The Lambeth Conference: Keeping the media at arm’s length

24/07/2008
By Pat Ashworth

If you’d seen me sitting on a bench in the sunshine here in Canterbury today, Wednesday, you’d have thought it was a pretty enviable place to be. It’s around teatime. Picture me in a garden space with dappled light on the grass, three plump rabbits motionless under a tree and hymn singing floating out of the Big Top.

It’s important to mention that I’m eating another salad out of another box. This is because I have, upon recommendation, just trekked across the campus to the Keynes building and its Italian restaurant, La Dolce Vita, only to be told by an officious member of the university catering team that I can only eat in the Tex-Mex restaurant in Darwin, the building where I am living in my sixties student room.

But what if I don’t like Mexican – or at least, not every night for a fortnight, I plead? She gives me a cold stare and repeats her mantra: you can only eat in Darwin. She flicks a cloth across the counter and I leave. The restaurant, by the way, is almost empty of diners.

I go into this sorry detail because after a week in residence, I hit a new low tonight. I am hearing the worship borne so tantalisingly on the air but I can’t attend it because journalists are not to be trusted near the bishops when they are worshipping. The paths around the Big Top are ringed with security fencing. We are allowed in for selected plenaries but only with an escort and only en masse. the rest