Winter comes to Bristol

After an (unusually) warm January, winter seems to have arrived! In fact it’s snowing oh so lightly now (doesn’t look like it will amount to much). Yesterday morning I woke up to a thin veneer of ice across my little waterway... as the day dawned, I could see that much of the harbor was decorated with sheets and rafts of ice, thin but sufficient to hold the weight of the seagulls, who congregated on ice patches anchored to the harborsides. It was such a lovely morning that I was drawn repeatedly outside with my camera ... the light kept changing as the sun rose, and the quality of the light was exquisite as it reflected and refracted off of the ice and the ice-stilled water. Can’t resist including several of these images!

 

The first hint of winter arrived on Monday morning, when I was greeted with flurries of wet snow as I headed to the train station, en route to Cambridge to give a seminar. The public transportation route to Cambridge is a bit convoluted - train from Bristol to Paddington station, London; tube from Paddington station to Kings Cross station; train from Kings Cross to Oxford. My train from Bristol was cancelled, but there was another train 30 minutes later (quite crowded, as there were two train loads of people trying to squeeze in!)... but managed to make it to Cambridge only 30 minutes later than planned. I headed straight to the department to meet with some people there, and then made my way, indirectly through cute little winding streets and past sumptuous colleges, to Magdalene College (pronounced “maudlin”), where I was staying in a Fellows Room, courtesy of Prof. Mike Carpenter from the Earth Science department. I dumped my things in my room - a nice sitting room with overstuffed chairs, an ornate wooden chair (more about that later) and round table, plus a bathroom (tub only, no shower) and small bedroom, with, single beds and, puzzlingly, a calendar for June 1921 carefully framed on the dresser... Then I decided to head back outside to explore a bit more, before meeting Mike and Sally Gibson for dinner. Madgalene College is immediately adjacent to the River Cam (hence Cam-bridge), which hosts many flotillas of the punts for which Cambridge and Oxford are famous.

Dinner was a proper “high table” meal in the Magdalene College dining hall... no students that night (it was a Monday) but several staff with guests. Dinner was by candlelight, served by waiters who also kept wine glasses full. After dinner we retired to a wood-paneled room upstairs, also lit entirely by candles, for after dinner drinks (port, madeira or dessert wine). An experience from another century. As was my room. Remember the chair that I mentioned? It was given to the college’s most famous graduate - Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps” like the yellow marshmallow chicks). Most famous for the diary that he kept from 1660-1669, which provides a detailed account of daily life in Restoration England, Samuel Pepys was also Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, in which capacity he apparently partially responsible for making the Royal Navy a professional organizetion. He left his entire library to Magdalene College - all the books that he thought anyone needed to obtain a complete education.

Spent all day Tuesday at the University. High point was a chance to look at Darwin’s thin sections of samples from the Galapagos (some of which Sally has written a paper on) and to see many of his geologic specimens from the Beagle trip in the Sedgwick Museum (attached to the Earth Sciences Dept). Also had lunch at Emmanuel College with John McClellan, and a tour of the grounds of Clare College and Kings College (including a visit to King’s incredible gothic “chapel”, which is more like a cathedral - apparently the building has the largest fan-vault ceiling in the world) with Clive Oppenheimer. After my seminar, we retired to the Eagle pub (apparently where Watson & Crick worked on the DNA problem) and then to a nice little Italian restaurant for dinner. The next morning dawned cold and clear, so I headed out for an early morning walk around the “backs” before heading to the train station...

And so back to Bristol... went sailing last weekend, but even the sailors aren’t out today - too much ice for small dinghies, and too much white stuff in the air! Actually, it seems odd to me that the harbor freezes, but I realized that I just make the assumption that the water is salty, when, of course, it’s mostly fresh. And the temperature has been getting down to -5˚C. I’m off to Pisa tomorrow for a few days - apparently they have a lot of snow there (VERY unusual)... so hopefully I’ll have some snowy pictures for next week’s blog. For now will post another photo from yesterday morning!