Jenny's mind again wandered as the group made slow progress over the ice, all repetitive movement, breathsound, and echo.
She considered how the rolling landscape here recalled in form the gentle meadowscape of Cambridgeshire. Palette aside, Cambridge too was apparently flat, in a way that seemed to approach a platonic ideal for most who arrived there. The greatest incline in the city itself, on Magdalen Road, was largely imperceptible. There was no hill-top campus, like Oxford's Headington Hill or Bristol's Vale Street, to provide a neat metaphor for hungover students of the past to justify the inevitable variation on the per ardua of their university's motto. Time, familiarity, and an absence of external reference would nevertheless eventually afford residents a sensitivity to the variation of relief between the locally contracted minima and maxima. Whether by lift or familiarity, it seemed that over time, you grew closer to the ground.
Just outside the city of Cambridge, however, were the Gogmagog hills. Those chalk forms provided the tallest peaks in the region, at a maximum of around 75 metres. It was hard not to compare the great cliff before them to those hills now, both impossible to consider as anything other than titanic in the context of their surroundings. Indeed, this ice shelf was likely only a few hundred metres from ground level. The greatest difference being that they were not now in the midst of a city, all cramped ancient streets folding in, and outwardly interceded by the vestiges of conurbane residential estates, factories, and latecomer research institutes.
She wondered if the Gogmagog hills loomed, ever present, over those people of the ancient, unobstructed Cambridge. They were, after all, named for their being the rumoured gravesite of the Cornish giant Gogmagog, who was killed following the loss of an ancient wrestling match. This seemed to stretch credulity to Jenny, given Cambridgeshire was on the opposite end of the country to Cornwall. She supposed, however, that to a giant, the relation might be more akin to the kind of relative exile people in Birmingham, where she grew up, used to imply when they said someone had been "sent to Coventry."
Coventry itself was now a popular tourist destination, centred around a series of three apposite cathedral ruins, surrounded by a complex network of city motorways. The motorways were dreamed up by a group of mid-20th century urban planners who had continued to be divinely inspired by the worst excesses of the petrol-obsessed futurist artistic bent long after World War 2 had ended. A particularly diabolical choice for the rebuilding of a city that had been largely destroyed in the course of that war, it was the kind of macro-scale expression of historic irony that was in fashion amongst tourists to Earth.
"Sent to Coventry" had, in recent years, become a popular slang term amongst the British cohort of earthbound, now referring to those who had gone to space - distances far greater than the few hundred miles between Cornwall and Cambridgeshire. The phrase encoded some sense of the inscrutability of the leavers' purposes to those who chose to remain, while also providing the necessary ironic precursor for memetic genesis in its reference to the notion that Birmingham, rarely a desirable destination for most British and the butt of many jokes, was somewhere you might prefer to remain. Especially, Jenny thought, because the same city planners had their way with the roads in Birmingham, too.