In the case of this week’s chosen theme, I am definitely more sinned against than sinning. I make people angry – it’s a gift. My stammery indecision, lackadaisical manner and tendency to eat nothing but a jar of Nutella a day all week and then wander round the kitchen saying thoughtfully to everyone ‘It’s so weird, I just feel so queasy but at the same time very hyper’ – all of these things are designed to bring out the boiling rage in others. Most of the time I am perfectly inoffensive, even nice to have around the place – like an embroidered throw cushion, I blend tastefully into the background. But then someone will ask a favour of me, or a supervisor will request evidence of some thought going on in this blonde head of mine, and all civility crumbles away.

I am simultaneously incredibly infuriating and also extremely unsatisfying to be angry with. I won’t react, I just blub quietly into my knitted jumper while scheming my revenge for later – leaving rancid prawns in the fridge, putting tiny rocks in my attacker’s sneakers, switching the orange juice with bleach and other such harmless domestic pranks. I have so much sublimated aggression that my stomach ulcers have stomach ulcers. It was not always thus – in early adolescence I smashed a bottle of HP sauce against a wall in the course of a light-hearted dinner table debate, and was known for carelessly tossing my sisters clothes from a third floor window if I felt slighted. But I soon realised that almost the moment you allow your anger to take hold, the mood dissipates, and then you’re left scraping brown sauce out of the carpet with a spatula or picking mini-skirts out of the flower beds, finding it difficult to recall exactly what riled you so much in the first place.

University wrath is very different to cuddly domestic fury. At home, my mother can scream ‘I should have aborted you with a whisk’ and then mere hours later all is calm, you are watching How To Look Good Naked together and bitching about the fatties, while any deep psychological wounds have been safely repressed for marriage counsellors to rake over years later. However at university such healthy slanging matches are just not the done thing – it’s all about the bitter, long term grudge. Also, as I heard a girl telling a friend on the way to lectures this morning ‘I know he’s going to come round tonight, and I just don’t have time to be angry afterwards, I’ve got work to do.’ Giving in to the wrath is hardly an option when you have to read all of Strindberg, pipette mouse viruses into test tubes for six hours or make a cardboard scale model of Manchester Town Hall. So you store up the Feelings until you can go out and drink a liver-shrivelling amount of gin wearing a dress that is basically a glorified top covered in sequins. You’ll either wake up next to someone inadvisable wearing only a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, or tell every girl who comes into Kambar toilets about each mishap that has befallen you since the age of fourteen. Both outcomes will leave you so embarrassed that your shame will eclipse your anger, problem solved.

As an amoral acquaintance of mine told me earlier in the week ‘We’re in our early twenties – now is the time to do hateful, hurtful, destructive things while we’re still pert and rosy cheeked enough to get away with them.’ In this stressful, libidinous, booze-soaked environment, it is inevitable that everyone you know will be unreasonably horrible at least twice a term to someone they love and cherish. So don’t hold back – scream at them for being a heartless cretin, but then move on, because you will doubtless do something as misguided next week. However, if you do absolutely insist on clinging on to your resentment, do it in style. Don’t get mad, get even – skywrite the bastard’s name over town, put laminated posters of their misdeeds up on every spare railing and bribe heavily for a derogatory mention in a regular student column.