London, Cambridge

July 10, 2011

Cambridge on a sodden late afternoon.

Met up with Justin and Margaret and John and Celeste and Rob in London, and we lunched French, then took ourselves to the Abbey (too crowded to enter), the Houses of Parliament, and finally across the unbelievably teeming-with-human-life Westminster Bridge (it was the prime Saturday of summer) to the London Aquarium. The aquarium was crowded, and in some senses useless, but John had never seen one before, and we all had fun for his sake. All the venues along the river were passing an incredible volume of humanity through them hour by hour, and I had as much of crowds, for that moment, as I wanted. Came home very early and slept very long, happy to see the group again after an absence even of a day.

Mayhem at King’s Cross attempting to get back to Cambridge. We were comfortably settled on the train, with four minutes before departure (I was writing in my journal) when the announcement came that the train had been put out of service and that we were leaving–in four minutes–from track O, entirely across the station. All the British were running (I’d assumed they’d hold the train for us, but the natives we’re panicked, so I was too) and when we got there we were stopped like a flood behind a dam and told that THAT train was not ready to depart, that there was some sort of fire warning, and we should return to the main room of the station and await further orders. And alarm and the repeated announcement for so-and-so (clearly an emergency code) to report made everyone in the station uneasy. A while later the departure board flashed that same train at that same platform, so we all got on, together with the crowd which would normally be taking that train. It was a crush. The train was headed to Peterborough, but let us off at Stevenage, where we were herded onto a fleet of busses, which took us to Royston, where we finally caught the train to Cambridge.

Driven from the station by an Iraqi Kurd, who gave me a run-down of his life in Cambridge, which has been good. “Everyone knows me,” says he. He was playing Kurdish radio. The music was catchy and showed no signs of internationalism.