earth on foot 4
18 june 2025
A small brown spider crawls across my notebook. Spiders are storytellers, weaving intricate tales everywhere here.
After hours of travel from Newark, my mother-in-law and I walked and walked, from Newnham to Cambridge Center and back, enjoying the last light of the season’s long, long day.
Cambridge snapshots:
—Moving aside for one bicycle, then another, then many versions of cycles, some carrying books, groceries and kids, never sure where to walk. (Rules were explained—still wasn’t sure!)
—Our wet laundry draped on the garden chairs drying
—So, so many bookshops! Including the venerable G. David Books where I purchased a teeny tiny Tempest and Mr Messy
—A graft of Newton’s tree—the original still grows nearby in Lincolnshire where Sir Isaac escaped the Cambridge plague times, only to discover modern physics when the fruit fell on his head!
—And his study at Trinity College Library, his copy of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica with handwritten notes
—So, so many weeping willows dangling over the currents of the River Cam, that friendly waterway whose June inhabitants include swans, cows, and punters
I spent most of my last day walking the calm, flat earth of the University Botanical Gardens, refreshed, then sipping cherry plum kombucha
Roses, bugs, cats, birds, clouds—oh, the constant dance!
One afternoon a wood pigeon and I had lunch together—me in a cafe, the bird mostly upside down dangling from a gooseberry bush, with grey striped wings spread wide. Imagine that!
Even now I startle three hares into a hedgerow. Ah, summer!
