Do you actually play the cello?

Edmund was an English king, who came to a sticky end in a confrontation with some Vikings. That misfortune quickly earned him a sainthood, and his shrine became one of the richest in England. The ruins of the abbey, that I can see from my window in Kate and Matthew’s lovely house, cover acres.

I was intending to accompany Matthew to morning prayer, but the flint ruins are too strong an enticement. I spend half an hour among the roses and ruins. If there was more time I would have sat for a moment.

But there’s a long way to go today, and after farewells to Sarah, and James, who were so welcoming yesterday, I pedal out of Bury St. Edmunds feeling utterly blessed. Only the Peace Garden, dedicated to the 57 victims of a massacre of Jews here in 1190, reminds me that not all the world is happy.

More beautiful flint churches, some with striking round towers. A few little hills, mostly inconsequential. I’m not sure what County I’m in, but the Suffolk flint seems to be gradually giving way to Essex clap-boarding. Picturesque ruined barns.

Thinking it’s about coffee time, I find myself in Clare, facing another of these grand churches. The churchwarden hails me from across the road, and her husband tells me, “That’s a butcher’s bike; I used to deliver groceries on one of those, a hundred years ago.”

They direct me to a highly rated coffee house, where the town’s dog walkers congregate in numbers. Afterwards, in the church, a visitor with a large camera asks unexpected questions: “How do you decide where to go next?” “Do you actually play the cello?” A parishioner in a floppy and flowery hat says she thought from a distance that was a canoe.

I spend too long in Clare, and nearly ride straight past Clare Priory, just outside the town. But something about the sign tells me to stop: “Clare Priory. Founded 1248, dissolved 1538, restored 1953.”

As I’m taking a photo of a Madonna and child through a dusty window, 80-year old Fr. John, on a long sabbatical from parish work, comes out of the ancient door of the pretty pink-dormered building.

He wants to see the bike, and talks about riding a Claude Butler from Botchergate in Carlisle to Penrith, trying to do the 17 mile journey in an hour.

Before long he’s showing me the ancient building – a door with its saintly images hacked off with an adze when the King’s men were coming; an image on a sagging beam of the Clare Legend; a Heritage funded new church growing out of the flint wall.

The legend is of a prior who sold his soul to the devil, and died by falling down the stairs. Ah, Faust. So then we’re talking about Faust, and Thomas Mann, and the temptation for the ordained to think that God considers them special, and Original Sin (“Not that I believe in Original Sin, of course,” says Fr. John). Isn’t the original sin, he asks, the belief that I’m always right?

We could have talked all day. So now I’m pedalling quite hard to get to Chelmsford in time for an after-Evensong performance. I was ordained in this cathedral, about 100 years ago, but I don’t remember it like this – light and lovely – though it must be me that’s changed, not the cathedral.

One couple have driven 50 miles to hear this, after seeing Look East yesterday. There’s an attentive audience, who all want to hang around afterwards, while the verger is discreetly trying to move us out of the building so he can go home for his tea.