Life, with the garden
Location: Cambridge, England • • • Visit: June 2013
Report from a train, between Petersborough and Cambridge: The day started nicely in Orkney, with some sun and a little bit of breeze, but now the damp air is thick and grey outside the windows, barely revealing the incredibly flat and green landscape of East Anglia.
My mood can’t be bulged, though. It’s my first day of the real Europe trip that I’m embarking on. Orkney with dad was just a little introduction, traveling by car, eating at nice restaurants and sleeping in comfy hotel beds. Now I’m off for the real thing. Trains, couches in stranger’s homes, language barriers and new experiences. Pushing my own boundaries!
First stop: Cambridge. Abbie, whom I met while wwoofing in California, is going to meet me at the train station. She is studying for her master’s there. So, even now I’m starting it kind of gently, staying with a friend, visiting a small city. Which is good, I think. There’s no sense in doing everything, all at once.
On the train from Edinburgh to Petersborough, I managed to go through all the photos I’ve taken so far, get rid of the bad ones, pick out the good ones and then edit them so that they can be uploaded and shared. I’ve also managed to find seats on both trains, and not have any trouble with my ticket. My plan is working out, so far!
Also, I’ve had one text message from Elin and one from Hanna, asking how I’m doing. Even though I have no wish to head back home yet, it still feels nice to know that there are people back there thinking of me.
It’s midsummer’s eve and I’m sitting in a little hidden corner of the limestone garden in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, a bench with a seat shaped like a half circle, sheltered by high rock walls covered in purple flowers on three sides. The bees seem to love the purple flowers, because the air is filled with the hum of their wings.
The sun is shining behind a thin veil of clouds and the temperature is of that pressing kind, like as if it’s awaiting thunder. Abbie, the friend I’m visiting in Cambridge, told me yesterday that this feeling is common here, but that the thunder never comes. Must be tiring, the constant wait for a release that never comes.
It is calm here, in the garden. Birds are singing and the grass is still a little wet from the rain earlier today. There’s just something about this place. When it comes to gardens, the British do know what they are doing.
Compared to other botanic gardens I’ve been to in the UK, this garden is not large. But it has everything you need in a botanic garden, with that typical British eye for lush detail and secret nooks. And they even have a grass garden. Flower beds full of different kinds of grasses. I so appreciate the careful display of the ordinary, the easily missed and passed-by.
Later, after returning from the botanic garden: Since it was Swedish Midsummer’s Eve, Abbie had invited some friends to eat strawberries with us. Earlier in the day, we had walked past a market and ended up buying six cartons of strawberries, which probably meant more than two kilograms of berries, and I also bought a bottle of rosé wine.
I really regret not bringing my camera with me out to the Emmanuel collage back lawn, to capture this lovely evening that I spent, celebrating Midsummer in Cambridge. I forgot the camera, and then couldn’t be bothered to go back up Abbie’s rooms. But let me paint the picture for you, in words:
Abbie had brought out a blanket that we spread out on the grass. The sun was shining, but soon disappeared behind the collage chapel, but the light still lingered for quite a while, letting us sit there with our glasses of wine and the huge bowl of strawberries. My one regret (more or less) for going away in the middle of June and not returning home until the tail end of July, is that I will miss the strawberry season in Sweden. But, last year I handled being away by systematically eating myself through the Duckworths’ strawberry field in California, and this year me and my fellow Duckworth farm volunteer made sure to get our share together on Midsummer’s Eve. I probably ate half of the strawberries all by myself, and I felt content just listening to the others talk.
Most of the people there were Abbie’s classmates, some I had already met the night before, and I couldn’t always keep up with what they were talking about. This world of theirs, the prestige of Cambridge and the academic tradition and practice of the humanities, felt so alien to me. Which surprised me, because I’ve studied philosophy (five years ago, but still). Coupled with my interest in music, history, language and art, I thought I should be able to follow. But no. As it was, I kept mostly quiet.
After some more students joined, a group of people started playing croquet. Apparently, it’s a very English thing to do – so obviously, I had to play too. It was hard. Very very hard. The swinging technique, the aiming, how to weigh the force you put into the croquet mallet. I barely made it through the first hoop, and the dark was already falling and eventually we couldn’t even see the hoops. It wasn’t as if that many of the other participants had played before either, so that’s when we gave up. It was fun for a while, though.
The night ended in Abbie’s big living room, lying on the couches and eating cookies. I got to talking about Danish tv shows with a language genius. Not that I know anything about Danish tv shows, but apparently, he had learned Danish from watching them, just like that, but for some strange reason could not understand spoken Swedish. These Cambridge people are not your ordinary twenty-something-year-olds.
Katja Malmborg 