In such a tightly packed, inward-looking university city, there are always going to be some student names that you hear of more often than others. Oliver Rees, is one of them.

Last year, he started a project encouraging students and Fellows to decorate and fill a matchbox for charity; an initiative persuading people to make their own bottled memories quickly followed.

Then, there was the Twitter-style ‘Library Whispers’ website during exam term, and who could forget the ‘Anonymous Pigeon’ scheme in between?

But now the Jesus student is in the middle of his largest-scale mission to date: love.

This morning, all across Cambridge colleges, fifteen volunteers will be hopping on their bicycles and delivering roses tagged with anonymous messages to 500 students, as part of Rees’ latest brainchild, ‘Beginning, Middle, End.’

In the ‘Beginning’, students were offered the chance to send an anonymous text message to that special someone they had had their eye on. Now that a connection has been created, we are in the ‘Middle’ and the team of do-gooders are willing to deliver positive messages – completely free of charge – on behalf of all those that filled in the online form.

“It’s all about connecting people; finding a way to make people feel special,” Rees gushed to Varsity. “I want to give people a reason to say nice things.”

For most people, such an idea wouldn’t have gone much further than a conversation down the pub but Rees seems intent that he can make a difference to a society that, he sees, has lost an ability to connect directly and intimately with fellow humans.

“This project is meant to be the complete anti-thesis to that concept of getting pissed and having a one-night-stand by doing something caring instead. What’s really sad about virtual stuff is that there’s no physical communication. The first stage was a text service but now we want to make the virtual into something real.”

But surely by providing such a service, Rees is taking away from the act of doing something special by doing all the hard work on the lover’s behalf?“

I appreciate that some people just don’t have time to make such a big gesture. This is not a matchmaking service and nothing can replace real communication – we are just facilitating it. I also think there’s something to be said for the anonymity – it’s exciting to not know who the mystery sender is!”

The messages have been sorted by Rees’ team of well-wishers and only those with a positive sentiment pass the “would-you-be-happy-if-you-received this?” quality test. As for funding the project, apparently that will all become clear in the ‘End’.

So does Rees think he’s found the antidote to a modern age that’s sick with communication deficiency?

“My simple aim is just to make people feel more connected. If this can give someone more confidence – even if only for a day – then it will have been worth it.”