Your childhood bedroom is now a storage cupboard- returning home for reading week

As the days get shorter and the to-do list gets longer, many of us will begin to turn our minds towards Reading Week. While some will stay at uni or take the opportunity to slip off for a sneaky holiday (and who can blame them with the weather we’ve been having?), for the majority of the student body, reading week means returning home. 

This is an opportunity to catch up on the work that has inevitably accumulated over the past few weeks. The plan is always to spend day one getting organised, day two making serious progress catching up on missed content and spend the rest of the week attacking the reading list. In reality, the first day disappears into unpacking, day two is spent catching up on sleep and seeing friends, and before you know it it’s Thursday, and you haven’t touched a book yet. Of course, it may also be the case that your family have their own ideas about how you should be spending the week, which may involve helping round the house or wheeling you out to visit relatives. By the time you’re done visiting family and meeting up with friends, the carefully planned work schedule might start to feel a little optimistic. It can be hard to stay productive when you have access to a sofa for the first time in six weeks.

The positives

Coming home can be a huge relief. Goodbye overflowing bins, squalid kitchens and damp bedrooms! No more passive-aggressive messages on the accom group chat or dealing with filthy flatmates for a whole week! At home, the heating is on, the fridge is full, and the house is clean (my kitchen at uni has a fly infestation, so the bar is pretty low). But the relief of coming home can be so much more than just the physical comforts. It’s also about the alcohol detox you promise yourself, catching up with friends who throw the detox out the window on day one, and hanging out with your dog that can’t remember who you are. For all the excitement of university, it is comforting to return to the familiar. It feels good to talk to family properly, face to face, instead of the rushed weekly phone calls squeezed in between seminars. Not to mention it’s nice making dinner plans without having to split the cost of ingredients six ways!

The strangeness

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But there can be something strange about coming home too. You return expecting to find everything as you left it and, instead, find out that a lot can change in a few months. Catching up with old friends can be a reminder that life hasn’t been standing still while you’ve been away. Suddenly everyone’s got placements, promotions, internships or actual career plans, and you’re left wondering when everyone got so grown up. Friends go from struggling to organise a holiday to managing shift rotas and updating their LinkedIn profiles unironically.

It’s not just friends who change while we’re away. Even home itself may start to feel a little different. Perhaps a younger sibling has gone off to uni, or an older sibling has moved out. Maybe someone has even dared to tamper with your childhood bedroom without consulting you. You may start to realise that, whilst you have been busy building a life at university, life at home hasn’t exactly stood still either. 

Familiarity and nostalgia 

Despite all the little changes, some things will remain comfortingly familiar. For me, coming home to London, the first glimpse of our famous parakeets as the coach rolls into West Kensington always brings a familiar prick of nostalgia. It’s reassuring to see London’s aggressively green, slightly ridiculous-looking unofficial mascots still going about their business. It’s the kind of small detail that makes you realise you’ve missed home a little more than you thought, even if your bedroom has since become a storage space and your delinquent friends are now frighteningly employable. 

Still, it’s hard to complain when the fridge is full, the bathroom is clean and, if you’re lucky, someone else is doing your laundry for you. Enjoy the home comforts, catch up with the people you’ve missed and make the most of the short break from student life. Most of all, don’t forget what this week is really about – getting back on top of the work you left to accumulate while you and your flatmates were at the pub! Your week 10 self will thank you for it.