Love, work and other English heritage ailments
Autumn 2013 —
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire… on the river Cam…
I. A small test of inconvenience
Most mornings, I rode a white bicycle with a wicker basket and a D-lock — what we’d call a U-lock in the States — through a drizzle so gentle it felt like God had a lingering runny nose. Coming from Utah, where rain is a rare spectacle of thunder and repentance, I never quite adjusted to how punctual it is in England. In the mountain desert, rain happens about as often as people eat green Jell-O (practically never).
I cycled through the drizzle toward the libraries, down Hills Road toward the center, a punctuation mark in the grey paragraph of morning traffic, weaving close to cars without hitting their mirrors. The colleges would wake up: porters unlocking centuries-old doors, someone eating a “cheeky” sausage roll at a bus stop. I’d loved Cambridge long before I got there, but in England you can’t just say something like that. You have to start by complaining about the weather. It’s as though affection must first pass a small test of inconvenience.
II. Three places, one God complex
When I told people where I was from, they nodded with that English politeness that means mild confusion. “Utah?” Someone would usually ask, “Near Las Vegas?” — meaning the place British men flock to for stag weekends, armed with inflatable anatomy and the promise of bad decisions.
In reality, the two cities are six hours apart by car, a straight shot down I-15. Salt City mirroring Sin City across the motorway — the two of them glaring at each other like a separated couple in a bad marriage still sharing a bank account.
Cambridge has Old World charm, so neatly named it borders on self-parody. There’s a river called the Cam and, of course, a number of bridges. Locals, ever self-aware, like to joke that the name proves genius is in the water.
For some, Cambridge was still a finishing school for the world’s most polished: chauffeured to formals, brunching in AirBnB’d castles, posting filtered group pictures under Hellenistic sculptures on the relatively new app, Instagram, (founded in 2010, acquired by Facebook in 2012).
Days blurred into drafts and deadlines, the slow rhythm of library lamps and late-night tea. Ambition was its own religion here, quiet but consuming. We scrawled the motto over our doorways: Silent Desperation is the English Way.
III. Shine on, you Cantabrigian diamond
Syd Barrett and Roger Waters were rumored to have played their first set here when they were fourteen or fifteen at the Anchor Pub. Barrett grew up (and died) in Cambridge. I met coursemates and friends who came to visit at the pub; sometimes I came during lunch, watching the punters on the river. Sometimes I sat by myself in the corner downstairs — listened to music, spent a little time with Syd’s spirit.
I felt at home, haunting the town as a cultural-anthropologist-to-be with a black wool coat and a funny last name. British people still think Macbeth is unlucky. Sometimes I felt it. Maybe I was living in a fever dream or an Earl Grey delirium… regardless, I was there.
IV. The other American girl
In 2013, her posts reached us like contraband, circulating among the unconcerned nerd girls. She was studying across town, photographing candlelit formals and sun-washed courtyards; her posts slipped into our common rooms like dispatches from a parallel university. She made Cambridge look effortless, like a romantic comedy. Something both brass and totally American, but novel in the brave new world of Instagram filters. Enter Valencia Rock ’n’ Roll from N.Y.C.
What fascinated me most about Caroline Calloway — with her literary name straight out of Fitzgerald — was the story behind the sparkling façade: the strange duet of authorship and illusion. I watched it all from the Anthropology & Archaeology Library, the University Library, the Hughes Hall library. I didn’t feel envy exactly, more like the fascination of seeing someone animate their own myth in real time. She’d translated Cambridge in the 21st century into a vivid image. In many ways, my experience felt like endurance. But then, every myth has someone in the shadows — usually a woman — doing the invisible labor that keeps the illusion intact.
V. Caroline’s chorus: every drama needs its ghost
The story that broke in 2019 revived the Caroline Cambridge myth that began in 2013, when Caroline and I were students at Cambridge. The story focused on Natalie Beach: they had been best friends in college, collaborators turned co-conspirators in character invention. Natalie later alleged that she had not only helped write the early Instagram captions but had co-created the Caroline persona itself, an uncredited ghostwriter to the myth. Together they built the witty intimacy that made Caroline’s feed so addictive, while Caroline lived it in public: the gowns, the heartbreak, the fantasy of effortless belonging. (Very Gossip Girl; yes… I watched it all.)
That was twelve years ago. And still, in 2025, glossy stories keep appearing — Caroline posed in soft light, telling new versions of the same tale. The fascination endures. When the ghostwriting story broke, I didn’t feel vindicated. I mostly felt curious, and, if I’m honest, a little jealous… of the paid ghostwriter Natalie.*
My love of psychedelic theater like Dark Side of the Moon and secret Gossip Girl viewing proved I’d always been drawn to spectacle, but I dressed my artistic aspirations as coursework: poetic prose that made academic boards give me grants — or let me take out loans so I could learn more. Back then, I just worked. Didn’t question it.
*A friend who proofed this essay (male) believes that deep down I wish I were posing in my underwear next to a Beauty & the Beast costume for thousands and thousands of dollars. This repressed intimation of female jealousy, he reckons, is the most interesting idea in the essay.
VI. An honest day’s haunting
By then, I had started to notice that Cambridge had its share of quiet ghosts: people like me, living in libraries, alone or in company, absorbed enough in our work that we began to fade at the edges. We moved, in light or in darkness, in a kind of near-invisibility; kept vigil for old, tattered stories while others told prettier ones.
I worked at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology on exhibits about disappeared civilizations, and with visiting groups from South Africa, Australia, Nigeria, First Nations, and the Blackfeet Nation. As graduate students, we twenty-somethings met with representatives, listened to stories tied to identity and memory, and learned to care for the objects living at the museum.
I used to drink coffee from white china cups after lunch, thousand-yard staring out a window overlooking the cricket green. I told people I was agnostic when the Utah question came up, but I also spent hours each week in Cambridge’s churches crying.
In Turkish restaurants, Muslim-owned grocery stores and malls in the suburbs, where I rented a shared council house, I encountered many other people trying to become something or do something great. I felt privileged, but everyone could see the missing buttons on my coat, stumbling in for real-sugar chocolate at odd hours.
Sometimes I wondered if loving a place was just another form of study — an endless observation that never turned into certainty. I wrote about belonging as if naming it might make it real, but Cambridge resisted ownership in the way all beautiful things do. My research, interviews and writing addressed the question: How do we inhabit the places we’re from, those we adopt, those we — lovingly, even masochistically — serve? ’Til death do us part… or not, Dear Cambridge.
VII. Portrait of the artist, post-graduation
On Orchard Street in Cambridge in 2018, I rented a small room with my long-time boyfriend, who I’d met years earlier as a master’s student. Outside, bicycles clicked past toward the river; inside, the Medieval rafters exhaled in little sighs and radiators creaked. The ceiling slanted, the air smelled faintly of rain and coffee and the small desk by the window became the site of my artistic evolution, a miraculous spurt of production after years visiting the altar of the Muse of Writing, waiting for a sign.
VIII. Devotion and other British habits
A stone’s throw from Orchard Street was the Princess Diana Memorial Garden — a modest town park with practical flowerbeds, nothing exotic — somewhere I used to sit at all hours of the day, cross-legged. Children ran in circles around the benches while parents unwrapped sandwiches, the ordinary rhythm of British weekends. It wasn’t the sort of place anyone photographed, which was what I liked about it.
For anyone who grew up in the 1990s, her image was everywhere: the ocean-blue eyes, the head tilt, that quiet strength that seemed to glow from television screens and magazine covers alike. In Utah, that admiration had its own peculiar intensity — perhaps because so much of our culture still carried traces of old England, with hymns and hierarchy just a breath removed from High Anglicanism. Loving the Royal Family came easily; devotion to Lady D felt like a shared inheritance. My mom cried for a week when she died. It’s a vivid childhood memory. Blonde, magnetic and naturally elegant, my mom had what people used to call “a Diana-like way about her.” England never felt totally foreign to me: so much of our cultural heritage is close, intimate — even painful — like a family photograph.
However, different parts of me spared me from imposture syndrome or castigating myself too much in an environment where I was, more often than not, stepping on toes. Maybe it was the Celtic stubbornness or the frontier nostalgia, but I took a quiet pleasure in belonging somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. I was an Irish-Scottish-Swedish-Swiss-Welsh mix from the Wild West — a cultural collage that shouldn’t have blended with Gothic chapels and rowing clubs.
Yet, walking past King’s on foggy mornings, I felt more local than foreign, more student than visitor, grateful and a little defiant at once. I felt pride when I studied for finals in the Eagle Pub, beneath the scorched signatures of RAF and American airmen who had burned their names into the ceiling during the Second World War: a small inheritance of audacity I could recognize in myself.
The cathedral of feedback
In the morning on Hills Road, I passed tech workers and tourists, each on a different kind of pilgrimage, convinced the next bright screen or cloistered courtyard held meaning. Celebrity, scholarship, capitalism: chapels in the cathedral of feedback. Some heard noise as progress; others were just trying to do good work, live decently and make sense of where they’d ended up.
Cambridge had a rhythm of its own — oftentimes made judgements about correct ambition and devotion, noise and truth. Some days I thought I understood it; other days it was all confusion. There was comfort in a shared definition of meaning in the midst of tradition, architectural beauty and tantalizing “No Entry” signs everywhere.
P.S.salm 46:5
To my Fourth Watch Love
