NOSTALGIA

A few days ago, I heard some delightfully old-fashioned language on the Home Service. A gentleman describing himself as "the Bishop of Leicester" was talking about Unity!!! Just as people like him used to back in the 1960s!! It was all there: the importance of Unity for Mission; the Prayer of the Lord for Unity (Anglican bishops get quite fundamentalist about the Gospels containing the Lord's ipsissima verba when it suits them ... less so when it doesn't) ...

"Gracious!" I thought, putting down my piece of toast laden with melitzanosalata from that nice Greek Deli up Walton Street (it was a little after 8.30 and I was tucking into brekker after my 7.45 EF Mass). "The buggers have changed their minds! They want Unity after all! They're going to call Walter Kasper back and tell him, in floods of tears, that, despite everything, they long for his kisses and are heeding his call not to go further down the path of wilful and heretical divergence!"

Er ... No. "Leicester" was in conversation with a Methodist gentleman, and his rhetoric was just part of the longstanding campaign - really, when you think about it, rather like the activity of Somali pirates - of the Anglican Establishment to kidnap the Methodists' buoyant and smartly painted property portfolio and Pension Fund before HMS Ecclesia Anglicana sinks finally beneath its burdens of debt and bureaucratic overspending. (Someone should warn the Methodists that Anglican bishops may sound like gentle and respectful wooers, but it's important for a girl to watch where they put their hands.)

How could I have been so naive?