So, after my skiing injury and the Christmas holidays, I returned to Cambridge, teetering on the brink between skint and really bloody skint. Pre-arrival of my lifeline, the sacred student loan, I was disheartened to receive the two most loathed things among students alike: a college bill and a reading list. The college bill recorded an array of idiocies and expenditures committed by my frivolous past self, whom I now hated. At what point did I seriously think eight pounds a week on take-away coffee was a sound investment? And why had I been using so much heating? What ever happened to layers, a good old-fashioned jumper?

Staring at the sum I now owed, I realised, I was no Edith Piaf; oui, je regrette beaucoup.

Alongside the list of financial sins I had committed in the past term came my reading list for the ensuing one. This was, to say the least, lengthy. As a student of English literature, it should not come as a shock that I’m expected to read a vast selection of material before and during each term, and yet, it always does.

The list I recently received was perhaps the most foreboding to date; a great catalogue of suggested novels and poetry anthologies spanned across several pages of a rather threatening Word document; each had their own, even more threatening price tag.

Obviously, you are not expected to buy all these books and there is a wealth of libraries across Cambridge which stock pretty much everything you could ever want to use. However, there are a list of reasons which mean that every term, I end up edging into the overdraft because of purchasing most of my reading list.

So, why wouldn’t I just grab my books from my college library and save myself the cash? Well, for a gal at a very NatSci college, this is often not an option. There may be 400 copies of the same physics textbook, but trying to get your hands on the only copy of The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader can prove quite the struggle. Especially when there are five of you, all working on the same texts for the week, and you are, unfortunately, not the most organised member of the group. 

The next suggestion would probably be other college libraries – just borrow from somewhere like Caius, which seems to smugly possess everything on iDiscover. But alas, this is not as easy as it seems. Invariably, in order to procure anything from these well-stocked shelves, one must first, argue with a sarcastic and unhelpful porter, then, rather pathetically, linger outside the library waiting to be let in by a member of its college, subsequently locate the book in unfamiliar territory and, finally, attempt to check it out; which the librarian is often unwilling to allow because you aren’t a member of the college.  

So, we press on, and come to the safe-haven of faculty libraries. Yet, a trip to the faculty library includes, not only a time-consuming journey there and back, but also the risk of further financial doom, in the form of fines for late returns. If you are not regularly venturing to the faculty site or are not the most responsible of library system participants, the prospect of fines quickly becomes a dark reality.

Even for the less committed student, a Cambridge lifestyle is thoroughly time-consuming. You are always busy. It could be a sports fixture or a supervision, an evening out or an application, but there is very rarely, if ever, a moment where you don’t have something to be doing or somewhere to be going. For this reason, I have caved. I do not bother to argue with librarians or venture across town in the hope of acquiring a book which may or may not be available at that time. I quite literally pay the price for my reading list because I don’t have time to waste.

Since Amazon Prime lovingly gifted me a year’s free membership, the deliberation between ordering a book or borrowing it from a library ceases to be much of a question. When it’s raining, or Cambridge-freezing-cold, and I have the option between either braving the elements, cycling into town and searching for a book or selecting a £1.99 Wordsworth Classic Edition for next day delivery, well, it becomes something of a no-brainer.

These frequent ‘buy now with one click’ clicks eventually amount to a fatal sum. Yes, your shelves may be filled with Austen and Defoe, but your bank account is pretty barren. I suppose my grandpa would say it’s a ‘millennial thing’, the need for instant gratification among our generation, but I’m not so sure. I can make do with a slightly broken phone charger by bending it to a certain angle and even if my jumper is wearing holes in the sleeves, I won’t buy a new one because it isn’t necessary. But it is always necessary to have the material for your weekly essay, and you can’t afford to be without it. So, it comes down to the simple question of time or money and, in a place where you’re always running out of time, money seems to go just as quickly