Tuesday, July 22nd ....

I'm reading a book at the moment called Dreaming of the Bones, part of a series by Deborah Crombie.  It's an odd book.  The others in the series are fairly standard crime stories but this one is much more pretentious.  It's about the supposed suicide of a poet and is set in the village of Grantchester near Cambridge.

Grantchester is famous as the home of the poet Rupert Brooke who wrote the lines: ... Stands the church clock at 10 to 3, and is there honey still for tea?  Brooke lived at the Old Vicarage, which is now  occupied by Lord Jeffrey Archer and his wife, scientist Mary Archer.  There has been a house on the site for 400 years and Mary Archer recently published a book about it. 

The Guardian crossword setter Araucaria set a famous clue: Poetic scene has, surprisingly, chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12) giving, as an anagram, THE OLD VICARAGE GRANTCHESTER.

Brilliant!

My friend, Brian, took me to see Grantchester when I was in UK last year.  I saw the clock (now replaced) and the Old Vicarage, and the river where Cambridge students bring their punts to picnic in the fields. 

Even though the book is a bit staid, it's interesting to visualise the places mentioned in it, and Grantchester is now another place we intend to revisit .... some time.

Another interesting belief is that Grantchester has the highest concentration in the world of Nobel Prize winners living there, probably because of its proximity to the University of Cambridge.