Hemmed in by the desert

The Botanic Gardens in Cambridge are lined with incredible wooden-framed greenhouses, full of giant cacti, tropical plants and tiny shrubs. Inside, they're baking hot and full of light. We ran a feature in the paper on places to visit in the town, and so I cycled over to here to take some pictures of the gardens - I think we ended up with a big cactus on our front page, which was pretty great.

From the terraces inward

At the beginning of August I went to Athens to visit Aris, where we walked around in the blistering heat, stopping off to drink coffee with ice cubes floating in the glass. We visited open air summer cinemas, gallery rooftops for glasses of wine, the disused Olympic stadium, and bakeries for cheese and spinach pies. We drove to the beach, sat on his grandmother's terrace for the best view of the Acropolis in the city, and ate pieces of watermelon at a local market in the suburbs. 

I felt for a while that I could see little evidence of the Greek crisis, but derelict store fronts became more noticeable as we covered more of the city. I was amazed by how cheap it could be to eat out in the city, and many galleries had weekly openings until midnight free of charge. I was also surprised by how late everything operated until, with films being screened at 1am, and one bar that we went to closing only when the sun came up and it became too hot to remain in the open air. 

Narrow windows high up

As my exams came near I spent more and more time at home, looking out the window at the wet weather and feeling increasingly claustrophobic - alleviated only by brief trips to the library. I took both of these in moments of feeling idle - it feels slightly odd looking back at them now that my degree is finished for good. 

  

The city and the tower

A couple of weeks ago I went up to Edinburgh to visit my sister Isabel. We wandered around the criss-crossing streets, ate haggis for breakfast, climbed up to the view across the city - and I got a shock from just how close to the sea we were when I turned around suddenly - and drank enough whisky for me to run late and miss my journey back.