C-C-C-C-Cambridge

Well, it's official. I'm never cleaning anything ever again.

Nope, not even my own apartment or house or sink or cardboard box. I will never clean anything ever. I will hire someone and pay them to clean for me as I think I have cleaned enough in the past five months to exempt me from ever cleaning again.

In short...


Bye-bye Blenheim...


Hello Cambridge!


Ah Cambridge University! Home to such minds as Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and other people who didn't write comedy like John Milton (Unless you're part of the small minority that finds Paradise Lost hilarious).


Having loyalties to Oxfordshire, I was slightly worried about venturing into enemy territory. Oxford and Cambridge are bitter rivals and many an unwary tourist has found themselves tied to an anchor and throw into the bottom of the Cam for wearing a Oxford University sweatshirt.

Bearing this in mind, the first thing I did when I arrived in the city was to wave my Oxford University Press copy of Evelyn Waugh's short stories in front of windows of the Cambridge University Press bookstore.

I live on the edge.


I travelled Cambridge with the most intrepid of all travelling partners, Miss Krushel and our fabulous guide and pointer-outer of important things, Miss Kathy who did not beat me up for seething that Oxford was tops but instead found us the only sushi restaurant in all of England. After Stephen Fry, she is the best person ever to have stepped foot in Cambridge.

And after wiping away the tears of joy that sprang forth from tasting raw fish once more, I reconsidered Cambridge.


The colleges of Old Cambridge are ridiculously beautiful (except Ruskin - what were they thinking?) and as you walk along the cobbled streets, dodging the handsome young scholars on bicycles with their robes whipping behind them, you can hear the choirs wafting out from the top of the towers and the organs practicing for the evening service and the bells marking the hours.

And after about five minutes of walking the streets of Old Cambridge, you start talking like a woozy, Victorian poet who's overdosed on the mead and romanticism.


This is the inner courtyard of King's College which you can observe for free if you walk past the gates looking haggard and talking about "ballyol' tutors" like a P.G Wodehouse character.


Punters on the Cam! Punters punting in front of King's College, Cambridge University! All my English expectations in one scene!

I swooned and was revived by Kim Philby and together we went away to become glamorous spies for the Soviets.


My man Henry VIII in front of Trinity College.


The lonely tree of Trinity College.



In order to help schoolchildren in Kenya, some bearded idealist decided to live in a tree and collect donations to support his removal from the rest of the ground level population.

Because we took a picture, Kathy gave him a pound donation and then asked how long he had been in the tree.

"Five hours," was his blithe reply.

Five hours? I'd spent more time on the bus that day.

Feeling a bit cheated, we sat around with pointy sticks to make sure we got our money's worth of tree living.


However, Cambridge does have something in common with Oxford: The pub food is terrible.


We ate at the Eagle Pub where the ceiling is decorated with the signatures of WWII RAF pilots and their women who signed with lipstick and lighters.

The Eagle is also where Watson and Crick held the press conference to announce their discovery of the Double Helix model of DNA. During the course of this press conference, they did not announce that they'd basically stolen the entire idea from Rosalind Franklin but I guess they were busy choking on the pub food and collecting Nobel prizes.


That there where my foot is resting on in defiance of college regulations? Is pristine and sacred King's College grass.

Life Mission No.33: Complete.