Had a lovely time in Cambridge. The conference was really good. About 350 delegates from every imaginable country. Churchill College was a lovely place to stay. Had a great room with a King size bed overlooking a central courtyard garden and it was gorgeous in the morning with the mist over the green Cambridge countryside.
It was really busy. We presented on the first day and really enjoyed all of the presentations. I chaired sessions all day Wednesday and Thursday and ran a workshop with Annie from Qatar on Thursday afternoon. Annie had me in stitches telling me about her Zumba classes in Qatar. The windows are all blocked out so the women won’t be seen but the instructor is a male – she amused me no end demonstrating her Zumba moves on the floor of Churchill College. Zumba in Qatar led us in to an English barbeque for dinner – really struggled to get my head around that one as well. It was a lovely setting on the lawns of Churchill but the poms really should stick to high tea.
Wednesday night, sitting at long tables in the stunning Harry Potter hall of Caius College, I was definitely waiting for the howlers to fly in. Caius was founded in 1348 and has produced thirteen Nobel Laureates. The dining room was amazing with long tables set with candles, the choir singing above us and hundreds of years of senior fellows watching us from the walls. The stain glass windows included one honoring John Venn, the inventor of the Venn diagram.
We organized to meet Tom from Adelaide, and Benny from Plymouth, for a quiet one at the Eagle pub on the way home. A 14th century drinking house, it has a ceiling that has signatures of RAF pilots from all over the world who returned from the Second World War and signed their names on the ceiling using cigarette lighters, candle smoke and lip stick. After the biggest pot of cidre ever, we staggered home in the dark across cobblestones and Roman streets and came across a bus heading to Churchill.
Went on a walking tour of Cambridge before returning to London, which was lovely. We visited St Catharine’s College with its beautiful gardens. The 31 colleges that make up the University of Cambridge are all stunningly beautiful, with King’s College chapel the centerpiece of a stunning medieval city.
Notes to self:
- Buy new lovely little MAC computer at least two weeks before one leaves the country
- Always set up new computer before you leave the country
- Don’t lose hard drive on the plane with all of your work on it including presentations
- If you are going to lose hard drive lose it on Heathrow leg not Dubai so can easily be retrieved
- Remember to send nice email to Dubai QANTAS man to thank him for looking after hard drive at QANTAS Club
- Take screen shot and send details of server log on to one self
- Don’t eat College food
- If you do eat College food make sure nice English loo is close
- Have good son at home who is not a mac user but is a good computer hacker to find all work
- Remind oneself why one really had children – one is an ATM so children should be computer hackers
- Do have dropbox set up for emergency loading of presentations
Sleeping under the stars 