h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well my visitors left this morning, and it all seemed to go very well. They arrived on time on Friday, said they hadn't had any trouble finding where I live from my instructions (it's inside a maze of one-way streets and no through roads). We chatted for a bit, then they asked to borrow the computer for J to write a proposal for some work he'd been offered just before they left home. This took a bit longer than expected, which resulted in the salmon being a teeny bit dry, but everything else seemed to be OK.

Saturday started off cloudy but fine, so we drove over to Newnham and left the car there while we did the tour of the college, then went to the flower festival at St Mark's Church (quite small, but obviously an awful lot of thought and hard work had gone into it - the arrangements were beautiful). Then we walked along the river to Grantchester and had lunch at The Orchard tearooms. This is a real orchard, where you can sit on old-fashioned deckchairs under the trees - it's where Rupert Brooke and loads of other famous literati used to hang out. They have a little booklet with the famous Brooke poem ('The Old Vicarage at Grantchester') and various amusing anecdotes. Unfortunately said Old Vicarage is now inhabited by one Jeffrey Archer, who I understand has had a brush with the law recently. Anyway, it's all very picturesque.

We'd just finished lunch when there were a few heavy drops of rain, so we took refuge inside for a while, but it didn't last more than a few minutes, and we were able to walk back to Cambridge without getting wet.
It then turned into a lovely sunny evening.

The dinner with their friends from Inner Mongolia was a great success - they'd prepared masses of food, centred around a 'hot pot' - a bowl of broth, in which you put the pre-cooked food to reheat, before fishing it out with your chopsticks. Unfortunately they'd forgotten that J is vegetarian, but there was some fish, various sorts of mushrooms, noodles etc and Bin quickly prepared a non-meat hot pot in a pan, just for him!

In the early hours of this morning there was a terrific thunderstorm which seemed to go on for some time - lightning around Cambridge is pretty spectacular because the area is so flat - but C and J said they didn't hear it, so they must have slept well on the sofa-bed!

They left straight after breakfast to drive on to Margate, so I've had a lazy day. It'll be nice to have another day off work tomorrow, and I've already made plans to have a coffee with a friend from my Spanish class - we might even try and speak Spanish, so she can practise for the oral exam. I'm not taking the exam, as I'll be in Canada by the time the written part happens.

I went to my Spanish O level oral exam straight from a Latin lesson. The Latin teacher wished me good luck and I answered him "Multas gracias"... slight mix-up there. All the way up (about 15 mins' walk) from the girls' school where we did Latin to my boys' school where the oral exam was held, I talked to myself in Spanish to try to erase the Latin from my mind.

Hello, Annie

Thanks for the message in The Bull! I haven't time to answer them all at the minute so I'm taking the opportunity in here!

I'm glad your entertaining went well.

Good luck to your friend. My youngest has her GCSE Spanish oral this Friday. She and some of her friends are planning a "día de español" tomorrow. They are meeting up, working on their orals and their presentations and eating nachos and tortillas.

French oral next week.

Eilis

Hello Eilis

How very enterprising of the youngest Snowflake to organise a 'día de español'!

I have to say that when I helped my friend's granddaughter with some of her work for her GCSE French oral, I was rather horrified that they didn't really seem to be expected to do much! She was also very reluctant to try and say anything in French at all spontaneously.

I discussed this with my boss, the Admissions Tutor and she probably thought I was just doing a version of the Monty Python 'four Yorkshiremen' sketch - you know, 'it was all so much harder when we were young', but now her husband is doing GCSE German, and she is just as shocked as I was! She said that in the past she had sometimes thought we were rather harsh in paying attention to high grades in GCSE, but now she thought it was probably just as well that we do.

Anyway, best of luck to Snowflake and her friends! And here's some chocolate for them - I'm sure it's good brain food!