garden of eden

I did my last teaching of the year last week, I had meetings with four separate students today — and no more 1:1 meetings remaining — and I just have one half-day of work remaining for 2025. Between work and illness, I feel almost flattened with exhaustion, so it's a real relief to have my upcoming holiday almost in touching distance.

Today's December talking meme prompt is from lokifan, favourite places to visit around Cambridge.

I could talk about so many, but I will limit myself to three(ish), in three different categories. You'll get lots of guides to Cambridge highlighting the beautiful old colleges and grounds, the standard walk out to the village of Grantchester along the river, punting tours and so on, so I'll stay off this beaten track.

My favourite museum/gallery in Cambridge is Kettle's Yard, which is a contemporary art gallery with a difference. It started out as the home of Jim and Helen Ede, art collectors, who hosted frequent open house events for students to view and tour their collection, and was later gifted by the Edes to the university. Now, the former living space is preserved essentially as it was — filled with objects from the Edes' collection, plus lots of lovely indoor plants — and students can come in and use it as a quiet study space. Other visitors to the gallery get a guided tour of the space, and then can move on to the extension, which is an exhibition space displaying temporary exhibitions. It's an absolutely beautiful, jewel-like little oasis of calm, and rewards return visits. This is a photoset of photos I took there many years ago.

My favourite outdoor space in Cambridge was somewhere I discovered serendipitously during the first days of the pandemic lockdown in early 2020. I had leapt into working from home with enthusiasm, and had deliberately built a whole bunch of routines into the day out of a mistaken fear that Matthias and I would be stressed or irritated or find things monotonous, and one such deliberate routine was my obsession with having short walks outside after lunch, to ensure we moved and saw the sunlight. One day, I made a spontaneous decision to go down a little street I'd never ventured before, and I ended up, quite literally, in Paradise (Nature Reserve). This is Paradise. We had lived with this beautiful, green, jungly place just around the corner from us for eight years and had never known. For the last year we lived in that little house under the ivy, it became a favourite spot. Walking into it was like inhaling deeply.

Foodwise, my favourite high-end places are this one (entirely vegetarian tasting menus; they also have a wonderful newsletter that gathers together curated links on all things foodie, crafty, cultural and local), this one (seafood), and this one, and in general I love the Mill Road area, which is home to two of the previously linked restaurants, but also a great cocktail bar, some excellent cheaper restaurants and takeaway places, and all the Asian, Eastern European, South Asian, Middle Eastern etc grocery stores in the city.

It was a good place to live — and it became more interesting, especially in a culinary sense, during the thirteen years that I lived there.