The mother church

I don’t think there is a more magnificent cathedral in England than Canterbury, the first English cathedral, dating from early in the seventh century.

And better than some of England’s other grandest cathedrals, Canterbury manages to be friendly, and welcoming, and full of spiritual intensity. You don’t feel that tourism has swamped it; the tourists – at least today – have the air of pilgrims.

There are 24 chapels here, I discover, and the early morning services rotate around them. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the cathedral police, after carefully stowing my bike in the Archbishop’s garage, direct me to the wrong one.

Bishop Rose, the Bishop of Dover, whom I’ve known a very long time, is taking the service, in the chapel of St. Anselm. But if you ask me now to pinpoint that chapel on a plan of the cathedral, I couldn’t do it.

After the service the cathedral doesn’t officially open for another hour, but with permission I walk slowly around it, in the extraordinary silence. My breath seems to echo. The stillness is like that of a mountain. Only the spot where Thomas Beckett was murdered in 1170 seems to cry out. You can almost see the blood still on the floor.

I was due to perform the Meditation at 12.00 in the Chapter House, but the cathedral notices say it’s 1.15, in the East Crypt. So that’s what it had better be, almost underneath Anthony Gormley’s 2010 sculpture, “Transport”, made from nails from a repaired transept roof, among stone pillars and arches carved in 1220, and in sight of two Saxon piers here for safe-keeping.

It’s a lovely and wonderful place to play, where a sit-down audience is supplemented by a steady and slow procession of pilgrims. The performance is received in absolute silence, except for the lawn mowing outside and just above head height. Afterwards there is fulsome applause, spontaneously repeated after Bishop Rose’s warm blessing and extravagant hug. I don’t normally, I said, greet a bishop like this; but I’ve known Rose a long long time.