From Croft Castle to the Polite Vicar

I have just returned from a very enjoyable and successful few days promoting and selling my two books,  Four Centuries at The Lion Hotel, Shrewsbury and God’s Secret Listener.

Over the weekend we went to Hereford stopping off to see the impressive Croft Castle and its ancient church, pictured below, which is a lavish country mansion that began life as a Norman stronghold on the border of Wales.

On Sunday morning I went to preach at St John’s Methodist Church at the invitation of the Rev Dave Meachem. I hadn’t seen him for more than 40 years when we both went to the large and highly-successful Tunstall Methodist Youth Group, but I bumped into him by chance in Hereford Cathedral last autumn and he invited me down to speak.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people come up to talk to me after a service to say that while they were on holiday in Corfu in the 1980s they looked across the sea to the forbidding and dark landscape of that closed county and its large penetrating searchlights. Again many Hereford people were fascinated to find out more about Albania.

In the evening it was on to Newcastle Congregational Church to meet an old friend and journalist colleague, the Rev Ian Gregory.

Ian, who was a part-time church minister and part-time journalist, is the only ordained person I know who has had a pub named after him – The Polite Vicar in Basford, Newcastle-under-Lyme (pictured below).

He had founded the Polite Society in 1986 encouraging politeness in society and in particular in sport. It made national headlines turning him into a well-known figure.

I was a panellist on the inter-church Faith Faces Reality monthly discussion joining Joel Moors, Radio Stoke’s News Editor, and Jackie Whittaker, ex-Sentinel journalist and journalism lecturer at Staffordshire University, to discuss the media. It was a lively evening and a good audience asking many probing questions.

On Monday lunchtime it was off to Stone Golf Club to talk to the town’s Probus Club against the backdrop of the ninth green. It was again a fine occasion meeting up with some old friends over an excellent braised steak lunch before talking about Albania and The Lion Hotel and selling more copies of both books.

Tomorrow night it is off to a fellowship in Hartshill in the Potteries to talk about Albania.