All roads lead to Rome

Tempus fugit, as my old tutor used to say, as he passed me another glass of excellent sherry, in his cosy sitting room, as we sat by the fireside watching the last of the Autumn leaves struggling downwards to the pavement, and attempting to parse some particularly fiendish bits of Virgil about the Danes and their longships. My apologies for my prolonged absence, and it will no doubt take us a little while to get up to speed, but I will start more or less where we left off, with Charlie and Hetty frolicking in the glebe. As I contemplated the serendipitous circumstances of having achieved Robert Browning's poetic wish to be in England in April,I noticed Mrs McElhone waving frantically from the doorstep, holding the phone in one hand and a wooden spoon, (liberally coated in cake mix) in the other. I made for the phone, and the spaniels, less reluctantly, for the cake spoon, and little did I know then that the simple pleasures of a country co-adjutor bishop were to be suspended, as I heard the crackly tones of a long distance call summoning me to Rome.