For if you punt upriver on the Cam from Cambridge you get to the meadows of Grantchester, a hamlet immortalised in Rupert Brooke's poem "The Old Vicarage at Grantchester" which ends:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
So the correct answer as Chris pointed out was 2:50, otherwise known as ten to three.
There is something very quintessentially English about the meadows, they seem unchanged through the centuries. You could imagine the medieval peasants joking as they worked the fields for a feast for King Henry VI to celebrate the founding of Kings College in 1441.
You can picture the young Darwin searching by the river bank, his eyes gleaming with excitement as he finds a rare beetle, completely oblivious to a future filled with great discoveries and voyages.
They would have shared these pastures with a fighter ace from the Battle of Britain, spending a day's leave with his sweet-heart, lying on his back to inspect the sky with the eye of an expert.
And us, who went to college here and meet once a year to practice our punting skills on the river "the water sweet and cool".
I hope like the true England of Aslan's land it remains like that for ever:
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
