Last Saturday, as I said in my last blog, I travelled up to Cambridge. I've been there before (last summer), but Justin had asked me if I wanted to go to St John's College Choir's Advent service and, never one to pass up any free service that promises gorgeous music, I agreed :).
Justin and I met on Saturday morning at King's Cross station to catch our train to Cambridge. The weather forecast had said for days before that the day may be rainy, so it was to my intense relief that it dawned cold and foggy instead (hey, it's better than rain!). In a fit of inspiration the day before, we had decided that we would meet at Platform 9 3/4 - it started out as a joke, but then we realised that it would probably be the easiest place to meet since it would be sooo easy to find. lol. Thus I found myself standing with a crowd of tourists at 10am that morning, watching in amusement as they took it in turns to snap pictures of themselves standing in front of the trolley half embedded in the wall.
I was torn away from my amusement, however, when Justin texted and suggested we meet at M&S instead. We found each other and, when our platform was announced, made our way to our train, found ourselves some seats, and settled in for the 45 minute ride. The ride went quickly - 45 minutes isn't a long time (shorter than my commute within London, most days), and I amused myself reading the label on the bottle of water I'd purchased in the station. For some reason, the label read, "Volcano filtered, so it's full of volcanicity!". I found this both amusing and puzzling, and neither Justin or I could figure out what the heck that was supposed to mean :D. I'm still confused! lol.Anyway, my next source of amusement was to be found on the platform at Cambridge station, where the signs read, "Welcome to Cambridge! Home of Anglia Ruskin University". Cue much laughter! I found this extremely bizarre - what about Cambridge University? Surely if the city wants to welcome people to a university at their train station, they'd want to mention the one the city is actually famous for? Again, still bemused about that :).
Once we had walked into the city and oriented ourselves in the core, Justin and I found that we were starving. Remembering a little cafe across from King's College we had eaten at before, we made our way there, only to find that the place was packed and there was a queue waiting. Undeterred, we slipped in the door to wait with everyone else. At one point we considered going somewhere else, but I was determined to have English comfort food and this place does it like nowhere else I've come across (the menu includes things like roast with yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, and vegetables, and desserts like fruit crumble with custard). Our patience was rewarded when we were finally given a table, and we thoroughly enjoyed our lunch :).
I'm not going to go into too much detail about the rest of the afternoon because basically what we did was go on a 2-hour walking tour of the city. We were taken through the big colleges (King's and Trinity), a couple of the smaller ones, and a lot of churches, etc. Our tour guide was a sweet, older man who kept referring to Oxford as "the other place" and commending us on coming to Cambridge instead, which is obviously superior :). It was a lot of fun - I would recommend it to people who visit Cambridge. We lucked out because our group only consisted of 7 people, which meant that we got to sneak into some places the normal tour group wouldn't have gone. We recited Lord Byron in Trinity College, sang the music for "Chariots of Fire" in a quiet courtyard, and stumbled across a rehearsal for Trinity choir's advent service and were subsequently invited to stay to listen (gorgeous - imagine a tiny little church filled with beautiful music and an audience of just 8 awestruck people), amongst other things.
When the tour was through, we were frozen solid and the sun had completely gone down. Needing to thaw out and get something to drink, we ducked into a Starbucks for some Chai tea lattes. We finally left for St John's about an hour before service was supposed to start and were relieved to find that we were allowed into the chapel, even though it was still early.
Being some of the first people in the chapel, we had our pick of general seating and settled down to watch everyone else being ushered around by St John's students, who were wearing black robes of the sort that we all graduated in. Here, again, we lucked out - about 5 minutes before the start of service, one of the members of the clergy came out to where we commoners were sitting and said that there were some empty seats available in the reserved section. Since we were sitting in the front, we were invited to go in :). We hurried in and slipped into our seats right next to the choir just as the service got underway.
The service itself was gorgeous - St John's choir is seriously underrated, in my opinion. When people talk about Cambridge choirs, they always talk about King's. St John's is MUCH better than King's though, at least for me. At the end of the service, we headed through a door at the side of the chapel and were surprised to see 2 choristers standing in the tiny room outside, holding buckets for collection. Apparently the boys were having a competition to see who could collect more money (amazing what you can overhear :D). The boy furthest from the door seemed to be winning, since people would step past the first boy as they rummaged through their wallets and drop their money into the other boy's bucket just before they exited. Feeling sorry for the first boy (and very impressed with how polite he was being to everyone), I dropped my offering into his bucket and was rewarded with a surprised smile from him and a joking glare from the other boy. lol.
When we got outside, it was absolutely FREEZING. Not wanting to endure another 20 minute walk back to the station, we hailed a cab and rode in comfort. After stopping in M&S for some food, we boarded our train and made it back into London by 9:30 :).
All in all, a great day filled with interesting things to do and see! Cambridge is a beautiful city - after London, it's probably the place I would most want to live in in England.
This past week, I also went to St Paul's advent service on Sunday, again with Justin (his interest in choral music is just as keen as mine). It was lovely - very atmospheric, because a lot of it was done by candlelight, and the music was as gorgeous as always. Then on Thursday, I went to see St Paul's sing Handel's Messiah. Another great concert where they sounded amazing. All of the Year 8 boys had a solo, which was fantastic - always nice to hear them sing solo :).
So, it's been a week filled with Christmas music and lots of teaching! And next week is even busier - a carol service given by Temple Church on Monday, a chorister recital and supper at Westminster Cathedral on Tuesday, a Christmas concert at St Paul's on Thursday, and another concert at St Paul's on Saturday :D. I'm going to be all Christmas-ed out soon!
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