As an obsessive documenter, the New Year is always a time to look back on everything I’ve done throughout the year. Each Polaroid, receipt, and business card marks an instance that I found meaningful enough to be preserved forever, memorialised with a glue stick or a ballpoint in my annual Moleskine. However, since coming to Cambridge in October I’ve not kept on top of this practice, collecting things as I go only to shove them in a desk drawer: eventually my collection grew so large the drawer itself struggled to open. Although frustrating, I now find intense value in my collections sitting at home, drowning in a pile of ephemera waiting to be catalogued. Sorting through my hoarded treasure becomes a walk down memory lane: my first Jack's immortalised through a business card that I picked up on after a history talk with friends, the name tag that came on my gown, and most precious of all, the programme from the GADS panto, picturing our M1 rowing captain as the title character, Shrek. Clothes tags and paper bags serve as a reminder for next term that I must be more careful with money, yet pictures of the clothes themselves seem to offset those sensibilities rather effectively. They are a way of looking back in a moment in the year which is so focused on looking forward.

“The non-tangible reminders of university stand out just as much as polaroids and receipts”

My opening journal entry of the year is, likewise, always monumental. The first page in any new notebook, like all of these mementos, is a sacred thing, and I thank myself every year for the intimidation that forces me to write in my best handwriting, allowing me to easily read these lines from January 2024: “I hope I settle well into university, enjoy my course and the people. I hope I develop more of a sense of self that doesn’t rely on the people around me. I think these are all completely reasonable”. It’s a warming sentence to read; as I look back on all of my past years of resolutions and goals - drinking 2 litres of water a day, consistent exercise, finally finishing the socks I’ve been knitting for seemingly the last decade - I realise that I have actually achieved what I had aimed to, and can look back and not feel very silly at the unfulfilled grand notions I’d had for the future. The year was born out of these year old aspirations, collecting journal entries as I do ticket stubs.

When looking back on my first Michaelmas at Cambridge, I find it hard not to feel happy with how things are compared to that wish a year ago. I have settled in well to university - too well some might say, as I proudly wear my college puffer and scarf around my small village at home. College is something I have truly missed over the winter vacation, and although I live deep in the countryside, nothing compares to the Girton experience. Grey squirrels are nothing when accustomed to black ones, country walks pale next to the Girton nature walk, and weekend mornings are nothing without brunch. The non-tangible reminders of university stand out just as much as polaroids and receipts.

The objective facts of my academic Michaelmas are one too many essay extensions, late night (technically early morning) ‘power hours’ and not as much of The Leviathan read as there really should be. It’s hard to lament about workloads, deadlines and the rest that comes with a Cambridge degree when you feel so truly lucky to be experiencing it in a wonderful city, with such wonderful people. The friends I’ve met since being here mean that I am at peace with the last element of my 2024 goal being unfulfilled: “I hope I develop more of a sense of self that doesn’t rely on the people around me”; this is indeed a reasonable thing to aspire to after spending 18 years cloistered in a small town, ready to leave whatever the cost. However, looking back on my first term and the people I’ve met, I would be thrilled if any element of my sense of self - in 2025 and beyond - reminded me of them, even if these things can’t be neatly glued into a journal.

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