n York for the weekend, we made a point of going to the minster for evensong. At last, live music. But things are not, of course, precisely the same as they were. The service no longer takes place in the forgiving gloom of the choir, but in the minster’s vast nave, the tiny congregation spread out like currants in a fat rascal; there are no prayer books and to see those responsible for the heavenly sounds that fall on the ears like fine silk or pure gold, you must crane your neck, for the singers are all about a mile behind you. Strangest and most haunting of all is the sight of the clergy processing towards you in their masks – or at least this is what I thought at first. The scene, I felt in my quietly hysterical way, was so horribly cinematic: nine parts The Name of the Rose to one part Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth. But later on, my eyes raised to the glories of the great west window, I thought of the building’s 1,000-year history and was comforted. Like the Black Death before it, and any number of other literal or metaphorical plagues, Covid-19 is just passing through. I listened to the plainsong and to the old familiar words and when it was all over I went out into the Yorkshire rain, feeling about a stone lighter and ready for my tea. Foreign stays for exceptional women The new edition of The Virago Book of Women Travellers is a tonic for those of us who long to go on foreign adventures again and not only because of the places it takes you (last night, I was in the foothills of the Elburz mountains in Iran with Vita Sackville-West where, somewhat predictably, she was hunting a Persian garden). It also puts the present stasis in perspective. As its editor, Mary Morris, notes, for centuries it was thought both physically and morally dubious for the female of the species to travel and as a result those women who did were exceptional – figures of fascination and scrutiny. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously followed her diplomat husband to Constantinople in 1716, causing something of a scandal as she did so. In Sophia (sic), she visited a Turkish bath where the women begged her to undress. “I was forced at last to open my shirt and shew them my stays,” she wrote of this experience. “Which satisfied them very well for, I saw, they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.” Haw toast, anyone? Divided loyalties in the garden. Having been forced, as a child, to wear a T-shirt with the word MYCOLOGY emblazoned across it, I look indulgently on all forms of fungi. But it was still heartbreaking to see our old plum tree chopped down, its long, lingering death the result of honey fungus. And what to replace it with? Hornbeams, which have resistance to honey fungus, were the fashionable choice, but in the end we planted five scarlet Crataegus, aka hawthorns, which will look lovely in both spring (pink flowers) and autumn (red berries). Depending how things go pandemic-wise, perhaps they’ll prove life-enhancing in other ways, too. Richard Mabey’s 1970s classic Food for Free informs me that the young leaves, traditionally called “bread and cheese” by children, make for excellent spring greens and that, when fully ripe, the haws – attention, hipsters – taste a little like what he calls avocado pear. • Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist