A Cambridge Summer – crochet, crowds and angle grinders

Summer has hit Cambridge. It seems like only a week since the city was shrouded in cloud and I was wearing gloves to work. Now the streets are thronging with tourists, the buskers are out in force, and you can’t walk five paces without being invited to hire a chauffeur punt.

With the fair weather came the college’s May balls – providing free (though enforced) music across the city until very late at night, as well as some enjoyable firework displays. We were also treated to the midsummer fair on Midsummer Common and Cambridge City Council’s Big Weekend where The Beat played live, which, if you’re of a certain age, was very exciting indeed.

The sun also brought the stealth crochet artists out again.

Less welcome have been the bike thieves who I presume are encouraged to go about their trade all the more enthusiastically now that the city is so full of rich pickings. I’ve blogged about problems with bike theft in Cambridge before here. I’ve now been alerted to a new scam, whereby the would-be thief locks an old wreck of a bike to yours, leaving your bike stranded, and then comes back at night with some bolt cutters to remove your original lock and tidy your bike away for good.

We discovered one of our family bikes immobilised in just this way this week on Quayside. Thankfully, we’d been tipped off and were able to secure it with heavy-duty bolt-cutter-proof locks until we could sort the problem out.

The procedure was to contact the police, get a permission slip to confirm they’d been notified, and then ask one of the City Council’s rangers to come along with an angle grinder… They were great and sorted the problem out very quickly.