Property News · November 5, 2011

A working life: the university porter


Part mentor, part policeman, Colin Maxted loves every minute of his job as a Cambridge college porterIn a narrow Cambridge street opposite Sainsbury’s is a wall of elderly cement and behind that is a secrecy of gardens, cloisters and Elizabethan quads. Presiding over this hidden world is Colin Maxted, who considers himself the luckiest man in East Anglia. “I recently came off night duty,” he says, “and I thought, who would believe that, while they were sleeping, I’d discovered a dwarf in a wardrobe.”Life as a Cambridge college porter is an invigorating melange of the mad and the mundane. Keys and fire hydrants are the principal ingredients in Maxted’s role of steering Sidney Sussex College through an ordinary week. The walls of the cramped porter’s lodge, last renovated in 1948, are fluorescent with keys, 2,500 of them, each with multiple codes and a coloured plastic tag. There is no escaping these keys. Even the tiny back bedroom, where the night porters berth during quiet moments, is stressfully hung with the spares of the spares, as well as with the black college gowns that fellows and students like to store there for reasons no one can remember. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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