I love the University Library, I love everything about it, literally everything. I love the new lockers. I love the plastic bags and have plans to stock pile them so that I can transport my possessions to the Old Folk’s Home in them, 50 years down the line. I love the view of allotments and far away church steeples from the windows of the Fifth Floor, North Front. I love the fact that I now, after weeks of wandering, know where Fifth Floor, North Front is, and even where the book 212:c.a.38582.r.3:flk.99893.J.per.458 is.

Most of all I love the tea room. My breathtakingly serious classics teacher at school very rarely deigned to talk to me however, over the course of 6 years, he gave me two life-changing pieces of advice: a) it is nicer to have brown sugar on your porridge than honey, b) it doesn’t matter what you do in Cambridge as long as you spend hours giving strangers lingering looks in the UL tea room. Flirting aside, the tearoom is a warm hub of non-whispered conversation after a day in the library, which, even I will admit, does bear some very very slight resemblance to a prison, and does, just occasionally, leave one feeling a little low.

At such points one can identify with Toad of Wind in the Willows fame, who finds ‘himself immured in a dark and noisome dungeon’, aware ‘that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine’. Toad’s Week 5 blues are elevated, his jollity restored, in perhaps the best description of food in the history of English literature, by the arrival of tea: ‘a cup of fragrant tea [...] and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.’

WOW, EH. Such a passage leaves one determined to appreciate life’s small pleasures: to hear ‘the twitter of sleepy canaries’ with each sip of tea, to, Nigella-Lawson-style, find a raison d’etre in heart- attack inducing ‘great golden drops’ of butter, and to find time to make the perfect welsh cakes. (Really, I wanted to give a recipe for ‘very hot buttered toast’, but some fools have been making pointed remarks about the level of cooking my recipes require...)

Ingredients: 500 g flour, 250 g butter, 250 g sugar, 75 g raisins, 1 large egg, beaten

1. Rub the butter into the flour. Add sugar and raisins and mix well together.

2. Add egg.

3. Mix to form a dough

4. Roll out and cut into circles with pastry cutter or the rim of a glass

5. Cook on lightly-greased frying pan for a few minutes on each side until lightly browned

 

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