On Saturday night I got drunk with a witch and a vicar. If this were a proper Guardian story, the witch would have been male, and the vicar a woman. But in real life it was the other way round. After all the cheap jokes and scurrilous gossip were exhausted we bitched about religion. "Witches make the best church ladies," said the vicar, comfortably. Dating a witch is only the latest raid in his long war against what he calls "English Heritage Christianity".
He's still sometimes nostalgic for his life as a database programmer: with a program his only limits were his own cleverness, the hardware and his imagination. You could make things in software far more easily than with people. Worse yet, it's easy to tell when a program is broken and when it's working. But in the Church of England today there is no one who can say with confidence just how things ought to work – no one, at least, who isn't clearly wrong.
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