Punting: perhaps the most iconic Cambridge activity, and feature of many a serene postcard you might send to your nan just to remind her that you do actually go here. Images of punts gliding smoothly along the Cam must illustrate every college website and prospectus, and our newly-arriving freshers would be forgiven for thinking, therefore, that it qualifies as a Relaxing Activity.

Oh, my sweet summer children, let me tell you a story.

It is a beautiful summer’s day towards the end of Easter term. The sun is shining, the birds would be chirping if not for the murderous peregrine falcon that has recently begun to frequent my college. My college friends and I are mostly finished with exams, and we decide, naïve fools that we are, that punting sounds like an excellent idea.

We begin the day in Mainsburys, optimistically buying breadsticks, hummus, a Spanish olive trio, raspberries, and an inordinate amount of Pimms. Essentially, we are planning for a middle-class hen party; we have forgotten, in our hummus-fuelled haze, that those middle-class hen parties HIRE TOUR GUIDES WHO PUNT FOR THEM. It does not occur to us that this might be a problem. We are five strong independent women perfectly capable of punting ourselves.

I cannot stress enough how much we are not.

We queue for a punt, during which time we open our mini panda-shaped biscuits, put them back in the bag and fail to realise that it is not sealed. There are soon mini panda-shaped biscuits everywhere. This sets the tone of the day nicely. We encounter a puppy named Dougal with whom we are all immediately obsessed, but we fail to take any photos, distracted by the rapidly increasing feelings of impending doom. Dougal got in the boat in front of us, and presumably had a much calmer and less perilous time. Oh, to be Dougal; small, fluffy, able to swim, and not expected to be in charge of steering.

There are five of us, which amounts to about two and a half able and/or willing punters. I am selected to go first for the flimsy reason that I have ‘done it before’ — a trip which involved spinning in increasingly desperate circles in front of King’s chapel and paying extra because we failed to turn round within our one-hour window. I watch, with some resentment, as my friends settle themselves in the boat, before I take the pole and attempt to set us going.

“This bridge has been standing for 800 years,” he tells them, “if these students don’t destroy it now”

I immediately fail at my task, and we spin in circles for a good few minutes while I scream to the amusement of literally everyone. Dougal is well out of sight by the time we make it under the first bridge and witness a man topple spectacularly into the water. We carry his image in our minds like a talisman: whatever we do, it cannot be that bad.

Or can it?

We stressfully continue our endeavour, at one point failing to turn the punt round for so long that we become a spectator sport for a group of fellow students sitting on a college wall. I am the one to free us, and this earns me a cheer; it is undoubtedly one of the proudest moments of my life. Steering is impossible. The punt is going backwards more often than it is going forwards. No one has time to drink the Pimms. We are all too tense even to think about cracking open the Spanish olive trio.

We make it, somehow, to Clare Bridge. Our punt continues spinning around, à la Kylie Minogue, until suddenly it stops. We wanted this to happen. We did not want it to happen like this. We quickly discover that we are in fact wedged, Suez Canal style, under one of Clare Bridge’s three, frankly unreasonably small, archways. A normal bridge has one big archway. A normal bridge would not lead to this situation. Should there be an afterlife, I will be tracking down Clare Bridge’s long-dead architect, and I will be having words.

As we struggle to free ourselves without even the aid of a tiny digger, a tour guide — potentially with a middle-class hen party free to enjoy their olives and Pimms — breezes past. “This bridge has been standing for 800 years,” he tells them, “if these students don’t destroy it now.”

We do not destroy the bridge. We heroically unwedge ourselves and immediately turn back. I am resentful that we were not greeted with the same ovation the Ever Given received upon finally docking at Felixtowe — and we definitely weren’t as late back as she was.

Back on dry land, we are finally free to enjoy the glamourous picnic we intended to delicately sample while processing gently along the backs, perhaps trailing our hands in the water and fanning ourselves. It has instead been potentially the most stressful experience of the entire eight-week term. Bizarrely, it is still a genuinely good way to unwind; you won’t be thinking about your supo work when you’re trapped, seemingly irrevocably, under a very old, very photogenic architectural feature. I extend my apologies to Clare Bridge, and also to any tourists who, searching for their own picturesque photo of the relaxed punting idyll, instead got five moderately weak, very dependent women screaming and throwing Pimms cans around. And also to that man who fell in.