I went to Cambridge University to start my novel. Here's what happened.
City AM
You get to 40 years old and something in your psyche screams: “You’re halfway there, buddy – if you’re going to make something of yourself, you’d better hurry the hell up.”
Kids are the obvious legacy fodder, but I’m still on the fence about all that. Attempting to create a cultural artefact feels more feasible. I did try writing songs once, though that dream did a synchronised nosedive with Myspace.
But I can write, damn it. So, a novel then? That time-honoured paean to the ever-heavying heft of mortality. Existential dread, writ small.
The issue with novels, of course, is that they’re famously hard to finish, demanding quiet concentration and passive income. Kryptonite to an ADHD-addled writer. I was going to need a leg up.
Enter the University Arms, Cambridge’s smartest hotel, which, at my time of panic, had just begun offering guests the chance to spend time writing at neighbouring Cambridge University. Yep, actual Cantab, with its limestone erudition and lettered line of poet laureates.
Specifically, guests are now permitted to use one of the stately private rooms overlooking the quadrangle of Christ’s College, a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. By chance, I’d be visiting during the Cambridge Literary Festival and so planned to attend a few talks to learn from the literati.
It started badly with my poor Rover 75 dying on the M11, but when we did eventually arrive the martinis were cold – write drunk, edit sober – and our lovely corner bedroom had all the dark-academia chops we’d hoped for. Lovely view, too, onto Parker’s Piece: a linden-fringed square, perfect for chin-scratching walks and nature’s inspiration.
The book I’m writing, in case you’re interested, is a mostly-made-up tale of a young lad who becomes addicted to progressively more daring trespasses. Roald Dahl high jinks with a bit of Brass Eye bite.
Anyway, my day at Christ’s College was bloody lovely: quietude, the must of old tomes and the topical feeling of sneaking into somewhere you don’t belong. It made fine fuel for my first 1,000 words. No wonder this place turns out Blighty’s brightest.
“The ire lining the teacher’s tone made the room brittle and the single-glazed windows behind Gabriel seemed to bulge out like an infected eardrum.”
A little try-hard, granted, but I was having fun – and isn’t that the point? I actually hit a flow state. That lovely mix of focus, immersion and enjoyment where time seems to disappear. Like a bubble bath for the brain.
That evening my partner/muse/minder and I dined at the hotel’s “English brasserie” restaurant. The dish to order is the Creedy Carver duck, dry-aged like beef and roasted till the skin turns lacquer-like and the flesh blushes just-so. But it was the simple burnt cream pudding that I’ll remember the longest.
My full English the next morning was in the same space and that’s when we noticed how charming it is: palladian arched windows, dark parquetry and eccentric Brit-coded art lend the place a Bloomsbury Group tone. Spot on for my literary delusions.
Day two was spent zigzagging (on an electric scooter) over wet cobbles, around dreaming spires, looking for the festival’s various venues. We were most looking forward to seeing historian Janina Ramirez, billed to talk about her new history of women in the Middle Ages, Femina. But she flaked and we were given a hard-to-hear Zoom call projected onto the wall instead. We left early, dodging tuts on the way out. Not a great start, though sitting in the Old Divinity School at St John’s College was its own reward.
Sebastian Faulks’ evening talk, A Life in Writing, made up for things. His advice: write what you don’t know, research hard, plan loosely – and accept that the norm of literary life is “qualified disappointment.” Belly laughs went round the room for the last point, as he went on to admit that it took four books for him to write something he considered readable. Ah, humble British writers – a beautiful thing.
The next day, I took his tips and dragged out another 1,000 words at my bedroom’s desk. We celebrated a successful weekend with an ale at the Diagon Alley-worthy Mill pub and my gal dutifully listened to me harping on about my nascent works. “...so, yeah, I can call myself a novelist now, right?”
