Where are you from? I was brought up in Freeland, ten miles outside Oxford, from the age of 12, and went to Magdalen College School, so this is my home town. As an undergraduate and then (inter alia) freelance journalist I lived in a succession of bachelor pads around the city, then moved to London in 2006 to get married and start the family. In 2011 we moved to Amsterdam and came back to settle in Oxford last August.
How did you find St Margaret’s? Internet search. We knew the area anyway (my wife was at St Hugh’s) so on our first Sunday here we gave it a try and asked the children if they liked it. This elicited an instant ‘yes’ in unison, and this happens so rarely we reckoned the die was cast.
What do you do here? I’ve just joined the rota for the teenage discussion group, and that will do me for the time being. I was an elder and lay preacher for five years at the English Reformed Church (ERC) in Amsterdam, which is part of the Church of Scotland, so I’m still getting my breath back and refreshing my Anglo-Catholic roots.
What do you like about the church? The ritual and the music which are, of course, inextricable. We had great music at the ERC as well, but we did have to suffer some pretty ghastly and needless modern hymns along with the classics. For me an ‘accessible’ hymn is one with a grand old tune everyone knows, and you can’t honour God with ugliness.
What are you looking forward to over the next few months? Finding a permanent home here, my daughter’s thirteenth birthday, and watching my son start cricket in earnest (a bit of indoor tip-and-run at the Amsterdam Cricket Club really doesn’t count).
What three words would you use to describe your faith? Living God’s love. I believe we have to try to remember, every minute of every day, through prayer and contemplation and referring back in the face of every event, that God’s love made us and sustains us and gives us the life of the body and the spirit. If we forget that we might as well be robots, living without circumspection or moral sense.
Tell us something most people would never guess about you… As a sergeant in the school cadet force I instructed in drill and weapons training.