A virtual space for (some) writing
There is an ancient tradition at the University of Cambridge amongst art students, which I honour here today: taking a cool-sounding quotation from an intellectual source, and repurposing without context. My title for this post is taken from F.R. Leavis in Two Cultures (no, I haven’t checked the citation, on the principle that I’ve graduated.) …
Continue reading “The essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge”
And so we enter the event I am calling ‘The Second Fucking Time I’ve Had To Flee A Country On The Year Abroad.’ (TSFTIHTFACOTYA for short?). It’s all happened pretty quickly. On Friday I sent an e-mail to the company I was supposed to work for in Beaune, in which I (oh, innocence) wondered whether …
Continue reading “We escape lockdown corona crisis in France”
You’ve probably noticed by now how it’s all gone a bit Exodus, that the newspapers have become great harbingers of doom, and that the world’s generally on an off-day. Coronavirus (for it is she) has spread to France, which is now the 2nd most infected country in Europe, and the ENS has closed. Plus no …
Continue reading “Corona-vacances : she may be small, but she’s shut down France”
(n.b. I wrote this while I was quite tired, so some of it might sound like I was smoking something fruity. I wasn’t.) For Part 1 at Cambridge, we studied the nouvelle vague classic, Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7h. This film, which follows Cléo through her day, represents time as an elastic quantity, …
When in Gaul, do as the Gauls do. Something like that. Last weekend we found an opportunity to prance around like it was 47BC, in the little town of Vienne. After some confusion over where we were meeting, how to get from the ENS to the station, then how to get from the metro to …
I decided to go to the Alps. Although I have been in Lyon for just over a month, my life here so far has been steadily horizontal – far from the breathless climbs that pushed through every day in La Paz. Skiing was pretty much out of the question; despite my parents paying for private …
According to internet sites of varying reliability, it was Napoléon Bonaparte who first said ‘If you want a thing done well, do it yourself’. Though presumably he said it in French. Such a statement makes sense within the context of French administration, a vast and knotted series of systems designed to never let anyone into …
I actually travelled York – Lyon by train, but it sounded better with the alliteration. And although both Yorkshire and London firmly believe themselves to be at The Centre of The Universe, even I must concede that London is probably (marginally) more globally important. So London will be where the journey starts. After a 1st …
As I attended the kind of school where you call teachers by their first name, it should be of no surprise to you that there are printed-out poems in the staff loos, for reflection during excretion. This was where I came across Cope’s most famous poem, the Orange: The Orange At lunchtime I bought a …
I backpacked around Chile, staying in hostels, as well as travelling in Bolivia on the weekends; worked in Bolivia, stayed in hotels in Peru (with my mum), and visited a range of climates – the jungle, salt flats, hiking in national parks, staying in cities, staying near the coast, mountains. Also La Paz is quite …
Continue reading “What I packed for 3 months in South America”
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