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  • Balderdasha
    replied
    I meant to add that my grandpa, who was watching the ceremony, had never been prouder. Firstly, because I had earned a degree from Cambridge, which had been an unfulfilled dream for himself and his three daughters. Secondly, because I hadn't conformed. My grandpa spent most of his adult life refusing to join the masons.

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  • Balderdasha
    replied
    Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
    In other news of how Cambridge is a different world from the rest of anything else ever, one of my team at work went to her graduation ceremony today having completed her MA. I'd like to imagine that what she was describing (and another team member who had hers a year or so back, doing so from experience), was an elaborate satire on Oxbridge ritual, but I rather fear that it is in fact real. So, the basic part of this event is that when you go up to receive your degree, you get to the front and kneel down in front of the [insert job title of person handing out degrees here] (yes, kneel, subserviently) and hold on to one of his/her fingers (so (s)he can confer five degrees at a time). Seriously, I'm not making this up. The whole ceremony takes place in Latin to boot. The whole image of this is so... honestly, fucking appalling and dodgy.
    Yes, this is exactly what happens. No, it's not satire. You can apply in advance to refuse to kneel, which is what I did. I was one of only three girls in my year who stood to receive my degree, and later my masters. There is, however, no avoiding the finger. If you don't 'take the finger', as the very camp man who trained us for the ceremony described it, you don't get your degree.

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  • ad hoc
    replied
    It's fun listening to these women talk about their experiences because none of them are Brits and many learned significant parts of their English as students at this odd place. The one I work with most is from Madrid, and she told me how when she was in the main office of the company we are both working for, she went to get some food from the canteen and asked her office mates "Do you want anything from the buttery", which of course perplexed them being from backgrounds for whom the word buttery doesn't exist (or is simply an adjective describing toast)

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  • ad hoc
    replied
    Well as with any graduation ceremony, you don't have to attend. But that. apparently, is what the ceremony involves. No idea if it is just MAs.

    (I think the Masters degrees that you don't have to earn but can pay for a year or so after you get your bachelors degree perhaps doesn't have a ceremony)

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    They don't do that for M. Phil's, do they?

    My recollection is that friends just paid their five quid and got something back in the post.

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  • ad hoc
    replied
    Today, for the first time this week, I could have made it to watch EEG and his team bump/be bumped/ row over. However, sadly, it started raining, and the idea of cycling across the least attractive part of the city really didn't appeal. Which is a shame as i have never been to the bumps before (town or gown) and I wanted to immerse myself in the culture a bit. No matter. Hope you did well EEG. The result hasn;t appeared yet on the site, though they are pretty fast at updating it.

    In other news of how Cambridge is a different world from the rest of anything else ever, one of my team at work went to her graduation ceremony today having completed her MA. I'd like to imagine that what she was describing (and another team member who had hers a year or so back, doing so from experience), was an elaborate satire on Oxbridge ritual, but I rather fear that it is in fact real. So, the basic part of this event is that when you go up to receive your degree, you get to the front and kneel down in front of the [insert job title of person handing out degrees here] (yes, kneel, subserviently) and hold on to one of his/her fingers (so (s)he can confer five degrees at a time). Seriously, I'm not making this up. The whole ceremony takes place in Latin to boot. The whole image of this is so... honestly, fucking appalling and dodgy.

    Anyway, in the time it has taken me to write of my horror, the results have been posted and EEG and his team have rowed over again

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    Janik, it needs to be bloody loud because there are 18 boats racing in each division (17 boats per division plus the "sandwich boat", i.e. the boat which just finished top of the division below). At the start they are spread out in sequence along the river bank with 1 and a half boat lengths in each gap, so the first and last boats are a very long way from the start cannon located half way up the starting range, and the noise needs* to be correspondingly loud. It's a bit tough on the ears for the crews who are bang (very much "bang") in the middle of the division.

    SB, ha ha. Actually I see from the results tables that it was only the one pair of boats immediately ahead of us who bumped out. But we were never going to catch the boat 3 places ahead of us - they're the ones who bumped us on the first night.

    * Edit: I suppose one could do something with loudspeakers, but you know, tradition. And, more seriously, the sound technology would be one more thing that could go wrong.
    Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 18-07-2019, 23:15.

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  • Janik
    replied
    Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
    start cannon.
    This is the one thing that always gets me about the bumps - the starting 'gun' is an actually honest to goodness cannon.

    The first time I came across it was playing a cricket match in Fen Ditton (the pitch is very close to the Plough) and unexpectedly hearing it. "WTF was that??" we asked the home team, whose casual response was "Oh, just the start of the bumps"

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  • San Bernardhinault
    replied
    The 4 boats in front of you bumping out would have given you a rare opportunity to make up 5 places in the standings, wouldn't it? An almost impossible task, but the bumps equivalent of the Ben Stokes overthrow 6 as a way of having a remarkable late turnaround. The producers would have preferred that version for when they make the docudrama of this.

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    Eventful third row. Spoiler: we rowed over (meaning we neither made a bump nor got bumped). But that bare fact doesn't give a flavour of the experience.

    Our crew includes a guy (Jamie) who is not actually with our law firm, but is the boyfriend of a female trainee (one of our coaches) who is. He's a schoolteacher down in Hertfordshire so needs to drive back up the M11 to join us for the races. He can't make it to the boathouse for when we get the boat out, so we arrange to meet him half way down the river to the race start and get another squad member (in practice, one of the women) to row with us in that seat down to the rendezvous. So, today there was an accident on the M11 and Jamie was held up in a jam to the point where he clearly couldn't make it. Cue frantic ringing around of anyone we know who can row and who would be eligible to sub into our crew on zero notice - work colleagues expecting to be in the office for another hour or two etc. Time was incredibly tight, but we got hold of one of our squad who was not supposed to be rowing tonight but was willing to drop everything and race over on his bike. He finally made it, cycling down the towpath to join us at our starting post 10 minutes before the start gun. Much to the relief of Jessica, who was fearful of having to row the race with us. (Women are allowed to row in the men's crews but not vice versa for obvious reasons; in practice that only happens in emergencies.) Not an issue that she's a woman, there are a few in our women's crew who I'm sure would make a more useful contribution to the movement of the boat than I do. But she is one of the smaller women and, crucially, a novice this year. Anyway, Ed arrived and we, Jessica especially, have never been so happy to see him.

    So. all sorted? Hardly! Ed needed to adjust the positioning of his footplate for his longer legs than Jessica's. Normally not too much of an issue but sometimes if the mechanism is a bit "sticky", it can be unmoveable for a while then suddenly move too fast as you pull at it, and come off altogether, at which point it's a bugger to reattach. Guess what happened, around four minutes before the start cannon. Clive, the old hand from the club who always pushes us out from the bank for the race start, got on the case, quietly cursing under his breath. Nightmare job, the clock ticking down. He always starts to push the boat gently off from the bank for the race start around 35 seconds from the start cannon. Ed's footplate was finally screwed into the correct position just under 40 seconds before the start, so with 5 seconds to spare. Felt like one of those Bond film scenes with the timer display counting down to the bomb going off.

    Then the race started. We had a bloody awful first 30 or 40 seconds, and the boat chasing us closed the gap to less than half a boat's length (the boats start 1 and a half boat lengths gap from each other), but we suddenly got it together and calmly put down the power and drew steadily away from them, ending the race around 5 or 6 lengths clear. No chance of making a bump as the boats ahead of us had already bumped out in pairs. But rowing over felt like an absolute triumph, given that we got bumped the first two days and came so close to getting bumped again today. And, wonderfully, this was the first day that my wife and my 8 year old daughter had made the trip over to the Plough to watch us from the riverside beer garden, and they saw our crew racing. So chuffed. And, because of the bump ahead of us today, we're chasing a relatively slow boat tomorrow, so I may still, on the final day, make my first ever bump.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    That is particularly interesting to me, because elite university rowing here has become much more competitive as more high schools and junior programs adopt the sport and more international rowers come to the US for an education.

    More than half of the guys I rowed with has never been in a shell before they arrived on campus. That doesn't happen any more at all. And while I know less about the quality of intramural crews (roughly equivalent to college teams at Cambridge), I would expect them also to be much better. I was the only person in my intramural boat who had rowed in competition before (which is how I went from bow to stroke).

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    Hope you do make it ad hoc.

    So, we got bumped again on our second day. Agonisingly close to the finish line, we rowed much better than on the first evening. Some brief footage of an early section of our race linked below. We're the crew with the bright pink shirts, and I'm the grey-haired guy in seat 4.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIrFwDTnO9M

    That's a chunk of the men's third division. The standard in the top division, at least in the top half of it, is very high: the top town club crews are now significantly stronger than the top college crews, which is the opposite of how things were 40 years ago in men's rowing. The standard of town rowing has gone up (due to more serious rowers moving to Cambridge and keeping their sport up) and the standard of men's college rowing has declined from how it was say back in the early 70s when most colleges were all-male, their intake had a larger proportion of freshers from rowing public schools, and the boaties were able to prioritise rowing training over their studies (e.g. having mid-afternoon outings, which are no longer feasible in the stricter academic regime of today).

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  • ad hoc
    replied
    Still hoping to get down for one day of these - had hoped to rent a bike for the month but given Cambridge's pre-eminence in this country as a cycling city it's extraordinarily difficult to rent a bike if you're at work from 8 to 5.30. Anyway, will continue to hope that I can make it. Feel like trains between Cambridge and the new Cambridge North station, which would be dead convenient for Fen Ditton, ought to be free like the ones between Heathrow terminals.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    I'm probably biased, but it doesn't strike me as much more arcane than a report of a important village cricket match from a similar source.

    Each sport tends to develop a specialised vocabulary, and writers of that type of piece generally want to use as much of the range as possible.

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  • San Bernardhinault
    replied
    I love the language in EEG's link. It's clearly in a form of English, but it's not the kind of English that anybody actually speaks. It's seems like a strange creole created when the land bridge between the Oxbridge of Waugh's Brideshead and the rest of the Britain was inundated and they were left to themselves uncontacted by civilisation for a century.

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  • Benjm
    replied
    Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
    All those crossing lines over the course of the days were inordinately fascinating, despite me having no personal affinity for, say, the Oriel VI boat.
    'No personal affinity' is harsh. I really thought we were the people's champions.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    From what I've been told, such concessions were much less common back in the day, especially near the top of the ladder.

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    I've never heard of a boat actually sinking in the bumps (though it may have happened, I just don't know). Actual physical contact on a "bump" is the exception, as most coxes of bumped boats have the common sense to raise their arm in acknowledgement of a bump as soon as the bow ball of the chasing boat gets ahead of their seat. Occasionally serious accidents do happen, usually on a corner, or perhaps where a cox is unwilling to acknowledge a bump until absolutely unavoidable because his or her crew are both about to get bumped and about to make a bump.

    Kev, your organisation, along with my firm, and Raspberry pi, all have arrangements with X-Press to field an office crew through them. The other "specific" X-Press crew is a bunch of postgrad geologists from the Uni, who call themselves "The Boat that Rocks".

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  • Kevin S
    replied
    I've worked it out now, they're XPress 7 in Div.4.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    Given that I most often rowed competitively in those two seats and that my hearing has deteriorated in the intervening 40+ years, that is likely useful.

    I also imagine that boats sinking after being bumped is not as common as it was back in the days of wooden shells (my nephew didn't believe me when I told him that oarsmen used to episodically put their feet straight through the bottom until a coach of my vintage mentioned it in passing).

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  • Kevin S
    replied
    Hmm, one of the teams is clearly from the office I work in. Not a surprise, as it's pretty big and we have three rowing machines in a room somewhere.

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    Yes, I think headset microphones for the coxes are pretty universal now, with one or more loudspeakers down the boat so that everyone including Bow and 2 can hear instructions clearly.

    In case it wasn't obvious btw, that foliage in the hair of the young woman in the first pic is the standard victory thing, worn by all crew members of a crew who have just made a bump.

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  • Nocturnal Submission
    replied
    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
    Does your coxswain have a headset?

    Might be best to restrict this sort of stuff to PMs, eh.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    Aw man

    I can definitely beat the guys in the bow there.

    Does your coxswain have a headset? In addition to being grievously out of shape, I'm not at all prepared for all of this "new" tech (I've only rowed in a non-wooden shell a handful of times).

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  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    For ursus: you'll see from one of the photos in the local newspaper report (linked below) of the Town Bumps first evening that the men's crew who started in position 63 (fourth division) were pretty senior. Also, from the text, that a crew with average age "around 60" bumped a crew with average age around 16. My crew, Xpress 5, got bumped, and the attached news report tactfully comments that one of the oarsmen in the boat that bumped us " had only rowed three times". Yeah, right. We'll get them back tonight. Our firm's women's crew (Xpress 3) made their fifth consecutive bump, having won their blades last year.

    https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/spo...tures-16590835

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