A round year, squared

You can safely infer from my silence over the last two months the following: I fell into a coma after the previous apoplectic rant and have only just now woken up. Or per'aps the silence went unnoticed, or seemed so indistinguishable from the white background noise of the blog itself that it was mistaken for a post. In fact, I'll claim that. I felt the genre to be fatigued and in need of regeneration, so I posted two months worth of absence-of-posts. Space is interesting, and that's a vacuum. Thus it follows that nothingness is, for the blog, the final frontier.

Which takes this back down to earth. Apologies for the interval, but, contrary to usual reasons of sloth, this time it's justified. Loads has gone down inside the respiring Cambridge animal over this period of cyber-quietude; alas, it's often hard to prevent stuff from stealing writing-about-stuff's thunder, or vice versa. Only so many hours in a day ordinarily, and a fraction of these are cultivatable. But of late, there have been even less in a day. It's not just the shrinking northern sun. As I dance the two-fingered keyboard duet, the view has changed completely. From the strange twilight zone of West Cambridge, where the juggernaut of an endowment bears fruit in brand new apartment blocks, conference centres, faculties of William Gates, I've flung myself to the other side of town. East side. Wrong side of the tracks (I do have to cross a railway bridge to get here, so comparison not entirely facetious). I'm now in the slightly less-monied neighbourhood of Romsey, where live slightly more-diversed peoples. Though Cambridge's answer to multicultural hotspot is still a bit muted and imbued with a 'stuff-white-people-like' - me included - smell of asian grocers and moroccan restaurants and charity shops, it definitely feels less unreal than bells hourly bouncing off chapel spires and eighty-year old dons overtaking you on their bikes. This is Mecca for students who symbolically reject all that the privileged intra-college life has to offer by living - gulp - outside the ring road. Usually because our colleges didn't have any accommodation to spare. If there's one thing we're good at, it's turning necessity into nobility.

So I'm moved, but in a widened sphere, I'm very much back. To square one, on the round trip. August and September dissipated in a blink: I look at them and remember my prophecy about resolutions for extreme productivity crumbling into extreme online newspaper reading. Unfortunately there was no extremity to speak of. My routine went: bit of Greek in the morning, Shakespeare play or two in the afternoon. But most of the memories feature abortive literary encounters in starring roles. Tried to learn Italian for the eleventh time. Gave up. Tried to read some Philip Roth. Gave up. Sorry Phil...short attention span. Tried to revise some German vocab. It's gone. Tried to read 'The Philosophy of Money', on account of being poor and grappling with the idea of what I was missing out on. But the thickest German, watered into English, passed straight through me. When not coming face to face with my inability to learn anything anymore, I was working twenty hour weeks in the college library, playing a key strategic role in the Sisyphus-sized task of reorganising the infrequently used books that sit behind the frequently used books on the shelf. I also recorded books on a dictaphone for a blind undergraduate student. I enjoyed a bit of novel read-aloud time and relished the chance to insert entertaining asides into what must be pretty laborious learning for the poor guy. When I reached a long passage in French, for example, I butchered the lovely melody and stuck the knife in by saying 'pardon mon Francais' in a disgustingly Australian accent. Fun at times, but mostly monotonous - and I didn't retain a single thing. The work I performed for the library pretty much encapsulates those last two months of my break: being in close proximity to lots of books, sometimes even reading them, yet absorbing nothing in the process. It almost resembled reading for pleasure, the holiday slump where one happily yields to the drag of the airport novel, liberated from the chore of raking up bits of use and beauty for later. Almost. But the type of book I had to read came with titles like 'Order in World Politics' or 'The Complete Works of Thomas Aquinas.' Textual s+m, if you're into that sort of thing. If not, just plain pain.

The hand-to-mouth existence was - who would have thought? - poor on romance, but rich in life skills. Necessity is the mother of boredom, but also of innovative ways to stay alive whilst suffering boredom. A three-hour shift in the library would come with a free meal voucher for the college cafeteria: and I redeemed that shit good. I'd strut in, fill my tray with a smorgasbord of earthly delights, pig out, and keep a sandwich for later. Bam. Two meals in one, made lovingly for you by paid staff! I became versed in the intricate art of food dilution: pasta sauces went further than ever, distributed just above the key threshold whereat the depressing realisation that you're eating chunks of wheat kicks in. The stomach is a naive consumer easily fooled into thinking it's getting a great deal. Boiled rice is just rice; but stick it in a wok with one pea and half an egg, and it's Traditional Chinese Fried Rice. Baked beans + baked potato = Pomme de terre a l'air de bum. The only necessities for bowel-deception are that there be more than one ingredient, that these ingredients be different colours, and that the end product be given a non-literal, preferably non-English, name. Sainsbury's Basics sausages, for example, can quite happily carry the adjusted title 'viscera Catonis' (Guts of Cato). Raw matter bought for near-nought becomes food for thought when purse strings are taut. That's what grandma used to rap. I also found made-up rhymes concentrating depression era scraps of wisdom to be grand consolation.

To come clean after all that: the poverty was basically self-imposed, since I had any number of avenues for incurring debt at my disposal. And I yielded as soon as the prospect of a holiday came up. Hear that? It's the bourgeois fire alarm going crazy. But at least the spirit of the holiday was sobre and carbon-lite, even with a belly full of baked beans. A friend and I did the West Highland Way, a wonderful trek just north of Glasgow. There was glory: surveying the conquered incline of the nominally intimidating 'Devil's Staircase' as the sun turned on and off in the distance, its switch flicked by clouds moving a lot faster than we terrestrial snails ever could. The solitary energy bar I'd had for breakfast played its part, but the giddiness must have equally derived from that most simple of pleasures: release capping struggle, summit achieved, result paying for input. I think that's the reason I love walking so much, and walking uphill even more: the fact that achievement is so quantifiable, commensurable, that you can look back straight away and commit to memory the distance covered and terrain trodden, because you weren't thinking about it at the time. Perhaps it focuses, in a very visible, spatial form, the pattern I've been attracted to my whole life. I confess, I find the ideal of perfect reciprocity sexy: the circle which smooths off and rounds out punishment and reward, completes the square, balances the equation. The minor and major corrections to be made keep me going in entertaining orbits. Inescapably, the Simpsons satellite in all of them. As Kang, disguised as a presidential candidate, says in Treehouse of Horror VII: 'We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.'

There was pain also: my hiking companion injured his knee midway through, soldiered on for a day with impressive male defiance/stupidity, but decided to bail for the final stage. Which left me alone with the elements - and Scotland has a generous supply of them. Sheets of rain, inclement, incessant, made a dramatic landscape all that more dramatic; the track turned into a riverbed as torrents began to wend their way around the big rocks and stream straight over the small. It was like walking a twelve-mile tyre-strewn obstacle course: every step had to be closely considered. The rain dried briefly the next day for my hike up Britain's highest mountain (Ben Nevis), but only at the bottom: the peak is ever shrouded with dark grey vapour, which provided an interesting exercise in that it rendered the above-mentioned 'glory moment' impossible to realise. Instead of casting an arrogant glare over three hundred and sixty full degrees, mistaking godlike panopticism for omniscience, I fumbled my way across a lunar landscape, sat on a cold wet rock and tried to warm my fingers on a portable gas cooker so that they would reach sufficient temperature to perform complex tasks such as opening a packet of dried beef stew, and repeat with snickers for dessert. Maybe it was a more fulfilling conquest: you couldn't verify it by a horizon of external reference points, so you had to trust the sign saying 'summit' and the fact that you couldn't see any higher points in the twenty metre radius of visibility at your disposal. Fulfilling, but chill: I was so cold that I ran halfway down the mountain to get my extremities back online.

So went the last hurrah before the business of re-starting the academic year avalanched on me. All I know at this stage is that I've left Ovid behind, and have signed up to spend the next three years with the ancient world's greatest misanthropic arsehole: Juvenal, the satirist who hates everything and fixes nothing. Get ready for heightened bouts of negativity as I do in-character research. That means I should end this post, by rights, on a gloomy note. But I'm no slave to the subject.

It's the end of Cambridge year one. Have I run out of stuff to say about the place? Will life - as I always fear - contract as I get tangled in a three year mental death trap? The pessimist has plenty of options: the law of diminishing returns, Juvenal, the rule fixing the inferiority of the sequel to the original. But there's room for hope, a gloom-piercing ray:

Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

This summer...an outmoded model of academic robot will protect the future saviour of humanity from an upgraded model of academic robot with the weapon of highly rhetorical poetry. This robot will be programmed to carry out the pedagogical project of making John Connor into a square who will then teach others how not to cause apocalyptic wars with machines by complaining about the prospect of them instead.

Cambridge 2: Cambridge Squared.