Extraordinary Summer

It is October, and it is 29 C in Cambridge.

This magnificent summer goes on and on with balmy days and warm evenings. My time at Cambridge is coming to an end and as I wandered around Trinity at the end of last week, I could not resist taking a few shots of part of this vast College, Great Court with its fountain and blaze of red flowers, Nevile's Court with the Wren Library at the back, and the interior of the Wren, bathed in natural light.

On the right of Nevile's Court is a set of cloisters in the sunlight. They act as a nearly perfect waveguide for sound, and it was here, in the 17th century, that Isaac Newton measured the speed of sound by timing the round trip of echoes, knowing the distance to be double the length of the cloistered hallway. The echo return time he ascertained by clapping his hands in synchrony with the echoes and then counting claps over a fixed time period. .

I took Catherine to High Table dinner last week, and before entering the Fellows Parlour took her to the cloisters and made a loud clap to demonstrate. At the far distance of the cloisters an elderly fellow in a gown grumbled at the childishness, but before he could escape into a side door I called out "I'm only doing what Isaac Newton did!". That silenced him.

Catherine's dining experience was made the more delightful by the fact that she ended up sitting next to Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law, and one of her law teachers during her Cambridge LLM.