LSMedia or Liverpool student media at liverpoolstudentmedia.com is a brand new website launched by the University of Liverpool's students to promote and support talented Liverpool student's creative written, visual or radio content.

It’s a typical Saturday afternoon; the rawness of the morning’s hangover is slowly but surely beginning to wean and you suddenly have an overwhelming urge to leave the house . After a quick text around, you all troop to your  local cafe in your hangover best. The preliminary vat of tea is chugged and even before the first hour is up several paninis, various slices of cake and evermore pints of tea have with gulped down with ease. And quite suddenly, four hours have passed without any sign of productiveness and more importantly no knowledge of where those hours have gone . Basically, you’ve spent your entire afternoon in a cafe doing nothing but eat, drink and fool about. But, why? What is it about the cafe surrounding that urges us to waste away hours inside? Or have those pesky cafe owners slipped a sneaky something into those mugs of tea to keep us relaxed in those sofas? 

 In the nineteenth century, cafes were seen as so much more than a meeting place to the French bohemians. A hub of activity, where ideas could be shared, the bourgeoisie watched and a bohemian identity formed. Do we as students fancy ourselves as the next Murger, Courbet or Baudelaire? It can be reasoned that students themselves are practicers of bohemianism, with our unconventional lifestyles and our company of like minded people. Not to mention our forced appreciation of that bohemian tipple, Absinthe.  However, as much I would love to romanticize myself as a modern bohemian, I don’t think that is the answer to why I’ll spend hours of weekend in a cafe. So goodbye dreams of being Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge. 

Could it possibly be that we’ve followed suit from the big boys and girls of the metropolitan cities who go to cafes to network?  Putting on their best attire and a full face of makeup, they sit in a cafe (laptop and coffee included) just to create contacts for business purposes. Basically, just ‘being seen to be seen’. Hmm, students, getting dressed up and going out just to be seen, sounds like a typical night out to me (vodka and hangover included!) Students going to cafes to network? Maybe not. 

 Hang on, is this the answer? Picture this, you’ve had a sudden burst of energy/fear concerning your forthcoming essay so you drag various textbooks, your notes and your laptop to the nearest cafe, and you prepare yourself slug at some work with your friends . But once inside the hub of warmth and tea, you forget all about those textbooks and notes, and the hours whizz by. Hands up if this is familiar. To me the answer is clear, students are lazy. Epiphany or what? In no way am I pointing the accusatory finger at you all, granting myself a halo and judging look, I’m lazy too! It seems that laziness possesses us the moment we accept that unconditional offer. Of course, I’m not saying that students never do any work, but we certainly are lovers of ‘leave-it-to-the-last-minute’ method, (but that’s another article for another day.) By going to a cafe, you appear to actually be doing something, by doing nothing. We go a cafe to do nothing rather than sit at home and do nothing. By sitting in a cafe all day, our laziness can really get comfy and that’s why we spend so long in there - we can’t be bothered to get up. And that’s fine, at least for now. So, cafe anyone?