Kettle's Yard

Francisco's friend also took us to one of the most unusual museums I've ever encountered--Kettle's Yard. Kettle's Yard was created by a former curator of the Tate gallery who, with his wife, bought and decorated a house and donated it to Cambridge University. It's free to enter as he wanted students to come and sit and visit with the art and other decorations. You can enter every part of the house (except the kitchen).

There are flowers and plants and seashells and stones and other bits of the natural world, in addition to chairs and other furniture to sit in and art to look at.

It's inspiring--it makes you want to curate your house with as much care and attention to beauty as Jim and Helen Ede did this house.

The only complaint I had is, how can you have a house without having food? There are tables, but not even tea (which is otherwise ubiquitous in England).

Regardless, it is a very nice place to enjoy art. There aren't even signs beside the works of art, so unless you recognize the artwork, and I only recognized a bit (it's primarily British art from the first half of the 20th century), you just have to enjoy it on it's own terms. The founder was attempting to create "a living place where works of art would be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might infuse an underlying formality."

The Botanical Gardens

Our visit to Cambridge was full of walks; sadly, all of the walks were balanced out by the savory pies, and I returned home no more ready for my wedding than I left it.

We walked, through a slight mist, with one of Francisco's old friends, a new friend to me, around the Cambridge botanical gardens.

What I loved most were the tiny, delicate, alpine flowers. And the really old greenhouses, which were made of wood, with wrought iron hinges and other contraptions.

The Orchard

Something that's really charming about Cambridge is the proximity of the city to rural life--to fields and cows and surrounding villages. From Lawrence and Mrs. Lawrence's apartment in the heart of Cambridge, it's about a two and a half mile walk out to the village of Grantchester. (As Mrs. Lawrence said, the walk is about the length of two conversations--one on the way there, and one on the way back. Lawrence: We measure out our life in conversations.) The walk is charming--it's English pastoral landscapes at their best.

The destination was The Orchard Tea Garden, a little place that Francisco loves with tea and scones and clotted cream, to be enjoyed in the gardens.

We just so happened to visit at the best time of the year, when the leaves of the trees in the orchard were heavy with all sorts of blossoms.

Let's just say, Anne of Green Gables would have loved this.

The poet Rupert Brooke moved into the Orchard House in 1909 and later moved to the nearby Old Vicarage. From what I understand, he brought his friends around. People like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertrand Russell.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath hung out there later. Here are some excerpts from her letters, as found on the Orchard's website:

“Remember Rupert Brooke’s poem? Well we had tea by the roaring fire at ‘The Orchard’ (where they serve tea under flowering trees in spring) and the ‘clock was set at ten to three’ and there was the most delectable dark clover honey and scones”.

“We walked 15 miles yesterday through woods, fields, and fen, and came home through moonlit Grantchester and fields of sleeping cows”.

“Ted and I went up a green river in a punt … We had tea, honey and sandwiches under the apple trees in Grantchester”.

“Got up at 4.30 am this day with Ted and went for a long walk to Grantchester … I felt a peace and joy in the most beautiful world with animals and birds … We began mooing at a pasture of cows, and they all looked up, and as if hypnotised, began to follow us in a crowd of about twenty across the pasture to a wooden stile, staring fascinated. I stood on the stile and, in a resonant voice, recited all I knew of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for about twenty minutes. I never had such an intelligent, fascinated audience”.

More pictures from the walk to Grantchester, interspersed with Rupert Brooke's poem:

". . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . ."

"God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
...
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
...
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;"

"Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"

I'm not sure that I'm a big fan of either the ideas or the form or the refrain of the poem, but it is what it is. If you read the whole poem, it's a little disturbing--very romantic and focused on youth and certain ideas of beauty. 

This picture (above, from our walk) is one of the only ones I got of the countless fields we passed (in cars and trains), full of the yellow flowers of rapeseed. Sadly, I didn't get a picture closer-up.

About them, Brook writes, 

"and I know

How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . ."

A Random Assortment

~ Williamsport college president finds lost Lincoln document.

~ A hidden Armenian (the last Armenian) in a town in Turkey.

~ The Hermit. What, if any, punishment would you suggest?

~ This didn't load quite right for me--but cutest. ad. ever. You'd better believe I sent Francisco a virtual letter, sealed with a kiss.

~ Wow--I've definitely made fun of these--who knew they'd become cool? I'll probably be smoking one before you know it.

~ Cayman and Diana. Always interesting to learn more about your good friends in news articles:)

Cambridge.10

There's a great little market in a square in Cambridge. And a great little pasty shop that overlooks the market. (Francisco and I ate loads of pasties and little savory pies during our trip. I love these and am committed to cooking some for dinner parties for our friends when we set up house.) (Have I told you?! We're going to be setting up something more than a transient apartment in the fall! I mean, it will still be transient, but it will be much more settled than I've been since I left Little Gidding (the apartment, not the chapel). Plus, it's in a city that Francisco and I love. I can't wait to have dinner parties again after two years without them.)

On the second floor balcony above the pasty shop, there's a dressed-in-real-live-clothes statue of an old man. The pigeons love to land on his head (as can be seen from the state of his clothes).

Booths at the market.

Cambridge.9

As a lover of ribbed vaulting in basically any form, I was entranced by the King's College chapel's ceilings. The windows weren't so bad, either.

I overheard a tour guide talking about Rubens' Adoration of the Magi (above), a rather recent gift. He said that it was uninsurable, because the price was too high (how is that even possible--can't someone insure everything?). He also said that the painting was once attacked with a knife and carved into. He said that you can still see the trace of what they carved if you look closely.

Cambridge.8

90 percent of our visit to England was grey, grey, grey. So when the sun broke out from the clouds after Lawrence's birthday party, even though I would have preferred a nap, I took the next best thing--a walk with my (aka Francisco's) camera.

Cambridge.7

These are pictures from a lovely walk around Cambridge with Lawrence and Mrs. Lawrence, Ilana and Francisco.

According to our friend Sydney, English gardens aspire to cultivated wildness. They're like no other gardens I've ever seen--they're more like meadows full of lovely wildflowers.

These pictures are primarily, I think, from Trinity College and its fellows' garden.

In the fellows' garden there are sheds that can be used for tutorials. Purportedly this one got a lot of use, both academic and, shall we say, recreational, from Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein.

I love the way the lovely old architecture pushes up against fields and meadows and villages in Cambridge.

This is great bridge.

The Pheasant

On our way home from Little Gidding, we stopped for a delightful long lunch at The Pheasant. (Look at that roof! I've never seen thatching like it!)

Awkward Wedding Pictures

Looking today at pinterest for wedding pose ideas, I realized that 90 percent of them make me nauseous. So, in the vein of Awkward Family Photos, I give you a mere smattering of the awkward wedding pictures that pinterest contains:

The nose-smash kiss. Always awkward.

The vampire picture.

There are so. many. inappropriate pictures. This is the tamest. I promise.

What if he had three arms, so he could wrap her even more tightly?

Ew to making a heart on her butt with your hands.

Okay, so, this one is sort of excellent.

Maybe this is too liberated woman of me, but I'm wary whenever a woman is doing something that children do.

Basically, there are very few wedding pictures that I don't hate. Uh-oh.