A few weeks ago, on a perfect autumn day, I took the train to Cambridge and cycled a rambling, rolling 84 miles home to London.
I know what you’re thinking.
Well, it represented some solid exercise and I had coffee with my friend Robert, whom I seldom see.
And, as is ever the way, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Mostly though, and most strangely, I went looking for another Robert, a Georgian clergyman called Robert Fiske.
Robert Fiske served the parish of Fulbourn, about five miles from Cambridge, for 45 years between 1781 and 1826. In the last years of his life, he took to walking in the countryside, making notes on the plants and birds he saw, and then writing a very long and very bad poem about them, called, ‘The Seasons’.
I know this because many years ago I found the manuscript of his epic verse in a secondhand bookshop, and bought it.
My ride took me to Fiske’s church in Fulbourn, then along the lanes to Wendens Ambo, where he was born, and Wenden Lofts, where his son was vicar. I rode over the highest point in Essex (spoiler: not that high) and then down through the Hertfordshire villages, looking forward to the last part: 25 miles along the River Lea to the Thames, all of them mercifully flat.
Trouble was, though, that those last 25, flat miles were also narrow, rutted and potholed, filled with clouds of twilight midges and, by London, almost pitch-dark.
The end is seldom as comfortable as we would wish.
In the Bible, Moses imagined himself leading his people into the Promised Land but after forty years of travelling his journey ended with a song and a blessing and only a glimpse of his destination.
When my Dad died, earlier this year, we played his favourite music from the Dream of Gerontius and read psalms and prayers as he travelled the last miles.
Those last miles may never be as flat and smooth as we’d like, and they will end in darkness. But they can also end with songs and blessings and poems.
And, as Robert Fiske discovered, walking and making notes on swallows and the uses of elder-wood after 45 years of ministry, even a bad poem is a comfort when the day eventually draws to a close.
When I undertook the ride I had no thought of All Saints or All Souls but, writing this just before Hallowe’en, it ended up as the meditation I needed at the season of remembering the dead.
The image at the top is not Fulbourn, but a distant view of Holy Trinity, Chrisall, at the highest point in Essex, the next parish to Wenden Lofts with Elmdon annexed, where Robert Fiske’s son, also Robert, was vicar.