John Bishop, Ben Fogle, Miles Teller, Seasick Steve and Melanie C

From Rev’d Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

“How do you manage to fit in everything you do?’, asked someone who had been trying to track me down the other day. “By neglecting important things and disappointing people,” is the truthful reply; but like most half-time clergy who have other jobs outside the church, I find it tricky.

Jesus warned us of the dangers of being a servant of two masters, but that’s not the problem that presses most insistently. It’s being in the right place at the right time wearing the right things and holding the right bit of paper. I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to improvise a dog collar out of a squeezy bottle, or found myself weirdly overdressed in a cassock doing ‘Wannabe’ at a karaoke.

No longer. I am now empowered with an on-line diary. A generous friend set it up, and my existence is no longer scribbled down on bits of paper lost in the litter and dog-hair of life, but set out smartly, in rainbow colours, organised by hour, day, week, month and year, accessible from my laptop and my mobile, accessible also to my agent, to him indoors, to Janet who does the parish magazine, and for all I know a pimply fifteen year old hacker in a back bedroom in Leeds…

…and with it the surprising, liberating feeling that comes from handing over your disorganised life to someone, or something, else. Liberating because it frees me first from the illusion that I am master of my destiny; second from the vague but troubling anxiety that I have double booked Grafton Underwood Women’s Institute and Newsnight; and third – and best – because it makes it easier to do nothing guiltlessly; to look out of the window, to take the dog for a walk, to catch again the wind in the trees, and the stars at night, and the turn of the seasons, the deep rhythms of the everyday miracle of being alive.