About Ian
Pointless champion Revd Ian Fellows has been the vicar at St Andrew's since 2007. He likes Dr Who.

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I spent Thursday morning talking to different classes at Bowker Vale Primary School about the parable of the good Samaritan (note the power of language - nowadays Samaritans are good in this country, and it's all on the strength of one story told by one man 2000 years ago.  Jesus reverses the meaning of the word!).

Part of it was, of course, asking the children "Who is your neighbour?" - which we reached via the questions of exactly whom they would like to next to... and whom they wouldn't.

Ideal neighbours included a good chef (mine), Thomas Mannix, Stephen Gerrard (despite my ban on footballers), and lots of friends and relatives.  Oh, and from one lad who then blushed to the roots of his blond hair, Hannah Montana.

Neighbours from hell included the devil (you'd be living at number 668, the neighbour of the beast), Thomas Mannix's cousin James, and boys generally.

"You mean you'd live in a street full of girls?" I asked the young lady who'd presented this possibility.  She nodded excitedly and grinned, enthralled at the possibility of an all-female Utopia without those boys who play kiss-chase with you but don't quite know what to do when they catch you.

"But... what if you couldn't get the lid off a jar of marmalade?" I asked.  "Who'd do it?"

Ooh, naughty.

And the next day, there I was in my kitchen, banging the marmalade jar on the counter and looking fit to burst a bloodvessel as I strained with a tea-towel and wished there was a girl somewhere to twist the lid off for me.

Some people call this karma.  But it's nothing so impersonal.  It's a God with a great big sense of humour.  Not so much teaching me a lesson (I was joking at school and everybody knew it) as reminding me that he's there in the classroom and the kitchen, and that the Cross gives him the privilege of pulling jokes like that every now and again.

In which case, Thomas Mannix (who will hit this website if he googles his own name) will soon be living next door to his cousin James.