First day of school
Should have got up at 6 am to catch the bus at 7:05 to get to Girton by 8:20. Woke up at 7:01 and ordered an Uber. Found out that an Uber on my phone cost £22, an Uber if I signed in on my laptop cost £20, and if I used the phone app I could get an Uber for £15. Did you know about this? Barry says it's because the drivers bid for fares and the lowest one gets the ride.
Today is the first day of Michaelmas Term. All Girton College first-time-enrolled Cambridge University postgraduate students lined up in the courtyard on a metal grandstand for the taking of a school photo. I'll show it to you once I get a copy.
This first-time entry of new students into studies at Cambridge is called "matriculation". You only ever matriculate once at Cambridge, so if you were there as an undergraduate or a master's student, you don't take part in the matriculation celebrations for postgraduates this year.
For this photograph and for drinks with our postgraduate tutors and the formal fresher's dinner tomorrow all matriculating students are required to wear their academic gowns. Which we all had to buy last week. We have to wear gowns to all college formal dinners at Girton or as invitees to formal dinners at other colleges. The master's gowns are quite different from undergrad gowns and the PhD gowns are different again.
Master's gowns have two black ribbons called "strings" attached inside the shoulders. Right now we have to thread the strings through a loop inside the gown to keep them out of sight. On our day of graduation, we can proudly expose the strings, fixed outside the sleeves of our gowns with a button. I knew about this because the gownmakers told me when I bought mine in town, but many students had tied the strings together to keep the gowns closed. The photographers told them sternly to hide them away. I felt stupidly smug because I already had. Well, there are so many things that are new and strange. Knowing something other people didn't gave me a tiny thrill.
Most of the other students I meet are doctoral candidates, and all those I've met so far are scientists. Today I met Maggie, who came here from the University of Toronto and whose subject is Applied Mathematics. Her area of specialisation is flow dynamics, the mathematical measuring of fluid objects (for example water). Her research area is the Arctic ice floes and the rate of loss of ice due to global warming. She says Cambridge has a different approach from North America, where the same studies are computer based within the faculty of engineering. Her research at Cambridge is mathematically based. The difference is that at Toronto Uni the current accelerated loss of mass is being measured by computer-driven calculations measuring cracks and fractured chunks that break away, while here her calculations start with mathematical assumptions and develop mathematical formulae measuring the loss as continuing flow. Maggie is at Girton because half of her funding comes from Girton College (the other half comes from the University's Centre for Climate Repair).
I begin to feel like a pedantic diletante. Everybody else is working on something useful for human wellbeing, analysing environmental or social issues or engaged in medical research. While my paper posits the assessment of timbre as a structural element for multi-valenced analysis of Messiaen's organ work Messe de la Pentecôte. This is incredibly interesting to other musicologists, but it's a rarified and even frivolous scholarly indulgence. I feel like Nero fiddling while Rome burned. It's old-fashioned in these times to work on learning in the humanities purely for its own sake. Universities are filled with students following courses with more urgent and lifesaving purposes, But at least I was the only one who knew what to do with my strings!
Anyhoo0......today is also my BIGGEST birthday so far (you might say that's true of every birthday, but this is a BIG number of years and possibly even my last decaded birthday).
The whole gowned gathering of PhD and Master's candidates crowded on the grandstand sang Happy Birthday to Me before scattering to other parts of the college for breakfast, coffee, or back to bed.
We got home from the photo shoot and to my complete amazement and joy the afternoon brought a series of knocks at the front door. Postman with birthday cards from my dear ex-spouse Mitsuhiko in Duncan. "Knock knock" again to herald a graceful bouquet of flowers from my older son Mitsuru and Mia; another knock bringing a quartet of floral vases from our oldest lovely friends David and Elizabeth in North Vancouver; then another knock. The crate of groceries ordered from Sainsbury's oh well. Look at me in my gown and the flowers and cards on our mantlepiece on our second day in our new home in the village of Grantchester:
I never, ever expected all this. I was feeling sad not to be with everybody in Vancouver, but it's turning out to be one of the best birthday every. We're going out to dinner tonight at one of the villages three pubs, either the Red Lion or maybe the Blue Ball*, two doors down from our cottage.
*Featured, together with our house, in the tv detective series "Grantchester"Season 3 Episode 2 at 16 mins. 20 secs., when James Norton and Robson Green walk right past our front door (as you know, two doors down from the pub). The Grantchester Parish News avertised for extras from the village to be in the last episode of the last (11th) season, and if we'd moved in last week we might have been in it!