Week 4: Olympians and Poets

Unsurprisingly, this week has carried an Olympic theme.  

On Monday, I attended a lecture in the Cambridge Union Society on “The Olympic Ideal.”  One of the speakers was an Olympian named Cath Bishop.  She is an alumna of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and she won a silver medal in rowing in the 2004 Olympic Games.  

I was intrigued by her description of life as an Olympic athlete.  She had to take scrupulous care of her body: she avoided crowded spaces and even family members to keep from catching an illness.  And she trained seven days a week for years on end: by the time she retired, she had rowed a distance equivalent to several times around the Equator.

The Cambridge Union Society

On Friday, the Pembroke-King’s Programme organized a party in the Cambridge Union Society bar to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics.  As the athletes entered the stadium, we all cheered loudly for our respective countries (the Canadians even sang their national anthem).  And of course everyone made a fuss over Team GB at the end.

Other highlights of the week include:

(1) Guest lecture by crime writer Michelle Spring in my Creative Writing class.  She talked to us about different methods of developing plot: some writers plan their novels extensively, while others just start typing and hope for the best (and then fix everything in the rewrites).

(2)  Dinner and drinks at the pub with my “Behavioural Ecology” instructors and classmates.  One of my instructors did research on meerkats at the same site where “Meerkat Manor” was filmed, and he had some amusing things to say about the emails he gets from die-hard fans of the show.

(3) BEING DONE WITH MODULE ONE EXAMS!  Exam proctors here are called “invigilators” and wear academic robes.  Somehow this makes taking an exam seem so much cooler.

(4) Walking to the Orchard Tea Garden at Granchester.  The three-mile walk goes through beautiful countryside.  Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E.M. Forster all used to be frequent visitors to The Orchard.

A stream

We had to go through a herd of cows that were grazing placidly on the path.

The Orchard Tea Garden

 

One of the buildings at The Orchard is now a museum devoted to the poet Rupert Brooke, who died during WWI at the age of 27 and became a very romantic figure.

And you've got to admit he looked the part.

British food log: toad in the hole, fish and chips, Cornish pasty, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, trifle, crumpets, Eton mess, shandy, gin and tonic, sausage and mash, scones, and more tea than the human mind can fathom.