Category: Blog Entry

Poppy and I are alone on the bridge this evening.  She was watching the Classical Brit Awards waiting for to see the nominations for the ‘Music for the Cultured Cat’ Award.  I did a bit of surfing – looking for the local cycling fraternity.  The roads round here are wonderfully flat – although, if I turn left towards the Tay, it is straight downhill for a mile.  The cycling websites are full of helpful stuff for the armchair tourer.  Some are for the mountain bikers who like to hurl themselves down the nearest mountain in the cycling equivalent of white water rafting.  Others invite me to join the peloton – I suppose I could bring up the rear as bishops do in procession.  And the Perth and Kinross Cyclists say, ‘Join us every third Sunday’  Maybe they would join me on the second Sunday in return.

It’s been a strange weekend. The war of attrition on the remaining boxes is coming towards its end. There are still more books and more pictures than there is space for but we’ll get there. Yesterday we went with some old friends from Portadown to a dinner in Dunkeld – part of a weekend for a group of surgeons from Northern Ireland. As always there were people we knew and people who knew people we knew and a former pupil of my father’s. I said Grace – and then watched the surgeons swapping their plates of venison around so that they got their meat well done or rare as they wished. This evening we went to a performance of a children’s musical in Dunblane. It was great – particularly good to see lots of children around the church and totally enjoying the buzz and excitement of it all.

Must be the worst sign-posting in the world.  Where else has roundabouts without any signs on the exits?  I ended up on the A73 heading south when I should have been going north but couldn’t get back.  Must be a sermon lurking in there somewhere.  Anyway, I lost about 40 minutes on my way home from Coatbridge, visited Falkirk involuntarily and thought the faithful Passat was going to run out of diesel.  Falkirk is the place where it took me 25 minutes to find the hospital.   I also spent part of the day with Mothers’ Union who had a lunch in Perth attended by 130 members from all over Scotland. All clergy, if they are wise, treat MU with the utmost respect.  But I do remember another ‘Eats shoots and leaves’ moment when we went to the parish long years ago.  One of the members claimed that they were the ‘biggest Mothers’ Union in the diocese’.  Anyway, today they kindly gave me a copy of ‘even angels tread softly’ – a rather remarkable collection of poetry.  One about 9/11 begins, ‘This morning I donned my shroud/ – smart suit, high heels, handbag/ and strode out into my ordered commercial day.’

I went to an Army presentation this evening.  I am probably one of the most unmilitary …. but I have genuine gratitude for all the years through which they made it possible to live a ‘normal’ life in Northern Ireland.  They also work hard at the skills of presentation.  I became fascinated by their distinctive use of language – ‘deploy’ as an intransitive verb; ‘theatre’ as a place in which tanks do their stuff – and so on.  Until, of course, I had a bit of a ‘mote and beam’ moment and began to reflect on the way in which we in the church take language and create our own patois.  The lower slopes are words like ‘outreach’ and ‘fellowship’.  My favourite is ‘collaborative’ which we use in a postive sense.  And to be fair my OED only lists ‘cooperating traitorously with the enemy’ as the second meaning.

I’ve spent the last 36 hours at a meeting of our bishops held in Scottish Churches House in Dunblane.  I emerge to a sort of snowstorm of E Mails and phone calls – I must be on rather more of a daily treadmill than I realised.  Scottish Churches House is an inter-church residential centre right beside the Cathedral – it is a wonderful, plain but sombre building.  I never look at it without thinking of the dreadful scenes of grief and distress which it has seen.  I can almost hear the cries as I look at it.  I made the mistake of continuing to read Susan Howatch’s ‘Scandalous Risks’ around [but not actually during] our meeting.  The stories of high politics and dark forces gathering around the more rarified levels of church life seem far from the mundane [sic?] realities of a bishops’ meeting ……

We’ve had friends with us for the weekend – so one sees one’s surroundings through the eyes of the visitor.  We managed to find our way to the bank of the Tay and to walk a fair distance towards Perth and Stanley.  It is, of course, extraordinary.  The river is massive and flows at a very impressive pace.  And it is possible to be sufficiently ‘away from it all’ that one can hear no cars and see no other intrusions of modern life.  Poppy has been slinking her way into this blog more and more – but I do have to mention that she disappeared for most of Friday evening.  We suspect that she was luxuriating in the attentions of the Brownies in the Guide House across the road.  Meanwhile, in our search for her, we interviewed some Danes who said they had arrived to shoot deer.  They said they had a licence to do so – could this really be true?  We’ve hardly got used to having deer around the place and now there are people turning up to shoot them.  What next, I wonder?

The reshuffle came at last – strange that it only came after punishment at the polls.  Some measure of accountability must be important – which reminds me that clergy and bishops are still a protected species in this regard.  No requirement to record everything in triplicate.  And no real measurement of performance or of failure.  Which is partly because it is still not altogether clear what we are expected to do.  That is a great privilege but it also provides hiding places which, in reality, we might be better off without.  I feel the need to be accountable but am not at all sure how.

How long does it really take to move  house?  Answer: about a month either side of the date and probably even longer than that.  Put Easter into the mix and it’s hard to find any settled rhythm of work for ages and ages.  But slowly it is returning.  I still haven’t got my voice over internet phone working satisfactorily – and the mobile doesn’t work out here properly either although there is an O2 mast just across the fields.  Meanwhile I went to another amazing concert in the new Perth Concert Hall – Ashenazy conducting the Philharmonia in great sweeps of Russian music.  I sat there wondering what it is that makes music so characteristic of different nationalities – this was wonderful but really too romantic and spilling over the edges for me.  I have a tendency to like my music tidy and economical.  Would that my desk was the same.  Poppy, by the way, having been allowed a taste of freedom in the steppes of central Perthshire, is restless and noisy again.

I imagine that most bishops spend a considerable amount of time dealing with matters financial – I certainly do.  And not well qualified to do it either.  Diocesan budgets have a sort of abstract quality which makes them difficult but relatively pain free.  The task of encouraging people to increase giving in congregations is more difficult – a sort of wierd balancing act in which one tries to make clear that ‘it is serious’ while simultaneously trying to avoid seeming to obsess about it – and one brings Prudence to the party while continuing to suggest that faith can move mountains.  Well, by Scottish standards, fairly modest ones anyway.  And all the time one searches for the Holy Grail of the rhetoric of stewardship which suggests that giving is not the same as fundraising – much more a sort of personal liberation from the ties of mammon.   I hear it too.

Interesting day yesterday.  Eucharist with 2 adult baptisms in Burntisland – there is life and there is hope.  Brunch with the congregation and on to do a hospital visit in Sauchie.  An hour to spare – so unfurled the Brompton folding bicycle and headed off on the Round the Forth Cycle Route from Clackmannan under the Kincardine Bridge and on.  Not the most beautiful place but the roads are flat and there were lots of families out for a cycle.  Then a service with senior citizens in Alloa – a very lively group and members of the congregation well involved in ministry.  And home in time to shove the last of the boxes out of sight before baptising the new house with hospitality for the Cathedral Chapter.  And it was a beautiful day … the scenery on the way home through Glendevon and Gleneagles ….