The 'week in the life' project was co-created with 11 students currently studying at Cambridge from different disciplines and with different interests. The students created this content in their own voice to represent their own experiences of navigating the Cambridge 'week'.

Kettles Yard : a visit to this museum by the author of this page

Images Attribution: LBH

Essay reading day

a wander:  Two years in, I have moved to structure my Cambridge life around limited regular commitments, preferring the flexibility of more relaxed society schedules and the serendipity of Cambridge’s carousel of slightly random events (ceramic snail-making has been known). One place however, where you can be sure to find me each week is at yoga sessions. On Monday at 6pm, as the sun goes down, a friend and I meet at Queens’ College to perform yogic salutations to said sun, accompanied by the lovely yoga teacher Karin. Then, at 7pm, restored by copious downwards dogs, we retire to her staircase to cook and then eat outside on Queens’ Erasmus lawn where we can see the last of the day’s punters glide by.

a wonder: This week we have been tasked to read Wordsworth and Coleridge and produce an essay of our choice which investigates some aspect of their works. Interests piqued by Margaret Atwood’s very enthusiastic review of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, I decide to take ‘gift theory’ as my critical lens for the week. I wonder about the implications of both Hyde’s book and its inspiration, Marcel Mauss’ essay ‘The Gift’, when reading and interpreting the personal and artistic relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth - was William’s paraphrasing of Dorothy’s journals an act of appropriation or homage, exploitation or love?

More essay reading & focussing of topic

a wander: Recently, a couple of friends and I have been on our swimming grind. Forming a little collective self-christened as ‘A Very Serious Swimming Group’, we meet on sunny early evenings to swim, chat and snack — all in a highly serious manner of course. Sometimes we take trips to Jesus Green lido, but more often we head to the river at Grantchester meadows - a swimming spot historically favoured by Rupert Brooke, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf — where we take a bracing dip and then dry off on the grasses. This day even the heron made an appearance. Going to Grantchester on Tuesday brings even delights because the Fish and Chips van is parked up on the crossroads on the way home. I make the dubious decision to get a fishcake(??) while others get crispy battered haddock, chips and mushy peas variously. We sit eating, chatting and drinking multipack beer from the local co-op on Coe Fen for an hour or so before heading home to get some reading done before tomorrow.

a wonder: I carry on wondering about my essay question for this week, a question which I have now distilled down to ask whether the persistent view of William Wordsworth as a solitary artistic creator is a fair one. I work across centuries, looking at contemporaneous paratexts and reviews of Wordsworth’s works such as William Hazlitt’s comment that ‘it is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe’, as well as modern caricatures and cartoons in newspapers such as The Telegraph and The New York Times which depict Wordsworthian scenes. All of this serves to encourage consideration of poetic reception and how public characterisations of the writer's personalities arise.

Images attribution: LBH

Essay planning & write beginning

a wander: Despite the English degree, I am also very interested in the medical world: linguistics, the history of medicine and attitudes to alternative medicine striking a particular cord with me. I have, to an extent, been able to follow such interests within my degree, completing medically-minded essays such as one on the work of Franz Mesmer and the emergence of ‘mesmerism’, or hypnosis, as a medical treatment in the eighteenth century. However, there are also extracurricular opportunities to bridge disciplinary gaps. The Medical Humanities Society in Cambridge is currently a small group. but works minded to the mammoth task of dissolving the dichotomy between STEM and humanities which Cambridge, and our education system in general, tends to find refuge in. Events I have been to of theirs include an amazing talk by the brain surgeon Henry Marsh on his life and works. This Wednesday however, I head to Newnham for an early evening talk/ seminar they have organised about the historiography of contraception. The research is presented by Kim Alexander, and talks of perceptions of fertility and gendered experiences of health care. Her findings were striking and surprising and I urge anyone interested to check out her research.

a wonder: Today I plan my supervision essay which is due tomorrow lunchtime. I also write the introduction and first paragraph of the essay so that I am not working with a completely blank page tomorrow morning! Besides this, I spend some time pondering a particularly good lecture I went to in the morning. It would be idealistic (and misleading) to suggest I go to all my course lectures. Lectures in English are not compulsory, nor are you examined on any of their specifics. Rather they are very useful to introduce topics and to inspire interests; they are powerful in how they illuminate all that you could write about, not what you must. I tend to go to the majority of them at the start of each term and then whittle down the numbers as I work out which lecture series are most aligned with my interests and which I find most engaging. This term for example, I really enjoyed the Tactile Values series which discussed the importance of touch in long eighteenth century literature. The lecture this morning addressed the nervous system. The lecturer cogently explained how we have lost a whole discourse because we treat terms of feeling such as ‘irritation’, ‘nervous’, ’sensibility’ and ‘sympathy’ purely as their metaphorical value (Nietzsche describes metaphor as coins which have lost their value), when in actual fact they were very tied to the physical body. He applies this to the writings of Austen and I am hooked.

Essay writing - deadline @1pm

a wander: This evening my wandering is college based. I wander to our hall for formal dinner and then later around the Churchill sculptures, a sort of after-dinner constitutional as the theme would have it. The formal tonight is a 1920s themed one and the hall has been transported to Great Gatsby-esque splendour. ‘Transported’ is perhaps generous to the gold tinsel which lines our tables, but since I and two other friends are the college Ents (short for ‘entertainment’) officers responsible for such decoration, I am going to choose to depict the scene before us as one perhaps slightlyyy more magnificent than the reality. Nonetheless, the evening is a super fun one. We wine and dine on 1920s delights until about 9, all to the backing track of 1920s jazz punctuated by the occasional roaring-twentiesified pop remix - queue Crazy in Love Kid Koala Version.

a wonder: Today’s wondering returns me to thoughts of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and co. Mostly, I wonder if I’m going to reach my 1pm deadline. Along the way, I wonder what Hazlitt’s paradoxical comment on Wordsworth ‘nothing but himself and the universe’ might really imply about William’s solitude - after all, in other writings Hazlitt calls nature a kind of ‘universal home’. Perhaps then his comment is not such a hermetic statement on William as a lonesome creator as it first appears.

Essay Supervision day

a wander: My supervision today is at Lucy Cavendish. This lovely college - until recently a centre education open only to mature female students - is, handily right next to one of my favourite spots in Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard. I like to spend a couple of hours before or after my supervisions at Lucy Cav in the Kettle’s Yard café justifying their delicious but overpriced cake to myself, and doing some reading in the process. If there’s a new exhibition on I’ll also pop in while I’m there. On this occasion, I had a look around the Lucy Rie pottery exhibit. My highlights were some eclectic buttons of all shapes and sizes; it was also this moment I realised why button mushrooms must be called button mushrooms (see bottom left). Also an amazing pink pot!

a wonder: We did some group wondering during the supervision. Our supervisor urged us to consider whether Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals might be said to fit into the Romantic tradition. They certainly hold a Romantic preference for simple, delicate, pared down language and attention to a landscape’s details (can see the world in a grain of sand logic). However, they also hold a reticence about exploring deep emotion; Dorothy mentions her crying on occasions but never explains why or the particulars of such in any prolonged way. In this way, the supervisor urges us to think more expansively about what we mean by romanticism.

TCS & Diss thinking

a wander: Today I amp up the wander. I wander to London on the 50 minute train to Kings Cross to meet an interviewee who I am chatting to for a piece I am writing in the student publication, The Cambridge Student. TCS is one of Cambridge’s student newspapers and I have recently decided to try to start an interview column which records chats with interesting and interested people - celebrities, academics and friends - about words. Today, I am meeting my interviewee at the top floor of the Southbank Centre.

a wonder: Precipitated by my chat with the interviewee, my most notable wondering today concerns the ‘taste’ of words. My interviewee tells me if she could taste one word it would be ‘notion’ because she wonders whether it would taste salty, like the the ocean. We talk about songwriting and conclude that if we could taste them, words which rhyme would taste more similar to one another because of how it feels to say them in the mouth.

In the evening I do some wondering about my diss in the library.

Day off!

a wander: As it is nearing the end of term and deadlines are waning, a friend and I take up the offer of another friend for a beach-bound road trip. Armed with an ambitious plan to swim in the Norfolk waves, we head off on an hour and a bit drive to Holkham bay. When we get there the large gusts of wind that greet us out the car quickly put us off our amphibian mission. Nonetheless, we have a great time picnicking on the sheltered sand dunes and kicking around a stray football on the beach. As we head back towards the car however we realise we’ve been encircled by a not inconsiderable amount of sea water which cuts us off from the carpark. We’re stranded by the water on a sandy island and to escape, we realise - in a moment of we’re going on a bear hunt clarity - we’re going to have to go through it.

a wonder: This brings us then to the chief wonder of the day: how to escape our castaway fate. One friend takes the lead, deciding a firm stride through the water is the way to go … easy for her, she has wellies. The rest of us follow but take off our shoes and socks in a futile attempt to maintain some degree of dryness. Wondering on this occasion though has proved largely fruitless and we arrive back at the car soggy and sopping. On the way to the service station we briefly wonder about Bichon Frisé, then Doritos.

The final contemplation of the day surrounds the age old question: should we go to Sunday Lola’s tonight. The answer is almost definitely no, we shouldn’t, and yet we most probably in fact will. We did. After getting refreshed back at college, we got ready and headed off to the Sidney college bar and then Spoons for some pres. Needless to say, the wondering lulled soon, streaming thoughts replaced by streaming Sam Smith in a discography larger than I needed to know. We dance on until 3am, before heading to Gardies, bagging ourselves some cheesy chips and popcorn chicken and heading back on the walk down Madingley Road to bed - all ready to go again tomorrow!