The icy wind of D&AD came to a halt nine days ago. And now the world feels very still. Curiously still. Was that all? Is that all there is to life? 

When I started SCA, D&AD felt like the crux of a student’s so-called career. It felt like an unattainable thing. Something that a version of me in the long, far away future would grapple with. A version of me with a much larger brain and an Austin Powers-esque stamina. But now we’ve done it. We’ve only gone and completed D&AD. How the hell have we managed that? And what the hell do we do with ourselves now? 

The studio feels dazed, whipped at by a frenzy of determination and grit. The three weeks that went past now feel like a strange blip on the horizon. A murmur of static in a forgotten land. When it comes to finding out if any of us lucky b*stards have won a pencil, we won’t even remember our own entries. It feels like a nice brain purge, the idea of forgetting about something that once meant so much to us. That was unintentionally profound. 

Anyway, there is a consensus in the studio that everyone’s brains are like empty udders. Milked, I should say. We’ve given D&AD our all, the saliva from our mouths, our darkest lucid dreams and the promise of our first-born child. We’re doubting whether we have much left. Do we have anything left to give? But of course we do! Omg!!!!! We’re only at the world’s most-awarded advertising school! 

That’s why for our ten days off, we’ve been advised to not rot at home, sweltering beneath a stained duvet with a spicy cigarette balanced between our KFC-glistening lips, but instead get some culture in. Find a way to refill these empty udders of ours. Because we can’t go into Term 3 with tumbleweed thoughts. It’s harvesting season, and our ideas will be our currency for the next four months. And we need to be rich, rich people. 

So, from that, I have promised myself that I will be lurking in the cafes and libraries of London’s galleries. When Tony Hector spoke to us at school the other day, he warned us of the curse of indoors. The four walls of our bedrooms don’t hold much greatness. We should immerse ourselves in culture that makes any dilettante squeal. Observing the greatest of the great allows us to filter out the stuff that is, well, not so great. Our antennas are constantly probing the thin air that covers our surroundings. We are a colony of ants, crawling all over inspiration, leaving it with a red, itchy rash.

@laradavis0