Some things do not change.

Though it probably would have shocked my companions had I told them so, of all the things I revisited and experienced today, the single best of them all was this willow tree in the late afternoon sun.  It wasn't even my willow tree, the one I visited each day beside Trinity Bridge, the one for which I learned the term "catkin," the one I touched hello and goodbye as the year wore on.  This was just one more of the willows along the Cam, outside the Wren Library, but this afternoon it was the one where the light was and where the other people weren't. 

Some kinds of intimacy, some kinds of knowledge, are simply too close, both too much and too little to be borne.  Going back through the day, I might have tried not to see wrists crossed in sleep, not to have an elbow pressed to a hip in a punt.  I certainly would have absented myself from at least one whole conversation.  But: c'est ma vie.  And tomorrow, I will get up again, and that part of it will be all over, possibly forever and ever, which will be its own strangeness and great relief.

Tonight, rain falls on the roof of my college, and because I live just under the roof, I hear it strike and fall, strike and fall.

Some things change.

As I walked around this afternoon--on my old "walk around from 2-5 p.m." schedule--I discovered the range of things that have closed or moved here.  That shoe store that I kind of liked the couple of times I went in?  Gone.  The First Class Teas shop next door?  Also gone. The art gallery near the Barclays ATMs?  Moved around the corner.  The HSBC with the other ATMs I used to use when the Barclays ones refused my American ATM card?  Gone?  No--moved, with its old building apparently in the process of being deconstructed from the inside out. 

In that last case, though, a small (perhaps even somewhat perverse) lesson: sometimes when things go away, they do so in order to make room for new things.  Like this tiny bit of unexpected graffiti where a window used to be.

The passing of time.

Already I know that one of the objects I'll be studying this month--returning to it again and again, seeing it in different lights, contemplating it with different cameras, figuring out how it works and what it means--is the new clock at Corpus Christi College.  The corner of Corpus was under scaffolding for most of the year that I lived here, and when the building that was being renovated was finally unveiled, it was a lovely-looking new library space inside a refurbished old building in the middle of town.  What we didn't know in 2008 (or during the part of it when we were here, anyhow) was that its corner would soon be graced by a monster guarding another monster:

It's a clock that was designed and donated by a man named John Taylor, who invented a thermostat switch used in electric tea kettles the world over.  That monster atop it is the Corpus Chronophage, a time-eater; he's also the literalization of an innovation called the grasshoper escapement, invented by the man who also figured out longitude.  I first saw the Chronophage on my way to dinner at the Eagle (known as the pub where DNA was discovered); by the time we were done with dinner, he was lit up and even more terrifying than before.  I did my best to steady my camera against my stomach, just to give you a first glimpse of him, but--as I've said--I'm going to return to this guy, if only to get a better (i.e., non-reflective) shot of him.  Perhaps even taken using a tripod.  For now, satiate yourselves with others' news of him.

It was a low-key day for me, not least because I didn't get out of bed until 1 p.m.--my solution to jet lag being to sleep for an absurd-seeming number of hours in a row on the first night and then to hold myself to a high standard for normal sleeping from there on out.  Then there was a small shopping trip (which yielded me a cardigan), and then there was an awkward garden party at which I was a tag-along--which means that I've now fully returned to Cambridge.  Some parts of my life here are things I should not revisit; I'm more aware of that than ever.

Some things, on the other hand, are eminently revisitable.  Among them:

Tomorrow, I believe that it will be time for me to visit some other favorite places.

Scenes from an arrival.

Like clockwork we came in: we had made landfall long before I swam up out of my last sleep; we were nearly on the ground before I could see the patchwork of southern England, the ancient lush trees spotting green pastures, the wheatfields yellowing, the tiny villages, the cows, the sheep.  The runway.  Gatwick again.  I know London Gatwick as well as I know almost any airport (though that's actually Heathrow up top there): the weird long distance one walks even to get to passport control, the new strangeness of being split off from everyone else if you're American and actually follow the signs to the correct place to enter the passport control hall, the absolute bizarreness of being able to make a deposit for a luggage trolley using either a £1 coin (= about $1.60) or 25¢.  (Thank goodness for stray quarters.)  The Marks and Spencer food hall immediately past the international arrivals spit-out.  The vaguely back-door quality of the coach pick-up area. 

By 1 p.m., after a morning of sleeping as my coach hit every London airport but Luton, I was back in my college, being hailed again and again by people who know me.  It is more of a blessing than I can talk about, right this moment, to have in my life right now not one but two academic villages where I am known, where people are happy to see me and no one has to ask my name, where I belong.    

And I suppose one really knows that my feet are on the ground when I start taking pictures of flowers.  Some slightly more iconic shots of Cambridge tomorrow--though I have to tell you that the most adventurous stuff I'll do here will be on 120 film, which means you won't get to see it (possibly ever--depending on whether I have access to a negative scanner when I finally develop these rolls in the fall).