The words of his mouth were smoother than butter

The Mays is an anthology of writing and images by students at Cambridge and Oxford that's been running for years, so I submitted two pictures that I took at the end of last summer for this year's edition and they made it into the book. The book itself is a really nice object, and the spacing and ordering of the poetry and prose on each page seems to have been considered just as much as the layout of the images. I was excited to be published in an actual book, as well as for the garden party where drinks and strawberries were served at 11 in the morning.

A feast is made for laughter

May Week in Cambridge absurdly falls in June, the week after exams and term have ended, and is set up to be consciously hazily hedonistic, lazy and lavish. Around the oysters, candyfloss and Pimms and lemonade that overflowed at every ball and garden party that we went to, we spent our time following the river into the countryside, discovering bright blue outdoor swimming pools, and duck-spotting. One afternoon between eating ice-cream on the college lawn and going punting in the night, Siobhan and I cycled to a strangely timeless open park of picnic tables and picket fences amongst the fields, where we marvelled at the colour of the pool and took these pictures.

Much learning doth make thee mad

These were taken in my first few weeks in Cambridge, when it all felt strange and lonely and I'd just stayed up until it got light writing my essays for the first time. Arturo came to visit and we cycled away from the town and my books until we found open, empty fields and tiny paths in tree-covered clearings, where we hid our bikes, walked towards the railway bridges, and took these pictures with our camera hanging from a tree branch.

The dense accumulation of fogs and vapours enveloped the chaos

The last winter I spent in Paris was the coldest I've ever felt - it felt painful to leave the house, and even sitting still for too long at home made us begin to shiver. Maciek was experimenting with infrared photographs, and ended up taking a series of pictures in the Buttes Chaumont in the pitch black of winter nights for Vice. I styled the series with Bambou and Charlotte, which meant bringing all the clothes we'd sorted in huge bags to the park, as well as running around on the icy grass with battery boxes for the lights, struggling to stay upright and keep warm.

For the final picture, we wanted a group of girls running naked as if they were deers caught in the headlights. The six of us who did it in the end built up the nerve in a bar around the corner before, moving from picon beers to vodka drunk straight from the bottle in the vague hope that it would, if not warm us up, numb the cold. In the end it wasn't the cold that forced us to stop shooting, but a park keeper who came across us and attempted to march us all to the authorities. We desperately scooped up the rolls of film while rushing to get dressed, and then made a break for it all the way back to the bar we'd started off in, now giddy with the cold and adrenaline - and perhaps the vodka too.

After we'd warmed up enough we went home for tea sipped in front of the fire, and waited for our feet to regain feeling.