Monument

Yesterday, Kit did me the honour of being my guest at the annual CUHaGS St Nicholas' Feast, which was held in the hall at Caius:



One of the particularly interesting things about Caius is that there are memorials to famous Caians around the place. There is an oil painting of Stephen Hawking, a stained-glass double helix to commemorate Francis Crick, and a stained-glass Venn diagram to commemorate John Venn.

Also in attendance were a bishop in his robes, a Wing Commander sporting many medals and an impressive moustache, several PhDs in full-dress gowns, and the usual characters. The food was good and the wine was very good. There was a proper boar's head carried in to the Boar's Head Carol; the President then found that nobody had a knife and had to borrow a sgian-dubh from a nearby Scotsman, which was well-suited to the purpose. Afterwards there was much loud singing of carols and other songs; I was rather happy to find myself joining in an impromptu rendition of Dives in Omnia. The end of the evening came too soon, as always, and although several people invited us to carry on to an after-party, we thought it prudent to leave while we were still standing.

A wonderful night, and I hope there are many more to come.

The constitution of the Pembroke College Winnie-the-Pooh Society provides that:

The James
XXXVII. There may be, if a candidate present him/herself, an officer called the "James", who shall not be a member of the Committee, and may be voted into or out of office at any time.

XXXVIII. The duties of the James shall be to abstain from voting on any matter, to find innuendo where no others can, and to provide hunny-and-condensed-milk sandwiches once a year at a time which may be convenient to him/her.

The James was mysteriously absent from Meredith Belbin's groundbreaking work on team roles, but I have sometimes thought that more organisations should have their own James. Could your committee benefit from one?

This was a game of scratch cricket on Parker's Piece I watched from my hotel room window. The building in the foreground is Hobb's Pavilion.

Rupert Brooke wrote:

On Friday night I went home by train to my parents' house, where we ate pie and drank beer.  On Saturday morning we went again to see my grandfather.  He seemed somehow older, far more than four days older: his eyes were tired and his speech lacked hope.  He talked to me about family history, and poetry, and the war.  When the others had left he asked me whether I was, in fact, happily married.  There was none of the solemn joking and laughter which usually fills his thoughts; he seems to be preparing to leave.  I told him I would try to be back in the autumn.  "If I'm spared," he said.

Later we went with my grandmother to the Crown in Shillington, where she bought us a very good lunch, and we ate it sitting in the sunshine while we talked.  The ringers in the belltower next to the pub were ringing call changes for a wedding throughout the meal: if you had decided to arrange a perfect meal for me as a treat, you would not have gone far wrong with this one.  I do worry about my grandmother, and how she will cope when her husband is gone.  I'm not sure how I can help.

My mother had kindly washed my clothes when I came back to their house.  I packed them up and returned to Cambridge, and slept for a while, then walked to Churchill where Collabora were throwing a party, with much food and good beer.  I left early and came back to the hotel to get ready to fly to Amsterdam tomorrow.  It seems so strange to be leaving.

This building is rather near where I work. In the real world, which Cambridge occasionally approximates, I assume it means a theatre.  However, I sometimes imagine that behind that door is a ballpit and bouncy castle kept ready for the relaxation of the students of Corpus after a hard day at their books.

Yesterday, as we were walking back from lunch on Christ's Pieces, the bells at St Edward's started ringing.  It turned out to be a quarter peal of St Clements College Bob Major, which I enjoyed for the next three-quarters of an hour sitting at my desk.  (It was a successful attempt; the striking was a bit off.)  I'm a little regretful that this visit is not going to involve ringing; after work, I heard bells and went to investigate, but they stopped before I found the tower, and did not continue.

Interesting fact about St Edward's: it is, as far as I know, the only Anglican church in Cambridge not part of the diocese of Ely; it reports only to the Crown.  This is known as a "royal peculiar".  [Update: Apart from the college chapels; thanks for reminding me to clarify this, emperor]

Last night was the only night this week I hadn't planned to do anything in particular, and though it's been very good to see people, the break was welcome.  I had dinner at Wagamama's with the Collaborans, though, which included a pint of ginger beer and three scoops of ice-cream.

But I spent most of the evening hacking on work stuff, which might explain why I dreamed about X.  I realised that part of my system isn't working because I'd made the elementary mistake of confusing keycodes with keysyms, so I worked on rectifying that.  I also have some surprisingly dull work to do on the forthcoming book, which involves laboriously applying paragraph styles to several chapters.  Many pages of this still remain to be done sometime today, unfortunately.

I am hoping to give a lightning talk on my work on xzibit at GUADEC.  Today is the last full day I can work on the system (at least, on work time) before the conference, so I'd better use it well.  Tomorrow is a training day.

Tonight, I'm hoping to see some of you in the Carlton.

The motto of the University is Hinc lucem et pocula sacra, "light and sacred drinks from here". Because of this, it soon became customary to represent Cantabrigia, the spirit of the University, as a profusely lactating woman, who is or was known locally as "Leaky Lizzie".  (I read this part in an old book and cannot find a citation.)

In case you think I am making this up, here is a photo of a statue of her which I took this morning.



Yesterday Marble and Psyche came over, and we had curry and talked, mostly about window managers. It was lovely to see them both. Today I am playing with VNC servers; it's appropriate that I've returned to Cambridge, where VNC was invented, to do so. Also, I spent this morning in a crypt.

Here come Johnny serving hot dogs, burgers,
He's got the fryer at his fingertips,
Here come Johnny saying, I gotta pita,
Fills it with doner and a side of chips.
He's got the cola, he's got the shandy,
Three fifty for the burger, please,
Brown sauce and ketchup if the bottle's handy,
50p for the extra cheese.
And after all the drinking and the nightclubs,
There's a place to calm your stomach from its strife:
He do the van.
He do the van of life.