North and South?

I picked the University of York partly because I liked the campus. Partly because I liked the course. And partly because I wanted to get up north.

Two years later and I don't regret my decision. Okay, so my home-town isn't really south enough to be properly south; and isn't really in the middle enough to be the Midlands. It doesn't even have the decency to receive the same news channels in the house (one TV gets Midlands Today, the other gets Points West). But compared to York, it is most certainly south.

So I like being in York. I like getting proper amounts of snow in the winter. I like building up a partial immunity to the cold so I can impress friends and family with my hardiness when I come home. I like working with people who seem incapable of saying the word 'the' – and yet make it sound effortlessly simple to miss it out (and anyone who has tried to imitate this knows how difficult it is!)

When it came to coming home this holiday, I was disparaging. I didn't want to go. Surely, everything I liked, everything exciting, everything lively and meaningful was up north? It was a separation of city and countryside. York was vibrant compared to my sleepy/chav-ridden country town. I was exchanging bars and, well, Ziggy's, for ridiculously over-priced pubs full of old locals and, well, fields. I was going to hate it; surely the promise of seeing family wasn't going to be wholly enough to combat the overwhelming boredom that would set in soon after arriving? I wasn't even going to be getting the lure of free fantastic meals cooked for me, or at least not as fantastic as they used to be – my parents had decided to go on a diet, and if I was coming home, that meant salads and reduced portions and a distinct lack of divine home-baked goods for everyone.

But this morning, despite my disappointingly small Roast Dinner the day before (Sunday lunches at our house used to be a resplendent affair), and the weight of missing all my friends, I managed to drag myself out of bed at 8am to hit my old running route.

And I realised that I love this town. It may not be the perfect sleepy countryside idyll that I make it out to be, but it was comforting to run past the cows grazing near the stream. To get a cheery hello from everyone I met because, let's face it, almost everyone seems to know my mum, or my grandma. For a moment, I had a sense of nostalgia as I looked at the hedgerows and lamented the fact that I used to be able to name all the plants I could see. I dropped this habit soon after primary school because I didn't think it would be “cool” to be in “Nature Club” (I was right to an extent, and to twelve year-old girls, “cool” matters far too much), but I kind of wish I hadn't. Okay, so what use would it have ever have been to me? Would it have helped me pass my exams? Would it have given me any advantage over other university applicants? Well, of course not, but that's not the point. The point is, it was a way of being connected to the land. It was a way of saying, this is my home, and I know it.

And that's the true distinction between York and this difficult-to-place town. It's not a North and South division. It's not even a city and countryside divide, but a place that is home, and a place that is not home. Many of my friends are nostalgic for London when they're in York. But me, I'm nostalgic for my own little slice of whatever/wherever this is. As much as I complain about it; as much as I refer to my house in York as “home”, and as much as I've lost touch with the things I used to love, home is where the heart is.

And that can't be defined by geography or accents.

It just is.

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