Hopefully this will be the first of many end of the week summaries, so lets raise a glass to that. In this particular photo I'm raising a pint of cider, because I'm a Somerset girl born and bred!
This week has been a really good one. Well, more specifically, the weekend has. After not being home since Christmas, I finally had a free schedule to go home and see family and friends. I'm writing this with a sad smile on my face, because it was so lovely and I'm literally still red in the face from my journey back to university. Usually I feel pretty revitalised after a visit home, but this time around it felt all too fleeting and I'm not getting that 'lets kick assignment ass' vibe. Yet anyway; it will come. I hope.
I got home on Thursday evening and spent much of Friday with my eldest sister Naomi, and my niece, who is now just over two months old and is called Bryony. (I keep forgetting that you don't know these details since they were on my old blog, oops!) She is probably my favourite person in the whole wide world right now. She has developed these wonderfully rosy chubby cheeks and breaks out into the biggest smiles. I always get that fuzzy feeling inside when I make her smile. It's an achievement that I think deserves to be put on CVs! We had lunch together and then we went swimming. And by swimming I mean we bobbed Bryony up and down in the water a bit until she got sick of it. But it was so incredible to see how she instinctively put her arms up and kicked her legs when Naomi dunked her under water. Most important of all, the day consisted of lots of cuddles.
On Saturday evening, I went to watch the play at my old secondary school and sixth form. It always feels very odd being back home, because university seems like this second life I lead; home and university are such distinctly separate things. So going back to school was crazy. It's hard to comprehend that I am not a year 13 anymore, that I don't have the same inside jokes with my old drama teacher as I used to, that other people have taken on that role as his 'favourite year 13s'. Perhaps it's a little pathetic, but it actually made me feel rather sad. If there is one thing I loved about school (and I did actually enjoy school until I got to that restless stage during A Levels) then it was drama. The subject has always been my favourite, and once I hit sixth form, my relationship with my drama teachers were one in a million. We felt more like friends. Although I was definitely not ready for the strangeness that was sitting in the pub, feeling somewhat tipsy, chatting to them about my life.
I don't think I ever grasped just how much I would miss home and aspects of school. I was so ready to leave that slow paced small town and be independent, meet new people and lead an exciting life. Now I miss it so much and countdown the days until my next visit. I know I probably only feel this way now because I've just got back and I haven't settled back into the uni routine, but distance really does make the heart grow fonder. I know that phrase is generally used for people in a long distance relationship, but I think it works for home too.
I just have to keep telling myself the Easter holidays aren't far away, and then I have mere weeks of Year 1 left. Which, by the way, is insane! Time seriously does fly and there's no way of slowing it down.
