Cambridge cows chilling

Cambridge is the only city I know which grazes cattle in the city centre. Here are some that greeted me recently.

On Midsummer Common:













In King's College, on the backs by the river:





In other news, my mobile phone returned to me after being missing for 10 days. This is about the fourth time I've lost and retrieved my phone - my sister says my phone is like a cat with nine lives.

As my mum commented, it's good that I bought a phone with a homing device. Or, as a Mormon missionary from California said to me on a previous occasion when this happened, "Wow, it sounds like someone is looking out for you."

(To which I replied, "Yes, I believe He is.")

“greybeards of rare intellectual powers”

“Every boy entering a university expects it to be a wonderful, exciting world, different from anything he has ever known. If he is studious, eager, and serious-minded, he naturally expects a university to be peopled with boys not unlike himself, and with greybeards of rare intellectual powers and personalities to match. If, in addition, he arrives with the applause of schoolteachers still ringing in his ears, with a hunger for learning still unsatisfied, and with an idealistic determination to fulfil the high hopes of doting parents, he will suffer disappointments and heartaches difficult to endure.
. That John Milton was such a boy there is much to persuade us. Recently turned sixteen, he was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, on Saturday, 12 February 1625, almost exactly a month after the Lent term had begun.”

(William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), vol I, p. 23.)