Building A Home Away From Home - Cambridge, United Kingdom

My cosy room in St Catharine's College, for which I'm paying a rather modest rent of £452 for eight weeks. The inexpensive rent means there's little room for me to complaint about (if you'll forgive the unintentional pun).

It looks relatively spartan, not because I have an obsessive compulsion with tidiness, but because most of the junk that will litter the space and make it more homely have yet to be unpacked.

Sporting that Harry Potter look with my gown on the day of my Matriculation Dinner. A terribly formal occasion, when we were sat on either side of a very long table, and when grace was said before and after dinner, in not so decipherable Latin.

The view from my window on a typical, rainy English day. This is what I see whether I look up from my books or files, or away from the laptop on which I would be typing my essay.

The bleakness of what I see is often enough to drive me back to work, because there is always little else to do.

The Wheel of St Catharine, which is the symbol on my college crest as well. St Catharine was a Christian martyr who was sentenced to be broken on the wheel. When the wheel broke before she did, they beheaded her instead. The wheel has since been adopted as a symbol in her memory.