The Sabbatical Wanderings of Toddy in France (1) Friday 30th June 1995. Arrive at Poole. I have no passport. It never occurred to me to bring it and it would get wet anyway. No, I cannot board as Martin's son! Security say I can board, but may have to run the risk of not being allowed to land in France. To board is 80% of the problem solved. So the voyage passes quickly and pleasantly. Arrive St Malo. Aim for wrong marina. In the great heat, our bags weigh a ton. Take short cut through hole in fence, so avoiding passport control. We find out where our boat really is - up by the old town near the swing bridge. Arrive at boat. Celebrate and go ashore for a meal in the old town …………… Saturday 1st July. After provisioning the boat, we sail for Paimpol. Good brisk sail. The menu for the day features rice and mushrooms (simple food for simple folk). No fish available over the weekend and there'll be no meat shops open on Monday. Sunday 2nd July. Paimpol. Raining. Tour de France passes through the town. This is a major French pastime with much advertising hype. The route is marked out with straw bales in red and white polythene bags, plus the crowds with all the usual asides. Squads of support cars precede the cyclists, plus a scattering of dollybirds for advertising. The whole thing goes off rather like a premature kapellmeister*, which the music of the French National Anthem seems to suggest. Whoosh, 124 or whatever bicycles in a solid batch, like a swarm of bees, glide past and are away down the bend. The cyclists all have their heads down, so one cannot identify anyone - nor even, at that speed, remember the names of the two Brits who are participating. So we cannot even give them a cheer! Being Sunday, we take our ease, and explore the town between showers. Breakfast is always croissants, lunch is wine bread and camembert (simple food for simple folk) and for supper we devour sausages on a bed of apples ………….. During the course of conversation there is no escape on the state of the Church: "Where do we go next?" usually boils down to "Where do you go next?" because so many see the Church as a non-participating exercise - so long as it does nothing they disagree with. [ * kapellmeister - uninspired music in routine style (OED)

I feel more and more like a member of some rare breed and regret that the Church Commissioners in their greed have speculated so much money away in investment after the market had boomed. That money should have been spent on training more people for the Ministry. So many clergy are "briefcase men" and rush around to meetings - so that visiting and the pastoral side appears to be ignored. Yes, chaplaincies cover hospitals and prisons in good gospel style, but, for a population that has doubled umpteen times over, we have the same infrastructure as in the Eighteenth Century. We're specialists because we won't share the job, i.e. having lay celebration. We're the only organisation that doesn't totally close down at 5 p.m. on a Friday. We cultivate a turn of the century attitude and we're crippled by tradition and the expectations of being one cleric to one church. We're thinning out. Grandfather did his visiting once a month on a Thursday, but then he'd been there 40 years already. His whole parish was the size of the village I live in. Now his seven acres of glebe are a packed housing estate and his parish is the residence of the Archdeacon of Sherborne. At the end of the day, the priest has to accept the real help he has offered to him. So if charismatics want to wave their hands in the air and get on with it, and on the other hand the village won't form a choir to sing matins, the former wins. Much help, too, comes from the Methodists whose resources are now centred more or less on the market towns. We may yet become a chapter of priests based on a market town, but still lodged out in vicarages. To make any training, study, or group work viable, it is best done through the chapter. However, at the end of the day, the Gospel has to be lived amongst people and there the parish priest has his job. He does it better by not moving about too often and getting known, getting to grips with the area and having to live with his mistakes …………… Monday 3rd July.An enjoyable sail up river to the medieval town of Treguier.