Cambridgers

Hello. I am going to stop writing very soon because it is the very middle of the night and I am completely wagged out.

I have also drunk a very great deal.

It is the end of the first of our middle-class adventuring, being a night in Cambridge dressed as Batman and trying to remember what intellectuals look like.

I can arrange my face like an intellectual but only if I am sober, and by the end of the evening it had become something of a challenge I can tell you, and I can assure you that nobody at all would have been convinced except perhaps some of the dopier taxi customers who have never met anyone with a real GCSE.

By ten o’clock I was scarlet-faced and trying hard not to become raucous, at least not until grace had been said after dinner, and we were allowed to behave normally again.

It has been the loveliest of lovely days. We had a colossal breakfast followed by a trip into Cambridge where we had no aim more exotic than milling around the retail premises offered by the town.

Actually I wanted to visit the second hand book stall on the market, the rest of the town is nice but far less interesting. I was hoping they might have a John Betjeman collection but they didn’t, maybe on eBay.

After the books we looked at clothes. I had flapped so much during the packing that somehow I had forgotten almost everything I wanted to wear, and had arrived in Cambridge with suitcase after suitcase stuffed to bursting with the most peculiar combinations of garments, purple shorts and orange T-shirts  and all the usual outpourings of my sartorial taste.

I remedied this with the purchase of a beautiful new pair of dungarees. They are leopard-skin print and will look amazing with my pink shirt tomorrow. Number One Daughter said she would prefer to sit somewhere else at breakfast but probably she won’t when she sees how lovely they look.

The dungaree shop was interesting. It was staffed by two amazing young men with pink hair and purple check dungarees and ear-rings in other bits of their faces, and I would have liked very much to stay and talk to them, but of course they were just trying to sell things really. They both said very flattering things about the leopard-skin dungarees, and one of them even said I ought to buy a smaller size, which was kindly but untruthful, so we had a lovely time.

After that we took the college punt out on the Cam, which was also ace, because there were hardly any other tourists and the world was peaceful and mellow. Mark pushed the punt with the pole, and Number One Daughter helped with an oar, and I was an idle passenger but nobody minded, or at least if they did they were too polite to mention it.

We dashed back afterwards only to discover that half a day’s parking in Cambridge cost thirty quid, the rascals. I would think this was a brilliant idea if I owned a car park but I don’t, so as it was I was merely affronted.

Then it was dressing for dinner, and the award ceremony, and all of the rest of it. I was very glad to have Mark and Number One Daughter with me because I don’t mind telling you I was so worried by then I could barely walk down the drive. This was because I could not decide which might be worse, winning or not winning, how terrible to lose and to have to be polite, and how equally terrible to have to be the winner when your friends are disappointed,

Of course it was a brilliant evening in the end. My tutor had turned up to support us, and my friend Emma was there, and the dinner was magnificent, and after all of my worrying I did win, so that was nice as well.

I might have to tell you anything else tomorrow, because I am so tired I can hardly see to write, and it is becoming a massive effort, so I am going to stop, but I am feeling very contented and full of the sort of dinner that has lots of courses and comes with Prosecco, sherry, wine and then port.

It has been splendid.

I have just got to go to sleep.