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Day 10 Part 1 Cambridge - Places 22 & 23: St Cedd's and The River Cam

Ten days into the pilgrimage, I left London for Cambridge. DNA was born in Cambridge, returned for college, and left us this Author's note in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

"The physical descriptions of St Cedd’s College in this book, in so far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of St John’s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately from other colleges as well. 

Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in real life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus. The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this book and any real institutions or people living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment."

I actually spent my first night in Cambridge awake through a night of torment. But not ghostly, more infantile. Well, infant related anyway. There was a baby in the next room. A howling baby that ear plugs could not block out. And the owners liked very much to have an early morning row as they cooked breakfast. Just below my room. At 7am. My Trip Advisor reviews will reflect what I thought of the accommodations. 

I awoke tired and cross, and did not head out until the early afternoon to see the town. As a result of the authors note, I didn't worry too much about nailing down any specific place. I just generally went and had a nice day of exploring. Of course, it turns out that when I do that, I end up in exactly the place that I need to be, Dirk Gently style.

The first college I came across was Jesus. The gates were wide open so I wandered in. And wondered around. And around, and around, and around. Then I followed my own footsteps back out.

It was a nice walk, but a very long one. I had not paid any sort of fee, or been admitted as part of any official tour, so I was very nervous about being caught. I should have learned from this first experience that the colleges keep themselves very carefully separate.

A little ways down the cobblestone streets was St. John's College, which helpfully listed a self guided tour fee. That made me feel much more comfortable, and I set off into the college that DNA attended.

These are the actual doors used to walk into the chapel. The door knobs/handles are fascinating. They look like simple pulls, however, in order to open a door, you have to twist the pull as if it was a knob. The twisting motion lifts an iron bar on the inside...and suddenly you are in an immense medieval chapel. You know, just hanging out in the immense medieval chapel. 

With some dead saint guy's remains.

Because that's how they define "holy" in ye olde England.

I really liked the ceilings and the courts.

Every court has a thick, brilliant green grass patch in it. There are signs everywhere saying do not walk on the grass. Apparently, only Dons can walk on the grass. I saw one do it! (but did not get a picture)

I did get pictures of Second Court and the most likely corner staircase that was the model for Reg's rooms: "Behind the stoutly locked outer door in the corner staircase in the Second Court of St Cedd’s College, where only a millisecond earlier there had been a slight flicker as the inner door departed, there was another slight flicker as the inner door now returned."

The self guided tour is extensive, informative, and peters out between the old and new parts of the college:

"It had been one of those light summery days when the world seems about to burst with pleasure at simply being itself, and Reg had been in an uncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked over the bridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college from the newer."

DNA may claim that his memories have been cobbled together to create St. Cedd's, but the fact is that the place described here exists precisely in real life. There are two bridges in St. John's College that go over The River Tam. One is called Cambridge's Bridge of Sighs. The other is just a bridge. The tourists on the self guided tour (me) only get to walk the open one, with no fancy name, but they both divide the older part of the college from the newer part of the college. I'm not complaining. I walked over a beautiful bridge. Just not AS fancy.

On the other side of the bridge is "new college" which includes the world's very first Gothic Revival architecture, and some hideous, modern stone blocks. The kind you would see on a UC campus today.

Technically, BOTH of the buildings in the foreground are "new college" but one is a lot newer...

Having refused to learn my lesson wandering around Jesus college, I followed the tour out one side of St. John's and then let myself in through a gate on the other side. A man was trying to open the gate in order to wheel his elderly mother in a wheelchair out and down the road. Really, I was just lending a hand. I had assumed the giant iron gates were locked, you see. Once I realized that they were open...well, the gardens were so quiet and lovely and tempting. So I went back in and wanted around some more.

This area looked nice. 

So I sat in it.

When it got too cold to sit in one place in the shade, I started to walk in the woods.

The woods surrounded by moats. And gates. And bridges with gates. All locked.

It turned out that the reason I had been able to wander through the gardens as I had was because the gardener was mowing. He left the gates open behind him and close them as he finished. To escape, I had to creep past the caretakers cottage and the enormous, sorted green waste heaps. 

After that, just like at Jesus, I wandered out the way I had come in. This time with warmer, more magical sunset lighting for my pictures.

Video Musings Here:

https://youtu.be/3hY8tu4A1vs

Day 9.5

I wanted to add a sidenote here about getting food after the tour. I ate at the tavern.

Englishman have the most attractive bar snacks ever!

And they really know how to do a warming, wonderful, chicken curry.

Day 9 Place 21: Lord's Cricket Ground

Lord's Cricket ground has nothing to do with titled fellows. It is called that because Mr. Lord was a shark at real estate, and the chaps wanted someone business savvy to take care of the arrangements, so they would have a place to play ball.

The approach to Lord's starts at St. John's  tube station which is copper-covered, and therefore a little bit steampunky.

I walked from the tube station through St. John's Wood to approach Lord's. Like many of the parks in London, it's not exactly clear which bits are a park, versus a graveyard. And that's not bad. Just quintessentially un-American.

Even as you walk towards the cricket ground, it becomes immediately apparent where DNA might have gotten the odd idea that space ships could somehow be involved in the game of cricket.

"It was a charming and delightful day at Lord’s as Ford and Arthur tumbled haphazardly out of a space-time anomaly and hit the immaculate turf rather hard. The applause of the crowd was tremendous. It wasn’t for them, but instinctively they bowed anyway, which was fortunate because the small red heavy ball that the crowd actually had been applauding whistled mere inches over Arthur’s head. They threw themselves back to the ground that seemed to spin hideously around them."

I was lucky enough to be in time for a full tour of Lord's. Even though I was running late, had to catch a train to Cambridge, and starving, I was intrigued enough by the "spaceship" and tour description, to sign up for 105 minutes of information about cricket. A game I believe I have never seen played. Yeah I'm not sure why I took the tour either. It was there.

The tour began in the museum.

Where I learned the actual history of the ashes. The actual ashes are the reputed remains of cricket bails gathered and burned as a joke by the ladies of the Australian governor's household. The story goes that the governor's wife dumped the perfume from her terra cotta glazed scent bottle and filled the urn to present as a joke gift to the English cricket team. To be clear, in the late 1800s, for the English cricket team to go for a re-match in Australia, we are talking weeks and weeks of travel via boat. For honor! For the ashes! All a little cuckoo if you ask me. The sort of intense sportsmanship that cannot readily be explained. Sort of like the attitude of those nice chaps on the planet Krikkit.

There's a lot more to it than that, if you actually care deeply about English cricket. Approximately 90 minutes more. But for our purposes, what amused me greatly is hoping that Douglas Adams had found out that someone - a clever lady, in fact - had made a very funny joke, and he would further riff on that theme.

"He fretted as he heard it explained that the Ashes were about to be presented to the captain of the English team out there on the pitch, fumed when told that this was because they had now won it for the nth time, positively barked with annoyance at the information that the Ashes were the remains of a cricket stump, and when, further to this, he was asked to contend with the fact that the cricket stump in question had been burnt in Melbourne, Australia, in 1882, to signify the “death of English cricket,” he rounded on Slartibartfast, took a deep breath, but didn’t have a chance to say anything because the old man wasn’t there. He was marching out onto the pitch with terrible purpose in his gait; his hair, beard and robes swept behind him, looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well- cut lawn instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain."

"They tried not to listen, but could not help noticing that Slartibartfast was querulously demanding that he be given the silver urn containing the Ashes, as they were, he said, “vitally important for the past, present and future safety of the Galaxy,” and that this was causing wild hilarity. They resolved to ignore it. What happened next they could not ignore. With a noise like a hundred thousand people saying “whop,” a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to create itself out of nothing in the air directly above the cricket pitch and hung there with infinite menace and a slight hum. Then for a while it did nothing, as if it expected everybody to go about their normal business and not mind its just hanging there. Then it did something quite extraordinary. Or rather, it opened up and let something quite extraordinary come out of it, eleven quite extraordinary things. They were robots, white robots. What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that but they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads around the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary because they appeared to contain jets that allowed these curiously civilized robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did."

The big white spaceship is actually the modern day press box. It was included in the tour.

The insides are painted sky blue and look like the interior of a submarine: all the doors have rounded corners, porthole windows, and everything is curved.

From the press box is an incredible view of the historical home of cricket.

And if you take the tour you get to see the beautiful interiors.

The grounds include father time and "The Bowler" statue.

"Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth. The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others. Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it dodged and weaved as if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and spun, and suddenly turned and dipped as if crossing the lip of a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leaped on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness and emerged unexpectedly in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground, St. John’s Wood, London, toward the end of the last Test Match of the Australian series in the year 198- , with England only needing twenty- eight runs to win."

My route was more direct, but at times didn't feel any less mad. The tour also goes into the player's dressing rooms, which have an amazing view of the pitch.

Even though I had never seen cricket played, and had no idea what I was getting into, everyone on the tour was very kind. Once I fessed up as to why I was there, we all had a good laugh and a certain measure of respect for one another. Watch the video that I made below to hear more about geeks geeking out together - even when their interests are extremely far apart and appear to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with each other. It is a selfie video, and I took it on the way to check out of our flat in Islington and jump a train to Cambridge:

https://youtu.be/9KnS8aNnBzM