“Forty six miles? You were lucky! Every day I had to get up and drive five hundred miles to celebrate holy communion in the middle of the night, and then drive back and take ten funerals, followed by a couple of church council meetings, a mothers union festival and then get to the cathedral for a diocesan meeting. We worked eight days a week, fifty-three weeks a year. Every forty years we had ten minutes off!”
“Dreamland! When I were a vicar, every five minutes the Archdeacon were round the parishes for a visitation, and if everything weren’t up to scratch, he’d kill us stone dead!”
“Luxury! Huh! When I were a parish priest, we lived in a vicarage with no roof, and our children froze to death every night before they went to school, and when they got home they froze to death again before they went to bed. Our stipend was a ha-porth of gravel every year, and we had to meet our own expenses out of that!”
“Gravel? Gravel? We dreamt of gravel! Bah! Yuh don’t know you were born! I were ordained when I were three, given a parish of fifteen thousand homicidal maniacs in Rotherham and made to stay there until I’d visited ‘em all twice, then sent to Outer Mongolia on a mission with one donkey and a nylon sheet to sleep under. When I got back twenty years later the bishop demanded to know what I’d been doing, and refused to pay me expenses!”
Hmmm. And if you tell young people that today, they don’t believe you.
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1 comment:
That made me laugh, especially when I had thought "huh! that's nothing!" after your last comment about mileage as I drive 260 miles each week in my commute to work. But then I wouldn't like to live among my parishioners...
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