Punters

I don’t write in here on Saturdays so this is just a few lines of update, even though it is my Day Off.

We have been in Cambridge on our bicycles. It is amazing how much fun it is to ride a bicycle when there are no hills and it is not raining. I almost got squished by buses and things a few times, because of being inexpert and accustomed to taxi operation, which leads to opportunistic recklessness, and also because my bicycle is not equipped with brakes, but these things just added some exciting adventure to my life, and I am still here to tell the tale.

Cambridge is an amazing place to be. Quite apart from the wonderful clock, the whole place echoes to the sound of bells and street music. There are not very many cars because it is middle class and also because it is all right to be smug about your contribution to the climate when you live somewhere warm. It was warm. It is ten degrees warmer here than it is in the Lake District, we looked.

We started the day with breakfast on the market. Cambridge market is the very best in the whole world, because it consists entirely of peculiar things to eat and a brilliantly-well stocked book stall. We ate things and bought books.

We ate ostrich burgers, actually, because of having an exciting foreign adventure, and they were perfectly nice although not terrifically exciting, I can see why they have never become a gourmet delight.

After that we bought some books. I was very tempted by a book of terrifically rude poetry written by some long-dead chap called John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, but decided not to in the end, maybe another day. It was definitely not the sort of stuff you would want your mother to find on your bookshelf.

When we had finished eating and ambling we went off for the highlight adventure of the day, which was the wonderful punting adventure.

I think I explained that as a Lucy Cavendish student I am allowed to borrow the college punt, so we did, and we brought some champagne, in completely rascally defiance of the instruction that under no circumstances were we to be drunk in charge of a punt. There were six of us in the end, so we did not get very drunk, but we laughed a very great deal and glided merrily along the rather sludgy green surface of the Cam.

It was utterly wonderful, short only of some straw boaters and a wind up gramophone. We had a splendid time. We went beyond the bits where the tours go but had to come back when we decided that the thundering noise we could hear might well be rapids, and thought that perhaps a punt was not the perfect vessel for white-water adventures.

We bumped into other punts, and they bumped, inexpertly, into us, and once the pole got stuck and we left it behind, but somebody rescued it so that was all right, and once we rescued somebody else’s pole, and we had some excitingly rocky adventures when Mark and Amanda’s husband Jez changed places, because they were taking it in turns to punt, but nobody fell overboard, so that was all right as well. Amanda squeaked and worried about Jez punting us all into a disaster, and Beth said she thought it might be like the Titanic, and once we ran aground, but Jez pointed out that since he had spent the last twenty years as an airline pilot in charge of massive aeroplanes full of people then probably he could manage a punt in shallow water.

Bryan asked him then what his most terrifying flying moment had been and Jez said it was when somebody had accidentally given him an economy class in-flight meal.

I thought both Mark and Jez did a truly brilliant job of punting, certainly they were better than I might have been, but I did not volunteer to have a go and so we shall never find out. My contribution was putting the cushions away in the locker afterwards.

We all went back to Madingley Hall then, and had some more wine before dinner, then some wine with dinner, and I am writing this in bed feeling very cheerily full of wine and dinner, and tomorrow I have got to make a speech.

Did I mention I am making a speech at Cambridge in the morning?

Well, I am.