As I explained in End (ish) of an Era, my time living in Cambridge has come to an end, although I plan to keep posting here occasionally. In the meantime, I’ve arrived at my next home in Grenoble, France, and with that new start has come a new blog! I’m trying out a new platform, Substack, which operates as an email newsletter as well as a traditional website. If you enjoy my posts on The Cambridge Placebook, I invite you to subscribe to my Substack, Anne of Green Places, which will have the same kinds of posts about my explorations of the French Alps, and perhaps more. Read the first post here!
I knew the day would come, of course, but it still felt surprising: I have moved away from Cambridge. During the last few months since finishing my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I thought I would have all kinds of time to scratch all the exploring and blogging itches that I put off during the thesis deadline push of the summer. However, work and friends and community commitments went on at full tilt, and then in the chaos of moving I left without feeling like I really got to say goodbye to the place (though my friends gave me a lovely sendoff). It still hasn’t really sunk in.
Writing this blog, however, has helped me get to know Cambridge in a truly long-term way–I think there were only a handful of places on my bucket list that I never touched. That said, there are a lot more Cambridge haunts I haven’t managed to get on the blog yet. I know that new places will soon crowd out the freshness of my time in Cambridge, so I don’t know the long-term future of this blog, but, for the immediate future, I plan to keep posting my backlog. Stay tuned for the promised part II of A Tale of Two Sites, and at least a few more museums, stately houses, and Dinky Doors!
In the meantime, I plan to soon start a new blog or Substack to take along on my future explorations–watch this space!
Four years after I arrived in Cambridge, I’ve reached a major milestone: I submitted my PhD thesis, and just today, passed the viva (thesis defense, from viva voce, oral exam in the obligatory Latin–and no the exam isn’t in Latin)! I still have more work ahead on publishing the chapters, so I’ll be hanging around a few more months with much the same routine. But given this milestone, I thought it would be good time to resurrect a blog post I started writing in 2019 about the two places where I spent most of my PhD time (that is, outside of pandemic lockdowns).
The day-to-day routine of a PhD student is often fluid, and has only become more so during the pandemic. Before, I went in every day to the office desk I was assigned in the David Attenborough Building (DAB) in the city-centre New Museums Site, or else to the lab in the Plant Sciences Department across the street in the Downing Site. Then, for almost two years, I worked exclusively from my laptop and borrowed second monitor in my bedroom. Over the last few terms, I gradually transitioned back to my old office haunts as my colleagues also repopulated the desks. After only a few visits, once again tromping up and down the six flights of stairs and through the many sets of glass doors emblazoned with frosted swifts up to the familiar DAB tower office with its view of carparks, spires, and sunsets, it felt like I had never left.
Every summer in early May, bird-minded Brits start looking for the swifts. The birds come screaming up from Africa and southern Europe like arrows, filling the sky with a fantasy of speed. They’re here for just a few months to return to their mates and their nests and breed, the only time of year their little stubby feet will touch down. Their nests are high up—once on cliffs, now more likely in the eaves of buildings—so they can drop easily down into the air on their foraging trips for drifting nest-makings and insects and spiderlings.
For someone from the western U.S., Europe’s common swifts (Apus apus) are a treat. Before, I had only seen one other species of swift, the white-throated, a few times, slicing high around a remote cliff face—nothing like the daily sightings of acrobatic squadrons in the sky above my house in Cambridge. Learning about their yearly sojourns and heroic feats of continuous flying endeared them to me even more. And the David Attenborough Building swift nest boxes clinched the deal.
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.
But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners.
Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
After a roughly two-decade lifelong stint in the Western US, I’ve moved to Cambridge, England, and I want a record of the place. I want to name its multitudes of places. Presumptuous of me, maybe; people have been recording and naming this place for dizzying centuries, and I’ve been here for six months. But I want my turn anyway. You’re welcome to flip through this placebook, if you can’t come see and be here yourself.
King’s College, Cambridge
For some thoughts and lots of mixed metaphors in which I try to untangle my motivations for creating this blog, read on.
