The Twin in the Basement

Those familiar with my pre-exilic clowning will know that destination UK was decided about a year ago, after the dons failed to run a background check and graciously let me in to their towers; I just didn't know whether it would be Oxford or Cambridge until August came around. I was teetering on the precipice of heading for the older, bigger place, when some intuitive beam snapped. I called my prospective supervisor here and asked him if there was any spare cash lying around to make up the difference between the full funding I had at Oxford and the partial amount I had at Cambridge. The man's magic translated from Greek to finance seamlessly. Upshot: you're reading a blog about life in Cambridge, and not the place at the other end of the wormhole.

And yet, however happy I am in a place, my imagination has an insuppressible appetite for greener grass. In the darker moments of the Cambridge winter, I couldn't help meditating over the question of 'what would life have been like...over there?' Everyone gets the desire to be somewhere else, of course: we filthy rich westerners are ever buying up images of island paradises to escape to. But the long history of the Oxford/Cambridge dichotomy made the decision into a caricature of a pivotal moment, a bifurcation so clear cut that you could write a film about it. You'd call it Sliding Doors. A younger Gwyneth Paltrow would play me. Anyway, the evil twin, though confined to the basement, would raise a cry from time to time and demand its scraps and crumbs; I couldn't quite let it die.

The way to kill it was through overfeeding. I went to Oxford for the second time a few weekends ago. The first time didn't really count: I arrived in the morning, had some grub, went for a bit of a walk, saw a play purely in Greek, then went home. Another day at the office. This second time was both more extended and more representative of what I would have lived through had I taken the Oxford option. Three Cambridge diggers and myself had booked in for a one day colloquium on 'Latin Poetic Commentaries' (at Corpus Christi, my would-be Oxford college), featuring various home- and international-grown stars of the commentary scene. In non-techy terms, a commentary is usually an edition of a classical text (such as Virgil's Aeneid, etc.) which includes explanatory notes ranging over anything the commentator feels will help interpretation: grammatical, literary, historical, cultural notes are all fair game. Because Latin and Greek, being dead languages, have become utterly unfamiliar, the commentary has gained central importance. Whenever you're mulling over a text, a commentary is the first port of call; more often than not it straightens out basic linguistic problems you have, and forms a convenient synthesis of modern criticism which has been written on the text. So the commentary, next to the text itself, is the thing that is most read in classical circles, and generally the most respected. You really have to know your stuff to write one; and the time investment required is often astronomical. One commentary I use a lot took thirty years to percolate. That's a marriage right there, working up to the satisfying divorce of publication.

This colloquium was set to consume all Saturday. It didn't begin well. The friendly antipathy between Oxford and Cambridge is singularly well-serviced by the vom-generator also known as the x5: it's a bus that miraculously manages to transform a 1.5-2 hr sprint into a windy 3.5 hr marathon. The mid-point, right where the accelerations thrash your stomach against your intestines at peak intensity is, by a cruel twist of fate, scenic Milton Keynes. This is the UK's answer to Canberra, but much, much uglier. Sitting down to design from scratch, you could just imagine the round table of architects eagerly discussing their utopian vision; too little did they anticipate that it would one day turn into the dystopic city of bus sickness, a place at which people don't even have to alight to feel repulsed.

Glad for some air, we made the walk to Corpus Christi under the expert guidance of a knowing defector (she was an undergraduate at Corpus before she made the conversion for her masters). We smashed a pre-conference tea and biscuit in the bite-size Corpus Christi hall as we paid our monies and registered. The miniature dimensions of the college became a bit of a running theme...well, gag...for the day: the quadrangle was microlithic, and the lunch was proportional. We settled into a crammed space (the day was already 'sold out' before the saint of an organiser let me squeeze in) for the first paper. This was probably the highlight for me, given that it was still morning, I was all tea-d up, and I hadn't heard the sleeping pill of a word 'lemmatistic' yet. The presenter was a young PhD student at Corpus, smattered over the UK media of late because of her phenomenal success on University Challenge (a quiz show for Uni students; taken uber-seriously). She was quick, clever, and knew how to speak; she's writing a commentary on part of Catullus' poem 64 for her thesis, one of my favourite poems ever. So I was already sympathetic to the material. My attention began to fade during the next presentation on Propertius; I dipped in and out of Statius and Ovid after lunch, and by Horace, namely post-Afternoon Tea, I was almost out. The fault lay largely with the nature of the field: commentary-writing is about as nitty-gritty an activity as you can get in classics, and the method of microcosmic analysis that it encourages tends to shift attention away from the bigger picture to questions like 'How many times does that word occur in Horace? 32?! My, that is interesting!' Even when the Ovid woman tried to lay her cards on the table and get controversial, declaring from the whistle 'this commentary is a political commentary...so let's get political' - no one got political. That was depressing; but even more depressing was my own inability to engage or comment. I'm chronically tongue-tied at these events as it is. I get ultra-nervy and can't control my voice properly, so my usual practice is to try to ask inoffensive questions of short duration, standardly relating to puns. But barely anything came into my head on this occasion. The rest of the Cambridge contingent picked up my slack, god bless 'em.

The Catullus girl kept raising an apt point about the boredom often involved in reading a commentary. She touched repeatedly on the importance of 'waking the reader up' with the odd lightning-bolt turn of phrase. Those were probably the only moments where my head filled with 'hell-yeah's. If there's one thing I'm genuinely invested in, it's the war on dreary academic writing. That's not to completely marginalise all big-man principles of science, objectivity, structure etc. (always contestable); just to say that rigour doesn't have to equal boredom. If we're spending days reading books and articles, we might as well be having fun.

Anyway, not much taken from the Saturday which we hadn't already discussed in our MPhil seminar in first term. Sunday was different though. We had a pancake-fuelled day in town, walking beneath a gleaming sun that threatened spring. Oxford is a very pretty place; I'd even go so far as to say it trumps the Bridge. That might just be my controversial bent on the slant (likewise I praise Melbourne over Sydney to anyone I meet-haven't decided whether it's a rhetorical exercise or an opinion yet). But it feels like a more homogeneous attempt at a university: the architecture of colleges and uni buildings works well together. There're also prime meadows and punting territory within walking distance (and full view) of the magnificent Christ Church College. We glided downstream over some cake and gin, periodically visiting the bank and ducking beneath spindly tree branches as we went. But no one fell in. I think my chances of drowning would be slightly higher writing a commentary than travelling in a punt. I certainly know which of the two I'd rather be doing.

So the twin below no longer knocks. The flowering Cambridge daffodils nod assent.