So this is farewell. My dad and I expended joules of muscle power this morning in shifting my belongings to Bedford. My head was not in great shape. The final night in the 'bridge was spectacular in every sense. It began in the Fellows Garden where Chris presented me with an original 1847 aerial-view print of Cambridge, commemorating a visit by Queen Victoria. This will be placed at the very top of my luggage on Monday - I can't imagine a more perfect memento. HY and Aurelie cooked a scrummy dinner (I've been lucky in befriending excellent chefs while a grad!) and we managed a Skype chat with Cameron - himself moving this week to take up a post-doc in the math(s - see future post) department at Notre Dame. Next to the King's bar, and some chat about old times. I persuaded everyone that it would be a good idea to walk on the back lawn, and actually perform some cartwheels too. This, not unreasonably, drew the chagrin of a duty porter, to whose entirely feeble injunction ('oi, you, stay where you are!!' as if he was about to come and cuff us or something) we responded by legging it pronto. Damn feds!
Quite a few tears escaped over the course of the evening. Two things, really, combined to make the departure a terrible, difficult wrench.
The first is the specialness, indeed uniqueness, of Cambridge. I often ponder wistfully the university's 801-year star-studded history. There is, I've concluded, literally no other institution in the world that's made a parallel contribution to human kind. Accept a mere sprinkling of noteworthy examples: In the last century King's College produced Alan Turing and John Maynard Keynes - the fathers of computing and modern economics. The Politics library, site of my frantic annual dissertation-writing, once housed the Cavendish laboratory where, in 1897, Thompson discovered the electron; Rutherford was to first split the atom there in 1932, and, a decade later, in those same dusty labs, Watson and Crick unearthed the secrets of DNA. Christ's College can boast Charles Darwin and John Milton; Trinity, Isaac Newton; St John's, Wordsworth and Wilberforce; Queen's, Erasmus. The name 'Pakistan' was coined at Cambridge. From the university as a whole, 15 prime ministers and 87 Nobel Prizewinners have emerged - not a bad trawl.
Across the globe, storms of ideas and ideology rage; people are cured of disease and draw comfort; they find themselves ever more free to pursue their leisure through great feats of technology; they understand liberty; and, steeped in the arts, they have come to know love and beauty better. For this frenzy of progress, and some occasional backsliding, Cambridge bears enormous responsibility. To have participated in this awesome tradition, even in a tiny way, has been a matchless experience.
But, more important, Cambridge is the place where I grew up. School is a blur in my mind - a not-so-happy period of work and feeling out of place. At university I hit upon the best people practically in an instant. Brilliant, liberal, easy-going, they took me under their wing, and during thousands of hours of conversation (and over probably many more thousand beers), I gradually figured out the things that matter to me. The buildings of King's have been my home - the idyllic Cam for a long time the view from my window. Few can be so contented or fulfilled as I've been these past few years. I'm grateful. The days truly were halcyon.
And so I'll never forget the moment on the 2nd of January 2004 when I clicked the refresh button and a fateful 'G Nellis: Accepted' appeared on that pixelated old screen. To the admissions tutor whose big mistake has had such fantastic, unforeseen consequences, a hearty hug - I owe you one. To Cambridge University, keep working hard, for there's much to be done. And to the rest of you - the unforeseens who've made me so very happy in that glorious place - well, thanks :)
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