Cambridge and a load of Punts

The river's called the Cam and there are lots of bridges across it, which is presumably why some inspired now-dead person came up with the idea of calling it Cambridge.

Similarly, and to digress a bit, some old Roman must have found a broken bridge in Yorkshire somewhere and decided to call the place Pontefract, which is what it means if you speak Latin, which I used to, a bit. But hey! They've probably mended the bridge by now, or replaced it altogether, and the town's still called Pontefract. It's the equivalent of us calling somewhere Broken-Down Lorry.

Anyway, Cambridge, jolly famous university city. It sort of runs from North to South with all the colleges next to each other, mostly very beautiful and all knowing how to take money off tourists.

At the back of the colleges are what's called the Backs (by 'eck, they knew how to name things in Cambridge). These are grassy bits with a river flowing through them, called the Cam, and there are lots of bridges over it. Yes, I know, we've had that bit.

I was going to Cambridge to see an actor in a play, and Silverback kindly agreed to accompany me, and what's more to drive too. This driving offer may, perhaps, have been a gesture of self-preservation: but anyway, it was all highly enjoyable, to me at least.

Anyway, in the early morning the river looks all tranquil, like this:

It doesn't last though. In the daytime, at this time of year at least, the river is full of people on punts, which are the British equivalent of gondolas. You stand at one end and push it along with a pole.

You can't walk more than ten yards in Cambridge without someone asking you if you want to go on a punt: it gets very irritating after a while and you find yourself thinking of sentences that start with Go Away and have Stupid in the middle and then a bit of rhyming slang at the end.

You can go on a punt with someone to punt it, or you can - if you're more adventurous - hire one to punt yourself.

So, once all this is going on, the river looks like this:

or like this:

It may look easy - - actually, it doesn't look easy, now I come to think of it. It looks like a blend of hard work punctuated by lots of opportunities for close encounters with the wet bit.

So there's a mixture of skilled punters who clearly spend the whole summer trogging up and down the river with tourists in the punt - - and self-punting tourists who think it can't be too difficult.

Lots of crashes, lots of punts spinning round in a circle, the occasional lost pole. One person actually fell in the river whilst we were watching, though cruelly didn't wait until we could get our cameras on him. Very entertaining, though.

I had a lovely time in Cambridge - - thank you, Silverback for your excellent company - but now I'm trying to get my head round my next little adventure, which is going to Paris tomorrow, back on Saturday evening. What a great week! It's work, Captain, but not as we know it.