England

Eating Out

Ba­si­cally, we have two op­tions when eat­ing out: eat­ing in Hall or ex­per­i­ment­ing with un­known bud­get restau­rants in down­town Cam­bridge. An­drew de­scribed his first ex­pe­ri­ence in Hall as gen­er­ally pos­i­tive. The menu was lamb stew over rice and cold chips (think el­lip­ti­cal steak fries). While that doesn’t sound like much, it is a lot bet­ter than what we got at St. John’s, and be­cause Hall food is heav­ily sub­si­dized by the Col­lege, it’s the least ex­pen­sive op­tion if we don’t want to cook for our­selves.

We’ve also tried the £5.95 spe­cial at the “bar room bar” at the Cow. While the set­ting was less than de­sir­able (es­pe­cially cleanliness‐wise), the brick‐oven pizza with three dif­fer­ent kinds of Ital­ian meat was worth a re­turn trip. An even bet­ter lunchtime op­tion, es­pe­cially for those crav­ing a taste of home, is man­namex­ico, a van‐vendor turned hole‐in‐the‐wall shop on Re­gent St. Their fea­ture item is the “Big‐Ass Bur­rito”. While the na­chos are cov­ered with tinned cheese, the na­chos made with whole pinto beans are de­li­cious. We used a double‐scoop of jalapeños to help clear up our Cam­bridge con­ges­tion. The com­bi­na­tion of weather and pol­lu­tion can be so bad that Kara’s se­nior tu­tor claims Cam­bridge gave her asthma.

We found our fa­vorite stop on the way home at the Yippee Noo­dle Shop. It’s de­li­cious. It’s at­trac­tive min­i­mal­ist ap­pear­ance with long rows of ta­bles might make you fear minia­ture por­tions, but the plate of Sin­ga­pore noo­dles eas­ily fed us both with the ad­di­tion of a small‐plate and a bowl of hot and sour soup. The fried dofu was ex­cel­lent and the in­gre­di­ents in the noo­dles, in­clud­ing bean sprouts and chicken, with scrup­tuous. But noth­ing com­pared to the £1 bowl of hot and sour soup. It was hot and tangy with­out be­ing spicy, and was as hearty as a stew with­out be­ing thick. We were sur­prised by so many ref­er­ences to prawns on the menu, un­til we dis­cov­ered that in the UK, ‘prawn’ doesn’t mean “big shrimp”, but just your av­er­age pinky‐sized crus­tacean.

Last but not least, most of our culi­nary ad­ven­tures have been bring­ing things home. One of our fa­vorite places from which to bring things home is the Cam­bridge Mar­ket. Whether it’s yes­ter­day’s rasp­ber­ries for 50p or tiny Eng­lish straw­ber­ries, £2 a pun­net, the Mar­ket is al­ways a mag­netic temp­ta­tion. One of our most re­cent ad­ven­tures was the shared con­sump­tion of an Eng­lish yel­low pome­gran­ate. While it was tasty and a bar­gain at 50p, it was not as tangy as the red pome­gran­ates to which we are ac­cus­tomed.

8 November 2008

Jon Kara Shields

Mixed Kitchens

One of my great­est reser­va­tions when we came to Eng­land was the prospect of shar­ing a kitchen. One of my firmest re­quire­ments for any kitchen we had to use was a dish­washer. The lodg­ing into which we moved does have a dish­washer, but it is bro­ken and doesn’t seem likely to be fixed while we re­side here. It’s used to store soap pow­der. This cri­sis is mit­i­gated by the fact that in­stead, we have ex­tremely huge sinks. Each sink is about eight times as large as our pre­vi­ous sink, which was so small it must have has a pre­vi­ous ca­reer in a den­tist’s of­fice.

The first night we were here, Chris of­fered to make us din­ner. He asked of if there was any­thing we didn’t eat. Kara said no, but in hind­sight, wishes she had said “fish”. Chris went out to the store, and when he re­turned, he brought back a hare fresh from the butch­ers. He pro­ceeded to com­bine the hare with lots of veg­eta­bles in a meaty, dark stew. When he went out again to pick up Justin from work, he left Kara with a bowl of dumpling bat­ter and a plea to watch the stew. It turned out tasty, but we have no­ticed that this is a habit with Chris — start­ing to cook, and then leav­ing his guests with the kitchen while he goes out. It al­ways seems to work out ok, though.

We have found that shar­ing a kitchen with Chris (since Justin doesn’t cook very of­ten) to be a fairly sat­is­fac­tory sit­u­a­tion. Most Eng­lish peo­ple seem eat around eight in the evening, and even later when din­ner is more for­mal. We usu­ally eat around six or seven, so we don’t run into each other much.

The only thing which we have found to be un­de­sir­able about our shared kitchen is the fre­quency of fishy smells and Chris’ ten­dency to wash up, but leave pots and pans full of din­ner lay­ing about for sev­eral days. The lat­ter also frus­trates his part­ner, Justin, es­pe­cially when the food spoils. There is also a rather mys­te­ri­ous foil‐wrapped pack­age on the edge of the counter. Af­ter the first week or so, we peeked in­side, but we are still un­elu­ci­dated. It looks like it might be a strange kind of cake, maybe for Justin’s birth­day this month, but by that time, it will have set for at least two months! It may be some­thing in the Christ­mas pud­ding vein: we saw Chris make three or four large pud­dings last week, and, of course, those are meant to set and “ma­ture.”

8 November 2008

Andrew Shields

Matriculation

It was on a re­ally cold Sun­day, and rain­ing pretty hard. When we ar­rived, I signed a bunch of pa­pers for porters and ad­min­is­tra­tion, re­ceived a bunch of pa­pers, and bought a col­lege gown. The Cor­pus Christi gowns are, as An­drew said, more like a cape with arm­holes. The gown goes to about my knees, but are one‐size‐fits‐all, so it was much stranger look­ing at the new Or­gan Scholar who was at least a foot taller than me and 40 pounds lighter. They are black with vents on the sleeves, with one strip of vel­vety col­lar.

Af­ter the com­ple­tion of pa­per­work, there was tea in the Old Com­mon Room, which is the com­mon room for Fel­lows. Af­ter that, they took a pic­ture of all of the fresh­ers out­side be­cause it had stopped rain­ing; how­ever, it was still quite cold. Sev­eral fresh­ers at­trib­uted colds to the event af­ter the fact due to the long pe­riod of time spent wait­ing while names were called out so that we could be arranged in al­pha­bet­i­cal or­der, for easy cap­tion­ing. Af­ter the pic­ture, all guests were asked to leave, and we went into the hall to sign “the big book”. Af­ter a short break most of the fresh­ers at­tended a lovely, op­tional, Even­song ser­vice where they sang Pur­cell and Mon­teverdi and read the liturgy. The Chapel was so full that they had to bring in ex­tra benches and they ran out of ser­vice pam­phlets. At the end, the ju­nior or­gan scholar, a fresher read­ing his­tory, played a lengthy and dif­fi­cult pre­lude for the re­ces­sion. The most amaz­ing part was that he has only been play­ing the or­gan for three years. Af­ter Even­song, we went to the s Lodge, which is lo­cated in the Col­lege, for drinks. Thence we pro­ceeded to For­mal Hall, where I was seated with the other the­olo­gians be­tween the ar­chae­ol­o­gists and the Ori­en­tal stud­ies stu­dents.

Mas­ter

For­mal Hall is a sil­ver and china ser­vice meal where gowns are re­quired and the ta­bles are waited upon, in­stead of the more com­mon every­day cafe­te­ria style of the Hall. That night we were served tomato tart­let salad and duck in an or­ange and wine sauce served with some sort of French prepa­ra­tion of pota­toes; it was de­li­cious. For desert we had a slice of choco­late mousse cake with a can­died plum. I sat next to the Mas­ter’s wife and was very cor­dially in­vited to tea at the Lodge, and across from me sat An­gus, a fel­low the­olo­gian. We dis­cussed An­gus’ prospects of faith as he stud­ied re­li­gion, the en­gag­ing na­ture of this di­a­logue the only pos­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion for leav­ing part of my duck un­eaten!

The col­lege con­tains a lovely sil­ver col­lec­tion and a very ugly clock; along with a large wine col­lec­tion these as­sets help con­tribute to Cor­pus’ sta­tus among the top three rich­est col­leges in Cam­bridge. All other as­sets are over­whelmed, how­ever, by the mag­nif­i­cent Parker Man­u­script Li­brary where I saw the orig­i­nal draft of the 39 Ar­ti­cles, the found­ing doc­u­ment for the Church of Eng­land. A 6th Cen­tury gospel kept by the li­brary is still used at the en­throne­ment of each new Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury. I also saw a jour­nal where there were draw­ings of the first ele­phant ever to come to Eng­land (They fed the ele­phant meat, so in­stead of liv­ing the es­ti­mated hun­dred years, it died af­ter two.), sev­eral Anglo‐Saxon books, and many beau­ti­ful il­lu­mi­nated pages from the gospels. While most un­der­grad­u­ates have no need of the li­braries re­sources they are al­lowed to visit and bring guests to the li­brary at any time dur­ing of­fice hours and even to han­dle many of the books. The li­brar­ian had many in­ter­est­ing sto­ries to tell and when I asked if there was a good bi­og­ra­phy of Matthew Parker (who was the arch­bishop that gave Cor­pus all the man­u­scripts and was ap­pointed by Eliz­a­beth I to “make sure it [Protes­tantism] sticks”) that cov­ered his later life, in­cor­po­rat­ing the masses of mar­gin­a­lia in the books, he said “No, will you write one?” And turned his eye strongly on me. I thought, how­ever, that this sounded much more like an in­vi­ta­tion to be­come a Caus­abon than to be the glo­ri­ously rev­e­la­tory bi­og­ra­phy for which he hopes. How­ever, of the man­u­scripts, printed works, and many let­ters etc. kept at the li­brary, all the man­u­scripts are be­ing put on­line and can be viewed any­where in the world.

Pretty nifty. I asked if they used un­der­grad vol­un­teers. They said, …not much.

8 November 2008

Jon Kara Shields

Making ‘England’

One night last week, just as I was slip­ping into sleep, I saw an im­age of an open mag­a­zine and re­al­ized that it was a mag­a­zine about our ad­ven­tures in Eng­land. In the next mo­ment, I thought with re­gret, “I am now asleep, and will never re­mem­ber this in the morn­ing.” But I did, and set to work try­ing to make the mag­a­zine as soon as I woke up.

‘Eng­land’ is the re­sult, and is re­mark­ably faith­ful to the vi­sion I had. To this faith­ful­ness there is, how­ever, one caveat: I de­signed Eng­land us­ing Sa­fari on OS X. I haven’t looked at it in any other browser. It prob­a­bly looks hor­ri­ble in them. I am un­apolo­getic (in the mod­ern sense). If one reads much about web de­sign, one knows about the dark ages of the in­ter­net called ‘the browser wars’ in which peo­ple struck this sort of at­ti­tude all the time, and are now re­mem­bered for it with con­tempt and dis­tain. In those days, the big browser mak­ers (Netscape and Mi­crosoft) com­peted to win the mar­ket for browsers by in­tro­duc­ing pro­pri­etary fea­tures and con­vinc­ing web de­sign­ers that they couldn’t live with­out them. This lead to a lot of alien­ation and un­hap­pi­ness, and so even­tu­ally to ‘web stan­dards’ and a more open, friendly in­ter­net ab­stracted from the browser one used. At least in the­ory.

Now, I have writ­ten Eng­land with web stan­dards in mind, and haven’t used any non‐standard code. And it will still ‘break’ or look wrong in many browsers. I’m not go­ing to worry about it, be­cause I have enough un­happy things to think about and do. If you find Eng­land un­read­able, , and I’ll send you a copy of what­ever it is you want to read. That said, I hope that some of you will be able to share in what I think is a beau­ti­ful web­site.

The Tools, and other in­ter­est­ing things

Be­cause we want to share with you as many of the things we get to see dur­ing our is­land so­journ, we de­cided to get a re­ally good cam­era to doc­u­ment our lives in all their over­cast and rainy glory. Un­for­tu­nately, re­ally good cam­eras cost thou­sands of pounds, so we set­tled for a ‘just enough’ cam­era that still has enough fea­tures to keep us con­fused for the next decade. We bought a lightly used Nikon D40 on eBay, and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens and 4GB SDHC card on Ama­zon. This gives us an ex­pen­sive, but not‐too‐expensive, cam­era that can do al­most any­thing. We’re still learn­ing to fo­cus, and we strug­gle with aper­ture and shut­ter speed, but every once in a while we take a re­ally nice pic­ture. We plan to share these pic­tures with you by in­clud­ing them in ar­ti­cles and by us­ing them as ‘Ti­tle Pages’ for each is­sue we pub­lish.

The rest of our tools are rough and un­fin­ished rel­a­tively ar­cane bits of code and tech­nol­ogy that store these pic­tures and our words and that at­tempt to send them back out to you in a rel­a­tively or­dered and com­pre­hen­si­ble fash­ion. Some of their names are listed in the colophon ap­pear­ing on the table of con­tents pages.

Bon ap­pétit!

8 November 2008

Andrew Shields