Crisis? Which crisis?
Ruth Gledhill weblog
Tuesday, 04 July 2006

When I started out in journalism, "crisis" was one of the overused nouns, some would say cliches, that we students at the London College of Printing were instructed to under use. Or not use at all. But the only one of my tutors who had worked on the staff of a national paper had only worked for the Guardian, and that was subbing not reporting, and he is now living in France. (Winford Hicks, in case anybody recalls him.) It's a bit like TS Eliot says, '"That was in another country, and besides the wench is dead." It was certainly another era, the fag-end of the hippy era, and none of us challenged the injunction against crises, except me, and Winford always marked me down. But I passed the course and landed up on the Daily Mail and discovered a whole new world of superlative. "Astonished", "Extraordinary", "Amazing". It was all of those and more, and I began to forget Winford.

Now that we appear to be at the fag end of Anglicanism (to risk a possibly tasteless joke), I find myself almost wishing that Winford would return from France and somehow acquire the power to indict against the word "crisis". Or not so much the word, as the phenomenon itself. Admittedly, it is difficult to see how my profession would survive were there no more crises, but there comes a point when any observer must wonder just how many more crises the Anglican Church can survive intact. "Of schism they were made, and to schism they will return," was the other title I considered for this post. the rest