‘Don Juan’ breaks the most terrifying news yet: peace is over, war has begun.
After a stray St John’s firework set a tree on fire in the Trinity gardens, Trinity has now declared a state of war.
Our Master has recently declared that the tree had in fact not been an instigating factor for the conflict and that the events had merely happened to coincide by accident as she’d personally really wanted to do it for a long time and was just looking for a reason at this point.
An official written declaration of war is currently being drafted, although—according to Cambridge rules — it must be calligraphed in liturgical copperplate on vellum. As such, war has been postponed until they’ve chosen the most historically accurate font.
A series of complex pacts and alliances have now been triggered by the conflict on the recent discovery of an arcane manuscript under a piece of plate glass reading ‘Break in case of Emergency’.
In the emergence of a conflict — the text stipulates — Corpus, Jesus and Christ’s would side with Trinity, whilst Homerton, Churchill and Caius would side with Johns and, as per football association rules, would swap sides after lunch. ‘We’ve never been so busy!’ said one medievalist or other who had been requisitioned from whatever they were doing before (which was probably a long cognac-soaked nap).
A band of Trinity students have also attempted to enter Johns by force but were caught by porters and have now been made to wait for weeks under the pretence of ‘waiting for a friend from the bar’ to let them in. A camp has already formed outside King’s College within minutes of the conflict, although members — when pressed for the details — were markedly unsure about exactly what they were protesting. Most were there for the free food.
Varsity had already published a special edition about the conflict with a four-page pullout, although eyebrows were raised about the fact it had appeared to have been written a month before the conflict was instigated. One journalist wrote: ‘We’re so close to the sources, we pick up the news before it’s even happened. That’s always been our defining journalistic ethic — we don’t just break the news, we make the news, too.’
The wine cellar has been repurposed as a bunker, though the conditions have been considered inhumane, as they only had stocks of Montblanc wine produced during the drought of ‘89, as opposed to the far superior rouge of ‘88. The Pitt Club had already set up a protest over dinner before imbibing themselves back into a catatonic stupor which is expected to last until Lent.
Trinity has been criticised for refusing to obey the Geneva Convention Suggestion and instead playing by the rules of the battle of Agincourt, saying ‘we will fight the only way we know how’ and provoked further outrage after a John’s fellow was shot dead for accidentally setting foot on the Great Court lawn — although Trinity has confirmed that this was regular policy and was not a wartime precaution.
As I am writing this, news has broken that the war has now been settled over a cup of tea; the colleges have bonded over how they may as well play nice, seeing as no-one else can stand the pair of them either.
In other news, Girton has apparently still to catch wind of the conflict, and upon a request for comment last month, we received a parchment note reading ‘What war?’ delivered by a carrier pigeon which promptly died from exhaustion and was served for our lunch.
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