A theory

I noticed the newish fence extension to the north of Christchurch Road at reference 1.

Passing it again this morning it occurred to me that the idea was to keep young people out, young people who might be inebriated, wanting a bit of privacy or something.

The fence is not particularly solid, that is to say quite apt to move about in an alarming way if one climbed on it, and the discrete spikes sticking out of the extension at regular intervals would deter many, certainly me. One could quite easily do something quite unpleasant to oneself on one of them, particularly if one had taken drink. Much more discrete than barbed wire or broken bottle glass set in mortar - the technique favoured in Cambridge when I was young. Presumably saving the dons' scouts - a word I remember from our collected 'Morse' - the bother of putting all the bottles out for recycling.

PS: I have had good value out of the biography of Lévi-Strauss of reference 2, first noticed at reference 3, and I shall notice it properly in due course. In the meantime, I have just been struck by this memory of childhood, in the context of his parents being second cousins and with the two families really being one big family: '... Each week they would gather at his paternal grandmother Léa Strauss's house. Once a year she would take the covers of the furniture in the dining room and the family came together for a meal. After lunch they would tour Paris's cemeteries, visiting the graves of their forebears...'. Striking, if just slightly puzzling, as we had previously been told that his paternal great-grandfather was an immigrant from Strasbourg. I wonder now where one digs such stuff up from.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/horton-lane-clockwise.html.

Reference 2: Claude Lévi-Strauss: the poet in the laboratory – Patrick Wilcken – 2010. Page 54 of the Bloomsbury paperback edition of 2011.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/artistic-affairs.html.