The Importance of the Summer Fete Season

Today I have three of them, others of you may have one or two. Yes, it possible that some of my comrades with seventy-six churches in their benefice will need to rent a teleportation device, but this is the season for the Church Summer Fete.

These are not simply social gatherings. They are the yield of a year of planning, of committee room sparring and of flounces flounced. Among the cream-teas and silly-hats, danger lurks for the hapless cleric:

 - The dog show needs judging, and if you get that wrong you can kiss goodbye to your biggest 'giver' (and the fete organiser, churchwarden, organist, head server, PCC secretary ... all these roles being held by the same nonagenarian). This pales into insignificance when placed next to the worst of the worst - the Cutest Baby Contest. Be afraid, Vicar, be afraid.

 - Produce Stall: You don't know what is in that jam-jar, when it was made or by whom, but if you are to get through the day un-murdered, you will need to shell out the £8 a jar and buy three. No jam, no chance. Cakes are normally safe, but a hasty sprint from the car upon arrival will be only way of assuring a purchase. Failure to arrive early at the Cake Stall will mean that you will lose to the large person who always buys ten and freezes them (for a period of consumption that remains a mystery).

 - Tombola: Did you ever stop to wonder who Tom Bowler was? He was the first vicar to overlook to buy twenty-quid's worth of tickets for the raffle, and after his execution, they formed a new game and named it after him. It's written in the Olde Englyshe nowadays. Well, your are laughing if it is a Bottle Tombola, but beware the queue - though that said, the odds of winning that Single Malt are 3,600,000,000,000,000,012 to 1. 

 - Raffle: Twenty is plenty, but any less and you become the social pariah (see above). You don't want to win that jigsaw with the missing piece, and lavender smellies are not your thing, but avoid the Raffle at your mortal peril. 

 - Bric-a-Brac (a sort of rhyming slang for 'A Load of Cra...' you get the idea): A pile of unwanted goods, a single stacked-heel boot, a computer disk with software for the eagerly awaited ZX Spectrum, a kitchen device hitherto unseen by human eyes, a collection of four chipped Hornsea pottery mugs, a spittle-washed teddy bear (wrenched from the arms of its devoted owner only days before), and some pants on a scale that suit Moby Dick. You need to buy, vicar - just one thing, but buy you must. They don't have change for that Tenner though. 

 - Book Stall: No theology here, Farv - but lots and lots of Maeve Binchey and more smut-fest Mills and Boons than you care to swing the Vicarage Cat at. If you are really really lucky, there will be a Haynes Manual for the 1976 Austin Allegro or a book on the forgotten episodes of Star Trek (though the pages with the good bits will be long long gone). There will be some Tracts though. The Tract Fairies always seem to appear in the dark of the night and infiltrate book stalls, and so titles like: "Why God Doesn't Like It When you Eat Cake", or "The Forty-Six Prayers of Jesus During His Sleep" - eight copies apiece, but no-one knows how they got there. 

 - The PA System - oh my word, the focus of all that can (and will) go wrong! Button-up and it's on. Button down and it's off. Easy. Or so you would think. The average vicar will get it wrong to begin with and so will greet his crowds in near silence (which will annoy the person running the Cutest Granny Contest because the contestants are still fighting over the loo). Conversely, the microphone will be live when the Reverend feels it appropriate to comment on the daft hats, the poorly attired, and the basically funny-looking attendees - all at eight-thousand decibels. Worse still if the Vicar visits the loo with handset in pocket convinced that privacy will be assured. "Beans last night Vicar?"

 - The Barbeque: Now it is absolute fact that only nutters drive the Burger Stand at Summer Fetes. You may think that the articles places in your grasp is charcoal with nasty sauce, but you would wrong. That was incinerated with malice-afore-thought, and just for you. What is brought to the stall holder is a nice array of burger patties, Lincolnshire sausages, Cumberland sausages, marinaded chicken drum-sticks - what you get is a symphony of the incinerated similar. "I think that was chicken, Vicar. Onions with that? The sauces are over on that ... oh, in the dog's mouth"

I love a good Summer Fete. They are church life at its best in my opinion. It is the 'inside' coming outside, and for the outsider, it is a chance to regard the sallow skinned, sunken eyed Sunday Shufflers and see that they are human and can, despite all that is heard, work as a team for two hours a year. The church will raise some much needed cash and in the end, they are a sure sign of the Kingdom. 

School Shoes and Easter Eggs

Firstly, noble reader, I must apologise for not spewing forth this last few days. Sometimes, the Day Job gets in the way - you know how it is!

Today I want to grumble about something ["Makes a change, Farv", I hear you hollerin']. 

I was watching the Gogglebox over the weekend, ensconced as I was amid the gubbins of the Matriarch, and an advert appeared which took me wayyyyyy back to my halogen days of yoof. It is was a 'Back To School' advert for some shop or other. It reminded me of those bitter-sweet days of yore, the last day of school when half of me couldn't wait to get the hell out, and the other part of me that is clingly and needy and would miss the routine of daily school life. Normally, the Scarper Tendency won, and I can still remember a considerable number of those moments when I left the school for the last time for the summer. We weren't a family for copious foreign holidays so I had the prospect of a whole six weeks at home mucking about with the others in the park or at home - blissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

 I used to spend the odd summer back in the Homeland with my Nan and Grandad - memorable and wonderful days of Sesame Street, Painting with Nancy, Laurel and Hardy, Crossroads (with Benny and Miss Doi-anne) and Granada News at Six. We would go to Oldham Market and Nan would buy me gladly recieved plastic crap that only an 8yr old could love. We'd have Scotch Pies for lunch, perhaps a trip to Presto for something for Grandad's tea, a drop by the big Co-Op where Nan used to work - then past C&As where it all went horribly wrong - 'Back To School', on the 18th of frigging July!

It must happen now for the little poppets as they gaze forth to a near-eternity of holiday wonderfulness - only to be assaulted in so many media by the stark reminder that they will have to go back to school sometime. Leave the kids alone, man! Oh, the humanity!

But it happens in all walks of life. I have no doubt that supermarket warehouses will already be holding full pallets of Christmas fodder. By the 3rd of January, Easter fodder starts to find its way to the shelves. Fourteen seconds after the Lord rises from the tomb, summer-holiday fodder is called to the front. We are in such a hurry ..... The problem with this is not so much the cynical profiting from religious feast days the meaning of which has been lost by most, but more because in all this hubbub of retail foreshortening, the year seems shorter and increases our sense of hurry. It is the McDonald's effect - food presented for delictation in less than minute that causes the punter to neck it at Warp Factor Nine. Speed begets speed. Hurry begets hurry. 

I know that in about eleven seconds it will be Easter 2011. I daren't sleep anymore, life is happening too fast now. I might miss a Christmas and a Valentine's Day if I use the loo. Welcome to the 24/7 World that never stops, even if you are caused to by the needs of living.

Endings

I am not normally one to write blog posts whilst in an emotional state (except the misanthropic), but I need to refect on the day that I have just had.

I have spent the day at the school in Aylesbury where I serve as both chaplain and governor. It is has been a wonderful day for a panoply of reasons, among them:

1. Year Six Leaver's Assembly: Awards were given for a range of wonderful gifts and skills, most significantly for effort and good endeavour. Yes, there were cups for those who were good at sport and science, and rightly so - but the most poiganant awards went to those who bust a gut trying. It was my (painful/emotional) job to close the Assembly for them with a Blessing, painful because it is tough to let go, even to crowds of kids you don't really know very well. I reflected that in them we all have hope. I reflected on the quality of their characters in all the colours and hues they were made manifest, that grace poured out from them to us. It is my belief that if we invest in children properly, that the world might just be saved one little bit at a time.

2. The Headteacher Retired: Today was the day when the Head retired. I commented that she reminded me of the Good Shepherd: loving her flock, knowing them by name, laying down (all but) her life for them, looking for the lost sheep, and so on. I am part of that flock, a young(ish) Curate who entered her school after ordination petrified. I am now a gob on a stick thanks to her oversight and care for me. Even kids feel the pain of separation, and I can't be sure if the tears were for the leaving kids or for the leaving Head. Oh Lord, how I wish I could bottle the purity and intensity of care and connection that children have for and with others, whom they trust with just about anything.

3. Being mobbed: I have worked my socks off to be a positive clergy presence in the school. I am there with collar as often as I can be, and when I am, I am a normal human being. I don't do needless piety or waffly kid-centric theology. We have fun and we 'do theology' at the same time. At three points today, this 38 year old priest, in blacks and collar, was being chased by well over a hundred screaming kids around the school field. They loved it, and so did I - what a remarkable privilege to be a priest whom kids are not afraid of, or diffident about. Maybe I have had the the good fortune to convince some children that being a God-botherer is ok, a bit fun, acceptable even - possible maybe. These moments were among the Magic Moments of Vicarring.

4. Leaves from the Prayer Tree: Kids are so instinctively altruistic. The things they they hold in their prayers are remarkably mature and insightful. There was a simple prayer saying 'thanks for pencils', for example - that is one child who does not take the richness of the gift of their education for granted. I recieve them termly and pray over them at church so that they have a way of 'processing' them meaningfully. They pray for those in need and for loved ones, quite without prompt and in private (the tree is in the main hallway and accessible at all times). If I could pray like a child, my own flock would be the better off I think.

I nearly cried (fool that I am) at one point when addressing a full school hall. Our children are the best asset that we have as a society. They are real and pure and believable and honest in a way that adults simply are not. Perhaps childhood is wasted on the young, I don't know - but I know that I would love to be seven-year-old again. Tonight (heat and twins allowing), I will sleep safe in the knowledge that the world we live in isn't quite on the edge of peril as I had once feared.

May God bless those and all children as they start their holidays. May they find rest, live in safety and surrounded by love, and may they return safely next term. Amen