En Vacances

Harriet Goose, the Cathedral's Deputy-Under-Sub Publications Editor (With Special Responsibility for Web Design, Print Media and All the Important Things) has been spotted by one of the retired wing-commanders who frequent the Cathedral. She has been en vacances in bracing Bridlington, and was seen walking along the Front with her parents, with all parties dressed in matching orange cagoules, with hoods up, and the little nylon threads tied in bows under their chins. Which would be touching if she hadn't hinted that she was going to St Tropez, and implied that she would be accompanied by one of the loucher (and rather sexually ambiguous) Lay Clerks, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Jeffrey Archer but with floppy public-schoolboy hair.

Perhaps she and her parents belong to a cult, whisper some fo the concerned voices in the Cathedral. Might it be time to inform the Sub-Dean who may engage in acts of muscular prayer and deliverance?
Watch this space.

The knowledge ...

As he who knows where all the bodies are buried, I feel the time has come to have some input here, just in case there are those reading this who feel this blog may be an entire work of fiction! Mind you, burying anything at all in or around this Cathedral is problematic. In some areas the somewhat unstable medieval foundations make any excavations a health and safety nightmare, and in others the presence of water necessitates the use of scuba gear! In fact, in the graveyard is so full of flowing water that the headstones no longer bear any relevance to what lies beneath – a bit embarrassing when we need to open a grave to bury someone in a double plot and someone else has moved in!

But anyway, I digress … [more to come]

Dubious Religious Tat #1 - Pope on a Rope Soap

The Cast Part Three - nuns and random others

The Sacristans - Sister Mary (Specific) and Sister Basil
Sister Mary is one of 5 sisters named Mary at her convent. She is the youngest, but people have avoided referring to her as Sister Mary the Youngest because of all the hassle with Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, Pitt the Middle etc which still causes ripples several hundred years later. She has threatened to revert to her birth name, Muriel, if she is ever mistaken again for one of the other Sister Marys - Sr Mary (Regular) and Sr Mary (Irregular) - both named for their bowel issues; Sr Mary (Particular) named for her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Sr Mary (Unspecific) who suffers from dementia and is usually living in 1941.

Sisiter Basil is not named after one of the great doctors of the church, like Basil of Caesearea or Basil the Great, but after her hometown of Basildon is Essex, because it is easy to remember. Her upper body is entirely covered in tattoos, and in a previous life she was a boy racer. She enjoys alco-pops, but has to throw the bottles out of her window on the third floor of the convent rather than be discovered putting them out with the rubbish. So far she has caused several thousand pounds worth of criminal damage to the luxury car showroom over the wall.

The Cast part Two - Laity (2)

Development and Marketing Manager - Brent Clipper
Brent is alternately blessed and cursed with the gift of being much to cool for the cathedral. His marketing strategy involves glossy brochures with artistically out-of-focus shots of gargoyles and melacholy choirboys lurking under black umbrellas. This causes endless confusion among the retired wing-commanders and elderly flower-ladies who make up the regular congregation - who are already naturally suspicious becuase he is Austalian. Brent's shirts are handmade in a small Italian village from cotton grown only on the north facing slopes of a local mountain range, harvested while the Hail Mary is recited, and dyed using only the organic products of the sheep-farming industry. Despite this, they are quite nice shirts. In his alternative life, he is a renegade urban graffiti artist whose tag is "Clip".

Deputy Publications Under-Manager - Harriet Goose
Most of Harriet's time and energy is expended in trying to persuade her colleagues that she has a life, and the rest of the world that she has a really important job. A 30-year old virgin, she lives with her parents and nurses a secret passion for crocheting, and a not-very-well-hidden passion for Frank Stanford. She steams open her colleagues' mail and exercises all her ingenuity to hack into the server and read their emails. As web manager, she has slowly been changing her job title to make it sound more impressive - if she keeps this up, she will be calling herself Dean by Christmas. In an attempt to amke Frank jealous, she has recently been flirting with teenage choristers and with Johnny the organist. Sadly, this is failing miserably so far.

Director of Music - Edmund Venables
A brilliant and irascible musican, Edmund strikes fear into the hearts of the choristers with The Look - a stern combination of furrowed brow and piercing eyes which could freeze cheese. In his spare time he retreats into a hermitage he had built on his wife's family estate and composes incomprehenisble atonal music which receives rave reviews worldwide.

Our committment to cheese

The Cathedral is very committed to cheese. Select quantities of impressive cheeses are fed to worshippers at regular intervals; the Director of music survives entirely on Bach and brie; the Administrator has been poisoned when a jealous lover spiked his morning coffee with a feral Stilton.

The link below is an entirely spurious personality test based on cheese preferences. God help you if you come out as Colby.

http://www.quibblo.com/quiz/2OBTrG/What-kind-of-cheese-are-you

What the Administrator's desk is like

Cartoon by Dave Walker.