I’ve been catching up with friends over the past few days. It has been lovely to meet an old colleague from my theatre days in her home town of Cheltenham, to spend some time together driving through the Cotswold villages and on to Cirencester and Malmesbury and to finally have a chance to visit the splendidly revamped Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Yesterday we headed – via a hasty glimpse of Gloucester Cathedral – to meet more friends in Hereford who had come over from Wales to see Mappa Mundi, explore Hereford Cathedral and have a mooch about the city. We loved Hereford Cathedral with its shrines to St Thomas of Hereford and St Ethelbert (and the recent art commissions are very well chosen) but thought the Mappa Mundi and the chained library displays were disappointing. We hadn’t intended to stay for evensong but were very glad we did when we heard the fine singing of Tallis and Grieg from the Cathedral’s choir.
