While I've been away

While I've been away from the blog, a number of things have happened. Here is a quick resume.In October the balance of my mind was sufficiently disturbed to be signed off sick. This went on for weeks. I couldn't read. I couldn't write. I missed Christmas. Lots of snow fell, and we were on the boat so we got frozen in, which was fun. I did lots of dog walking, and slept hours and hours on end. I have now been given approval to retire at the end of May. My mind is not quite so disturbed.

While all that was happening the Church of England stumbled on in its inimitable way. Two things in particular convince me that it is time to go. Last summer, while everyone was tripping round the country on staycations and going to each others churches, it was decreed by the archbishops that we should distribute communion in one kind only, ie. no chalice. This is something that has never happened since Henry VIII managed to come up with a sane and wise decree for once, ordering that communion in England should be in both kinds. It has never been suspended since then. The plague, Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, AIDS, none of these led the Church to take such a decision. This was supposed to be our response to swine flu. It was no doubt inspired by the Archbishop of York, always on the look out for a way onto breakfast TV or the One Show. It didn't work. Each diocese interpreted it differently, some strictly, some not at all. Clergy came back from holidays to find chaos in their churches. People got very upset and some blamed their vicar. The whole thing eventually got dropped.

The second thing that happened was that a new marriage application form was introduced to reflect the changes in the Marriage Measure 2008 (Google it if you really want to know). The previous form had been in use for the whole of my thirty six year ministry, and probably longer. One side of a piece of paper, it didn't even acknowledge the invention of the telephone. If you wanted to ring the couple during the preparation period, you had to remember to write their phone number in the box mysteriously marked "For Clergy Use Only". The new form is available to download, of course, and runs to five pages and four sections, with lots of instructions on how to fill it in.

Definitely time to go.