At Cambridge life is just one long garden party. Or so we want to believe.

The rose plant, sat on a male friend’s windowsill, was admittedly surprising. He reasoned ‘What? If they are in a pot they are manly, it’s like I’m gardening’.  Perhaps, but they still left his room with a delicate floral fragrance reminiscent of my granny. And they weren’t a gift either, no, this was pure self-indulgence. Exam term gives you social license to buy yourself flowers, apparently.

Flowers are everywhere. Girls float around the University Library with flowers in their hair, ethereally draped in pretty floral dresses. You never see them working at a desk, they just glide from aisle to aisle. Fairies trapped in a gloomy factory of academia. In market square, my bicycle enviously eyes up its neighbour - adorned in a garland of flowers, delicately wound around a wicker basket. I feel quite neglectful of my rusty vehicle.

It’s unavoidable. A wealth of boutiques has sprung up in Cambridge, like a bed of pansies. Exclusively selling the pretty, the colourful, and the floral. Who can avoid the chintzy chintzy cheeriness of Cath Kidston? The purported sweetness of floral prints is actually really big business.

In exam stress we like to imagine ourselves in a delightfully English garden.  To be fair, it is what was promised. How many of us were deceived by the brochure – students languishing idly in the Fellows Garden, surrounded by beds of roses. No one told us then that we weren’t allowed on the grass. Perhaps we cope with this disappointment by decking ourselves – mind, body and soul – in flowers?

The UL fairies, and my friend with his potted plant, are just trying to live the Cambridge dream, and it’s a floral one.