A very polite telling off....

'C' staircase felt like a change. So this morning found us attending Morning Prayer not in the usual location of our Common Room but in King's College Chapel. You can see us walking there in the photo. Along the way we encountered Star Radio's Coleman the Patrolman, a roving traffic reporter who roves Cambridge on a bike instead of a helicopter. Being on foot I lacked a car horn so I greeted him with a verbal 'honk', which he returned with a blast from his handheld squeezy hooter. The japes these mature students get up to!!

Back to the plot. We arrived at King's with a few minutes to spare. The staff there looked a little astonished as 16 of us trooped in and down the main aisle in search of the service. As I was at the back of the group I got a ringside seat for a conversation with the college Chaplain, along the lines of:

Chaplain: 'Hello, there do seem to be rather a lot of you, I'm afraid we might not have enough seats for you all'

Us: 'That's alright, we can stand'

C: 'But the chapel is quite small'

U: 'Oh, don't worry, we can squeeze quite small' (strange, it looks quite big from outside...)

C: 'It would have been useful if we had known you were coming'

U: 'Ah, yes, we, err...couldn't find your e-mail address' (but it's a publicly advertised service?)

C: 'I don't think we'll have enough service books.....'

U: 'It's OK' (producing our own Common Worship books from our pockets with a flourish)

And so we proceed to the Chapel, feeling like we've been told off firmly but very politely. We discover that the reason for his concern is that King's College Huge Christmas Carol Service Chapel also has a number of small side chapels, and it's in one of these, the Memorial Chapel, that Morning Prayer takes place. I think the fact that it was Monday morning accounts for the fact that King's students had - cough - 'forgotten' about Morning Prayer, which was today attended by their Chaplain, 13 Ridley students and 3 Ridley staff! A very intimate and quite special time together. I suspect the Chaplain was actually quite glad to have company.

Afterwards we slowly made our way out, gawping at the architecture, the spectacular ceiling and 360 degree stained glass - we would normally have to pay just to get in, but attending services is free! You can get a feel of it by visiting the chapel website but it's no substitute for seeing it with your own eyes.

A full English breakfast in a local cafe followed, before the reality of the day's lectures intervened.