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.
But where is home? Now, being back at York after three weeks being in the place I’m supposed to call “home”, I can look back on the Christmas holiday with a clear eye.
Ironically, after being away for ten weeks, my first impression was that nothing whatsoever had changed.
But there were little things that reminded me that I’d been away. Like the kitchens glasses being noticeably thinner than those that I use up here; and the tines of the forks being longer. And the water felt a whole lot softer than that provided by Derwent College.
And then there were the things that I immediately fell back in love with: my double bed, food that I didn’t have to cook (and that wasn’t pasta or soup). An armchair to sit and watch TV in - and since I got most of this term’s reading list for Christmas presents I took the chance to sit and do exactly what I wanted to do – read a few books completely unrelated to my course. I was pleased I hadn’t lost my knack of reading an entire novel in a day, even if it was only 400 pages.
So, read a book for pleasure? Check. Next on my list was meeting a friend for lunch. I was worried about this one; worried that after the initial elation of seeing each other again in the pub the night before that we wouldn’t have enough to say to each other to last an entire meal. It was with trepidation that I sneaked in to the old café where I used to work and took a table at the back. Could such a close friendship last one friend leaving for ten weeks? He had stayed behind and I had gone on ahead.
But I needn’t have worried: everything was fine. More than fine, in fact, because he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say, and I was happy to let him talk about his life, simply for the pleasure of being sat with him again after so many weeks, and the familiarity of the names and places he referred to. He admitted himself that it was as though nothing had changed, as if I had never gone away: and that’s what I had wanted to hear. I liked the idea that I could always come home and sit in that café and chat for hours.
But when meeting others who had gone away to Uni for ten weeks like myself, the story was a bit different. It became a competition: who had the funniest story, who’d done the wildest things. We became obsessed with talking about ourselves for the sake of it, and telling every little detail, whether the person we were talking to was interested or not.
And even when we weren’t trying to compete, I found myself longing to talk about something relevant. Something I was thinking about – but no one knew it. At the beginning of Freshers, I longed for people who knew me, the ones who I had spent the last 5 years knowing. But then, the tables were turned: I still longed to chat to people who knew what wavelength I was on, except those people were scattered across the snowy country. Even across the world.
So I took a few days trying to get completely away from York… and yet found one of my blockmates had been right when he said that you could take him out of York, but you couldn’t take York out of him. A trip to my old school for a presentation evening was suffocating after the freedom and independence of University life and learning. I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was part of two worlds now, and the important thing was not learning to deal with the situation like one would deal with a crisis, but to try to work out how to strike the right balance between the two.
Hopefully I’ll manage it at Easter.
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