How to graduate in the jungle -

Are you on the wrong continent for your graduation and worried that you will forever be upstaged on your mum’s living room shelf by a glowing photo of your preferred sibling, who graduated from Warwick University with dual honours in French with Italian? Then this could well be the blog post for you.

You will need the following.

A pair of black trousers. Don’t have any? Borrow some from a guy who recently got done up like a dog’s dinner for some fancy tropical biology conference in Kuching.
Some jungle marking tape. See point seven.
A belt. Particularly useful if you have recently been on the fad jungle diet of “bed-ridden for five days, then hospitalised with food poisoning, a bladder infection and infections in both ears”.
A shirt and tie. Again, borrow the shirt from above mentioned Conference Guy. Cut the tie out of card and pin it on with…a pin.
A graduation hat. For this, cut a head-sized hole into a small box of Bran Flakes, stick a circle of cardboard on top and wrap the whole thing in a bin bag, which you can fasten on with paperclips. Unless you’ve cocked it up, your head should fit just about perfectly into the head-sized hole. Otherwise you didn’t make it head sized. Feel free to coordinate your tassel colour with your tie in point four. Always remember that yellow is classic and fetching.
A camera.
Your faked graduation certificate (my real one for a Master’s in Zoology from Sheffield University is somewhere in the post I hope)! Simply roll up some card and tie with the jungle marking tape from point two.
A black microfibre towel. This doubles very nicely as a graduation robe. Again, feel free to pin it in place with a pin.

Optional accessories and extras…

A watch. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fake waterlogged Casio as long as it’s shiny.

A cameraman. I hired Conference Guy for fifteen minutes. I would not recommend his services. I found his fees to be unreasonable and his foul mood to be generally unpleasant to be around.