91Èȱ¬

From Rev'd Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

People often ask me ‘are you really a Vicar?’; a bit disconcerting, really, especially when it’s the Bishop. One person recently commented, ‘I bet you only got ordained for the dressing up’, a perceptive comment, as it happens, because even for a dressy Vicar it’s been a dressy week. I’m Chaplain to the High Sheriff, which means I get to wear a tricorn hat should a senior judge come to Northampton, and we’ve recently hosted Lord Justice Ryder of the Court of Appeal. He was sitting at court number one in the Session House, where in 1705 the last two women to be executed for witchcraft in England were condemned. Back then it would have been my job to pronounce the ‘Amen’ at the end of that death sentence.

None of that now, I’m happy to say, for Lord Justice Ryder was not pronouncing sentences but giving a lecture as part of the High Sheriff’s seminar on youth justice, calling for people who have fallen into unimaginably difficult circumstances not to be written off and dispensed with, but to be given a helping hand and another chance. Mercy, not judgment, is where the emphasis falls now, although those things invariably come as a pair. Afterwards, we all went to dinner in the Judge’s Lodgings where I sat next to the Chief Constable, who turned out to have trained for the priesthood, and in an odd reversal of roles, found myself confessing my motoring offences.

I never did get to wear the tricorn hat. I borrowed one from the panto, but it had been made for a pirate and I didn’t have time to unpick the skull and crossbones on the front (which would have sent out quite the wrong message).

What’s the right message? That it’s not about us. We’re not models making fashion statements, just the latest wearers of this kit, not here to be beautiful, but dutiful, the latest occupants of a role which was there before we were and will continue after we’re gone. On with the motley.