Tea cosies on Dartmoor

It’s a lovely sunny day. I’m sitting in a beautiful Devon garden, before breakfast, trying to feel positive about it, and not quite succeeding.

I’m full of doubts about the day – a Sunday performance in a big cathedral, and then a ride across the top end of Dartmoor. What could be better? But I’m focussing on all the wrong things.

Even a 15-minute live interview with BBC Radio Cornwall can’t assuage the day’s doubts.

It’s half an hour into Exeter, and I get there just in time for the service. There’s a bevy of CCR cyclists – including, I discover later, the Canon Precentor with whom I had long correspondence about today – and I immediately feel left out. They are to be fulsomely and formally blessed at the end of the service.

The service includes a parade of six gold-robed clergy, a big supporting cast, much incense and choir-singing in Latin. The Dean preaches a sermon of congratulation to the young cleric who was elevated to the priesthood this week. I don’t belong here.

There’s no mention of the Pilgrim Cello performance in the service sheet notices, or anywhere else, and it’s a surprise to hear my name in the prayers. That hasn’t happened before.

After the service, which a Methodist member of the congregation describes to me as “pure pantomime”, a verger says I’m to play out in the cloister. What about chairs? I can get you a chair, he says. What about for the audience? Well, we haven’t advertised it, he says.

I take his shrug as permission to make my own arrangements, and set up in front of the nave altar, where a small audience is already gathering. It would be polite, I feel, to ask the still-robed Dean if he’s going to give any introduction. You’re the cellist, he tells me with an authoritative gesture. That’s the Canon Precentor’s job, and he’s gone off cycling to Truro.

This is the first place where I haven’t even been able to play a preparatory scale before the performance. It’s straight into the Meditation, to an audience suddenly of 50 people.

When I’m playing, all the doubts evaporate. This is what I’m doing it for. The attention from the audience, a few tears near the end, and the things people want to say afterwards – all this tells me I am in the right place.

Barbara shows me where to buy a pastie the size of a handbag, and so it’s after 2pm before I can set off on the day’s cycling.

I knew it would be hilly. The GPS tells me the climb out of Exeter will be 797 feet, the first of 12 climbs. Periodically it issues the ultimate rebuke – a little trill to accompany the information that the ride has been “auto-paused”; it can’t detect enough movement to register.

And there aren’t proper excuses to stop until I’m up on Dartmoor. Suddenly I’m having to brake for wild ponies on the road, to admire avenues of ancient twisted trees, to park the bike and climb up to a ruined castle, and – after the steepest hill of them all – for a tearoom unexpectedly open at 5.20 on a Sunday afternoon.

Such a place just has to be patronised (as long as you don’t patronise us too much, the lady says) and its collection of tea cosies properly admired.

Sitting outside, in the cooling air, I talk to Chris. I wonder why his T-shirt advertises the East Africa Wildlife Organisation. He tells me he’s never been to Africa – it was a present from a friend’s holiday. He was born in Tasmania – I said his accent didn’t seem authentically Devonian – but he’s lived in the same house, he says, pointing, for 62 years. And in 62 years I’ve never cycled up that hill; it’s not possible.

I don’t have a choice. I physically can’t push 50kg up a hill; I have to stay on the pedals, whether it’s possible or not.

Bridestowe, where I’m heading, is pronounced with three syllables, he tells me. We’ve just merged our cricket club with theirs, he says. How, I ask him, can you play cricket where there’s no piece of flat land bigger than a double bed?

We agree that it’s amazing what you can do if you try. I’ve climbed 4000ft today, and the pub is going to stop serving food very soon. I can’t lie down just yet.