CATHEDRAL JOURNEYS

I am a collector. Nothing unusual about that of course: many different people collect many different things for, I suspect, many different reasons. It's not that I'm a conscientious collector: I have many collections half finished, abandoned or discarded. You won't find me at auctions bidding for rare objects or travelling halfway around the world in search of that final illusive piece. And I don't always collect things - some of my collections are experiences, others are places. I've been doing it, off and on, since childhood starting, like many my age, with stamp collecting. We had a stamp-collecting club at my junior school of which I was an enthusiastic member. I had an album which featured all the countries of the world at that time and packets of little adhesive folded squares that you licked and stuck on the back of your stamp. The club would begin with the teacher emptying out a bag of used stamps and then we would then forage around to find stamps that we hadn't already got. I loved the eastern European stamps best because they frequently featured bold pictures of animals and birds in bright colours: the Hungarian stamps bore the name Magyar Posta which sounded very exotic at the time. Of course, the Great Britain pages were absolutely covered with a mixture of school club stamps, stamps from home that I prized off envelopes after soaking them in saucers of water and the odd stamp from a local stamp shop that I'd occasionally visit with my parents on trips to Nottingham. Other pages such as Papua New Guinea and Chile remained stubbornly devoid of any stamps but I was incredibly proud of my collection. It could have become a lifelong passion but then I transferred to secondary school and there was no stamp club. My little book was placed in a drawer, then in the loft and finally in the bin as a new passion, collecting bus tickets, took over.

Sadly, that bus ticket collection has followed the same journey as the stamp book and my Leicester City programme collection and my tiny Heinz baked beans tin collection. The latter came about when my wife and I unpacked our shopping  after a visit to the local supermarket. The tin we'd purchased had the words 'Heinz Alubias Cocidas' on it. Somehow a Spanish consignment had ended on a Midlands supermarket shelf. Such a find could certainly never be consumed and so we put it out on show in our kitchen for all to marvel at. On a holiday to Venice, in addition to taking in the sights of the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and the Grand Canal, we ventured into the little general purpose stores with the sole purpose of adding 'Fagioli Stufati' - roughly translated as stewed beans - to our collection. On our return the newly acquired tin took pride of place next to the Alubidas Cocidas and the pair became three when 'Heinz Gebackene Beanz' arrived after a holiday in Austria. Despite subsequent trips to Russia, Denmark and Czechoslovakia, there were no further additions and the happy trio were finally condemned to the dustbins when we redecorated the kitchen and discovered that despite their cheery blue labels, the tins had corroded and stuck to the windowsill.

The following chapters chart a series of visits that my friend A and I made to collect every one of the 43 Anglican cathedrals in England (and the one on the Isle of Man) over a twelve-year period beginning in the early 1990s. I have attempted to give a flavour of each cathedral and to share some of its history, its significant characters, and the treasures held within. I have tried not to be too repetitive, with many of the buildings having suffered similar fates over the year - fires, tower collapses and destruction, first by Henry VIII's reformation enthusiasts in the 16th century and then the Puritans in the 17th. I am also no architectural expert and so my descriptions of the building styles are straight from information gleaned elsewhere. I hope I haven't got any of my facts wrong - there are rather a lot of them and so it's possible that the odd one may have slipped through. It may be helpful to understand the terminology of a typical Anglican cathedral floor plan before you read on. Put simply, the nave is the bit where the congregation sits and is at the west end of the building. Moving east we come to the choir where, you'll be astounded to discover, the choir sits. Then comes the chancel where the altar is. Running along either side of this nave-choir-chancel structure are aisles and most cathedrals have extensions to the north and south called transepts. All around the edge there is the potential for additional chapels and some cathedrals have space behind the main altar called an ambulatory. There, that's the technical details done.

This book though is not a guide to cathedrals, rather it is the story of a journey that friends took over a number years. It is a tale of little traditions, such as our Telegraph Weekends, our Christmas Shopping Days and our frequently pointless trips to watch Leicester City FC try to win a football match away from home. It is the retelling of disasters and triumphs, of amusing incidents and awkward situations, of countless times when we've agreed and disagreed. I've also dwelt on the many diverse collections that I have assembled over the passing years as they came into my thoughts.