During the school holiday I took my kid to Audley End, where I was bemused by the accumulation and display of centuries of private wealth, and he had fun playing Victorian games on the lawn.
If they call it a lawn here.
Walking back from the train station I absent-mindedly glanced in the window of a house and noticed a Trader Joe’s shopping bag: a common object back home but absolutely unheard of here. The sight made me clap my hands together and squeal (yes, I really do act like that) until I realized I was being both a voyeur andfoolish.
Just then a face popped up behind the bag – it was Karen holding her gorgeous daughter.
The fact I had no idea she lived there underscores a few interesting truths about life in this town, not least the hunch that I have not worked hard enough to sustain local friendships.
Karen graciously invited us in and fed us dinner, during which we had many fantastically entertaining conversations and my son (who used to hiss at babies) sweetly entertained a lively toddler.
I was especially intrigued to hear that, even though Karen certainly likes the town more than I do, she also misses the west coast in approximately the same way. Not just the landscape, or family, but the collaborative and community based nature of the arts scene.
Cambridge offers many advantages I have never experienced elsewhere, but there is literally no discernible underground. Artists, yes. Intellectuals, yes. Musicians, definitely – so many highly trained and brilliant musicians you stumble over them all the livelong day. We don’t just have buskers, we have opera singers on every other corner.
But the emphasis is very much on the cultural elite – the competitive and refined, whether mainstream or esoteric, is always always inherently part of the system.
This town is literally the definition of Establishment.
I’m sure it was different in earlier eras – I have read enough to grasp the incendiary nature of intellectual discourse here at various points. Though those times tended to coincide with a lack of en suite plumbing.
Now the town is too expensive and too transitory. This place is not like certain U.S. college towns where the waiter at the cafe has a PhD in chemistry, or your friendly bike messenger is a trained medievalist.
This is not a criticism. Karen agreed with me that the west coast can feel claustrophobic, overly idealistic, too personally demanding, often anti-intellectual. Exactly the opposite of Cambridge.
When I decided to move here I craved solitude above all else, and that is something I certainly did find.