Wildwood

It had been announced on Monday that our first ever field trip would be on Wednesday morning. Neither us of had any idea where we were going. “Woodlands” something or other, Richard Griffiths had blithely tossed out before advising us to bring “warm clothing and footwear, preferably waterproof, as you never know, this being England it could likely start snowing or something.” I was thrilled purely for the fact that we’d be getting out and about, instead of being shut up inside yet another lecture room.

The place we went to was actually called ‘Wildwood’, and it appears to be a nature park run by a trust that's working on the conservation of native English wildlife, and includes captive breeding programs for species such as the Water Vole (Arvicola terrestris amphibius), the Hazel Dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius) and the Pine Marten (Martes martes) which are all species I’d never even heard of before. (Apparently, one popular program now sees tennis balls being collected after Wimbledon is over, and having holes drilled in them to serve as little Harvest Mouse nests.) A very interesting place, and extremely educational, but there was barely enough time to explore and see everything.

Oh I’m only moaning because I never got enough time to dally in the gift shop. Gift shops are a death trap, and I’m a particularly susceptible victim. I don’t know why it is but let me walk into the gaping jaws of a gift shop and I may never walk out again. There’s just something about being in one of those things that’s terribly, terribly seductive…and before I know it I’ve just spent a small fortune on a pile of things I will never ever need.

Ah yes, but the wildlife. That one trip to Wildwood taught me more about British wildlife than I’d ever known before. They have Puff Adders, Harvest Mice, Water Shrews, Fallow Deer, Red Deer, Wild Boar, Wild(ish) Ponies, Arctic Foxes, Badgers, Otters, and even Wolves!! They also enlightened us on some key issues plaguing British wildlife conservation, things neither you nor I would have ever thought of when we think of the UK.

Like, did you know that Wild Boar went extinct in the wild here about 400 years ago?? After awhile the only Wild Boar they had were the ones they kept in captivity…but then at some point later (I can’t remember when), these escaped and started repopulating the wild places again. They’re excellent ‘habitat managers’ because they open up an area, allowing things like birds and mice and squirrels to start moving in, and before you know it you have your very own little ecosystem humming away. Only problem is, people such as farmers don’t like Wild Boar because they damage crops. And, quite bizarrely, they spoil the bluebells. Wild Boar love feasting on bluebell bulbs, which means that other different kinds of plants can start coming in as well, but because there are people who want to have their little bit of uninterrupted bluebell carpet so they can look at it and think “Oh how pretty”, well – things aren’t looking up for the Wild Boar right now.

At the opposite end of the spectrum you have Red Deer. These are now the largest mammals found on the British Isles, and they’re doing very, very well. Their population has quite simply exploded, and now they’re becoming a bit of an annoying problem. So: do you cull (in other words, shoot them, kill them, eradicate them), which some people have a problem with? Or, do you reintroduce their native predator, the European Wolf, and have everyone jumping at shadows each time they’re outdoors when night falls? Bear in mind, for many British people the badger is the largest carnivore they know.



Unfortunately like I said, I didn’t get nearly enough time to see all the things I wanted to see. (Or buy all the things I wanted to buy.) I forgot to mention that Wildwood itself is situated within what is known as "Ancient Woodland", which basically refers to any forested area more than 400 years old. This particular forest is far more ancient than a paltry 400 years, though - it was mentioned in the Domesday Book, that staggeringly comprehensive land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror himself, in 1087 AD. This is definitely one place I’ll have to return to, so I can walk around and explore at my own leisure.



Kitchen mates

Remember my concern about sharing a kitchen?? Well it seems my fears have been realised…I walked in this morning to find that (a) Someone’s been using my dishwashing liquid; (b) Someone’s not only using my dish towel but keeps tossing it onto the table; and (c) Someone’s most probably using my milk too.

Well, all in all, nothing I hadn’t expected really. Our kitchen’s really grubby. Really, it’s horrible. There’s certain people who don’t clean up after themselves, never mind the fact that there’s never enough space to put things. Only thing is, I didn’t realise just how grubby our kitchen really was, until I went upstairs to see Daria’s kitchen.

Daria lives one floor above me in Tyler Court. After we returned from Wildwood she invited me up to her kitchen for lunch. As soon as I walked in I felt incredibly cheated. Their kitchen was lovely. It’s so much nicer than our kitchen, so much tidier and well-kept. Well-stocked too. And the two spanking new fridges they have to put their things in, why, I was speechless with envy. If you don’t believe me, take a look at my kitchen:-


Now look at Daria's kitchen:-


The differences may seem miniscule, but it’s usually these little differences that really matter. It’s not fair.

Also, in Daria’s kitchen I was introduced to Carolina, from the Czech Republic, who helpfully informed me that “You should never keep your mushrooms in plastic, because then they turn poisonous.”

New faces

After spending an entire weekend completely on my own, I’m slowly starting to connect with people, both on my course and along my corridor. I walked into the kitchen this morning and found Sandrine sitting there having breakfast, a French girl who happens to live in the room right next to mine. She’s a small, unbelievably freckled redhead who single-handedly helped me to solve the Internet connection in my room, and who I have therefore now elevated to sainthood.

Sandrine tells me that a group of boisterous young Mediterranean undergrads have been coming over to use our kitchen. I can’t imagine why they would want to?? But it does explain the dismal state of said kitchen – I still haven’t cooked there yet. And it explains the noise over the last few days. According to Sandrine, there is at least: one Greek guy, one Turkish guy, and one Cypriot-Mexican guy (??). They crowd around the kitchen at mealtimes, then in the evening crowd into one of the rooms and watch football in the dark, punctuating this with a lot of masculine shouting. Oh dear.

As I said, I’ve got an extremely international class. We sometimes share classes with the others taking Conservation & Tourism, Ethnobotany, and Social Anthropology. During our first lecture we all had to take turns standing up and introducing ourselves, so I now know that we have a healthy mix of: Malaysia (me), Korea, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, India, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Colombia, Palestine, Ireland, oh yes and the English. As a matter of fact, one of the English students, Richard, like me also studied archaeology and worked as an archaeologist for about a year before he got fed up with it. Hmm what a coincidence. I wonder if this is some sort of pattern.

The first lecture went by straightforwardly enough, but as the second and third ones wore on I started realising that I actually know very little about any of it. And that we have an awful lot of reading up and studying to do, and that we’ve actually got quite a packed timetable, and that I am probably going to end up failing this course. Umm, did I really say I wanted to do this??

In one of those happy twists of fate though I ended up sitting next to a Korean girl, Daria (“My name is Jeong Hee Han but I find it is an effort for you to pronounce this, so just call me Daria”), who is every bit as lost as me if not more, and is every bit as scared, worried, panicked and freaked out over the course. It’s good to know I’m not alone.

Directions in conservation biology

Towards the end of the evening reception on Friday Richard Griffiths gleefully accosted me brandishing a thick sheaf of papers. “Sheema! Homework!” and I swear there was something vaguely wicked about his smile. I took it, thanked him for it and promptly ignored it, resolving to ‘have a look at it’ sometime over the weekend. It looked a bit threatening and I really didn’t feel like dealing with it right then, especially if it would make me do something horrible like write an essay or something, or go look for books.

As it turns out, it’s a bit of weekend reading, I suppose to prepare us for our first class Monday morning. It’s an extremely thick paper (26 pages to be precise, not including references) someone called Graeme Caughley wrote in the Journal of Animal Ecology 1994, and it’s called ‘Directions in conservation biology’. I’m convinced now that Richard did this on purpose, specifically out of a sadistic delight at terrifying the living daylights out of new Conservation Biology students. He must do this every single year. Here’s a little extract from the paper, and you tell me if you can make head or tails of what it’s talking about:-

“The variance in rate of increase of a population of size N is simply Vd = Vd√N. Table 1 shows that a population, which would increase at r = 0.3 if it had a stable age distribution appropriate to fixed schedules of age-specific fecundity and survival, needs to be moderately large before the rate of increase stabilizes. It shows further that a small population, although ‘trying’ to increase at r = 0.3, is likely to suffer erratic swings of growth and decline that might knock it out before it escaped from the pit of low numbers.”

And, as an extra treat:-

“It is an established result that, under demographic stochasticity alone, mean time to extinction increases with intrinsic rate of increase rm and, if the population is bounded above as in the logistic or truncated exponential model, persistence time exhibits an upwardly concave trend (nearly exponential) when regressed on that upper bound K (Fig. 2: dashed line).”

I gave up after page 3, which is about the same time I discovered that I’ve bought some very horrible coffee.

Now I really wish I’d attended the DICE induction talk earlier, 2-4pm Friday. I was too busy being frantic and stressed out that I never even remembered. Someone, please remind me that I need to get a timetable (when are my classes??) and a reading list (what books am I supposed to be reading??).

Have kitchenware, will cook!

And so I desert my academic reading for yet another excursion into town. It’s not aimless wandering, honest really, since I’ve got plenty more things on my shopping list to procure. Besides, the sun is out, and in the UK that means it really would be a sin to stay indoors.

My state of being potless and panless means that I nip into 'Poppins' for a jacket potato lunch. Ooh English jacket potatoes – I’ve been dreaming about them for years. People can say what they want about English food (and I frequently do), but boy do they know how to make a good potato. I’d originally promised myself one with cheese, but one look at the menu brought memories of prawn & mayonnaise flooding back, and from that moment I was lost. And the taste, why, the taste was even better than I’d remembered it – all soft and buttery and melt-in-your-mouth. I underestimated English portions though, and overestimated my eating capabilities (polishing off an entire dish of three-cheese & broccoli pasta bake with a pile of chips yesterday had made me cocky). It was a monster of a jacket potato, and, after soldiering on heroically through three-quarters of it, I finally conceded defeat. I know those poor little prawns will come back to haunt my sleep tonight.


And, speaking of English food, let it be known that the person who invented flapjacks deserves to be given an award.

Mission…somewhat accomplished, for today. I struggled back to Tyler with a bag full of cooking implements and extra bedlinen. I’m still mystified though that finding a winter duvet for a single bed appears to be an impossible quest. None of the shops seem to have any, and Argos, the student’s godsend, is too far out of town to reach on foot (I’m sure that was done on purpose). On the other hand I now know where Sainsbury’s is, if I ever feel like struggling uphill for an hour weighed down by groceries. I do believe I’ve done my calf in, or at least I’m certainly not imagining this sharp pain that seems to have now migrated down to my ankle.

I don’t mind too much, today has been quite fruitful in more ways than one. The weather has been smiling down on us, sunny enough for t-shirts, yet coolly pleasant…why, it’s so warm today that I’ve even got my window open to let the breeze in! Ah, if only English weather were like this all the time…

Curses, I can hear conversation and laughter in the corridor outside my door. That means more people are moving in…oh no! Neighbours! More people to share the kitchen with! It’s not as bad as sharing the bathroom, but anyone who has experience of student kitchens will tell you that the dishes never get washed, the rubbish is always overflowing, and your stuff is forever getting nicked. Dare I take out my shiny new pots and pans and expose them to certain desecration?? More importantly, will I work up enough motivation to start cooking my own meals?

Oh yes and there’s the business of that paper I’m supposed to finish reading…

Student life

I like my room. It’s functional. It could do with a bit more space and places to put things, but all in all I’m pretty happy with it. Tyler Court’s actually quite nice, it has a reception desk with some very nice reception desk ladies, and at least they separate us from the riffraff (sorry, I meant undergrads), plus it even has a launderette of its own (very important). I’m making all these observations because I have absolutely no experience of living on campus. During my whole three years at York I lived off-campus, in proper houses, and since the Department of Archaeology was in town I very rarely ventured onto the campus proper. Plus, let me tell you now that turning a university campus into one big duckpond is never a good idea, and I shall never miss those memories of having to constantly dodge goose droppings along the footpaths, or that rankling stink that greeted you as soon as you got within several metres of the university.

Thank God UKC doesn’t have any ponds, or ducks or geese. It’s quite a novel experience. My room, 125, is in a corridor, actually the furthest corridor away from the entrance, which is nice because you don’t get all that human traffic to-ing and fro-ing all the time. I’ve got my own bathroom but I share a kitchen with eight other people. So far I’ve only met one of them, an English guy called Mark. He seems nice but after saying hello to him I immediately forgot what he looks like, and only know him as ‘that guy in room 129’ and probably won’t recognise him if I saw him anywhere else. I think I passed him by on my way out of the building earlier, in which case I can now remember for a fact that he’s tall and balding. Later on my way back to my room I heard the sounds of a football match (‘soccer’ to anyone in American mode) blaring from his room – Chelsea against someone else, I think. Oh God yet another football junkie.

Canterbury on foot

I’m pretty sure I’ve completed some sort of walking marathon record by now, and it’s only my second day here. I’d forgotten just how much you use your legs when you’re a student in the UK. To save money you walk everywhere, even into town (“What? Take the bus?? I’ll walk till my toes fall off before I pay that 42p or whatever it costs just to get to town!”). It takes half an hour, but according to my standards anywhere that takes half an hour is easy walking distance. Still, what a re-adjustment after being able to drive everywhere in Malaysia! I thought I was clocking up the walking miles pretty good back home, but that was piddling compared to the torture I’ve had to put myself through these last two days. I’m sure my poor scrunched-up toes (gosh I’m glad I cut those nails before I left Malaysia) are wailing in protest; it’s been awhile since they were used to this sort of suffering. Plus the upper part of me (including my brain) is still sore from some very Herculean efforts at lugging around some very heavy loads. Note to self: Please let’s not do this again.

Unfortunately, trips into town look likely for at least the next two days. I’m constantly discovering all the many things I don’t have yet but desperately need: food, for example. I managed to get some supplies from the campus shop conveniently located near Tyler, but then realised that I don’t have any pots or pans to cook in. I got myself some coffee (when on earth did I start getting attached to coffee??), only now I need a teaspoon to make it with. Oh yes, and last night I had to use my coat as a blanket, because my bed doesn’t come with a duvet, and I should probably take measures to prevent against freezing in winter. Little things like that.

Strangely enough it’s been a real challenge hunting down a duvet. You’d think a necessity like that would abound in UK shops, but no one seems to cater to student needs, or at least single people’s needs. I went into Debenhams today and said “I need bedding for a single bed, plus a duvet,” and came away with a bedsheet, a pillowcase, a duvet cover, and no duvet. I still can’t quite comprehend how, between me and the salesgirl, neither of us remembered that the duvet was the really crucial element of the entire exercise. Never mind, it’s probably too big to lug around anyway. I’ve literally got my hands full with shopping (and it’s no fun doing a 30-minute walk uphill weighed down with bedlinen and stationery), so I’ll just come back and get it another day.

So, shopping, shopping, and even more shopping yet to come. The thing about shopping in the UK is that it’s not convenient like Malaysia, where you have gargantuan shopping malls filled with just about every single shop you could ever need, plus quite a few more that you never will. In Malaysia you can just zip from one shop to another and then happily bundle everything into your car in the parking lot. Not so in the UK.

The trick to English towns is that they're all the same. Oh, certain trivial details may differ - this place has a fountain, that place has a ruined abbey. But every one of them (at least the reasonably sized ones) has more or less the same kind of shops in its town centre. All the basic shops you’ll need to get to at some point (Marks & Spencer, WHSmith, TopShop, HMV etc.) are all there, somewhere. The real trick therefore is finding out where everything is, and the shortest possible way to get there. Of course this necessitates a lot of wandering around and getting your bearings about you, not to mention investigating possible shortcuts. A shop that was conveniently located in York, and therefore quite regularly visited, might not be so in Canterbury, and so adjustments and improvisations are necessary. Sometimes it’s the useless stuff that keeps popping up – like that ubiquitous fudge shop whose staff walk the streets offering free samples. And yet the most basic, most important places sometimes seem to be inexplicably missing, for some reason or another. Like, how come Canterbury doesn’t have a shop selling armour and replica swords of all manner, which in York you can find on a very prominent, centrally-located touristy street?? What’s up with that? Where am I going to walk in and wander around when I’m bored in town? Honestly, you’d think they could put a bit more thought into their town planning.

It's a real effort shopping in UK towns. After you've figured out where everything is and how to get to them, you then begin the business of comparing prices. If you're a student, then this becomes doubly crucial. Most shops have a lot of the same sort of things, so for example if you're looking for a bathroom mat then you'll find yourself criss-crossing between several different shops to see which one has what you're looking for, what's the nicest pattern, and where you can get the cheapest deal. Oftentimes you end up retracing your steps, which is why shopping in the UK is the best and quickest way to get to know a town as intimately as you know the back of your hand.


Thankfully, just like York, a touristy place like Canterbury has a very helpful and efficient Tourist Information Office, and they’ve been telling me where I can go to get computer accessories, bedlinen and things like that. It’s located right across from the gateway to Canterbury Cathedral, which is a gorgeous place to be. My recollections of Canterbury are very hazy, but that’s because the only other time I was here was more than five years ago. Back then, I had a sometime English boyfriend (I can safely say I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, suffice to say I wasn’t) from Canterbury who had managed to land himself in hospital with kidney failure. So I found myself on a train down there from London, and I stayed with his parents for two nights and three days. During that time Dylan got temporarily discharged “on good behaviour” or something like that, and he took me to see the Cathedral.

I vaguely remember it as being smaller than York Minster, but more elaborately decorated, and the stained glass was more colourful. And there was a statue of the Black Prince in the gardens (more on Canterbury history later, when I manage to find out myself). I’m dying to go in and explore, but it seems too jealously guarded…the sign at the entrance saying ‘Adults £5’ is quite an effective deterrent – at least the Minster was free! I used to go there after classes and walk around for a bit, soaking up the serenity of the place. Since I missed UKC’s orientation week I also missed out on a free trip to the Cathedral…so I guess it’ll be awhile before any photos of that make their way up here.

I suppose comparisons between Canterbury and York are going to be inevitable. Not just because York is the only other place in England I’ve really lived in, but also it’s impossible not to compare England’s two cathedral towns, each with their very own Archbishops, immense ancient history and now very, very touristy. It’s amazing how much Canterbury is like York, in very many ways. It’s a lovely place to walk around, just because there’s so much history here. A lot of ancient remains, a lot of ruins, a lot of ‘old stuff’, which I just love. On my first day here I discovered that it even has its own city wall, although it doesn’t go all the way around like at York. Also, like York, Canterbury has its own bars! Now when I say bars I don’t mean bars in the American sense of the word (although people certainly told me that York was a “boozing town”, with “a pub for every day of the year”!). No no, a bar in the historical, or rather archaeological, sense of the word is basically a huge, ancient gateway made of stone, usually attached (or once was) to a city wall or a castle. I forget the exact definition, and the origin of the word (er, I think we learnt this back on the Archaeology course, but I must’ve not been paying attention). It’s just like how Canterbury also has a few ‘gates’, such as Burgate and Northgate, which aren’t actually gates but streets. Now that, I do know, comes from the Viking word gatta, which is solid evidence that Canterbury has had some Norse influence somewhere down the line there.

York has plenty of bars. I can’t remember how many now, but off the top of my head there was Bootham Bar, Monkbar, Walmgate Bar and erm…..OK I can’t remember the others now. I think there were two more. And practically every street in central York is a ‘gate’ of some sort: Petergate, Coppergate, Goodramgate, Stonegate, Gillygate, Skeldergate, wonderfully evocative names. There’s even Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate, “the shortest street with the longest name”. They all radiate out from the town centre like the spokes of a wheel, or at least in my mind they do, and there are little nooks and crannies, and secret little lanes to explore, if you know how to find them.

Canterbury seems less of a maze than that, but no less thrilling to explore. Rest assured, I’ll be doing a lot more walking in the weeks and months to come. For now, though, I’m going to totter back to my room and collapse for the night.

"I just arrived at lunchtime today..."

"Write a blog," they said. "That way people can find out what you're up to." Yes, well, which really translates to you're all way too lazy to email, doesn't it?? That's alright, cos I'm really way too lazy to email too, so this actually works out quite well. It's a brilliant idea. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to read through pages and pages of my ramblings, but several people did say, “Let us know what you’re up to in Canterbury!”. So I am. It’s mainly for you people, the ones who asked, that I’m doing this. Also, let’s face it, it beats having to type out the same email to a dozen different people, or mass emailing which I have never quite taken to. Don’t worry though, I won’t be writing in every single day – only when I feel I have something of note to report.

And the first thing of note, of course, is that I managed to arrive at the University of Kent at Canterbury (to be referred to henceforth as UKC) in one piece. I made good time, and from KLIA to London Victoria coach station it was smooth sailing all the way. I did, however, have the misfortune of running into an extremely surly driver on the coach ride from Victoria to Canterbury. He was obviously in a bad mood, and he kicked up a bit of a fuss over my overweight luggage – alright, alright, it was 11.1 kg over my 20 kg limit, but then most people get a 30 kg limit right, and they still overshoot that by several kilos don’t they?? Perhaps he was having a particularly bad morning, I don’t know. Our exchange was brief :-

Grumpy Coach Driver: “Now that has got to be over twenty kilos.”
Me: “Erm, yeah, actually it’s thirty.”
Grumpy Coach Driver: “Eighty???”
Me: “No, thirty.”
Grumpy Coach Driver: “That is way too much weight for a luggage handler to handle. I’m not going to do it, especially since I’ve done my back in today. So you’ll either have to get it on yourself, or wait for the next coach.”
Me: (thinking to myself) Ah yes, that wonderful British hospitality. Now what am I doing back here again??

I got the suitcase on the coach, and made it to Canterbury in record time. It was the first time I was actually glad to get out of London.

UKC

The rest of the day was a mad dash of registering and sorting out details, finances etc. Very boring, very stressful stuff. Note to future students: Do not arrive just before the weekend when your classes start on Monday!! Things will inevitably go wrong and all the offices will be closed so there’s nowt you can do except doss around and worry. But, on the bright side, UKC looks like a nice campus (all the buildings are labelled!! Praise the genius who thought that up!), and everything important is within a very short walking distance from my room at Tyler Court A. Plus from where I am you can walk out to a grassy slope with a very lovely view of Canterbury town, with the Cathedral in the distance. I don’t know how I feel yet about being a student again – it’s still very unreal to me at the moment, and almost like a joke. I feel a lot more excited about belonging to Kent than I did about York, though, for some strange reason I can’t explain.


I touched base with the Department of Anthropology today at an evening reception for students and staff. And found out I’m officially a student of DICE – the Durrell Institute for Conservation & Ecology. The Head of Department, Bill Watson, is a small, lively man who studies political Islam in Indonesia, and had to stand on a chair to address us all. My course convenor is Richard Griffiths, a very important focal point who I’m going to have to pay close attention to and maintain very good relations with for the next six months. He seems a likeable man though, so that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

In fact, everyone in the department is nice, and very interesting. All the research that they’re working on is very interesting (one American guy, who I must get to know better, studies ethnic identities in Cuban society!). And what an international mix too, so different from the all-English environment at York Archaeology. Several of the teaching staff are American, and we have a number of Japanese students, oh, oh, plus there is one Malaysian here doing Environmental Anthropology, a guy from KK called Paul. Not only that, but at least four of the teaching staff are doing research in Southeast Asia, and can speak BM – well, it’s more like Bahasa Indonesia, but it’s more than I can say for anyone at York! They also seem very friendly, and genuinely interested in getting to know you. I didn’t even mind that my head was swimming from fatigue and jetlag, and that my limbs were ready to fall off.

I have a good feeling about this Department.