Ask the Nympho: 'It was reading week. I did not read.'

• Our woman on campus returns with a full report on a weekend she describes as "academically a write-off"
• A rugby social, a fire alarm at 3am, and a boy named Callum who owns exactly one fork
• This week's reader question: is it rude to leave before breakfast if you have a nine o'clock lab?
• She is 21, she is having a better time than you, and she would like you to use a condom

Right. Reading week. I had four articles to get through and a lab report due Tuesday.

I read the menu at the chip shop on Osborne Street. That is the sum total.

FRIDAY

The rugby social. I know. I KNOW.

In my defence I did not go for the rugby team, I went because Priya was going and Priya cannot be trusted alone with a jug of anything. By eleven Priya was asleep in a coat pile and I was being explained to, at length, by a second-row forward who wanted me to understand the offside rule.

Reader, I already know the offside rule. My father watched nothing else for nineteen years.

But there is a particular kind of man who needs to explain a thing to you before he can relax, and if you let him get it out of his system he is frequently very good company afterwards.

He was very good company afterwards.

SATURDAY

Fire alarm at three in the morning. The entire block outside in the car park, in whatever we happened to be wearing, which in my case was a duvet and one boot.

You learn a great deal about a building at three in the morning. You learn who lives alone. You learn who very much does not live alone tonight. You learn that the boy from the flat below, Callum, owns a dressing gown that his mother clearly bought him.

We got talking in the car park because there is nothing else to do in a car park. He made me toast at four in the morning. He owns one fork. One. I asked what happens when he has a guest and he said, and I quote, "this has not previously come up."

It came up.

SUNDAY

Nothing. Genuinely nothing. I ate an entire garlic bread alone, watched four hours of a programme about people restoring canal boats, and did not answer my phone.

I want that on the record, because people have a picture of me and the picture does not include canal boats.

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION

*"Is it rude to leave before breakfast if I have a nine o'clock lab?" — J, second year*

It is not rude. It is rude to leave without saying you are leaving.

Wake him up. Four words: "I have a lab." He will say something incoherent and go back to sleep and you will both remember it fondly. Vanishing at dawn without a word is how you end up being described to somebody's friends in a tone you would not enjoy.

Also: text later. Not a paragraph. A sentence. "That was fun, I have eleven hours of titration ahead of me, bye."

AND THE STANDING NOTE

Everybody in this column is an adult, everybody said yes out loud, and the pharmacy on campus gives them away free in a bowl by the door.

Take some. Take a handful. Nobody is counting, and Callum, if you are reading this, buy a second fork.