Dear everybody.
I like writing on these pages very much indeed but tonight I have got to say that if I do not sleep then I will have a truly horrible day tomorrow. The moment at which the alarm trilled this morning was not my finest hour. I failed to leap enthusiastically out of bed shouting joyous greetings to the day, which is really not the thing in Cambridge. You are supposed to get up early, eat yoghurt, vote for the Green Party and walk ten thousand steps whilst identifying different species of finch in the hedgerows before lectures start. I mean postgrad students, obviously. Undergraduates are allowed to groan and crawl.
Hence I am going to go to bed early.
Nevertheless, before I do I want to tell you that I( have had a truly splendid, magnificent day, and I love Cambridge with a passion.
I was even pleased to see the Natural History man, who came tearing into class this afternoon to find me because he had found an interesting moth that he thought, correctly, I would like to see. We went to inspect it, and even found the chrysalis from which it had just hatched, and actually he knew far more about the moth than I did so probably he might write his Guardian column better than I could after all.
We have learned all sorts of things. I can’t remember what any of them actually were but I have been captivated and happy all day, apart from a peculiar session about travel writing whose lecturers must have been chosen to provide some diversity, because they were completely incomprehensible. I did not mind this. The point of university is that it is fairly incomprehensible. If it was easy then any old joe could do it.
Also the food was magnificent and the cake was, as always, wonderfully plentiful, and quite splendid. I counted. I have eaten five pieces of cake today. Large ones. No wonder the chattering classes are always concerned about how many steps they have walked.
I have walked lots of steps, because we had a tour of the Hall and a look at some Tudor murals in the tower, real, original peculiar murals, painted by a dead Tudor person. They were a bit more savage than the sort I have painted on the camper van, being mostly illustrations of wild animals being torn apart by dogs, but interesting all the same.
Also I had to make a frantic dash back to the camper van instead of writing something called a Skinny Poem, because there was a sudden thunderstorm and I had left the roof lights open. I had to run all the way, but I got soaked anyway.
Hence I have even had lots of exercise, which might offset the cake a bit.
After all of the exercise and the thinking I find myself in a state of complete exhaustion. The wine and intellectual conversation over dinner might have helped. I did not do any intellectualling. I listened and pretended, which seemed to work reasonably well. After the second glass my pretending may not have been very impressive, but everybody else had had two glasses by then as well, so it did not matter.
I want you all to know that I am very happy indeed. I have spent the entire day listening to people talking about writing things, writing things myself, and eating cake in between. There can be no greater joy in life.
It has tired me out.
I am going to go to bed.
