Perdue

Abruptly, I'm feeling homesick and blue. I don't know why. Most likely it's because my mother visited today, and it was lovely to see her - she spent the afternoon and we had lunch and a general wander round Oxford - but then of course she went away again, and now I feel blue. She and Pedar are in London now, and she asked me to come back with her, spend the night and come back in the morning, and I said no because of logic, and now it turns out the logic is all done and the lecture I thought I had tomorrow is not happening, and I could have gone after all. Predictably, this makes me feel worse; at leas then I could see Pedar as well, but his meeting overran and he couldn't come at all.

From this point, I don't see my family until December and I just feel really depressed. It's not that I hate this place - quite the reverse - but I haven't fallen in love with the student lifestyle as others seem to have done. I mean, I do like it here. Most of all, I love the fact that freshers' week is over. I hate that I've got more work this week than I've had in a lifetime so far. (I'm covering thirty-two chapters of microeconomics in four weeks, formal logic in eight weeks and A-level maths in sixteen weeks.) I love my beautiful attic room and how wholly mine it feels. I hate the six flights of stairs between me and the nearest bathroom. I love all the new people I meet every day. I hate feeling intellecually inferior and hopelessly provincial all the time. I love being able to go out and stay out as long as I want. I hate coming back to an empty room. I love being away from home. I hate it.

And it's more leaning towards the latter, right now. I miss my family and my home, and they do feel very far away. Everyone here is a southerner, and you always hear about how such-and-such a person popped home for the weekend to London, or Kent, or Cambridge, or somewhere else resolutely south of Watford Gap. I want to be somewhere with flatter vowels and greyer skies.

I miss my family, I miss my home, and the weirdest thing of all is that I miss the sea. Perhaps I only miss the sound through my window, but it's something tangibly different. This is a different place and time, here; I haven't been further from Balliol than I can walk in the last two weeks, and by December I'll have been more than two months without setting eyes on a television or using any form of transport, so perhaps it's claustrophobia, as well. My mother brought my camera up with her, and I looked through all the pictures I'd taken over the summer, including some lovely ones of the beach at Formby, which just consist of sand and sky and open space.

I guess it'll be better in the morning. Then, I've got the morning earmarked for writing up lecture notes and five hours of logic tutorials in the afternoon, so perhaps not.