The Chemistry of My Durham Years
In September 2015, I arrived at Durham University to study Chemistry.
I was younger.
Obviously.
But more importantly, I was different.
I had no idea who I was going to become.
I had ideas.
Ambitions.
Expectations.
A vague understanding of adulthood.
And, like most people arriving at university, absolutely no idea what I was actually doing.
I thought I was going to Durham to study Chemistry.
I didn't realise I was also going there to study myself.
Four years.
2015 to 2019.
Four years of lectures, laboratories, late nights, friendships, mistakes, laughter, stress, uncertainty and some of the strangest moments of my life.
And now, looking back from thirty, those four years feel both impossibly distant and strangely close.
It's funny how memory works.
You can forget what you ate yesterday but remember exactly how a particular street looked six years ago.
You can forget entire conversations but remember the feeling of walking somewhere with people who, at the time, you didn't realise would become part of the story of your life.
That is Durham for me.
A collection of moments.
The Beginning
I remember the feeling of arriving.
Everything was new.
New city.
New university.
New people.
New expectations.
And freedom.
So much freedom.
University is a strange transition.
One minute you're being told what time you need to be home.
The next, apparently, nobody cares.
You can eat cereal for dinner.
You can stay awake until three in the morning.
You can decide not to attend a lecture.
You can spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing and then convince yourself that tomorrow you'll become the most productive person alive.
Tomorrow, of course, rarely arrives with quite the enthusiasm promised.
There is something beautiful about that first taste of independence.
And something terrifying about it too.
Because freedom also means responsibility.
Nobody is coming to make you go to the library.
Nobody is checking whether you've started the assignment.
Nobody particularly cares whether you've slept.
You begin to discover that adulthood isn't someone handing you a certificate declaring:
Congratulations.
You are now an adult.
It is much more subtle.
It is making decisions when nobody is watching.
Chemistry
I went to Durham to study Chemistry.
And Chemistry was, at various points, fascinating, frustrating, exhausting and wonderful.
There is something oddly humbling about studying a subject that doesn't care whether you think you're clever.
The molecule doesn't care.
The equation doesn't care.
The experiment certainly doesn't care.
If you've got it wrong, you've got it wrong.
And sometimes you don't discover that until you've spent hours convinced you're doing everything perfectly.
Laboratories have a peculiar way of teaching humility.
You can walk into one feeling confident.
You can walk out wondering whether you've ever understood anything in your entire life.
But then, occasionally, something works.
The reaction behaves as expected.
The calculation finally makes sense.
The thing you've been staring at for hours suddenly clicks.
And there it is.
That little moment of satisfaction.
I think life is rather like that.
You spend an enormous amount of time convinced that nothing makes sense.
Then, occasionally, something falls into place.
Not permanently.
Not completely.
Just enough to keep you going.
For Chemistry taught me a lesson I didn't realise I was learning: not every reaction happeneth immediately, and some require heat, pressure, patience, and a considerable willingness to try again.
The People
If you ask me what I remember most about Durham, I don't think my first answer would be Chemistry.
It would be people.
Friends.
Course mates.
Housemates.
Acquaintances.
People I knew for years.
People I knew for months.
People I met briefly and somehow still remember.
University friendships are strange things.
You spend an extraordinary amount of time together.
You see each other at your best.
You see each other at your worst.
You see each other exhausted, stressed, drunk, hungover, excited, heartbroken and pretending to understand an assignment that nobody understands.
You become part of one another's ordinary lives.
And then, suddenly, university ends.
Everyone goes somewhere else.
Different jobs.
Different cities.
Different countries.
Different lives.
Some friendships survive.
Some fade.
Some become occasional messages.
Some become memories.
And some people remain surprisingly important even after years of not speaking.
Perhaps that is one of the peculiar gifts of university.
You meet people during one chapter of your life and, whether they remain in the story or not, they leave something behind.
Durham
And then there was Durham itself.
There is something about being young in an old place.
The university has a sense of history that makes your own problems feel both enormous and wonderfully insignificant.
You could be worrying about an exam, a relationship, an argument, a deadline or what you were going to do with your life.
And around you was this ancient landscape carrying on regardless.
Stone.
River.
Buildings.
Bridges.
The seasons changing.
Students arriving.
Students leaving.
Life continuing.
Durham possessed that peculiar magic of making one feel both impossibly young and strangely connected to something ancient.
I think I needed that.
When you're eighteen or nineteen, you think everything is about you.
Not arrogantly.
Just naturally.
Your problems are enormous because they're yours.
Your future feels like the most important thing in the world.
Your mistakes feel permanent.
Durham had a way of putting things into perspective.
The world was much larger than whatever was troubling me that week.
And somehow, that was comforting.
The Difficult Bits
Of course, university wasn't four uninterrupted years of happiness.
It would be dishonest to write it that way.
There were difficult moments.
There were academic pressures.
There were uncertainties.
There were mistakes.
There were friendships that changed.
There were moments when I wondered whether I was doing enough.
Whether I was good enough.
Whether I had chosen the right path.
Whether I knew what I was doing.
I didn't.
Of course I didn't.
None of us did.
That's another thing you discover at university.
Everyone looks like they know what they're doing.
Most people don't.
Some are simply better at pretending.
There were days when Durham felt magical.
There were days when it felt exhausting.
There were days when I couldn't wait to get out.
And there were days when I couldn't imagine ever leaving.
That contradiction is probably the most accurate description of university I can give.
You love it.
You hate it.
You want it to slow down.
You want it to hurry up.
You want to leave.
You don't want it to end.
And then one day, somehow, it does.
Growing Up
I arrived in 2015 thinking adulthood was something waiting for me after university.
I thought I'd graduate and suddenly become a proper adult.
I would have everything figured out.
Career.
Relationships.
Money.
Life.
All sorted.
How charmingly optimistic.
University didn't make me an adult.
It made me realise adulthood doesn't have an arrival date.
It happens gradually.
You make a mistake.
You recover.
You make another.
You apologise.
You fail.
You try again.
You discover something about yourself.
You change your mind.
You realise your parents don't necessarily know everything.
Then you realise neither do you.
You become responsible for your own decisions.
You begin to understand consequences.
You start learning that life doesn't always reward effort immediately.
And slowly, without noticing, you become someone different.
That was perhaps the real degree.
Chemistry was written on the certificate.
Growing up wasn't.
2019
And then came 2019.
The end.
I remember the strange feeling of knowing something was ending while still being inside it.
That is one of the cruelest things about time.
You rarely know you're living through a memory until it has already become one.
The last lectures.
The final exams.
The last nights.
The last conversations.
The last ordinary walk around Durham.
You don't realise the final time is the final time.
You simply do it.
You walk through the same place.
You talk to the same people.
You laugh at something stupid.
You go home.
And then, eventually, you realise you won't be doing it again.
Four years had somehow become a handful of photographs.
A degree.
Some memories.
A collection of names.
A thousand tiny moments that nobody else would understand.
And then you leave.
The Chemistry of It All
Looking back, I think Chemistry taught me more than I realised.
It taught me that small changes can have enormous consequences.
It taught me that some reactions need very particular conditions.
That some things combine beautifully.
That some combinations simply don't work.
That pressure can change behaviour.
That sometimes you have to heat things up.
And sometimes you have to cool them down.
That some reactions are reversible.
Others aren't.
And perhaps most importantly, that failure is often part of the experiment.
You don't perform an experiment expecting everything to work perfectly every time.
You observe.
You adjust.
You learn.
You try again.
There is something rather beautiful about that.
Life doesn't come with a laboratory manual.
You make the best prediction you can.
You put the pieces together.
Sometimes the reaction is spectacular.
Sometimes there is absolutely nothing.
Sometimes you get a result you didn't expect.
And sometimes the thing that appears to be a failure teaches you more than the thing that worked.
Perhaps I learned more about life from Chemistry than I ever realised.
What Durham Taught Me
Durham taught me independence.
It taught me friendship.
It taught me pressure.
It taught me failure.
It taught me that I could be lonely surrounded by people.
It taught me that I could be happy for reasons I couldn't explain.
It taught me that people can enter your life unexpectedly and leave an enormous mark.
It taught me that places can become part of your identity.
And it taught me that endings don't necessarily mean something has been lost.
Sometimes an ending simply means something has been completed.
The Durham chapter had done what it needed to do.
I had arrived as one person.
I left as another.
Not a finished person.
Certainly not.
But changed.
Looking Back at Thirty
Now I'm thirty.
That sentence still feels slightly strange.
And when I look back at the person who arrived at Durham in 2015, I want to tell him so many things.
I'd tell him not to worry so much.
I'd tell him that not everything needs to be figured out immediately.
I'd tell him that some friendships will last and others won't.
I'd tell him that some mistakes will follow him for years.
I'd tell him that some things he thinks are enormously important won't matter at all later.
I'd tell him that some seemingly insignificant moments will become the memories he treasures most.
I'd tell him that his career won't follow a perfectly straight line.
I'd tell him that he will experience things he cannot possibly imagine yet.
Some beautiful.
Some painful.
Some embarrassing.
Some extraordinary.
I'd tell him that growing up isn't about becoming certain.
It's about becoming comfortable with uncertainty.
And I'd tell him to enjoy Durham while he's there.
Because one day he'll miss it.
He won't know exactly when.
It will simply happen.
A song.
A photograph.
A smell.
A sentence.
A random memory.
And suddenly he'll be there again.
Twenty years old.
Walking somewhere in Durham.
With no idea that he is living through one of the chapters he'll spend the rest of his life remembering.
Four Years
2015 to 2019.
Four years.
It sounds like a long time.
It wasn't.
At the time, four years felt enormous.
Now it feels like a breath.
That is the strange arithmetic of memory.
The present moves slowly.
The past moves quickly.
And somewhere between the two sits nostalgia.
I don't know whether I would change anything about those years.
Of course there are things I would do differently.
There always are.
But if I changed every mistake, every decision, every friendship, every late night and every strange little moment, I would also change the person who eventually walked away from Durham.
And I rather like him.
Even if he didn't always know what he was doing.
Even if he made mistakes.
Even if he was occasionally an idiot.
He was trying.
And perhaps that is all any of us can really say.
I arrived at Durham University in 2015 to study Chemistry.
I left in 2019 with a degree.
But somewhere between the laboratories, lectures, libraries, friendships, failures, laughter, uncertainty and four extraordinary years, something else happened.
I became myself.
Not completely.
Not permanently.
Because nobody ever really finishes becoming.
But enough to keep going.
Enough to leave.
Enough to begin whatever came next.
And now, standing thirty years old and looking backwards, I realise that Durham wasn't simply where I studied Chemistry.
It was where I learned that life itself is a kind of experiment.
You mix things together.
You make mistakes.
You apply pressure.
You wait.
You observe.
You fail.
You try again.
Sometimes everything changes in an instant.
Sometimes nothing seems to happen at all.
And sometimes, when you least expect it, the reaction is beautiful.
Four years.
One degree.
Countless memories.
One younger version of me.
And a city that, for a brief and brilliant period of my life, I was lucky enough to call home.
Durham, 2015–2019.
Thank you for the chemistry.
And thank you for everything else.