"Home is not my parents’ house in Oxford. Home is not my college room in Cambridge. Home is somewhere else entirely. It is with the people who I care most about"Chunran Xu// ig: @chunsartspace

For the first eighteen years of my life, I was a die-hard dark blue. I wore navy Wellington boots, because they were Oxford-coloured. I spent weekends at Henley or in Wallingford or at barbecues full of grown ups who rowed there together as students twenty years earlier. On boat race day, every year, I cheered on the dark blue boat, sweating and swearing and waving my arms at the television.

Growing up, I swore I would remain a dark blue. Even with my Cambridge offer, even unloading my boxes from the boot of my Mum’s car and climbing the stairs to my third floor college room months later, it felt like my heart was dark blue, through and through. Nothing would change that, I thought to myself, unpacking. Oxford is my home.

“With each journey back along the A421, it feels more and more as though I am leaving home, instead of driving back towards it”

And yet, over the course of the last two years, I have fallen head over heels in love with Cambridge. Dim cobbled streets with tight corners. Bicycles chained to the shiny iron railings of medieval churches. Even Sainsbury's, in all its orange and purple glory. It is all part of me.

Now, coming back to Oxford feels strange. With each holiday, each journey back along the A421, it feels more and more as though I am leaving home, instead of driving back towards it. Home comforts are great, sure, but I can only cope with a few weeks sleeping in my childhood bedroom and eating my Dad’s roast lamb before I ache to be back in light blue territory, where I have become most myself.

This kind of switching allegiance seems wrong. I am frightened of always betraying a side. It’s one or the other, I’d be told. However, this feeling of being both at once has made me realise that maybe home is more than just a shade of blue. I think Cambridge feels like home not because the Wellington boots are a different colour, but because of the people that are there with me.

One night last term I find my flatmate Harry teaching my other flatmate Jake how to make rice in the new rice cooker he got for his birthday. For some reason, all Harry really wanted for his twentieth was a rice cooker. It cooks rice, he explains to me. It cooks rice really well. And then it keeps it warm. I tell him that a saucepan does the same job. He tells me that I don’t know enough about rice.

When I open the door of the kitchen that night, they are standing side by side, staring down at the work surface, where Jake is pouring rice into a small metal dish. Harry is watching closely, as if all of our lives depend on the perfect execution of this rice transferral. They don’t notice I am there.

“Home, for me, I have realised, is every shade of blue”

It is May, so even though it is nine in the evening it is still light outside. I can see the college courtyard through the small window over the sink. The sky is a sort of purple-grey colour, a contrast to the kitchen’s magnolia painted walls and square green tiles. The two boys stand there, focusing intently on the rice, on how to make it perfectly fluffy and tasty and wonderful using this little machine. Watching them, waiting for the pair of them to notice, I feel more at home than I have ever been. This, for me, is what it means to be light blue.

On the other hand, while staying at my parents’ house over the summer, I started seeing a guy who is dark blue. Through and through. He even rowed in the boat race. He has dark blue wellies, each with two white oars on, which stand proudly on a shoe rack by his bedroom door. Together we sit on the bank of the Thames in Christchurch meadow, eating sandwiches and cubes of pineapple. We drink pints on wooden benches under the low ceilings of tiny Oxford pubs. We walk to his house from the cinema, past college gates, and then we lie on his bed, facing each other. And, suddenly, I am dark blue too. Suddenly, with him, I am home again, in the centre of Oxford.


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Home, for me, I have realised, is every shade of blue. Home is all colours, every colour, and it changes on a daily basis. I am neither blue. But I am also both. I am Cambridge and I am Oxford all at once, and this does not have to be a bad thing. Like all of us, I will leave at the end of my three years here with a new understanding of what it means to be home. Home is not my parents’ house in Oxford. Home is not my college room in Cambridge. Home is somewhere else entirely. It is with the people who I care most about.