This image is from a few weeks back. Graduation for the House of Hufflepuff, or is it Ravenclaw. Actually, I think it's Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, if I read the colours correctly (http://tinyurl.com/9e9483q).
Cambridge Colleges graduate in the Senate House. (http://tinyurl.com/9vu9q5r). A neo-classical hall with a main gallery reaching the height of two floors. It's big, but not big enough for an entire graduating class, faculty and family -- not even of a very small College. Students and their families will be called into the house at appointed times and proceed through the standing room only ceremony (http://tinyurl.com/97ju9dz). Graduates, rolled diploma in hand, then wend their way toward the back of the House and exit onto the pavement of King's Parade.
As the graduation spectacle splashes out onto the streets of Cambridge, beside the cameras of townies and tourists, it's like carrion placed before buzzards. — Faculty, marshals for the day, keep order. — Students circle, awaiting colleagues. — Old money families mingle with the foreign and new. (I don't know if this makes sense, but you don't necessarily need to be a foreigner to be foreign amidst the commingling.) — The punt touts resign themselves to writing off the day; more than enough will make their way, on their own, ungoaded, to the River in due course. — The pick-pockets find easier pickings amongst the gathering crowds. — And, plain-clothes police make a good living nicking* the pick-pockets from their unknowing bait. — Meanwhile, forming a Saturnal ring, the photographers like me snap up pictures of the nebula.
*Note: sadly coppers are now said to 'nick' their prey.
In the 1850s, the police 'copped' criminals. The verb, from the old French for 'to capture', seems to have fallen on hard times, if not into a house of ill repute, where it survives only by 'copping a feel' and, occasionally, by 'copping a plea'.
In any case, 'nick', the verb, has venerable history in the English of the early 1600s when the 'notch' it referenced was a small, literally a 'bolt-hole', a tiny cell in the local police station.
My, how did I get from graduation to government?
Yesterday evening, a young woman stopped me not far from my house to ask directions. Normally, I would have given directions referencing cardinal points. "Go to the coffee shop and turn South", I might have said. That's largely because I've never properly taken to the concepts of Right and Left. Forget about all that "writing hand is right" stuff; such aids usually begin with the question, "Are you right-handed?". How would I know?
It was easy, knowing North from South. Living in Florida, working my way across the Caribbean, the sun always rose in the East, set in the West, and was overhead -- neither North or South -- at all other times. Here in England, it's more difficult. The sun rises in the South. It sets in the South. And, its southerly all day-time long. ... When it can be seen through cloud-cover, that is.
It was easy too, if more conceptual, to fix cardinal points whilst living in the American North. In Cincinnati, Gainesville, Lexington, Washington, and in New York City — even when I worked in Gaborone (Botswana), water was always fixed in the South. Of course, directionality was aided by the position of my bed, which — while not deliberate — always gave me a southern footing. It was grand, laying in bed at night, watching lightning storms tearing up the Ohio River valley. Here in Cambridge, the River Cam bends like a lower-case 'n', arching north westward, around the city centre. And, inside, at home, there's nothing to tell what direction my bed is oriented.
More confounding, the arching shape of the River Cam lends the impression — to someone used to walking, anyway — that the city bends over on itself as if on a Möbius strip. Like the highways in Cleveland (Ohio), if you want to go south out of downtown, you head north. "Its counter-intuitive," the taxi driver tells you, "but it's one in the same." Of course, in Cambridge, the fact that major streets change names virtually every block or so doesn't help in the giving of directions either. You imagine that people, here, used to live and work so close to home that they needn't ask directions, and, never need know, "Dem Bones" style, that Hills Road becomes Regent, becomes Saint Andrew's, becomes Sidney, then Bridge, and Magdalene, Castle, and Huntington all within one linear mile.
At the short of this story is one question: How do you give directions when cardinal points and left/right have not meaning? Street-view. Not the Google Maps product by that name, but the view that pops into your brain like maps used to.
"Go to the coffee shop that you can see in the distance", you say. You might qualify the distance in meters, "12 metres or so". "There you'll see a big 'S' laid into the pavement." This is one of four cardinal points, laid in as decoration, public art, rather than direction. "Follow in that direction. Turn at the next intersection." It a T intersection — most intersections here are — and there is only one way to turn. You might add that a cycle shop stands at the intersection, possibly give the new street its name: "That's Paradise Street". And, "You'll find Guthrie Court half-way up the street. It's the big building. The one with marquee lights on over the large double doors."
Is it a wonder that in the former British colony of British Honduras, now Belize, you can still address an envelope to "My cousin, the barber, three doors down from the parrot (a reference to the sign that's faded on the wall where it was painted), 'round the corner from the old pink shower tree (a cassia tree that flowered only well into the dry season, but that is now little more than a rotting trunk), Centre, Belmopan, Belize".
I bet that the architect read Coleridge.
That aqua copper bit, the tower roof, resembles the tents one sees painted on the page of early Turkic (Mongol Turk) texts.
Coleridge's Kubla Kahn was published in 1816.
The University Arms Hotel, on Parker's Piece, was built in 1834, the year Samuel Taylor Coleridge died.
Just one more Coleridge inspired architectural jot, the copper cap of the Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge.
The cap takes the form of a Mongul warrior's helmet.
[Aside:]
This photo also contains a Cambridge curiosity, a gift of the city's Nightclimbers.
Look carefully at the tail fin of the whale weather vane. That's a red Santa's cap.
The Nightclimbers delight in scaling impossible heights - at night, of course - and leaving something behind.
In one story of their escapades, a Nightclimber's cap appeared on one of the ornate towers of King's College Chapel. At great expense, the College erected scaffolding to reach it. The night before the scaffolding reached the top of the tower, the cap was removed ... to a facing tower.
Until I moved to Cambridge, I'd never given much thought to the nature of the American university "named-Chair", assuming the operatic scenes in which God descends to the stage in a chair, deus ex machina.
Here in Cambridge, the letter of David's contract to the Woodwardian Professor of Geological Sciences spelled out some curious terms. The Professorship is Cambridge's oldest named "Chair" and perhaps England's oldest as well. (Oxford has dubious competing claims, all theologians of course.)
Terms required that he had to live within 20 miles of Old Saint Mary's Church, for example. And, his election had to be approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely -- hearkening back to a time when earth-bound fossils bore discoveries that shook the firmament of Heaven. (... before Creationists, of course, corrected the timeline: man and dinosaurs lived side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, hand-in-glove, foot-in-mouth.)
Among other terms, he had to spend a weekly allotment of time in the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, which was founded upon John Woodard's fossil collection. Specifically, he was required to sit at Woodward's desk -- still found in the Museum -- and warm Woodward's chair.
Endowed scholarships pre-date Woodward; but, it is quite possible that Woodward gave the world it's first named chair, as well as a greater number of old rocks.
