It took me seven and half hours to drive from London to Durham. I hate driving. The constant need for concentration, the traffic jams. On trains one can read, work, and, above all, sleep. I listened to the news two or three times, it was full of depressing talk of strikes on the railways and in the air. Even my CD of Gregorian Chant couldn’t provide the soothing effect required when faced with another crawl around Wetherby.

Finally I arrived and drove straight to the Cathedral. Luckily although past six it was still open and I sat gratefully at the back. However often I go back, it never changes; the same stark Norman grandeur, the twilight lit cloister, some of the choir practising in the distance. What interests me about religion is not the endless theological disputes but the numerous moments like this when one has the sudden sense of being in the presence of God.

Later that evening I had another sensation of time standing still. I went to a student play at the university theatre on the Old Bailey. I had last been in this room forty years before when I had directed, in a rather hapless way, The Importance of Being Earnest. Like the cathedral, nothing, from the furniture to the colour scheme, seemed to have changed. It was a sensation of being ghosts in time. The buildings stay, we move on and pass away. The students were the same as forty years ago, with shorter hair. We had moved on. They had stayed.