The Cast Part Two- Laity (1)

The Administrator - Frank Stanford
Frank is the cathedral's most eligible bachelor - or at least the only one with a full set of teeth and a disinclination to wear frocks. In his early forties, he is a landowner with a taste for good wine, adventurous travel and vintage sports cars. He is often accompanied by his two large labradors, Boanerges and Rex, who function as body guards when he is being pursued by any of the army of slightly unstable women who harbour dubious marital fantasies about him ( and Boanerges and Rex). He has worked in the Cathedral in various capacities since his 20s. Much to the Dean's discomfort, he knows where ALL the bodies are buried.

The Dean's PA - Sylvie Johns
Sylvie is by far the most qualified of all the Cathedral staff, and she had a highly successful career as a landscape architect before inexpicably giving it all up to do the Dean's dirty work instead. If Frank holds the institutional memory, Sylvie holds the confidences of the staff and can make a savvy guess at any point about who is doing what to whom and why. She is widely regarded as a more important pastoral presence than all the clergy combined, but there are some who see her as a dangerous power behind the throne.

Cathedral Dogsbody - Albert Shuttcock
In his early twenties, Al is the only member of the Cathedral staff to have a full, rampant and entirely ungrey head of hair, and also one of the few to have a full, rampant and entirely uninvented sex life. (Probably) A technical genius, it is Al who can change the lighting from 'Restrained Evensong" to "Funky Disco" setting on a whim when he wants to punish the Precentor for a particularly tedious sermon. He periodically plugs himself in to the Cathedral server and achieves a kind of Nirvana, which can disrupt the sending of emails for others. He often forgets to eat, and his desk is strewn with lunchboxes growing small and crunchy new civilisations. If it happens at the Cathedral, Al will probably have set it up, plugged it in, downloaded it illegally or duct-taped it down. Nuns love him.

The Cast Part One - Clergy

A brief guide to the figures who will make themselves known in these posts in the coming weeks and months.

The Dean: Very Revd Oliver Snell
Oliver came late to the priesthood after a dazzling career in Public Relations, from which he has never fully recovered. Blessed with a certain double-jointed ability to wriggle out of trouble, he courts the media wherever possible. His mission is to chair a Quango. It is widely beleived that he bought his degree, a moderate Second in Land Management from Cambridge. He pays a great deal for his haircuts.

The Sub-Dean : The Revd Canon Winifred Box
Win was a Commonwealth javelin thrower before she was converted at a beach mission and gave it all up for Jesus. She sees her role as the sergeant-major of the Cathedral Close, holding back the waters of chaos with Canute-like persistence and about equal success. Her boyfriend gives everyone cause for hope - he is a tattooed former Buddhist monk who breaks horses for a living.

The Precentor: Canon Bob Swallow ( and his wife Bea)
Bob recently retired after a lifetime's work translating Suppuration and Stringing Nettles, the autobigraphy of the 9th Century East Anglian Saint Osfrith, who lived in a cowshed and was tragically stung to death by bees. His other passions are enumerating precisely the semicolons in the Church of England Ordinal. His wife, the very-appropriately-named Bea, is an expert on the Dewey Decimal system. Surprisingly, they have several children.

The Canon Pastor: Canon Edie Hurdlecroft
Edie was a Scottish presbyterian by birth, and is still slightly perplexed by the liturgy and apt to stand for long periods smiling vaguely into space. She is widely believed to love all living things, and often tries to pat them, which has worked well with children, but has proved problematic with crocodiles, and the Administrator's labradors.

The Canon Theologian: Ven. Canon Dr Pamela Holford-Crivvens.
Although relatively young in priest years, Pamela is often confused by the nature of reality, though it has got easier since she started to label her own possessions, particularly her shoes. She is largely peripatetic, since she cannot easily find her office. Often she is to be found writing sermons under trees, or editing articles while sharing a park bench with derelicts. She has an irrational fear of librarians, and otters.

Quote

After Earth Hour, when all the streetlights had been turned off.
The Administrator:
"Some thieving git has made off with our downpipes!"

Quote

Good Friday
The Director of Music, to a chorister:
"Stop scratching, vile child! This is the most solemn day of the Church's year."

Where was Moses when the lights went out?

Earth Hour: As the lights went out all over the city, and Albert, the Cathedral Dogsbody flipped the trip switch and plunged the Cathedral into darkness, curses were heard from the cupboard, where the Frank Stanford the Administrator was furtling to avoid the unwanted attentions of Bridget the bellringer. She was one of his numerous wannabe wives, a fact he attributed to to the indefinable glamour which came from working in an office which contained two thirds of a gothic window.

The Canon Theologian had stolen someone else's desk, not being able to find her own in the gloom, and was adapting a sermon for the local public school. It had all gone a little peculiar after the opening lines, and she was now pursuing a strange line of reasoning in which the atonement was likened to a flock of geese pursuing the Prime Minister. Across permafrost. It gave her a brief pause for contemplation, but then she shrugged. The Sundays after Easter were all a little temperamental, as were the geese.