Friday, May 3rd .....

Another train trip, this time to Cambridge to meet long-time friend, Brian and his wife, Frances.  There was Brian, waiting for me at the station, easily recognisable after 28 years.  Frances is terrific and Brian clearly depends on her level-headed approach to life.

The weather was beautiful and we took advantage of it to spend a day exploring the extraordinary University city.  It is the lead-up to exams so many of the colleges are closed to the public but we were able to have a good look at Queens, Kings chapel, and Pembroke. I know I looked silly, walking around with my mouth open, but every corner brought me to another element of the history and the continuing wonder of this place.

At Queens, we crossed the Mathematical bridge and watched the punts gently floating down the river.  The Kings Chapel is awe-inspiring from the lofty ceiling to the Reuben's painting on the altar.  To think that this edifice was built around the time of Richard III whose ancient bones have just been unearthed beneath a car park is remarkable.

I've taken dozens of photographs but they won't do justice to this fabulous place (and I use the word with its proper meaning).

In a little alley, we stumbled across the Haunted Bookshop. What a place!  Inside the pokey little shop, there were old tattered books everywhere, on shelves, and in piles on every flat surface.  Boxes stood about waiting to be emptied when space became available.  Brian mentioned that he was looking for an Enid Blyton book he had as a child but couldn't remember the name.  The girl who was huddled behind the tiny counter said that children's books were upstairs.  Upstairs?  Yes there was an upstairs, reached by the narrowest, steepest stairs I have ever seen.  We had to pull ourselves up by a thick blue rope hanging from the upstairs ceiling. Health and Safety? Ha!

The upstairs room was even more chaotic than the downstairs.  There were some shelves but most of the books were in piles, although they did seem to have some order to them.  All the Enid Blytons were together, hundreds of them, packed two deep on shelves.  Brian still couldn't find the one he was looking for.  I picked up a Biggles book, 1950s vintage, £60.  No thank you.   A 1957 Broons Annual, quite shabby, was £40.  I could have spent all day there but there were more colleges and churches to see so we pressed on.