Yep, that’s it, that’s the post. I don’t really do sports (insert tangent where I wonder out loud about archery, fencing and kayaking as sports and my relationship to the sporting aspects) and I definitely don’t watch them. But I make an exception for the Boat Race. I don’t know why I watch the Boat Race other than perhaps it’s the one sport you can keep up with while only being required to pay attention for an hour and a half a year. I’m a Cambridge fan – I bleed light blue, as their Instagram asked at the weekend – and that’s not because they’ve been pretty unfailingly dominating the Boat Race for the last few years. It’s mostly because a friend went to Cambridge when I was a teenager, so Cambridge was the first of the Oxbridge universities that ever really entered my orbit.
I’m not Oxbridge material myself. I went to the University of Kent which claimed to be similar to Oxbridge in that it was one of the very, very few collegiate universities, although universitycompare.com has thirteen collegiate universities, so that’s no longer much of a claim to uniqueness. Oxbridge colleges are mini-universities in themselves – you live in your college, you learn in your college and I believe your degree is issued by your college rather than the University of Oxford or Cambridge. At Kent, it works more like school houses, in that everyone’s a member of one but it doesn’t generally affect your day-to-day life. The only difference is that at Kent, if you live in student rooms, you don’t live in “halls”, you live in “colleges” and you’ll probably (but not definitely) live in the college you’re a member of. If you don’t live in colleges, your attachment to your college is probably little more than the fact that it’s written on your student ID. You won’t be taught in your college until that college happens to be home to your particular faculty. I was a member of Darwin but I did a language degree, so almost all my lessons were in Cornwallis North West – having said that, for some reason the first year optional Catalan Ab Initio module was taught halfway across campus in Darwin. Anyway. I think my point was that although I was a member of a university college, it wasn’t an Oxbridge college, I didn’t row. I didn’t even know there was a rowing club. Wikipedia says it’s been around since 1966, so I guess I was just oblivious because five minutes ago, I’d have said “there wasn’t a rowing club, although there was a canoeing club” (which I didn’t join because I neither canoed nor kayaked back then. I caved. Oh, did I cave!).
So. I’m not Oxbridge. I didn’t row at university. I don’t row at all. I don’t know what the appeal is of the Boat Race. And yet year after year I sit there entranced by it and getting excited over this or that team being deliberately aggressive and getting into trouble. Oh, the drama of the Oxford women trying to sabotage the Cambridge team this year! The way Cambridge just annihilated Oxford this year! Women’s, men’s, reserves, lightweights, just incredible.
But… having said that I don’t row, I have rowed a couple of times. Not university racing style. Swallows and Amazons style. At Wareham, where I go to hire a canoe every now and then, you can also hire a rowing boat. We did it on A Level results day. We had a friend who’s capable of rowing, and he was our skipper. That was good, like being in the Wind in the Willows, just bobbing up the river on a sunny day, enjoying the freedom of being between school and university, the last true summer of freedom.
And I’ve done it myself! I’ve been out twice. I went in 2019 and… well, didn’t get on too well. For a start, if you row alone, you can’t see where you’re going, which makes steering difficult. How do you avoid hitting things if you’re facing backwards? Old-fashioned wooden rowing boats don’t have coxes to point out obstacles or control the rudder, you just have to keep looking over your shoulder. I’m pretty sure I must have crashed into the bank many times. Rowing boats are huge, heavy and unwieldy and so are the oars. Getting the oars doing the same thing at the same time on both sides without knocking them out of the oarlocks is incredibly difficult too, especially when it’s the first time you’ve tried and you’re doing it on your own without anyone else to point out the obvious mistakes. However, I don’t look overly unhappy in the photos and I didn’t capsize the thing or upset any yacht owners or anger any passing swans. What I should have done was consider that a win and quit while I was ahead.
But apparently I went back in 2021! Oh, I remember this one. For a start, it was a much greyer day and it was a spur of the moment decision to go for a rowing boat rather than a canoe, maybe even because there were no canoes available. Seems unlikely; I sometimes wonder if it’s financially worth keeping the canoes since everyone goes for either a rowing boat or a motorboat except me. I’m wearing a hoodie in some of the pictures but I’ve managed to take it off in others. Did I dare to pause and take off my buoyancy aid while out on the water? Where did I then put the jumper to stop it getting wet? And why have I pushed one trouser leg up to just below the knee but not the other?
I really struggled on this trip. I didn’t know which way I was supposed to face, I didn’t know which way the boat was supposed to point, I didn’t know which bench I was supposed to sit on. I assume I said that I’d done it before and the hirer therefore didn’t think I needed to be told such basics. I do! I knew enough to realise that the blunt end forward didn’t feel very hydrodynamic but it didn’t seem to make sense to go the other way. This time, you can see from my face that I’m not getting on with this.
I can’t row. I just can’t get those hands even, I can’t make sense of going backwards, it’s not my thing. But the good news is that in my experience, things that just aren’t your thing can become things that you’re tolerably competent at if you just keep trying. The first time I went canoeing, I spent the entire hour crashing into and then swearing at the reeds. I’m a lot better now. If I hired a rowing boat two or three times every summer and made a ritual of it, I’m sure I’d be able to get halfway to the road bridge in a year or two.
The trouble is, when I go out rowing, I hear the dad from Swallows and Amazons, and his “better drowned than duffers” telegram. I sometimes remind myself that just because I can’t row it doesn’t make me a duffer – I can handle a canoe reasonably well and a kayak better. I can go out on the water with the best of the Swallows, as long as you don’t expect me to sail or row. But the moment I get in a rowing boat, I know that I’m a duffer. I can’t do it.
Is that why I enjoy the Boat Race? Watching the professionals doing something so smoothly and so expertly that I know I can’t do. Nah. If I watched and was impressed by everyone who did something I can’t, I’d never do anything because I’d never have the time. I guess I just like the water.
Bumblebee Paddles 