A merry dance
I’M JUST about to go and see my new puppy. Just a week old, he’s a black Labrador, and, so far, all I’ve seen are photos sent by his breeder. There has been much excitement, not least in the parish: at our “Very Chatty Café” (our senior citizen answer to “Messy Church”, where some 70 or so members join on alternate Fridays for craftwork, a talk, a meal, and much chattiness), there was uncontained joy at the prospect of a new canine member of the congregation. One lady was in tears.
I think I’m going to call him Vito. A friend suggested naming him after the excitable Italian pro dancer on Strictly Come Dancing (who also won Celebrity MasterChef; so he is splendidly multi-talented), who is himself very much like an exuberant Labrador. Also, my redoubtable PCC secretary, Gillian, discovered that St Vito (Vitus) is the patron saint of dogs. I checked this, and discovered that he’s also the patron saint of oversleeping, which has a certain appropriateness, both for me and, I suspect, for any rectory Labrador.
Anyway, I’ll go and see him and begin his instruction on becoming a working church dog. Advent will be a real time of preparation in the rectory, with Vito as a late New Year/Christmas present. I’ll have to see if he likes the name: being a Labrador, he might want to be something like “Rambo” or “Titan”. Hopefully not.
Small world
“I’M ON the phone to Tunisia and can’t talk,” I said desperately to a friend who was dropping off stuff for our next jumble sale. I was in that third circle of hell which is the setting-up of a new printer for my laptop.
The previous one had given up the ghost while printing out a 40-page tome on Primary School SIAMS Expectations (the church equivalent of Ofsted), and I urgently needed a replacement. I had duly loaded the app on computer and phone, accessed and registered the Wi-Fi, and sorted regular ink supplies. The only problem was that it refused to print.
In desperation, I tried the helpline, getting through straight away (to my surprise) to a patient, friendly, and efficient young woman, who led me through the process via my laptop’s camera. I asked where she actually was and was amazed to discover that she was in Tunisia. Twenty minutes later, all was well, and I continued on my merry way, printing off reams of stuff that, I suspect, I’ll never read.
Salad days
I STILL hanker for those happy days in the 1980s, when I first started as a curate, of solely a diary and a landline. Now, as a hoary old rector with increasingly Luddite tendencies, I have laptop, printer, iPad , iPhone, Apple watch, email (five addresses), Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and — since Covid — the dubious joys of Zoom.
I noticed, in my two most recent Zoom meetings, that I have acquired a photo of the Forth Bridge as my backdrop, instead of my actual (pretty chaotic) study. I have no idea how it came there, and no idea how to change it, but I rather like it. It has caused some comment.
Temps perdu
BUT one thing that has certainly changed for the worse since my heady, carefree curate days is the sheer number of meetings that I have to attend — and often chair. I suspect that many clergy feel the same, as the years roll on.
In a single day last week, I had six solid hours of meetings with barely a gap between each; an hour with some distressed parishioners; an hour with a School Ethos sub-committee (for which I had printed the SIAMS-related stuff — see above); a School Standards Committee that became an unplanned, two-hour full governors’ meeting to talk about our head’s suddenly moving to a new job; then a PCC meeting, which itself unexpectedly went on for almost two hours.
I think that an hour and a half is the maximum that any meeting should go on for (especially PCC meetings): I know my attention span fizzles out by then, and I think everybody else’s does also; so this was the equivalent of four consecutive PCCs. Joy. The will to live was rapidly lost.
All this was followed, may I say, by a large gin and tonic and a lie-down in a darkened room. Come back, curacy: all is forgiven.
Now I’m 64
IT WAS something of a relief, the following Saturday, to get out and into the countryside for a sponsored walk in aid of Sussex Hospices under the auspices of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem, for whose Sussex Commandery I am Chaplain.
It did not bode well. According to my iPhone weather app (technology again), there was an 80-per-cent probability of heavy rain as we prepared to tramp up the River Adur from Lancing College; but, as we walked out of the car park, lo! the rain stopped, and the sun came out. Thirteen and a half miles later, after encounters with flooded woodlands, dodgy cattle, and (bearing in mind how soggy we were) scary electrified fences, we staggered into St George’s, West Grinstead, where we were welcomed with restorative cake and fizzy wine.
Last time I did this was five years ago, pre-Covid. I was 59 and used to dog-walking. Now, five years on, I am 64 and haven’t really been dog-walking for about two years; so my feet blistered, and my hips gave out. Never again, I vowed, as I sipped my fizz. Mind you, Vito might have an opinion on that.
The Revd John Wall is Rector of the Uckfield Plurality in East Sussex.