Coming attraction

CANON Neville Vine, Vicar of St Andrew, Auckland, is something of a sailor, too. It helps explain why he is walking so gingerly, like a man whose sea legs have turned to jelly.

A week or so earlier, pottering about on his yacht in Hartlepool marina, Canon Vine had tripped and fallen atop the main mast, which by great misfortune lay on the deck.

Several cracked ribs resulted.

So what does a priest say at such a moment? “You can say that I blessed the name of the Lord,” says Canon Vine, and supposes that doctor’s orders to sit still as much as possible may at least have come at a good time of the year.

“I’ve had lots of time to reflect,” he says, and reflects that worse things will happen at – well, worse things will happen, anyway.

Last Sunday was both St Andrew’s Day and the first of Advent, the season of forthcoming attractions. The feel of frost and of festivity fills the air simultaneously, the church like a perfect Christmas card.

The frost is so thick, indeed, that even at 9.15am it has to be scraped from the bus timetable, like the rime from the inside window of Scrooge’s counting house, in order to ascertain when it might be possible to get home again.

Liturgically, Advent Sunday takes precedence, St Andrew’s Day ecclesiastically postponed and to be celebrated 24 hours later with a parish party in a Bishop Auckland pub. The cheery have two bites at the cherry.

Completed in 1274, St Andrew’s – known locally as South Church – is a glorious place on a hilltop, one of hundreds of English churches dedicated to the apostle brother of St Peter, his fellow fisherman.

He may be yet more revered in Scotland. The national patronage, it’s said, is because Rule – an “obscure”

Scottish saint, known sometimes as Regulas – journeyed with Andrew’s relics until told by an angel to stop at a place in Fifeshire, where he built a church. It later became known as St Andrew’s, a place of pilgrimage for Christians and golfers alike.

Andrew’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Saints supposes that the legend survives in several irreconcilable versions – “some of which posit angelic intervention”.

The entry for Rule merely supposes the stories “not entirely consistent”, and well it might.

In Andrew’s entry, the Oxford account supposes the journey to have made in the eighth Century. In the Rule entry it was in the fourth Century.

These scholars, alas, are the lords of mis-Rule.

THE welcome is as warm as the day is cold, save for the considerable problem of St Andrew’s double doors.

We’ve mentioned them before, much smaller openings – sort of cat flaps – set within the church’s great main door and about as easy to pass through as the biblical rich man and the eye of a needle. The SAS, indeed, might like to consider the doors of St Andrew’s as the last-laugh lap of an assault course.

The arrangement’s to keep the heat in, of course. Maintenance costs on the venerable building are constantly huge, the latest a £3,000 bill to repair the south upper parapet of the nave. “We have to try very hard to keep on top of it all the time,” says Canon Vine.

Among the 100-or-so congregation is 84-year-old former Grand National winning racehorse trainer Denys Smith, who lives – and trained – nearby.

Red Alligator, the pub named after his best-remembered horse, is next door to the church.

Denys, looking good for a canny few furlongs yet, sits in a pew marked “Bell ringers”. None may better know the ropes.

In the row in front is Derek Priestman, 77, chairman for the past 11 years of the North-East region of the Sports Aid Foundation. “This church is just part of my life,” he says.

Though Brian Varley, the organist, sounds terrific, there is sadly no choir. We sing good old Advent hymns like O Come, O Come Emmanuel and Lo He Comes with spirit, even so.

Nor are there many children, though a “Fresh expressions” group attracts 25 youngsters each week to St Anne’s school and monthly to a family service. The sermon’s preached by Alan Barrasford, what the Church of England calls a lay reader and whom previously we’d heard at St Anne’s, the sister church in Bishop Auckland market place.

“Unusually for a journalist, you listened,”

he says, generously.

This one’s Advent-related, the analogy about a teacher who leaves her class for a few minutes, tells them to behave and discovers that all hell’s been let loose as soon as her back’s turned.

“God has left each one of us in charge of the classroom,” says Alan, and among the other familiar faces is Tony Howells, retired head of King James I school in Bishop, the column’s alma mater. It probably sounds familiar to both of us.

At the end, Sophie Carr carefully lights the first of the four candles on the Advent wreath by the font. Coffee and conversation ensue.

Canon Vine talks – enthusiastically, if a little breathlessly – of the 15 who regularly attend the Monday evening study group, of the teams of pastoral visitors, of the forthcoming Alpha course. “Certainly we’re in good spirits, we’re doing quite well together,” he says.

The winter sun now doing its Sunday best, it has been a thoroughly enjoyable morning back at St Andrew’s – like the poor Vicar’s ribcage, everything it’s cracked up to be.