This picture comes with a poem attached
I was at a retreat for members of the Deanery clergy, sometime in the early '80s. One afternoon I went for a walk on the hills above the retreat house (which was later sold to the footballer Phil Neville) and took my camera with me. It was lovely weather when I started out- as you can see- and then a storm blew up and I got very wet. It's no joke being caught out on the hills in bad weather. Especially if you're lost- as I was. You could get yourself killed.
Anyway the heart of the experience is in the poem,
CLERGY CONFERENCE A soft-voiced bishop was speaking to us In the music room. It was stuffed with vicars Mostly in mufti. A marble Venus Standing in roses up to her hips Gazed in at us and a little stream, Tipped from the hill, went clattering past Down a stepped cascade. When the session ended I found a path. There were purple shadows On ochre fields. There were bones of sheep In the tough old grass and a barn or two With their roofs knocked off. When the storm grew over I hadn't even a coat to keep off The beating it gave me. I came back down With shoes full of water. I'd missed the session On urban mission. A god as loving And hard to pin down as the city council Had not been much to my taste in the hills. It's not that the rainstorm broke my faith; That took much longer. It's only that after The conference I could remember nothing The bishop had said. I had only the droning Mellifluous tone of his voice to counter The shout of the cascade under the window, The roar of the rain and, after it stopped, The slap-happy sound of a hillside, drinking. | 
