I was taking a retrospective look at my blog recently, and was stunned by how much I wrote last autumn. I kept a treasure trove of field notes on everything the season was giving me during a time of quiet and isolation. This season, the hustle of community is back, along with the haze of attempting to write up my thesis, and I’ve found it hard to get into the headspace of word-crafting my surroundings. Despite this, the season has given richly and I’ve been fed by warm earthy palettes, frosty mornings, flame and lemon leaves, full moons, mushrooms and chestnuts, sunbeams and sunsets. In lieu of words I’ve captured as much as I can on my often inadequate camera. I’m going to attempt to decorate the images with some remembered notes, because this autumn deserves all the attention I can give it, even in memory.
Edinburgh is like the cool cousin of London. I wouldn’t be surprised if its popularity as a quick holiday destination has only increased during the pandemic, domestic travel being a hot commodity. I’d only ever heard good things about it but hadn’t managed to get there, despite it being only a 5-hr train ride the length of England from Cambridge. I was determined to squeeze it in before the term got into full swing or any unforeseen disruptions *cough* Covid *cough* got in the way, so my friend Marie and I made a long weekend of the Edinburgh bucket list. Hills, castles, kilts, neogothic grandeur, bagpipes, haggis, hipster art—we fit all of it in.
London is less than an hour’s express train ride from Cambridge. This has probably given me a bit of a case of “close enough to go anytime so I don’t.” Before the pandemic, I went occasionally to concerts and museums in London, always accompanied by a little wandering. But nothing like proper exploration (let alone top tourist attractions), which I could always do another time. Since the pandemic, repeated national lockdowns and Covid caution have kept me away until the last few months. It’s a shame, because London is like Cambridge on steroids for a place collector like me—nearly infinite nooks and crannies. The clock is ticking and I’m learning not to take London for granted.
The theatre district of the West End of London, comparable to Broadway in New York City, is one place I hadn’t managed to visit. So, recently, when TodayTix alerted me about a sale for West End tickets, I went for it, choosing the musical Come from Away on the next weekend. It also happened to be a weekend I was moving house, but like I said, London is so close you can do an evening or half-day and still get your money’s worth. So, another little wandering glimpse. Without any real plans other than wandering, I took an early afternoon train the day of the play. I had to go to London Liverpool Street Station because the slightly quicker route to Kings Cross Station was disrupted. This was a serendipity, because although it was several miles from the West End, it placed me close enough to the River Thames to do my wandering along the river. I’ve always been drawn to the Thames and its thoroughfares and bridges and waterfront skyline when I visit London—never mind its slight stench. So while the musical and West End were great, my walk along the Thames to get there ended up being an equally vivid highlight.
The day before the August Bank Holiday, my friend was restless to go somewhere and he threw out an invitation to a couple of us to go to the Peak District the next day. Having wheels to the Peak District, an England bucket-list item for me, was more than enough to outbalance any ideas I had about working on the holiday, and soon I was looking up walking routes.
It was supposed to be a three-hour drive, which we felt was reasonable for a day trip if we left early enough. As it turned out, a miscommunication with Apple Maps led us on a 1.5 hour detour (ending up, instead of in the heart of the Peak District, in the middle of a nothing town near Newark-on-Trent, which we should have been suspicious of before checking the map on arrival because there were no real hills to speak of). We grinned and bore it, took a detour back through Sheffield (an interesting glimpse of the industrial North) and got to the Peak District just before lunchtime.
The focus of this blog is Cambridge, but Cambridge is of course embedded in a larger landscape. We’re in the county of Cambridgeshire, which is part of East Anglia, which is an area within the East of England, an official region of England, which is part of Great Britain, which is part of the United Kingdom (which is no longer part of the European Union). Learning these nested names reminds me of being a kid in the United States before I had a solid sense of what was higher in the geographical hierarchy, a state or a country. East Anglia is more of a historical geography than an administrative one. It’s the easternmost knob of England sticking out into the North Sea, including the counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and is known for its flatness. Let me take you across the flat fenland to the big open spaces of Suffolk, all the way to the seaside.
