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Scenes from the life of my grandfather, #1
Sunday, March 27, 2005
My grandfather’s first curacy was in a hamlet so remote that the laws of physics were unknown there. When he tried to knock a nail into the wall of his bedroom his arm turned to water, and he had to abandon his habit of kicking choirboys after propelling one of them into the eighth dimension. But he was a strong, vigorous man and he threw himself into his work with such a passion that village idiots spontaneously combusted wherever he went.
The hamlet was a backward place, but he took it in hand. By the end of the year every home had cable television and most of the villagers were postmodernists who only went to church ‘ironically’.
One of his favourite parishioners was Miss Von Dorffmundt, an elderly spinster who always had a smile, a joke, a buttered scone, a flick-knife, a swastika armband, a compulsory work party and an ill-founded claim to the Sudetenland for everyone. How sad he was when she moved to London and became Head of Human Resources at the Department for International Development.
Passing through woodland one afternoon in early summer he came upon a secluded pool. Yielding to the impulse of the moment, he stripped naked and was about to dive in for a refreshing dip when Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the British Board of Film Censors leapt out of the undergrowth and started chasing him along the bank making whooping noises.
He never told us what happened next, but shortly afterwards he applied to be an industrial chaplain, ‘preferably in a large city made of soot-caked brick with no foliage of any description for ten miles in any direction.’ The bishop was not happy, and that was before he’d seen the video.
Scenes from my grandfather’s life #3
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