Week 7 concluded this week, with a run in Lewes, through the Priory as members of Southover Bonfire Society prepared their fire site, then up Juggs Road. It was a beautiful sunny day after yesterday’s storms. When I’m doing greater distances I might follow this route to Kingston and up onto the hills above.
Week 6 went well, but with nothing special to report. But at the end of week 5 I found myself in Cambridge, whither I had gone to see the 2019 Cambridge Greek Play, Oedipus at Colonus, and to attend a symposium about the play on Sunday. I spent the night in Westminster College, a Presbyterian institution which offers very reasonably priced rooms for the night.
I rose at 7 on Sunday, just before dawn. It was cold and misty. For my run I decided to run along Grange Road, and, if I could in the allotted time, see if I could reach my late parents’ retirement home in Newnham.
The programme insisted on a 5 minute brisk walking warm-up, which took me from the college gates, up Madingley Road, and into Grange Road itself. I started running outside St John’s prep school, where I had spent a miserable term and a bit at the age of seven. It has now expanded to take over more or less all of that end of the road. There is no limit to the appetite of Cambridge parents to pay to have their small boys educated at the hands of sadists in holy orders, it seems.
Enough of that. On I went, past roads such as Adams Road and Herschel Road where the better class of don used to live. These days even Regius professors are not paid enough to live here. I expect they’re owned by foreign bankers. In one of these lived Dr Alice Roughton, a wealthy and eccentric medical colleague of my father’s. Alice Roughton stories are many, and I was delighted to find that the Lost Cambridge blog has a Roughton entry.
On the other side of the road was the University Library, which my father used frequently for its flute music, and once brought me with him so that I could consult books on heraldry, a childhood hobby. In later years, back home from Kent University in the holidays, I was allowed to use the collections, though I don’t think the SCONUL scheme had yet been devised. I had to present a letter from my tutor, and was then allowed reference access, and the chance to consult the bewildering catalogues, offered in bound volumes and card catalogues.
I then passed the Cambridge University RUFC ground. When at school, we would be granted a half-holiday when the Steele-Bodgers XV came to play the University as a warm-up for the Varsity match. Micky Steele-Bodger was a veterinary surgeon who played for England. I later met his brother Alasdair, also a veterinary surgeon, when I worked for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and was able to ask him to thank his brother for these escapes. Time ran out and I did not cross Barton Road to reach my parents’ old house, but turned to run back.
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