Cambridge, five months on... Part 1

I'd decided I had to go back to Cambridge. I wanted to retain or regain my links with the place, and thought it might also help me decide whether I wanted to do another degree. So, I did.

Friday morning saw me, feeling very grown-up and reading the Guardian, taking the train to London - half an hour later than planned because getting up is just too hard. The weather at home was bright, clear and very beautiful, and one stop down the line I found that it'd been snowing and we'd been deprived of it. London, of course, looked duller and greyer. The bit of west London you see on the way in is really not very pretty, and for the first time I can remember I entered London not feeling excited to be there. This, incidentally, was the first time I'd been there alone, and already the longest train journey I'd made alone. Indeed until October I hadn't really been very far on my own at all. Anyway, I made it through the tube without too much drama, trying not to aggravate the locals, and arrived at King's Cross to find that thanks to a six-minute delay I could still take the train I'd originally planned on. The dude on the platform ushered me on and we set off pretty much straight away. I found a table for myself, in a half-carriage containing only two other passengers, both probably somewhere around 60 - a professorish looking man and a nice lady who offered me a chocolate cream éclair. I declined in what I hope were polite English tones - not really sure what the etiquette is for such situations. A man with a drinks/snacks trolley compounded the Hogwarts-Expressish feel of it (North from King's Cross to 'Hogwarts', y'know), and I noted that north London looked nicer than the west. It was the first time I'd been on an electric train and I enjoyed the whirring noise whilst dutifully reading my careers guide.

Out into Hertfordshire, a place I hadn't knowingly seen before, the sun was out and the weather warmer. The landscape of large, not-quite-flat fields was new to me. Towards Cambridge, some kind of snow or sleet came and went.

Surprisingly soon, the Cambridge University Press buildings - which I'd never seen before - appeared alongside the train, and on the other side some new flats with banners proclaiming that you could enjoy a nice lie-in and still make it to London in time for work. I reflected that with a commute of only an hour it might be very pleasant to live in Cambridge if one worked in London, especially if the trains were as quiet as this one.

Cambridge station, 1pm. It felt magical to be back, especially as a light snow had begun to fall. I was getting a new perspective on Cambridge by arriving in a new way, which perhaps helped to accentuate the happiness at being back because it was relatively free of nostalgia. I walked through the back-streets to Alex’s, which is a much nicer house this year in a very good location indeed. The rest of the afternoon passed in a festival of tea-drinking, incredibly underpriced Boots-meal-deal eating, town-roaming, tripod-buying and College-revisiting. I met one of my compadres at college, which was cool. It was strange to realise that for the second and third years everything was much the same now as last year, and slightly odd to spot a few first years – the same, but different. Then after my first college dinner for a while (and not in my college but some crazy college where they don’t even have lighting in the hall…) Alex, Katie and I attended the UCP concert, which was fab. The rest of the evening was spent reading TCS and Varsity (yay!), Alex being introduced to su doku, and me trying out the TCS holiday crossword, which I finished!! It was pretty easy but still… As you see, a day for childish pleasures. And so to bed, and to strange dreams of some kind that I now forget. Must be something about sleeping bags.