It would be fair to say that we all get that same anticipatory feeling of dread as week five draws near: work begins to pile on, housemates get on your nerves, and your nose is raw (from all the covid tests), but nothing could have prepared us for the storm that hit our accommodation block this week: scabies.

“I always thought that there was nothing like that feeling of wanting to get started on an essay, like an itch you have to scratch so it’ll go away”

I always thought that there was nothing like that feeling of wanting to get started on an essay, like an itch you have to scratch so it’ll go away, and that is a feeling that scabies, I have found, quite literally embodies when it infests you. After self-diagnosing with this crippling affliction, myself and a few other housemates had the thrill of ordering our topical treatment, the anticipation of curing ourselves of ‘The Itch’ almost moving us to tears. Rubbing it over our nude bodies proved to be a thrilling incidence of intimacy in a time where intimacy is quite literally against the law.

Then again, this was the very sort of closeness that got us into this pickle in the first place. We truly were getting under each other’s skin, but we just hadn’t realised that in doing so we were facilitating the burrowing of some – actually quite a few – less-welcome guests. It all started with Prosecco Night no.2. Drunkenly stumbling through the pandemic-deserted streets of Cambridge, something in the air was drawing us towards the river’s edge. There’s just something about looking down at those freezing, dirty waters from Orgasm Bridge as they scream “I CAN MAKE YOU FEEL SOMETHING”, when orgasms seem to be a thing of the past and that liberating fizziness of wine-drunkenness reaches your toes, rendering you numb to the Baltic chill of a February twilight.

On a directly related medical note, scabies is a water-borne disease, so our infestation seems to have been drawn out from the depths of the Cam. Or maybe it was just Trinity poisoning the waters of Cambridge, like a King ramming his moat full of crocodiles. Back at college, we sat in a circle holding hands, downing our glasses and vowing to be best friends for life. This was the sort of solidarity guaranteed to get us through the week without a breakdown. Little did we know, this was also the sort of solidarity guaranteed to spread our freshly contracted scabies throughout the group. Nobody was safe.

“This was the sort of solidarity guaranteed to get us through the week without a breakdown”

The next week saw an exponential increase in cases of the aforementioned ‘Itch.’ It strikes often at night. A battalion of scabies bombarding you in the pitch darkness like a cowardly lover. (Anyone who feels personally targeted by this should probably purchase some scabies cream: £10 at Boots). You can’t sleep, you can’t focus, you’re in constant pain, so it’s basically like your average period, but you also have to devote a day to laundry and fumigating your bedroom.

What was more exciting even than that whole saga, was having to tell the wider household that no, you don’t have Covid, your lovers that no, you don’t have an STD (not really), but instead that you inexplicably seem to have contracted some medieval-sounding condition with a name frighteningly similar to rabies. Week five really does hit different when your all-nighter incorporates the activities of a troupe of mites as they bury themselves under your skin and spawn their children into your hands. If it wasn’t for them, I’m quite sure I’d be on track for a triple first...

Explaining this to your long-suffering supervisor in an attempt to defend the travesty of an essay you produced in a COVID-19 riddled, post-scabies Britain was possibly the low point of a week always doomed to be hateful. You probably would have done more work for it, you cry, had you not had to devote an entire day to hot washing all your clothes and deep cleaning your bedroom.

Other than that, nothing much else has happened. The geese on the Cam seem vaguely more aggressive than usual, but who can blame them? We have dipped into their territory several times over Lent, desperately trying to spice up our nights in a way that Cindies no longer can. Perhaps Trinity isn’t the culprit. Maybe the scabies was an act of revenge for our geese-disturbing shenanigans.

Oh Karma, you sweet Executioner of retribution, why must you hurt us so?

“Week five really does hit different when your all-nighter incorporates the activities of a troupe of mites as they bury themselves under your skin”

Now cured of this crippling affliction, the group of us who have undergone the treatment are forced to avoid those whose cream is yet to arrive, lest they re-infest us, forcing us to demand compensation from them on the grounds of violation to our physical and mental health. Relations are already strained at a time like this, and a lawsuit would likely cause tensions that would be difficult for us to overcome. That is why this week has also seen an exponential increase in the amount of Just Dance™ that has been performed in the corridors. It’s hard to be annoyed at someone who is enthusiastically hip-thrusting in full view of the Porter’s Lodge, even if they’re simultaneously ‘accidentally’ knocking into you (to facilitate the mites’ abandonment of them in favour of your enticingly bare forearm).

Avoiding scabies does keep things exciting at least, as does bopping to the song “Pump It” by The Black-Eyed Peas, which does a lot to get the heart racing at 3am, and has connotations reminiscent of the primary reading for my essay this week – the Earl of Rochester’s very sexy “A Ramble in St James’s Park” – an essay I finished at 5:50 am on the morning it was due. Try following that with a microwaved Sainsbury’s Apple Crumble and you have yourself a freshers’ night to remember.

Anyhow, what have we learnt from this Lent Term week five, then? The Cam is apparently riddled with water-borne scabies mites, people are surprisingly willing – under the right circumstances- to shell out £10 for a cream that has to be slathered all over them from head to toe and left for 12 hours, and dancing in the early hours of the morning is the best way to combat the week five blues. Sorry that we finished writing this so late that none of our advice can be applied to your breakdown week until next term. We were very busy, obviously.