Evensong in Norwich

I'm just back from a couple of days' work in Norwich - but I arrived early and had a few hours to myself in the city. It's a strange place - I walked in from the station and was downhearted at the grimy shops and battered sixties office blocks. But then I crossed some kind of invisible boundary  and entered another city of cobbled lanes and alleys, a surprising number of craft shops selling floral handmade teddies and wooly scarves, just as many charity shops, and an incredible number of churches.

I stumbled upon The Book Hive, a splendid independent bookshop which doesn't bother trying to stock every title under the sun, but instead presents you with a scarily tempting selection of books that you realise that you really really want to read. And many of them you just don't find elsewhere - or at least you'd have to hunt hard for them. So there was a great collection of writing about nature, and not all by Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin (both of whose writing I love, but they don't own the genre) - there was also a table full of beautiful books from Little Toller (who publish the Clare Leighton I blogged about a while back). And I found Diego Marani's New Finnish Grammar - raved about in the Guardian a while back but invisible in 'normal' bookshops. Given the temptation, I was incredibly restrained and bought only the Marani. It's on my towering bookpile as I write.

By now, the shops were beginning to shut and it was that awkward time for a visitor to a strange city. It's too early for dinner, too late for afternoon tea. Your hotel room is bleak and anonymous, and anyway you don't want to walk all the way back there only to have to return to the city centre for dinner. You could go to the cinema, but you can do that anywhere - it's a waste of a new city. Everyone else is pulling shut their office doors behind them, hopping on their bikes or in their cars, and heading home.

If I were a different person, I'd find a bar and settle down with a bottle of wine in a corner, but I'd be asleep after one glass, and that's no fun.

So I set off to the cathedral. Like all the great churches of the east of England it shoots up into the sky, its stone spire thinning to a blade against the clouds, a strange combination of ethereal and rock solidity.

Inside, I wandered past side chapels and tombs, peered at the skeleton carved into the wall reminding us that we'll all be like him one day, gazed up at the soaring roof, let my mind wander. And then I heard a moment of song.

It vanished as soon as it had come.

And then an announcement over the tannoy, 'If you would like to join us for evensong in the Choir ...'.

I have to admit to being rather nervous - I don't go to church, and it's not part of my upbringing, so I know that I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to services. And I always hesitate - do I have a right to participate as an atheist? Will I pollute the believers' rituals by my presence? A silly thing to think, maybe, since I don't believe in the rituals.

And yet, it was a quietly magical experience, sitting in the back of the choir stalls, behind the singers of the choir, lit by candles, listening to ancient words from the old and new testaments and to sung psalms, saying the creed (peeping at the printed sheet provided), standing, sitting, wondering why today we are hearing about Abraham and Sarah being given Isaac by God, and then about Mary - how terrified she must have been - being visited and told she would be bearing the son of God. We thought about Rowan Williams in Zimbabwe, we sat in silent contemplation.

It was a deeply soothing experience to sit among worshippers, allowing the music to wash through me, and closing my day in peace.

(I clearly didn't take this photo - that really would have been a wrong thing to do - so this one's from the cathedral website. On Monday it seemed darker, though it was still daylight outside. I was sat on the left of this picture, my back to the wall. Those choir stalls are not comfortable - despite the choir master saying it was a good spot for snoozing as he showed me my place.)