Mail on Monday

Sorted out the mail for the past ten days or more on Monday, because I refuse to go through it all on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and on Easter Day we are celebrating the Resurrection, and on Easter Monday all the clergy I know including me clear off for a few days R&R. So when you get back there’s a pile of stuff.

By the way, while I’m on, did you know that more phone calls are now made in a single day than were made in the whole of 1980? And only forty per cent of UK workers take their full holiday allowance? Well ya do now!

Anyway, there’s all the usual junk mail, of course, even though I’ve joined the Mail Preference Scheme (I was telling a gay friend about how this had changed my life, and it took me ages to work out why this smirk was spreading across his face. Honest!). Still stuff like Maintenance & Equipment News, which seems to be sent to every clergyman (Why?). And I love looking at all the different titles and offices I hold. Rector. Vicar. Parish Priest. The Incumbent. The Father! (but never the Son or the Holy Ghost, curiously). The Minister. The Communications Manager. The Director of Mission. The Office Manager. The Administrator. The Householder. The Occupant. Anyway, all that goes in the recycling. That cuts it down a bit.

Then the personal stuff. Take that through to the dining room table.

Then, aha! Letters from the diocesan office! Every year in Holy Week, the office posts out stuff timed to arrive on Good Friday! Why? Do they not have a liturgical calendar there? Do they not know what we’ll all be busy doing? One is important; a stiff and formal letter about Chancel Repair Liability (I’ll leave you to google it and see for yourself rather than provide a link; your jaw will hit the deck; all about a parish in Warwickshire that found an old law and got £95,000 out of a couple who had the misfortune to have a house built on glebe land). The attachment is five pages of legalese, some lawyer’s way of explaining whether any of us could or should be looking for our own pot of gold in any of the local executive mews developments or affordable housing schemes. The letter ends, as so many of them do these days, with the thinly veiled warning to churchwardens that they’d better pay careful attention, as “any members of the PCC who act in breach of their duties may be required to make good any loss the PCC incurs out of their own personal resources”. Charming. Just what hard-pressed volunteer church officers want to hear, especially those who are attempting to keep their farms solvent and are up all night lambing, those who are retired and on fixed incomes, and those who have time to read this when they’ve finishing campaigning to keep rural schools, post offices and hospitals.