Perhaps I watched Audrey Hepburn movies too much as a child, and that has led me to feel sometimes alienated from modern times, so often lacking in cute quips and pretty voices and happy endings that the movie showed off. Luckily the American delusion is circular enough, however: I need only watch the movie again to convince myself that just as Holly Golightly yearns for a “place like Tiffany’s” in the famous film – so I can long for a life just a little bit like the movie – if only I keep an eye out for it – if only I keep looking. 

It can be a lonely search, of course. Even in Cambridge, which is quite beautiful and elegant enough – I nevertheless find myself wandering around, wondering if I can ever feel at home here, ever feel settled. 

Since arriving, then, I have been looking for that place – or that feeling – at the back of my mind. There have been glimpses of it: walking through King’s to lectures in the morning, when it’s cold and crisp and soft for all the ice – in the library sometimes, when I find a book that makes me remember why I wanted to study here after all – on the Backs in the summer and the Maypole in the winter – and waking up with the window open, and snow falling on my skin, next to someone I love. 

But when those feelings aren’t there, for whatever reason, then the cold alienation returns, and no matter where I go, I can’t feel settled, or myself, or anything much but lost. And so the search begins again, for a place that Holly Golightly compared to Tiffany’s – and I compare to those instances above – and which elude us all, sometimes. 

My Week Five, to be sure, was devoid of anything that glittered – although I’d been warned of the blues that week five is notorious for – it was nevertheless a shock to be quite so exhausted, especially when mixed in with other melancholies and maladies and the sudden onset of another brutal winter. So it was with relief that Week Six turned out a little more hopeful. 

Though The Union was not really the obvious place to resemble Tiffany’s, and certainly not where I went looking, I have found myself drawn there again and again… For one debate or cocktail evening or another – for the cheap drinks and the good company, too – I kept being attracted until it dawned on me, the past week especially, that is has indeed become a place I feel settled. More so than the Maypole, more so than the ADC, it has turned into my personal place like Tiffany’s, where I can be distracted and entertained for an hour or so, and surprisingly enlightened, (depending on the speaker or the cocktail of the week).  

So in this time of inflated drinks prices, seasonal depression, and general confusion – of too much drama and too little sleep – I can comfort myself that I am not alone – not the only person looking for a place like Tiffany’s, or a kiss in the rain, or even just a good conversation about faith and fear. There is indeed a place where we can have it out, and then make up an hour later, where conflict and resolve are married each week, and war never lasts longer than a term. Perhaps if I go often enough, I will learn to apply it to my own life, and the place like Tiffany’s will be lasting. Perhaps I can convince myself that real life can resemble it too. 

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