A different perspective

By its rule that it does not provide accommodation to fourth years, my college nevertheless found a way how to make my Cambridge experience more rewarding and (slightly paradoxically) more pleasant. What follows therefore won't be a description of the spectacular beauty of our old colleges, nor it will be an account of my academic experience. It will be a digest of several aspects of living in a rented house in England.

As unlikely as it may sound, it indeed seems to be the case that the most favourable way of living out of the college in Cambridge is to rent a small house among a group of friends. Here I should point out that if you succeed in making a good choice (just as we eventually managed), your house will serve you as an excellent base for your studies and will provide you with a direct company of your friends (college accommodation in single-bed rooms may feel slightly isolating in this respect).

Before you set off for viewings of your short-listed properties, I advise you to leave behind any false hopes about well-maintained interiors: you should be prepared to kindly reject numerous offers of mouldy wall-art, surely for a very favourable price. Even then you'll probably need to be content with some level of mouldy stench in some parts of your house or, alternatively, to crank up the limit of what you'd be happy to pay for rent.

Either way, if you manage to get over this unfortunate state of affairs, you can enjoy the prospect of studying at a prestigious university with a slight twist of having to perform domestic chores. The question that immediately arises is whether this actually makes a positive contribution to your everyday experience. As I have already hinted at in the introductory blurb, my (surely subjective) answer is a definite yes.

I have spent the past three years living in a college whose main purpose was to offer the students a complete service in terms of accommodation and catering, thus enabling them to fully focus on their studies. In my case (again, perhaps quite paradoxically), this apparent advantage kept turning into an excruciating disadvantage whenever I was having hard time keeping up: there was nothing to stop me studying hard for days without break, which often left me in a state of mental discomfort. Luckily, all of this is over now when the housekeeping duties provide a vital escape from the world of theoretical physics and make me perceive the reality around me every now and then. I can even feel a boost in my studying efficiency, in spite of the apparent waste of time and distraction brought about. Not to mention the fact that this way I feel more independent than when I let the college to take care of everything for me.

Should I name one particular item in our house which made our efforts at choosing it worthwhile, it would probably be its garden, which needs mowing at least once a week. Here I should stress that I'm 22 and I really don't feel affected by an early onset of mid-life crisis, or at least not as yet. Nevertheless, as much as I despised the excessive concern of the British about their lawns when I used to live in the college (the sound of the garden tractor of our college gardener provided me with an unwanted wake up call every Saturday morning), it now became one of my favourite means of relaxation: what a relief it is to leave my efforts to understand the fundamental laws of nature for a minute and instead go outside to cut back the bushes and trim the hedges.

One funny detail before I finish: many would be amazed by a look into the kitchen, which is (quite standardly) equipped with gas stove with a weird-looking extractor hood above, that upon closer inspection actually turns out to be a gas grill for cooking English breakfast. And after you turn it on, you will find out that the flames are, quite bizarrely (at least for us Eastern Europeans), applied from above of what is cooked!

To conclude this post, there is an obligatory complaint about English weather whose way seems even this autumn somewhat unfortunate to me: in particular, it spoils my favourite gardening activities a little. It remains to hope that we will finally have a rich snowfall this winter (it would be the first time in past 3 years). A snowman would fit in our garden just nicely.