Let's see, where were we?

Oh yes, this is supposed to be a blog charting my relationship with the Church of England, or more accurately, the decline in that relationship. But actually, we seem to have arrived at a plateau in that relationship, and things are, well, quiet, at present. We don’t say a lot to each other, the rest of the diocese and I. I haven’t been in the Cathedral this year. I haven’t seen the bishop for over six months. I don’t reply to a lot of the diocesan email traffic. Have you noticed that if you stop replying and sending emails, you also stop receiving them? I mean the junk and stuff; obviously, if you stop writing to your mates they don’t write to you, I know that. But my junk mail count has gone down dramatically. So that’s good.

The thing is, with very few exceptions, I’ve never really enjoyed the company of clergy. Generally, they make me nervous, or bored, or I’m just left feeling as though I don’t fit in. Thirty five years, and I still feel as though I’m on the outside looking in. Not that I want to be in either. I’m OK with being an outsider. It just puzzles me.

I was at a church service, a funeral, in the south of England not long ago. I knew no-one in the church except the bereaved family. I went in to the refreshments afterwards and looked around and sat down beside a lady in a dog-collar, who was politely welcoming. We did the usual stuff; where are you from; who do you know; how are you getting back. She very kindly offered to take me to the station, for which I am very grateful. And we did talk about ministry and stuff, but it all felt a bit stilted. She was non-stipendiary; a volunteer, therefore. She made it clear that although she worked in the parish, she didn’t live there, and couldn’t afford to live there. I said it must be a busy place, to which she replied that “they set the bar high for their clergy”. I offered the opinion that she was the future of the church , and old dinosaurs of stipendiary clergy like me were on the way out. No comment. I mentioned the emphasis in our part of the world on lay ministry as part of the solution. No comment. Lines of discussion got started, and then led nowhere. Was she interested? Bored with shop talk? Didn’t agree with me? We’ll never know. We parted happily enough, me to the train, she to her allotment, and I wished her well.

The Escape Plan continues. I’ve got to grips with iTunes now, and am digitalizing our music collection (is “digitalize” a word; or is it “digitize”? Dunno). This is quite large – some 400 albums I reckon – so is going to take some time. It’s all going onto an external hard drive, and can then be copied onto an iPod, or similar. Cousin D has over 1,400 albums on one iPod, he tells me. He’s my 24 hour technical support. I rang him the other day. He was in an airport departure lounge, heading for Vienna. Mrs Demon and I look forward to a simple carefree existence, living on our boat and moving slowly around the inland waterways system, but we cannot survive taking off with the minimum of belongings unless that includes a handy pocket size version of our entire music collection to take with us. Once that is done, I have to digitalize all our slide photos, which go back long before the boys were born, and contain lots of really important stuff from the days when were backpackers and intrepid travellers. So tonight I’ve been trawling the net looking at reviews of slide scanners. Down-sizing is so much more complicated than it used to be.