TRAVELOGUE (an occasional Travel series)
Punting in Cambridge
By Femi Olugbile
The discussion started with the vagaries of British weather.
Joel, your young student guide and punter, stands on the stern of the boat, punting from the rear as you head away into open water. A few of your fellow sailors are local English folk. Others are Asian tourists – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and they are chirping away happily and photographing everything with their camera phones. And – oh- sitting next to you is your brother Yinka, a budding politician in Northamptonshire Labour circles. He does not like the water, and is sceptical about this out-of-the-way acquatic adventure.
‘There are two things we can’t control in Cambridge’ says Joel, as you begin the journey. ‘One is the weather. The other is the dangerous manoeuvring of careless self-driven boats, which may run into you’.
On that slightly alarming note, you set off on the journey down the Cam River.
A punt is a flat-bottomed boat with square ends, propelled by a pole. Boats have featured prominently in the thousand-year-old rivalry between Cambridge University and Oxford University.
The first group of people who lived in Cambridge, two thousand years ago, were the Celts, avers Joel with his posh English accent. They were overwhelmed by the Romans, who didn’t build a fort to protect the town, as they did up north in Manchester, Leicester – all the places ending in ‘ester’ had Roman fortifications.
You pass under the Mathematical Bridge.
The boat is moving forward at a sedate pace.
Three civilisations left their imprint on Cambridge at various times – the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Vikings.
‘Cambridge is not the oldest University in the world’ admits Joel, with regret in his voice, ‘although we would have loved it to have been.’
The oldest was Bologna, founded in 1088. Oxford came next, in 1096. Cambridge came into existence in 1209.
On the right-hand side, you glide past a grand building that is part of King’s College. Cambridge has thirty-one Colleges. King’s College Chapel is the world’s largest private Chapel, a beauty with a fan-vaulted ceiling which creates a unique echo and obviates the need for central structural supports.
Further down is Clare College. Clare is the oldest College on the river, founded in 1338, by a colourful lady of means, who was already widowed three times over by the time she was twenty-seven years old. She sensibly gave up on husbands and decided to found her own College.
Trinity Hall is next on the river, founded during the plague – the Black Death, in 1350. Stephen Hawkins is part of the reason why Trinity College is famous nowadays, says Joel. Stephen, a brilliant but annoying man, first went to Oxford. He so frustrated his tutors there that they told him they couldn’t guarantee him a First Class if he stayed on there for his postgraduate degree. Chagrined, he moved over to Cambridge. In the film of Hawkins life – ‘A Theory of Everything’, Steven is played by Eddy Redmayne, who also came to Cambridge.
Trinity’s new Court building is where Prince Charles, now the King of England, used to live. Students who came to Cambridge were expected to have at least four As in their ‘A’-levels. The Prince of Wales had two As, and a B and a C. But what did that matter if your forebear King Henry VIII was the one that started the Reformation and created the Church of England, with Trinity College as the emblem of it?
You glide past the Wren Library. The courtyard was made famous in the award-winning film ‘Chariots of Fire’. This was where Isaac Newton discovered the speed of sound by clapping his hands and counting with a metronome the speed of the echoes going across the courtyard.
Further down is St Johns College with its two bridges.
Magdalene College was the last college in Cambridge to admit women as students. Now there are more female graduates than male every year, overall.
It is easy, you reflect, to disappear into this narrative of past imperial glory, innovation and eccentricity, as Joel gently steers the canoe down the placid water. But you are acutely aware that at this moment, your country, Nigeria is in a ferment. For a moment, you feel like Emperor Nero, fiddling while Rome was burning.
You think of the Nigerian crisis and its protagonists. The air of unpreparedness that attended the introduction of drastic, but necessary changes in the nation’s economy. Government running behind the ripples, instead of paddling ahead of them. Real hunger and hardship coursing through the land. Your worry that the President is not tapping the power of direct and continuous communication with his people, and not creating a perception of empathy and shared suffering to weld his people together behind him through a temporary extreme passage of hardship. On the other side, there are characters such as The Shaggy One, a voluble lawyer, determinedly adversarial, delusionally self-righteousness and morally exclusive. Another figure – the young warrior whose newspaper column used to share a page with your column. Brilliant, rude, abrasive, pursuing personal hatred with monomaniacal, hell-for-leather passion. And the haunting unfinished story of ENDSARS, infiltrated and derailed by people in pursuit of other causes, from which no lessons have been learnt – by the zealous protagonists about how to define and prosecute a successful struggle, or by the government about how to manage one.
More stories follow from Joel as he steers the punt.
The poet Lord Byron and the bear he kept as a companion in Cambridge.
The ‘LGBT’ flag flying in honour of a former an alumnus of King’s, Alan Turin, who cracked the Nazi ENIGMA code in World War II, but was prosecuted for being gay.
The statue of award-winning nature film-maker David Attenborough, an alumnus of Clare’s College, in the College gardens. Students go there to rub his nose, in the belief that it will bring them good luck.
As Joel manoeuvres the punt back to anchor, you are left with a feeling both of sadness at coming back down to earth, and exhilaration at re-inhabiting the real world populated by your own pressing issues. Even Yinka is wearing an expression of smug satisfaction on his face.
You will be back in Lagos in two days, you know, just before the first of August, when the nation-wide protests are due to start. Nigeria will come right, in the end, you say to yourself.
