Necessity, said Plato (or did he?) is the mother of invention. Whoever said it, some years ago I was forced to change the cherished beginnings of the festive ceremonies at St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green’s Easter Sunday because of wet paint.
 
I had been blessed from my curacy to have at least one member of the congregation so artistically gifted that we did not have to rely on commercially produced symbols on the Paschal Candle. For some years these were posted on the parish website.
 
Back to the year in question: the candle duly delivered in good time, the artist that year announced at a relatively late stage of Lent that the candle was broken.  A replacement was couriered over, given to the painter and we waited for the scene on the St Matthew’s candle to arrive in due course. Usually this was delivered before Palm Sunday.
 
On Good Friday, the candle was handed over and we noted that the paint (pastel rather than the usual gloss) was still moist. By early Sunday morning, resurrection or no resurrection, things had not improved. At this point creativity, urged on by a certain amount of holy panic, set in and I sat down to adapt our liturgy to a candle that could neither be removed from its stand nor processed during the festivities.
 
The current incumbent, The Revd Erin Clark, on the feast of St Mary Magdalene, in 2020, was gracious enough to recall that she had inherited a particular rite for Easter Sunday. She champions its use. While neither Easter nor St Mary Magdalene’s day, I offer the rite and some thoughts on women in the leadership of the Church.
 
St Mary Magdalene, pray for us.
 
 
 
                                            THE RITE OF MARY MAGDALENE
                                                       (The Gospel of John)
 
We gather in front of the church around the fire.
Each has an unlit candle.
In church the Paschal Candle is already lit.
 
President:      My sisters and brothers, we gather here to recall the wonder of our Lord’s resurrection. For his followers the days after his death were ones of fear and sadness. So much that they had hoped for had failed to come true. Or so they thought.
 
In the gospel of John we hear of how, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb where Jesus had been laid and saw that the stone covering the entrance had been removed. She ran to tell the other disciples. Simon Peter and the disciple Jesus loved ran to the tomb where they saw linen wrappings and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head rolled up in a place by itself. They then returned to their homes. John goes on to say:
 
 
One of the congregation goes into the church, and proceeds and stands by the Paschal Candle.
 
Reader 1:       But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her,
 
Angels:           Woman, why are you weeping?
 
Reader 2:       She said to them,
 
Mary:              They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.
 
Reader 1:       When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her,
 
Jesus (The President):          Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?
 
Reader 2:       Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him,
 
Mary:              Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.
 
Reader 1:       Jesus said to her,
 
Jesus:              Mary!
 
Reader 2:       She turned and said to him in Hebrew,
 
Mary:              Rabbouni!
 
Reader 2:       (which means Teacher)
 
She lights a candle from the Paschal Candle, slowly returning to the congregation.
 
Reader 1:       Jesus said to her,
 
Jesus:              Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'
 
Member of the congregation returns with her lighted candle and calls:
 
Congregant + Mary:            I have seen the Lord!
 
The faithful move into the church singing New English Hymnal 110
(Jesus Christ is risen today)
When the congregation are in the their seats:
 
The President:          Gloria in excelsis deo!
 
Organ fanfare
 
We sing the Gloria
 
The Collect
 
The mass continues as normal



Liturgy, of course, does not convince all people—part of me thinks more the pity. However, some time back I also had some thoughts about women in leadership in the Church (as the neologists like to call things) and I felt moved to offer these thoughts. It would be great to say they won the day, but...
 
 
 
                                                            WOMEN BISHOPS
                                                   An alternative Biblical view
 
In much argument about whether or not churches should proceed to consecrate women as bishops, there is the seemingly attractive Biblical authority to oppose it.
 
However, I believe there is a Biblical imperative to allow this development to occur. Quite simply, to insist on male headship and reserve the ordained ministry to men is a sign of the fall. How can this be?
 
First, the mark of God’s first created order was one of total equality. In the first account of creation in Genesis, God creates humanity, male and female, on the same day.
 
So God created humankind in his image,
   in the image of God he created them;
   male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’. (Genesis 1:27-28)
 
This is a shared dominion in which there is neither headship nor subjugation. There is, of course, an alternative creation story which gives man precedence over his helpmeet. It is not surprising that many ‘Biblicists’ skate over the first creation story. The hierarchy, they argue, is in the created order.
 
The fall of humanity, when the wily ways of the serpent succeed in an astonishing round of finger-pointing – the man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent – leads to the expulsion from paradise. It is in that action that the Almighty creates a distinction which leads to what can be oppressive views of gender.
 
In God’s address to creation in Genesis 3, harmony is banished and the sign of the fall is in rivalry between humanity and the serpent and between men and women. As Phyllis Tribble has argued, God’s wrath led to an inequality that had not existed before.
 
In the atoning actions of God in Jesus, we find the great reconciliation. Before this, Jesus called his followers, both female and male, but chose to represent the new order of the twelve tribes of Israel in the traditional male model.
 
It is in the action of the resurrection that Jesus replaces this temporal order. In all the resurrection stories, the primary witness is Mary Magdalene. In John’s gospel it is personal. Jesus chooses to reveal himself to Mary in the garden. He then her to tell the disciples, proclaiming restoration in heaven and earth. But he warns that the human perspective is both temporal and partial:
 
Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John20.17-18)
 
In the gospel of Mark this commission is secondary. An angel gives Mary Magdalene the message to give to the disciples. In this Mary Magdalene is both made preacher and evangelist. To withhold women from preaching is to undercut this commission.
 
I believe it is both biblical and catholic for women to be ordained, to be consecrated to the episcopate and to exercise a full ministry in leadership. To hold onto headship and male only orders is to fail to see that which has been overcome, vanquished and restored.
 
 
 
All in all, I offer this for others’ consideration.

It's been a strange time, as many are saying.

And in the darkness of so much happening around us, rightly challenging the evils of our world, deciding to publish a new journal of poetry seemed an interesting venture.

I contacted the nameless editors of the journal, Saccharine Poetry, suggesting their title may not be the most apposite for religious poetry.

An exchange ensued, in which they told me they were using the term ironically and had a wide, even challenging approach to new work.

Having recently been given the nod by another journal, who won't be publishing my work before next year, I thought I would put forward three poems to SP, the editor's or editors' nom de plume.

To my surprise they decided to publish all of them.

They can be found here.

A health warning: one of them is a concrete poem and the publication over three pages does not really give the shape one would hope, but them's the breaks.

Perfectionism is a peculiar blessing and curse. It can bring about excellence, a comparative needed to allow the brightest and best to shine. It can, however, become something of an inhibitor on an individual or society. I have written about the clash of those elements and how it affect(ed)(s) me in Three Angry Men.
 
When my first book was published it produced that feeling spoken of by parents of their first newborn—euphoria, delight and anxiety. The hard slog of pregnancy, the joyous terror of labour and childbirth seemingly evaporated as I held my progeny and wondered at its future.
 
As nervous parents await the result of a baby check—is there something ‘wrong’ with the child?—I scanned the pages with concern only to find my self confronted with a solecism, a feminine job title.
 
The parental need to know and blame ensued. Was it on my side, or was there something about the process of growth and development, external environmental factors, that led to this?
 
The word shocked me profoundly. I had, as a journalist, been an activist to have gender-specific professional words—authoress, WPC, stewardess—removed from journalese, allowing employment to take precedence over gender.
 
An investigation into the process followed, as publishing in the corporate sector allows no voice to sing alone. My initial typescript had been read by the commissioning editor who suggested a number of changes—necessary and improving—the subsequent draft overseen by a process editor, again with feedback to the author, proofs read by writer and a proofreader. It was this last professional eye that had made the offending ‘correction’.
 
For all that, the slip was not that monumental. A collector’s item of particular delight is The Sinner’s Bible or The Wicked Bible which has God’s injunction, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’.
 
Time is not in itself a corrective. Rushing, of course, can cause its own problems but in the time-pressurised old world of print journalism the aforementioned checks and balances caught many bloopers before the papers hit the streets. Like fish, it is the ones that got away that cause embarrassment.
 
I recall a front page story of an award of damages to a patient whose surgeon had erred in the amputation of a limb. Evidence had been given that it should have been the left leg that required surgery. The text of the article was consistent on this. What put the mockers on the front page splash was the reversal of the image should showed the wronged patient minus his right leg.

 With that in mind, self-publishing presents a minefield of opportunities for gremlins to creep in—the original draft, the revised typing, the imperfectly set proof, the slovenly read-through, the improperly reset and reviewed text.
 
The Rest is Silence was not produced in haste. Indeed, the first outline of its plot was recorded in my commonplace book in 2003.
 
In the preparation of the e-book and paperback a number of drafts were gone through. In one, I realised a very mild example of the form—an added ‘e’ appeared in a name, punning on the title of a poem and song. I corrected the name but distractedly put in the original, rather than the punned, title.
 
Of course, I have now come to realise that there are other small mistakes. I could, of course, revise the editions, and may in time. Or even issue some Errata. But, to quote Pilate, and allow myself to move on, it is best to say ‘Quod scripsi scripsi’  ('What I have written, I have written'.) As for the errors, for the moment  I will leave it for others to point them out.

The night my father died my six brothers and sisters and I went into something a cleaning frenzy. Whether it was a symptom of a release of pent-up tension, a harbinger of grief, is hard to say. But it did see us revealing hidden stores of hearing aid batteries, books, knick-knacks and, in particular, scribbled-on pieces of paper.
 
The papers were records of thoughts, ideas, rhymes, commentaries and the odd grump about the world, product of the active, fecund mind of Ken Scully, also known as John Dawes, journalist, commentator and poet.
 
One room was exempted from our search-and-clear mission: my father’s study. This was a closed sanctum, entry into which during his life released the unreasonable tiger caged in my father’s psyche.
 
There were bowing bookshelves, all but groaning under the weight of publications reviewed, given, donated or cast aside in Dad’s professional work and personal reading. The desk was piled with papers and layers of dust that attested to my mother Norma’s vow, repeatedly challenged as fallacious by Ken, that she never went in there.
 
For all that, if he failed to locate something in the uncurated chaos of the room, Norma would be accused of having moved it while she was cleaning. She would not even allow the home help, who came as they both aged into frailty, to do more than hoover the floor.
 
It was this room that contained the treasure trove of a lifetime’s work. And it became my task to open drawers of a filing cabinet that were stuffed with materials—clippings of articles he had written, notebooks, a handwritten draft in pencil of a novel, plays, poems. It was a cornucopia of material that we all knew would be bigger than a family’s personal momentoes.
 
Ken had been the editor of The Catholic Weekly, had been a key figure in the Australian poetry scene in the 1950s but somehow did not make the cut to established presses. For his efforts, he had been made a Knight of St Sylvester but Pope John Paul II. He was a major player in a minor league.
 
Over the next week or so, I did a preliminary sort of the material in the office. It seemed overwhelming in range, substance and topic. It was clear, we could all see, that to cherry-pick the papers for sentimental reasons would be a travesty.
 
But who would take on such a burden? It so happened that the Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, Br Julian McDonald cfc, had been at Ken’s funeral, which had taken place four days after his death.

Julian had been my English teacher at high school and he was an inspiration and has remained a friend to me ever since. I called him and was pleasantly stunned and relieved when he got back to me after making enquiries to tell me that the ACU would be delighted to be the custodian of this literary heritage.
 
It was another surprise to find that collection was done by the Chancellor himself. Dad’s lifework was packed into the boot of a car and driven to Sydney, where the papers remain at the Strathfield campus of ACU.
 
A few years later I was able to spend time with—and complete the archive by adding some material that had been overlooked or excluded on Norma’s insistence—as part of a sabbatical in Sydney. This led to my writing Three Angry Men, which is available free on the Books page. It is in this form because, like much of my work, it was praised but turned down by a number of publishers (something a repeated strain in my writing life, but no matter.)
 
The weight of paper hangs heavily on writers of a certain age. What to do with as one moves on, either in accommodation or circumstances, is an issue that needs to be addressed.
 
For the famous and renowned, it is easy: there will be institutions almost gagging to be allowed to be custodians of first drafts, revisions, stabs and failed attempts, along with the published canon of an author’s work. Eleven years ago Alan Bennett announced that the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, where he read History, is to archive his life’s work. He is rightly acknowledged for his place in the world of letters and, as such, deserves the space to store his cast-offs.
 
But what of the work of minor players, among whom I have to count myself? For years I have held a personal archive of work in my office at home. When I moved to my current post—one which is midwife to many others facing the dilemmas of downsizing—I faced the same challenge.
 
There is the digital solution, of course, but that involves quite a bit of fuss for those with hard copy back catalogues, not to mention those (like me) have reverted to doing a lot of first drafts in pen an paper. This stuff adds up. But maybe I am just putting off my own bonfire of vanities?
 
There is the family, of course, but who really wants more stuff when they are going to face the same challenges? I suppose I could ask the editor of The Author to commission an article on the matter. After all, it is another aspect of mid-list and lower order  writers who, along with the luminaries, make up The Society of Authors? Or would it be a waste of paper?

…wrote and sang Loudon Wainwright III in Cobwebs. It is a mordant meditation couched in a bouncy tune acknowledging, as the best meditations do, personal responsibility for his part in the rash on society he observes – the ubiquity of ‘like’.
 
The use of ‘like’ for many purposes - a vocal utterance to provide time to think, the equivalent of ‘umm’ or ‘err’, a voiced tic, or a phoneme with no semantic content – is extensive.
 
Its irritative quality is contagious. Some reactions to it are anti-social. I have heard a woman call out loud numbers, like a scoreboard, announcing each time another young woman said the word into her phone. It was a showstopping performance on a rush hour bus.
 
I have myself reprimanded an American tourist on the London Underground, pompously telling the bewildered, backward-cap-wearing young man, ‘Don’t say “like”. It doesn’t mean anything.’ (An American-born priest friend told me later that I had no doubt provided the chap with an anecdote that will delight his countrymen about how curmudgeonly the English are.)
 
Wainwright posits many reasons for the use of the word -  ‘Chickens from the sixties finally coming in to roost,’ Jack Kerouac, Maynard G. Krebs ( a Beatnik character in the American television series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis).
 
As a recent diversion I took from my shelves A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, his ‘greatest hit’. The work is the only one of Burgess’s to be routinely found now in bookshops and libraries. He wrote over 30 novels, though The International Anthony Burgess Foundation is reported to have found notes for three more works.
 
A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, made popular by the Stanley Kubrick film nine years later. The novel reveals a prescience for the dull four letter word amid the linguistic fireworks of Nadsat. (Burgess himself acknowledged the Russian origin of the asterisked terms in the glossary of the 1972 Penguin edition.)
 
‘Like’ does not appear in the glossary, but it does throughout the narrative of Alex, the lead droog on the way to questionable reform. And it is not just Alex who uses it: his father and others ‘like’ their way throughout their dialogue. It pops up in Alex’s account of horrorshow violence, his brushes with the Law, his time in prison and his medically-led rehabilitation. It even appears in the final pages.
 
Needless to say, Burgess – of whom Private Eye, in a ‘Things They Never Said’ piece, jokingly quoted Little Wilson saying, ‘It’s this damn writer’s block’ – could have written long and hard about the use of language in the novel.  He was, after all, a gifted commentator and critic in addition to being a extraordinarily creative artist.
 
I am sure the Burgess Foundation could steer me right on my researches. Based in his native Manchester, it ‘encourages public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.’
 
All of this, of course, might let me know how ‘like’ made into A Clockwork Orange. What I probably need is not the background, nor the history behind  ‘like’’s popularity, but why the common usage of a word, which any descriptive linguist would merely accept, has the ability to annoy me and so many others. Like.

A beginning, a middle and an end. The holy trinity of narrative.
 
Beginning: The trouble with the first aspect is it can go back. Sometimes forever. So let’s start with a childhood friend. And he has a son. Who comes to London. And his partner, who shares my passion for theatre, is with him. And they eventually go back to Australia but, with family connections and complications, are on their way to Italy via London for holiday. That’s the genesis. Oh, and it happens that while they are in England the World Cup is on. So it is in a pub in the literary heart of Britain, Soho, that I find myself with them and a few of their friends, one who works for an Australian publisher, ostensibly watching the green and gold crash out against Peru.
 
Middle (1) : It appears, sadly, that the football is not going the Aussies’ way. My mate's son’s partner is a drama teacher. She and her friend, Alice Lewinsky, senior publicist for The Text Publishing Company, and I find literature more and more enticing than the ball play. We swap stories of authors, known, unknown, forgotten or overlooked and, as someone says at one point, ‘Who would have guessed this?’
 
Middle (2): Alice puts me onto two books, one a reissue, The Women in Black, soon to become a film, Ladies in Black directed by Bruce Beresford, a friend of the author, Madeleine St John and Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons. They come to me with a card promoting They’re A Weird Mob, reminding me of a teenage read of the work by Nino Culotta, a pseudonym for John O’Grady. To trim the edges of memory, the graphic for the book evokes for me Faces In The Street by Henry Lawson, which somehow conjures up Collins St., 5p.m. by John Brack, which hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria.
 
End: The books were both engrossing  but very different. Having grown up in Sydney about the time of St John’s book, there are memories, evocations and wonderings that flowed from a deceptively simple and charming story. Sentilles ‘s mixture of anecdote, history, polemic and theology challenge me intellectually and textually. It is a book that is both startling and engaging.
 
Coda: Thanks to friends. Sorry for the delay in putting this down. Oh, yeah. And bad luck, Australia. But it is a while ago.

Time was literature ran on correspondence. Letters, packages, notes, slips and cards were profuse. They created the aptly named paper trail. They also contributed to the slush pile.
 
Much of this exchange of wood-sourced communication was de trop, but it reflected at least a patina of civility as gatekeepers in the world of letters – agents, publishers, administrators of competitions – dealt with those who thought they had something that merited admission to their wordy universe.
 
Of course demand and contact has changed substantially in all areas of life and nearly all of those dealing with authors, at whatever stage of their career, have eschewed the acknowledgement card, personal letter and rejection slip. The only news is good news. Advice that if you don’t hear from someone within a period of time is sufficient to tell the aspirant that their work has not hit the mark. No indication that it ever arrived, let alone was read and found wanting, never mind the reasons.
 
Which means my recent return to poetry competitions has been, in part, a journey into the past. Some – not all – of the administration of these contests have a nostalgic feel: fill out a form, place it in one envelope with your name and the title of your poem; in another fold in your verse, with only the title, never your name; enclose a specified number of stamped addressed envelopes which should be marked with their possible purposes – acknowledgment, shortlist, results. And this is to be put into one large envelope with the cheque, usually for a sum in a single figure.
 
In one way it is quaint. In others it can create an unduly messy office for whoever is overseeing the process. Many competitions are overseen in the e-world. Does it create a smoother process? Probably. Does it attract a different kind of writer? I wonder. Are the pieces of better or lesser quality dependent on the procedures used? That is a question only the judges can rule on. However they decide to communicate their choices.

One of the practices of clergy – a mixture of perk and requirement – is to take a break after the big religious festivals. So many priests need period a physical or psychological refreshment after the exertions to mark the Nativity and Resurrection of Jesus.
 
This year, after Christmas and Easter, I spent a week with famous people – Alan Bennett and Antony Sher respectively. Not in their actual company, but through their diaries. Bennett’s Keeping On Keeping On followed the Lord’s birth and Sher’s Year Of The Mad King followed the drama of Holy Week and Easter.
 
Each has similar material for reflection – theatre, relationships and ageing – themes that resonate strongly for so many people. And it pointed a way to bringing these together for publication. I suppose the actor’s diary was a must-read for me, with Sher’s approach, trepidation, rehearsals and ultimately opening in the production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford.
 
A festal link should be mentioned here. My wife Adey Grummet and I host celebratory lunches at Christmas and Easter. Guests at the latter usually include the actors Debbie Radcliffe and Andrew McDonald. We performed together during a tour of what turned out to be my last professional engagement in my only lead role. It was Andrew, knowing my penchant for the king who divests himself of his realm to his daughters so he can travel through madness to death, who gave me Sher’s latest book.
 
David Whitney, who had been a fellow student actor at NIDA, and I hatched a plan to fly to Melbourne, stay in digs somewhere and catch Richard III, similarly captured in Sir Antony’s Year Of The King, when the RSC toured to Australia in 1986 but abandoned it when we realised we had no hope of getting a ticket. This was all before online booking.
 
Bennett often draws on his Yorkshire childhood and his relationship with his parents. I have always been particularly drawn to his portrait of his butcher father playing his violin along to concerts broadcast on the radio.
 
And Sher makes an incisive comment about drawing on his father for his performances over the years, especially when it comes the darker aspects of a character, but in particular King Lear. He quotes the playwright David Edgar assuring him that laughter during the stocks scene in Act Two, Scene Four when Lear becomes inarticulate was not malicious. ‘No, no, it was perfect…We laughed, and then we caught ourselves thinking, “That could be my Dad”’. And he later asks, ‘I wonder if all actors who do Lear just end up playing their dads?’
 
I have often thought that if I had ever got the chance to play Lear – we can always dream, however ridiculous it may be to do so – I would have had a deep mine to draw on in my father Ken’s rages when it came to that aspect of the ageing monarch. Indeed, when we were young people often told us of Dad’s ‘Shakespearian’ voice.
 
Readers of this blog will know I have spent a long time thinking and writing about my father. One publisher, who ultimately chose not to take on Three Angry Men, my spiritual memoir of Ken, was of the opinion that it was worth a wider public but not under their imprint.
 
Alan Bennett and Antony Sher have a lifetime of performing and writing behind them. When it comes to writing about oneself, some kind of public profile helps. I have said before that neither my father nor I were famous enough for Three Angry Men to pass that pitch for publishers.
 
But it was great to spend some down time these with remarkable men. I thank them for it.

‘Write what you know. ‘ That is a consistent piece of advice given to authors starting out. It is probably not appropriate for seasoned novelists. How many books do we want to read about a person sitting alone in a room trying, as the cartoon team Biff once said, to knock out their ‘latest wordplay, ripped steaming from the haunches of language’?
 
Yet there are tantalising elements in any writer’s life and work that has the reader sometimes searching for connections. This was done, at times painfully so, in the three volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. I made it through the first two – 1300 pages of it – only to find myself preferring the novelist’s original cadences and narratives over the sometimes achingly evoked pseudo-psychological reasons for Greene’s works and words.
 
I was perplexed to receive feedback from readers about my novel, Harbour Glimpses, which seemed to mistake the ‘I’ of the narrator, Michael Keogh, for the writer. One said things about my father and his relationship with me. Another commented on my schooling. I found myself haplessly trying to explain that the character was in a Protestant school on the North Shore of Sydney and that I went to a full-faith Roman Catholic establishment in the western suburbs. If you want to know about my father Ken Scully, I told them, there is, after all, Three Angry Men, which is a spiritual memoir of him.
 
I have mentioned elsewhere that my latest effort has been the slowest to deliver – my first outline in my notebook was thirteen years ago and, to my surprise, the main plot outline has varied little from my initial thoughts. Crafting the intricacies of how to tell the story has taken longer than initial expectations might have suggested. I have used the device of placing my professional self into the narrative as a character. No doubt that will cause me all sorts of trouble.
 
The geographical trajectory of the protagonist (who is not me, I hasten to add needlessly) is from Australia via rural Dorset to inner London and ends in Surrey. At this stage – I have put the work aside for revision later – it is a mix of real places and fictional ones. An early recast saw one identifiable locale renamed to eliminate confusion between actuality and artifice. It was perhaps too close for comfort.
 
The character finds himself finally in a facility for retired clergy – though he is a lay professed brother of a religious community. Part of the plot requires the Warden of this establishment to let me, as 'editor' (thanks to Søren Kierkegaard and others for this device), know of events in the character’s life.
 
The line between art and reality is arguably permeable. Yet I have a new, unforeseen at the time of gestation, dilemma. The residential college I drew on for the book recently appointed a new Warden. It happens to be me. What I do, or don’t do, with all this is one of those situations is not one likely to be addressed in the plethora of courses, websites, and chat rooms that cater for those who would like to be published. I say ‘not likely’ but I really cannot say that with any authority as I tend to avoid them.
 
That probably comes from my habit of writing about what I know.

The business of writing can be like fishing: you spend a long time waiting for a bite; some fish are easy to land; others put up a struggle before you manage to haul them in; and sadly, there are the ones that get away.
 
On my list of authorial regrets was a suggested, but never followed through, biography of an amazing woman in a church I served. Joyce Graham was in her 80s when I met her, a determined and committed perfectionist of a sacristan, who drew on a fascinating life experience.
 
She had trained in the London Hospital, seen dire East End poverty at first hand, and was part of the revolution in the National Health Service which sought to offer accessible and free health care to all – something the Conservatives have always seemed to want to claw back on.
 
What made this one woman’s story so interesting? Among the highlights of her career were tending to the first German airman shot down over England and nursing men released from the Japanese work camps in the Pacific. This latter experience almost cost her the Christian faith she practised with typical Joycean tenacity.

She went on to be Sister Tutor at the London Hospital, bringing to that her gifts of firm oversight, meticulous eye for detail, and a compassion in a crisp coating. I met a woman in her sixties at a writing group who told me she had trained at the London. When I asked if she had known Joyce she sat bolt upright, stubbed out the cigarette she was smoking, brushed down her skirt, and asked, 'You know Miss Graham?'
 
Others told stories about Joyce. She herself was initially reluctant to recount her exploits. But they slipped out now and then during conversations as she polished brass, prepared vessels and vestments for the mass or building towers of flowers. And over the extraordinarily strong and fine gin and tonics she would offer guests.
 
But baiting the hook, waiting and landing the fish is not enough. You have to sell the catch, or eat it yourself. The literary nursing memoir market is now saturated – only to be overtaken by neurosurgeons and other medics – because of the pioneering pen-work of Jennifer Worth.
 
Worth is probably best known as Nurse Jenny Lee in the BBC television series whose title was taken from her first book of memoirs, Call The Midwife. The popularity of the book, even before the surge in sales following the TV programme, about go into its seventh season, meant Worth as a writer was attractive to publishers. And because her books sold, she could propose work that may not have been entertained otherwise.
 
Her last book, written with her own death in sight, is magnificent. In The Midst of Life, which draws its title from a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer 1662 service for the Burial of the Dead, with instructions that the priest recite it ‘When they come to the Grave, while the Corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth’. And Worth has an extraordinary talent in listening to and representing views she does not share, a thirst for knowledge, but retains a lively faith in the face of her own demise.
 
The writing fuses memoir, anecdote, analysis, medical information, musings on the changing practices in medicine and nursing, and some of the best theological thought produced on this important part of life.
 
It is probably never going to make it onto the reading lists of any training scheme for clergy. Which is a shame because, as Joyce Graham might have said, the best thinking about God is in the doing.
 
Death is a fish we all will land. No matter how much we might want it to be the one that gets away.