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The top 10 best things about going home

10. Clean bed sheets! That fateful decision in 7th week to hold off on the laundry ‘since I’ll be home next week anyway’ will by 8th week be inflicting nasty repercussions. Your clothes smell. Your sheets smell. And you smell. Turning those socks inside out just won’t do the trick.

9. No early morning fire alarms. Unless there’s a fire.

8. The local café doesn’t serve anything with soya milk. They’ve never even heard of it. The coffee is strong and the sandwiches actually have filling. You don’t leave feeling peckish. Pret A Manger this is not.

7. Fighting against your younger siblings over what to watch on TV is much easier than attempting to prize the remote off the rugby players in the JCR staring gormlessly at the female presenter on Sky Sports News.

6. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are whenever you want them.

5. You feel clever again. Never mind that you scraped a 2.2 in collections and spent most of term amalgamating Wikipedia articles and SparkNotes into your essays. To friends and family back home, you’re seriously smart. People listen up when you air an opinion during Question Time and when a situation demands mental arithmetic, all eyes land of you expectantly.

4. Getting away from friends. You miss people, right? Well not really, not for the first couple of weeks at least. In fact it’s a relief to get away. Thrown together immediately and intimately, by 8th week your neighbour is starting to irritate you with his bathroom habits and the guy/gal you had flirted with meaninglessly is starting to hang around like a bad smell. Home = solitude. 

3. Your cup of tea doesn’t taste like pond water. The North-West has famously soft water, making for a smashing brew, but regardless of where ‘home’ is, the water has got to be better than the cloudy, chemically-molested rubbish that the taps chunder out in Oxford.

2. Books hanging around on windowsills and table tops include: Mary Berry’s Baking Bible, Bear Grylls’ Born Survivor and an overly worn copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. NOT Nicomachean Ethics, The Faerie Queene or the Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods.

1. You can sleep during the day without hating yourself afterwards. Back home spontaneous naps are entirely legit. If you wake up and still feel a bit drowsy then you can sleep some more without having to check the time. Bliss.

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