July 3, 2015
Clifford, England: Land of hope and glory
GOOD GUY, Elgar. Karen hadn't heard of him - "who is he, anyway?" - but she did know his most famous composition. It's one of his Pomp and Circumstance marches, generally known by the words added later and which he never liked. They start:
Land of hope and glory Mother of the free...
Many British people would like it as their national anthem instead of the sometimes stirring but generally dull tune they have at the moment. In America, it's apparently the music played at diploma ceremonies... which is odd given its indivisible link with the old colonial power.
Anyway, old Eddie was a cyclist and proud of it. He used to roam the Malvern hills, where he spent much of his life, before getting home and knocking off another tune. When he wrote Land of hope and glory, by the way, he showed he was a good deal less stuffy than his Victorian era by telling friends he had "a tune that'll really knock'em out."
How does he come into this story? Well, we were joined this morning by another friend, Andy, who lives in and therefore knows Hereford well. We rode there over some demanding hills and along narrow lanes with high hedges and he pointed out where Edgar had lived and at his statue, complete with bicycle and noble pose, beside the cathedral.
We left our bikes against the ancient walls with the assurance of a gardener that "your bikes won't be half-inched, don't worry."
If Karen heard it, she would have been mystified. It was British rhyming slang. Anybody born on the island knows that "half-inched" means "pinched". Obvious, really.
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We wandered through the cathedral's ancient library, where the books have always been chained in place because books were valuable back then. We looked at the Mappa Mundi, a 13th-century depiction of the world with Jerusalem at its centre. It's not all that big - about a metre and a half square - but it's astonishing for its detail, with 420 towns and cities all in about the right place, and filled in with Biblical events, plants, animals and no manner of fanciful creatures that people back then assumed existed where foreigners were.
In all, we spent a good couple of hours there.
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We had lunch in the cemetery of a large church with a funeral bier, then pressed on along a road that kept coughing and rearing up before reaching Clifton.
And there we had a puzzle.
Because we never quite got to Clifford. I asked a man washing his car. "There's Clifford all round here," he said.
And it's true: the signpost across the road pointed in two directions. And, to complete the confusion, our campground lay along a third way. An idyllic place it was, too, with views across the countryside for as far as anyone would care to look, and a garden for coffee and cake, and all run by a woman called Véronique and her English husband. She's been in Britain for 26 years.
In a back room, her daughter was talking French to her visiting penfriend.
"I don't really miss France," Véronique said. "Now I'm taken for English there because I have an English accent.
"'You speak very good French for une anglaise,' they say. But there are words in French that I've forgotten now and there are lots of modern expressions that I don't know."
She's an artist and finds England easier. Far less red tape, she says. She and her husband have run the campground for two years.
"The people in the village were reticent at first, but then there are always people who'll object to anything, aren't there? They don't want change."
She smiled and shrugged.
Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 1,225 km (761 miles)
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