Out on the Fen When I first moved to Cambridge in December 1986, I stayed in a rented room and looked out for a flat or small house for sale in the local newspapers. Just think how archaic that is now! You would do all that searching on the internet nowadays. Anyway, in a weekly free newspaper, I think called the Town Crier, I encountered a regular column entitled View from the Fen, by Michael Jeacock. Jeacock was from Derbyshire, where his father, Robert Jeacock, had been first a coalminer and then a policeman. He had worked on the Daily Express in Manchester and London and had somehow ended up working as a freelance journalist and living in Swaffham Bulbeck in East Cambridgeshire, around halfway between Cambridge and Newmarket. He took a great interest in his adopted home of Cambridgeshire and with his wife Janet wrote a guidebook to Cambridge. He was a country boy, deeply conservative in his instincts, and Conservative with a capital C when it came to politics. I don’t ...