Until living in Cambridge from 2017-2022 I had little interest in cows. If you pressed me, I felt vaguely averse to them. What I now see as placid I instead read as passive, leaving me with a vague sense there wasn’t much to them as animals. But when I found myself living somewhere surrounded by them, that rapidly began to change. I found the same peacefulness watching them I used to find observing my Roborovski dwarf hamsters at night. During the first lockdown the return of the cows to the field near my house was one of the most deeply reassuring events I can remember in my life.
I miss the cows deeply, particularly as they’re not as prominent in how I experience Cambridge as a regular visitor as they were as a resident (partly because there are now less cows 😢). The last truly sunny day I spent in Cambridge before leaving, I fell asleep in a shady spot on the bank of the Cam on Stourbridge Common. I woke up to find a cow quizzically sniffing my face, possibly wondering if my beard was edible. I realise intellectually there’s a slight risk I could have been trampled on but it’s a lovely memory nonetheless.
Turns out Gertrude Stein had a similar relationship to cow watching. From Gloria Mark’s Attention Span loc 2929:
Gertrude Stein, whose writing omitted punctuation like commas or periods so that it read without pauses, did in fact incorporate pauses into her composition. She would briefly stop her work and gaze at cows. With her companion Alice B. Toklas, they would take a drive through the countryside of Ain, France, where they lived. Stein would set up a campstool, write and at intervals take breaks to watch the cows. Every so often Toklas would nudge a cow into Stein’s field of view so she had ample opportunity to observe it.[4] Ironing, hand-washing, watching cows—these all involve rote, mindless attention. Rote activity has its advantages. It occupies the mind without using up much cognitive resources. Its easy engagement keeps people’s minds open while they put hard-to-solve problems aside, making room for new ideas to appear or half-baked ones to progress.
I haven’t eaten meat for two decades but beyond occasionally proclaiming I should be a vegan, I’d never really seriously considered it until these years. But my new cow friends made me give up the leather jackets I loved, as well as dispense with the aspiration for a leather chesterfield which I assumed I’d get when my cat friend was no longer with me. I’ve been thinking again about going vegan, partly because I hadn’t entirely understood what a dairy farm was like until watching this film:
Mark Carrigan 