The Sunday Times Magazine • 25celebration of Easter, I retire.
In May I start a new life in
what looks like Tilling from
the Mapp and Lucia novels. I’ll
be living in a charming 18th-
century cottage with a bow
window that looms over the
street affording a privileged
view of my neighbours’
comings and goings, as the
scent of lavender floats across
the village green. Who lives
in a house like this? A retired
gay vicar, only unusually
well provided for by
present day standards.
That is all splendid, and
lucky me, but the move is
not without anxiety. Not so
much about where I’m going
— there is a bus every ten
minutes with free wi-fi that
stops outside Waitrose — but
about what I leave behind.
I am not just leaving a job
but a community, and a
community in which as vicar
I have played a particular part.
A while ago I was in church
when a burly young man
called in and we fell into
conversation about his hopes
and his girlfriend and the
state of the world. I asked him
if he was local and he said,
“Father Richard, it’s me!” and
I realised I had known him as
a little boy in our primary
school. I might have married his parents,
buried his grandparents, watched him in
a tinsel crown solemnly offer the Christ
Child the gift of a lightsaber in the Nativity.
I leave behind a network of relationships
formed in the extraordinarily privileged
work of a parish priest. Example: Eric, the
guitarist in the Cupping Melons, our parish
band, in which I occasionally guest on
keyboards, met Lizzie, but it went wrong,
so he resolved to make it go right and,
missing a critically important Manchester
United home game, flew to Sydney, where
she had gone to forget about him, to
persuade her to change her mind,
successfully, so they were married in
church, restricted due to lockdown, but we
had the knees-up when restrictions were
lifted, the Cupping Melons reformed,
with Toddy from the cricket club, whose
daughter I baptised, and Baishy, whose nan
I buried, accompanied by a brass band
playing Bring Me Sunshine, and Tim, now
cricket coach at Eton, whose father I buried,
who had been my grandfather’s dental
technician, whose partner in the practice
lived at Thingdon Cottage, built by Squire
Dolben, opposite Dr Spencer, whom I
buried, who was my father’s GP, and whose
son, my old schoolmate, is my GP.
These generationally networked
relationships, characteristic of places like
Finedon, are rarer now in bigger places with
transient populations. I have often wished
people who make decisions about how we
all live lived in places like here, because
they might understand better what sustains
the pulse and heartbeat of a functioning
community. I do not want to idealise this,
for it can go the other way. Murder, assault,
abuse, neglect, exclusion and karaoke have
also occurred, and sometimes have been
very difficult to deal with, as in any parish.
But even so the occupation of parson,
according to the Office for NationalStatistics, is No 1 for job
satisfaction. This is not
because we work only one
day a week, or serenely net
butterflies in our glebe, or
summer in our villas in
Tuscany, but because we
get life in its fullness. Not
serenity or fulfilment or
happiness, but life in its
fullness, which is what
Jesus actually promised.
What does that mean? You
see the best of people and the
worst of people. A woman,
reckoned nothing in the
estimation of the world, who
loved all the lost kids onher estate when everyone
else had abandoned them,
and implanted in them a
realisable hope of life being
better. A man who took in his
disabled father, lonely after
his wife of 60 years died,
emptied his bank accounts,
ran down his credit cards and
left him in a rented room to
be discovered by a stranger
after sitting in his own
excrement for two days. I’ve
seen the great and good lie
and cheat and the lowly give
everything they have for
another. I have been punched
a fair bit, threatened with a
machete, spat at, ridiculed
more times than I can
remember, not always deservedly. I’ve been
handed a cheque for £250,000 by a stranger
to save a tiny but irreplaceable charity from
going under. I have married people who
should not have got married and been
prevented from marrying people who most
definitely should, and buried a woman in her
wedding dress who died a week before her
marriage of a condition so obscure it took
the coroner six months to release her body
for burial. I have had tea with prisoners and
dinner with princes on the same day. And
I have been with people in perinatal ICU,
police stations, deathbeds, crime scenes,
castles, classrooms, the western fjords of
Iceland, C wing, and a revolution.
I was able to because I am a priest, and
no one has ever asked me why I am there
or what I’m for; the collar, this little strip of
white plastic visible from half a mile away,
has been my passe-partout. When I was
first ordained I thought that if anyone
noticed me at all it might be as a sort of
supporting artist, a sitcom character. But
it has not really been like that at all.“Don’t get stuck,” said David’s mother. “Get out there,
meet people. It’s what he would have wanted”
Top: Coles with his late husband, David,
who died of alcoholic liver disease in 2019.
Above: on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017 ➤