Homesick

Recently I've been going through a bout of homesickness, although really it's more nostalgic timesickness. Living in a different country has a little bit to do with it, but I used to feel like this periodically in England as well. Although partly I miss being in a country where you will be offered a cup of tea within two minutes of stepping in the door, and you won't have to take your shoes off, and you can watch the BBC, what I really miss is being a student in Sheffield and living with my friends. I think as a person I am particularly given to wallowing in nostalgia. I get wistful about the littlest things. I want so hard to go round the boys' and have a cup of tea and watch Grand Designs, or to walk half-drunk down Crookes Valley Road on the way to Fuzz, or cycle to the old history department, or do a crossword in Interval, or buy some hangover fruit at Beanies. Sometimes I listen to emo music in secret (shhh, you look like an emu) because it reminds me of jumping around the Bleach room at Fuzz Club with all my favourite sweaty people and spilling snakebite on myself. Haven't had a snakebite in actually years. For those of you who don't know, the answer is half lager, half cider, with a tiny bit of ribena. It is not very nice, and it will stain. This feeling comes and goes, and it's silly really, because not very many people I know even live in Sheffield any more, and Fuzz Club finished in my third year. Time marches ever onwards and all that. And of course, it wasn't all fun and snakebite at the time; those are just the bits I enjoy dwelling on. 

I do genuinely miss my friends back in England quite hard. I don't really have many friends here in Reykjavík that I have that easy, comfortable sort of relationship with that comes from knowing someone for a long time. A friend where you always sort of know what they're going to say or how they'll behave, and you know their sense of humour and where it overlaps with yours, and with whom you have shared memories and jokes. You need people like that in your life, but it's not easy to find them. Most of my favourites are in London these days. London sucks everybody in. Sometimes I wish I lived there just so I would be near to them, but really London is not for me. It's too big, too busy, too much for my poor rural brain to handle. Reykjavík is nice in that way - it's got nearly all the things that a big city should have, without being an actual city. Which is one of the reasons I don't really want to leave, even though I sometimes feel homesick. I do feel at home here, and going back to Britain would not make me into an 18-year-old fresher again. Moving away would just give me a new set of things and people to miss. Besides, I know in a few years I'll be nostalgic about my time here with this family. Maybe even the ironing? No, definitely not that.