Town Not Gown? Gown Not Town?

So it's the 36th Cambridge beer festival this week, the oldest continuously running beer festival in the country and the second largest beer festival outside London. A festival of beards, tankards, cheese, pork pies, morris dancing and last but not least murky pints of old head stomper, badger botherer, stoat fancier and whatever other whimsical names have been attached to the alcoholic weapons of head destruction they have on offer this year.

Although I'm a lager man at heart I always like to head down for a spot of people watching, some quality cheese and and a few pints of worryingly strong continental "biers".

Every year the festival has an theme, this years is Town and Gown a subject close to our hearts at Cambridge T-Shirts. They have carrried this motif to the beer glasses.. The gown one shows the character drinking beer with a mortarboard, playing cricket and rugby, and with a spade. The locals one shows the mascot drinking beer. Is this a metaphor for student life? Who knows?

Anyway while we are on this subject it seems like an appropriate opportunity to recomend you abotu a couple of our choice local T-Shirts:

For those of you of a Town persuasion we have this lovely little beauty where you can proudly declare your allegiance to Town Not Gown.

For those of you on the other side of Reality Checkpoint we proudly present this other tasty T-Shirty morsal allowing you to proudly tell people you are Gown Not Town

This other Cambridge

So a while ago I got name checked on a local web-site We're All Neighbours, not entirely in a positive way mind, it was part of a thread on "Why is Cambridge Shite", my t-shirt site was held up as an example of the "pretension.... and overly inflated ego..." of the city as a whole, which was pretty funny. Of course the beauty of other peoples pop-psychology analysis of you is that they might just be right, doing anything in public, and the Internet is pretty public, does require a certain amount of raging ego!

Anyway it got me belly button gazing for at least five minutes and trying to justify me to my head, and that is obviously where blogging closes the circle given that it's main purpose as far as I can see is to allow geeks like me to whinge about how the world is so very, very cruel to them and how they are going down the bottom of the garden to eat worms....

So why did I start the Cambridge T-Shirts site? Well I had been churning out t-shirts in a variety of guises for a while, mainly for my own amusment/ego, most of the stuff on sale said "nothing to me about My life" and the more obsessed I became with shirt design the more I started to notice the Cambridge shirts. The visitor to Cambridge could be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion from the visible evidence that the only thing in Cambridge is the University. They would not be entirely wrong, to a large extent the town has and is defined by the University, yet at the same time the students are only 20% of the population, outside the reality Bubble there is another 80% of the town who sometimes seem to not exist... except they do because they are the people I work with, live with, play with and drink with. The same people who post on Internet bulletin boards asking why Cambridge is so shite?

This antipathy that sometimes bubbles up between the 80/20 divide is no new thing, you can even go on tours within cambridge to discover the "Town not gown", it's even been around long enough that even wikipedia has a page on it, which makes it fact with a capital Fac.

Anyway as ever on to where this blog always ends up, trying to flog you some brightly coloured and mildly entertaining coverage for the top half of your body. In the spirit of equal opportunity we present something for both the 20 and the 80.

Until next time, ego a go-go!