|
Letter from St James the Least of All On the costs of heating a rectory
The Rectory St. James the Least
My dear Nephew Darren
Ah, the joys of June! At last I can return to the Rectory without putting on my overcoat before going inside. For the next 4 months, all windows and doors are left open in order to let the heat in. If anyone else tells me how lucky I am to live in a 12 bedroom Queen Anne house, I shall have them excommunicated.
You will soon stop complaining about your one bedroom flat should you ever have to live in a rural Rectory; the days of wandering about the house in shirtsleeves will become a distant memory. In my first winter here, I had the central heating on full blast 24 hours a day. The house was almost warm, even if the boilers sounded like the Queen Mary coming into port. But that quarter’s gas bill needed a substantial grant from the International Monetary Fund to cover it, so ever since, for 6 months of the year, I live in the kitchen. Parishioners find it either touching or sad that I sleep with my Labrador. It never occurs to them that I need her for extra heat.
It does mean that evening meetings at the Rectory on winter evenings can be un-Christianly satisfying. Watching committee members fighting – with infinite politeness - to get nearest to the one-bar electric fire is highly entertaining. They hold on to their coffee cups less for refreshment, more for a little extra warmth. At least it means that meetings are short.
My predecessor was a model railway enthusiast and so several bedrooms were taken up with a system of such complexity that it made Crewe junction seem trivial. He also found it helpful to put his teenage son in the turret bedroom, where he could play his drums without anyone else in the house being able to hear a thing.
Nowadays, all these extra rooms are filled with cribs and nativity play costumes, Easter gardens and spare choir cassocks. It is remarkable how all these things used to be stored quite satisfactorily in the church vestry until the parish acquired a single priest; now the empty rooms in the Rectory have become vital storage space. I so hope my successor has a plethora of children, so that parishioners have to find alternative accommodation for all the detritus vital to church life.
No, dear boy, cherish your centrally heated, dry, draft proof, mice-free, bat-less, modern-plumbed accommodation. It will not be ever thus.
Your loving uncle,
Eustace
|