Category: Blog Entry

In Prison

I’m tempted by the story of Steve McClaren. I have no interest in football but, after a lifetime around churches, I know the smell of death and decline when I meet it. And the FA Board are right there. Thank goodness for £2m pay-off’s I say. I’ll come back to it because I am fascinated by the way in which the mindset of decline – like sectarianism in Ireland – gets a grip without people realising that it has happened. And it is difficult to turn around.  An imprisonment.

Prisons Week this week and I preached at the local service in Perth .. which happens to have a prison with more than 600 in it. I doubt if I could cope with Prison Chaplaincy but all the issues are there.

Folding Enthronement

Just a quick [!] trip yesterday for the enthronement of my friend, Nigel Stock, as Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. We go back to Cuddesdon training days when Tamsin the dog and +Brian of Edinburgh taught us theology and Archbishop Michael Ramsay lived in retirement at the top of the lane. It’s always interesting to see the C of E in full establishment cry at an event like this – and to know that, beneath the veneer, things are pretty much the same as they are everywhere else. ‘Quick’ meant that I arrived in Bury St Edmunds at 12.15 after an eight hour journey that involved car, plane, train and bus – home about 11.30 pm. But of course the highlight for me was the arrival of the Archdeacon of Canterbury on her Brompton Folding Bicycle. While she didn’t actually ride it in the procession, she had cycled from Victoria to King’s Cross and then across Bury St Edmunds to the Cathedral. Next comes the Folding Lambeth Conference? If you want to know more about the folding world view, visit the Folding Society’s website.

White-water blogging

Alison is a rare sighting on this blog. So partly in honour of her birthday – partly because the registration process for the spouses’ outing at the Lambeth Conference required it – we thought it was time for a photo. Readers of the Church Times will have noted Caroline Chartres’ concern about the – shall we say – domestic arrangements at the University of Kent. All rooms are single and ‘the organisers cannot guarantee that spouses will be accommodated in adjoining rooms to their husbands ..’ or words to that effect. Sounds like an event to savour! So the rapids and overfalls of the Falls of Dochart symbolise one’s feelings about Lambeth joys to come.

TinTab

Killin Church

Killin Church

This is our church at Killin – one of the few remaining tin churches of the many which used to be scattered across the Highlands. Known as the TinTab by its congregation, it’s one of those places which I increasingly feel simply ‘is’ the Scottish Episcopal Church – small, warm, lined in wood, flickering candles, faithful congregation .. It was built in 1876 by the 7th Marquis of Breadalbane as a place where members of his shooting parties could worship – hence its other local name of ‘grouse chapel’. I brought this sermon with me. And if you want the tourist stuff, the church is just round the corner from the splendid Falls of Dochart and close to the western end of Loch Tay. The entire congregation enjoyed Angus and Jill’s hospitality after the service, sitting around the dining table. Quote of the day for me? ‘We demolished 23 rooms when we moved here.’

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God in the detail

So taking a leaf out of Chris’s diary and her advice to write about whatever I want to write about, I should share with you the major cycle expedition which Alison and I did today. Start at Dunning – along the side of the hills to Forgondenny and back through Forteviot – about ten miles with the wind strengthening and the rain coming. This raises two major issues. Are strong headwinds a greater impediment to forward movement than hills? The answer appears to be yes. Does a pub lunch in Dunning, which one requires as a reward for the headwinds, etc., involve the intake of more than the 400 calories expended in dealing with the headwinds? Yes again.

Interesting times

Sometimes I find my blog-energy waning a bit. Maybe it’s the extraordinary mixtures of things. Among the bits of my day yesterday, I spent some time in a meeting attempting to formulate our response to the proposed Anglican Covenant – as always trying to identify the Anglican Goldlocks ‘just right’ point – prescriptive enough that it means something but not so prescriptive that it is used to drive a new and limiting orthodoxy. And on to a meeting of Mission to Seafarers in Scotland. I listened yesterday to broadcaster and Times columnist Libby Purves talking movingly about the suicide of her son. Coincidentally you can find her here talking about the divisions in Anglicanism. Meanwhile police were digging up a garden in Kent. And, finally, as I unfolded my Brompton bicycle in the public car park outside Halfords in Perth today, I pondered the extraordinary story of the man who simulated sex with his bicycle. What does one make of it all?

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Next stop Perth?

I was interested to hear Simon Calder declaring the new Eurostar high speed line to be an irrelevance – unless you happen to live in the south east of England. He suggested that the money would have been better spent on a high speed line to Manchester. It was he who also suggested last week that short haul flying will ultimately be seen as an aberration of the 20th century. But looking at the historic under-investment in the railways, the cost of the fares and the dreadful train service between Perth and Edinburgh, it’s hard to see how it will be possible to give up flying.

Spice of Life

Sometimes one lurches rather from one thing to another.  I spent part of the afternoon with a group of people trying to work out how diocesan structures might be redesigned.  The challenge is to work out how the structures might encourage growth.  It’s not easy.  So after banging my head against that wall for a while, it was quite a relief to head away up the glen above Blairgowrie for the AGM of our congregation in Ballintuim.  Characters all, they are a remarkably hospitable and social group.  We dispatched the AGM fairly swiftly and moved on to the socialising.  Among the nuggets of information which ‘might come in useful some day’ was some information about how to float my Land Rover across the Zambezi River on three canoes.  You just never know.

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Remembrance finally

Quick and enjoyable visit to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to preach on Remembrance Sunday.  Christopher the new Chaplain is working through his Irish and St Andrews ‘little black book’ – so Canon Jonathan Mason will not be far behind me.  A while ago, I dropped in on Jesus College Chapel where Niall, my nephew, is a Chorister.   As I looked at the young men of the Choir, I had a sort of Birdsong moment – thinking that they were just the kind of ‘not quite grown up’ people who ended up in the trenches.  And I had the same feeling yesterday.   Anyway, after much flailing around, I preached a sermon a bit like this

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Distress Purchasing

I had my infrequent clothes-buying down to a fine art in Portadown.  I would enter McMahon’s bright new shop [bomb damaged and reconstructed twice, since you ask].  John the owner would be standing inside the door with a suit ready for me.  It would fit perfectly.  I would hand him my Visa and leave.  Neither Marks nor Spencer was waiting for me at the Gyle Centre this morning – or they were busy looking after the whole of Scotland which seemed to have descended on the place at the same time.  But at least you can bring stuff home and bring it back again.

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