Mappa Tuesday

We went to Hereford (after a lazy start). It’s a bit like Godalming only with a Cathedral - the liveliest place we saw was Greggs when we succumbed to our first vegan sausage roll in ages. Actually it was more like that town in Simon Pegg’s The World’s End - you felt like the people had been replaced by alien plastic imitations with half smiles (at best).

I’m probably being unfair and we just caught it on a bad day. And in any case it was worth the trip to see the chained library and the Mappa Mundi in the cathedral; god that is beautiful and fascinating. The only way I can describe it is to ask you to imagine a medieval mind map etched on to an oily animal skin, and packed full of exotic and contemporary references to places, peoples, fantastic beasts and men with impossibly large penises. Brilliant. Google it.

The Cathedral does have a lovely walled garden which we lingered in for a while. Then tracked down the house that TSM’s grandmother lived in when she came to Britain, having left Eastern Europe with her parents between the wars and arriving in Hereford via Bristol. It is now a hairdressers but the manager was fascinated to talk to us about TSM’s personal family history. And we saw a lot of old fashioned prams pushed by women in old fashioned clothes. Apart from they were wearing trainers.

At the festival we saw a panel about supporting refugees; this year is the 80th anniversary of the kinder transport and Lord Alf Dubbs (who escaped Prague as a boy aged 6) and Nicolas Winterton’s daughter were there. Also the woman who started Help Refugees in 2015, a rather astonishing venture which goes some way to restoring your faith in social media. Check them out and donate here

https://helprefugees.org/about/

Unfortunately it wasn’t well chaired or focused. 6/10.

We then saw Paul Boateng and Neil Pearson in full on bibliophile mode, talking about life and their experiences of reading and loving books; much more interesting than I’d expected although a little bit contrived. 7/10.

Extraordinary and captivating sunset on the drive home in the evening.

Another great day. Little collage by way of an extra. Oh and an anniversary note: it was two years ago today that we went vegan.