Colour co-ordination

I stop for coffee in a place called Quorn. At first I can’t work out if that’s the name of the village, or what they want their customers to eat with their coffee – which doesn’t sound like a good idea at all. Two small boys are being treated to very adult sized milk shakes, topped with an excess of ice-cream. “What would you rate this out of ten?” the elder asks the younger afterwards, “I’d give it a five.” I didn’t hear the reply, but that’s a pretty demanding customer, I’d say.

There are more of these cycle path barriers, and more swearing. A dog walker watches me struggle. I ask him if he might help me for a moment, and he declines the invitation, while his bulldog growls at me. They are both satisfactorily taken aback when I growl, quite ferociously, in return, and I win the battle with the barrier.

There’s a comprehensively closed road, but the very narrow footpath is still passable. A lady steps aside to let me pass, and congratulates me on the control I seem to have over such a beast of burden.

Then a pretty canal into Leicester, past a handsome building that seems to be made out of bubble wrap, and turns out to be the National Space Centre, to the recently refurbished cathedral with underfloor heating.

The heating definitely isn’t needed today, and anyway there’s an enormous glowing sphere dominating the space, which must, surely, be giving off heat. This is Mars, an installation by Luke Jerram, which is accompanied by a soundtrack of – allegedly – Martian storms.

Mars is slightly stealing the limelight from Richard III, recently translated from his previous resting place under a Leicester carpark. Overlooking his memorial there are new and beautiful stained glass windows, one of which features, allegedly, the M1.

A tourist, distracted by all this, trips over Richard III, and bleeds dramatically onto the patient King, activating an equally dramatic First Aid response that seems on the verge of shutting down the entire cathedral.

There’s time for a brief lunch across the road in the Nagarjunar Buddhist Centre, with verger Les, still in his black cassock, and beginning to look overheated in the sunshine. Then the Meditation before a small audience in the pretty chapel where the altar covering exactly matches the cello case.

The chapel is small, and there isn’t room for the paintings in their usual place on the floor in front of me. Instead they are ranged on the altar behind, which I think is a good arrangement.

In the audience is Binta, from Walsall, whom I met nine years ago when I crashed her 12-year-old son’s birthday party (long story) and haven’t seen since. She’s brought me a box of onion bhajis. Lovely.

I love Leicester. Its multi-culturalism is magnificent. I remember the Jain temple, which I haven’t time to visit. I’m told that Leicester also has the largest Sikh gurdwara in the country – a claim shared with my old home town of Wolverhampton – but I haven’t time to see that either. 33 miles this morning, and another 27 this afternoon – miles to go before I sleep.