of mine – fellow students do establish an amazing bond with one another and when we did meet up for a game or two, we even managed to play, and more, to win a tournament as a team we had hastily put together after I got there. Victor loved Cambridge so much during his six years reading Medicine at Robinson’s, he decided never to leave, so he has kept a country home here to escape to each weekend. I discover that this is what many successful professional people do. T ey make their living in London, endure city-living through the week and then escape to the country for relaxing weekends! Jack has just turned nine, so it is
time to start investigating schools for him. We are hoping to send him to a British boarding school so he doesn’t miss out on what was one of the best experiences of my teenage years. I loved my six years spent at Benenden, and I sure want my boys to also enjoy the joys and challenges of the British private school system. T is was the other reason for our trip. When I was nine, my parents had taken me the same path. Before boarding school, GCSEs and A-Levels, we took a similar family trip to the city of University cities – Cambridge – and I fell absolutely in love with the place and never forgot that particular holiday. My whole school career after that amidst the studying, riding, skiing and making friends revolved around fulfi lling this dream that was awakened before I even knew what a University was.
This trip seemed to evolve in
exactly the same way for Jack. Before our holiday we were warming him up to the idea of studying abroad, living away from home, dormitory feasts and all the other delights of boarding school, and he didn’t bite. “What’s so fun about dormie feasts?” he said. “I like my present school.” What indeed. When we got to Cambridge, he absolutely did not want to leave. When we packed our bags for London on the fi nal day, he bawled. It was the fi rst time I had seen him cry in a long time. And by the time we started visiting possible secondary schools the following week, he was begging to go, because he’d decided that attending
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a good British public school was going to get him his ticket to Cambridge. I don’t really know what magic the place wove for Jack, but he rapidly gained a new independence with this newfound motivation he was creating for himself. I could not be happier!
PUNTING THE CAM There is something about Cambr idge in the summer that is difficult to find elsewhere. It radiates charm and a history dating back more than 700 years, with few cars about and hundreds of bikes scattered along the railings bordering delightful cobblestoned roads, students strolling through the market square, and of course punting along the Cam. While I was a student here, most of my punting escapades involved indecent amounts of alcohol; this time we re-enacted some of those typical traditions which I became quite nostalgic about, sipping (comparatively modest amounts of) champagne from paper cups while admiring the views of the lime-green lawns in front of King’s College and the other historically beautiful buildings and bridges along the river. While a current student would remind tourists and those uninitiated in this town that the Cam is by far the most polluted river in England, with a dip in it making you sick for weeks, as a re-tourist, I couldn’t be prouder to be an alumni. Both my boys Jack and Josh took
such great delight punting in the evening light, and our wonderful and obliging tour guide Sam went to pains to teach the kids how to paddle and punt. We fi nished our evening with traditional fish and chips at T e Anchor, a pub suitable for kids on one edge of the river, followed by a twilight stroll through the by now more empty streets of this enchanting city. In feng shui they say that every
great city has a river, a “Dragon” that feeds and fuels its growth and success, allure and appeal, and Cambridge is no exception. Cambridge continues to be home to one of the most prestigious centers of learning in the world.
POLO ESCAPADES As well as revisiting my old College Gonville and Caius, we also ventured further afi eld to the town of Lode, about twenty minutes drive from Hotel du Vin where we were staying. T is is where Victor keeps his horses, at Cambridge County Polo Club, which boasts eight polo fields, a stick-and-ball fi eld, and numerous more grass paddocks stretching for as far as the eye can see. Our adventures here spanned three short days, but the amount we managed to fi t in, from riding strange horses to making wonderful new friends, taking endless snapshots on our camera phones and dining at pub after pub, made the holiday. It was not all smooth-sailing and the biggest hiccup came when my husband Chris took a tumble from a horse two minutes into his first chukka of the tournament. He tried to play the drama king, sprawled out piteously on the grass aiming to draw sympathy from the crowds before
JULY / AUGUST 2013 | F ENGSHUIWORLD 25
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