Two people have told me in as many days that they wish they had made more of their youth. They wish they had not squandered opportunities that came their way to finish this course, or take up that hobby. Telling them that squandering opportunities is what young people do didn’t seem to help. I wish that I’d taken up rowing more seriously when I was at Cambridge. I very nearly did, but it was fear that stopped me. Fear of jumping into the unknown, fear of stepping into a milieu populated by those who’d rowed at school and who all spoke with posher accents than my flat-vowelled Cumbrian voice. Cowardice, ambivalence, fear of being ridiculed.

We are too hard on ourselves. We have reasons for doing, or not doing, what we do, or don’t do. Our choices may reflect disordered thoughts, faulty logic, or fear, but they are nevertheless entirely understandable given our circumstances and the forces that have shaped us.

Not long ago I was the invited speaker at a medical school reunion: people I’d taught when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, barely ten years older than them. At the time of the reunion, they were in their mid-40s and well-established in their careers, on astronomical salaries, living in gaffs with tennis courts and swimming pools. It’s always the ‘successful’ ones that go to reunions. Can’t think why. I started my speech by commiserating with them that they were just about to find that they were at a difficult time of life: all has gone well so far, in the main, but trouble will soon start as kids hit adolescence, as relationships start to creak and as confidence begins to wane. Oh, how confidence wanes.

And how would you describe yourself?

I was at a job interview recently at which someone asked me how I would describe myself. That rather took the wind out of my sails. (Interviews, by the way, get much harder as one ages. You would think the opposite would be the case, but not for me.) It’s difficult to answer because I need so many qualifying clauses and verbal explanatory brackets, and a few seconds were all I had. A fatuous question, of course, but interviewers are full of fatuous questions. Anyway, the question set me thinking.

The first thing I remember wanting to be, and howling at the top of the stairs because I wasn’t, was a boy singing on the TV. Then I ‘wanted’ to be a doctor—but that was to please my parents, especially my mother. Then I wanted to be a cathedral organist. That lasted a long time—indeed, it’s still there inside me: in my darker moments I’m still a failed cathedral organist. Next, I wanted to go to Cambridge (managed that one, God only knows how, since my A level results were spectacularly mediocre: an E in biology, I ask you). I’m conscious that I never lived up to parental expectations: they saw me as a wealthy GP living in a big house on Beacon Edge in Penrith, or as a medical consultant with rooms in, say, Portland Square, Carlisle. All I managed was a second rate academic with a poky office in Nottingham medical school. I certainly was a teacher, and a good one too in the sense that I provoked people to think. Since I taught them, I moved on to a good job in Dublin by charming the selection panel, and then managed to write two textbooks, neither of which sells terribly well, for they are too gloriously idiosyncratic to appeal to those responsible for recommending them to students. And now I am a clerk in holy orders in the Irish midlands.

Some people look at this story and say: ‘he likes getting qualifications, he must have an inferiority complex’. Others say: ‘he likes dressing up and lording it over others’, and hint at some dark secret. Some think ‘he’s restless and can’t settle at anything.’ Yet others say ‘he’s a dilettante’ (not a compliment). Well, all I can say is: guilty as charged on all counts (except for the dark secret, of course, depending on what you call dark). My life has been rich, and it ain’t over yet.

At the interview, I mumbled something about other people seeing me as gifted, but that I didn’t see it that way, for I am just me. I have all these fears and insecurities, and lots more. I am just me, like all humans, wonderfully and deeply flawed. At the risk of sounding complacent, I’ve stopped worrying about lost opportunities, and now wish only to make the best of what comes my way. Perhaps that’s the product of being 62 rather than 42. I’ve stopped worrying about my ‘kids’ as much as I used to: when I was their age, I managed without parents worrying about me, because they were both dead.

It’s Holy Week. One of the risks of being churchy in Holy Week (and there are many) is that we will feel, or be made to feel, guilty about the fact that we betray like Judas, we deny like Peter, we squirm like Pilate, we are cruel like Herod, we are economical with the actualité like Pharisees, we sometimes follow the mob. In other words, we are human. I have a Judas, a Peter, a Pilate, a Herod, a Pharisee, a mob, living inside me. They are part of me. I hear the passion stories no longer as guilt-inducing because I’m not perfect, but as comforting (that is strength giving) because I will never be perfect and I can stop trying. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to stop being human. If I say hello to all the different parts of me—the Judas, the Peter, the Pilate, the Herod, the Pharisee, the mob—and give them a hug and look them in the face, then divine light can love the hell out of them, out of me, and out of you if you do likewise. There is nothing to fear, and everything to gain.

Whatever happens, there is something bigger than me, and you, and we are not in control. Despite this the world keeps on turning and the sun keeps on shining. A happy Holy Week to you all.

As choirmaster at St Ann’s Dublin, now many years ago, I inherited a set up that was still very much in thrall to the choirmaster who died about a decade before. Many Irish church musicians have reason to be grateful to what he taught them. He’d been in post so long that I suspect the men of the choir, who had grown up with him, were still mourning his passing. I arrived on the scene and it was soon made apparent to me that I would never measure up to his memory. My feet were in my shoes and not his, so I just about withstood the onslaught. Since his death there had been a succession of choir directors, none of whom had stayed more than a couple of years, and pretty quickly I understood why—there comes a time when you realize that bashing your head against a brick wall is unproductive. A particularly fond memory was hearing that as the men were queuing up to enter the church, they were kept waiting by someone or something, and were muttering about how long they’d been there. My 16 year-old son, irreverent and fearless, who had been drafted in to lend some accuracy and quality to an otherwise rather wet-dishcloth-like tenor line, could take this no longer and said, very loud, ‘and I’ve been here since 1654’. I suppose you had to be there.

Anyway, the point I’m getting round to is that here I’m much more aware of ‘the way it used to be’ than ever I was in England. This is surprising in a way, for the culture in which I grew up was almost Wahabbi – rural, isolated, conservative, women largely confined to kitchens and bedrooms. In church terms, while women make up the bulk of the congregation, and do most of the work, in some parishes and church institutions it’s all but impossible to get people to vote for them. I refer you to the blog of a neighbouring Rector who is much more trenchant about this than I am.

It’s a human characteristic to hark back to glory days that never existed, but some people seem very good at it. Perhaps it’s because in the old days the tribes were more clearly defined, and comfort was to be had within the fences they provided. The trouble is that the fences are pretty scrappy now: the trumpet blast of increasing transparency and mobility has brought down the walls of Jericho. And a good thing too, for such conservatism, whatever its benefits, stifles creativity and imagination. It can even be dangerous when its adherents refuse to accept that what was appropriate years ago may, because of legislation and changing standards of good practice, be inappropriate now.

To finish the story about St Ann’s, I quickly came to see that the choir of men and boys had had its day. Recruitment of boys was a mug’s game, what with changing family expectations and the move of schools and people from the city centre. Girls were introduced. Mutter mutter grumble grumble. Even that was not sustainable, so a semi-professional group was employed and the Vicar retired the men. I think, on the whole, they were relieved. There comes a time when enough is enough and we grudgingly have to accept that a decent burial is the right thing. In Jesus’s words loosely paraphrased, there’s no point flogging a dead horse*: move on, there’s work to be done.

* though quite a lot have been flogged – as beef.

West Kensington

Back in 1988, when I’d recently arrived from Nottingham to work in Dublin, an intellectual asked me why I’d come to Ireland to take a job that could have been filled by an Irishman. This raised questions of Irishness, charity, welcome, and his cerebral stenosis. And my sanity. Back then things were not so good economically as they became a decade later, so maybe the inquisitor was mindful of inherited notions of poverty that, if you believe what you hear, only Ireland has suffered. Self-pity is a wondrous thing. At that time we lived in a money-pit in Co Wicklow, and I worked in Dublin with, amongst others, inhabitants of West-Kensington-by-the-Liffey, whose knowledge of poverty, I can only assume, must have been truly profound. Once these people established that I was related to nobody that mattered and nobody they knew, I became invisible. This allowed me space to observe. And observe I did. Fortunately, I found good friends who had a surer grasp of Dublin’s latitude and longitude.

I come from part of England that has been trampled afoot by conquistadores from Scandinavia, Rome, Scotland, Normandy, Scotland (again and again) and Westminster. And now Brussels. The BBC thinks it’s part of the same region as Liverpool and Manchester. Other institutions regard it as part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. People assume that my accent comes from Yorkshire. They are all wrong. The churches of the region are dedicated to people like Oswald, Ninian, Kentigern (Mungo), Hilda, Columba and—wait for it—Patrick (how that must sting!). Yet my worthy assailant felt that I was an unwelcome interloper.

I’ve been confronted by a similar question recently from someone who resents eastern Europeans taking Irish jobs. His family depended years ago on one of them finding work in London. Geneticists tell us that there is no such thing as pure Irishness, or pure Celticness, or pure anything. The Celts came from way over east. Aran islanders, I’m told, have genes from Cromwellian soldiers. This must be truly shocking. At a recent Remembrance Sunday political speech, I heard about the sufferings in the two world wars of the French, Germans, Belgians, and Irish, but only of oppression by ‘our near neighbour’. I heard nothing about the sufferings of the Russians who suffered more than the rest put together, but that’s for another day maybe. The faux-Irishness that has infected this culture seems to have grown up really as an anything-but-Englishness.

It’s undoubtedly difficult for outsiders to settle in these parts. Everyone is related to everyone else. Nobody will tell it as it is for fear of offending neighbours and relations. Valley of the squinting windows. This is all the more reason why outsiders are needed—to point out what needs to be pointed out, because locals won’t. Yesterday we heard that Jesus was hounded out for daring to tell his folks that they were getting no special favours from him just because they were his kinsmen. Scriptural readings emphasized that we are all in this together. Plus ça change …