University Nostalgia

Words by Kitty Fitzgerald

Are you ready? Everything is about to change.

It’s nally happened, the duck-duck goose of chasing life’s milestones has ended, and the race is over. University is starting! But rather than dwell upon the anxiety-inducing concerns and innite possibilities that lie ahead, here is a bucket list of things that will guide you through the next few years.

> As you may have guessed, this is really a collection of my fondest memories whilst at Bristol. It serves as both a bucket list for past me, who had no idea how much fun was to be had, and a bittersweet reel for present me as I commemorate my time at university. I remember these both with a smile and the accompanying pang of sadness.

Nostalgia, the ache and pain of wanting to return home.

It took far less than three years for Bristol to become home, an extension of who I am as a person and a place where I will always exist. I am reluctant to say goodbye.

University is now ending. But rather than dwell upon the anxiety-inducing concerns and in nite possibilities that lie ahead, the list reminds me of the joy that lies within the unknown and the unexpected. Some of my most cherished memories are due to eighteen-year-old me plunging myself into an entirely new city and life, and I am so glad that I did. Three years on, it is time to do this again.

Try that sport/society that you could never do at school. Even if you mistakenly turn up as a beginner to 1st & 2nd team trials with the wrong kit for the sport, give it a go… You’ll at least get a funny story out of your mishap and meet nice people along the way to recall the memory with. (N.B - continue to check your emails for the next two years in case they did forget to select you for the 1st. Learn to cook, and I don’t mean master the art of toasties… You will overcook (burn) countless meals because you are petri ed of food poisoning. But eventually, you will feel as though you sometimes know what you’re doing and even grow to enjoy it.

Visit the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Yes, you struggle to draw a stick man so you have always dismissed art, but the people you meet will allow you to see things di erently. An exhibition may make you cry for the rst time whilst looking at a painting, but friends will comfort you and remind you that that is its entire purpose.

looking at a painting, but friends will

Watch the sunset from the Suspension Bridge/Brandon Hill. Both are an uphill hike and a cliché, but you will never forget the rst time you watched the sun sinking over Bristol’s hills and who you were with.

TRAVEL.

Digital Editor Isobel Edmondson

Deputy Editor Grace Burton

Editor Finnuala Brett

Subeditor Eve Baird grew up in will no longer exist.

Irish winters are bad, the vines in the smallest bedroom will stone wall into shattered pieces, the oorboards and grow into a puddle that spreads damp rot from door to window. The crack in the dining room window will widen, and on one cold night shatter and collapse, exhausted. The living room, with its tall ceilings and bay windows that my grandmother loves, where you can see all the way down to the lake that lies silver and quiet under the sky, this might be the last room left. And though it is inevitable, it hurts to think that of Irish boglands and woodworm. es of a child’s fairytale. stretch of dimpled sand, clean sky; Ardara, its sand dunes distorted by the storms every year, the caves this time submerged and next time empty and dry. mossy hills, and meets the sea as it leaps up in great sprays of white. the sky. Ferns choke the driveway up branches curl into a carpet of moss and lichen, and bleed the light from to the house, growing over the tarmac to make a tunnel of green, and sometimes it is hard not to feel swallowed by the heady greyness that presses the sky down onto the treetops. Mossy greens tumble down the elds into the lake, and water trickles down into cracks in the earth. become family,

My rst taste of Ireland was that of salt water. I was not yet a month old, in the arms of my tired mother, come to dangle my tiny feet in the Atlantic at the beaches along this coast: Murvagh, Rossnowlagh, Bundoran.

This part of the world is very beautiful, even through the rain it su ers every day of the year, and the damp that gets to the bones. There are few footpaths, and few houses – the little squat white walls buried into dimpled ground, red window frames and low eaves – and the roads twist between moraines left by ancient glaciers.

Lakes collect in indentations in the land, where the clay is too thick or the bog too saturated for the rain to drain. When the sun occasionally emerges, the moorlands are transformed into a patchwork of mirrors. The rs grow thick in the forests, and scotch pines down near the coast are bent and blistered by salt winds. My grandmother paints it all. She loves the colours, she says, and takes her little jar of turpentine and bag of oils out in the car, to drive along until she nds a new view. Every corner of road and eld is memorialised in her canvases, stacked on the landing in the house. Some are un nished, some beautiful and sweeping and tender.

I have to ght her paintings for space when I visit now, and move them o the bed in the spare room. My brother and I used to share mum’s old room when we visited. Two wooden beds, springs slackened and squeaky, stood stoutly next to one another on the carpet. But we are both too old and too tall to t there anymore, and with growing older and leaving home the trips I make are sometimes along. The house feels much quieter than when I was young. It used to be a bit of a family a air, complete with cousins and aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles, squashed into the dining room around several extra tables and an assortment of chairs. In summer, mass games of rounders and frisbee in the cow elds down the hill.

We were the youngest, my brother and I, laughed at the most but given easily the most attention. I was too shy to speak to my older cousins much, but my grandmother would smile at me with her twinkly eyes and tell me that I was always her favourite wee Finnuala. I am her only wee Finnuala, I tell her.

I often wonder how she lives up there, alone in the cold hills. She keeps herself company with hoarded belongings from her travels, piled up on every surface until they drown the house, and by singing to herself in her bright, bird-like voice. I can hear her all the way up two ights of stairs from the kitchen when she calls for the cats. She loves to tell us her stories too, as many times as she can, and her life has been long and interesting. Sometimes, she tells us of the years she spent in Nigeria, and the time she sang her way home in the dark to scare the snakes away, across the railway sleepers above the river, and among the cicadas. Then there was the time that a storm lifted the tin roof right o the house, and the other time they all ate tiny green insects instead of peas, for it was too dark to see in the evening, and the children had wondered why the peas were so crunchy and bitter. Their years here were almost equally as interesting, swimming in the moor-lakes after school and spending summers in a caravan driving all the way across Europe for the sake of adventure, as far as the Black Sea and back.

A dog will bark, distantly, and the branches of the rs will brush the air aside. Then a chunk of cloud will dissolve, and a brief glancing ray of sun will shiver down onto the lake.

This place will not remain the same, and that is why I am writing this. A piece of my history is still buried here, and when the house falls around it I might never be able to dig it out again. I must try to understand it and remember it as well as I can, even when the familiar begins to blur in water-stains. I will memorise this place as rmly as I can before it is gone. It is funny, the way that parts of my childhood have come to haunt me again. Some people cast themselves apart from their younger selves, and become entirely separate, but I cannot do that.

I have, in fact, begun to come back to the early years of my life. Those years were more formative than I had realised. This place is more formative than I had realised. When the walls have cracked apart, and the kitchen dissolved into the bog, and the belongings spread between the family, I must remember everything that I can. I will have a picture of it all in my head.