In A Field Guide to the English Clergy (2018), the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie offered an amusing and informative survey of some of the more eccentric priests and prelates to have served the Church of England over the years. In Touching Cloth, he focuses on a contemporary eccentric: himself.
On New Year’s Eve he was taken for a drug dealer, and on Holy Saturday for a blind man
The book is an account of a year in his life as a young curate at the Church of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Liverpool. It is loosely structured around the major church festivals, while at the same time making a case for some of the lesser known ones, such as Epiphany. Above all, it is a rich store of anecdotes, both sacred and profane.
Butler-Gallie is careful not to reveal too much personal information. He writes that he is the eldest of five children; his mother is a doctor, his father was an army officer whose forebears fought at Waterloo, and his grandmother was a messy eater.
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