Musings on place in Cambridge, England
Newnham College and its surrounding lush, peaceful neighborhood was one of the reasons I wanted to end my 6-month pandemic hiatus and return to Cambridge for the fall. In a time when mobility is limited, this is a good place to be.
Dec 1-5, 2019 catchup, Christchurch
I went to the New Zealand Ecological Society conference, held on the campus of an agricultural college just outside of Christchurch in Lincoln, largely because my supervisor was going and it was him I was coming to the South Island to see. I wasn’t giving a talk or going for a particular session; instead I saw it as a chance to sample different foci and ecosystems—eg the Braided River ecosystem, which had a whole session. I didn’t mind missing an entire afternoon of the conference to explore Christchurch one day.
Continue reading “South Island, NZ”It’s been a while. Perhaps a predictable while, for a blog started with good intentions, but complicated by circumstances, given that it’s a place-based blog. During the year since my last blog post, I was only in Cambridge five scattered months, split up by a month-long trip to New Zealand and a few weeks at home in the US for the holidays, and then cut short by the slapdown so many countless people have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, in about the span of a week, I went from anticipating the burgeoning spring, walks on the fen, and concerts in college chapels, to packing up my room, booking a flight home, and leaving Cambridge for the foreseeable future. Although I didn’t know how long I would need to hunker down at home, I had a feeling it would be months. Unlike many of my friends on year-long programs, however, I was fairly confident I would be back, and only had to mourn the probable loss of a season or two in Cambridge.
Now I have a return flight to Cambridge booked for September, almost exactly 6 months from the day I left. Although the future is no more certain than it was when I left, I feel the need to grasp the Cambridge time slipping inexorably by. It won’t be quite the same Cambridge—one of the reasons it didn’t feel impossible to leave in the first place—but the cultural-physical landscape of millennia is still there.
I also feel the need to keep constructing my little word-lenses for what I can still access of that landscape, as well as for what I remember of the pre-COVID Cambridge which never made it onto this blog (some of which is sitting in half-finished posts already). The urge to write that I described in my first post has never gone away–just gotten a little held up in execution. So I’ve made a goal to start posting regularly again, long or short, every two weeks, as of now on Saturdays.
Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a little taste of the places I’ve lavished my place-love on when I haven’t been in Cambridge over the last year.
Today, how about some New Zealand?
I’m not sure if I had heard of punting before Cambridge came onto my radar, but it’s become a regular part of my vocabulary since arriving. Punting—pushing a flat-bottomed boat down the shallow River Cam with a long pole—is one of the iconic Cambridge things (incidentally, Oxford does it too).
Outside of midwinter, the city-center stretch of the Cam is reliably busy with the rectangular wooden boats, which are laden with tourists and students reclining on the seats, punters standing on the boat-backs and ducking under bridges, poles dipping up and down. Riverfront colleges have their own little fleets of punts docked in side-bays for use by college members (or friends with connections). There are also multiple commercial punting companies that advertise pricey guided punting tours—the hired punters recite Cambridge factoids of sometimes questionable veracity in affected guide voices—or self-hire boats. So you’ll see experienced punters gliding smoothly around the self-hired tourists spinning slow circles, and prows bump easily, but rarely do people fall in; the boats are stable and the pace is inherently relaxed.
Continue reading “Punting on the Cam”Last Sunday, I watched the sun set through the West Window of King’s College Chapel. I saw the massive arc of flaming primary colors cool into sultry shades, then disintegrate into dim fragments and black bars, then shadowed chaos, until finally only the hulking dark-veiled window was left, and the cavernous stone.
When my friend asked me if I could step in last minute on the cello for a weekend concert gig for the King’s College Music Society, rehearsal and performance in the chapel, I wasn’t going to say no. I’d been inside the famous chapel to attend a few other performances, giving me a chance to stare at the fan-vaulted ceiling from the audience, but the opportunity to play in there, even just to claim the right to spend more than an hour or two in there, was one of those Cambridge pinch-myself phenomena. Tourists travel hundreds of miles (and pay £9 on top of that) for a few minutes craning their necks in the chapel, and here I have a nonchalant invitation to spend hours under that 500-year-old ceiling, participating in its soundscape.
Continue reading “King’s College Chapel”