Friday, 5th October 2018, Cambridge
To be technically accurate we are camped four miles outside of Cambridge where we are staying for a second night. This morning we decided not to bother driving to the Park and Ride to leave Modestine and take the bus into Cambridge. Instead we left her on the campsite, walked down into the village and caught the hourly bus into the city. Not only did I not need to worry about driving and parking, we could use our free bus passes! It all worked perfectly and we staggered back this evening exhausted after being on our feet all day.
Thatched cottage. Comberton. Cambridgeshire.
As we stood waiting in the village street for the hourly bus into Cambridge to arrive, two ladies also waiting, began chatting about the Cambridge local history society meeting they'd recently attended and just what a fantastic local historian Mike Petty was. Ian eventually could keep quiet no longer and told them that he used to sit on the same national committee as the person they were discussing and he agreed completely with everything they'd been saying. How strange but gratifying to be a couple of hundred miles from home and to overhear nice things being said about a work colleague!
We have visited Cambridge once before in our lives but our memory of it is lost in the mists of time. I vaguely recall walking from Cambridge through meadows and arriving in Granchester. Today the bus passed through Granchester on the way to Cambridge and we recognised nothing. Not only did the church clock not stand at ten to three, we didn't even see the church! The village pub is though named The Rupert Brook in recognition of his place as a war poet and his deeply emotional poem, written during the First World War out in France, when thinking back on his homeland here in Granchester.
We were dropped at the bus station in the city centre and swept up into the crowds of tourists from around the world. Everywhere students were bowling along at speed on their bikes, rushing off to lectures or through the parks, up and over the hump-back bridges across the river Cam. We peered in at the entrance gates of various colleges, where we could. Now though it seems all the colleges charge to permit ordinary tourists to see inside the grounds. Some have a barrier across so that you can at least see the quad' though nothing more. Charges vary from £4 for some of the lesser known colleges up to £10 per adult at Kings and St. Johns. Most were closed to visitors anyway today.
Sidney Sussex College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
Round Church. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
Trinity College, Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
Trinity College Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
/Saint John's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
Queen's College. River Cam and bridge. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
King's College. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
University Library. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
Ian insisted we go to the University Library where the high tower is apparently filled with around 1,000,000 books of lesser renown. He remembers visiting the library with his fellow Sheffield library school colleagues and discovering the tower was actually crowded with every Enid Blyton work she'd ever written, deposited there under national copyright law.
University Library. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
University Library tower, Children's literature. Cambridge. Cambridgeshire.
We walked through the parks, crossed the wooden bridges across the Cam, watched students punting on the river - where Ian explained the technique to me and commented with disdain that in Cambridge they punt from the back of the boat whilst he and fellow punters in Oxford always punted from the front. Don't mention it to him but personally I thought it looked far more sensible to punt from the back!
We stopped at a pleasant coffee shop for a baguette and coffee, and to read the Guardian and the Times, provided for customer's use, before gathering our tired limbs together and returning to the fray. The weather has been very warm which leaves us rather weary when we are walking all the time.
Mid-afternoon I felt so tired we headed for the park and sat for a rest in the Princess Diana memorial garden, amidst the rose bushes. On a nearby bench sat a voluble Italian lady chatting on her phone, presumably to her boyfriend in Italy. Suddenly, from behind her back appeared a large, pale ferret! She managed to scream and jump to her feet, but without dropping her phone and we watched in fascination as a workman in overalls assured her it wasn't anything to worry about, he was simply taking it for a walk and it had hidden itself under a rose bush! He then, to our further astonishment, explained it again in fluent Italian as she'd not understood him in English! What, we wondered, would her boyfriend in Lucca, still on the line, have made of it all? She was still talking to him on her phone when we left to return to the bus station, and the Englishman had finished crawling around in the bushes making encouraging noises intended to lure a reluctant ferret into a navy blue bag. When the creature was eventually recaptured and was safely zipped away its owner swung the bag over his shoulder and wandered off to catch his bus home. I was rather relieved he wasn't travelling on ours!
