'A corner of England where time stands still as the outside world rushes by'. This is how the Orchard, Grantchester, describes itself in the pithy opening of its brochure. Appealing- yet idealist perhaps, hyperbolic, nostalgic as pastoral poets yearning for the harmony of our lost Golden World.

That was my certainly first thought. In reality there seemed no escape: the outside world was all-consuming, that mean little voice polluting my mind with reminders that my essay-deadline was forever encroaching, conducting an ever-silent countdown. Yet despite this, despite its purely metaphorical nature, this opening line perhaps holds inordinate significance for generations of Cambridge Students.

And why? Cambridge runs on seconds. Every moment of the day counts. Cambridge's newest monument of importance, as of 2008, is none other but a clock- and one that compounds its purpose through the presence of a 'time-eating' insect which appears to swallow the seconds, those fragile yet beloved barriers between you and your next deadline. To whom can the concept of the world 'rushing past' be more applicable than to Cambridge students? Our eight week terms are short and compact, locking us into a tight routine which vanishes before our tired eyes as quickly and suddenly as Fitzbillies appeared to. Our lives are seconded, minuted, houred. We can never forget it.

No-one was more aware of this 'rush' than Rupert Brooke, a young man who took up lodgings in Grantchester in 1909 to escape his hectic Cambridge routine. Brooke wallowed in his idyllic life where seconds and minutes appeared to linger, unthreatened by either giant insects or ominous deadlines. The appeal soon caught on and Brooke became the centre of a set which included Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Wittgenstein and Forster. They were the Neo-Pagans. For them, time, appointments, deadlines, seemed as distant as these figures now seem to us.

The Orchard is important, not merely as a place for a post-May Ball breakfast, as the haunt of these famous people past, but for what it represented for them, and what this representation signifies for us today. Perhaps, as Brooke realised as he sipped his tea in the Orchard's gardens, sometimes it's important to forget those seconds-on-steroids. Sometimes it's important to pause.

Of course, Brooke is an extreme: the idea of hosts of undergraduates deserting their studies in order to spend their days roaming the woods is both strange and worrying. No,'doing a Rupert Brooke' probably isn't the best idea. But, as Brooke realised, as the opening to the Orchard's brochure reminds us, as we all want to believe but are perhaps too nervous to: sometimes, perhaps, we should believe that the clock really does stand still at ten to three.

Maybe we all need a dash of Rupert Brooke in our tea.