And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage – their dreams, desires, connections and communities.

Most of us get a little plot and headstone if we’re lucky – Cuddy got one of the great architectural wonders of the world built on his head. Overall it read a bit like a guided tour of the points of interest at the cathedral (which I remembered from mine--would it have been less obvious otherwise? This is always near impossible to pull off and, while I admire the ambition, I feel like it could have been pared back a little.Book II tells of masons repairing the cathedral stonework in 1346 and makes the saint an actor in condemning an abusive husband. But, they are of course linked by a shared sense of place and a history which ultimately binds them together, if not as seamlessly as one might expect. Despite being one of the few bands in the scene that was not straight edge, Sour Face became the mascots, with their third performance seeing them open for NOFX. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, because it’s near-perfect, and Ask Dr Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller because it contains dirt, humour and wisdom. There is always an owl-eyed youth, a provider of victuals and seer of visions, a bad monk and a violent man, their prominence ebbing and flowing from story to story.

I read Book I with enthusiasm, its verse-like format and fragments of historical detail building a picture of his 10th-century followers ("this colourful caravan of committed Cuddy acolytes / this coffin-carrying cult, forever on the flit, / forever making camp and breaking camp") as they travelled with his remains and envisioned a home for them at Durham. Cuthbert was first buried on Lindisfarne, an island off the Northumbrian coast and scene of the first Viking raid on England. In fact, most of Cuthbert’s story takes place after his death, when he is exhumed and moved to safety. We’re probably only somewhere between fifty and a hundred generations away from that time, and Durham Cathedral is living proof that we were not living like primitives one thousand years ago: we had vision. A man who lived alone on a rocky island in the North Sea, preferring the solitude and the wild birds to the company of men.I do sometimes wonder if writing - or all committed creative pursuits - is actually a form of mental illness. The five books and a prologue span just over a thousand years and drop us into vignettes from the dead saint’s life and legacy.