Christmas

Cambridge from the tower at St John's College, overlooking John's, Trinity and the massive King's College Chapel in the background.

Deadline extended: the two greatest words in the English language. I did have a paper deadline tomorrow, now it's in two weeks. So I can relax a bit and finally get round to finishing my Christmas memoirs!

So, I arrived at London on the evening of the 23rd. That night and most of the next day I stayed at Jo H's place again. She had gone north to visit her fam, so I was housesitting, and feeding the rabbit Bonsai. Bonsai and I got along gangbusters, and within a few hours he and my right foot were more than just good friends. Left foot strayed the same way soon after. (Why don't people name their feet? Seems so impersonal just saying right and left foot. In certain contexts.)

Anyway, On Christmas Eve I went to Cambridge to visit my old uni friend Wai Keet, who is there doing a PhD in quantum physics.

Wai and me in the Great Court of Trinity College, walking in the footsteps of such high achievers as Newton, Francis Bacon, Maxwell, Russell, Wittgenstein, Tennyson, Byron, Nabokov, G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan, etc, etc.

Wai seems perfectly at home at Cambridge, he is quite possibly the most quintissentially English person I know, despite the fact he is Chinese-Malaysian, and had lived in Australia since he was nine, and went to England for the first time two years ago. I'd put money on his first word having been "quite", as used as an indication of agreement. Possibly in response to a detractory remark about the architecture of some gothic cathedral or other.

He's one of those people who is basically a sponge for knowledge, especially languages (he did a degree in linguistics alongside Elec Eng, and he's fluent in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, German and Latin) . He lapped up all I could teach him of Swedish, 10 points to me for learning a language obscure enough not yet to have felt his wrath!

On Christmas morning we heard, and (barely) saw, the Kings College Choir, a Cambridge must do. Apart from that, most of our time was spent drifting around Cambridge from lunch party to dinner party to dinner party to dinner party, eating more meals in one day than most doctors recommend. Met some interesting folk, including a strange German girl studying the cyphers used by alchemists, who dreams of one day becoming a mad spinster living in an attic with hundreds of cats. I'd rate her chances of realising that goal as pretty high.

Also met a half-Guatemalan dude who was thrilled to hear I'd been there and loved it to bits. His dad's Guatemalan, but his mother is American, and she was doing aid work in the Guatemalan mountains during the "scorched earth" civil war, in which entire villages were roasted indiscriminately. She was simultaneously in danger from the rebels for being a yankee, and from the American-supported death-squads for, well, existing. His father also had a price on his head for some reason I don't quite recall, and they fled to America with their baby boy and settled in the Pennsylvania Amish country. A change is as good as a holiday!

Wai also showed me around his lab at the Cavendish, which had lots of old "artifacts" with rediculous signs on them, such as this:

Anyway, that's more or less the sum of it!