Click your heels three times motherfuckers, we’ve arrived

The greatest gift you can give this Christmas is one we all received: the reminder of the reason why we all left in the first place.


Click your heels three times motherfuckers, we’ve arrived

Me feat. books.

Returning to university after the holidays, I am powerfully struck by one particular thing: I am so grateful to be back. Mid-term nostalgia may have led to feelings of despair and existential crisis, but God do you remember what it felt like to be challenged? Suddenly you’re nostalgic for a place where you only live for eight-week stints, and you’re missing that particular flavour of Cambridge pretentiousness from your everyday routine.

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but only when the absence continues. Reuniting brings back the harsh reality, that things were not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s so easy to build up being home, and fantasise over having your mum around to make you a cup of tea, and not having to go to lectures. However, this utopian dreamscape is shattered immediately upon return to your childhood home. Your visions of a life of idle pleasure are soon replaced with the cold, hard thud of reality.

What’s more is that being in the hometown is fucking weird. You expected to come back, and find everything still the same, and to some extent it is.  But there are subtle differences you keep catching yourself on, like the sofa that your parents have inexplicably moved two inches to the left. That familiar world playing slightly off tempo only increases how out of sync you already are, building your whole emotional state to a billowing crescendo which tolls out “YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE ANYMORE”. Despite your earnest earlier exclamations from the beginning of last term, nobody back home can understand you due to your horrendously corrupted speech (see “The Orwellian Language of the Cantab”).

Shameless inability to communicate.

You now sound like a Cantabrigian remix of Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl”. Whenever you say “totes” you sound like a parody of yourself, and your friends have taken to carrying a water-spray bottle and spritzing you when you start chatting shit.

So studious.

Being at uni has changed you: you’re a better person now, more mature, more sophisticated. Unfortunate, nobody thought to inform your parents. Did they always treat you like such a child? Maybe your return at this most festive of year times has brought out the nostalgia in such a crushing full force that they are deliberately trying to trigger some sort of infantile regression, in order to relive the era when you were at your cutest and least likely to leave home.

Or maybe being away has finally made you self-aware enough to recognise this treatment.  Whatever the reason, you can no longer stomach the coddling which makes you feel like you’re breathing through cotton balls.  Return to Cambridge, and relish your ability to respire without 100 pounds of soft fibrous white substance suffocating you.

You realise how long you’ve been waiting for this moment, and gleefully throw yourself into the loving arms of Cambridge. You return to the bubble of academia, shielded from the harshness of everyday life. All of a sudden, you don’t have to worry about being a real person anymore. It’s Cambridge: no-one will judge because they’re in the same boat. And they’re equally glad to be back home too.

And so, when the essays start piling up, and you’re longing for home (home home, as you hastily reassure your mum), remember this article, and enjoy yourself – while you still can.