It’s enough to drive you bonkers... (From The Northern Echo)

It’s enough to drive you bonkers...

10:49am Tuesday 16th March 2010 in

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IF I could put a caption to the events of this past week it would be: “Welcome to the asylum”.

The routine image of the people who operate in the City of London is of hard-headed types: “Sell the widows and orphans and buy South American zinc.” This may be true of the money men, but the politicos are a different breed.

How about this for a ripe old piece of insanity?

The Square Mile is well-populated with plane trees. They add a welcome touch of greenery to the concrete and glass jungle, but they grow very tall and, when they overhang buildings, this can be catastrophic.

Our church, for instance, was built in 1450 and is a magnificent Grade-I listed building – irreplaceable. On one side, the plane trees rise far above it from where they drop their leaves, block the roof gutters and cause torrents of captured rainwater to pour down the interior walls destroying the ancient fabric.

Well, that’s easy: just get the tree man in to do a bit of light pollarding. Not on your life.

The Chief Tree Hugger and Metropolitan Sentimentalist in the Corporation of London told me that if I touched the trees I would be in serious trouble with the authorities. I protested that I love trees. I had been a country parson and my Yorkshire garden was full of them.

I told him: “Look, I don’t want carnage – no question of cutting them down mercilessly.

Just crop them back a little, please, so they don’t overhang the church.”

The corporation’s Commissar for the Environment regarded my modest proposal as if I had suggested mass murder. That was when I made my second big mistake. I ventured that it was a strange sort of concern for the environment which was indifferent to the historic fabric of an ancient church for the sake of a few feet of topmost trees.

There was absolutely no way I could convince the authorities that my proposal was just to prevent serious damage to one of the finest churches in the City – a building that has given pleasure to millions over the centuries and still does. So obviously evil was my suggestion that you’d think I’d asked the Corporation to pull down St Paul’s Cathedral.

Then we had the archdeacon’s triennial visitation. An archdeacon is a senior clergyman who has responsibility for the fabric and good order of all the churches in his area. Before each visitation, the archdeacon requires parishes to return articles of enquiry.

In my first parish in Yorkshire, these articles took the form of one side of paper on which the vicar had to say how many he had christened, married and buried over the year; how many attended church at Christmas and Easter; and how many were on the parish electoral roll. It took five minutes to fill in.

Now, it’s 50 pages with arcane sections about Criminal Records Bureau checks, carbon footprint and audit this and audit that.

So many obscure questions you’d think it was designed so as to be impossible to fill in.

That was when I made my third big mistake.

I mentioned the trees. The archdeacon’s secretary told me: “Oh, the Bishop of London has had the same problem. When he asked to trim a tree in his garden that was obscuring his window and dropping damaging leaves, the man from the corporation accused him of ‘arboricide’ – tree-murder.”

From box-tickers, jobsworths and sentimental bureaucratic tree-huggers, Good Lord deliver us.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.