People power

Sir: Quentin Letts’s article (‘Plastic parsons’, 22 August) underlines the dire state of the Church of England today. How can the Church grow when its leaders are more and more removed from its flock?

The problem is in the way the Church is managed. When confronted with increasing costs and lower revenue, dioceses cut the number of vicars and force parishes to merge to form benefices of ten or more parishes, each overseen by one or two salaried priests.

Instead, perhaps we lay members of parishes should push back. Every diocese has many ordained clergy among its ranks. Each diocese should be required to allocate these ordained clergy to parish churches where they can continue to perform their diocesan duties as well as being a parish vicar. The administrative functions of dioceses should be merged, releasing significant cost savings in both people and buildings. It goes without saying that reparation funds would be off the table.

Perhaps then we might avoid the fate that Letts highlights, for a few more years anyway.

Julian Knott
Rolvenden, Kent

Have faith

Sir: Quentin Letts’s piece makes very depressing reading, especially so because he hits the bull’s-eye so effectively. Three current realities are of special note: first, the type of new ‘oversight’ completely undermines the values and practices of the ordinal (the priest’s job description); second, agendas have replaced faith as the sine qua non for ordination and ‘preferment’; and, third, an inflated and suicidally inefficient Anglican hierarchy refuses to listen to the Save the Parish ‘ginger group’ of lay professionals and clerics with proven track records in all aspects of running and growing large institutions. And yet… where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The Revd R.C. Paget
Marcham, Oxon

Bond rating

Sir: I do not agree with Madeline Grant that there is no room for a period series of James Bond films (‘Bond’s identity crisis mirrors Britain’s’, 22 August). Fleming was a very modern writer, but it’s difficult to see where Bond can go after TV’s excellent The Agency, where Michael Fassbender effectively plays Bond, crossed with the Le Carré world. Most of the original books have never been filmed properly. There is no secret rocket pad volcano in Fleming’s You Only Live Twice; instead, there is the marvellously sinister image of Blofeld clomping around his poison garden in medieval Samurai armour, encouraging Japanese pilgrims to commit suicide. To my mind, the most exciting Bond book is Moonraker, which is almost entirely set near Dover – although I admit it would be difficult for the big screen to get across the excitement of its pivotal game of bridge.

Tim Adler
London E2

Sweet revenge

Sir: Lord Moore enquires (Notes, 22 August) whether other readers have received syrupy invitations to address members of book clubs via Zoom.

I have received two such invitations by email in the past month. The first informed me that ‘your cozy debut novel requires infrastructure’. As soon as I noted the spelling of ‘cozy’ I deleted it.

The second was from a lady who appeared to represent an organisation called ‘The Chapter Map’, clearly also transatlantic and of a similar nature to the book club that approached Lord Moore. I decided that this was a gift horse that required a full dental check and forwarded the email to the Society of Authors, which sent me a standard warning note about fraudulent publicity offers.

I take encouragement from the fact that, firstly, someone in the US appears to have at least glanced at one of my books, and secondly that they think my work might be worth exploiting.

D.M. Quillman
Hemel Hempstead, Herts

Wild supposition

Sir: Charles Moore is wrong to conflate wild swimming and wild camping (Notes, 22 August). Wild swimming is simply bathing in lakes, rivers or the sea, something which people have done for time immemorial, repackaged as something altogether new and radical. There is no connotation of doing it in places one is not meant to be. Now swimming in a sewage works or a ball pit: that would be genuinely wild.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce
Blairgowrie, Perthshire

Please advise

Sir: Mary’s solutions in last week’s issue (Dear Mary, 22 August) were at once ingenious (on repulsive nose-blowing), off-the-wall (on reducing a neighbour’s wildfire risk) and surprisingly racy (on enticing a potential partner). It would be interesting to learn whether any of them achieved the desired results.

Jeff Green
Bath

Luncheon voucher

Sir: Harry Mount deplores the current state of the dinner party (‘Whine and dine’, 22 August). I largely agree. Much better is the lunch party, which can also vary in character depending on the time of year.

Lunch also allows for something that has no equivalent at the dinner party – sobremesa, the languid period spent relaxing and talking when the meal is over. I highly recommend the bible of lunch, Keith Waterhouse’s The Theory and Practice of Lunch.

Rick Sareen
London NW11

The berry on the cake

Sir: As a fellow mulberry-picking addict, can I recommend to Freddie Heffer the mulberries at the National Trust property the Vyne, where my daughters and I have spent happy summers foraging (‘Notes on… mulberries’, 22 August). Recently, I was aghast to discover that my father-in-law, an Old Hamptonian, could not remember the prominent mulberry tree that has stood in the cloisters of the school for more than 80 years – my fear is that picking was not actively encouraged. I commend the National Trust on its foraging policy: they ‘welcome sustainable picking’ and note its role in helping us to ‘appreciate nature’.

Catherine Finniear
Guildford, Surrey

Hairy decision

Sir: Nigel Jones is mistaken in saying that Prince Albert wore a beard (‘Notes on… shaving’, 15 August). He preferred a clean-shaven look with a small moustache. His fellow European heirs and princes did, though, wear full heavy beards as symbols of marital dominance and manly authority. Unusually, the Austrian Archduke Maximilian favoured a forked beard, which, when emperor of Mexico, he refused to cut off to disguise himself to avoid capture, saying it would destroy his dignity. He wore it at his execution.

Malcolm Watson
Ryde, Isle of Wight

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