The river Cam wends its silvery way down the length of Cambridge, flowing languidly past colleges, commons, lawns, and copses. A relative of mine, who was at Cambridge way back in the ‘50s (or was it the ‘40s?) tells a story of how he, along with a bunch of madcap friends, spent a lazy summer afternoon preparing a large sphere out of cardboard. It was given a rough surface, painted grey, and made to look exactly like one of the stone spheres which dotted the top of a parapet along a bridge next to their college. The men positioned their masterpiece carefully, about halfway between two of the genuine spheres on the parapet, and then made a big show of pushing it over the edge of the parapet into the river below, putting in a lot of effort (or so it would seem to a bystander). Of course, evil minds that they had, they timed this huge farce for when a punt was actually passing below. The occupants of the unlucky punt, hearing all the heaving and panting above them, looked up, and to their horror, discovered these madmen set on shoving this huge stone down on them. They panicked as the sphere fell, and leaped out of the punt on either side, straight into the Cam. Whether the perpetrators of this wild prank stuck around to see the reactions of their victims is something I do not know. Rest assured, this is not a daily occurrence if you’re going punting. We did, and nobody shoved stones- fake or otherwise- down on us. Three of us- me, my husband and a friend of ours- hired a punt- a neat, comfortable little boat with a flat `stage’ at the end for the punter to stand on- for £10 an hour and spent a most enjoyable 60 minutes exploring the river. (The £10 was for punting ourselves; hiring a student punter to do your punting for you costs about three times that amount).
My husband and our friend took quite some time learning the ropes- punting isn’t as easy as it looks, and the ride out took a helluva long time, with the punt drifting about from bank to bank with gay abandon. Getting used to it takes a while, but after some time we got the hang of it.
The ride's wonderful- the river flowing between grassy banks, with willows drooping low over the water, and the towering, majestic buildings of the colleges further away from the Cam. All along the river are a series of bridges, and our ride took us below six of them, including the famous Mathematical Bridge, a self-supporting wooden structure, constructed without the use of even a single nail, originally said to have been built by either Sir Isaac Newton or one of his students. Nobody seems sure which, though the latter seems more likely.