today don’t even realise how strange it is that King’s is locked to anyone except King’s students, or that it is a unique occasion when you have a formal at a friend’s college.

Across Cambridge, societies haven’t rebuilt themselves from disruption – the Caius Politics Society is conspicuous in its absence, a peculiarity given the alumni who have had successful careers in Fleet Street, Westminster and Whitehall.

The bourgeois rationalisation of the Cambridge don has made them mere teachers

Perhaps most damagingly, lockdowns have accelerated the changing role of the don in colleges. In Waugh’s Brideshead, Charles Ryder is advised not to treat his tutors at Oxford as headmasters or teachers but as his local priest. But the bachelor don who lives in their college set, and knows every student in their staircase, is an almost extinct phenomenon.

In their place is the professional, the nine till five don who uses their rooms only for their formal work and little else. There has, as a result, been a strange death of college discussion societies, which dons would traditionally host in their rooms. This is the type of experience one has and can only say: ‘this is what Cambridge should be about.’ But it no longer is, and I doubt ever will be. The bourgeois rationalisation of the Cambridge don has made them mere teachers.

But although the old world is disappearing there is much to be optimistic about. Lecture halls are swollen, the consequence of rightly stopping the recording of lectures. College societies and bars are mostly restored, although Caius is still lacking the most important thing: Guinness on tap.

Library dwellers and college drinking society bulldogs have been released in equal measure from the restrictions of the lockdowns. Politics continues to permeate Cambridge, but it is not the air most students breathe; rather, more of a buzzing around the ears – ironic considering the reigning monarch, Bank of England Director and Chancellor are all Cantabs and we are experiencing the most serious economic crisis in decades.

But Covid has proven that the student culture of Cambridge is not quite as resilient as one would assume a centuries-old institution is. A world can never be restored completely, and it ought to be acknowledged that we have lost some of the quintessentially Oxbridge things, like discussion societies. The lockdowns were not the cause of this but were without doubt exacerbating factors. A world restored, in part; but also a world still waiting to be made anew.