I think I’m going through a quarter-life crisis. At least, that’s what I told my tutor when he asked how I was doing (prompted by the fact that my library books were so utterly overdue that the librarian sent him an email wondering whether I had died). At 21, I’m the right age to be having one, after all. Not to mention, all signs point towards it. I recently invested in a fringe (read: my friend gave me one using blunt kitchen scissors at 1am when we were both drunk), and I tried to reinvent myself as a girl who drinks herbal tea (bagged, not loose. My efforts at reinvention have their limits).

I don’t think the crisis is spurred by age as much as it is spurred by my stage in life marked by those pre-graduation jitters. For the first time in my life, the world has unfurled itself before me, a completely blank canvas, mine for the taking. Except this is utterly terrifying to me. The world may be my oyster, but I currently have a raging allergy to seafood. I’ve been half-heartedly slinging my (metaphorical, I promise) crap at the wall and seeing what sticks; grad scheme applications, master’s applications. Despite absolutely hating the great outdoors, I have even considered the idea of sacking it all in and running off to the peak district to work in a Youth Hostel. I’m screaming into the void, and hoping the void will answer back with a fifteen-point plan of what to do after gripping the praelector’s hand and mumbling some latin, because the alternative is too terrifying to bear.

“I think of the V&A museum and the snuffboxes lined up in the glass cabinets, all ornately decorated, highlighting how we have always taken pride in the most menial of stuff”

Yet all of these ramblings are fairly impractical. Really what I should be worrying about is how I’m going to manage to tidy up my room one final time when I leave. My problem is that I absolutely love tat, which I blame on the emotional beats of ‘Toy Story’ that worked a little too well on six-year old me. I even began to feel guilty about chucking tram tickets because what if they had a family? However, I’m not alone in my love for tat. I think of the V&A museum and the snuffboxes lined up in the glass cabinets, all ornately decorated, highlighting how we have always taken pride in the most menial of stuff. In a way, there is very little difference between these snuffboxes with their gilded casings and plush velvet interiors, and the pastel minimalism of Lost Marys. Even the name Lost Mary sounds like something straight out of Lyrical Ballads – though if any Romantic was to be inclined to huffing through vapes like nobody’s business, it would definitely be Byron (Coleridge is a close second, however).

My room has also been collecting crap because I’ve been sick recently. Like clockwork, two weeks into every term of my time at Cambridge, I have found myself bedbound with some sort of terrible illness (the common cold, usually). Maybe it’s the impending deadlines and their accompanying stresses wreaking havoc on my immune system, or maybe it’s a fortnight of Cambridge tap water breaking down my weak and feeble Yorkshire-water-accustomed body, but without fail, I find myself confined to my bed like a malaised Victorian lady.

“My room has been collecting tat, but in my sickbed stupor, I’ve been collecting questions”

This latest head cold has made it so my eyes can’t look at any screen without giving me a thumping headache, which unfortunately has deprived me of my two greatest screen-related pleasures: watching ‘Real Housewives of Cheshire’ and watching 30-second family guy clips with crap mobile gameplay underneath on Instagram Reels for 7 hours at a time. That leaves me with some good old-fashioned analogue entertainment. As such, armed with a pen I found down the side of my bed covered in hair (I did say I needed to tidy my room after all!), I’ve been writing. My room has been collecting tat, but in my sickbed stupor, I’ve been collecting questions. For my dissertation supervisor: why are there so many poems from the 1570s shaped like swords? How do ciphers work? If Sir Francis Walsingham was alive today, would he have enjoyed the daily Guardian cryptic crossword? (Maybe that last one should be left unsaid in my next supervision). For my friend three doors down: will you please buy me a pack of those Lemsip cold and flu tablets? For myself: when are you going to hoover your carpet?

Even when I’m ill, I can’t stop collecting. I’ve been collecting all sorts for three years; rejection emails and illnesses, photographs and friendships, formal crockery (totally legally), and most importantly, memories. I like to think that if I am going through a quarter-life crisis, then collecting - like a dad going through a mid-life crisis getting really into coin-collecting - isn’t too bad of a way to express it.