A MODEST wind shakes the poplars in celebration of October 1987. Rooks and gulls whirl around. I am writing a sermon about St Luke and his publisher, the most excellent Theophilus, when friends arrive from Norfolk. Being still in my dressing gown, I hastily tell them about Victor Hugo writing Les Misérables in a cassock. They are carrying a duck casserole, strawberries, etc. (Norfolk is very classy.) Why didn't they let me know that they were coming? Although, "Welcome, welcome."

"But we did," and they wave a postcard to prove it. It was about to be delivered by Jamie, the postman, whom they ran into on the track.

I apologise for my scruffy state. They say that they love me as I am. I hide my tray and flourish a tablecloth, find glasses. Where did I keep my ladle? The white cat, who is a closet bohemian, dances about on a radiator. Oh, the bliss when the work routine of a writer is wrecked! They have brought enough food to last me a week. I open some nice white wine from New South Wales, where I once saw it growing. They are singing in a Bach or Mozart Mass, I can't quite remember which, the swift transition from bread and cheese to duck having made me mindless. What I do recall are ridiculous things such as Suffolk cheese's being so hard you could mend gates with it. We have lunch until teatime. "You won't need to cook tonight."

So I return to Luke. Also, I make a note to buy Hilary Mantel's terrifying novels. We met at a Lake District literature festival. She, her husband, Roger Deacon, and I, each of us with our particular writing in our faces, as it were. I went for a long walk just before I had to give my talk, and got lost, arriving on stage with not a minute to spare and wet feet. Roger went for a short swim, although it was February. Mantel sat very still in a window. Thus we momentarily see literature.

St Luke was such a good writer. Also a physician and an artist. They say that he was so many things: the anonymous walker on the Emmaus road; unmarried; St Paul's companion on the road from Troas to Philippi; and the painter of the portrait of Mary in her church in Rome. He is certainly the best travel-writer in the New Testament. But then he was free, with no family ties to hold him back, and fully creative.

We are starting an interregnum, a long space that has to be filled with our own continuities. If I added all my interregnums together, they would come to a kind of lifetime. But who is counting? The seasons pass, the apostles and saints call out their names, the altars flicker, the hymns are sung, and somebody brings a bat into the vestry. Bats are not as blind as legend would have them. Echoes guide them when they fly in darkness. When our south-aisle roof was mended, we made entrances for them. There they live according to their natural rules, and not silly human fantasies.

One day, Isaiah says, we shall leave our idols to "the moles and the bats". And they will say: "Whatever shall we do with this rubbish?" The non-natural history of the natural world still keeps many of us busy.