You think graduation is the end of everything. You could be right. But it is also the beginning of the most legendary bender you will ever attempt to undertake. Because there was Graduation Ball. The University of York Graduation Ball 2006 was held at the York racecourse. I really want to say that it was vastly memorable, but I must admit now that as the soi-disant aggregative climax of my uni experience, it was rather a letdown. Great party, tick. Mates all around, tick. Personal digital photography extravaganza, tick. But nothing more. I thought, "So this is it. Whoop." How wrong I was. Because there was Results Day. Actually it doesn't deserve the uppercase at all. It's just results day. It wasn't some giant coordinated release of results that I expected it to be, with students swarming over campus like ants on a corpse and shoving around the notice boards and delighted shrieks mingled with miserable howls. Students merely moseyed on down to campus sometime during the day, mostly hungover from GradBall the night before, some rang in to check, some got their results by proxy. Some departments didn't even release their results that day. I didn't get my results until two days later, not because my department released them late, simply because I didn't want to know them. My mate Rhiannon burst the news upon me when I went over to her house to help her pack, and I'd just like to say right now, ladies and gentlemen, that when you've been expecting a Desmond (2/2!) and get a first instead, it's something else. It's really something else indeed. Rhiannon's dad was in the next room moving boxes and it must've seemed to him that his daughter was consorting with Tourette's sufferers. Afterwards I went over and bashfully apologised for my profane outburst, but I still had this lingering feeling that I would henceforth be known in Rhiannon's household as "that girl who swears prodigiously upon receipt of good news" A little while later, I walked into town, and while waiting for mates to show up, purchased and consumed a bottle of champagne. Followed by a bottle of champagne. Followed by many other things, but I don't remember what they are anymore. I don't mean to promote binge-drinking; the human body is not made to withstand 37-day benders on a regular basis, but if you absolutely must embark upon one, graduation is probably the best time to go about it. Looking back, it seems like the period after GradBall made up for everything that GradBall wasn't. The nights of intolerable brightness with the people who've woven the fabric of your past three years. Talking into the early hours about things all the more inconsequential for the knowledge that you'll never again lie out in back gardens swigging gin and debating the cake/biscuit dichotomy of the Jaffa cake. Your very last purloined traffic cone. Getting spectacularly kicked out of the Gallery nightclub. That one last (massive) library fine. Your expertise at negotiating through a minefield of duck poo. Goodbyes and goodbyes and goodbyes and the sudden cognizance of immense tracts of geography that never meant anything to you until someone left to be there, the differential antithesis of here. And you turn around and wonder when the world appeared. You think graduation is the end of everything. You could be right. But you're not. Suzanne | 
