As May Week revelries draw to a close, the generic May Ball review has been well and truly had. We’ve heard all about the myriad beauties in frosted yellow frocks, frolicking amongst champagne streams that lap at the feet of mountains of caviar or of gold nuggets or of any other symbol of utter ostentation.

Reflecting upon this picture that all reviewers seem to paint, I realise that every male featuring in their merry tableau is painted with the same face – they all seem to be Pierce Brosnan – whilst the women formed an eerily serene, terracotta army of Nicole Kidmans. The only grub on the banquet table is suckling pig. It’s an effigy of mass-consumption, of utter ostentation, of the glorious and the magnificent and the lovely.

But then I recall the May Balls that I have had the pleasure of attending first hand, and this lavish phoenix of a vision shrivels into a heap of broken images, a puddle of cigarette ash and ProPlus wrappers. It transforms into the scene found at 5pm after the Coast summer sale – heaps of garishly shimmering satin, trodden on and embellished with poorly-defined shoe prints, a plethora of plastic glasses and piles of paper plates. It’s all champagne flutes on pristine white tablecloths, with a cardboard box poking out from underneath it.

Faced with sky-high standards of fairytale perfection, you’d expect this biannual Ball at a small college to fall flat, weighed down by previous disappointments and hangovers. Yet the atmosphere at Catz really did seem to hit the nail on the head this time, and despite the demand for imagination in the ball’s title, a seemingly impossible fiction became reality before guests’ eyes for a night.

The lighting was perfect and the food and drink on offer left me floundering with indecisiveness. Truly Medley Deeply on the agenda and a milkshake stand satisfied every female at the door, whilst the Ball committee offered guests more than mere show.

Yet the night was not without its problems. The one-way system proved a rookie error – less glam and more cattle market,with one too many ‘no entry’ signs and far too many poor chaps positioned about asking to see my wristband.

Essentially, what I have realised is that a good May Ball isn’t made by three different types of meat in five various sorts of bun. It’s not even about big-name headliners you catch a glimpse of between sweaty pits and massacred toes. It’s about the little touches and attention to detail that feel luxurious rather than theme-park-happy.

And it’s here that Catz really won me over. With a theme like ‘Make Believe’, the committee’s vision of the magical was ideal from the start. I overheard a fellow ball-goer call it a ‘boutique ball’.

There is one question plaguing your mind as your hand signs away two hundred and forty precious pounds for an evening four months in the future. What could possibly justify a term of eating nowhere but the Buttery and two terms never wearing new outfits without the price tag grating at the nape of your neck, a relentless reminder of your acute unease?

The answer lies in that cheesy feeling, of ‘make believe’: of Christmas morning for a 4 year-old and ‘the morning after’ for a 40 year-old. And this is what Catz truly made us believe again.