Welcome to May Week!

Hello again,

We are now officially in May Week, the week in June(!) where Cambridge students have fun, having finished work for the year. I began May Week yesterday with two garden parties. The first was the Harry's garden party in St John's scholars' garden. The day was swelteringly hot, giving us the weather we prayed for. The garden party consisted of food, croquet, a talk from Rachel (with a mouldy jamjar/dishwasher) and a testimony from Yumi, all of which went down well. By the way, for the benefit of non-English speakers, croquet differs quite significantly from cricket (though both are gentle upper class summer games). Cricket involves hitting balls thrown at you and then running, whereas croquet involves hitting balls through hoops with a wooden mallet. I also finally got my hands on the newspaper picture of me meeting Prince Philip (thanks to Yumi). I discovered that it's easier to take surreptitious pictures (my speciality) using a digital camera. When I've managed to upload the pictures, they'll be put up on the Harry's website.

After this I went to the English/History/MML (Modern and medieval languages) garden party in college. Here we had the classic Cambridge strawberries and cream with champagne. The turnout of second and third year English students was quite poor, but it was nice to be able to chat to the fellows in a more relaxed setting. I caught the end of normal Harry's after this, and afterwards some of us went to (surprise surprise) Jesus Green for a picnic. There were eight of us in a circle, of 7 different nationalities - we were from Hong Kong, India, Japan, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland and England (x2).

Today my parents came to see me and helped me to sort out a few loose ends and pack up a bit. I ate in the café at the Fitzwilliam Museum with my mum and had a very nice chicken and chorizo sandwich. I failed to go and see the May bumps (a very strange Cambridge sport which involves trying to crash your boat into the boat in front) for yet another year. Hopefully I'll make it next year (if I'm here). Apparently one of the college women's teams got blades (i.e. they successfully crashed into ("bumped") lots of people). If there are any female Christ's boaties out there, congratulations!

This evening we had the Joined-up Worship service, which is designed to bring Christians in college together. The theme was freedom and I had managed to book my friend Richard to speak. As expected, he did a great job, distinguishing between the false freedom offered by the world (freedom to do what I want and to serve myself) and the freedom that we have in Christ (to be righteous and to serve God and others). Galatians 5:1-15 - great stuff. Didn't focus too much on verse 12, though ;-). We also got to "handcuff" ourselves with symbolic paper manacles. Afterwards we retired to the chaplain's room to have food - pizza and dessert wines among other things. What Cambridge is all about ...