Urbs in rure

To Hereford today. I am sure I have been there before, but have no recollaction of what it was like: although I feel I liked it slightly better today than previously. On the way down in the train you can tell when you suddenly hit proper countryside (at some point after Worcester), because you get a sudden whiff of manure. 'Lovely country smell,' my mother would say: it's not lovely, dear, it's faeces, & that (or one like it) is the very smell that fortunes have been spent to deal with in the city.
Hereford doesn't live up to its slanderous reputation of being a city of inbred sheep-shaggers: there are even Polish supermarkets. Although I did hear a man say who was trying to return something in a charity shop (I'm not making this up), 'I haven't driven all the way from Merthyr Tydfil for you to tell me I can't return it, look you.' For lunch I had a beef roll, which at £3.30 I thought would be a tourist rip-off until I saw the butcher cutting off chunks of the most delicious beef, almost tender enough to eat with a spoon.
The cathedral, while showing a strong Victorian going-over (I suspect Gilbert Scott) has a relative paucity of camp memorials. It seems quite high church now: ironic they're busy putting images in when the pre-reformation stuff is still there with heads hacked off. Witness the angel.

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