Fuming...

...This just in from 'Command and Control Centre' (aka Bishop Tom's Secretariat).

It would seem that by the first day of July in the year of our Lord 2007 (or 2011 if we are to be bullied by scriptural scholars) I must, on pain of most dire punishment, desecrate our lovely village Church.

An odd thing you would think for the very defender of the local faith to be thus instructed. For do we not have sufficient of said desecrating forces at work in society, without it being a commandment that I should be forced to swell their numbers? Are there not already enough of the yobs to smash windows, pee in the cemetery, scrawl graffiti in the sanctuary?

It seems not, for I am told that by said date I must install a large 'No Smoking' sign outside the West door, giving full details of the unlawfulness of lighting up inside together with assembled judicial penalties for any who dare so do.

Now many things sacred and secular have happened within those holy walls down the centuries: fights and frights of many types. Fornication has even been rumoured in recent times - and, for myself, I would have no trouble in believing that to be so. Not approving, just accepting it has probably occurred.

But in all the years of service I have yet to encounter a person so stupid - or to preach a sermon so boring - that sees someone reaching for their Silk Cut Light. (Colonel X did once put his empty pipe in his mouth in some absent moment during an extended Easter Vigil, but one sensed that even that was merely an unconscious need for a comfort dummy rather than any preparatory move to fill the choir with the reek of rough cut.)

This missive, therefore, has me fuming literally and metaphorically. I stand within my den puffing away and raging at the inanity on nanny state - and, it would seem, nanny state religion.

This order - I determine - shall be resisted to the last. No such monstrous sign will deface my place of worship, whilst there is breath in the Rector's body.

With luck I shall be the first cleric in the land to be arrested for failure to comply with such nonsense. E will cringe naturally and I'm not sure that H will give the move her entire support.

But if lonely martyrdom is required then lonely martyrdom it shall be!