Our Lady of the Gates of Grace....

...It was quite humbling to hear, the other week, that dear Maurice was shortly to be taking himself off on pilgrimage. Never really saw him as the type. The annual Parish trip for a day's retreat at our neighbouring Priory perhaps, but not an extended hike to some further place of sanctity involving tiresome travel and uncertain beds. Not his thing at all, I would have said, if asked.

But then I wasn't asked, I was told. Mildred had telephoned apologise for and to explain her husband's irresistible absence from last weekend's monthly Finance Committee meeting. A thing near miraculous in itself that the old buzzard would turn down the chance of attending one such spielfest, for put 'Finance' and 'Committee' into a single sentence and usually you would have the fellow positively salivating with glee - the effect not dissimilar to my own fondness for the coupling of the words 'Nicole' and 'Kidman'. (Ah dear lady!)

"Pilgrimage!" I exclaimed in awe. "Yes Rector. It's his weekend for Lourdes. Does it every year. Good for him I think to keep in touch, don't you think? His playing days are long gone and the subscriptions are getting a bit steep on our pensions, but when he walks through them gates of Grace I know he's smiling inside and out."

Fair bit puzzled by all that I had to admit. Didn't realise that you had to stump up a regular payment of any material kind, prayer being all needed to maintain the connection to the place in my book. As for the playing of it - that left me for dead. (The 'gates of grace' motif though was touching. Must use the image in one's next homily.)

But best not to press in such circs. So I didn't. The Finance Committee came and went, and, it must be said, 'twas all the more tedious for lack of Maurice's usual spirited challenges to the chair over some arcane audit procedure or motion to dismiss various - and seemingly sometimes random - committee members for flagrant, if invisible to all but Maurice, rule violations.

And so then spotting the old man this morning I had to ask "How was Lourdes then?"

"Pretty dull the first day - bit of a procession if you ask me, which you just did - but perked up no end on the second. I love the amateur game though don't you? Bring two villages together, give them their one day of glory and watch them play with a passion to shame the pros."

One had to reel, it made so little sense. Now 'procession' I could grasp, one has seen the very moving photos of crowds of the sick and their helpers wending their way to the salving waters. So why that should be seen as clearly not a good thing was beyond me. And as for the rest, I'm sorry I hadn't a clue.

Not wanting though to be found wanting, as it were, I fought for anything else to say, coming up somewhat lamely with "Must take you a deuced while to get there."

"Not at all these days Rector. You'd be amazed. Bus to N, fast train to Town, then a short hop on the Tube and I'm there in under three hours."

Now I may be too long hidden in the rural depths to know much about modern international travel, but even I know that the London Underground does not yet - nor ever likely should - stretch as far as la belle France.

Said so indeed, then wished at once I hadn't. Old Maurice gave me the kind of withering yet pitiful look usually reserved for the poor fool who had tried to last the year as Parish Treasurer without his - Maurice's - backing or support. Happened twice in living memory and on both occasions the respective poor fools failed miserably: the one ending up with a two-stretch for fraud (it was just a technicality, nothing malicious - just very true that there was some serious money missing come Lammas Day) and the other who chose to emigrate rather than face the public's rank opprobrium.

"Since when is St. John's Wood in France then Rector?" thrust Maurice in my very face.

It was then that the the penny dropped and the light shone bright once more. For yes surely this could be the one, true answer. That single tablet of LSD one had taken as a student had indeed - as forewarned it might - so deep-fried the brain that all since had been a continuous, fallacious hallucination. I was not Rector of my own Parish, but a mental patient in some asylum for whom the nurses have long since given up any hope of recovery.

But even hallucinations must be answered, especially the ones positively rocking with mocking laughter in one's - imaginary - High Street, with a throng of cheeky neighbours - dream creatures all for sure but irksome for all that - beginning to gather round.

"I may not have been the sharpest blade in the seminary kitchen drawer," I replied thus most haughtily, "But I can assure you that dear Bernadette Soubirous was never spotted anywhere near North London! So how can your journey to Lourdes have taken you there! Tell me that!"

"Lord's Rector, not Lourdes!", was the howling-with-glee response. "Did you think I were at Lourdes? Ah wait 'til Mildred hears this. She'll be splitting herself."

Oh how we all laughed. All but myself that is.

'Hail Mary,' one silently intoned, 'Full of grace, get me out of this fix please!'

Graceful as ever She is, at once Maurice desisted in his mockery. "Come and have a beer Rector, you looks like you need one, and I'll tell you all about MCC and me. Greatest place in the world - you wait twenty years to get in then are rewarded with some of the hardest seats in Christendom, and most of the worst portraiture in the Western world under one roof. Makes you proud to be British!"