Tattoo You Sir...

One's generally esteemed colleague, the Rev. Mullen, has gotten himself deep into some pretty hot water for 'injudicious' (if you accept the "only joking" excuse offered) or downright awful (if you take him straight - as it were!) remarks about the efficacy of tattooing male homosexualists' bottoms with dire warnings concerning the health risks pertaining to the act of sodomy.

We have been, of course, historically a society that has not shunned from branding certain classes of criminals with a palpable and everlasting mark of their offence. ("Oh you mean Jones the Burglar? Fat bloke, hangs round the village pump most days. Got a dirty big 'B' branded on his forehead. You'll not miss him.)

Not, overall, conducive to rehabilitation that one I would have thought, but no matter now. We are done with it and for better no doubt. But are we in danger of missing an important trick here? Seems we might. For story just in of perhaps the most hapless criminal loon of the year, who was caught nicking cars by a CCTV camera that had little difficulty in homing in on his neck on which the man's name and date of birth had been largely and visibly tattooed!

An elective act presumably, handy perhaps even for assuring oneself of one's identity at an amnesiac drugged or drunken moment. Useful at parties too, for avoiding those awkward moments of trying to pretend you can recall the name of the newly arrived, dimly but very distantly remembered, guest who hails you as the best of friends.

Think of the possibilities. Would save a fortune on ID cards or DNA databases. Being 'collared' - that once popular name for being arrested by a member of Her Majesty's finest constabulary - would take on fresh meaning and legs. ('Scuse me Sir. May I just turn down your shirt collar for a moment to confirm whom I am arresting for littering the Queen's highway?)

H, mind you, has always banged on about how I should have my name and number embellished on the old dog-collar lest I get lost far from home. Have assumed 'til now she to have been jesting. Must re-visit that premise!

Don't Panic!

...That great rallying cry to alarm of our very own and much cherished Corporal Jones [see 'Dads Army' passim] only passed his lips, of course, when he was in a very deep blue funk; not of fear as such - for he would yet have charged a Nazi tank with a British broom handle if necessary - but as an air-raid siren to warn all and sundry that something very nasty was imminently afoot.

So did I panic today when dear E cried out in tears and agony to her doting Papa that she was showing all and every sign of a heart attack as we pulled into some horse show? Actually it was not she who signed the thing specific. She merely described the symptoms - acute chest pains, inability to breathe properly and tingling all down her arm. Plus body rent by spasms that no parent ever wants to observe in a beloved child.

Oh and clammy too to the feel. That last at the insistence of the terribly calm lady at Ambulance Central - or howsoever titled - who smartly asked to be so advised. Serious from the start of the call, I could tell from the urgent tone of her voice that as soon as the "Yes very clammy" phrase was half out of my lips she'd hit the red button.

"We have a First Responder who will be with you in minutes. An ambulance will follow shortly thereafter and may even arrive before the air ambulance lands." In the end it was a tie. The paramedic vehicle pulled in just as the helicopter was circling for its rapid descent.

That I am sitting here tonight so very calmly posting this note is perhaps clue enough that all is well that has ended well. The diagnosis given on the spot was a panic not a heart attack. A much welcomed, of course, and half-assumed at the time alternative explanation of what was unfolding.

E, as all riders about to compete, does get nervous and roused. General and clear signals of such pressures and stresses are loud swearing and cursing. At the horse often, at her dear Mama and Papa always. We the parents - and perhaps too the horse - don't much care to be so roundly abused, but we take it - as indeed does the horse - in good if battered spirits. (A sort of equestrian equivalent of "You cannot be serious!" as performed by dear young Mr McEnroe those many years ago.)

Oddly enough, as she later described the events, E had not been feeling consciously anxious about the impending show though indeed it was to have been one pretty significant qualifier for a regional, possibly national event. "I was just reading NME [ah how the years slip away!] when it started out of the blue."

She didn't panic as such it seems but she was very scared. That I can well imagine. When the body starts so misbehaving that way for no discernible reason it can only be terribly frightening.

Everybody was wonderfully supportive and helpful it has to be said. "Not a well puppy" were the kindly words of the on-site First Aider - whose show it was and whose show indeed had to be suspended whilst the helicopter came and went. (Can't really be having a dressage test running "B to M working trot. At X rider bucks off as horse bolts to sound of descending aircraft!")

Reassurance too from the paramedics in whimsical fashion: "My middle name's Jesus. I've cured you without any medication." Not the first mention of Our Lord's precious name that afternoon I can tell you!

You stand there as parent not panicking but dreading. It cannot happen you pray. You believe. You insist!

It could be happening you do though know. It did happen to a friend of mine some years ago. Her young daughter - a mere mid-twenties - collapsed one day for no clear reason. It was, it terribly transpired, her heart. She had been born with - unknown until that day - a defect called 'Long QT syndrome.'

A genetic - I believe - abnormality of the heart rhythm for which there was only medication once revealed but no cure. The consultant told the mother that her daughter might live a long and normal life. Or not. Emma - for that was her name - woefully got the not. She died within the year.

It has been long since I last pondered this terrible sadness of some twenty years ago. It will be yet a while before I stop remembering.

Did one then in the end panic? Yes and no. It was not panic that decided me to call for an ambulance in the face of uncertainty. No father of any wit or sense can contently rest on the arrogant presumption that fell illness cannot strike his beloved simply because that is what they are - his beloved. There was a binary choice to be made - call or not call. A call was the only call to make then in all the circs. as given.

But did I panic as I waited those long anxious minutes to be told there was no need to be afraid for the very life one holds so completely and utterly dear and precious?

Need you ask or I reply?

Bandit Country...

Ever pictured yourself as a Balkan bandit?

By and large I suspect not. Nor indeed, mild parson that I am, have I much dreamt of a life of brigandry. Fearless - near desperate sometimes - descent from mountain fortress intent on fell havoc on peaceful valley folk below. That sort of thing.

This though is the glory of the pipe, as filled from Eastern European tobacco and purveyed by harmless, eirenic no doubt, London retailers.

Tonight, through them, I can be the fiercest bandit alive, should ever I wish to be such.

Latakia based baccy in a Churchwarden pipe?

'À rebours' as dear Joris-Karl Huysmans would say.

"De Mortuis...

...nil nisi bonum." That, we were told, was the golden rule when speaking of the newly dead. They weren't exactly in any decent position to rebut or refute any ill or unkind words, so it was deemed only fair not to say what may well have been on anyone's mind about the fellow.

May well have been a complete basket-case, but best not to harp too much on that tune; refer rather to the deceased as 'mildly eccentric not perhaps completely at ease in the society of others.' Not an untruth, but neither the full picture. A satisfactory code among friends.

It was though dear Harold Laski who so cleverly picked up on where that might lead: 'De mortuis nil nisi bunkum' indeed. Paeans of praise for a right shafter, or charged glasses raised in tribute to an utter stinker.

Better though perhaps that rank hypocrisy than the all too modern habit of the relentless scribing of positive pen-portraits for all deceased and sundry, but most especially for the all too many young people who die so needlessly and early.

I do not want to read that Charlie was well-liked by all in school, eternally cheerful and diligent in work and play. I do not want to be told that Angie was an angel who touched the lives of all she met.

They may well have been just so. But equally they might have been appalling little monsters who terrified their families and terrorised their neighbourhoods.

The only desperate thing that matters now is that they have died, and that death is a horror to those who love them - God too - saints in the making or budding little devils alike.

A Fête Worse Than...

...is there indeed anything more to be dreaded than the impending annual fête de village, that terrifying mix of warring egos all gathered together for the alleged greater glory of the parish coffers though in reality assembling but for an occasion of ferocious factional fighting?

You'll not have failed to spot that there has been a lacuna not far short the span of the Missouri River at its very widest (round about where it whacks into the Mississippi if you must know one gathers) of tales of local derring-do and other country matters in these writings of late.

In truth, one has been walkabout much this past year - both interiorly and externally - and thus heart and mind as well as travelling body has been largely absent from Woldean parts.

H has been a brick throughout it must be said at once. If one were to describe this whole thing as a reverse 'Brief Encounter' climax - you know the lines "You've been a long way away." "Yes." "Thank you for coming back to me." - that would be wrongly to impute that romance of an adulterous kind, howsoever unconsummated, had been the fell matter in hand.

Au contraire - as the visiting Victorian Frenchman replied to his English hosts when asked after a particularly rough Channel crossing if he had partaken of luncheon - there have been fewer than two persons involved in this tricksy little shindig of mine. Moi seul indeed has been somewhat lost in transit not found in any wrongful place or arms.

One has though in some ways been off-piste as well as off-colour. 'Male menopause' might be the glib - if singularly organically inapposite metaphor - to have thrust at one by way of explanation. Yes, there has been some nostalgic sense of 'a great future behind him', but then one has always been somewhat of a gloomy cove for whom the obvious impermanence of the fragile glass was always more to the fore than whether its contents should be considered half way up or half way down.

Nor indeed has the time of life quite yet been reached when one by instinct turns first to the Telegraph obits. for the latest news on one's cronies. ("Ah dear Parson 'Mildew' Millhouse. Never knew he toyed with Roman ways in his youth. Quite the proto-Oratorian it seems he was. Too much dry sherry at an impressionable age I'd call it." That sort of thing.)

Though by happenstance, it must be said, it was only the other evening when old Canon 'Hanging' Jeffries - a pal since seminary days - phoned for a chat and enquired, inter alia, how our mutual friend Prior Margaret of the Sisters of the Lost Souls did, to which one could but only reply "Still dead I fear" she having passed on to glory a decade or more since. Bit of a teeth and malt sucking moment for all that one.

No, not death but life has me in a jangle, and jangling one doesn't know for the life of one what quite the matter is. A troubled faith perhaps, though what faith deserves the name if it is not so assailed by frets from time to time? Certainly some ill-bodings on perhaps the irredeemable nature of our land and its people - that rank heresy of course but not an unarguable position.

Bit foxed without a clear route to a bolthole it must be said. Maybe there are no boltholes anymore, the ones one thought were there merely illusory even.

Dear Dom. Robin would never have stooped to the "Get a grip boy" confessorial line, but if he had he might be so tempted now.

Cannot in any way dispute that a firm grip on this wretched - no stripe that, wondrous - village fete heading my way is needed. Squadrons of helpers of all sorts from showers-in to shovers-out to be recruited. Legions of impeccably fair judges to be lined up for all the varied and desperately important competitions from pony dressage to melting-moment cakes. One or two families even to be sharply warned that the archery display is quite not the time to settle ancient festering feuds!

The mettle of a warrior priest must be summonsed from far distant dusty attic rooms. The mantle of battle shaken out of its moth-strewn cupboard. The motto of Hannibal - 'Aut viam inveniam aut viam faciam' - once more to adorn the Palladas crest.

That's the way to do it. I trust!

A Timely Gift...

...You will recall (or see archives if not) a fondness of mine for the travel writings of dear Patrick ('Paddy') Leigh Fermor. So morbid have been recent thoughts I hardly dare write his name lest it prompt refulgent and deserved obits. to appear. Ninety-something he must be by now, possibly though dessicated to immortal mummification by the fierce Mani sun.

They do say that his sole novel, 'The Violins of Saint-Jacques', only among his works failed to trouble the scorer as it were. Breathe it not in Babylon, but I've not much quite cared either for his monastic book 'A Time To Keep Silence.' Not that it's a hash by any stretch, making rather a decent smite - as an outsider - at the life to be lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict.

That though is the keen point. The view of the outsider cannot in any place or at any pace comprehend or communicate the utterly alien other world of the insider. An anthropologist's doom that one. Even I, as one once in now out again, cannot say or recall to the new self what once the old self knew and lived.

He could have done worse of course. Graham Greene did for one. Rattled on about "the vow of silence" in 'Monsignor Quixote' I believe it was. Tried warning him that there was no such thing, but the pompous prig avowed he knew better because he was "...a frequent guest of the Abbot."

Guest my arse, is my riposte. That is precisely it. Guests are not there to know anything whatsoever and if they did it would probably shrivel their tender, slightly idolatrous, souls.

But put him in his métier vraiment - the young itinerant with a passion for secular, pre-War European cultures de haut en bas - and there is none to match Paddy for sharpness of observation and richness of insight. From the hideous bursting Burghers of Munich - and their wives - gorging themselves obese in monstrous tribute to their nation, to pale, delicate White Russian exiles all shadow and cobweb yet joyous musical talents; from welcoming farmers and artisans for whom a guest was indeed a holy thing, to lustful young peasant women happy to fetch some colour to a pale Englishman's cheek - all shall be found, and so much more, in but the first two books of his travels on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930s.

Not though merely - as if that were little which it were not - depicting or describing the present, the crisp glory of a near silent European winter forest or the bustle of hard-working, hard-drinking farmers, Paddy takes you through the voluminous historical pasts that swarm through every town and over every field. A battle fought across these river banks in the time of the Caesars, meddling if righteous medieval saints uprooting sacred pagan oaks, Renaissance dynasties or Carolingian factions disputing every mountain and valley - all this is woven into the landscape of rock or river, and thus no single blade of grass even seems less than a thousand years old.

Architecture, art, music, literature all sprung from its place in European time, that too is there. The gross martyring artisans, belching as they slew the troublesome saint, the be-ribboned Landsknecht - in whose elaborate costume the modern quite bursts through the medieval - or the blond warrior giants of The Thirty Years War all pose for their respective portraits or else emerge from pages of wonderful poetic text. Towns, towers, walls of castles and houses - generations of history in stone and wood. The summation of Gothic art and mind in a single decorative carving on a cathedral choir stall.

The slow, occasionally turbulent often brutal, wending of ancient tribes and races across the continent. The rapidly rising modern tide of darkly approaching Nazism. Or lighter than that, the castle prison of Richard the Lionheart or that precise spot on the Danube where Schubert - he too on a walking trip - composed the 'Trout Quintet'. All - as Melville's warp and woof of life - is freely given as a gift to the reader.

Was all this blown away in the flattening horror of the war just to come, or did we simply forget how to see the past in and through a post-war facade of cement, steel and ideology? Would it be possible - permitted even - to take that same journey now, and meet by chance in crowded, smoke-filled (not that alas for certain) inns people who would greet a stranger with kindliness and fill him with food, beer and knowledge of lore, custom, nature and life stretching back over centuries? Somehow I fear I doubt it would.

If you know the story then you do. Some forty years past the first volume - 'A Time of Gifts' - was published; nearly another decade before the second - 'Between the Woods and the Water' - appeared. And now some twenty years later we still wait for the third and final instalment to show.

Time for another gift if you would be so kind Paddy. But if not to be then one's thanks for favours already gratefully received.

Is There A Doctor Faustus In The House...?

Doctor Faustus made a pact with the devil, one he came unsurprisingly deeply to regret though remorse was no escape. I made no such pact, would not even if I could. But I did, when this wretched sarcoma came, avow that as best I could I would live long enough to see E grow up.

Being somewhat the pedant I would have seen her turning eighteen as that moment of formal adulthood. But I think she has beaten me to it at a mere seventeen. Left school, with a more or less live-in boyfriend [see earlier] the dear infant - ah but no longer that - even started her first job on Tuesday this.

A veterinary practice in the village has taken her on as a trainee, but the first of many steps to qualifying in some profession to care for animals. A man - a father more - could not be more proud. At lunchtime on her first day, I texted her to enquire how she was doing. 'So far so good' came the reply. Dear child - that too no longer - I could not bring myself to add 'Just another forty years to go then!'

And so she has grown up and my avowal is fulfilled, thank the Lord. I do not believe Lucifer has come to claim his reward, for it was not with him I made my concordat. But maybe, just perhaps, higher claims are being put upon me. We shall see. It may not be, but if so then I shall rest in peace.

Not until the very late autumn is my next scan - the proverbial now annual date with destiny - and I do trust I shall manage some undisturbed nights while I wait. I get the message, believe me, if message there is to be one.

La Mort Encore....

What is it with me and death at present I ask? Last night, once more, death came by in a singularly aggressive and unmannerly manner. A dream again, yet perchance a portent? (Might even be minded to check my life insurance policy, but then that wouldn't take long as I have none.)

The circs. were slightly different, though the grabbing, thrusting act was the same. A totally invisible force this time; no hand or arm just a sharp presence.

Forewarned being forearmed, when death struck last night I struck back. It grabbed me, so I grabbed it with equal, opposing force. That though not to its liking one bit - nor actually to any useful avail - for it merely hurled me the length of the dream room leaving me startled, winded and more or less running up the white flag of surrender.

That the moment to wake up of course, in something of a muck sweat and wonderfully rationally aware that the fell fiend was there before me still, an inch from my face daring me to open my eyes to confront its invisible self.

So I did. Eyes ablaze, but it was not there. It had fled my conscious counterblast. For this time at least death has not undone me. I do believe though it is getting bolder by the hour.

Death's Dream...

...every once in a while I dream of my death. Don't we all? Can't spend all our sleeping time in complete oblivion, or else in some incestual turmoil despite Herr Freud's prognostications.

This then my latest death's dream:

I am in our house of life. It is a long, low bungalow. One storey - but many stories, each for one of who we are. My room off a corridor that opens out to H's room and to E's.

Both are absent this day, not something that troubles me. We are on a high plain, the land is glossy and bright. Old, magical clowns play on the sand. They could be irksome, with wild clothing and hats, but I am not anything more than intrigued that they are there.

The wind picks up and I lie down to show that this defensive posture is best for protecting against a coming storm. Only mild swirls of perhaps danger approaching, so I am not sure why I am so determined to be down on the ground.

But then someone says "Look, see the tornado, we are in its path." And we are. A force five massive funnel comes over the hill straight towards the house of my life.

Can I run away, avoid its path? Why should one man not avoid nature, a natural thing I allow, but looking so much a cartoon merely a moving sketch? But strangely I cannot. My humanity is not able, I am cross to discover, to nip to one side and avoid this terrible thing. The tornado, no longer just a drawing in charcoal, must hit right across me and the house of my life.

So again I duck down into the ground. I fear above all that I will be sucked up by the force of the thing, flung high into the air to my doom.

At a mercy, however, as the full force of the tornado passes over me, it does not lift me up but pushes me down into the friable earth. The wind is a terrible weight. I am driven deeper and deeper underground. I am almost buried in the earth and I clutch a small root hoping neither to be plucked up into the sky nor to be suffocated into the ground.

There must come a climax, the epicentre of the tornado and then the passing. And so it happens. The crushing, downward force lifts from me and I must scrabble towards the light to be free from the earth that threatens to drown me. There is the light from a window above me and I push upwards towards that light. The root to which I have clung breaks, but I had expected no more and no less of it. Not quite a symbol, nor yet a strong refuge, it had been what it could be.

I am alive and I am safe. Alone, but not yet entirely sure that E or H have been hurt or unharmed. I must check the other rooms in the house of my life to be sure they have escaped. In the first room there are mementos of how we were when E was little. Small cameos, inscribed on plaster, show our lives as they were. I cannot be certain that each episode is our actual past, but if not then close enough to something we once were.

But I must at least call out to make sure that they are not here, that E and H have been somewhere entirely away from the tornado.

No response from either and though the silence is somehow sad, it still remains that better that I here alone without them than that they too should have been scared by the wind.

So I must check their rooms to see if they are all right. I know where to look for them, but by accident I open the door to a room that is not one of ours. There is a thickish grey curtain blocking the view and behind it lies someone or thing that must not be disturbed. I retreat to the corridor off which lie all our rooms and I find one room that is ours, though it is empty.

Emptiness is not a problem: E and H were not here when the storm came, but I have to be sure.

One more room to check for their presence. It is a simple matter of setting aside the room not to enter. But I cannot count out this other room and once again I open the door to the not-our room with the curtain behind which lies my doom.

To have done this the once was forgivable, but not a second time. The doom is unleashed. A hand - an arm but no body - whips out like a snake's tongue. The hand grips me by that part of my side where the surgeon cut out the sarcoma.

The hand clasps that place. It knows what it seeks. The pain is horrid and unendurable. I know that the hand grips me for a purpose. It compels my death. It knows that this grip is all that it does and that in doing it I am slain.

As that moment comes I awake with a terrible gripping pain in my side, in that very place where death-to-be once lived.

Did I but sleep badly for lying on that one sore spot, or has death come to tell me it will not wait for me forever?

I am inclined to believe the latter.

The Character of Brown...

...So our Gordo compares himself to Emily Bronte's Heathcliff does he, much to the amusement of all?

Wrong character, wrong novel.

Gordon Brown is the spitting image of Widmerpool.

See Anthony Powell's duodenary masterpiece 'Dance' passim.

One Hundred Things To Do When You're Dead Drunk...

...you can sense already where this is heading, and you'd not be wrong. Those lost moments when alcohol commands the stage; brain, conscience, fiscal probity, etc., all banished mute to the wings.

The act itself - written, directed and performed a bottle soliloquy - need not be awful, merely unhinged, unexpected and utterly untoward. Very personal too. One is not talking of some ghastly public display of moral turpitude, tale of which is round the village 'ere one is half-way to perdition; but rather some matter or moment of inner silliness distressing none and hurting none more.

So behold 'One Hundred Things To Do When You Are Dead Drunk" #1:

Traffic, now there's a band. Couldn't abide them first time around between you and me. A veritable mish-mash of styles, all with layers of embarrassing English whimsy. One minute quite groovy rockers-lite, next some half-decent, mystical coves in fey Albion mode (a little of that going quite a long way thank you), but then falling over themselves dissolving into fits of schoolboy giggles at some silly impish nonsense.

The occasional gem of course - 'No Face...etc.', 'Low Spark...et al.' and, above all dear 'Dear Mr. Fantasy', anthemic in quite the right manner for the time. A band for the pick 'n' mix Ipod generation if ever there were one. Pick the few treasures and deep six the rest! ('Hole in My Foot' eh? My arse rather!)

That last though presumes one is, and one absolutely isn't - Ipod-man I mean. 'Twas hard enough letting go of vinyl for CDs, but that was it as far as this dude was and is concerned. At least there was some residual tangible thing qua thing with a CD - an object to have and to hold - even if no one ever rolled a decent joint on their tiny, plastic covers.

Did I ever give the typology of the very different highs to be had from a joint rolled on a mid-period Grateful Dead album sleeve as opposed to, say, an early Bob Dylan? No? Probably best just left to the quietude of history, lest Tom the Bish should ever glance at these idle pages! (But do try - if you are that way minded, and not if not - doing a five-skin spliff on the inner cover of the Allman Brothers Band double-album 'Each A Peach'. That extended hippy-happy world graphic will give you something to fall into until the morn' I can tell 'ee.)

But here we were, late one night, not stoned of course but seriously tipsy. And what should happen? A sudden, inexplicable, irresistible urge to hear Traffic once more. Do not ask from whence it came this compulsion, for I knew it not then and could not tell it now.

But came and rested it did. Traffic must be summonsed from the grave of youth to haunt the hearth of the ancient. Now had one been an ancient versed in this music 'downloading' malarkey no doubt the appetite would have been satisfied - satiated rather - in but a few twirls of apposite computer knobs and dials. Google this, click that and hey presto out she comes.

And if one had, would one have even recalled the doing of it the next day, let alone remembered either the pleasure or the pain? (We are talking some serious level of inebriation after all.) Well no, one wouldn't have. Possibly a faint returning wisp of memory a few days later: "Did one? One did! Lord above, fancy that!" etc.

Not me though. Luddite to the core, mastery of the fell desire was the ordering of the requisite CDs that have duly arrived today a week or so after the squiffy night in question. All right, that did involve a certain online activity complete with site search (Germany seemed to have it all for some reason), placing of orders and confirmations of dispatch, etc. The upshot though is that - now, later, and largely sober - I have three fine Traffic CDs to be consumed at my leisure.

The moot point remains: does one dare listen stone cold sober to music of one's long abandoned youth, risk rending the veil of forgetting unaided, unjuiced?

Things To Do When Dead Drunk #2 - listen to early Traffic?

Time shall shortly tell.

Remembering The Day....

"Do you remember that time you came round to my flat. I cooked coq-au-vin and you...?"

The rest of the sentence was lost amid the general noise of the crowded conference-on-a-break room. 'Man - Something To Be Overcome?' the title of the day. Not, mercifully, an outright charge by the feminist brigade to oust all remaining male vicars but rather - perhaps worse - a theological gonk having overdosed somewhat on dear Nietzsche - "More meddled against than meddling" was Dom. Robin's fine take on the man - and deciding we clergy needed exposure to a spot of 'radical transvaluation in faith'. (I have to say when it comes to impenetrable jargon we church coves can knock the spots off any Town Hall apparatchik or business middle-manager.)

But back to my interlocutress. There she stood, diminutive as ever, still perky, bright and - one cannot deny - as alluring as ever she was those fifteen or so years ago we last met. The surprise in now finding ourselves thrown once more into the same company was mostly mine not hers. A vicar even then, it made sense to both that I should be now attending some ecclesial bash. But that she had not veered off into a career path of, say, high fashion retail, preferring rather to stick to her guns as shepherdess of souls - albeit in a lay capacity - was not by me expected I owned.

It was perhaps recollection of our very first encounter that had sealed my mistaken conviction she would not last. Dashing breathless and late into some dull 'inter-agency' committee meeting, it was less the frazzled hair or the waft of heady scent just applied, but more the little black frock number that caught the eye, ear, nose and attention of all.

"So sorry, Madam Chair, got held up in traffic" she gushed as she took her place, before whispering to her startled neighbour: "Actually, don't say anything to Daphne [said Madam Chair] but I never quite managed to get home last night. Clean forgot about this bloody meeting in all the fun. No time to change. Do I look frightful? Name's Sarah by the way. New head girl of MetSoc. How do you do?"

The aforementioned startled neighbour happening to be myself I boldly, if utterly untruthfully, murmured her appearance was perfectly fitting for the occasion and also - more in truth this time - that I did rather well. MetSoc it took little working out was her abbreviation for the 'Metropolitan Society for the Preservation of Souls' - a Victorian charitable institute that had somehow survived the century to become a pretty fine and effective toiler in the troubled vineyard of young women gone rather off-piste through drugs and alcohol. ('Head girl' turned out to be Chief Executive, a joke I never quite took to though never dared rebuff.)

I being re-parished not long after - perhaps some six months - my time in professional company with Sarah was brief as well as occasional. Enough to become convinced she had the heart and guts for the difficult work of her trade, but possibly also not to assume it would last. Time then to confess I was wrong in that latter, for here she was still at it after all the years. No longer leader of MetSoc, but even more exalted as procuress-in-chief for one of the largest of independent health providers in our Woldean vicinity.

She was, it seemed, on the look-out for a new Chaplain for a recently opened hospital they ran and hence her attendance on the day. We agreed that the Bish would not necessarily appreciate her being seen to 'head hunt' in such a manner or gathering, but I promised not to tell so long as she dared not tip her hunting hat in my direction.

That hat-tipping thing of hers was a matter of some local legend it has to be said, way back where and when. 'Man eater' is not a happy phrase and so I shall not use it, but if one were to cast the matter into the gourmet mold it would have to be said that Sarah had then a more than fair-to-middling appetite for the delights of the table.

This is not to cast a stone, nor even to pick up a pebble. Wedded as I was to both trade and H, it was perhaps more a matter of relief at not having had to resist any temptation that might have befallen. For some the dog-collar is a great aphrodisiac - the allure of the forbidden of course - but for Sarah, she had freely owned at the time, it was anything but.

"No offence P, but I'm not into clergy," she had told me once in passing. "Can't be doing with all the pre-coital guilt - that unmannerly 'forgive me Father for I am about to sin' thing." I could and did see her point.

Which all the more made her remark this latter day so alarming. Remember going round to her flat? Not, I fear, in the slightest did I! Could I really have been there, done that and then not even had the decency to recall the - presumably - ecstatic moment? ("Hello H. How's your day been? Guess what I've discovered. Apparently I was unfaithful to you some fifteen years ago and had completely forgotten about it until today! What a hoot eh?" No, that would not do at all.)

Was it she in fact mistaken? Could I have been muddled with another assignation, one other who having dined on doubtless delicious chicken in the French style had...? Not merely an unkind thought but highly improbable a truth, Sarah having already in the conversation shown sharp recall of so much of my life as she had known it then. How was E? How was H? Did we still live in X? What about that cat with the dodgy temperament...etc? Accurate personal info tripping off her tongue as if last spoken of yesterday not a decade and half before; was such acuity of recall compatible with a misremembered tryst? Not as best I could judge.

"Lord! I didn't did I?" was not on the whole the finest of remarks to have blurted out in reply, implying as it did not only that I had no recollection of the deed - hardly the act of a gentleman - but also that the doing of it would not have been to my particular taste - the act really of nothing less than a cad.

Amusement, mercifully, not astonishment nor approbation even was the note of the dear lady's kind response. As gentle a letdown as was not my deserved lot in the circs. "No, silly man. We never had sex. I gave a dinner party for the regional forum and you came along with Daphne and all that dread committee of hers. You made some pompous remark about the best wine for a coq au vin."

'A wine snob? Moi?' as they say. Sadly all too possible, though marginally preferable to the amnesiac adulterer.

OK Commuter....

...Never have I quite gotten my head round precisely what it is Bro. Charles does for his living. He can - and indeed does - talk at great length about the desperate iniquities of the entire health and social care systems, which - so he would aver - only he is best placed to fix root and branch.

That much is more or less clear. We all know it doesn't work as it should. But it is rather a large leap for any sibling to believe in the soi disant heroics of a Bro. (howsoever cherished of course) as the White Knight come to rescue us all. (More of a Don Quixote if you ask me, but breathe it not abroad!)

And as for the technicalities of it all - processes and systems, strategies and policies, dynamics and behaviours - well veritably I glaze over as he rants, much as one did back at seminary when Dean 'Fruitbat' Wilfred would go so on and on about the theological intricacies of the latter part of the Albigensian heresy. (All very well if you're up with the lingo of course, but pretty deathly if not I find.)

Yet with that caveat it is good to hear from the urban-doomed Bro. from time to time, and on that note this just in from him:

"The last time I commuted for a living was last century, that distant time when Blair was largely blameless we thought and Radiohead seemed so, so cool. I hated it then and I abhor it now. Blasted new contract, however, requires a daily slog through the so many undone dead of whom Eliot wrote so chillingly.

But you know what Bro? I could almost weep sweet tears of nostalgia. Not of course for the beastliness of it all - the shove and the push, the suppressed anger or the flat despair, the train with no seat at the end of a long, baking, aching day - but for the wondrous, vivid recall that there was actually a time before.

A time before one lived daily with the bugbear of the beast and its pain, a time when life-limiting illness was something out there not in here. (You know what I mean and have no need of repeated detail.)

In its significant if illusory way I have been returned to that past that cannot be, it feels as if the Garden has been re-opened and one has been asked back inside - just a day tripper, a visitor, tourist perhaps but I have been there, where it never seemed I could go again.

OK Commuter?"

Needs a good holiday one suspects does the Bro. Not sure a week in the The Wolds is quite the thing, but I shall offer.

Crazy Days...

...the least - let alone the more - of you will have spotted how few posts there have been here these last months.

Many the reasons for this. Work, life...blah, blah. So many other distractions, too many to mention.

But key has been how to comment in any rational or valid way on a world gone utterly, utterly crazy? Nothing one can say seems to have relevance or purpose when so much is totally insane. "The horror, the horror"...once one accepts Colonel Kurtz's view, is there really anything else to say?

But, one will try. Two moments just cannot be ignored.

First. Two Christian preachers - the evangelical types one would ordinarily cross the road to avoid - are close to being arrested for daring to distribute religious leaflets in a predominately Muslim part of an English city. They are told they are committing a 'hate crime' and if there were to be beaten up - as they assuredly would be - it would be nothing but their own fault.

Well damn their eyes I say! Not the eyes of the preacher men, but the police auxiliary goons who dare spout such offensive rubbish. John Stuart Mill you should be living now!

Second. An man is refused access to an aircraft because his tee-shirt carries an image of a gun!!! It is a cartoon. It is some ink on cotton. Yet he cannot board the aircraft until he changes into some other, less offensive, garb.

Bloody, bloody nonsense both. The one not unconnected to the other.

This is my tee-shirt I wear everywhere - and I swear - everyday now: "If You're Not Appalled You've Not Being Paying Attention."

Need one say more?

Sentamu Nails It

This prolonged Yorkist sojourn has few perks. Still slaving away in penitential mode on this 'training the clergy' malarkey. Nearly done - and nearly in truth done in too.

There is though one perfect blessing, which is proximity to the mighty spirit and voice of the local Arch.

He one John Sentamu, famously bereft of dog-collar pending the binning of that great monster Mugabe.

A prayer he has written for Madeleine. No better words than these could there be:

"Keep her safe and take away her fear and anxiety. May your holy angels guard and protect her. We pray that she may be reunited with those who love her. Give hope to all her loved ones and hear our cry for her safe return."

Hear our cry indeed, for her and for all children who suffer today.

One Year, Another Day...

...Some months back I watched a documentary on the mass trade in Chinese children - boys kidnapped to be the one male heir, and now girls to mate in time with the boys.

A mother sat weeping, crying out in her pain: "Each day I wonder where he is, what he is doing, if he well. When it rains is there someone to keep him dry? If he weeps does someone wipe his tears? I should be doing this, but if I cannot I can only pray that someone is."

A year's anniversary of the abduction of Madeleine McCann and we too pray that her life is nourished and nurtured, not cruel and scared. The imaginings of that life must always be with Kate and Gerry.

One year of loss, another day of wondering and hoping and praying.

Wherever she is, may - as He most assuredly does - the Lord hold her in the palm of his hand, keep her safe from harm. One day to return her.

Learning Lessons...

Wales, it seems, is to "learn lessons" from the conviction of these two modern day witches - see below - for manslaughter.

Pray tell what would these be? That our society is doomed and we all with it?

That - rather I am sure - a restructuring of the procedures for child protection will be whipped up as a substitute for any real action?

That the Inquisition was not so very far off in prescribing burning at the stake for witchcraft?

Do I sense despair and doom-mongering here in the fragrant Wolds? God, you betcha I do and the sooner we stop being so immune to such horrors the better.

Meltdown...

A judge today has spoken of his deep concerns that British families are in meltdown, a threat he sees as far more serious than global warming. (The Government, naturally, has responded with a flurry of specious statistics that claim to prove, as ever, the MacMillan Myth 'We've Never Had It So Good'.)

Meanwhile, another judge - this time sitting in a Court rather than giving a public speech - is presiding over a case in which a mother and a half-sister are accused of leaving the sixteen year old daughter of the former to die of an overdose of heroin, preferring rather to watch something called 'Emmerdale' on the television than to call for an ambulance.

The girl - born to an addictive 'family' - herself hooked on heroin at fourteen - had - the prosecution alleges - been assisted by the two women to 'score' drugs during that fatal day and who were, therefore, reluctant to call for help lest their their complicit crime be revealed.

So noticing the child was showing signs of an overdose - 'blue lips' a bit of a giveaway - they put her to bed 'in the recovery position' before popping downstairs to watch their soaps. (I imagine they learned that procedure on some 'Hug A Druggie' training course funded by the NHS - i.e. you and me.)

This is what we hear. We also hear of the mother who giggles during police interviews when her son is accused - then later convicted - of kicking a young woman to death simply because she was a Goth in her dress and demeanour.

Meltdown? Total obliteration of the entire human race cannot come too soon. I speak as a loving Christian.

"Save the planet. Put an end to humanity."

There is a logic. A fearful logic.

Life, The Universe And Everything...

....not a Holy Week homily - that yet to be carefully scripted for delivery at the Vigil of course - but a reflection on a dear friend now so early dead. (In Heaven too I am sure, though he would have scorned the very existence of the place whilst on Earth.)

DNA - no not that either as life's meaning, but the man's name.

Douglas Noel Adams. You'll know him, though not perhaps the Noel bit. He of 'THHGTTG' - and if I have to spell that one out you'll not be knowing of him and the point of the tale would be lost, so I shan't.

Anyway, cutting to the chase as ever one does, there was - now some thirty years ago God spare us from remembering how long ago - the matter of the meaning of 'LTU&E', that being the Ultimate Question put to Deep Thought, a computer of gargantuan scope that took some several millions of years to come up with the question's answer: '42'

Good answer, if a bit tricky to fathom - as many of the best answers are. So still comes the secondary question - what on Earth was DNA up to? Forty-frigging-two! Some crazed, teasing, madcap genius playing with our sensitivities these thirty years? In many ways yes.

The source of many a learned paper on the matter, with explanations quite as weird and wonderful as the answer itself. Many based on warped misuse of the near-science of numerology: codes within codes revealing a certain truth all dependent on symbolism and affinity. (Quite fun in its way - dear Saint Augustine loved it - but generally that way obsessive compulsive madness lies.)

All wrong in any case of course. Lend or bend - according to taste - an ear, I shall expound all.

DNA and I roomed together at School. When I say 'roomed' I mean rather that we were but two among four hundred or more boyish souls condemned by cruel fate - and harsher parenting - to dwell in the deep discomfort of a boarding school.

Among the many aches and pains of such a life was the very industrial scale of the thing. Nothing was ever really personal, all was en masse from bathing facilities to dormitories to dining halls.

Eating would indeed be at a long double-sided table seating twenty or so pupils, each grabbing what they could from the vast troughs of food 'ere a greedy neighbour had scoffed the last remaining pie.

In such circs. a boy's fantasy would be dining on a totally more domestic scale. As indeed boy turned to youth, hormone infested and deeply charged with - largely - unrequited sexual longings, the perfect ideal would be the a dinner date with a lascivious female as prelude to whatever the virginal youth - as such he was - could most fervently imagine.

From thus came forth the great - and greatly misunderstood - answer to life the universe and everything. Deep Thought - taking on the mantle of its author - did not give a numerical answer, as generally taken, but a verbal. Being, however, a computer not entirely versed in the full idiom of English the words were not uttered entirely as they ought.

Deep Thought thus, in answer to the great mystery of life, spoke of "For tea two" - that wonderful intimate moment of a pair of persons alone with their scones and their Darjeeling - instead of the intended or more correct "Tea for two".

That was the earthly paradise the boarding school boy had yearned for, and the one he wished pronounced. An intimate meal - nothing more, but most certain nothing less.

There is in fact, within the text, a 'second phase' (as these rugger types would say) meaning not to be overlooked.

For the people who heard Deep Thought utter the Great Answer assumed that a computer must give a numerical answer, because computers were but vast 'number crunchers' after all. '42' might be odd and a bit off, but at least it was a logical starting point, they reckoned (applying further the numerical idiom).

And thus from this dual misunderstanding, based on mutual attempt to see the world from the point of view of the other, came complete confusion.

Or chaos.

Which is where DNA really did intend to leave his Universe.

But I do hope - indeed I know - that the man has finally found his proper ordering of the finite world within his now infinite sphere.

Might not be the making of an Easter homily. But then again it might.

Capering Curates....

Charlie the Curate is a fine fellow, much welcomed around these parts. The parishioners adore him, as well they might being all chubby-cheeked and cheerful and earnest and all. (They like their curates fresh. Somewhat in the manner of Count Dracula sometimes I fear - young blood on which to feast and be forever young.)

I too rather approve of the cove. Keeps me on my toes with a veritable - if occasionally mildly irritating - encyclopaedic knowledge of all things scriptural and eccesial. He never means it of course, but oft-times it's a bit like one of those entertaining yet irksome chappies in public houses who can perform the most astonishing of card tricks, also never failing to chip in with the right answer when there's a pub quiz question the team simply cannot fathom. Smart or what, in a kind of too-good-to-be-true sort of way.

Quote him any line - half-line, word even it sometimes seems - from the Good Book and he'll be back at you with the next Chapter and a Half before you can say "Fine Charlie. Take your point. Now where's that bottle of malt gone?"

Not that there is anything of the showman about the fellow, nor even - far worse - the dour text-book puritan ever on the lookout - and all too swift to shout it out loud - for a soul in peril of perdition for not having the right party line about a particular Biblical matter of God and salvation.

For all that though Charlie can have - as these young chappies must in truth - an eagerness for truth that can set the teeth a-grinding. He's done it before - no doubt will do it again - and has once more done it today.

Comes a story - perhaps no more than that - from you-know-where of a Bishop (male) and a close junior cleric (female) who may - or who may not, though don't put your mortgage on it - have been indulging in "Ugandan discussions" to the detriment of their respective marriages and the shame of the diocese.

Now Charlie may well have a point that no Bishop worth his reputation for sanctity or his stipend should be allowing any such person to be his 'PA', let alone one who is female, young and tolerably sprightly by view of all the many photographs of the woman now filling the Internet. (The one of her gazing with seemingly infinite adoration up at the man from her desk was not a wise move.)

Be all of that as it may, and howsoever it all pans out, I am not best pleased to have had to received six of the hottest telephone calls this late morning from church folk voicing the strongest objections to my Curate's harsh words on the subject, uttered - in a moment of madness it must be - at Mattins of the day.

Had he merely rushed to judgement, as these young sorts will do, I could have let that pass. Not entirely in the loving spirit of the Lord I would have advised him, yet not condemned the man the more for having fallen short in the mercy of God department.

But does he do that alone? No, sadly not. He cannot merely content himself with some pertinent if prejudicial ranting. He has to take the angle that a man in a position of power should not be dabbling in any improper exercise of that power over a subordinate.

Don't get me wrong. Although such a notion is, for me, too far into the deathly realm of sexual politics from which fell domain no person may return unscathed, I would not refute Charlie's central notion that men in power should learn to keep their hands to themselves. No Sir - or Madam - me.

Charlie's fault lies not in the subject itself - howsoever tangential to the main matter of Peace on Earth and all that - as in the chosen expression of his thinking. For Charlie, you must understand, came forth from the mournful land of 'meejah' to become the burgeoning cleric he is. And it is from that place his metaphor arose to the consternation of the Mattins masses.

It goes thus I am told: "Are we not minded when we hear of this possible great scandal of that sad motto from the world of television - the PA made the tea and the Producer made the PA?"

Well, no they were not so minded of course! Not one of them knows a jot or a tittle about the dark world of television and who does what to whom for what indulgent, sensual purpose. This is The Wolds and not the White City, or wheresoever television is made these days.

Charlie's perky remark might have played well among people for whom such matters are daily food and drink. Out here though they have caused a right stink, as well they might.

Silly boy - as Captain Mainwairing would have said!

Lenten Fare Too...

...oddly enough, having driven through the desperate winds of last night to spend a restful day en famille one finds oneself tonight completely sans same famille.

H and her sister - the latter only a direct descendant of Count Vlad I swear - having taken their mutual mother for a slap-up pre-Mother's Day outing and meal ("We're driving mum into the country for the day." "And bringing her back too?" "Oh so funny.") E and I could have been spending a jolly parent-bonds-with-child evening together, the latter pouring out the ten-year matured malt for the former in a dedicated if sympathetic manner whilst the thus soothed parent pours forth the equally distilled wisdom of even greater age.

But 'tis not to be, for E is off with her cronies to celebrate her seventeenth - no less - birthday, leaving Papa with but a single malt taken in solitude and some certain sad reflections on the rapid passing of the years. Gone forever the jellies and the ice-creams for twenty of one's best nursery chums, to be replaced by malibus and cokes all round.

One says 'cronies' though in truth one must add that a first and seemingly quite special 'boyfriend' is among that number of the birthday gang. Seems a pleasant enough sort of young cove. Clearly utterly smitten by E - which is reasonable one has to say - and is known for undertaking Duke of Edinburgh Awards rather than partaking in crack cocaine - which these days has to be a massive bonus.

Nonetheless the morphing from central male figure in a daughter's life into that of but a bit-part player (still handy for the wads of cash needed to maintain a teenager in the life to which she wishes to become accustomed, but no longer needed for the drives to town as T 'has wheels' - as they say) takes more swallowing than the third malt that somehow, by God's good grace, has found its way into my glass.

Thank goodness Curate Charlie is taking First Mass of Sunday this evening.

Lenten Fare...

Have you missed me?

Of course you have! A Lenten posting to the frozen North - a fine Minster city you'll immediately guess - robs me of Internet access during the week. Much good no doubt comes of this abstinence, not least as it was not on the self-selected list of not-to-dos this fasting season.

Dear Robin would always say that it was the unexpected - unwished for - trial that would put one to the test and not the "I'll do without the malt for a spell. Save some money, shed a bit of weight and lose the morning hangover" type of essentially selfish approach.

I'm not actually accusing the Bearded Bard of taking his revenge for some overheard remarks of mine concerning the central idiocy of the man, by sending me North to cover some 'much needed' (his words and no one else's!) administrative function for the duration. But if ripping a man away from his post and place in order to complete an audit of clerical equalities training needs for the coming decade is his idea of a 'vital role', then it is not mine!

There is some blessing in leaving the dear Curate in charge of said Woldean post and place at present, for it is not the least of the irritants of the job, as lived where one is, that one has to endure the perennial 'Grumpier Than Thou' faces of the penitential parishioners, too many of whom seem to see Lenten observance as nothing but an Olympic event: faster (more fasting than her), higher (more holy than him) and stronger (more rank from less personal hygiene).

I admit that I too have had my days in youth, when the endurance angle of Lent was to the fore; when thoughts of the early desert Fathers - saints on stilts some of them truly - atop their stylites and seeming to exist on nothing but fresh air and piety - did capture the imagination of the burgeoning cleric.

One has though - and not over-setting the significance of commitment to self-denial seen through to an end or rather to a purpose - largely let slip this 'No pain no gain' view of pre-Easter training of the soul.

'Tis even about the only occasion on which one has welcomed a change to the Liturgy. The old 'Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return' for Ash Wednesday has been replaced with the more positive spin 'Repent and believe in the Gospel'.

Yes indeed, the motif of dust was apt for the day, but one can become a bit too fixated on the bitter gloom of death - a form of self-indulgence really and no more - and not enough minded of the truly awful - as in awe-inspiring - glory of the Easter to come.

What was it Saint Paul said when asked by one of his numerous correspondents what was one to do whilst waiting on the Lord? "Rejoice and be glad" was his simple, startling and wonderful reply.

So on with the Lenten 'glad rags'. Let sinners all not mourn their shame by sanctimonious show of sadness, but let their delight shine forth rather in the great redemptive feast hoving into view.

"I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles"....

...nothing to do with West Ham football team, but some wretched television advertisement - all right, possibly the best as well as the worst ever - that has had H in stitches tonight.

Cue some impossibly handsome, freshly showered and naked-but-for-a-towel kind of cove sliding so easily towards the camera, explaining how some sort of chocolate confectionery has to be best enjoyed at a certain air temperature in order that the bubbles therein can release the true flavour of the sweet.

Cue then two unseen musing females - voiceovers I believe they are known in the trade - the one who remarks "So that's what the bubbles are there for!", to which the other responds "Sorry, was he speaking?"

Oh how we laughed! Well, H did anyways leaving me feeling so very mid-aged.

Death On The Railway...

One heard yesterday the desperate news of a man crushed to death by a train. The railway station is local, the man not known to us here.

We do not know, but we heard it said that he was in his fifties and that he jumped - not fell or was pushed.

Why do I immediately picture someone so bereft of hope at the impending collapse of all he has worked for and dreamt of - the result of impending financial ruin - that only death could end the torment?

It may not be thus - and God save his soul and protect his family - but I fear it may be so.

We have had, in our Wolds, the shotgun farmers and we have had the starving widows, but now too it seems we are just as likely to have the bankrupt bankers. Black bin-liners to clear the desk; not the anticipated, expected annual bonus.

Do I grieve for such souls as much I would the others? Yes, without any shadow of a doubt I do.

My greatest dread has ever been death by mechanical crushing. It is my certain belief that this dread came about because when but a child of less than seven years I was nearly run-down by a car reversing out of its driveway.

Mother was following as I rode my tricycle along the pavements towards the shops. We were off to buy food for Father's tea. (Well, perhaps we weren't. Maybe we were doing anything you might care to imagine. But what we were doing was totally ordinary and safe to the child I then was.)

There was a low brick wall to my left. The driver of the car would not have seen me and my tricycle coming. He passed slowly backwards just as I reached his driveway, trapping me under his rear wheel. Mother - people - screamed as they saw what was happening and could happen. The driver heard and stopped. I lived. I might not have done.

That then, from that day, has been my abiding fear. An impersonal machine grinding my soft flesh. Our - and he is our - man on the railway line did die that way, split and sundered in a second. From life to death in a moment of agony.

God save us all from such an end. For whatever reason. For whatever purpose took him there. Good Lord preserve us.

A Regular Lent...

...do you recall that preamble to the Easter liturgy that goes more or less thus: "We now having faithfully completed our Lenten observances...etc, etc"?

I do so always love that line gazing out, as one does, over the sea of faithful faces gathered in whilst they collectively wince at the painful reflection on all the things they so earnestly promised, strove or intended to do - or not - as signs and portents of preparation and reparation, yet now acknowledging to themselves that to have been so much straw in the wind.

Of course, had any of the flock the foresight or gall to glance my way at that moment they would note the most solemn of wincing as I - ever thus - can in no way pretend or aver that I have stuck one iota to the fast.

Just the one iota - if such a thing can be singular - perhaps, and that in being so, so sorry for having taken one's hand from the Gospel plough as ever one did.

Lent, of course, is not a marathon endurance race of self-restraint or denial. There are no heroic garlands for managing a bare forty days withot a drink or a raised temper.

This we know, but is it not a mark of the feeble soul who cannot abstain from meat or drink or whatever a mere month and a bit? All right, a tee-total vegetarian is not the sort of clerical image I would wish to push on the world, yet such was my intent this year. No beef, no beer. Seemed simple enough at the time. But 'twas never thus.

Three things comfort me here. Our beloved Saint Peter for starters, keeper of the keys and so forth, was the most abject exemplar of failure to sustain in times of trial: "Me know the Lord? Get out of it!"

Then there is the remembrance of one Lenten time when coffee was forsaken utterly. Did I turn to God in my time of temptation? Did I heck. All I could think of was that first caffeine hit after the Vigil. It was the only - the only - thing on my mind the entire season. Not entirely helpful to anyone or for anything.

Finally, blessed above all, was dear Robin - late Prior of Q - who once confided that he always took a bite of chocolate on Good Friday of all days to remind himself what a hopeless soul he was.

But he wasn't of course. He was a veritable saint. Patron saint of Lent in my book and a regular guy.

Bless You!

...odd the things one comes across.

This from a useful tome on the practical application of science:

It seems that some time past an experimental anti-depressant drug was noted as having an unexpected impact on the women on whom it was being tested.

For when the women sneezed the drug induced an orgasm! (Quite a find you might argue, and who am I to disagree indeed?)

Being diligent researchers of course the boffins were concerned about these 'side-effects', so one of them asked "What do you take for this syndrome then?"

"Pepper" said the woman!

Bless her!

Begone Bearded Bard....

...What a loon! What on earth possessed the Bearded Bard to be so inept as to assume he could, as head of the Anglican Church, stand up before any congregation - never mind it were an 'intellectual gathering' (one reaches for one's pistol naturally at the very name of the thing) - and say anything quite so daft as that Sharia Law was a) a good thing or b) that we ought to be having it here.

'Holy Fool' does not do justice to the man. He is too plain daft to be the sanctified other. Let him be some unauthorised scholar, labouring away safely in some quiet college, if he wants to come out with such nonsense. But as the Head Boyo of what's left of C of E he had no right to be putting all us underling clerics in this ridiculous position of having to run around after him trying to explain - well God knows what he was saying to be truthful.

As for putting up the poor old Bish of Southwark to bleat further nonsense about the writ of British law being just an 'umbrella' under which all other religious laws can shelter, I simply shudder.

How can he have not foreseen the damage his words would have on relations between British Muslims and others of different or of no faiths? What kind of dream world does he inhabit?

He must go and soon is not swift enough.

Harry Gregg's One Life...

...Well more than one really. Quite a few actually. 'The World's Best Goalkeeper' for starters.

'The Hero of Munich' too. Though not according to the man himself. You would perhaps have heard Harry speak last night in personal memory at the fiftieth anniversary of that dreadful aeroplane crash, which killed half a team of the most promising footballers of their day and many of the journalists who followed them in their pursuit of glory and triumphs.

It was indeed an era of 'jumpers for goalposts', a time when promotional photographs would show the boys practising their skills and grinning for the camera, not in some mighty stadium - or on a Brazilian beach - but on waste-ground behind the houses of the men who would pour out of a hard week's work at Trafford Park to rejoice in the artistry of the players of Old Trafford across the way. (That was the message to the team from Matt Busby - show respect for the workers. And they did.)

But when Harry Gregg dismisses claims that he was a hero for going back into the aircraft to saves lives when others were fleeing - and it was the choosing of the risk that makes him brave - it is not the stern, generational self-deprecating sentiment he reveals, but the tormented, unending agony of the guilty survivor.

He lives and they died. Them he could not save and Harry's pain is that he believes he needs to be forgiven by them for this. Forty years he stayed away from the the families of the men who died, because he could not bear to look them in the eye.

Ten years back, however, Harry was persuaded to attend a fortieth remembrance service with those families. And they thanked and praised and loved him for what he had done, not spurned him for what he had not. It was some great relief from a heavy burden.

If you do not understand the guilt of a survivor, then count yourself very fortunate for only they who live with this pain can comprehend its strength and power.

I've had it seven years. I'm not sure I can wait another thirty or more to be forgiven, but then perhaps Harry's one life gives hope for mine.

Thank you then Harry Gibb for living a part of my life as well as the many of your own.

Saint Cuthbert - Fat or Thin?

...Possibly not the first question you'd ask yourself when considering Saint Cuthbert: was he a fat or a thin monk?

Granted, many may not pass any a moment giving reflective consideration to the fellow. Even a 'Who he?' remark might be heard among you. Sad that really, as the life of this early Christian British - we'll address that point of his Britishness in a moment - hero is a rich and interesting mixture of the scholar, the monk, the cleric, the soldier too, the hermit and the peace maker.

British? Irish many say, and indeed Cuthbert's allegiance to the Celtic rite - an adherence he renounced in obedience to the Church and his monastic vows - may indicate a homeland. Scots perhaps, born close to Melrose Abbey where his monastic life commenced.

It is not though either Cuthbert's nationality or even all he was as a temporal and spiritual leader that compels my attention tonight. Was he a fattie or was he not I ask?

And why so? This so...

Go to the Holy Island of Lindesfarne, as I have done once more today, where Cuthbert was Prior - when he wasn't busy being hermit then Bishop then back to hermit once more - and you will see a tall, lean modern statue of the man gazing south across the Priory lawn towards his monastic Church then on towards Farne Islands.

Well could you understand the sculptor's thinking here: stern life-long fasting not the diet to build a big fellow. Ascetic by habit and conviction, one can't really picture Cuthbert tucking into the massive monastic meals that some Abbeys did and do enjoy.

Convincing though the portraiture, my diffuculty with this image is that I know a real live monastic Cuthbert who is neither tall nor lean in the slightest. Doubtless - indeed so - a man of deep spirituality, committed to the cause etc., my Cuthbert is nonetheless a jolly round fellow. Always has been and not, over time, losing girth far from it.

So say 'Cuthbert' to me and I picture not this awful lean - gaunt almost - figure that sits on Lindesfarne lawn. But was the sculptor right? I suspect he might have been more lifelike in his presumption than I. For I noted today for the first time, just how narrow and tight the residual spiral staircases are at Lindesfarne.

The night stairs from dormitory to choir are so narrow a couple of pencils would have problems passing each other. The day stairs rather slightly wider, though not by much, and granted that Prior Cuthbert would have had his own quarters apart from the rank and file, that not withstanding the whole tone of the place reeks of 'slim or stuck'.

Really. No Friar Tuck could fit, literally, into Lindesfarne. Nor indeed would my modern Cuthbert.

As we then begin our season of liturgical fasting (I hate 'Slimming For Jesus', but you can see the joke I hope), I must aspire more to the Cuthbert of ancient tradition than of modern actuality.

His Father's Library...

Christ has given us to understand that there are many rooms in His Father's House. This is splendid news of course as it gives hope for us all. Somewhere there will be an allotted space - howsoever tiny or peculiar - for each and everyone, if only we would choose to take up residence therein.

A veritable heavenly Gormenghast no less, peopled with some utterly bizarre coves no doubt, each pottering about in their unique and particular manner. I do rather love that notion, it is so wonderfully inclusive. Heaven will have its standard saints of renown and proper fame, but also there will be room given to the so many who never quite understood their purpose on earth or ever appreciated that their quirks and oddities added to the necessary theme of redemptive humanity.

I would aspire no more - and no less - to be one of these latter sorts. It's a goodly and a Godly intent. And should it so pass that I find, in time - or rather perhaps out of time and into eternity - that a room in that mansion is mine, I do so jolly hope it can be the Library.

For there must be a Library in that mansion mustn't there? None would be complete without it. Some may wish for the billiard room or the kitchen garden in which to feel at ease, but for me the Library is the thing.

An eternity in which to read could be for some a hellish prospect one owns. But when I consider the volumes I simply must either return to or to try anew, I simply find there cannot be sufficient time in this mortal life to do it all and that Heaven must supply the gap.

To put it thus. In just some twenty hours or so it has struck me that I cannot rest until I have once more completed 'War and Peace', taken a revisit to 'Moby Dick', been nostalgic about a thirty year old yet intensely relevant dissertation on the nature of literary fiction titled 'The World and the Book', absorbed the entire output of Thomas Mann and not just 'The Magic Mountain', taken at least a dip once more into Albert Camus not to mention finally reread Sartre's 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy, compared Herodotus to Thucydides again, given Dante one more go, not failed to appreciate George Eliot as one did as a callow youth, spent a happy month in the company of Eliot, T. S., remembered what it was like to be sixteen and enthralled by Robbe-Grillet, suffered with dear mad William Blake and pondered in the serious company of Tennyson.........there is hardly an end, and all this is just what one would wish to achieve before the weekend were out.

You can see the difficulty. Quarts into pint pots do not ye go. There is the day job to consider, yet to mention family commitments and so forth.

Time simply does not permit it all. Only eternity is sufficient for the purpose.