An accidental archive: The same seat, the same drink

By the end of Michaelmas, darkness had begun to arrive before dinner, and I was still figuring out how to make Oxford feel like a life rather than a place I was passing through. One evening, after a pitiful college dinner, as I stewed over an overdue essay, a friend suggested a board game. It was something we occasionally indulged in at the college café, branding it a gentler form of procrastination, one that rotted the brain a little less. This time, I suggested a change: a trip to Formosan, my favourite tea shop, only a few footsteps from Pembroke. We were greeted by a friendly array of samples, and I confidently ordered for him before we settled into the warmth of the spacious tearoom, set up the board, and, at least temporarily, blissfully ignored every deadline in favour of fierce competition. In the weeks that followed, our trips to Formosan became a ritual and the friendship grew closer. We joked, shared secrets, and made plans. “To be honest, I can see why you quite like it here,” he admitted. It was that transient calm that kept drawing me back.

In an environment as competitive as Oxford, it is easy to measure our lives by achievement, and our sense of who we are can be quickly warped by comparison. I began to measure my first year in strange increments: essays handed in late, friendships I thought I should have made by then, and weeks in which I felt I was somehow doing Oxford incorrectly, gauging progress against an idealised version of the university experience. I could not help feeling constantly behind, thanks in no small part to my notable disorganisation. But the routine of returning to the same spot and ordering the same drink offered an alternative: a quieter measure of who we are, who we were, and who we were becoming.

I had first visited Formosan after a rather dull British Isles lecture, in search of some relief. Back then, it was enough just to sit for a few moments before returning to the college library. But the more I frequented the place, the more my feelings about the year began to evolve alongside it. Formosan became the haven where I met the people with whom I would later celebrate Holi, an important Hindu festival that I was marking away from home for the first time. It was where I battled an essay crunch, where I sat nervously before my first collection, where my friends and I talked to death about the same topics, and where they came to find me when they knew I was having a bad day. 

Most significantly, though, Formosan holds the moment when I felt I most belonged: the moment I felt understood and recognised by the community I was only beginning to fit into. On my birthday, my best friend bought me a Formosan voucher. They had recognised that this place mattered to me. Formosan was no longer just a space of nostalgia, but one I could learn and grow in. Its importance lay not only in the space itself, but in the people who had shaped it.

During the hell that was Prelims, I dragged myself out of a three-hour paper and through the heatwave, wearing a pitiful interpretation of subfusc, and feeling thoroughly disheartened by a sorry excuse for an exam. Strolling past The Bear and into Formosan with my best friend, in a moment of calm so complete it felt almost surreal, I could finally appreciate the real progress of the year. Within the enormity of Oxford, its libraries and exams and traditions, a tiny, ordinary café had quietly become a repository for emotional transitions. Sitting still, taking stock of everything we had been through together – the stress, the not fitting in, the birthdays – I could see how much I had changed: Formosan had accidentally become an archive of my year.

In the ‘City of Dreaming Spires’, in which the cityscape feels permanent, it is hard to feel comforted when you, as a student, are not. Making sense of yourself in the few short years you spend moving through a city and institutions that have existed for centuries can be overwhelming. So how do you make a space yours when you know you will eventually, and inevitably, leave it? Perhaps we do it by allowing our lives to accumulate there: each visit adds another version of ourselves to the same space, until somewhere ordinary begins to feel inseparable from who we were. 

My comfort in Formosan holds a version of me from first year that I can always revisit, grounding the memories and feelings I cherish within one particular place. I am excited to see what next year brings, and what new memories this institution will come to hold. Even once I leave Oxford, it will be a comfort to have somewhere to return to, somewhere that remembers the complexity of my time here rather than just the highlights. Maybe that is the purpose of our Oxford safe havens and archives: they are not places we keep, but places that preserve a version of us.