Graduation ceremony is in full swing in Cambridge; slightly unusual timing but there is still a lot of catching up to do from last year. Yesterday, over 500 smiling, happy people proceeded to the Senate House in orderly, regularly spaced out groups, wearing all sorts of colour linings on their hoods – scarlet silk for PhDs, blue for MPhils, light-blue for MEds, and white fur for BAs, to name but a few. Let’s wish them good luck for the future!
No “Mooore Gin” any mooore… The colourful visitors, Cows about Cambridge, who so triumphantly invaded the city two months ago, are all now gone, and, unexpectedly, the spaces they left behind look strikingly bare.
I popped into Ted Baker’s the other day – not to browse through their garments, of course, but simply to look at the interior, and was pleasantly surprised to see some familiar Cambridge characters on the wall. There was Isaac Newton’s rough-hewn image with a piercing gaze, a strikingly young and handsome Lord Rayleigh, and a heavily bearded old Darwin deeply engrossed in his thoughts. ‘What a great idea’, I noted, ‘male scientists as role models to inspire the customers to aim high’.
Then a grand staircase leading to the women’s department caught my attention – and I was almost flying up the stairs before I knew it, in the anticipation of a close encounter with Rosalind Franklin perhaps, or Dorothy Hodgkin, or Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Guess whom or what I saw there instead? Just a couple of dead birds on the wall…
Why Tangential Cambridge? Well, for many reasons! First of all, we’ll roam and meander on our tours, exploring links and allusions and often going off at tangents, which is much more fun than sticking to a single track. Secondly, it’s a reference to an iconic Cambridge site (see the picture – courtesy of Wikipedia). Also, it’s a mathematical concept close to my heart. And, finally, it somewhat resembles my own name, Tanya!
