Ten Highlights of My Fifties

Crossing the Pyrenees on the Compostela Way (photo by Ratnadeva) - September 2008, a couple of weeks before meeting Natalie for the first time!

1.        A Change to the Programme

Graduation Day 2007, outside York Minster: the woman in the red gown is my colleague, Sue Yore, and the graduates are Rebecca, Lucy, Sarah, and Barbara

Eileen the Head of Theology had a system for disseminating important news: she told the people closest to her in confidence; then the people quite close in the same way; and then the rest. The people closest to her were Richard, number 1, and Louise, number 2, which is understandable as they had both been students at the college before becoming lecturers. I was number 3, which wasn’t bad in a staff of over a dozen. In the early summer of 2003, she told Richard in confidence that she was going to retire. Richard was so keen to discuss the future of the department with me that he couldn’t wait for the information to get to number 3, and so we had a private chat about it. Then I had to keep secret the fact that he hadn’t kept it secret! When Eileen invited me out for afternoon tea in Masham, I had to pretend to be totally surprised at her news.

I was very happy to agree that Richard should be Eileen’s successor as Head of Department; I knew that he was the one she wanted to take over, and he was a natural leader. He and I had been appointed Heads of Programme together nine years earlier in 1994. I felt that, as he would be taking on a change of role and a new challenge, then I should take the opportunity to do the same. His position as Head of Programme for the undergraduates would become vacant. Despite managing the postgraduates, I was already involved quite a bit with the undergraduate students as a personal tutor, and I got on well with them and cared about them. One lass from Middlesbrough had said to me, quite perceptively, ‘You love us, don’t you?’ So I suggested to Richard that I should take his job when he became Head of Theology, and both of these moves were agreed in the Autumn without any competition; we started our new roles in January 2004.

I looked after the undergraduate degree programme for a few months short of ten years and it was the most fulfilling job of my life. Still single, I had the time and energy that allowed me to dedicate a good deal of effort to it. Richard, like Eileen had with the postgraduates, gave me a free hand, for which I was extremely grateful. You can only do well if people allow you to. But I take no credit for the fact that we enjoyed such a large jump in the number of new undergraduate students from 2004 onwards. For some reason, Theology & Religious Studies became the flavour of the month and our college, soon to be university, cornered more than our fair share of the market. The numbers doubled and we were taking in around seventy new students a year, single and joint honours. Then, to add to that, we continued to run the postgraduate programme, which I continued to look after until we found a replacement in 2006, and there was also a large and growing number of church people doing foundation degrees as part of church leader training, managed by Louise. We were told that we had become the largest Theology department in the country!

I hit upon a formula for success. Learn all the new names in week 1, however challenging that might appear. Knowing names helps build solid relationships. Answer all e-mails as soon as possible, and keep a good diary of outstanding tasks to avoid forgetting anything. Treat everybody as if they were your favourites, women, men, old, young. Try to find solutions to students’ problems, using the system as positively as possible. Hard work as all that might seem, on the whole it tended to forestall crises and disasters, which made my life easier. My neurotic, anxious nature well-hidden behind a generally sunny disposition was perfect for the role, despite my penchant for Dad jokes.  And we got excellent feedback from students, which was a team effort, of course, with a range of lecturers working across several modules. This was a golden age for our department, which continued until economic and political factors caused Theology & Religious Studies numbers across the country to decline considerably from 2012 onwards.

In the process of the college becoming a university in 2006, we employed a research professor, a Korean named Sebastian, who helped us form a partnership with his old theological college in Seoul. Every year, they sent a group to York, and we sent a group to them. I visited Korea twice with a group of undergraduates, in 2009 and 2011 (I had also been sent to Sri Lanka in my postgraduate role back in 1997, a partnership which was much less active than the Korean one because of the great disparity in the value of currency).

The undergraduate programme gave me more than a fulfilling career. My fifties were memorable for friendships with ex-students. In 2003, three young women graduated, Becca, Beth, and Jen, who had been livewires on the degree and great fun to work with. I bumped into Becca on the street after the graduation ceremony and felt sad that I would not see her again. Fortunately, I was quite mistaken. She lived in York and wanted to keep in contact; consequently I saw a great deal of her over the years, and also Beth, who moved back to West Yorkshire but not too far away. I attended the weddings of each of them, Becca, Beth, and Jen, and became guide father to Beth’s daughter, Darcey (not godfather, as Beth is a humanist!). Through them, I kept in touch with students from their year whom I already knew, like Gary, whom I often met as he managed the boardgame shop in York and then Leeds.  I also met some that I didn’t already know, for example, three ex-students who had not taken Theology: Kirsty, Lisa, and Cressida. Despite not having known me when at York St John, they became good friends. At Becca’s wedding, Kirsty encouraged me to undertake my one and only parachute jump along with Lisa (highlight number 9 in this blog). Cress haunts me still. She died at 28 from cancer, tragically young; during her final illness, I often drove Becca and others from York to visit her at her family home in Holmfirth. Now I live near to Holmfirth and often travel past the house where she lived and the church where we attended her funeral.

In addition to Becca and Beth and their mates from the class that graduated in ’03, my friends included Ebony and Nikki from ’04, Bev and Laura from ’05, and later Charl from ’09, Amy from ’11, and Paul from ’12. All of these came to my wedding in 2015. In addition, I would make a special mention of Sam from the class of ’12, the highest graded student that we ever had and, as he was very keen on literature and poetry, he encouraged me with my creative writing. I have met up with him and his circle of friends occasionally at reunions. I would list many more names, but there is the risk of sounding like someone being awarded an Oscar! Nevertheless, as I write, I realise how many wonderful souls I’ve left out because I've only included those whom I saw regularly, at least for a few years. But there are many more that I exchange comments with on Facebook from time to time. It is true, sadly, that I have lost touch with several of my closest York St John student friends since those days, as life has moved on with marriages and children all round, and Covid didn’t help, but I will always remember those times with great fondness. And my closest ex-student friend, of course, Natalie Louise Leavy, became my wife.

If you have read all my other life highlights blogs, you would expect the inner demons to surface amongst all this success and jollity. They did – only a year into my job as Head of Undergraduate Programme. I began to experience an involuntary twisting and closing up of the mouth at certain times which led me to find speaking more difficult than I had done previously. This got worse as the years went by, and was bad enough at times for a colleague to wonder whether I had suffered a stroke. Was it psychological or physical? The fact that it came and went intermittently and worsened when I felt under pressure suggested psychological, but a specialist whom I consulted arranged a brain scan and concluded that it was likely to be a mixture of both. You have only got to compare the faces of famous people in their older years with pictures from their youth to see that a loss of ease in using the mouth happens to everyone to some extent, although not as acutely as in my case. I have got used to it now, so I am not as affected by it as I was in my fifties. But then I was under work pressure, probably more than I recognised. The problem affected my confidence, and this caused me to seek early part-retirement at sixty, at which point I passed the undergraduate programme over to a new manager. Without my twisting mouth, I would probably still be Head of Programme!

Nevertheless, the inner struggle that it caused will never take away the great feeling I have when I remember my job from the age of fifty to sixty as Head of the Undergraduate Programme. I was well motivated and felt appreciated. Who doesn’t crave those things in their profession? I can only thank everyone concerned for making it such a tremendously good time, especially the students, 99.9% of whom were friendly, generous, and positive (OK, now it does sound like an Oscar winning speech again!).

2.        Thirty Shrines in Five Days

The chapel of Mary Magdalene at Chalet above Massiac; it overlooks the hotel La Colombiere

A geek I may be, although I am not alone in enjoying collecting sets of things. As a child, I bemoaned the fact that my parents didn’t like the tea that yielded collectable cards, and so I had to depend on my grandparents’ less sophisticated taste to help me fill in the books that were provided to house the sets. I bought bubble gum for twopence a packet even though I didn’t like it, because that yielded cards too. I travelled round the London tube so that I could say I had passed through all the stations – why anyone would want to do that, with so much of it in the dark, I do not know any longer! I collected stamps like my father, who assiduously bought two of each new British set and sent one stamp of each value to himself so that he had mint and used copies. However, my own philatelic efforts ceased when I became an adult; it was too much trouble, and they were bringing out more and more sets, so it was also becoming expensive!

You can therefore imagine how captivated I felt when, on my holiday in Le Puy in France in 2002, I discovered that there was an extensive set of postcards depicting statues of the Madonna and Child. I found several of them in a stand outside a shop at the bottom of Le Puy’s L’Aiguille, ‘the needle’, a spectacular spindle of volcanic rock with steps up to the chapel of St Michael at the top. I then found an address book with one of these postcard pictures for each letter, and several books on the history and culture of the Auvergne which included these statues and more. I came home with as much of all this as I could find. I found a map of the region and placed postcards upon it before enclosing it all in a picture frame to be displayed on my bedroom wall. I did one for 2002 and another for further acquisitions in 2003. Now, clearly, I needed to go to all the places indicated on my wall!

In those two summers, I had travelled with Ratnadeva and Liz. Although I did dip my toe into the long list of statues, chapels, and shrines that now beckoned very enticingly, I could not go into it with the obsessive fervour that I would have liked, having quite reasonably to compromise with other people’s holiday preferences. So I looked forward to a day when I could splurge a whole lonely trip just on getting round the set. In 2004, I visited Budapest, and so the Madonnas had to wait until the spring of 2005 before I began the process of ticking them off in my shrine-spotting book.

I flew into Rodez, hired a car, and began the process of looking for a place to stay. Passing through the Auvergne region along the central motorway past a town called Massiac a couple of years earlier, I had noticed a spectacular cliff with a chapel on top. This seemed a good place to try. Only a few hundred metres from the motorway exit, I came across a small hotel on open land called La Colombière (‘The Dovecote’). This proved to be very different from La Terrasse in Saugues that I talked about in the highlights of my forties, as it was away from the centre of town, square and functional, and the cuisine far from gourmet standard (it provided evening meals on request, but it wasn’t a restaurant like La Terrasse). However, the owners were friendly, the place was comfortable and not expensive, and the position by the motorway proved perfect for a shrine spree. It became the second hotel in the region that I would stay at several times over the years.

I visited thirty shrines in five days; what more could a shrine collector wish for? There were very few left to discover after that trip. I travelled the extent of the Puy de Dôme and Cantal departments comprising the volcanic chain of mountains which give their name to the whole Auvergne region. I found many churches, chapels, and a few basilicas. A handful of the statues had been transferred to a couple of museums, so I visited those too. The Auvergne countryside, as one can imagine, is stunningly beautiful and quite varied, from high mountains with ski slopes to rolling swathes of green with volcanic knolls that make them distinctive from undulating regions elsewhere. On my journey, I came across many helpful people, giving directions, loaning me the key to a chapel, telling me something about the place. I can hardly remember there being anywhere where I failed to get access, and that was lucky, as inevitably churches and chapels do get locked up for certain periods during the working week.

The medieval Madonnas formed a wonderful and diverse array, as each church had its own original, unlike the mass-produced statues and images of the modern world. Some had obvious similarities, as the medieval guilds which crafted them had their own distinctive style, but generally the sheer variety struck the eye. The statues were either battered and worn or restored and shiny, weary and sad-looking or upright and serene, veiled or bare-headed, the faces austere or benign, painted dark (the 'black madonnas') or light. There were the enthroned, stern queens (‘virgins in majesty’) of the Romanesque period and the standing, loving mothers of the Gothic. There were the pretty dolls and the ‘scary Marys’, and everything else in between!

The two most unusual and interesting Madonnas were the Vierge Ouvrante (‘Opening Virgin’) of Massiac, a Mother and Child which splits open to reveal a triptych within. On this were painted images of the Annunciation, Gabriel on the left and Mary on the right, with a faded panel in the middle that seemed once to have depicted the cross. Other versions of the vierge ouvrante, I have discovered, include an image of the Trinity, which may have been the reason the Catholic Church banned such statues after the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. The idea of a Mary enclosing the Trinity within her would seem to have confirmed the Mariolatry (Mary worship) of which Protestants were accusing Catholics during that period. But some of the vierges ouvrantes survived, including the Massiac example.

In the basilica at Brioude I found the Vierge Parturiente. This statue depicted a Mary in the moment of giving birth, the parturition itself hidden under her gown. She is resting her head on one arm as one does when lying down and partly sitting up, and strikes a most relaxed pose. The statue reinforces the ancient tradition that the birth of Jesus was painless, as it involved no sin. Of all the moments of Mary’s life, I had never seen an image of this one before!

The statues had to be kept secure by French government decree as, being cultural artefacts from before Church and State separation in 1905, they belong to the nation. Some were in cages, others protected by elaborate theft detection systems. The parish church at Chastreix had to display a copy of a statue that had been stolen in the 1980s and never recovered, while that at St Gervazy had gained its original back after it was stolen and later rediscovered in an auction. As with all subjects, the more you looked into the detail, the more interesting it got (yes, really!).

The hotel La Colombière backs onto a river, the Alagnon, which winds through gorges on its way to meeting one of two major rivers of that region, the Allier (the other being the Dordogne). As in Yorkshire, it is useful to get to know the main rivers in the Auvergne to give you a sense of where you are. The hotel stood between two high gorges, the one that I had seen from the motorway and another at the back of the hotel. Both of these high points sported chapels. On the motorway side, the hamlet at the top was known as Chalet, and its chapel was the original home of Notre Dame de Chalet, a Romanesque virgin in majesty which had been moved to the Massiac church for safety as the chapel was left unattended. The chapel was dedicated to the Madeleine, that is, Mary Magdalene, about whom there are many legends in southern France, as she was supposed to have travelled there as a missionary. If she was ever there at that chapel, she will have enjoyed the view! And I did too, here as elsewhere, despite all the rushing about.

3.        On the St Lawrence River

Ordination of women on the St Lawrence River, 2005, from BBC news on-line (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6697271.stm)

My desire since the 1970s for a more feminine spirituality and Christianity made inevitable my support for the cause of women’s ordination. This has been instituted in many Protestant churches, but it is still not allowed in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, which remain patriarchal. In the Church of England, it has come in stages: women deacons in 1987, priests in 1994, and bishops in 2015. As a Catholic living in Anglican vicarages in the 1980s, I enjoyed supporting the Anglican campaign mounted by the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW). It was a very lively movement with members from all sections of the Anglican Church and, of course, it was successful.

Therefore, I was delighted when I learnt of the foundation of a Catholic Women’s Ordination movement (CWO) in Britain in 1993. A Leeds branch was formed by a woman called Pippa, who lived and still lives in Harrogate, and so I phoned her. I agreed that All Hallows’ Vicarage, where I lived at the time, could host the first meeting. Ratnadeva came, and he and I were the only male participants. An awkward moment came when someone asked whether it was OK to have men at the meetings, but our presence was very quickly welcomed by the rest of the group!

Unlike MOW, CWO has never been a large-scale, grass-roots movement. There is something in the Catholic psyche which accepts the status quo, even though many Catholics would have no objections to women becoming priests. I think it is a bit like Brexit; it would cause so much upset that many people prefer to avoid the argument. And so, when six people turn up at a cathedral to campaign for women priests, it can come across as a sign of weakness rather than strength. The movement therefore works best as a place of refuge for those who wish to remain Catholics but feel that the Church is too patriarchal, and that is how CWO has often functioned. In the Leeds group, I suggested that we didn’t spend all our time talking about campaigns but spent some of our energy on prayers, readings, and reflections in gender equal forms of worship. In 1997, Leeds hosted the annual meeting of the national movement, and I wrote a hymn for the occasion called ‘Hymn to God as Mother’, which was very beautifully sung by Anne, one of our members who lived in York, while I played guitar. The local press gave us a write-up. Anne and Pippa and others, like Pat and Katherine, enrolled on the York St John postgraduate programme in order to learn more about Theology. Heady times!

A World Ordination of Women for Catholics (WOW) was formed in 1996, and a conference was held in Dublin in 2001, which several of us attended. There was a suggestion at the conference that women should be encouraged to prepare for ordination, even though it wasn’t available at the moment. Inspired by that, I suggested that the Leeds group run a course along those lines, and I asked Dianne Willcocks, the York St John principal, whether we could have a free room for the day once a month on a Saturday. As she was an Anglican and a feminist, I calculated correctly that she would jump at the idea. And so the course got under way.

It continued for two years from 2003 to 2005. I’m not sure that it was all that successful, as the numbers dwindled; after all, there wasn’t actual ordination at the end of it. We struggled to find people confident enough to lead sessions. But those who did hang on to the very end seemed to get something out of it. Our greatest moment came when Cristina Odone, a well-known journalist and Catholic, heard about it. She was filming a programme on the issue of women’s ordination and asked if she could come and interview us during one of our Saturday sessions. I consulted Dianne just to make sure that the college would be happy to have a film crew on site; yes, she was definitely in support!

Cristina was known to be a conservative Catholic whose emphasis was on ‘family values’. It was clear at the outset that her instinct was against women’s ordination. However, she tried to give us a good hearing on the film. As the day progressed, Cristina seemed upset, and we learnt that her father had only recently died. She was clearly vulnerable, and the group offered as much support as we could. By the end of the day, she was saying that we had gone a long way towards convincing her to change her mind. The conversion of Cristina Odone – quite a coup! Was it a lasting conversion or a one-day wonder because of her emotional state? Well, I read an article by her ten years later urging the Catholic Church to open up a conversation about women priests. So that provided the answer!

WOW held its second conference at Ottawa in 2005. I was able to combine it with a visit to my brother Andy and his family in New Jersey, and hired a car to take me the eight hours from there to Ottawa across the U.S.- Canadian border. The conference went well, with some famous American feminist theologians as speakers. Pat and I gave a seminar on our course, as it made sense to follow up what had been encouraged at the Dublin conference.

But the day after the conference, the 25th July 2005, was the most memorable. It was announced that nine North American women would be ordained, whether the Church liked it or not, on a boat on the St Lawrence river. The delegates at the conference were invited. It followed a similar ordination event on the Danube in 2002. The rivers being on international boundaries provided a symbolic sense of people on the margins, carrying out a radical act outside the territory of countries. I am not sure how the ordinations claimed their legitimacy through the traditional line of succession via the ‘laying on of hands’, but it was announced that they did do, and I won’t bore you (or myself) by trying to uncover the details! But what was decidedly not boring was the event in such a dramatic and spectacular setting. We were a few miles down the St Lawrence from Lake Ontario; the river is very wide there and includes many small islands which we toured around. We were told that, despite the lack of blessing by the official Church, the women concerned would have many ways in which to exercise their ministry.

I left the women's ordination movement not long afterwards; the ordinations on the St Lawrence were inspiring, but in Britain it felt as if we were banging our heads on a brick wall. There were other things to do, and you cannot persuade a Church to change its traditions if it does not wish to do so. I take my hat off to those who have continued the fight over the intervening twenty years; I last saw them at a meeting in 2022, and they still looked cheerful! I don’t think any of us will forget the St Lawrence river.

4.        Pagan Vicars

The baby naming of Mark and Susanne's son Laszlo, c 2008

When I entered my fifties, I had a reasonable amount of experience with creative, do-it-yourself Christian forms of prayer and worship: at All Hallows’ community; in the seminary; as a member of the Catholic Women’s Ordination movement; and at the Chapel of Our Lady of the Crag. When did I cross a boundary and start creating pagan rituals? My memory is vague. At the latest, it was in 2003 when aged fifty, as I remember doing a solstice ritual in December of that year.

I had taught the New Age and Pagan Spiritualities course since 1995, and we had films and speakers, so I was familiar with the rituals which are practiced in modern (or Neo-) Paganism and Wicca/Witchcraft. As a fairly radical Christian with a strong commitment to understanding divinity through feminine, as well as masculine, metaphors, the distance to either the Goddess worshipping groups, or those that celebrated a God and Goddess, was not that great. My theory is that, when there is a lack or omission in a Christian tradition, new groups form to fill it and, while seen as heretics by the original institution, are in reality simply adding something that should have been there already. Protestantism added worship in one’s own language and greater emphasis on the Bible; the Baptists added adult decision and commitment; Quakerism added silence and greater relaxation of form, not to mention pacifism; much more recently, Paganism and Wicca added the feminine and the importance of nature and the environment. I am not the first to suggest that modern Paganism has a Christian derivation; indeed, several books do. I have also heard that there are Pagan-Christian summer camps, although I have not attended one. So not everyone sees the two as inimical.

Ebony, a York St John student who graduated in 2004 and then took an M.A., was very interested in the idea of creating Pagan ritual, and we stayed in touch for many years after she left York. I came up with the tongue-in-cheek title ‘Pagan Vicars’ and, based on what I had seen, suggested to her the idea of a business venture providing do-it-yourself rituals for people. They could be, but did not need to be, Pagan. The main thing was that the people involved, either because they had children and wished to present them to the community, or because they wanted a non-church wedding, would choose the form of service themselves. Pagan Vicars would provide advice, ideas, and lead the service. Ebony bought gowns for us both and I visited a drum shop in Leeds to get some instruments for people to strike during the rituals.

In the event, we did several rituals for people we knew and eventually Ebony’s own wedding to Rob in Marsden in 2012, as well as the baby welcoming of her son Reuben a couple of years later. Pagan Vicars never became a business, either because our advertising was poor, or because we both had full-time jobs and didn’t commit enough, or because there really wasn’t the demand, I will never know. Of these, I think that one and two are the most likely, as I am sure there are enough people around who would appreciate the chance to have a ceremony done in the way that they would want, in either hired venues or the cheaper and more natural option of outdoors.

And so all three of Mark and Susanne’s children, Nadja, Janec, and Laszlo, were ‘baby named’ in fields above the Knaresborough gorge. I was asked to be the ‘goddess father’ for the first two! Lucy, a York St John graduate who was also a member of staff in the Theology Department for a time, asked us to do the baby naming for both of her children with her partner Ian. Thea’s took place in a field by the Ouse in York and Henry’s in a woodland reserve a few miles north of the city. We led a wedding for another York St John graduate, Kate, and her groom, another Rob, in a reception centre in Darwen which, being in the woods, allowed for an outdoor component when the rain abated. And then there was the baby welcoming for Darcey, the daughter of Beth, whom I mentioned in the first of the highlights of my fifties, when I was asked to be ‘guide parent’. There was also an all-female couple who were adopting boys and wanted a ceremony to mark the occasion. In all cases, we had a full and detailed meeting beforehand with the participants to find out what they wanted. Good vicar practice, that’s all, except that in our case, the form and contents of the ceremony had no limits (except ethical ones!).

Most of these events were roughly Pagan, although not all. What does a Pagan ceremony look like? Well, the relatively light version that Ebony and I used, which is most accessible to non-specialists, acknowledges the divine feminine; nature; the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water); and the four directions of the compass. It sees nature as inspirited, that is, full of spiritual life. It prefers circles of worshippers as equals rather than rows with a leader at the front. Circles are opened at the beginning of the ritual and closed at the end. We often included a flower ritual in which people were able to bring a flower to the centre of the circle and offer their own blessing to the bride and groom, or the child being welcomed and named. As in traditional ceremonies, participants were encouraged to choose people to do readings. The overriding principle: get everyone to take part as far as possible. Nothing too heavy-going, as many of the participants will be strangers to the idea. But, in our experience, many of those who encountered such rituals for the first time said quite genuinely that they enjoyed them.

In one of the censuses, I declared myself a ‘Pagan Catholic’ and wondered what the census compilers would make of that. In more recent years, I have drifted back to regarding myself fully as a Christian and wouldn’t identify as a Pagan. Yet I have a fondness for those traditions which express something that Christianity has been lacking and I, for one, want to take that lesson back into the Church. Probably radical, feminist Christianity has more in common with Goddess Worship, Wicca, and Paganism than it does with the conservative wings of the churches. And so I don’t have any problem with saying that I was once a ‘Pagan Vicar’, and would happily be one again if the opportunity presented itself!

5.        Calling

The cover of Calling, a photo I took in Clermont-Ferrand

I always fancied trying my hand at creative writing. Because I found Maths easy at school, I naively went down that road when I could have taken Literature and Music. If I had my life again, knowing what I know now, I would spend a lot more time on those subjects. One of my creative writing pieces, which I wrote for my mock ‘O’ level in English, found its way into the school magazine. OK, that was a bit of a one off, and I didn’t get a high grade in the ‘O’ level proper, but it was still an indication that at least I had enthusiasm for writing.

‘There’s a book in everyone’, apparently. In the early 2000s, I began to feel that there was a novel in me, and I started to plan a rough outline. I also took the trouble to read as many novels for which I could find the time, particularly those from the Booker Prize nomination lists, as I thought it would be a sensible idea to find out what people considered good literature. Some were a bit dull, I must admit, but there were other inspiring ones!

A major obstacle to my writing is an appalling lack of awareness of colour, texture, and physical detail. Writers are able to describe the sky or a bookcase with words that I haven’t heard of, or if I have, I wouldn’t have associated them with the sky or bookcases. It amuses me when a book is written in the first person from the point of view of, say, a fifteen year old who miraculously has the vocabulary to see and describe colour and texture just as Vermeer or Van Gogh might have seen and described it. I suppose I have to count myself among the writers who don’t say all that much about that sort of thing.

Despite all that, I dreamed about writing something that might sell a few copies. As I said in the highlights of my childhood when writing about my adventures with the guitar, there is nothing quite so motivating as self-delusion. The American notion is ‘follow your dreams, they will come true’, but my English-lived-in-Yorkshire-for-40-years version is ‘follow your dreams, they won’t come true, you idiot, but you might have fun dreaming’. And I can certainly confirm that creative writing is really fulfilling, and worth all the hard work.

I put off the terrifying day of starting on that blank computer screen because work was always busy. One Sunday afternoon at around 4 p.m., the 5th of February 2006 it was, I decided that it was too late that weekend to make a beginning. And then I realised that, if I didn’t start then, I never would. And so I went upstairs – squeezed into my bedroom I had one of those old-fashioned PCs that took up quite a bit of space – and began to type. It came out more easily than I had anticipated. I kept up a steady couple of thousand words per week, and in 21 months I had completed a novel of 163,000 words.

My novel was titled Calling. I followed the wise, time-honoured advice to write on things that that I knew about. I knew about apparitions and other religious phenomena. I knew about modern Paganism and Witchcraft. I knew about shrines, especially French ones. I knew about Leeds and its environs. And I knew about the spiritual awakening of a twenty nine year old who thought that they might have preferred to fall in love. My main character was a woman who experienced all these things. I thought it might be a nice challenge to write a book from a female perspective. Her name was Frances Dryburgh because when I was a child, I had an imaginary girlfriend whose name was Frances Zion, I don’t know why, but I guess I heard the word ‘Zion’ at Sunday school. Zion seemed a rather heavy and unlikely surname for a Leeds woman, so I looked up Zion in a Hebrew dictionary and found that it meant ‘dry place’. I looked through surnames and found Dryburgh. As Jerusalem, where Mount Zion is located, is a walled city, and ‘burgh’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon for a fortified town, this seemed absolutely right! Dryburgh is a Scottish name, but plenty of Yorkshire people have names from Scotland, Ireland, or Wales.

I needed some kind of background template for my story, and I hit upon the Wizard of Oz, because it is about a girl (admittedly a lot younger than twenty nine) who goes on a journey and has to contend with witches and a wizard. I had never seen the film, amazingly, so I bought a second hand video of it and sat down to watch. So Frances goes on her spiritual journey with three companions, Debs, Nathan, and Jose, all of whom are associated in some loose way with the scarecrow, tin man, and lion of the Wizard of Oz. And of course she gets to meet the wizard, an elderly Chinese woman called Wei Chi, who just had to be a woman! The four friends in the story experiment with rituals just as I did at that time with Pagan Vicars.

Frances has apparitions of the Goddess which guide her through the complexities and pitfalls of her journey. I wanted to bring the age-old themes of the Catholic religion into a modern non-traditional setting, so Frances becomes a Goddess-worshipping witch, albeit a very light and fluffy kind! For this reason the novel was titled Calling, that is, Frances experiences a calling or vocation to become a spiritual practitioner who leads rituals for other people.

In my visits to Rocamadour, I had discovered that the French composer Frances Poulenc was associated with the shrine, having written Litanies to the Black Virgin during a period of rediscovery of his father’s Catholicism. I had come across Poulenc in the Leeds University choir when we sang his Gloria, but it was in my fifties that I really fell in love with his music. And so I often wrote parts of the novel with Poulenc playing in the background on the CD player. Consequently, one of the characters, Jose, is a Poulenc fan (Poulenc was gay and so is he), and it is at a Poulenc concert that Frances experiences her first apparition of the Goddess. OK, I am not selling this novel to you, but that’s the way it was! Calling and Poulenc’s music belong together in my mind.

We were fortunate to have the British, Indian-born poet and writer Debjani Chatterjee as the writer-in-residence at York St John at the time. She very kindly read the whole script, all 163,00 words of it. It was fortunate that Debjani had a special interest in goddesses. Thanks to her, I made some revisions and cut it down to 145,000 words, which improved it considerably! I self-published the novel, and Debjani allowed me to put her name to a positive testimonial on the cover.

The self-publishing company Lulu had a range of options, and I went for the most expensive at around £1000 because, given how much work had gone into the novel, it seemed worth the extra expenditure. I got some help and advice from them too. Calling was published in 2010. Of course, I have not sold many. Note to self: don’t order 150 copies if you don’t know where you are going to offload them! Yet a decent number of family, friends, colleagues, and students have been kind and have said enough to convince me that they read it thoroughly and enjoyed it. So it may not have hit the writers’ top twenty, but it was still an experience and achievement that added something important to my life. I expressed myself, my experiences, thoughts, and feelings, and it felt really good to do so.

Much more recently, during the Covid lockdowns, I wrote a second and much shorter novel, Diamond Jubilee. This time I confined myself to putting it on-line on my website, and not publishing hard copies. It's quite different from Calling: it’s a nostalgic story about rock music in the 1960s, and it has a male protagonist. But, like Calling, it draws upon my inner life and creatively deals with ideas and issues that I find important. Hopefully, there will be time and opportunity for a third!

6.        Scaling the Twin Peaks

DVDs of the more surreal Lynch films

I hate the Daily Mail. It is a nasty, insidious, ‘fake news’ paper. I hate it even more because my parents had it delivered daily. Back in the postwar period, it appealed to people from working class backgrounds who aspired to be middle class. They thought it was a cut above the common rags whereas, in fact, it is much the same. My parents voted Liberal and I’m not sure they knew how right wing the paper was. So, to sum up, I hate the Daily Mail! Yet it was responsible for my discovering one of the highlights of my fifties. Fancy that, an acknowledgement for the Mail on the blog of this soft leftie!

When I visited my parents and, after 1998, my widowed mother, there was the Mail lying about in the living room as it had always been. Because it set out to appeal to the lower middle classes, it had a decent cryptic crossword, which kept me going after Mum went to bed. And it had articles on music and film. At Christmas 2001, they included a list of films of the year. I noticed Mulholland Drive as one of their top picks, and thought that it looked interesting. I resolved to see it when I got the chance.

In December 2002, the month before I turned fifty, I attended a winter wedding by the Devon seaside and went for a cold and windy walk bar t’ hat which resulted in my having a very stiff and painful neck. I had to sleep propped up for a few nights and so TV watching was rather forced on me. I managed to loan a copy of Mulholland Drive from the video shop, a year after deciding to watch it. In case you don’t remember them, video rental shops were a bit like food takeaways; people went in there looking as though they had just got out of bed and couldn’t wait to get back in.

When the film ended, I knew I would have to watch it again; it was fascinating, and I just had to go back to the beginning and see how it all fitted together. I had been introduced to the weird and wonderful world of the surrealistic director David Lynch. As my fifties progressed, I set out to watch his entire oeuvre. Not all of it is surreal; it includes Elephant Man and The Straight Story, for example. But the films I really enjoyed were mind-bending: Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Inland Empire. While Mulholland Drive seems complicated at first, it is actually the most straightforward of the surreal ones and the key to the rest. Lynch with his modern art background used film to try and describe the inner life of a person, using a chaotic mixture of dreams, fantasies, emotions, and impressions. The important question to ask when watching one of Lynch’s surreal films is not ‘What is it about?’ but ‘Who is it about?’.

It took a while for me to get round to the most famous of Lynch’s works. In 2009, I went to stay with Ratnadeva just after he moved to a Buddhist community in Devon (yes, Devon again – it’s where the name Maunder comes from, you know). He put me up in a housemate’s room while she was away, and I discovered a stack of videos on the shelf. There amongst them was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which is actually the 1992 prequel to the notorious Twin Peaks TV series, first screened in 1990. I asked Ratnadeva if I could take it away to watch it and post it back. And so I watched the prequel before the series, which was an interesting way round. Fire Walk with Me is very strange indeed, but absolutely riveting, at least it was to me. David Bowie makes a cameo appearance. In both the prequel and the original Twin Peaks series, I really enjoyed the way that Lynch tries to depict spirit beings. Since then, I have read several of David Mitchell’s novels, one of my favourite authors (that’s three Davids in one paragraph). Mitchell, like Lynch, feels no embarrassment at including spirits in a matter-of-fact way as main characters.

The final piece of the jigsaw was Twin Peaks: The Return. That was released in 2015, twenty five years after Twin Peaks, using many of the original cast. Another series: eighteen hours of strangeness and very challenging to one’s powers of comprehension! I had hoped that Lynch would follow it up, but his death earlier this year (2025) has scotched that.

Lynch was stubborn in not explaining his movies, as he wanted to leave the interpretation to the viewer. We can all decide what the film is about. In that sense, his work is a bit like the Bible; we all look at its enticing hotchpotch from a different standpoint, come up with what we think is a convincing answer, and find that everyone else disagrees! For those who want final, definitive answers, his films are hell. But for geeks and ‘brain food’ people, they are heaven. Maybe we should just follow his lead and be satisfied with our own interpretation, while respectfully listening to other people’s which might shift ours a little, and just checking in on the experts from time to time to get the nuances we might miss. That would be very good advice for anyone reading the Bible!

7.        Big Band Night

Big Band Night 2010: Amy, me, and Nat

With the closure of the Ripon campus, the college consolidated its operations at York over 2000-2001. This made it easier to get involved with after-work activities without having to drive too far. I was a keen participant at five-a-side football. I would brag about my football prowess, but Richard Noake has threatened to unmask me as a fraud if I ever do so! Well, I have scored some pretty good goals in my dreams. In my mid-fifties, I had the impression that people weren’t passing to me as much as they did, and so I hung up my boots and took up badminton instead. I also used to do the university annual fun run for charity around the York racecourse. You could do one lap of 3 km, or two of 6 km. I always did the 6, but was up against the keenies – mostly much younger – for the second lap. One year, near the finish, I looked back and was relieved to see that I wasn’t last, as there was one young female behind me. As chance would have it, I was walking behind her as we left the racecourse only to hear her say to a friend, rather disconsolately, ‘Even that old man beat me’!

The area on which I spent most time in my after-work recreation was singing. I was a bass in the college/university choir from 2002 until the year of my semi-retirement in 2013. It wasn’t the first choir I had sung in; I moved through the parts as my voice broke in the school choir and, in my thirties, I joined the Leeds University choir. But the York St John choir engaged me more fully than those ever had; apart from concerts, we sang at all the graduation ceremonies each year, and sometimes performed away from York. Except for a couple of occasions, I was the only lecturer in a choir of students. I must thank Ralph Bateman, music lecturer and choirmaster, for putting up with me and helping me to become more confident as the years went by. Doubly thanks to him for agreeing to include one of my favourite Poulenc pieces on one occasion! We sang music from across the centuries, early modern to modernist. There was a funny moment when we were singing something ultra-modern with very little in the way of musical compass bearings, and I expressed some anxiety that I wasn’t getting it right. Luke, a fellow bass, commented that no one would notice whatever we sang! He was right. But, overall, it was enjoyable. I even got some singing lessons to try and improve. And one of the tenors, Adam, asked me to join in a barber shop quartet and we had fun with that over a couple of years.

One thing though: I am not really a performer. I always enjoyed the rehearsals more than the concert at the end. You can’t go back and have another go at the final performance. On the couple of occasions that I had the chance to sing a short solo, I screwed it up. So what on earth was I doing agreeing to sing at the university ‘Big Band Night’?

Big Band Night was proposed in 2010 and a date set in December. The University brass band would accompany acts and offer a range of options for which they had the music; the audience would vote for their favourite. There would be a bar and refreshments. Proceeds would go to charity. All the staff were asked if they would join in, although most were a little too nervous of the prospect. But Richard had experience of amateur musicals; I had seen him in action at Harrogate Theatre. So he was definitely someone who could participate, and I agreed to join him in a duet.

For reasons that I cannot now remember, Richard had to drop out a few weeks beforehand. But we had already put our names down; would I continue on my own? I decided that I could. From the band’s list, I chose ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. Finally, I had the chance to be a crooner. My choir experience didn’t necessarily mean that I could sing a decent song on my own through a microphone, and with some trepidation I turned up at the rehearsals. But it felt OK; my voice didn’t sound too bad through the amp. The woman organising commented that I looked as if I had pleasantly surprised myself. I had!

It was cold that night in December 2010. Sometimes the journey from Knaresborough to York across the A1 resulted in passing from one weather zone to another. I set off in chilly but not icy conditions, only to arrive and find that the car park was an ice rink. I found a table with my colleague Stephen and two third year students, Natalie and Amy. Yes, it was that Natalie, the one sitting a few feet from me as I type this. We were a long way from being an item on Big Band Night. But, luckily, hearing me sing didn’t put her off for life! And she recorded it on her phone, so we can still relive the experience, although there is an awful lot of background noise in the crowded hall.

I had decided to write my own second verse to ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. In it, I sang that the student was a tramp, as she avoided the library because she found it cold and damp, and didn’t like lectures, etc. It got some laughs. Most things got a laugh, because there was plenty of drink flowing! But I wasn’t allowed any Dutch courage as I had to drive home on the ice. The act that won the vote was a group of female admin staff doing ‘The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B’ in harmony. They were really good, one had to admit. But I got a few compliments, and enjoyed my moment of fame singing with the brass band.

The following year, I had another go, this time with ‘I’ve got you under my skin’, inserting ‘York St John’ for ‘you’. I had York St John under my skin; yes, it was true (I still dream about the place on a regular basis despite not having worked there for five years). That second year, I was solo from the word go. There was no Natalie in the audience, as she had graduated and, although doing her M.A., no longer living in York. Yet it seemed to go well again. I don’t know if there were any more Big Band Nights; I don’t recall hearing about one. Perhaps it went ahead but they kept it secret to keep me away! Big Band Night came and went, but I’m glad that I got the chance to be Frank Sinatra for the evening on those two wintry occasions.

8.        Going back to Germany

The Chapel in Marpingen with Leighton in the foreground

In 2006, York St John College became York St John University. Although there had always been some expectation that the staff would engage in research and try to submit some publications, this became ever more important. We had something called the ‘Research Assessment Exercise’, a government device to find out where the research money for universities should go. To be included in your department’s entry, you had to publish four pieces: books and articles, mainly. I knew there was unfinished business from my thesis. I had focussed on the internationally best-known Marian apparition shrines from the 19th and 20th centuries, but there were several less famous apparitions in Germany that I hadn’t covered and, as I wrote in the blog on the highlights of my childhood, I always loved to go back, having lived there for two years and a bit in my teens. There is just something about Germany: its square, clean buildings; its old quarters in the towns and cities with their drinking and eating al fresco; the frothy pilseners and refreshing altbiers; wurst and pommes frites with sauerkraut and sweet mustard. It all brings back such good memories for me. So I decided to travel to Germany on a university-funded research trip to write an article on its modern apparition shrines, which turned out to yield quite a lot of interesting data.

Also around 2006 – I’m not sure of the exact date but it must have been about then – the number of my boardgame buddy couples increased by a very important addition. Mark and Susanne invited me round to meet and play a game with Polly and Leighton, recently married and living in Knaresborough. Polly was a colleague of Susanne’s. And so, a great, long-lasting, and keenly competitive friendship developed!

When I mentioned the Germany trip, something similar happened to the situation in 1999 when Mark and Susanne asked to accompany me on my great shrine tour. This time, Leighton volunteered to come along. Despite my enjoyment of the solo ‘thirty shrines in five days’ trip to France that I described earlier, generally I prefer company when travelling. It’s good to share meals, compare notes, and slip in the odd boardgame when the business of the day is done. And so I was very pleased to accept the offer, ensuring Leighton understood that the research had to be centre stage as my part of the expenses was being borne by the university. Fortunately, he made sure that this remained the case as we toured around together. It didn’t mean that we couldn’t occasionally step out of the research mode, as we did on the day that we visited the celebrated airship museum in Friedrichshafen. Well, who wouldn’t?

So, in April 2011 during the Easter break, we took my Honda over from Hull to Rotterdam and then headed south to Saarland in the extreme west of Germany, where we visited the nineteenth-century shrine at Marpingen, a chapel in the woods. You certainly didn’t need to be religious to enjoy a good walk through the Härtelwald.  Then it was on into Baden-Württemberg, where we stayed in Ulm, with its famously tall spire, on the Danube. There was no shrine in Ulm, but it was near to the village of Pfaffenhofen-an-der-Roth (don’t you just love German place names?) with its shrine of Marienfried (literally, ‘Mary’s peace’), which is just over the border into Bavaria. This area of Germany has an historic name: Swabia. That is the kind of thing you learn when you play too many boardgames.

It interested me that several German apparition shrines emerged in the period 1933-1952, i.e. the Third Reich and immediate postwar periods. Catholics suffered in the early years of the Nazis. Of course, this was nowhere near the same level as the persecution of the Jews, and many Catholics joined the Nazi cause. But a number of priests, monks, and nuns died in concentration camps, and the shrines remember these Catholic victims. The shrines also offered Catholics after the War the opportunity to create distance between themselves and the Nazis. Germany is unusual in being a country split into two distinct parts: predominantly Protestant in the north and east, and predominantly Catholic in the south and west. The postwar shrines in the Catholic regions emerged in a time of deprivation, concern about communism – both internally and from the eastern bloc – and rebuilding.

Leighton and I will never forget the shrine which dates from 1949-1952 at Heroldsbach in Bavaria. It’s on a hill, and we charitably gave a lift to an elderly lady who was about to walk up. Unfortunately, she returned the favour by leaving a strong wee smell in the car. I shouldn’t mock; I’m becoming painfully aware in my seventies of how the sense of smell deteriorates!

We spent a pleasant few nights in the pretty walled town of Wangen im Allgaü, also in Bavaria. It is near the shrine at Wigratzbad, with its story of Catholic resistance to Nazism. The visionary refused to use the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ instead of the traditional Bavarian and Austrian ‘Grüss Gott’ (‘God’s greeting’). She also objected to a crucifix being replaced by a picture of Hitler, and spent some time in a Gestapo jail. On the way home, we found another beautiful small walled town at Warburg, between Kassel and Paderborn, not a shrine but a very good find as a travelling stopover. The final place on our itinerary was Delft, the town in the Netherlands made famous by Vermeer and his ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. We left without a pearl earring, but with a parking ticket! Our boardgame league was very close, decided by a final decider on the ferry back from Rotterdam. I have a feeling that I lost that one, but maybe my memory is being pessimistic!

The crazy thing about our journey, given that it was 2011, is that neither of us had a working mobile phone. The car was wonderfully reliable but, if it hadn’t been, we would have had to do the time-honoured thing of appealing for help at the nearest farm. And Leighton got into a pile of bother from Polly because she hadn’t heard from him for the ten days of our journey. Boys will be boys. He still hasn’t heard the last of it.

I felt that there was more to learn about modern German apparition shrines, and so I returned in July of that year. There was more funding available. This time I went on my own and flew to Düsseldorf where I picked up a hired car. I went to even more obscure places as well as returning to one or two that Leighton and I had visited. This second trip was rather dominated by some kind of bite that I picked up in the summer weather at Schönstatt near the Rhine. The skin on my hands and arms went mad in a reaction that I had never suffered before, never have since, and hope that I never have again. I have no idea what bit me, but it was not a common or garden mosquito. I had to negotiate a hospital, and discovered that my German works better in bars and restaurants than it does in hospitals.

So the April trip with Leighton was by far the more enjoyable of the two visits but, overall, it was great to go back to Germany. I felt guilty about passing so close to where my schoolfriend Nigel and his wife Ulli lived without calling in, but it was a university-funded venture, after all. I made up for it by going over to see them with Natalie in 2016, the year after we got married. The Germany research trip did result in an academic article, which fed into a chapter in my book on twentieth-century apparitions published in 2016. So the university was happy too!

9.        Dropping in on Scunthorpe

Lisa, Kirsty, and me all togged up for the jump!

While waiting for my flight home in Düsseldorf, I began to feel nervous, and this was because of what was to come next in my diary after the research trip. In the previous year, 2010, on the 15th August, Becca – whom I mentioned in the first of my fifties highlights – married Ryan in the Hospitium in York Museum Gardens. It was a great do, made better for the fact that I had made several new friends through Becca. Beth was there too, with baby Darcey. And so was Kirsty, to whom I got chatting as the reception wore on. For reasons unknown, the conversation turned to parachute jumping. I was several drinks in and, as is typical for males in that situation, up for any mad venture. Kirsty was trying to get me to agree to making a parachute jump with her, and it didn’t take her that long. I made a hilarious quip by saying that I wanted to do a parachute jump before I die, but not just before I die. And so, when I came home from Germany in July 2011, I was three weeks away from flinging myself out of an aircraft at several thousand feet.

The system was that you paid about £400 for the jump, half of which went to charity. You were supposed to raise the money from sponsors, but I didn’t bother; I just paid it myself. Now, with the date getting nearer, I suddenly had visions of plunging down out of control, despite the fact that I knew I had to jump attached to a professional. I can understand people who drop out of the dropping out! My advice to anyone undertaking their first jump is: have a look at some film of people skydiving. This is what I did, I'm glad to say. On the website of the airfield, which is near Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, there was footage of groups working in teams while jumping. It was quite clear that they had absolute control over their bodies; they could manipulate their positions relative to one another, and they looked relaxed as if they were floating. With that reassurance, I was fine from that moment, and didn’t look back – or down! We imagine falling as plunging because that is what it would be relative to short distances and nearby buildings. From a great height, this is not the case.

One the day, I went with Kirsty and Lisa, another of Becca’s college friends. We had to wait a while for our turn. My accompanying professional was the largest male of the team, as I am six feet tall and weighed the best part of sixteen stone at the time. He took one look at me and volunteered himself. The challenge is to get oneself attached to one’s jump partner from the seating area of the plane – where you have to don all the gear in safety – the few feet to the open door for the jump. That is quite a struggle. My only injury was that I scraped my knee on the metal ledge at the door as we squirmed across the floor of the plane.

My jump partner advised me to yell as I jumped; apparently, that helps to disperse any nerves and avoid muscle pulls due to tension. And so I did as we threw ourselves out. Then I discovered the pleasant experience of floating as you fall from a height, and my jump partner showed me that I could manipulate my arms, hands, fingers, and even reach inside my pockets if I wanted to. You have quite a lot of control as you fall. There is no feeling of plunging down. He pointed out the town of Scunthorpe, the Humber river estuary, and the North Sea, all of which I could view from several thousand feet.

After a couple of minutes, he opened the parachute, which would have opened automatically at a certain height were anything to happen to him. You spend the last couple of minutes floating down, and he advised me to tuck my feet up and let him take the impact of landing, as it still is quite a hit – the equivalent of jumping from several feet – and can cause injury for the inexperienced. The time with the parachute open is actually the worst part, as you can feel quite nauseous, and I did, a feeling that lasted until we were well into the homeward journey by car. It is caused by the sudden change in velocity. It was made worse by the fact that it was a hot day, and we didn’t eat much before jumping because we had to wait across lunchtime with just a few snack machines on site. So, if you do it, take a packed lunch and make sure you have eaten well.

I would certainly have no hesitation in jumping again, although I have never felt that the few minutes of thrill was worth another four hundred pounds. I know that people can get quite hooked on it, and aspire to the next step which is solo jumping. I didn’t, but it certainly was exhilarating, and I’m glad that it is one of the things I have experienced before I die, and not just before I die. There is no way to really know what it is like unless you actually do it. Thank you to Kirsty for getting me to take the plunge (parachute jumping gives rise to very many puns, I’m afraid!).

10.   We loved Leuven

The chapel in Melen, Belgium, dates from 1933 but now serves as a garden shed!

2012. Fifty nine years old, and the year my life changed! Certain things happened that helped everything fall into place. First, a woman called Mandy from the Isle of Man (with a strange accent, one that sounds Northern Irish one moment and Scouse the next) was the York St John Director of Teaching and Learning. In 2010, she had the job of interviewing and selecting two research assistants for me. It was a scheme whereby lecturers could employ third year undergraduate students for a small salary. It helped both the lecturer and the students. I wanted finally to write a book on the apparitions of Mary that I had studied since the 1980s, and needed helpers to check the many internet sources. Mandy interviewed four applicants, and she chose Natalie and another student called Nikki. I told her later that she was an unwitting matchmaker!

The second fortunate occurrence did not seem so at the time. It was a meeting in early 2012 with Pauline and Sebastian, who were overseeing the Research Assessment Exercise for the department. I had written the article on Germany, edited a book called Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary based on a Centre for Marian Studies conference I had organised in York, written a chapter in it, and written a chapter in Sarah Boss’ Mary: The Complete Resource (a title we both hated: blame the publisher!). Surely that completed the four pieces of work that I needed to qualify for the five-yearly assessment? No, said Pauline and Sebastian, they had checked, and the editing didn’t count. I needed another article and only had a year to produce it. OK, I thought, the book wouldn’t be ready by then, but I could do some more research towards it. I had visited Belgium in 1988, but it had been a brief trip, and I knew that there were many shrines and sites of apparitions that I hadn’t visited; a spate of visions had happened across Belgium in the 1930s. Belgium was easy to get to, and not too expensive for the department’s research budget. In 1988, I had spent a couple of days at each of the popular shrines at Beauraing and Banneux, and time in the library of the University of Leuven. I resolved to revisit these places, and find several lesser-known sites.

Could I find another companion for the journey? My mind turned to Natalie, my research assistant of the year before. She was a Catholic with a passion for Mary, which would have formed part of the reason for Mandy choosing her. She had graduated and was now a postgraduate. Furthermore, she had become a friend over the time of her degree, and had remained so afterwards. Certain students did show an interest in being friends more than others, although I made sure that I avoided any preferential treatment in terms of providing tutorial support and grading assignments. Fortunately, no one ever accused me of favouritism! I had been invited round twice for a meal with Natalie and her friend Amy, and enjoyed the experience. Natalie showed herself to be a much better cook than other student hosts who had provided a meal for me. I won’t name the people who gave me plain slices of supermarket pizza and then oven-ready chips at a later time because of bad timing when using the oven!

So I asked Natalie whether she would like to come to Belgium for the one week that I had arranged, and help me with my research. She said yes, fortunately, although she didn’t discover until much later that there was no funding for her, and that I had to foot the bill myself for any extra costs. As it was, the most expensive aspects – the car on the ferry, petrol, and accommodation for a single person – were covered by the university. But, to keep costs reasonable, this did mean a shared room (with separate beds, of course), which is something Natalie, to give her credit, took in her stride!

And so Natalie sat on the settee in my living room on a Sunday in the early summer of 2012 as we prepared to get into my Honda and head for the Hull-Zeebrugge overnight ferry. We have both admitted since that we felt quite uncertain at that moment. A friendship we certainly had, but we had not spent seven days together before. Would it work out? I brought some travel-sized boardgames along with me for the evening hours on the ferry. That did work out; Natalie seemed quite genuinely to like boardgames. Would she like being dragged round as we tried to track down some of the more obsolete shrines, which meant asking random strangers and, in one town, resulted in us discovering a one-time chapel which was now a garden shed? Yes, she did; in fact, she relished the task and entered into it fully.

The first night in Belgium gave Natalie something to laugh about for life. In Beauraing, there wasn’t a lot of suitable accommodation, and we were pointed in the direction of a grand chateau on the hill. Clearly, it would be too expensive, we thought, but we asked anyway, and surprisingly, no, it wasn’t. The downside turned out to be the very narrow beds that were provided. In the middle of the night, I fell out of mine. I had no idea that Natalie had woken up as I muttered to myself in annoyance over the incident. She kept quiet, and found the whole episode very funny, but didn’t feel able to tell me for quite some time!

The tour took in the University of Leuven again, where we met a Belgian academic called Tine van Osselaer, who was also researching the Belgian apparitions of the 1930s for a book. We had coffee with her. Tine is from the Flemish (Dutch) speaking community in Belgium and, consequently, speaks several languages. She asked Natalie how many languages she spoke, which caused Natalie some embarrassment, the English once again caught out on that question. But, nevertheless, Natalie and I loved Leuven! It’s a typical small European town with the obligatory expansive marketplace where people sit, drink, and eat outside; there’s a lot of activity, but it all takes place in a friendly and easy-going atmosphere. There are a lot of bicycles. Ripon and York St John College had a partnership with the teacher training college in Leuven in the 1990s, and I know that Richard enjoyed going there. And so did we in 2012. It’s funny to report that Tine has just informed me that her book is out, a mere thirteen years later. The best things are worth waiting for!

I had only booked one accommodation beforehand on the internet, which was the third place where we stayed for the final two nights in our short tour of five nights in Belgium (plus two on the ferry). It was a fairly random choice based on location, but it turned out to be very fortunate, as it had a reasonably-priced Michelin guide restaurant and we had a fantastic meal. Eating and drinking has been another important facet of our relationship, along with boardgames and shrines. There was a wine flight. And so we got quite tiddly there, especially Natalie!

Just as with Germany, I felt there was more research to do, and returned for a second, shorter visit two months later. It seemed only right to invite Natalie again and, of course, she came along. She proved very useful in a small French-speaking town called Ham-sur-Sambre. The visions there in the 1930s were condemned at the very highest levels of the Vatican, which makes them interesting. The first people we asked knew nothing about any shrine. Then Natalie spotted a cemetery. Let’s ask someone who is visiting a grave, she said, they’ll probably be elderly. It seemed a long shot, but in we went. The first man we encountered seemed disinterested in my stuttering French questioning until he suddenly realised that we were English and not Flemish. Then he sparked into life and spoke perfect English. He led us to the rather neglected vision site a kilometre or so out of town and recalled processions to there from the church in which he participated as a child during the 1950s, evidence that the phenomenon had lasted for at least twenty years despite official disapproval.

The second visit to Belgium meant more shrines, more twin rooms, more restaurants, more investigations, more searching for obsolete locations, more memories. On the way back, we did the ‘holiday quiz’ that I had started with Mark and Susanne. Natalie is very good at remembering the colour of curtains! When we look back at those trips to Belgium, it feels as if we were a couple already, despite the fact that becoming an ‘item’ was still the best part of two years away. Our trip was over, but our journey had started. The foundations for a future marriage had been set down. My sixties would be very different from my other decades.