I’ve managed around fifty years of hiding my nasty streak, but gradually as the grey hairs have taken over I find I’m allowed to be a battle-axe, marching in where Charlie’s Angels fear to tread. So let me introduce my new Grumping campaign.

I thought at first I should grump about odd-smelling Cumbrian towns. Penrith smells of chicken guts, Carlisle smells of biscuits.  But I couldn’t decide what Kendal smelt of (it’s not mint cake) and I couldn’t be bothered to trek over to Wukkinton to remind myself of its particular pong. Grumpy, yes; energetic, no.

I’m very well qualified to grump about public buildings. For A level Art, I studied Architecture. It’s irrelevant that this was back in 1970; architecture goes back a lot further than that and it is all around us. It’s just begging to be criticised.

The ideal target has to be large and somewhat public. I wouldn’t want to bother having a feeble go at some Legoland housing estate. I want to shoot at something unique, that once thought itself imposing and arrogantly wonderful. My annoyance factor will be so much greater if the object is reverently singled out for admiration in tourist brochures and web-sites.

So, for this one I’m going to the very top. My candidate is Carlisle Cathedral. “What,” I hear you gasp, “you can’t Grump about the House of God. Everybody knows that a Medieval Master Mason is now practically a saint.” Well, I think God already knows how nasty I am so it won’t come as a shock to Him. I’ve worked next to the seat of His Bishop for the last year and, sacrilege or no, I can tell you, an awful lot of it was built by cowboys. Five hundred years and more of them, building in a hurry with one eye over the shoulder at the Scots side of the Border.

The founders picked a spot above potential flooding all right (2005 proved that), but it still wasn’t all that good foundation-wise as there was water underground. The Norman part was secondhand, being composed of nicked bits of Roman fort, and is now represented only by a tiny, grey West end because Cromwell – not being noted for his reverence towards Catholic foundations – put most of the Roman stone into military use again by nicking it back for army barracks.

What’s left now feels extremely weird. Any well-brought-up Christian’s internal compass will go haywire trying work out his orientation, because to enter the main church you go through the choir stalls, and under what would normally be the rood screen, and then you find that the east end which should properly accommodate only the choir and clergy is enormous, and this is where the congregation sits – and they’re all on the wrong side of the tower.

It’s an uncomfortable place with an unfinished feeling. The 15th C choir stalls underneath the canopy seem to be missing their finials. They hang there looking chopped-off at head height. Most of the niches stand empty, without the wooden saints who should have populated them. In addition, you can’t even see the choir stalls when you attend a service, because they are behind you.

Before long, still other things intrude on your consciousness. The weirdness is that these things are incomplete – not altered, worn out or damaged, but utterly wrong by design.

The arithmetic of the arches underpinning the sandstone clerestory is surreal. Why, for Heaven’s sake, are there seven windows in the clerestory,  held up by three and a half arches? Why should there only be a half, to meet that marvellous window in the end wall? The arcade must have been built before the clerestory above it, so why not four whole arches, with eight windows above?

I can forgive idiosyncracies due to the activities of Scots or Puritans; after all, gunpowder, fire and war are known to have reduced Carlisle to the smallest Cathedral in Europe (until the building of the Cathedral of the Isles in the 1850s). I can forgive changes of fashion. Most English cathedrals have lived through several styles, the changes occurring later the further north you travel. But stagger dizzily out after your encounters with the mad interior, and the view outside is no more reassuring.

The action of wind and rain has had a disastrous impact on the soft red sandstone. The remaining saints and rich, delicate, hollow carvings stare sadly through safety netting. Then, between the buttresses that support the length of the East end walls, you find there are windows – of a sort – Early English but completely unpredictable. Sometimes there are three, and sometimes two; and sometimes two huddle aside apologetically in a space meant for three. Sometimes they are defined by pretty mini-pillars and sometimes by a remnant of mini-pillars which, again, you can’t make up your mind about: was there ever a lower part to them or were they always just tops supported by nothing? And we also have more peculiar half-arches – complete sets of mouldings that outline lancets, while blank halves disappear into the adjoining buttresses. “I’d like some arches please, Master Mason, but don’t make them too ordinary.” “Agreed, I think I’ll build something that looks half-arched.” Whatever Carlisle Cathedral is, it isn’t ordinary.

Some of it is genuinely beautiful. Honest, reverent devotion, combined with an extreme skill and understanding of geometric harmony, created the curving tracery of that East window and the dazzling azure vault studded with golden stars. But the rest is just plain odd:  war, bigotry, hatred and destruction have created a space that doesn’t know which way to turn, and mind-boggling schizophrenia appears to have built the rest.

No matter how kind you were feeling before you went in, you come out feeling ruffled and disturbed – maybe even as grumpy as me. As an exercise in forcing you to define normality by showing you the bizarre, perhaps it succeeds; but I don’t think that was its intention. It’s undoubtedly the weirdest building in Cumbria. Get out of that one, God.