St Stephen's Divinity School - III

I was sitting out in a gorgeous vicarage garden not long ago up north, far beyond the smoggy confines of Old London Town, with a remarkable young vicar, who is trying to keep his whole country collection of small villages from lapsing into dreadful Geneva style Calvinism with all its sickly denials of things sacramental in our beautiful churches of the South Downs of the South Riding, south of York, when my esteemed and very youthful colleague on the handsome vicar calendar circuit pouted up and explained, as he was showing me his alianthas and gerberils and lilies and the like around his newly planted border, that blogs are like gardens - they need something exciting like a Venus Fly Catcher, and it thuswise occurred to us that this blog from the Rev Simon should now be rechristened and called not so much THE REAL CHURCH OF ENGLAND as THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

This was also the assertion of the Rev GG for whom it was not so much the assertion of the old medieval catholique church before that dreadful misanthrope Henry VIII got his disease-bag mits on it all that counted but rather the old church of England that all country vicars used to know and love in the old days of Nineteen Thirties Britain when it was all unspoilt by those disgusting german bombs all over our beautiful 1707 cities. It was a mistake, the Rev GG opined very solemnly, while pouring his second cup of regimental Ceylon tea, that we went to war at all against the das machine-like Germans, and that we should have listened to Edward VIII and so on and so on. I looked up into the azure skies and thought ruefully of dear old young Prince Charles and his inspiring reading from Ephesians 6 at the D-Day memorial Service in Normandie and the lovely speech of young Prince William too on that day with his pretty bride.

We reasoned it all out, over tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawns I would have you know, and there we have it - we both resolved that we would write an old fashioned letter of some import to our esteemed friend in foreign climes in the Med on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the beaches of Malta, the dear old Rev Simon, to this effect, a) that a calendar of handsome vicars and feminine canons at St Paul's be drawn up, but b) Germans should be generally apologised to for our being so overly attached to ridiculosities like cavalry-ridden aristocrat Poland, and c) more importantly for the survival of the churches, namely that the blog which everyone is reading as if a rage in Kensington should be renamed THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND  - the church of england of daily anonymous tea on the eponymous lawns.