I've just been reading the recent report about battered clergymen. It's on the increase, apparently. Petty thieves and delinquents, forever in search of ready cash to fund their druggy "lifestyle", are finding vicarages, presbyteries and church vestries easy pickings. And if the priest gets in the way, he's as likely as the layman to receive threats, abuse, a blow on the head, a knife - or worse.

Clergy wives are not exempt from this sort of treatment either. We've had some unpleasant experiences ourselves over the years, but nothing too serious, thank God. Knocks at the door in the dark evenings followed by a pitiful request for "...my train fare to go see my mother who's dying in Southampton". You couldn't subsidise every caller, even if you believed all were telling the truth. That's when some turn nasty - trying to force their way into the house, issuing threats and cursing the rector, his missus, and the Lord himself.

But forget violence against the clergy for a minute and consider violence and other forms of nuisance perpetrated by a few of the clergy themselves against their hapless parishioners and even against their colleagues. Many years ago, I began my first curacy in a leafy suburb on the edge of Leeds. Our senior curate was what the psychiatrists call "disorientated for space and time". Many a weekday winter's morning he, the vicar and I would meet in church before it got light to say Matins. You had to be careful not to linger in the vestry chatting to the vicar - because you might find that your senior colleague had rushed off and left you locked in. This happened several times and the only remedy was for the vicar to ring the church bells until his wife heard them and came to let us out. There was some very un-ecclesiastical language uttered. Later, when asked for an explanation, the curate would say that, since it was dark, he thought it was Evensong not Matins, night not morning, and so he'd locked the church for safe-keeping.

Disorientated for space and time, he also had a funny idea of matching colours. Often at the weekday celebrations of Holy Communion, there'd be only a handful there. No matter that it might be the Trinity season and all the altar colours green, out would trot the curate from the vestry in vivid red vestments. I remember one occasion - our bluff little Yorkshire vicar on the edge of a nervous breakdown - he called out: "Go back and get changed, lad, you look like a parrot!" He was a clever lad, this curate with an Oxford degree in theology. But the vicar used to tell him: "It's no use knowing all about the ontological argument for the existence of God if you come out with your trousers on backwards!"

Hospitality? That curate had a failsafe way of ruining it. I went across to the vicarage one morning for a staff meeting and found the vicar giving him lessons in how to sit down without breaking the armchair. Apparently, he'd been going round the parish on his gentle ministrations and smashing up the furniture. He was an immensely conscientious, kindly man, but his "disorientation" (our vicar had shorter Yorkshire words for it) meant that, if he got it into his head a parishioner needed a visit, he would make that visit irrespective of whether it was eleven in the morning or eleven at night. The people complained in the nicest possible way: "Can't you buy t'bugger a watch?"

But worse. My aunt lived in the parish and I called to see her one day. She had a black eye and her arm in a sling. "It was your colleague, the curate," she said. "He came to see me last week and I asked him if he'd like a glass of wine. I went to the top of the cellar steps to fetch the bottle and he would follow me, you see. You know how he gets too close to you and nods his head? Well, he did it to me and I couldn't back off in time. He nutted me in the eye and I fell backwards down the cellar steps."