The Gondoliers
Punts on the River Cam at Cambridge. A delightful and timeless scene, but the modern world intrudes into this Elysium as everywhere else.
I had imagined these craft to be freighted with undergraduates ...not "students" if you please... elegantly passing their ample leisure in the discussion of quarks (this being Cambridge). What an exquisite, ideal existence. But no. As one of the punts passed beneath the bridge upon which I was standing, a voice rose up ..."coming into view on the left", intoned the helmsman, probing with his pole for a lodgement in the river bottom, "one of the masterpieces of the English Perpendicular style..." Evidently the punts were available for hire, the man with the pole doubling as cicerone. Indeed, as far as I could judge from appearances, the guides were themselves mostly undergraduates, driven to earning a few extra pounds when they ought to have been running up unpaid bills with their tailors and wine merchants. The Brideshead Generation ...Eheu! Soon they'll be selling ice creams.
In the closest punt old Rover seems to be enjoying his outing afloat. Perhaps he is about to shake one of the ducks to death.
The Gondoliers
Punts on the River Cam at Cambridge. A delightful and timeless scene, but the modern world intrudes into this Elysium as everywhere else.
I had imagined these craft to be freighted with undergraduates ...not "students" if you please... elegantly passing their ample leisure in the discussion of quarks (this being Cambridge). What an exquisite, ideal existence. But no. As one of the punts passed beneath the bridge upon which I was standing, a voice rose up ..."coming into view on the left", intoned the helmsman, probing with his pole for a lodgement in the river bottom, "one of the masterpieces of the English Perpendicular style..." Evidently the punts were available for hire, the man with the pole doubling as cicerone. Indeed, as far as I could judge from appearances, the guides were themselves mostly undergraduates, driven to earning a few extra pounds when they ought to have been running up unpaid bills with their tailors and wine merchants. The Brideshead Generation ...Eheu! Soon they'll be selling ice creams.
In the closest punt old Rover seems to be enjoying his outing afloat. Perhaps he is about to shake one of the ducks to death.