It had seemed such a good idea at the time, to join the annual torchlight tour of the cemetery on February 2 to celebrate the Christian festival of Candlemas. That was before it snowed.

"I shall try not to go off piste," jokes Ian, a trustee of the Friends of the General Cemetery which organises the event.

Bring a torch they said so the Diary brought a wind-up pink piggy one.

"Candlemas is 40 days from Christmas, the end of Epiphany. From now on you don't look back to Christmas but forward to Easter so it's quite a turning point in the calendar," says Ian.

There was also a more secular importance. "It was also half-year rent day for tenants of the Norfolk estate."

Outside the cemetery, the last resting place of some 87,000 souls, another half a million more alert ones were unmoved by twilight Candlemas strolls.

There was just one person waiting for Ian – the Diary, about to negotiate a let's go home deal – until local resident Laurence Craig turned up. And he was keen to walk.

We walk by the catacombs, a 19th century version of the 21st century city centre apartment building. Most of them, like apartment blocks, are empty.

"Yorkshiremen are canny types and don't like spending brass and they were too expensive. And being non-conformists they preferred to be laid in the ground," says Ian.

Some of the others were later filled by bodies displaced from cemeteries during the building of the Inner Ring Road.

And after this the notes get rather sparse because Star ballpoint pens dislike working in cold, snowy, damp surroundings on wet notebook pages.

It soon becomes apparent that this tour is more about the cemetery than Candlemas. In fact, it doesn't get another look in until the end.

It does look rather magical in the snowy moonlight. Ian prefers the cemetery in the winter because with the lack of foliage you can see how the Victorians planned it.

"This would all have been green fields," he says as we walk down wide carriage paths and descend steep steps,m explaining the cemetery was needed because grave space in the city was filling up and cholera raged.

We do the tombs and monuments of luminaries like the Cole Brothers and industrialist Mark Firth, go off piste to do homage at the grave of Chartist Samuel Holberry, who died on the treadmill for wanting one man, one vote, and share a delicious joke at the tomb of Alderman Burch.

This tall, phallic column commemorates a man who married a rich heiress and took her name.

It rears up alongside the solid, more modest chest freezer-sized resting place of his father-in-law.

Ian can't be sure, of course, but looking at that rock solid column, could the good Alderman be making an allusion to his real name of Mycock?

"It depends whether women are present which version I give of that story," he smiles.

Every tour deserves a mystery and Ian shines his laser pen at a gravestone half-hidden by bushes.

"Everyone asks when the last burial was held and officially it was in 1976. But that gravestone was put up, I think, in 1992. We don't believe there is a body buried, just a gravestone, and flowers are still put there."

Fifty minutes and the cold has set in but, happily, we return to the gatehouse where we started. "I've not said much about Candlemas, have I?" says Ian cheerfully.

"Now if this were America you know what day it would be? Goundhog Day."

Oh no, we're not going to do it all again tomorrow. . . are we?

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