And then there was one

The perfect holiday job?

On the one hand, of course, there are considerable disadvantages to being the last to leave. People frowned at me, exclaiming, "won’t you be lonely?! Won’t it be creepy, knowing you have a whole building to yourself?!" I’ll be honest, after ten weeks solid of living in such close proximity to everyone, much as I love most of them, I didn’t want to go straight home for five weeks of close proximity to the family. I thought I needed a few days to sort stuff out: clean my room, pack and finally do just what I wanted to do. Well, that was the plan, whether it works out remains to be seen.

But the biggest downside? I’m going to have to say, that’s the kitchen. Nice? Empty? A pleasure to be in? Unfortunately this could never describe our lovely Derwent kitchen. I had hoped that once the worst offenders of our universal squalor and general mess had vacated for the holiday, that I could cook without fear of catching something or inadvertently launching some sort of biological weapon – it’s best to never, NEVER open the mysterious tub on top of the cupboards – but, alas, it was not to be. The kitchen is as hideous as always, complete with fat-encrusted frying pans, a tower of often-dirty recycling and overflowing bins.

But this is nothing new, so why should it bother me so much? I’ll tell you why, because if the kitchen isn’t in some sort of acceptable state by the time the cleaner gets in, we may well get fined for it – we’ve been threatened before. So, yes, you guessed it, this means that yours truly has an exciting day ahead of her. A joyous day of organising mould-coated tins, dealing with greasy pizza boxes and probably getting bin-juice all over her clothes in her battle with the stacks of rubbish. A day of scraping dried fat from plates and cutlery and removing socks stuck to the top of the microwave (it’s probably best not to ask – I only hope they actually belonged to someone in the block) sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Well, oddly it has been (although I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t tackled the kitchen yet). It made me laugh when people did a double take when I told them when I was going home. They didn’t seem to understand I didn’t want to run straight home: that I didn’t need to. By sheer luck, it also happened that a friend from home was coming up to the north for a week or so and suggested meeting up for a night out in York on his way up. It turns out; this was exactly what I needed.

I took him to Evil Eye. And he loved it. Despite his heavy student debt, he embraced the spirit of my favourite haunt in York and used the extensive cocktail list to its full advantage. I’m ashamed to say I stuck to my two regulars, but I had an epic night all the same: one that I would have missed had I gone home at the earliest opportunity.

The knowledge that a few of my second-year friends were also staying up for a while made me even more determined to enjoy myself by meeting up with them. Ironically, that didn’t quite go as well as it was supposed to, but I don’t regret a thing. Had I gone home with everyone else, I would have spent the last couple of days sinking into the boring mediocre routine of domesticity and suffocating small-town life.

Instead, I like to think I may have learnt almost as much about myself over these few days of the Easter break than I have over the entire term.

Maybe Freshers shouldn’t be so eager to leave. They might discover there’s more to University than term-time.

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