That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent considers why it is that some words have wider implications than others.
I became entangled in the flurry of my fiction of dissatisfaction in coming back to a country I no longer felt was my own; seething with jealousy toward my fellow students who were richer, more beautiful, better-dressed and, naturally, more popular than me. I hardly realised that time was passing faster than it ought, and now look upon these year with tender nostalgia. I had angered a handful of café owners and driven mad a dozen people, but I’d made it, bent but never broken. I had made it through high school.
In High School, I seethed with jealousy toward my fellow students who were richer, more beautiful, better-dressed and, naturally, more popular than me.
And thus, sooner than I had ever imagined, I started University. And sooner than even that, I can see it ending. I remember arriving at York, a walking cliché if there ever was one.
There could be no doubt that I was a fresher, armed with £2.50 and silly smile as I got on the bus. I was a foreign fresher when I walked into a shop giggling excitedly at the wonders of British shopping. I was a silly fresher when I bought a wrecked bicycle for £15 only to waste another £12.95 on a (computer) lock. I was a naive fresher as I stepped into the Charles still excited at the prospect of going out on week nights. I was an unorganised fresher complete with equally unorganised fresher friends eating salad out of a pot for lack of a salad bowl. I was an overenthusiastic fresher as I walked excitedly into a lecture theater, and took overly-detailed notes.
I was a fresher as I never slept, and was always broke. Fresher. Noun. Naive, silly and new as I walked the streets of York, or strolled round campus eyes wide open ready to take in any and all details, idealistic and tipsy as I shared my pseudo-politico-religious views over whisky in a semi-tidy semi-destitute Uni kitchen in the small hours of the morning.
I was a fresher in everything I did, and frankly I had rarely had this much fun.
I reveled, and revel still in the extraordinary multitude of people—their personalities and backgrounds—such that there is no way not to find compatible minds. Equally clichédly within a week my friends and I were inseparable and struggled to remember a time when it didn’t feel right to call each other constantly and “cook” lunch at each others’ places and steal their food and randomly crash or enter into heated (and mildly alcoholised) debate about anything.
I have walked at dawn through narrow streets, mildly inhebriated, in a post-ziggy’s daze, and discussed Titus Andronicus with a semi-love interest. I have walked back to campus from the train station at seven a.m., through a bizarre twist of fate involving some daft prioritising of a hot chocolate and muffin over a bus ticket. And, treading the uneven pavement and looking up at the starry heavens, the moon high above the city walls, Clifford’s tower towering over me as the sun rose, shivering slightly in the morning cold—it is in these random but genuine moments, that I have felt that that this foreign, cold, wet small town was my new loving home.
It is in these moments indeed, that the longing for a sense of belonging, that which High School never did grant me, has been so brilliantly filled.
It is a rare thing to feel that suddenly everything in one’s life is going right, but suddenly it felt that way. I felt at home. I felt happy—not all the time and not outrageously so, but somehow the move away from home was nowhere near as scary as I had anticipated. I came ‘home’ to the same people I saw all day.
Things don’t run smoothly and the bumps you encounter vary in size, but no matter how homesick you may be, how much you miss your family or your friends there is this conviction that everything will turn out fine—not because everything is fine, but because it’s difficult not to feel that way—except perhaps with a severe hangover and a nine-fifteen.
But then you buy a bike, give it a silly name, do your laundry or go to Tesco’s and the utter ecstatic satisfaction of having achieved all that on your own is a reward to keep and treasure always.
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