I AM trying to be a priest; but I haven't time. When I was appointed vicar of my first parish in 1977, the mornings were clear for study, the afternoons for visiting and the evenings for socialising, family and leisure. There were occasional parish meetings, but these were regarded as a necessary evil and we soon got them over and done with, then off to the village pub. The diocesan annual returns were on one side of A4: all I had to do was list how many I'd christened, married and buried, how many people were on the electoral roll and how many came to church at Christmas and Easter. The job of filling in this return could easily be managed over morning coffee. Nowadays, the annual returns are a foot thick and a bundle of perfidious obscurity, hedged about with health and safety and absurd questions about light bulbs, and serious inquiries as to what the PCC is doing to reduce our carbon footprint all because the Church has taken up the pagan fantasy of global warming. I think the returns are devised in some Kafkaesque archidiaconal madhouse and calculated to be impossible to complete even over the whole year. They are just the latest example of the Church following secular fashion, in particular, to ape the most jargon-ridden claptrap of management-speak.