Grantchester spring

[tamaranth]

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Originally uploaded by tamaranth

Today woolymonkey and I cycled to Grantchester, had lunch in the Red Lion and took tea in the Orchard Tea Garden "where more famous people have taken tea than anywhere else in the world". Turing conceived the idea of artificial intelligence in Grantchester; Wittgenstein and Virginia Woolf went skinny-dipping (probably not at the same time); Sylvia Plath recited Chaucer to a rapt audience of cows.

The brochure at the Tea Garden contains the entire text of Brooke's 1912 poem 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' (the one that ends Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?)

I don't think I'd ever read it all, and I certainly didn't know just how entertainingly rude (in doggerel) he was about Cambridge folk:

Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley, on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles

Ah, poetry: what crimes are committed in thy name.

Comments

[zotz]

When I was at the Sanger we took some visiting 'Merkins there. I laughed myself sick at the list of the famous patrons, all broken down into artists, mathematicians, philosophers, scientists, authors, and so on . . . the little unheaded section at the end was, of course, the Russian spies.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

"And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;"

That amuses me: to be considered the far South, rather than the far North of Herts. On the other hand, he may well have remembered when our half of Royston lay in Cambridgeshire, the county boundary running down the middle of the street.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

That poem's a joy.