The Yorkshire Vet: Special memories and special people - Julian Norton
A few weeks ago, I was back in Cambridge. The main reason was to attend a celebratory event called the Foundress Feast. According to menu and judging by the sumptuousness of the spread, it was indeed a feast. Its purpose was to commemorate the founding of Pembroke College in Cambridge. Back in 1347, Mary De St Pol (the Countess of Pembroke) granted a license from her relative King Edward III for the college. This was to celebrate England’s recapturing of Calais during the Hundred Years’ War. Thank goodness current wars don’t usually last for one hundred years. I was very grateful that Mary De St Pol decided to found this college, for it afforded me a home for my six years at Cambridge while I studied to become a vet.
I had a wonderful time, meeting some amazing people and learning from the best. Alumni are invited back every five years and, as well as celebrating the Foundress, it’s an opportunity to catch up with old friends. Happy (and quite drunken) as these events are, there is always a degree of sadness for me. I happened to be seated right in front of a painting of one of those friends, albeit from a different year group to mine. The subtle but beautiful smile of Jo Cox shone across the assembled crowd of former students, reminding everyone of her famous words: We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us. How right she was.
Events like this are humbling, since so many people there were and are high-flyers. One old friend had flown in from Washington specially for the event, working as she does for the Foreign Office. She looked more tired and weary than back in her student days, but I guessed that we probably all did. She showed me some photos of us as undergraduates, which included a now famous TV presenter, who frequented our local pub. There were professors in abundance and even the founders of a new company which supplies energy and seems to be taking the country by storm.
As always, I was keen to maximise the use of my time in Cambridge and had arranged to visit the School of Veterinary Medicine. There was more to do on this trip than just socialise and reminisce. I had arranged to visit a veterinary ophthalmologist called David Williams who is a leader in the field. As well as being a superb clinician, David is as passionate about teaching and sharing his knowledge as he is eccentric.
I arrived to find the vet school in a very upbeat mood, having recently survived a review over its future. The proposed closure seemed a daft idea, as the school provides some of the best education available. Although the fact that the site was now surrounded on all sides by huge, modern science buildings gave the obvious impression that the vet school was being swamped. When I was studying there, “it was all fields”. There was a small and rather ramshackle farm called Murton Hall where horses lived for students to learn from, and ride if they wished. One had a huge heart murmur and was wheeled out (not literally) regularly for auscultation practise. Now, the farm was replaced by a megalithic building, glistening white and silver, for physics research- the epitome of modernity.
In the clinic, I met David, two students who were assisting and a patient called Blue who had a growth inside his eye. My job was simply to observe the surgery, which was very relaxing without any stress nor worry, for a change. Everything went smoothly, Blue was cured and the students had learnt a new skill. Without the need for a shiny white new building.