This last weekend Jane and I went to Cambridge for a special one-day event at my old college, St. John’s.  Champagne in the Combination Room (where, in December 1624, James 1st signed the agreement whereby his son, the future Charles 1st, was to marry Henriette Marie, sister of Louis X111 of France);  a pretty good lunch with some excellent wines in the great Hall, a portrait of a former Johnian, William Wordsworth, in front of me and that of another, William Wilberforce, behind me; a marvellous violin and piano recital in the drawing room of the Master’s Lodge (now featuring a large millefiori ceramic egg of Jane’s which she had all of a sudden decided to donate to the college); and ending up with tea and various cakes and pastries back in the Hall. More than enough for an average day, one would have thought.

And yet all that was only part of the day.

It started after breakfast in our B & B on the Chesterton Road when we read that the 2012 Cambridge Open Studios happened to be on that weekend. Jane immediately started leafing through the brochure and discovered that Elspeth Owen, one of the ceramicists she most admires, was opening her studio in Grantchester, inviting all and sundry to

walk, cycle or punt from Cambridge to [her] beautiful workshop and garden where [she makes] things out of clay, wood, words, photography, dust and weather.

Elspeth was happy for us to arrive at 10.30, half an hour before the official opening time. But since this was a mere hour and a half before the first College event we couldn’t really use any of her suggested modes of transport: no bikes; punting would take too long; and as I hadn’t walked to Grantchester in over 50 years I wasn’t sure of the way.

Eventually we took a taxi, arriving about a quarter of an hour early, which was just as well since her place took some finding.  A tiny sign showed where you had to squeeze through a hedge and make your way gingerly along an overgrown, slightly muddy path to the old barn which she uses as her workshop.

All I knew of Elspeth’s work was the delicate bowl on the left of the picture above, which Jane bought many years ago and which has managed to survive the move from Waterloo to the Chilterns with equanimity. This piece (like the two others in the photograph) is known as a ‘pinchpot’, the most basic form of pottery, made by taking a ball of clay and hollowing it out until the desired shape is formed.

Of course, there’s more to it than just that. Some potters, as Jane explains in her Colour in Clay (Crowood Press, 1st edition 1998), will add colour to the clay itself by making a well in the centre of the ball of clay while it is still plastic, then will ease the pigment in, folding little pieces over to meld with the surrounding clay before wedging more vigorously.

Once the pot has been carefully shaped (as Elspeth explains on her website www.imaginedcorners.net)

Layers of coloured slip are painted on, the surfaces are burnished and the work is low-fired to a temperature of about 1000c. Sometimes I will then smoke or second fire the pot. Finally everything is lightly polished with beeswax.

And, as Jane points out in her book,

Elspeth is excited about the fire’s interaction with her work, enjoying the spontaneous and magical way in which the flames illustrate the surface with their own designs, using the colorants as a palette, and leaving their marks sealed within the clay’s surface.

She feeds her fires interesting food to keep it excited, packing in such organic matter as seaweed, salt and dung which interacts selectively with the oxides in the body.  The fired pieces remind one of the sea, the earth and the landscape, eroded through history and time.

The results are stunning, and the photo of her three pots will give you some idea of what she is capable of. What you can’t imagine - just looking at the three pots lined up tidily on our shelf - is the extraordinary  effect of walking into her studio barn and being confronted by hundreds of pieces of her work, at all heights, on tables, desks and shelves, hanging from beams and fastened to the walls; peering from ancient assemblages of cobwebs, lined up along a ten foot high dividing wall, poking out from the middle of an ancient log-pile rising one log deep up the wall in the adjacent room, its saw dust clogging up yet more cobwebs.

And though there are many pinch-pots - some as small as thimbles, others rounded off as rattles enclosing dozens of tiny beads - she has also made many examples of work where the clay is thinly flattened out, or curved, often linked to various forms of writing, or placed in multiple sequences or mixed into assemblages with all kinds of found or recycled objects.  I wanted to buy the whole barn and plop it down in our garden.

But it was 11.00 o’clock, two more potential buyers had arrived, and we had to settle for the two smallish pots, also in the photo. We had noticed a footpath pointing towards Cambridge just a few feet away from Elspeth’s place, and she said we would make it to John’s in less than an hour.

And so we did, drenched, if not to the skin, at least as near as dammit. The part of Jane’s frock extending below her hooded waterproof top was clinging to her thighs, and the rain had soaked right through the part of my raincoat not protected by my umbrella.  But by the time we had finished lunch we had dried out pretty well and we decided to spend the hour before the music recital by accepting the invitation, pinned up on the screens at the end of the Hall, to go to the Junior Common Room to watch the Wimbledon final.

Yes, of course we had recorded it at home. But since we wouldn’t make it back until the next day there was a good chance that we’d find out the result in some way or another. (Remember the episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? where they are desperately trying not to know the result of the England match?). So we made our way to the JCR, where the match had been on for ten minutes or so, and were pleased to discover that Murray had broken Federer in the opening game.  Half an hour or so later we set off for the Master’s Lodge, delighted that Murray had won his first set in the final of a Grand Slam.

You know the rest.  On our return things had started to go downhill, and by the time we got back to the JCR, after a pretty cursory tea, Murray was starting to struggle.

Still, he did make it to the final, the first time a British player had done so since 1938. And (unlike what happened in The Likely Lads) the new roof meant that the match wasn’t rained off.  And there’s always next year.  And we did end the day with two beautiful pots. Oh yes, and one of the spherical ceramic rattles which I am giving to my daughter Celine for her birthday next week.