Hymn: Spring

By popular demand, and by popular demand I mean one reader's suggestion (at least I have one reader - thank you Duncs, for a courageous self-naming and shaming), I'm sunning this blog to bud, greener than ever. I've been hard at the old essayism during the week, hard at the journey on the weekends: the last few have taken me to Istanbul, Glasgow and the New Forest. But now I'm back, ready for a final eight weeks of pain before the summer makes itself subtly present. I look forward to adapting the Australian summer pattern to an English context. That is, me making resolutions about extreme fun and productivity, and answering them with extreme online newspaper reading.

But for the time being, the bloom means automatic happiness. Over the last month, Cambridge has been transformed; and the changes have seemed all the more miraculous for my repeated departures and arrivals. First came the flowers. The path over the King's bridge, fast becoming my seasonal sundial, became thick with yellow; then brilliant whites and purples joined in the colour run. Times like these I wish I knew my quaint garden botany better. But I'll hit you with three known quantities: daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses quiver everywhere in the light breeze. Then the green began to arrive in truckloads, every day bringing an increase. Yesterday I punted up and down the Cam and the obstacles have really changed. The low-hanging willows now brush you with foliage rather than jab you with sticks. The river was crammed with peak time traffic of all sorts. You don't need a punting licence, so the conditions are expectedly unruly. A hot-shot tour guide veers elegantly around you, controlling two punts at once with effortless dips of the pole, sounding off about Byron and Wordsworth; while on the other side you're beset by novices entangled in messy knots with each other, the bank and the bridge. Much as students revile tourists, they're good for lightening the tone, and making you feel master of your own floating domain.

Up in Glasgow and down in the New Forest, I was given a prime chance to compare springs UK wide, north and south. The delightfully bleak, post-industrial, semi-dystopic landscapes of Glasgow didn't really show off much of mother nature's nude bits. I was here for one of the highlights on the classical calendar: the annual Classical Association conference. Not only were the buds and beds limited within the 4-star grandeur of the Crown Plaza Hotel, but they also had trouble finding space to live outside and around it. When Tam (my room companion) and I first alighted at the Exhibition Centre station, we were thrilled to look out over our expectations of Glasgow made flesh: a concrete plain of motorways, roadworks, shudder-inducing flashbacks to the future as it was in the 1980's. There was a windowed tunnel footbridge over the road, whose red semicircular beams seemed to point towards a badly designed infinity. The windows were no longer windows, but rather frosted and scratched chunks of plastic, worn down with repeated removals of stubborn graffiti. At the other end of the tunnel, a monstrous parody of the Sydney Opera House (the Exhibition Centre itself) loomed up: it looked like an armadillo, or a trilobyte, bending in on itself, arching its back to deflect the tomato assault that would come, inevitably, to protest its ugliness. Through some carpark and cut-up road, our hotel stood isolated on a block of land that could have easily gone the way of bitumen at birth. It was hemmed in by road, and I sensed that, when infrastructure progress comes a-calling, the Hotel Campanile might be the first sacrifice. It's one of those buildings whose absence might even bring significant aesthetic gains.

Despite the surroundings of the conference, we managed to escape into other, prettier bits of town. The university and its area are definitely happening; the CBD to a lesser extent. The centre felt clean and modern almost to the point of anonymity. It saddened me a little that you could probably walk through streets and streets of Glasgow without being able to identify it beyond 'miscellaneous U.K. city': dense oldish buildings now dominated, at least at street level, by those familiar reproducibles (Maccy D's, Pret-a-Manger, Pizza Express, Costa's Coffee; the unavoidable Wetherspoon's, Britain's answer to the question 'why shouldn't a pub be made into a chain?'). Amid all the superficial gloom of glomerating commerce, however, there were some real gems. The conference delegates were treated to a drinks reception at the city chambers, which housed one of the best staircases known to (this) man: walls, stairs and railings were all fashioned of smooth pink and white marble (or something like marble). We then downed our champas and picked at hors d'oeuvres in a gilded, high-ceilinged hall. We listened to more shameless flattery about the general greatness of classics, and the incomparable intellects of classicists. The latter may have been true once, because every educated person was a classicist (to some degree). Nowadays the platitudes make me cringe a bit; but they at least sound more sincere in the U.K. (proud home of elitism) than they do in Australia.

Not many natural gauges of spring in Glasgow then, apart from the marginally increased mating among classicists. When the blood of a scholar starts pumping, interpretation of that line of Apollonius has been known to wait for DAYS. Enough of that, lest I lose my ironic detachment from overheating. There was more scope for flower and shoot in the New Forest, despite rubbish weather. This patch of England, hinterland just near the coastal city of Southampton, is lovely indeed. Woodland tracks twist and turn through the trunks, each post of a tree given its own generous radius; nothing like the dense scrub of Australia. But there were weirder landscapes as well: hilly heath, which only supports rocks and brittle bushes. Then the wackiest innovation of all: a marsh on high ground. We walked up a fairly steep hill covered in overgrown grass thinking that it would be less muddy than below, but the water just seemed to swell out the top layer of earth into a squelching bog. I was wearing gumboots, and at one point I was stuck with both legs sunken up to the knees, my left hand in next to the legs, and my right hand clasping onto a skinny tree branch, trying to haul the rest of my defeated limbs out of trouble. For a time, I was the next bog man.

We're not out of the woods yet: April still threatens to go either way, beautiful one day, grim the next. But limb by limb, we escape the bog, and sing the hymn...

Spring!