...is not what The Reverend Doctor Patrick Richmond said (him being the Winner of the Daftest Silly Thing to be Said in Public, Ever Contest and slightly ahead of Oinky The Pork Cutlet Pig and her comments on Bovine Eternity). Nor is it the Alpha Course, a front for the black-market trade in poor translations of the Bible and antimacassars to the unsuspecting. It is ...
... spiders. I am scared to death of them. I can't bear to look at them alive, dead, moving, still, little, large, hairy or pie-bald. I hate spiders almost as much as I hate .... (not telling). The only time in my little life (did I ever mention that I am quite young?) when I fainted was when a spider the size of a Collection Plate emerged, with its boots on and its tattoos and everything, and walked across a ceiling between me and the door. I couldn't escape; it was horrid. I fell down in a dead faint, naked as a the day I was begotten as it happened to be in a small shower room.
Now, you may be wondering what this has to do with the church. Not a lot in truth, but the title got your attention, and it is always good to see you, but there is a small overlap. As a priest, I have a certain amount of my working life that is, shall we say, church-facing. I do 'church' quite a lot. And so do spiders. English churches are, often, quite old. Spiders like old places, and the carcasses of dessicated arachnids that fall to the floor are so old that they are bleached white. One was even carrying a Tyndale translation, he was that old. So, the thing is this - if I become Archbishop of Canterbury, not only will I have to take on half the bloody bloggers of the world, but I will have to close the medieval spyder-hyders in which we worship. Fainting Graces are not pretty.
Need to grow a beard first, which is something I just cannot do (I speak of the physical, not the moral).
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