It’s important to mention that I’m eating another salad out of another box. This is because I have, upon recommendation, just trekked across the campus to the Keynes building and its Italian restaurant, La Dolce Vita, only to be told by an officious member of the university catering team that I can only eat in the Tex-Mex restaurant in Darwin, the building where I am living in my sixties student room.

But what if I don’t like Mexican – or at least, not every night for a fortnight, I plead? She gives me a cold stare and repeats her mantra: you can only eat in Darwin. She flicks a cloth across the counter and I leave. The restaurant, by the way, is almost empty of diners.

I go into this sorry detail because after a week in residence, I hit a new low tonight. I am hearing the worship borne so tantalisingly on the air but I can’t attend it because journalists are not to be trusted near the bishops when they are worshipping. The paths around the Big Top are ringed with security fencing. We are allowed in for selected plenaries but only with an escort and only en masse.

So I cannot do my job and describe for those in the dioceses and parishes the richness of worship there must be when voices from all around the world come together in praise and supplication. I can’t report accurately for our readers - whose Church this is - whether the bishops are doing what they came here to do. I don’t even know who’s here and who isn’t, and I’m not likely to.

Our morning press briefings bristle with tension and frustration. The Church House communications team are brilliant: they go the extra mile for us every time and are taking all the flak for whatever higher authority has decreed that we cannot have a list of the 670 bishops who are said to be present. Lawyers and privacy laws have been mentioned. Today we are told there will be a list, but that bishops can decline to be on it. So our readers worldwide - whose Church this is – cannot know whether their bishop turned up or not.

Of course we can’t go to the Indaba groups where bishops can talk without fear of being quoted. Credit us with some sensitivity: we didn’t expect to. Back to my salad box for a moment. Quite apart from being refused entry at La Dolce Vita, the reason that I am loitering here is that I can’t even get into a fringe meeting tonight.

The Episcopal PR person thought I was joking when I asked to go and hear A Conversation with Gene Robinson, advertised in the programme as ‘Open – all conference participants welcome’. There were palpable jitters when I asked to listen to Canadian and African bishops engaging over community building, which seemed a Very Good Thing to be doing in the circumstances. Sorry, I was told, not unsympathetically. You can’t come. But you can speak to somebody afterwards.

It’s the story of our lives, speaking to somebody afterwards, if they’ll speak to you at all. It’s second-hand reporting. It just won’t do. None of the bishops’ seminar options, the ‘self-select sessions’, are open to us. I look at the range of issues and am desperate to sit at the feet at some of the renowned people from all over the globe who are leading them.

Here is everything that matters, everything the Church should be engaging with. What wouldn’t I give to go to The Deadly Co-epidemic of Tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS, chaired by the Archbishop of Cape Town? Or The Consequences of Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa? I want to know about the Church’s role in peace building and conflict resolution. The mission challenges posed by eastern spiritualities. Christian responsibility in relation to the Holy Land. And the rest.

I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth. I want to see the flashpoints, hear the burning things I hope the bishops want to say from their own contexts. I don’t want someone else to tell me what was said. The conference is heavily in debt and there’s all the more need for us to know it is doing its work. The only result of keeping the media at arm’s length like this will be the headlines that everyone’s expecting and nobody wants.