More propriety, vicar

REV PETER MULLEN Touching Cloth

By Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie Transworld £16.99

Touching Cloth is Butler-Gallie’s memoir of his first year, mainly in a Liverpool parish, after his ordination to the Anglican priesthood.

He writes like an overpraised teenager with breathless literary aspirations and determined to keep on saying, ‘Boo!’ to his maiden aunt.

His style is unusual, perhaps unique, and might be termed ecclesiasticalscatological; and for a parson, his vocabulary is rather unexpected, pickled with arse, arsehole shit, crap, pee, piss, pissheads, bastard, sod, wazz, f**k and f**ked.

He tells what I think is a joke, in which a nun says, ‘F**k off!’ and he even quotes his mother as having said ‘f**king’.

He recalls a bishop whose only advice to his ordinands the night before he lays hands on them is ‘Never enter a public lavatory while wearing a dog collar.’

It’s like Round the Horne, with Jules and Sandy, where one of them – usually Kenneth Williams – exclaims, ‘Ooh, you are bold!’

I get the sense that this is what Butler-Gallie would like us all to admire about him: such language, such a mucky mind – and I’m a clergyman, too!

But … behind the pretentious theatricality and the narcissistic posing, there are better things in this story. Throughout my priesthood, I have endured the sham antique produced by the illiterate, tin-eared concocters of new liturgies. So I was cheered by Fergus’s saying, ‘When it comes to Common Worship – the Church of England’s famously complex and supposedly more accessible liturgy devised in 2000 – while I’m sure it does for some people, I’d rather praise God using a dishwasher manual.’

And he captures the effete, primping and preening of those priests in the Anglo-Catholic daisy chain ‘in outfits so extravagant they make Liberace look like an odd-job man’.

Bishops and that procession of cliché-mongers who turn up on Thought for the Day wax squeamish when it comes to Remembrance Sunday parades because these might seem ‘to glorify war’.

Fergus sees the point of these rites in allowing us to express our gratitude to people such as ‘… the veteran of Arnhem who had seen friends, barely older than boys, die in front of him and had willingly jumped out of an aeroplane on to a continent under the grip of Nazism to bring about its end’.

Now that is reassuring. But, a few pages on, in a discussion about what constitutes sanctity, we are back in Round the Horne with Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick: ‘Would a saint have accepted a fourth gin?’

Or we’re in the public lavatory again with that bishop and his advice to his ordinands: ‘Would a saint, as I did later on, jump the barriers to avoid paying 20p for a wazz at Euston?’

Come on, Fergus. You can do better than that! And, bless him, he does do better than that. There are stories here to hint at what priesthood is at its core; about the meaning of sacramental living.

But sentimentality and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as ‘cheap grace’ trickle all down the next page: ‘Sharing memories inevitably mixes grief and joy.’

And – no substitute for pastoral care – there’s the psychobabble of ‘sharing’ and ‘coping mechanisms’.

But we come to Fergus’s epilogue – a reminder that only one letter separates bathos from pathos. His story does not end well.

After his initial post-ordination parish experience, Fergus sought a permanent, salaried post but, ‘In the Church’s own words, I had failed to find enough experience and so I am, I hope temporarily, leaving ministry.’

He is understandably bitter. ‘I’m filling in at a parish where there is no vicar, but I’m not considered up to scratch to take it on full time.’

Fergus’s bitterness was compounded by his treatment at the hands of ‘clerics who delighted in sidelining their juniors or volunteers, those who were sweetness and light to people’s faces, then dealt in calumnies behind their backs’.

As a priest who has more than once over these last 50 years got on the wrong side of bishops and other superfluous ecclesiastical hindrances, I know exactly the sort of treatment meted out to Fergus. And, for all his occasional childishness and temperamental silliness, I believe he has priestly qualities.

I hope he comes back soon.

Rev Peter Mullen was Rector of St Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London

Censorship obliged creators to find a way to show, without showing, thus giving the viewers liberal range for their imaginations.

Janet Leigh on the shower scene in Pyscho

Happiness is a useless subject for a writer. Especially in English. Why do you think that is? English seems particularly suited to irony and sarcasm, to suggesting the emptiness of human hope and the futility of human illusions.

Frederic Raphael, The Glittering

Prizes

It is always a pleasure to see other people desperately coveting expensive items that one has not the faintest inclination to own oneself – new model cars, designer clothes, up-to-date holidays, costly lotions and so forth.

David Sexton

Any piece of human behaviour will seem absurd if described precisely enough.

Anthony Powell

If you were a farmer, your farm cart needed oak for the frame and ash for the spokes of the wheels. Your plough was hacked out of oak, except for the ploughshare. The cog wheels on your mill were cut from hornbeam. If you were a landlord, your carriage had panelling of cherrywood and perhaps a walnut inlay.

Thomas Pakenham on wood in 16th-century England

Art is elimination.

Rudyard Kipling

The ordinary ‘horseless carriage’ is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle. The Literary Digest on the future of the car, 14th October 1889

Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects they know about.

Robert Conquest

One study of psychiatric patients suggested there’s a total of 6,000 facial expressions; another conducted by a Dutch artist, by electrical stimulation of the facial muscles, discovered 4,096 in half an hour. Another study guesses at 10,000.

The Face: A Natural History by Daniel McNeill

My London is not your London, though everyone’s Washington DC is pretty much the same.

Paul Theroux

Millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

Herman Mankiewicz, later the writer of Citizen Kane, on Hollywood – to screenwriter Ben Hecht, 1927

Men do great deeds because women are watching.

Friedrich Nietzsche

America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know, you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is ‘What’s the big idea?’

P J O’Rourke

Seat-hoggers

Don’t you hate it when one person takes up two seats on public transport – one for themselves and the other for their luggage?

You politely ask them to remove their stuff so that you can sit down. They either fix you with an icy glare at your impertinence or inform you crossly that there are plenty of other seats available – even when there aren’t.

If you insist on taking the seat next to them, they will make such a huge palaver about moving their stuff that you’re made to feel guilty for inconveniencing them so much.

Others will resort to extreme strategies to ensure nobody dares to sit next to them. They will deliberately choose an aisle seat so as to make it especially difficult for another person to clamber over, or they will ignore you by looking far into the distance, as if you don’t exist.

The mobile phone comes in handy to them here: they will get it out and embark on a long conversation, ensuring you remain ‘invisible’ to them.

Worst of all are two-seaters who beckon you with their finger to join them. This, they seem to hope, makes potential seat partners think

Small Delights

Getting your hand far enough round your back to get at that itch.

DAVID BYE,

Budapest

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk you are so mad that they quail at the prospect of taking up the other seat.

I am on a mission to combat this selfish, antisocial behaviour. At the risk of making myself mightily unpopular, I say loudly, ‘It’s one seat per person, you know.’ If they still refuse to move their bags, I say, ‘If you want your luggage to have a seat to itself, buy it a ticket.’

If they remain reluctant to move their baggage, I inform them in my best sarcastic tone that luggage racks are for luggage and the seats are for humans. Then I plonk myself down next to them, even if there are other free seats.

LIZ HODGKINSON