God in Manchester

Bishop of Manchesterism's Thoughts

This week a particularly beautiful and moving Choral Evensong on Radio 3 was in fact Solemn Vespers from Buckfast Abbey, where poor Ann Widdecombe had a sung Requiem a few days after her murder. (She used to worship there, driving over from Widdecombe’s Rest, her garden-gnome-adorned bungalow on Dartmoor.) Chasrles, the son of ,y friends Ysenda and Michael Maxtone-Smith is the organist at Buckfast.

My dear old non-believing father was obsessed by the place, and often took me there as a boy. He said it was because he wanted to look at their pottery but retrospect teaches me that he was one of those unbelievers who believed that members of religious orders, who spend so much of their time in prayer, might - horror of horrors - actually be on to something. For some of the same reasons, Norman Wilson sent all his children to a Roman Catholic convent as their first school.

In my teens I was so haunted by the great church of the ages that I ‘went over’ to Rome , but I reverted to my mother’s religion, the C of E, in my early twenties. I have not regretted coming back, but just occasionally, I have a day which makes me wonder! Today is such a day, as I sat listening to the sublimity of the chants coming from the abbey on a Wednesday afternoon, on Radio 3, my mind unwillingly dragged back to the morning broadcast of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day.

Manchesterism, the creed of the new Prime Minister, is rife in the BBC. I think it is possible that the Corporation invented it even before Mr Burnham embraced it. Nearly all the announcers on Radio 3 have Northern voices, and as many broadcasts as possible seem to be aired from Salford.

And as many Thoughts for as many Days as possible are expressed by Northerners. Today we had the Bishop of Manchester, who is one of their regulars. He sounds like a nice enough bloke, so one hesitates before adding that he also sounds like a complete chump. I mean, a real chump. Today, listeners could hear the cogs of his brain clanking round like some crazy old piece of Northern machinery invented by Heath Robinson.

We have a new Prime Minister - a Man from the North. How will he match up, compared with the England manager, who , like Burnham, picked his ‘team’, And, in a very real sense, is there anything we could learn from the Bible about Men from the North picking teams? There you have the brilliant ‘thought’ of this Bishop .

I should have switched off at this point, because i could see where the ‘Thought’ was going, and I knew it was going to make me become a Voltairean. I should not have listened at all, of course. Years ago, I gave up listening to Radio 4’s Today Programme, finding in Petroc Trelawny and Bach Before Seven a spiritual and aesthetic nourishment which was definitely not provided by Thought for the Day. Indeed, Thoughts for the Day often provoked in my the sad and contradictory Thought that I did not believe a ruddy thing, and certainly did not believe what the daily Thinker was saying. But Petroc has been replaced by another Cheeky Northern Chappy who tries to Dumb Down even Bach Before Seven, and so I do sometimes drift back to the Today Prog. And today I did so because it was being compered by the wonderful Katya Adler.

The Bish today - the Right Reverend David something - plunged in, like Cassius, and bade us follow. So, indeed, we did. Thomas Tuchel took great care to choose a good England team and many have criticised his choices. How about Andy Burnham? Being good centrist Radio Four listeners, we all wish Andy well - or so the Bishop would like to believe. Maybe Andy will think of another Man from the North choosing a team?

The Bish thinks that Jesus did not surround himself with ‘lookalike’ males when forming his Cabinet of Apostles. Strangely enough, very little is said in the Gospels