When the young clergyman Fergus Butler-Gallie was asked, by the curious and the insolent, “What made you become a priest?” – with a variety of different emphases depending on the interlocutor – his stock answer was to reply: “Well, I heard that black was slimming.” Yet, as he subsequently reveals in this diary-cum-memoir, his true answer, shruggingly expressed, was: “Death, I suppose.”
It is this dichotomy between the sacred and profane – or to be more exact, tragedy and farce – that permeates Butler-Gallie’s account of contemporary life in the Church of England. After two accomplished volumes of humorous ecclesiastical history, including 2018’s excellent A Field Guide to the English Clergy, he now turns his attention to himself and proves a witty and adept guide to the foibles of the well-intentioned and all too human figures who follow holy orders. He comes from a military family, and when he tells his father that he is considering becoming a clergyman, the patriarch’s response, delivered with “a well-worn hereditary hangdog look”, is: “In many ways it’s not so different from the army. The outfit’s stupid and the pay’s crap.”
