Tag Archives: My Friend Lauren

Ridgeway Walk/My Friend Lauren’s Birthday Celebration

14 Friday Sep 2012

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The Ridgeway Walk is an 87-mile trail across Southern England that begins at Avebury, a modest but very cool version of Stonehenge (or at least, a different set of giant stones in an even giant-er circle)  For My Friend Lauren’s birthday, we did 24 miles of the walk, beginning in Avebury, over two days.  It was a larger chunk of the walk than we thought we were doing  (day 1 was 11 miles instead of 6.6…oops) but the walk was beautiful.

The Ridgeway Walk is very cool for a few reasons:

1. Its beautiful

2. Avebury, which is pretty famous

3. Hill forts! We walked through three hill forts and a burial site in two days

4. White Horse Hill, Uffington, a prehistoric sculpture of a horse wherein the land has been scraped away to reveal the chalk below. It’s awesome:

Image courtesy the-history-girls.blogspot.com

Of course when you’re standing next to the horse, you can’t really tell what it is, and its at the top of a hill, so you can’t really see it from below…but you can get a sense of the scale, which is very large.  Apparently if you stand in the eye of a white horse (there are several scattered across Wiltshire), its supposed to make you fertile.  My Friend Lauren said that and then followed it with “Don’t even think about it!”

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, friends.

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Book Review: MWF Seeking BFF

16 Monday Apr 2012

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Image courtesy TheDebutanteBall.com

A friend recommended MWF Seeking BFF to me a while ago, and I pre-ordered the British paperback off Amazon immediately.  Its a book about a woman who follows her boyfriend (subsequently, her husband) to Chicago, a city where her social network is a little thin.  After a couple years, she realizes that she hasn’t found her go-to girl in Chicago: she has a social life, but no one she can call on a moment’s notice.

The friend recommended the book to me because, obviously, I am also in the process of finding a social life in Cambridge.  The author of MWF Seeking BFF goes on a friend-date once a week for a year – meeting friends of friends, going friend-speed-dating, at one point even hiring a friend for an afternoon – and reports back.  The good news is, after a year of working really hard to make friends, she calls it a success: she’s met lots of people she really likes, and some have become close friends.

Its not exactly literature, but MWF Seeking BFF is a solid read.  I didn’t love the whining she did at the beginning – “I don’t have anyone to get a pedicure with!” – but I empathized just the same.  And I took heart from the conclusion: almost everyone the author, Rachel Bertsche, met was open to new friendships and was pleased to be invited on a friend-date, even though not all of them became friends in the end.

The thing that I did wonder the whole time was, what had she been doing the previous two years of her life? I have spent six months in Cambridge frantically trolling for friends, and while I’m not popular, exactly, I’ve met some people on whom I can call in a crisis and who have lifetime-friend potential.  When I mentioned the book to My Friend Lauren, I said I didn’t think the experiment – 52 friend-dates in a year – would translate to Cambridge, because its too small and because so much of the social life centres on the university.  She said “and its so un-English” – which was an important factor that I hadn’t even considered.

For the most part, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how friendly English people are, in defiance of cultural stereotypes.  Its been better than I was expecting – although when i said that to a Swiss friend, she said “What were you expecting?!”  We’ve made a commitment to being in the country for a long enough time that people are willing to commit to getting to know us.  And of course the advantage to living in a university town is that new people are always arriving, most of whom don’t have a pre-existing social network in the area.

That said, if anyone has suggestions for ways of making new friends, I do welcome suggestions…

CornWALL…wow bad pun.

11 Wednesday Apr 2012

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A few weeks ago, I got a text message from My Friend Lauren that said “sea cliff climbing in Cornwall Easter weekend?” and without actually looking to see when Easter weekend was, I responded “YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU.”

I’d done some outdoor climbing in the past, but I’d always done top-roping – where you hike to the top, set up some gear and thread a rope through it, and then go back to the bottom and climb the same way you would in a gym.  This time, we were trad climbing – one person attached crap-tons of gear to their harness (they sounded like goats with bells on, scrambling around the rocks).  Then, as they go up, they wedge safety gear into the rock.  Trad climbing is really dangerous, because if you fall, you fall pretty far, and there’s no guarantee your safety gear will hold up.  So I stuck to pretty tame routes this time, especially as I was getting the hang of it.  The first thing I “led” was about twelve feet high, and the guidebook designated it as a scramble.

I learned so much this weekend – about Cornwall, about climbing, about all the people I shared a trailer with (its called a caravan in England.  The walls were so thin you could hear someone brushing their teeth from the other end of the thing.  seriously.)  And also how much bigger England is than I realized.  Cambridge is the red dot above – and we went allllll the way to Land’s End.  It took a lot longer than I expected when I blithely agreed, via text, that sea cliff climbing would be awesome.

I already can’t wait to go again.

Oh, England.

27 Monday Feb 2012

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If you want proof that England is still a very class-conscious and formal society, I think this photo will suffice.  Its from the London School of Economics website (I think, or maybe University College London) and I encountered it in the process of applying for a job a few weeks ago (I clicked “Ms.”)

I’m a little annoyed that there’s no Professor Lady option.

There is so much to learn about the nuances of class and social mores in England – because it is very, very different from the US.  After rock climbing last night, a group of us got into a heated discussion (in a pub, of course), about the boundaries, definitions, and perceptions of class. It started because Lauren and I were talking about how pleased I am to live in a terrace house.  Lauren said that most English people live in terrace houses, and we decided to take a survey of the table (there were 8 of us).  A few seconds late, we learned that everyone else had grown up in a free-standing or semi-detached dwelling, and that everyone considered themselves to be middle class.  The resulting debate – on the definitions of class; what the major hallmarks are; on how self-perception of class changes or doesn’t change as education and income change; and how to best generate social mobility in the UK – left us both on such an intellectual high note that my husband thought we were trashed, despite our single beer each.

Lauren was annoyed that her survey of rock climbers had failed that she sent me statistics on housing in the UK the next day – she was right; a plurality (though not a majority) of people live in terrace houses.  The discussion has continued: both the BBC and the New York Times have class calculators.

I would say that class is a mixture of income, education, and profession – but of course in many respects the most important denominators are impossible to quantify (although the BBC tries pretty hard): how to you quantify culture and self-perception?

I would be curious to hear what other people think is the chief determinant of class, and I’d be interested to know how fluid people find class to be.  The US and UK are the least socially mobile countries in the world, although for different reasons.  Is there a panacea? What is it?

Someon Else’s Commute

09 Friday Dec 2011

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My friend Lauren works about 10 very scenic miles south of Cambridge, and after she and I ate too many ginger biscuits, we decided that she and I would get up before dawn and cycle from Cambridge to work.  She would go to her desk and I would turn around and go home.  Because that’s what I do for fun.

Naturally, we chose the coldest day of winter so far; temperatures hovered around freezing the whole time.  Also, I got a little lost on the way home.  Despite the pre-dawn departure and a persistent, biting wind, it felt like a grand adventure.

I was really amazed – again – by the extent of the cycling infrastructure in this country.  Cars may not defer to you when you’re in the street, but there is an extensive network of off-road paths, with bridges and signage to match.  I went 22.6 miles round-trip (plus another ten in the course of my everyday errands), and today I can feel it in my bum a little.