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?
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