BARBICAN LIFE


A View from St Giles’


Katharine Rumens Rector, St Giles’ Cripplegate


T


ake one tissue – just one tissue of the manly variety sold in rugged manly boxes of severe manly design. Not one of those flighty, flimsy tissues for ladies suitable only for dabbing at the single tear shed while reading French poetry.


It beats me why we still live with the paper equivalent of Dick Whittington’s red spotted hankerchief for the adult male nose and the delicate lace fashion accessory suitable only for pressing cologne to the forehead of the adult female. But we do.


Experience teaches us one tissue of either persuasion goes a long way. Just the one: especially if you are not concentrating, and allow it to get minced up in the wash with four black clerical shirts. Results are less tedious with white cotton sheets. Yet who would have thought one tissue to have had so much fluff in it? As Lady Macbeth would have lamented, had she displayed her nurturing domestic side and done the washing.


I’ll be ready next time: I have bought one of those industrial fluff rollers. I did scrutinise the box for reference to the customers’ charter. One mere polite request in leaning italics: ‘Please remove all paper tissues from garments before washing.’ (As removing after washing can take a bit longer.) This what an efficiency drive and an intensive programme of list writing and organisation of self and others is doing to me. My mind is on my sabbatical. Some call it a long holiday, but that would be frivolous and everybody would expect a ‘wish you were here’ postcard. For tax purposes others stick to the vagueness of ‘study leave’; yes, anything to avoid paying 4d in the £ on the dosh the diocese gives. For comprehension I am calling it a sabbatical. We all know where we are with that, it sounds suitably erudite – and heaven knows it’s biblical: ‘For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow’. It’s all spelt out in Exodus 23.


There is a great mystique about this 46


sabbatical lark and I come at it brimming with ignorance never having attempted one before. Each diocese has different way of going about things. In some you have to express an interest years in advance and are dealt with in an orderly fashion, in others it seems a few phone calls when the mood takes you will get it sorted. In some jobs you get them every 10 years, if you are in theological education it seems you get one every 7 years. That has to be because theologians know their bibles and can argue chapter and verse to legitimise time out. ‘Must go and check up on my fallow fields, and the vineyards and orchards too’. I expect, unlike the rest of us, they regularly feel the urge to get a book or a few learned articles off their chests.


The idea of a sabbatical came to me after a session with my Ministerial Reviewer and also hearing a colleague’s account of her forthcoming three- month spree in Venice. She’s gone to improve her Italian, do a fine art course and learn how to cook a bowl of fritto misto. She said the grant-giving powers that be didn’t find it all that robust. But hey! We do lots of robust.


In this diocese I think you are supposed to spend part of the time applying yourself academically – brushing up that New Testament Greek or interrogating some mediaeval heresy. In a neighbouring diocese you are prohibited from opening a book. There it is compulsory motorbike maintenance or pottery. In some places you have to write a report when you get back, in others they prefer a slim volume.


I used to chair a grant-giving committee. We’d interview care-worn clergy conscientiously talking through their forthcoming sabbaticals. First stop: liberation theology in some inaccessible part of South America. Six weeks without running water or the electric on a mission station. That accomplished: next stop Australia to live alongside some swampy emerging initiative for the marginalised. Returning to UK via Japan to experience inter-faith meditation in a


gravel garden. With any luck there would be 48 hours remaining when they could nip off to some wind-swept rock to write an opera before returning to the parish.


Being in charge of the money is a very powerful place to be. ‘Well,’ I would say as chair, ‘could you indicate something less worthy which will stop you from biting your nails and might appeal to us to fund? Candy floss and a novel on the beach?’ I paraphrase, but the serious ones looked horrified. One man, who did get it, was meeting up with his wife who was teaching origami on a cruise ship. I am happy to say he is now a bishop. Another grant went to a cleric who wanted to do a pig-slaughtering course in Devon. He turned up with three pounds of sausages for us. We did not often accept bribes; they were very good. He is now retired and I hope the piggery is prospering.


Me, I’m happy to say my successors on the committee have given me a grant. I am going to Wales for a duration to paint, then other places to find the sun if Wales has been wet, and to say my prayers. I also discover I am to learn how to drive a ride-on mower which is quite an unintended measurable learning outcome. It was considered a sufficiently robust proposal for there to be no question about funding; wisely I avoided Venetian cookery lessons.


Right now I write lists for Sunday cover and church keys. And instructions: the no confetti rule holds even in my absence, and do not lean on the altar without first checking that the bolts are firmly in place. It is because I have my mind on such higher thoughts that a tissue seized the opportunity to creep into the dark wash.


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