Tourist stuff

Now that school is in, I'm sort of footloose and fancy-free during the day. I've had to search for the right gym shorts and wash the dishes and I could be cleaning the bathroom, but if I want to go look at a college, I can....
So yesterday I met Stephen for lunch and we did a quick tour. We saw St John's college and chapel, walked across Cambridge's Bridge of Sighs, saw the garden at Clare, which is so wonderfully rich and tidy and English-gardeny... There's a rectangular pond with lilypads with actual flowers on them, and one apple tree carefully placed on either side, and a bench; and big piles of red flowers over here and yellow and pale pink over there... It's lovely, and it sure shows that someone spends a lot of time making it just right. How do they get the flowers to look so riotous and the grass so neat? (No pics today, but I'll get ya some.)

The thing we had set out to see was the Wren Library in Trinity. The front gates of the college were closed, but Stephen has a card, as a member of the university, so we went round back and showed the card and got in. They only let 15 people in the library at a time, but there were only about 3 or 4 of us when we were there. In the covered cases we saw Newton's walking stick and
his own first edition of the Principia; the manuscript for Winnie the Pooh (and the librarian rushed over and told us that we were not allowed to photograph that); an 8th century manuscript on vellum, I think; a typed account of someone watching the first atomic bomb test (stamped SECRET but then that was scratched out); a First Folio of Shakespeare and all the other wonderful stuff.

I love uncovering those cases -- you never know what you will find! And for the colour theorists, all the books are brown -- a few white-bound ones stand out; the reds and greens add a spot of colour, but blend in nicely. One wonders about the cataloguing system. And here's a nice little lamp on a desk, but many of the niches hold laptops, and one big blue iMac. I still have to get to the Pepys library in Magdalene, but this will do for now.

After the library we went back out through Kings, and saw the chapel briefly before heading back home to get the kiddies from school. Now that I know we can wave the magic card and get into the colleges when we like, we'll try to do it more often. And we must go to a sung service sometime, just to hear the music.

I started to make a list of nice pictures, just things I liked the look of. And they were all green!

Here's one now!

Then I tried hard to find non-green ones, and they were all grey and brown. Must branch out, must find blue and red things. (Oh, I do love a good red pillar box, but they are often surrounded by grey and brown... I almost bought some pillar box salt and pepper shakers, but they were, alas, just too tacky.)

I've been knitting the shedding wool, and it's lovely to watch the colours blending, but I'm going to take a break from it soon and work on the pink cotton... soon, honest....