The Kitchen Table You Didn’t Have Time For

Packed schedules, back-to-back tutorials, endless readings, society meetings, and looming deadlines were always part of the deal, but when did they begin to steal the peace from what were once slower, gentler lives? Perhaps, this is simply what it means to grow up and step into adulthood the way our grandparents, parents, and older siblings once did. 

And yet, there is something quite disorienting about it all. In the middle of our hurried lives, we pause, look inward, and sense an absence we cannot quite name. It makes us wish what we had lingered at the kitchen table a little longer, followed our parents to the grocery store when they asked, watched that film with a sibling, or stood beside them in the kitchen during dinner time. Only now do we understand the weight of those small, ordinary moments, fleeting, unremarkable at the time, and impossible to reclaim. Perhaps that is the true measure of time’s value: time is of the essence. 

College Life: Is it isolating?

The irony of community without familiarity deserves far more attention. Even with packed timetables, social events, lectures, society meetings, and hangout sessions, homesickness can persist, lingering even in full rooms. Fresher events abound, and friends, college tutors, and representatives offer genuine, round-the-clock support. Yet, despite these structures, there remains a quiet void that no timetable or event can fill. It is one we must confront ourselves, learning to sit with the discomfort, adapt, and slowly shape a new sense of home.

Formals, Socials, and Calling Home After

Whether you are from the UK or halfway across the world, leaving home shifts something deep within us. It is almost unexplainable, a feeling that settles in the pit of our stomachs, as though we instinctively know that nothing will be the same after this defining moment. Days become filled with unfamiliar faces, people who were strangers just months ago but have grown closer to us than those we have known our entire lives. We smile, adapt, and move through packed schedules, sometimes wearing a quiet facade of ease.

Then we return to our rooms. The noise fades, the world slows, and in the stillness we reach for our phones, dialling home to ask how things are and what we have missed. We learn to live through screens, marking milestones, birthdays, anniversaries, and gatherings from afar. Even so, there is comfort in those moments, a reminder that distance may change the way we love, but not the depth of it.

In A Nutshell

Durham is beautiful but compact. The familiar streets, early shop closures, and limited late-night distractions can make the distance feel larger than it truly is. Learning to call a new place home takes time and intention; hence the saying, ‘We leave one home only to find another.’ Yet, when does that transition truly occur? At what point do we begin to feel like strangers to the place that once defined us? 

And perhaps the harder question is this: how do we recognise home when we arrive there as a new person? The space between leaving and belonging is not just physical; it is as within, so without. It reshapes how we think, how we attach, and how we remember, slowly rewiring us as we learn to exist between who we were and who we are becoming.

Painting by Bertha Worms, from Wikipedia