Meetings in Cambridge

Tuesday, 11^th October: One of the good things about working from home is that it free up time from travelling, mostly.  There are times when you have to meet people and the next few weeks seem to be quite busy for me, with meetings in Cambridge and London.  Which is why I am behind on my posting – yes same old refrain.  I also have been hit by a minor bug – which not to put too fine a point on things has caused a major liquidity event and no I don’t mean in terms of earning money.  The sort that has tied me to the house. I have also done some work, but the temperature I also seem to have has made sleep tricky. So I seem to feel tired all the time as well.

When I cycle for work, it is still a pleasure, however I generally only take a small camera with me. (My Sony DSC W-200, now out of date. but a camera I have been very pleased with – for its small size the picture quality has been good at 12 million pixies, battery life has been good and it has been reliable. I bought it to replace an earlier camera that had also seen good service including having its image sensor de-dusted using a vacuum cleaner. I passed it onto my wife and daughter, but the advent of smartphones in the family,  with half-way reasonable cameras, means that it no longer gets much use.

I had several meeting around Cambridge, switching between the University and cafes in town.  I was a little concerned that parking my bike might be a problem as I set of a little later than I should have done for my first meeting. It was OK though. I had arranged to meet at the Michaelhouse cafe just down from Great St Mary's. There is cycle parking alongside the church, but it gets pretty busy. As luck would have it I found a space straight away and actually got to the cafe on time.

The great thing about having my bicycle in Cambridge is that you can arrange meetings around and about the place without generally having to worry about parking and you can certainly get from A to B pretty reliably.

For one of my later meetings the person I was meeting tend to park at the Madingley Road Park and Ride and then ride around Cambridge – for the same reason.  There were three of us meeting up at the Hauser Forum and two had arrived by bike – that’s Cambridge for you. The cycle parking was also no trouble at all and what’s more the Sheffield racks had a reasonable spacing.

The trouble is all the to-ing and frow-ing meant I didn’t actually have time to take many pictures. I did notice a whole new crop of students cycling off to lectures though – the place was clogged with them at one point. It is good to see – let’s hope they carry on when they are titans of industry and government!

On the way home I did detour a little way up Stourbridge Common – the River Cam was empty.

I also stopped to take some pictures of cyclists at the intersection for the Green Dragon Bridge – a busy bridge and care is needed. This is really a cycle crossroad and is also the route of NCN51.

I didn’t hit it at the rush hour though and so it wasn’t that busy – you can see by the lean that this cyclists is moving quite quickly.

A deserted cycleway.

The bridge does have a cyclists dismount sign – it is quite a narrow bridge. The trouble is that pushing a bicycle takes up way more space than riding one – mind you most cyclists don’t seem to get off as it happens.