Englishness

Strolling around Grantchester Meadow, I do think that this is a very nice, relaxed environment. I am sitting now in the Red Lion pub in the open air backyard, with a pint of IPA and a pack of Walkers crisps, cheese and onion flavour.

This is the kind of thing I took for granted while I was in Cambridge. Indeed, I can even say that I kind of looked down on these typically English traits. I did not swell in it. I rather thought myself as being tired of it. I felt that the English is a rather boring and common species.

But now I realize that these environments have become an integral part of my mind and blood, this relaxed way of looking at things, this balance of the man and the nature. I got to know the central Cambridge area in and out. I can imagine myself walking through the streets of Cambridge without any problem. The Englishness has gone into my blood.

The warm reception of me by Horace and the lunch in the Trinity college had much to do with the change of my perspective of what is English in general.

(Excerpt from the diary written during a revisit to Cambridge in 1998. I stayed in Cambridge from 1995 to 1997.)