I've just got back from a perfect holiday in the Algarve. Sitting in the bar before dinner every evening I got drawn into those conversations of instant intimacy.

The bloke with the pipe said: "So, you're a parson then? Now what I'd like to know is what goes on at theological college?"

I told him: "Believe me, theology is only a part of it. We had elocution lessons to help us project the voice. Our teacher was a particularly robust woman of a certain age and built like a cross between Mike Tyson and the battleship Illustrious. She used to make us lie down on the floor. Then she would demand to hear our vowels and we would go through the whole repertoire - ah, eh, i, o, u - and if she didn't like what she heard from any particular chap, she would rush across, bestraddle the poor blighter and squeeze his chest with all the vigour of someone stuffing a reluctant turkey.

Also at theological college they taught us to eat and drink. I'm told these days that the clergy don't do any visiting. People say the parson is like God: you never see him through the week and you can't understand him on Sundays.

But when I was a young curate, the fashion was to go visiting from two o'clock until five every afternoon. You weren't expected particularly to talk to people about God or their sins. But there was one golden rule: You must eat and drink everything that's put before you, otherwise parishioners get dreadfully offended.

I suppose that's why some of us are the shape we are. An afternoon of conspicuous consumption might typically include two ham sandwiches, several glasses of home-made wine registering about eleven on the Richter scale, three or four butterfly buns, a large piece of the eldest daughter's wedding cake, biscuits innumerable, a beer or two, gin at the judge's house and whisky at the doctor's.

Then you had to go straight into Evensong with your vicar and the senior curate. Our senior curate had a strange sense of hospitality. He was a voluminous, ungainly man with wild ginger hair. He was also what the psychiatrists call "disorientated for space and time". Many a weekday winter's morning he, the vicar and I would meet in church before it got light to say Matins. You had to be careful not to linger in the vestry because you might find the ginger giant had locked you in. The only remedy was for the vicar to ring the church bells until his wife heard them and came to let us out.

Later, when asked for an explanation, the curate would say that, since it was dark, he thought it was Evensong not Matins and so he'd locked the church for safe-keeping.

Hospitality? That curate had a failsafe way of ruining it. Apparently, he'd been going round the parish on his gentle ministrations and smashing up the furniture.

Worse, my aunt lived in the parish and I called to see her one day. I was sorry to see she had a black eye and her arm in a sling. "It was your colleague, the curate," she said. "He came to see me last week and I asked him if he'd like a glass of wine. Well, I went to the top of the cellar steps to fetch the bottle and he would follow me, you see. You know how he gets too close to you and nods his head? Well, he did it to me and I couldn't back off in time. He nutted me in the eye and I fell backwards down the cellar steps."

So that's what I did on my holidays. Nice to be back.

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