The archbishops and me...

If you can't name-drop in your own blog... where can you???

Today Dan and I went to the Trustees meeting for the UCU UK Partners, which was held this time at Cuddesdon Theological College, just outside Oxford. We had a really good productive meeting, which was good. Also, it was lovely to visit Cuddesdon, which is in a beautiful rural location, amongst rolling fields and sheep. I don't know how the students concentrate, with such lovely wide views outside the windows...

It happens that Cuddesdon is near the village where my parents lived when I was born, and they went to the church there. And it happened that Robert Runcie was the vicar and principal of Cuddesdon at that time - he later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since it was my parents' church, I was baptised there, by Robert Runcie - my Dad remembers how he lifted me up afterwards, right up in the air, facing the congregation, and said, "We welcome you" and I looked out at everyone. I don't remember a thing, of course... But today we called into the church to see it, as I had never been back since we moved away when I was six months old. It is a beautiful, wonky, unspoiled old church, parts dating back to 1124 AD! The side bits  were added in the 1200s, and not much has been done to it since. Amazing.

But I must add here that Robert Runcie is not the only A of C I have had dealings with. Donald Coggin, who was archbishop in the 1970s, came to preach at my university college in 1987, and I sat beside him at chapel breakfast - he tried talking to me in Hebrew but it didn't work and we ate our fried eggs together. George Carey invited me to tea at Lambeth Palace, as an Anglican mission partner - there were a few others there, I might add... We did meet him again later in Harare at the WCC, and in Mukono as a visitor to UCU - he didn't remember me on any occasion... And then Rowan Williams, was my Early Church tutor in Cambridge, and I had tutorials in his college rooms. He made me tea with sour milk that had sat on his outside window-sill (as all the tutors did). I liked him a lot.

So you can understand I am a bit miffed that the new Archbishop, Justin Welby, I have never met, and I do not know him from Adam. Well. Perhaps something should be done about this.