I arrived to study at Cambridge University forty-six years ago, in 1979, and moved into a room at St Catharine’s College, or Catz. It was Bull 51, a room at the top of Bull Hostel under a leaded roof, looking out over King’s Parade (the one marked in the photo above).

Three years later I graduated in the Senate House on the other end of King’s Parade and two years later I picked up my Diploma in Computer Science from the same spot. That was forty years ago. Later that year I started work as a programmer at Bensasson & Chalmers in offices above the Lunn Poly travel agency at 6 King’s Parade. about half-way between the two. It was my first job in computing and I learned to code in C on UNIX systems, working with databases.

As I look back, it seems that much of my life has involved moving up and down the same street. When I left B&C after two years I worked for Acorn Computers, in the famous Silver Building on Cherry Hinton Road but I kept the King’s Parade connection, as Acorn’s first office had been the B&C office at 6 King’s Parade, after Sinclair Research moved out.

In my years working for Instruction Set, PIPEX, The Guardian and then freelancing until I joined the BBC in 2009 I spent a lot of time around the centre of Cambridge. There were some great pubs, and twenty years or so ago I started going to a cafe just off King’s Parade, on St Edward’s Passage. Over the years Indigo and its proprietor Claire have been woven into my life, and Claire has done so much for my family, as well as keeping me supplied with excellent coffee. And cake.

I also stayed in regular contact with college, through friends who were Fellows and then when Katie and I got married there thirteen years ago. We left Catz Chapel as a married couple and walked down King’s Parade to our wedding breakfast at the Arts Theatre.

The connection continued when Katie took a lease on 12D King’s Parade and it became home to CH&W and Granta Architects for eight years. I would go into the office to check systems during the early months of 2020 when we were all locked down, and in that summer I would buy a coffee from the Nero here and watch the UK begin to open up.

I’m outside there as I write this with a macchiato and a laptop, watching the MA graduation queue rise and fall and reflecting how far I’ve come while hardly moving at all.

Plot my life for since 1979 and it’s a large circle for Cambridge, a smaller circle for West Stonesdale (since 2012), a connection between them up and down the A1 road, and a vast number of lines radiating from both to points near and far. But zoom in closer and King’s Parade is the axis around which my life in Cambridge has turned.