Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index
An Allergy to Soap
For reasons best known to themselves, my adopted parents were addicted to watching Coronation Street. It could have been because it reminded them of their childhood but why anybody would want to come over all nostalgic about living in grubby little houses like that eluded me. Violet Carson appalled me. I had doted on her when she was Auntie Vi on Children’s Hour, and to discover that she was playing a wrinkled old harridan in a hairnet was heartbreaking.
So it was with great delight that, one August day, I signed on the dotted line at the recruiting office in Middlesbrough and found myself on a train to the safety of Hampshire, well away from Albert Tatlock and his ilk. No more compulsory viewing of that mangy cat on a back yard wall nor listening to the dreary, tinny, signature tune. I was, therefore, less than impressed to wander into the television room in the NAAFI to discover that they even received the programme down south.
It had never occurred to me that the cultured citizens of the Home Counties would want to know of the goings on in the sooty streets of the North of England. I thought that they were ignorant of our existence. When it snows in London the newscasters announce it as if they were the only people in the country to have winter. If the sun shines brilliantly in Surrey while we have been shrouded in a sea fret for a fortnight, they boast about the heat wave, as if everybody was having one.
In the same kind of way those who never enter the doors of a church imagine that nobody else does, either. They ask the impertinent question, with a smug look on their faces, of how many we had in the congregation this week. They expect an answer in single figures. That we, in our socially deprived parish, often top the ton on a Sunday is beyond their imagining. If we revealed how many turn up during the week their flabbers would be well and truly gasted. In August we lose some of our loyal members to holidays, but they inflate somebody else’s numbers and visitors replace them. The church, as we know it, is not dead, nor is the Christian faith a thing of the past. And that is true all over the world.
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
Back to index of vicar's letters - Back to the main index