Cambridge Christmas

Cambridge Christmas has been going on for about a month now. I’m now home to celebrate real Christmas, but I thought Cambridge Christmas deserved a mention. My first Christmas dinner of the year was on November 24th, when Harry's and Globe (two coffee bars for international students) came together to offer a traditional English Christmas dinner to our guests. I've attended five carol services so far, the first being on November 26th and the rest fairly evenly spaced since then.


In Link House, every Sunday evening in Advent the wardens Paul and Hilary have a session in their lounge where they light an Advent candle and serve mince pies and mulled wine (well, a non-alcoholic variant thereof) to the residents who choose to come. This is accompanied by a brief discussion of something to do with Christmas and singing carols together. It's especially fun to teach people from other countries to sing The Twelve Days of Christmas.


Christ's College's Commemoration of Benefactors was the fun it usually is, with the seven course dinner featuring partridge (not in a pear tree). Some people were turned upside down near the mulberry tree, where I was holding hands with the college chaplain in the midnight dance. (It isn't me in the photo below, by the way, it's Phil, who has a passing resemblance to me in the dark. I am reminded of the wise words of Emo Philips: "It's amazing where a joke might come from. I find a lot of humour just by metaphorically turning things upside down, or literally."


By the way, Christ's has a new master, Dr Frank Kelly, following the sadly early retirement of Professor Malcolm Bowie due to illness.

On Monday, we went to Bella Italia (so says the sign, though everyone calls it Bella Pasta and their internet business listing also calls it such) for a leaving meal for Jens, who has spun out his Cambridge stay for seven and a half years and is now probably migrating to Edinburgh.


Cambridge looks beautiful in the snow. This is attested by my photos of a couple of years ago, but we haven't had such a visitation this time round so far. We've had to make do instead with freezing fog (or "a freezing frog", as a TV news reporter said yesterday), though this can have a certain enchanting mystery swirling above the green spaces of Cambridge. The accompanying cold is not so friendly, especially given that I have lost one glove of my pair. (I once lost one glove each from two pairs, leaving me with a pair of odd gloves).


Other highlights include the quintessentially English fun of Iolanthe, performed by the university Gilbert and Sullivan Society at Robinson College.

"He was born of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute." (Augustine)