Cambridge and environs – Page 4 – The Cambridge Placebook

April 26, 2019July 5, 2021

Punting on the Cam

I’m not sure if I had heard of punting before Cambridge came onto my radar, but it’s become a regular part of my vocabulary since arriving. Punting—pushing a flat-bottomed boat down the shallow River Cam with a long pole—is one of the iconic Cambridge things (incidentally, Oxford does it too).

Punters and St. John’s College from the River Cam (photo credit: my dad)

Outside of midwinter, the city-center stretch of the Cam is reliably busy with the rectangular wooden boats, which are laden with tourists and students reclining on the seats, punters standing on the boat-backs and ducking under bridges, poles dipping up and down. Riverfront colleges have their own little fleets of punts docked in side-bays for use by college members (or friends with connections). There are also multiple commercial punting companies that advertise pricey guided punting tours—the hired punters recite Cambridge factoids of sometimes questionable veracity in affected guide voices—or self-hire boats. So you’ll see experienced punters gliding smoothly around the self-hired tourists spinning slow circles, and prows bump easily, but rarely do people fall in; the boats are stable and the pace is inherently relaxed.

March 24, 2019July 5, 2021

A Cycle Ride from Cherry Hinton

My first open Sunday in a month or so turned out to be a perfect, sun-touched spring day. On the 3-mile cycle ride to church in the morning I knew I would be taking my time on the way home—I’ve long been itching to properly soak up the green corners I whiz past on my bike every week, catching them only in my peripheral vision. A full schedule, bad weather, and bike-sapped energy have kept me from deviating much from that route until today.

The Cambridge meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in Cherry Hinton, one of those outlying suburbs of Cambridge. Few members with cars live near me, and the bus requires an extra 20 minutes of walking, so most weeks I put on leggings and cycle to church. The route from my flat in Newnham (the neighborhood surrounding Newnham College, which is also considered a Cambridge suburb) to the church takes me through several parks and fenland, over the Cam, for a stint on a tree-lined cycle path, and finally down a long commercial road. The green space makes the ride worth it, even when I’m only glancing. Today was even better.

Here’s a tour of the ride I went on today, in church-to-home order.

March 14, 2019July 5, 2021

King’s College Chapel

Last Sunday, I watched the sun set through the West Window of King’s College Chapel. I saw the massive arc of flaming primary colors cool into sultry shades, then disintegrate into dim fragments and black bars, then shadowed chaos, until finally only the hulking dark-veiled window was left, and the cavernous stone.

When my friend asked me if I could step in last minute on the cello for a weekend concert gig for the King’s College Music Society, rehearsal and performance in the chapel, I wasn’t going to say no. I’d been inside the famous chapel to attend a few other performances, giving me a chance to stare at the fan-vaulted ceiling from the audience, but the opportunity to play in there, even just to claim the right to spend more than an hour or two in there, was one of those Cambridge pinch-myself phenomena. Tourists travel hundreds of miles (and pay £9 on top of that) for a few minutes craning their necks in the chapel, and here I have a nonchalant invitation to spend hours under that 500-year-old ceiling, participating in its soundscape.