A Night in a Year: 6. Walk

[jacquelineb]

The centre of town is ten minutes walk from her apartment. She takes small steps, trying not to mince, nor stride, nor hobble. Confident, at ease, yet provocative too. She passes the Mill Road shops – the hairdressers, the Arabic and Korean groceries, Subway and wine merchants. There are a few glances from men, but she ignores them, not wanting to graze on home turf.

She crosses Parker’s Piece. The central lamppost, Reality Checkpoint, is lit, though the light is still dusky. People are heading home from work or shopping, and others, like herself, are heading for the centre. For fun, or at least for drinking and to forget.

She will drink, but she wants to remember the events of the night.

The centre of Cambridge is both alike and unlike other towns in England. She has grown used to the sprouting up of shops and restaurants of the same chain, clones that are making the cities indistinguishable from one another. Pret A Manger and Pizza Express. M&S and Monsoon. Buying and selling of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries latched onto the medieval colleges, vying to take attention from the spires of King’s College Chapel, from the imposing Senate House.

They would not succeed. Capitalism conquered much, but 800 years of intellectual achievement wasn’t gained by paying attention to the whirring wheels of the material world.

The nightlife was a mix of the raucous (the Regal, partying opposite Emmanuel College) and the somewhat urbane (the Vaults disappearing underground opposite Gonville and Cauis). But there aren’t many. Monotonous, the same people, the same places, a friend once said.

She has little doubt that tonight she will meet people she knows, or has fucked. That was the fun, navigating a known world to find pockets of variety.

Of newness, and novelty.

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Next: 7. Bar

Image found on flickr, by luschei, used under the Creative Commons License.

Mirrored from jacquelinebrocker.esquinx.net.