Mercury in the Sun

In the centre of the main quadrangle of our college, there is an ornamental pond with a statue of Mercury. In the past, it was traditional for undergraduates to throw friends into this pond, or to jump in themselves. Currently, such entrance to Mercury carries a heavy fine for undergraduates (because there are great dangers, and the statue has been know to topple over to trap "bathers" at the bottom). The pond also contains a large Koi carp apparently worth a large amount of money and donated by the Empress of Japan. The base of the fountain was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Activities involving the pond are described in many literary works. At the very end of this Blipfoto entry, I reproduce a passage from Brideshead Revisited.

The photograph and preceding paragraph are intended to introduce the main thesis of today's submission. Look at the ancient stone beyond Mercury's leg. You will see several people gathering around a door, and some going inside. This is the entrance to the Deanery, wherein Alice of Alice in Wonderland once lived. The people entering the Deanery here are making their way to the Deanery Garden, where pre-dinner drinks are being served.

We are this evening bidding farewell to a most loyal and highly regarded colleague who is embarking on his retirement. Many of his former pupils have come, some from far away (even China, I heard) to wish him well for the future. Here you see the retiree with some of the guests in The Dean's garden. You can identify him, because he is holding a book that has been specially prepared and presented to him. It is a book of "Reminiscences", personal recollections of pupils and colleagues of the roughly fifty years he has been with us.

I am not going to provide individual links to the many photographs I took on this evening. Instead, I'll provide a link to a gallery that I have prepared. We had an excellent dinner, with good food and fine wines, and we didn't get to bed very early!

I hope that our colleague enjoyed his evening, and that he became well aware of the affection in which he is held. He has been a unifying influence for the chemists at our college, and has turned pupils and staff into a kind of (highly) extended family.

We wish you a happy retirement, Martin.



From Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (1945)
"I got into the fountain and, you know, it really was most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, 'Anyway, we did put him in Mercury'. You know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time. When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say when my name is mentioned 'We put him in Mercury one night,' and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!"