Cambridge at Christmas

            There's nothing quite like Christmas time in Cambridge.  The grey British sky is almost as unwelcoming as the constant wind coming in off the heath.  The cold keeps people inside, but it doesn't have that wintertime bite that waits for us just the other side of January.  Our days will get colder, and the sun still sinks behind the hedges before 3pm.  Dusk sits outside almost as long as the daylight does, with the sunlight that does filter through always having that end-of-day light yellow feel to it.  
           Walking along King's Parade in the shadow of the looming chapel, it's almost eerie.  No more tour guides, with their little yellow flags bopping on sticks above the crowd, no more buses full of secondary students trailing along behind teachers who are earnestly telling them that they too, can go to Oxbridge, and no more tourists asking if you are a Cambridge student and then they can take your picture.  The handful of punts meandering up and down the river underneath the bridges and past the empty fields are full of bundled up people joking about mulled cider and bad ideas.  The porters wile away empty time in their empty lodges, watching re-runs of cricket, or football (proper) to help push the hours along.  The rush of students asking for post or directions long since packed up and gone home.  
            Wandering down the halls of the colleges there is a quiet camaraderie as people pass one another here or there.  Footsteps that are usually drowned out by the chatter of people echo along the ancient stone paths. People share one of maybe a thousand reasons for watching bits and bops of rubbish scoot along the sidewalk on Kings Parade rather than curling up by a fire and Christmas tree, or drinking white wine in the sun as the holiday creeps closer and closer.  Home is too far away, there isn't money, lab samples will die if left alone.  Maybe there isn't much of a home left anymore back where-ever you came from.  Maybe you are just one of those people who follows home to each new place.
            One thing we all share is that as the departments and colleges have emptied out, slowly but surely, we are still here.  Wandering in and out of department offices, taking stabs and productivity while sitting next to empty desks.  Once in a while we meet up, drinking coffee and perusing book shops, "will you be here over Christmas?"  Knowing with each passing day that the answer is more and more likely to be "Yes, will you?"
             Outside of the city centre, in the places where Cambridge is real, not just "school" the bustle of everyday life in the days before Christmas continues to hum along.  Primark is sold out of unicorn sweaters and pre-teens text back and forth in a crowded December mall.  People run last minute errands and the Sainsbury's has mulled wine on offer for Christmas morning but the turkeys have all sold out.
            And for the first, and last, time in 2014, the lights are clicking off in many of the college libraries across the university.  Usually open 12-24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 350 some odd days a year each and every year, the empty aisles and desks signify how different Cambridge becomes around Christmas week.

December 16th

On December 14th 2012 26 teachers and children went to school one morning and never came back home.

Newton Connecticut was devastated.  Even in a nation where school shootings have become common, and public mass shootings almost rampant, the deaths of 20 young grade-schoolers and the adults who tried to protect them was shocking.  It was one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.  Families were left shattered, and while the nation mourned, at the end of the day nothing much changed.

On December 16th 2014 at least 145--maybe more--teachers and children went to school one morning and never came back home.  

The lives of hundreds if not thousands of people in Peshawar Pakistan can never again be the same.  Families have been gutted and if healing is even possible it will take decades if not years.  A nation, and a world, are in shock.  The idea that children can be targets goes far beyond unsettling, and reminds us that evil exists in every corner of the world.

Watching the news coverage unfold from the European side of the pond, I can only hope that as the hyperbole begins my US friends and family have a chance to read articles that go beyond our usual understanding of violence in the middle east as "Terrorism" (even if in this case it may well be) and dismissing the actions of these men as representative of Islam in any way, shape or form.  I hope that the pictures splashed across the internet and the front lines of papers are those of families standing together, mosques worshiping and mourning, mothers holding hands.  Not photos of seven men holding guns.  I  hope that the stories told are those of students accomplishments and dreams.  Not the stories of violent idealists who have hijacked a religion and a God to justify the destruction they seek in the world.  

I can only hope that when American families learn more and more about what happened on December 16th 2014, they are reminded that all people are human, and that the loss of a child in Pakistan is felt as deeply and horribly as the loss of a child in Newton.  That the tragedy of the future cut short is not lessened by where a child was born, what religion they worshiped or language they spoke.  And that we as a nation don't dismiss these deaths as easily as we dismiss the hundreds who die in ongoing drone strikes in the mountains of Pakistan and it's neighbors.  I can hope that this might remind us as a nation and a world, that a senseless death is just that; senseless.  That maybe a constant escalation of violence will not someday bring us peace.  That getting a bigger gun won't end the bloodshed.

But in a world full of violence, much of it precipitated and carried out by the US military, I suppose that's all I can do.  Is hope.