Do you have children?

Yes, three.

In descending order of age, they are

alice_g
manfalling
and Joe

Oh you're too kind ;)

Are you married/partnered?

Yes indeed. I've been married for 13 years to craftyailz

Have you always lived in Manchester? If not, where else has been your home?

I was born in London and grew up in Croydon- which is now more or less a London suburb but was then a town with its own identity. When I was nine or ten we moved to a village called Hadlow in Kent. If you want to look it up on the map it's about four miles east of a town called Tonbridge.

I went at boarding school at Lancing- near Brighton on the South Coast- and to University at Canterbury. I then spent three years in Cambridge.

I moved to the Manchester area in 1976 and have lived in Oldham- a small town to the east of the city- since 1983 and in this house since 1986.

Why did you become an Anglican priest? Was it a long-term goal? Were your sermons superb? Controversial? Did you keep them?

It wasn't a long-term goal. At the time I made the decision I wasn't even a churchgoer.

I was always a loner, always unworldly. For a while there it seemed like the perfect profession for someone of my temperament.

I wasn't a great preacher. My sermons were too literary, too "well written". I didn't have the common touch. The one thing I did have (and which a lot of Anglican preachers lack) is voice projection.

I wasn't terribly brave. Towards the end I was sliding towards Eckhart and Jung and talking about "taking leave of God for the sake of God." I don't suppose most people understood what the hell I was talking about.

I haven't kept any sermons. I've always been a great one for bonfires.

I understand (I think) about the need to take leave of God for the sake of God.

(And thanks for the other interesting answers.)

While I still have the greatest joy singing second soprano in the choir, I left behind the Prayer Book long ago, searching out something, and learning along the way that no one knows anything, really, that mostly we converse about our religious lives in shorthand that shuts out real thought, and that no one can help sort things out, because we're on our own.) When I was in my forties I discovered string theory and Eckhart at about the same time. It was an amazing juxtaposition, I thought, and it thrilled me very much:

Eckhart says, "Heaven is pure, touching neither time nor space. Corporeal things have no place in it. It is not inside of time; its orbit is compassed with speed beyond belief. The course of heaven is outside time—and yet time comes from its movements. Nothing hinders the soul's knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments, whereas God is one! And therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know God above time and outside of space...."

According to author Michael Kaku, (Hyperspace) current theories, backed up by mathematics, are that once (before the beginning) the universe consisted of ten dimensions. Then, because the ten-dimensional universe was unstable, it fragmented. Six of the ten dimensions compressed, and, simultaneously, four rapidly expanded. These four are our known universe. The other six are, mathematicians say, compressed into a tiny ball, too small for us to see. Here is the mystery, then: What caused the Big Bang is increasingly being seen as this collapse of the ten-dimensional unstable universe into two fragments.

So, I concluded with great excitement (having read Eckhart and Kaku together and forced the fit) that God is the ten-dimensional universe. And God made us—that is, made the four-dimensional universe out of Himself; that the great barrier for us is the speed of light: it is the mystery. I wondered if, when we die, we go back most naturally (as Eckhart would say, without being corporeal) to the speed of light—back to God, back to the ten-dimensional realm we cannot by our nature as humans experience.

--That was in my forties. The older I get, the less forced juxtapostioning I allow myself.

But I still wonder if I came close to something...

Darn, I never get to tell anybody about this! Thanks for listening, if you got this far down the page!

I've had similar thoughts. I went through a phase where I was very keen to yoke metaphysics and quantum mechanics.

These days I'm content to accept that there's a Mystery and leave it at that. In the end the "philosophy" (not the right word but I can't think of a better) that means most to me is Zen.

Two Zen masters met in a rice field. Their disciples crowded round to hear the exchange.

ZM1: Lovely weather we're having.

ZM2: Yes, but it could rain by this afternoon.