Living in tied #housing

In the CofE if you're paid as a Rev then you will often get your accommodation provided. This can be in the form of a house that the Diocese or Parish own.  Sometimes it is by them making a contribution to the cost of renting somewhere.  

If you've been a home owner before then this is a bit like going back to your younger days at that 1st job or college renting your accommodation. 

With rented accommodation what can be nice is not having to fix, or pay to be fixed, the various things that always seem to need fixing in a house (dripping taps, faulty switches, seen better days shower grouting spring to mind as some of the cheaper things).  

But not having to fix stuff becomes a disadvantage when the landlord takes a long time to fix things as well.  And if the decorating isn't to your taste then you may not be able to convince the Diocese or Parish to redecorate just because you don't like the colour scheme, (returning the decorations to more neutral colours may help your argument as thats the general guidance given on what colour to paint stuff).

The curates house my wife got as part of her tied accommodation is perfectly pleasant.  It is owned by the parish and they are very good at fixing things promptly.  I'm told that the diocese are a lot slower in getting round to fix things on properties they own.  Apparently the trick to getting things fixed quicker by them is as follows.

As in advance as possible from when you are due to move in go round the property with a rep from the diocese property dept. and if you can somebody like an archdeacon.  If you're lucky the property rep will make a list of what needs fixing and then it will get fixed - eventually.

My top tip would be to try and contact the previous curate to find out if there are any particular niggles with the accommodation that they noticed over their 3 or so years as a curate.  

Its also worth finding out whether out whether they did much maintenance on the house.  As a curate's husband you can run into the assumption that all men are good at fixing things. 

In my case I'm not  - so it was useful to make the point that I wasn't a fixer when we first viewed the property with a church warden.   Clarity on expectations helps both sides I think.

Remembering #Names

I'm useless at remembering names.

But as the wife is a curate people seem to sometimes assume that if she knows their name then so will I.

When you're part of a church community it really does help to be able to call people by their first names.  And its far more preferable than "I've forgotten your name" smokescreens like "Hi mate",  "Greetings Friend",  "Wotcha" and soon on.



Over time I've picked up a couple of tips to help me remember names better ...

1) Always try and use the persons name a couple of times early on in your conversation.  For me this seems to help cement their name in my short term memory a bit more.

2) In your minds eye try to associate the person and their name with somebody else you know well.

3) I almost always carry a bit of  paper and pen with me so - as soon as I can after a conversation - I scribble down the name and a couple of key facts from the conversation to help me remember them.

4) Then when I get home I enter their name onto a list with a brief something to help me remember the person.  For me this seems to work as long as every now and then I read through the list and the reminders.

When we moved for my wife's curacy we wee lucky in that the church was having an away weekend in the summer before she started as their curate.  So we managed to get along to the weekend which really helped us learn a few names.  

In addition at the end of the weekend a group photo was taken.  With the churchwardens help my wife was able to write a key underneath the photo of people's names.  A quick glance at the photo and it's key every now and then helped us quickly learn people's names.

In fact this worked so well my top tip to church's welcoming new staff would be to take a group photo of the congregation, add people's names and send that to the new staff member a couple of weeks before they start.

The need for 2 #cars

When we got a newer car (the 2nd we'd owned as a couple) we kept our previous car as something for the girls to learn to drive on.  

As it happens neither of them have so far learnt to drive - and see no need to .. maybe I've made a tactical mistake in terms of the service levels from dad's taxi inc.

So for several years our previous car stood on the drive awaiting its never to be role as a learning car and occasionally having its engine turned over or battery charged. 

Although the learning car plan has not yet worked having a second car did come in most useful once my wife started her curacy.   The old learner car sprung into action as my car whilst the wife got the newer one. Mainly because her need to use a car often seemed to coincide with my taxi duties for our daughters.

But what I did come across when we were looking at the pros and cons of getting the old car going versus buying a slightly used one - or maybe even a new car  - was this  new car loan finance market (new to me at least).  Basically as far as I can make out its a bit like those £40/£50 a month mobile phone deals - you get the latest swishest model - but you pay about 4x the rate you need to  given the data/text/minutes you're actually using - or in the case of the car finance  - the mileage.

Once I'd discovered these car finance deals - which are something to avoid like the plague in my opinion - it suddenly began to explained how come there are so many new cars on the roads. 

I'd always wondered how on earth so many people could afford those £80,000 drug dealer Range Rovers and now I know. They can't.  Its just on the never never and has all the characteristics of the sub-prime mortgage disaster - unsecured loans on unverified incomes.  With new cars sales last year at a record level apparently even the Bank of England is getting concerned at the level of car loan financing and what will happen if the loans don't get paid.  So apparently if it all goes belly up they'll be a lot of 3 year old cars on the secondhand marker in 2 or so years.

Gardening, seasons and knowing its three years

At our previous house I'd done the manual labour in the garden and some weeding (once the other half had shown me which were the weeds and which weren't).  

Planting stuff and pruning were all jobs beyond my expertise and so my wife did those.

As it was our own house I guess we put a bit of effort in as we had in mind we'd be around it for some time.  And we were.

Now we've moved into the curate's house - which is a fantastic perk of the wife's Rev job - we have a much smaller garden.  So gardening duties at the moment are more about doing the minimum to keep it tidy and make it a nice place to sit out in as the weather is better.

In deciding what plants - if any - we buy for the garden I've noticed in myself a tendency to pick those that can be grown in pots - and so can move on with us - as well as focusing on plants that you see results on in a year or less.

As you can tell from the direction of this story - after only a few months of being the curate's husband - what I've already noticed is how the knowledge that we'll probably be moving on in 3 or so years effects how I view things.  I'm not saying that I engage with the local life less enthusiastically.  Its something more subtle than that.  

The nearest feeling I can match it to was when I went to university.  New town, new people, new things to do, new place to call home.  And at uni of course I engaged fully in the student lifestyle.  (Mind you this was in a pre-internet, pre-mobile, pre-always connected  age where you really did feel unconnected from home when you went to Uni.  Contact with home tended to be limited to queuing at the phone box to shovel money as you talked to an anxious Mum and Dad back home)

But in that Uni experience  - at the back of your mind  - you knew that it was a three year gig - a temporary (but important) peculiar island on the trip forward to some unknown destination in your life.

And that is kinda what it feels like it is now for me in the wife's 1st year as a curate.