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Homesick?
Student David Jackson realises there's a positive side to homesickness...
By now most students are happily installed in squalid holes that universities call 'student accommodation'. Living, like myself, off a basic diet of instant pasta, toast and cheap, flat, lager. After a month or so, most students will have made their friends and settled into a life of gross debt, malnutrition and relative poverty.
However, the other day I encountered a problem that unnerved me. I looked around the room and all I could see was piles and piles of fermenting, dirty, washing. At home I had never had this problem. Washing was folded, washed and presented to me on a daily basis in piles in my drawer. It was then that I realised what I'd forgotten to pack. Washing powder, softener and my mother.
I was homesick. Not pining after my parents affection or infinite guiding wisdom, Oh God, no. I merely wanted a shower that didn't give me third degree burns when Pat in the room upstairs decided to flush his toilet, food that didn't taste of corrugated cardboard, clean underwear, not pants I'd turned inside out so I could wear them twice.
Most upsetting of all, I wanted my friends. A month ago, when my mum sat patiently in the car huffing and looking at her watch, I was quickly taking down the addresses of my friends explaining how I'd write, phone, come down for the weekend. I have done none of these things. It was a this moment that I realised the fickle nature of friendship - and that my Fray Bentos pie had been in the oven for over three hours.
After extinguishing my dinner and eating someone else's, I began to see the advantages of this long-distance relationship with home. OK, so you lose touch with special people in your life but at the same time it means you can sever any links with friends who particularly annoy or depress you. Anyone who you only spoke to because you felt sorry for because they were ugly, you can now simply scribble them out of your address book and you'll never need to see them again.
So, I whipped out my address book and began to cull all the people who smell, irritate me or talk too much. And as I sat there and slowly massacred my acquaintances with a permanent marker, my home sickness passed and I realised that leaving home need not be such a torturous experience if, like me, you have all the emotional depth of a half-emptied paddling pool.
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