CHAPTER 2: WINCHESTER, WELLS & NEWCASTLE WITH A SCATTERING OF FOOTBALL LEAGUE GROUNDS

Having visited Leicester Cathedral en route to a game of football, A and I repeated the procedure at the start of 1995. The venue was Fratton Park, the home of Portsmouth Football Club, but for reasons that must have been obvious at the time, we chose to leave Portsmouth Cathedral for another day, instead breaking our journey to the south coast at the cathedral city of Winchester. I had been to the cathedral many years before with my parents on one of our many holidays in the New Forest. It was on a disused airfield next to our caravan site there that had my first experience of driving, my mother letting me take control of the wheel a few months before my seventeenth birthday. That went well. I inadvertently took a wrong turn and found myself on a proper road, driving under age with no license. I panicked, took a sharp turn left back onto the old runway and, in indicating, hit the indicator stick that cars had in those days so hard that it snapped off and hung forlornly under the steering wheel for the remainder of the journey back to the caravan. My father, a wonderful man despite having a temper that could be described as fragile, stayed remarkably calm when we told him what had happened, and he remained that way until he tried reaffixing the said indicator stick and in doing so gave himself a considerably painful electric shock. The next day the car had to go into the garage for repair and my early driving days came to an end. My next visit to Winchester also had a driving connection because my mother and I called there a few months later on our way to Southampton University where I had an interview. I was now driving legally although I had yet to pass my test. My mother and I shared the driving on the way down but by the time we came to return several hours later, a dense fog had descended which made the return journey fairly challenging. So challenging, in fact, that my mother abdicated all responsibility and let me drive almost the whole way back, with me learning to use the cats' eyes as a guide to where the road went in the absence of any other discernable features in the mire. The interview must have gone well because they offered me a place and the following Autumn we were once again driving down south for me to begin my life as a student. My daily routine involved walking from my hall of residence to the university campus so I must have been reasonably fit but I have no idea what inspired me to decide one day to visit, on foot, an old school friend who was at the teacher training college in Winchester The twenty mile round trip took most of the day, leaving me little time with my friend and no time at all to go around the city or its cathedral. The following year I walked a slightly shorter eighteen miles to Gosport before taking the ferry to Portsmouth and catching the train back, the two walks being the sum total of my long distance walking during three years at university. 

With a football match to get to, we had restrict ourselves to a quick whizz around the cathedral, leaving the exploration of the pre-Norman conquest capital city of England for another time. Before entering the vast Gothic building - one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in Europe - we went to look at the original cathedral which lies to the north of the current construction, outlined on the pavement in red brick. The first Anglo-Saxon church was one of the earliest stone churches built in England, becoming a cathedral in about the year 660. One of its bishops was St Swithun whose impact on both Winchester and the world of meteorology only occurred after his death. With his final breath, he asked to be buried outside the Saxon cathedral so that his parishioners could easily visit him and, more bizarrely, so that his grave could benefit from the sun and rain. His wish was granted and there he lay for about a hundred years until it was decided to move him indoors. Either it poured with rain on the 15th July, the day of his re-interment, or a period of unusually high rainfall occurred over the next few weeks, spawning the belief that the weather on what became St Swithun's Day would determine the pattern for the next forty days. 

As well as weather forecasting, St Swithun's remains soon earned a reputation for healing and his grave became a centre of pilgrimage. When the Normans built their new cathedral, the one A and I now entered, they transferred St Swithun yet again and his shrine soon became a place where miracles occurred. Of course this was good for the cathedral's coffers and when Henry VIII's commissioners visited to close down and destroy the monastery that had been established next to the cathedral, they discovered that the see of Winchester, the area under the control of the bishop, was the third wealthiest in the land after Canterbury and London. They also discovered St Swithun's shrine and so utterly destroyed it that just an empty hole remained, this being filled in at a later date. So A and I couldn't pay our respects to the rainy Saint, but we could marvel at the six richly decorated mortuary chests that contained an assortment of royal bones. Several Saxon kings and good old Cnut of tide turning fame were buried in the old cathedral and they too had been moved to the new cathedral, not reburied but stored in vast wooden chests. These chests may also contain the bones of two brothers, one of whom, William II, was on my burial list of post-Norman kings. His older brother, Richard, had died in a hunting accident in the New Forest in about 1074, his body being brought to Winchester for burial. Nineteen years later it was William's body that was laid to rest here, after he was killed in yet another hunting accident in the New Forest. It was obviously a dangerous place to go hunting if you were of royal descent. There are those who believe his death may not have been quite as accidental as it was portrayed as he does not appear to have been an altogether popular monarch. When Winchester's central tower collapsed in 1107, many blamed the catastrophe on poor old William whose earthly remains lay directly beneath it.

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When you stand in the centre of a great medieval cathedral, you can't help but marvel at the skills involved in its construction given the technology that was available at the time. It is little wonder that towers and spires would occasionally collapse or that walls would need devices such as flying buttresses to stop them from bulging outwards under the weight of the roofs. In a corner of the cathedral we found a small statue commemorating the work of a less ancient workman - a twentieth century engineer, William Walker, who saved the cathedral from destruction. Building a cathedral on marshy ground was always going to store up problems for the future and gradually the weight of the cathedral caused some of the peat layers below to compact. The alarm was raised when it was discovered that the eastern and southern sides were beginning to sink into the ground. For five years, William donned his diver's suit and descended into the watery foundations to shore up the building. The monument was a fitting tribute to 'Diver Bill', the hero of Winchester. Well it would have been if the statue of a clean-shaven, slight man had borne any likeness at all to the moustached, much heavier William. Several years after our visit, the cathedral authorities finally admitted that there had been a case of mistaken identity, the statue being that of Francis Fox, a consultant engineer on the project. Diver Bill became the subject of two statues! Our final stopping point before leaving was to gaze up at the great organ. This had been the largest organ amongst the exhibits at the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Winchester's organist, S. S. Wesley was so taken with it that he arranged for it to be adapted to fit the space in the cathedral. Having seen the sights, we then set off for Portsmouth and a rare away day win for Leicester. 

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Although I am an ardent fan of Leicester City, I was born near Nottingham and would accompany my father to the odd Nottingham Forest game where he had a season ticket. My first trip to the City Ground however was with a school friend and his dad in 1967 to watch Forest play Plymouth Argyll. Strangely, decades later when I was considering applying to become a primary school headteacher, I spent a morning shadowing a headteacher to see what the job entailed. All I can remember about the visit was that this head had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Nottingham Forest and when I mentioned the first game I'd been to, he was able to tell that it was in the third round of the FA Cup and what the score had been, a 2-1 win for Forest against Plymouth Argyll as it happens. He then checked with his records and they confirmed that he was correct. So Forest was the first ground I went to and Leicester City's Filbert Street was the second. When I decided to go to Molineux to watch Leicester play Wolves, that made three football league grounds and another collection had begun. Now you may know that visiting all the 92 English professional football clubs is a feat attained by many football fans but that made it no less a goal to aim for. The problem I had was that at an average of two away games a year, it was going to take me about fifty years to complete. When Sue and I had a family, the away game rate dropped to one a year and, even in retirement, it hasn't risen greatly. So I have reconciled myself to the fact that the quest will outlive me. My grand total at present stands at 47 although, as I write, Notts County, 'the oldest professional club in the world' is no longer a professional club, at least for this season. Several of the grounds I have visited are now shopping centres or student accommodation after the 1990 Taylor Report prompted the construction of a flurry of new stadia. 

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Whilst I have now seen thousands of Leicester home games with few standing out, the relatively small number of away games I've been to stay much longer in the memory. The weirdest match was a trip to Cambridge in the 80s. Sue would sometimes accompany me to the odd game but on this occasion, as we parked up in a multi-storey car park in the middle of Cambridge, she had a day's shopping planned and so we said our goodbyes, arranged to meet up at the car after the game and went our separate ways. I was well prepared, having bought my ticket in advance. I'd also located the ground on a map of the city and so I made my way there, arriving fifteen minutes before the start of the game. The area outside the stadium was deserted with just a trickle of fans going through the turnstiles. I'd read that Cambridge United had the lowest attendances in what was then the second tier of English football, League Division Two, but this was ridiculous. Bemused, I stood and waited on the fringes of the concourse for a good ten minutes. I suppose I was expecting a last minute flood of supporters but it never came. Eventually I made my way to the away turnstile and approached a steward. "Is this the right entry for Leicester supporters?" I asked, having seen no evidence of my fellow fans. 

"Leicester?" the steward replied, " We're playing Altrincham today." What was going on? I took out my ticket to make sure I had the correct date and time. "Ah," said the steward on seeing my ticket, " Leicester are playing Cambridge United - this is Cambridge City." Cursing my own stupidly, I left the non-league ground with directions from the steward as to how to get to the correct stadium. It was a couple of miles outside the city but driving there wasn't an option as Sue had the car keys in case she wanted to put some of her shopping in the car. This being the era before mobile phones, I had no way of contacting her and so I set off at a jog and after several minutes I arrived at the perimeter of United's ground. I now experienced a further problem. Despite having a ticket and the game only about twenty minutes old, all the turnstiles were locked with no stadium staff around. As I stood despairing, a young police officer approached me. 

"Are you alright Sir?" he enquired. I showed him my ticket and within seconds he was giving me a leg up so that I could climb over the perimeter wall. As I walked towards the main stand, I heard a might roar which sounded ominous. As I finally took my seat, I discovered the roar had been Cambridge equalizing but no sooner had that information been imparted to me than there was another cheer as Cambridge scored their winner. An hour of turgid football followed before the final whistle put the Leicester team and fans out of their misery. I was now faced with a long walk back to the car and, once outside the ground, asked another member of Cambridgeshire constabulary the best route to take. Whether by accident or design, the route he recommended took me precisely in the opposite direction to the city centre and only after walking for about a mile or so did I realise this. When I finally arrived back at the car, Sue had about given up hope of ever seeing me again.