Elgar’s bicycle

This is a very strange feeling. The cello case is on my back, instead of on the bicycle. And I’m on foot.

The three cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester are fairly close to each other – the three corners of a 25 mile triangle. I’m staying in Newent, which is not far off the centre, so I was going to enjoy the luxury of two nights in one place, and “commute” to Hereford.

But I’m a bit like Oscar Wilde – and most people I know – in being able to resist most things, except temptation. So when Angela suggests driving to Hereford and back, it just sounds like a remarkably good idea.

The two days to and from Oxford have seriously tired me, and I tell myself it wouldn’t be a good idea to crash out at this stage.

And here, outside Hereford cathedral, is a very stern looking Edward Elgar. He isn’t even looking at the cello which once – and not very well – sat in front of an orchestra and played his magnificently wonderful concerto. He’s just rather pointedly leaning on his bicycle, with its nicely extended front wheel like mine, and raising a bushy eyebrow in questioning rebuke.

I try to explain that the absence of bicycle is not failure, or cheating, or anything else like that. On a pilgrimage, Colin was telling me earlier over coffee and cake, you make rules of observance. But you don’t follow them slavishly. The slavish following of rules is an abdication of responsibility. And there’s something about a pilgrimage which emphasises our own taking of responsibility.

Pilgrimage – I’m agreeing with Colin – is a model of life; we have autonomy, we have agency. If we surrender that, in order to follow unbending rules, we are reduced.

Of course, this too isn’t an unbending rule. On a pilgrimage you slightly step outside of the mainstream; in daily normal life our autonomy is bounded, moderately constrained, by our living in family and society. It’s a balance.

Is old Edward convinced? I’m not sure. But I take my hat off to Colin, who performed his pilgrimage around the 42 cathedrals entirely by public transport.

So I explain to the audience in Hereford’s Lady Chapel that the bicycle is OK, even though it’s not here. That seems to me a sufficient explanation, and no-one asks further question.

I’ve become used to people walking out of my performance. I try not to take it personally. They haven’t paid, so they don’t feel a need to get their money’s worth. They perhaps sat down anyway just out of curiosity, and curiosity satisfied they can carry on. Fair enough.

I worked out yesterday there’s one point in the performance when I can guarantee there will be a walk out. The fourth of the Seven Last Words – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me – is a turning point. Theologically it’s the separation of the inseparable, God and Christ. Humanly, it’s the lowest point, the overwhelming realisation that it’s meaningless. It’s all been for nothing.

So my poem is bleak. There is no God, it declares. That causes offence. And then I play Bach’s fifth Sarabande – the only movement in the whole Six Suites which is just a single melodic line – in a bare and empty style. At that point there’s always someone ready to call it a day.

I didn’t make the connection until yesterday. So today I’m approaching the point with some nervousness. What if no-one walks out at that point? Will that indicate a failure to get the point across? But true to form there is a whispered exit. A perverse success.

Afterwards Verity invites me to see the Mappa Mundi. The big circular parchment was made in about 1300, and it’s been in Hereford cathedral ever since.

The first thing I think when I see it is how far our knowledge of geography has advanced since 1300, and what a boon to travel is the GPS. But then I realise North isn’t at the top. East is at the top, being the important direction. And it isn’t simply a geographical representation. It’s a story.

Here’s Jerusalem, in the centre. Here’s the Tower of Babel – bigger than anything else, but on the point of collapse. Here’s Africa, uncharted, falling off the edge. Most of the Latin is hard to make sense of, but some of the names are recognisable. That dark sprawling splodge is the Mare Mediterranea, the Mediterranean, the sea in the middle of the land. China, Russia, India, are all there.

Now it tells me the opposite of what I first thought: what an enormous geographical knowledge there was 700 years ago. And how inextricably mixed up are knowledge and legend, fact and explanation, story and history. What’s changed?