A brief visit to Cambridge

It's been quite the 24 hours. Friday "dawned" very early when the cabin crew came round with food I didn't want to eat, about 2 hours after they had previously come round with food I didn't want to eat. It's a short flight and with four hours of time difference, one of the worst in terms of not getting any rest.

While everything was ostensibly on time, in practice it took longer to get landed in LHR, taxied to the parking position and then bussed to the terminal than might be expected. Nothing was exactly late or delayed, but every train / tube / whatever I went for seemed to involve a bit of a wait. As a result, having originally been slated to land on time at 0650 in LHR, it was exactly 1030 when I eventually made it to the centre of Cambridge for the conference. A just-in-time arrival. But at least I managed to get a couple of tricky emails away whilst I was on the train between London and Cambridge.

The conference was held in my alma mater (Trinity College Cambridge), which was quite busy as there was a (postgraduate) graduation that morning. It was in Blue Boar Court, which didn't exist as such when I was a student. It's around the back of the Wolfson Building which did exist and which I continue to find striking (see second extra). A friend who was also at the conference had had the benefit of an earlier tour of the College delivered by the colleague organising the conference, but had missed out on the Wren Library (see first extra), so I took advantage of my status as a member of College to take her at lunchtime. My blip is taken from a staircase at the back of the College library, and is looking up towards St. John's. The view looked better in real life than it works as a photograph. She wanted to see materials related to Srinivasa Ramanujan because that was of interest to her brother. However, I was more interested in Wittgenstein's notebooks. I must have been in the Wren Library many times, and it's pretty impressive, but I strongly prefer the architecture outside rather than inside. See the right hand side of third extra, which shows two sides of Neville's Court.

The conference was to present the book in honour of the UK's last Advocate General at the Court of Justice, who is an old friend. I only stayed for the first couple of sessions (exhaustion was setting in), chatting to a few people, and then I headed on the long trek back to Edinburgh. A taxi through the gridlocked streets of Cambridge to the station. A quick pint in a pub in the station building. A completely packed cross country train to Peterborough. And then a reasonably ok LNER train up to Edinburgh. We arrived in Edinburgh just after 2300, and I was back in the house before 2330. A quick shower and bed.