Re-unions

After an ample hotel breakfast, we spent the morning seeing Cambridge on foot, visiting colleges, as tourists do, and then took an hour's guided tour of riverside colleges in a punt piloted by an eloquent young man, who happened to be a home grown local lad, recently graduated from Aston University, whose summer job this was. An entertaining experience, and for him, his last day of work before setting out for a year's EFL teaching in China.

After lunch in a cafe restaurant opposite King's College under Turkish management, I headed out of  the town centre to visit my architect cousin Ivor, now living in sheltered accomodation in an inner suburb. It's several years since we last met up. Since then he's been plagued with illness. Now he's getting used to a new way of life, and after a hands-on career as an architect and teaching architecture, he's becoming an historian of modern architecture, drawing on his unique perspective of a lifetime of working experience, some of it spent with his mentor, the renowned Leslie Martin.

He has scholarship funding, and tells me that one of its benefits is the right to have his remains interred in a Cambridge college with which he's associated. I imagine having his work published and available on University library shelves is much more important to him, with such a story to tell. Like art and literature, the buildings of our era are an essay describing in their different ways the values and attitudes to life that matter most. Buildings that much easier to understand when accounted for by those who belong to their circle of authorship.

In the evening Clare and I met with Craig and Mel McKay, whom we haven't seen for over thirty years. Mel was Clare's bridesmaid at our wedding, and married Craig, a Cambridge astronomer five years later. They've lived in the city ever since, she working as a counsellor for thirty years and then in retirement as an historic garden guide, and he at the cutting edge of technological development for space probe instrumentation, still full of the excitement and enthusiasm for the developments of the age we live in. He got to work on building legendary Hubble space telescope quite early in his career, and is working on the Roque de los Muchachos telescope array in the Canary islands. Retirement, what is it? Working on the things you love, but on on a pension.

Here's a link to the photos taken during our stay