Trapped on a Covid campus

Only after I signed the lease on my house for my final year at university was I told that, this year, all my seminars will be online. As well as all my lectures. Which when you throw in the new ‘Rule of Six’, puts a bit of a downer on clubs and societies and the rest of campus life (online registration for the student newspaper saw just 16 people sign-up, compared to 200 last year). Our library visits have been rationed – when trying to book a seat in the library I discovered that currently there are around 200 seats across all of the university’s libraries, which is about one seat per 190 students (there goes the idea that university is an expensive library membership) – and even digitised lecture hours are being shortened. The tuition fee is the same: £9,250 a year, and almost the same again in living costs.