Canada Memorial Scholarship, Cambridge University in 1996-97

I was an incurable anglophile even before leaving England, so I was hardly surprised to find myself captivated by the splendour of Cambridge. I spent early mornings rowing on the Cam and afternoons on the rugby field, lunch hours at the Fitzwilliam Museum and, in the spring, in the glorious neoclassical gardens of Clare College. I played in orchestras in the chapels of King's and Trinity, and studied English law in the garden overlooking my college's medieval cloisters. This college, Sidney Sussex, had a Franciscan wine cellar, an Elizabethan dining hall, and an elegant Stuart chapel under which lay the head of Oliver Cromwell. I expected the ‘ghosts' to be impressive in England, and they were.

What surprised me was that I found daily living in England frustrating. Administrative and infrastructural planning was not as logically organised as in Canada. I am thinking of the impossible narrowness of the sidewalks in the most congested part of town, the convolution of streets and lack of a ‘user-friendly' grid system, and the way a road would change its name every three blocks. I found basic errands difficult because of unpredictable office hours (one office would open every second Monday; another, every third Thursday) and the practice of closing offices at lunch, rather than staggering employees' lunch breaks. I noticed a similar illogicality in the naming of things. ‘May week' was neither in May, nor was it a week. Michaelmas term still began on the second Thursday of October because in the eighteenth century, coaches did not run from London to Cambridge any earlier. As a result, weeks of term were (and still are) numbered from Thursday, not Monday, so that locating a lecture series beginning on the fifth week of term became unnecessarily complicated.

My first few months were characterised by a sort of ‘Ugly Canadian' grumbling. What I soon realized, as I became familiar with the idiosyncracies of English life, was that with my cherished regularity comes a sterility, a loss of charm for the sake of utility. What makes some English customs inefficient also makes them eccentric and cozy. In purely rational terms, the administrative duplication in Oxbridge colleges makes them wasteful and costly. Nonetheless, they create, through their symbols and traditions, a sense of integration and loyalty unknown in the typical lean but impersonal Canadian university. The winding cobblestone streets and tiny shops of Cambridge are less convenient and more expensive than the monolithic warehouse outlets in Canada. And yet, they appeal more than the multi-lane suburban highway lined with generic strip malls. They provide regional character, and again command personal loyalty despite their inefficiency.

England grows by accretion - by a superimposing of layer upon layer. This fundamental conservatism is natural in a country of England's age. My high school history teacher, who grew up in the United Kingdom, once told me that Canadians stripped away the old layer of wallpaper in order to put on a new one, while the English would traditionally lay one over the other. It is a perfect metaphor: rational, self-conscious demolition and reconstruction versus accrete, quasi-subconscious growth. Efficiency and convenience are inversely proportional to the preservation of ancient structures. I realize now that what I most like and dislike about England (the tradition and the inefficiency, respectively) necessarily travel together. Both are results of growth by layering.

This sort of accrete growth presupposes a refusal to allow rational thought to monopolise certain domains. I noticed this tendency even in people's personal tastes and interests. ‘Health asceticism' does not exist in Britain as it does in Canada. This North American obsession is the application of rational thought to diet and physical activity, non-rational activities normally ruled by appetite alone. The British mottoes of ‘moderation in all things' and ‘sport for sport's sake' (not for fitness or weight loss) are both refusals to rationalise these activities. Canadians also seem to rationalise their social and emotional activity far more than the English. When I returned to Canada, I noticed how books on self-help and pop psychology dominate even our university bookstores, a sign of an insatiable appetite for rational self-analysis. The taste of British readers strikes me as less self-absorbed and more outward-looking, undoubtedly a remnant - and perhaps a precondition - of empire.

Before this year I had neither lived in England nor had any close friends there. Even so, like a true Commonwealther, I felt like I was going ‘home' when I left Canada. My year in England exposed me to a history I adore and a heritage with which I identify, despite the fact that my western ancestors have not been English since 1607. But I am even more appreciative of the chance to clarify in my mind a distinction I had previously underestimated: that of the Old and New World.