Cambridge is a town for eavesdroppers

A travelogue

This week I’ve been wandering around the streets of Cambridge. There are the tourists, the spires, the punters, the pigeons, the groundskeepers, and the pubs, the pale 20-year-olds racing around looking disheveled and important. I have never been to Cambridge and always imagined it would be full of boys like Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited with cable-knit sweaters tied breezily around their necks and an air of petulance and empire about them. Instead, the student body seems largely international, and their conversations are less “my father’s just fired the butler, old boy” than “the ions are negatively charged.” But I am taking it in stride. 

At every turn, there are tourists. There are the ones who travel in multi-generational groups wielding selfie sticks, and the ones who travel in pairs – usually couples in their sixties – arguing in hushed tones or gazing wearily at their city maps, oblivious to the pedestrian traffic jam they’re causing. There is a third group too, I guess: people like me who are wearing backpacks and pretending very, very hard that they are locals and, because of age and whatnot, are largely successful at it. Someone even asked me how to get to the business school today. Luckily, we were standing right in front of it.

I have spent most of my days walking in the rain from library to coffee shop and back again, listening in on conversations and reading the newspaper (in another life, I imagine that I was the suited patriarch of a middle-class family who skimmed the Wall Street Journal instead of speaking to his children). The conversations are wide-ranging. It’s just before term time, and there are many meetings between colleagues that revolve around the restructuring of certain courses based on the results of mock exams. Then there are the PhD students interviewing each other, the 25-year-olds grilling 40-year-olds about their manuscripts, and the two identical men this morning who were talking about how “Satya” (Nadella – the CEO of Microsoft), put too much money into “Chat GTP.” 

At lunch on Monday, I heard an American PhD student talking to an English woman about all the states he’s visited. “What even are the Dakotas?” he asked. “I’ve never met anyone from them. As far as I know, they don’t even exist” 

“What about Rhode Island?” She asked. 

“I’ve met some people who lived there but weren’t born there,” he said. “So it’s under review.”

Yesterday, I sat near an elderly couple who were eating soup. After 10 minutes of silence, the woman said thoughtfully, “That man sitting over there to my right reminds me of the man whose name we were trying to remember earlier.”

It has struck me over the past few days just how much people change in public depending on whether they’re alone or with someone. When you see a person on their own, they are closed, their expressions inscrutable, their eyes hard – more stones than ciphers. You get a feeling about them right away. You project your own insecurities onto them. You think, “That person must be important. Look at their jacket,” or “They must be angry. Look at how they just opened their laptop” or “They must be unimpressed. Look at how they looked at their phone.” If they are alone for the duration of their visit, you think you know them. But as soon as someone else walks in and turns out to be the person they were there to meet, everything changes. That stony expression breaks into a startlingly open smile. That private, shuttered face becomes something bright, hopeful, almost painfully eager as they awkwardly shake hands or hug or ask if the other person has already ordered. It makes them somehow less readable once there are variables that are not of your own making. 

Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons in ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ ITV 1981

Here, I must confess that I have always felt that travel blogs miss the point. You can share all the basic stuff like which restaurants you like or how the parking is, but that doesn’t necessarily make anyone feel like they know the place. You can show them pictures of a duck lounging by a river or an image of the Wren Library at sunset, but what about all the people standing behind you taking the same photo and making you feel like the experience actually isn’t that singular or particularly memorable after all? In the spirit of spreading pertinent information, I will share the two main things I have learned about Cambridge in the past four days. The first is that you will probably get hit by a bike, and the second is that the university has a very particular way of bragging about itself. 

Cambridge is, based on my own empirical findings, second only to Amsterdam in reckless commuter cycling. Pedestrians are putting their lives on the line every time they cross the street or drift by inches from the curb. It’s the wild west out here, but instead of bucking broncos and spooked horses, you’ve got a woman in an ankle-length skirt hopping a grate and a dad towing three kids in a buggy blitzing straight down the centre line. Cyclists move through these streets like Americans on Black Friday. It’s every man for himself and everyone against each other. You might have something to say about the relative danger of cars at this point, but I don’t want to hear it. I am not interested. On these streets, it’s the human-powered vehicles that will be the end of us all. If you visit Cambridge and aren’t planning to ride a bike, I suggest you wear a helmet. 

Regarding the second point, I don’t want to be one of those American tourists who make everything about the cultural differences between the U.S. and England, but I will anyway because it’s low-hanging fruit and I lack imagination. In America, people assert their perceived superiority in the clumsiest, most effortful manner. Enormous cars. Rolexes. The acquisition of Twitter. In the U.K., they do it in a much more subtle way. The implication is that there is nothing to prove because the superiority is obvious. Prima facie, as the Cambridge folk might put it. To state something overtly would be an embarrassing, rather desperate gesture. In that vein, there is very little information about the university's extensive history on campus as far as I can tell. There aren’t billboards or colourful plaques or open-topped bus tours. But in the entryway of the main library, there is a list of names of major donors of the building that is presented in chronological order. It casually begins with a man named Nigel de Thornton in the year 1278. The subtlety is more of a quick stab than a flex. 

I will leave you with an image. I am currently sitting in the aforementioned 800-year-old library looking out over some very old spires just beyond the treetops. The sun is setting, turning them a bright gold. A church bell is ringing. And a siren. A cyclist just careened past the window on the hunt for some pedestrians. Five people are taking a picture of a red phone booth. A teenager with floppy hair and jeans three inches too short just passed my desk, half-running, toward the history section. Some things just can’t wait.