A warm welcome

In Ferryhill, they're celebrating the 150th anniversary of St Luke's church, an event - two-and-a-half years in the planning - reflecting the whole history of the former mining community and of its satellite villages.

The launch service on Friday evening was simple and successful, the exhibition in the church centre offering talking points for months. Thirst after righteousness, St Luke's also has a bar.

The following morning, we were invited officially to open the flower festival and craft show at St Matthew and St Luke's in Darlington, a church externally unremarkable but warm, welcoming and really quite wonderful within.

The At Your Service column had joined them a year ago, not least impressed by the Rev Brian Holmes, a Tow Law lad who left school at 14, became an apprentice steel moulder and lived in the Darlington parish for almost 30 years before becoming its Vicar. He also won Saturday's art competition.

"A vigorous and immensely user friendly church, a caring congregation and a dynamic 61-year-old Vicar," concluded AYS.

Now he's 62, but every bit as dynamic.

Both occasions were well considered examples of how to live the Gospel and to make it relevant, of trying to persuade non-attenders that their churches are no longer a conservative clique - which, truly, they're not.

What if they succeeded? What if the newly awakened went home and read Saturday's papers?

The Guardian filled most of a broadsheet page with a report of how a weekend conference of Church of England "evangelicals" - broadly those who cling closely to the literal word of the Bible, specifically those opposing homosexual priests and bishops - could barely even be civil to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Church Times had another page reporting that the evangelical house was now dividing - sub-dividing? - against itself.

The analogy about Rome burning may not be ecclesiastically appropriate, but it is entirely apt to echo the Emperor Nero's famous frustration: "These Christians!"

It is the steadfast folk of Ferryhill and Darlington, and many thousands like them, whom their leaders throw shamefully to the lions.

HIMSELF never more than a square mile from controversy, our old friend the Rev Dr Peter Mullen is also on the receiving end of an articulate and ferocious broadside in this week's Church Times.

It's a long and not unfamiliar story: "breathtaking hypocrisy" may best summarise the arraignment.

It is not for one of his weekly witherings on the page opposite for which poor Peter is being pilloried, however.

The guy is universal. The offending article was in the Wall Street Journal.

THAT commendably Christian charity Traidcraft has sent out its new catalogue - including "handmade" paper containing elephant dung. Would it, asks Chris Eddowes in Hartlepool, be the perfect present for someone who writes a load of bull? (Answers on one side of the paper.)

THOUGH the Highland holiday is now just a happy memory, the tartan flavour lingers with an e-mail from Alan Tomlinson in Stockton and an invitation to settle a bottle of wine bet.

Before taking another step, however, readers may care to consult a map of the top left hand corner of Scotland in order to appreciate that the nine mile single track from Poolewe to the end of the road beyond Cove is really very remote indeed.

We walked it on September 4, passed about three motorists and several thousand sheep and thought little more on it until Mr Tomlinson's message.

He'd been one of three motorists, convinced that the foot slogging figure - "striding purposefully" he says, generously - looked familiar. Impossible, said his wife. Enjoy the wine, old boy.

HAVING located the column in the approximate middle of nowhere, where were the Tomlinsons - or any other good Samaritan - in Stockton last rain swept Saturday evening?

Setting out at 5.40pm to plodge the three miles from Norton sports complex to the town centre, the column became slightly rain affected, wandered woebegone through Ragworth and Primrose Hill - not noticeably floribundant - and having just missed the Darlington bus, arrived at Thornaby's newly refurbished railway station at 7.25.

Further disorientation occurred because, according to the station video screens, most of the departures in the next two hours were going to somewhere called Error B, which doesn't appear to be in the autumn timetable.

The good news, however, is that - according to the Thornaby station screens - every train to Error B was running precisely to time.

BACK north of the border, we have more news of former Cowpen Bewley wicket keeper Terry McCabe, now happily settled among the other 100 hardy folk on the Orkney island of Eday. When Terry arrived, reports his friend Martin Birtle in Billingham, the island's only bar opened on Friday and Saturday evenings. Soon afterwards - "and despite Terry's very best efforts to sustain it" - the watering hole dried up for ever.

The Times, meanwhile, reports that a nudist beach is to be established on the north Scottish coast near John o' Groats to complement the shooting, stalking and fishing but with one ever present danger. The laird's up front. "The sea breeze means there are very few midges at all."

AMONG its nine lives, last week's column wondered why curiosity should have killed the cat.

Bill Taylor, brought up in Bishop Auckland but long in Canada, cites the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (no less) that the line first appeared in a short story by the American writer O. Henry, otherwise William Sydney Porter.

Tom Purvis in Sunderland suggests that both Shakespeare and the 17th century English poet George Withers had thoughts about care killing a cat, which may have been adapted.

Curiouser and curiouser.

It was O. Henry who also recorded that life was made up of sobs, sniffles and smiles. Sniffles, he added, predominated.

...and finally, back to the Church Times, which amid the continuing master class in self-destruction finds space to expound the meaning of the hokey-cokey.

Apparently, it was a response by the breakaway 17th century Church of England to the rigmarole of the Latin High Mass.

All the inning and outing - not, perhaps, the most apposite word - may be equated to the extravagant gesticulation and genuflection of the Roman Catholics.

Hokey-cokey is itself a corruption of hoc corpus something or other, at the centre of the liturgy.

More than three centuries later it all sounds wearily, schismatically familiar. So that's what it's all about.

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