The season of farewells

Right, back from Barcelona, my "recovery" holiday with my sister after the madness that is May week. Both deserve special entries I'll try and write in the coming days, but for now, a brief note on the end of Lent term.

One of the harshest, but most apt pieces of advice I was offered by a friend on returning for the PhD was: "Don't get too attached to the new MPhils. They're gone before you know it."

It's both a happy and sad season, at the moment. There are a lot of graduation celebrations going on, and a lot of farewells to be said. The peril of being a PhD student in a collegiate environment is the slow exodus of one-year MPhil students. My MPhil was a dizzyingly intense year, academically and socially, and while the pace of life as a PhD is quite different you can stil get quite swept up in college life and become close friends with a lot of the newbies.

And now many are leaving. It's a frustrating time, as courses finish on different dates, graduation cermonies are scattered across the calander, and people leave Cambridge over a similar range of dates. So there are as many nights being spent at pubs, but more often to say goodbye than hello.

That said, the lovely thing about it all, is the sense that with many it's not "goodbye", it's "until next time."

Aye me.