Patrick Kingsley on Everything
Cam Course
How walking the Fens helps soothe my academic angst.
Brewer Merlin, at the source of the Cam.
“Every day I’m hustlin’,” moans Rick Ross in his 2006 single, Hustlin’, and, at this time, I can empathise. Not that I particularly peddle cocaine, mind. It’s just I always feel that returning to Cambridge at the start of every term is somewhat analogous to the kind of kerfuffle that coke-pushing might involve. Every day is a new hustle – a DoS meeting; a dissertation supervision; an awkward, chance encounter with my ex’s mother in the detergent aisle in Sainsbury’s – and by the end of Week 0 I’m usually suffering from an acute form of what I like to call ‘academic vertigo’, a crippling psychological condition which makes me want to scurry out of Cambridge as quickly as I arrived.
Which is, in fact, what I’ve taken to doing this past year. With an enlightened droog – Merlin: brewer; accordionist; breeder of moths – I’ve tried to escape the vertiginous heights of Tripos tribulation by making, at the beginning of each semester, for the flats of the Fens. We’ve set ourselves the goal of walking the length of the Cam, from source to mouth, over three stages. Last September, we made a Michaelmas pilgrimage along the towpath to Ely Cathedral. In April, we’re ploughing the forty miles from Ely to the King’s Lynn Wash. And just last week, we took the train to Ashwell, Essex, and wandered from there – the river’s source – back to the City of Research (as I like to call this fair metropolis).
Many acquaintances tell me they couldn’t picture anything worse than trundling along the dull, flat Cambridge countryside. “On foot? In the rain? For miles on end? You must be joking,” some of them say, often while inadvertently projecting phlegm towards my face. “There aren’t even any hills to provide visual variation,” they continue, as I wipe the spittle from my cheeks. They’re partly right, of course: the Fens are flat. (On Monday, Merlin and I ‘climbed’ the highest summit in the county, and we could barely see over the hedge at the bottom.) But to equate flat with dull is a heresy.
Like the pancakes you douse with maple syrup, pancake terrain is actually delicious. To those with a more subtle aesthetic palate, the experience of walking through a landscape which spreads out so infinitely around you, and towards a horizon which is so unerringly straight, is more sublime than dull. Often, it’s not even clear where the horizon actually is – the ground merges with the sky to create a kind of transcendent smudge. And in the snow, it was particularly beautiful. Animal tracks – which would disappear instantly on a dry day – were left clearly indented in the snow to give us a rare glimpse of pathways populated not just by humans, but by rabbits and deer, hare and pheasants. Merlin was particularly chuffed with the discovery of a badger track.
Perhaps, however, the most satisfying aspect of our adventure was the physical act of walking itself. Placing one foot in front of the other for ten straight hours, powering ourselves across thirty miles of snowy earth with the strength of just our very own tods must be one of the most satisfyingly rhythmic and organic experiences. I recommend it: walking aids thinking, it’s good for talking, and, for me, it makes the next half-year – six months of endless essays, Finals, and the ever-nearing prospect of being spun out like a turd into the latrines of the wider world – seem slightly more glorious.
Topics: Cambridge, Nature, Sport
‘the ever-nearing prospect of being spun out like a turd into the latrines of the wider world’
The recurrence of this particular image across various pieces predicts a future dissertation- ‘Fruits of the Defecation Motif in the Prose of Patrick Kingsley’. Combining lyrical biographical-gastroenterological ruminations with constipated historicist speculation on the literary ramifications of insoluble fiber intake amongst the early 21st century student journalist elite