PREPARING to move into a vicarage is quite a thing. At present, mine is occupied — not by protesters, or by my predecessor, in some sort of pension-related sit-in, but by paying tenants; so I await the end of the month before they depart and I am allowed in to measure, view, and assess.
Firm instructions have already reached me, however. You are allowed “four neutral colours, one of which is white” when it comes to having it painted by the powers that be. This makes me suspect that the ground floor of the parsonage may more than resemble a dentist’s waiting-room. If you want a different colour, you have to fork out more than £200 per room — as a sort of fine for having imagination, I assume.
I suppose those in authority are confident that a few years of incumbency, and all my imagination will have gone, and I will be begging the diocesan decorators to come back and paint everything — me included — in magnolia.
Cool oven
THE question is: do I hand over several hundred pounds to have the dining room decorated in Crushed Cardinal (yes, that really is the name of a colour), and the study in British Racing Green, or do I save up for an Aga? News that I am moving has clearly reached the epicentre of postal misery which is the headquarters of Direct Mail; for I am beginning to get brochures for things.
Last week, I received a brochure urging me to buy an Aga. Obviously, the Direct Mail people have heard that I am moving, but not that I am moving on a Church of England stipend. I spent a few happy minutes lost in the glossy photos and luxuriant text, imagining how transformed my life would be by possessing such an icon of bourgeois contentment.
The reality, however, is that the main transformation would be having to live in a cardboard box; for the cheapest oven they had on sale was going for £5000, and the latest version, which you can switch on and off (surely, though, that’s not the point of an Aga?), costs a cool £10,000. Perhaps creative use of a microwave is called for.
Coffee covenant
NOT moving in until May, and currently existing in the ecclesiological netherworld that is the Oxbridge chaplaincy, means that I miss the great diocesan debate on the Anglican Covenant. You can imagine my sadness.
I thought I could assuage some of my misery by inventing different types of covenant we might have. If you can have a covenant based on the monstrous threat posed by gay people, I don’t see why other, equally central issues, cannot be addressed. How about a coffee covenant, where all provinces that sign up to it promise to eradicate instant coffee from après-mass refreshments? Provinces that still offer Nescafé after two years could be given serious punishments — like being forced to drink it.
Alternatively, you could have a washed-out covenant, where clergy who wear black shirts that have faded to brown or grey (and their theology with it) are required to get a cheap flight to Rome to buy some new, deep-black priestly garb (and some new books on doctrine while they’re at it). Persistent refusal would mean you were made to join the URC.
I am sure readers can come up with other vital matters to the future of the Church, without which the Body of Christ will collapse in a godless heap. How about a worship covenant so that all provinces promise to stop producing new liturgies for 20 years so that we might actually be allowed to get used to the ones we’ve got?
Sorry. I know. I am just being ridiculous.
Pets in the parish
THERE are other vital issues to be addressed when moving into a vicarage for the first time. Do you get a pet, for example? When I was little, I was not allowed a pet, because my parents said that if we got a dog, say, after a week’s initial enthusiasm on my part, it would be left to them to walk, feed, and generally look after. So I was allowed a goldfish instead.
It was not half as much fun as a dog, and I have always been secretly keen on having a hound when I finally got a house. Equally, I rather fancy chickens, as they will produce eggs, and be useful; yet, on the other hand, I have always had a soft spot for pigs, and think them hugely endearing.
Churchill used to say that while dogs look up to you, and cats look down on you, only pigs treat you as equals. This may be an important thing for a vicar to experience. Perhaps I had better wait until I settle in; and, anyway, I’ll have a parish, PCC, and churchwardens to deal with — more than enough of a menagerie to be going on with, I suspect.
On the sunny side
ONE of the treats of Cambridge college life is the provision in the common room of newspapers; yet, for me, this is about to end; and so a new vicar must ask himself whether to take a daily paper.
I recall at Westcott House that one of the most hotly debated topics was which newspapers the theological college should buy, and a particularly bad-tempered discussion took place when one of my fellow students proposed that we should take The Sun so as to understand our future parishioners better. (That individual has now joined the Ordinariate.) After much hoo-hah, it was finally voted down.
Now that the Archbishop of York and Lord Carey are regular writers for that august journal, I am sure that the debate would be very different: the whole college would be as one in wanting to receive the wisdom of such learned prelates, and they would probably order a job lot, so that several ordinands could be edified all at once.
I fear that a mere vicarage is an unworthy location for such holy erudition, and a mere vicar may not understand the lofty language; so I may stick to something a bit more downmarket — perhaps the Telegraph, or The Guardian? A new incumbent should not get above himself.
The Revd Robert Mackley is Vicar-designate of Little St Mary’s, Cambridge.