About this time each year I try to ride the 90 or so miles between Oxford and Cambridge on my unspectacular bicycle (no drop handlebars, no space-age alloy frame, but a large and sonorous bell, a basket and a big, soft saddle).

I first did it some years ago to see if I could, then to check on the state of the madly abandoned railway line I used to use between the two cities in the 1960s (it’s enough to make you weep, actually. Overgrown or ripped-up tracks, stations obliterated, and in one key stretch, built over so that restoring it is all but impossible). Even Dr Beeching didn’t want to shut it – but Harold Wilson did, an act which seals his reputation in my mind. Now I just do it because it's a beautiful way of spending a September Sunday, and for the triumph of struggling up and over the hill near the village of Orwell (yes, there really is such a place) and seeing the glories of my destination in sight at last, lit up by the late afternoon sun

Anyway, as I wheezed and creaked into the centre of town (nobody can persuade me that Cambridge is a city. Not least because it lacks a cathedral) I was asked by a passer-by if I was going to 'the Jeremy Corbyn meeting'.

Not merely was I not going to it. I’d never heard of it. I was planning a long soak in a bathtub, an enormous meal, and hours of profound slumber. But now that I knew, I obviously had to try. Putting all else out of mind, I walked on creaky knees to Great St Mary’s church, to find it ringed by a shuffling queue of Soviet length. These were the people who’d signed up online to attend. Presumably because the thing was being organised by the unions, they were all being subjected to a minute bureaucratic examination, and the line was barely moving. Tangled up with it was another queue, for people like me who hadn’t signed up in advance. Having sorted out which was which with some difficulty, I joined this (the Biblically learned will understand why I referred to it as ‘the Foolish Virgins’) on the basis that you never know.

And so I spent a pleasant hour or so in the lovely, elegiac Cambridge dusk (gosh, September can be the loveliest of all months when it tries) , with the sky fading from gold to blue behind the pinnacles of King’s College chapel, chatting with the interesting variety of people who’d come along.

I think I spotted a social trend. There were plenty of young people, in their early twenties, many in couples. And there were plenty of people of my age-group – late 50s upwards. But I rather think those in between were more thinly represented.

Just before eight o’clock, as the light thickened into dusk, we were told we wouldn’t get in – but that ‘Jeremy’, as everyone calls Mr Corbyn, would come out and speak to us, the improvident casual turners-up, first. For me, this was a huge stroke of luck. I’d vaguely hoped to get to a Corbyn meeting at some point but there were none near where I lived, as far as I know. I had never been organised enough to locate one somewhere else, and now I was going to attend one without all the tedium of the other platform speakers, the introductions, and without being crammed into a stuffy, overcrowded church, no doubt sandwiched between two people who loathed me, on one of the loveliest evenings of the year.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that Great St Mary’s holds 1,400 people, and was totally full, and that there were at least several hundred outside who couldn’t get in. And that the meeting had been postponed because the original venue had been too small to safely hold the audience who signed up. Apparently it wasn’t possible to hold the meeting in the open air on Parker’s Piece, the great green open space, where Jack Hobbs once played cricket, that lies near the centre of Cambridge.

I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things . One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.

I suspect that most readers of this blog, if they heard the speech without knowing who was delivering it, would have thought it workmanlike and commonsensical, though obviously of the left. It was not high-flown, it contained a reasonable amount of self-mocking humour, it was proudly free of personal abuse or political invective. It was also (this made it easier for me) free of anything about the wild enthusiasm for comprehensive schools and multiculturalism which Mr Corbyn shares with David Cameron.

It was completely coherent, delivered fluently without notes by a man who obviously still writes his own speeches and understands what he is saying. Every statement in it obviously resulted from a long and considered examination of the subject, and he could have defended every assertion if he had had to. This was itself a refreshing change from most modern political speeches, crafted by professional experts in blandness, rehearsed and spoken by the ‘leader’ (what a horrible term this is) more for effect than for edification. I simply don’t think any of his rivals could have done this, not because they’re stupid or bad speakers, but because they don’t actually have coherent political positions.

They have to supercharge their words with emotive claptrap, slogans and clichés to get them off the ground at all, and ,while they might briefly soar they quickly sink to earth again. Mr Corbyn’s speech, by contrast, took off in an orderly, well-piloted fashion, flew at a sensible height for the correct amount of time, droning gently, and then landed smoothly at the intended destination. I think this is the sort of thing people used to do in the 1940s, and perhaps the 1950s, when we still had real-live contentious politics in this country. But they have forgotten how since the PR men took over in the 1960s.

Its economics, under the circumstances, were quite level-headed. At a time when interest rates are absurdly low and the economy needs revival (the EEF report today suggests the Osborne boom isn’t up to much) , borrowing to spend makes perfect sense.

The Private Finance Initiative has been a costly disaster. There’s nothing wrong with public provision either for health or welfare. As he pointed out, much of what he said would be considered more or less mainstream in Germany.

Its politics (I noted a repeated assertion that greater equality is good for its own sake, and a clear belief in immigration as a good thing in itself ) are shared by the Tory Party. The only difference is in the detailed method of application, and the honesty and clarity (or lack of either) with which they admit to this.

Once or twice I was tempted to applaud the style and the sentiments, particularly his opposition to big money in British politics, a problem which increasingly concerns me. But I didn’t because there is a wise convention that journalists don’t . In the end, this is a protection against being *made* to applaud, or being *expected* to do so, which can be much the same thing – and which was important on the day when I declined to applaud a (frankly, terrible) speech which Nelson Mandela once delivered at a Labour Party conference. Whatever views we have, we must maintain a distance between us and power, or those who seek it.

Is Mr Corbyn on the way to power? I don’t think so, though a small but significant part of me says ‘Don’t rule it out’. It is impossible to imagine any other politician living who could draw such a crowd . Tony Benn could have done, and they’d have paid, but that was because he had become a holy relic and because what someone once called his ‘lovely, wuffly Children’s Hour voice’ could create great waves of nostalgia for long ago teatimes in the hearts of a certain generation. Mr Corbyn has no such voice, or presence. He wasn’t even famous until recently.

There is obviously something going on, but is it going on England, or in a small, particular part of English society, the educated, thoughtful old left who have been disenfranchised by the New labour smoothies? They might look impressive all gathered in one place, but do they add up to much in the total of votes, even in a rather exceptional place such as Cambridge? Or are they in fact outnumbered by the great mass of the indifferent, who either never vote or who can be manipulated and bought, to vote for whoever has been given the Mandate of Heaven (or at least the Mandate of Murdoch) that year?

We will rapidly discover which it is, if Mr Corbyn is elected on Saturday. Either a wider audience will say ‘Actually, we are impressed by this style of politics, regardless of the views expressed, and wish to see more of it. Indeed, it would be good to see all parties adopting it’. Or they won’t. Knowing what we know of modern Britain, from instant mashed potato to comprehensive schools, I fear the answer won’t necessarily be the one that the audience in Cambridge would like to hear.