The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

Just now the lilac is in bloom,

All before my little room:

And in my flower-beds, I think,

Smile the carnation and the pink;

And down the borders, well I know,

The poppy and the pansy blow.....

Oh! There the chestnuts, summer through,

Beside the river make for you

A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep

Deeply above; and green and deep

The stream mysterious glides beneath,

Green as a dream and deep as death.

-Oh damn! I know it! And I know

How the may fields all golden show,

And when the day is young and sweet,

Gild gloriously the bare feet

That run to bath......

Some, it may be, can get in touch

With nature there, Or Earth, or such.

And clever modern men have seen

A faun a-peeping through the green,

And felt the Classics were not dead,

To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,

Or hear the Goat-foot piping low:...

But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie

Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,

And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester...

-Rupert Brooke (from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester)

I don't just love these lines because their poet has my name:) I myself have been lost in the centuries at Grantchester, where time begins to blur. The whole experience of having tea and scones, or lunch perhaps, in The Orchard at Grantchester seems a bit surreal. It retains its distinct character from the days when E.M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russel, and Maynard Keynes used to grace its grounds, and, in lawn chairs beneath the trees, patrons can transport back to simpler, more serene times. 

One piece of advice: make sure you know where you are going if you plan to walk to The Orchard! Mom and I might have got a little lost, for which I take all the blame since I am the one who actually lives here. 

A lovely place to study!

 Thoroughly enjoying our scones.

Cheers!