Julia Lasica 

Following on from Blanca’s doodles last week, I thought I would document this week with drawings, too. Like any week in Cambridge, it was filled with lots of varying ups and downs, exhaustion and also the most fun I’ve had in quite a while – days here are so oddly spaced out, hardly seeming to begin before the sky starts to darken and the library lights click on, signalling that yet another little seventh of yet another week in Cambridge is drawing to a close. It does make me feel slightly nervous, how structured each day is, and that when I arrive at its end, it seems I have filled in a box, which carries me closer to the end of term – but sketching for five minutes slowed this down and allowed me to think about marks on a page other than the letters in the essay I was writing. On Monday, I stretched the definition a little, and included just some grass I had picked up and decided to press in a notebook.

None of the drawings are accurate depictions of all the things which happened in my day and flowers did not really stand tall and bright around me as I worked away in the library. But I found that adding small twists like the thin layers of light pink and blue brought my days a little bit of magic which perhaps they were lacking, objectively. Week Four at Cambridge wasn’t what I wished it had been, in terms of how long I spent outside the library at concerts, or at talks, or any of the other events everyone always seems to be going to and talking about afterwards. But there were more than enough moments of excitement which stretched through my days, and now allow these drops of happiness in pink and blue to make their way into my drawings.