Southampton
I've been settled here for coming up to a month now. As my actual studies haven't started yet (I received my student card (and a surprise laptop) yesterday, my first meeting with my supervisor is on Wednesday), I've spent my few weeks here trying to get a sense of the city and its environs. Most generally, it seems quite English, quite nice, perhaps quite boring. The weather was great until the autumn coldness took over last week - I think this partly because of the luck of when I arrived, but also because the climate here is the best I've ever lived in, and I secretly feel I live in the tropics.
I ventured beyond the city: to the New Forest first. This is a big forest which starts where Southampton ends. I tried to cycle to it, this cycle being only half an hour by Google Maps's new cycling thing; but this route, it turns out, necessarily involves going at one point along a road that would have been a goddamn motorway had it a hard shoulder (the absence of which made my journey the more dangerous); and it wasn't just Google Maps being buggy either, because at the end of these terrifying few minutes I saw a cycle lane appearing at the side filtering me off to a proper route. Clearly Southampton City Council explicitly figured that bikes should share the slow lane of a motorway with trucks and camper-vans so that they appreciate the forest the more when they get there. Well I didn't that either, because I couldn't find a bit of it that was smooth enough for my road bike (acquired by a friend's dad at a skip, tidied up, and bought by me for £25) but quiet enough of traffic to feel remotely like a forest. Next time I will get a train to the nice place instead of spending half my day fearing for my life cycling among industrial landscapes, the other half among identical suburbs, and the remainder along narrow country roads which are not any the less busy for being narrow. But I exaggerate, a bit.
My other expedition was to Winchester, for the sake of the cathedral, although I did also wander around a Sunday market and pick up lunch at a cute arty café which was like Taste except without the character or quality, but did have slightly less dodgy art on all its walls.
The cathedral was wonderful: over a thousand years old, and every bit of it still in use, and I stumbled upon a weekly evensong service. I'm not sure what that is, but it appeared to be a normal mass, except on a Wednesday, and, this is the point, with incredible music - a professional choir and an excellent organist (on an incredible organ) playing the prominent musical part. Catholic girlfriend and all that, I'm softening dramatically toward Christianity, which has for a long time been too associated with Ireland, which I've been trying to keep as distant from as possible since leaving three years ago. So I shall go again, with the girlfriend though, because I'm not become open enough to mass that I'll get a train to another town for it.
As I said, yesterday I registered, got my student card, so on; I also met some of my fellow PhD students. I'm trying to find out if there's a philosophical culture we create, and whether that's notably different to St Andrews's culture. With only a handful of us - an intake of four per year - I can't imagine any culture will be very pronounced, and I haven't had much exposure yet. But my sense so far is that there aren't the insanely intelligent and industrious, but quasi-autistic people you get in St Andrews; but that people here tend to be quite normal, to have broader interests (many of them are musicians! (one wants to have a Wagner Ring Cycle night, and so I think he's probably mad)), and to be less interested in navel-gazing philosophical puzzles. Superficially they of course have the difference of almost all being interested in 19th-century German philosophy rather than contemporary analytic philosophy, and I expect that it is no coincidence artistic and autistic people have the interests they do.
When I first arrived, it was after dark, and I felt quite scared walking from the train station to my new house. I've never lived in a city before, and I felt all the fear country boys, lords of their own villages, are portrayed as feeling in art. Psychopaths were in every shadow. Fortunately the journey was short, and I quickly arrived to the house and slept my first night on a bare mattress under a tablecloth. Which was fine.
I ventured beyond the city: to the New Forest first. This is a big forest which starts where Southampton ends. I tried to cycle to it, this cycle being only half an hour by Google Maps's new cycling thing; but this route, it turns out, necessarily involves going at one point along a road that would have been a goddamn motorway had it a hard shoulder (the absence of which made my journey the more dangerous); and it wasn't just Google Maps being buggy either, because at the end of these terrifying few minutes I saw a cycle lane appearing at the side filtering me off to a proper route. Clearly Southampton City Council explicitly figured that bikes should share the slow lane of a motorway with trucks and camper-vans so that they appreciate the forest the more when they get there. Well I didn't that either, because I couldn't find a bit of it that was smooth enough for my road bike (acquired by a friend's dad at a skip, tidied up, and bought by me for £25) but quiet enough of traffic to feel remotely like a forest. Next time I will get a train to the nice place instead of spending half my day fearing for my life cycling among industrial landscapes, the other half among identical suburbs, and the remainder along narrow country roads which are not any the less busy for being narrow. But I exaggerate, a bit.
My other expedition was to Winchester, for the sake of the cathedral, although I did also wander around a Sunday market and pick up lunch at a cute arty café which was like Taste except without the character or quality, but did have slightly less dodgy art on all its walls.
The cathedral was wonderful: over a thousand years old, and every bit of it still in use, and I stumbled upon a weekly evensong service. I'm not sure what that is, but it appeared to be a normal mass, except on a Wednesday, and, this is the point, with incredible music - a professional choir and an excellent organist (on an incredible organ) playing the prominent musical part. Catholic girlfriend and all that, I'm softening dramatically toward Christianity, which has for a long time been too associated with Ireland, which I've been trying to keep as distant from as possible since leaving three years ago. So I shall go again, with the girlfriend though, because I'm not become open enough to mass that I'll get a train to another town for it.
As I said, yesterday I registered, got my student card, so on; I also met some of my fellow PhD students. I'm trying to find out if there's a philosophical culture we create, and whether that's notably different to St Andrews's culture. With only a handful of us - an intake of four per year - I can't imagine any culture will be very pronounced, and I haven't had much exposure yet. But my sense so far is that there aren't the insanely intelligent and industrious, but quasi-autistic people you get in St Andrews; but that people here tend to be quite normal, to have broader interests (many of them are musicians! (one wants to have a Wagner Ring Cycle night, and so I think he's probably mad)), and to be less interested in navel-gazing philosophical puzzles. Superficially they of course have the difference of almost all being interested in 19th-century German philosophy rather than contemporary analytic philosophy, and I expect that it is no coincidence artistic and autistic people have the interests they do.
When I first arrived, it was after dark, and I felt quite scared walking from the train station to my new house. I've never lived in a city before, and I felt all the fear country boys, lords of their own villages, are portrayed as feeling in art. Psychopaths were in every shadow. Fortunately the journey was short, and I quickly arrived to the house and slept my first night on a bare mattress under a tablecloth. Which was fine.