Country Living - parishes and people

And so I went off to live in the countryside. And tried to be Staffordshire's answer to whatever vicar Ambridge had got. I think it was a handicapped, black lesbian last I heard, so maybe I could never compete. Right up to the end the struggle continued with the usual rows and splits and accusations. I was simply “The Rector”, never seen as a person in my own right. In other words church as usual.

There were four churches – three listed, one Victorian. Two needed roofs replacing, all needed new heating systems. Two had full sound systems, one a loop only, one nothing. Four churchyards with overgrown trees. Two choirs. Two schools and four village halls and a handful of local trusts. All in all there were all the ingredients for a lengthy soap opera. Local conflicts; rivalries that went back years; struggles for control and dominance that would have made JR blench.

At the interview they had asked how I would cope with conflict. I pointed out that most conflict in churches is about nonsense and I would try to get people to realise how ridiculous they really were. Sadly some people never manage to see that. And don’t realise the damage they are doing. I never dared point out to one of the worst offenders that my mother wouldn’t have spoken to him because he had been “in trade”.

Before I came there had been one vicar between three churches. I was looking after four. Only one had a worship team that took family services. So I had four services most Sundays. One of my first jobs was to establish a worship team in each parish. Over five years I achieved it. When I left there were over twenty people involved in leading worship in one way or another and I had just grouped them into a ministry team.

To start with everyone seemed friendly. In fact lots of people popped in or dropped in cards. It was an altogether different feel to the Black Country.

Normally between postings you get between two weeks and a month off to sort out the move, get the last place out of your hair and settle in. I was given strictly ten days from my last service at St James and my induction at Haughton. As usual I was thrown in at the deep end – two funerals and I hadn't even been inducted.  I pointed out that people were dying to meet me, but they thought that was bad taste.

Rather than get a retired vicar in I decided to do them on my first day at work which was a Friday, which of course is normally my day off. But it did mean that I got to meet the whole of the district as one of the funerals was for a prominent farmer.

And people actually seemed pleased to see me. I did go off on a wander round the lanes on Sunday afternoon and met up with someone who had called to see if I was OK on Saturday. He and his partner were going the other way but told me to drop in on a cottage half way round the circuit for a cup of tea with a member of the PCC. Well I thought I had better get back as there were another 73 boxes to unpack. So I went straight past said cottage (well actually a substantial house with outbuildings and barn owls). Then later the owner dropped in on me on her way past and said how sorry she was that I hadn't called in and gave me a bottle of wine.

Had no-one told these people that they should slag off the vicar, slam the door in his face and burn the vicarage down?  I soon realised that they were simply biding their time, lulling me into a false sense of self-confidence. In the end it was the loneliest place I ever lived.

Actually there had been a crime wave in the village which was causing great consternation and calls for "something to be done". A 'for sale' sign was removed from outside a house in the village one Friday night and planted outside another house down the road. Was it just coincidence that this upsurge in anti-social behaviour happened just as I arrived?

There were four services on my first Sunday (as on most Sundays, with four churches to cover and worship teams not yet in place in all of them). And after two there were slap up meals to welcome me in the village halls. Not just the usual sandwich and sausage roll spreads where people cough bits of pastry at each other across the food, but real meals with proper food. So I ended up very full and probably shouldn't have been driving home. But then a local policeman did give me advice on the "safe" way back where I could stick to side roads and just drive across the main road and avoid anyone noticing.

The one drawback was that it was freezing. None of the churches could have got over five or six degrees.
It was really cold. And I know I go on about the cold even when it isn't, and sit on the beach in midsummer with scarf and overcoat; but it was cold. Really, really cold. In all the churches. Everywhere. No amount of clothes could compensate. I expected to see David Attenborough following a couple of polar bears down the aisle.
I came home and climbed into the fridge to warm up and finally thawed out at midnight.

None of the churches sorted out their heating while I was there. Haughton only heated the congregation with nothing for the organist or celebrant at the front. Later, after I had been shaking uncontrollably at the end of a service and people were getting freezer burns off my hands, they gave me a fan heater for beside the altar. If I stood within three feet of it I could thaw my hands out from time to time. Church Eaton – a medieval listed barn of a place – had only three radiators and one of those was covered in a blanket because it “didn’t look nice”. Bradley had the nerve to have a thermometer on a pillar at the back just to remind you that it was only 3⁰C in there even after the heating had been on for hours. And Derrington also had overhead heaters for the congregation, but not at the altar.

Well it had to happen. Inevitably I hit the wall, as you do in a marathon after 20 miles or so, or after being in a parish a month. All I really wanted to do was sleep, but sleep didn't come. It was I’m sure an effect of going straight from one stressful situation to another without a real break. So I kept going, and tried to keep cheerful; which was always a strain at the best of times. Not that much had gone wrong, yet. I discovered a few of the conflicts. But they are all so nice about it. Not wanting to cause offence.

One church was against raffles, which was a shame since they needed £450000 from the lottery if the roof was to stay on. Another arranged for me to bury ashes when I was also five miles away doing something else. No one seemed to notice I had three other parishes to cover.

A fairly typical day off for me was a funeral, the end of term service and a village institute Agm.

The school service had its moments. The head gave out the prizes to the children who had had 100% attendance that term. He called them out one by one. Then there was no answer to one name. One of the pupils had gone home at lunchtime thinking there was only a boring service to go before the end of term, so what the heck. But it has apparently ruined the school average.

Meanwhile the problems began with the church Agms. Someone emailed me a set of reports and I naturally thought that it was just for information. So I turned up at the Agm without even printing them out. But no, I was the one who had to produce copies for everyone. And the secretary hadn't produced an agenda either. Someone did have a copy of last year’s agenda which was all over the place with the elections coming randomly in the middle of reports. And as there were no copies everything had to be read out in full.

At least everyone agreed that it wasn't my job to do the paperwork. In some previous churches it was left to me and I gave in and did it, but with four churches now, I didn’t want to create a precedent. I did live to regret it though as that particular agm was always chaotic with no clear agenda and the reports squashed so tightly onto one sheet of A4 that they were unreadable.

At all the agms everyone was re-elected, though I did mention that it might be nice if someone actually wrote down who they all were as there seem to be no lists of who was on any of the committees. Every year they simply agreed that the existing committee carry on. But if you go back a few years you can see that the membership has changed completely. How and when remains a mystery.

What was interesting was the number of people who wanted progressive things to happen. I had thought that one of the organists was a bit of a traditionalist until she asked if I could put a small altar up in the chancel arch instead of using the main altar which is hidden away at the top of the church; and if the people could sit in the front few pews instead of at the back: it would all be a bit more together. Moving the altar was too much for the people though. The same church started up a mother and toddler service once a week and planned to put in a disabled loo and kitchen to cope with more use of the church. More of that later.

Another church started a youth group, collecting together those who had been confirmed over the past few years. After a few sessions it was clear that homework and other activities took precedence, but they did continue to help at the family services.

After the previous rector left, the church decided they didn't need their own copier and sent it back, incurring a £1000 penalty for breaking the contract. That left me with nowhere to copy service sheets and notices. In the end I had to give in and start using the parish council photocopier for weekly newssheets and services.

Easter was still celebrated in the country as it used to be. The churches were well attended and by the end of the day over 10% of the population had been through the doors. Try fitting in that number in the cities.

How do people in the dear old CofE make really interesting things sound so boring? I went to the deanery synod. Not something I often do, but it was my first one in a new area so I thought I should show my face. It was supposed to be a time for all the local CofE churches to get together to find out what is going on and to create new plans for the future. And what was going on was, more or less, exciting - a sort of son-et-lumiere in one local church; plans for a labyrinth outside another; new youth congregations working outside the structures. But after about five minutes I had switched off because the presentations were so boring. There was a speaker to talk about a children's church that meets in a converted shop, and sensibly never goes near the church.

Everyone just read off scripts and droned on. Where was the excitement? The passion?

And when someone else talked about people who never go to church coming together in faith, inevitably someone from the floor asked what that had to do with the CofE. Quite. That's the point. For too long the CofE has seen it as nothing to do with them. It reminded me of Sedgley in the 1870s when one of the congregation asked if people could get together to talk about faith. And was told that has nothing to do with the church, meet elsewhere.

But meanwhile in my small corner things were stirring. I called a meeting of churchwardens and treasurers which took it for granted that at least these four churches would bail each other out if any got into difficulties. I thought it would take three years to reach that point. Although in the event when one church did get behind in its payments to the diocese none of the others thought to help. They were a bit stickier about aligning fees across the group but in the end agreed to pick the highest, which are still lower than what I charged elsewhere.

Then the cleaner resigned. Not mine. The one at the church. The church that needed half a million.
The builders were in looking to see what needed to be done first. And they came on the wettest day of the year. So a fair amount of the mud and dirt from the roof, which they were inspecting, got trodden into the carpet when they came in to look at the roof from inside. The roof has been there for five hundred years and so needs a bit of a seeing to. Anyway they didn't find too much wrong, it just needed replacing, so that was all right.
Except that the cleaner resigned. Because she had to clean.

She was only happy when she had nothing to do, as soon as the church actually needed a clean she was off.

Of course there were always the bats.
They have just started flying around. And as is their way they leave their calling cards all over the place. And that needs cleaning too. Except that is done every week before the services, because otherwise no-one could sit down. The cleaner of course cleaned after that. So the church was always clean.

But don't tell English Nature. We told them that the bats were only in the tower. Except when we wanted to repair the tower when naturally we said they were only in church. If they are everywhere then the work on the roof can't be done till the winter. And the grants that we have from the local funders are only available for six months so the work has to start in July. But the bats were still there then. In fact I think they seemed to be around all year but that would have meant we could never repair the roof. Luckily the bat lady came on a day when they must have stayed asleep as she said that we didn't have a colony of bats just a couple of lone males. If true they have to be fairly incontinent as the pews are covered every morning. Maybe they go out on the razzle and after a few bevvies and a curry come back to spread the results around the church.

We had a concert to raise some of the money. Haydn string quartets. He can still knock out a decent tune. The raffle ticket sellers had to take people out into the rain to sell them tickets because they weren't allowed to sell tickets in church in case Jesus didn't like it.

Not everything that's bats is in the belfry.

It was appointment time in school. So faced with three candidates, who do you choose? The solid dependable one, not very exciting but smooth enough to fit in, cope with the class and be nice to the parents; the jargon ridden one devoid of all character who simply repeats all that has been written in the documents; or the totally off the wall one who has us laughing through the whole interview and who would ensure there is never a dull moment in class or out of it.

Well of course you go for the personality free one, who won't rock any boats and won't be "a risk"

Shame really. The risky one was the only one who spoke at length about the spiritual ethos of the school and who knew what to do with a vicar, given half a chance. I would have enjoyed the after school training sessions. The one they chose had no idea what a vicar was.

I was distracted anyway as there was fifty litres of water a minute coming through the roof of the rectory and I knew the builders couldn't get here till after lunch as they were fixing every other leaking roof in the diocese first. Of course I should really have diverted the leak into the water tank and killed several ecological birds with one stone. What remained unsolved is how the hole appeared in the roof in the first place. Quite a neat hole, the size of a fifty pee piece. Looked like it had been drilled there.

In between times I had to give tea to the village neurotic - who I worried could yet turn out to be a stalker.

 I started my "Celtic" services. Everyone, well six of them, sitting around and supposed to be joining in. A few songs a meditation and an open prayer session. And a bit of ritual action - dipping your finger in a bowl of water, holding a stone, looking at leaves, that sort of thing, as you do.

And they hated it. Silence, when they should have been coming up with prayer topics. Silence, during the hymns - well admittedly we didn't have a musician so we had to make do with those karaoke hymn cds which seem to be in strange keys and even stranger timings. And everyone sat rigidly in their seats when they should have been participating.

Then the next week, same service but different church. And a church which had its strange moments. I think there they would much rather have carried on without a vicar. They wanted to do their own thing in their own way. But the service went really well. We only did the karaoke for one hymn and then decided it would be better to sing without it. Everyone joined in and everyone afterwards said how valuable the experience was for them.

So should I give in to the boring church and give them a boring service that only the spiritually dead will come to and concentrate on the living? Or should I try to revive the corpse and pump some life back into it? That was the unresolved question of my ministry.

Then I had a meeting to point out that every other church in the land had servers to help the priest in the service and a lay assistant to give out the wine. And maybe the four here could start what everyone else had been doing for two thousand years. But no. They don't do that here. Doesn't matter that Jesus had a young lad helping with the loaves and the fishes. If he had tried that in Staffordshire he would have to give them out to the five thousand himself or they wouldn't want them. And as for these strange new services I was introducing - they're far too spiritual. And trying to get people to shake hands. You don't come to church for things like that. It's confrontational pushing God at people in church. Not the sort of thing they were used to at all. I subsequently discovered that all of the churches had had lay assistants in the past and only when they had left or died had they not been replaced. It took five years to get all the churches to accept them again.

Each of the villages has its fetes. Now I've always believed that bazaars are bizarre and a fete is worse than death. But I almost enjoyed them. Admittedly the best were village events in a village where everyone is working together. Some villages were rigidly divided in all sorts of ways and the “social events” seemed always a bit forced.

Meanwhile at one of the fetes the highlight was ferret racing. This is a sport I could really get into. Five ferrets put down transparent tubes and the first one out of the end wins. Of course they have no intention of trying to win and one decided the fastest way out was to turn around and get out the way it went in.

I stirred things up a bit by appearing at one of the fetes with one woman and then an evening do with another which has confused them. I am supposed to be either married or celibate. They can't cope with me having friends who appear from time to time.

Then just when you think that they are all working together and maybe there are only normal people around, something happens to confirm that the waterworks are only a short distance away.

There hadn't been any emotional blackmail or manipulation for a few weeks - well not by me anyway. But then the waterworks returned. At one of the churches we congratulated someone for operating the fete tombola for 40 years. A worthy effort you might think. But of course immediately someone else burst into floods of tears. Seems they had run their stall for 35 years without a mention. Hang on I thought, you have to wait another 5 years before you get anything. But apparently it is all too insulting and they won't be doing it again.

So it's all back to the reality of the CofE.

 All of the pccs then met with varying degrees of panic over finance and people.

One church still thinks it’s easier not to bother paying the diocese rather than try to raise some extra. Looking for £20000 in the immediate future, they have decided to hold a bridge evening. I suggested they play for £100 a point which might raise a bit for the church but it was frowned on. Maybe I should suggest putting the collection on online poker and see what happens.

One village raised thousands at a time but charged £35 for every event and once a year involved the whole village in a scarecrow weekend. I did a scarecrow service at the end, but chickened out of dressing up, though some would say I didn’t have much dressing up to do.

August is usually a quiet month. I can get on and file in the recycling all the rubbish that has come in for the last few months and spend the rest of the time in the garden. With a barbeque coming up that was increasingly urgent.

Ali had come up and we did a new design for the garden, cut down the trellis, replanted the borders. Luckily at the time she was working for the National Trust and at college at Pershore so we had access to cheap plants.

At the deanery we had Christine from Reflections on Cannock Chase. She has a meditation garden and pointed out the obvious. What you need in a garden is lots of honesty, sage (wisdom) and Thyme.

Well after three months of hard work, the night came round at last. The opening of the new garden, and a barbeque to celebrate. The weather had been perfect for barbeques if not for gardens. But I had faithfully watered my way through the summer and the plants, 200 of them, were at their splendid best. And fifty tickets were sold, which meant, with helpers, sixty people would descend on the garden to admire and praise and socialise.

And so the day came round. And it poured. And then it poured some more. And then, as if we hadn't noticed, it poured some more.

The gazebos, gathered carefully for the occasion proved to be sun shades and not at all waterproof. So the chairs and tables were soaked. The PA was running with the wet stuff. And many of the flowers were flattened.

But did the people care. Of course not. They are British. So they collected their sausage and pork steak and overdone chicken breast, you can't be too careful with chicken, or with breasts come to think of it. And then they stood dutifully in line at the kitchen door waiting for the salad and rice. And the rain poured on.

So there they were. The sausages floating dangerously close to the plate’s edge, breasts getting limp. Hoping that the rice would soak up enough water to get them safely back under the leaky covers. There they could sit under an umbrella, under the gazebo and eat, or rather drink, what remained.

But only one person had phoned to see if it was still on. No-one didn't turn up. And few left early. All in all we made about £500 for the funds. And the tale will be told as long as there are people to tell it.

The following year they decided to repeat the experience. This time they didn’t tell me when they were coming to set up. Nor did they co-ordinate with one another where to put the tents. It didn’t help that overnight a storm blew some of the gazebos into the field next door. By the day of the barbeque few were talking to each other.

I had also invited a friend from another parish. Rose is black, the daughter of a Jamaican coal miner from Cannock. Naturally one of my parishioners went up to her and asked how she was enjoying England, and when she looked dumbstruck, asked if she understood much English.

I also had two visitors from Malaysia with me at the time, looking at the church in Britain. In Malaysia nothing is done without prayer; being Church of England, once someone thought the sausages were remotely edible, everyone plunged in. Leaving our guests to say their own grace and eat last. In the end they did better than most. The first diners had overcooked chicken and undercooked sausages. We had cooked sausages and freshly cooked chicken. And as no-one invited them to join them at their tables, Chimbie and John joined Rose and me.

In the community I tried to get a ticket for a social event in the village hall. They only sold tickets by tables, I needed to buy a minimum of four tickets. If I went on my own I would be seated at a table by myself. At no time in five years was I invited to join anyone at “their” table.

For a time I persuaded L to come with me. At least as part of a couple I was allowed in. Then one of the local tribe, confused as ever as to who I am with/not with, went up to her at a do at the rectory and asked if she was going to stay the night. I didn’t like to point out that there were five bedrooms, as this would suggest that I moved around my guests every couple of hours in the night. Actually its hourly – I go back later for seconds. But L soon grew tired of the trip out from Dudley and was anyway busy with her own friends.

And so the madness went on. CE had run out of money – just as H did earlier in the year. And in the same way they feel they need to send out an urgent appeal for funds. So I gave them what I have used over the past twenty years or so. A brief run down on what God says about giving and an exhortation that if they believe in God they should pay for the privilege. The usual sort of stuff. Anyway the treasurer immediately emailed back to say that we can do without dragging the Bible in. People don’t want to read that sort of stuff. It’s really about keeping the 14th C building going and that is what we must emphasise. So the parish magazine the next month contained no mention of the good Lord. Whether he approved of being left in the cold remained to be seen.

We had a round the churches walk each year and I took A along with me. She pet sits most of the time which is a bit of a lonely occupation. But she has an immense knowledge of the countryside and what can be eaten. So one of the other walkers went home with armfuls of puffballs which I would have avoided. Apparently they are very good for breakfast and said parishioner is still with us so they must be OK. On the other hand I did sample the wild greengages in the hedgerows and especially liked ending the walk at the ice-cream farm. The cows are kept in specially refrigerated stalls, fed on local strawberries, and the resultant cream is milked straight into the cones.

I thought I was in for a quiet month but I had forgotten the Methodists.

Each year they came for a service at Bradley. Usually in September. They like to get away from the inner city and anyway some of ours went down to them earlier in the year. So far so simple. But then I phoned the guy. I was going to organise the service and wanted to know what input they had.

It doesn't work like that he said. If they come they have to organise the service, choose the hymns, they bring the choir, write the prayers and bring their own preacher. They will let a couple of people from B read a lesson and maybe say a prayer. But they have to set the form of the service or they won't come. And if their minister can't preach then he won't come either.

And just how do they see me fitting in. Well if I really wanted to I could welcome them in - he actually told me what to say, and then sit at the back.

This is supposed to be a church exchange, to experience another tradition and to learn something of their culture. So what will they learn from us. Only that we are prepared to roll over and let people walk all over us. They want to learn nothing and are probably concerned in case I should preach a gospel that they don't agree with. Of course I didn't say that. They are obviously none too clever and wouldn't have understood.

Would they, I thought, ask me for a meal and then allow me to bring my own food. They could provide a fork, but I would take my own knife, and they should just welcome me at the door and then go and sit in another room while I ate.

So  when it came to the return match – at theirs six months later, I thought OK so we write the service, choose the hymns, take our organist and generally take over.

Of course it didn’t work like that. On their home ground, as a Methodist church welcoming Anglicans, they would hold a, for them, rare, communion. Which was just like ours, except slightly more old fashioned. But a bit more fun as the minister knocked over the chalice and the wine went all over the table and soaked into the cloth. Didn’t matter though as the people got those little shot glasses I remembered from university in the late night sessions of downing as many Southern Comforts as possible.

The churches carried on in their own sweet way. Mostly ignoring anything I did or say - so nothing new there then. There was a bit of a bust up about some benches outside one of the churches. A chap wants them in memory of his parents and I simply passed the message on. Seems I should have gushed my appreciation over him daily ever since. And he has now accused me and everyone of being unchristian. He still gave us the money though and I gave him a proper service when we dedicated them so no real harm done.

We were in the midst of the harvest festivals. The first ended with an auction at the pub which got a bit out of hand. They had a set of mugs with "Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks you are an arsehole" on them so I bought them for John for Christmas. He'll know why – or you can find it in the “Country Living” post. Then at the end they were twenty pounds short of £1500 so they auctioned my dogcollar. I did say that whoever bought it had to preach on Sunday but he didn't turn up so I had to carry on as usual.

Harvest wasn't yet over and already we were singing carols. The first lot of carols were to open the local garden centre's Christmas display at the beginning of October, they wanted a choir to set the mood and it wound up all those who don't like Christmas starting too early. We did it for a couple of years and so about twenty people gathered and sang while the shoppers went about their business and ignored us.

There were three choirs - two village ones and a church one. It was the first time most of the massed choir had met one another and the first time that the choir from Haughton had agreed to sing unrobed, though they did keep their ordinary clothes on, which was a blessing of sorts. As I joined in so the singers gravitated away from me towards each other so that they could get some idea of what the key and the tune were. I handed out a few leaflets extolling the virtues of our churches and trying to explain our abstruse service pattern. And someone went round rattling a couple of tins, though whether they were with us or just taking advantage of the opportunity I didn't find out.

The public supping their wine seemed to enjoy it and a couple of stray children even joined in until retrieved by their parents to do more interesting things like looking at the heaped up boxes of what might have been decorations if the labels were turned the right way and the blank curtain that promised that Santa would appear on Nov. 18th.

And I gave out a leaflet that listed our Christmas services. At least so I thought.

What I hadn't taken account of was that although I had asked for the programme back in September, they had no intention of giving me the right details. So hardly any of the services/concerts that they told me about, and which I had printed off to give to the punters, are actually happening. Or at least not on the day/time listed. And guess whose name was on the bottom of the leaflet?

So I ripped them all up and started again, working on the assumption that no one given a leaflet in October would still have it in December. And I sent another email around everyone asking for final details. That was in mid November. So I thought I was safe to print another set of leaflets to give out from the weekend of 1st and 2nd Dec when there was a Christmas tree festival at Bradley. Naturally it came as no surprise the morning I printed them to discover an email that gave yet another date change.

There is a choir which always has a concert on the Saturday before Christmas in Haughton which we assumed that year was the 22nd. Especially since that was the date they gave us in June. Then they told us it was really on the 15th. Which was a shame because we had already arranged another concert on that date at Bradley. Then the people of Bradley decided they don't want the concert then anyway and it should be on the 14th.

Which is why they have never had Christmas leaflets before; and another set of 500 leaflets hit the recycling bin.

Then it was back to Harvest and the last of the auctions. No-one really knew why it was taking place a week after everything else but the pub was packed with people and produce nonetheless.
As the evening wore on the prices grew wilder and wilder. I bought a few overpriced vegetables and left at about half-ten as I had an early service the following day but the jar of pickled onions, saved to the last, went for £370. Which must be about £10 an onion. In total over £1700 which beat the Bell by a couple of hundred.

Well I suppose it was all too good to last. There we were in the middle of a project to spend £400000 on the church at Bradley when a mobile phone company decided they wanted to put a mast in our tower. In the middle of a village. Well OK children are not allowed in the church and everyone who comes hasn't got long enough left to contract cancer. But even so. I did think they would reject it out of hand.

But no. They wanted to have the people around - could it be the promise of Powerpoint or perhaps the offer of up to £120000 that tempted them. Surely not in a Christian church. Anyway I put off the decision from one meeting and then said at the next (yesterday) that we shouldn't touch it with a flagpole. (Apparently the mast looks just like a flagpole and you can even fly the Union Jack from it - flag extra).

So I began the meeting by saying that of course we were not going ahead were we. And the response came unanimously - O yes we are! They were all in favour.

Well being a democratic sort of chap - which means people walk all over me - I let them drone on thinking I would put a stop to it next time. Trouble was I forgot that the restoration project needed to be up and running by Christmas. So in the middle of the night I whipped off an email to those in the know saying that I have pulled the plug on it and come down the heavy Rector on them all. The phones would then have been red hot by the end of the night and BT shares peaked.

Well the grumbles rumble on.

After the aerial it was the raffle. Barclays give match funding (up to £750) to their employees who raise money for charity. But they put restrictions on it. It has to be raised by the person themselves and it has to be raised in one day basically. Usually the worker recruits friends and neighbours and church people and the event has a bit of a run up or is part of a wider fundraiser. All very good.

So two of the churches got in on it. Trouble was one of them raised over three grand and the other only 600. So the fur started to fly with accusations of cheating and even complaints to Barclays control. Of course both had done exactly the same thing – used a nominal Barclays employee; involved church members to do all the work and stretched it over several weeks with the big draw on the day. But JH was convinced that she stuck to the rules and the others didn't. She threatened to have the offending employee sacked.

Meanwhile there was a bit of a whiff around the choir. They wanted to get rid of one member who has developed a "women's problem". She clearly didn't watch daytime TV which seems to be exclusively about such things, so that even I know how to deal with them. Whether it was my greater knowledge or simply passing the buck they deputed me to "do something about it". Or else. Naturally I did little more than go round to see if the person concerned was aware of the problem. But having lived with it she obviously wasn't and wasn't currently seeing her doctor for anything else. I contacted the health visitor, but she couldn’t go without a proper referral. So I passed the buck, and the sponge, back to the choir.

I had just added up our Christmas numbers. We had 325 in church over Christmas. That's 17% of the population. And it didn't include some of the extra services we did. All our carol services, school services, crib services, and Christingles were well attended but there was no way to say who attended more than once. I would imagine most years about 1200 came to something out of the 2500 who lived in the parishes.

But that doesn't fit with the perception, even among churchgoers, of the church as failing and driving away the few who insist on still coming.

So it was good one Christmas to hear from Diane. Diane has MS. She was in a wheelchair from time to time, but not always. And she is one of the funniest people around. So when she came back from her Christmas visit to Northampton I was pleased she affirmed what the Church of England should really be about.

The service she said was the old one, the very old one. 1662 in full. The sermon concentrated on the faults of the people, the world and the nation at such length that Diane fears the preacher has clinical depression. I didn't like to point out it is a requirement of the job. Instead I let Diane carry on with the blow by blow account of the service, all two hours of it.

And blow by blow there was. The vicar, who appeared not to have washed for a month, had a cold. He sneezed over the chalice, and wiped his nose on his surplice.

Then it was time for communion. The people went forward. Diane in her wheelchair waited to the end. Fatally. The vicar didn't notice her. After the last walking communicant had gone he turned from the rail and proceeded to finish the bread and gulp down the rest of the wine that he had poured himself. Only then did his assistant nudge his arm and point to Diane, waiting patiently at the rail. So the vicar poured a bit of water into the backwash remaining in the chalice and offered it to Diane. How could she refuse such a tempting invitation?

It restored my faith in a church quite incapable of living by any of the ideas on which it was founded. I obviously needed to try harder.

We had a Gardeners Question Time at the local nurseries. I was the chair for the event. There were four gardening experts and me. I had made up my mind not to try to answer anything myself as it might show up the experts and annoy them. So I kept it all pretty straight. I was tempted by one question though. How to accelerate the breakdown of the compost heap. I was always told to pee on it. At least that's what I told the nice policeman. The case comes up next week.

Then one Friday, supposedly another day off, there was a funeral at Ranton. Not one of mine but the family wanted me to take the service. And it snowed. Again, obviously, only the congregation were heated. The walk from the gate was about a hundred yards, so I had an inch of snow on my head when I reached the doors. Then at the end of the service back to the graveside and the snow by then was falling so heavily that I had to hurry with the words before my service card was obscured, brushing off the snow between sentences.

In the good old days the gentlemen undertaker with top hat and frock coat would have held an umbrella over me. No such luxuries these days. Maybe we are meant to be harder than that now. I should have done the whole thing in t shirt, shorts and sandals and not wimped out by wearing a heavy cloak throughout.
Anyway that is why, instead of visiting the poor and sick, I spent the afternoon with whisky and lemon in hand in front of the fire watching the rugby. It was the only way I could store up enough heat to face Sundays.

I joined the John Young Foundation and became their chairman. This mainly involved letting them talk for an hour and a half and getting lunch out of it. They didn’t take much notice of what I was saying or my attempts to get them to move onto a more professional footing to expand the organisation. It was mainly those who had known John Young when he was alive, who were happy to keep his memory alive by getting together from time to time for a lecture or a service. But they did ask me to lead their quiet days, which gave me an excuse to do some reading and writing.

And I continued to stir up the parishes. We had a joint parish meeting to set out my community based philosophy which they seemed to accept. At least they seemed for a time to have abandoned some of the confrontations between church and village; and village and village that were around.

But every time I thought things were looking up the retaliation began. Although admittedly they waited about a year before telling me that I know nothing about God and that I am wrong about how worship should be done and what prayer means. Nothing new there I know, the principal at my theological college would agree with them.

So I had to be told. Put in my place and generally sorted out, as if I am straight out of college.

I don't even know where to stand in the service.
Why don't you use the pulpit,
why don't you church leaders teach old fashioned values,
why don't you tell the people to be quiet before the service starts,
why do you hand the people the chalice which shows disrespect to God?

There was a dispute about trees. Some were all for cutting the lot down as they were more trouble than they were worth; others said they had to be kept at all costs. Someone had called in the diocesan advisor, whose view was to cut things down. English Heritage demanded that they were cut. Then someone else would get in the council tree man, whose view was that everything had to be left as it was until a falling branch actually killed someone. It was impossible to reconcile. And that was of course my fault.

I was totally unprofessional. I didn't run the meetings properly.
At least that is what they said.
Truth was usually they had cocked up and wanted to blame anyone but themselves.
And to avoid them looking stupid it had to be my fault didn't it.
And I had to go and grovel and say yes of course I am shit.
Couldn't possibly be them could it. After all they had all the power.
They could walk away and leave me with no secretary, or churchwardens, or fundraisers.

Seems they are all a lot more traditional than they make out and didn't really like me referring to God as if he's actually around. Leave him up on his cloud and get on with life. And life is to carry on with the way things have been done for the past hundred years. Despite the disconnect with true Christianity.

So we had a bit of a bust up about allowing people in to have their children baptised when they don't come to church. If we didn't, there wouldn't be any baptisms at all and young families would have no contact with the church at all. One character who spent most Sundays on his feet leading prayers and showing off his holiness was going into apoplexy over it. How dare I let them in?

Then they didn't like me preaching from the floor of the church. They wanted me up in the pulpit where I am a little bit more remote and they could see that what I said has nothing to do with them. So I used that year’s slavery anniversary to remind them that the pulpits were put in to allow the clergy to lord it over the people and to celebrate their status as slave owners in the churches they had built with the immoral profits. And which they were intent on preserving.

Anyway I came back to earth with the school celebrations of Easter. I spent the week making pipe cleaner donkeys and edible Easter gardens. At the end of creating the latter I showed how the rock (a chocolate digestive) was rolled away from the tomb on the Sunday morning. As I had missed lunch to get the church ready, I ate the biscuit. So a school full of children will have gone home to tell their parents that Jesus got out of the tomb because the soldiers ate the rock.

Well I managed a week away. With having to find four people to take over while I am gone it was always a bit of a struggle. But I made it. And I was back at least twelve hours before someone had a go at me. For forty-five minutes. Why no one goes to church and never will, why the church has no money. Why no one likes church people. It was all down to me. Personally. But then you knew that already.

All I had done was to suggest that there is no automatic right to be married in a church of your choice. That's not how the system works. You get married in your nearest church, or the one you go to. Not the one you were baptised in thirty years ago and then left the area. Even if you were in Sunday School twenty years ago and Rose Queen. And then haven't been near a church since.

I did suggest that if they came a few times and made this "their" church then we could go ahead. But she didn't want that because she thinks the stuff the churches put about is rubbish. Claiming there's a god for heavens sake! Who believes that these days? Churches are there to be booked in the same way as booking the venue for the do after. The clergy are just there to look pretty on the video - well that lets me out.

So she got her mother to phone and turn on the charm with a forty-five minute tirade against the church, the law, me personally. Apparently everyone else thinks it's ridiculous.

I tried to point out that I could do it but it wouldn't be legal. That actually my churches are growing, services more popular than before. More people involved in more things and a growing young people's group. And that other couples find no problem in coming now and again on a Sunday. One couple even seemed to enjoy it, and carried on coming even after the wedding. But that didn't help, It seemed to make things worse.

Bride’s mothers were always ready to call up to say that the bride had got it all wrong and the service should be as she (the mother) wanted.

And some couples forgot us entirely. Once the building was booked for the wedding there were more important things to do. We chased one couple for weeks trying to get the details for the wedding. I even ended up going to the groom’s parent’s house to ask if they knew what the couple wanted. They denied all knowledge of it and when I said I needed some details for the banns, the groom’s father threatened to punch me. The following day the groom phoned on his mobile to say he was fed up with it all and was off to London. I took that to mean the wedding was off.

Another mother wanted her daughter's child baptised. No problem I said. Just ask her own parish if it's OK. They will say yes. We do the baptism. Everyone happy. No chance. Why should they ask a church they won't ever go to for permission to have the child done in another church they won't ever go to. It's ridiculous. Expecting them to believe the things they will say in the service. I even checked with said other parish - that they weren't one of the really awkward ones that would refuse. They said they are always happy to give permission. It's just courteous to ask.

And that's too much to ask. I was in trouble with the churches if I took services for “outsiders” and in trouble with the families if I didn’t. Personally I was happy to bless anything that moved and a few things that didn’t. But a lot of people insisted on what they demand on a plate as soon as they demand it. That there might be ways of doing things that put them out they weren’t interested in. Expectations. Let alone the fact that God might take the promises made seriously, even if they don't, and one day come calling. Paybacktime. Perhaps I should have suggested that next. Warned them that God will come and claim their baby if they don't do it right. That God will be the third person in their marriage if they skip the only rituals that will protect against him. It was worth a try.

I rarely went to Deanery Synod meetings. They all seem the same. The same dreary people, with the same dreary arguments as there were thirty years ago.
But then one week they were debating women bishops. I thought there might be some excitement. There might also be some liberals who welcomed anyone who actually wanted the job. But of course it didn't work out like that.

First the Rural Dream introduced the speakers. You might think there would be equal people either side of the argument. But no. There were two opposed, one catholic type and one loony evangelical - men of course; and only one for - a woman naturally. The evangelical rural dean introduced the evangelical speaker as putting the biblical point of view, which of course he didn't. He put his own narrow opinions forward and claimed they were supported by his blinkered idea of what the Bible actually says. Whereas an unbiased view is that the Bible confirms the Marxist social theory for the overthrow of all hierarchies and undoubtedly doesn't support Bishops of any gender.

The two others having already been categorized as non-biblical had to find other ground to stand on. The catholic one thought it would be better to wait until the Romans and the Orthodox had women too, but offered no reason why not; and the woman just generally thought women were a good thing.

Then there were the responses from the floor. Naturally most people wanted what had been going on for two thousand years to go on for the next two thousand. Only one person tried in vain to inject a bit of controversy by saying he thought those opposed should leave the church.

Then the people who had started were allowed to get a friend to speak up for them. And that was it. No vote, not even a straw poll which might have been interesting.

I decided not to mention that I thought with so many old women already on the Bishops benches, a few real ones wouldn't do any harm.

I went home and watched Dame Shirley Bassey at Glastonbury – now she would make a great Bishop.

Another synod looked at macho men. Why don’t they come to church? From someone called John Leech  from the Hereford Diocese.

He presented it as a PowerPoint presentation, with every sentence ending in ‘FACT’. Which of course none of them were. It reminded me of The Office with David Brent at his most pompous, so I got the giggles and set off the rest of the Church Eaton reps, so my memory of the rest is a bit hazy.

Men apparently don’t like singing (So why are there so many male voice choirs?)

They don’t like flowers in church or stained glass and want axes and moose’s heads instead (try getting that through the DAC).

Men don’t want to love people and save the polar bears, they want to blow things up.

They don’t want God to let everyone into heaven, they want more than a few to rot in hell.

They don’t like shaking hands and prefer fighting.

And there were about five more ‘FACTS’

It was all apparently the fault of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was said to have feminised theology.

In fact, no really FACT, Bernard left the monastery at Citeaux because it was too soft and set up at Clairvaux with a bunch of other guys. Within a few years he had 700 men at his monastery and was invited to set up the crusades by the Pope. Among his many sayings is “the knight of Christ kills with an untroubled mind”. So hardly the wimpy feminist icon our speaker made out.

In fact quite the opposite, he could have been used as an example of the macho theology we apparently need. John L could then have said that maybe we should send our kids off to the middle east to kill a few foreigners and our churches will be full. Oh, sorry, we seem to have tried that.

In the end he admitted he got it all from one of those American (the moose’s heads were a give-away) paperbacks you get at the airport for a boring flight home. So it is about as serious as Jordan’s latest guide to life, FACT.

At church the wedding season started. The choir were supposed to show for one but I was told on the Monday that no-one had told them and so they were all away. I had to give the money back to the couple (although they kindly donated it to the church). Then after the wedding one of the choir - not away and present on the day, told me that the reason they didn't sing was that after the last wedding they were told off for not wearing robes. As they are all over seventy and hardly sing at all putting them in robes made for seven year olds would make them even more ridiculous than they normally are. Anyway I finally knew not to offer their services.

After the service we went off to the local manor where they normally hold civil weddings. I did try to get a side job doing blessings after the registrar has gone and so spent most of the time chatting up the couple that run the place. I never did get to a civil ceremony but they did invite me to fish and chip nights and a Victorian tea party.

 With the stock market in freefall and the CofE deciding we all need to work three more years before retiring, my long held dream of retiring in 2010 (nice round number) seemed to be fading.

Meanwhile the Bishop came. Originally he was going to come in June but then he lost his voice. And he wouldn't have made it anyway as the roads were flooded. So it was put off till October. But I arranged the same programme. First to one of the schools. This is a peculiar one - neither a state school nor a church one. A local foundation set up by Henry the eighth started it off and still runs it. Though over the years it has changed from being a grammar school to being a primary one. Still the Bishop was made very welcome and he got the kids to wear his mitre and cross and hold his crook. Which excited them all.

Then we went off to the strawberry farm. Still picking in October, having started at Easter. They were beginning to run everything down but there were still a lot of migrant workers on site for the Bishop to meet. And we were each given a punnet of strawberries to take home. It is run well with a proper system of employment - no gang masters. And the people come back year after year so they must enjoy it. So Bp Gordon wanted to bring some of the other diocesan high ups to look at what goes on to counter some of the images of migrant workers that are floating around. Sadly both he and I retired before we could arrange it.

Then naturally into the pub for lunch. The Bell had held our harvest auction the weekend before and £1690 was raised for local charities - with another £200 or so to come from the school. Which impressed the Bp and earned me a few brownie points.

Then half way through the meal my voice went. Now I know the Bps voice went three months ago but this seemed a bit too late to show solidarity. And I had a few things left to do in the week which I couldn't get out of. So I've struggled on.

And then a strange thing happened. Which has never happened before - except maybe at CK but then they didn't know any better. Someone phoned up to ask how I was - they were concerned about me.

Of course by today normal service had been resumed and all those who knew I had been ill during the week carried on as if nothing had happened and gave me grief over all sorts of irrelevancies. Even when I just stared into space and told one person who had wittered on for ages that I was trying to be ill they took no notice. So my faith in the lack of empathy in the church was restored.

Meanwhile we had an auction at Bradley. I had offered some of my photos only to be told that no-one would want to look at my holiday snaps. So I had put one of the photos in the local pub which would advertise the craft fair which was to surround the auction. I was asked to be the auctioneer and could see the congregation turn up expecting to buy craft items for pence and so asked the organiser what the guide prices were. Her attitude was that we should just get what we could and when I said I wasn't going to accept pence she said that the church would lose out. So for them it was just a way for people to get something for nothing. I went round the lead craftspeople and asked them what they should get for their items and collected a set of prices. In the end there were a couple of people there who felt as I did and the prices were reasonable, except for those crafts done by the organiser and friends which I knocked down for pence, naturally. My photograph went for £30 despite (or perhaps because of) being displayed upside down.

There's always the feeling that somehow every New Year is going to be different. Then somehow within the first couple of hours it proves that it is all the same.

The same manipulations from the same people.

In 2008 it all seemed to be about churchyards. I joked with someone that they would want white marble teddy bears next and sure enough a phone call came which asked about putting a three foot high white marble teddy bear on a grave in one of my churchyards. Someone wanted a memorial to his grandson in the churchyard. I was very sympathetic and tried to explain how unsuitable it was. And then discovered the child had died twenty years before and they were only now thinking of a memorial. If there is life after death I tried to explain, he is beyond teddy hears by now.

Maybe that was better than the poem that someone wanted on their husband’s headstone. The first letters of which spelt out f*** o**. And they accused me of being a spoilsport for not allowing it. Then as we were dedicating the gravestone we did allow, twenty mourners brought their rifles into the churchyard without telling me and fired off a salute to the deceased. Not that there was much that I could have done to stop them. The ex army churchwarden said it reminded him of Belfast. But of course it is all nothing to do with me and I did decline when she asked me to stay the night as she didn’t want to be alone.

Hectic is probably the word for it. The polite one anyway.

I got these weeks from time to time when everything needs doing yesterday and all sorts of things turn up at once that have to be dealt with.

I suppose the start of the year is a bit like that anyway. The confirmation classes are back up and running and I had to get myself in gear for them. They were supposed to follow Emmaus but I seldom did. Just go with the flow. But improvisation needs more preparation than repetition. teenagers early evening, Adults later. Then there is the magazine for February to write - my bits anyway. Which covers Lent so I have to think up a Lent course. And the dates for the year need co-ordinating. With four churches, two schools four village halls and endless trusts there are always clashes and I need to avoid the obvious ones, clashes that is, not meetings. And I had to do the return for the marriage registrars for the last quarter and find out why they hadn't had a return for a quarter a couple of years ago - not me I wasn't there. Then I have three PCCs in a row and they are clamouring for agendas. Then two couples decided to marry over Christmas and I had to see them to fix dates, which means fitting that in the diary and contacting organists and bellringers; and someone died so there is a funeral to fit in. And someone else wanted their husband's ashes buried in a particular part of the churchyard and we had to go round to see if they would fit in with everyone else as most churchyards are nearly full. And my biennial appraisal is coming up and I had to get my self assessment form filled in for that and sent off to my supervisor. And then there is the usual weekly round of visits and Sunday's newsletter to write and photocopy.

And all has to be done and dusted by Wednesday night because Thursdays are always busy and I really, really, want Friday off.

At least it didn't snow. We were promised but it didn't come. Just rain. Snow looks lovely but working with four country villages along roads that the gritter never goes down and fifteen minutes between Sunday services is no fun. Especially when the local cycle club is coming the other way. Disconcerting for them too no doubt.

Probably the two most boring meetings came in the same day.

Clergy chapter - which is fifteen of the local clergy getting together every month. We were given a talk on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator - which is a method to work out whether you are introvert or extrovert with a few other bells and whistles thrown in. It’s been around for sixty years and as I moved around the church so it seemed to follow me. At each new diocese they discovered it as if it was the new sliced bread. A long time ago I was trained as a counsellor, later involved in post-traumatic stress debriefing and part of a crisis support team. I have also run workshops on listening skills and was part of a counselling tutors group. So I had heard it all before. And I prefer Belbin.

I could never understand why people insisted on giving lectures on prayer and sermons on silence. Just do it and people will pick it up. So someone talking for an hour and a half without interruption about what is essentially a practical exercise defeated the whole point of it and put everyone off what might have been a useful exercise - if he had done it as just that, an exercise. Still it told us a lot about his type. Boring.

Then tonight the trustees of the Bradley Trust. Which manages some land and buildings in Bradley and gives a few grants to local organisations if it makes a profit. It was almost always exclusively about the land and buildings. Very rarely did it consider people in need and only then in order to find reasons not to help them. But it did manage the village hall so it was useful at that level. Though like most local organisations it kept disputes going as long as possible. There was a long standing one about rights of access across the car park. It had been running for decades and probably had a few more decades to run.

Sometimes national events intruded on village life. The Archbishop dominated the headlines for a whole weekend for being eminently sensible. And the retired colonels and a few bored housewives leapt on the bandwagon of condemnation without bothering to find out any of his views. Anyone who is on General Synod has far too much time on their hands.

The Archbishop had given a highly academic lecture to some lawyers on the finer points of law and religion. That was what they were meeting about. That is what they wanted him to discuss. And that is what +Rowan got into so much trouble for discussing. Don't talk about what you are asked to talk about for heaven’s sake. It will only get you into trouble.

Or perhaps he should have said that the only valid religion is the CofE and everyone else is going straight to hell.
Instead he said that the law should be sensitive to people’s religions. After all the blasphemy laws protect Christianity and the Jews already have their own courts. So why not take into account some Muslim sensibilities. Seems reasonable. But not to the hang them, flog 'em, keep England white and the CofE tied to 1662 and the Authorised Version party.

So people you have never heard off appeared on TV as representative of the General Synod and said the Archb should go - after having his tongue cut out and his hands cut off presumably. Why not burn him at the stake while you are about it?

The same members of the congregation up in arms at +Rowan were the ones who came up to me after the publication of The Da Vinci Code to ask if Jesus really had married Mary Magdalene and moved to France. It was impossible to explain that it was a novel and novels were made up. And these were people who had spent their lives in church

But of course in the shires, the congregations still get their theology from the leader writers of the Daily Mail, and I got on with the important stuff about what colour gravestones can be in our churchyards and whether to repolish or stain the elderly diseased pews for the elderly diseased parishioners.

The Archdeacon had been having a go at us about gravestones. They are all supposed to be regulation size and shape and colour but over the years clergy have allowed people to put in what they want. So there was a clamp down and the clergy were supposed to enforce the rules. But since everyone was choosing something similar to what is already there, but isn’t supposed to be there, it was hard to know where to draw the line and of course we were the ones in the front line. In theory there was a “consultation” and I had to spend a week taking photos of gravestones to prove I have obeyed the rules. As if I am likely to take photos of the ones that don't. Despite suggesting that it was possible to have our own graveyard policy the Chancellor after examining the responses from the parishes passed an edict that we all had to obey whatever lunacy he came up with.

Then we were supposed to enforce the rules on child protection. But again they sent out contradictory advice. The clergy were told all bellringers had to be checked, but the bellringers magazine quotes the diocese to say they don't. So the refusenik bellringers, who may be child abusers or just Daily Mail readers, all go off to the churches where they aren't checked.

There is no other church in the world which requires its clergy to be managers as well as ministers. And it always means I just respond to whichever lot are emotionally blackmailing me this week. Archdeacons, chancellors or people.

I was given a book to read by the healing group I am chair of. It's from the Northumbrian Centre for Christian Healing and is supposed to be a course on healing. The group wanted to know if it is worth putting on. But I disagreed with almost everything. It was very much on the lines of, God will give you what you ask for and if you don't get it your faith is rocky. God wants everyone to be well etc. But that means my faith is worse than useless as I've suffered from asthma since I was three and been on my own for fifteen years and have prayed consistently for both to go away. I think God spends most of the time getting us to cope with what we have since we wouldn't be human if we just clicked our fingers and God solved everything. And I think we are all healed, but not all cured. And the course was written by someone called Randy which put me off before I opened the book. So I didn't recommend we adopt the course.

I spent some time with one of the organists who was terminally ill. She was quite a character. She was a musician but before that did a bit on the stage. She was supposed to have had an affair with Michael Caine. She drank like a fish and swore like a trooper. My first encounter with her was when I was trying to arrange a funeral and tried to phone to give her the hymns. She seemed not to be able to follow what I was saying and the following day phoned to ask me what they hymns were. I learnt to always phone her before 6.00pm.

Visits to her were always funny and she had a splendid send off when the time came. Including choir and congregation, as the coffin left the church, singing “wish me luck as you wave me goodbye”.

Mostly I found I was ploughing on regardless and the drag kept getting harder to pull through. Since Easter 2008 I felt like it was all too much effort. Having blown up at people before I went on holiday, I came back to yet another row about I don't know what.

For a time I did have some Sunday help, but then the diocese decided it was more important that he worked in the town in a team of five in one church. So I was alone with four churches. I had one day a month off if I was lucky. Which as I have said before was not a problem if there was the support there. But if at every service people  line up with the complaints and every PCC is a struggle for control among the disparate factions then it can be difficult.

One of the four parishes owed the diocese £11000. Instead of being concerned and upping their giving, they just shrugged their shoulders as if it didn't matter. Their level of giving was less than half anyone else’s and they were unconcerned that someone else has to make up the shortfall.

In another parish was that there was someone who tried to run everything from behind the scenes. He wouldn't come on the committee but insisted on getting his own way. After each meeting he would let his views be known on all we discussed. Trouble was he was the mastermind behind the £500000 appeal for the restoration and we couldn’t afford to tell him to f*** off.

The insurers told us that we had to keep the church locked to remain insured and he said it has to remain open. No win for us. Win win for him as he has managed to stir it up and continue his conflict with all and sundry.

One summer it was over the form of heating for church.

Some people seemed to wonder why I had a perpetual cold from October through to April. My voice goes and I would spend the services coughing and spluttering through the words.
The answer was in the churches.

As I went back from the altar at the midweek service at Bradley I glanced across at the thermometer hanging on one of the pillars. At the end of the service it had managed to reach 3^oc. There was, needless to say, no heating on in the church and there are holes in the roof where they are fixing the joists. Even if it had been on, heating is only provided for the congregation - one overhead heater. There is nothing for the priest up at the altar. I had to buy my own heater and hawk it round the churches, it always ended up at the wrong one.

In the winter it was rarely above 10^oc on a Sunday and as I had already been in two other churches with similar temperatures I used to go home shaking with cold at lunchtime. (Another priest in the diocese described my conditions as luxury – in his churches the water in the flower vases was usually frozen, another said he couldn’t get into his vestry as the locks were frozen. How are we meant to work like this?) They did discover after one winter that the heating improved if they actually put water in the radiators – the expansion tank had been dry for years. But really it needed a new system. I would have thought anything would be better, but no, the row over what sort of heating to have simmered on. Should it be background to heat the building or instant to heat the congregation? It would of course be perfectly possible to do both, but that wouldn’t keep the dispute going.

So we had a meeting. It was supposed to decide that we would call in an independent advisor and agree to be bound by their advice. That night he called me to say he was "disgusted" when we suggested that we were concerned about the congregation. His concern was only for the building.

So I walked out for two months. Needless to say hardly anyone from the parishes contacted me to discover why I was off, and in one parish people were actually told to stay away from me. The only contact from the diocese was to make sure I filled in my sick claim so they would get the money back. After I came back it was as if I had never been away.

What it felt they were saying was. We hate you and all you stand for and wish you weren’t here, please go away and don't come back. And as usual there was no-one who cared enough to call and say, are you ok. No-one to come around and just be there.

In reality they simply didn’t notice. I only existed as someone to stand at the front on a Sunday and to take their baptisms weddings and funerals. I had no existence outside the role I filled.

But as the nonsense went on so the possibility of my escape from it became possible. After struggling through several winters, my mother died and my half of the estate made it possible to buy a retirement house. So after returning to work I began the process of detaching myself from it all and planning my exit.

They also told everyone to stay away from a funeral. Sheila had asked for a simple funeral - straight to the crematorium. So they started to put pressure on her husband to move it to the church. He resisted, so they went around saying that he wanted a private funeral anyway and no-one should go. If you don't play their games they boycott you.

I had to get word around that everyone was expected and all should turn up. Though I did wonder if it was because his son was living with a guy called Steve. But everyone did seem to know that.

Meanwhile another parishioner jumped in front of a train and people went around looking surprised. More surprising was that there weren't more. I knew of three possible suicides and a couple of probable’s just in one village. The friendliness and welcome of the average village is so superficial that few know each other in any real sense. And the tendency to spread gossip means that people are reluctant to share their real concerns.

But then I did get two birthday cards one year - after five years.

I went to Sarawak with Fred Price as the return leg of the Malaysian exchange. We were the guests of the Diocese of Kuching and in particular the parishes of St Luke’s Sri Aman and St Paul’s Roban.

We were met at the airport and taken straight to a welcome barbeque at the Diocesan Centre. The barbeque gave us a taste of what was to come as we hardly stopped eating and drinking until the time we left for home.

The first impression is how well equipped the churches are. With music from a band and a full state of the art sound system at the brand new church of Tabuan Jaya. Naturally they have a fully staffed office complete with administrator so that the clergy can be freed to get on with pastoral work and mission activities. And there are of course kitchens and loos to meet the needs of lunch clubs and study groups.

We were invited to the final meeting of the Alpha course for Tabuan Jaya which had over a hundred participants, though we squirmed a bit at the attack on homosexuality which was levered into an otherwise innocuous talk.

We then moved up to Sri Aman about two hours from Kuching where we stayed in the parish guest flat, built into the new Church Centre. Plans were in place for a new church to be built to hold the 600 strong congregation they usually expect. The parish staff of clergy and lay leaders shared a meal with us to introduce us to the parish. Men at one table and women at another (though that pattern broke down as the week progressed and Fred and I both made a point of sitting with the women at some point during the evening).

On Sunday morning they apologised that there were “only” a couple of hundred in church. Many had gone home for the festival. We had arrived just in time (no coincidence, we planned it!) for Gawai – the rice harvest festival. So the next two days were taken up with visits to longhouses around the area where we were given a full eight course celebration meal at each, often just half an hour after leaving the last one. And then the drumming and dancing could begin. All the time we were offered a constant stream of glasses of rice wine which then changed to gin, vodka, brandy and scotch as the day progressed. But it would have been impolite to refuse and it no doubt improved our dancing.

And then we moved on to Roban. As we arrived John was printing the newsletter off the computer and taking it to the local print shop for photocopying, then he and his wife sat on the floor to fold it for Sunday. No administrator here, out in the rural areas. It all seemed very familiar.

John had also given us an easier programme after the busyness of Sri Aman. We had time for some sightseeing at Sarikei and even a trip to the beach on the South China Sea.

Then it was time for church on Sunday. Once again John apologised for the “poor” attendance, though the church seemed packed to us. Fred and I gave our now familiar talks about church life in the UK and the importance of links across the world. And we gave them a chalice as a present from our churches.

All too soon it was time to take the bus back to Kuching and after another night at the Diocesan Guest House and a sampan trip on the river, it was back to the airport for the flight home.

The hospitality of the people was overwhelming and there is a real sense of community that seems to have disappeared in the UK. They loaded us with gifts to bring back including a pennant from St Paul’s Roban for each of our churches.

With a bolthole to disappear to for a couple of nights a week the parishes became just the day job. I was no longer a part of their intrigues and conflicts but able to get away from them.

I didn’t want to just drift into retirement. My doctor had refused to officially sign me back into work; “until there were safeguards in place”, she said. Of course there never would be. But I didn’t want to just be signed off for two years until the church decided to pension me off. And with the house in place and almost paid for I could afford to take the reduction in pension from taking early retirement myself.

So I set about tying up loose ends. Not solving the divisions of the churches and communities – that would have taken even me longer than two years. But I did want to leave behind a worship group in each parish that could take services and not depend on visiting clergy. And Paul, who had been the only person to keep in touch with me during my time off and who had taken on some of the workload, began the process of going forward for ordination.

And I wrote a Marxist history of the KJV for the magazine. See how that goes down in this exclusively Mail reading area

By the time I left the worship teams were in place and if not fully trained then at least competent to keep together and move the churches forward. I had initiated a ministry team across the four parishes but only had time for a couple of meetings to try to get them to have a vision for the group of churches. And the diocese agreed to fast track the appointment process so that the momentum I had created should not be lost.

And in the end they gave me a better send off than I had ever received before. Representatives came from three of my previous parishes and our Methodist partners.  As usual things were said which if they had been said a year before might have got me to stay.