to their heads while their gowns billowed in a gale that threatened to blow the frailer ones away.
Two porters were standing at the entrance to the Hall and others had taken up positions around the Great Court. They wore the traditional bowler hats (made somewhat ridiculous by the compulsory high-vis jackets) but something about their manner suggested to Stanton they weren’t porters at all. Too focused, too likely looking. Stanton had briefed enough security details in his time to know one when he saw one.
Inside the five-hundred-year-old building, however, the peace and serenity of the fusty old College remained. In fact, it felt to Stanton almost as if he was attending a second Christmas Service. A string quartet was playing seasonal music and there was the same atmosphere of whispered reverence. Lines of chairs had been set out before a little lecture platform like pews set before an altar. And once more there were many candles, although these seemed only to increase the gloom, failing entirely to illuminate the beams of the great ceiling, which lowered above them deep in the shadows.
When McCluskey, who had been bustling about with a clipboard, had satisfied herself that everyone was present she led Stanton to the place reserved for him in the centre of the first row in front of the podium. Then she mounted the little platform and turned to address the room.
‘Good evening, everyone, and a merry Christmas to you all,’ she boomed. ‘Each one of you knows the purpose of this gathering save for our newest and last Companion, Captain Hugh ‘Guts’ Stanton, late of the Special Air Service Regiment and renowned webcast celebrity. Captain, your fellow Chronations bid you most welcome.’ There was polite applause, which Stanton did not acknowledge. He did not feel remotely that he had joined any order or that he was a companion to any of these people. ‘Captain Stanton has been very patient with me,’ McCluskey went on. ‘I have told him scarcely half the story, so far being scarcely qualified to do so. I now call upon Amit Sengupta, Lucian Professor of Mathematics here at Cambridge and Newton’s direct successor, to explain the matter further.’
Stanton knew of the corpulent Anglo-Indian academic who now rose from his chair and took the stage. Everybody in Britain knew Sengupta because besides being an eminent physicist he was also, as so many eminent physicists are, an appalling media tart. A man who appeared regularly on news and documentary shows commenting on any matters even remotely related to science and the cosmos. He was always introduced in the most breathless and epic terms as ‘the man who has looked into the eye of God’ or ‘the man who has travelled in his mind to the edge of space and the beginning of time’. Sengupta himself, of course, always affected amused modesty at this sort of hyperbole, looking uncomfortable and claiming that he had in fact only journeyed back as far as fifteen seconds
after
the beginning of time and making it very clear that the first quarter minute of the life of the universe remained as much a mystery to him as it would to his driver or his cook. Professor Sengupta was also a hugely successful writer, having produced a work of ‘popular’ physics called
Time, Space and other Annoying Relatives
, which purported to explain relativity and quantum mechanics to ‘the man in the pub’ and of course didn’t. In scientific circles it was said of Sengupta’s book that it was easier to find a Higgs Boson particle without the assistance of a Hadron Collider than it was to find anyone who’d got past the third page.
The professor waddled up on to the stage like a seal taking possession of a rock. He wore a pinstripe suit beneath his gown and a yellow-spotted bow tie of the type favoured by professors who like to be thought of as a bit mad. On his head was his trademark Nehru hat, to which he had pinned a badge that said ‘Science Rocks’. Sengupta opened his
Two porters were standing at the entrance to the Hall and others had taken up positions around the Great Court. They wore the traditional bowler hats (made somewhat ridiculous by the compulsory high-vis jackets) but something about their manner suggested to Stanton they weren’t porters at all. Too focused, too likely looking. Stanton had briefed enough security details in his time to know one when he saw one.
Inside the five-hundred-year-old building, however, the peace and serenity of the fusty old College remained. In fact, it felt to Stanton almost as if he was attending a second Christmas Service. A string quartet was playing seasonal music and there was the same atmosphere of whispered reverence. Lines of chairs had been set out before a little lecture platform like pews set before an altar. And once more there were many candles, although these seemed only to increase the gloom, failing entirely to illuminate the beams of the great ceiling, which lowered above them deep in the shadows.
When McCluskey, who had been bustling about with a clipboard, had satisfied herself that everyone was present she led Stanton to the place reserved for him in the centre of the first row in front of the podium. Then she mounted the little platform and turned to address the room.
‘Good evening, everyone, and a merry Christmas to you all,’ she boomed. ‘Each one of you knows the purpose of this gathering save for our newest and last Companion, Captain Hugh ‘Guts’ Stanton, late of the Special Air Service Regiment and renowned webcast celebrity. Captain, your fellow Chronations bid you most welcome.’ There was polite applause, which Stanton did not acknowledge. He did not feel remotely that he had joined any order or that he was a companion to any of these people. ‘Captain Stanton has been very patient with me,’ McCluskey went on. ‘I have told him scarcely half the story, so far being scarcely qualified to do so. I now call upon Amit Sengupta, Lucian Professor of Mathematics here at Cambridge and Newton’s direct successor, to explain the matter further.’
Stanton knew of the corpulent Anglo-Indian academic who now rose from his chair and took the stage. Everybody in Britain knew Sengupta because besides being an eminent physicist he was also, as so many eminent physicists are, an appalling media tart. A man who appeared regularly on news and documentary shows commenting on any matters even remotely related to science and the cosmos. He was always introduced in the most breathless and epic terms as ‘the man who has looked into the eye of God’ or ‘the man who has travelled in his mind to the edge of space and the beginning of time’. Sengupta himself, of course, always affected amused modesty at this sort of hyperbole, looking uncomfortable and claiming that he had in fact only journeyed back as far as fifteen seconds
after
the beginning of time and making it very clear that the first quarter minute of the life of the universe remained as much a mystery to him as it would to his driver or his cook. Professor Sengupta was also a hugely successful writer, having produced a work of ‘popular’ physics called
Time, Space and other Annoying Relatives
, which purported to explain relativity and quantum mechanics to ‘the man in the pub’ and of course didn’t. In scientific circles it was said of Sengupta’s book that it was easier to find a Higgs Boson particle without the assistance of a Hadron Collider than it was to find anyone who’d got past the third page.
The professor waddled up on to the stage like a seal taking possession of a rock. He wore a pinstripe suit beneath his gown and a yellow-spotted bow tie of the type favoured by professors who like to be thought of as a bit mad. On his head was his trademark Nehru hat, to which he had pinned a badge that said ‘Science Rocks’. Sengupta opened his
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