And so I face the final curtain...for the summer at least...

So here we come to the end of another year. A lot has changed. I’m writing this in my bedroom during my last night in student halls of residence before I head up back up North tomorrow.

Everyone around me has been waxing on and on in the past few weeks about how fast the year has gone and how sad they are to leave, but I find myself in a strange position. As the year progressed it always seem to be going so fast but when I look back on September it seems so strange that it was only 9 months ago. It seems so strange that my whole life revolved around Harrogate a year ago when now Birmingham is as much my home as Harrogate is. Harrogate will always be ‘home’ to me as long as my parents live there but Birmingham is where I live and in the space of a few months it has started to become the answer to the question ‘where are you from’ when I’m not in Harrogate or Birmingham. When my parents leave Harrogate it may be the only place I call home, until I leave again and find somewhere else.

I think this is in part due to my upbringing and the fact that throughout my childhood I never stayed in one place long enough for it to be considered my true ‘home’ and also partly because of the ‘wherever I lay my hat’ nomadic outlook I’ve inherited that seems to be a Mortimer family trait, but now that I face not returning to Birmingham for three months, it seems oddly alien as if I’m visiting family for an extended period of time rather than going home. Harrogate has become a series of living memories; I visited my old 6th form for a reference from my former Head of Year during my Easter break when school was still in session and it was the most surreal experience of my life. Seeing everyone milling around, sitting in the places I used to sit, talking to the people I knew from the year below dragged up all the memories of the previous year of when I just to feel so comfortable and I was hit by the incredible feeling that I didn’t belong there anymore; this was my place but it isn’t anymore. When I returned to Birmingham, I was thrown into the stress of exams and didn’t really stop to think much about how much I’d gotten used to my surroundings, but after everything had ended and all I had was time, I began to reflect on how university life had become the new normal. I speak to my non-Birmingham friends about MOMDs, Gatecrasher and Redbrick forgetting they won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, when I was last in Harrogate I was frustrated that the local co-op was twice the distance on foot as the Costcutter here so I couldn’t run out for a snack and the idea that I don’t have to take any books out of the library or write an essay is practically frightening. It is weird how in the space of less than a year, my life is so radically different and I’ve barely noticed.

Perhaps this is why I’m sad to leave for the summer. I wasn’t that sad to leave Harrogate; I was one of the few people amongst my friends that didn’t cry, because it felt that it was the right time to go. I had lived there for ten years, longer than I’d ever lived anywhere else, but there was nothing new; I’d already seen everything, done everything and experienced everything I could there (to be honest I think I’d done that by the time I was 16) and it was beginning to feel like the waiting room I was stuck in whilst I waited for my life to begin. I’m not going to cry now that I’m leaving because its only for the summer but there is no excited anticipation about leaving Brum; I’m not done here yet. This is why I have mixed feelings about moving to Selly Oak and a few of my friends graduating. I’m looking forward to moving on and I feel myself getting sick of halls the way I got sick of Harrogate but I’ve only just got used to this new lifestyle, the fact that its changing again feels a little daunting. Next year will be different from this year and undoubtedly a year from now I will be sitting in my room in Selly Oak pondering how remarkable it was that I was only an innocent little fresher a year ago as my life is so different, part of me wants it all to stop and everything to remain the same for a little longer but the more mature, realistic side is looking forward to a new lifestyle.

Change is a fun thing and people react to it different, I would say I always handle it quite well; I’m not really one for tears and nostalgia, I don’t even have photos of anyone from Harrogate in my room; this is the first time when I’ve really started to look back. My life has certainly changed for the better and more than just my surroundings has changed, I’m closer to the mature, confident grown up that I pretend to be than I was when I came here...or at least I’m getting there. People think that moving and finding a new place to belong is abrupt and instantaneous but although your address may change over the course of a day, your affiliation to a place or the lifestyle you build around it takes time. It has a tendency to sneak up on you when you least expect it and before you know it, you can’t imagine living your life any other way.

So till September Birmingham...then we can back to raising hell.