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?