Night Punt in Cambridge
It was surreal, suddenly. The world had turned dark sepia, like a washed and overexposed film, all the shapes all blurred and meshed. I didn’t know if I was dreaming or if I was merely a figment of imagination.
King’s College chapel was large to my right, its shape almost silhouetted against a night sky. The spires were softly illuminated by moonlight exposing its ornamentation and its age - like low-light shadows elongating the wrinkles of an old woman’s face. The long grass to my left was blowing gently with a breeze that lifted, then lulled, then lifted again.
I was hovering in between, alone, feeling bodiless on the river, which had turned into something fantastic, otherworldly and wonderful. The light on the water was waltzing with the chapel silhouettes and shadows of bridges, trees and bits of nature; the river was breaking apart into celebratory, dancing specks of light. And there was a mist, ghostly and flirtatious, floating over the water like a translucent, shimmering gauze.
It felt like time had never existed - the starry sky had dark blots of clouds that shape-shifted around the moon, the majestic old spires punctured the landscape, the river seemed to dangle between the past and the present, the foreign and familiar - it was… well, surreal.
Then Amna gave a shout as her punt came crashing into mine. I fell with a laugh from the punter’s ledge down into the punt itself. I pulled myself back up, shook off the water that was dripping down slowly into my sleeve, dropped the pole down again, deep, and pushed.