‘Tea towels and tantrums – and that’s only the staff’ – comment from a school principal friend on the pre-Christmas rush. It reminds me of former life when one fitted in endless Nativity Plays and Senior Citizens’ Christmas Dinners around everything else. Bishop-life [forgive the oxymoron] seems hardly to change as Christmas approaches. They let me out on Christmas Eve. But otherwise my life seems to be ‘more of the same’ while the clergy rush about being Christmassy – or should that be Adventy.
Tax Gathering
How I hate it – the annual struggle with the Tax Return as the January deadline looms. In my pre-PAYE days, it was particularly terrifying. But now it’s just the scattered fragments that remain after PAYE has done its worst. I also think nostalgically of the distant past – a time when I could have a shiny car and depreciate it by 25% every year. Now the sensible thing is to run a car which suffers no depreciation at all. Roll forward, faithful Passat, whose value ebbs and flows by the phases of the moon, the state of world commodity prices and the time left until its next MOT. Pretty much like myself, really.
More from the bottom of the tank
Sorry for my continual ob-cessing about the septic tank. They arrived today with two tankers – each decorated with the slogan above – and carried out an evacuation of all four Bogstead systems. If you really want to get ‘into this’ as it were, here are the pretty diagrams for a CAP [Continuous Aeration Plant]. You have to empty the outer chamber first – if you do it the other way round, the pressure in the outer chamber distorts the inner chamber and damages it. That’s what we think has happened to at least two of the four systems here. Isn’t it wonderful that this time last week I knew nothing at all about all this?
Ciel Blue
Spend more than half the day at a ‘Blue Sky’ thinking meeting for the Council of Glenalmond College. Added interest came from the fact that was being filmed by Saltire Films as part of the ‘fly on the wall’ documentary which they are preparing on the life of the College. This meant that I had to remain in ‘media mode’ for the whole morning – listening intently to everything anybody else said, remembering not to scratch myself, making at least one devastatingly ‘on message’ intervention, refraining from dealing with correspondence, writing sermons, etc. I still find the whole thing fascinating – since I carry the recent memory of being Chair of Governors at a Junior High School in Portadown. The budget was one seventh of that at Glenalmond and, while the majority of parents were totally supportive of the school, there was a minority who made it almost unmanageable. Our children passed through that system and Portadown College to follow – and it did them proud. But this is somewhat different. You may have noticed recent reports which suggested that children from socially and economically deprived backgrounds who were sent to independent boarding schools in some cases thrived – the strong culture of order and discipline and the constant presence of highly committed adults … I can understand that – having been given the most stimulating intellectual workout in a while by one of the staff over lunch – creative writing, theology, sociology, politics … all in one. But, sadly, I couldn’t afford to send myself there.
Relief postponed
Meanwhile back at Bogstead .. the arrival of the tanker is now delayed until Saturday morning. So we are holding on grimly. The inner chamber of the septic [or was that ‘sceptic’]tank has collapsed because it was emptied without the outer chamber having been emptied first. It’s obvious and deserves a separate module at TISEC.
In this action-packed scenario, Poppy has been attempting to bring the field mice to the edge of extinction. She was shouting in the middle of the night and was given the run of the house in the hope that she would quieten down. She then advanced on the episcopal boudoir – still shouting – with a mouse clamped between her jaws. What would St Francis have done?
Roland Walls again
I was intrigued by his description of the Scottish Episcopal Church .. ‘that almost its sole raison d’etre has been to be a non-Catholic form of sacramental Christianity …. through thick and thin they did preserve that sacramental tradition in the face of a highly non-sacramental church.’ That’s interesting as a statement of what we are for – a sacramental counter-balance to the Kirk. But of course there are other things that we seem to be for – a liberal expression of Christianity … a marker of the identity of a distinct cultural group. The danger is, of course, that if we are mainly defined in adversarial/over-against terms, we may never manage to be a church with a mission to the whole of society expressed through a living tradition which we value.
Meanwhile back at Bogstead, we are dealing with an issue to do with our septic tanks. Like Tutankhamun’s tomb, they consist of a number of interlinked chambers which need to be emptied and filled in a particular sequence. Should anything go amiss with that ordered sequence, terrible problems result. Of which more tomorrow ..
One?
My Facebook homepage records that ‘I think I have had enough for today’. Our twice-yearly meeting with the Catholic Bishops was followed .. by a nice lunch .. and then by a lengthy meeting of the College of Bishops. On the train home, I finished ‘Mole under the Fence’ – conversations with Roland Walls, a wonderful mystic of a man who served as Priest in Charge of the famous Rosslyn Chapel .. became a Catholic .. established a religious community. I don’t think he would have found our meeting today particularly exciting. He said, ‘I’m not one of those who despise formal ecumenism. It’s all been part of a very necessary process in the simplification of faith’ Would that it were so!
Callander Youth Project
I dropped in today to the Callander Youth Project which lives in the Leisure Centre in Callendar. I’m glad to be able to say that the SEC is one of its financial supporters. With a staff of seven and close links to McLaren High School next door, they offer 12 different youth initiatives and projects. I took a look at Compass – described as a dedicated support service for young people in the High School. I asked all the questions about young people in the rural community. I suspect that there are many young people who are isolated and bored and have all sorts of issues and problems – and working with them is demanding. The results, as always, come slowly – but, when it happens, there is something magical about seeing young people gaining confidence and interacting positively with the world.
Early Christmas
Quick weekend trip to Dublin to deliver presents to our extended family in Dublin. People there are pre-occupied with the belief that the Celtic Tiger has taken a one way trip through the cat flap. I would think that any fall in house prices could only be welcome if it made it possible for first-time buyers to buy houses, etc. Readers of Hillhall Presbyterian Church’s Wayside Pulpit in Belfast will want to know that it now reads, ‘Seven days without prayer makes one weak.’ And the Sunday Times had an interesting article on strategic choosing of godparents.
It’s the vision thing – or is it?
We’re still pushing along at the Diocesan Review process. And it’s moving steadily. I have almost lost count of the number of times I have been ’round the houses’ with this kind of process. People think it’s about visionary leadership. I suppose it is – new ideas, new approaches, new angles on old problems. But I think it’s even more a process of working out which five of the hundred and twenty-five bright ideas you are actually going to pursue – persistently asking, ‘But what are we actually going to do?’
So I’m hoping to be able to call it ‘Done’ by the Diocesan Synod in March – tho’ it will take a bit longer than that to work it through properly.