IN BATH ABBEY

I had the rarest opportunity to sit in Bath Abbey the other day, right in the middle of my university city.

I heard Christmas carols floating on the air, from eighteen Christmases ago. Catherine squeezed my hand as the choir sang, and voices fluttered into the magnificent vaulted roof. Joyful all ye nations rise, through the stained-glass window skies, above the clouds and down the years, to find me, back in tears.

A kindly woman with a dog-collar on smiled at me. I smiled back and blinked the moistness out of my eyes.

There’s always an atmosphere in cathedrals. And especially this one. The prayer-soaked stones seem to radiate the history, the power and the anointing of hundreds of years of worship. The delicate craftsmanship of columns, arches, naves, vaults and windows, calls out from the excellence of men who gave their all to build them. Polished brass sparkles, mahogany glimmers, and the cavernous light is infused with a medieval sort of glory. I love it.

I loved it. That Christmas, the night air was full of a strange sort of hope too. It was the year of the Millennium, and assuming we would all survive Y2K, we were going to graduate, and the Twenty First Century would open out for us, with all its opportunity, and all its promise.

Bath reminds me of all of that, whenever I go back. But just as the memories come back, so does the realisation that no-one is there to know me any more. They’ve gone, and for me, they were the beating heart of the city, and without them, all that’s left is a sort of empty silence.

An empty silence. Catherine looked at me strangely, as though I’d just created the awkwardness out of thin air at the bus stop. I knew in that moment what the score was; I knew the conversation that was coming. I breathed through the silence. The abbey was illuminated with floodlights, each flying buttress casting a deep shadow on those lovely old stones. A yellow clock hung, suspended almost, like the moon, above the west portico.

I sighed. The clock is still there. That temporary bus stop though, is now a full plastic shelter. The grey sky replaced the Christmas night, just as grey hair replaces the dark. The ancient stones were a little more blackened, a little more weathered, and that end-of-Century-I-can-do-anything hope, the unswervable mood of a row of graduating students singing Christmas carols on the cusp of a new millennium, has changed a bit too.

And yet, these stones have seen so much more. My short time is just a blink in the abbey’s long history - just a moment, set against thousands of stories, hundreds of millions of prayers, under billions of gently rolling stars.