Moving Home

It would take me about 3 and a half hours to do the journey, the only problem was that although I had somewhere to live I wouldn't have any furniture till the next day. I toyed with taking a camp bed and a sleeping bag, but quickly decided not to. I would enjoy living there more if I had somewhere to sit.

Option 2 was to stay in Southampton. That would mean doing the whole trip in one day, much more sensible to break the journey. So a cursory look around my friends was needed. How far north did they live. Ah ha...I noted I did indeed have northerly friends. I surveyed them. Gareth in St Andrews. Since staying with him would mean driving a long way past the new place, and then coming back it wasn't really practical. Matthew in Castleford. Same thing smaller distance. There was no doubt about it I was a Southerner and most of my friends were in the South. So I looked again, apart from Matthew and Gareth how far North did they go?

Milton Keynes.







So I decided to overnight there.



The traffic was no too bad even though it was rush hour as I made my way on to the M3. I arrived 2 hours later for a late tea, my overfull car would spend the night on the drive.







The next day I set off at 11am. Found my way to the M1 and began to make my way further north than usual.

Half way up I passed something called Market Harbour and knew I had arrived in my new Diocese. I skirted my way round Leicester passed something called the National Forest and I began to count the junctions as we got into the late teens and twenties. Finally I saw junction 22 and there I headed up into the the most Northerly town in Leicestershire.



A small market town they called Loughborough and there I was to make my new home, and there I found my new University.

Moving on up

The trouble with being given a month to do things is that, invariably, you will do it all in the last two days. I was supposed to sort out all those bits of paper in my office and throw away the contents of my out of date files. I was supposed to organise the move and work out what was needed at the other end. Mostly though what I did was actually step back and live in the house.

Then one day the doorbell rang and three young men stood there. I had already taken down most of the curtains and many there had already been many trips to the tip and I'd even discovered a computer recycler. The bloke in charge asked me to them on a tour. I explained that room a was going to go to room b. Room b to room c and d and room e to a and f to g and all that sort of stuff.

“It's a large house” said one of the men.
“It's a vicarage” I replied.
“My Dad's a vicar” he told me.

So the rest of the day was taken up with me disassembling furniture and watching other people work. Mostly I made the tea. And sat and thought I now had space, there was nothing else to do.

When I had resigned I had asked the Bishop of Winchester to allow me not to work my notice but rather to leave as soon as possible. Not surprisingly he had agreed. He asked me to try to do all I could to make freshers week in Southampton went as smoothly as possible. I was told by the students and the other chaplain that I was going to have not one but two successors both of whom were going to be unpaid. Of course when I had asked the Area Dean about this he refused to be drawn. I was going to be kept in the dark until the end. I didn't mind, we talked about other things and then he shook my hand and wished me well and left.

It was going to take three days to move after the first day the men left at 4 o' clock and I had a house full of boxes. I had a cooker and a tele so I made dinner in one and ate it in front of the other. The house now seemed soulless. 24 was very much my home, it was full of memories for me. The life I had led off campus. Friends and family.



The second day was gloriously sunny. I watched the guys load all my possessions into their lorry. It took till lunchtime and they nearly got it all in. They finished about 2pm. The driver was going to take the stuff back to the depo overnight and would meet me outside my new house the following afternoon. And with a shake of my hand they all bundled into the cab and flinging aside the branches of one of the garden trees the contents of my house zoomed off down the road.



Leaving me with a suitcase on the bedroom floor, a kettle, some tea bags, milk powder and a cup. I paused to make myself a cupper in my empty house. 5 years almost to the day that I had moved in.



I visited the University campus one last time. I went for a walk on Southampton Common. I got out my yellophone and updated my status on facebook. 'Going' I wrote. I'd liked Southampton. I was less happy in the Deanery. My only real dealings with the deanery were a constant stream of requests, to cover vicars who wanted a holiday. The year long silence from colleagues in the deanery, following my redundancy, had been near deafening.

I dropped round at the Catholic Chaplain's house and put my keys through the letter box. I entered the word “Going” once more into my status. As instructed I had left a key with a neighbour, and so I put my set in the kitchen drawer. They were going to pop round the next day to get the house ready to rent out. It was a strange feeling not having any keys in my pocket. I was going to have to start again somewhere else. I'm not the world's best Christian* but I do try to live in a way that is an offering to God. There was always going to be an element of giving up in that

I had one final look round. I was a terrible decorator, really.







I put my suitcase and the rest in the boot. Closed the door and got in my car.

I entered the word 'Gone' into my facebook status, started my engine and headed north.

*see last blog entry for details

Damn you Gandalf

It was a early evening and I approached the pub with Tamsin. Tamsin was my chauffeur for the evening. She promised to get me home no matter what. I was sure I wouldn't need that. The first thing I saw was Toddy in a fine yellow and green waste coat and Louisa. She was one of Tom's friends from sixth form who had since gone on to study at Loughborough University. I hugged Toddy it was good to see him. Inside it seemed like the whole pub was decked out in yellow. There were yellow balloons everywhere and everyone was wearing yellow. It was like I had come home and my own people were waiting for me. It was a good turn out given the time of year, and people had come back in August just to be there. Everyone was a story. Everyone was someone I had met along the road and I had received as much from them as I had given. I was so very grateful. I spent the evening having a few drinks and talking to everyone.

And there it is best to leave it. With the sun slowly sinking below the horizon. A happy picture of me surrounded by my students one last time. So you, gentle reader should probably stop here, close your browser and go away with the happy thought and warm feelings that picture engenders and not read any more....

...because what happened next is that Dan asked me if I'd 'done the fellowship'. Which, for those of you who do not know, is 5 drinks, all high alcohol cocktails served in 5 pint glasses each with the name of a character from the Lord of the Rings. This is served in Southampton's premier LOTR themed pub 'The Hobbit'. I had lived near the Hobbit for 5 years and been in on countless occasions, I had never, however done the fellowship.



What followed was a journey to the Hobbit. I didn't really want to do the whole Fellowship but someone bought me a Gandalf. Ok I'll just haver that one. It was a nice shade of blue. I really didn't want to do anything embarrassing. I mean I don't like drinking too much. Then all of a sudden there was the red one. Someone must have bought it for me. Oh dear it would be rude not to. I especially liked the yellow one. It was a proper yellow and that's really what I look for in a drink, being canary yellow. How could I not drink the yellow one? Oh dear! I am told I did the Green and the Grey one too. I remember talking and laughing I remember people but not many faces. I remember making friends, and I remember entering a dream like state in which there was no direct relationship between anything.

I remember eating an egg burger. I remember sitting somewhere and I remember someone saying “You like egg burgers”. I'm pretty sure that happened in the opposite order, but not certain. Someone said later it was no so much a farewell party as a stag do before I married my new job. Not that your ex is supposed to organise your stag do.

I woke the next morning with a slight hang over, a realisation that facebook was not my friend and an overwhelming feeling I needed to leave Southampton.

A question in a car park

“Do you actually want a leaving do” asked Tom.

It was in a car park as we were saying goodbye. Since Tom had left the chaplaincy we had taken to meeting regularly for a bite to eat. Mostly in Tragos (good burgers!). It was now late July and I had announced my resignation so I wasn't really working either. Half of me often wonders about hanging round with people 15 years younger than me, perhaps I should grow up. The other half of me thinks age is not really important anyway. I seem to be able to relate to people younger than me, as long as that's not forced, it doesn't really matter. I was enjoying the chats with Tom. Now neither of us worked there it gave me more of a chance to get to know him. Without work getting in the way. We were just two unemployed blokes soaking up the summer sun in a unhurried way. The fact that I was still getting paid was only adding to my comfort levels.

I considered Tom's question. Whenever a Chaplain at Southampton left post they always had a leaving do in the chaplaincy, at which the great and the good were invited. The longest serving chaplain gives a speech about their nearly departed colleague. This had never really appealed to me. A buffet lunch with the Chief Operating Officer didn't really fit with my ministry quite so well as a student party. Anyway it was now too late for the buffet to happen I had already done my last day at work and I was booking a removal van. It was probably too late to organise anything. Of course whenever you ask Tom to organise something you invariably ask Alex to do the same.

It is not actually possible to organise a student gathering at two weeks notice in August. Which is why Alex was just the person to ask to do it.

The other view

I placed my cup of tea on my desk and sat down. A cup of tea, a good considering sort of drink. Not like a beer, that's a sort of friendly drink, or a cup of coffee more of a roll-your-sleeves-up drink. No tea is the I'm-sorry-I-haven't-got-a-clue of drinks. Only less comical, really.

I felt comfortable, I was at my other desk, the one in the office my students never saw. In my house. This was a more relaxed office,the carpets were thicker and the décor to my taste. The room was filled with my books and mementos from all the places I'd been. I looked out of the window. It was a lovely sunny day in June. A long way from the snows of January.



No car park just the same view I had had for nearly five years. I'd always lived off campus, in fact the A33 which connected the centre of Southampton with the M3 stood between me and campus. I had space away from work, a good place to make this decision.

In front of me two letters, two job offers. That was an improvement on a few months ago. One letter was from the Bishop of Winchester offering me another year in Southampton. The other from another Bishop offering me a job I hadn't actually applied for. I had read and re-read these two letters and now I knew I had to make a decision, but how does one make a decision like that? It was not just going to affect me, this was one that had ramifications for others too.

There were many reasons not to accept the offer to stay. I would have to start looking for work, and if I found a job I could hardly ask them to wait until next June for me to arrive. In all likelihood I would not finish the year I was about to start. Then there was the fact the Diocese had suggested that in order to reacquaint myself with the 'coalface' that I should take a Church on the East side of Southampton through an interregnum, starting in late September, which was going to leave me very little time to be a chaplain. Oh, and there was the the whole dead-man-walking thing. There were a whole series of meetings happening to discuss the future of chaplaincy, involving the University, the free Church Chaplaincy Council and my Catholic Colleague to which I simply was not invited. Why would they invite me, I was part of the past not part of the future. The day I found out I was staying for a year, I told the RC Chaplain. She knew, apparently they had told her at the meeting the other week. I asked why she didn't tell me. They'd asked her to keep it a secret. Although I would not be named as acting chaplain, clearly I didn't deserve that sort of plutoing , in all but name that was exactly what I would be.

However as I reflected there in my other office, it was obvious none of that actually mattered. If that was what God wanted, then I would, and I should, put up with it. That is when the realisation dawned on me. The answer I had been looking for. When I though about vocation and what I was actually called to do. I came back to the words I had said in synod right at the beginning of the whole thing. I offered to live by faith, and if the Diocese took away my stipend I would still live by faith.

In a time when unemployment was rising, when the government was about to take an axe to the public sector, when many of the staff I worked with in the University were about to be made redundant, I was sitting on a guaranteed job. For 12 months I would draw a salary, coasting along, keeping a chaplaincy ticking over with no real vision for the future, before taking up a parish post. Did that really seem like living by faith? Where was the adventure? Where was the risk?

By contrast the other letter offered talked of a place I knew nothing about. A job I hadn't applied for, in a place I didn't know, a diocese I couldn't even locate on a map. Just somewhere on the M1, and as everyone born on the South Coast knows, the M1 enters the foggiest of all fog north of Watford. A job with no job description just two very exciting words...'Student engagement'.

I had offered to live by faith and it seemed that God had answered.

I switched on the computer, I had two letters to write, and a leap of faith to make.

A purple passage

I parked my car and got out to stretch my legs. I had been on the road for a good few hours and my back and arms were protesting, a gentle ache circled my shoulders. I looked around me, it was a small city, smaller than Southampton, I had wondered my way through the one way system confused and hesitantly. Here I was in the midst of houses by a large park, a few streets away from my final destination.

I had no idea how the parking would be so I decided to stop here and walk the rest of the way. I left the park behind and headed through the streets, I passed a couple of coffee selling establishments and a second hand book shop. It seemed quite suburban but down at heel. I passed by a Gurdwara, this was more cosmopolitan than I was expecting, in fact a whole lot less salubrious. There ahead of me was the street I was looking for and at the end of it, a large three storied Victorian house. It was not however a palace.It was in an area that once upon a time might have house moderately wealthy industrialists but now the other large houses had been turned into multiple occupancy and even one rest home for the elderly.

Next door the house had been demolished and replaced with a long building with a strange slopping roof. This was the office attached to the large building, and it was here I was heading. I buzzed in and the receptionist greeted me.

"Simon Stevens to see the Bishop of..." I paused of course here he was just the Bishop. "...to see the Bishop."

I was shown through past a door marked 'Chaplain' and into a door marked 'Bishop' and there he was the man I had been journeying all day to see.

"Simon, Simon good to see you." his opening words. He motioned me to a couple of chairs one side of the room he took one himself. I looked around the room. He desk over one side by the window. A couple of honorary doctorates on the wall and a very large map of his diocese. It felt like a very calm office, measured almost. He was wearing a navy blue chunky jumper, his purple shirt peering out at the neck. As we spoke he played with his half rims.

I'd served my whole ministry in Winchester Diocese. It is not often I got to meet other people's Bishops. In fact I had only ever met the Bishop of Liverpool and the last Bishop of Truro. Still I now had one more to add to the list.

We spoke for about 45 minutes. He asked me about my view of chaplaincy. How I understood it. What my priorities were, what was going on in Southampton. Whether I would stay or not. I asked him almost as many questions as he asked me. We talked about the role of Archdeacons and the wider diocesan education policy. He had three full time HE posts in his diocese and all of them were currently vacant. There seemed a lot of room for new ideas in that set up, and each time he spoke, calmly and measured, I became more excited about the situation he was describing.

Finally I rose to my feet. He shook my hand warmly and thanked me for coming.

"Will you pray." I asked him. "for the situation in Southampton, and what will come next."
"Well" he said "This may be an answer to those prayers."

As I got back to my car, I was confused. I had assumed that God wanted me in Southampton. I wanted a miracle. I had stood up in my local Church in Highfield and loudly said "I do not believe in a God who sets budgets. I believe in a God who raises the dead" quite a few cheered but most of the Church did not. When the Area Dean had said "If plan A is not working then God has a plan B" I had resisted. It seemed to be letting the diocese of the hook. It wasn't 'we are going to trash your ministry' but 'God doesn't want your ministry any more' and yet here was a plan B I actually wanted.

I put my confusion aside and started my engine, I had a long journey ahead of me. I would have plenty of time to think. I began to weave my way through the streets again. It would be easier to find my way out, I just needed to follow signs for the M1.

Service from on High

"So that's the situation" I said "I don't know where we go from here. I just ask you to pray."

"Don't worry, I shall certainly do that." said the Archdeacon.

It was an odd conversation to be having really. I hadn't really spoken to my own Archdeacon about it all, and here I was on the phone to an Archdeacon in a diocese over a hundred miles away.

"When will you have a clearer idea about what's happening?" he asked.

"Well my Diocese was supposed to be getting back to me in January but that was nearly two months ago, so I don't know. They seem to be talking to everyone except me!"

He laughed on the end of the phone.

"Do you have a CV you can send me?" he asked.

"A CV? Um....I don't know. I think I need to update my old one. It's been a while since I was looking for a job. I'll have a look."

"How are you fixed at the moment?"

"Um, well I'm quite busy, but I can always find a space. What did you have in mind?"

"Well" he paused "the Bishop would like meet you..."

Chapter 2: In which our hero tells the story of what really happened.

It was a cold day, it had been cold for a while. Outside the sky was grey, had I been at the window rather than at my desk I could have seen the freshly fallen snow making the car park look slightly less shit. My assistant was out of the room, I'd told him I wanted some privacy. I needed some privacy.

The man from the Church of England sat in my office. He wore a slightly nervous face, as he listened. I had been a member of the Church of England for over fifteen years, and ordained into it for nearly eight and a half, but you don't often deal with the actually Church of England, mostly you relate to your local Church or your diocese, but I was a chaplain whose diocese had just made him redundant. The Church of England, as it actually exists is based in three different places. Two of them Bishopthorpe Palace, and Lambeth palace also house an Archbishop, but this chap worked in a place called Church House, Westminster. He had come all the way, he said, 'to listen'.

"I'm supposed to have had a meeting with the Bishop in the New Year, and he's supposed to come back with a definite answer by the end of this month." I said.

"I can't get hold of anyone from the Diocese, I've tried several times." he replied.

"Neither can the students, they seem to have taken the phone off the hook in Winchester. To be honest we've probably sacked the person that answers the phone. With a £1.6 million hole in the budget we needed to sack someone, It's just it should have been our accountant. Mind you I expect we have sacked him. By the time this is done Church House, Winchester will just be an answering machine somewhere, with the beep replaced by the sound of a creaking rope."

"The students seem to be making a lot of noise. That's been..." and here he paused searching for the right word"...noticed."

"Noticed bad, or noticed good?"

"Good, it's quite a testament to you."

"Yeah, well they are the reason I'm going to stay. I have to stay, I'm going to fight this no matter what."

"I don't think the search for alternative funding is going well."

"If they want to take away my pay, I'll just stay anyway. I owe them that. I can live by faith. This is where God wants me."

He'd been listening to me rant on like this for over an hour, but he didn't look bored, he wore the look of concern he'd had since I met him off the train.

"You know" he said gently "there are other options."

That was how this new story started. It all seems so long ago now, in the snow and the cold and recession. Almost a lifetime ago from the vote and the fight and the confusion. It's hard to remember it all now. Some of the details have blurred with time. Really, that car park always looked completely shit.