Scholars' ghosts?

This is Free School Lane (at the back of Corpus Christi, in Cambridge) as I walked down it on Saturday night. It has looked the same for all the decades I have known it - and pretty similar for centuries before. (OK, without the bicycles.)

It would be equally familiar to EM Forster, Charles Darwin, Samuel Johnson and Isaac Newton. Indeed, Desiderius Erasmus will have walked down here nearly 600 years back.

Imagine who has thought what here, who has fallen in love here, who has quarrelled here, and who has drunk too much and been sick here over the many many years since they built the AngloSaxon church of St Benets at the corner of this street..