Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 25: “Tell me about a time you showed leadership.”

[Previous chapter] [The Church: February 2019 – June 2019 (four days a week, except Easter)]

In March 2017 I went for a walk down a public footpath that I’d never noticed before in the north of The Landsker County. There was no sign at the top of the lane; but there was a green dotted line on my Ordnance Survey map. I wanted to sneak a look at a house I’d seen on Zoopla, and I was pretty sure this was the place. The lane began in a wooded valley at a turn in the road, tucked between a narrow stone bridge that straddled a fork in a river, and a squat little double-naved church that looked mediaeval in origin. There was a galvanized steel gate at the top of the lane, but no discernible house sign, and nowhere to park; so I left my Dacia Duster in the layby on the other side of the bridge, walked back across, and climbed over the gate.

Shut up, Prospective Employer. This is important.

The lane, or driveway, was potholed and overgrown with spring flora. Fragrances from flowers whose names I didn’t know because I was still under 35 came wafting on the gentle breeze. The sound of the rocky river was a static hum in the background, and a ramshackle collection of broken sheds came into view between the trees, along with a concrete-pebble-dashed farmhouse with a ruined porch, which the footpath—such as it was—apparently passed right in front of. I double-checked my map: yes, onward through the not-quite-recently strimmed nettles and brambles. I had that prickly feeling that I was being watched. Not a sixth sense, so much as a physical manifestation of Fear or Guilt—because I’m the sort of person, Prospective Employer, who feels afraid and guilty even when doing something I know I’m allowed to, as long as I imagine that someone might not want me to be doing it. (Walking down a public footpath near a house is A Classic Example of the sort of thing that might precipitate this feeling.)

But there were no signs of life. If anyone was in the house, there was nothing out here to suggest it. I dared to walk up to the door, and to peer through the glass panels. Empty. No furniture—but it didn’t quite look... derelict. Just worn. Neglected. I moved away, in case anyone should arrive to see me peering into their house. (Their empty house, that they’d listed on Zoopla; presumably in the hope that somebody might take an interest in buying it.) When I turned around, that was when I first properly noticed The Mill. The Mill was lower down than The Mill House—halfway to the river, which was wider down there behind a stand of mature trees that I couldn’t identify, because, again, I was under 35; and I didn’t know the first thing about trees in 2017. (So I didn’t know then that they were dieback-riddled ash trees, one of which would be felled by a storm in February 2022, just before I began this chapter, and would come crashing into the roof of my shed-based home-office—where I may well have been crushed to death, had I not spent more time on DIY than writing of late, and had thus augmented the brittle OSB and roofing felt that made up the shed roof with a timber-framed secondary roof of corrugated galvanized steel.)

The Mill was a grand two-storey building—as big as the house, or bigger—with flat-edged exposed-stone walls (I didn’t know what “dressed” stone was then). The rusty metal water-wheel was still mostly intact down by its side; but I couldn’t tell where the water had come from to power it, because the river was way down there beyond the… not exactly lawn, but meadow… thing; whatever a meadow’s called if it’s full of nettles and dockleaves and giant hogweed. (But I didn’t know what giant hogweed was then…) I wanted to go and look at The Mill; but I didn’t dare, because it was slightly wide of the dotted green line on my map. So I followed the footpath south through some low, boggy woodland, out into a paddock—where the sound of the river guided me southwest through a succession of sloping, muddy fields littered with horse muck, in which I saw no horses.

On my way back up the linear footpath, I plucked up the courage to go down the stone steps onto the lawn-shaped bit of undergrowth below the house—someone’s garden once, if not now—so I could take a photograph of The Mill. A photograph much like the photograph I’d seen on Zoopla, which had piqued my interest in The Mill House. But my photograph: to show Wife # 1 when she came back from The Great Wen on Friday what I'd discovered. I already knew I wanted to leave The House on The Corner. I’d known I’d want to leave it one day, before we even moved in. And we’d been there for five years: longer than I’d lived anywhere—longer even than the three years, which once felt like half an eternity, that I’d lived in The Villa in North Wales. And I’d felt more At Home in The House on The Corner than I’d felt since I left Wales nearly two decades ago as a teenager. But it wasn’t where I wanted to settle. And like mud in a moat round a castle, I was ready to settle. I’d wandered the footpaths of The Landsker County for five years, searching—though I never quite knew what for. And the more I wandered, the more I wandered north of The Landsker Line and headed for what the OS-mapmakers called “hills” but which the locals called “mynyddoedd” (mountains). First with a baby attached to me; then with a different baby attached to me, and a toddler by my side (which was the baby from the previous sentence, just to clarify). Then with two small children following behind (these were the toddler and the baby from the previous sentence, Prospective Employer). And later still with a Papillon, a Pomeranian, and two small children; by which point it was starting to get a bit more difficult to penetrate the invariably bramble-and-gorse-choked footpaths of the inland of The Landsker County, which tourists (AKA Customers) visit less, so the Authorities in the form of the National Park rangers, armed with strimmers, don’t like to bother visiting either. 

On the day I first visited The Mill House, both of my children were at The Little Welsh School in The Village in The Hills, and I’d left the dogs at home, so I was alone. Even though I felt like I was being watched, I wasn’t; because the owner of The Mill House was a farmer who lived in the south of The Landsker County, and he’d let The Mill House out to tenants for many years; but it had stood empty for about a year by the time I first saw it. And when I saw it, I wanted it. I knew it could be a Home for us. A Proper Home. For the children, a Home to Grow Up in; for us, a Home to Grow Old in. Even to Die in. A Home that would Change us as we Changed it. A Home I would give anything to be changed by.

If any Locals wanted The Mill House, they never said so, or couldn’t afford it. The link had been shared thousands of times on various property blogs; but the estate agent (oddly, I thought) told us hardly anyone had come to look at it. One man came from Kent, she said; but he took one look inside and got back in his car and drove back to Kent. A couple from Berkshire came, and conducted a broadband speed-check, and, having observed and digested the results, took their business elsewhere. I’d expected a bidding war. I didn't dare to hope that such a beautiful place was really within our reach. I was sure someone would offer more than it was worth—or more than it was listed for; which was already much more than we could afford. But what’s anything For Sale worth, but what someone will Pay for it? From the crown jewels of the Sultan of Brunei to the hourly labouring rate of a freelance writer, editor or toilet-roll Facebook page community manager... The Children disliked The Mill House, which was littered with the desiccated corpses of pipistrelle bats, and its garden, full of nettles and brambles. But I somehow convinced Wife # 1 that this was an opportunity not to be missed, and that we had to put in an offer. So we put in an offer, and it was rejected. So we put in another (slightly higher) offer, and it was accepted. And my mother spotted some Japanese knotweed growing down by the river, as we were walking across the road bridge that bisected the two-and-a-half-acre riverside woodland that comprised the garden of The Mill House, so we reverted to our original offer. There was a minor war of words. The owner threatened to relist it. But eventually he accepted an offer just above what we’d originally offered. Which, upon crunching the numbers, Wife # 1 realized we couldn’t really afford at all. 

Neither of us had a Full-Time Job, of course. But we did have a mortgage on a house already, at least part of which we'd paid off over the 5 years since we moved to West Wales. But Wife # 1 insisted that we couldn’t risk trying to sell The House on The Corner (which, including the original Deposit and five years of Overpaying The Mortgage, we by then owned about a quarter of) in case the Sale went ahead but the Purchase fell through, and we ended up Homeless. So instead, following some creative accountancy and intrepid debt-juggling, we ended up Owning Two Houses—which was a problem, Prospective Employer; but obviously quite a different problem to Being Homeless. In case you've never been in such a situation, I can assure you that Having Two Mortgages (while, again, and I do feel I should stress this, nothing like being homeless) isn’t quite the same as Owning Two Houses either. We had to borrow A Considerable Sum of Money from Wife # 1’s sister for a week or two, and then I had to get A Massive Loan from A Supermarket Bank in order to immediately to pay her back. I wasn’t allowed to take out A Massive Loan to put A Deposit on A House—because that would be Illegal and therefore Bad. But I could take out A Massive Loan to give somebody some Money that I owed them for vague and unspecified reasons; that was Fine and Legal and therefore Okay. (Inasmuch as nobody actually arrested me.) So then I had A Massive Loan to repay, and we had Two Mortgages. Wife # 1 would have to Work all hours available—but from The Bailiff’s House on The Wrong Side of The Tracks, where my mother and her partner now lived; because The Terrible Internet in The Mill House was even more terrible than The Terrible Internet in The House on The Corner. Which was A Good Thing, actually, because otherwise somebody else would surely have bought it for more Money than we could “afford”.

We left The House on The Corner just months after finally getting rid of The Horrible Carpet and replacing it with lovely new (expensive) oak parquet. And we moved in to The Mill House. Or rather, I moved into The Mill House, while Wife # 1 and The Children were visiting Wife # 1’s family in East Anglia, to scatter her father’s ashes in the sea. He died that spring, before we moved to The Mill House. It was a shame, because he loved the children and they loved him. And I’ve often thought he would have loved The Mill House too.

I wanted to sell The House on The Corner and be rid of it and its Mortgage. But Wife # 1 said she loved it and didn’t want to sell it, in case we hated The Mill House and had made an enormous mistake. Or in case one of The Children wanted to live in it when they were older. Neither scenario seemed plausible to me. Child # 1 was happy enough with the novelty of A New House, but Child # 2 hated (and always would hate) novelty, and wanted to return to The House on The Corner. I could see my choice of “forever house” was going to take some convincing for the rest of The Family to embrace. So, imagining that I had a choice in the matter, I Obediently acquiesced to Wife # 1’s demand that we keep The House on The Corner for a couple of years, while we decided whether the new house was a mistake or not, and try to set it up as A Holiday Let. 

My older brother said that if we turned The House on The Corner into A Holiday Let, it would (and indeed should) be burnt down by irate locals due to our wilful depletion of the rural housing stock. My mother was of a similar, if somewhat less inflammatory, mind. It wasn’t what I’d wanted to do either, Prospective Employer—although more because of logistical than ethical concerns—but I didn’t think it worse for us to let it out to Tourists all year than it was for the Previous Owner to use it as her personal Holiday Home whenever she fancied, and to leave it empty for the rest of the time. Furthermore, it was nowhere near any other houses, or any shops or pubs or anything. Not even a church. We barely met anyone from The Village in the five years we lived there. So if my family wanted to regard me as some kind of Absentee Land Baron or Champagne Socialist, just because of my aspirational approach to debt-management, well... so be it, I thought. Champagne was delicious; everyone knew that: that was pretty much official. And I’d voted for The Greens in the 2015 General Election, because Ed Miliband stood next to A Weird Giant Communist Gravestone Sculpture demanding Controls on Immigration; so he could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned. Like so many other high-minded socialists, Champagne- or otherwise, I was rewarded for my principled stance against Labour's perceived rightward shift with another five years of Tory Government (sans Clegg) and a Referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU: a matter few had given a damn about before, but which we were all to be convinced was The Most Important Thing in Our Lives by 2016. As I mentioned two jobs ago, Prospective Employer, on my 33rd birthday—June 2016, just after Wife # 1 and I began The ill-fated [Redacted] Job— the results came in that England and Wales voted “Leave”. What hope for Internationalism now? What hope for Socialism? What hope for Democracy? Like millions of other Brits (just under half, I suspect) I wanted to “leave” The UK from that moment. So I packed up The Most Serene Republic of Landskeria and took it to its New Home by a river in the foothills: yet farther from your “Civilization”, grown ever more Barbarous.

The PCC

A dishevelled-looking elderly man with a Southern English accent appeared at my door one rainy evening in March 2018, about half a year into our tenure at The Mill House, wearing a beanie hat and a cagoule. He greeted me enthusiastically and apologized for not recalling my name. I had no idea who he was, but I told him my name and invited him in. And he sat down on the leather sofa in our fireless front room, rain and condensation fogging his spectacles.

“Ah, Lenovo,” he said, noticing my laptop on the coffee table. (Having no Job as such at that Time, Prospective Employer, I’d begun Work on a lengthy Document concerning the History of The Mill House...) The man began opining concerning the relative merits of different brands of home computer, and took off his hat, and wiped his glasses. It was only when he made a passing reference to being a vicar that I finally realized who he was: he was The Vicar! It turned out that the squat little double-naved church that looked—and in fact was—mediaeval in origin was still operational on a twice-monthly basis. I’d not been to a church (as opposed to into one) for a very long time; but that Christmas we’d gone to the carol service, because we were new in The Village, and a nice (albeit English) woman had popped by to invite us. I knew by then that most of the Locals in The Village (who attended church) went to The Baptist Chapel three miles to the northeast, because an elderly local man had recently told me as much. He’d stopped his car on the bend in the middle of the road when I was putting the bins out, and introduced himself first in Welsh, then in broken English. I’d done my apologetic bit about how I was re-learning Welsh after having grown up and learnt Welsh in North Wales, even though my parents were regrettably—and through no fault of my own —English. I was beginning to notice that Locals tended to be more concerned by the former part than the latter. (“Oh! A Gog, are you?!”) The Elderly Baptist asked me whether I’d been up to The Chapel, and I said not yet, but I had gone to The Church at Christmas. “Beth?” he asked. I indicated the building on the bank that loomed over our driveway. He acknowledged it with a nod:

“Ah, yes: that’s for the English,” he said.

The implication, I felt, was that the influx of English into the parish since the mid-twentieth-century had brought this mediaeval church with them—perhaps in flat-pack form, from Jutland, Saxony or Frisia. But I didn’t argue; most of the people I saw there at Christmas had been speaking English, and most of them with English accents. I was dimly aware of a cultural wedge between chapel (nonconformist, Welsh) and church (Anglican, English) in the area. But keen as I was for opportunities to speak and listen in Welsh, I’d received no invitation to The Baptist Chapel before this encounter, and wasn’t quite sure whether the exchange itself constituted one. So, back to The Vicar:

Once we’d moved on from IT talk to the best Open-Source image-editing Software available for Free Download, we eventually got around to The Actual Reason for His Visit: something he’d mentioned in passing after thanking me for my reading of a Thomas Hardy poem (“The Oxen”) at The Christmas Carol Service. Apparently the PCC (Parochial Church Council) was losing two of its members before the AVM (Annual Vestry Meeting) in April. If they didn’t replace them with Somebody Else—ideally Two People—The Church would have to be Deconsecrated, thus ignominiously ending its seven-century History as A Christian Place of Worship. I won’t say he laid it on thick, Prospective Employer; but despite my own lack of Faith—which Faith or lack thereof, he never once enquired about—I felt a very real Gravity to The Situation. Prior to buying The Mill House we’d been careful to take out “chancel indemnity insurance”, which I still can’t spell without the aid of a computer. This basically protects Property Owners (or rather Mortgage Payers) from “chancel repair liability”. No? Chancel Repair Liability is A Legal Obligation attached to a property that used to belong to a church to pay for the repair of the church building or its chancel in the event of either being in need of that. This is something lawyers more-or-less make you pay for if you buy a house nowadays—certainly if you buy a house in A Rural Area, near A Mediaeval Church. The likelihood of the church invoking such rights is probably low; not least because it could generate very negative publicity if they were to do so. "Our" church had been re-roofed recently; which I knew from having seen the activity in process while driving past, some time before I even discovered the existence of The Mill House. I later discovered this was the result of an £87,000 grant from a fund made available to parish churches in England and Wales by former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, in-between shutting down public libraries, etc.

You see, Prospective Employer, when I was just a man from The City of A Thousand Trades who was thinking of buying The Mill House, I had no interest in The Church beyond a passing appreciation of its rustic aesthetic charms. But since moving to The Mill House, I’d been to The Church numerous times. Once when other people were in it (albeit only for a carol service). And I’d also discovered—while researching the history of The Mill House—that our house and The Church had an inexorable link stretching almost all the way back to The Norman Invasion of Wales. The Western Half of The Parish belonged to a nearby Tironensian Abbey, founded by the son of The Norman Knight who conquered this “cantref” (hundred) in The North of The Landsker County. The abbey was established in the 1100s, and our parish was gifted to it in 1118; but the first mention of The Church (“capella”) was in the “The Taxatio Ecclesiastica” of Pope Nicholas IV (1292). The Pope had ordered a comprehensive audit of Church-owned Land in Britain and Ireland because he wanted to raise funds for a tenth crusade to The Holy Land, where the city of Acre—the last major stronghold of The Crusader States—had just been conquered by Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil. Pope Nicholas would die before he realized that ambition. But thanks to his “Taxatio”, historical evidence records the existence of a “chapel” and a “grange” with four mills—three for corn, and one for wool. The chapel is generally agreed to be the original northern part of the surviving mediaeval Church. (Its southern aisle was added either after the destruction of two paupers’ cottages in the late nineteenth century, or in the fifteenth century: depending on who you talk to, or read.)  The Woollen Mill was almost undoubtedly situated on the same site that the modern Edwardian Mill still occupies in our garden.

But what does all this have to do with my Employability, Prospective Employer? That will become clear. There will be Time for Box-Ticking. This is the Time for Words. What I lack in conventional Christian Faith, Prospective Employer, I do not lack in reverence for Ancestral Communion in its many forms. Thus I felt it just as important that The Church remained open as A Communal Space as it was that The Church wasn’t Sold Off and Converted into A Holiday Let; because that’s what we wanted to do with The Mill, and I didn’t want immediately adjacent competition from a much older and more historically significant building. Because, and I hope we can both agree on this, by this point: fundamentally, I am A Good Person.

So I agreed to become The Secretary of The PCC.

In the first instance, this involved a lot of Admin, and a small amount of Prayer. The other members of the PCC included The Vicar, The Vicar’s Wife, The Worship Leader, The Worship Leader’s Husband (also The Treasurer), and two Churchwardens: the woman who’d first come to The Mill House to invite us to the carol service, and a woman who lived in a castle in South Wales and had a holiday home in The Parish to which she was hoping to retire if she could ever sell The Castle. I presumed they were all English. But I didn’t ask. The AVM was our first Meeting, and this took place in a large Victorian church in a neighbouring parish. The Vicar was responsible for four or five churches in the “cylch” (circle) and that one was the most commodious and most conveniently located of the group. Everyone was there from each of the churches’ PCCs, and all of them were speaking English. On average, they were about thirty-five years older than me. You may or may not recall that I mentioned at the beginning of The Boutique Agency Job that I often had sit-com titles in mind when I found myself in new or unusual Jobs, and this Voluntary Position was no different. The most repetitive phrase I noticed in the AVM and subsequent PCC meetings was “Carried Unanimously”, and I felt that this would provide a nice multi-layered metaphor for the convoluted borderland between Spiritualism and Bureaucracy that these meetings tended to skirt around.

It was mentioned during that first AVM that in order to serve on a PCC one needed to to be a “communicant”—one who receives Holy Communion—but that this would be left “as a matter for your conscience”. The other members of our PCC presumably knew or at least suspected that I wasn’t and didn’t. But from what I’d come to understand, I couldn’t be a communicant unless I was a member of The Church, and thus entitled to receive Communion. And I couldn’t be a member of The Church unless I’d been Baptized into one or other branch of The Christian Faith. And I hadn’t. So I had to consider whether I either wanted to be or was willing to be. The fundamental requirement for Baptism (hello, Wikipedia) seemed to be Belief in The Trinity: belief that The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit are all God, but are not each other. That seemed fine to me, because it was by now my view—arrived at gradually throughout my twenties, mostly as a result of Thinking About It when I was supposed to be Doing Other Things, usually for Money—that Divinity was synonymous with All Existence; with Reality, if you will. So by definition if those things Existed (as The Historical Jesus is widely agreed to have, and as The Other Two may have without necessarily leaving me any First-Hand Evidence) they must, in my estimation, be Divine. My problem came with what was excluded by Christian doctrine: that anything beyond or external to The Trinity might conceivably be Divine too. I’d already discovered that the closest approximation to my own Spiritual or Philosophical position was called “Pantheism”. It seemed there were elements of Pantheism in Christianity as well as in most other Major Religions, and vice-versa. But having Pantheistic Beliefs wasn’t sufficient to qualify one for Baptism into The Christian Faith. One also had to accept The Bible as The Word of God, even though one knew that it was written by humans and that one wasn’t intellectually equipped to read it in its original language; and that even if one could, any language was implicitly A Human Invention, and any Human Writer—while maybe Divine to me by virtue of their existence—was not considered Divine according to The Bible. Christianity as I saw It, thus, required a belief in The Supernatural coexisting alongside and in opposition to the Natural; but my Belief was that nothing was Super- to Nature because Everything That Existed was, implicitly, Natural. This might seem A Semantic Issue; but for me, Semantics are inexorably linked with Thought. Even when not Writing, I think words in my head—even if there isn’t as much punctuation, and many of the sentences are shorter and less grammatically conventional.

Pantheism might seem indistinguishable from Atheism, or from Theism, depending on exactly which Theist or Atheist you ask for their opinion. I used to consider myself Agnostic, as I'm sure I told you back when I was recounting my Experience of Work in a Photography Shop, Prospective Employer; but I’d come to the conclusion that Proof and Doubt, Knowability and Unknowability weren’t satisfactory tools with which to measure Divinity. For me, the choice was to reject all Divinity as Supernatural and Unreal, or to accept all Reality as Divine and Natural. Agnosticism gave way to Ignosticism: “to question the existence of God is meaningless because the concept of God has no unambiguous definition”. Words are the best tool we’ve developed for Remote Communication, Prospective Employer; but not necessarily the best for Thinking or Feeling. We use words to try to understand Reality, and in doing so implicitly limit our understanding of it. But we also use words to fashion our Reality. And no word is what it represents. Thus, God is God with or without the word “God” and whether or not anybody else Believes what we Believe when we use The Word. My God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnivorous, and—yes—probably even Omnichannel. 

But nobody asked me whether I believed in God in those meetings. (Probably for the best...) And my conscience was clear. I attended meetings at The Vicar’s house, and in The Church. I took notes. I distributed the minutes after the meetings via email. I prayed. I mumbled the words we were supposed to say after or during the prayers, which I didn’t know (except “Amen”). I voted, and was careful to wait until everyone else had done so, so as to agree with them and thus not abuse my status as a non-Christian by unduly influencing the outcome of The Vote. But there was no danger of that, because the Motions were always "Carried Unanimously". I read poems at carol services, and at harvest festivals. Not my poems, of course; poems by John Betjeman and Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy. I helped decorate The Church. I dug out the path to the entrance to allow prams and wheelchairs—should any ever visit—to gain access. I agreed to read A Biblical Passage one Christmas, because there weren’t enough Christians to do it. But I did not go up to take Communion, or even to receive A Blessing, the one Time I attended The Church at Easter, in 2018. And neither did my nominally Catholic father. He mumbled about The Vicar being too cheery, and how he doubted "all those" (seven) people taking Communion were “in a state of grace”.

This Voluntary Position is ongoing at the time of writing, so I’ll say no more about it. It is not The Church Job to which this Chapter pertains. I only detail it here because I would never have applied for The Church Job—to date, My Last Job—had I not already volunteered for The Secretary Role on The PCC of our local church, the spring after we moved to The Mill House. But, over the following winter, I spotted an ad for a “managing editor”—whatever one of those was—for a Project to deliver a new section for The Website of what I can only describe as a major English Christian Church, headquartered in The Great Wen. The focus of The webpages was to be Internet in Churches. A matter I knew The Vicar had already looked into for our Church, and which would have been very helpful if a signal could have been relayed from The Church roof and received by a dish on The Mill House. Alas, in the case of our Church, there was no transmitter with a line of sight to it, and not enough houses in the locality to make the endeavour Economically Viable for it.

Although I had A Lot On in terms of DIY (which I was gradually becoming competent at) Wife # 1 pointed out that we needed more Money, what with the two Mortgages and The Massive Loan I’d taken out for The Deposit on The Mill House. So I applied for The Church Job, a Contract position lasting three months over four. To my surprise, I was invited for an Interview. They told me how much it Paid, and the Day Rate wasn’t out of this world; but when measured Pro-Rata, it paid better than any Full-Time Job I’d had. So I attended the Interview in The Great Wen and delivered a short Presentation I’d put together on PowerPoint suggesting how I might go about Researching, Planning, and Delivering the Project. I made full and frank use of my experience on the disastrous CMS Project at The University. I also made a passing reference to my knowledge of Connectivity Issues in Rural Areas, and the Remote situation of our House and  “our church”. And I briefly mentioned my Voluntary Position on the PCC. Again, Prospective Employer, my conscience was clear. The ad had said that the applicant did not have to be a Christian; but that it would be necessary to “support the goals” of the organization. I was entirely comfortable with the goal of using remote church buildings to serve the community in new ways, thus helping to ensure their continued existence as Communal Buildings and places of Worship—a form of Ancestral Communion.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from The Church HQ. But it was a grand, impressive, and only slightly dishevelled building on Thorney Island right in The Administrative Heart of The Great Wen, within walking distance of The Burgundian Quarter, where I’d lived with Boots and Olaf a decade ago. The interviewers were a young, enthusiastic and intelligent woman with a broad knowledge of Church Buildings, and an older, serious but gentle man who worked in the Business side of the Organization—arranging Contracts and Procurement and suchlike. I really had no idea whatsoever how it went. But I was out of there in about thirty minutes and back on a train to The Landsker County within a couple of hours. The male interviewer—who I’ll call Bossman, because he was about to become my Bossman—telephoned me on the following morning to offer me the Job, and I accepted.

The role

It was agreed that the Job would take three months over four, and that—at least to begin with—I would work three days of four per week in The Church HQ on Thorney Island, within a stone’s throw of The Houses of Parliament. Not that I’d be throwing any stones at The Houses of Parliament, Prospective Employer, because stones are not readily available in the heart of The Great Wen; and in the interim between my Youth (when I first began to visit the city regularly) and my becoming a Freelancer, the guards around Thorney Island had developed significantly—both in terms of their numbers and the lethality of their armaments.

For the initial Research and Planning phase of the Job, I was placed at a vacant desk in a cluster within a loose Team of Employees who worked on The Website For Church Supplies, and other Business areas related to Ecclesiastical Procurement. I was in fact to be tasked with creating Content for The Website For Church Supplies as part of my Remit; but The Lion’s Share of my Work would be for The Church Website Proper. The Team responsible for The Church Website Proper was located elsewhere, and for Reasons that would become unclear later, it would never be deemed necessary for me to Meet them. The Administrative Structure of The Church HQ made even that of The DIY Company appear Simple and Transparent by comparison. The Departments and composite Teams were Legion—all veiled in an extra layer of Impenetrable Ecclesiastical Jargon, and most recently displaced by a mass Office Re-shuffling. Tracking down a map of the many floors of The Church HQ on the Intranet, and persuading a reasonably nearby Printer to render a physical copy, was a difficult enough Task in itself; but actually using the thing to navigate the physical space proved close to impossible—because there was no North point indicated on any of its pages. The building was basically square, with almost identical office plans on each opposing section of each floor, overlooking city streets on the exterior side (which were not named or otherwise indicated on the map) and on the interior side (at least from the upper floors where I tended to find myself) the huge copper roof of The Central Assembly Hall; which was used to host Church Synods, Awards Ceremonies, Boxing Matches, Human-Rights-Abuse Tribunals, Christmas Parties—and anything else anybody might want to hire it for.

In the first weeks of the Job I was Tasked with arranging Meetings with Internal Stakeholders who might want to contribute Content toward The Project. I’d done similar things in other Jobs, so I had a pretty good idea that The Internal Stakeholders wouldn’t want to provide Content, and would regard that as my Job. So it proved. Indeed, one of The Internal Stakeholders was my Bossman. And since he was far too busy to talk to me most days—let alone Research, Plan and Produce any webpages for me—he might have foreseen that people elsewhere in the Organization would be similarly disinclined to drop their Business as Usual to help a Contractor with their (i.e. my) Job. Nevertheless, I Met various Stakeholders at Church HQ over the following few weeks. There was a guy who Worked in Buildings and Conservation, who was very down on Trees. I politely pretended to Share His View while secretly fighting the urge to argue—a Skill I’ve learnt over many Jobs, Prospective Employer; it’s as much about Knowing My Place as it is Picking My Battles. There was an Ecclesiastical Law guy too, who took weeks to pin down. I had high hopes he might offer an explanation—ideally in terms a five-year-old might understand—as to the Legal Issues surrounding Internet in Churches. I was hoping I could simply transcribe his words onto the corresponding section of The Webpages, without the inconvenience of having to understand them myself. Unfortunately The Legal Guy had yesterday received a pretty massive Promotion, so he spent the whole Interview grinning in a state of Nervous Excitement, and said nothing but “Yes”, “Great”, and, a couple of times “Wonderful”. We also had one Meeting with the guy who owned The Main Website. I say “we” in this instance because Bossman came to that one, and used the majority of the allotted Time to pick bones and grind axes—mostly concerning how Bad he thought The Website was and the various ways in which he wanted it changed immediately. Website Guy was defensive about this, citing ongoing problems with The Builders of The Website. He regarded me and my Task with equal parts suspicion and indifference. There wasn’t much I could ask him about The Website anyway; I hadn’t yet had CMS Training, so I hadn’t actually seen The Back End of The Website, and thus had very little idea what I was Working with. 

I’d booked my Training slot on Day Two—but Training usually took place on Friday, which was my Childcare Day when I had to be back in West Wales to pick up The Children, who finished school after lunch. Thus my Training Seminar was scheduled in three months’ Time, by which point I’d been hoping to have had the majority of The Webpages ready so that they could be extensively tested over the last month of the Job. When Training Day finally came, Easter had been and gone, and so had the Contracted In-House part of the Job. I made a special trip to The Great Wen, where with admirable tragi-comic Timing, my Lenovo laptop chose the beginning of The Seminar to begin updating itself. The cherubic young chap running The Seminar suggested I book in for another date (hah!) but I insisted on taking notes on paper. None of the other Employees in The Seminar offered to share their laptops, or even to show me the notes they’d taken on their screens. So it’s lucky I was already An Expert in general CMS use, and was thus able to pick up fifteen minutes in when my laptop finally agreed to load up Windows 10 and a Chrome tab. It turned out The Website was pretty easy to use; although there were Major Flaws with The CMS and The Website, which The Training Guy was legally not allowed to discuss with us because The Church was in the process of suing The CMS Provider—or possibly vice-versa; I forget the details, because they were scant and I found them superfluous to my requirements. (A Selective Memory is a Skill I possess but never misuse, Prospective Employer.)

I didn’t see Bossman at all on that visit. If Bossman was sometimes elusive and difficult for me to find Time with (he was) I didn’t take it personally. The very reason for my Job existing was that neither he nor anybody else in The Church had the Time to do it themselves. But I also became aware by the complete coincidence of my older brother having Worked with Bossman in an entirely different capacity in his (i.e. my older brother's) job as something-or-other-to-do-with-financial-software that his (i.e. Bossman's) Unpindownableness was a Trait born of Professional Necessity, and not one he rolled out especially for me. My older brother was living in Steel City by this Time, which he’d moved to from The Great Wen (not long after I left it) to conduct An Aggressive Takeover of the digital systems company he’d long Worked for. Not to be confused with my oldest brother, who had moved to The City of Angels to become a party DJ—after his second hip-hop album was greeted by (in my view) a rather unfairly lukewarm critical and commercial response—and was busy churning out soundscape albums of electronic beat music overdubbed with monologues by conservative, classical, and libertarian philosophers. (If only my two older brothers had names it would be easier for you to remember which was which, Prospective Employer.) My older brother’s Company, as I understand it, made software for Devices in order to allow Charities and other Organizations to take electronic donations using in-situ card-readers. At the time I got The Church Job, he was already in talks with The Man Who Would Become My Bossman about getting the Devices into Church Buildings. Not a million miles away from some of the Work I was doing in my Job, so I did feel the need to stress to Bossman when I revealed the unlikely connection that there had been no coordinated effort on the part of Our Family to infiltrate the Department and influence his decision-making process. He seemed mildly amused; presumably by the thought that his decision-making process could be influenced. I could have kept schtum about all this: both of my older brothers still have our father’s surname, unlike me (and my mother, and my younger brother); so there was no way Bossman would have known. But I find myself compelled to be Truthful in Professional contexts, Prospective Employer; which you may interpret as a Strength or Flaw as you see fit. (Let's hope you're not the head of MI5! But enough about you...)

In the absence of a CMS to experiment with in the first months of the Job, I produced a lengthy Project Timeline in Microsoft Excel. And an Information Architecture (AKA a Glorified Sitemap) in Powerpoint. I put together a Project-introduction email to send out to any Stakeholders who weren’t to be found somewhere in the labyrinthine realms of Church HQ. Of the many people we hoped would enthusiastically reply, none did. Even after a more direct approach to some of the Stakeholders—including offers to go and Meet them where they were—most were much too busy to respond. Nevertheless, the Head of The Church Bell-Ringers’ Association was forwarded my email; and it turned out she had several pages’ worth of information that it was very important for me to include on the website—specifically regarding the importance of not interfering with church bells or bell-ringing apparatus in your insufferably hubristic quest to get the internet into your church, thank you very much.

As nobody from a Legal background was willing to do more than smile, nod and wish me good luck, I spent quite literally days reading up on the legal considerations of Internet in Churches. There were treatises by learned political and religious figures on the Thorny Issues around people being able to do “in a consecrated place” the numerous unpalatable things one can do on the internet—watching violent pornography, inciting racial hatred, illegally downloading mp3s, thus depriving honest hard-working record-label employees of their cut of somebody else's labour; that sort of thing. These were listed and rebutted using a smooth and pragmatic combination of Moral Logic and King James Scripture. It all seemed pretty simple, until I stumbled upon a series of canon law cases, going back many years, made on the grounds of “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”. I already knew what that was because of American TV crime drama “Better Call Saul” and had long been aware of the concept following conversations with hippy parents from The Steiner School, one of whom—who initially seemed quite zenlike—angrily related an anecdote about how his ex-wife had irreversibly poisoned their children’s brains with electromagnetic energy from a television last time she’d had custody over them. If television is brain-poison, heaven help my Children, I’d thought. (And Wife # 1, and me, I’d afterthought...)

I went over the Legal stuff with Bossman to make sure I was Researching along the right lines. It turned out he was quite familiar with electromagnetic hypersensitivity. It was most unfortunate, he was keen to stress. But the practical position of The Church was that it was their building, and they weren’t doing anything illegal or—as far as they were concerned—immoral. “The problem is,” he said, “Once they’ve made up their minds, no amount of argument, and no manner of evidence, will convince these people otherwise.” He smiled. “It’s a bit like Brexit.”

Ah yes: that. Almost three years from that most unwelcome of birthday presents, Thorney Island was by now a daily carnival of colourful and cantankerous protest simultaneously for and against Brexit. Religious zealots with placards would repurpose scripture to pass judgement on the EU. Stop Brexit Guy could be heard foghorning his antidemocratic mantra over the hordes of Parliament Square tourists each lunchtime. TV camera crews blocked the backstreets with their cumbersome vans. Police with automatic firearms yawned and/or glared at passers-by on street corners. I saw John Pienaar ducking out of Pret a Manger in a camel-coloured-suit to take an urgent call on his mobile. I saw Michael Gove by the Emmeline Pankhurst statue at the northwest entrance to Victoria Tower Gardens, delivering an entirely unrelated but nevertheless impassioned speech abut plastic-bag use to camera—over and over again, till he got it just right. (“Surprised? So was I!”) Meanwhile a daily contingent of Brexit-piggy-back protests would join the throng to make their voices heard on equally unrelated issues—and to hand me photocopied documents about (for example) the regrettable history of UK foreign policy in Cameroon.

Inside Church HQ, Bossman and the other Superiors were mostly tight-lipped concerning the B-word. But one much looser-lipped middle-aged Liberal Democrat on my desk-cluster spoke of little else. And she seemed certain that nobody at Church HQ could possibly have been stupid enough to vote for something so ridiculous. From my relatively brief experience of The Church and its Staff, I wasn’t so sure that the complex mass of humanity therein could be so reductively characterized—though I took her assumption to have been made with what she thought was charity. I’d definitely come to The Church Job with my preconceptions of what big-C Christians might be like; but aside from the evangelicals—who wore their hearts and their crucifixes on their sleeves—The Church, like any other big Workplace I’d experienced, was made up of all manner of people from all walks of life, who each themselves “contained multitudes”—to quote Bob Dylan, or Walt Whitman. I was pleasantly surprised, for example, to learn from the electromagnetic hypersensitivity question that Church Superiors gave very short shrift to any scientifically inexplicable phenomena when manifest as obstacles to Christian mission. Brexit, one supposes, was considered minor turbulence by The Church—itself having been founded following a very neatly comparable Rupture, albeit five centuries ago. Meanwhile, the relatively narrow and (I thought) morally sound focus of my own minor Mission within The Church provided me with much-needed insulation against the very real sense of A Nation Coming Apart at The Seams that greeted me every time I turned on the TV in a cheap Burgundian Quarter hotel, looked at the BBC news app or social media feeds on the screen of my Samsung Galaxy smartphone, or indeed set foot outside Church HQ into the tall, judgmental streets of Thorney Island. 

In my last weeks in The Great Wen, Bossman arranged numerous meetings with Rural Broadband Companies. Ostensibly these were benevolent small businesses, willing to cover infrastructure blackspots, which, if addressed wholesale, might bankrupt The Public Sector Telecoms Giant. But as often as not—I suspected from personal experience with Terrible Internet and the companies who claimed to be able to address It—these were probably a loose alliance of chancers and grifters, importing Chinese hardware and charging over-the-odds monthly subscriptions where nobody else could be bothered to provide competitive offers. One pair came to Church HQ from a company with a futuristic name, claiming they’d soon be providing wireless connections across the length and breadth of the UK’s blackspots. Their marketing woman “connected” with me on LinkedIn in advance of the Meeting, and subsequently never exchanged a word with me, in Real Life or on The Internet. Her male colleague was an over-caffeinated hard-ass salesman who seemed determined not to let her, me, or Bossman speak at all during our Meeting. I waited till everyone had left the Meeting, and filled my bag with uneaten complementary biscuits to serve as pudding to my lunch—and dinner—of Huel. The second rural broadband company sent a guy on a 400-mile round-trip train journey from a completely different bit of the country. Bossman warmed to him as soon as he mentioned that he was on his local PCC, I noted; and he seemed like A Nice Guy. But as soon as Bossman had left me to “see him out”, and I tried to make chit-chat while packing away my things, he actually fucking lifted a finger to silence me while he replied to an important work email on his laptop. Clearly he could tell I was no Superior—and his manner had switched with so little effort from Professionally Pleasant to Downright Rude that I was almost impressed. The third Rural Broadband Company (well, A Guy from It) told us we “might want to take a look at [the first company’s] accounts” because he was pretty sure that “far from providing wireless broadband connections across the length and breadth of the UK, they’ll soon be drawing the dole”. A dated reference, but intriguing nonetheless. Yes, the rural broadband companies seemed mostly shifty. And the speed with which they were willing to completely change the Services they intended to offer, the associated Products, and the Prices of both, did not fill me with confidence for the reflected reputation of The Church, years down the line. Still, Contracts were Bossman’s Remit. I didn’t want the Information about Rural Broadband Companies that I put on The Webpages to be Incorrect; but I’d be long gone by the Time Customers were relying on it, so it would be quite literally Someone Else’s Problem. I’d hate to be accused of floccinaucinihilipilification, Prospective Employer; but because—or possibly in spite of—antidisestablishmentarianism, our country had A Different Church. So however Useful my Webpages turned out to be, the Internet in The Mill House would remain Terrible, whatever the outcome of my Job.

The Great Wen wasn’t a bad place to Work by spring. Winter had been harder. On the day before I left West Wales for The Church Job, I took my daughters up the south-facing slope of one our parish’s many hills (AKA “mynyddoedd”) to take turns hurtling down snow drifts into gorse bushes on a plastic toboggan. Leaving on the following morning felt like a wrench, as it did on any Sunday afternoon, boarding a Rail-Replacement Bus for a day-long eastward journey. But once in The Great Wen, I’d just get on with it—alone. My father was in North Wales, and we’d fallen out last November anyway, and would subsequently become estranged. Most of my friends had by now left the city, or been priced out to its ever-gentrifying peripheries. Wife # 1’s sister offered to have me stay with her and her partner in the north; but I didn’t relish a twice-daily tube commute, when—for the relatively modest price of £40 to £50 a night—I could bed down in The Burgundian Quarter and walk to work at 7:30am each morning. The standard of accommodation (booked at the last minute, on Booking.com) started off shabby and got worse as the weather warmed and demand from Tourists gradually increased. The “hotels” in The Burgundian Quarter were all fancy pillars and Victorian grandeur on the outside, and all sticky carpets and awkward views of airflow ducts and soil-pipes within. They had names like Enrico, Romano, Cowboy, and Grapevine. The first one I stayed in had no lock on the balcony door, and the balcony was shared with a room in a neighbouring hotel. On the whole, they were fine. The rooms were basic, but temporarily liveable. The breakfasts were bad, but just about edible. And the staff were surly, but largely indifferent. Wife # 1 persuaded me to try an Airbnb for the third week, suggesting it might be nicer; but my room was one of three in a ground-floor flat on the edge of an estate (and not the sort of “estate” you get in The Countryside). There was a shared living area where the TV had been programmed by a previous guest to default to pornography. The Spanish-or-Portuguese couple eating dinner when I arrived were just as terrified to see me as I was to see them. (The communal nature of the let really was not made clear on the website.) Plus it was about three miles from Thorney Island, and not in The Burgundian Quarter! I forbade Wife # 1 from booking any Airbnbs thereafter. 

More fool me. The next Burgundian Quarter hotel I stayed in had a forebodingly bizarre layout: its shower room was the first thing that greeted you when you stepped through its front door, yet its toilet was located three floors down, in-between two other guest rooms. Unperturbed, I followed the usual pattern of popping to a nearby pub to have a pint and read half a chapter of “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe” before I retired to my hotel to watch crap TV until almost tired enough to sleep. Then to a corner shop to pick up some weird Turkish garlic crisps, a Snickers (which I could only eat when working away, due to Child # 1’s Peanut Allergy) and a can of premixed Jack Daniels and cola to knock me out. I ate and drank these while watching more crap TV, and noticed a little orange bug crawling across the bedcovers toward my naked arm. That’s odd, I thought. A bug on the bed. You don’t often see bugs on beds. I wonder what sort of bug it is? I started Googling what sort of bugs might be found on beds, only to be interrupted by an almost imperceptible feeling that I was being very, very slowly eaten. 

“Ow! You bastard!”

I crushed the thing with the TV remote, and put its body in an empty single-serving milk carton on the bedside table. My phone directed me to the Wikipedia page for bedbugs: Cimex lectularius. It looked a lot bigger than the one I’d just killed; but here were several more to compare it with. Yes, pretty small. About the size of half a woodlouse. But a sort of burnt-caramel colour—and they were all making beelines (buglines?) for the nearest part of my body that was available for eating. I crushed them with the TV remote and put them in the pot with the other one. I decided to carry on watching crap TV, because even though it was ten o’ clock, I didn’t feel that tired. By midnight I’d killed seven of the little buggers and I was trying to get to sleep, having covered as much of my body as possible in pyjamas, and having become quite warm as a result. It didn’t really work. Every time I thought I was capable of drifting off—or maybe even did, for a few minutes—I was overwhelmed by the sensation that I was being eaten or about to be eaten. And everyb time I turned the light on and leapt out of bed, I’d find at least one more bedbug, somewhere in the vicinity, marching slowly but deliberately across the fresh white sheets. I took the whole bed apart, and removed the mattress, and the pillowcases and cushion-covers—everything. I killed every bedbug I found. Still only ten in total; but at least half had managed to bite me first. I put the bed back together again and tried to get back to sleep. It was half one in the morning by now, and I was supposed to be waking up at seven. It was useless. Eventually I gave up, got dressed, shook out my bag and my suitcase to ensure there were no stowaways, repacked my belongings in my case, and returned to reception armed with a pot of dead bedbugs. 

Nobody was at reception, so I had to stagger forlornly down the moonlit Burgundian Quarter high-street, dragging my suitcase on wheels behind me, until I found a hotel—any other hotel—that was open, and willing to take me in. I wasn’t clever enough not to mention the bedbugs as my excuse for a late and unexpected arrival. But fortunately the receptionist at the first open hotel I got to wasn’t interested or awake enough to notice or consider the implications of what I’d said. By the time I was finally confident enough to sleep, safe in the knowledge that I was no longer being parasitized, it was three in the morning. I woke at seven sharp, showered, breakfasted, went back to the hotel I’d left and emptied the pot of dead bedbugs onto the counter.

“I had to leave your hotel in the middle of the night because my room was full of these. I want my money back.”

He didn’t seem as surprized as I’d hoped; but neither did he argue. It turns out there’s a pretty big difference between a two-and-a-half star hotel in The Burgundian Quarter and a three-star hotel in The Burgundian Quarter: Cimex lectularius docks you half a star. I did my staple 8am to 6pm at Church HQ that day, with an hour break for a baguette, a turmeric latte, and a wander through “the madding crowds” to which I was slowly becoming impervious. I spoke to no one in The Office that day. It was late March and various people had come back from various Holidays, so I wasn’t even sitting near Bossman or any of the other Teams who had anything to do with my Project. I’d come down for three days that week to go over the draft Webpages I’d mocked up for The Church Website; and Bossman took two days’ worth of Wrangling via email and brief—and barely tolerated—desk visits to agree to meet me for the final 35 minutes of the last of these three days before I had to (quite literally) run to catch the last train Home. Bossman spent the first half an hour of my allotted 35 minutes telling me how his CRM worked—which I didn’t need to know, either for my Project or for any other reason. He spent the last 5 minutes telling me how much he hated the default templates that were available for content-production via The Church website; and thus, by extension, the Draft Webpages I’d produced. I agreed to resize some images and see how that looked. That was that. A run to the underground. A packed Circle Line train. A packed Bakerloo Line train. And a packed Great Western westward, on to West Wales—desperately hoping no bedbugs had stowed away in my suitcase.

These Great Wen visits where I spoke to nobody only happened once or twice; and more by accident than design. And they weren’t all completely wasted. What doesn’t kill you, permanently injure you or infect you with pathogens, makes you stronger—one hopes. I got to meet up with Boots and Shandy a couple of times—both of whom still worked semi-regularly in The Great Wen. We went to a Mexican-themed chain restaurant started by a TV reality-show-contestant chef. The food was good, but the atmosphere was not. We also went to a great and surprisingly inexpensive Lebanese restaurant just off Oxford Street—near to where I’d lost my first wedding ring, on that first successful Great Wen Freelance Job, six long years ago. I’d lost my second wedding ring (a cheap silver one from a market) while on holiday in Ireland in 2016, when I’d had the (ultimately futile) notion to rewrite The Novel and make it four times longer. And I thought I’d lost my third wedding ring when I left a family-in-law holiday in The Marches to attend a meeting at Church HQ toward the end of that Easter. I noticed the ring missing when I got off the train, and ran back to search the carriages I’d passed through, probably delaying the train’s departure. I even sent a follow-up email to the train company. But I found the ring, months later, in the miniature pocket inside the main pocket of my work trousers—a sort of chino-jean, or “jeano”, if that’s a thing? I must have taken it off while washing my hands. Utterly inexcusable behaviour, Prospective Employer. No Frodo Baggins, me: when it comes to ring-care, I never learn. 

I met Greg, the ghost-story writer (as I’d come to think of him), in a pub in The Royal Borough—just round the corner from The Conference Company where I’d worked twelve long years before. He was doing fine. Still had A Writing Job. Was working on his third volume of ghost stories. He told me he’d built a whole street out of Lego in his flat. I congratulated him and bought him a drink, but he didn’t buy me one back. Classic Greg! 

I also met Lou one night after Work, at the same terrible craft beer bar underneath a railway bridge on The South Bank where my younger brother had celebrated his 30th birthday a year before. Having been an ale drinker in my youth—and more recently a wine drinker, and occasional cocktail drinker—I was warming to craft beer, unfashionably late. But the acoustics of the former-industrial hinterland made for a terrible meeting place; only made worse by the frequent passage of trains, what sounded like (and presumably was) just metres overhead. Lou was my last remaining meetable friend from Sixth Form days. The others were busy with children I’d never seen, or they’d moved to gentrified coastal locations that were mildly less horrible than the places they could afford in the city. I’d left Facebook a few years before (when a robot impersonated me, and another robot refused to intercede) so I wasn’t even sure who lived where these days—or who was still alive. We discussed The Church Job that had brought me east, and the coincidence of Lou having got a full-time Job at a different major Christian Church HQ, just a year or so ago. But I was surprised to find we more-or-less ran out of conversation before we’d finished our last half-pint. In my head it wasn’t long since I’d stayed with Lou and his long-term girlfriend in The Marshes—I was in town for some or other interview—and he’d had to tell me to “keep it down” as we chatted outside, because after a few years living rurally I’d forgotten what “neighbours” were. Or even that time we’d played board games and he’d slept on our sofa in The Haven Town. But those nights were now long ago. I’d only seen him once in the last decade—at the launch event for my second poetry book. And I was alarmed by how much older we both were now, and how stark that seemed for the ageing having happened behind one another’s backs. Lou was still in touch with the Sixth Form crew; a lot of them had been his friends since primary school. I could barely remember the names of people I went to primary school with, and I’d lost touch with everyone from The Big School on The Mainland and The Posh School—give or take the odd monthly social media “like”. My one remaining friend from those days had been Wayne. But Wayne moved to Poland, and never came back. He stopped replying to emails (mine and others’) and made a new Facebook account with hundreds of new friends. And he never accepted my friend request when I discovered it! Even though we definitely were friends—and I had documentary evidence to prove it. I wondered what I’d said, and when. What I'd said to all those other ex-friends I'd never see again. and couldn't remember falling out with... I said goodbye to Lou that night more than half-sure I’d never see him again, and that with him went the whole of the rest of my extra-familial life before the age of eighteen. And it was an odd feeling.

I digress, Prospective Employer.

As The Project drew toward its conclusion, three things were becoming clearer concerning the all-important “case studies” section of the Internet in Churches webpages:

1. That the required Case Studies did not already exist in any reusable form, as text or video Content.
   

2. That none of the people with whom Bossman had put me in contact were both willing and able to provide such Content.
   

3. That if the mountain would not come to Muhammad—for want of a less Islamic metaphor—Muhammad would have to go to the mountain.

Being The Leader of a Project Team of one (me), I decided on a Strategy. And Bossman agreed—to my delight—that I should travel the length and breadth of England to collect six Case Studies documenting internet usage in churches large and small; and I agreed—indeed suggested—that I would personally conduct, film, edit, and transcribe, interviews with vicars, churchwardens, and anybody else who might be willing to give their time and tell their stories pertaining to the issue of Internet in Churches, the better to enrich The Church website’s webpages, the better to evangelize the PCCs of any internet-free churches, the better yet to further the mission of The Church, and by extension to nurture the souls of the communities it served. It was strange, in a way, because prior to this Job I would never have considered myself in any sense of the word “evangelical”; and yet I was much more excited by the prospect of this part of the Job than I would have been had I been travelling around writing—for example—reviews of bands, or write-ups of (British) vineyards. I wasn’t yet sure if I was undergoing something akin to a Crisis of Doubt, or if I was merely on the verge of… Job Satisfaction?!

The quest

My quest—should I choose to accept it; which I implicitly did, because I'd set it myself—was to visit six English churches in the last few weeks of the Job, to stay in the cheapest available rented accommodation nearby, to meet with representatives of the local branch of The Church, and to elicit from them inspirational tales of how they’d hooked their church up to The Internet and thus improved the lives of their parishioners—be they church-goers or not. That these Case Studies had to serve six preordained themes chosen many months ago by Bossman (and Bosswoman, who I hadn’t seen once since the interview) made things trickier. I’d had back-and-forth with Staff from numerous churches (and a few cathedrals, and one priory) up and down the country; and I certainly had some ideas about where I might want to go—based on factors both Practical and Selfish. But ultimately, the chief criteria for selection of case studies would be the Readiness and Willingness of interviewees. I’d sent out a survey as part of the Research process many moons ago. (Well, three moons ago.) And that first step had established communication with a few parish churches. One or two others were arrived at simply by me looking for a place on Google Maps that was suitably distant from the other likely candidates, and had a good enough website to suggest that they probably had The Internet and knew what to do with It. The final case study—actually the first I recorded, by virtue of it being within walking distance of Church HQ—was suggested on the basis of one of The Church HQ staffers being among its congregation.

Church # 1 was an enormous, gorgeous, bells-and-whistles mega-church in the beating heart of The Great Wen, with mediæval roots, fibre-optic broadband, and donations coming out of its apse. It had its own marketing department; so I interviewed the head of that, and she was both Professional enough to know what to say to provide us with Content, and Personable enough to forgive the numerous technical blunders I brought to the party. I was using the same bruised audio-visual equipment I’d purchased six years ago in order to film Poetry Videos that nobody wanted to watch, and I still didn’t really know how to use it. She informed me that I could probably just have used an iPhone. But I didn’t have an iPhone because the last one I had played a U2 album I’d never bought—and didn’t want—every time I turned it on. (It occurred to me at that moment, just weeks before my 35th birthday, that I had at some point in the interim become Old). It was a strange experience to be heading to Work in this location, just off the city square—in my Youth a default location for meeting internet friends—where I used to delight in feeding crisps to pigeons, before Ken Livingstone had them all removed for personal reasons.

Church # 2 was the farthest-flung from Church HQ; or Church HQ was the farthest flung from It, depending on your point of view. I’d found it through extensive Googling, and was pleased to find its churchwarden receptive to my emails. It was just outside a small village a few miles north of The English Zion, where I spent a wonderful evening eating Lebanese food, drinking in pubs, and marvelling at the unfathomably beautiful cathedral. The village itself was famous for being the birthplace of Prefab Sprout, whose album “From Langley Park to Memphis” I listened to on the bus out from the city the next morning. The Church was a short walk over the flyover from the council houses: a beautiful mediaeval building down a narrow leafy lane. I arrived at the end of a service (loitering awkwardly in the porch for fear of a faux pas) and was immediately thereafter greeted by the churchwarden: an unassuming knitwear-clad local man, doing his best to help The Church to regain a place at the centre of the community. The congregation was ageing and dwindling, he admitted; but he liked to see The Church being used by more people—even if not for worship. He got an old lady in a cupboard-kitchen to ply me with tea and cake. He introduced me to the vicar, who wasn’t local, and who answered my question of “What brought you here?” with: “God”. Her tone suggested the question was rather a foolish one. But I didn’t ask whether her answer was to be taken literally or metaphorically—because what’s the difference anyway? She was full of praise for her churchwarden, but didn’t hang around, because The Internet and its uses in The Church were his thing. I interviewed the churchwarden while the kitchen-cupboard lady swept the floor, sometimes in the back of the shot. I took some daft photos of the churchwarden pointing at a router and smiling. And he thanked me, and I thanked him. He told me if I ever came back to the village on holiday he’d be happy to show my family around. He had offered to walk me back to town along a disused railway line, now turned into a cycle-path, which passed the ruins of a 13th-century priory. But it was raining, so I let him off, and walked back to The English Zion alone. I never saw the priory ruins; they were some way off the main path, obscured by trees. And I’d miscalculated the distance, and had to jog the last few rainy miles—my equipment-laden rucksack rubbing my shoulders raw—to get back to the hostel in time to grab my suitcase and clatter up the train-station steps as the southbound train eased in.  

Church # 3 was on the southwestern slopes of the far side of Dartmoor—I’d come across it in a brief Case Study provided by one of the nicer rural broadband companies (the one lot I never met in person). A woman sat next to me on the train had an awful cold, and didn’t try as hard as she might have to keep it to herself. The big bus from The Ocean City was full of sorts; but they got off before the university, and by the time the national park hoved into view, the village where I was to stay revealed itself as an upstart traffic island surrounded by plummy pubs and trinket shops—with a council estate neatly tucked behind colossal evergreen hedging. I ate a hearty meal in a bay window seat and watched the rah-rah families enjoying post-hike ales, J2Os, and elderflower cordials. I planned a miniature hike of my own, to take a selfie by the signpost of a rudely named village. The following morning I checked out of my breezy, pleasant bed-and-breakfast, leaving my luggage in the lounge by arrangement. My destination was a good few miles’ walk; but I was still hours early for my appointment. So I hiked up onto The Moor to check out some Neolithic stone rows, and I filmed a pony drinking from a brook just a few feet away. The morning was warm and still so I fell asleep beneath a gorse bush for a couple of hours, and woke feeling sun-bothered and woozy. The Church itself was an imposing fifteenth-century building, with plenty of later additions funded by bequeathals from wealthy farmers. It quite literally towered over the little village below, and while the congregation was modest, the vicar (an early-retired lawyer, who wasn’t) had apparently made a good deal of headway in reversing its decline—doing so well that he’d been offered a proper high-up Job with the local diocese. I’d asked him for good weather when we spoke on the phone last week, and he’d said “Hey: I’m in sales, not management!” He certainly wasn’t short of energy and enthusiasm for his role; but I could tell his head was already half in the next one. His church was in frankly magnificent condition, having benefited in recent years from a million-pound windfall. Because of its remote location, they were also able to rent it out as a hostel of sorts to camping groups heading up to explore the barren wilderness of the moors. Before he got back in his car and drove away, the vicar showed me the gravestone of a boy who died of exposure on The Moor, aged just fourteen. “They paid for this as a warning; not because they were being nice,” he said, making a face: “Victorians!” The month of the boy’s death: July. I surmised I was lucky to have returned from my brief jaunt to those "heathen" heights relatively unscathed. But I returned to West Wales that evening with a dreadful cold. And that night in the shower I discovered two ticks with their heads buried in my waist. That’s what you get for sleeping under gorse.

Church # 4 was one of the ones I’d discovered via the survey. The churchwarden had been unusually receptive to enquiries, providing details of the many community activities facilitated by his church, for which The Internet had been instrumental. The building was situated in a suburb of The Beacon Town in the West Midlands. The town itself was picturesque: bounded by bald green hills, it looked much like our own West Welsh parish might—had it too been continuously developed and empopulated over the course of the last millennium. But Church # 4 itself was in a more modern, suburban area. Of course, I’d planned to walk from the station; but the churchwarden absolutely insisted on picking me up in his car. He’d taken a long lunch off from work to meet me; not a problem, he was very happy to help. The drive took about three minutes. The Church was quite unlike the others I’d visited: a twentieth-century brick building; but for a sizeable plastic (or perhaps metal) crucifix at one end, the building might well have been mistaken for a village hall—which purpose it was latterly also coming to fulfil. Because of its modern look and the dedication to St Mary, it was occasionally mistaken for A Catholic Church, he said. Do the Catholics ever stay once they find out it's not? I asked. “One couple did once,” he said. “But they never came back.” There was scaffolding around one of the gables, for which he apologized; there was a bit of a vandalism problem in the area, which they were trying to address with outreach programmes and youth groups. I quite liked the scaffolding; if it was my church, I mightn’t have been happy about it—but for the purposes of my Work, I felt, it only added to the Diversity of my Case Studies. What they could do with a million-pound bequeathal here, I thought. I set up my wonky tripod and DSLR, and got going. The interview was good; he was nervous—as I’d have been at the other end of the camera—but he spoke fluently and enthusiastically about how technology was helping them spread the word of God in their parish. The vicar arrived midway through the interview and smiled and waved, and watched from a respectful distance. It turned out she was his wife, and she’d come to invite me back to their house for lunch. I was flattered, and also a bit terrified. I’d been looking forward to a Ginster’s slice and Red Bull on the train home; but I couldn’t turn them down when they’d done me the kindness of granting the interview. (And he was insistent on driving me back to the station anyway.) Their house on the corner of a cul-de-sac across the road was pretty and modern. She’d made us vegetable soup with crusty rolls and butter. I still had a stinking cold (from the train journey to the last place) and probably shouldn’t even have been at Work that day—but for being Self Employed and On A Deadline. Still, half a year before Covid struck, such matters were deemed trivial by most; they certainly didn’t seem bothered. The vicar said a quick prayer, and we conversed over lunch about Life and Work and Children. They reminisced about the environmentalist protest marches that took them to The Great Wen in their youth, and expressed gratitude and bemusement that their little church of all churches had been chosen to be featured on The Church Website. I was worried at that lunch—even more so than when drinking Huel at my desk in Church HQ—that I would be abruptly discovered and outed as a non-Christian. Yet the more time I spent around these people, the more I wondered why I wasn’t one. They were good people; or rather: people who, not content with merely existing, had chosen to actively pursue goodness. If asked, maybe I’d differentiate myself from their position by claiming not to really feel confident in knowing what “good” was—especially not on behalf of others. But wasn’t The Truth likelier that while implicitly observing notions of "good" and "bad" as inherited from the "Judeo-Christian philosophy and Greco-Roman intellect" of my society (© Killing Joke, 2010) I was just too Selfish to be like them? (The Christians I was having lunch with; not Killing Joke.) They had their Faith, and it guided their Lives. What did I have? What was I for? I had no Cause, no Purpose. I was Nothing: just a Drudge, exchanging Labour for Remuneration in order to keep myself in Ginster’s slices and Red Bull. Yes, I had Children to feed too. But Wife # 1 could feed Them well enough on her income if I fell or even jumped in front of a train. Yes, I was on a PCC; but only because someone had asked me to do it, and I’m not very good at saying no—because of Obedience. And I was pretty sure that Obedience wasn’t the same thing as being, or even trying to be good. But what is Goodness, Prospective Employer? Given a direct choice, I’d like to think I could make the Good one; but being tasked with defining existence in terms of absolute moral truths, I’ve never been satisfied with the definitions provided by any scripture I’ve read, or any language I’ve mastered (i.e. English, up to MA Professional Writing standard, and Welsh up to about the equivalent of an A-level). Anyway, they didn’t ask me whether or not I was a Christian; and whether the vicar or her churchwarden husband—or anyone else I met and worked with over the course of The Church Job—ever diagnosed me as a muggle (or whatever they call us) they never said anything. And they never—as far as I knew—held it against me. There was one woman I spoke to on the phone a few times—who almost helped me to find two Case Studies, but eventually helped me to find none—who I think might have got the inkling I wasn’t... legit. She mentioned having recently Googled me. And why would you ever tell someone you’d Googled them, if not to subtly threaten?! If you Google me—don’t Google me, Prospective Employer; there’s really no need if you’ve read this far—you tend to find:

1. recent tweets I’ve written, often sweary, replete with typos, usually complaining about politicians or can-openers or other inanimate objects, depending on the time of composition; 

2. two negative reviews of my first poetry book, published by Doubtist Books, which sounds like—but isn’t—some sort of atheist “skeptic” imprint. 
   

Not the sort of results you’d expect from a decent Christian, I suppose. The Vicar’s daughter—that is, our Vicar’s daughter—was a proper poet, published by Faber & Faber. Mind you, I don’t know whether she’s a Christian; I've never bought any of her poetry books, and I never asked him whether she was a Christian. (Maybe he’s never asked her.) 

Church # 5 was an almost-cathedral-sized building by an A-road in the desolate sun-drenched backroads of The Fens. Its spire pierced the vast East Anglian sky with audacious holiness. I could have stayed with Wife # 1’s mother, who lived a short car journey away. But I was doing the last two of my six church visits over two consecutive days; so it made more sense for me to rent a squalid room in a hotel whose reception looked like a taxi-hire office counter, a few streets south of The Railway Hub in The Great Wen. The room also overlooked an A-road, but a much busier A-road than that which passed Church # 5, and which was full of honking buses by night. The building being creaky and the walls being thin and my room being far too hot, I didn’t get much sleep at all; but at least I was conveniently close to The Railway Hub for my journey to The Fens on the following morning. This church, it would transpire, was the hardest to access via public transport. From The Great Wen I got a train to Cromwellville, a bus to Olde Slepe, and then another bus into what any reasonable person would recognize as The Middle of Nowhere. The really quite needlessly massive Church # 5—dedicated to Mary: these English churches were unimaginative with their dedications compared with the obscure missionary saints of West Wales; which I suspected was something to do with the Reformation—had recently suffered from a spate of lead-thefts. This was a massive inconvenience for The Church and its PCC, but good for me because I needed a security-themed Case Study for my web-based Guidance, and Church # 5 thus suggested itself as an ideal candidate. The churchwarden was a gentle, serious man who echoed Church # 2’s vicar in claiming that God had led him to the area. I remember thinking—on hearing this for the second time—that it must be nice to receive Instructions from A Supreme Authority, because it would free one from Accountability for one’s Life Choices. Romanian gangs, he said, would come over the channel, target a couple of churches by night—often in East Anglia, where the churches are huge and covered in lead—then head back to the continent by dawn. (Presumably in a very heavy van.) Looking at the height and the slope of the roofs of the church, I couldn’t help but admire the Resolve and Ingenuity of these hard-working Romanian gangs; though of course I didn’t say so—this was the second time that Church # 5 had been relieved of its lead in as many years. Having claimed funds from some or other relevant grant, the PCC were now going to use their Internet connection to power security cameras, which would be monitored by a company who were able to send the police out sharpish if they saw Romanian gangs (or anyone else) lifting the lead off the roof. The inside of the church was being done up as well at the time of my visit—and not just with cameras; they were ripping up the floor, taking out pews: repurposing unused space for community activities and whatnot. You must have a decent-size congregation to afford all this? I suggested. He shook his head. Not really, he admitted. It was ageing, and dwindling.

Church # 6 was in a modern satellite-suburb of The First English Town, almost 300 miles due east of The Mill House, and—at least on the early summer’s day I visited it—it felt 300 miles closer to the sun. I had a weird sense of déjà vu, walking the streets of The First English Town. I knew I’d never been there before, and not being much into notions of inherited memories or other such paranormal fare, I attributed the feeling to a combination of emotions, sensations and observations mirroring those experienced in another time and another place. Today I was a 35-year-old man visiting The First English Town to journey to its suburbs where I would interview a vicar about his Internet connection. But as I walked through the town centre on that sunny afternoon I could have sworn it was my 12th birthday, and I was in The Oldest City in North Wales, on my way to meet up with my friends to go and watch Street Fighter at the cinema. On that day in June 1995 I was denied entry to the film—which had been given a 12 rating for UK release—on the grounds that, despite it being my 12th birthday, I didn’t yet look 12 years old. Some Administrative Shenanigans dreamt up by my older brother eventually allowed me covert access to the (as it turned out, terrible) film I was legally entitled to see. My older brother wasn’t with me now, of course; he was in Steel City trying to get my Bossman to reply to his emails. And I was not to be denied entry to the last of the six churches I was visiting. Because the young and trendy vicar who turned up to meet me didn’t care how old I looked—or how flustered and sweaty I was after walking half a mile from the big roundabout by Tesco with my weighty equipment. The “village” was less than half a century old, so the church was awkward, square and modern—more like a school or a village hall than a church; at least to someone like me, who was mostly into churches for the history. I noted the oddity of a stained-glass window depicting Spitfires—recalling The Heath’s history as an airfield during the Second World War—with a throwaway comment that it was “pretty cool”. The vicar, as it happened, disagreed: he didn’t like to stand there talking about peace and love while his congregation looked up at glorified killing machines. He said it felt jarring: a fair point, I conceded. The interview went well, after that. All of the required points were addressed. He was a natural performer, and comfortable in front of the camera, as the vicars—contrasted with the churchwardens—tended to be. Disastrously, I forgot to ask him his favourite colour; which question I’d used in each of the other interviews shortly after beginning the recording by way of an icebreaker. But by the sixth time of doing it, I was pretty comfortable with the process, and felt like the ice now broke of its own accord. Thus, no sooner had I felt that I’d mastered my new role as roving ecclesiastical interviewer, than the role-within-a-role ended; and all that remained was for me to retire to The Mill House in West Wales, edit my videos, type up my interviews, and finish uploading my draft webpages.

Good Job or Bad Job?

Interviewing vicars and churchwardens wasn’t the Job I’d seen advertised; nor was it the Job I’d accepted. Quite probably, I would never even have applied for such a Role. Yet toward the end of The Church Job I came to think that interviewing vicars and churchwardens might be my True Calling. Doubtless the novelty would wear off after a while, as all novelties do. But it felt more Proper than most of what I’d got up to in my Freelance Career thus far. Not because of the religious aspect, specifically. I think it was more to do with the focus of the Job on Work, and Vocation. I’ve never really had a Vocation, Prospective Employer. I mean, I liked writing; so I became a writer. And I maintain that I’m not A Bad Writer; and can, when put to good use, be A Good Writer. But would I call my Work a Vocation? No: writing is merely a medium. And I can’t stand with hand on heart and attest that every Facebook post I’ve ever written for a Toilet Roll Brand was a manifestation of a Calling. I could not say “God brought me here” nor even “Writing brought me here”, because money—only money—did. 

Still, belief that what one is doing might be valuable to people somewhere is what I cling to as Productivity in my liminal existence in the digital world of standardized abstract symbols intended to convey real meaning. Productivity yields Dignity. It’s hard to be Dignified in Unproductive Labour; certainly if the Labour shows little promise of being anything but. I felt no shortage of Dignity in The Church Job. While merely tolerated as a general presence about the office, in the context of my Work I was respected for my Skills—even presumed to have some that I wasn’t sure I actually possessed; which only encouraged me to try to procure them. But I felt grounded too; that I was evidently such a minor part of such a major Operation was humbling, but not in a negative sense. While my own lack of conviction for the letter and law of The Church was a niggling thorn in the side for Solidarity—and I never made friends in The Church Job, as I rarely made friends in my Freelance work—I did share a sense of Solidarity with many I worked with in the role, in that we were where we were, doing what we were doing (whether Paid or Voluntary) at least in part because we believed that we might make life better for others. I don’t know how many (if any) churches in England were persuaded by my Work in The Church Job to get their buildings fitted with broadband connections. But I trust that I did my best to persuade them of the benefits and to suggest avenues for enquiry, should they be convinced. I’m hopeful that some small Difference might have been made to the world by my activities over that season I spent travelling to and from England. And thus I feel sure that it was A Good Job.

 Concluding Notes

• I produced all of the work I’d agreed to, and a fair bit I hadn’t, only a week or two over the original deadline and well within The Project’s Contingency Budget. Thinking back to the absolute fiasco of a project I’d worked on at The University, and the ever-overrunning one going on behind (usually) closed doors at The DIY Company, it hardly seemed fair to use the same term to describe the 28 or so Webpages of mostly text-based content (with a few pictures and videos) that I’d produced for The Church. But in Managing what was described in A Legal Contract as a “Project” I’d also technically led and managed a Project Team—of one: and I must say that my Team was the most manageable Team I’ve ever had the pleasure of managing. He turned up an hour early and left an hour late, every day. He always wore clean shirts, with clashing ties. He never complained about work, audibly, except when Working From Home. He only got bedbugs once. And although he drank too frequently when Working Away From Home, it was never to excess. I was pleased with his Work and would happily recommend him for any Jobs you might have going.
  

• Bossman was pleased with my Work too. He maintained something of a poker face throughout my time in (and out of) Church HQ, thus I was sometimes concerned that he hated me or thought I was doing A Bad Job; but he (somewhat exaggeratively, I thought) referred to the “genius” of my “guidance” Webpages during my closing Meeting with him and his Bossman (who I had previously only been conceptually aware of). Bossman even spoke of further Projects in the near future, and asked if I’d be interested in similar Jobs should they become available. I said that I would; but that I needed a month or so to work on the shed I was having put up in my garden, in which I was hoping to install a Home Office. At the time of writing, although I am writing this in that shed—in the half that I have indeed converted into A Home Office—the shed as a whole still isn’t quite finished. There’s no water connection to the toilet; so you have to take a bucket of water in with you if you want to flush it. Also the socket circuit I wired is just one long spur, and never returns to the consumer unit; so it works, but it’s not quite... right. And the little wood-stove that my mother and Wife # 1 got me for my birthday in 2020 doesn’t work, because the flue I fitted was single-skinned, and doesn’t suffice in our topographical situation to provide an adequate draw. So if I light the fire, the office fills up with smoke. Shed notwithstanding, no offer of further Work would follow after The Church Job finished. And I never chased after it. I did contact The Church Job Bossman for a testimonial in late 2020—following the sale of The House on The Corner, with a view to seeking Work after The Pandemic was over—and he was kind enough to provide one. (Although somewhat disappointingly it did not contain the word "genius".)

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